Protecting Hickok

by Bill Brooks

  “He says that you should repent.”

  “Repent!”

  “He says that the place he is in is terrible, full of fire and misery, that his soul burns night and day and that you will suffer the same fate if you do not repent.”

  Ned Loyal ran a fist full of fingers through his greasy hair. He looked about the room, but other than the lamplight flickering against the walls and ceiling of the tent, he saw nothing else there but himself and the fortune-teller. No sign of any sort of Hank.

  “He says you need to abandon your current ways and seek forgiveness for your sins.”

  “Shut up, you damn witch!”

  Madam Moustache opened her eyes fully. “You must leave now.”

  “I ain’t got for what I come for.”

  “I’ve told you everything I can. You must leave now.”

  “I need to know where those bank plans is.”

  “You must leave now!”

  “Stop saying that!”

  And when she said it again, he pulled his revolver and shot her.

  At first she saw a tunnel of white light. Then the light turned to many wonderful colors and it felt as though she had wings and was gently soaring above the ground. This is the most wonderful feeling…she thought. She could see Ned standing there below her, the gun in his hand still smoking. She could see herself lying faceup on the floor of the tent, a flower of bright red spreading across the bosom of her kimono. She saw Ned bend and open fully the kimono and touch her breasts and bring his fingers away dripping blood. Oh, he was the most terrible man she’d ever encountered, and she’d encountered quite a few in her day.

  She lay there gasping, and Ned thought about shooting her again, but he was scared now because he’d never shot a woman before. Then he got to wondering what it would be like to fornicate with a dead woman and bent down and opened her kimono and felt her tits, but blood ran warm against his fingers and he didn’t like it much and lost all carnal desire for her as quickly as it had come on him.

  A glowing figure appeared to her, and without speaking, she knew that some great spirit was calling her and she gladly went. The nearer she drew to the formless shape of light, the more she felt filled with light. She reached toward that glowing figure.

  Ned was startled nearly witless when the woman stretched out her hand as though reaching for him. He stumbled backward and tripped over the stool he’d been sitting on and fell hard, banging the crazy bone in his elbow, which caused him to drop his pistol. He had to pick it up with his left hand, which felt awkward.

  Come daughter, the glowing figure seemed to say.

  Ned scrambled out of the tent, but not unseen by several of Madam Moustache’s neighbors, who’d come out of their tents at the sound of the pistol shot. They saw a man in fancy boots running up the street. Boots with big white stars tooled into them.

  Jeff Carr was summoned.

  “That Gypsy’s been shot. The one who tells fortunes—Madam Moustache.”

  They described the man and the boots he was wearing, and Jeff Carr knew who it was right off. Only a goddamn dandy or cold-blooded killer would wear such prissy boots.

  Somebody said they saw the man running toward Frenchy’s Saloon. Jeff rounded up three of his deputies and marched down to Frenchy’s.

  Sure enough, prissy boots was standing at the bar tossing back drinks. Jeff sent his deputies left and right, then thumbed back the hammers of his shotgun and walked to within good killing range of Ned Loyal.

  “Ned Loyal, I’ve come to arrest you for shooting that Gypsy. Stand away from that bar.”

  Ned looked up, his face a sheen of sweat. “I don’t shoot women. I’m a man killer pure and simple.”

  “Drop your pistol in that spit pot.”

  “Why that damn bitch was nothing but a fraud, claimed she could talk to the dead. She couldn’t talk to the dead no better’n you and me.”

  “You don’t drop your iron in that spit pot, you’ll get firsthand knowledge of what talking with the dead is really like. Stand away now or make your play.”

  “Well, shit, the way I see it is you’ll hang me if I throw my iron away and let you arrest me, and I hear that is a terrible way to die. So I guess I won’t.”

  Jeff Carr raised his shotgun to eye level and sighted down the barrels.

  “This here will tear you up pretty good,” he said. “No way of knowing for sure it’ll kill you. Might just tear you all up and you’ll end up dying slow and hard. Seems to me a broken neck at the end of a short rope would be the sure thing.”

  “Well, I say fuck that. Get to shooting, Jeff Carr!”

  A cardplayer was killed by one of Ned Loyal’s stray bullets, and a crib girl was shot through the leg by another. Ned Loyal was himself flung head down across an upturned table with most of his insides spilling onto the floor in greasy gray ropes, and one arm near shot off as well from the double ought buckshot Carr loaded his scattergun with.

  Carr couldn’t hear a thing from the loud blasts, and his two deputies were still holding their unfired pistols, wondering who, if there was anyone, they needed to shoot. The scattergun breathed smoke, and all anyone could see of Ned Loyal through the haze was fancy boots with stars on them sticking up above the table.

  “Jesus Christ,” Carr said, working his jaw up and down, trying to get some of his hearing back. He could hear ringing, that was about it.

  As she was being carried to the physician’s office three blocks away, Madam Moustache felt immersed in the light, warm and happy to be so. But the light began to fade and her wings seemed to fail her and she felt herself being pulled harshly toward the cold earth again.

  Why?

  “Why, why, why?” she cried in her semiconscious state.

  The doctor, who was himself under a great deal of laudanum influence, said to those who’d carried Madam to his office, “She’ll live, but don’t ask me to explain how.”

  She’d been shot through the brisket, which usually was a fatal place to be shot through, and had lost a great deal of blood. Still, she breathed and her heart beat in a steady patter and the doctor couldn’t help but notice the bloody fingerprints upon her bosoms. He shook his head, thinking of how much violence he’d seen perpetrated over the years in the name of love and God.

  Word arrived in the Gold Room via a miner who’d just witnessed the shooting.

  “Jeff Carr just killed Ned Loyal over in Frenchy’s. Shot him half in two!”

  Bill and Teddy and Charley occupied a corner table where Bill could keep his back to the wall.

  “Well, what goes around comes around, I reckon,” Bill said, lifting his glass.

  “Here’s to them who would shoot horses,” Charley said. “May his soul be damned in hell.”

  “I guess that about plum cleans up the assassins,” Bill said. “What with that ’n’ you shot the other day.”

  Teddy knew he should feel relieved, but realized that the world was probably full of men who would yet see Hickok dead. And he knew Bill was simply putting on a brave face, because Bill knew better than anybody that there would never be a world without assassins in it—at least not his world.

  Chapter 25

  They drank until the dice quit rolling, until the roulette wheel was spun a final time, until the last hand got tossed in. Bill had himself a good night with the picture cards and won nearly $250.

  Twice Charley drifted off up the stairs to Squirrel Tooth Alice’s crib with her. Each time Alice put on a big show of it for Bill’s benefit, but Bill hardly seemed to notice, which put a fury in her she took out on Charley, which only made Charley that more enamored with her.

  “You fornicate like a madwoman,” he said breathlessly after each time.

  “I got my reasons,” she said.

  “It’s all right with me whatever they are. Say, you wouldn’t consider being my common-law wife would you?”

  “What, and give all this up?” she said sarcastically.

  “I’d rent us a house when me and Bill ge
t up to Deadwood. You could grow petunias in a flower box and be a regular gal. Nobody’d have to know you were a crib girl.”

  “You don’t know, do you?”

  “Know what?” Charley said.

  “About me and Bill.”

  “What about you and Bill?”

  “We was practically married when we lived in Abilene.”

  Charley felt a great disappointment. He wondered if there was any woman in the West Bill hadn’t had at one time or another. There went love, it felt like to him. Twice in a day his offer of marriage had been turned down by doves. Charley figured sure the preacher had put some sort of curse on him with all that talk about death and seductresses.

  “It never was me you was interested in, then?” Charley said.

  “I was hoping to make Bill jealous.”

  “I never seen him that way.”

  “Did he ever mention me before?”

  “No. If he had, I think I’d remember that. But Bill never talks much about his paramours that I know of. He’s respectful in that way. I am too.”

  “I came all the way from Abilene to find him and he spurned me,” Alice said.

  “Look at us,” Charley said. “We’re pretty pathetic, ain’t we, Alice?”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  Charley knew what it was to swallow his pride, and when he looked at Alice there in the bed beside him with little to cover her but a crème chenille bedspread that come up only as high as her waist, leaving everything else exposed for his eyes, Charley caved in on his resolve not to be a beggar.

  “I guess I could get over the fact of you and Bill if you could,” Charley said.

  “I’ve been a dove for a long time, Charley. And I don’t know much about life in general except that it’s hard most of the time and never gets its foot off the back of your neck. And I know girls of my profession would do just about anything to be something other than what they are, including marrying the first feller that would ask them. But I am not fool enough to jump from the fire into the frying pan, and that’s what I’d be doing if I was to go with you to Deadwood. You’re already a married man, Charley. I can spot married men from here to Kansas. I’d just as soon nest with my sisters and be a free bird as to be one man’s dove in a gilded cage. No offense.”

  “None taken, Alice.”

  “I do believe that is the longest speech I ever made.”

  “It was inspiring.”

  “You want to go again, or have you run out of cash?”

  “I always keep a little reserve in my poke, girl, but I’m feeling about like a winded horse that’s done run his race and don’t see how I could possibly get my money’s worth a third time around. I’d just peter out on you.” Alice laughed at the pun.

  “Would you be up to buying a girl a drink at least?”

  “That I could do.”

  Teddy was trying hard not to think about Kathleen. She and the kid had left on the flier to Denver, but in a way it seemed as though she’d only been something his imagination had conjured up, so short had been their relationship. Everything about the West had a most temporary feel to it—life most especially.

  It felt like he’d aged ten years in just the last week or so. He’d been blooded—had taken a life and nearly had his taken. And now he’d known love and had it taken from him as well. Innocence lost, he thought.

  He watched Bill at the poker table from across the room. The famed shootist hardly seemed real either. Teddy wondered if he weren’t just in a long dream he couldn’t wake from, and maybe he was still in law school and Horace and his father were still alive and his mother wasn’t enamored with some English poet she was preparing to go live with in Europe.

  He felt an ever-growing sense of uncertainty, that too many things were unfinished, that there were too many questions without answers.

  Maybe he was just tired, he told himself. His mood was as black as the last hour of night before dawn began to seep across the plains, crawling slowly toward that outpost called Cheyenne.

  Bill stood finally, his pockets full, his face a mixture of the sorrow, which had become almost permanently affixed in those watery eyes, and one of modest satisfaction at having finally had a streak of unbreakable luck.

  Charley was near asleep by the door but came alert when Bill slapped him across the back and announced, “I just earned us our expense money for the journey north.”

  The three of them walked back to the collection of tents and wagons, and Bill said, “Come with me and Charley up to Deadwood, old son. You’re a good pard and we’d be privileged to have you in our camp, wouldn’t we Charley?”

  “Sure enough,” Charley said, still a bit dazed from all the rejection he’d suffered, and from too little sleep.

  “I might could go with you boys,” Teddy said. He wasn’t sure what George Bangs would want of him. “When are you fixing to leave?”

  Bill paused, made a visor out of his hand and looked at the growing light, the way the sky shone over the land—white at its core and pink around the edges. Then he sniffed the air and said, “I reckon we can leave about any time, the weather is broke good enough to suit me. How about this afternoon after we’ve had a good catnap?”

  “I could stand a change of scenery,” Charley said. “But I’ll have to buy myself another horse to replace old Abe Lincoln.”

  “See if you can find one that has a nose for gold,” Bill said. Charley hadn’t seen Bill’s spirits so high in months.

  They walked into camp, and Charley went and paid some men to put ropes around Abe Lincoln and drag him far out onto the prairie. “Far enough where I won’t have to be reminded unnecessarily of my old pard,” Charley told them, paying each five dollars for the onerous task.

  Bill started off toward the trees to make water, and Charley made like he had to go too, but Teddy knew it was just so he could keep an eye on Bill’s back. They were up there maybe fifteen minutes, and Bill walked sort of funny on the way back then crawled into the tent and fell fast asleep.

  “He says when he has to piss it hurts for some time after,” Charley explained about the funny way Bill was walking.

  “You want to stand first watch or second?”

  “I’ll take first,” Teddy said.

  “I got a bad feeling for some reason.”

  “You think there’ll be another attempt on his life?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “I feel like somebody’s always watching us.”

  Teddy looked off toward the trees. “It could be somebody is. A man with a good rifle…wouldn’t none of us be safe if he had bad intentions.”

  “I know it,” Charley said, then yawned. “But I guess we could worry ourselves to death as well.”

  Charley crawled into the back of his and Bill’s wagon. Teddy took the old bucket and turned it upside down, setting it against the wagon wheel so he could rest his back against it. He couldn’t say whether Charley was right about the possibility of another attempt on Bill’s life, but he knew that certain men had certain gifts when it came to knowing about things yet to happen, and Charley might well be one of those men.

  The sunlight came easily along the ground until it touched the toes of his boots, then climbed up his legs and settled in his lap like an old house cat and warmed his hands. Bill was right, the weather looked like it had finally broke. He wondered what Deadwood would be like—that country he’d heard stories about nearly every hour from the mouths of men who wanted to go there, and some who’d gone and come back again.

  He thought in a way how nice it would be if he could stake his own claim in that country and perhaps make a strike. He played loose with the ideas of what he’d do with all that money, but his ideas kept taking him down roads that led to Silver City, New Mexico, and the frail but lovely Kathleen Bonney. It was a thought as pleasant as the new weather.

  Jeff Carr looked out his window at all that morning sunshine and said to his deputies, “Boys, it’s going to
be a good day. The weather’s broke, and that mean’s all these yahoos and miners and gunslingers and pimps and whores will be busting out of camp and heading to Deadwood and points north, and that’s good news for us.”

  “Hooray,” they said.

  He might just as well announced Christmas was due to come early, for the smiles it put on their faces.

  The sight of all that sunshine just put a good feeling in a man’s bones, and Jeff thought maybe he’d take the day off and go on a picnic with his Molly, and he said as much to his men.

  “You boys hold down the fort for a few hours and try not and kill anybody and try not and let anybody kill you.” And they all agreed that it sounded like a good idea.

  Jeff left his office and went straight home, where his wife by common-law marriage was baking a cobbler with peaches she’d canned the summer before. She and Jeff were childless, and it was just as well with him that they were because he’d not want to raise sons and daughters in such a lawless place as Cheyenne, though admittedly, it was getting tamer with each passing season. Still, he’d not want to have to explain to little boys and girls that had his eyes and Molly’s sensibilities why he had to shoot a man so badly at Frenchy’s Saloon the other night.

  “That smells frightful good,” Jeff said.

  “Peach cobbler,” his wife replied. “Your favorite.”

  “I love you like money.”

  “You always did know how to talk romantic to a gal,” she said teasingly. She was a bit French, some of her people were—on her father’s side—and Jeff knew she leaned toward fancy words and genteel mannerisms, which was something he didn’t possess much of, being a man originally from the backwoods of Kentucky.

  “I was thinking it’s such a pretty day we should go for a picnic,” he said.

  It surprised her, his thoughtfulness.

  “I bet we could swing by Carson’s Café and get us a basket of fried chicken and some cold beer to go with it.”