Authors: Pete Dexter
Boone was taken back. "This here's your last'words," he said.
The killer said, "To camouflage the hook," and went off into eternity.
Lurline put an arm over her breasts and turned halfway over. His arm stopped her. "One day you're going to kill me, ain't you?" she said. He leaned down and kissed her shoulder, then her neck.
"What do you think?" he said.
"I think you'll kill me," she said. He moved off her and lay down on his back, smiling. She sat up and looked the other way. Her back was smooth and pale, it looked like you could snap it between your fingers.
"Well," he said, "there's worst ways to go." He watched her back, and before long he saw her shoulders move forward, like she was coughing. In a minute she'd be laughing out loud, it was the same every time. He reached under the sheets and found his long underwear, and got himself decent. He didn't get out of bed, though.
"I brung you a surprise."
She turned around and smiled. "Where?" she said. Her eyes were wet in the corners. She wiped at them with the back of her hand, and then pulled down on her cheeks, like she was stretching them. "You never brung me nothing before," she said. He could see she didn't believe him.
There was something happening outside, they heard the noise. It sounded like a dogfight. Maybe Pink Buford had found somebody to fight his bulldog. She put on her shoes and walked to the window, and then stood there with her hands on the sill for a long time, buck-naked, watching it. Forgetting that he said he had something to give her.
Boone looked at the leather bag, then back at the window. He didn't like to be treated incidental. "Lurline?" he said. She didn't say nothing, didn't seem to hear him. It wasn't no dogfight, the excitement wasn't the right pace. "What is it, a wagon train?"
She turned back to him, smiling. "You ain't going to believe this," she said, real happy now. "It's Wild Bill down there. Wild Bill in Deadwood."
Boone got out of bed and went to the window. He looked out and saw half the population of the badlands standing in the street in front of a wagon, some from the proper end of town, too. While he was watching, Captain Jack Crawford climbed up onto the wagon and shook hands with the man holding the reins. He was sitting straight and serious, wide shoulders, dressed in expensive buckskin. The one with him was small, and dressed even fancier. Both of them had hair down to the shoulders.
"That ain't Wild Bill," he said, but he knew it was.
Lurline had left the window and was back sitting on the bed, dressing. She put on her undies and her garter belt and stockings, and then pulled her dress over her head. The more she put on, the less he liked her. "I brung you a surprise," he said again. He wished he'd stayed on top of her a little longer, help her remember him.
She slipped her feet back into her shoes—they were more like slippers, now that he noticed, you couldn't take two steps in the street but they'd get sucked up in the mud—and headed for the dresser. She had a bottle of toilet water there, along with smaller bottles of perfume. She splashed some into her hand and rubbed it all around her neck and then down the front of her dress.
"That little sissy with him probably got more shit on than you do," Boone said. She didn't seem to know he was in the room. She dropped on her knees and reached up under the dresser, came out with a bone-handled mirror, and fluffed at her hair with one hand while she held on to the looking glass with the other. From her expression, she wasn't satisfied with what was there.
She hid the mirror back under the dresser, taking her time with that, and headed toward the door. He stepped in front of her, and she stepped back, suddenly finding him there. Boone was faster than he looked, that was where a lot of characters was fatally fooled. And Boone May never gave you a chance to fool him back.
"You don't care what I brung you?" he said.
She looked at him without sparkle. "All right," she said, "what is it?" It wasn't the way it was supposed to be, with her crawling all over him, begging.
"Something from Cheyenne," he said. He saw an interest stir. Maybe she thought it was something to wear. Lurline spent every cent she made on clothes. She had four dresses that he knew of.
"Well?" she said.
"You got to find it," he said.
She shrugged, then looked over at the pile of clothes on the chair. "It's in there," she said. Boone smiled at her, and she walked over, the heels of her slippers making hoof noises across the pine floor, and picked up his pants. There was pockets in back, and she reached in and come out with Harry Pine's front tooth. Boone had broke it off while he was looking for gold teeth, and kept it for good luck. He meant to have a piece of jewelry made with it.
"What the hell?" she said.
"That ain't it," he said. "Put it back."
There was an oration in the street outside, then some clapping. She looked toward the window, forgetting what they were doing again. "I'm missing everything," she said.
"It ain't nothing special," he said. She picked up his coat and put her hand in the pockets. She dropped the coat on the bed, beside his pants, and touched the leather bag. He smiled at her.
She picked it up, interested in the weight. The bag was tied, and it took her a while to pick open the knot. "You ought not to chew your nails," he said.
She got the knot loose and separated the pieces of rawhide. He stood still and watched her face. She opened the top and looked inside. "What is it?" she said.
"Look and see," he said.
She reached in, stopped, and then pulled it out by the hair. She held it up in front of her, eye to eye. He thought she was going to scream. "Shit," she said, "it's just Frank Towles."
"It's his head," he said.
She put it back in the bag and dropped it on the bed. "You been everyplace in the Hills with that head," she said. And then she walked around him, smelling like flowers, arid went out the door. Boone didn't stop her this time.
He heard her slippers on the stairs and closed the door. He took Frank Towles's head out of the bag for a look. It wasn't true that he'd been everyplace in the Hills with it. He'd only had it three days. He'd tried to sell it to W. H. Llewellyn for $150, and save himself the trip back to Cheyenne, and he might of offered it for sale at the Green Front. That was all. Not everyplace in the Hills. It was strange, now he thought about it, how something could be worth $200 one place and not another. A head only had one value. A thing was worth what it was worth.
He put the head back in the bag and tied it shut. Then he put on his pants and shirt and boots, and decided to move camp to Nuttall and Mann's Number 10 saloon, where the bartender— Harry Sam Young—was mixing the most expert gin and bitters in Deadwood. Pink gin was all Boone drunk, since he discovered it. It was Pink Buford's drink first, of course, he named himself after it. Besides owning the best dog in Deadwood, Pink might of been the best cardplayer too. He received visions at the card table. Boone admired Pink Buford for what he had, and wished there was a way to take it away from him.
He put his gun in his pants and started out of the room. Before he got to the door, though, he looked at her dresser. He got on the floor and felt underneath. She'd hid the mirror in back, on top of a board. He saw his face in it once as he brought it out, and again in one of the pieces, after he'd broke it on the headboard of the bed.
Bill and Charley had been in Deadwood four hours when the Mex rode into town carrying the head of an Indian. He held it up, away from the giant pieces of slop that were coming off his horse's hoofs, yelling some kind of Mexican yell. He rode to the bottom of the badlands, and then back up into the respectable part of town, and then back into the badlands. It was the most excitement since the wagon train, and the miners and roughs followed him up and down the street—some of them making the same noise he was.
"What is it?" Bill said. He and Charley were standing at the tent across the creek from their wagon, trying some of the fifty-cent whiskey. The man who owned the tent had given them the first drinks free. He said it was an honor to own the spot where Wild Bill Hickok first set his feet on Deadwood soil. He said he might put up a sign to commemorate it.
"It looks like a Mexican on a stolen horse carrying somebody's head," Charley said.
"That's an Indian," said the man who owned the tent. He'd hung calico on the inside walls to brighten the mood. "There's a town reward, two hundred and fifty dollars for any Indian, dead or alive."
"That one's dead," Charley said. His humor sometimes grew an edge when he drank.
Bill shook his head. "I never heard anything like that. Paying Mexicans two hundred and fifty dollars to kill Indians."
The man who owned the tent poured them another shot. There had been twenty or thirty others there drinking with them, but they'd left now to follow the Mex. "It's the law," the man said. "It used to be twenty-five dollars, but it went up after what they done to Custer."
"Custer?" Bill said.
"Kilt him and everybody with him. Two, three hundred boys of the Seventh Cavalry up to the Little Big Horn in Montana." Bill shook his head. "June twenty-fifth," the man said. "You didn't hear that?"
"We been out of touch," Bill said.
"We're all out of touch," the man said. "The pony express—shit, you might as well just walk out here and deliver your messages in person. But Custer's a fact. Terrible mutilations, no survivors." He waited to build the suspense before he told Wild Bill what kind of mutilations, which had been the focus of conversation in town ever since the news arrived. "A polite way to put it," he said, "if Custer had survived, he wouldn't of had no eyes to see, and he'd of had to squat to piss."
As soon as the man said that he saw it hadn't set right with Bill. Maybe they were friends. He tried to soften it. "That being the case," he said, "he's better off dead."
Bill finished the shot and headed off in the direction of the Mex. "I didn't mean nothin'," the man said to Charley. "I was just explainin' the problem."
Charley watched Bill walk across the street, his chin up, not even looking at the mud, and then down the other side into the badlands. They were shooting guns down there now, and Charley wondered where the boy was. Lord, don't let the boy get shot. Charley Utter had lived thirty-seven years, most of it unworried and natural. He'd hunted and fished and run trap lines into all the tributaries of the Grand River. When they'd found gold in Colorado, he'd bought and sold claims. When the gold began to peter out, he ran supplies into the newer, more remote camps. He'd made more money than any miner he knew, and held On to most of it. He'd been shot twice in the legs by accident, hunting, but he'd never had to pull a gun on a living soul. As much as you can, he'd even gotten married on purpose.
It did not sit with him that now, in the space of a spring, he was dreaming at night of Bill's blindness, and doing everything for the boy but powdering his ass. It wasn't that they'd asked him, it was like a sickness he'd caught.
Two different sicknesses. He'd been to the edge of the canyon with Bill, and could predict him better than anybody alive. He was tied to Bill, who was like his own person. There was one side that got Bill women and money and included the stories people told about him, and there was another side he kept to himself. Except Charley felt like he was keeping Bill's private side for him now. The public side was as wild as ever—a reputation always changed slower than a man—and more and more, Bill occupied himself in that. Charley imagined it was the blood disease, or going blind, but Bill sometimes seemed to lose track of the line between the stories and what was true.
The boy, on the other hand, was a problem connected to his wife, and when Charley worried about the boy, it was the purest self-interest. Charley's wife was named Matilda Nash. He'd married her on September 30, 1866, when she was fifteen years old. She was the cleanest human being Charley ever saw. She had readable eyes and pale, English-type skin, and she used to sit on the bearskin rug he'd given her father with her chin pressed against his knees and believe every lie he told her about the places he had been and the things he had done.
Her father was a baker from Bath, England. Charley had a picture of that place in his head. Her mother had died at the birth of Malcolm. Everything considered, she did the honorable thing. Tilly brought the boy up herself, mad at him every minute, complaining about him to anybody who would listen. And she would kill you if you agreed with her.
And after the boy and her father were asleep, she'd sit at Charley's feet—he didn't sit on the floor himself because of the ache in his legs—and listen to his stories. She seemed to understand everything he said, including the way it was between him and Bill. It never occurred to him that she was sitting there smiling, making lists of the things she was going to change.
Charley opened his pouch and watched the man who owned the tent pinch out enough gold dust to cover the cost of what they'd drunk. Whiskey was less than two dollars a gallon back in the States, and what the man took had bought maybe twice that. "The overhead doesn't hurt you much here, does it?" Charley said, looking around. He was always interested in how people made a living.
The man smiled and leaned closer. "1 don't know nothing about that," he said, and Charley could see that was probably true. "You think I could still put up a sign?" he said. "I don't want to do nothin' to upset Wild Bill more than he is."
"He won't mind," Charley said, and started off.
The man said to tell Bill he was welcome to come by and look at the sign anytime he wanted. "And you too," he said.
Charley walked back down into the badlands and found Bill in the company of the Mex and Captain Jack at the bar of the Green Front Theater. There was a crowd of miners and gamblers and reprobates around them, a lot of drinking and backslapping. Somebody discharged his pistol into the floor, and the smell of the powder stunk worse than the miners.
A man stood in the doorway holding his hat upside down and asked Charley for a dollar. The hat was full of paper money. "It's a donation for the greaser," the man said. "On account of the Indian he killed." Charley put a dollar in the hat and moved toward the bar.