Paradise Sky

by Joe R. Lansdale

  What struck me as most interesting, though, was he came in with the fellow that had been scalped, cut, and burned. The busted fellow still had a limp, but as I said before he had abandoned the cane. There was also with him a little man with a sunken chin and a dimple in it like a bullet strike. This man was thin of shoulder and chest. His eyes were always darting about the room, which made me think of a weasel, which was the name he was known by. When he sauntered in he had on a set of guns and a belt full of cartridges.

  Like a lot of cowboys and miners, there was them that didn’t like to check their weapons, their manhood being tied so closely to them. This often meant I’d have to beat them about the head and ears with my own pistol, since as bouncer I was allowed to carry mine.

  Weasel and Big Boy was among them that wanted to hang on to their goods. They grumbled when I asked for their weapons and promised them a claim check in my best handwriting. I pointed to a sign right by the door that said CHECK YOUR GODDAMN GUNS. AND WE MEAN IT.

  “A man’s guns ought to stay on him,” Weasel said.

  Like a lot of the others, I believed my manhood was tied to my weapons, too; it was easier to prove it with a pistol than it was with an idea, cause that took brain work and consideration and someone on the other end of it that was willing to listen. Problem with trying to be rational all the time is the other fellow ain’t always concerned with how logical your argument is.

  What I said next hit Weasel solid as a brick. “Your johnson stays on you, your guns go behind this counter.”

  Weasel leaned over the counter, got close to my face, letting me get the full measure of his breath, which was already wet with alcohol and onions and something that came from deep down inside of him like a mating skunk. His clothes smelled, too, mildewed and musky. Sweat was dripping down from under his hat and onto his forehead.

  “I fought for the Confederacy, and now I got a nigger telling me I got to give up my guns?”

  “I’m telling you to check them,” I said. “I don’t plan to auction them.”

  “You getting smart with me, boy?” said Weasel.

  “I’m telling you the rules,” I said.

  Big Boy stepped up and loomed over me, even though I was standing behind that counter. He was so tall I felt like I was sitting down. The look on his face was frightening, not because he looked mad but because he didn’t. There was some kind of mark in the center of his forehead made with what looked like fresh chicken shit.

  “Fellows,” said Burned Man, and his voice seemed to come from some dark mine shaft in which there had been a cave-in. “This man has rules to follow. Like all servants, he knows his job and his place, don’t you, boy?”

  Here I had been feeling sorry for this fellow, burned to a cracker, scalped, and pretty much shit on by life, and now he was making those kind of remarks with his tunnel voice. My job wasn’t to avenge every sour remark that come up on me, because believe me, each night I got a washtub full of them, but any pity I might have felt for his burned-up self flew right out the window. Fact was, something about him made my neck knot up and my spine grow tight.

  “It’s my job,” I said.

  “Very well,” said Burned Man, and he reached under his very shiny black suit coat into the inside pocket, came out with a lady’s pistol, and laid it on the counter. This led to Big Man pulling his hog leg and smacking it on the counter alongside it, along with a bowie knife about the size of Saint George’s sword, which he thrust into the wood point first, so that it stood up. Weasel just looked at me. He was breathing heavy, and his oily face shone in the lights. As his lips curled back, his twisted yellow teeth came out of his mouth like a groundhog checking for sun. For a moment I thought he was going to pull his pistols. I determined if he should make that motion, I would beat him to it. I laid a hand on the LeMat and watched him, tried to keep one eye on the other two, cause from time to time not all the weapons got corralled; now and again a few got through. I figured Big Man, however, could just fall on me and kill me.

  “Now,” Burned Man said, laying a hand on Weasel’s shoulder. “It’s for everyone, and we want to be cooperative.” He was smiling wide enough I could see his gapped and snagged teeth, and he was speaking in that voice I told you about. I sensed deep down inside that tunnel there might actually be some honey, but it was spoiled honey.

  Weasel slowly removed his gun belt and placed it on the counter. I gave them all a claim check with a number on it, tied off a tag to the weapons with the same number, and put them under the counter. All the time I’m doing this they gave me their full attention, and Big Man loomed over me like a cloud. Burned Man had a way of holding back, being behind them, letting them be the first line of defense. All that money he had come into had made him powerful.

  They wandered off, Weasel the most unhappy of the three, and took a table where a card game was starting. Wild Bill appeared, laid an elbow on the counter, said, “I watched you deal with them fellows. Right nice job.”

  “Frankly, Bill, I was a little nervous.”

  “Ought to be,” he said. He pulled his revolvers from his pants pockets, laid them on the counter. I knew he had a hideout gun, but thought it prudent not to ask about it. “I was near, though, and I would have come into the fray had the situation called for it.”

  “I know that,” I said. “I seen you over to the side, and that gave me comfort.”

  I hadn’t really seen him, but I thought it was a nice thing to say. I wanted him to know I trusted him, and in my mind the respect I had lost for him earlier had been regained.

  “They were about the business of picking a fight, Nat. I should know; I’ve had many a one picked with me.”

  “Suppose you have,” I said.

  It had gotten noisy in the Gem. The cigar, pipe, and cigarette smoke had started to fill the air and drift across the room in little gray clouds. The piano player was really loud that night, and no more in tune or aware of what tune he was playing than he was any other time. There was a new girl singing, and she couldn’t hit a note any better than the piano player’s wife—not if she had had a boat paddle and the note was tied to a string just over her head. I put my hands behind the counter so Bill couldn’t see them shake.

  “Buy you a drink?” Bill said.

  “Sarsaparilla,” I said.

  As I mentioned earlier, Wild Bill didn’t much care who said what to whom as long as you didn’t say it to him. He didn’t mind sitting with a colored, and because of his reputation and ability with them pistols, everyone gave him a slide. It was better that way. There was people to cross, but Bill, pleasant as he could be, wasn’t one of them.

  “I get a reprieve in about half an hour,” I said, pulling out my pocket watch and reading the face of it.

  “That’s when we’ll do it, then,” Bill said. “Well, going to get me a drink, find some cards, and if the night is right, line me up some feminine companionship, preferably before drunkenness has set in, so my choice will be better and cleaner and of a more satisfying nature when I awake in the morning.”

  For a married man with a disease, he was pretty cavalier about things. He wandered off into the crowd, them making way before him like he was Moses parting the sea. I went back to my work, and in about a half hour I turned over the gun gathering to another worker, a white fella with a drinking problem and a runny nose. I went out to find Bill.

  Bill was holding down a table with three others, playing cards. Bill, as always, sat with his back against the wall. When I seen he was in a game, I started to walk away, but he called out, “Nat, come on over, friend.”

  I came and stood by him as he was tossing in his cards. He said, “I’m done with this round.” He said to them others, “I would appreciate it if you would abandon this table so as to leave me and my friend to it for a private conversation.”

  Now, I can swear without exaggeration they was studying him and me, trying to put the whole thing together. It wasn’t like the problem was they was all Southern boys, because they
wasn’t. There was plenty who fought for the North wouldn’t give a colored man the time of day or piss on him if he was on fire. As I heard one Yankee say one time, “It was more about territory than niggers.”

  But this was Wild Bill, and after a moment of consideration they got up and scraped their chairs and went away. Bill watched them lest one should turn on him, cause the truth was, excluding Charlie Utter and a few others, Bill had few friends that was solid, and many of them that he had was really more like suckasses. Some might even be looking for a moment when his back was turned to pop him. Me he trusted cause I had thrown in my hand that night without knowing who he was or caring.

  “You may be off duty, but pull your chair around here by me, the back of it against the wall,” he said.

  Like I said, he liked his back to the wall. I did that, and he said, “Nat, there’s some that don’t like you hereabout.”

  “I suspect they are legion,” I said, “but it ain’t for anything I done.”

  “You are a tribute to your race,” Bill said, not realizing there was an insult in that. “But there are some that would shoot a dog that brought them a rabbit, and just because the dog was black. You following my drift, Nat?”

  “No insult to you, but I have been in this position before and have been worse off in times past.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “But I tell you now, that big man, he is one of the breed that killed Jesus, and he has your number.”

  It took me a moment, and then I got it. The big man was a Jew.

  “Furthermore,” Bill said. “The little fellow, he don’t have nothing but dead in his eyes. He likes to kill.”

  “Some might say such of you,” I said.

  “Some might,” Bill said, his teeth showing slightly beneath his mustache. “They would be wrong. I don’t like to kill, but I’m willing to if the need arises. I prefer to go to bed at night without having killed a man, for it only furthers the desire of others to pull down on me so as to build a rep. But I can sleep with who I am. I have never killed a man that didn’t need killing, except for an unfortunate accident with a deputy once. But I’ll not discuss that. Weasel, though, he’s one of a bad breed, Nat. He was not only a soldier, he used to be a buffalo hunter, and by all estimates a fair shot. He is said to have shot buffalo calves for fun and was known during the war as a man that liked to shoot the wounded; it didn’t matter North or South. He was Northern, but it was for the blood, not for any kind of cause. That could just be a story, but I tend toward believing it because he has the look about him. I am a good evaluator of character, having used my good judgment to avoid being shot by many a scoundrel.”

  “How do you know all this about him?” I asked.

  “I was in the war, Nat, and I knew of him through Custer. They were at Bull Run together. The little bastard was deadly, but mostly from behind a tree or from a ditch. He isn’t exactly a coward, but he measures his odds out, I can promise that. No one ever saw him at the forefront of the battle if he could dodge it. He is a backshooter, if he gets a chance.

  “The giant, his name is Finklestein, or so he claims. There are those that contest his story of being a Jew and say he is a German or some other foreigner, but it hardly matters, does it? They say he took his wife’s last name. His family, as the story goes, were all killed when he lost his mind and took an ax to them. They say it was a fever and he didn’t know what he was doing and he lives in constant sorrow. That’s why they say he is here in the Territories, to avoid the law.”

  “Who is ‘they’?”

  “That is a good question, Nat. But I have heard the story from several. However, they always got it from another person. And it changes a little here and there. I’m telling you the version I prefer, the one Charlie Utter told me. Anyway, the big man went kind of mad and decided he was a Jew and that he had been turned into something called a golem, if I hear correctly. Fact is, he calls himself Golem, like that’s his name.”

  “What’s a golem?”

  “It’s a Jew thing. Some kind of monster they say will whip the ass of their enemies. He thinks he’s that monster. That mark he’s put on his forehead, says that stuffs him full of power, whatever that means. Charlie was a little unclear on the matter.”

  “Think there’s anything to it?”

  Wild Bill grinned at me. “I figure a .44 slug will straighten things out. As for the other, the walking Yule log, I think he pulls the strings on those two due to his having a reservoir of money. There is something wicked about him, of that you can be assured.”

  “You may be right, Bill,” I said. “He makes my skin crawl, and I don’t think it’s just because of the way he looks. I like to think I’ve got a better heart than that.”

  “Let me get right on the matter. I have been told they have been following and asking about you. I have heard it this very night in Mann’s Number Ten from a man said he overheard the greasy one say such when he was in his cups. According to what this fellow told me, and this fellow is something of a wind blower, Ole Yule Log has a thing for you, Nat, and that’s why he has the crazy bastard and the grease bowl with him. He plans to plow your crop, come soon, and I don’t mean he wants to mount your ass, least not in the carnal way.”

  I searched through the crowd and spotted the three at a round table not far from us. A fourth man had joined them. He was dirty and small with carrot-colored hair sticking out from under his hat. His nose had been broken and was bent; the tip of it pointed to his left ear. He was cross-eyed, too, but he had eye enough to do what them others was doing. They was all staring right at me.

  “They have added another,” I said.

  “Jack McCall. He came out of his mama’s wrong hole and she forgot to wipe. So there he is. But he is of no concern. I’ve played him in cards, and he’s a coward. You can tell a lot of things about a man by the way he plays cards. I even felt sorry for him a few days back after I’d taken everything he owned in a friendly game of chance. I gave him a dollar and my best wishes to buy him some food and a rope to hang on to. He took it, but resented it. I stepped on his pride. I thought he didn’t have any.”

  When Bill spoke of hanging on a rope, he was referring to what some called a trot line. When a man needed sleep but had little money, there was a building on the back side of Deadwood that tied ropes up, and you could hang between them as a way of sleeping standing up. That way the owner of the place could really pack them in. I figured I’d just as soon curl up on the ground and get nibbled by the rats.

  It was in that moment my eyes settled firmly on Burned Man, took full notice of the way his eyes flashed across the room, hot as a prairie fire. It was like someone had slapped me in the back of the head. I knew what should have been obvious all along—scalped head, burned-up face, smoked-up voice or not.

  He had survived them Apache and was still after me. It was Ruggert.

  18

  A rare bout of common sense and my love for Win saved Ruggert that night.

  Believe me, I wanted to stand up right then, march over with my LeMat, the striker flicked to fire that sixteen-gauge shell, and blast his head off. But I didn’t. I knew that I didn’t have a chance of coming out alive, even if I was a bouncer in the Gem. I could get away with doing my bouncer work, but killing a white man for a past grievance I couldn’t prove, even in the wilds of Deadwood, was going to be a hard pill for most of the cracker population to swallow. You could backshoot, card-cheat, and maybe even steal a horse and screw the preacher’s wife and not be hung for it if the folks was in the right mood, but a colored man did any of those things, instant they caught you your boots would be off the ground and your neck would be stretched. I might have Wild Bill on my side, a few others, but even with that deadly man in my camp the numbers would be against me. It would be like trying to bail out the ocean with a teacup.

  And I didn’t want to lose my chance with Win. She was what I had been looking for all my life, and I didn’t even know it until I come across her, seen her for the first time in
the moonlight, playing music to rats. We could have a life. I figured Pa would want that more than he would want me to shoot Ruggert.

  I didn’t even tell Wild Bill I knew who it was that wanted me dead and why. I let out my breath easy, made my excuses to Bill, and hit the street. I found myself walking very fast, becoming madder and madder, wanting to turn around and go back for Ruggert.

  Finally I thought of how he looked and what had happened to him. I didn’t know how he ended up in Deadwood, but it never occurred to me it had been on purpose. Probably figured me dead by Apache, and my guess is that was a disappointment for him, not having the chance to get his hands into the act. And then fate had brought us back together. He had somehow made his way to Deadwood, was little more than a beggar, and here I came riding in with Cullen and the China girls.

  From the time he seen me that day, his fortunes had steady climbed up the ladder, and it may have been giving him too much credit to think he had improved them purely to hire the help he needed to take me down, but I wouldn’t put it past him. It fit with what Mr. Loving said. He latched onto notions like a thirsty tick and wasn’t happy until he had sucked all the blood out of them.

  By the time I got to my room, I had begun to feel sorry for Ruggert again, the way he had been tortured by the Apache, and though it wasn’t enough to soothe my burning hatred of him, as he had done just as bad to Pa, it was enough to throw a damp towel over my feelings, at least to some extent.

  Pushed under my door was a flyer. Inside my room I lit a lamp and gave it a gander. At the top of it there was a couple sentences penciled in:

  This here sounds like your meat. It could mean big money.

  Cullen

  The flyer had a drawing of a man with a rifle, and he had long hair and was dressed like Wild Bill. It was about a Deadwood shooting match, and the prize money was considerable. There was an entry fee and a sign-up deadline. I had two days to beat that.