Authors: Pete Dexter
Charley stuck the finger in the glass of whiskey and it stung him clear to the elbow. "Stings, don't it?" Harry Sam Young said.
Charley looked at him. "If it stings," Harry said, "it's infected. That's what the sting is, whiskey fighting germs."
"You ever splashed whiskey in your eye?" Charley said.
Harry Sam Young thought it over. "You don't need infected eyes for whiskey to sting," he admitted after a while. "But if they was infected, you don't think they'd sting worse?"
Harry Sam Young spent half his life in bars, and could argue logic with anybody. A loser at the card table abused him then, calling for a gin and bitters, and the bartender moved off to serve him. Charley saw a platform had been erected over the door to display Bill's death chair. There was a sign that said, in this chair THE FEARLESS GUNFIGHTER JAMES BUTLER (WILD BILL) HICKOK MET HIS MAKER ON AUGUST 2, 1876. SHOT IN THE BACK BY JACK MCCALL WHILST HOLDING ACES AND EIGHTS.
Looking closer, Charley saw there were cards propped against the legs of the chair, spotted with dried blood.
Harry Sam Young finished with the gambler and returned. "They put it up for the tourists," he said. "It draws people, the death chair of the famous."
"Is it Bill's blood?"
Harry Sam Young shook his head. "It ain't even his chair, for sure," he said. "The cleaning boy come in that morning and had the place spotless by the time anybody else got out of bed."
Charley stared at the platform, unable to decide if that made it better or worse. "Whose blood is it?"
Harry Sam Young scratched his head. "Originally?"
Charley stared at him.
"I believe it belonged to Pink Buford's bulldog. Pink fought him with another bulldog—it was a reprobate come in from Chicago with this animal in a cage. Like it was wild. Pink, he don't care. He's run out of local dogs to fight."
"I'd hoped he'd retired him." Thinking of Bill.
Harry Sam Young shook his head. "Pink don't retire nothing that can still make money. He fought him with a pig last month, the noisiest event in the history of the badlands. Sheriff Bullock himself showed up to stop it, said it was waking up respectable people. By then, though—"
"A
pig?
"
"They been known to kill farmers."
"So has lightning." Charley drank what was in the glass and Harry Sam Young poured him another. Charley took five dollars out of his shirt pocket and put it on the bar. Harry Sam Young ignored it. "Farmers stay alone too much," Charley said, "they get strange. They get so strange pigs kill them."
The bartender said, "Well, as fighters pigs are loud, but not much else."
Charley felt the whiskey in his ears, meaning it had soaked through his brain to get there. "A
pig?
"
"Pink's dog killed the pig, he's killed a wolf, there was rumors of a Colorado man had a bobcat that fought. Pink don't care, bring your contestant and your money. He says he'll fight a bear, so another dog don't scare him, even a dog that looks like Pink's and they kept him in a cage."
"I don't like to see anything in a cage."
"Pink's dog got his leg chewed half off before he killed him. He'd ripped out his stomach and the animal from Chicago still wouldn't let go of his leg. Afterwards, Pink brought him in here to clean his cuts. Mr. Nuttall seen the blood, and got it in his head to drip some on a poker hand and put it up there with the chair."
Charley looked at the platform again. "There's worse blood," he said. "Bill had an affection for the dog's spirit."
An hour later Captain Jack Crawford walked through the doorway. Half of the talk that evening still concerned the McCleod woman and her babies—it would until there was something bloody to replace it—and when Crawford came in, that half of the talk stopped.
He took an empty seat at one of the tables and looked toward the bar. The men sitting there turned away. He called to Harry Sam Young for a glass of milk. Harry refused him. "It spoilt," he said.
The room went quieter. Captain Jack smiled and looked around him, found nobody who would meet his eye. "That's how it is, is it?"
"All I said was the milk's spoilt," Harry Sam Young said. "The lady we got it from's left town." He stared at Captain Jack and Captain Jack stared back.
"I'll have something else."
Harry Sam Young poured him a glass of the same whiskey Charley was drinking. He put it on the bar and said, "One dollar."
Captain Jack stood to collect his drink. Somebody said, "Momma ain't going to like this." A whore laughed and then it was quiet. He drank the whiskey where he found it and put another dollar on the bar. Harry Sam Young refilled the glass, and Captain Jack took it to the table.
There had been two men there before, but both of them moved while he was at the bar. He sat down, alone now, and looked at the glass in his hand. Charley drank what was left in his and stood up to leave.
Captain Jack called to him from across the room. "Charley Utter, I'm no worse than you, or nobody else." His voice was already a little slower than his lips. Men that didn't drink shouldn't drink.
"I got no appetite for this tonight," Charley said to the bartender. Captain Jack made his lips into a circle and put them against the lip of the glass. He poured half of what was in it into his mouth, and held it there a minute trying to get it down.
"Let me fill that once more," Harry Sam Young said to Charley. "It's been a long time, and you ain't told me nothing about the whore business yet."
Charley considered it, and Harry filled the glass. That's all the edge a bartender needed, for a man to consider. Captain Jack got up again, holding his glass, and Harry Sam Young filled it too. "There ain't a man here," he said in his poetry-reciting voice, "would have done any different from me."
It was not the first time Charley had heard a man lose his English usage when he drank, it was a sign of forced schooling.
"I fought with Custer, I been wounded in battle," he said. He was pushing his voice now. "And a battle's one thing, death's odds is another. There wasn't nothing the Minutemen could of done but got killed ourselves. There was forty Indians that I counted in the yard, that many again in the trees, waiting."
One of the men who had moved from Crawford's table said, "You couldn't get forty Indians one place if you was giving away puppies."
Captain Jack's face turned red and he drank his whiskey. A gambler shouted, "I'm sorry, Momma," and killed his drink too, and in the time it took to say those words, they became famous. And a long time after Captain Jack Crawford and the McCleod woman and the Minutemen were gone and forgotten, the gamblers and miners and whores who drank in the badlands shouted "I'm sorry, Momma" before they drank. Tourists took the expression to other parts of the country, and at least one of them named a bar that. The I'M SORRY MAMA. He was from California.
Captain Jack got himself another drink. And another. "Being around them girls all day long," Harry Sam Young said to Charley, "do you ever dally with more than one at once?"
Charley scratched his chin. "I've heard of it, but I never tried it."
"I heard whore men try every girl they hire."
Charley closed one eye to look at it from a business angle. "My advice on that," he said, "would be to visit somebody else's house, if you were inclined that way."
"Whilst you got it free right there?"
"None of it's free. The cheapest kind is what you only paid for once." He had received a letter from a lawyer in Empire, Colorado, earlier in the week, addressed to him in care of Lurline's House of Distinction, notifying him that Matilda had filed for dissolution of their marriage. He reflected at the time that her letters had been cool lately.
And he wondered at the cost, and he wondered what kind of ties were left after a marriage was dissolved. More to the point, he wondered if Malcolm was still his relation, and what obligations he had to keep him out of trouble.
The boy had set up ministries in every mining camp for twenty miles, and spent the week on horseback, traveling from one to the other in Preacher Smith's old clothes, preaching the Bible of the Black Hills. Whenever he was in Deadwood he stalked Al Swearingen, waiting for his confrontation with the evil side of the Lord.
"I might like to try two at once," Harry Sam Young said. "I begun to think about it last week, one of the whores in here mentioned it in passing to a tourist."
Charley said, "You're always welcome at Lurline's, Harry. You're a gentleman."
"You don't have no rules against two at once?" He filled Charley's glass, which was already full, and offered him a cigar. Charley bit off the end and allowed Harry Sam Young to light it.
"The only rule is no hurting the girls, and not to shoot in the rooms. It's the tourists that seem to want to hurt them, I don't know why."
Harry Sam Young said, "I never wanted to hurt a girl. I just want to try two at once. Ever since I heard about it I don't want one at a time."
"Peeder's a contrary thing," Charley said. "Given a choice, anything else in the body prefers what it's used to."
It was quiet while they both fit their cigars this way and that in their mouths and thought about the nature of peeders. After a while the bartender said, "I expect that's what keeps a whorehouse in business."
Charley said, "What keeps it in business is those that would otherwise go without. There's miners come in every week, don't even take off their pants."
"I heard of that, they just talk."
"It's to have somebody know they're here."
Sometime later Handsome Banjo Dick Brown came in on crutches. They had amputated him just above the knee, and he'd cut off his pants leg on that side and sewn the ends together so it looked like that was the way pants came from the store. Even so, nobody called him Handsome Dick anymore. He never sang in public, he'd quit womanizing, although there were plenty still interested.
Charley kept track of Handsome from Lurline, first one thing and then another. She'd said Handsome didn't hold it against him that he was the one that crippled him. He came further into the saloon, awkward on his crutches, and hopped the last few feet into the only empty chair in the room, next to Captain Jack.
Charley stared at his cigar. There was no pleasure in seeing what he'd done.
"Nobody forgot who shot Handsome Dick," the bartender said. He meant it as a compliment. Ever since Charley invited him to visit Lurline's, Harry hadn't left him more than thirty seconds without a compliment.
Charley looked again at the seam where Handsome Dick had sewn his pants leg together. Lurline had told him that Handsome's leg hurt him after it was cut off. He could still feel it there after it was two weeks buried in the ground.
She said sometimes he still felt it.
Charley tried another sip of whiskey; it tasted like somebody had poured tree sap in it. "My last remark on the subject," he said, leaning closer to the bartender. "The only pure thing is a thought. When you first think something, it's pure. Shooting or business or peeders. But everywhere betwixt the thought and the deed are impurities and distractions, until in the end if the deed resembles the thought at all, you can count yourself luckier than most."
Harry Sam Young poured himself a drink and looked troubled. "That could be true for some and not for others."
"We're all the same flesh and blood."
The bartender looked at the chair on the platform over the door.
"He had his distractions," Charley said.
"Not with a gun in his hand."
"No," he said, "there was a purity in him that way."
The bartender moved to fill Charley's glass. Charley pulled it away. He heard Captain Jack and Handsome at the table. "There was fifty Indians in that widow's yard. It wasn't a thing we could of done but give them eight extra scalps."
"I don't hold no grudges," Handsome Dick said.
"It ain't fair to be accused by rumor."
"I don't want no revenge, Indians or nobody else. I killed my share of men, I don't need to get even with nobody over this."
"I been shot myself," Captain Jack said. "Wounded twice at the Battle of Spottsylvania, the Forty-seventh Regiment of Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1864."
"Don't hold grudges," Handsome Dick said. "Don't ever hold grudges."
"I forgave the South when Lincoln did. And though my body bears the scars of conflict, there is no such in my heart." He raised his voice. "And I do not judge other men, else I have walked in their footsteps."
"Or their footstep," Handsome said. He laughed, too loud, and false. He hadn't shaved in days, his shirt was dirty. He'd lost his leg and his shine; he wasn't even handsome anymore, when you looked close.
"It's one thing to meet the red devil in fair combat," Captain Jack said after a while, "but fifty Indians—Custer had as much chance."
"I heard Custer died with a smile on his face, that he had forgiven his enemies and overcome the evil side of the Lord."
Captain Jack squinted at his drink. "I didn't hear nothing like that. I heard he killed with his last breath."
"Father Malcolm told me," Handsome said.
Charley decided he'd have the drink after all.
"I never heard of an evil side to the Lord," Captain Jack said. "It sounds Indian."
"It's as white as you or me, a blue-eyed white boy in a black coat. The disciple of Preacher Smith, who died with a smile on his face."
"I believe in forgiveness," Captain Jack said.
A gambler shouted, "I'm sorry, Momma," and killed a shot of whiskey. Captain Jack did not acknowledge the insult.
Charley could not get his eyes away from the table and the seam where Handsome Dick's leg had been. He pictured Malcolm and a whole ministry of the lame. He pictured Matilda.
"What is your experience with the aftermaths of the dissolution of marriage?" he said.
Harry Sam Young looked startled. "All this talk of the evil side of the Lord, it's a passing fancy, like pink gin. No reason to get morose."
"Dissolution of a marriage," Charley said. "There must be somebody comes in here's had a marriage dissolved."