The Six Messiahs - Mark Frost [88]
Women: There was the bedrock of his mountain in life. Try as he might, Frank had never completely grasped the nature of his indestructible appeal to the fairer sex: What did they see when they looked at him? He didn't have a clue what it was, but he knew it wasn't him. Did it have something to do with his having killed a woman in front of a crowd—poor Molly; the best of him had died right along with her—and getting his name in the papers that made the rest of them swarm around like flies?
Most of the women who tried to visit him in prison couldn't hear enough about the who, how, and why of every human life he'd ended; some sort of sick electric thrill ran through them. He failed to find any sense in that and none in them: Like any man of principle, all he wanted to do was forget about the people he'd killed. Maybe their interest was another side effect of all those dime novels over the years with his stupid picture on the cover that in hindsight he hadn't done enough to discourage. Hell, he'd even tried writing a few himself; the guards had a pile of 'em back at the prison they used to hawk to the tourists. Buckskin Frank: Geronimo's Nightmare. I Rode with Wyatt: Tombstone's Invisible Man. Half a dozen others. Big sellers, every one.
He had to face facts; through some fault of his own, fame had destroyed his privacy and it made Frank's brain ache like a rotten tooth. Five years in prison had brought him a peace uninterrupted by a woman's ceaseless demands that he behave like some crazy idea she had in her head—obedient, mild-mannered, devoted to her every mood: in other words one hundred percent back-asswards from his actual personality. This tranquil stretch had led Frank to conclude that the main reason a woman wanted a man around in the first place was so she could bombard him with the arsenal of dumb questions ricocheting around in her head:
Did he like this dress? Didn't she look too fat in it? What about this new shade of rouge? Did he like his steak red or pink? Could he believe how much they wanted for a yard of calico at the dry goods store? Did he want to hold hands and sit swinging on a glider in the moonlight? Well, no. He liked a poke in the hay well enough, but beyond that he couldn't figure out why they expected so much from him. He didn't know any of the answers to their questions: As far as he was concerned, all these choices having to do with daily existence were equally weighted and to fuss and bother like it was life-or-death about what to eat for breakfast or wear to the square dance squeezed the juice right out of living. Molly was the only woman who'd ever figured that out about him, and look what happened to her.
Husbands were men who brought home the bacon, never drank before dark, and always woke up in the same bed they started the night in. Before they got down to doing the deed for the first time, he had always meant to stop and ask one of these hungry gals flat out: Did he honestly look like husband material to them? And if the. answer was yes, he would reach for his hat because that was a conclusion that could only be made by a lunatic. What Frank wanted, what he thought any man who'd lived life as he had wanted—more than fame, more than fortune—was to be left alone.
Frank felt pathetic: Here he stood scarcely twenty-four hours out of the calaboose and already feeling sentimental about it The trustees used to smuggle in a whore for him once a month or so—there'd been no shortage of soiled doves lining up for the assignment. To his astonishment, he had