by Pete Dexter
In the wagon he'd lift Malcolm's head and pour the milk into the corner of his mouth, a tiny bit at a time. Some days Bill would return from Nuttall and Mann's Number 10 and attend the feeding. That's where he went for his morning drinking and a daily exhibition of his skill at shooting bottles off the heads of soft-brains and drunks.
He would take off his shirt and wash himself in the Whitewood, then cover his chest with mercury, slipping his hands down into his trousers to his privates. Then he'd put on a clean shirt and stand at the back end of the wagon and watch Charley feed the boy.
"How is it?" he'd ask.
Charley would shake his head. "I don't know."
"Well," Bill would say, "he isn't bound for the other side yet."
And then, like his saying it made it so, he'd head off into town somewhere, to play cards or tell stories to the tourists. Some days Charley gave him twenty dollars, and some days Bill didn't need it. Charley never minded the money, he'd never in his life had trouble finding more.
It took him an hour to move a quart of milk from inside the bottle to inside Malcolm. It spilled, of course, and Charley kept a wet towel close by to wipe it as it slid down his cheeks and neck. Even so, the wagon began to smell sour. For smells, Charley hated sour worse than anything up to decayed fish.
He washed the boy after he fed him, and changed the sheets. The first time he did it there was a spot of blood from the boy's backside, but he never saw that again. He took the dirty sheets, along with his own clothes, to a laundry in Chinatown and picked up the clean.
He walked through the two blocks of Chinese slowly. He was interested in their cooking and their language and their ways. One day he saw the girl the Chinese whore man had kept to himself on the wagon train. Another day he saw her picture in the door of one of their theaters. Her name was the China Doll.
Whenever Charley had been to Chinatown, he went to the bathhouse. It was later in the day than he liked to bathe, but he waited because it didn't make sense to take a bath and then to go to Chinatown. Sometimes he sat in the tub and talked to the Bottle Fiend, sometimes he didn't. It was funny with the soft-brain. You could say what you wanted, sorting out your thoughts, because he couldn't understand what things meant, but then the next day he might repeat the whole thing back to you.
"It don't seem right," the soft-brain told him one morning, "that the boy ought to be getting between you and your life, but there it is. You marry, you carry."
Charley gave him a dollar and said, "Forget you heard that, Bottle Man."
The Bottle Fiend said, "What?"
In the afternoons, Charley looked into business. He spent two days in the district recorder's office, going over placer claims. He had bought and sold claims in Colorado, but it was nothing he liked. If you wanted to know who somebody was, set them down next to a gold claim. Charley had seen common people cheat their brothers and fathers, abuse their wives and leave their children to get close to gold. Mostly, they acted on the assumption they could come back and straighten it all out after they were rich. They believed gold healed, too.
And there wasn't a man in a hundred who doubted he could handle it. The softest-brains in the Hills, the kind that couldn't buy new boots without having their own dog piss all over them, would all assume they could handle money.
It was easy enough, then—buying and selling mining claims— to take what money those people had, but the feeling was related to the one he sometimes got the moment a black bear came out of her den in the morning, and he was sitting in a tree forty feet away with a needle gun waiting for her. It always felt like it was too early.
Of course, trading mining claims, you didn't have a Ute Indian shooting your ass out of the tree while you were sitting there waiting.
Charley studied the placer claims and declined to enter the business. There were other things he understood as well. Transportation, hauling, if worst came to worst he could trap for a living. He had something over $30,000 in Colorado banks, there was no hurry. Money had always come to him like he was standing downhill.
By the end of the week, he had decided to run a pony express from Fort Laramie into the Hills. A transportation line was too encumbered, Charley was not married to this place yet. He had been partners in such a line before, and there was more to it than mules and wagons.
The financing was not incidental. Teams of two mules or American horses went for three hundred dollars each. Broncs were eighty dollars, pack mules were sixty dollars, where you could find them. Charley didn't know what he would do with his yet, but he was grateful to have them. Then there was food for the animals, and horseshoes, and a blacksmith's tools, and guns and ammunition and shovels and hatchets. Oats were $1.40 a hundredweight, baled hay was twenty-five dollars a ton. And some of the drivers ate too.
And sometimes they stole, but more often they lightened their loads by throwing part of it away. Charley's experience in the transportation business was that the only way things operated right was when he rode the wagons himself, and there was no future in that for a man with painful legs.
The pony express looked cleaner. Of course, he had never operated one before. There was already a twice-weekly service run by Enis Clippinger, but it took a letter two weeks or less to get from Boston or San Francisco to Cheyenne, and that long again to find its owner in the Hills. And then, depending on the rider—some could read and some couldn't—the seals on the letter would be broken and the letter stuffed wrong into the envelope.
Sometimes the letters didn't get to the miners at all. Enis Clip-pinger wrote public notices blaming the Indians and the outlaws. He said the miners were ungrateful of his efforts. He also said nobody could do better, which was when Charley decided to take his business. On Thursday he sent letters to the Black Hills Pioneer and the Cheyenne Leader announcing his new service.
Messr. Charles Utter has established a pony express between Deadwood and Cheyenne and will make round trips hereafter. All riders are hired illiterate. The pony express must prove a great convenience and we hope it may be adequately patronized.
It took him one minute to write. Bill stood over him, watching. "I don't know how you do that," he said. "Like the words are already inside the pen."
"It's just what's in your brain," Charley said. "The way the words come to you naturally is the best way to put them down."
Bill said, "The things in my head don't come in words."
The boy stayed the same, or might of lost ground, it was hard to say. Charley fed him milk until he refused it, washed him, changed his sheets. He'd almost given up talk, the boy wasn't listening. And the boy didn't know him from the blanket. He thought he might hire someone to care for him until it went one way or the other. The thought came to Charley then that if you stayed one way long enough, that was the way you were. He wished he could explain it to the boy.
By the end of the week, the boy's tongue had turned colors. It was lighter now, greens and blues and purples, and didn't look so swollen. "What in the world could of happened to you?" Charley said, more to himself than the boy. The boy shrugged. He always shrugged when he heard talk.
Calamity Jane Cannary came by on Friday afternoon. She had stopped three times previous, looking for Bill. Once he had hid under the wagon. Friday afternoon was the first time Charley had ever seen her sober.
"He's in the wagon, ain't he?" she said.
"No, ma'am," Charley said.
"There's something in there," she said.
He said, "It's my wife's brother." He tried to mention his wife at least once every time he saw Jane. "He's been sickly all week."
Jane took off her hat and ran her fingers through the knots and tangles and burrs in her hair. Charley looked for bats. "What is it?" she said. "Torpid fever?"
Charley shook his head. "I don't know," he said. "I found him in there early this week, and he hasn't moved since." Jane closed her eyes, thinking.
"I'll take a look at him for you," she said.
"There's already been the doctor
here," Charley said. He'd found Dr. O. E. Sick at his office one afternoon and brought him back to the wagon. He went to him because of his association with the Bottle Fiend, which somehow struck Charley as connected to the present case. Dr. O. E. Sick had run his fingers through the boy's hair. "In some ways," he'd said, "it resembles snakebite."
"Doctors don't know nothin' about healing," Jane said. She walked past Charley to the wagon, washing him in her smell. She was wearing buckskin trousers and a fringed buckskin coat, an old Colt .41 that must have weighed eight pounds, an ammunition belt, and a wool scarf around her neck. It was the middle of a summer afternoon.
She leaned into the wagon, staring. "Why, he ain't nothing but a boy," she said when she had come out.
"He's eighteen," Charley said. "My wife's brother." She climbed into the wagon then, and Charley heard her in there, talking to him, moving things. He didn't try to stop her; it took a shock sometimes to bring a person out from under a spell.
She asked Charley for water, which he got her, and then a towel. She stayed in there with him most of an hour. "His tongue is swole," she said when she came out, "but it's more serious than that."
"I don't know what it is," Charley said.
"I could come by," Jane said, "and look after him. I nursed the sick all my life. Smallpox, torpid fever, consumption . . ."
Charley did not see how it would hurt the boy to have a little more company. There was a temptation to picture the unexpected arrival of his wife again—finding Malcolm fork-tongued and molested of his senses in the care of Calamity Jane Cannary—but he fought it off.
He saw that she wanted to be in Bill's camp, but it was something else too. She cared for the sick. Charley left her there with the boy and went looking for Enis Clippinger.
He found Bill instead, outside the Bella Union, Pink Buford's bulldog had just killed a wolf in the street. Pink collected five hundred dollars, and was inside, buying drinks. Bill was sitting on the steps with the dog. The dog had lost an ear in the fight, but was otherwise unmarked.
"I wish Pink Buford wouldn't fight this dog so much," Bill said.
Charley said, "It must be what he likes."
Bill kissed the dog on the muzzle and looked him in the eye. "I can't see it," he said. He moved the animal's head and looked at the place where his ear had been. "That isn't going to grow back," he said. The dog licked Bill's chin. The wolf lay in the street, opened wide at the throat.
Charley sat down next to Bill. "I decided to run a pony express," he said.
"They already got a pony express."
Charley shook his head. "I'm going to race him, Cheyenne to Deadwood, for rights to the mail business."
Bill said, "Why would they race you?"
"I'll issue a challenge," Charley said. "When you issue the challenge, they always come around to race."
Bill smoothed the bulldog's ear back on his head, trying to make both sides look the same. When he spoke again, Charley heard something coming. "I located a dead Chinaman half a mile north of here," Bill said. "Near the mules."
"A dead Chinaman."
Bill shrugged. "They didn't have a cause of death, or even a name. Nobody claimed him, so he's ours."
"Lucky day," Charley said.
Bill looked at the dog while he talked. "There was a delivery today, from Sioux City. A kiln, a great big bastard, to the Deadwood Brickworks. They left it north of town."
"Who left it north of town?"
Bill shrugged again. "Whoever. They weren't ready for it yet at
the Brickworks, so they left it. Cast iron, it must weigh four tons. I removed the crate myself."
"Slow down," Charley said. The Deadwood Brickworks belonged to the sheriff, and Charley saw where Bill was pointed in this.
"We could go out there tonight," Bill said. Charley thought it over, remembering the newspaper account of Baron Van Palm. Bill said, "A Chinaman's got a right to decent disposal too."
The part that came back to Charley was when the baron's hand pointed toward his ascending soul, and a holy light glowed around his feet. He had to admit it was something he wouldn't have minded seeing for himself. "The Chinaman didn't have a family?"
Bill said, "All they intend to do for him is dig a four-foot hole in the ground and roll him in. Chinese don't even get a box if nobody claims them. He's better off with us."
"You know whose vessel that is you propose to use to float this slant-eyes to heaven? You know who the Deadwood Brickworks is?"
Bill was not interested. "What difference does that make?"
"Bullock," Charley said. "It's Sheriff Bullock's kiln."
Bill looked at him, waiting for the rest. Charley waited too. That seemed like enough. Bill said, "You think this might be against the law? You think they got a law about Chinese in kilns? This place barely has laws against crucifixion . . ."
Charley edged away from him, not to confuse the Lord over which one of them said that. "Besides," Bill said, "all that's left when we're done is a few ashes. The sheriff won't know it's been tested."
Some time passed before Charley spoke again. Their conversations were like that, they would let the words settle between them before they added to them.
"How did you come into possession of this slant eyes?" he said.
Bill shook his head. "Dr. Wedelstaedt gave him to me. He said the Chinese was ostracized from the rest. They wouldn't talk to him if he came in the front door, they wouldn't see him if he was standing in front of them. He wasn't allowed to live in Chinatown or attend the Chinese rituals."
"You been seeing Doc Wedelstaedt?" Charley said. He didn't like having more people in it than needed to be there. "What's he said?"
"He says the Chinese got their ways and we got ours. He isn't much of one to make judgments."
"I mean about yourself."
Bill looked away. "He's got treatments, but nothing that would appear to be better than dying. One thing is a wire that he sticks up your weasel and heats it."
Charley tried to see how bad Bill had taken that news, but he couldn't read it one way or the other. "He gave me more mercury," Bill said, "and then he told me about the Chinese, and what his own people did to him. He's the kind of doctor that if he can't fix what's wrong with you, he's got a story about somebody that's worse off."
Charley nodded. There were a lot of that kind of doctors. "Did he say why the Chinese did that to one of their own?"
Bill stood up and stretched and smoothed his hair back off his face. "It had something to do with a girl," he said. "More than one, maybe. He knows their names, which all sound sing-song to me. It was money and weasel and promises, one depending on the other, and there wasn't anything they could do in the end but ostracize him or admit they might of been wrong about the way they had things set up for about three thousand years. The slant-eyes say 'Sorry, sorry' all the time, but among themselves they don't like to be wrong."
"Nobody spoke to him, over a girl . . ."
"Not a person," Bill said. "They sent him off into the trees, I guess he'd been there since spring. The doc says he never heard of him until he was dead. When that happened, the Chinese were more conciliatory, at least to the point they would mention his name out loud."
Charley stayed on the step, looking up at Bill. He thought of how the Chinese liked to talk, how they couldn't seem to get it out fast enough. "That must have been a lonely slant-eyes," he said.
"Well," Bill said, "it's taken care of now."
The Chinese was lying under a small pile of branches and pine needles, back in the trees beyond the field where Charley had tethered his mules. Bill went right to the spot, even though in the fading light he couldn't have seen the length of his arm. Charley followed, putting his feet in the same places Bill's had been, out of habit.
Before they got to the Chinese they passed his lean-to, and Charley stopped to look inside. There was a book he took to be some sort of Bible, a pair of U.S. Army boots, a bone knife, an empty money pouch. They were set out neatly a
long the straw mat the Chinese had used for a bed, as if they were things he meant to sell.
"There isn't even a picture in there," Charley said.
Bill said, "Maybe he didn't want to see them, either." A little later he said, "There's white men do cruel things too."
Charley could see the Chinese before they moved a branch. He was lying face-up, not much bigger than a boy. He had on loose pants, sandals, and a U.S. Army coat. His mouth was open half an inch and there was dirt on his front teeth. Bill began to pull the branches off. "Is this where he died?" Charley said.
Bill said, "I found him on this spot, and never touched a thing."
The more Bill uncovered, the less of the Chinese there was. Charley suddenly didn't want to know about the Chinese, any more than he had to.
When the branches were gone, Bill borrowed Charley's handkerchief and brushed the pine dust off the face. "He wasn't much more than a boy, was he?" Charley said. Bill stopped cleaning the Chinese and said he wished he'd brought a bottle of pink gin along.
Charley said, "I wish you did too." Bill picked up the body as if there were no more weight to it than the clothes it was wrapped in. He draped it over his shoulder and they walked around the edge of the field, keeping just behind the trees. It was a half mile that way over fallen limbs and singed tree stumps, but Bill never even broke a sweat. Charley followed him, watching the Chinese's head bounce against Bill's back.
The kiln was a monster. The doors must of weighed two hundred pounds themselves. It was built on two tiers. There was a bottom compartment for wood or coal, and a top for what you intended to heat. The compartments were separated by a steel grating and a flat piece of metal that might have been tin.