by Pete Dexter
Before the sun broke the hills, the boy was in the creek. Every morning. He sat on his haunches in an uncomfortable way, and none of the ordinary panning motions was ordinary for him. He was jumpy, and he tried too hard. He panned gold like there was somebody watching him.
Which in fact there was.
The old man saw him on Friday, sitting on a horse above the trail that followed the Whitewood into the city. The old man only saw him for a moment, but he recognized the beard and the posture. It was the man from the Gem Theater. He sat on a horse the same way he stood on his feet. It was him. There was nothing wrong with the old man's eyes.
He had been to the Gem six times in the last six weeks, but not regular, like every Saturday morning. He went when he wanted. Sometimes he paid the girls, sometimes he paid the man.
There was nothing wrong with his peeder, either.
He was there again on Sunday. He came in the afternoon with two others, and stayed in the trees away from the trail, not to be seen. When they had gone, the old man walked down to the water. The boy was as grim as the creek he was panning.
He had froze his mind on keeping on, and had forgot what he was keeping on at. He had worked Number 12 seven days then, taken maybe five dollars' worth of gold out of the claim. If a luckier man was to fall in, there might be that much in his pockets when he climbed out. The boy had no luck, though. That was as clear as the fact he had no talent.
Not that the two were unrelated.
"Even the Lord rests on Sunday," the old man said.
The boy was slopping gravel over the sides of his pan and never looked up. "I don't care about religion," he said. "I care about what I can see."
The old man sat down on the bank and watched him work. "It ain't that clean a line, sometimes," he said, "what you can see and what you can't."
The boy shook his head, like he had been accused. "I ain't seen nothing lately," he said, "but silt and gravel." The old man saw the skin on the boy's hands was cracked at the knuckles, and he knew how it hurt to work with broke skin.
"You ought to go slower," the old man said. "Look around more, get the feel of what's around you . . ."
"I know everything about this wet bastard creek I need to," the boy said. "I know I staked a claim, and I intend to work it until it gives up its gold."
"It ain't no hurry," the old man said, seeing he would not be warned.
"Maybe not for you, old man," the boy said. "But I got things to do." The old man stood up and walked back to his camp. He would have told the boy about the man who come out twice to watch him, but he could see the boy didn't want him there, and wouldn't listen anyway. He would have told him, but the old man did not like to be called "old man."
The man from the Gem Theater was back again that evening, with the others. The old man was in the trees, collecting kindling, and heard their horses. The boy had stayed in the creek until dusk, and then gone up the hill and taken off his boots. He'd gone to sleep without supper.
The men on horses stopped in the trees above the boy's camp again, but only for a few minutes. They tied the horses there and walked down. The old man moved to a place where he could watch. He had a scattergun in his cabin, but there was nothing he could do with it but get himself shot.
They moved down the rocks to the tent slowly, trying not to make noise. They needn't have bothered, the boy slept like he was buried. They came slow, and when they were a few yards from the tent two of them took the guns out of their holsters. The old man thought they would shoot the boy in his sleep and take what they wanted, but they stopped at the entrance to the tent, and the man from the Gem Theater held on to the roof and kicked inside. There was a grunt, but nothing else. The man from the Gem kicked again.
"Wake up, boy," he said. "Al Swearingen is here to collect his debts."
The old man could hear the boy talking inside the tent, but he couldn't tell what he said. The man from the Gem Theater kicked again, and then backed up several steps in a hurry as the boy came out after him. One of the others hit the boy across the back of the head—the old man thought he'd hit him with his gun, but the light was going fast and he couldn't say for sure—and the boy dropped on the ground.
The man from the Gem Theater walked away, and the other two dragged the boy after him. They had him under the arms. They draped him across the boy's firewood and took off his trousers. There were no sounds at all from the boy, not even a groan. The man from the Gem Theater unbuttoned his own pants and got down on the ground behind the boy. "Now," he said to one of the men, "put that knife in his mouth so he'll notice it when he wakes up."
The old man turned away and sat on the other side of the tree. In a few minutes he heard the boy. He never groaned, the old man was surprised at that, it was a gagging noise. "That's Mr. Bowie in your mouth, boy," the man from the Gem Theater said. "Don't move nothin' . . ."
The boy made that noise again, strangled, like he was trying to get out the words. Then he cried out—half a cry really, something had cut it off—and the man from the Gem Theater was talking. "Where's Wild Bill tonight, boy?" he said. The boy made the strangling noise again. "No, no," the man said, almost gentle, "I brung my friends tonight. . ."
The old man stood up, quietly, and made his way back into the trees, trying to get away from it. The farther he went, though, the louder the boy's cries got. He had walked fifty yards before it was quiet again, and he sat down there. There was a scream a few minutes later, a long, scairt scream, and then it was quiet.
The old man thought of his scattergun again, and that maybe there were things that signaled you were supposed to get yourself shot. The scream was the last of it. The old man waited in the trees, and a long time later the men came back up the hill. "We ought to finished it," one of them said.
The man from the Gem Theater said, "I know it."
"I wouldn't had nothing to do with this business," the first one said, "if you said you was going to leave him alive."
The man from the Gem Theater said, "There's things you give away without knowing why. We give that boy his life."
"You give him his life," the first one said. "If it was me, I'd go back down there and finish it."
The old man heard them get on their horses. He thought of the scattergun, but he didn't want to kill anybody. He was sixty-seven years old, and didn't want that over him now. He didn't know what he did want, except to wait for the mining companies, and sell them Number 11 Above Good Hope, and then move into town and eat his breakfast in the hotel. Maybe visit the Green Front once a week. He didn't expect he would be going back to the Gem.
He made his way to his cabin in the dark, stumbling over tree roots and rocks, but he moved quiet. He didn't want to make noise now. The air was dead still; the only sound from the boy's camp was the creek. He made a fire so the boy could see he was there, and sat down in his chair by the door. There was still no noise from the boy's direction, nothing but the creek. He tried to act natural, like he had just got back from town. He made himself a pot of coffee and ate half a pound of New York cheese. It was thirty cents a pound at Farnum's, and he ate it for dinner every night. He sat on his chair holding coffee in a tin cup in one hand, the cheese in the other. The mosquitoes never bothered a man that ate cheese every night.
He looked in the direction of the boy's camp, but there were clouds that night, and no light at all from the sky. The thought hit him that the boy might be hurt serious. The old man didn't want to bust in uninvited—the time for that was past—but if the boy was hurt. . .
He walked to the edge of the fire's light and stared down toward the boy's tent. He listened; he thought it over. It wasn't likely the boy had gone back to sleep, so he was either hurt or morose. The old man decided to wait. He let the fire die, and when it was gone he went inside his shack and lay in bed. The scattergun leaned against the door, and he thought again that he might of been supposed to go down there and get himself shot.
He woke in the morning at first light, put on his boots and hi
s trousers, and walked outside. The clouds were still there, heavy and low, and the air smelled the way it did before a storm. He looked down to the boy's camp and saw it was empty.
The old man walked down the gravel slope and looked inside the tent. He had took his clothes and personals, left the pan and shovel and the rubber boots. There was dried blood all over the cot. The old man pulled his head outside the tent; he'd already seen more than he wanted. There was blood on the ground, too. It led from the firewood to the tent. The old man wondered what they had done to him that bled this much and didn't kill him. He wondered that, and he wondered what it had to do with him. "What was a body supposed to do?" he said out loud.
He walked back up the little hill to his own camp. "All I could of done," he said, "was to get shot myself." He sat down on the chair near his door and looked out at the Whitewood Creek, where the boy would have been by then, ignorant and clumsy and strong, holding his silent argument with the nature of how things were. He missed the boy, and felt the loss. And he had lost something besides the boy, sitting in the trees, listening to the sounds of what they did to him.
The boy walked along the creek back into town, his tongue was cut deep and swollen, and the metal taste was as strong as when the knife was inside his mouth. He. did not let himself think about the rest of it.
He'd done too much of that after what had happened in the whore man's wagon on the way out, thought about it until it crippled his talk and his feelings, until he stuttered and couldn't decide what to say. He'd felt himself close to something bad then, and he knew if he thought about this now, he would find it.
He walked past half a dozen miners on the way in, most of them sitting in chairs outside their tents or shacks, usually with a rifle or scattergun propped against a tree nearby. The boy saw something humorous in that, men worried that somebody would steal their ground, something that was always there. Only one or two of the miners were working their claims; the boy saw there wasn't much left in the stream.
He came into town downhill, along the same path the wagons had took the first day he had ever seen Deadwood. He didn't know where he was going, he hadn't thought about it. He did know there wasn't anything for him sitting on his heels in the Whitewood Creek, looking for specks of gold. He could have sat in front of his tent with a rifle, like the old man, and waited for the mining companies to buy him out, but the boy did not have a waiting sort of disposition.
It was nine-thirty. He could hear shooting down in the badlands, but he was in no hurry to get there. He had lost his interest in shooting. A woman in a flower-pattern dress came out of the Dead-wood Brickworks, Inc., carrying a chamber pot, and spoke to him. He was standing in the mud. "Good morning," she said.
He started a reply, but his tongue suddenly felt too big for his mouth, and he was afraid if he tried to talk, it would come out and he wouldn't be able to get it back in. He smiled at her instead, and the blood leaked out a corner of his mouth, and her face changed.
"Are you shot?" she said.
He shook his head no. She ran back into the Deadwood Brickworks, Inc., calling for the sheriff. The boy stood in the mud and waited, he didn't know what for.
She came back, pulling the sheriff by the arm. He was a big man with eyes like a bad dog. He said, "Is something wrong with you, boy?"
The boy wiped at the front of his mouth and turned away from them to drop a line of blood out of his mouth into the mud. "What's wrong with him?" the woman said.
"Something," the sheriff said, "but it isn't serious."
"He can't speak," she said. "He's bleeding from the mouth."
The sheriff seemed to soften. "All right," he said, "I see what it is now. I'll take care of it."
"Thank you, Sheriff," the woman said. "If you need first-aid techniques, you know where I am . . ."
"I'll take care of it now," the sheriff said. He took the woman by the elbow and walked her off his porch. When she was gone, the sheriff turned to the boy. "Where did you come from?" he said. The sheriff took a step closer. The boy didn't feel afraid, but something was causing the blood to flow from both sides of his mouth now.
"Where did you come from?" the sheriff said again. He reached out and grabbed the boy by the neck. It was almost gentle, the way he reached for him. The boy saw that the sheriff didn't want people to see that he was hurting him. His thumb pushed into the nerve at the bottom of the boy's neck, and the movement started his tongue bleeding for real again, and he opened his mouth to let the blood out.
The sheriff watched him, reconsidered, and let go of his neck.
"If I was you," he said, "I wouldn't come here. This is a business area, son. Ladies walk on the street. If I was you, I'd go to the badlands, or back where I came from."
The boy did not let himself think about where he had come from. And when the sheriff finished, he walked away, toward the badlands. The sheriff stood out on the porch of the Deadwood Brickworks, Inc., watching him. The boy felt him back there. He had a stare you could feel on the back of your head.
He walked into the bathhouse, thinking Charley might be inside. There was nobody there but a soft-brain, though, who wanted to see inside his mouth.
He walked north, downhill, until he saw Charley's camp. There wasn't anybody around. He looked inside the wagon and saw the sheet Charley had laid out for himself, the blanket, the pillow. Everything clean and white. He realized what he wanted was to sleep.
He took off his boots and his shirt. The shirt was heavy from his blood, some dried, some fresh. He walked to the creek and splashed water over his face. He didn't want to soil Charley's bed. The feel of the water on his face made him thirsty, and he poured a little of it from the heels of his hands over his lips. Some of it went into his mouth—he felt it—and then it disappeared. There was nothing to swallow.
He crawled in the back of the wagon and fit himself into the sheets. He lay still a long time, leaving his thoughts empty. He looked at the canvas roof and kept himself still. That was the way you mended, he thought, keeping everything still. He fell in and out of sleep all that day while the sun moved across the canvas top. It was hot, and then it was cooler. The flies were all over him, but he threw his shirt out the back of the wagon, and most of them followed that.
The light was dim when Charley came back to camp. The boy heard him coming in, heard him stop when he realized something was in his wagon. Charley didn't like anybody but himself in his bunk. He called it a shooting matter.
The boy listened to Charley's steps, slow and careful, and then he saw his head at the front end of the wagon, the opposite place he expected it to be. The boy thought Charley would yell, but he didn't. He stood there a minute, looking in, and then he climbed in too, and sat backwards over the driver's seat and looked at him.
"Malcolm?" he said.
The boy smiled. A line of watery blood came out one corner of his mouth. His tongue had swollen now where he couldn't close his teeth. "Good Jesus," Charley said.
The boy shrugged, but his shoulders were under the sheets, where Charley couldn't see them.
Charley wiped at the sides of the boy's mouth with his handkerchief. "What kind of accident was this?" he said. He moved the boy's jaw, seeing if it was broken, and fresh blood ran down into the sheets. Part of the boy's tongue lay between his teeth, the color of the Hills themselves. The tongue was sliced through in front, Charley couldn't see how far back the cut went.
"What in the world?" he said.
The boy smiled again, keeping himself still. He wasn't going to think about that now, he wasn't sure he could remember. When it happened, the boy knew every detail. No matter what assault was made on him, there was something that accepted it, and knew what it was. And walking back to town, even after what had happened, things had a normal feel. Now, though, lying in Charley's bed, it began to slip away from him, the normal world. The boy did not struggle against that, it didn't seem like something you needed to fight.
Charley considered writing matilda a letter, he b
egan it on the evening of the third day the boy had been lying in the wagon.
My Dear Wife,
I do not wish to upset you, there has been a small accident with your brother, the nature of which remains a mystery. Has there been tongue-biting in your family?
Charley got that far and decided against a letter. Even if he told her everything he knew, which wasn't a thing, it wasn't going to satisfy her on anything, except the fact that she had made a terrible mistake trusting him with her brother in the first place. On the other hand, he could conjure a picture of his wife coming in unexpected one day on the stage and finding Malcolm with his tongue swollen half out of his mouth, lying in the wagon with brains like a barbecued squirrel's.
"It isn't likely Matilda would show up unexpected," he told Bill later, "but not impossible. She's done it before."
Bill thought about it half a minute. "If it was me," he said, "I'd write her the letter and keep it on my person at all times. If she showed up and the boy wasn't improved, I'd hand it over and say I didn't have the heart to worry her before."
There was some practicality in that. Charley never considered himself the captive of true love, but there was something about Matilda beyond her skin that he liked, especially when he'd been away, and he didn't like to see her disappointed in him.
"See," Bill said, "you married on a different level. A girl like that can't understand people like us."
Charley nodded, even though it was never what Matilda didn't understand that worried him. Bill said, "My own Agnes, you never saw her short-tempered, because being famous herself, she knows the situations you can get into. It's understanding that makes her different. There's nothing Agnes won't understand."
And Charley heard the wishing in that.
The boy went downhill. He lay still, looking at the ceiling, and except to drool or shrug, did not respond to noise or movement.
Charley bought milk from a widow woman, whose husband had been hit by lightning the week they got to the Hills. She had four children—all girls, one of them too young to talk—and they'd run to Charley when he came for the milk in the morning, and grab his hands and walk him to the back, where the widow kept her cow. Charley wondered what kept her in the Hills, but he never asked. He'd get his hands loose from the little girls, overpay for the milk, and leave. He would feel their hands wrapped around his fingers all day.