(1986) Deadwood (15 page)

He came into town downhill, along the same path the wagons had took the first day he had ever seen Deadwood. He didn't know where he was going, he hadn't thought about it. He did know there wasn't anything for him sitting on his heels in the Whitewood Creek, looking for specks of gold. He could have sat in front of his tent with a rifle, like the old man, and waited for the mining companies to buy him out, but the boy did not have a waiting sort of disposition.

It was nine-thirty. He could hear shooting down in the badlands, but he was in no hurry to get there. He had lost his interest in shooting. A woman in a flower-pattern dress came out of the Dead-wood Brickworks, Inc., carrying a chamber pot, and spoke to him. He was standing in the mud. "Good morning," she said.

He started a reply, but his tongue suddenly felt too big for his mouth, and he was afraid if he tried to talk, it would come out and he wouldn't be able to get it back in. He smiled at her instead, and the blood leaked out a corner of his mouth, and her face changed.

"Are you shot?" she said.

He shook his head no. She ran back into the Deadwood Brickworks, Inc., calling for the sheriff. The boy stood in the mud and waited, he didn't know what for.

She came back, pulling the sheriff by the arm. He was a big man with eyes like a bad dog. He said, "Is something wrong with you, boy?"

The boy wiped at the front of his mouth and turned away from them to drop a line of blood out of his mouth into the mud. "What's wrong with him?" the woman said.

"Something," the sheriff said, "but it isn't serious."

"He can't speak," she said. "He's bleeding from the mouth."

The sheriff seemed to soften. "All right," he said, "I see what it is now. I'll take care of it."

"Thank you, Sheriff," the woman said. "If you need first-aid techniques, you know where I am . . ."

"I'll take care of it now," the sheriff said. He took the woman by the elbow and walked her off his porch. When she was gone, the sheriff turned to the boy. "Where did you come from?" he said. The sheriff took a step closer. The boy didn't feel afraid, but something was causing the blood to flow from both sides of his mouth now.

"Where did you come from?" the sheriff said again. He reached out and grabbed the boy by the neck. It was almost gentle, the way he reached for him. The boy saw that the sheriff didn't want people to see that he was hurting him. His thumb pushed into the nerve at the bottom of the boy's neck, and the movement started his tongue bleeding for real again, and he opened his mouth to let the blood out.

The sheriff watched him, reconsidered, and let go of his neck.

"If I was you," he said, "I wouldn't come here. This is a business area, son. Ladies walk on the street. If I was you, I'd go to the badlands, or back where I came from."

The boy did not let himself think about where he had come from. And when the sheriff finished, he walked away, toward the badlands. The sheriff stood out on the porch of the Deadwood Brickworks, Inc., watching him. The boy felt him back there. He had a stare you could feel on the back of your head.

He walked into the bathhouse, thinking Charley might be inside. There was nobody there but a soft-brain, though, who wanted to see inside his mouth.

He walked north, downhill, until he saw Charley's camp. There wasn't anybody around. He looked inside the wagon and saw the sheet Charley had laid out for himself, the blanket, the pillow. Everything clean and white. He realized what he wanted was to sleep.

He took off his boots and his shirt. The shirt was heavy from his blood, some dried, some fresh. He walked to the creek and splashed water over his face. He didn't want to soil Charley's bed. The feel of the water on his face made him thirsty, and he poured a little of it from the heels of his hands over his lips. Some of it went into his mouth—he felt it—and then it disappeared. There was nothing to swallow.

He crawled in the back of the wagon and fit himself into the sheets. He lay still a long time, leaving his thoughts empty. He looked at the canvas roof and kept himself still. That was the way you mended, he thought, keeping everything still. He fell in and out of sleep all that day while the sun moved across the canvas top. It was hot, and then it was cooler. The flies were all over him, but he threw his shirt out the back of the wagon, and most of them followed that.

The light was dim when Charley came back to camp. The boy heard him coming in, heard him stop when he realized something was in his wagon. Charley didn't like anybody but himself in his bunk. He called it a shooting matter.

The boy listened to Charley's steps, slow and careful, and then he saw his head at the front end of the wagon, the opposite place he expected it to be. The boy thought Charley would yell, but he didn't. He stood there a minute, looking in, and then he climbed in too, and sat backwards over the driver's seat and looked at him.

"Malcolm?" he said.

The boy smiled. A line of watery blood came out one corner of his mouth. His tongue had swollen now where he couldn't close his teeth. "Good Jesus," Charley said.

The boy shrugged, but his shoulders were under the sheets, where Charley couldn't see them.

Charley wiped at the sides of the boy's mouth with his handkerchief. "What kind of accident was this?" he said. He moved the boy's jaw, seeing if it was broken, and fresh blood ran down into the sheets. Part of the boy's tongue lay between his teeth, the color of the Hills themselves. The tongue was sliced through in front, Charley couldn't see how far back the cut went.

"What in the world?" he said.

The boy smiled again, keeping himself still. He wasn't going to think about that now, he wasn't sure he could remember. When it happened, the boy knew every detail. No matter what assault was made on him, there was something that accepted it, and knew what it was. And walking back to town, even after what had happened, things had a normal feel. Now, though, lying in Charley's bed, it began to slip away from him, the normal world. The boy did not struggle against that, it didn't seem like something you needed to fight.

Charley considered writing matilda a letter, he began it on the evening of the third day the boy had been lying in the wagon.

My Dear Wife,

I do not wish to upset you, there has been a small accident with your brother, the nature of which remains a mystery. Has there been tongue-biting in your family?

Charley got that far and decided against a letter. Even if he told her everything he knew, which wasn't a thing, it wasn't going to satisfy her on anything, except the fact that she had made a terrible mistake trusting him with her brother in the first place. On the other hand, he could conjure a picture of his wife coming in unexpected one day on the stage and finding Malcolm with his tongue swollen half out of his mouth, lying in the wagon with brains like a barbecued squirrel's.

"It isn't likely Matilda would show up unexpected," he told Bill later, "but not impossible. She's done it before."

Bill thought about it half a minute. "If it was me," he said, "I'd write her the letter and keep it on my person at all times. If she showed up and the boy wasn't improved, I'd hand it over and say I didn't have the heart to worry her before."

There was some practicality in that. Charley never considered himself the captive of true love, but there was something about Matilda beyond her skin that he liked, especially when he'd been away, and he didn't like to see her disappointed in him.

"See," Bill said, "you married on a different level. A girl like that can't understand people like us."

Charley nodded, even though it was never what Matilda didn't understand that worried him. Bill said, "My own Agnes, you never saw her short-tempered, because being famous herself, she knows the situations you can get into. It's understanding that makes her different. There's nothing Agnes won't understand."

And Charley heard the wishing in that.

The boy went downhill. He lay still, looking at the ceiling, and except to drool or shrug, did not respond to noise or movement.

Charley bought milk from a widow woman, whose husband had been hit by lightning the week they got to the Hills. She had four children—all girls, one of them too young to talk—and they'd run to Charley when he came for the milk in the morning, and grab his hands and walk him to the back, where the widow kept her cow. Charley wondered what kept her in the Hills, but he never asked. He'd get his hands loose from the little girls, overpay for the milk, and leave. He would feel their hands wrapped around his fingers all day.

In the wagon he'd lift Malcolm's head and pour the milk into the corner of his mouth, a tiny bit at a time. Some days Bill would return from Nuttall and Mann's Number 10 and attend the feeding. That's where he went for his morning drinking and a daily exhibition of his skill at shooting bottles off the heads of soft-brains and drunks.

He would take off his shirt and wash himself in the Whitewood, then cover his chest with mercury, slipping his hands down into his trousers to his privates. Then he'd put on a clean shirt and stand at the back end of the wagon and watch Charley feed the boy.

"How is it?" he'd ask.

Charley would shake his head. "I don't know."

"Well," Bill would say, "he isn't bound for the other side yet."

And then, like his saying it made it so, he'd head off into town somewhere, to play cards or tell stories to the tourists. Some days Charley gave him twenty dollars, and some days Bill didn't need it. Charley never minded the money, he'd never in his life had trouble finding more.

It took him an hour to move a quart of milk from inside the bottle to inside Malcolm. It spilled, of course, and Charley kept a wet towel close by to wipe it as it slid down his cheeks and neck. Even so, the wagon began to smell sour. For smells, Charley hated sour worse than anything up to decayed fish.

He washed the boy after he fed him, and changed the sheets. The first time he did it there was a spot of blood from the boy's backside, but he never saw that again. He took the dirty sheets, along with his own clothes, to a laundry in Chinatown and picked up the clean.

He walked through the two blocks of Chinese slowly. He was interested in their cooking and their language and their ways. One day he saw the girl the Chinese whore man had kept to himself on the wagon train. Another day he saw her picture in the door of one of their theaters. Her name was the China Doll.

Whenever Charley had been to Chinatown, he went to the bathhouse. It was later in the day than he liked to bathe, but he waited because it didn't make sense to take a bath and then to go to Chinatown. Sometimes he sat in the tub and talked to the Bottle Fiend, sometimes he didn't. It was funny with the soft-brain. You could say what you wanted, sorting out your thoughts, because he couldn't understand what things meant, but then the next day he might repeat the whole thing back to you.

"It don't seem right," the soft-brain told him one morning, "that the boy ought to be getting between you and your life, but there it is. You marry, you carry."

Charley gave him a dollar and said, "Forget you heard that, Bottle Man."

The Bottle Fiend said, "What?"

In the afternoons, Charley looked into business. He spent two days in the district recorder's office, going over placer claims. He had bought and sold claims in Colorado, but it was nothing he liked. If you wanted to know who somebody was, set them down next to a gold claim. Charley had seen common people cheat their brothers and fathers, abuse their wives and leave their children to get close to gold. Mostly, they acted on the assumption they could come back and straighten it all out after they were rich. They believed gold healed, too.

And there wasn't a man in a hundred who doubted he could handle it. The softest-brains in the Hills, the kind that couldn't buy new boots without having their own dog piss all over them, would all assume they could handle money.

It was easy enough, then—buying and selling mining claims— to take what money those people had, but the feeling was related to the one he sometimes got the moment a black bear came out of her den in the morning, and he was sitting in a tree forty feet away with a needle gun waiting for her. It always felt like it was too early.

Of course, trading mining claims, you didn't have a Ute Indian shooting your ass out of the tree while you were sitting there waiting.

Charley studied the placer claims and declined to enter the business. There were other things he understood as well. Transportation, hauling, if worst came to worst he could trap for a living. He had something over $30,000 in Colorado banks, there was no hurry. Money had always come to him like he was standing downhill.

By the end of the week, he had decided to run a pony express from Fort Laramie into the Hills. A transportation line was too encumbered, Charley was not married to this place yet. He had been partners in such a line before, and there was more to it than mules and wagons.

The financing was not incidental. Teams of two mules or American horses went for three hundred dollars each. Broncs were eighty dollars, pack mules were sixty dollars, where you could find them. Charley didn't know what he would do with his yet, but he was grateful to have them. Then there was food for the animals, and horseshoes, and a blacksmith's tools, and guns and ammunition and shovels and hatchets. Oats were $1.40 a hundredweight, baled hay was twenty-five dollars a ton. And some of the drivers ate too.

And sometimes they stole, but more often they lightened their loads by throwing part of it away. Charley's experience in the transportation business was that the only way things operated right was when he rode the wagons himself, and there was no future in that for a man with painful legs.

The pony express looked cleaner. Of course, he had never operated one before. There was already a twice-weekly service run by Enis Clippinger, but it took a letter two weeks or less to get from Boston or San Francisco to Cheyenne, and that long again to find its owner in the Hills. And then, depending on the rider—some could read and some couldn't—the seals on the letter would be broken and the letter stuffed wrong into the envelope.

Sometimes the letters didn't get to the miners at all. Enis Clip-pinger wrote public notices blaming the Indians and the outlaws. He said the miners were ungrateful of his efforts. He also said nobody could do better, which was when Charley decided to take his business. On Thursday he sent letters to the Black Hills Pioneer and the Cheyenne Leader announcing his new service.

Messr. Charles Utter has established a pony express between Deadwood and Cheyenne and will make round trips hereafter. All riders are hired illiterate. The pony express must prove a great convenience and we hope it may be adequately patronized.

It took him one minute to write. Bill stood over him, watching. "I don't know how you do that," he said. "Like the words are already inside the pen."

"It's just what's in your brain," Charley said. "The way the words come to you naturally is the best way to put them down."

Bill said, "The things in my head don't come in words."

The boy stayed the same, or might of lost ground, it was hard to say. Charley fed him milk until he refused it, washed him, changed his sheets. He'd almost given up talk, the boy wasn't listening. And the boy didn't know him from the blanket. He thought he might hire someone to care for him until it went one way or the other. The thought came to Charley then that if you stayed one way long enough, that was the way you were. He wished he could explain it to the boy.

By the end of the week, the boy's tongue had turned colors. It was lighter now, greens and blues and purples, and didn't look so swollen. "What in the world could of happened to you?" Charley said, more to himself than the boy. The boy shrugged. He always shrugged when he heard talk.

Calamity Jane Cannary came by on Friday afternoon. She had stopped three times previous, looking for Bill. Once he had hid under the wagon. Friday afternoon was the first time Charley had ever seen her sober.

"He's in the wagon, ain't he?" she said.

"No, ma'am," Charley said.

"There's something in there," she said.

He said, "It's my wife's brother." He tried to mention his wife at least once every time he saw Jane. "He's been sickly all week."

Jane took off her hat and ran her fingers through the knots and tangles and burrs in her hair. Charley looked for bats. "What is it?" she said. "Torpid fever?"

Charley shook his head. "I don't know," he said. "I found him in there early this week, and he hasn't moved since." Jane closed her eyes, thinking.

"I'll take a look at him for you," she said.

"There's already been the doctor here," Charley said. He'd found Dr. O. E. Sick at his office one afternoon and brought him back to the wagon. He went to him because of his association with the Bottle Fiend, which somehow struck Charley as connected to the present case. Dr. O. E. Sick had run his fingers through the boy's hair. "In some ways," he'd said, "it resembles snakebite."

"Doctors don't know nothin' about healing," Jane said. She walked past Charley to the wagon, washing him in her smell. She was wearing buckskin trousers and a fringed buckskin coat, an old Colt .41 that must have weighed eight pounds, an ammunition belt, and a wool scarf around her neck. It was the middle of a summer afternoon.

She leaned into the wagon, staring. "Why, he ain't nothing but a boy," she said when she had come out.

"He's eighteen," Charley said. "My wife's brother." She climbed into the wagon then, and Charley heard her in there, talking to him, moving things. He didn't try to stop her; it took a shock sometimes to bring a person out from under a spell.

She asked Charley for water, which he got her, and then a towel. She stayed in there with him most of an hour. "His tongue is swole," she said when she came out, "but it's more serious than that."

"I don't know what it is," Charley said.

"I could come by," Jane said, "and look after him. I nursed the sick all my life. Smallpox, torpid fever, consumption . . ."

Charley did not see how it would hurt the boy to have a little more company. There was a temptation to picture the unexpected arrival of his wife again—finding Malcolm fork-tongued and molested of his senses in the care of Calamity Jane Cannary—but he fought it off.

He saw that she wanted to be in Bill's camp, but it was something else too. She cared for the sick. Charley left her there with the boy and went looking for Enis Clippinger.

He found Bill instead, outside the Bella Union, Pink Buford's bulldog had just killed a wolf in the street. Pink collected five hundred dollars, and was inside, buying drinks. Bill was sitting on the steps with the dog. The dog had lost an ear in the fight, but was otherwise unmarked.

"I wish Pink Buford wouldn't fight this dog so much," Bill said.

Charley said, "It must be what he likes."

Bill kissed the dog on the muzzle and looked him in the eye. "I can't see it," he said. He moved the animal's head and looked at the place where his ear had been. "That isn't going to grow back," he said. The dog licked Bill's chin. The wolf lay in the street, opened wide at the throat.

Charley sat down next to Bill. "I decided to run a pony express," he said.

"They already got a pony express."

Charley shook his head. "I'm going to race him, Cheyenne to Deadwood, for rights to the mail business."

Bill said, "Why would they race you?"

"I'll issue a challenge," Charley said. "When you issue the challenge, they always come around to race."

Bill smoothed the bulldog's ear back on his head, trying to make both sides look the same. When he spoke again, Charley heard something coming. "I located a dead Chinaman half a mile north of here," Bill said. "Near the mules."

"A dead Chinaman."

Bill shrugged. "They didn't have a cause of death, or even a name. Nobody claimed him, so he's ours."

"Lucky day," Charley said.

Bill looked at the dog while he talked. "There was a delivery today, from Sioux City. A kiln, a great big bastard, to the Deadwood Brickworks. They left it north of town."