by Bill Brooks
Cody knew of Bill’s skill and luck with the picture cards, and it wasn’t very good. But still, you didn’t tell a man like Wild Bill he wasn’t worth a damn as a gambling man. In fact, you didn’t tell Wild Bill much about himself.
“I sure hate to leave without you,” Cody said.
Bill started to say something when Jack fell off his chair and awoke with a start. Both men looked at him and he at them.
“I dreamt I was being chased by Indians and I rode my pony off a cliff,” he said, feeling around his person for broken parts. “I’m sure glad it was just a dream.”
Bill stood, shook hands with them and said they’d get together again when they were all fat rich men.
“Someday they’ll be telling about us in history books,” Cody said.
“I doubt anyone will remember us more than two Tuesdays after we’re dead,” Bill said.
Jack said, “I thought I was already dead.”
They parted company and Bill walked back to his and Charley’s tent. He was pleased to see that Squirrel Tooth Alice’s underthings were gone off it, and so was she. Though he didn’t care much for the fact she’d still be in town, probably working for Harry Young as a crib girl. He’d have to find himself another “office” until the weather broke and he could go up to Deadwood Gulch.
He sure missed Charley.
He climbed into the tent just as sun broke over the eastern horizon. It gave him pause to look at it, thinking Agnes was probably already up and had her breakfast and was worrying about him. He figured to go down to the post office later and see if he had a letter from her.
He pulled off his boots, then soon as he did, felt the urge to make water. He pulled them back on again, climbed out of the tent, and walked off to the trees.
As he stood there doing the best he could to make water, he thought what a cruel thing it would be for one man to sneak up on another and shoot him while he was pissing. Instinctively he looked around. But nobody was sneaking up on him. All he saw were the tents and the wagons and some folks waking up and stirring around. He never could understand that regular sort of life some folks kept—of going to bed when it got dark and waking up when it got light. Nothing really interesting ever happened during the day.
He finally finished up and walked back down to his tent and pulled his boots off again, wrapping himself in the buffalo robe, keeping his pistols close at hand. He fell into the gunman’s sleep—the kind where a man isn’t full asleep nor full awake but about halfway between and ready for anything.
Sometimes Mike Williams showed up in his dreams, and sometimes it was Phil Coe who did. And sometimes it was McCanles, and sometimes it was others he’d shot over the years. And sometimes it was just an angel that he couldn’t tell whether it was male or female, but one with golden hair and bright blue eyes and a cherub’s mouth.
He always liked it better when the angel showed up than when the others did.
Chapter 21
Two days of domesticity and Charley was feeling as restless as a cat outside a cage full of birds. The company of a wife just wasn’t the same in the quiet district of Denver as it was in the wild place of Cheyenne, or just about anyplace else in the company of Wild Bill.
Mrs. Charley Utter was a kindly soul, plain-faced, and practical as a hammer. She loved Charley greatly in spite of his wanderlust ways. And Charley’s daughters looked exactly like him, except for Emma, who favored her mother both in features and temperament. Lottie and Hortence were restless creatures and fat-cheeked little things with happy dispositions like Charley. He loved them all equally and truly, just as he loved his wife. But love was hardly enough to scratch the itch in his feet.
Rain spilled down the windows while Charley read an article in the newspaper about two men found shot dead on Colfax Avenue: Assailant unknown. Victims were Otto and Karl Schmidt, late of Des Moines, Iowa. Apparently robbery was the motive. Both men found with empty pockets sans wallets and personal items. Both known to local police as bunko artists and pickpockets. Bodies to be interred at Potter’s field.
Charley looked up from his paper and across to his wife, who sat quietly knitting. The girls were away at school, and Charley could hear the clock in the parlor ticking and the cat breathing as it lay curled by his wife’s feet. It was about like death, he thought, all that quiet.
“I’m fixing to leave in the morning,” he said.
His wife looked up. It was plain to see her disappointment.
“Where to this time, dear?”
“Why, back to Cheyenne, of course. Bill needs me to go up to the goldfields with him. Of course I hate to leave you and the girls, but this could be my big chance to strike it rich. We could all move to a big house with plenty of room. Why, I could even have a greenhouse built for you where you could raise roses. Wouldn’t you like your own greenhouse?”
“I fear for you both,” she said.
“Ah,” he said, knowing she was about to pester him with her dreams.
“I’ve been having bad dreams lately.”
“What kind of bad dreams?” He did his best to be polite at such times, but he knew the dreams she would tell him about would be the same dreams she always had.
“Ones where you and Bill get yourselves murdered.”
He rolled his eyes. “Never going to happen,” he said. “Bill’s the best pistol shot in the whole West. Cautious too.”
“You said yourself his eyes have gone bad.”
“When’d I say that?”
“The other night…”
Charley tried to think when he would have said anything about Bill’s eyes.
“When we were upstairs,” she said.
“Oh.” He remembered now. He always did tend to talk too much right before and after fornicating. “Well, I believe it to be a temporary thing, Bill’s eyes.”
“You wouldn’t be the first to pay the price for keeping the wrong sort of company,” she said.
“I don’t suppose I even know what that means.”
“I think you do.”
Charley went back to reading his paper. There was no way he was ever going to win an argument with her. She was far too clever with words and the thoughts that came out of her head. She’d gone to college. Why she ever agreed to marry him remained a mystery to Charley. It wasn’t as though he wasn’t smart, he just wasn’t educated.
When he first caught her attention and began to court her, he told her he was the sort of man who didn’t believe in a lot of thinking, that a man ought to just go ahead and do whatever he had his heart set on doing. This impressed her for some reason. She was practically the opposite of him in every measurable way, including the fact she was a good seven inches taller than he.
He’d said the morning of their wedding, “How do you think this is going to work out?”
And she’d said, “How what will work out, Charley?”
And he’d said, “Me being a lot shorter than you.”
At first she still didn’t know what he was talking about, but then that night when they finally got undressed and in bed together the first time, she understood his concern and laughed.
“See,” she said, after a bit of amorous positioning, “it all just naturally works out.”
And Charley sort of settled in and said, “I guess it does.” And after that the difference in their height never bothered him any. In fact he thought it a badge of honor to be seen with her, knowing that others would take notice of how much taller she was than him; they’d wonder what it was a short man had to make a tall woman want to be married to him.
Even Bill made mention of it once.
“She’s tall,” he said.
“Sure is,” Charley said with a smile.
“I don’t suppose…”
“No. It all works out, you’d be surprised how it does.”
“I never been with a lady taller’n me,” Bill said. “I’ll have to take your word for it.”
“But you been with women a lot shorter, right?”
“Same difference, only the reverse.”
Bill thought some on it and then said, “I see your point.”
“You don’t have a problem with me going back so soon, I hope?” Charley said to his wife.
“If you’re asking me am I happy that you are, the answer is no. But I’ve known you were the way you are since the first and I’ll not try and change you now.”
“I think that’s the part about you I love best,” Charley said.
She smiled and said, “It’s nicely quiet without the children home.”
“You want to go upstairs and show me again about how things work out between a tall woman and a short man?”
She set aside her knitting and stood from her chair.
“You’ve forgotten already? It has just been a day or so since I showed you the last time.”
“I think it’s that sulfur water I been drinking up in that country,” he said. “Makes me forget easy.”
She offered him an exaggerated sigh.
“Maybe you ought to take pen and paper with you this time and write it down,” she said.
Charley folded his newspaper, stood and came to her, offered her his hand and said, “No, I’ll remember this time—I’m clear-headed now.”
In a way, it was powerful hard for Charley to wave good-bye to his family as they stood waving to him there on the train station platform the next morning. Mrs. Charley Utter was a good wife, and his daughters were good children, and he vowed to change his ways this time and not visit any more crib girls. Bill had gone celibate, why couldn’t he? Yes sir, he’d be celibate too, no matter how much the urge came over him for female flesh. Him and Bill would go up to Deadwood and open an establishment and make a fortune each, then he’d return home and that would be it for him. They were both getting a little long in the tooth to be running all over God’s creation, drinking and gambling and whoring and generally carrying on.
The tears of his dear, dear family seemed to fall straight onto his heart like a cold rain, and he had to swallow hard to keep his own tears from flowing. The train lurched, and he felt like jumping off right then and there and running to their arms. But he knew it wouldn’t be long before he’d be hankering to run off again. When he was home he longed to be gone, and when he was gone he longed to be home. It seemed like a curse, all that longing for the other thing.
He couldn’t hardly stand thinking about his longing, and so instead of dwelling on it, found his way to the dining car, ordered a drink and drank it, then ordered another and drank it too. Then he ordered a third and so on, until he washed all the longing out of his blood and began to feel more like his old self again.
It wasn’t long before he was thinking about Lilly, the pretty little crib girl who worked at the Gold Room. Then he started thinking of all the reasons why it was wrong for a man to go too long a time without female flesh and how it got some men in trouble who tried to be celibate. He’d heard a lot of theories about what going too long without a woman did to a man. He knew most fights between men were over women, because men gone too long without the company of female flesh were prone to violence. It just wasn’t a normal condition for a man to be celibate like it was a woman. It clouded a man’s mind and led to unnatural thoughts that generally led him to untold troubles.
Charley had known of a few men who had “wives” in different towns so they were never without one when they traveled. It made good sense, in a way. He ordered another drink and thought about it further. Bill sort of used to be that way, but not any longer.
By the time the train was halfway to Cheyenne, Charley had figured out it might be a good thing for him to ask Lilly to marry him—as long as she was willing to be his wife only in Cheyenne or Deadwood and didn’t ask too many questions of him about his need to often travel without her. He thought maybe he’d ask Bill his opinion of such an arrangement, Bill being wise in the ways of women as he was.
He was feeling plum better about things by the time the sun settled low in the distance and threw the shadow of the train out across the prairie. He saw some antelope running, but it was the buffaloes he missed most. Hell, he’d be happy to see a few Indians riding free and wild—their hair and the tails of their ponies fluttering in the wind. It wouldn’t be long before even the antelope would disappear and there was a town sprung up every twenty miles.
Maybe him and Bill should go up to Alaska when they finished in Deadwood. He didn’t know exactly where Alaska was, but he figured he and Bill could find it.
Charley went back to his seat unsteadily now and nearly stumbled and fell on a man reading a Bible there in the coach car. The man wore a black hat and coat.
“Pardon me, Preacher.”
The man looked up, but Charley didn’t see no milk of human kindness in those eyes. He figured it was because he’d lost his balance and nearly sat down on the man’s lap.
The man didn’t say anything, and Charley made it on to his seat and flopped down thinking that train riding had gotten to be an awfully damn more difficult a business then it used to be.
He hunched down under his hat feeling much like a prairie dog in its dark burrow, and quite enjoyed the scent of the hair oil his wife had used to comb his hair with that very morning while he bathed.
She was too good a woman to play fast and loose with, he determined in a single moment of lucidity. He’d just have to tell Lilly he wouldn’t marry her no matter what she would agree to. Then a moment later his resolve crumbled and he was back to thinking about her in carnal ways—those little doe eyes and that young slender body of hers.
Oh, what to do?
He drifted in and out of fitful sleep and dreams that alternated between his wife and Lilly until he could no longer stand it and got up and made his way back up the aisle again to where the preacher sat staring out the window at the purple haze of a night fallen.
“Pardon me,” Charley said. “But I was wondering if you could help me out on a matter of a spiritual nature?”
The man cut his gaze to Charley, his countenance this time less unfriendly.
“You need to talk to me of your sins?” the man said.
“Well, something like that. Seeing’s how you’re a man of the cloth.”
“Go ahead and confess what is troubling your heart, friend.”
Charley took the seat opposite and began telling the preacher about his dilemma, and the man listened with great patience even as he sized Charley up for a coffin. It was Charley’s good fortune that he couldn’t begin to know what the man was thinking.
When through explaining his situation, the man said, “For by means of a harlot, a man is reduced to a crust of bread; and an adulteress will prey upon his precious life.”
Charley said, “That’s a bit confusing…”
“Proverbs six, verse twenty-six.”
Charley scratched his head. “I guess I get your point.”
“Are you a believer?” the preacher said.
“I believe in things I can understand, but I do confess to not understanding a lot of the good book, or what you’re talking about.”
“Do you have your house in order?”
“It was fine when I left.”
“I’m speaking of your spiritual home.”
“Oh, I don’t know too much about that, no sir.”
“Be prepared, my friend, for death comes like a thief in the night…”
That done something to him he didn’t care much for. There in that dim light of the rocking railcar with night hard up against the windows and everybody else asleep in their seats, Charley felt the cold hand of fear he’d only felt once or twice in his life.
“I’m sorry to have troubled you, Preacher. I guess all that fruit wine I drank in the dining car has laid waste to my senses.”
He couldn’t swear to it, but it almost looked as if the preacher’s eyes were glowing. He hadn’t felt this way since that time he got into some bad snakehead whiskey in Manhattan, Kansas.
&
nbsp; It was the conductor who woke him and said, “Cheyenne…Final stop, sir.”
He uncurled himself out of his seat, sat up and wiped the slobber from his chin and the weep from his eyes and looked around. He didn’t see any preacher, and thought maybe he’d dreamed him. He shucked himself loose and stepped from the car onto familiar turf again and felt like he was at last back in his element. First thing was to go see how Bill was. Then go and get himself a drink of something decent to take the hair of the dog off.
Charley still felt plagued by the bad feeling the Preacher put in him. Whatever it was, it seemed that feeling would remain for the rest of his days. Only whiskey and a turn with Lilly might hold it off for the time being.
’Least, he hoped it would.
Chapter 22
Teddy was having coffee alone with his thoughts there in the now-empty dining room and hoping that she might yet make an appearance so he could speak with her about last night.
And finally she did appear, and he said to her, “What’s wrong, Kathleen?”
She was drawn and more pale than usual and her hands trembled a little, causing him to want to take them into his own and hold and comfort them.
“I received a letter yesterday,” she said. “It was from a constable in Kansas City informing me that my husband was dead.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“He said he was going to the goldfields…I don’t understand what he was doing in Kansas City.”
“You sort of expected the worst, didn’t you?”
She slumped into a chair at the table. “I suppose I did. I mean I expected never to see him again. But having it confirmed that he’s dead…”
He stood, went to the stove and poured her a cup of coffee, and remembering how she liked it sweet, put in a teaspoon of sugar and set it before her. He touched her shoulder and said, “There’s only so much you can do. It’s not your fault.”