Authors: Pete Dexter
The white man pointed to his ear to show that he did not understand. She untied the sash of her robe and let it fall open on top. "Shall I undress?" she said again.
The white man nodded in an uncertain way, and put his hat on the chair near the window. Then he sat down and took off his shoes. He began to speak to her, words she didn't understand. She noticed that he had stopped undressing. He spoke in a soft voice, and asked with his eyes for her to understand him.
Presently he looked down at his hands and played with the wedding band on his third finger. She understood he was speaking of his wife.
She pointed to her ear, as he had done, to tell him she did not understand. That seemed to please the white man, and he straightened his back and pointed to his chest. He spoke the word "Bismarck."
She pointed to her own chest and said, "Ci-an." He smiled and began to speak again, less anxious now. She sat on her bed and waited for him to show her what he wanted. He stayed where he was, talking, until it came to her that the talk itself might be what this one wished.
A moment after she.had thought that, though, the white man left the chair and came for her. She stood and removed the robe, and saw that he was struck by her beauty. There was a time when she had imagined all men struck in this way, but that was another time, and her dreams went a different way now. She lay on the bed, feeling the coolness of the quilt on her legs and back, and watched him remove his coat and unfasten the suspenders that held up his pants. When he saw that she was watching, he turned away.
She closed her eyes, not to embarrass him. She heard his breathing, she heard him stumble getting out of his pants. The room was still a long time. She felt him watching her, and then she felt his hands, as soft as a woman's, touching her ankles, then the curves of her feet.
When she opened her eyes, he was kneeling at the end of her bed, kissing her feet. She could not feel the kisses themselves, but the places where his lips had touched were wet, and she felt the coolness.
There was a circle at the top of the white man's head, barren of hair, and she saw that he had not removed his shirt or his tie. He pushed his face deeper into her feet, making eating noises, and she picked her head up off the pillow a few inches to watch more closely. The old woman had told her white people did not understand the beauty of bound feet.
He stayed at the foot of her bed with his face buried in her feet a long time, and when he emerged she saw that he was erect. The old woman was wrong about that too.
The white people's shafts were not in proportion to the size of their noses, they were the size of their noses.
The white man climbed onto the bed, as tentative as a pet who knows he does not belong there. He crawled, hands and knees, until he was over her face. His own face was pink and damp. She closed her eyes and waited. The white man lowered himself gently, again speaking words she did not understand, until his soft body was draped over hers like the final disease. He kissed her eyes and cheeks; she did not move. She felt the shaking in his arms and chest, and heard it in his voice. She thought she felt his tears on her cheeks, but the white man was naturally wet, and it was difficult to know.
He entered her more rudely than he had approached. There was a sudden jab, and then she could feel his small shaft working in and out, as if at the finish of the race. Which it was. The white man spent himself in the time it took to swallow a piece of beef. She wondered at the connection.
He left her body the way he had come to it, lifting himself slowly off until she felt the singing of her skin. She opened her eyes as he backed off the bed, and when she could, she swung her legs over the side, stood up, and wrapped herself in her robe.
The white man had turned away to dress, and stood on one foot as he put the other into his trousers. She went to her window and looked out, willing the friend of Wild Bill to come to her room soon. In this way she ignored the white man's shame, and her own. lb acknowledge it was to feed it.
She waited for him to leave the room, but he stayed. When she brought her eyes back inside, he was standing against the door, wearing his coat and vest and trousers and shoes again, holding his hat in his hands. It was as if he had just come in.
He began to speak to her again, a rush of quick words that stopped as suddenly as they had started. The white men fornicated and spoke in the same manner. They had only one speed. She listened to the words with her eyes properly lowered. She had no desire to insult the pitiful or the lame.
When he had stopped speaking he came to her again. He knelt where she stood and kissed her hands, and then he stood up—his eyes had tears now, she was sure—bowed, and left her room.
A moment later, she saw him appear on the street, moving faster, hiding his face in the collar of his coat. She watched him walk a block west, and then turn left, to the south, in the direction of the cemetery. The white man's posture changed as he left Chinatown, his gait slowed, and as she watched him, she saw that he would return.
Charley Utter got back to Deadwood on Friday afternoon, a day ahead of the Clippinger man. He rode through town holding the pouch with fifty copies of the
Cheyenne Leader
over his head and delivered them to A. W. Merrick at the offices of the
Black Hills Pioneer
, and was told there of Bill's death.
His distinct feeling, from the moment he heard the words, was that one half of himself was gone.
"A common drunk?" he said. He remembered lying under the
pine tree after he had nearly drowned, realizing Bill was incomplete. Now, in Bill's absence, he saw the other side. It was a balance between them.
A. W. Merrick nodded, pleased to have a chance to tell it again. "Bill was holding aces and eights," he said, "and the coward Jack McCall came up from behind, pistol drawn, and fired once into the back of his head."
The newspaperman watched to see how Charley took it. "Doc Pierce said he'd never seen a prettier corpse, that Bill's fingers were just like marble." He paused again to see how that set before he went on. "The ball tore a perfect cross, coming out his cheek."
Charley stood dead still, feeling the newspaperman's eyes on him, feeling the words he'd said working on all the years of his life, pressing into them, changing them. Changing him. Not only what he was, but what he had been. The newspaperman had taken a pencil off the desk and prepared to record Charley's words.
Charley held on. "What are your feelings?" the newspaperman said.
Charley shook his head. "I don't have a thing to say in the newspaper," he said.
"This is for Bill," the newspaperman said. "He oughtn't to pass from this world to the next unmourned."
Charley looked across the counter. "Has anybody written his wife?" he said.
The newspaperman wrote that down, and then answered without, looking at him. "There has been some conjecture that there was none," he said. "Can you verify a legal marriage?" Charley reached over the desk and took the pencil out of A. W. Merrick's hand. The newspaperman yelped.
"A common drunk?" Charley said again. A moment had passed.
"It happened in a split second," the newspaperman said. He cradled his wrist where Charley had touched him. "Before anyone could sense trouble. It was like lightning, or a flood. An act of God."
"It's no act of God to shoot a man in the back of the head," Charley said. "That's man-made."
Merrick shrugged and took a step away. "I think you fractured my wrist," he said, Charley having refused to notice he was carrying it.
"What happened to the assassin?" Charley said.
"Tried by a miner's court at the Gem Theater, and released,"
Merrick said. "His claim was upheld that Bill shot his brother in Abilene, and had vowed to murder the whole family on sight."
Charley remembered Abilene and swooned at the years that had passed, the things that were gone. "Where is this avenging angel?" he said.
The newspaperman held on to his wrist, insisting on his injury. "He took a horse and headed out alone in the direction of Fort Laramie," he said. "Jack McCall is his name, but he is known by his association with cats."
Charley turned and started out the door. His legs hurt, and he was tired and dirty. "Are you after him?" the newspaperman said.
Charley stopped. He breathed deeply before he answered, and waited until he was sure he could talk. "There is no hurry for circumstances to catch up with Mr. McCall," he said.
As Charley left, the newspaperman had overcome his injuries and was writing down his words.
Charley took the gelding to the livery stable and told the boy there to feed him and brush him down. The horse was good to Brick Pomeroy's word, and would run as long as you asked him. Charley thought he would keep the gelding, even though he now had no interest in the pony express. He thought he might give the business to his brother Steve. He gave the livery boy five dollars and walked back to his camp on the Whitewood. Malcolm was gone from the wagon, leaving only sour sheets and the smell of urine and aired whiskey.
He stood in front of the wagon, thinking of how things changed. The boy passed through his thoughts like a piece of A. W. Merrick's newspaper blown across the street. The killer Jack McCall appeared and disappeared too, weightless.
He held on.
He took the mattress out of the wagon and stripped the sheets. He filled a pail with water from the creek and scrubbed down the floor of the wagon. He took the sheets and his dirty shirts into Chinatown and left them at a laundry. He picked up fresh clothes. He was nauseated at the smell of Chinese food, and the sight of rows of dead ducks hung on lines outside the windows. He walked back to the wagon to collect his toilet, and then to the bathhouse. The Bottle Fiend was at his station next to the door, holding on to a sack of bottles.
"Hot water," Charley said, and handed him a dollar.
The Bottle Fiend did not seem to recognize him, and Charley wondered if he had truer instincts than people with unmolested brains. If he saw inside Charley, and didn't recognize him.
Charley sat in the tub while the soft-brain heated water. After a while the Bottle Fiend spoke, and Charley saw he had been silent out of respect. "I don't believe nothin' I heard about Wild Bill," he said. "That he shot that man's family connections back in Kansas."
Charley said, "Bill shot six men in Kansas, including Phil Coe and the M'Kandass cousins. Nobody named McCall, in Kansas or anywhere else."
The Bottle Fiend said, "I don't believe nothin' I heard. I listen to my heart." Charley wondered again if the Bottle Fiend remembered him. He sat quietly as the tub filled, a bucket at a time.
"There is things in the future the newspaper can't tell," the Bottle Fiend said a few minutes later. "I told Bill right on this spot, and he said, 'If you see this man with the little-bitty gun, tell him there's about to be a cheap funeral in town.'" The Bottle Fiend shook his head. "I ain't seen him yet to tell him. It wouldn't make no difference if I did. Who listens to a soft-brain?"
Charley closed his eyes. He didn't inquire who it was with the gun. What was revealed was revealed, and you couldn't hurry it, asking a soft-brain questions. To learn, you had to see a thing on its own terms. And sometimes, understanding it, you came to love it.
Bill.
"I shot myself once," the Bottle Fiend said, "it's like having your picture took. You see them same colored bubbles, and one of them's got yourself inside it."
The Bottle Fiend looked at Charley then, and maybe into him. "Don't worry none about Bill, he just took one of them bubbles to heaven." For maybe two seconds there was a connection, brain to brain, and then as fast as it had come, it went, and the soft-brain was soft-brained again. "Don't ever eat poison eggs," he said. "Poison eggs is worse than hanging."
Charley washed himself with soap and sent the Bottle Fiend for two raw eggs, which he used to soften his hair. There was a condition that hair reached where it matted together so thick you couldn't even comb out the wildlife, where all you could do for it was to cut it off. He thought of Bill's hair, which was thinner than his own, and softer. It seemed to clean itself in the rain.
He held on.
He stood up and dried. He put on a clean white shirt, clean
pants, clean socks. The Chinese put starch in everything, and the pants went on like new boots.
"I don't expect you'll be back now," the Bottle Fiend said.
"I'll be back."
"When you ain't so sad," the Bottle Fiend said.
"There are some things I got to take care of," Charley said.
The Bottle Fiend nodded. "He's up on Boot Hill," he said. "He ain't marked yet, but it's the one with all the flowers."
Charley gave him another dollar, and walked to the cemetery. He followed the wagon road over the Whitewood on a little wooden bridge that shifted under his weight, and then he climbed about a hundred yards up the side of a 3500-foot hill on the east side of town. The cemetery was in a natural clearing. There wasn't a grave there that had settled yet. The newest ones, the dirt was still piled a foot above level. The older ones, the dirt had sunk below level, leaving a pocket in the earth, a place that looked like you might want to lie down there too.
Bill's grave was toward the north end of the cemetery, with a nice view of the gulch, where he could have looked things over and told the rest of them up there what was going on. Charley thought he would have liked the spot. The dirt was fresh and pieces of it still held the shape of the spades that had been used to dig it. There were wildflowers at the head and the foot, and a fresh-cut tree stump someone had written on.
A Brave Man; the Victim of an Assassin
J. B. (Wild Bill) Hickok, aged 48years;
murdered by Jack McCall, Aug. 2, 1876.
Charley pictured Bill receiving the news that he'd just been memorialized into old age. He held on. "We should never have gone in that canoe," he said.