(1986) Deadwood (28 page)

She did not know what had turned him sad. "Bismarck," he said, pointing to himself. Then, with another finger, he pointed at her and said, "Ci-an." And then he crossed the fingers.

She closed her eyes and thought of Wild Bill's friend. In this moment, she suddenly knew, he would begin to find her.

She heard the sounds of Bismarck's undressing, and opened her eyes long enough to see him standing on one foot, pulling his pants leg inside out. He was not as careful with his clothing now as he had been before. He.stumbled; she closed her eyes, and waited. His breathing grew louder as he fought with his pants, and then grew louder, a different way, as he came close.

He touched her hand first, the one she had put the ring on. He held it gently, cupping it as if it would spill, and then he spoke into the palm and kissed each of her fingers, beginning with the smallest and ending with the thumb, where he kissed the ring itself.

He spoke to her again, kissing her arm and then her shoulder. She smelled the beef he had eaten in his sweat. His voice became more melancholy as he spoke. She had no interest in what his words meant, but she thought that perhaps, like herself, he would be happier without his life. She thought that one day, if there was time, she would end his sadness.

Bismarck sat up suddenly, as if he had heard her thought, and walked across the room to the table where she kept the paper and charcoal she used to draw her flowers. He took a piece of the charcoal and several sheets of the paper and came back to the bed. He began to sketch. She watched his lines and saw white men had no talent for drawing.

He drew a picture first of a man. It was not an important man, for he placed him in the corner of the paper. The man had stick arms, a single line for a neck, and a mouth as narrow as a bird's. He drew hair and a tie and a hat. He drew shoes. Then he pointed to the man he had drawn and said, "Bismarck."

The next figure he drew was larger. He put it on the other side of the paper, in profile, so it watched the man. The second figure was sticks too, but on this one he drew fingers, and on one of those he put a ring.

He pointed at the second figure and said, "Wife." She did not know the word, but understood the meaning. Then he drew mountains between the figures, and stick deer, and water.

She looked at the drawing and said, "I will end your sadness, if there is time. But not now." He smiled at her, not understanding the words. He put the charcoal against the paper again and drew an X across the larger figure.

She thought Bismarck's wife was dead. She sat up against the bed board, keeping the sheet over her breasts, and took the charcoal from his hand. She drew a likeness of Song on a clean paper. It took only a few seconds—she had drawn his face many times, and knew the tricks that showed the intelligence in his eyes, and the gentleness of his expression. And when she had finished, she drew an X over him too, to show that he was also gone.

The drawing pleased Bismarck, and he took the paper and charcoal from her hands and dropped them on the floor. His eyes teared again and he buried his face in her neck. The smell of the cows was stronger now, and she closed her eyes and held herself motionless.

It was a long time before he moved between her legs. She felt him tremble, and before he entered her, he had spilled himself on her legs. Like a boy. He stayed on top of her, with his head pushed deep into the curve of her jaw, until the trembling stopped and his breathing evened.

Later, after he had dressed, he returned to her on the bed and knelt on the floor. He was not sad now. He spoke into her hand again, and then kissed the thumb and the ring he had fit over it.

He left her a few minutes later, closing her door quietly behind him. She lay in her bed, and from there she saw the drawing of Song on the floor, and the drawing of Bismarck and his wife beside it.

Dead faces in her room.

She looked at the ring on her thumb and wondered what kind of ceremony that had been.

Charley did not set out to become drinking partners with a soft-brain, but those things happened when you were kind to the underprivileged. Every morning he sat in his tub with the weight in his head and a weakness in his legs and arms. He sat there until it was time to begin drinking, when he would give the Bottle Fiend five dollars and send him for J. Fred McCurnin swoop whiskey. Charley couldn't do chores for himself until he had thinned out his blood.

The Bottle Fiend would return with the bottle and sit in his chair, remarking on Charley's new bites and bruises, until, a few swallows into the morning, it would suddenly seem cruel to Charley that anybody ought to have to go through life soft-brained and sober, and he'd pass the bottle back and forth with him half the morning.

And sometimes, after he'd dressed, he took the Bottle Fiend with him to the badlands and bought him drinks at Nuttall and Mann's. The Bottle Fiend didn't talk much when he drank. When he'd drunk enough, in fact, he didn't talk at all. It came to Charley one afternoon in the bar that Bill had never talked much either, and that from a conversational point of view, there wasn't much to choose one over the other.

He was not surprised. Drinking depended more on understanding than talk anyway.

Charley liked the Bottle Fiend for being straightforward, but had no idea what went on inside his head. And without that, there wasn't any understanding. It was more like drinking alone. But that had been done before too, somewhere in the history of the West.

And that is how it happened that the morning Charley finally ran into Mrs. Langrishe again, he was in the company of the soft-brain, both of them freshly bathed and drunk. Mrs. Langrishe was coming out of Farnum's carrying packages that pushed against her chest and distorted it in an agreeable way.

Charley took off his hat and nodded. He was holding an open bottle of J. Fred in his other hand. "Good morning," he said. She stopped, and took a moment to remember who it was.

"Mr. Utter," she said. "I thought you had disappeared."

"I've been laying low," he said. She looked into his face, and then into the Bottle Fiend's face. "This is my friend, the Bottle Man," he said. She smiled at the soft-brain, and he looked at his feet. Charley was not embarrassed.

"He is shy with strangers," Charley said. Then he turned to the Bottle Fiend and said, "Mrs. Langrishe runs the theater."

The soft-brain looked up from his feet at Charley, but would not acknowledge her. "Is she the one that bites you?" he said.

Charley smiled at Mrs. Langrishe, a horrible smile, and said, "Sometimes he gets things confused."

She smiled back at him, and the heat came into his skin. He had been with Lurline again the night before, at it one way or another all night long, but the heat was in him again. "I missed you at Bill's funeral," she said. "I never had the opportunity to tell you how sorry I felt." She was still holding the package. "He seemed like such a gentle man," she said.

Charley said, "He had a lot of sides." Then he handed the Bottle Fiend the whiskey and replaced his hat. He reached for her packages.

"I'll tote these for you," he said. She gave up the packages and— a peculiar gesture—she ran her fingers along the hollow of his cheek.

"I know how you feel," she said. And he wondered if that was true, and if it was, how far it went. He smelled the perfume on her hand—it was different from Lurline's—and every bit of blood in his body was congregated in his head or his peeder, pounding the tom-toms. He adjusted the packages and began to walk Mrs. Lang-rishe home. The Bottle Fiend followed them, a yard or two behind. Every now and then he would stop to splash a little whiskey into his mouth. The Bottle Fiend could not drink and walk at the same time.

Charley was not embarrassed. He refused to be embarrassed of his friends.

Mrs. Langrishe studied Charley as they walked. It was something about actresses that nothing they did ever seemed out of place. "I heard you had begun a pony express," she said. They had come to Shine Street, and turned west, uphill. The trouble with living in a gulch, besides floods and fires, was that every time you made a turn, it was uphill.

Charley shook his head. "We held a race for the business," he said. "Myself against Clippinger. We won by half a day, but Clip-pinger never quit his line, and my brother Steve got put in jail for thirty days for shooting somebody's pig back in Fort Laramie during the celebration." The news that Steve had been put in jail for shooting pigs had come in a letter, delivered by Clippinger Pony Express.

She smiled at him. "How ever did he come to shoot a pig?"

Charley looked behind him and saw the Bottle Fiend had just turned the corner. He stopped, waiting for him to catch up. "Excuse me," he said, "he gets confused."

"Your brother?" she said.

"Well, him too," Charley said. "But I was speaking of the Bottle Man. My brother Steve is thirty-six years old, and he's never shot anything on purpose yet." Mrs. Langrishe did not pursue the matter. The Bottle Fiend caught up, and they started back up the hill.

"So you abandoned the mail line?" she said.

Charley shrugged. "It's hard to say in these matters who abandoned what." She laughed at that and gave him that feeling he was clever in a way he didn't quite see. He smelled her and watched her all the way up the hill.

The house was two stories. It was whitewashed and had a porch and an ice-blue door. There were windows everywhere, more windows than house. It didn't look safe. She held the door for them, but the Bottle Fiend would not come inside. Even when Mrs. Langrishe offered him a glass for his whiskey, he shook his head and refused to move. "Relieving a bottle fiend of his bottle is no inducement," Charley told her.

"Well, perhaps I could find a bottle for him inside," she said.

The Bottle Fiend said, "Perhaps indeed."

They looked at each other for a minute, and then Mrs. Langrishe and Charley went inside. The Bottle Fiend stayed where he was. Charley followed her into a sitting room and put the packages on a chair. The walls of the room were covered with pictures and marquee signs from shows Jack Langrishe had done in the East. There were certifications of appreciation, and the key to the city of Gary, Indiana, hanging over the piano. The windows went from a foot above the floor almost to the ceiling, all of them closed. The room had a natural coolness.

"Mr. Langrishe must still be at the theater," she said. She sat down on the davenport and patted the seat next to her. The heat poured off Charley again. They sat so close her face was out of focus. "My husband has been consumed with the theater since the storm," she said.

"It was an opening night, all right," he said. He got that unintentionally clever feeling again. She tittered, and he saw that he was right.

"Poor Jack," she said. "He's there night and day. Rehearsing the players, overseeing the new roof. The reviews of Camille ruined his disposition."

"I don't believe I saw the reviews," he said. "I've been lying low . . ." She had a copy on the table, under a picture album. It was from the
Black Hills Daily Times
. "
Miss Flowers
" it said, "
is poor at dying, because she generally dies too hard. Her positions are not good in her passion scenes; when she should swell out like a mountain she sinks in like a gulch. That's wrong in this country—Camille is not her forte.
"

She leaned over his back as he read the review. "He is completely consumed," she said, in a way that made Charley think of eating, and then of the inside of Mrs. Langrishe's mouth. And then, against his will, he thought of her biting him.

He wondered if Lurline had turned him left-brained forever.

While he was thinking that, Mrs. Langrishe hung a short, soft hum behind his ear, a sound that could have been taken two ways. It seemed to Charley that everything about Mrs. Langrishe you could take two ways.

"What consumes you, Mr. Utter?" she said.

There, she did it again.

Charley swallowed and tried to think of what was consuming him. It wasn't much of a time to think. "Something," he said.

"But what?"

Charley shook his head. "It isn't one thing, like the theater," he said. "What's after me now doesn't have any focus." She left her hand on his shoulder, and moved it to the side of his neck. He felt his own pulse where her fingers touched him.

Nothing had any focus. Not himself, not her face. Charley saw that she was nodding. "I understand," she said.

He opened his mouth, wondering what would come out next, and at the same time he looked past Mrs. Langrishe's shoulder, trying to see something clear before things got more out of focus, and found himself staring at the Bottle Fiend, who was pressed into one of the windows in a way that had flattened his face.

The sight startled Charley—his nerves weren't good when he was drinking regularly—and Mrs. Langrishe felt the change in him, and looked back over her shoulder too. She issued a little cry then, and later on Charley would not be able to say for sure if it was the sight of the soft-brain pressed into the window that caused it, or the sight of him falling through.

He came into the living room and rolled across the floor. The glass seemed to follow him, maybe chasing him. The Bottle Fiend had been open-eyed and open-mouthed as he fell—that much Charley would swear on the Bible—but by the time Charley got to the place on the floor where he had finally stopped rolling, the soft-brain was drawn into himself, curled into a tight ball with his eyes squeezed shut. He looked like he expected to continue the fall momentarily.

There were small cuts on the Bottle Fiend's arms and hands, and one that looked more like a tear across his neck. Charley touched his arm, but the Bottle Fiend would not open his eyes. "Are you alive?" he said.

The Bottle Fiend did not answer.

"Are you cut somewhere I can't see?"

The Bottle Fiend lay motionless on his side. The glass spread out behind him like broken wings. Charley felt his eyes fill, he had no idea why.

Mrs. Langrishe bent over the soft-brain from the other side. "He's cut," she said.

Hearing that, the Bottle Fiend opened his eyes. He sat up and looked at his arms and hands while Mrs. Langrishe went into the back of the house for bandages. Charley said, "This is the last time I take you anywhere polite," but the soft-brain didn't seem to hear him.

He was staring at the cuts like a banker that had found six piles of money all at the same time. When he did speak, it was more to himself than Charley. He said, "I got inside."

"You might of used the door," Charley said, but then he saw the soft-brain wasn't talking about houses. He thought he'd broken into a bottle.

Mrs. Langrishe was back in a minute carrying a bowl of water, alcohol, and bandages. She sat on the floor between Charley and the soft-brain and began to wash him up. She cleaned the cuts one at a time, beginning at his neck and then working down. First with water and then alcohol, and then she wrapped them in cotton gauze. The Bottle Fiend watched her and from time to time, when he reached in to touch one of the openings in his skin, she pushed his hand away.

It was a thing about women and injuries that Charley had noticed before, that once you turned one over to them, it was theirs.

"I got inside," the Bottle Fiend said again. He looked around the room, and then at Mrs. Langrishe. He began to smile.

"This is a house," Charley said. "A bottle is a bottle." Mrs. Langrishe stopped working on the Bottle Fiend's arm and gave Charley a look. "He thinks it's a bottle," he said, and looked to see if that explained it. "My friend doesn't look at things the same as most people."

"I surmised that," she said, and returned to the cuts. She wiped away some blood and stared into the soft-brain's palm. Then she reached in, as delicate as fate, and pulled out a long sliver of glass.

Charley noticed her nails were painted red and thought of them on his chest. That's where Lurline put hers. She never did anything where you needed a mirror to see the mark.

"You see," Charley said, "to him, there's secrets in bottles."

Without looking up, the Bottle Fiend said, "There is secrets in bottles, sometimes I heard them." The cuts Mrs. Langrishe hadn't attended yet bled and ran down his arms to his elbows and fingers, finding the lowest places, and dropped from there onto the floor.

Mrs. Langrishe's floors, like anybody else's, were soft and warped, and the blood ran into the cracks between the boards. The Bottle Fiend was looking at the walls now.

"Do you like my pictures?" Mrs. Langrishe said.

The Bottle Fiend shut his eyes. "It's all right," she said. "You can come back sometime and look at them closer." As she said that, she smiled at Charley.

"Whence do they come?" the Bottle Fiend said.

"People paint them," she said. "Artists."

"No," he said, "I mean, whence do they come?"

Mrs. Langrishe stopped and thought. "From secrets," she said after a while. "Secrets inside painters." Charley saw that made sense to the Bottle Fiend. He wondered if Mrs. Langrishe knew about his secrets too.

"There's secrets inside me," the soft-brain said.

"There's secrets in everybody," she said, and looked at Charley. In the accident, his peeder had temporarily lost its sense of purpose, but it recovered itself now. She seemed to know that too.

"I knowed Bill was going to get shot," the soft-brain said. "But that ain't a secret now."

"No," she said, "not now."

Charley sat on his heels and looked at the Bottle Fiend's face. He waited for what had happened to Bill to reveal itself, but the Bottle Fiend shook his head. A line of blood appeared from the bandage on his neck and ran into his shirt. "A man with a little-bitty gun said so," he said.

"Does he take baths?" Charley said. The Bottle Fiend touched his ears.

"It wouldn't help nothing," he said. "It ain't a secret now."

And that was as much as he would say. Mrs. Langrishe wrapped him from the top down, the tip of her tongue working into her upper lip as she tied the little knots. Charley's legs had begun to hurt, and he took a seat back on the davenport. From there he admired her posture and her concentration, and he noticed the Bottle Fiend had relaxed and put himself in her hands. God had made him a soft-brain, but He'd given him instincts to protect himself. The soft-brain looked at the walls while she tied her knots. "Where is that from?" he said. He was looking at one of the marquee posters.

"It's from a play," she said.

The soft-brain scratched his head. "I never been to a play," he said.

"You'll have to come," Mrs. Langrishe said. "Perhaps Mr. Utter would come with you."

The soft-brain nodded. "We'd be delighted," he said.

That night Charley gave the Bottle Fiend one of his shirts. The Bottle Fiend's regular shirt was covered with blood from the accident, and it didn't have a collar anyway. They both took baths—he had to pay the soft-brain for them both before he would sit in the tub—and met Mrs. Langrishe and her husband at the theater door.

Charley stepped between Mr. Langrishe and the Bottle Fiend before they could shake hands. "He can't shake right now," Charley said. "He's injured his arm."

"Sorry to hear it," Mr. Langrishe said, and looked behind them for the next customers.

"Excuse my husband," Mrs. Langrishe said, as she walked them to their seats. "He is so absorbed in this place . . ." She walked between Charley and the Bottle Fiend, with a hand on each of them. She squeezed Charley's arm when she said that.

The program for the night was not exactly a play. Jack Langrishe had brought in some cancan girls from Cheyenne to fill the week between
Camille
and
Othello
, and among them was a woman named Fannie Garrettson, who had taken up living quarters with Handsome Banjo Dick Brown, the most famous singer in the Black Hills. Banjo Dick was known for the song "The Days of Forty-Nine," which he sang first and last at every performance. Sometimes he cried at the closing words:

My heart is filled with the days of yore, and oft I do repline,

For the days of old, the days of gold, the days of forty-nine.

The song had been written during the California gold rush, but miners were miners, and loyal to what came out of the ground, and not the ground itself.

While the theater filled, the Bottle Fiend turned in his seat, looking at the people in back of them, then at the walls, then at the ceiling. Jack Langrishe had constructed another canvas roof, although this one had less sag. It reminded Charley of the fine line between stubborn and stupid.

The ladies in the audience were dressed like they'd planned it from last week. Some of them had brought opera glasses. Charley smiled, thinking he might buy the Bottle Fiend opera glasses. The lights dimmed then, and Jack Langrishe came out onto the stage, comfortable in the wash of applause, and announced the evening's program and his plans for the cultural affairs of Deadwood. In the end, in a voice that hung in the air after he'd quit, he said, "No one will stop us from building a theater of the arts as great as the cities of Europe."