Karen Memory Read Online Free Page B

waist and a man’s white button shirt on her backward so you could get to the dressings on her back. There was a mask over her face, and Crispin’s other big enamel-knobbed brass machine that handles all those sickbed things that the steam-powered knife machine doesn’t was kind of wheezing and whirring around her, its clockworks all wound up fresh and humming. The bloody sheets were heaped up in the basket and the Indian girl was perched on the chair by the head of the bed, holding Merry’s sallow hand clutched between her olive ones and rocking back and forth just a tiny bit, like she was trying with all her might to hold herself still.
    I picked my way between smears of blood. Crispin looked up, grinning instead of grim, so I knowed Merry Lee was going to be just fine unless the blood poisoning or the gas gangrene got her. “Karen honey, you are a delivering angel.” He nodded to the tray. “This here is Priya. She helped me change the sheets.”
    I got a good look at her and at Merry Lee while I set the coffee on the cleanest bureau. Merry was a lot younger than I would of expected from the stories, fresh faced and sweet as a babe in her sleep and maybe seventeen, eighteen—not more than a year or two older than me.
    Given she’s been a thorn in the side of Peter Bantle and the rest of those cribhouse pimps for longer than I’ve been working, she must of started pretty young. Which ain’t no surprise, given some of Peter Bantle’s girls—and boys, too—ain’t no older than your sister, and given that before she got away from him Merry Lee is supposed to have been one of them.
    The Indian girl had dried her hair and Crispin or somebody must of given her a clean shift. She must of warmed up some, because she was sitting in the blankets like a nest instead of wrapped up in them.
    Now I could see her arms and legs and neck, she was skinnier than anybody ought to be who wasn’t starved to death. I sat there watching the knobs of her wrists and elbows stick out and the tendon strings move in the backs of her hands. I guess sailors and merchantmen don’t care so much if the slatterns and stargazers they visit are pretty so long as they’re cheap, and it’s dark in a whore’s crib anyway; plus, I guess if Peter Bantle underfeeds his girls they’re easy keepers.
    Still, as I sat there looking at her, her tangled hair with the blood drying in it and her long face and her cheekbones all sharp under skin the color of an old, old brass statue’s, it more and more griped me thinking on it. And it more and more griped me that I’d been going to let Bantle have her.
    That weren’t like me at all.
    Unless it was, I thought, sickened, and I was just making comforting noises at myself now.
    There was plenty coffee in the pot, cream and sugar, too, and I’d brought up cups for everybody. But it didn’t look like the Indian girl—Priya—was going to let go of Merry Lee’s hand and pour herself a cup.
    So I did it for her, loaded it up with cream and sugar, and balanced all but one of the biscuits I’d brought along on the saucer when I carried it to her.
    She looked up surprised when I touched her hand to put the saucer in it, like she might of pulled away. She weren’t any older than me, either, and this close I could see all the bruises on her under the brown of her skin. Layers of them. There was red fresh scrapes that would blossom into something spectacular. That might of been from dragging Merry Lee bleeding across half of Rapid City. There was black-purple ones with red mottles like pansy blossoms. And there was every shade of green and yellow, and you could pick out the hand- and fingerprints among ’em. And the red skinned-off slick-looking burns from Peter Bantle’s electric glove, and some white scars, too, which made me angry and sick in all sorts of ways I couldn’t even find half the words to tell you.
    She was a fighter, and it had cost her. My daddy was a horse tamer, and he taught me. Some men