dollars?”
“I’ll let you know.”
Light comes in the window and the wild dogs start to snarl on the street, and then there are loud voices as the next room starts to fill up.
“That’s Babe hosting the spillover,” she says, rising to pull her stockings off. Her legs look even skinnier without them on. “She’s gonna be over to get me if we don’t go out.”
She puts on two sweaters and oversized men’s pants and her mukluks and Hod scouts the stairway so they can hit the street unnoticed. With Hod’s parka on her and the hood up Addie Lee gets barely a glance from the stunned-looking celebrants emerging from the saloons and dance halls, though a bob-tailed mastiff trails close, sniffing at her till Hod chases him away. They walk north of town, avoiding the wagon road, until Skaguay is only a hundred columns of woodsmoke in the sky behind them.
She plays at blowing puffs of breath into the air, turning in a circle to look up at the treetops, then stops and stares into his face. “McGinty aint really your name, is it?”
“No.”
“Most of the percentage girls, they got a different moniker up here than what they were born with. A lot of the men too, hidin from the law or their wives or whatever. Like there aint no rules cause it’s not really America.”
“There’s rules,” says Hod. “It’s just different people in charge of them.”
They start to climb, circling around the boulders and felled trees, the sharp air feeling good in Hod’s chest. Inside there is smoke everywhere, cigars and pipes and woodsmoke and his clothes all smell like smoke but here, where the stampeders have never been, there is only clean wind shaking the tops of the spruce trees.
There are women in the camp who aren’t for rent, not the way Addie Lee is, who do laundry and cook and wash pots and sell goods or run boarding houses, but they dress against the cold and wear big shoes and none of them, not a one, shows the least bit of interest in Soapy’s other nigger. It was the same in Butte, the same in every mining camp he’s ever worked in. He climbs slightly ahead when it gets steeper and reaches back to pull her up.
“I suppose you come here for the gold,” she says.
“Me and fifty thousand other halfwits.”
“So what happened?”
“I got to the top,” says Hod, “but I never got over.”
He motions for her to stop, taps his mitt against his lips.
There is a bear coming down the slope.
It is immense, dark brown flecked with gray, swinging its head and grunting now and then as it rubs its flanks hard against the tree trunks.
Hod feels Addie Lee slip her arm into his and pull tight, so little that is actually her inside the layers of clothing, a thrill shooting through him, and then the bear sees them or smells them, stopping to stand, steadying itself with a massive arm against a spruce tree, its tiny, stupid eyes trying to comprehend.
“We’ll get out of your way,” says Hod in as steady a voice as he can muster, then pulls Addie Lee sideways, neither of them taking their eyes off the beast.
It makes something between a bark and a grunt and drops back onto all fours, pawprints dwarfing the tracks of their feet as it descends on the path they took up. They watch till it is lost in the trees. Addie Lee has tears running down her face but doesn’t seem scared.
“To think there’s such a thing in this world,” she says.
They climb up a ways farther, not talking much, angling sideways so they won’t surprise the bear on the way down. Where there is enough snow she tries to slide down on her back, but it’s too powdery.
“There’s never a crust on the snow here,” she says. “It’s dry as sawdust.”
“You don’t get a thaw, you don’t get a crust.”
She is in a dark mood by the time they come back to town, making their way through the badgering merchants and frantic, ignorant stampeders.
“It’s just what men turn into when they get up here,” she says, studying them, her face
“I’ll let you know.”
Light comes in the window and the wild dogs start to snarl on the street, and then there are loud voices as the next room starts to fill up.
“That’s Babe hosting the spillover,” she says, rising to pull her stockings off. Her legs look even skinnier without them on. “She’s gonna be over to get me if we don’t go out.”
She puts on two sweaters and oversized men’s pants and her mukluks and Hod scouts the stairway so they can hit the street unnoticed. With Hod’s parka on her and the hood up Addie Lee gets barely a glance from the stunned-looking celebrants emerging from the saloons and dance halls, though a bob-tailed mastiff trails close, sniffing at her till Hod chases him away. They walk north of town, avoiding the wagon road, until Skaguay is only a hundred columns of woodsmoke in the sky behind them.
She plays at blowing puffs of breath into the air, turning in a circle to look up at the treetops, then stops and stares into his face. “McGinty aint really your name, is it?”
“No.”
“Most of the percentage girls, they got a different moniker up here than what they were born with. A lot of the men too, hidin from the law or their wives or whatever. Like there aint no rules cause it’s not really America.”
“There’s rules,” says Hod. “It’s just different people in charge of them.”
They start to climb, circling around the boulders and felled trees, the sharp air feeling good in Hod’s chest. Inside there is smoke everywhere, cigars and pipes and woodsmoke and his clothes all smell like smoke but here, where the stampeders have never been, there is only clean wind shaking the tops of the spruce trees.
There are women in the camp who aren’t for rent, not the way Addie Lee is, who do laundry and cook and wash pots and sell goods or run boarding houses, but they dress against the cold and wear big shoes and none of them, not a one, shows the least bit of interest in Soapy’s other nigger. It was the same in Butte, the same in every mining camp he’s ever worked in. He climbs slightly ahead when it gets steeper and reaches back to pull her up.
“I suppose you come here for the gold,” she says.
“Me and fifty thousand other halfwits.”
“So what happened?”
“I got to the top,” says Hod, “but I never got over.”
He motions for her to stop, taps his mitt against his lips.
There is a bear coming down the slope.
It is immense, dark brown flecked with gray, swinging its head and grunting now and then as it rubs its flanks hard against the tree trunks.
Hod feels Addie Lee slip her arm into his and pull tight, so little that is actually her inside the layers of clothing, a thrill shooting through him, and then the bear sees them or smells them, stopping to stand, steadying itself with a massive arm against a spruce tree, its tiny, stupid eyes trying to comprehend.
“We’ll get out of your way,” says Hod in as steady a voice as he can muster, then pulls Addie Lee sideways, neither of them taking their eyes off the beast.
It makes something between a bark and a grunt and drops back onto all fours, pawprints dwarfing the tracks of their feet as it descends on the path they took up. They watch till it is lost in the trees. Addie Lee has tears running down her face but doesn’t seem scared.
“To think there’s such a thing in this world,” she says.
They climb up a ways farther, not talking much, angling sideways so they won’t surprise the bear on the way down. Where there is enough snow she tries to slide down on her back, but it’s too powdery.
“There’s never a crust on the snow here,” she says. “It’s dry as sawdust.”
“You don’t get a thaw, you don’t get a crust.”
She is in a dark mood by the time they come back to town, making their way through the badgering merchants and frantic, ignorant stampeders.
“It’s just what men turn into when they get up here,” she says, studying them, her face
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