The Twin Whores of Connolly Valley

Lily and Peach came to town about the same time as all the other children and wives, but these twins stood out from the rest. They were about ten and blond with joyful, porceline faces. When you saw them, you felt this divine contentment and knew the Lord had achieved perfection with them, and achieved it twice. Such beautiful little girls...

Still, I hated the women's advent. Once it started, they coursed by mule like blood down the winding trails of the Sierras wearing bonnets and grasping umbrellas for shade. THey were either married or young, and I was neither. I was only the lonely record keeper for Connolly's lumber mill.

Mr. Phil Connolly founded our little town after nearly starving in the mountains on his way to San Francisco. He saw the river winding throug the wide valley and the next batch of peaks byhond and said he'd be damned if he didn't learn his lesson in the first batch. So he stayed put - collected things, cut wood, built a home and sold provisions to wagon parties. Eventually some miners found a vein nearby and gave all its gold to Connolly . Craftsman and traders sprang up, sold other things and new services. A town grew, and the wilderness was tamed. The men took trees and stone and turned them into buildings and businesses and law. Then the women came, because their men had finally sent for them.

The twins' dad was called Artie. When he paraded his girls down Main Street, he wore a huge grin, like nothing I'd never seen. He'd beaten the curse (he claimed to be cursed, which I doubt, although his luck was certainly rotten). He blamed the curse for killing his wife only three weeks after he left for California and for taking his money when he bet to double it for the pilgrimage home. So he stayed in Connolly Valley and swung an axe into trees until he could make a home for his daughters.

Every morning, I met Artie by the well filling his canteen for the day that lay ahead and every morning, he steered every conversation toward his girls. They were learning to sew apparently, and Lily had a suitor called Jeremy Mansbridge. I tried to avoid old Artie, for his joy overshadowed mine. I failed, though. I had no route but past the well and always found him waiting, whether I were late or premature.

His happiness lasted three years, until he fell a tree onto his leg. Jack Gifford and Billy Stern hacked the mangled thing from his torso, and Dr. Kane sewed him up. It was a bloody mess of an ordeal, but Art was so drunk on whiskey and pain he never recalled a minute. He just woke up legless and jobless, his girls crying on either side of his bed. Everyone took pity on him and helped however he could. Mr. Descariot, the grocer from Baltimore, gave the family food on credit the Ms. Scarlet cooked and served. I often brought whiskey and let old Arite just ramble on for hours. He was a good man whom I respected, which is why I waited for him to die before I ever bought his daughters.

They turned to whoring by means of Miss Rosemarie who, having nowhere else to go after her own husband's death, assumed the role of matron at Artie's cabin. She cleaned and cooked and held back Mr. Descariot for as long as she could, but the grocer eventually demanded payment. The girl's only hope was Jeremy, who gathered the girls' prayers and left for the mountains. He promised to return before winter with enough gold to save their home.

By next summer, no one had heard from Jeremy, and Descariot owned everything. He let the family stay. They worked at his store and mended coats for nickels but fell furtther into debt. They were damn near destitute when I chanced to overhear the twins talking in the woods.

"I don't want ya'll's dad to know nothing."

Lily and Peach were both crying, not hysterically with shock, but as thought they'd seen it coming all along.

"You won't have to do it for long. These men'll give everything they got to be with twins. It really could be worse. You could be ugly."

"I'd rather be ugly than a whore." I'm not sure which girl said that, but I think it was Peach because she turned turned to her sister and asked, "You don't think Jeremy will come?"

"He's dead. Eaten by a bear. I dreamt it so clear last night, I know it's true."

The next night I saw them outside The Clamper's Saloon. They were dressed up in matching lace bodices and green skirts. Big feathered hats nearly hid their faces, except for the golden curls and bright red lips. Miss. Rosemarie was their auctioneer, and the winner was Phil Connolly himself. That man of sixty-four years bought the pair of virgins for a hundred dollars a head and led them quietly into his house.

The next day in Connolly's office, I heard all about it. He claimed that they were so nervous and cute that he almost didn't fuck them. But he got past it. He laid them side by side and moved from each to each, becoming in the process obsessed with blending their hymen's blood.

"It was great," he said.

In time, our twin whores grew less ashamed and more confident. Other girls joined them. Rosemarie kept a gun and part of the profits, and soon they had a decent business going. Artie lived to see his debts paid, but didn't seem to care. He never asked where the money came from, and I'm damn sure no one told him. It doesn't matter, though. THree days after his last bill was paid, he died for no apparent reason.

The girls took about a week off to mourn and according to some, almost left for San Francisco at Peach's urging. I guess Lily talked her out of it, or else it was never even an issue, becasue on the following Friday night, I had them both. Lord knows if it's for show, but the two are polar opposites in bed. Lily was half drunk, laughing, and going wild, while Peach abstained entirely from alcohol. She was tender and romantic like we'd been courting eachother for months and finally found ourselves alone together.

It was great.

After that I had at least one every pay day. Peach always told me that she loved me when it was over. Lily always begged me to buy her again. Sometimes I did. I liked her more because with her, it was simpler, and Peach could hardly act.

I asked Lily about it once. I said, "How come you never tell me you love me, like your sister does?"

I expected a joke in return. I was surprised when her smile faded and her eyes cut through me.

"I've only ever told two men that. I intend to keep it that way."

"Well, damn," I said. "You wouldn't have to mean it."

Five years came and went. THe gold was mined out, and the town's entire economy became dependent on our whores. Men came from all over California and Nevada to be with Lilly and Peach. They stayed in Mike's hotel and ate at the Clamper's and fed their horses at Connolly's Feed and Supply. The town was prosperous but completely transformed. THe twins were our prized possessions. We were proud of them like other towns were proud of courthouses and churches. We didn't need that junk. We had pure, perfect beauty - twice. And we could fuck it for a fee.

For all the change in Connolly Valley, my life was much the same. I still sat bored at an office desk every day and alone most evenings with a pint in the Clamper's Saloon. The working men avoided me on account of my education. I'd never known a glimpse of their hardships, and they'd never thought near the thoughts that I thought.

One day I took the twins riding through a meadow stocked with purple wildflowers. It was fun until Lily thought she saw a phantom standing quietly near a tree. When she turned to look more intently, he was gone, but not quite, becasue she sort of saw him almost hiding behind a juniper shrub. Peach and I had no idea until we stopp to picnic and found Lily terrified beyond all reason. She refused to speak, forcing Peach to confusedly console her and ruining my plans for free wilderness sex.

I saw the phantom myself that evening, and clearly. Both girls were upstairs with other men, but I swear to the Lord, we in the bar saw it just appear from amidst the twilight. Its eyes were empty black. The rest of him was a mess of tattered rags, long hair, and gnarled beard.It began to rain.

In flashes of lightning, we watched him run a sharp blade over his face and scalp. The phantom was Jeremy Mansbridge! He gathered his cleaven hair in the wet dirt and divided it into three piles. The first, he doused in oils and set ablaze; he threw the second into the wind; and he took the third and rubbed it all over his bits, then laughing, scattered the hair over the fire.

All of that was very strange, but the incredible part was when he calmly entered our saloon, sought the bar man, and produced a rock of gold like a fist from some secret place within his rags.

“Tell the piano man to play something softer,” he said.

The barman snatched the gold, and immediately the music was morose and quiet, a song called “Longing for Snow,” which Mr. Benway played in an eerie minor key. From the dumbstruck men, there arose a gentle murmur, which gradually became a chorus of shouting and praise.

“I knew you’d make it!”

“Jeremy, back from the dead!”

“Hooray!”

“Let me buy you a round!”

“Tell us what happened!”

Jeremy’s eyes darted wildly about the barroom and drinkers and card players. His teeth were clenched so that the veins showed on his neck. He looked downright mad standing there newly bald and bleeding some, draped in stinking, mismatched hides poorly stitched together. An odd talisman made from a squirrel’s skull and a handful of bear’s teeth dangled from his throat.

“So the bear was real?” cried the men.

“And you killed it alone?” I asked.

But he responded thusly: “The spirits warn of a larger bear, immune to the weapons of man.”

Not one of us knew what to say to that, so he left. The Clampers’ had gone completely quiet except Benway’s piano, and if the other men felt what I had, their silence was a symptom of fear. The whole episode seemed like more than the ravings of a loon. The ritual with the hair, the lightning, and above all that massive lump of gold just given away for nothing – it leant weight and credibility to his mysterious prophecy. Five years is a long time to spend face to face with death, but that Jeremy, he persevered, fighting and clinging to life until he could make good on his promise to Lily. It seemed to me that such a resolute will brought back to that ancient animal state, straddling that little line between the basest of nature and the supernatural beyond, well, seems like he’d come away with something – some incommunicable understanding, some strange ability to listen. When folks began to speak, they swore that he was crazy, gone out of his skull from years of solitude and scavenging. I swore it, too, but I was lying. When Peach was done with Gifford, I told her everything. She thanked me, remounted the stairs and stayed all night alone with Lily. I wonder what she told her.

It was two days before anyone saw Jeremy again. He strolled up to Connolly’s feed store around nine in the morning. There wasn’t a cloud in sight, and most of the sky was a blue like Lily’s eyes. The air was ruined though, by a thin brown haze of smoke that hung over Sherwin Ridge. Jeremy wanted to buy a horse.

“I need a fast one.”

“Well, none of these is broke yet, Mr.”

“I’ll buy one with gold, for escaping.”

Connolly named the price at a hundred fifty dollars. There was no damn way any one would pay that much for a wild horse, but Mansbridge produced the rock. A nigger brought a scale, which he handed to Connolly, and the horse’s tack, which he dropped on the ground. Connolly found the gold’s weight, which I multiplied silently by its value. To the cent, the rock was worth one fifty.

Jeremy was no whisperer. He saddled the wild horse, hopped casually on, and was bucked right back off. He climbed on again, and this time the horse shot out like a bullet through the open gate and out toward town. Jeremy bounced and flailed wildly but managed to hang on somehow. Lily finally saved him. She smelled like bourbon, too much like it, like she had swum in it instead of drinking. The horse stopped for her apple, which she held out like a matador’s cape. Lily calmed the horse and told it she loved it. Jeremy jumped to the ground.

“Been a while,” she said.

“Your soul smells strange, Lily,” he said.

“Why didn’t you come home sooner?”

“I promised you gold.”

A curious crowd had gathered, myself included, to see this odd reunion. Neither mad man nor whore retained any trace of the hopeful child the other had loved five years before, but there they were, hugging in the dusty road. Lily was sobbing, but I didn’t see any tears.

“It’s OK,” said Jeremy. “I’m here now. I’ve come to save you.”

Lily led Jeremy to her house. Ms. Scarlet and Peach were out, so the two would be alone. Peach would come home later, and with Jeremy’s gold, she’d finally get her wish to leave for Frisco. To tell you the truth, I was painfully jealous, and a touch angry. What right had this crazy fool to make good on his word four years too late and take from us our beloved whores? I stormed on over to The Clampers’ to warn Ms. Scarlet. I thought maybe she could stall Peach, maybe Lily and Jeremy might leave without her. I wanted to keep at least one. I guess I was desperate.

But I couldn’t find Ms. Scarlet. Word was she was off with Descariot. So I stayed at the saloon and got piss drunk. It was a Saturday, and the place was lively and full, even at noon. A few hours later, stumbling and bleary-eyed, I bumped into Lily herself. She was alone. Not really alone. She was surrounded by men, but none of them was Jeremy. I knew she wasn’t Peach from her laugh and from the beer in her hand.

I barged on through the huddle of men to my precious Lily and slapped a wadded bill into her palm. Upstairs, we fucked like animals and basically destroyed the little room we had. I’d never let loose like that before and haven’t yet since.

“Well shit my friend,” she said once I was spent, “I never thought you had it in you.”

“I’m just happy to see you,” I said, barely awake. “I was sure you’d be long gone with Jeremy by now.”

“Jeremy?” she gasped. She looked shocked and a little scared. I didn’t really care. I sleepily watched her cover herself with my shirt. I was out before she fled the room.

When I awoke, it was night and everything was over. Lily and Peach were both dead and Jeremy was gone. Course, I had no idea. I dragged myself home, oblivious, and passed out on my porch in a pile of vomit.

Next morning by the well, Jack Gifford sat on a tree stump staring at nothing. He didn’t notice me till I’d finished filling my canteen and asked him what the hell was the matter.

“It’s the twins, friend. A bad sign.” He hadn’t moved or blinked, just kept staring. I was too hung over for patience and already walking away toward Descariot’s for eggs and butter when he said, “I can’t believe our whores is dead.”

“What?”

“Probably my fault, too. They was packing when we bust in. Her and Jeremy was. We listened first, real quiet like. We were after his gold, ya see. Mr. Descariot and me. It was his idea, I swear. I wouldn’t o thought to rob nobody, but he needed someone strong, ya know. Sounded like a good idea the way he told it.

“Well we heard em talking about heading to San Fran and I kicked in the door and threw that boy to the ground. I beat him but good. Lily was screaming and all, but Mr. Descariot held her tight and told her to shush. She didn’t listen none. She kicked him square in the balls and run off into the woods somewheres. Scared as all hell I’d say.

“He told me to strip that boy’s clothes off and I did, but we couldn’t find no gold. You seen him pulling them nuggets right outta his pockets, huh friend? Well me too, and I wanted one. But we didn’t even find no pockets in his messa rags. I beat him some more. ‘Tell me where that gold is,’ I said. But he wouldn’t tell nothing. He just laughed and laughed.

“You shoulda seen him. He’s crazy ya know. Got demons in him. He was a bloody damn mess just laughing. Talkin bout…well…I don’t wanta say exactly, but he said they was coming. Dead injuns or something. Spirits wantin revenge on us white men. Blood gonna be spilt.

“I swear he meant it too. It weren’t just no bunch a talk. The look in his eyes. That boy was dead serious, knew just what he was sayin. It scared hell outta me and Mr. and we left him there and run down to the creek and washed his blood off. Whole way there, we heard him laughing, like we was the ones got our asses beat insteada him.

“They’d a been in Frisco by now if we hadn’t bust in like we did. But they’s dead instead and Jeremy’s done run off. Just look up yonder, friend, and tell me it ain’t some sorta sign."

I looked up and saw the sky was dead with smoke.

“Well, what happened next?” I asked.

“You better ask ol’ Dr. Kane bout all that. I waddn’t around fore the rest, but he
sure was.”

Dr. Kane was sitting at his desk in his office fiddling with a bit of string. His diploma was framed on the wall as were pictures of skinless people all skeleton and muscle. He didn’t look like a doctor, though, not that day. He looked like a scared little boy aged thirteen.

“I heard you saw what happened,” I said.

“Yes, I did.”

“Well?”

“I’m not a superstitious man,” he said. “But I don’t know if science has any explanation for the things I saw last night.”

He leaned back in his chair and lit a cigar, a curious course of action for an adolescent.

“I was here, of course. Mrs. Beatrice has some sort of infection. I was looking through the journals when I heard him.”

“What’d he say?” I asked.

“I told you I’m not normally superstitious. But I’ll be damned if I repeat his words. They were evil, friend.

“When he was done ranting, Lily started up. ‘You’re too late,’she screamed. Said she was a goddamned whore and liked it. Said there wasn’t any going back and that she hated him.

“Naturally, I went to the window to watch. It was open already and the blinds were drawn. It was pretty warm last night if you remember. Well, they were right in the middle of the road. Jeremy was completely naked, completely bald, and covered in blood. Lily was wearing a man’s dirty under shirt.

“Jeremy’s voice was a growl, inhuman and terrifying. ‘You promised!’ he said.

“With that, he lifted a large rock and lobbed it at her head. Her cranium caved in. A gush of blood spewed from her ear, and she fell to the ground, dead.

“I watched the whole thing. I probably could have stopped it at some point. Couldn’t I have? But how do you see that coming? How was I to know?

“At any rate…when the rock hit, I drew my pistol. You’ve seen me shoot before, right? I hit every bottle the other day behind Mike’s. Well, I fired six rounds at a full grown man last night and hit nothing. The bastard escaped into the forest.

“The townsfolk gathered then and covered Lily with a blanket. Ms. Scarlet set out in search of Peach. I’m glad it wasn’t me that had to do it.”

I found Ms. Scarlet where she found Peach - in the cabin that Artie had built eight years before.

“It was all my fault,” she said.

“When I got here, the first thing Peach said was, ‘We’re finally getting out of here. We’re going to the city where we won’t have to live in shame. Nobody’ll know the life we lead.’

“She was smiling so big, like her daddy used to. There was dried tear tracks on her cheeks and twigs in her hair. I told her about her sister. It was the hardest thing I ever done. Before I said the last ‘duh’ in dead, Peach was crying. She wasn’t actin neither. I never seen a person so miserable. Can you imagine? She had her sister right there beside her her whole damned life. Then all a sudden she’s alone in the world? I knew she couldn’t cut it on her own.

“I tried to comfort her. She wouldn’t have it. She clawed my cheeks to death. I went to Mr. Descariot for help but couldn’t find him, and when I come back to the cabin, I opened the door and there she was, hanging from the banister by a halter rope. Those damned eyes of hers…”
It was dark when I left Artie’s cabin that Saturday to go to sleep alone in my own house. The next morning, I rose early for Church and dressed well. It had been a long time.

I arrived around seven forty but Father Mersh never showed. Three of the more pious families were also absent – the Grants, the Coens and the all the Connollys but Phil. The rest of us, the entire town, knelt and prayed. We all waited till eleven thirty in desperate need of guidance, not knowing what to do. Descariot rose first and quietly left. We all followed him, trickling from the church like blood from a wound.

I left last. It was noon and it was dark out. I was terrified, but I couldn’t bring myself to pack up and leave. Where we would I go? And from what would I be hiding? No one else left either. I think we were all secretly content in the knowledge that we’d earned whatever destruction God wrought upon us. We waited impatiently, but no one was really too surprised when the Indians never came.