Deadwood

by Pete Dexter

  It turned out, of course, that the Hearst Company's supervisors were also scared of their wives, who objected to looking at the business on their way to and from the bakery or church. And in the end, the supervisors induced the mayor to hire Boone May to remove the nuisance.

  Boone had been sick more than a year, long enough to know he would never get well. There was the first spell, which resembled torpid fever, and that had changed into something else, something quieter, that took his strength a little every day.

  He drank at night, lying in bed, and sometimes he thought he felt his body dying bit by bit under his long underwear. He never took his underwear off, for fear of what he would see. In the mornings he was sick, sometimes too weak to dress. He was a size, though—head and body—that no one noticed. On the occasions he walked into the bars of the badlands, the sight still frightened the tourists.

  And so it happened that on the first Friday in October Charley looked up from his newspaper and found Boone May sitting on a horse in front of Lurline's House of Distinction. Lu-Lu was perched on the railing, smiling at Boone in a business-related way. Charley saw the star pinned to Boone's shirt as he climbed off the horse. There was a yellow cast to his skin and something unsure in his movements, as if he didn't trust his hands and feet. His clothes hung on him like there was nothing under them at all.

  "I ain't takin' that one," Lu-Lu said. Being the best looking, Lu-Lu had turned temperamental, refusing the roughs and common miners and anybody ugly or missing as much as one finger.

  Lurline had tried to get Charley to slap her. He wouldn't do it. He said, "You just have to talk to her yourself." He was tired of the whore business, Lurline was stealing from him, the girls took advantage because they knew he wouldn't hit them.

  Lu-Lu looked over at Charley now from her spot on the railing and made a face that Boone couldn't see. It was a horrible, rubber face—children could do that—but it was prettier than Boone's.

  Boone took the two steps up the porch slowly, holding on to the hand rail, and Charley sensed the sickness in him and measured the distance between them, willing him to stop before he got communicable.

  Boone wore one gun; it hung three or four inches off his hip and moved when he moved. He seemed to feel the weight of it as he climbed the steps. He stopped at the top and leaned against the railing.

  He stared at Charley with one eye. "I heard you had a whorehouse, pretty," he said.

  "I ain't going nowhere with this one," Lu-Lu said.

  Charley said, "Why don't you run inside the house, child?"

  She shook her head. "I want to see this."

  Boone turned his head and put his eye on her. She got off the railing and went inside. "We might have a position for you," Charley said, "the girls aren't scared of me."

  Boone said, "I got a job already."

  "So I see."

  He dropped his hand close to his gun, heavy and slow. "I'm the sheriff."

  "I didn't remember that there was one."

  "They give me two hundret dollars, and now they got one." He patted his shirt pocket, where the money was. His fingers were dark and he smelled like he'd been all month in a buffalo skin.

  "This isn't the place to spend it," Charley said. "Deadwood's the spot for you."

  "They told me that same thing about yourself," Boone said.

  "I've been to Deadwood, and I moved here." The ground shook and rattled the insides of the house. It seemed closer today, Charley guessed they were right under the street. "I like the quiet," he said.

  Boone didn't move. "The town fathers would insist to see you move your place down the hill," he said, meaning Deadwood.

  "It's going to make most of them a longer walk."

  "Well," Boone said, "the point here is, they made me sheriff on account of you."

  "There's no law broken here."

  Boone yawned.

  "I obey the law," Charley said.

  "That's what they given me the two hundret dollars for, to come tell you the law don't want a house in Lead."

  "Where's the papers?"

  Boone fixed that single, dark eye on him. Charley saw the fire start and then die, for lack of fuel. "No papers," he said, "just you and me."

  "The law is papers now," Charley said. "You can't shoot a bad dog without the papers."

  Boone stepped back and rested his hand on the butt of his gun. Charley didn't move. He was not anxious to shoot Boone May, not after the stories that followed his duel with Handsome Dick. He did not have the nature for taking human life, and one episode led to another.

  "I ought to of spanked you like a baby," Boone said. "You and the gunfighter both."

  "I obey the law," Charley said. Boone looked around him, smiling at a few spectators who had stopped in the street to watch.

  Charley heard Lu-Lu inside the house, shouting, "Charley's going to shoot the sheriff." And Boone smiled at that too, but he was sick and he was weak, and he saw he'd misjudged the pretty. Charley sat still.

  "I ought to throw you in the mud and drown you," Boone said. "It's no point in being polite."

  Charley thought of drowning and stood up, straightening his legs one at a time, and walked across the porch. Boone smiled, dropping his gaze as Charley came closer, until his chin was right on his chest. "I hope you aren't contagious," Charley said, and he picked Boone up, grabbing a leg and his ribs, and threw him off the porch.

  Both places Charley touched him, he felt bones. Boone landed on his shoulder and lay still a moment, stunned. Charley walked after him, hearing the girls in the house. "Charley's kilt the sheriff!"

  "Don't ever say drown to me," he said.

  Boone got to his feet, slow and weak, and then dove at Charley's legs. He got one of them, and Charley hit him behind the ear. Boone held on with one hand, reaching for Charley's privates with the other. Charley hit him again, and his head dropped an inch down the leg. Boone bit him, a long, deep bite. Worse than being shot.

  Charley brought both fists down on the back of Boone's neck, glimpsing Lurline standing in the doorway now, her hands on her hips, watching. He wondered if she was jealous, seeing him bit by somebody else. He hit Boone again, feeling something tear in his leg, and then Boone was lying in the mud.

  Charley's pants were torn and the blood ran down his leg into his moccasins. He sat down on the steps to examine the damages. A piece of flesh the shape of a tongue was torn from his thigh, connected only by skin, and Charley pushed it back into the crater, and pressed it there until the bleeding slowed.

  He looked over his shoulder at Lurline, who was still in the door. "I need gauze," he said.

  "I don't think we got any," she said. Her voice was soft and scared.

  "We got to have bandages," he said, "it's a whorehouse." Boone lay face-down in the street.

  Lurline left and then reappeared with bandages and a bottle of clear local whiskey. Charley looked at the bottle, he looked at her. "I could get the good whiskey," she said. "I didn't know you want the good . . ."

  He had never seen her timid before, he guessed it was the blood. He took the knife out of his belt and cut his pants leg from the knee up, regretting to further ruin good clothes. He took the bottle out of Lurline's hand and poured half of it right into the bite. The sting was a second behind the cold, and Charley closed his eyes until it passed.

  When he opened them again, Boone May was on his hands and knees, clearing his head. It was like trying to smash a wasp. Charley took the bandage from Lurline and wound it slowly, four times around his leg, so tight he could feel his pulse underneath.

  Boone stood up, holding the back of his head. The assembly of citizens moved back and Boone swayed in the mud. There was blood on his chin and his bug-eyes were pushing out of his head. Charley stood up, beginning to feel pure.

  Boone pointed a finger at him as dark and wide as a gun barrel. "Death is on the way," he said. "Ain't nothing can help you, pretty, because there's more ways to kill a man than to stay alive."

  H
e felt something then that Bill must have felt. There wasn't hate or love or remorse or misgivings in it, it was someplace he was going. He dropped his left foot behind his right, offering less of himself to shoot at, and took the right-hand gun out of its holster.

  There was no hurry, Boone was still talking. He cocked the hammer and Boone's eyes retreated back into his head. He held up a hand. "Whoa, pretty. Death is coming, but not today. This ain't our day yet."

  And then Boone lost his footing, backing up, and fell, and Charley lost his killing feeling. Shooting was too good for Boone May anyway.

  The hurt in Charley's leg gathered itself and came back at him, and he limped to the bench in front of the bakery and sat down. Boone got up and followed him over, smiling and sick, and then sat down in the street.

  "How you going to take care of all them girls and watch for me too, pretty?" he said.

  Charley looked at the way he was sitting and saw he was hurt, and saw he was right. And what to do about it. He made up his mind in two seconds. "I'm not," he said. "Right here, on whatever date this is, I hereby publicly and legally turn over fifty percent of the operation to you, and the rest to Lurline Monti Verdi."

  Boone watched him to see if he was serious, and then he began to smile. "You're a strange one, pretty," he said.

  Charley went inside to get his things, passing Lurline in the doorway. She was smiling too, blinking tears. "Nobody ever went fifty-fifty with me in my life before," she said.

  And it almost made him feel bad, to hear her grateful.

  In the summer of 1878, smallpox came to the northern hills. There had been a mild strain two years earlier, a month before Bill and Charley had arrived, which had claimed three lives. A pest-house had been built then, first near a brewery on Spring Creek in Elizabethtown, a mile from Deadwood, then on Spearfish Road, and finally in South Deadwood, where the Deadwood and White-wood creeks met. The last site was agreed to in the belief there was nothing that could come out of a pesthouse that wasn't already in the Whitewood Creek.

  The pesthouse was used by roughs and miners and whores, and avoided by anyone with a roof of his own to be sick under. For the two years between outbreaks of smallpox, the building sat empty.

  The epidemic of 1878 brought a different strain of the disease. There had been one hundred cases in Sidney, Nebraska, in the spring, killing thirty-four people. Jane had nursed the sick there, and returned to Deadwood in early July on the stagecoach.

  The stay in Nebraska had renewed her spirit—which the bartenders of the badlands had spent two years discouraging—and her commitment to the medical profession. She was still lame in the leg she had broken in Rapid City.

  Charley had left Lead the day he gave away his whorehouse and was living in the Grand Union Hotel again. He saw Jane get off the stage—she took off her hat and kissed the ground and then screamed her eagle scream and headed for the Gem Theater.

  Deadwood was changing in small ways, and there was something in Jane's manner that reminded him of the way things had been before. Before what, he couldn't say. There was talk of telephones and streetlights now, but those were not the changes that tugged at him.

  And he was glad to see Jane, but avoided the Gem Theater all week just the same.

  He heard from her, though. Her eagle scream would carry the length of Main Street in a hailstorm, and he got reports on her behavior from the Bottle Fiend. She claimed to have doctored the population of Sidney, killed most of the Indians in Nebraska, visited the widow of General George Armstrong Custer, and had sexual congress with a rooster.

  The Bottle Fiend repeated what he heard and asked Charley what was true. Charley would sit in the tub nearest the door, where he could catch the light to read the paper. "She would have nursed the sick," he said. "Jane has a nursing instinct." Sometimes he thought it was Deadwood changing, sometimes he thought it was himself. Things seemed to be shaded darker. His eyes saw what they always saw, but in some subtle way the light fell tangent now, never right on what he wanted to see. Sometimes he thought of Agnes Lake as just out of sight, sometimes he thought he might have seen too much. It hadn't entered his thoughts yet that he was going blind.

  "The rooster," he said, "don't believe that. If Jane took a rooster, it was just to show off. It wasn't anything she meant."

  "It's what I heard," the Bottle Fiend said. He had grayed and aged that winter, beyond anything normal. It seemed to Charley there were two kinds of constitutions, and one took to the Hills and one didn't. And it seemed to him that a man who looked in the mirror and saw himself getting a year older every week would find a new climate. Even a soft-brain.

  The history of the northern Hills was a history of its claims, though—even the Bottle Fiend's—broken hearts and broken backs. There was something undiscovered that nobody would leave. It held Charley too.

  He thought sometimes of leaving to look for Agnes Lake, but his thoughts of her were like dreams, and in his dreams Deadwood was where she was, and he was afraid he would lose her if he left.

  The first case of smallpox broke out on a friday, two weeks to the day after Jane's return. It was one of the upstairs girls at the Gem Theater. She was found in her bed by Al Swearingen, sweating, blistered skin, running a fever that Jane—who had been pulled from her sleep under a table downstairs—put at 106 degrees.

  "Get her out," Swearingen said, when Jane told him what it was. "I don't want none of that in here."

  Swearingen never left the theater now, an adjustment he'd made to the boy in the preacher's clothes sitting across the street waiting for him. He had even quit going to the windows. It was useless, because he worried one way when the boy was gone and another way when he was there.

  Swearingen had given up on having the boy killed—there were roughs who would shoot off their own toes for a hundred dollars that had refused to put a bullet in a preacher—and found his safety inside. He stayed upstairs, where he'd taken a corner room. Several times he had begun to read the Bible, for protection, but he couldn't read enough of the words to fight the boy.

  The discovery of smallpox in his place—two doors from his own room—was a sign to Swearingen that the boy and his Bible were beginning to force him out into the open. And he stood at the door while Jane worried over the girl, wondering how things had gone so wrong. Jane soaked rags in a fixer she had mixed in secret and pressed them against the girl's forehead, holding them there with one hand, drinking from the fixer with the other.

  "It's smallpox, all right," she said, sounding proud. "Just like in Sidney, and Elk Point before. It's a lucky thing I got here, the regular sawbones is scairt to treat it."

  "Get her out," he said.

  Jane shook her head. "No such thing. I ain't takin' this poor child to no pesthouse." She wiped at the girl's forehead and patted her cheek. The girl's eyes were shiny and inattentive.

  "It's God's will," Jane said, "that he puts me to a place in time to nurse the pox."

  "This is my place," he said.

  She didn't even look back when she answered. "I am a screamin' eagle from Bitter Creek, the further you go the bitterer it gets, and I'm from the head end. Now git before I shoot the toes off your feet."

  Jane had been saying that, every time she got happy, ever since her return from Nebraska.

  A line of sweat broke out across Swearingen's forehead and a trembling occurred in his hands. He stepped out of the room and watched Jane tend the whore from the hall. He felt it coming after him now—a judgment before he was ready. He touched his cheek, testing for fever. Jane had begun to hum. The upstairs girl pulled at her nightclothes and a bubble of spit hung on her chin. He took the handkerchief out of his back pocket and held it against his face. Through it, he felt the trembling in his hands.

  Jane poured fresh fixer into the rag, took another drink for herself.

  "This is my place," he said again.

  She laughed at him. "Move her yourself, then," she said. "You touch this child, and you'll be dead in three weeks."


  The upstairs girl's eyes came back into focus for a moment, and her breathing turned faster and shallow. "Don't be scairt," Jane said, and put the rag against her forehead. "I been through this about six hundred times and you ain't got a killing case." She considered the sores on the girl's face and shook her head. "There is going to be some disfigurations, though . . ."

  "You got one hour," Swearingen said.

  Jane unholstered one of her pistols, cocked it, and set it on the bed next to the girl. "Ain't nobody takin' this child to the pest-house," she said. "Nobody that wants to live."

  He stared at the girl on the bed. One minute she twisted with the fever, the next she lay still as the dead. He tried to see if the boy was behind it, but the image of the girl on the bed was strong and clear, and wouldn't move aside for him to look for the cause.

  "I'm going to need about six helpers," Jane said. "Git me plain girls without no medical education. I don't need arguments. They can take turns to sit here and empty pans."

  He closed the door and walked downstairs, into the bar. The whores had seen the girl's affliction, and they crowded around him to ask what it was. One of them said if it was poison, she knew who did it.

  Swearingen pushed through them and walked behind the bar. He found himself a bottle of clear whiskey and a glass. "Is she dead?" one of the girls asked.

  He walked back through them, up the stairs and into his room. He locked the door and pulled back the window curtain, and sat on his bed, watching the street.

  The boy was gone, but he would be back.

  The second and third cases of smallpox were reported the next day at the Bella Union, across the street from the Gem. It was another upstairs girl and a gambler, both of them broke. Dr. H. Wedelstaedt was called to the bar early in the afternoon, and he ordered them quarantined in the pesthouse.