The Horses by Bill Brooks

Author:Bill Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins

Chapter Fifteen

El Paso, Texas

He had her bent over a barrel, her skirts hiked high, in a rain-washed alley while Willis waited his turn with her.

“Come on, now,” he was saying, as though he were coaxing a mule to step over a log crawling with snakes. “Come on now, old gal…”

She was the lowest sort of whore—a crib girl without a crib to work out of since it had been torched a few days earlier by an irate and crazed self-appointed preacher. So she took men in the alleys or whatever handy shadow there might be, or behind some building, any place that wouldn’t get her locked up by the local police; for they could be fearsome on whores with Albert Hightail as the new chief. He was a religious zealot, and perhaps the man behind the preacher’s burning of her place. The pious chief would just as soon see every whore run across the border and had already jailed her twice on charges of loitering and disorderly conduct. Her name was Alma Washburn and she’d left a husband and three kids back on an Iowa farm for what she thought would be a grand adventure after meeting a westbound rake who proved out to be an ex-convict who’d tossed her a line with his charm hooked on the end of it. She’d stolen the sugar bowl money as surely as he had stolen her heart, and together they took the noon flyer out of Sioux City. But he shook her off the hook there in El Paso and disappeared.

She had choices of course, as every single woman of her era did. She could scrub clothes for a Chinaman or sell what God gave her—something to that point, she reminded herself, she’d given away for free. She chose the latter because the money was at first quicker and a lot easier. She could do what she did and keep her eyes closed and her mind back on her children in Iowa, which is mostly the way she did it. But then came the pox and addiction to opium to help her get through life, and ten years later she found herself bent over a barrel of Hatch’s choosing—not wanting to waste his hard-earned stolen cash on a room—there in the back of the Express Saloon and Billiards Parlor.

And while he was doing to her what it was men did, she thought of her children: they’d be grown now; Mattie eighteen and Roy nineteen. Sometimes she thought of Duck, her husband, wondered if he’d remarried, wondered if he ever thought about her. Most likely not, she told herself. And who could blame him?

“Come on now, gal. Come along there…”

She looked at the other one, waiting. Squirrel teeth when he grinned, yellow as acorns, a brush of whiskers on his chin reminded her of the mad preacher, fiery torch in his hand coming at her through the darkness. Both had real long faces and jug ears, and no doubt possessed.

“That’s it, honey,” she

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