Lola Dances excerpt from the bestselling author of
'Longhorns' Victor J. Banis. Sometimes funny, sometimes tragic and often bawdy,
Lola Dances ranges from the 1850 slums of the Bowery to the mining camps of California and Montana, to
the Barbary Coast of San Francisco. Little Terry Murphy, pretty and effeminate,
dreams of becoming a dancer. Raped by a drunken profligate and threatened with
prison, Terry flees the Bowery and finds himself in the rugged settlement of
Alder Gulch, where he stands out like a sore thumb among the camp's macho
inhabitants--until the day he puts on a dress and dances for the unsuspecting
miners as beautiful Lola Valdez--and wins fame, fortune and, ultimately, love
Terry
comes to Alder Gulch
Terry
felt like he had been lifted up into the air, as if in a tornado, and set down
in another world altogether.
It
had taken them most of a year to get here—by train and by riverboat, and
traveling for a time with a wagon train of Mormons. They’d gone first to California,
but the mine fields there were already overrun with thousands of others who’d
heard the same stories Brian had heard, of gold for the picking up of
it—stories they had quickly learned had been greatly exaggerated. There was
gold, to be sure, but coaxing it out of the ground and the creeks took work,
hard work, and lots of it.
In
any case, all of the likely spots there had already been claimed, and the
claims closely guarded by suspicious, quick to shoot miners who kept an
especially close eye on any newcomers. Gunfire was not an uncommon sound, and
new graves were not an unusual sight.
They
had no sooner arrived there, though, than news had come of a rich strike here,
at Alder Gulch, and Brian had spent most of the money he had left to buy them a
bullock cart and a horse, and they had
lit out the same night they got the news.
Terry
had turned eighteen on the long journey, somewhere close to Salt
Lake City, but he felt as if he had aged
decades. Already his life in the Bowery seemed as if it had happened to someone
else, or in another lifetime.
Brian
had quickly built them a rough log cabin, with a hard packed dirt floor, a
whisky barrel for its chimney and flour sacks for windows. The roof of woven
willow saplings leaked endlessly, so that in a heavy rain, the dirt floor
turned to mud. It was as good as most of the miners had, better than the
lean-tos and wickiups many of them lived in, but the cabin was tiny—a single room,
most of that taken up with stove and table, and one bed along the other wall, a
straw-stuffed pallet that they slept in together. There was hardly enough room
in the rest of the
cabin
for the two of them to move around in it when they were both there, let alone
space to do a jeté.
By
the time they had arrived at Alder Gulch, the best claims here had been taken
as well, but Brian had quickly found a job working for the Simmons brothers,
who had better than a half a dozen claims of their own staked and were
generally regarded as the richest men in the camp. They paid Brian a hundred
dollars a week. Back in the Bowery, that would have been a fortune, but here a
man could spend that much to rent a cabin if he hadn’t the mind or the time to
build his own.
Brian
got a tenth of whatever dust he found for them as well, and he got to stand
right there and watch as they weighed it, so there was no cheating in the
payment of it. Already, he had a nice little pouch of dust buried in the dirt
under their bed.
“When
I’ve got enough, we’ll set out on our own,” he said. “I didn’t come all this
way to work for someone else, even if the Simmons brothers are good men to work
for. They’re fair, at least, which is more than could be said for some in this
town. But it’s still just kissing ass, ain’t it?”
To
Terry’s undying shame and regret, though, Brian seemed to have accepted in his
own mind that what had happened back in New
York had been Terry’s fault and not
something odious that had been done to him by a drunken profligate. Once or
twice, Terry had tried to talk to him about it, to make Brian understand his
innocence, but Brian had made it clear he wasn’t interested in hearing Terry’s
version of things.
“It’s
not gonna change anything anyway,” was his final word on the subject. “Van
Arndst is lower than a snake’s belly, that’s true enough, but you were his
woman, weren’t you? That’s how anybody would see it, if they knew. How you went
about getting his pecker up your ass don’t make much difference. It was there,
is all that matters. You’re as much to blame as he was, the way I look at it.”
Which
was how it was left between them. The best Terry could do was to try to make
himself at home in Alder Gulch— but, he had doubts that he would ever really be
able to feel that way about this foreign setting in which he now found himself.
He wondered, was this where his omen and portents had been leading him all this
time?
At
first, when they had set out, he had felt a genuine sense of excitement. Maybe
this journey was the one for which he had waited and watched, the one that
would carry him safely and cleanly to the future he had imagined. Maybe at last
he would arrive at that walled city of his dream.
But,
surely, this Alder Gulch was not that future. He could see, when he strolled
about the town, that the setting must have once been beautiful. Surely, not
long before, there had been a carpet of pine needles beneath the towering fir
trees and the abundant alders. The creek that came down from the mountains was
tawny and sparkled in the sunlight, like jewels where it cascaded over the
rocks, and the mountains themselves, still snow-capped in the middle of summer,
loomed majestically against a sky almost obscenely blue after the soot-filled
air of the Bowery.
All
of it had been ravaged though, by the coming of these eager, greedy men. The
creek was an ugly patchwork of sluices and chutes, entire fields of trees
reduced to stumps and the carpet of pine needles was now a sea of mud that ran
between rows of cobbled-together buildings. Only the sky remained pure, and the
mountains that seemed to look down upon it all with a lofty and infinite scorn.
As
he strolled, Terry looked around him with a combination of puzzlement and
dismay. It was all so squalid, so dismal. Had he misread the signs, or only
fooled himself all this time? What kind of future could Alder Gulch possibly
hold for him? Even if Brian did get rich, and that began to seem more and more
like a fantasy, no more real than Terry’s dream of being a dancer, what could
that mean for him? They’d still be here, in this horrible place. And Brian
would still look at him with barely disguised disgust. At least, in the past,
back in the Bowery, he had sensed an abiding if rough affection on the part of
his brother, but Van Arndst seemed to have killed that as surely as he had
destroyed Terry’s innocence.
The
men who passed by as he walked—there were few women, and those were obviously
prostitutes—were all of a kind, lean, tough looking individuals with hard eyes,
unwashed hair and shaggy beards. They wore black trousers and black hats and
red or blue flannel shirts, and they looked curiously at the slim, willowy
stranger in their midst, with his white cotton shirt and the cleanly washed
gray trousers that clung tightly to his round little dancer’s bottom.
A
lone woman clattered by in a shiny black buggy, snapping her whip at a dappled
roan. She was a big woman, ample rather than fat. Her dyed yellow hair was
piled atop her head in careless ringlets, and her gown was as red as the buggy’s
wheels and too dressy for daytime. Terry stared as she drove by.
“Do
not lust after the whore of Babylon,”
a voice said from behind him.
He
knew who she was, then. Even he had heard of Belle Blessings, madam of the
local whorehouse. She gave him a quick glance as she drove by—a new male in
town was certainly of interest to her—and looked quickly, dismissively away,
her practiced eye telling her in a glance that this was an unlikely customer.
“I
wasn’t lusting, Reverend,” Terry said, turning to the speaker. “Just curious,
is all.”
“Let
your mind seek in the Lord’s way,” the Reverend Davidson said. “For that is the
path of salvation.”
The
Reverend was almost the first person Brian and Terry had met on their arrival
here. Brian had scarcely claimed a space for their cabin and begun to build it
with the wood from the bullock cart—the lone ox had been sold off for
supplies—before the Reverend had shown up to welcome them to Alder Gulch.
He
was a tall man, six foot six or more, gaunt and sere, as if the juices had been
dried out of him, with long skinny legs like a grasshopper’s, you wondered that
they could support him, and neither his hair nor his beard gave any hint of
ever having known soap and water, let alone a comb or a brush. He gave an odd
impression of being too large for his skin, and you couldn’t help thinking he
might be a bit less puckish if it fitted him more loosely, but he radiated a
kind of energy that made him seem anything but frail despite his leanness. His
wide dark eyes flashed with an almost alarming intensity when he spoke, and the
voice that emanated from that sunken chest was astonishingly deep and booming,
even in everyday conversation. He wore the same flannel shirt and dark, dirty
trousers as the others in town and apart from his shagginess, and most of the
men who had been here any time at all were similarly shaggy, there was little
to distinguish him from them save for the little gold crucifix that he wore on
a chain at his throat and fingered ceaselessly when he talked.
He
had invited Brian and Terry to attend services at his “church”—really, nothing
more than a lean-to attached to his own cabin. Terry had visited him there
once. It was as primitive as the rudest shacks of the miners, its only
decoration a roughly hewn wooden cross before which wildflowers were sometimes
scattered incongruously on the dirt floor. Occasionally on a Sunday morning one
or two of the miners could be seen there, kneeling while the Reverend exhorted
them to piety and led them in a hymn or two in a voice that made up in loudness
what it lacked in tune.
“He
catches them staggering home from the saloon,” Brian said of the Reverend’s
parishioners, and Terry was inclined to think he was probably right. Curious,
he had hidden among the trees his first Sunday in Alder Gulch, watching the
Reverend’s “service,” and it had been evident that at least one of the miners
was on his knees because he had difficulty standing.
Terry
wondered what had brought Davidson to Alder Gulch. It did not seem that, like
the others, he had come to seek his fortune, and if he had come expecting to
“gather the lost sheep back to the fold,” as Davidson himself put it, Terry
could not but think his journey a wasted one. The sheep showed little
inclination for being gathered.
“I’ll
keep that in mind, Reverend,” Terry said now, “though it doesn’t seem to me
that there is much choice of direction here in the Gulch.”
“Every
breath is a choice,” the Reverend said, “you walk toward the Lord or away from
him,” but Terry had already nodded and gone in his own direction, away from the
Reverend. The preacher made him uncomfortable. Those hard, dark eyes looked at
him as if they wanted to penetrate his inmost thoughts, and Davidson’s scowl
seemed to him altogether disapproving.
He
was grateful that the Reverend did not follow him, at least, though he had the
feeling that his eyes did.
Terry
paused to look in the open doorway of the town saloon, The Lucky Dollar. The
air inside was filled with stale cigar smoke and the scent of unwashed bodies.
Men clustered at the bar or around the gaming tables, scuffing their feet in
the sawdust on the floor and talking in overloud voices. Someone beat out a
discordant tune on an upright piano and as Terry watched, a tall wiry man
grabbed a woman from a chair, slapped her and shoved her reeling onto the dance
floor. A disheveled miner grabbed her with a loud whoop and began to spin her
around spiritedly, taking not the slightest heed of her sobs.
Fascinated
and frightened at the same time by the aura of vice rampant, Terry turned away
and continued his meandering. Two men standing outside the saloon glanced after
him as he passed and one of them gave the other a knowing smirk and pursed his
lips, but Terry did not notice them.
Print version from Rocky Ridge Books, will be
available Fall, 2015
