Kate, holding shears, came up to Dr. Boone.
“Cut my hair,” she handed him the shears.
“You seek a favor?”
Her nostrils swelled as she straightened that humpback of hers. She wore a blue button up shirt, the long right sleeve was folded up at the end of the amputated arm and pinned. “Circumstances goad me.”
Dr. Boone’s eyebrows raised above the gold rim of his glasses. “Oftentimes, when someone asks a favor, they say ‘please.’”
She glanced at the shears, then back up at him. She snatched a nearby chair, the wooden legs scrapping and dragging across the wooden floor. She smacked it down, hitting with the force of a mallet, then she spun around, her back to the doctor and flopped into the chair. The folded sleeve of her missing arm flapped when she made to cross her arms. Her left arm floundered awkwardly in the air, like a fish out of water, before she let it fall on her leg, the left hand clawing her knee. She sighed. “Please.”
Dr. Boone left the room, his leather soled shoes tapping on the stairs as he went up. Kate stared up at the ceiling, at his footsteps. Little puffs of dust burst from the ceiling boards and glistened in the sunlight streaming through the windows of the operating room. He returned, coming down the stairs fast and light. He smiled as he approached Kate (who was still sitting in the chair) and flashed a comb. “Even if I lack the skill, we must attempt with confident fervor.”
Standing behind Kate, he combed a long swathe of her hair and then cut it. She could see it fall, the long red ribbon falling and curling, laying limp like a snake skin. Soon, the red locks piled about her boots. What remained on her head was gray hair just long enough to tickle her upper lip and the bottom of her ear lobes.
She stood up, seeing her hunched reflection in a shaded pane of a window. There was her large nose. Her epithet. The marker of who she was, yet it jutted out from between the dry curtains of short gray hair that draped her face. Her hair was supposed to be long, long and red, a vibrant color, a hint of beauty on her loathsome frame, but now it lay in heaps about her boots. Then there was the empty sleeve. A life once lived. Of a home. Of Mr. Doolin. Poor, foolish Mr. Doolin, who she hoped to take care of, who she wanted to repay. There was also the trade she lost. A skill once had. A skill sought after and paid for that fed into a vision of herself, a perception of who she used to be, now only a memory, which she looked back on like a bird whose wings have been clipped gazing up at the blue sky.
Dr. Boone appeared behind her, his reflection behind hers. “Any shorter, and folks might mistake you for a man.”
She didn’t turn around. “At least that’s something.” And she lifted her hand, hoping that the specter in the window wouldn’t raise hers, but it moved. It drifted slowly up to her face and swept the gray hair from her face, tucking it behind her ear. Strands, too short to reach her ear, fell back over her sunken eye and gaunt cheek. She fetched a broom from the far corner, but as she turned around to return to the pile of hair, Dr. Boone stood in front of her.
She didn’t lift her head, but held the broom tight to her chest. She watched as his two hands moved, as one gripped the broom handle, and the other gently uncurled her clutching fingers. She stared at the broom in his hands, her own hand still up close to her chest, her fingers slowly closing into a white knuckled fist.
Dr. Boone went over to the mess of red hair and began to sweep. The straw bristles swished along the floor. “Mr. Hazeleton was last seen at the Amador Saloon.”
Swish. Swish. He swept.
Kate’s boots tapped on the wood floor as she walked to the front door. The knob jangled and the door scraped across the wood planks. The sounds of the street poured in. A wagon rattling by. A horse galloping. Folks walking and talking.
“Where is the Amador?” She stood in the open door, her back to the doctor.
He grabbed a dustpan and swept the hair up. “Go right and keep walking. A large green front with gold letters. Can’t miss it.”
“Thank you,” she said. The door rattled when she closed it behind her.
Kate stepped out onto the porch. She squinted, even lifted a hand as her eyes adjusted to the cruel light of the sun. The dusty lane in front of her was all a blur. Hazy silhouettes of men darted and weaved through the traffic of squeaking carriages and rickety wagons. Horses whined and neighed. The sweet odor of their manure peppered the air. Dust billowed like a dense, brown fog that rolled up onto the porch. Kate sneezed.
“Bless you… uh…” said a passing man.
Kate, as she wiped the phlegm from her nose, blinked her watery eyes and saw the man step off the porch down to the street. He glanced over his shoulder as he went by, and once a good six feet passed her, he hopped back onto the porch and continued down the boardwalk of storefronts.
She wrinkled her nose and then marched along the boardwalk. Another man, dirt in the hundred wrinkles of his face, slouched in a chair on the porch of his store, stared at Kate, and as she approached, he adjusted himself, sitting more upright in the chair.
She said, “Afternoon.” As she passed. He kept watching with big dumb eyes.
Only a few more steps and Kate locked eyes with fifteen kids rolling by on a wagon. All thirty of those eyes were wide with wonder. Some of the littlest ones even pointed their little fingers at her. Their mother, sitting in the midst of them, swatted their hands saying it was rude to point, but when she laid eyes on Kate, she gasped and tapped the shoulder of her husband who was driving.
More eyes fell on Kate and now it seemed like all of Goodenough was gawking at her. Faces stared at her from the glass windows of passing stage coaches. Women strolling the streets while spinning their parasols would hold their gloved hands over their mouths and scurry away from Kate like cave crickets whenever a crawl space door was opened. If she happened to be walking by the open door of a shop and a man walked out, he would stop stock still and stare. One fella stopped so suddenly that he slipped and fell, his sack of potatoes spilling all over the boardwalk. Kate didn’t stop to help. She kept walking, letting her head hang low so the gray hair fell over her face, but, of course, her huge nose poked out, like a rocky escarpment in the midst of a brackish waterfall.
For a long while, the street continued. On and on for so long that she doubted Dr. Boone’s direction, began to think that she was the butt of a joke, that there wasn’t an Amador at all, till at last the green came into view, towering three stories above the street. She stood across the way. At the very top of the front were the huge gold letters spelling out Amador. Below the name, along the two levels of balconies, women and men flirted. The women wore fancy dresses and their hair (blonde, red, brunette, black) were done up in intricate blooms of gleaming ringlets that draped over their bare, smooth shoulders. On the ground, dozens of horses stood shoulder to shoulder, tied to the hitching posts, nipping at each other and swishing their tails. Each one of their saddles were fancy. The horns were overlaid with silver and even the stirrups were silver.
There was nothing fancy about Kate. Unlike the pretty women on the balconies, her hair was dry and straight as straw. Her clothes were plain, even too big for her. Her britches piled on the ankles of her boots, and they ballooned from her waist due to the belt being cinched so much around her narrow waist (a foot of extra belt dangled from her hip). She gazed down at her missing arm, at the fold of blue shirt sleeve, of the safety pin, holding the fold in place.
A stagecoach sped by, the team of horses kicked up a thick cloud of dust that enveloped Kate. She coughed at first and then sneezed. Several times.
“Bless you,” came a man’s words through the whirling dust. They were innocent. Polite. Cordial. But, the spirit within them caused a shiver to run up Kate’s crooked spine. Slowly, her nose shielded by the elbow of her left arm, she stood, erect as she had been that one day in the Sheriff’s office, that one day when Mr. Doolin was tied to a chair, when the Esau Slayer hovered in the shadowed corner. As the dust settled, her eyes widened and her arm lowered, cautiously she turned around, for the voice had come from behind. But the store’s porch was empty. And even the door was closed. But, then it opened and a man stepped out. The bell jangled as he closed the door behind. They locked eyes.
He was a gruff cow puncher, sweat and dirt covered his red-tanned face. “Best direct that ugly face somewhere else.”
Kate blinked, turning away, as his boots thumped on the boardwalk as he walked away. Her sight fell on a shadow in the alleyway. The alley was to the right of the store she stood in front of. It was just afternoon and the sun was at an angle to the world, casting the shadow of a cowboy (who stood hidden behind the corner of the store) that stretched along the dirt from the alleyway to the street. Kate took a step toward the alley, but then stopped. Her heart pounded.
She relived the memory. Heard his voice, “It can’t be this easy.” Heard the crack of his revolver. Felt the bullet’s punch into the bone of her arm. She even felt the pain, the ghost of burning pain, even though her arm wasn’t there anymore. She shook her head and she forced a grin, huffing at her own foolishness. For the Esau Slayer was dead and buried. She had read so in the paper. Saw the picture of his corpse posed in the chair. To take another step would admit that her mind had cracked, that she had succumbed to her own silly imagination, that she wasn’t governed by rationality but by flights of fearful illusions.
She turned back around, forcing a grin and then an audible huff, a blast of air from her bellows sized nostrils that stirred a dust devil there at her boots. With her left hand, she screwed the belt of her britches up higher on her narrow waist and marched across the street to the Amador Saloon. There was another ghost on her mind. The ghost of her brother. And she was going to get Bart Hazleton to help her.