(1986) Deadwood (3 page)

The boy would not stop, though, except to drink. He got drunk and threw mud from one side of the hole into the other. Bill and Charley got drunk too, quieter now, and watched until the boy hit himself in the head with the shovel and stumbled down into the bed he'd, dug for the horse. It might have been two feet deep by then. He landed on his back and lay still. Then he turned over and got his knees under him. He seemed to settle there, and then he just fell over and went to sleep.

That's where they found him in the morning, still asleep. Bill picked him up under the arms, so when he opened his eyes he was already standing up. There was blood on both of the boy's hands where blisters had broken and he'd worn through the skin underneath. So he was useless to work. He held on to" Bill for a minute, finding his balance and looking around him, shocked, like raiders had come in the night, shot the horse, and torn up the earth.

"I got to finish it," the boy said.

"Leave the damn horse be," Bill said. He'd done all his laughing the night before. There were noises from the other wagons as the whores kicked each other awake. Some of the Chinese had kept their fires through the night and the smell of their food was everywhere. There wasn't a clean breath of air in two miles. Charley thought of fingers inside those mouths.

"You can have my mule," the boy said to Bill. "He ain't much . . ." The boy's mule was tied with some of the others. They were blowing to get started. One of the whores was screaming at her whore man over at the other end of camp. Bill didn't like any kind of emotion before his morning cocktail, and climbed up into the wagon and poured himself a drink into a glass. He sat up there, sipping it and chewing jerky, while the camp got itself ready to leave.

After a while he climbed down the other side, walked up the hill, and disappeared into the bushes. The boy hitched the wagon and threw Bill's saddle into the back. Charley washed and shaved and cleaned his teeth. He had a real mirror to shave in. The boy said, "You think Mr. Hickok might change his mind? I wisht he'd take my mule."

"Bill doesn't want to talk about transportation this morning," Charley said. By now old Peerless was swollen twice his regular size around the stomach, and the place where the boy's ball had gone into him was black with insects. Bill had had that horse a long time.

He came out of the bushes just as the sun broke the sky over the Black Hills. He'd combed his hair and tied it in a knot. He walked down the hill, right past the wagon. Charley thought he might not have seen them—you could never tell when Bill wasn't sure of himself, he didn't give anything away—but he passed Charley and the boy and went right to Al Swearingen's rig. The whore man sat on his cushions eating boiled eggs and watched him come.

"It's a beautiful day to enter the Hills," Swearingen said. "An omen for the future."

"You got somebody can handle horses?" Bill said.

The whore man smiled and swelled. "I got these girls trained to do everything I tell them," he said. "Completely obedient."

"Get one that can drive," Bill said, "and move your person inside the wagon." The whore man didn't blink. "Don't show me your face again," Bill said.

The whore man patted down his beard. Everybody in earshot stopped what they were doing to watch. "Al Swearingen drives his own wagon," the whore man said.

"Then Al Swearingen mistood his omen," Bill said.

The whore man looked at Bill half a minute, long enough to see what he needed to, and then called one of the whores from another wagon. Smooth Bones. From what Charley had seen, she was the best of the lot. She wasn't more than seventeen or eighteen, the same age as the boy, and if she'd had teeth in front she might of been pretty. Of course, if she'd had teeth in front they mightn't of named her Smooth Bones too. You could what if yourself right out of this world.

She sat on the cushion next to Swearingen and he gave her the reins. "Tell that boy it ain't settled," he said. And then he crawled into the back.

Bill sent the boy ahead to scout, mostly to get him out of his sight. Thirty-two wagons were safe from Indians. He climbed up next to Charley and said, "I ought to of finished it and got the whole episode out of my mind."

Bill could put things out of his mind, once they were dead. The boy moved a quarter of a mile out in front, and beyond him were the Hills. The wagons strung out in back of Charley and Bill, the wheels creaked and the mules blew and complained and once, just after they'd straightened into a line, Charley looked back and saw old Peerless lying in the dirt, next to a hole that was supposed to be his grave. It looked like God Himself had dropped him out of the sky, and he'd bounced once when he hit.

Let the Indians figure that out.

They came into deadwood downhill, from the south, the gulch fell out of the mountains, long and narrow, following the Whitewood Creek, and where things widened enough for a town sign, that was Deadwood. It was noon, July 17. The place looked miles long and yards wide, half of it tents. The Whitewood joined a smaller creek—the Deadwood—at the south end and ran the length of the town. The mud was a foot deep, and every kind of waste in creation was thrown into the street to mix with it. The mountains that defined the boundaries were spare of live trees. There were thousands of the dead, charred black trunks lying across each other on the ground.

"How's it look to you?" Bill said. He was handling the reins, sitting tall and handsome, nodding at voices when somebody called to him from the street. The word of who it was in the wagon got through town before Charley and Bill made a hundred yards.

"Like something out of the Bible," Charley said. They rode through, the mud sticking to the wheels and the mules until it broke off from its own weight. It took most of an hour to get the train down Main Street, stopping to shake hands and once to give an interview to a reporter from the
Black Hills Pioneer
. Although he enjoyed a taste for the printed word, Charley winced to hear there was already a paper in town.

They went farther north, and the population changed. Whores and roughs and gamblers stood in the doorways, holding drinks, shooting their guns into the air. It was a part of the city called the badlands, and it was as far as the whore wagons went. The place was shabby, but the ladies there looked better to Charley than the load they'd delivered. Some stood in the windows, as good as naked. "What part of the Bible?" Bill said, when they were alone again.

"Where God got angry," Charley said.

A hundred people suddenly came together in the street in front of them. Bill steadied the mules, and one of the men climbed halfway onto the wagon with them and shook Bill's hand. He was wearing a cheap leather coat, fringed, and two pistols.

"Captain Jack Crawford," the man said. Bill gave him his left hand. "On behalf of the city of Dead wood, Dakota Territory, I would like to welcome you and your party, and express the hope that you are here to settle and prosper. We can use men of your ilk here."

Ilk again.

"Thank you," Bill said.

The man seemed to notice Charley then, but couldn't bring himself to let go of Bill's hand. "Captain Jack Crawford," he said to Charley. "Scout, poet, and duly authorized captain of the Black Hills Minutemen. We can always use volunteers, lads, with the Indian situation."

"Charles Utter," Charley said. "Does this place have a bathhouse?"

The question drew its share of comment from the crowd, which

Captain Jack pretended not to hear. He pointed back up the street and said it was five blocks on the left. "You passed it on the way in," he said. Then he looked around and said, "It's too bad there's not more who have asked the question." Before they could get him off the wagon, Captain Jack had told them where to graze the mules and where to find women, and that he had personally ridden with Custer and Buffalo Bill Cody.

They turned around and found a place to camp on the other side of the Whitewood Creek, between the badlands and the bathhouse, across the street from the Betwix-Stops Saloon, which was a canvas tent. The proprietor had turned two barrels upside down in the doorway and laid a piece of lumber across them, and was selling whiskey from the States at fifty cents a shot.

They left the wagon three yards from the creek and blocked the wheels with logs. The boy took the mules to the north end of town beyond the badlands, where the canyon widened and the ground was flat and grassy. Charley got his blankets from inside the wagon and threw them over the top to air out. Bill sat on a tree stump curling his hair around his finger.

"I've got a feeling about,this camp," he said, "a premonition."

Charley stopped his chores. He had known those who made a career of black feelings, but Bill was never like that, and Charley took this seriously.

A month after the shooting in Abilene, for instance, a reporter appeared from Philadelphia—that was a class of paper-collars Charley would like to have studied, reporters—and told Bill how Bill had stood in the middle of the street, Phil Coe and four of his brothers shooting at him from every cowardly angle the area afforded, and that Bill had operated there, calm as an engine, picking them off one by one. The reporter said, "How do you sustain your courage in the face of death's odds?"

Bill never blinked. He said, "When you know in your heart the bullet hasn't been made with your name on it, there is no tremble in your hand at the weight of a Colt."

The reporter took it down word for word—Bill had to say it twice for him—and then he got drunk four nights straight and then he got on the stage east and went home to Philadelphia. Bill said later he was a good reporter, although he never straightened him out on how many Coes he killed that day—or how many policemen—but what he said about knowing the bullet hadn't been made yet for him, that was true. He'd told Charley much the same thing.

The change in him came with the blood disease, or with Agnes, or with losing his sight. Charley was not sure those were separate things.

"What kind of premonition?" he said.

"This is the last camp," Bill said.

"We could go somewhere else," Charley said. "We're not married to this place yet."

Bill shook his head. "There's something here for us," he said. He looked up and around, and Charley believed that in his own way Bill could see the hills around them clearer than he could. It had something to do with the way things connected for him. "You don't wind up in a place like this for no reason," Bill said.

Boone May was lying in a bed on the second floor of the gem Theater on top of Lurline Monti Verdi. He loved to say her name. He was finished now, but he liked to lie on top of her and watch her face when she panicked. After the passion left her, Lurline's thoughts always went to suffocation.

Boone May was oversize—he had a head on him a foot across— and he would lie on her until her breathing changed. Then she would push at his chest with those little white hands. "Boone, honey, I can't breathe . . ." And a couple of minutes later she would be pounding his head with her fists, screaming he was killing her. Boone loved the feel of those soft little fists against his head as much as the sound of her name. Nobody ever came to help.

Screaming didn't mean a thing at the Gem Theater, and even if it did, everybody knew when Boone was upstairs, and he was the last man on God's earth you wanted to walk in on during fornication.

He waited for her now, patiently. There was a chair beside the bed, where he'd left his clothes. All except his underwear, which he only removed under sheets. His pants were buckskin, and he'd hung them over the back. On top of that was a leather bag, drawn together at the top by a piece of rawhide. Frank Towles's head was inside it. There was a two-hundred-dollar reward for Frank, but the way things had got between Boone and Sheriff Bullock, he'd have to ride back to Cheyenne to collect. That's where Frank was wanted.

Boone May didn't know where it went wrong between him and Seth Bullock. The way it always worked, when road agents was identified, Bullock always sent him and W. H. Llewellyn out to bring them back. W.H. was Boone's partner. They hired out as messenger guards for payrolls and gold shipments together, and they both took it as a compliment that the sheriff always came to them to bring in the worst agents. The way the business worked, somebody always got shot, them or the agents. Boone May had begun to see that the sheriff didn't care who that was, and did not take that as such a compliment.

She began to push at him now, and he smiled. He had teeth the size of a dirt farmer's fingernails. Lurline Monti Verdi was a singer and a blackjack dealer, and she fucked more highwaymen than there was bullets to shoot them. She liked that risky feeling. The head would be a surprise.

"All right, Boone," she said. "Get off now . . ."

He lifted his legs up off the bed to put more of his weight on her chest. Her mouth was painted into a little heart, and he could see the tip of her tongue in there in the dark. She began to squirm, but each way she rolled he moved against it, not letting her move an inch.

Her teeth clenched and she bucked, but he stayed on top, watching her mouth. It wasn't the feel of her underneath him now, it was all in her face. And then she begged him. "Please, honey, I can't breathe. Really, this time . . ." And then one of the fists hit his ear.

"You're killing me." She said that over and over, banging him, turning red and then white, and he watched it until he was sure it was real, until she quit hitting him with her fists, until she couldn't scream. In the end, her eyes came wide open and fixed on him and waited to see if he was going to call it off or kill her.

Boone stared at her, feeling the warm, sweet places where her fists had hit his head. He put his hands against the mattress on either side of her and pushed up half a foot. She took that much air.

Boone looked down at her breasts, the scar across her stomach— Doc Howe had made a mess of that, sewed her up with fish line— the little tangle of hair down where her legs come together. Boone had hung a man last year in Hill City who married a whore and then killed her for all the men she'd had. They paid Boone fifteen dollars to do it. He set the killer on his horse under a pine tree and put a rope around his neck—for fifteen dollars you didn't get much in the way of trappings—but before he slapped the horse out from under him, he asked if he had any last words. The man looked him dead in the eye and said, "Boone May, you know why God put hair on a woman's pussy?"