The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [169]
Of course, I had no idea where I was going or what I was going to do for the rest of the night, but it seemed as though all I had to do was remain in character as a man, or rather as a boy of, say, sixteen, old enough but still plausibly beardless, and every opportunity would present itself to me. My name would be Lyman. Mr. Lyman Arquette, close enough to my maiden name, Harkness, so that when men—other men, that is—addressed me by my last name, which was the custom in the west, the name would ring a bell. I would at least look up, giving myself a single precious moment to remember who I was.
My state of mind, which was both exhilarated and fearful of discovery, belied my real condition, which was more in danger of eventual starvation than of anything else. Even though, having eaten well during the day, I reckoned I wouldn’t have to eat again until suppertime the next evening (eighteen hours thence, but I didn’t let myself think of that), what then? I had but forty dollars, and everything in Kansas City was dear. Signs outside of hotels I had seen as we were riding through town read "Rooms, three dollars," or even "five dollars," and that was only for one night! My limited funds put a time limit on my vengeance; my masquerade, as good as I could make it by aping the ways of men I knew, would stand up to neither doing manual work nor engaging in another common western practice—sleeping two or three to a bed to save on lodging costs. Lyman Arquette would have to be a rather solitary, self-effacing fellow, always ready with a laugh, and ready to take a drink, too—Missourians required both—but keeping himself as much in the background as possible. I strolled away from the riverside and into manhood, trying to look alert and be alert. Every woman knew that men were rough and violent among themselves, and that anything could happen.
CHAPTER 20
Lyman Arquette Investigates
It may be set down as the unchangeable rule of physiology, that stimulating drinks (except in cases of disease) deduct from the powers of the constitution, in exactly the proportion in which they operate to produce temporary invigoration. —p. 107
AS SOON AS the sun was up, I roused myself from behind the wagon where I had taken refuge and began looking for a newspaper office. It had come to me in the night, as I was almost drowsing, that that was where gossip on every subject was to be discovered. As I walked about, I made up my own story—a boy from Palmyra, Missouri, a town across the river from Quincy that I had visited several times, my father a man like Horace Silk, but as for myself, no taste for retailing, Mother dead. My ambition was to learn print setting and newspaper writing, so that I could go west, out to California, say, and start up my own newspaper. I was a good Democrat, a follower of Senator Douglas and Senator Atchison, though of course too young to vote, and a believer in popular sovereignty. I practiced saying "them G— d— black abolitionists" to myself. But I planned on taking a great deal of refuge in silence and shyness.
Kansas City was both more and less than Lawrence—more in the sense that there were more people, animals, vehicles, buildings a-building, activity, and business; less in the sense that as quick as everything went in Lawrence, it had gone all the quicker in Kansas City and was therefore all the more ramshackle and make-do. In Lawrence there were women, which meant families, homes, farms, gardens, teacups, and a lending library (or plans for one). In Kansas City it didn’t look like there were women, which meant a lack of all these same things. Kansas City was half business, half politics, all money. Kansas City was in Missouri, and so there were slaves, too, doing a considerable amount of the work and none of the idling.