by Bill Brooks
…each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full grown, brings forth death.
“Oh, what sins have you committed, sweet William, that this nearly innocent woman would see you dead, dead, dead?”
He felt fresh as the new day, ready to raise some hell and feed mother earth a feast of fresh bones.
Chapter 9
He found her there in the kitchen, the morning light streaming through the window above her head as she sat drinking a cup of coffee alone. She looked up when he came in.
“You’re too late for breakfast, Mr. Blue.”
“Yes, I realize that.”
Their eyes met, held for a moment, then she looked away.
“Would it be possible for me to have some of that?” he said.
Again she looked at him, saw that he meant the coffee and started to rise to get him a cup, but he waved for her not to and went instead and poured his own.
“Mind if I sit with you for a few moments?”
She didn’t say anything, and so he took the seat across from her, saw that she had spread before her an aged copy of the Police Gazette.
“Anything interesting?” he said, sipping the steaming coffee—it was good.
“I was just reading about our town’s famous visitor,” she said. “Wild Bill. Do you know him?”
“I know of him.”
“They’ve published a letter of his warning those who would try and assassinate him that he will be ‘riding through your prairie dog towns and wear my hair long and am not hard to find by any who would try and corral William.’”
She looked up and across the table at Teddy.
“He seems like a strange man,” she said. “Almost as if inviting trouble.”
“I’m sure that is not his intent,” Teddy said.
Her eyes were as green as the sea, and he thought of the land that gave up this Irish girl and wanted to ask her about herself but held off.
“That boy of yours—” he started to say.
“Another William that is hard to corral,” she said in direct reference to the article. “Perhaps there is something to names. I’ve tried my best with him. His father died early. I suppose that has something to do with his wildness.”
“Well, I won’t trouble you further,” he said, and stood and carried the cup to a sideboard.
“I suppose I was a bit short with you last evening when my son brought you home, Mr. Blue. I’m Kathleen Bonney.”
“Teddy,” he said.
She smiled. She was pretty.
He nearly bumped into the boy as he was going out, and the boy coming in with an armload of wood for the stove.
“You shoot a hole in anybody since I seen you last?” Teddy said, jibing the boy.
“Not yet, but it’s still early.”
“I’ll keep an eye out.”
“Would be a good idea.”
“There a place in town a man could rent himself a horse?”
“Tut’s,” the kid said.
The kid was wearing a battered stovepipe hat. Teddy would see him wearing the same hat years later in a tintype that would be circulated after a New Mexican sheriff named Pat Garrett killed him. But right at that moment, he looked simply like an Irish urchin.
He found a café and ate breakfast, then walked the town to get the lay of it. He found the livery the kid had told him about and approached the man mucking stalls.
“You rent horses?”
The man straightened, eyed him down the length of a long oft-broken nose.
“You Jim Miller?” the man asked Teddy.
“No, I am not.”
“You look a lot like him.”
“What has that got to do with my renting a horse?”
“He’s a known horse thief.”
“I told you, I’m not him.”
“Well, you look enough like him to be his twin.”
“Forget about it, I’ll find another livery.”
“No, that’s okay. I just thought you was him. I’ll rent you a horse.”
“Might need to rent two in a day or so.”
“Two?”
“You have a policy against renting more than one horse at a time?”
“No, hell, you can rent ’em all if you want.”
“I’ll just need two.”
“Dollar fifty a day each.”
“That’ll be fine.”
He walked down to the telegraph office and asked if there were any messages for him. The clerk took a sheet of yellow paper from a pigeonhole and handed it to him. It was from George Bangs:
MONEY ON ITS WAY. KEEP EXACT ACCOUNTS. MR. P IS A STICKLER. BONAFIDE EXPENSES DO NOT INCLUDE EXPENDITURES FOR DOVES, AS YOU CALL THEM. KEEP ME INFORMED OF YOUR PROGRESS. IF UNTOWARD EVENTS OCCUR, INFORM IMMEDIATELY. G. BANGS.
Teddy folded the telegram and slipped it into his pocket, a bit of a smile playing at his lips thinking about expenditures for doves. He decided his next job was to locate Wild Bill and try to establish some sort of contact. He wasn’t sure exactly how he was going to go about it, but as it turned out, the event would take care of itself.
He walked back to the boardinghouse under a glaucous sky, the clouds bellied in so low he could slap them with his hat. It would probably snow or rain. He wasn’t in any mood for either. He figured Hickok would make his appearance on the streets of Cheyenne later in the day. He’d wait it out in his room, maybe get a little reading in.
She was there when he returned, doing wash now in a large metal tub full of steaming soapy water, stirring what looked like men’s denims with a wood paddle. Sprigs of her hair clung to her forehead.
He paused, thought about what he was going to ask her, decided it was better if he waited a bit and went to his room.
It was a small room, barely large enough to hold the bed, a small bureau. A single window looked out onto the open prairies. He removed his coat and boots, the shoulder holster rig, and hung it over the head of the bed frame. He took a small red book from his coat pocket and sat on the bed where light from the window fell over his shoulder.
The book was a collection of Shakespeare. He had a fondness for such words; he liked to think that such words could preserve a man’s civility even in the most uncivilized climes. The print was small. He put on a pair of spectacles and began to read where he last left off: Sap check’d with frost, and lusty leaves quite gone, Beauty o’er snow’d, and bareness everywhere…
He closed his eyes to absorb the image the words created. It struck him as being an apt description of this place—this frontier that was Cheyenne being reborn out of winter.
There was a knock at the door. He did not bother to take the revolver from its holster but instead went and opened the door to whoever was on the other side. Before him stood a short rotund man under a big-brimmed hat, dressed in fringed buckskin with fancy beadwork and porcupine quills needled into the leather.
“Charley Utter,” the man said. “Some call me Colorado Charley. My mammy calls me Charles. It’s all the same thing to me. How do you do, Mr. Blue? Mind I come in so we can talk in private?”
Without waiting for an answer, the man stepped into the room and looked around, then took up the chair Teddy had been sitting in by the window and noticed immediately the book. Picking it up, he held it close to his face then said, “Aha…Shakespeare. I know I’m in good company, sir.”
“How may I help you, Mr. Utter?”
Charley waved a pudgy paw.
“Call me Charley or Colorado. No need for formalities in this dung heap of a place. Weren’t for Bill, I’d be back in Denver dining on mountain oysters. But Bill, he’s a wandering fool. Can’t stay in one place more than a week. Always got to move on. Me too. He says soon as the weather breaks, we’re off to Deadwood. Deadwood! I say that’s the most rooting tooting son of a bitch of a place on God’s green earth. Bill says, ‘That’s why we’re going, Charley. Civilization’s crawling up our asses like bed
bugs in a fat lady’s hair.’ Old Bill…” Charley laughed, and when he did, his belly shook.
“Somewhere I must have missed something,” Teddy said, a bit intrigued with a man who talked so much and so fast. All the westerners he’d ever known were taciturn men who, when they spoke at all, spoke in bits and pieces, like conversation was just some rags coming out of their mouths. But Colorado Charley Utter did not utter so much as keep a running stream of words pouring forth.
“Why I’m here because of Billy Hickok,” Charley said. “Me and him are pards, and I got a telegram recent from his wife, Agnes, down in Cincinnati. Though strictly between you and me, I ain’t so sure Billy ain’t made himself a bigamist. For he told me once he was married to a half-breed woman down in Hays name of Indian Annie. Billy gets sometimes potted and does things when he ain’t always in his right mind, and women favor him greatly, so I can’t say for sure if he was married legal or not, nor more than once. Then too, there’s that crazy witch Calamity Jane who claims Bill married her in Abilene, but if he did, he must have been doped out of his gourd…”
Charley paused long enough to look at the passage Teddy had marked in the book and rub his chin. “That feller could sure enough write.”
“You care to state your case, Mr. Utter?”
“Just call me Charley, old son. I don’t hardly answer to much else. Promise me now.”
Charley was as jerky restless as a fish out of water.
“How do you find the widow Bonney? Quite a lovely package, don’t you think?”
“Should I just wait till you run out of wind?”
Charley grinned until his mouth looked full of horse teeth.
“All business, eh? Well, I don’t mind getting down to it. But to me, there’s always too plenty of time for business and too little for pleasure.”
Teddy waited in silence.
“Like I said, it’s about Billy the reason I come. Agnes—er, Missus Hickok—told me she’d hired Pinkerton’s to watch Billy’s backside…Begged me to check out their man—which I figure to be you because you don’t look like no miner, nor no gambler or pimp either. I know the breed, and you ain’t one. Fact is, I’ve been observing you since you stepped off the UP flier yesterday. And now I see that Colt Lightning hanging there in that shoulder rig, I figure I am right that you’re a man makes his living with a gun, but not one of them wandering itinerate types like Clay Allison or any of ’em.”
“I’m not at liberty to state my business here in Cheyenne, Mr. Utter.”
Charley swept the hat off his head and ran his fingers through his thick knotted hair, paused and dug at his scalp, then plunked the hat back down again as he examined what it was he plucked from his hair, then squeezed it.
“Well, the old lady…er, Missus Hickok, said in a letter that she wanted me to put up some cash money for Billy’s protection, since she herself, is a bit low on funds currently. I wired her I’d do it, but I’d have to meet the fellow was going to do the protecting. So I come to see what my money is a buying.”
“I might not be your man.”
“Oh, I think you are.”
“You don’t trust Mrs. Hickok?”
“It’s a lot of money.”
“I thought Hickok was your friend.”
“He is. Best pard a man could want. I just don’t want to be throwing my money down a sand hole on some weak sister ain’t got the grit to protect old Billy, it comes down to a row.”
“I won’t state my business to you, Mr. Utter. You’ll have to decide for yourself if the information you received is accurate or not. I will say this, though, if Hickok is a friend of yours, you’ll keep such information as you’ve carried here today to yourself.”
“Well, you’re a sly devil, I’ll give you that. Closemouthed. That’s a good thing. But can you sneak up on a fellow and blow his brains out if he’s about to lay poor Billy low? Can you face down the tiger, Mr. Blue?”
Charley paced back and forth waving his hands about as he talked, questioned, and did his best to cajole Teddy into giving himself up.
“Let me ask you something,” Teddy said. “If you’re his friend, why does Mrs. Hickok feel the need to hire someone to protect her husband from getting back-shot? Why not just ask you to do it?”
“Well, for one thing, she don’t know me all that well, except what Bill might’ve wrote to her about me. But then, for another thing, she probably knows from what he wrote that I ain’t reliable. Oh, I love Billy like he was my own flesh and blood, and I would take a bullet in the mouth for him. Hell, I’d even shoot out old Calamity Jane’s lights if he asked me to. But I got itchier feet than Billy does. I can’t stand to be one place too long. Even if it is to ride out of town just to shoot me a prairie dog or three. I got the hankering to go to Chiney and South America and a lot of other places, and I can’t be relied on to be any one place for any certain time. Billy knows it and he don’t count on me…Just like I don’t him.”
Charley stopped abruptly and put his hand over his heart. Teddy watched with interest.
“Sometimes I get palpitations. Doctors say I got a hole in my heart. I say shit, how can that be? Wouldn’t my blood all leak out? They don’t have no answers, those medicos. I know Sioux shaman that got more sense. But sometimes it gets feeling funny in there and I have to take a extry breath or two. That’s the other thing, don’t you see? I could drop over dead as Caesar at a critical time, then who’d look after Billy? Say, you don’t have nothing to drink, do you, it’s about the cocktail hour.”
Teddy shook his head.
“Most men don’t drink before noon—leastways the civilized ones such as yourself don’t. Well, you going to do it, or do I have to wire the old lady back and tell her she’s been bamboozled?”
“Go and rest assured Mr. Utter that your friend won’t have to worry about getting back-shot. But in return for such assurances, I’ll need you to introduce us. If I’m going to guard him, I’ll need to be in his confidence. You’ll be the one who needs to be sly. If he suspects what’s going on, well, you might be out of a friend, and I might be out of a job.”
“Oh hey, old son, don’t you worry none. Just be down at the Gold Room tonight and I’ll get you set up with a meeting.” Charley scratched his belly, said, “Damn graybacks. A man could wash all day and lay down just once with the wrong whore and come up with a head full of lice.”
“This evening, then,” Teddy said, holding open the door.
“Say around ten, eleven. Billy ain’t much social before then.”
“Remember, Mr. Utter. His life may depend on your discretion.”
“You’d get more out of a dead man than you would me on this thing. See you later.”
And with that, Colorado Charley Utter was gone, even though his presence seemed to linger on, as though his voice was still bouncing around the room.
Chapter 10
Teddy paused briefly before heading toward town. Kathleen Bonney was there in the parlor reading a book. The angle of her head, the color of her hair, the lace of her collar—something about her, maybe everything about her, inclined him to speak.
“I was wondering, do you ride?” he said.
She looked up. “Yes,” she said.
“I was wondering if you’d care to go riding with me, perhaps tomorrow, or the day after…if you’ve the time, of course. I know you’re probably very busy running the house…”
She waited a long moment before answering. “Is that what you’re asking me, Mr. Blue? If I want to go riding with you?”
“I suppose it is,” he said.
“Then the answer is yes.”
“I’ll call on you in the morning to see where you’re at with your business,” he said.
“That will be fine.”
Their eyes held for a moment longer, and he went out feeling quite good about the way she was.
There on the wide broad streets of Cheyenne, the evening light had fallen: a golden glow from the setting sun bouncing light off the face of
the earth. It seemed a beacon to all the gold hunters gathered waiting for the last breath of winter to abate. It seemed a gruesome wait to men starved for riches, fraying some men’s nerves and turning them violent and making them ill. So they waited in the saloons and gambling halls and bordellos, and some silently prayed they wouldn’t have to kill anybody or that nobody would kill them in the waiting.
Teddy made his way to Allan’s Variety to take his evening meal, perhaps play a hand or two of cards while waiting for the arrival of Charley Utter and Wild Bill.
The place was full of miners, gamblers, and about every other form of humanity imaginable, including the pistoleers who were a breed apart. You could spot them easily enough: men with watchful eyes and a certain tension in the way they stood or sat. Bill had it, so did the two standing at the end of the bar when he went into the Gold Room: Hank Rain and Ned Loyal.
He knew them from that time in Ellsworth. Old John Sears had pointed them out.
“Them’s two bad actors,” Sears had said.
“How do you know?” Teddy asked.
“Let’s just say I’ve had me some wild times and run with a pretty bad crowd once.”
Teddy had noticed how old John rubbed that place on his hand where his thumb was missing and in its place a scar of skin stretched over bone.
“They the ones who shot you?”
John simply looked at him and said, “Drink your beer, kid, and don’t get me pissed off.”
Now, he wondered if old John had made it to New Mexico. He wished he’d kept track of him.
Teddy found a table near the back, away from the gaming tables and long bar, away from the boisterous men who cussed and argued about everything, from which were the best whorehouse west of the Mississippi to who was the deadliest gunfighter. Some said it was Squirrel Tooth Alice’s place in Abilene, and that it wasn’t Wild Bill but Clay Allison who was the deadliest with a gun.
It all got lost in the noise of the hour, and Teddy didn’t much concern himself with the opinions of miners—that lonely, restless breed of men who followed rumor and hope into the icy creeks and rock hills to muck out dreams.