Authors: Pete Dexter
He took a handkerchief and wiped some of the mud off her face. She sat quietly and allowed herself to be cleaned. When he had done what he could, he gave her the handkerchief and let her wipe her front and hands for herself. "The way the law is," he said, "it's public. It doesn't apply in private life." Solomon Star had moved to the floor in back of him, and had a hammer in his hand and half a dozen nails in his lips. Bullock was glad that Solomon's mouth was occupied.
"What I'm here about ain't private," the woman said. "My husband and Mr. Boone May plan to have Mr. Wild Bill Hickok shot."
The sheriff smiled at her. "A man like Bill Hickok," he said, "there's bound to be stories . . ." Hickok had been in town a little over two weeks, and there was already talk of making him sheriff.
The woman shook her head. "These two ain't just talking," she said. "I know them better." Seth Bullock patted her hand. It wasn't the talk of Bill becoming sheriff that troubled him—the office wasn't anything Seth Bullock wanted to hold on to any longer than he needed to—it was the way people spoke of him, like Bill would save them from Indians and thieves and cold weather. Bill had done nothing but drink gin and lose at cards, and he'd already begun to take Seth Bullock's claim. Not just in the badlands, everywhere in the city. Nobody knew what Bill Hickok was like, but that's where popularity lay, in the idea, not the fact.
Nobody ever got his statue built because the public knew him over breakfast.
"Mrs. Swearingen," Bullock said, "I want you to go back to your husband and don't say anything about coming here."
"I come here to report him," she said. Bullock shook his head no.
"The law is public," he said. "People's private problems, they ought to settle them at home. In fairness, you married him, missus. Try to remember all the things you saw in him then, and see if they aren't still there."
She looked for something in his face, to see if that was a joke. "You ain't going to do nothing about this, are you?" she said.
"No," he said, "no, I'm not."
Friday, Charley left for Cheyenne. the clippinger pony Express Company had accepted his challenge as it was laid down. It had surprised Charley, and told him the business was not worth as much as he had surmised.
He left without talking to Bill. He checked on the boy, who he now believed would never improve, and gave Jane another twenty dollars for groceries. Then he got on a rough-looking gray gelding that he bought for $450 from Brick Pomeroy, and rode out of town. It felt wrong to leave without speaking to Bill, but the longer he'd stayed at the Grand Union, the more distance there was between them, and he didn't have the way to narrow it.
It was going the other way, in fact. He'd begun to judge him. He found himself thinking of Bill in ways that weren't any of his business. Like why he couldn't make money, or why he married a woman he didn't know. It was small and wrong, but he thought of those things anyway.
He tried talking to himself out loud. He said, "All Bill did was pull your ass out the river once—how long are you going to hold it against him?" but it was empty. There was something that happened in the water that day that Charley couldn't forgive.
He took six days to get to Cheyenne, stopping here and there to make arrangements to care for his horses later. There were two-and three-family settlements that the Indians had left alone, a few ranches. Texans, mostly. They were the least humorous people Charley had ever been among, Texans. He thought it was probably the dust storms. But they were reliable too, not likely to run at the sight of Indians. Not likely to run at all.
For purposes of the race, he decided to use four riders, with his brother Steve riding the longest stretch, which ran from a house full of Mexicans sitting unprotected out in the middle of eastern Wyoming into the settlement of Camp Collier in the southern Hills.
He would have taken the hardest ride himself, but he wanted the last leg. He thought it would be better for business if the miners saw him in the saddle, so they would know his express was trustworthy. Nobody had ever seen Enis Clippinger, or knew who he was. Charley surmised that was why the miners objected that he read their mail.
He met his brother in Cheyenne, and they spent the day hiring riders. The Street brothers, Brant and Dick, Herbert Godard, H. G. "Huge" Rocafellow, and Bloody Dick Seymour. Two were curiosities. Bloody Dick was a full-blooded Englishman, who had settled on the Niobrara River in Nebraska and then come to the Hills. Most of the English stayed where they settled. He wasn't much good on a horse, and useless with a side arm, but Charley liked his accent.
The other oddity was Huge Rocafellow, who was nearly as big as his horse—a dark, sorry-looking animal that Huge swore would run forever. "Where did you find that one?" Charley said to his brother, when Huge had left them.
His brother was so much like Charley that they had to stay apart from each other to avoid bloodshed. He said Huge was the best-humored man in Cheyenne, and he'd hired him for that. Steve was smart, and understood how his brother ran a business. If there wasn't some fun in it, Charley wouldn't do it.
Charley would waste his money, but not his time.
They spent the early evening in the bar of the Republican Hotel. Steve had two drinks and asked after Matilda, and then Bill. He had bee-homing instincts for what Charley didn't want to talk about.
"Is something come between you and Bill?" he said.
Charley shook his head. "It's nothing," he said. "Bill is Bill. There isn't anything written down that says we have to be together every minute of the day."
Steve couldn't have looked more surprised if his feet disappeared. "You and Bill are still partners, ain't you? I never seen partners as close as you and Bill . . ."
Charley stood up and stretched. "I got to get some sleep," he said. And he left him there in the bar and went to his room. He loved his brother, but he couldn't be around him.
He lay sleepless for most of the night. He mounted the bed on his stomach with his head hanging over the side, trying to find a comfortable way to position his legs—which ached from the time in the saddle—and stared for a while at a cricket on the floor. The cricket's movements were mostly in his whiskers. Charley believed God was in every creature on earth, even people, and waited about ten minutes for Him to reveal Himself. It didn't happen. He rolled over on his side and closed his eyes. There were no lessons for him in crickets.
He imagined the cricket and himself were something akin to Bill and Matilda, who after all, were both God's idea, but could stare at each other forever and never recognize a mutuality.
The boy had lost track of day and night, he'd almost forgot what it meant. Sometimes the canvas top was light, sometimes it was dark. When it was dark, she was always with him, holding his head against her body while she snored.
He watched her sleep and wake up, he watched her drink whiskey from the bottle. He heard her outside, talking to Bill. "You and me," she would say, "we're two of a kind, Bill. We got the same blood in our veins."
He never heard Bill answer. She would drink and talk, and then Bill would go away. Sometimes she would crawl into the wagon with him afterwards, and he would watch her cry.
She never knew he was watching.
He forgot why he was lying down. Something had happened, he knew, but it wasn't with him anymore, at least not at hand. It was someplace else. He didn't try. to find it, he didn't try to get up. He was weak, but it was comfortable. She sang to him when it was dark.
He had no sense of time passing, just that it had passed. He knew he couldn't lie in the wagon forever. He heard people on the street, and knew that sometime he would have to go out there himself. He was in no hurry. He lay in the wagon and waited for the things that would come to him.
She washed him at first light, talking to him as she scrubbed dark soap against her washrag, and then the washrag against his skin. She washed his chest and his arms. She held his peeder in a milk bottle and he would let go of his piss. He watched everything she did, and listened to everything she said.
She began to call him her baby. "When are you going to talk to me?" she said. And, "You ain't going to die on your momma, are you? You're all your momma's got. . ."
It never entered his thoughts to answer. She fed him milk and soup, a spoonful at a time, holding his head in the cradle of her elbow. His mouth did not hurt now to have things inside it.
And then one morning there was a voice outside. Louder than the usual voices in the street. He was lying against her shoulder when he heard it, and he recognized right away that it was for him. "Dear God," the voice said, "help the sad and the weak and the lost among us. Lend us Thy strength, so that we may do Thy work better, and find our way back to You from this place full of Thy enemies . . ."
He sat up, out of her lap, and looked out through the opening in front of the wagon to the street. A thin, gray-faced man was standing on a box in front of a cluster of miners, holding a Bible in front of his face, like he was talking to it.
The boy got on his hands and knees and crawled to the front of the wagon. "That's a preacher," she said behind him. "He's trying to save these sinners from hell."
The boy began to climb out of the wagon. He was the weak and the lost and the sad, and the preacher had come for him. She grabbed him from behind. "Whoa, my baby," she said. "You ain't dressed for church." But he was too strong for her and pulled away. He climbed out the front of the wagon, buck-naked on shaky legs, and then dropped himself onto the ground.
The preacher stopped when he heard the upstairs girls scream. There were a few of them scattered among the miners; most were there to catch the early service before they went to bed. They had spent Saturday night naked with these same miners, or ones like them, but at the sight of the boy, pale and naked and skinny, walking out of Charley Utter's camp, they screamed.
The boy came toward the Methodist, and the miners moved apart to give him room. The truth was, they weren't overly comfortable around an uncovered boy either. The boy did not seem to hear the screaming or notice the miners. He was looking at the Methodist on the packing crate.
The Methodist spoke first. "What is it, boy?"
The boy started to speak, but his throat was dry and unreliable. Half the noises he made could of come out of a hawk, but finally he made himself understood. "I'm the one you come for." This set off a new round of excitement among the upstairs girls, but the Methodist took it serious. He stared down at the boy, and then seemed to decide. "One of you get him a blanket," he said. When nobody moved, the preacher got down off his box and walked to the boy and wrapped him in his own coat.
The boy allowed himself to be wrapped. The Methodist looked into his eyes and the boy looked back.
The Methodist said, "Maybe so."
Jane watched it from the front seat of the wagon. She had four inches left in the bottom of a bottle of whiskey—she'd made it last half the week—and she pulled the cork now with intentions to finish it. The preacher got back on his crate and led the miners and whores in the Lord's Prayer, and then dismissed them without even asking for the collection. He took the boy away.
Jane felt herself crying. It seemed like that's all she'd done for two weeks. Unless she got hold of herself, somebody would catch her at it. She drank the bottle and watched the street from the seat of the wagon. After a while the crying passed, and she thought she might go to Rapid City and get drunk. She had once ridden a bull on Main Street there and got her picture in the newspaper. She thought about that day, how good her future looked, and wondered how she'd got so unhappy so fast.
She guessed it was from listening too much to her heart. "That boy was mine," she said out loud, almost finished with the bottle now. "I collected that Methodist about thirty dollars, too."
She stood up in the wagon and shook the last few drops of the bottle out on the ground. Then she threw it in the air and drew the Smith & Wesson Russian model she carried butt-first in her gun belt to shoot it. Then she lost the bottle in the morning sun and fell off the wagon.
The ground was drier there than the street, and hard. She heard the sound of her breath leaving her as she landed, and then lay still until she could tell that she wasn't hurt. That was a disappointment too, and she began to cry again. She curled into herself right there next to the wagon, in plain view of the public, and bawled. "He was mine," she said.
The Methodist took the boy to his cabin near the sawmill. He sat him in a rocking chair near the door, naked except for the coat. "What happened to your shoes?" he said.
The boy looked at his feet longer than it took to see he didn't have shoes on. "I got clothes," the preacher said, "but shoes ought to fit."
The boy accepted that like a first lesson. Shoes ought to fit. He nodded and waited for whatever the preacher would say next. "Can you work?" he asked. The boy looked at him. "Are you deaf?" he said. Not reproachful, a question.
The boy shook his head and cleared his throat. "I heard what you said. 'Help the sad and the weak and the lost among us. Lend us Thy strength, so that we may do Thy work better, and find our way back to You from this place full of Thy enemies . . .'"
Henry Hiram Weston Smith smiled. "That's more attention than I pay myself," he said. The boy did not smile back. The preacher said, "You're not soft-brained, what's the nature of your affliction?"
The boy shook his head. He wouldn't think about the nature of his affliction, something kept him from it.
"Have you been hurt?" the preacher said. "Are you on the mend?"
The boy turned in the chair, avoiding the preacher's questions. "I'm the one you come for," he said. Preacher Smith took those words seriously. He found a pair of old black pants among his things, and a shirt big enough for two men to wear at the same time. His initials were sewn into the pocket. A present from his wife, who always thought of him as bigger than he was.
He gave those to the boy, along with his spare underwear, and went outside while he dressed. He had no thought that his obligations to the boy were satisfied. He had no thought of what else he was supposed to do.