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31_days2016-08-01 05:37 pm
insaneladybug.livejournal.com) wrote in 31_days2016-08-01 05:37 pm
[August 1st] [The Wild Wild West] Chance Meeting of Nobodies on the Way to Somewhere
Title: Chance Meeting of Nobodies on the Way to Somewhere
Day/Theme: August 1st - we came from the same nowhere.
Series: The Wild Wild West (specifically, The Poisonous Posey episode)
Character/Pairing: Snakes Tolliver/Chita McCarthy (she's an OC; he's in my icon)
Rating: T/PG-13
By Lucky_Ladybug
I knew from a young age that my life was just destined to go four kinds of wrong. Once my parents were dead and I was sent to the orphanage, I couldn't turn around without running into the dark underbelly of humanity. Maybe you'd think that a Catholic-run orphanage would be a nice place, but it was awful for somebody who'd had the love of parents and a decent home before it was taken all away. There were more kids than the nuns knew what to do with, and there just wasn't enough love to go around. Usually, I got the short end of the stick. Oh, they tried to be kind whenever they could, but I was a handful.
There wasn't enough food for anybody to get much. We were told we had to be satisfied with what we got. I wasn't. Worse, I decided to do something about it. That was the beginning of my stealing things at a petty level. It wasn't long before I was taking small toys and candy besides other kinds of food. I never got caught, though, except once when another kid begged me to get something for him too. He denied that little part of it when the nuns found out. I already looked bad, but his lying made me look downright greedy. I guess I was when it came to stuff like toys and candy, things I didn't need. Before that, I only took enough food to actually fill up so I wouldn't go hungry each night.
There were some nice kids there. They were always the ones getting adopted. Or dying young. I saw at least two of them laid to rest when I was there, thanks to crummy kids' sicknesses. I don't know why I always had such good health. Maybe because of the extra strength I had from the food I stole. Maybe because only the good die young. That's true, you know.
People looking for kids never thought I could pull my weight. I got turned down more than once because I didn't look strong enough to help on a plantation or a farm. And then there was that little incident of me playing with a free colored boy who was passing through town with his family. In 1840s Virginia, that was about the worst sin I could have committed. When word got around about that, and that I didn't see anything wrong with it even after being "schooled" otherwise, that pretty much stopped any other potential adoptions for me in their tracks.
It was a funny world back then as we got closer and closer to the 1860s. Everybody---the North, the South, the slaves---were trying to turn things into some kind of holy war and interpreting the Bible to further their causes. People were always arguing over slavery and the slave trade and whether all slavery was evil or only certain "unjust" kinds. Every week you'd hear a lot of preachers acting like it was just fine and even pointing to passages in the Bible that they felt justified it. There in the South, they honestly believed they weren't doing anything wrong and that God was on their side and that the cold, industrialized North were the irreligious guys. The North, naturally, was screaming the same sort of stuff about the South and their slave-owning lifestyle.
Me, I didn't really want any part of any holy war from any of the sides involved. I wasn't any kind of a crusader. But I never really fit in to the Southern viewpoint, that's for sure. Maybe that was because my parents were from the Northern States and were sickened by slavery and I subconsciously remembered a little of their teachings. Maybe it was more because I've always done my own thing and I've very rarely agreed with society at large. In any case, I had a hard time believing that any just God would find slavery acceptable, except maybe in the case of crooks sentenced to hard labor, so I was almost always at odds with everybody else. I remember one time even saying that if the God they were worshipping sanctioned slavery, He didn't sound like somebody I'd want to worship. Yeah . . . let's just say that one really didn't go over well.
At the orphanage, the sisters tried to teach to love everyone while at the same time worriedly telling me that I really shouldn't play with colored kids or broadcast it all over the place like it was a normal thing to do. I asked why it wasn't and Sister Agatha really didn't know what to tell me. She was worried that I'd have to live at the orphanage until I was of legal age to move out on my own. It was a mixed-up world, she told me, and things just weren't the way they should be. I had the feeling she really felt the same as me, but she didn't feel free to say anything. I guess it would've been hard to, when one of the local bishops was all gung-ho about slavery and kept insisting that the Bible said it was okay.
I sure already knew the worlds was nuts. I'd known that all my life. And I knew I wasn't going to stay in the orphanage that many years; I'd go stir-crazy. I just didn't know how I was going to get out before then.
It was The War Between the States that did it. The South rebelled against the North, and while I have to say I don't think we were being treated fair in the years leading up to the war, I still wasn't really into the South's cause. Well, splitting off into our own thing sounded okay to me when the North was giving us the finger anyway, but it was their cause, not mine. I was into looking after me, not all the Southern States. I kind of figured I could survive just fine no matter who won. Then slavery was still the last thing I believed in. I didn't want to fight for that, but I guess I was a hypocrite, because I wanted my own freedom a whole lot more. When they came around asking for volunteers for the Confederate Army, I ran away one night and lied about my age to get in. I thought anything would be better than the orphanage. Boy, was I wrong.
I hated the Army like I've never hated anything before or since. I didn't like having people telling me what to do in the orphanage, and it was a lot worse having commanding officers telling you than nuns. I didn't escape people hating me, either; the scar that gave me my nickname was bestowed on me by a hateful soldier who just plain wanted to see me suffer. He never liked me, and when he figured out I'd let a Yankee soldier go instead of capturing him when he ran past the camp one night, well, he figured that was a perfect excuse to beat me half to death and brand me for life as the snake he felt I was.
I still don't know if I did the right thing or not. By that point I knew how awful the POW camps were on both sides and I just couldn't bring myself to dump somebody into one. The Yankee was panic-stricken, telling me that some of his fellow soldiers hated him and were out to get him, and I hid him until they went past. Maybe I felt a kinship with the guy. I don't know. I never saw him again and I never knew if his story was really true. I kind of always thought it was, though, especially after I met his comrades that same night. I recognized the irrational hate in them like I saw it in my own company, and I felt justified in protecting that kid from them. I'll tell you, though, that after what happened to me because of it, I spent a whole lot of nights thinking I should have been more worried about me than him. I vowed I'd never look out for anyone besides myself again.
It didn't stick. I tried to tell myself I was self-centered and self-serving, and I put on a show of coming across that way to most people, but I still ended up helping people if I thought they were genuine. I was a lot more selective about the people I helped, though, and I think I made some pretty good judgment calls.
When the war finally ended, I headed down to New Orleans to try to make my fortune in gambling. That was always what I was best at; even as a kid, I secretly set up poker games in the orphanage (and usually won them). I knew being a professional gambler was an actual, legitimate career (well, even though some people disagreed on the legitimate part), and I'd decided way back during the war that it was a logical choice for me.
I never expected what I'd find when I walked into one of the city's best casinos that night. Almost immediately, I saw this beautiful brunette lady with upswept hair arguing with a croupier. I guess she was beautiful in a garish, showgirl kind of way, but I'd seen a lot of showgirls by then and I could tell she wasn't the real deal. She was just pretending, same as I kept pretending I was tough and hard as nails. I felt a kinship with her right then. We'd come from different experiences, but we both knew what it was like to figure that putting on an act was the best way to survive.
I didn't have to get closer to hear what they were saying. The croupier was angry about a gambling debt she'd racked up and she was insisting she could pay it all back if he'd let her play again. It was when he leered at her and suggested maybe he'd consider it paid off if she'd play something else that I decided I had to get involved. Her disgusted expression and her approximate declaration of "Go to blazes!" wasn't going to make any difference to him. He was just about to call his henchmen to go after her when I stepped forward.
"Hey, Pal, leave the lady alone. Don't you realize that people are gonna leave here and tell other people to stay away because the croupier's got his mind in the gutter?"
He and his thugs and the lady all whipped around to see who dared to speak against what was happening. "Ah, but my friend," he sneered, "no one would dare to speak against this establishment for fear of losing their lives."
"Yeah?" My big response was to stand there and light a cigar. "Maybe the owner should be worried about losing this place."
The lady just stared at me. I wasn't sure if she was more surprised that I'd dare to say those things at all or that I dared to say them for her sake.
The croupier threw back his head and laughed. "You are threatening to take this business away from him? I have never seen you here before. You are little more than a whelp too sure of himself for his own good."
That was probably true, really. Sure, I'd won a lot of poker games, but to beat the gangster owner at his own game and take the casino out from under his nose was something altogether different. I think I was just making an empty threat at the time, but people like that are never willing to think of them as empty threats. I should know; I felt the same way after I clawed my way to the top.
"If it's not me, it'll be someone else," I said. "There's still a lot of people decent enough that they don't want that kind of garbage going on at their places of business."
The lady's eyes went wide. "You're crazy!" she yelped in a high-pitched New York accent. "These guys'll have you for breakfast. Get out of here while you still can!"
"I was going to tell you the same thing," I answered.
The croupier just smiled. "Well, let's see how you handle a different kind of fight. Beat them and perhaps we will talk about your proposition." He snapped his fingers and his gorillas lunged for the attack.
That was pretty stupid of me. Of course I couldn't beat even one of them up. And nobody but the girl jumped in to help me. But after she smashed a cash drawer over one of their heads and I'd somehow managed to punch the other one's stomach hard enough to make him double over and fall back, we had an opening to lock hands and run out of that joint.
"Are you okay?!" she cried when we were out on the pier. "They could have snapped you in half!"
"Oh, I'm fine," I retorted, "but didn't anybody ever tell you not to mess with people like that?"
"I didn't know it was that kind of place," she defended. "And you're one to talk. Look, your eye's completely turning purple!"
That brought on a hiss of realization. I actually hadn't noticed until she brought it up. Now the pain was flaming. I held up my hand to cover it and the loose sleeve of my red suit flapped in my face. Great, just great.
She sighed. "Hey, you're new in town, aren't you? You probably don't even have a place to go to clean up."
"I took out a hotel room," I answered. "But it's across town."
"Mine's closer. Come back with me and I'll see if there's a steak around or something for your eye." She tugged on my arm.
I stared at her with my good eye. "Don't you care about your reputation at all?"
She shrugged. "It's already not that great. Anyway, I care more about giving you a hand. Nobody's ever stuck up for me before. It was stupid, but it was nice." She looked down.
I could relate to that too. "I was glad to do it," I said in all honesty. "Hey, we haven't even introduced ourselves yet. I'm Snakes. Snakes Tolliver."
"Chita McCarthy." She smiled at me, not even seeming to notice the scar running down my face that everybody else shied away from. In that moment, I wondered if there was still hope for me after all.
In hindsight, I wish you hadn't given me that hope, Chita. It made what came later so much worse. I guess I'm sadder but wiser now, but I could have done without learning those lessons the way I did. If I had just realized that the reason you turned down the croupier wasn't because of any virtue you had, maybe I wouldn't have been so stunned later on when you showed your real colors.
But I'm getting way ahead of myself. There's still the whole rest of that first twelve hours to get through, and that's just for starters. I'm going to write it all down, Chita, every last bit. Maybe in some small way, getting it out like this will help me put it behind me once and for all.
Day/Theme: August 1st - we came from the same nowhere.
Series: The Wild Wild West (specifically, The Poisonous Posey episode)
Character/Pairing: Snakes Tolliver/Chita McCarthy (she's an OC; he's in my icon)
Rating: T/PG-13
I knew from a young age that my life was just destined to go four kinds of wrong. Once my parents were dead and I was sent to the orphanage, I couldn't turn around without running into the dark underbelly of humanity. Maybe you'd think that a Catholic-run orphanage would be a nice place, but it was awful for somebody who'd had the love of parents and a decent home before it was taken all away. There were more kids than the nuns knew what to do with, and there just wasn't enough love to go around. Usually, I got the short end of the stick. Oh, they tried to be kind whenever they could, but I was a handful.
There wasn't enough food for anybody to get much. We were told we had to be satisfied with what we got. I wasn't. Worse, I decided to do something about it. That was the beginning of my stealing things at a petty level. It wasn't long before I was taking small toys and candy besides other kinds of food. I never got caught, though, except once when another kid begged me to get something for him too. He denied that little part of it when the nuns found out. I already looked bad, but his lying made me look downright greedy. I guess I was when it came to stuff like toys and candy, things I didn't need. Before that, I only took enough food to actually fill up so I wouldn't go hungry each night.
There were some nice kids there. They were always the ones getting adopted. Or dying young. I saw at least two of them laid to rest when I was there, thanks to crummy kids' sicknesses. I don't know why I always had such good health. Maybe because of the extra strength I had from the food I stole. Maybe because only the good die young. That's true, you know.
People looking for kids never thought I could pull my weight. I got turned down more than once because I didn't look strong enough to help on a plantation or a farm. And then there was that little incident of me playing with a free colored boy who was passing through town with his family. In 1840s Virginia, that was about the worst sin I could have committed. When word got around about that, and that I didn't see anything wrong with it even after being "schooled" otherwise, that pretty much stopped any other potential adoptions for me in their tracks.
It was a funny world back then as we got closer and closer to the 1860s. Everybody---the North, the South, the slaves---were trying to turn things into some kind of holy war and interpreting the Bible to further their causes. People were always arguing over slavery and the slave trade and whether all slavery was evil or only certain "unjust" kinds. Every week you'd hear a lot of preachers acting like it was just fine and even pointing to passages in the Bible that they felt justified it. There in the South, they honestly believed they weren't doing anything wrong and that God was on their side and that the cold, industrialized North were the irreligious guys. The North, naturally, was screaming the same sort of stuff about the South and their slave-owning lifestyle.
Me, I didn't really want any part of any holy war from any of the sides involved. I wasn't any kind of a crusader. But I never really fit in to the Southern viewpoint, that's for sure. Maybe that was because my parents were from the Northern States and were sickened by slavery and I subconsciously remembered a little of their teachings. Maybe it was more because I've always done my own thing and I've very rarely agreed with society at large. In any case, I had a hard time believing that any just God would find slavery acceptable, except maybe in the case of crooks sentenced to hard labor, so I was almost always at odds with everybody else. I remember one time even saying that if the God they were worshipping sanctioned slavery, He didn't sound like somebody I'd want to worship. Yeah . . . let's just say that one really didn't go over well.
At the orphanage, the sisters tried to teach to love everyone while at the same time worriedly telling me that I really shouldn't play with colored kids or broadcast it all over the place like it was a normal thing to do. I asked why it wasn't and Sister Agatha really didn't know what to tell me. She was worried that I'd have to live at the orphanage until I was of legal age to move out on my own. It was a mixed-up world, she told me, and things just weren't the way they should be. I had the feeling she really felt the same as me, but she didn't feel free to say anything. I guess it would've been hard to, when one of the local bishops was all gung-ho about slavery and kept insisting that the Bible said it was okay.
I sure already knew the worlds was nuts. I'd known that all my life. And I knew I wasn't going to stay in the orphanage that many years; I'd go stir-crazy. I just didn't know how I was going to get out before then.
It was The War Between the States that did it. The South rebelled against the North, and while I have to say I don't think we were being treated fair in the years leading up to the war, I still wasn't really into the South's cause. Well, splitting off into our own thing sounded okay to me when the North was giving us the finger anyway, but it was their cause, not mine. I was into looking after me, not all the Southern States. I kind of figured I could survive just fine no matter who won. Then slavery was still the last thing I believed in. I didn't want to fight for that, but I guess I was a hypocrite, because I wanted my own freedom a whole lot more. When they came around asking for volunteers for the Confederate Army, I ran away one night and lied about my age to get in. I thought anything would be better than the orphanage. Boy, was I wrong.
I hated the Army like I've never hated anything before or since. I didn't like having people telling me what to do in the orphanage, and it was a lot worse having commanding officers telling you than nuns. I didn't escape people hating me, either; the scar that gave me my nickname was bestowed on me by a hateful soldier who just plain wanted to see me suffer. He never liked me, and when he figured out I'd let a Yankee soldier go instead of capturing him when he ran past the camp one night, well, he figured that was a perfect excuse to beat me half to death and brand me for life as the snake he felt I was.
I still don't know if I did the right thing or not. By that point I knew how awful the POW camps were on both sides and I just couldn't bring myself to dump somebody into one. The Yankee was panic-stricken, telling me that some of his fellow soldiers hated him and were out to get him, and I hid him until they went past. Maybe I felt a kinship with the guy. I don't know. I never saw him again and I never knew if his story was really true. I kind of always thought it was, though, especially after I met his comrades that same night. I recognized the irrational hate in them like I saw it in my own company, and I felt justified in protecting that kid from them. I'll tell you, though, that after what happened to me because of it, I spent a whole lot of nights thinking I should have been more worried about me than him. I vowed I'd never look out for anyone besides myself again.
It didn't stick. I tried to tell myself I was self-centered and self-serving, and I put on a show of coming across that way to most people, but I still ended up helping people if I thought they were genuine. I was a lot more selective about the people I helped, though, and I think I made some pretty good judgment calls.
When the war finally ended, I headed down to New Orleans to try to make my fortune in gambling. That was always what I was best at; even as a kid, I secretly set up poker games in the orphanage (and usually won them). I knew being a professional gambler was an actual, legitimate career (well, even though some people disagreed on the legitimate part), and I'd decided way back during the war that it was a logical choice for me.
I never expected what I'd find when I walked into one of the city's best casinos that night. Almost immediately, I saw this beautiful brunette lady with upswept hair arguing with a croupier. I guess she was beautiful in a garish, showgirl kind of way, but I'd seen a lot of showgirls by then and I could tell she wasn't the real deal. She was just pretending, same as I kept pretending I was tough and hard as nails. I felt a kinship with her right then. We'd come from different experiences, but we both knew what it was like to figure that putting on an act was the best way to survive.
I didn't have to get closer to hear what they were saying. The croupier was angry about a gambling debt she'd racked up and she was insisting she could pay it all back if he'd let her play again. It was when he leered at her and suggested maybe he'd consider it paid off if she'd play something else that I decided I had to get involved. Her disgusted expression and her approximate declaration of "Go to blazes!" wasn't going to make any difference to him. He was just about to call his henchmen to go after her when I stepped forward.
"Hey, Pal, leave the lady alone. Don't you realize that people are gonna leave here and tell other people to stay away because the croupier's got his mind in the gutter?"
He and his thugs and the lady all whipped around to see who dared to speak against what was happening. "Ah, but my friend," he sneered, "no one would dare to speak against this establishment for fear of losing their lives."
"Yeah?" My big response was to stand there and light a cigar. "Maybe the owner should be worried about losing this place."
The lady just stared at me. I wasn't sure if she was more surprised that I'd dare to say those things at all or that I dared to say them for her sake.
The croupier threw back his head and laughed. "You are threatening to take this business away from him? I have never seen you here before. You are little more than a whelp too sure of himself for his own good."
That was probably true, really. Sure, I'd won a lot of poker games, but to beat the gangster owner at his own game and take the casino out from under his nose was something altogether different. I think I was just making an empty threat at the time, but people like that are never willing to think of them as empty threats. I should know; I felt the same way after I clawed my way to the top.
"If it's not me, it'll be someone else," I said. "There's still a lot of people decent enough that they don't want that kind of garbage going on at their places of business."
The lady's eyes went wide. "You're crazy!" she yelped in a high-pitched New York accent. "These guys'll have you for breakfast. Get out of here while you still can!"
"I was going to tell you the same thing," I answered.
The croupier just smiled. "Well, let's see how you handle a different kind of fight. Beat them and perhaps we will talk about your proposition." He snapped his fingers and his gorillas lunged for the attack.
That was pretty stupid of me. Of course I couldn't beat even one of them up. And nobody but the girl jumped in to help me. But after she smashed a cash drawer over one of their heads and I'd somehow managed to punch the other one's stomach hard enough to make him double over and fall back, we had an opening to lock hands and run out of that joint.
"Are you okay?!" she cried when we were out on the pier. "They could have snapped you in half!"
"Oh, I'm fine," I retorted, "but didn't anybody ever tell you not to mess with people like that?"
"I didn't know it was that kind of place," she defended. "And you're one to talk. Look, your eye's completely turning purple!"
That brought on a hiss of realization. I actually hadn't noticed until she brought it up. Now the pain was flaming. I held up my hand to cover it and the loose sleeve of my red suit flapped in my face. Great, just great.
She sighed. "Hey, you're new in town, aren't you? You probably don't even have a place to go to clean up."
"I took out a hotel room," I answered. "But it's across town."
"Mine's closer. Come back with me and I'll see if there's a steak around or something for your eye." She tugged on my arm.
I stared at her with my good eye. "Don't you care about your reputation at all?"
She shrugged. "It's already not that great. Anyway, I care more about giving you a hand. Nobody's ever stuck up for me before. It was stupid, but it was nice." She looked down.
I could relate to that too. "I was glad to do it," I said in all honesty. "Hey, we haven't even introduced ourselves yet. I'm Snakes. Snakes Tolliver."
"Chita McCarthy." She smiled at me, not even seeming to notice the scar running down my face that everybody else shied away from. In that moment, I wondered if there was still hope for me after all.
In hindsight, I wish you hadn't given me that hope, Chita. It made what came later so much worse. I guess I'm sadder but wiser now, but I could have done without learning those lessons the way I did. If I had just realized that the reason you turned down the croupier wasn't because of any virtue you had, maybe I wouldn't have been so stunned later on when you showed your real colors.
But I'm getting way ahead of myself. There's still the whole rest of that first twelve hours to get through, and that's just for starters. I'm going to write it all down, Chita, every last bit. Maybe in some small way, getting it out like this will help me put it behind me once and for all.