by Pete Dexter
That sounded weak, and he started back inside to collect the Bottle Fiend. Before he took a step, Doc Pierce came out the door. The farmer came next, carried by the nephews. One had the shoulders, the other had the knees. One of the dead man's hands was dragging along the ground.
Doc Pierce stopped long enough to nod at Mrs. Langrishe, and the nephew carrying Ed Shaughnessy's shoulders bumped him from behind.
"Is there any special instruction, something you'd like done with the deceased?" the coroner said to Mrs. Langrishe. She had been trying not to look at the body, but the nephew had lost his grip on the farmer's overalls, and now he was fighting not to drop him, and nobody could ignore that.
Charley saw her take it in—a long look—and then she covered her mouth. "Ma'am?" the coroner said.
Charley cleared his throat. "It isn't the lady's deceased," he said. "She only runs the theater, she isn't relations with everybody in it."
"It's somebody's deceased," the coroner said. "If he ain't local, the city don't pay and I don't work free." When Charley didn't answer, the coroner turned to his nephews and said, "Put it down, boys." And the boys dropped Ed Shaughnessy on the ground in front of Mrs. Langrishe.
The one who had held the shoulders rubbed his fingers. "Damn, he must of been two hundred pounds," he said.
"Not two hundred," the other one said. "Maybe one-eighty."
Mrs. Langrishe was still staring at the body, and Charley saw that she'd had enough. "I'll take responsibility," he said.
The coroner turned from Mrs. Langrishe and looked him over. "What might be your interest in this?" he said.
It was Mrs. Langrishe, but he didn't say so. "I am Charles Utter," Charley said, "and I will make good on the expenses if the city refuses to pay."
As he said his name, Charley saw the coroner change. "Would you be the friend of Wild Bill?" he said.
Charley nodded, remembering the barkeep with the lock of Bill's hair. "I am," he said, "and I have met a man who has a piece of Bill's scalp that rightfully belongs to his widow."
"I never did it," the coroner said.
"I know Bill's hair," Charley said.
"If I did," the coroner said, "it wasn't no place where it would show, just a few curls from the back."
"I will be by to settle this," Charley said, meaning the farmer's body, "and at that time I will collect all personal effects of Bill Hickok's in your possession."
The coroner smiled in a painful way. "I didn't mean to keep nothing like that myself," he said. "All I took was a few curls for the family and friends . . ." Sheriff Bullock came out of the theater then, and behind him Handsome Banjo Dick Brown. Charley saw that Handsome Dick was not under arrest. He expected there was paperwork connected with the shooting.
Bullock tipped his hat to Mrs. Langrishe, who nodded back, and then he looked at the body lying on the ground. "Mr. Pierce?" he said.
The coroner shook his head. "We was just discussing business," he said. "But we got it straight now, and Mr. Utter's agreed to make good the costs of burial if the city don't."
The sheriff looked at Charley and then at Mrs. Langrishe. Handsome Banjo Dick Brown also looked at Mrs. Langrishe. He took off his hat and bowed. "Let me apologize for the inconvenience," he said. He took her hand then, and Mrs. Langrishe let him have it. Charley saw why they called him Handsome, but he didn't see how it was any great trick to collect women if you were willing to go around kissing hands in public.
Doc Pierce said, "All right, boys," and the nephews picked the farmer off the ground and carried him up the street.
Charley noticed Handsome Dick still had Mrs. Langrishe's hand. They were looking into each other's skulls, like they could not get deep enough. "Come along, Mr. Brown," the sheriff said. And Handsome Dick went along. He kissed her hand again, and then let go of it a finger at a time.
"My apologies, once again," he said.
Mrs. Langrishe showed the beginnings of a smile. "Thank you," she said, and the sheriff and Handsome Dick headed off in the same direction as the dead farmer. The last member of this parade— Fannie Garrettson—came from the back of the theater on a dead run, still wearing her dancing accessories, and caught Handsome Dick from behind and took his arm.
Charley heard her say, "I knew he would come after me, Dick,"
but if Handsome Dick heard her, or even knew she was there, he gave no sign of it.
Charley turned back to Mrs. Langrishe. Inside, the music had changed and he could hear the stomp of the dancing girls' feet on the stage floor. "If I can be of any assistance," he said, and Mrs. Langrishe looked at him as if she'd just found a dead possum in the trash.
Charley crossed the street and sat on a barrel to wait for the Bottle Fiend. He had never met a woman as contradictory as Mrs. Langrishe. The weather was more reliable. He thought he might love her.
The Bottle Fiend came out with the rest of the audience, half an hour later. Charley had a fresh bottle he'd bought at a tent bar. The Bottle Fiend refused a drink. "Bad things happened," he said. "Some of them ain't make-believe."
Charley walked him home, a little cabin on the south end of town. "I don't want to go home," the soft-brain said when they got there.
"You are home," Charley said. He was thinking of Lurline now, but the Bottle Fiend dug his feet in the mud and refused to move.
"You come in too," he said.
"I got things to do tonight," he said.
The Bottle Fiend laughed, at least it sounded like a laugh. It sounded like the voice in Charley's own head, and that was something like a laugh. "You get bit every night," he said.
"Not exactly bit," Charley said, and that was true. It was more than that now.
"Come with me and you can look at my bottles," the Bottle Fiend said. Charley took a mouthful of whiskey and followed him inside. He had wondered what all those bottles looked like together. The Bottle Fiend had no lamp, and they stood together in the dark while Charley patted himself for a match.
"You can't see them at first," the Bottle Fiend said.
Charley found his matches and struck one against the wall behind him. "Someday this place is going to burn up," the soft-brain said.
"You don't have matches of your own?" Charley said. The room was shallow and wide. There was a sleeping bag in the corner and old newspapers all over the floor.
"I don't have no matches at all," he said. "It ain't going to be my fire."
Charley held the match over his head and forgot it there until it burned his fingers. "It's a nice place," he said.
The next match he lit, he saw the soft-brain was smiling at him. "I got them hid," he said. Charley put the bottle back to his lips, being careful to keep it away from the fire. The soft-brain walked across the room and reached up, unhooking a piece of canvas.
The Bottle Fiend moved left to right, pulling the canvas after him, and then the light of Charley's match reflected back at him from a thousand places.
He took a step forward, but the Bottle Fiend stopped him. "Don't get close," he said. "They'll all fall down . . ."
Charley stood still and looked at the bottles. The pile was four feet high and stretched from one wall to the other. "There must be a thousand," he said.
"One thousand, seven hundred and forty," the soft-brain said. Charley looked at him and saw that he was telling the straight. The Bottle Fiend didn't have anything but the straight in him.
The bottles were stacked this way and that, in no order Charley could see. Some places the mouths stuck out of the pile, some places the bottoms. The bottles had settled under their own weight, and the balance was tricky. You couldn't take a bottle out anywhere without moving them all.
"How do you keep track of the number?" he said.
The Bottle Fiend looked at him, and the match went out. When Charley lit another, the soft-brain was still staring at him. The Bottle Fiend puzzled. "I keep track of the bottles" he said, "not the number." And Charley stood there lighting matches and sipping whiskey until he ran out of matc
hes.
The Bottle Fiend put the canvas curtain back and lay down on the floor. Charley's eyes had accustomed themselves to the room, and he could see the outline of the soft-brain in the corner. He sat on the ledge of the only window in the cabin and sipped whiskey and slapped mosquitoes. "I'll wait until you nod off," Charley said, but the Bottle Fiend didn't answer. His breathing had already evened out, and in a minute he began to snore.
He was flat on his back, unprotected. Charley tried to remember if there was ever a time when he could go off to sleep like that, if there was a time when he wasn't covering himself up. "Little friend," he said to the corner, "you might have found yourself the ticket."
The Bottle Fiend's place had mellowed Charley, and he walked the length of Main Street, thinking of dropping his whiskey in the mud and going back to the hotel. He couldn't make up his mind. The closer he got to the badlands, though, the less inclination he felt to abandon the bottle.
He stopped at the Bella Union, which he ordinarily avoided because of the tourists. All the talk tonight was of Handsome Dick, who had already finished his business with the sheriff and returned to the badlands. The Bella Union was full of eyewitnesses telling each other they'd of done exactly what Handsome did.
Charley listened and had a drink, then he walked next door to Nuttall and Mann's. The talk there was about Handsome Dick too, but at least at Nuttall and Mann's the eyewitnesses were calling each other liars. Harry Sam Young saw Charley and set a brown-eye on the bar in front of him. Ever since Bill died, Harry Sam Young had been setting up free drinks for Charley anytime he came in. "I guess Handsome Banjo Dick Brown shot a farmer over to Langrishe's," the bartender said. "Everybody here seen it."
Charley said, "Everybody in this town saw God rest on Sunday." Charley put the shot glass to his lips and cocked his head. The bar whiskey was rougher than his own, and he fought himself to swallow it. He understood that Harry Sam Young needed to give him free drinks because of Bill, and he didn't want to spit that on the floor.
"It was self-defense, I heard," the bartender said. "It must of been on account Seth Bullock already let him go." He refilled Charley's glass.
"The way it happened," Charley said, "it won't take a hundred-dollar lawyer to get Handsome off. The farmer threw an axe."
"Self-defense," the bartender said.
Charley shrugged. "He put four shots in him, after he was dead."
A pilgrim leaned between them and said, "Somebody throwed an axe at me, I'd shoot him too."
Charley drank the new shot, and then put his hand over the top of the glass so Harry Sam Young couldn't reload. "You ever notice," he said to Harry Sam Young, "the ones who know what they'd of done are always the ones who never did it?" He stood away from the bar then, tired of talking about dead farmers and Handsome Banjo Dick Brown, and walked out into the street. His moccasins sank half a foot, and it occurred to him that he hadn't noticed the mud once since he heard of Bill's death.
He was frightened at the things he got used to.
He looked at the Gem, undecided. Lurline had hurt him sincerely last night, and he had seen how the hurting fed on itself once he'd agreed to it. She had made him yip, biting his leg, and he had determined then to return himself to normalcy at the first opportunity.
He weighed the night, and it did not strike him as such an opportunity.
He walked into the Gem looking for her. Al Swearingen was sitting in a corner, and averted his stare the moment Charley's eyes came across him. The whore man had kept himself scarce since Charley had showed him his knife. Charley guessed you did not run a line of whores without learning something about what to leave alone.
Charley took a drink from his bottle and surveyed the room. He satisfied himself Lurline wasn't there; he climbed the stairs toward her quarters. On the way up, he glanced again at Al Swearingen's table and saw that the whore man was watching him, smiling in a way that set off a warning. Charley ignored it. He knocked at Lurline's door. There was noise inside, but no answer. He tried again, and this time he heard her voice. "Who is it?"
"Charles Utter," he said.
"Go away," she said. "I'm sick."
He took a drink of the bottle and stared at his feet. He felt himself sway. He heard her voice again, closer. "It ain't nothing contagious," she said. "Just let me rest, and I'll be fine . . ."
And suddenly Charley knew, as certain as his birthday was July, the whore man had beaten her up, and she didn't want him to see it. Charley started back down the stairs for him, but he stopped halfway and returned to her room. He wanted to see her for himself, to have that in his mind when he encountered Al Swearingen.
This time he didn't knock. He moved quietly, not to scare her, and turned the door handle without a sound. The floorboards had warped at a spot a foot and a half into the room, and the door hit there and braked. The room was half-lit, and at the sound of the door, two faces came up off the bed. They looked like ghosts. Hers stayed where it was, his rolled toward the bedpost. Charley saw the holster hung there, and dropped to the floor. He heard a chair break and found his knife in his hand. He found that he'd covered the distance between the door and the bed.
Charley never stopped, or thought, or saw it happen. One minute he was standing in the doorway, and the next minute he had Handsome Banjo Dick Brown's jaw locked in one arm and was holding the knife against the pulse in his neck. In the second that had taken, Handsome Dick had reached behind himself with his gun and the muzzle was pressed into Charley's leg. Charley held him dead still. "I been shot in the leg before," Charley said into Handsome Dick's ear, "have you had your throat cut?"
Handsome Dick could not answer, but he shook his head, an eighth of an inch, back and forth. It was all that Charley's purchase allowed him. "Let go, songbird," Charley said, "or I'll do it." The struggle had gone out of Handsome Dick's head, but he held on to the gun.
It was pressed into the very spot Steve's shot had found. Charley remembered the powder burns. For a while, that was what hurt him most. "Let go of it," Charley said again. "This isn't a dirt farmer that's on to you now."
It wasn't until after Handsome Dick's gun dropped and Charley let go of his jaw that Lurline spoke. "What in Jesus' name?" she said. Charley ran his hands through his hair in a way that Bill used to do, and waited for his dizziness to pass. Handsome Dick had dropped onto the foot of the bed when Charley let go of his jaw, and he lay there, stark naked, holding his throat with both hands. Charley kept an eye on him anyway, because Handsome Dick always got even. "I ast you a question," Lurline said.
"You didn't," Charley said, and he sat down on the bed next to Handsome Dick. "Just because it starts with what doesn't make it a question."
"I thought you was different," she said, and that was a question. She was sitting up in bed. He saw she was wearing her red and black undies, and felt a poke of remorse that she shared them with the others. He felt no such poke that Lurline shared herself. An upstairs girl was an upstairs girl, things were what they were. "I thought you was gentle," she said.
Handsome Dick was looking up at him now, as if that had been his understanding too. Charley shook his head. "It's not one way or the other," he said. "A person isn't all one way."
He noticed his bottle of J. Fred McCurnin then, over by the door. It had somehow landed mouth-up when he'd dropped it. It hadn't broken, from what he could see it hadn't even spilled. He stood up, unsteady, and collected it. He held on to the door when he bent over to pick it up. It was hard to see how, three minutes before, the same human being could have covered the same distance in something less than a second and put a death-hold on Handsome Dick's head.
"You and me was different," she said. "It wasn't no business involved, and then you cut a man's throat on my bed."
Charley looked at Handsome Dick, who hadn't moved. A skirt of blood hung from a single pink line high on his neck. "His throat isn't cut," Charley said. Handsome Dick sat up slowly and looked at the blood on his hands.
"I think you
damaged my voice box," he said.
Lurline looked at Handsome Dick when he said that, and then back at Charley. "See what you done?" she said. "You have damaged his voice box."
"I saw him put five shots into a farmer," Charley said, "four after he was dead. I don't stand still while a man with those sporting inclinations goes after his shooter."
"Self-defense," Lurline said.
"I saw it," Charley said, looking at the singer. "I know what it was."
"He threw an axe," Handsome Dick said. He patted the side of his neck and then looked at his hand. The blood had stopped running and was beginning to dry.
"You surmised he was going to reload?" Charley said.
Lurline did not give the singer a chance to reply. She. got up off the bed, crossed the room, and pushed Charley out. He let himself be pushed. "Don't come back in here," she said, and she balled one of her hands into a fist and hit Charley in the chest. She hit him again and again, all the way to the stairs. Charley walked backwards, smiling. Lurline hurt you less hurting you than she did loving you. "This ain't funny," she said, grunting on the word funny because she was throwing a fist at the time.
Charley stood at the top of the stairs until Lurline was out of breath. "You was special," she said, and then turned her back and slammed the door.
He looked at the ceiling. "I never said that," he said, out loud. He started down the stairs, and before he got to the bottom he heard Handsome Dick singing scales, testing his voice box.
Charley sat down at a table and looked at his bottle. He thought again of how it had landed and tried to see the reason. He decided he was meant to drink it.
The whore man had gone behind the bar while Charley was upstairs, and Charley moved his chair so he could watch him and the stairs both. He did not expect to see the banjo player again soon, but he couldn't be sure that Lurline would hold his interest the way she did his. A man who named himself Handsome Banjo could not be counted on to stay long-term with any girl.
He was still sitting there an hour later, drinking and watching the whore man and the stairs, when it came to him out of nowhere to find the pretty little girl in Chinatown, the one Al Swearingen had wanted to buy.