All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred twelve)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Four

Counterfeits

(part one hundred twelve)

The town’s waterfront was all its commerce and most of its residences. Wharfboat, floating pier. Rubble in a mound lit by the wharfboat’s lamps…depot for people who wanted rubble, or jetty-in-progress. Glimmers on the hillside, window-slits of wakeful houses.

Farther off a furnace sparked, and glowed semaphore…

Industry. The reason for this place.

Richard took things in without peering. Allen’s warning seemed apropos; quiet men in corners were a natural enemy. Sunk, strapped, Rowan could not replace his man-on-a-mission with another. He could not care much, with the Vanguard trickling out his secrets, and would let Richard rot.

Handyville, what Allen said, seemed a joke name. But half-proof sat painted here. A tedious passage of boards set at vertical, the backend of a warehouse with no outlet. White lettering: H’ville. Johnson Bros.

When he squinted up, he saw a door after all, the kind that drops a crushing weight, and becomes a ramp. A space down, H’ville, Johnson Bros, again…

Carry that with you, Richard told himself. “I’m looking for Mr. Johnson.” The world was full of Johnsons. But needed, before the opening line, was any sight of a saloon. He saw the Palmyra bulk above the warehouse, both limned by furnace-light more than moon. And here came a body, a Johnson Bros watchman.

Richard remarked: “Town looks dead.”

“Pretty much.”

“No place people eat?”

“Wharfboat.” The watchman jerked his head behind him, onwards for Richard. “I’ll walk along with you.”

They had forty feet or so to walk, lawman and suspect. At six o’clock, three hours past, Richard and the Allens had patronized the wharfboat. But suddenly supper alone seemed good. Allen was stingy and had a habit, with his eyes, of finding Richard wrong-mannered, unrefined at kniving and forking.

“Lot of little tricks, being on the stage. The layman don’t take it into account. All them politenesses fancy people have. Got any cards, Everard?”

Not a marked deck; the visiting kind. Table talk had devolved to ways of memorizing, of pegging lines to your surroundings—which skill paid the knowing of, too, in the confidence trade. Though Allen in company did not say such things.

A woman poured ice into a trough. Bottom ice, river-hued, catfish the article. Richard picked one.

From the watchman, from the waitress, he gleaned a string of facts.

The place was Harrisonville, pleasing to know. He had never heard a truthful explanation for an inside joke, but guessed the town a stop without airs, at least, where everyone stank in the clothes on their backs…

And possibly a curtain pulled aside showed a lamp with its own semaphore, H’ville’s handies.

120

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred thirteen)

(2024, Stephanie Foster)