by Pete Dexter
"What is it?" Bill said. He and Charley were standing at the tent across the creek from their wagon, trying some of the fifty-cent whiskey. The man who owned the tent had given them the first drinks free. He said it was an honor to own the spot where Wild Bill Hickok first set his feet on Deadwood soil. He said he might put up a sign to commemorate it.
"It looks like a Mexican on a stolen horse carrying somebody's head," Charley said.
"That's an Indian," said the man who owned the tent. He'd hung calico on the inside walls to brighten the mood. "There's a town reward, two hundred and fifty dollars for any Indian, dead or alive."
"That one's dead," Charley said. His humor sometimes grew an edge when he drank.
Bill shook his head. "I never heard anything like that. Paying Mexicans two hundred and fifty dollars to kill Indians."
The man who owned the tent poured them another shot. There had been twenty or thirty others there drinking with them, but they'd left now to follow the Mex. "It's the law," the man said. "It used to be twenty-five dollars, but it went up after what they done to Custer."
"Custer?" Bill said.
"Kilt him and everybody with him. Two, three hundred boys of the Seventh Cavalry up to the Little Big Horn in Montana." Bill shook his head. "June twenty-fifth," the man said. "You didn't hear that?"
"We been out of touch," Bill said.
"We're all out of touch," the man said. "The pony express—shit, you might as well just walk out here and deliver your messages in person. But Custer's a fact. Terrible mutilations, no survivors." He waited to build the suspense before he told Wild Bill what kind of mutilations, which had been the focus of conversation in town ever since the news arrived. "A polite way to put it," he said, "if Custer had survived, he wouldn't of had no eyes to see, and he'd of had to squat to piss."
As soon as the man said that he saw it hadn't set right with Bill. Maybe they were friends. He tried to soften it. "That being the case," he said, "he's better off dead."
Bill finished the shot and headed off in the direction of the Mex. "I didn't mean nothin'," the man said to Charley. "I was just explainin' the problem."
Charley watched Bill walk across the street, his chin up, not even looking at the mud, and then down the other side into the badlands. They were shooting guns down there now, and Charley wondered where the boy was. Lord, don't let the boy get shot. Charley Utter had lived thirty-seven years, most of it unworried and natural. He'd hunted and fished and run trap lines into all the tributaries of the Grand River. When they'd found gold in Colorado, he'd bought and sold claims. When the gold began to peter out, he ran supplies into the newer, more remote camps. He'd made more money than any miner he knew, and held On to most of it. He'd been shot twice in the legs by accident, hunting, but he'd never had to pull a gun on a living soul. As much as you can, he'd even gotten married on purpose.
It did not sit with him that now, in the space of a spring, he was dreaming at night of Bill's blindness, and doing everything for the boy but powdering his ass. It wasn't that they'd asked him, it was like a sickness he'd caught.
Two different sicknesses. He'd been to the edge of the canyon with Bill, and could predict him better than anybody alive. He was tied to Bill, who was like his own person. There was one side that got Bill women and money and included the stories people told about him, and there was another side he kept to himself. Except Charley felt like he was keeping Bill's private side for him now. The public side was as wild as ever—a reputation always changed slower than a man—and more and more, Bill occupied himself in that. Charley imagined it was the blood disease, or going blind, but Bill sometimes seemed to lose track of the line between the stories and what was true.
The boy, on the other hand, was a problem connected to his wife, and when Charley worried about the boy, it was the purest self-interest. Charley's wife was named Matilda Nash. He'd married her on September 30, 1866, when she was fifteen years old. She was the cleanest human being Charley ever saw. She had readable eyes and pale, English-type skin, and she used to sit on the bearskin rug he'd given her father with her chin pressed against his knees and believe every lie he told her about the places he had been and the things he had done.
Her father was a baker from Bath, England. Charley had a picture of that place in his head. Her mother had died at the birth of Malcolm. Everything considered, she did the honorable thing. Tilly brought the boy up herself, mad at him every minute, complaining about him to anybody who would listen. And she would kill you if you agreed with her.
And after the boy and her father were asleep, she'd sit at Charley's feet—he didn't sit on the floor himself because of the ache in his legs—and listen to his stories. She seemed to understand everything he said, including the way it was between him and Bill. It never occurred to him that she was sitting there smiling, making lists of the things she was going to change.
Charley opened his pouch and watched the man who owned the tent pinch out enough gold dust to cover the cost of what they'd drunk. Whiskey was less than two dollars a gallon back in the States, and what the man took had bought maybe twice that. "The overhead doesn't hurt you much here, does it?" Charley said, looking around. He was always interested in how people made a living.
The man smiled and leaned closer. "1 don't know nothing about that," he said, and Charley could see that was probably true. "You think I could still put up a sign?" he said. "I don't want to do nothin' to upset Wild Bill more than he is."
"He won't mind," Charley said, and started off.
The man said to tell Bill he was welcome to come by and look at the sign anytime he wanted. "And you too," he said.
Charley walked back down into the badlands and found Bill in the company of the Mex and Captain Jack at the bar of the Green Front Theater. There was a crowd of miners and gamblers and reprobates around them, a lot of drinking and backslapping. Somebody discharged his pistol into the floor, and the smell of the powder stunk worse than the miners.
A man stood in the doorway holding his hat upside down and asked Charley for a dollar. The hat was full of paper money. "It's a donation for the greaser," the man said. "On account of the Indian he killed." Charley put a dollar in the hat and moved toward the bar.
Bill was standing next to the Mex, both of them facing Captain Jack Crawford. Charley noticed the Mex was missing half an ear. The gun went off again—Charley saw the smoke this time, it floated up into the ceiling like a departed soul—and then the place went quiet. Captain Jack cleared his throat and opened a copy of the Black Hills Pioneer, and began to read out loud. "A Missive to Buffalo Bill Cody," he said, "from Another Old Indian Scout, Captain Jack Crawford. By Captain Jack Crawford."
It took Charley a little while to realize it was a poem.
"Did I hear the news from Custer?
Well, I reckon I did, oldpard.
It came like a streak o' lightning,
And you bet, it hit me hard.
I ain't no hand to blubber,
And the briny ain't run for years,
But chalk me down for a lubber,
If I didn't shed regular tears."
Charley pried his way through the assembly and got to Bill, who didn't see him. He and the Mex were both fixed on Captain Jack's recital.
". . . I served with him in the Army
In the darkest days of the war,
And I reckon, ye know his record,
For he was our guiding star.
And the boys who gathered round him
To charge in the early morn,
War jest like the brave who perished
With him on the Little Big Horn . . ."
Charley didn't know if he could wait it out. From where he was standing he could see Captain Jack's finger moving down the outside of the column. He'd read five or six verses, and was only halfway through. Bill and the Mex looked very solemn. The joints in Charley's hips and knees seemed to be locking into the bones. The Mex had tucked the Indian head into the crook of his arm, face f
orward, and somewhere in the achievement of its celebrity the Indian's face had been distorted, and half-looked like it was smiling.
Charley found a place on the bar to put his elbow and took some of the weight off his legs. The relief was instant, and when the pain ebbed he felt more patient. The poem was turning angry now.
"They talk about peace with the demons,
By feeding and clothing them well,
I'd as soon think an angel from heaven
Would reign with contentment in hell.
And some day these Quakers will answer
Before the great Judge of all
For the death of daring young Custer
And the boys that around him did fall. . ."
"Damn right," someone shouted. Captain Jack held up his hand for quiet, but there was a demonstration before he could finish. With interruptions, the poem lasted another five minutes, and at the end of it one of the miners drew his pistol and shot the smiling Indian out of the Mex's arm. The Mex was slightly wounded— more burned than shot, but a little of each—so they gave him the money right away, without teasing him.
He accepted it with the same solemnity he'd accepted the poem, and then he turned to the bartender and gave three of the bills to him, and pointed at the empty glass in front of him.
"Da-me" he said. The bartender filled his glass, and then Bill's glass, and then he picked up a glass that was sitting on the bar in front of a sleeping miner, threw what was in it on the floor, and set it in front of Charley. "Da-me," the Mex said, and the bartender filled it too.
Captain Jack refused even before the Mex offered him a drink.
"No da-me" he said, more to the room than the Mex, and began another oration. There was something about his voice that nobody else wanted to talk at the same time.
"After the war," he began, "in which my father was killed and I myself was twice wounded, Battle of Spottsylvania, 1864, Forty-seventh Regiment of Pennsylvania Volunteers, I returned home to New York to find my mother ravaged by sickness. As I wept beside her, she asked one last thing, that I never touch a drop of liquor, and I made that good lady that promise, and it is a promise I mean to keep." To Charley's knowledge, Jack Crawford was the only man in the West who spoke footnotes.
"Da-me" said the Mex, pointing to his glass. And when it was full he turned with it to Captain Jack and offered a toast. "Tu mamá," he said, and spilled some of it down the front of Captain Jack's buckskin jacket. Then he drank what was left and turned back to the bartender.
Charley moved closer to Bill. So did the poet-scout. "These are all good men," Captain Jack said to Bill, and pointed around the room. "Miners, paper-collars, even the greaser. But they don't know a thing about Indian fighting. Most of them can't use a side arm at all, except the ones that were in the war, and some of them don't have a stomach for it now."
Bill nodded. The war didn't leave anybody the same. Some of those in it came away too scared to live anymore, and some had spent all the time since looking for some excitement to match it. Captain Jack said, "They came here without the protection of the United States government, against the government, into these hills the Indians would claim for their own."
Captain Jack paused and gave the miners and gamblers a chance to agitate against the government. Charley had seen the same sort of thing a couple of times in Kansas, but he couldn't see the point here. There wasn't anybody around to hang.
"And so we have taken up arms to protect ourselves," Captain Jack said, and somebody shot a gun into the ceiling. "Forty-five volunteers, hard-working pilgrims of this territory, ride with me and patrol the mining camps on the outside of town. Three quick shots brings us on a run, and we are never more than a minute from the commencement of action."
Charley said, "Shit, they shoot off side arms in this burg like they used it to keep time." Bill turned and saw him there, and smiled at that.
Captain Jack nodded. "Discipline is always a problem," he said, "in any military situation. Compounded here by the fact that most of the Minutemen have no experience with arms or the military. That is why I would ask you"—he was speaking to Bill now—"to join me as a leader of the Minutemen. Together, we could make Indian fighters of these pilgrims."
"Da-me," said the Mex.
Bill looked at Charley, dead solemn. Charley said, "I already been shot by accident, once in each leg. I know where fate intends to put the third one."
The bartender filled the Mex's glass, and he offered another toast. "Tu mamá" he said again.
"No da-me," Captain Jack said. "We're discussing the protection of the miners."
That stopped the Mex cold. He had repossessed the Indian's head and was standing with his foot on one of its ears. As he considered Captain Jack's words to him, he rolled the head back and forth under his foot, the way a white man might stroke his chin. Finally he seemed to decide on something. He raised the glass toward Captain Jack again and said, "Pro-tess-shion." Then he smiled and killed what was in the glass.
"This greaser wears on you," Captain Jack said to Bill, "but he has proved himself in combat." The Mex set his glass on the bar and picked up the Indian's head. The eyes had shut, like it had seen the bullet coming that shot him out of the Mex's arm.
"Mis amigos" the Mex said. He hugged Captain Jack, then Bill. Then he turned to the rest of the bar and said it again. "Mis amigos." He started out the door, and the miners and reprobates cheered him, and some of them shot their pistols into the ceiling. The Mex smiled and blew them kisses. That caused more shooting and cheering, and the Mex, in a moment Charley considered inspired, stood at the door to the Green Front and blew the room a kiss from his own lips, and then one from the Indian's.
Then he went outside, got on his horse, and drew his pistol. He rode back through town the way he had come in, holding the Indian's head by the hair so it could bounce, shooting his pistol into the air so nobody would miss it. He went out of the badlands into Deadwood proper, where he was arrested by Seth Bullock and escorted out of town.
The citizens of Deadwood did not wring their hands over the workings of the badlands, but they drew the line at being shot in the course of their daily affairs by ambassadors of that part of the city, particularly a greaser carrying a human head.
Sheriff Bullock was just back from seeing the Mex out of town, and was sitting down behind his desk when Boone May walked into the office. The office was at the corner of Main Street and Wall Street, and the sign across the front of it said deadwood brickworks, inc. Beneath that were the words QUEENSWARE, FURNITURE, HARDWARE, LAMPS, WALLPAPER, ETC. And beneath that, in smaller letters, SHERIFF SETH BULLOCK.
Bullock's partner was a single-minded man named Solomon Star, who had come to Deadwood with him from Bismarck and put up the money for their business. He was tighter than Seth Bullock, and worried they were ordering too much, and too many different things. He had a wife back in Bismarck, but he had never loved anything but business, and did not see yet how much there was in Deadwood for the taking.
When Boone May walked in, Solomon Star was sitting at another desk, going over an ordering form. He had been against it when Bullock agreed to take over the unofficial duties of town sheriff. He'd said they hadn't come to Deadwood to end up as statues in the town square. He took off his reading glasses and looked at Boone May, then he looked at Bullock.
"You see where this road leads, Mr. Bullock?" he said. "You cannot leave your door open to all God's creatures in the blind faith that they were made by God, and somehow reflect His image."
Solomon Star had a facility for that. It always sounded like he was quoting the Bible. Boone May walked across the room, tracking mud, and sat down in the chair beside Bullock's desk. He was carrying a leather bag, and smelled like everything he'd touched or eaten in two months.
Bullock said, "Solomon, would you give us a few minutes?" He always spoke politely to his partner. The little man stood up and put his glasses in his shirt pocket. He took his coat off the hanger and held on to his shirt cuffs a
s they went into the sleeves of the coat. He stepped in front of the mirror and retied his necktie. His hat went on his head as carefully as you set dynamite.
Boone May watched him walk out of the office and close the door. He shook his head and smiled. "Paper-collars," he said. He didn't push that too far, though, because he wasn't sure that Seth Bullock wasn't part paper-collar himself.
Bullock sat still, looking at him in a steady, unfriendly way that made him forget the way he intended to put the case for collecting on Frank Towles's head. Seth Bullock was the hardest man to talk to that Boone May ever met.
"Lookie," he said, patting the bag, "I got Frank Towles's head that's worth two hundred dollars in Cheyenne. I shot him myself in a legal, fair fight, and did the public's welfare. So I don't see why you couldn't jurisdict this matter to give me the two hundred dollars here, so's I don't have to ride all the way back to Cheyenne."
Seth Bullock leaned closer. He was big through the arms and shoulders, as big as Boone. "Frank Towles's head isn't worth a nickel in Dakota Territory," he said.
"You could arrange it," he said.
Bullock shook his head. "I just paid a Mexican two hundred and fifty dollars gold for an Indian's head, out of the Board of Health funds, because that is municipal law. There is no such reward for Frank Towles." He didn't mention that he'd fined the Mexican the same $250 for endangering public safety, and taken his fifty percent collection fee.
Boone May covered his eyes. "You paid a Mex two hundred and fifty dollars?" he said. "And a white man's got to sit here and beg for what's comin' to him?"
"I never asked you to shoot Frank Towles," Bullock said.