Page 14 of Blowing Off Steam

Calliope didn’t lose her devilish demeanor, and she practically elbowed them in her camaraderie. “Pay me no mind. I helped you out of your predicament by playing this machine, and that audience scattered like a passel of blackbirds. You can rely on me, sirs. I can be a very helpful employee, capable of wearing many hats. I’ve got my own Derringer, an Arkansas toothpick in my garter, I’m fit as a fiddle, and I can make a rancid possum taste like chicken cordon bleu. I don’t get wallpapered either, like many chefs do. I’ve been through the mill, and I don’t scare easily.”

Again, Rushy and Field shared a glance, but this time they were smiling like dough heads. Rushy allowed, “OK, then. We’ll forgo the Tadich Grill tonight if you’re set on impressing us. We’ve got a leg of mutton in the icebox you could try and turn into a cordon bleu. And there’s plenty of claret and champagne. We don’t mind if you get a bit wallpapered.”

Calliope clapped her hands. “Bully! Mutton is scarce as hen’s teeth. Right now, I’ll go down and rustle you up a cheese platter with olives and anchovies. You’ve got to have those things in your galley, right?”

Rushy nodded. “Sure, we do.” However, her choice of hors d’oeuvres sounded suspiciously familiar. Just yesterday in Sacramento, while languishing in each other’s arms at the Fremont, hadn’t he and Field been jawing about exactly those items?

Rushy’s suspicions evaporated, though, with the sudden arrival of Tobias Fosburgh. He came crawling like a scaly critter from the bottomless pit over the edge of the roof, face red, his cravat all in disarray. “There she is!” He struck for the trio standing by the calliope, but his angry, beady eyes were fastened to the female Calliope. To her credit, she didn’t cringe back even slightly in the face of his rage. “There’s the trollop who chiseled me out of my gold! Well, what are you doing standing around, boys? Have her arrested at once and put into lockup!”

Rushy placed calming hands on Tobias’s shoulders. “We don’t have a brig, Tobias. And I thought you said some hooker on the street with some ill children bilked you?”

Tobias puffed out his chest, clearly bent on bumping Calliope into the water with its strength. “Indeed I did! And this is the very prostitute who bilked me!”

Closing his eyes with patience, Rushy turned to Calliope. “Is this true, Miss…?” He realized he didn’t know her last name.

But Calliope was holding her own ground. Lifting her chin to the attorney-at-law, she wiggled her eyebrows and said, “If Headmaster Smith is under the impression I have ever sold my affections for gold, he must be mistaking me for someone else.”

“You see?” Rushy tried to calm the irate solicitor, but he flailed his arms like a beached fish.

“Who are you calling Headmaster Smith, you lowdown woman of easy virtue? Search her bags, Captain! In them I’m sure you’ll find two eagle’s quills of gold dust.”

“Tobias.” Field laughed. “Everyone has eagle’s quills full of gold dust. Besides. Does this woman here—a chef and a calliopist—look like she has three children?”

Tobias sputtered so ardently spittle rained onto Rushy’s face. “Because she doesn’t have three children! Fellows, fellows!” Tobias chuckled now, nervously. “I invented that story to cover the fact that I was—well, that I was frequenting the same establishment as you, and in the upstairs portion of the Fremont House as well, where I met with this woman. It just wouldn’t do to be known as an eminent solicitor who also enjoys visiting with women of the town now and then.”

“Yes,” Calliope said drily. “An eminent solicitor who enjoys spanking young schoolgirls who are too naive to know that’s not really a wooden ruler in his pocket.”

While the river men laughed, Tobias renewed his tirade. “Do you see what I mean, gentlemen? She is admitting she is a public ledger, open to all parties. How would she know about that if she hadn’t been in the Fremont House, tormenting every man in the place with her, with her”—he fluttered his hands as though describing birds—“with her patent leather shoes and insouciant little braids!”

Rushy and Field burst into a hearty round of laughter. Rushy didn’t care a damn whether or not Calliope had made a pile at the Fremont House as a hooker. In fact, he rather regretted that she’d been dallying with Tobias Fosburgh—or was it Headmaster Smith?—while he’d been stuck with one of the callow, unenthusiastic emigrants. Calliope was fresh, abundantly ripe, and pretty as a fresh-picked flower. If she had been in the Fremont House, she’d probably been the most desirable woman in town and was probably the one Brannan had been searching for, his “best girl.” It flattered Rushy that she would want to leave a place where she was big dog of the tanyard to come slave on his boat. Rushy was only sorry he hadn’t been able to screw her before she left that employment.

And if she was running from Brannan, it gave them something in common.

Tobias was now raving, “Check her bags, I tell you. I’m sure you’ll find a flouncy bonnet in there, with long pink ribbons streaming like taffy!”

This made them laugh even harder, but now Cincinnatus was yelling from the pilothouse, “Rushy! We’re coming up to Steamboat Slough!”

Field had to get below, and Rushy had to steer between the snags and hulks of the narrower slough, which was a faster cutoff into San Francisco’s bay.

Field said soothingly, “Tobias. How much money would you say she took? I’ll make good on it. Minus, of course, her fee.”

Rushy chuckled all the way up to the pilothouse. The last thing he saw was the blonde stunner in the rich brown satin dress sneering at Tobias. “You blowhard. Before I left the Fremont House, I told Clara to warn all the girls about you.”

* * * *

The galley was splendid, situated on the main deck just ahead of the engine room. While Catalina—she should start thinking of herself as Calliope now, a grand and flirtatious name!—had lied about knowing how to turn a funky possum into cordon bleu, she easily found the leg of mutton in the icebox, and it didn’t smell at all. She quickly made the men the promised platter of appetizers and even found a Celestial boy who appeared to be a kitchen hand to show her how to work the dumbwaiter.

His name was something that approximated Maurice, so she called him Maurice, and he showed her where all the dry goods such as rice and barley were stored. Maurice couldn’t speak much English, but he demonstrated where they tossed the vegetable parings out of a vent. He continuously shoved new enormous flopping salmon at her, and she was curious, until he took her to the hurricane deck and showed her how they got caught in the paddlewheel buckets and were tossed fresh to the deck.

Calliope minced the mutton and put it on to stew with onions, green peas, cayenne, and lettuce. She made mushroom sauce for a rabbit she roasted in the oven, then set to making a pot of asparagus soup with celery and cream. She could impress the men with her roly-poly jam pudding for dessert, and her glorious fate would be sealed. By the time the boat steamed into San Francisco, Calliope had made a tureen of salmon pate and was baking dozens of biscuits on which to spread it. She finally allowed her mind to turn to the captains of the El Dorado.

She stood on the port side of the vessel to smoke her cigarro while passengers disembarked. There was a chance someone who had seen her in Sacramento at the Fremont House would see her now. So she smoked looking at the oak scrub of Angel Island and thought about the two lanky bucks she’d first witnessed kissing in the cell of Fremont House and just now again, doing much more in the El Dorado pilothouse. Calliope sighed heavily, as if to rid herself of the immense lust that had poured from her since viewing the two men.

Sucking on the fetid, crawly members of prospectors had never given her the slightest twinge between her legs. She always had to lubricate herself with bear grease to submit to any of their wallpapered fumblings, and she viewed them more as rank animals who existed only to hand her gold. Sure, she had serviced some of the cleaner, more educated ones, such as Mark Hopkins, Captain Sutter, and Leland Stanford. She genuinely enjoyed the company of men such as that, men who gave her news from back East and made witty jokes. But they were the exception rather than the rule.

No, viewing the two riverboat captains slurping on each other’s mouths had set in motion this current adventure. The sight had roused her such as she hadn’t been roused since…Well, since Levi in Utah Territory, before coming to California. Calliope had taken refuge from the horror of her emigrant party in what she’d thought was the emotional calm of the Mormons, only to find that her new husband riled her to heights she’d never imagined. Levi was brash, loud, domineering, intelligent, a leader. And what she’d expected and hoped to be a tedious and soothing marriage bed turned out to be a circus of carnal pleasure. Levi was a master of female anatomy, seeking the most ecstatic and thrilling spots and committing unheard-of raptures upon her body.

The other seven wives made life difficult for Catalina when Levi sought her out more frequently than them. Their forgiveness was a pack of lies as far as she was concerned. Eventually, Catalina was disfellowshipped and had come over the Sierra with other disgraced members. She longed for and craved Levi and the intimacy they’d shared, which rendered her new employment as a prostitute even more heinous. In her mind she built an even bigger wall between the glories of Levi’s body and the disgust she felt at the idea of every single other man.