Authors: Pete Dexter
"I'll try to find the doc," he said. He'd bought her morphine before in Chinatown.
"You'll forgit all about me," she said.
"No, I'll send the doc."
She said, "You can't wait to get away from here."
"That's true," he said.
Doc O. E. Sick was not in, but he'd left a pencil and a pad of paper beside his door for messages. Charley wrote,
I regret to report I got another victim, although this one was none of my doing. Her name is Jane Cannary, and she is staying in my camp and in need of morphine. I will settle accounts at your convenience.
Charley "Colorado Charley" Utter
He went back to the Grand Union for fresh clothes on the way to the bathhouse. Alphonso the Polite himself was behind the desk, wearing his bartender's uniform. Alphonso bowed, Charley bowed back. Alphonso always bowed when he saw Charley, it was not impossible that he was part Chinese.
"There was a lady by, sir," he said.
Charley stopped dead in his tracks. His first thought was that it was Jane, which was a sight more pleasant than his second thought, which was Matilda. "Was she limping?" he said.
Alphonso shook his head. "She carried herself with strength and bearing," he said.
"How old?"
"I couldn't say," he said. Alphonso the Polite never commented on a lady's age. He handed Charley an envelope with his name written in careful script on the side opposite the seal. "She asked me to deliver this personally," he said.
Charley gave Alphonso a dollar and stared at the envelope. It wasn't Matilda's writing, hers was smaller. And she pressed harder into the paper. He put it in his pocket and walked down the hallway to his room.
Dear Mr. Utter,
I received your letter concerning Bills death on the 27th of August, and came as soon as my obligations in St. Louis were fulfilled. I am
staying in room ip of this Hotel, and am Anxious to meet with you to discuss the circumstances frankly.
Thank you for your Prompt attention.
It was signed
Agnes Lake Hickok
.
Charley refolded the note and put it back in the envelope. It slid in easily, as if the matter itself wanted to be put away. He thought of Jane then, drinking whiskey, shooting morphine into her veins, and sitting out in front of his camp claiming that she was Bill's widow.
The first thing Charley determined was to keep Agnes Lake away from the camp. The second thing was to keep Jane drunk. Not wild drunk—he didn't want her shooting off guns to announce herself—but to find the place that bordered on wild, where she turned morose, and to keep her there until Agnes Lake left the Black Hills.
He put the envelope on the table next to his bed and found a clean shirt and fresh socks in the drawer. He liked having a drawer, it was a neatness you could see just sliding it open. In the weeks since Bill's death Charley's orderliness had slipped away from him, and left him open to every kind of trouble the wind picked up and blew his direction. It was unsettling, not choosing your own trouble, and Charley's instincts pulled him in small ways back to his natural protections. He closed the drawer and centered the envelope on the table and headed for the bathhouse. There was a bath at the end of the hall, but Charley was accustomed to the Bottle Fiend's company, and did not like to bathe alone.
The Bottle Fiend was napping in the chair beside the door when Charley came in. His arms were crossed and his chin rested against his chest. He looked ordinary as boiled potatoes. The thought came to Charley that the Bottle Fiend only gave himself away when he talked, or fell through glass windows, or walked up and down Main Street with his gunnysack collecting bottles. It seemed to Charley those things could be avoided.
He stepped up onto the porch and his shadow crossed the Botde Fiend's face, and he opened his eyes. He looked tired and old. Charley never thought of him that way—young or old—and it surprised him to see the age so clear. "You look wilted," he said.
The Bottle Fiend checked the gunnysack next to his chair; the bottles shifted and made flat, musical sounds. "It's the general's pony soldiers," he said.
The general had ordered all his officers and men to bathe, and more than one hundred of them had lined up outside the bathhouse. "They left all these bottles," the soft-brain said, and touched the sack.
Charley said, "Did you remember to charge?"
"American soldiers don't pay for nothing," he said.
"Who told you that?"
"Them."
Charley took off his shirt and pants and sat down in his regular tub. The Bottle Fiend heated water and poured it over his shoulders. "Did the biter die?" he said after a while.
Soft-brain or not, the man had the knack of sliding into a conversation.
Charley said no. He hadn't seen Lurline in three weeks, and then she was sitting with Handsome Banjo Dick Brown at the Eate-phone on Main Street, cutting beefsteak into bite-size pieces for him.
As long as Charley could remember, it was always too much peeder business or none at all. Mostly none at all. "I shook hands with the general," the soft-brain said, "and the lady was there that had us to the theater. She could bite you . . ."
Charley shook his head. "That one's likely to bite something off," he said. He turned in the tub and looked over his shoulder. "What's all this talk of lady biters anyway? I don't remember that you took an interest."
"I heard some things," the soft-brain said. "That you shot Handsome Dick over an upstairs girl."
"I shot him because he was about to shoot me."
"I heard it was an upstairs girl. You bested him in a gunfight, and then give him his life."
"I shot him from under a bed," Charley said.
"Whose bed?"
Charley dropped himself deeper into the tub, until the water covered his shoulders. The soft-brain said, "I heard you was the best gunfighter the Hills has left."
Charley saw where it was going then. He said, "Oh shit."
"They said you was as good as Bill." And a little later, "Bill got shot."
Charley said, "There isn't anybody knows that better than me."
"Gunfighters get shot."
Charley heard the worry in that, and thought worrying must be unnatural to the soft-brain, and regretted bringing it into his life.
"I wasn't intended for that," he said. "It was an accident."
"Because you wanted to get bit."
"Because there isn't anybody that can't be shot." The Bottle Fiend sat still, waiting. Charley's thoughts turned to Lurline; he had ideas to hire her to run a house for him in I^ad, where things were quieter.
He had considered it from every business angle, and couldn't see that it was worse than the other things he'd done for money. It wasn't being a whore man itself that he was against, it was the way whore men treated their girls. His would come and go as they pleased, quit if they wanted. The only rule he'd settled on was daily baths, and some of the upstairs girls had inclinations that way on their own.
The soft-brain said, "Did Bill know that he could get shot too?"
"Don't worry about Bill," he said. "He met God by now, and he was ready. He didn't keep secrets from himself, what he was, and in the end he was ready."
"I'm ready to meet God," the soft-brain said.
"Not yet," Charley said. "There's plenty of time, when things take their natural course."
"Not too much," he said. And Charley wondered at the things that the Bottle Fiend's heart told him, and that they never scared him. "I'm ready," he said, "I got a present."
The Bottle Fiend touched the sack of bottles.
"You going to give all those to God?" Charley said.
"I'm going to turn over my secrets," he said.
And, reflecting on it there in the bath, it seemed like they were talking about the same thing.
The presence of Bill's wife in Deadwood affected Charley's sleep, which was fitful even before her arrival. He lay in bed all night, trying to concentrate on old arguments he'd had with himself over the whorehouse in Lead. Her note lay on the table next to his bed; he could not keep her out of his thoughts. It felt like Bill himself had come back to ask where he'd been the last days of his life. He left his bed before sunrise and collected his gelding at the livery. He rode uphill into the mountains toward Lead, and the sun broke behind him before he reached town. In the sudden warmth he thought for a moment he had gleaned something about night and day and what happened to Bill, that things came to relieve each other. He tried to put that into words but it wouldn't fit.
It was one of the mysteries of his life, the thoughts he had that existed without words. Bill had once said the same thing.
The house he meant to buy was on the north side of Lead, at the lowest elevation in town. There were five bars within a hundred feet, and that was as close to a badlands as Lead had. The house itself had been built for L. D. Kellogg, who was sent out from California by the mining speculator George Hearst to buy the Homestake Mine and every property adjacent. Kellogg had arrived with his wife, and moved out of the house within one week. His wife was intolerant of drinking. The house had stayed empty since—anyone with the two-thousand-dollar asking price preferring to settle in Deadwood.
The structure had eleven rooms and a balcony off the second floor. There were brass door handles and locks, and little hooks in the walls where Mrs. Kellogg had hung pictures. Standing in the living room, you could hear Mr. Hearst's men digging the first mining tunnel in the Black Hills. It was a distant sound, you had to hold still to notice.
Charley stood in the front room now and listened. The house had a peaceful feeling, and while the feeling lasted he walked uphill two hundred yards to the bank, woke the manager, and signed over a draft from the Bank of Colorado for two thousand dollars. It took fifteen minutes to settle the sale—George Hearst owned the bank too.
Charley walked back to the house then, and stood in the front room again, but the place had turned restless. He thought of Bill's wife, waiting in room 19 of the Grand Union Hotel with eyes as cold as frost. He went cold himself, remembering her eyes.
He left the house, crossed the street, and bought himself a bottle. He got on his horse and began to drink—he hadn't drunk so early since the day he shot Handsome Dick Brown.
He had to force the whiskey.
Twice he regurgitated. His nose stung and his eyes watered, but he replaced what he'd lost. He rode in and out of the shadows of trees until he approached Deadwood, where the trees stopped. His balance was impaired, and the third time he leaned over in the saddle to regurgitate, he fell off the horse. He lay still on the ground, holding on to the bottle. The horse put his nose in Charley's stomach and blew. Charley had landed on his back, and it was a while before his breathing pains eased enough to slap the animal's head away.
He shaded his eyes and looked at the horse upside down. He sat up to take another drink, he lay back down. He talked to the horse. He said, "Man was not intended to fear woman until they were married."
The horse blew again, and dropped a thick line of spit onto the ground next to Charley's head. "If you'd hit me with that," he said, "I'd of had to shoot you." As a rule, Charley did not talk to a horse, believing, as he did, that the animal was nothing but a cow with bad nerves. But the gelding was smarter than most, and had seen some things, and Charley felt more comfortable about lying on the ground talking to him then than he did about getting up and trying to ride him.
"It's nothing personal," he said. "Now that I shot Handsome Dick in the leg, I have a reputation to keep, and I can't allow some old bastard who's had his balls cut off to come spitting in my gun-fighter face." He brought the bottle to his lips again, spilling alcohol down his chin. The horse blew. And then there was a voice. Charley was drunk, but he knew it wasn't four-legged.
"Charley?"
He leaned farther back, his eyes moving down the horse's head to his neck. At shoulder height, he found the face of Agnes Lake. He recognized the eyes.
"Charley?"
He sat up in the dirt, not trying to get up, not trying to hide the bottle. He noticed it was only dented, and wondered how, only three weeks before, he'd been able to finish one this same size in a single night. "I was just coming to see you," he said, "and this animal threw me off and tried to spit on my head."
She knelt in back of him and he smelled her perfume and the soap she had used to bathe. She was still humid from the bath, he knew there were still wet spots in her ears. She looked younger than he remembered, and softer. Her hair was tied this way and that, it made him dizzy trying to follow it around her head.
"You caught me at the disadvantage," he said. "I have been tangling with this horse." The horse moved a step to the side. Charley said, "Watch him, he spits." She stared into Charley's face, upside down, and it felt to him like they knew each other longer than they did. "Well," he said, because she was still watching him, "how was your trip?"
"I came as soon as I could," she said.
"There was no hurry," he said. "I took care of things as they came up." She was still looking into his face and Charley started to get up. He felt her hands under his arms, and then he was on his feet. Bill had said she was strong.
"Charley," she said. She looked him up and down, he brushed the dirt off his pants and shirt, thinking it was luck he'd fallen where he did because if he'd waited another hundred feet, it would have been mud. Of course, if he'd waited another hundred feet, the landing would have been softer.
"I was gone when Bill got shot," he said, "but I did what I could when I got back." He tried a few slow steps, testing his legs, and then took the horse's reins in his hand and began to walk in the direction of town. She fell in next to him, slipping sideways looks. It felt like she was waiting for him to tell her something, he didn't know what. He considered explaining the whorehouse in Lead, he considered explaining his drinking.