by Pete Dexter
"Anything that's left over, you'll get it back," she said.
"I might be gone a while," he said. "I got to travel to Cheyenne to set up a pony express . . ."
"You need riders?" she said. "I can ride with any man, and I have killed more redskins than I could keep count of." He watched her in the moonlight, and he'd never felt sorrier for anybody in his life.
"Not right away," he said. "I won't know what I need right away."
She climbed into the front of the wagon using one hand. The bottle was in the other. She was clumsy and lacked balance. It seemed to Charley that she didn't have strong enough traits either way—man or woman—to get by. When she was in the wagon, she sat down in the seat and pulled the cork out of the bottle. Charley saw her close her lips against the mouth of the bottle when she drank, but she threw her head back like there wasn't enough liquor in the world.
"Well," she said, "I still got the boy."
She climbed over the seat and disappeared into the back of the wagon. It creaked and complained as she settled. Charley was back in the street, headed for the hotel, when he heard her singing to Malcolm. She had a sweet, high voice, nothing like the way she looked. She sang "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."
Boone may took the Cat Man back up into the hills to practice. He set Frank Towles's head on a tree stump to shoot at. The head was worthless now, unrecognizable even in Cheyenne. Boone had set it on the floor at Nuttall and Mann's while he watched Wild Bill play cards, and the bulldog that followed him around had chewed into the sack and mauled the identifying features.
Boone had been studying Bill's moves at the time. It seemed like he had been doing that ever since Bill arrived in town, and he had decided the reason Bill was famous was that he could feel every current in the room. The cat man would probably run off when he saw him in person. Boone watched him, noticing what he drank, watching for him to spill cards or stumble on the way outside to piss. Which never happened.
He took forever outside. He'd tilt his chair into the table to save his spot and disappear for half an hour. Nobody ever complained. Boone decided if it was himself that had to do business with Wild Bill, that's where he would do it. Out in back, with a shotgun. That's where he would do it, but he had no confidence it would go his way.
He had the feeling the gunfighter saw as well in the dark as he did in the light.
He would have the cat man do his work inside, though. He was not the kind you could trust in the dark.
It was while Boone was figuring that all out for maybe the tenth time that the bulldog got into the bag and changed Frank Towles's features. Boone never noticed until he heard the bones cracking at his feet, and then the dog didn't want to give it up. Frank's head was soaked with dog spit, and Boone's hands kept slipping off when he tried to pull it away. The dog growled and held on. It was Wild Bill himself who called the animal away. At the sound of his voice, he let go of Frank's head and padded over to the card table, trailing saliva, and lay at Bill's feet.
Boone set the head on the stump now and stood beside the cat man. The cat man sighted down the rusted barrel of the gun he was holding, and then turned his head away and pulled the trigger. "You scairt of guns?" Boone said when the smoke cleared. "I didn't figure a cat man to be scairt of guns."
"I killed men," Jack McCall said. "I ain't scared of guns." Boone pointed at Frank Towles's head, and the cat man tried again. This time he didn't close his eyes.
"Get closer," Boone said. "You ain't going to get but one opportunity to die famous." Jack McCall stepped closer, then closer again. He was almost touching-distance before he hit the head.
"That feels peculiar," he said to Boone. "Shooting a head."
Boone shrugged. "It wasn't peculiar when I shot him." He picked the head up off the ground and put it back on the stump. "Do it again," he said.
"What for?"
"That's what practice is," Boone said. And the cat man pointed his pistol at the head again, and hit it again. He shot the head off the stump again and again, until it broke into pieces so small there wasn't anything big enough for Boone to put it back up there.
Boone took the cat man to the Gem Theater and bought him a bottle of J. Fred McCurnin swoop whiskey, which was as thick and sweet as molasses, and about as expensive. He sat him at a table with the bottle and a glass, and left him there while he went to talk to Al Swearingen. "Don't do a thing until I tell you," he told the cat man. "This is touchy business."
Boone found Al Swearingen in his office with his missus. She was crying, which was how Boone knew who it was. Swearingen did not like her to show herself in public. Boone walked in without knocking, and found them with their faces so close they might of been kissing, except he had the front of her shirt in his fist.
Boone stood in the door and waited. He didn't leave, he didn't interfere. The way he looked at it, anybody that married Al Swearingen must of liked to bawl. It was the same way with him and Lurline, who kept asking was he going to kill her someday, and kept coming back just the same. There was something in them that craved it.
Al Swearingen saw Boone wasn't going to excuse himself, and let go of his wife. She sat in a chair and cried. The crying sounded pitiful to Boone, who was used to an angrier kind. Swearingen sat down on the desk. "What is it?" he said.
"Two hundred dollars," Boone said.
Swearingen changed expressions. "It's done?"
Boone said, "As good as. I got the man to do it, but when Wild Bill's laying in his brains, I don't want you sayin' it was no accident. I got a lot of time and effort in training the right man, and I want my two hundred dollars. I already lost Frank Towles's head in this, and I want you to know right now that you and me are in business."
Al Swearingen's wife looked up, blinking tears. Boone stopped himself, then he nodded. "Ma'am," he said.
"Don't pay no attention to the woman," Swearingen said. "She don't talk unless I tell her what to say." She found a hankie in her dress pocket and blew her nose, and Boone could tell just from the sound of it that what Swearingen said was true.
"I see that," he said.
Swearingen smiled. "I got all my girls broke," he said. Then he said, "Who is this man you trained?"
Boone shook his head. "That's nothin' you need to know," he said.
"How am I supposed to know he's the one that does it then?" Swearingen said. "For two hundred dollars, I want to know it was me that paid for it."
"You ain't paid nothing yet," Boone said.
"After," he said. "After it's done. 1 don't pay good money to have somebody to run out on his obligations. That ain't the way I do business."
"The way you did this was to offer me two hundred dollars for Wild Bill's scalp, and that's what I'm here to announce."
"How?" Swearingen said.
"What's the difference, as long as he's kilt?"
"I told you," Swearingen said, "I want to know I was the one that paid for it."
His wife made a noise then, someplace between gagging and a laugh, and ran for the door. Swearingen shouted at her, but she ran past Boone and out into the bar. Swearingen scratched at his head. "I've about give up trying to understand that girl," he said.
Al Swearingen's wife ran out of the office and through the bar. A miner caught her around the waist and put her on his lap, but she stuck her thumb in his eye until he let go. She went out into the street, crying, and fell in the mud.
She was wearing a dress Swearingen had brought her from Omaha. She knew he'd let one of the whores wear it on the trip back, and then given it to her used. She could smell other women on all her clothes. When she stood up, the dress stuck to her legs in front, and it embarrassed her the way it showed her off. She shook some of the mud off her hands and then started south, up the street. She was crying and wet, and once she was out of the badlands people in the street turned and stared at her.
There was nothing unkind in it. The cold part of town was where she'd come from, where they didn't look twice at a crying girl. She ra
n from the Gem all the way into town proper, and then tired and began to walk.
She was still crying when she came through the door of the Dead wood Brickworks, Inc. Seth Bullock and Solomon Star were on the way outside to inspect the rock flooring they'd commissioned to hold their new kilns. An enclosure would be built over them, after they were all in place.
They both looked at the door when she came in, then Seth Bullock tipped his hat. "Yes, ma'am," he said.
"I am Mrs. Al Swearingen," she said. Bullock nodded. He knew every permanent resident of Deadwood on sight, even the ones that kept out of sight. She said, "I am here to report on my husband."
Bullock looked at the woman carefully. She was covered with mud and she'd been crying, but didn't appear to be bleeding, or even show new swellings on her face. The sheriff had seen her black-eyed and petal-lipped more often than not. There were a large number of married men in Deadwood—most of them hadn't brought their wives in yet—and Bullock was not anxious to begin stepping into the middle of family disputes. There were too many of them, for one thing, and it was a good way to get shot, for another.
"Mrs. Swearingen," he said, "I respectfully can't allow my office to become involved in family business. A man's house is his castle, and it isn't the business of the law."
"I am here to report on my husband," she said again. Bullock saw that she was about to cry. He got her a chair and helped her sit down. He wasn't in a hurry to get in the middle of family troubles, but crying, muddy women walking out the front door wasn't going to do anybody any good, either.
He took a handkerchief and wiped some of the mud off her face. She sat quietly and allowed herself to be cleaned. When he had done what he could, he gave her the handkerchief and let her wipe her front and hands for herself. "The way the law is," he said, "it's public. It doesn't apply in private life." Solomon Star had moved to the floor in back of him, and had a hammer in his hand and half a dozen nails in his lips. Bullock was glad that Solomon's mouth was occupied.
"What I'm here about ain't private," the woman said. "My husband and Mr. Boone May plan to have Mr. Wild Bill Hickok shot."
The sheriff smiled at her. "A man like Bill Hickok," he said, "there's bound to be stories . . ." Hickok had been in town a little over two weeks, and there was already talk of making him sheriff.
The woman shook her head. "These two ain't just talking," she said. "I know them better." Seth Bullock patted her hand. It wasn't the talk of Bill becoming sheriff that troubled him—the office wasn't anything Seth Bullock wanted to hold on to any longer than he needed to—it was the way people spoke of him, like Bill would save them from Indians and thieves and cold weather. Bill had done nothing but drink gin and lose at cards, and he'd already begun to take Seth Bullock's claim. Not just in the badlands, everywhere in the city. Nobody knew what Bill Hickok was like, but that's where popularity lay, in the idea, not the fact.
Nobody ever got his statue built because the public knew him over breakfast.
"Mrs. Swearingen," Bullock said, "I want you to go back to your husband and don't say anything about coming here."
"I come here to report him," she said. Bullock shook his head no.
"The law is public," he said. "People's private problems, they ought to settle them at home. In fairness, you married him, missus. Try to remember all the things you saw in him then, and see if they aren't still there."
She looked for something in his face, to see if that was a joke. "You ain't going to do nothing about this, are you?" she said.
"No," he said, "no, I'm not."
Friday, Charley left for Cheyenne. the clippinger pony Express Company had accepted his challenge as it was laid down. It had surprised Charley, and told him the business was not worth as much as he had surmised.
He left without talking to Bill. He checked on the boy, who he now believed would never improve, and gave Jane another twenty dollars for groceries. Then he got on a rough-looking gray gelding that he bought for $450 from Brick Pomeroy, and rode out of town. It felt wrong to leave without speaking to Bill, but the longer he'd stayed at the Grand Union, the more distance there was between them, and he didn't have the way to narrow it.
It was going the other way, in fact. He'd begun to judge him. He found himself thinking of Bill in ways that weren't any of his business. Like why he couldn't make money, or why he married a woman he didn't know. It was small and wrong, but he thought of those things anyway.
He tried talking to himself out loud. He said, "All Bill did was pull your ass out the river once—how long are you going to hold it against him?" but it was empty. There was something that happened in the water that day that Charley couldn't forgive.
He took six days to get to Cheyenne, stopping here and there to make arrangements to care for his horses later. There were two-and three-family settlements that the Indians had left alone, a few ranches. Texans, mostly. They were the least humorous people Charley had ever been among, Texans. He thought it was probably the dust storms. But they were reliable too, not likely to run at the sight of Indians. Not likely to run at all.
For purposes of the race, he decided to use four riders, with his brother Steve riding the longest stretch, which ran from a house full of Mexicans sitting unprotected out in the middle of eastern Wyoming into the settlement of Camp Collier in the southern Hills.
He would have taken the hardest ride himself, but he wanted the last leg. He thought it would be better for business if the miners saw him in the saddle, so they would know his express was trustworthy. Nobody had ever seen Enis Clippinger, or knew who he was. Charley surmised that was why the miners objected that he read their mail.
He met his brother in Cheyenne, and they spent the day hiring riders. The Street brothers, Brant and Dick, Herbert Godard, H. G. "Huge" Rocafellow, and Bloody Dick Seymour. Two were curiosities. Bloody Dick was a full-blooded Englishman, who had settled on the Niobrara River in Nebraska and then come to the Hills. Most of the English stayed where they settled. He wasn't much good on a horse, and useless with a side arm, but Charley liked his accent.
The other oddity was Huge Rocafellow, who was nearly as big as his horse—a dark, sorry-looking animal that Huge swore would run forever. "Where did you find that one?" Charley said to his brother, when Huge had left them.
His brother was so much like Charley that they had to stay apart from each other to avoid bloodshed. He said Huge was the best-humored man in Cheyenne, and he'd hired him for that. Steve was smart, and understood how his brother ran a business. If there wasn't some fun in it, Charley wouldn't do it.
Charley would waste his money, but not his time.
They spent the early evening in the bar of the Republican Hotel. Steve had two drinks and asked after Matilda, and then Bill. He had bee-homing instincts for what Charley didn't want to talk about.
"Is something come between you and Bill?" he said.
Charley shook his head. "It's nothing," he said. "Bill is Bill. There isn't anything written down that says we have to be together every minute of the day."
Steve couldn't have looked more surprised if his feet disappeared. "You and Bill are still partners, ain't you? I never seen partners as close as you and Bill . . ."
Charley stood up and stretched. "I got to get some sleep," he said. And he left him there in the bar and went to his room. He loved his brother, but he couldn't be around him.
He lay sleepless for most of the night. He mounted the bed on his stomach with his head hanging over the side, trying to find a comfortable way to position his legs—which ached from the time in the saddle—and stared for a while at a cricket on the floor. The cricket's movements were mostly in his whiskers. Charley believed God was in every creature on earth, even people, and waited about ten minutes for Him to reveal Himself. It didn't happen. He rolled over on his side and closed his eyes. There were no lessons for him in crickets.
He imagined the cricket and himself were something akin to Bill and Matilda, who after all, were both God's idea,
but could stare at each other forever and never recognize a mutuality.
The boy had lost track of day and night, he'd almost forgot what it meant. Sometimes the canvas top was light, sometimes it was dark. When it was dark, she was always with him, holding his head against her body while she snored.
He watched her sleep and wake up, he watched her drink whiskey from the bottle. He heard her outside, talking to Bill. "You and me," she would say, "we're two of a kind, Bill. We got the same blood in our veins."
He never heard Bill answer. She would drink and talk, and then Bill would go away. Sometimes she would crawl into the wagon with him afterwards, and he would watch her cry.
She never knew he was watching.
He forgot why he was lying down. Something had happened, he knew, but it wasn't with him anymore, at least not at hand. It was someplace else. He didn't try. to find it, he didn't try to get up. He was weak, but it was comfortable. She sang to him when it was dark.
He had no sense of time passing, just that it had passed. He knew he couldn't lie in the wagon forever. He heard people on the street, and knew that sometime he would have to go out there himself. He was in no hurry. He lay in the wagon and waited for the things that would come to him.
She washed him at first light, talking to him as she scrubbed dark soap against her washrag, and then the washrag against his skin. She washed his chest and his arms. She held his peeder in a milk bottle and he would let go of his piss. He watched everything she did, and listened to everything she said.
She began to call him her baby. "When are you going to talk to me?" she said. And, "You ain't going to die on your momma, are you? You're all your momma's got. . ."
It never entered his thoughts to answer. She fed him milk and soup, a spoonful at a time, holding his head in the cradle of her elbow. His mouth did not hurt now to have things inside it.
And then one morning there was a voice outside. Louder than the usual voices in the street. He was lying against her shoulder when he heard it, and he recognized right away that it was for him. "Dear God," the voice said, "help the sad and the weak and the lost among us. Lend us Thy strength, so that we may do Thy work better, and find our way back to You from this place full of Thy enemies . . ."