by Pete Dexter
Bill pushed the gin and bitters away. "Let me test something different," he said. "This is lost its bouquet."
The bartender moved the glass in front of a pilgrim a few feet down the bar—half of the badlands was drinking pink gin by then—and poured Bill a shot of whiskey.
The whiskey tasted healthy and familiar, and Bill wished Charley would come in the door so they could drink one together. No matter what had gone wrong between them, they couldn't be so far apart that a bottle of American whiskey wouldn't bridge it. He waited while the bartender poured him another, and then picked the bottle up and took it with him to the table where Pink Buford, Carl Mann, Charles Rich, and the river pilot, Massie, were playing poker.
Massie was still in Bill's customary seat. The seat they'd left for Bill offered his back to the door. "I don't sit with my back exposed," he said.
"I got your lucky seat," the pilot said.
Bill looked at him unkindly. He had his rules, and his reasons. With all the local talk of Indians and bandits and poisonings, the citizens and visitors of the badlands visioned themselves as charmed men in dangerous times, but the truth was there wasn't a man at the table anybody had ever tried to kill.
Bill had been shot at frequently. Once he had believed he was charmed too, but that feeling had ebbed from the moment he shot the policeman Mike Williams in Abilene. He never mentioned the change to a soul, not even Charley, but killing Mike Williams by accident told him he could be killed by accident too. And he was accordingly careful in places accidents happened. He never filled his right hand in a bar, he never sat with his back to the door.
It was a strain, always watching for accidents, and he was tired.
Nobody at the table moved, and Bill saw they weren't going to. It was like a test. He set the bottle of whiskey in front of the empty chair and sat down. The river pilot winked at him and patted the dollars he had already won.
The bulldog lay at Bill's feet and sighed. Bill took the winnings from the night before out of his pocket and laid them next to his bottle. The room seemed wrong, he couldn't say why.
Pink Buford dealt cards. They played dollar ante, table-stakes draw poker. Bill couldn't catch a hand; the river pilot's cards continued their winning run. He drew one card into Bill's three tens, and caught his straight. He drew into Pink Buford's aces, and made three fours.
The more the river pilot won, the more reckless he got. And the cards still defied all the laws of probability and common sense, and stayed with him. "I can't lose, boys," he said. Bill had seen runs before, and waited him out.
In two hours, Bill lost close to a hundred and fifty dollars, and finished the bottle of whiskey. He was feeling the need to relieve himself, but he hated to leave the table and miss it when the laws of common sense caught up with the pilot. It wasn't anybody's time forever.
Number 10 had filled, as it did most nights, with tourists and miners of all kinds and quality. Captain Jack Crawford had come in and was standing behind him, just out of sight. There was a professor at the piano, and the upstairs girls took turns singing ballads of the West. The tourists paid them to sing, the miners paid them to stop.
It was a hot night and even with the front and back doors open, all the smoke and noise hung inside. Bill decided to leave the table. He began to stand up, but the dealer, Carl Mann, gave him the first card of a new hand, and he stayed to finish it.
Jack McCall came in through the back door and went to the bar. He picked up a glass of gin and bitters sitting in front of a tourist and drank it before Harry Sam Young could stop him. The bartender fixed the cat man a hard look. "A whiskey thief is unwelcome everywhere," he said. "Even thieves won't have a whiskey thief around . . ."
But there was something loose in Jack McCall's eyes that Harry Sam Young had seen before, and he stopped himself in mid-sentence. Jack McCall walked away from him, down the bar, pushing through whores and miners alike. He was holding a gun in his hand now, and the ones who saw it moved out of his way.
At the end of the bar was the poker table. Bill had picked up his cards and was holding them against his chest. Across the table, Pink Buford noticed the change in the way Bill protected his cards, and prepared to abandon his hand.
Captain Jack Crawford saw the cat man and the gun, and backed out of the way.
Jack McCall fired into the left side of Bill's head from a distance of less than a foot. The ball exited through his right cheek, then broke all the bones in the river pilot's left wrist. Telling it later, the pilot would say he saw smoke before he heard the shot.
A moment later, Jack McCall shouted, "Damn you, take that," and Bill's head, which had been turned to the left by the force of the ball exiting his cheek, lowered slowly to the table. He could have been taking a nap. William Massie fell out of his chair, covering his wrist with his body; Charles Rich sat frozen. Only Carl Mann moved, and McCall pointed the pistol at his face and pulled the trigger. There was a snapping noise, but no shot. Mann would sell his half of the business the next week and move to New Orleans.
It was a few seconds before most of the bar patrons realized what had happened—it was nothing out of the ordinary for somebody to fire into the ceiling—and in those moments Jack McCall ran out the front door, snapping his gun at Harry Sam Young and half a dozen others. He turned in the street and yelled at the bar, "Come on, you sons of bitches," and then ran south and tried to take the first horse he saw.
The bar emptied out after him, with no one in a hurry to be at the front. The horse belonged to Mayor E. B. Farnum, who was a considerate man and always eased the animal's cinch when he left him saddled. The saddle turned over, dropping McCall into the mud. He got up and ran into Farnum's store, and hid in back behind freshly butchered meat. The crowd followed him in and took McCall prisoner. Not as much as a piece of penny candy was stolen.
In the crowd now was Boone May, who assumed authority, being the closest thing to a law officer there. He took McCall to the Gem Theater, holding him by the back of the collar. He allowed anybody so inclined to cuff McCall in the face, and by the time they arrived at the Gem, the prisoner was bleeding from the nose.
A miner's jury was already waiting at the bar. al swearingen closed all downstairs activities and forbade howling upstairs while the trial was in progress. Howling had become as fashionable as pink gin. Two hundred men crowded into the establishment to watch, and that many again stood outside, unable to get in. Word of what happened was spreading everywhere in town.
Jack McCall testified that Bill had killed his brother in Abilene, and then threatened to kill him too, if their paths ever crossed again. "As soon as I saw Wild Bill, I knewed it was him or me," he said.
The jury took an hour to decide. Al Swearingen opened the bar while they made up their minds, and then closed down again for the announcement. The foreman was a soft-brain who had once been a Confederate soldier. He was called Swill Barrel Jimmy, and owned what was conceded to be the oldest coat and shoes in Dead-wood, but always wore a clean white collar. "We find the defendant not guilty on account of his mortal grudge against Wild Bill, and self-defense," he said.
And Jack McCall was released. He took a horse that belonged to Al Swearingen and rode for Fort Laramie.
Elliot "Doc" Pierce was called from his house to administer to the corpse. He lived in the quarters behind his barber shop. He brought along his nephews, Mutt and Buster, to carry the body. They went into Nuttall and Mann's and found Bill lying oh the poker table. The cards he had been holding were in his lap. Pink Buford's bulldog was asleep at his feet. There wasn't much blood. Carl Mann, who had looked into the barrel of Jack McCall's gun, was still sitting on the other side of the table, drinking. Everyone else had gone to the trial. Doc Pierce felt for a pulse at the neck and the wrist, and noted to Buster that it was strange to find the most famous man in the West dead with so little company. There was about seventy dollars under him on the table.
He had the nephews carry the body back to the barber shop, and laid it on
a table. Doc Pierce sent Buster to Charley Utter's camp for Bill's Sunday clothes, and any other personal effects that would be appropriate for the funeral, such as his derringer.
He shaved Bill and then closed the wound in his cheek and covered it with pancake makeup. It was a perfect cross. He cleaned Bill's nails and cut ten locks of his hair from the back, where it wouldn't show as Bill lay in his box. The nephew came back, and they dressed Bill in a clean shirt and the Prince Albert frock coat that was his favorite.
They laid him in the box with his guns on and the derringer in a coat pocket. The white handles of Bill's pistols looked beautiful against the green lining of the box. They combed his hair. They put Charley's carbine in the box too, trying it on both sides to see which way it looked best.
A. W. Merrick of the Black Hills Pioneer arrived sometime after midnight, out of breath, shaking. He asked Doc Pierce questions and wrote down the answers. "What was the hand he was holding?" the newspaperman asked.
"I didn't notice," the barber said.
"Some said it was aces," the newspaperman said, "and some said it was eights . . . Exactly how did you find him?"
Doc Pierce didn't have much use for the printed word. "Lookit," he said, "I got things to do here. How the hell do you think I found him?"
"How did he look?"
Doc Pierce sighed. "This is for the people who loved the deceased," Merrick said. "This is the last they'll hear of him, so it ought to be good . . ."
"Well," the barber said, "Bill was the prettiest corpse I ever encountered. His fingers looked like marble."
The newspaperman was looking at him, waiting. "What else?" he said.
"The place where the assassin's bullet come out, it was a perfect cross." Doc Pierce brushed past the newspaperman then, pretending there was more left to do than there was. "You want to make yourself useful," he said, "you could print up some funeral notices."
By morning, the notices were posted all over town.
NOTICE
Died, in Deadwood, Black Hills, August 2, 1876, from the effects of a pistol shot, J. B. Hickok (Wild Bill), formerly of Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Funeral services will be held at Charley Utters Camp, on Thursday afternoon, 8I3I76, at three o'clock, p.m.
All are respectfully invited to attend.
The funeral was attended by four hundred people, including a large contingent from Crook City, so it was impossible to say later who stole Charley's rifle out of the casket.
All the town dignitaries were there, including Mayor E. B. Farnum, Sheriff Seth Bullock, and owners of all the large businesses. Mrs. Langrishe sang "I Know That My Redeemer Liveth," and then broke into tears.
Jane Cannary was in Rapid City, looking for a bull to ride on Main Street. Captain Jack Crawford had left town for Omaha, and would later swear he was a hundred miles away at the time of the killing.
And as Doc Pierce and his nephews were committing Bill's body to the earth, Charley Utter was asleep in Tigerville, between Hill City and Mystic, waiting to ride the last leg of his race against the Clippinger Pony Express.
The service was conducted by Preacher Smith, assisted by Malcolm Nash, whom he believed to be his disciple. The boy stood silently beside the preacher and stared into the sky, so lost in the preacher's words he could not remember who they were for, and he was the only one at the service who had ever known Bill at all.
She watched the funeral from the window of her room. It was afternoon, and she was not allowed outside. Behind her, the old woman combed her hair and talked of family problems. The old woman's breath was like swamp gas, and she talked too much. She was all that Tan You-chau had given her for servants.
The one they buried was Wild Bill. She knew he was honored by his people as a soldier. She did not know which war he had won or whom he had killed. The old woman told her one thing one day, another thing the next. She pretended to understand this place, but she lied by habit, as the women of her class did, and did not know herself what was true and what she had invented.
The old woman had told her, for instance, that the Red People had defeated Pudding, the greatest white warrior, and hundreds of his men, and that the white people mourned him and had sworn revenge. But she watched the white people from her window every afternoon while the old woman combed out her hair, and it was not true.
People in mourning did not laugh in the streets, or do business openly. She compared her own revenge to theirs, and saw theirs was false and unplanned. Not an intention, a comfort. "Hush yourself," she said now, and the old woman fell silent. They were moving the coffin from the camp where the man had kept his sleeping quarters. Four men lifted the box up onto a flatbed wagon, pulled by horses, and they took him south, up the street.
The cemetery was a thirty-minute walk to the southeast, and then a painful climb a hundred yards up one of the hills that marked the boundaries of the town. She had gone there herself, looking for a respectable place to bury her brother Song. First, of course, she intended to send the heart and eyes, and the bones of his arms, home. She did not care then that Tan You-chau had forbidden her brother's burial.
Burial did not matter now. The one in the coffin—together with a smaller man—had put Song's body into the oven, and what she had reclaimed could have as easily belonged to a dog. There was no heart, no eyes, no long bones to send home. She had come to this place to repay her brother's debts, but she had come too late. And she would never go home, either.
She watched the street for the smaller one, to see if it hurt him for Wild Bill to die. She was not white-skinned, and would not put away her revenge.
The old woman pulled the comb through her hair, starting at the scalp and traveling the length of her back. She began to speak of her husband again, who had quit his job and spent all his time in the opium dens. "He was always a dreamer," she said, "and now he dreams of his dreams. It is not my fault that he has changed."
"Hush yourself," she said, and the old woman was silent again. She went through the hair carefully at first, working out each tangle, and when it was smooth she pulled through with even, heavy strokes, grunting at the top of each one. The China Doll did not try to correct her manners. It was not possible to keep things here as they had been in Toishan. She thought of Tan You-chau, who kept only the customs which suited him. He wore the white man's clothes, but he had banished Song over a two-hundred-dollar debt, and Song had died in the hills.
She sat on her heels and watched the last of the white people turn the corner and follow the wagon to the graveyard. The little one was not among them. She wondered if he was dead too.
The old woman spoke of her daughters, who disobeyed her, and her son, who was a coward. He had been born the day after the slave ship docked in British Columbia, and refused the old woman a moment's peace since.
"Hush yourself," she said. Ci-an stood up and walked to her bath. The old woman averted her eyes while she undressed and stepped into the tub. Ci-an was the only Chinese in Deadwood with her own bath. She did not know about the whites. Even Tan's wife did not have a bath in her own room. Of course, Tan did not sleep with his wife.
Ci-an thought of her, fat and passive, as she studied her own body in the water. Her beauty gave her no pleasure now, except in refusing it to Tan. Even while he took her, she refused him. She would lie still on the bed and search the ceiling for the face of her brother. She would not smile or fight, even when he had threatened to sell her to the whites.
He would do that soon, and she welcomed it. Their skin had a rotted smell, and they were mannerless, but one day the little one who had put Song in the oven would come to her room. If he was not already dead.
She held one of her feet and washed between the toes. Her feet were smaller than her hands, and ached when she walked beyond the limits of her room. When she stayed in her room, as Tan wished, they turned numb, almost dead. That was the reward for obedience. She had walked once to the north end of town, and once to the graveyard in the south; and the curved, fragile bones in
her feet had hurt until she had forgotten everything else, and lost herself in the pain.
And she saw then that she must wait in her room for revenge to come to her.
The old woman knelt beside the tub and began to wash her back. "A disobedient child pulls at a mother's heart like a child in the grave," she said.
"Hush yourself, old woman," Ci-an said. "You do not know what you are saying."
In the evening, tan you-chau came to her door to take her downstairs. She was dressed in a silk robe and had made her face with rice powder and rouge. She had perfumed her palms. Most of Tan's girls had discarded formal dress. He had sold them all to the white men anyway. Only the singers—the Children of Joy—appeared in whiteface, but being ugly, they made themselves carelessly, more to fool the white men than to preserve themselves against this place. Tan had sold them to the white men too.
"Ah," he said when she opened the door, "the China Doll." That was the name he had given her, and it was written in two languages under the likenesses of her that hung outside. She did not like to be addressed in this way, especially by him who had given her the name. She bowed to him, expressionless.
"Perhaps before you sing for the creek miners tonight, you would like to lie with a man," he said.
She looked at him without interest or fear. "Do you want me to lie on the bed?" she asked. Her obedience angered him. He pushed her and she fell. The coarse wooden floor tore her robe. He picked her up by the sash and threw her, without effort, onto the bed. She lay still. He stood over her, staring, breathing through his teeth.
She did not change expression. Not when he tore her robe, not when he entered her, not when he slapped her face. She lay still and searched the ceiling for the face of her brother. In the end he spit on her breasts. "I will sell you to the cow-eaters," he said.