The Bully of Order Read Free Page B

choices. He’d abandoned ship’s crews on sandbars at low tide and was known to shoot them and stab them too, beat them unconscious and throw them in the water. The floating fleet. Last month he’d made a homemade bomb and blown up a cigar shop on F Street. One story went that he’d eaten human flesh in Whitehorse. All sorts, and Bellhouse was only one. He led his pack, but there were others that could pay to have him ripped apart on a whim.
    My father used to brag that he was a friend of Rockefeller, implied a business relationship, although as far as I knew the families had never met. He’d been a surgeon during the War, my father, but he put it away when he came home, tried his shaking hands at coal, and then oil. He couldn’t bear to see shoes or boots of any kind stacked willy-nilly on the floor or pant legs hiked up either, no matter if it were children or God save us a woman. I don’t think we ever even lived in the same state as the Rockefellers, let alone the same town. He bought stock and lost it, along with the rest of the country, but he took it to heart. There wasn’t much he didn’t. We seemed to be the opposite of the Rockefellers, but he’d tell you we were of a feather, my father would. At first he’d speak the powerful names like a trained bird, not knowing, but later in his life that changed. The blank cheerfulness subsided and he became more of a conjurer, a moribund circus magician, his incantations turned to questions and finally to pleas for mercy. He wasn’t a bad man, though, my father. He was a man in a hole looking up. There were many others like him that the War had left mostly useless, mostly ruined. When I left home I took his books and his bag and all of his tools. I might be worse than Bellhouse or Rockefeller or any of them, simply because I’m not who I say I am.
    A group of fishermen oared through Bellhouse’s wake in their Columbia River salmon boat. A boy stood in the stern, to his knees in fish, slicing and chucking guts. The two sets of oars went endlessly, like dragonfly wings.
    I stood and retrieved my writing tray from on top of the bookshelf and filled the inkwells and sat back down. With great pleasure I rubbed my stocking feet together and cracked my toes. When I was a child, my mother told me that I had beautiful feet, but the other children sometimes followed me and made fun of the way I walked. In the bedroom Nell kept a full-length mirror, and I couldn’t pass it without wondering at the body I lived in. Thank Christ I wasn’t a woman. Too ugly for the nunnery or the whorehouse. Napoleon said that women are machines for producing children. I believe that capacity and intent are two very different things. Nell had married down, and I was fine with that; she made me feel profoundly chosen.
    The sun slid through the clouds and disappeared, and once it was gone I sat in the dark. My plans to pen a letter to my brother Matius went foggy.
    â€œNell,” I said. “Come in here for a moment, could you, please?”
    â€œI’m busy, Jacob. What do you want?”
    â€œJust to talk.”
    â€œWe’ll talk later.”
    I hesitated. “Sorry to bother you.”
    She appeared in the doorway. “You’re not bothering me. What is it?”
    â€œSheasby’s wall was smashed by an oxcart. Bellhouse stole another ship.”
    â€œWhen?”
    â€œJust now.”
    â€œDon’t smile about Sheasby’s trouble, or the next misfortune will fall on you.”
    â€œI’m not smiling.”
    â€œYou are. You need some light in here.”
    I shook my head. She went to the table and lit the oil lamp. Her face changed, and I knew what she was about.
    â€œWhen is your brother to arrive?”
    The letter was in my desk, but I didn’t need to look at it again. I’d more or less memorized it. “June, I would guess. He sailed from San Francisco the first week of April. How