by Pete Dexter
He found Solomon on the cot and decided to leave him there for the night. "I found the Chinese," he said. Solomon looked out the window. "He's in their death house."
"He's not dead." Solomon sounded flat and strange.
"I never said he was dead. I said he was in the death house."
"When he's dead, I'll know."
"They'll probably hang you, is how."
Solomon went to the window he had been looking out. Bullock said, "John Manning's in Rapid City till tomorrow, but he comes back and finds the Chinese dead, he'll take it serious. He takes it all serious because sheriffing is all he does."
Solomon gazed out the window; there was no answer. And when Bullock checked back on him, after supper, Solomon was gone.
Solomon Star took the kerosene from the office—Bullock would find the jug they kept it in later, in the ashes of Chinatown— and splashed each side of the death house, feeling the coolness when it dripped onto his fingers.
He lit it with a match and then walked slowly to the Whitewood Creek, waded across it, and sat on the far bank to watch. The fire was slower than he had imagined—for several minutes there was only the blue kerosene flame, no smoke that he could see—but then it took, growing up one side of the death house, turning orange as it reached the roof.
It was in the roof before it was noticed, and Solomon sat still, listening to the screams in Chinatown, trying to pick out the one from inside the house.
Once it turned orange, the fire took the building in five minutes. Solomon watched a piece of the roof blow off and climb into the night sky; he realized he could not remember what her face looked like.
He stood up when he knew the Chinese was dead and wiped off the back of his pants. He wondered if he ought to return to the jail, or if he should sleep in his own bed. He thought of her again; the face was gone.
In a few minutes the first volunteers of the Deadwood Pioneer Hook and Ladder Company No. i appeared, wearing protective hats. But the fire laddies were helpless and soon left the street. There was a town ordinance requiring every building to keep a full barrel of water and two fire buckets, along with a ladder able to reach the roof. The Chinese never obeyed the white men's laws, though. They were afraid white men's laws led to white men's taxes.
Solomon watched another piece of the roof blow into the sky and carry across the street, then blow south, toward the town proper.
The gulch was naturally windy, and the heat from the death house created drafts of its own. The piece of roof dropped somewhere in the town and disappeared. More of the roof rose into the night as soon as the other was gone, and danced across the sky onto the roof of Tan's theater. In a few moments there was fire there too. It started at the top and spread slowly. The heat from the death house backed Solomon away from the creek. The fire grew, and he saw its reflection in the water.
Chinese ran out of the theater. Solomon recognized most of the girls, there wasn't the same turnover of upstairs girls here as in the badlands. It occurred to him there was no place else for the Chinese to go.
Tan's nephews came out of the door, then the old blind man who played the piano. He stood in the street, orange in the flames, and held his face up to the heat as if he could see it. He was crying Chinese words; the language lent itself to sorrow.
Solomon tried to remember how Ci-an's words had sounded, but they would not come back to him now either. He saw it was a kind of forgiveness. The fire spread to the building next to the theater. Children came from that house, some of them crying, and clung to one another in the street.
Solomon caught a flicker of light from the south, and presently there were shouts from there too. As he watched, the light grew and spread, and the wind grew with it, and carried the cries of the Chinese into the darkness of the Hills.
In a few minutes there was an explosion that shook the ground. It would be reported later that the fire had caught on the roof of Mrs. Ellsner's bakery and moved from there to Jensen and Bliss's Hardware, where it found eight kegs of black powder, which blew pieces of the fire and pieces of the store all over Dead wood.
Solomon moved farther away from the creek, back into the hills. Chinatown was empty now, the population running into town proper, and then beyond into the hills at the southeast end of town. The light from the fires lit faces in a different way from the sun, and showed truer feelings.
Solomon had never noticed a bleakness in the Chinese before, and it came to him gradually, as he stood alone on the hill, that he was the cause. He watched the houses disappear, clear to the southern limits of town; he heard cries in the wind.
It seemed to him that the wind gathered the cries, each in its place, and carried them to him, there on the hill, and then beyond, dropping them one by one, somewhere deep in the Hills, where they would never be claimed.
He knew then what he had done, and what he had lost; and one of the cries was his own.
The window in Mrs. Langrishe's attic faced west, away from town. Charley did not see or sense the fire until the eight kegs of giant powder at Jensen and Bliss's went up, shaking every building in the gulch.
His peeder was knee-deep in Mrs. Langrishe at the time. Her eyes were closed under him, and her fingernails were fastened into his back. In a moment she would say, "Oh, Charley," and pull his mouth down to her breasts, and then she would smile at him, looking down somehow even though she was underneath, and watch until he spent himself.
Mrs. Langrishe had one way she liked to have intercourse and about two hundred ways she didn't. There wasn't an inch of bend in her. Charley was with her one night a week, always in this same dead room; and sometimes he thought of Matilda, who had divorced him and married a politician, and sometimes he thought of Lurline, who had married Handsome Banjo Dick Brown.
And he thought of Agnes, here and everywhere else.
Mrs. Langrishe said, "Oh, Charley," and a moment later the explosion shook the house. The davenport moved, the window rattled, and the trees in the hills suddenly showed in the light of the blast.
It was the most interesting thing that had ever happened to Charley in Mrs. Langrishe's attic, and he stood up and went to the window, ignoring the abandonment in her face. There was another explosion, softer than the first, and it turned the yard yellow and shadowy.
"What is it?" she said. The abandonment was in her voice. The yard went black and he heard her feet behind him on the floor.
"Fire," he said.
"They'll put it out," she said. "They always do."
He smiled in the dark. "When this fire quits," he said, "it's because it's finished burning." He found his pants on the floor, dressed, and then stood on the arm of the davenport and pushed open a small door to the roof.
The door was hinged on the outside, and swung back flat against the shingles. Charley put a hand on each side of the opening and pulled himself up until he was sitting on the roof, his legs hanging into the attic. The wind blew the hair off his neck and shoulders and he could feel the heat of the fire on his face.
There were two main fires, one in the town proper and one in Chinatown. Then there were smaller fires, all the way up into the hills. It would burn till it was finished burning. "What is it?" she said, beneath him.
"The end of Dead wood," he said.
He heard her getting dressed, and then her hands were on his legs. "Help me up."
He leaned back into the dark and put his hands under her arms, and then lifted her out onto the roof. She looked old in the yellow glow.
The fire moved up Main Street, taking everything in its way. There were flames thirty feet over the theater, and she watched the walls fold in on themselves and disappear. "Jack will be furious," she said, and when he looked she was smiling.
The wind blew the fires south and east, away from her house. They watched the shacks and jerry-built pine houses disappear, sometimes in only a few seconds. They listened to the cries.
She put her hand on his knee and rubbed her way up his pants leg. Charley paid no atten
tion. The wind had changed—it belonged to the fire now—and blew west into the tents and shacks on the poor side of the hill south of town.
"They'll build it back," she said. One hand had found his peeder, the other was unbuttoning his pants. He shook his head, but didn't stop her undressing him. "It might be all to the best," she said, "to burn it down and start over."
The fire in Chinatown moved south, uphill, taking the badlands. The fire south of town moved uphill too. He tried to find the Bottle Fiend's house, remembering he had told him once, a long time ago, that this would happen.
"What are you looking for, off in the hills?" she said. "The sport's right in front of you." She popped his buttons and pulled his peeder out into the night air.
The Bottle Fiend's home was at the edge of civilization, the last place built before they gave up having the whole hill. Charley didn't think the fire had come to it yet, but he'd lost the road and the trees he'd always used to find it, and could only guess.
"They're building with bricks in Rapid City," she said. "Bullock and Star's got kilns, they'll fill the town with brick buildings and it will look like somebody lives here."
Charley stared at her, thinking of the soft-brain, that he'd told him a fire was coming. She held on to his peeder and the fire in the streets played in her eyes. "It always looked like people lived here to me," he said.
"Not like they intended to stay," she said. "You might get into the brick business yourself. . ."
"No," he said, "I've done all my business in Deadwood."
She put one hand on the shingle next to him and bent herself at the waist until her lips touched the end of his peeder. He saw the fire had excited her—it wasn't something she did on her own. She kissed him and spoke into his lap. "The place could use the permanence of brick," she said.
Her head moved in his lap and he laid a hand against her neck. He stared again at the fire in the hill, trying to locate the Bottle Fiend's place. "There's nothing to do about it now," she said.
And a little later, "What's wrong?"
"My friend sleeps like the dead," he said. w She pulled a few inches off his peeder. "There's nobody could sleep through this," she said. "You'd be smart to enjoy it."
"He isn't like other people."
"Oh," she said, "that friend."
Charley looked at the back of her head, and then at the south end of town. "He told me once he would burn up," he said.
She said, "There's some out here that aren't afraid to die."
Charley thought it over. "I don't know."
"He didn't seem afraid," she said.
"I can't find the road to get a fix where his house is," Charley said later. She put her mouth back over his peeder and her head began to ebb and flow, and he felt himself ebb and flow with her. And then he saw it, four hundred yards farther east than it should have been. He did not know how he'd gotten so turned around.
It was the road, and the fire was long since finished with the Bottle Fiend. "If he slept through," he said, "I hope it was all the way. Like one of his dreams."
"There's nothing to do about it now," she said again.
And then, later, she said, "You know, if you look at a fire in a certain way, it's pretty."
He found the soft-brain in the morning, in the ashes of his house. The clothes were burned off him, and the hair, and his fingers and toes were only stubs. By the time Charley got to the house the scavengers had come and gone, scattering the bottles all over the ground. They collided as he walked through them and made flat musical sounds. The soft-brain had thought there were secrets inside. Charley knelt beside the body and straightened the arms. The skin did not feel like skin, and he was afraid to pick the soft-brain up, that something would break inside him.
He could not stand to break his bones.
He eased himself onto the ground and looked out over the town. Everything from Chinatown to the jail was gone; the only way to tell the hotels from the shacks was the size of the piles of ashes. The wind came up out of the gulch and caught one of the bottles just right, and hung a long, low note in the air.
Below, the scavengers were going through the ashes, looking for gold and watches and tins of food. There were shots from the badlands; two men ran up the street.
At the south end of town the fire had spared Bullock and Star's brickworks, and the half block next to it. The houses on the west— Mrs. Langrishe and her neighbors—were spared too.
What had she said, The place could use the permanence of brick?
He stayed on the hill most of the morning, until the first soldiers arrived to protect against looters. Then he stood up, so stiff he could barely walk, and made his way back into town.
He found a fireman's shovel lying under a few inches of water in the Whitewood Creek, and took it back up the hill and buried the soft-brain. He dug the hole deep and wide, with enough room for some of the bottles.
The soft-brain had thought there were secrets inside, and planned to give them to God.
He picked some of the prettiest, and some of the ones with the signs of the fire, and then put them in the hole with him and replaced the dirt. He marked the grave with four smooth stones, stacked one on top of another at the head.
There was no wood for a marker, and it did not occur to him until he was halfway down the hill that he did not know the Bottle Fiend's name.
Malcolm Nash had given up his ministry in 1880 and come briefly under the tutelage of the writer Ambrose Bierce, who spent that year in Deadwood and then left for newer places, ending up in Mexico.
Charley was drawn south too, but he traveled slower and farther, and found Panama.
The boy stayed in the Hills, filing dispatches for the Black Hills Pioneer, and later the Cheyenne Leader. He saved his stories and sent them to Charley twice a year in envelopes that were yellowed in the months they spent traveling. Somehow it seemed to fit, that the boy had become a reporter.
Charley bought a drugstore, and when the Americans came, building their canal, he made a fortune. Everything in Panama was unhealthy for Americans, even the sun. Charley had never intended to make a fortune in Panama, but money was in the habit of falling his way; somehow he was always downhill. He'd only bought the drugstore for the location, and something to do.
The store sat on the eastern edge of a small fishing town called Pelican, on the eastern side of the isthmus, and overlooked a bay of the same name. The town was built on a rock plateau, a hundred feet above the water. From the porch you could close your eyes and feel the size of the ocean, and the world beyond it.
Charley had arrived in Panama in 1883, and by then he'd known he was going blind.
The first envelope came the next year, six months after he'd written to Merchant's National Bank in Deadwood to forward his funds. There was no letter from the boy then, there never was.
Just the stories, written in long narrow columns, and cut from the paper. Malcolm Nash, correspondent appeared over each one.
The first envelope included a dramatic account of the death of Al Swearingen, who died penniless in Denver, falling under the wheels of a train he was trying to hop. It was arranged first among the stories, although there were others—humorous incidents concerning the malfunctions of the local telephone system, for instance—that were written earlier.
Charley was never sure what the boy wanted him to know—that he had learned to write, or the news itself.
When the second envelope arrived, half a year later, he undertook to teach one of the village children to read English. He chose a small girl who hung on his fingers when he walked to the store for fish or beer.
She learned slowly, but he was patient. He was kind to her, and bought food for her family the year the fish disappeared from the ocean. He made presents for her on her birthdays and for Christmas, and told her stories of the Americanos and the places they lived.
In the beginning the stories were long and colored, but as he grew old and his eyes clouded, the stories were told in only a few words,
and she came to understand that all the colors had fallen away from him, leaving only the moments. A woman who performed tricks in the air, an animal pulling a boat underwater, dead children who spoke in his bones. A man who loved bottles.
She knew he told true things.
She heard the stories a thousand times, but she always listened. He had fed her family the year the fish disappeared from the ocean.
She visited him in the mornings, on the porch of his store, sitting at a table he had built long after his sight was gone. Sometimes she read him old newspaper stories; she knew them all by heart.
Sometimes he told her his stories.
And as she grew into her middle years, she saw new meanings in them. She saw that even among the Americanos, he had been a foreigner.
In the afternoon she left him to his beer. Sometimes he sent for a whore. It was said he liked to be bitten. He kept himself clean, walking each evening down the steps to the ocean to bathe. It caused him great pain to climb back. There had been much leg-shooting in his life.
The last envelope arrived in the fall of 1912. The old man was dying, and used morphine to ease the way. There was a letter with the newspapers, the only one he ever got. She could not read it all—the hand was old and unsteady—but she did what she could.
He listened without a word, facing the morning sun and the ocean. It was from a woman named Agnes Lake, and much of it concerned her trip to Deadwood to find what had become of him. It said she loved him, it said they had mending hearts.
She saw the words moved the old man, and filled him, and she was sorry she could not read them all.
It pleased her to see him this way, though, and she thought it was fortunate the letter had come when it did, before he died. Not so fortunate it had to be God's will—he was a kind man and had been living unloved a long time, as foreigners always lived—and things had to happen sometime.
May 3,1985