The Good Lord Bird

“Right. And I quit buying gold claims last year. I don’t care who you killed. You owe me nine dollars.”

“That much?” he said.

“Where is it?”

“Pie, I got something better than nine dollars. Look.” He pointed at me and Bob.

Pie looked right past Bob. Ignored him. Then she glared at me.

White fellers on the prairie, even white women, didn’t pay two cents’ worth of attention to a simple colored girl. But Pie was the first colored woman I seen in the two years since I started wearing that getup, and she smelled a rat right off.

She blew through her lips. “Shit. Whatever that ugly thing is, it sure needs pressing.” She turned to Chase. “You got my money?”

“What about the girl?” Chase said. “Miss Abby could use her. Wouldn’t that square us?”

“You got to talk to Miss Abby about that.”

“But I carried her all the way from Kansas!”

“Must’a been some party, ya cow head. Kansas ain’t but half a day’s ride. You got my money or not?”

Chase got up, brushing himself off. “Course I do,” he muttered. “But Abby’ll be hot if she finds out you let this tight little thing shimmy across the road and work for the competition.”

Pie frowned. He had her there.

“And I ought to get special favor,” he throwed in, “on account of I had to kill John Brown and save the whole territory and all, just to get back to you. So can we go upstairs?”

Pie smirked. “I’ll give you five minutes,” she said.

“I take ten minutes to whiz,” he protested.

“Whizzes is extra,” she said. “Come on. Bring her, too.” She moved upstairs, then stopped, glaring at Bob, who had started up the stairs behind me. She turned to Chase.

“You can’t bring that nigger up here. Put him in the nigger pen out back, where everybody parks their niggers.” She pointed to the side door of the dining hall. “Miss Abby’ll give him some work tomorrow.”

Bob looked at me wild eyed.

“Excuse me,” I said, “but he belongs to me.”

It was the first thing I said to her, and when she throwed them gorgeous brown eyes on me, I like to have melted like ice in the sun. Pie was something.

“You can sleep out there with him, too, then, you high-yellow, cornlooking ugler-ation.”

“Wait a second,” Chase said. “I drug her all this way.”

“For what?”

“For the men.”

“She’s so ugly, she’d curdle a cow. Look, you want me to job you or not?”

“You can’t leave her in the pen,” Chase said. “She said she ain’t a nigger.”

Pie laughed. “She’s close enough!”

“Miss Abby wouldn’t like that. What if she gets hurt out there? Let her come upstairs and send the nigger to the pen. I got a stake in this, too,” he said.

Pie considered it. She looked at Bob and said, “G’wan to the back door out there. They’ll fetch you some eatings in the yard. You.” She pointed to me. “C’mon up.”

There weren’t nothing to do. It was late and I was exhausted. I turned to Bob, who looked downright objectable. “Sleepin’ here’s better’n the prairie, Bob,” I said. “I’ll come get you later.”

I was good to my word, too. I did come for him later, but he never forgave me for sending him out the door that day. That was the end of whatever closeness was between us. Just the way of things.

* * *

We followed Pie upstairs. She stopped at a room, throwed open the door, and pushed Chase inside. Then she turned to me and pointed to a room two doors down. “Go in there. Tell Miss Abby I sent you, and that you come to work. She’ll see you get a hot bath first. You smell like buffalo dung.”

“I don’t need no bath!”

She grabbed my hand, stomped down the hall, knocked on a door, flung it open, throwed me into the room, and closed the door behind me.

I found myself staring at the back of a husky, well-dressed white woman setting at a vanity. She turned away from the vanity and rose up to face me. She was wearing a long white fancy scarf ’round her neck. Atop that neck was a face with enough powder on it to pack the barrel of a cannon. Her lips was thick and painted red and clamped a cigar between them. Her forehead was high, and her face was flushed red and curdled in anger like old cheese. That woman was so ugly, she looked like a death threat. Behind her, the room was dimly lit by candles. The smell of the place was downright infernal. Come to think of it, I have never been in a hotel room in Kansas but that didn’t smell worse than the lowliest flophouse you could find in all of New England. The odor in that place was ripe enough to peel the wallpaper off the worst sitting room in Boston. The sole window in the room hadn’t been disturbed by water for years. It was dotted with specks of dead flies that clung to it like black dots. Along the far wall, which was lit up by two burning candles, two figures lounged on two beds that set side by side. Between the beds sat a tin bathtub that, to my reckoning, in the dim light, appeared to be filled with water and what looked to be a naked woman.