Authors: Pete Dexter
"Who left it north of town?"
Bill shrugged again. "Whoever. They weren't ready for it yet at
the Brickworks, so they left it. Cast iron, it must weigh four tons. I removed the crate myself."
"Slow down," Charley said. The Deadwood Brickworks belonged to the sheriff, and Charley saw where Bill was pointed in this.
"We could go out there tonight," Bill said. Charley thought it over, remembering the newspaper account of Baron Van Palm. Bill said, "A Chinaman's got a right to decent disposal too."
The part that came back to Charley was when the baron's hand pointed toward his ascending soul, and a holy light glowed around his feet. He had to admit it was something he wouldn't have minded seeing for himself. "The Chinaman didn't have a family?"
Bill said, "All they intend to do for him is dig a four-foot hole in the ground and roll him in. Chinese don't even get a box if nobody claims them. He's better off with us."
"You know whose vessel that is you propose to use to float this slant-eyes to heaven? You know who the Deadwood Brickworks is?"
Bill was not interested. "What difference does that make?"
"Bullock," Charley said. "It's Sheriff Bullock's kiln."
Bill looked at him, waiting for the rest. Charley waited too. That seemed like enough. Bill said, "You think this might be against the law? You think they got a law about Chinese in kilns? This place barely has laws against crucifixion . . ."
Charley edged away from him, not to confuse the Lord over which one of them said that. "Besides," Bill said, "all that's left when we're done is a few ashes. The sheriff won't know it's been tested."
Some time passed before Charley spoke again. Their conversations were like that, they would let the words settle between them before they added to them.
"How did you come into possession of this slant eyes?" he said.
Bill shook his head. "Dr. Wedelstaedt gave him to me. He said the Chinese was ostracized from the rest. They wouldn't talk to him if he came in the front door, they wouldn't see him if he was standing in front of them. He wasn't allowed to live in Chinatown or attend the Chinese rituals."
"You been seeing Doc Wedelstaedt?" Charley said. He didn't like having more people in it than needed to be there. "What's he said?"
"He says the Chinese got their ways and we got ours. He isn't much of one to make judgments."
"I mean about yourself."
Bill looked away. "He's got treatments, but nothing that would appear to be better than dying. One thing is a wire that he sticks up your weasel and heats it."
Charley tried to see how bad Bill had taken that news, but he couldn't read it one way or the other. "He gave me more mercury," Bill said, "and then he told me about the Chinese, and what his own people did to him. He's the kind of doctor that if he can't fix what's wrong with you, he's got a story about somebody that's worse off."
Charley nodded. There were a lot of that kind of doctors. "Did he say why the Chinese did that to one of their own?"
Bill stood up and stretched and smoothed his hair back off his face. "It had something to do with a girl," he said. "More than one, maybe. He knows their names, which all sound sing-song to me. It was money and weasel and promises, one depending on the other, and there wasn't anything they could do in the end but ostracize him or admit they might of been wrong about the way they had things set up for about three thousand years. The slant-eyes say 'Sorry, sorry' all the time, but among themselves they don't like to be wrong."
"Nobody spoke to him, over a girl . . ."
"Not a person," Bill said. "They sent him off into the trees, I guess he'd been there since spring. The doc says he never heard of him until he was dead. When that happened, the Chinese were more conciliatory, at least to the point they would mention his name out loud."
Charley stayed on the step, looking up at Bill. He thought of how the Chinese liked to talk, how they couldn't seem to get it out fast enough. "That must have been a lonely slant-eyes," he said.
"Well," Bill said, "it's taken care of now."
The Chinese was lying under a small pile of branches and pine needles, back in the trees beyond the field where Charley had tethered his mules. Bill went right to the spot, even though in the fading light he couldn't have seen the length of his arm. Charley followed, putting his feet in the same places Bill's had been, out of habit.
Before they got to the Chinese they passed his lean-to, and Charley stopped to look inside. There was a book he took to be some sort of Bible, a pair of U.S. Army boots, a bone knife, an empty money pouch. They were set out neatly along the straw mat the Chinese had used for a bed, as if they were things he meant to sell.
"There isn't even a picture in there," Charley said.
Bill said, "Maybe he didn't want to see them, either." A little later he said, "There's white men do cruel things too."
Charley could see the Chinese before they moved a branch. He was lying face-up, not much bigger than a boy. He had on loose pants, sandals, and a U.S. Army coat. His mouth was open half an inch and there was dirt on his front teeth. Bill began to pull the branches off. "Is this where he died?" Charley said.
Bill said, "I found him on this spot, and never touched a thing."
The more Bill uncovered, the less of the Chinese there was. Charley suddenly didn't want to know about the Chinese, any more than he had to.
When the branches were gone, Bill borrowed Charley's handkerchief and brushed the pine dust off the face. "He wasn't much more than a boy, was he?" Charley said. Bill stopped cleaning the Chinese and said he wished he'd brought a bottle of pink gin along.
Charley said, "I wish you did too." Bill picked up the body as if there were no more weight to it than the clothes it was wrapped in. He draped it over his shoulder and they walked around the edge of the field, keeping just behind the trees. It was a half mile that way over fallen limbs and singed tree stumps, but Bill never even broke a sweat. Charley followed him, watching the Chinese's head bounce against Bill's back.
The kiln was a monster. The doors must of weighed two hundred pounds themselves. It was built on two tiers. There was a bottom compartment for wood or coal, and a top for what you intended to heat. The compartments were separated by a steel grating and a flat piece of metal that might have been tin.
The crating Bill had removed lay in a pile nearby, as tall as the kiln itself.
Bill said, "What do you think about that metal? You want to take it out, and lay him on the grating?" Charley didn't have an opinion on it one way or the other. "In the paper," Bill said, "did they have the baron on a sheet of tin or was it open fire?"
Charley put his head inside the kiln. It was as hollow and dark as bad dreams in there. "It didn't say," he said. Charley pulled his head out. "The problem with the grating," he said, "is if you wanted to keep the ashes separate from the wood. Without the tin, ashes is ashes, and we'd be guessing which was which."
Bill thought it over. "If it was me," he said, "I'd want the tin. You might need time for the soul to ascend from the remains. I think they probably used the tin with old Baron Van Palm . . ."
The tin slid out of the oven like a shelf. They laid it on the ground and put the Chinese on top of it. Bill straightened the clothes and did what he could to get the arms to lie at the sides. They tied the feet together to make it look neater.
Charley started the fire. He used dried pine branches and the crate the kiln had come in as kindling, and then went back for the Chinese's own firewood for the rest, walking straight across the field now he wasn't moving bodies. There were two flues in the top of the kiln that controlled the heat. Charley set them wide open, and when he looked in through the eye-hole twenty minutes later, the kiln had begun to glow.
The Chinese lay on the ground with his feet tied together.
"I do wish I'd brought along a bottle of pink," Bill said. They waited another ten minutes, neither of them talking. Then Bill said, "You think it's time?"
Charley looked into the eye-hole again, and the insides of the kiln were orange-red, he could see every detail of the seams. "If we're going to do it," he said.
Charley opened the top door, and the heat backed them both away. They picked up the piece of tin with the Chinese on it. Bill took the end with the head. "You're going to thank us," he said to the Chinese, "when we meet on the other side."
The Chinese wasn't heavy, but the tin was. "You think we ought to say some words over him first?" Bill said.
Charley said, "I think we ought to put him in the oven or put him down."
They put him in. Neither one of them was much for false starts once events were in motion. The tin fit into a groove in each side of the oven, and they slid it in and closed the door.
The heat of the kiln watered Charley's eyes, and he and Bill stood there for the first minute after the door was closed, looking at each other. Then Bill opened the eye-hole and stared inside.
"What's he doing?" Charley said.
Bill moved away from the hole and Charley looked in. The Chinese's clothes were on fire, and his hair. Little fires that started and then went out. His skin turned dark, and blistered, but he didn't catch fire himself.
Charley closed the eye-hole and moved away from the kiln. It felt like the heat had wrinkled his face. He and Bill sat on a log. "Sometime I'd like to know," Charley said, "what he did, that they would treat him like that."
Bill shook his head. "The doc explained it, but I don't think the celestials tell him the truth. To them, everybody's a foreigner." They sat quietly for a few minutes. There were popping noises inside the kiln. Bill said, "If they'd hung him, that's at least admitting he was there."
Charley went back to the oven. It felt hotter than it had. The Chinese was still intact. The edges of his ears were burned, and there was fluid from his eyes that bubbled on his cheeks but didn't seem to evaporate. And the feet were pink. "How's he doing?" Bill said.
Charley scratched his neck. "It's a time for patience," he said.
"This has got an empty feel," Bill said after a while. "It might not be a fair test, on account of the circumstances. That isn't an ordinary man in there, even an ordinary celestial. He was nobody so long, maybe the point's lost in the send-off now." Charley stared at him. Bill said, "How long could you go like that, nobody would admit you were there, before you began to wonder yourself?"
"He must have known when he was hungry," Charley said. "He built a lean-to, he must of looked at that and seen somebody did it." Bill went to the kiln now and looked inside.
"I'm talking about his spirit," Bill said. "This one, maybe his spirit was already departed, and we're sitting out here wasting our time."
"Either way, this is where we are," Charley said.
It got darker, and then the air turned cold, like it had the night they went to the play. Charley thought of Mrs. Langrishe dry, and he thought of her wet. He couldn't make up his mind which way he liked her best. Lightning broke overhead, then thunder.
The first drops of rain fell on the kiln. Frying noises. Bill and Charley stayed where they were. "What I meant," Bill said after a while, "was there's a part of you that anchors to what common people think. There's a body of opinion that you can't get away from, even if you lived by yourself twelve months a year."
Charley adjusted his hat so the rain would run off the front of the brim, and not down his back. "What's being famous," Bill said, "but somebody's opinion? It's the same as love. That doesn't make it false. If there is love in this world, then there are opinions, and one is as good as the other."
The rain on the kiln was smoking now. Bill was still working something out. "When the Chinese took away their opinions of this boy, they took away the biggest part, and he might not have been strong enough to keep his spirit by himself. It might have already left."
Charley looked in the kiln again. The lightning was hitting up in the hills. "I think it's going to take longer than the baron," he said.
"You see what I'm saying to you?" Bill said.
Charley nodded. "That you been loved," he said.
They sat in the rain and waited. After a while Bill said, "We could sit this out in town."
It started to hail just as they got to the door of nuttall and Mann's Number 10. It looked to Charley like a hundred people inside. They went to the bar and Bill ordered a gin and bitters. Like magic, Pink Buford's bulldog was standing at his feet, and a minute later Captain Jack Crawford was there too.
Captain Jack was with Brick Pomeroy, the horse man from Belle Fourche. Brick had caught up with his Mex in Crook City and shot him in the street. Captain Jack told the story and bought drinks for Bill and Brick Pomeroy. Charley bought his own, a nice brown shot of whiskey from the United States of America. There was a professor at the piano, and every kind of whore known to man, except a clean one.
Charley thought of Mrs. Langrishe, fresh out of her bath. He thought of the way her hand had felt when she took his arm. Captain Jack was discussing dead moose again. Charley had stepped away from the milk-drinker, but he heard him just the same. The man's voice carried like a bad taste in food. Presently Captain Jack stepped around Bill and addressed Charley.
"Bill and me are ready to hunt," he said. "Take a few horses up into the Hills and kill some moose. I know a place where they've never been bothered, they'll walk right up and nuzzle your ear."
Charley looked around like he'd just woke up in the middle of the Red Desert. "The Indians never hunted them," Captain Jack said, "sacred ground." He smiled when he said that, and some of the tourists laughed. "Of course, that never kept them from spilling white men's blood."
"What about the Minutemen?" Charley said. "Who's to keep this settlement safe from the blood-spillers if you're up in the hills killing moose?"
"Two days, and we'll be back," Captain Jack said. Charley looked him over, happy-mouthed and innocent. All in all, Charley would rather have gone moose-hunting with the Ute that shot him in the leg. "Wild Bill says you are the best hunter in Colorado," Captain Jack said.