(1986) Deadwood (11 page)

Charley said, "I believe Mrs. Langrishe is not slow to bring fresh buns."

Charley had just pulled on his pants when the first of the upstairs girls came in for her weekly bath. Not all of them took baths, but the ones that did came in on Monday mornings. In the afternoon they did their shopping. It was understood the ladies from the good part of town stayed off the streets on Monday.

The girl was young and blue-lipped and skinny. She walked past Bill and Charley and the Bottle Fiend and began to undress next to the tub in the far corner. The way she did it, it was nothing. The Bottle Fiend went over for his money. "Clean water's fifteen cents," he said. "Hot's another dime." Her shirt came off, and she was skinnier than she'd looked. Her skin was somewhere between white and light blue, and you could see the shape of the bones in her arms and ribs. She was shaking now, cold.

She looked through her purse for change, setting the things inside it on the stool next to the tub. There was a locket shaped like a heart, a man's ring, a shot glass, a comb, perfumed soap. Charley knew firsthand that perfumed soap left an eight-day rash. "Shit," she said. Bill covered himself with a towel and got out of his tub. He didn't need to cover himself, though, she had no interest in that side of the room at all. "I'll git you later," she said. "I left my money back in my room." She pulled her skirt up over her head and then dropped her underthings in a pile around her feet.

You could see the bones in her butt, too. Charley knew it couldn't be healthy when you could see the bones there. He also knew no upstairs girl in the world would leave her money in her room. But it wasn't his business. He tucked his shirt in while Bill got into his pants. "Cold water or hot?" the soft-brain said.

"Hot," she said.

"That's a dime extra," he said, and held out his hand.

"I already told you," she said, "I left my money in the room." Her legs were as thin as her arms, and Charley noticed the needle marks along the veins. He'd thought it was insect bites at first.

The Bottle Fiend looked at her in an uncertain way. Charley took a dollar out of his pocket and handed it to him. "For her too," he said. Charley had pity for anybody attached to morphine, and that heart-shaped locket had caught him by surprise.

The girl climbed in the tub and waited. She never said thank you, she never glanced at Charley or Bill. It looked like it had been two weeks since she ate, but there wasn't anything to do about that. Charley had been around morphine victims, and they just weren't interested. In food, or anything else but morphine. He thought it must be the worst way to go there was.

The boy could not forgive himself for shooting bill's horse. He left the camp and staked an abandoned claim a mile south of Deadwood, in the direction of the city of Lead. Number 12 Above Old Hope. It ran three hundred feet along the Whitewood Creek in shallow water. He registered the claim with the district recorder in Deadwood. It cost him two dollars. The recorder gave him a certificate that said, "
Personally appeared before this official, Malcolm Nasb, and recorded undivided right title and interest to Claim Number 12 Above Old Hope of 300 feet for mining purposes. This here is July 20, 1876
."

The boy's sister had given him sixty dollars before he left Colorado. He bought his tent and equipment from the old man who worked Number 11, and who had bought them himself from the previous owner of Number 12. The old man had rheumatics of the back and was always cold. His hands were twisted from the work and cold water until they were almost useless.

He sold the boy rubber boots, a pick and a pan and a shovel. A small leather bag made from a bull's scrotum. A frying pan, a fork and a knife, and the tent, which was lined with old calico. He charged him twenty dollars. It was twice what he'd paid the previous owner, who had quit the Hills and gone back to his family in the States.

The mining pan was about a foot and a half across, and five inches deep. The sides angled in to the bottom, which was less than half the diameter of the top. It was made of soft steel and rusted top to bottom. The boy shook his head at its condition. "I intend to buy a new one," he told the old man, "and keep it clean." He had watched Bill and Charley cleaning their guns after hunts.

The old man was patient with him. It was the rust that held on to the specks of gold, which was all there was left in Old Hope, specks. "Don't use it to cook," he told the boy. "You get slick in there, you might as well throw it away."

The old man was patient. He worked his claim one day a week, as the law required to keep title, and the rest of the time he sat on a box in front of his tent, resting his back, trying to rub some of the coldness out of his hands and wrists. The old man was waiting for the mining companies. They could get the gold out of quartz, and he thought they would buy him out.

He watched the boy all afternoon Monday. He saw that he had never worked a placer before—he handled the pan like it was another shovel—but it was after he'd been at it all afternoon and hadn't improved that the old man knew he had no talent. Before dark he walked down the bank into the boy's claim and took the pan out of his hands.

He filled the pan with gravel from the side of the creek, and then walked out into the water and sat on his heels. It hurt his knees to get down. The boy came with him, watching over the old man's shoulder.

The old man put the pan underwater and moved it gently side to side, cleaning out the dirt. He brought it back up and picked out the biggest pieces of rock, rinsing them, then tossing them into the water. Then he dipped one side of the pan into the creek and carefully rocked the contents back and forth until the sand began to spill over the side. "Look for it now," he said. "If there was a nugget, you'd see it now."

The boy watched, thinking of ways to do it faster. The old man rocked the pan until most of the sand was gone. What was left then was a small pile of red and black minerals, heavier than what had been washed out. Red garnets, iron, tin.

"Now watch," the old man said. He moved the pan suddenly. The boy thought he was throwing it away, but the old man held on and then peered into the bottom. The minerals were sprayed out there like the moon at crescent, and the old man poked his finger into the tip, and came out with a speck of gold. He put it in the boy's pouch. "It's always at the fartherest tip of the moon," he said.

The boy took the pan and did what the old man had told him until dark. In the morning, the old man watched him again. The boy had no talent at all. He had a strong back, though, and the old man saw it would be a long time before he gave up. He liked the boy, and was glad for the company.

Boone may had thought it over, and did not want to have business with Wild Bill. He'd decided that while Bill was shooting glasses off the head of Pink Buford's bulldog. It wasn't the shots themselves, it was something in the way the dog trusted him. Boone May had watched Bill for two days, and knew by then all the stories he'd heard about him was true.

Bill Hickok was not born to be killed by his peers. Nobody ordinary would survive trying. That was something Boone May felt, and he trusted it.

He lay awake next to Lurline Monti Verdi all night Monday, and was awake in the morning when Bill came up the street toward Nuttall and Mann's for his morning cocktail.

He thought about Bill, and about dying. Several times he also thought about Calamity Jane, which was somehow tied into it too. His thoughts were circular. First there was Bill and the dog, and then it was Bill and him in that half second when you realized you was killed but it hadn't happened yet, and then it was him and Jane. Every time he got to that part, he woke Lurline up and tried to wash himself in her again. He wasn't rough or humorous with her, and each time he was done she went back to sleep disappointed.

He got up at the sounds of activity in the street and watched Bill walking to the bar. He wished it was the sissy he had business with. He carried himself straight enough now, but Boone pictured him without Wild Bill.

He removed himself from Lurline's bed for good sometime toward the middle of the day. She was gone, but he could still smell her toilet water on the pillow. It was hot in the room, and he took off his underwear before he put on his pants and shirt. He did that fast, afraid someone would come in the door.

His peeder rubbed against the sewing in his trousers, and he noticed it was tender. He tried to remember how many times he'd took Lurline during the night, but when he considered them one by one they embarrassed him because he hadn't really took her at all. It wasn't like bedding down with Jane, of course, with her trying him out like a new saddle, but in the whole night with Lurline, he'd never once done anything manly.

There was time for that, though. Boone May was never one to let his peeder do the thinking. He had seen where that led, and when Boone cashed in, it wasn't going to be his member that got him into it.

He was looking out the window, thinking of the man he had hung in Hill City, when the Bottle Fiend came walking down the street dragging his flour sack, poking through the mud with a stick for bottles.

Boone had never had reason to talk to a soft-brain, but he saw something in this one, and called to hirn. The Bottle Fiend looked up, found him in the window, and came in the door downstairs. A minute later he knocked on the door. Boone guessed soft-brains wasn't afraid of nothing.

He opened the door. The Bottle Fiend walked in and took off his hat and put that and his stick on the bed. He held on to the sack. The bottles inside made stirring noises whenever he moved, then seemed to settle down when he stopped. The thought hit Boone that the soft-brain might think the bottles was his babies.

The Bottle Fiend looked around the room, then out the window. He seemed happy to look down where he'd been before. Boone watched him, not knowing how to put things so he would understand. "You're the one that commits suicide," he said after a while.

The Bottle Fiend held out his shirt collar to show him his neck. "I hanged myself and et poison eggs," he said. "And tried to shoot myself once, too."

"I heard about you," Boone said. He sat back down on the windowsill and the soft-brain took the chair over by Lurline's dresser.

"A soft-brain shoots himself in the head, so what?" the Bottle Fiend said.

Boone shook his head. "I never said nothing like that. What I heard was that you wasn't afraid." The Bottle Fiend stared at him and waited. "How many bottles you got there?" Boone said.

The Bottle Fiend pulled the sack close to his chest. The sound was fragile and nervous, but it settled. "I ain't going to take them from you," Boone said, smiling the way he'd seen other people smile when they talked to children. "I just wondered how many you had."

"Eleven hundred and forty-seven," the Bottle Fiend said.

And that made Boone smile for real. "Where did you hear a number like that?" he said. He thought bottles must be like money to soft-brains.

The Bottle Fiend shrugged.

Boone took his pistol out of its holster and held it up for the Bottle Fiend to see. "You ever shot a gun?" he said.

The Bottle Fiend nodded his head, but he didn't try to touch the gun. "I promised to Dr. Sick to quit," he said. "So he give me the bathhouse instead."

Boone smiled and nodded. The muscles in his jaws hurt. "What I meant was did you ever shoot anybody but your own self. Not that that don't count. . ."

The Bottle Fiend turned in his chair and looked the other way. It was quiet in the room. The Bottle Fiend ran his finger over one of the little bottles on Lurline's dresser. It was clear glass with a red cap, shaped like a drop of sweat. Boone thought it was her France perfume, but he wasn't sure. "You like them little bottles?" he said.

The Bottle Fiend moved his hand from that bottle to the next one, which was larger and regular-shaped. And then to the toilet water. It came from San Francisco; Lurline told him that when he'd first commented on her smell. Lurline was proud to have things from foreign places.

When he had finished touching the toilet water, the Bottle Fiend turned back around in his chair and looked at Boone again. "I ain't stupid," he said.

"I never said you was," Boone said. "I just asted if you liked them little bottles, because if you did, maybe I could let you have one if you did something for me." Boone tried to think of which one Lurline wouldn't miss.

The Bottle Fiend shook his head. "Not one," he said. "I need six."

Boone started up off the windowsill after him, but he made himself sit back down. He could almost feel the Bottle Fiend in his hands. It wasn't his peeder that led him around, but sometimes the feel of breaking somebody's bones did; it rushed over him in a way that he couldn't hold himself back.

He smiled, showing too much teeth. "I might could give you two," he said, "if you could do something for me at the bathhouse." Boone moved the gun closer to the Bottle Fiend, who gave no sign of taking it.

"I promised Dr. Sick," he said.

Boone said, "I ain't sayin' to shoot yourself. I'm talkin' about something else."

The Bottle Fiend turned back to the dresser and picked up the perfume from France.

Boone moved over next to him, still holding the gun in his hand. "There ain't but seven here," he said. He took the bottle out of the Bottle Fiend's hand and looked at it closer. It had little bumps in the bottom and a picture of an angel on the top, where it smoothed out. The Bottle Fiend looked up at him, wanting it back. "This here's a damn fine bottle," Boone said. "I could give you this one and some of the others . . ."

The Bottle Fiend picked up the toilet water, which came in a quart size, and moved it away from the smaller bottles on the dresser. He said he needed six.

Boone put his hand over the Bottle Fiend's mouth. The Bottle Fiend didn't move or try to get it away, he just stood still and stared at him, not even a little fearful. It wasn't the way Boone thought soft-brains would be.

"All right," Boone said. "If I was to give you this France bottle right now, that means you got to do something for me with the gun." He took his hand off the soft-brain's mouth and put the bottle back on the table to see if they had an agreement.