by Pete Dexter
Charley walked back to the house then, and stood in the front room again, but the place had turned restless. He thought of Bill's wife, waiting in room 19 of the Grand Union Hotel with eyes as cold as frost. He went cold himself, remembering her eyes.
He left the house, crossed the street, and bought himself a bottle. He got on his horse and began to drink—he hadn't drunk so early since the day he shot Handsome Dick Brown.
He had to force the whiskey.
Twice he regurgitated. His nose stung and his eyes watered, but he replaced what he'd lost. He rode in and out of the shadows of trees until he approached Deadwood, where the trees stopped. His balance was impaired, and the third time he leaned over in the saddle to regurgitate, he fell off the horse. He lay still on the ground, holding on to the bottle. The horse put his nose in Charley's stomach and blew. Charley had landed on his back, and it was a while before his breathing pains eased enough to slap the animal's head away.
He shaded his eyes and looked at the horse upside down. He sat up to take another drink, he lay back down. He talked to the horse. He said, "Man was not intended to fear woman until they were married."
The horse blew again, and dropped a thick line of spit onto the ground next to Charley's head. "If you'd hit me with that," he said, "I'd of had to shoot you." As a rule, Charley did not talk to a horse, believing, as he did, that the animal was nothing but a cow with bad nerves. But the gelding was smarter than most, and had seen some things, and Charley felt more comfortable about lying on the ground talking to him then than he did about getting up and trying to ride him.
"It's nothing personal," he said. "Now that I shot Handsome Dick in the leg, I have a reputation to keep, and I can't allow some old bastard who's had his balls cut off to come spitting in my gun-fighter face." He brought the bottle to his lips again, spilling alcohol down his chin. The horse blew. And then there was a voice. Charley was drunk, but he knew it wasn't four-legged.
"Charley?"
He leaned farther back, his eyes moving down the horse's head to his neck. At shoulder height, he found the face of Agnes Lake. He recognized the eyes.
"Charley?"
He sat up in the dirt, not trying to get up, not trying to hide the bottle. He noticed it was only dented, and wondered how, only three weeks before, he'd been able to finish one this same size in a single night. "I was just coming to see you," he said, "and this animal threw me off and tried to spit on my head."
She knelt in back of him and he smelled her perfume and the soap she had used to bathe. She was still humid from the bath, he knew there were still wet spots in her ears. She looked younger than he remembered, and softer. Her hair was tied this way and that, it made him dizzy trying to follow it around her head.
"You caught me at the disadvantage," he said. "I have been tangling with this horse." The horse moved a step to the side. Charley said, "Watch him, he spits." She stared into Charley's face, upside down, and it felt to him like they knew each other longer than they did. "Well," he said, because she was still watching him, "how was your trip?"
"I came as soon as I could," she said.
"There was no hurry," he said. "I took care of things as they came up." She was still looking into his face and Charley started to get up. He felt her hands under his arms, and then he was on his feet. Bill had said she was strong.
"Charley," she said. She looked him up and down, he brushed the dirt off his pants and shirt, thinking it was luck he'd fallen where he did because if he'd waited another hundred feet, it would have been mud. Of course, if he'd waited another hundred feet, the landing would have been softer.
"I was gone when Bill got shot," he said, "but I did what I could when I got back." He tried a few slow steps, testing his legs, and then took the horse's reins in his hand and began to walk in the direction of town. She fell in next to him, slipping sideways looks. It felt like she was waiting for him to tell her something, he didn't know what. He considered explaining the whorehouse in Lead, he considered explaining his drinking.
When he finally spoke, though, it wasn't considered at all. He just said, "Sometimes, you know, it feels like Bill's come back from the dead. Or like he isn't dead all the way, that it was some kind of misunderstanding."
She looked at him, the horse tugged at the reins. He couldn't read what was in her heart; there wasn't time to compose something to comfort her. He thought she might be stronger than he was, and he knew it was useless making anything up.
"I felt him watching me," he said, "more than once. I felt him asking me, 'Charley?' the same way you did. Only he doesn't mean why am I lying on the ground talking to horses."
She smiled at him, not frosty. He began to feel an attraction. "I went to Cheyenne," he said. "I was on the way back . . ."
There was something about the woman, though, that he couldn't let half a fact sit between them. He felt like he had to explain every other fact, and every other direction it took him, right down to what happened at the river and how his brother Steve went and shot somebody's pig after Charley gave him the pony express.
He began it again. "I was the same as Bill, and I was different. I never killed anybody, on purpose or accidental, and I never had to be hard about my feelings. Bill was more practical, he had to be or he couldn't of lived . . ."
She was holding on to every word. It made him cautious. "I don't intend to say he didn't have feelings," he said. "He spoke of you with tender affection."
"What did he say?"
"He said you were two of a kind."
She smiled and shook her head. "He told me that about the two of you."
"Well, we were and we weren't. I couldn't walk away from my feelings."
"Was that all he said? He and I were two of a kind?"
He thought about it, trying to remember the words. "He said you were as famous as he was, and understood the nature of celebrity."
She laughed out loud, startling him. "I never knew what he meant about that," she said. "He knew the inklings inside me as well as I know them myself, but he'd toss that aside to talk about being famous."
"It weighed on him," Charley said. "He never met a human being that didn't already have an opinion on him, and it was his nature to feel an obligation to fill their expectations. Myself, I can lie in the dirt talking to horses if I feel like it."
"You don't do that."
"I got an eyewitness."
She smiled again, and Charley noticed it was more comfortable between them. He stopped walking to look at her, and the horse bumped into his back. When they were walking again, he noticed that she moved her feet in and out of even the deepest mud without effort. She never lost balance. He brought the bottle halfway to his lips, and reconsidered.
"Why don't you quit that bottle?" she said.
"I got a friend who collects them," he said. But he dropped it in the mud. It landed mouth-up, with a sound as final as a body hitting the end of the rope. He made a note of where it was, in case things turned dry later.
They took the gelding back to the livery. She waited outside while he settled his account, and then they walked to the Grand Union. He noticed again how easily she moved through the mud, and was attracted to it. She ordered coffee at the front desk, and led him to number 19. The room had two chairs and a table and a view of the hills. General George Crook's officers had most of the hotel, and they wandered the halls with whores Charley knew from the Gem Theater. It reminded him he had to talk to Lurline.
Agnes Lake smoothed her dress over her legs and sat on the bed. Charley took a chair next to the table. The pot of coffee was between them and the steam rose into his face. Charley did not like coffee or its humidity. Especially after he'd gotten drunk and fallen off a horse.
"I've got a lock of Bill's hair for you," he said. "Doc Pierce cut it before he buried him." He pointed out the window. "He's up on the hill there," he said.
"I was coming from the grave when I saw your accident," she said.
"From a distance, it probably did
n't look like much reason it happened . . ."
"It looked like gravity," she said.
He said, "That horse is tricky. Tricky and subtle." She was smiling, softer now, and he saw why Bill loved her. "I'm relieved you aren't a crier," he said.
He thought for a moment she hadn't understood. He was about to repeat himself when she said, "You were coming back from Cheyenne . . ."
He nodded. "He was buried by the time I got to Deadwood. Nobody stole anything off the body except Doc Pierce, who took about five locks of hair. I've been meaning to collect them . . ."
She looked at her lap. "Was he sick?" she said. "His letters seemed to hold secret warnings."
Charley thought of the day Bill asked him how blood disease affected a woman. "No," he said. "His eyes had lost their sharpness, but he was strong." He wished he knew her better, to tell her this lie.
She stared at him, weighing what he'd said.
"It wasn't like him to talk of dying," she said, "but from the day he got into the Hills, his letters took that turn."
"He wasn't unhappy," Charley said. "You were on his mind all the while."
She shook her head.
"The place lends itself to the dark aspects," he said. "There's nothing ordinary here, not even weather. You never saw lightning like here. The day we arrived there were two men in the street carrying human heads . . ."
He saw he had confused her. "Heads," he said, holding his in both hands. "A Mex with an Indian, and a bug-eye miscreant named Boone May carrying the outlaw Frank Towles. Any intelligent man would turn his thinking to mortal matters . . ."
She sat back on the bed and closed her eyes. "He told me once the bullet was never made with his name on it." Charley closed his eyes too and lost his balance. He caught himself before he fell off the chair, and when he looked up she was watching him again.
"It's a trick chair," he said. She smiled at him, but he saw the joke was wearing thin.
"He told me the bullet was never made with his name on it," she said again.
He looked out the window. "They manufacture new bullets all the time."
"Did he know that?"
"It's the place," he said. "There's nobody immune here."
Even looking out the window he felt the attraction, he didn't know what it was. His ideas of women went a different way.
"This is uncomfortable," Agnes said.
"Just this trick chair," he said, wearing it all the way out. She looked at him and he looked at his hands. "I can't talk about Bill except to soft-brains and horses," he said.
When she spoke again it was so low Charley had to lean forward to hear. "The letter came in the afternoon," she said. "It felt like falling. I fell twice in my life from the tightrope, it isn't what you'd think."
"I fell off a horse," he said. "Once."
She looked at him like she knew him. "I know why Bill liked you," she said. "You kept him human."
"I know why he liked you." And that was the truth, he could feel it.
"When you fall," she said, "the thing that presses to you is the newness. It's a new world, and nothing from the other world can save you. You're helpless again, like a baby, scared of loud noises, and you don't know what's serious and what isn't, because you don't know what it means."
They stared at each other across the coffee pot, and he understood her. "That's what it felt like, to read your letter," she said. "I only had a few months with him, I didn't know him like you did."
"A few months could be worth fifteen years," he said.
"No," she said, "it couldn't. It never got past the newness. I married Bill and loved him . . ." She thought for a minute. "If I didn't, it was as close as I ever got, but I never understood him. I know you better. He saw things about me I never even saw myself, but I didn't know his heart at all." Charley was suddenly uncomfortable again, and sorry he'd left his bottle in the mud. She said, "That's why I ask you things. I don't know how else to find out what I lost."
She said that and stopped, and Charley saw she was through talking now. He ran his hands through his hair—it was Bill's gesture. He thought of the things he'd lost when Bill died, there weren't words to explain them. But she needed him to explain something.
"Things end out of balance," he said after a while. "There isn't any other way they can end, because that's the way they happen. At the end, you want things equal, but it doesn't happen." He saw her eyes begin to fill, he never expected it.
And he stood up and crossed the room, dizzy, and sat down next to her on the bed. He smelled soap again, fresh-scrubbed skin. He noticed age marks around the bottom of her neck. He put his arms around her and held her a long time.
And he loved her for all the lost parts of his life.
Al Swearingen was coming out of the Gem theater at eight o'clock Sunday morning when he saw the boy. He looked bigger than Swearingen remembered him, and older. Years and years.
The boy was sitting on the bench in front of the Bella Union, holding a book, wearing a black coat that was half a foot too short for his arms. It had just begun to rain.
The boy saw him too, and began to cross the street. Swearingen went back into the Gem and locked the door. His wife was standing in the door to his office, holding a handkerchief against her nose. He'd barely hit her and she'd bled all over the floor. It seemed to him that she was bleeding easier all the time.
"Get away, Al," she said, and took a step backwards. "I'll get even . . ."
He came back into the saloon and pulled the goose gun out from behind the bar. It was top-heavy and as fall as a man. He sat down at a poker table and laid the gun across his lap.
His wife blew her nose, knowing it would make the bleeding worse. She liked evidence. "Go ahead and shoot me," she said.
He kept his eyes on the door. "I ain't going to shoot you," he said. "Not yet."
"I ain't scared of you," she said, and stepped back into the main room. "They'll hang you, that's why you're afraid to shoot, you don't want to hang."
There were footsteps outside, stepping onto the porch, stopping at the door. Swearingen lifted the gun and his wife disappeared into his office and slammed the door. He heard her scream, "Murder! Murder!"
The boy tried the door; Swearingen began to shake. There were three knocks. Swearingen didn't move, and there was more knocking. "We're closed," he shouted.
Then he heard the boy's voice, stranger than he remembered it. It was dry and hollow, like it was coming from a long time ago. "I am here," it said, "in the name of the Bible of the Black Hills."
Swearingen moved the gun, slowly, until he looked down the long barrel and saw the door. He brought the hammer back and heard it cock. The boy knocked again. "I have found the evil side of the Lord, and I am here to meet it," he said. And when he knocked again, Swearingen pulled the trigger. He had never fired the goose gun before; it went off almost by itself.
Swearingen had been sitting low in his chair, resting the gun barrel between his feet on the table. He was unprepared for the noise or the recoil. The air seemed to shatter around his ears, and then he smelled the smoke, falling backwards onto the floor. He felt sparkles of pain in his shoulder, little points of light in a sudden dark.
He was lying face-up on the floor. The air had exploded, and little pieces of it still were falling around his ears, and the points of light in his shoulder gathered on themselves until they seemed to take it over.
He sat up carefully, moving his body and shoulder as one piece, and looked at the door. The goose gun had blown a hole in it half a foot across, dead center. The smoke hung over the table where Swearingen had been sitting, and as he looked through it now the boy's face appeared at the hole in the door.
He had eyes like a horse in a barn fire, and his voice cracked. "The Bible of the Black Hills is here," he said. The boy's head disappeared, and his arm came through the hole, feeling for the bolt. The arm looked a yard long.
Swearingen got to his feet and saw his wife, still holding a bloody handkerchief to h
er nose, looking out a crack in the door to his office. "I need a shotgun," he said.
She smiled—he saw her smile—and then she closed the door and locked it. He ran upstairs, one arm dead at his side, and then to the far end of the hallway. He waited, listening, until the boy found the bolt. He heard the door open.
Then he heard the boy's voice again. "It's time to settle," he said.
And then he heard something else, that he would hear again and again in his head, every day for as long as he lived. It was his wife. "He went upstairs," she said.
The boy came slowly. Swearingen waited until he heard him start up the stairs, and then he slipped down the back way and out the side door. He crossed Main Street and ran west, behind the Bella Union, until he came to the one-room shack where Boone May slept. The place had belonged to Edmond Colwell, the first Negro in the Black Hills, until Boone took it away. Swearingen found him now, lying on a brass bed in the corner. The bed was worth more than the shack. Boone had taken it out of the Gem.
Boone May didn't look good. His nose was red and swollen and his voice seemed to come from his nostrils. There was a bottle of Tutt's Pills on the floor next to him, and next to that was a spoon with some kind of medicine collected in the bottom.
"Get up," Swearingen said.
Boone May pulled the blanket around his neck and looked at him with both eyes, that's how serious he was. "Close that door or I'll shoot you where you stand," he said.
Swearingen closed the door. Boone coughed, cleared his throat, and spit. Swearingen watched the spit drop. There were a dozen wet spots on the floor. "Get up," Swearingen said.
Boone closed his eyes and dropped his head back onto the mattress. "Get me a pillow," he said. "I got torpid fever, I need a pillow to rest my head."
Swearingen looked at Boone's face, which was pasty and white. "You ain't the color for torpid fever," he said. "You're supposed to be yellow . . ."