Friends

by Charles Hackenberry

  After she pulled her shawl over her shoulders, she come over and sat on the edge of the bed and stroked my hair and then my cheek. "I must go now," she said real low. "Goodbye, Willie."

  "You're going over to that Justin fellow's room and crawl into bed with him now, ain't you?" I ask.

  "Please, Willie, do not spoil it."

  I felt the fool for acting jealous like that, and jealous was what it was, plain and clear. "I don't want to lose you again, gal," I told her. "And I don't mean just the bedding down together, either, though … well, you know how I feel about that by now, I reckon. No, the way I feel about you is a whole-"

  "Don't, Willie, please … "Mandy said, laying her fingers on my lips and cutting me off before I could make an even bigger fool of myself. "You are my friend, Willie, and I am yours. Please do not try to make me be anything else than that, I ask you. You will not lose this friend, eh? Even if I go away again?"

  I begun to see then how it was with her, how she looked at things. Mandy took the key off the table, walked to the door and unlocked and opened it. When she turned back and looked at me, I was surprised, for tears was rolling down her cheeks.

  I thought for a minute she'd changed her mind, as women will do. Maybe if I could find the right words she wouldn't go out the door, and keep right on going, which I knowed she was going to do anyway, no matter what I said or did. But I was determined to give it a try, because if I didn't, I knowed I'd be kicking my ass a long, long time. Only, when I drew in a breath to tell her I had to have her be more than just my friend, she must of read my mind, or at least figured out what I was going to say, for she put two fingers to her lips so as to stop my talking and ruining it for her.

  Maybe her being young and pretty like she was was a piece of it, part of why I felt like I did about that girl. But a big part of it had something to do with her just being her, too-being free like a deer and doing what she believed was right for herself, not what other people thought you ought to do. That girl called to something in me, called loud and clear, and it's not likely I'll ever hear that wind rustle the grass no more.

  It was like she was taking my picture there-not with one of those camera things-but with her eyes and her memory. A picture of me sitting up in that old hotel bed, under that crazy quilt we had warmed up good. Almost like she didn't want me to go moving so as to spoil it. I can tell you how I knowed what she was doing, for I done the very same thing a few days later, and that was when I realized what was going on in her mind back then that morning, not that I knowed it then. Then, it seemed just painful and jealous as fire.

  She kissed those two fingers she had up to her lips and then blew that kiss at me. "Goodbye, my friend," she said, that pretty smile back on her face, and then went out the door.

  "Goodbye, my lovely," I said in that empty old hotel room.

  I knowed I could not sleep after her leaving me like that. Feeling that miserable and lonely, and missing her already, I would probly not sleep for weeks, maybe months. Funny to think of it now, but soon after I heard her go down the steps I dropped straight off. Slept like a baby.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  I come out of a deep sleep hearing someone yelling and walloping a door down the hall and the first thing I thought of was them people we had woke up last night. But sunlight poured in my windows, and I finally reconized who it was screeching like that.

  "Sheriff Shannon! Sheriff Shannon! Open up!"

  After I drug myself up out of bed, I unlocked my door and looked down the hall. Sure enough, there stood that damn little Banty Foote banging on Clete's door and raising hell.

  "He ain't there," I called. "He was leaving with Sheriff Bullock pretty early. What time is it, anyway?"

  Banty stopped his pounding and looked me over good, then took out a big pocket watch. "Why, it's nearly eleven. Ten minutes of eleven, in fact. "Most men has been up for hours. Looks like you're just gettin' up now. I'd be ashamed to be getting up now if it was me. Nosir, the sun don't catch me lyin' in bed. I been up all night. Rode in from–"

  "Come in here if you got more to say, though I don't see how any more talk could come out of a fellow your size." He followed me into my room and I started to get dressed while he walked around the room looking everthing over careful and running his mouth.

  "Like I said, I rode in from Hay Camp. Rode all night. Almost no moon at all. Man in a saloon there told me he seen you men. I figgered Deadwood and I figgered right. Took that woman and that boy to Marsh's and left right away. Where's that sheriff?" He put his hands on his hips and glared at me like I was hiding Clete somewheres.

  "I already told you," I said, buttoning up a clean shirt. "He went out with Bullock to look for the man we're after." My head was aching pretty good, and I had heard about all I wanted to of his loud, fast talking.

  "Good!" Banty yelled, starting to strut around the room again. "I was worried you might of caught him. Strung him up before I got here." He spun around to face me again. "How come you ain't with that sheriff? You was with him before, back at the Perfessor's dig. How come you ain't-"

  "Because he don't need me right now. He's off with Bullock. Sometimes sheriffs like to spook around on their own together, don't you know that?"

  Banty moved his head quick side to side, like the rooster he was named for, while he frowned and thought that over. "Of course they do, everbody knows that," he said after a minute. "Say, what's this on the floor?" He went over beside the door, bent over and picked up a little piece of paper and started to read it out loud, a lot slower than he talked. "Dear-Willie, I-went-with-Sheriff-Bullock to-Eliza-Elizabeth-"

  "Give me that!" I told him. "Can't you see it's got my name on it and not yours?" I figgered Clete'd slipped it under the door that morning before he left.

  Banty held that note to his vest and it looked like he wasn't going to give it up for a minute. Finally he did, but not before he tried to sneak a peek at the rest of it.

  Clete's note said that he would be back around dark if they didn't find DuShane in Elizabeth and that I should stick around Deadwood and keep my eyes peeled for our man and find out what I could.

  Banty ask me what the rest of it said and after a while I told him because I knowed he would not leave me alone about it 'til I did.

  "Who's this Elizabeth gal he's goin' to see?" Banty wanted to know.

  "It ain't a gal," I told him. "It's a town a ways from here."

  "How'd ya git there? Which way is it? How–"

  "Hold on," I told him. "Yougoupthere and Clete will be mad as hell. He's with Bullock and he don't need you around, getting in his way."

  He looked kind of disappointed, but then he nodded his head. "What're you gonna do?"

  "Why, I'm going to do just like Clete said, stick around Deadwood and see what I can see. Only first I'm going to get some breakfast."

  "Good," Banty snapped. "I could eat too. I missed breakfas', ridin' all night."

  Well, I didn't mean to invite him along, but I could see no way out of it so we went down the street to where I'd ate my dinner the night before, Banty asking me a string of questions the whole way, sometimes two or three on top of one another.

  The place was nearly empty. I had a pair of eggs and some bread and coffee, but Banty ate the same meal I did the night before-beefsteak and mashed potatoes and gravy. He ate almost as fast as he talked, which he did both at the same time, and he was done with that big plate of food before I even finished my eggs. He waved his arm at the woman there and told her to bring him the same thing again. She stood and looked at him a minute, then shrugged her shoulders and went to get it.

  "You going to eat a whole 'nother meal?" I ask him.

  "A course," he said, acting like I was a fool for not knowing why. "I said I missed my breakfas. A man has to eat. Can't work if you don't eat."

  I couldn't see what work he had to do that required all that food, but I didn't say so. I waited 'til the woman brought his second plate and took away his first. "I'm going to walk
around town and have a look," I told him.

  "Where'll you be?" Banty ask.

  "In the saloons, mostly," I told him, heading for the door.

  "I'll eat this and then find you," Banty hollered across the room at me. "After I eat me some pie I'll–"

  "All right," I said, and went out the door.

  I don't know whether it was especial quiet in Deadwood that noon or if it just seemed like it after listening to him for almost an hour. The sun was bright and the day warm, but I felt tired out already and walked down to the Red Bird for a rye to settle my nerves. Bessie wasn't there and the barman didn't know where she was so I went out in the street again.

  I stood on the board walk outside Herrmann and Treber's wholesale liquor emporium and looked in at a case of Kentucky sour mash bourbon and thought maybe I would just go in there, buy it, take it back to my room and drink it all. But I didn't.

  Instead, I walked into the Green Front and had another shot of rye. The piano player there knowed Mandy but he didn't see her at all that day. He did talk to Justin Thebideaux early in the morning, though, and he thought Mandy and Thebideaux had plans to go somewheres together, but he didn't know where. Course, I'd already heard them talk about New Orleans. I asked him to play any old song he knowed about Texas and I sat down at a table to listen. I had give up on the rye and was sipping a beer when Banty walked in, blinking the sunlight out of his eyes. I pulled my hat down some and slid down in my chair, but Banty spotted me anyways.

  "Here you are, Deputy. I was looking all over for you. I already looked in three–"

  "Well, sit down and have a beer if you have room for one," I offered, trying to hear one of the Texas songs the man was playing. "Texas Sunsets," I think it was.

  "Nosir, don't drink no beer," Banty said, shaking his head fast enough to rattle his brains. "No beer for me. I could sleep, though. I'm sleepy. That beefsteak musta made me sleepy. I was up all night. Rode in from Hay–"

  "You can sleep in my room if you want to," I told him, more to get rid of him than anything else. "Ask the man at the desk for a key. Tell him I said it was all right."

  Banty stood there scratching his stubby little chin and thought that over awhile. "All right," he said, nodding a couple of times. "All right. I could sure sleep." He yawned a big one so fast I almost missed it. I reckoned he even slept fast.

  "Just sleep on top of the blankets if you keep your boots on," I said.

  "Where'll you be?" he ask.

  "Probly right here," I told him, slapping the table and propping my feet up on a chair.

  "All right," he said again. "But, mind now, if you see that killer, you come and git me. Don't you take him yourself. Come git me, you hear?"

  "He'll, I don't even know what he looks like, but if he should walk up and interduce himself, I'll just say 'Excuse me a minute, Mr. DuShane, but I got orders to go get Banty Foote before I shoot you,' and then I'll come get you. Is that what you had in mind?"

  Banty thought that one over a minute too. "I doubt he'd do that," he said. He shuffled toward the door, turned around and waved, and then walked out before I could even wave back. He could of thanked me for the use of my room, I thought, but I wasn't mad about it because that stinking old saloon went back to peaceful so fast you could almost hear it.

  That piano player at the Green Front was good at his work, and he knowed even more songs about Texas, or that had Texas in them somewheres, than I even did. I got to buying him drinks and thinking of Mandy, how maybe she would want to go along to Texas with Clete and me. Two big ranches side by side, Clete's and Mary's and mine and Mandy's. Course, that was only a drunk having himself a pipe dream, I see now, but it seemed real enough at the time. He played all them Texas songs, some of them twice when I ask him to, and I must have drunk more beer than I thought I did. When I stood up, I knowed how much though.

  I was just coming back from the little house out behind the saloon for the third or fourth time when that boy from the National-the one whose daddy kept throwing him back out the door-he come up to me and grabbed my arm before I could sit back down. "You're Mr. Goodwin, ain't you?" he ask.

  "Yes, I am," I told him, feeling pretty woozy and wobbly on my feet.

  It was then I noticed how worried that young fellow looked. "My Pa says for you to come quick. That sheriff you was with, he's been killed."

  "Sheriff Bullock, you mean?"

  "Nosir, the other one. The one you rode in with."

  Chapter Twenty-five

  I walked up the street with that young man from the National feeling miserable, and with every step I got a little more sober. You should of went with him, I kept telling myself. If you wasn't more interested in that girl than in catching that killer, you would have.

  "Who found him?" I ask.

  "I did," the young fellow said. "'was walking down the hall and I saw his door open and him dead."

  I wouldn't say I was all the way sober by the time we went in and walked by the desk, a big crowd of people gawking at me as we started up the steps, but I was all right. From the top of the stairs I seen that my door was open and a lot of people there too, instead of by Clete's room like I expected.

  I'd guessed how it was before we got down there. Banty Foote was stretched out in my bed, his throat cut. The whole front of his shirt soaked with blood and him lying in a pool of it where his weight made a hollow in the middle of the mattress. It's something how much blood a man has in him–especially when you see it out of him. Banty's arms and legs was spread out, and while it was clear he'd crawled under the covers, he still had all his clothes and his boots on. I got mad at him for a second before I remembered he was dead. Funny how someone being dead don't hit you all at once. His eyes was wide open and it looked like he was staring at something on the ceiling 'til you noticed he wasn't breathing no more and that a fly was walking across his mouth.

  I chased it away, closed his eyes, and pulled the blankets up over his face. That's when I seen where someone'd wiped his hands on the bedspread-used it like a towel. One bloody hand print was pretty clear and I laid my hand over it. Longer than mine, it was, and not so wide at the palm. DuShane, I told myself.

  I quick pulled the covers down off Banty's face, but not below where he was slashed on the neck. "He's still alive!" I yelled and then turned to the young fellow who fetched me. "Get everone out of here. Then send for the Doc and that deputy of Bullock's."

  "I'm right here," Bullock's man said, stepping toward me. "And if he's alive, I'm a–"

  "Don't argue with me," I told him, and then pushed everone else out of the room myself, including the young fellow, telling him again to go get the Doc. He looked at me like I was crazy when I closed the door in his face.

  "Are you crazy?" Bullock's deputy asked me, cocking his head.

  "I hope not," I said. "Do you know who this is?"

  "No, I don't. But he came in the office this morning, after Bullock and Shannon left, and asked where Shannon was. I said he was staying in town somewhere, but since I never got the man's name-he was in and out so fast-I didn't tell him Shannon was out of town with Bullock, and I didn't tell him which hotel, either, so this ain't my fault. He ain't who I was told was killed, though."

  "Me neither. I was told it was Clete Shannon who was dead. How about you?"

  "The same," he answered, turning his head a little and looking at me kind of sideways. "Say, what are you up to?"

  "Just one more question and I'll let you in on it. Who else knows this ain't Clete who's dead?"

  He stopped and thought it over. "Just Potato Creek Johnny, I believe. I straightened him out. And whoever else he told. Hell, even the hotel people think this sawed-off little runt is Clete Shannon."

  "Best to have some respect for the dead," I said, and that startled him. "Go find this Potato fellow and tell him to keep his mouth shut. The man who killed him will try and finish the job if he thinks Shannon's still alive."

  He shifted from one foot to the other, confused as a hoot o
wl in a twister. "But Shannon still is alive! Ain't he?"

  "As far as I know," I told him.

  He started getting a little mad about then. "Look, mister, I know you're Shannon's deputy, but if you don't start making sense soon, I'm gonna lock you up and let Bullock untangle this knot."

  "There's no time for me to explain it right now. Go find the man you told and tell him to keep his mouth shut. Is there a newspaper in this damn town?"

  "Yeah, sure, two of'em. The Pioneer and–"

  "Good, stop by the office of both of them and say Sheriff Shannon was cut, but is going to be all right. Go tell it to that redhaired man at the telegraph office, too. Spread that same story to some other people, only tell it a little different each time, ending up with the idea that Clete is okay. Then come back here and I'll tell you what's going on. I'm going to wait for the Doc and tell him. Now g'on."

  I wasn't sure for a minute he would, but he opened the door and went part way out. "Mister, this better make damn good sense when I come back, 'cause it sure as the Devil don't right now."

  He closed the door behind him and I waited. Banty's vest was on the floor by the bed and another room key laid on the night stand. I figgered he didn't lock the door, maybe because he wanted to make sure I could get in to wake him up if I found DuShane. Instead, DuShane'd found him.

  I wondered if that killer knowed it wasn't Clete's throat he cut. Banty's hat was beside his head on the piller, so maybe his face was covered up with it and DuShane'd sliced before he looked good. Though he was a born killer, I doubted if he'd of slit a man's throat if he seen his mistake, for that would of just give him away, give Clete and me warning he was here in Deadwood. Hard to say. Unless, a course, he thought Banty was me, and that idea give me the shivers a while. No way to see to the end of it, but I decided I would have my try at him and hope for the best. I looked at Banty's face there a minute and wished I'd been friendlier to him while he was alive.