Authors: Pete Dexter
Solomon came back into the office carrying a bag of roasted peanuts. There were peanut-sellers on every block in the city. He took off his coat and hat and straightened his vest and checked his pocket watch. It was an Elgin. Then he saw the head on Seth Bullock's desk.
"I wouldn't believe all them stories about Wild Bill," Boone May said to the sheriff. "I heard stories about Frank Towles here, and he went off crying like a baby . . ."
"What insult to God is that?" Solomon said, pointing at the desk.
"It's Frank Towles," Boone said. He watched Solomon Star, and was grateful to see there was still somebody that cared about a human head. He didn't know what the paper-collar was to the sheriff, but they had the same office and he decided to make his case to him too. "Sheriff don't want to pay me the reward on him, and I think he's got an obligation."
Solomon Star sat down at his desk and looked at the papers on top of it. Not like he was studying them, like he was trying to remember what they were. "He give a greaser two hundred and fifty dollars not more than an hour ago," Boone said.
Seth Bullock reached into a desk drawer and came out with a pair of fireplace tongs, made in Baltimore, Maryland. To Boone they looked like giant tweezers. The sheriff worked the small end, and the big end opened, wider than Frank Towles's head, and then closed around it. He picked the head up with the tweezers and dropped it in Boone's lap. "When I need you for something," the sheriff said, "I'll come find you."
Boone thought it was just like Seth Bullock to have a head-mover in his desk. "I'll be in Cheyenne," he said. He put the head back in the bag and pulled the cord that closed the top. "And I ain't forget-tin' who caused the inconvenience." It didn't have the right sound for a warning, though. It sounded half like a question.
Seth Bullock didn't move a muscle, he just stared. Boone stood up, looking for something more to say. He didn't like things to end sounding like questions. He didn't like nobody looking at him the way the sheriff was. "I wouldn't be countin' on Wild Bill too much," he said. Bullock still didn't answer. Boone said, "I wouldn't be countin' on nothing." But it still didn't sound like it should.
Boone walked out, passing the paper-collar, who was still sitting there staring at the top of his desk, and brushed him across the ear with the sack. He jumped about half a foot.
When the door shut, Solomon Star got up and went to the back of the store. He kept a pitcher of water there, and a bowl and some black soap on a cabinet, the only furniture he'd brought from his office in Bismarck. Seth Bullock had promised they would return for the rest of it.
Bullock followed him back now. Solomon poured water into the bowl and then worked the soap into it until the top was dark and bubbly. He got a washcloth out of one of the drawers in the cabinet, wet it, and centered it over his hand. He made the hand into a fist and began to scrub his ear.
Bullock looked at the faded yellow picture Solomon had hung on the wall. It was his mother, holding him on her lap. She had a jawline, the only one he'd seen like it was attached to Pink Buford's bulldog.
"Boone May is a fact of nature," Bullock said after a while. "There's worse than him around, ones that you can't aim in any direction at all."
Solomon quit scrubbing long enough to say, "He came into our place of business with a human head."
"Once something's dead, Solomon, it's dead."
Solomon began scrubbing again. His ear and all the skin around it were turning red. "It was a wanted man," Bullock said. "A killer of some kind ... a thief. He could of robbed the stage we sent the payment for the kilns." Bullock saw that carried more weight with his partner than just being a killer. They'd put up sixty thousand dollars—Bullock had borrowed his end of it from Solomon—for three kilns. They were on the way now from Sioux City. Bullock saw a day coming when the whole city would be brick.
The soap had gotten up into Solomon's hair, and the gunk he used to keep it slick ran down his neck into his collar. "It isn't like there weren't hangings in Bismarck," Bullock said.
Solomon took the washcloth away from his ear, which was now the color of two-day-old frostbite, and began to dry himself off with a towel. "That's hanging," he said. "It's civilized. A proper gallows is a comfort to the aggrieved, but he came into our place of business with a human . . . head."
"Dead is dead, Solomon," Bullock said. "What you're talking about is manners." Solomon finished with the towel, which was black every place it had touched him, and picked up the mop. He followed Boone May's steps from Bullock's desk to the door, washing what he could off the floorboards. They were pine—there wasn't any hardwood to be had in Deadwood yet—and already warped and uneven. The office was one of the first three buildings erected in the gulch.
Then he washed the door handles, inside and out. When he had finished, Solomon threw the dirty water into the street and went back to the papers on his desk. He didn't say another word to Seth Bullock, and Bullock didn't say anything to him. Solomon Star's talent was money, Seth Bullock knew other things, principal among them when to leave things alone.
Not counting tents or the Chinese establishments, where Captain Jack said he would not set foot, there were sixteen barrooms in the badlands. Some of them had been thrown together in a day, and the ceilings would shift in a wind or a fight. Some of them, like the Gem and the Green Front, were built more slowly, with a stage and a bar and little rooms upstairs closed off the hallway by curtains, and a girl's name written in chalk above each one. The prettiest ones and the singers got rooms with doors.
Charley followed Bill and Captain Jack from one place to another, all that night. Captain Jack would drink only milk, Charley had quit after the Mex left the Green Front, but everyplace they went Bill accepted all hospitalities.
He drank and listened to stories of gunplay. There wasn't a pilgrim in town that didn't have a story to tell Bill Hickok about something he'd done with a gun. Some of them had shot the eyes out of Indians at a hundred yards, some of them had turned the tide of battles in the war. Captain Jack Crawford told the account of his own injuries at Spottsylvania three different times that night, which to Charley was unforgivable for a man drinking milk.
Captain Jack said it was while he was recovering in the hospital that the nurses there came to like him, and taught him to read and write. "If it hadn't been for that Reb ball that found me in the midst of combat," he said, "and knocked me unconscious so I could not continue fighting, I would never have learned to write a word." By then he had read the poem he wrote in the paper about Custer six or eight times.
"Burn the South," Charley said.
Captain Jack shook his head and signaled for silence. "The wounds of war heal," he said, "and we must heal with them, pards. We're all of one skin and one country, and it's best forgotten."
Charley couldn't see what it was about Captain Jack that Bill tolerated so long, but he wasn't giving off any signs to be left alone. Bill's parents had been shunned in Troy Grove, Illinois, before the war for keeping a station that smuggled runaway slaves to the North, and he wasn't normally receptive to the reasons that people decided they fought for after the war was over.
They went from the Green Front back to the Gem, and then to the Senate, then to half a dozen places that didn't have names, at least not on signs in front. They went to Shingle's Number 3, then to Nuttall and Mann's Number 10, where Bill met Pink Buford and his famous bulldog, Apocalypse. Bill and the dog were love at first sight. The dog sat at Bill's feet, licking himself, and followed him every time he went outside to relieve himself.
Pink Buford made a place for Bill and Captain Jack at the card table, and they played draw poker and drank gin and bitters until Bill had lost thirty dollars. Charley could see Pink Buford was as drunk as Bill—you would have thought drunker because Bill never lost his deportment—but Bill wasn't in a class with him at cards.
Bill miscalculated himself at the card table, but it was harmless. He didn't have any money to speak of—mostly it was just what Charley gave him—and he would put the game behind him as soon as he quit for the night. There wasn't anybody Charley knew who didn't miscalculate himself one way or another—the main categories were guns or understanding women—and cards was a better blind side than most.
Charley wondered sometimes where his own blind side was. It wasn't the kind of thing you came out and asked your partner, though, not if you respected keeping a distance.
Bill was still at the card table when Boone May came in the door. Charley was looking in that direction at the time, supporting his weight against the bar with his back and elbows, and he took one glance and thought of the way the Hills had looked to him on the day the boy had shot Bill's horse. Something out of the Devil's dreams.
"Oh, shit," the bartender said. "It's Boone and that damn head."
He came in carrying a bag by its drawstrings, half a foot taller than anybody else in the room. He was bug-eyed, and his head was a size to be noticeable even if it wasn't up there above anybody else's. As he walked past the card table, his look stopped on Bill, but only for a moment. Charley had never seen a human being with eyes like that who wasn't in the throes of strangulation.
Boone May moved through the crowd to a place next to Charley at the bar. He didn't push anybody out of the way to get there, he just took over the air they were using, and they moved to establish breathing room somewhere else. He put his hat and the bag on the bar in front of him and ordered a gin and bitters. The bartender, Harry Sam Young, did not know where to put the glass when he came back with it and was reluctant to touch the hat or the bag. And so he stood there until Boone slid them apart and made room.
Charley smiled at the sight of a monster drinking pink-colored concoctions. Then the man was looking at him, eyes like a scared horse, like there was too much juice in there for even a head that size to hold it. Charley kept his smile where it was.
Boone May studied him with one of his eyes. "Little fancy," he said, "you got a hundret and seventy dollars in gold?" Charley squared himself and set his jaw.
"A dandy with pearl-handled guns, he must got a hundret and seventy dollars." Charley's guns were .36 caliber Colt Navy revolvers, designed in 1851, and modified in Chicago to take modern cartridges. He cleaned them after every use, and made no apologies for how they looked. Them or himself. Charley gave people their distance, and did not give up his own to strangers. ". . . And fine linen," Boone May said. He reached for Charley's shirt, and Charley dropped his left hand to his side. There was a boning knife in back of the gun there, pearl-handled and sharp. If it touched you, it cut you. It cost Charley seventy dollars, having the handle remade to match the Colts.
The fingers stopped before they got to the shirt, as if the hand had thoughts of its own, and went sideways to the sack on the bar. Boone May said, "Here's your chance to get rich in the Hills, fancy. Thirty fast dollars." He opened the sack and pulled the head out by the hair. "This unfortunate goes by the name of Frank Towles. I got a legal warrant for his arrest, dead or alive, with a reward of two hundret dollars for the apprehendor."
The noise at the poker table had stopped. Charley turned to Bill, who was sitting straight and solemn with his back against the wall and the bulldog in his lap, and said, "You notice something peculiar about this town?"
Bill nodded, never changed expressions. "I never been anywhere," Charley said, "that so many people were walking around carrying spare heads." Bill smiled at that, Captain Jack Crawford began to lean away from it. It wasn't any contest who would be first under the table.
Charley turned back to Boone May to see where it would lead. It was a pattern to his life that he didn't understand. Things would stop before they happened. Like this man's fingers. If his fingers had touched Charley's shirt, the clean-up boy would of found them in the sawdust tomorrow morning. But at the last minute, they'd seemed to sense it—Charley had watched animals do the same thing at traps—and gone some other way.
That was a difference between Charley and Bill. Bill didn't give off the same warnings, or maybe it was that by the time somebody decided to aggravate Bill Hickok they'd quit listening to what their private voices were telling them.
"All you got to do," Boone May was saying, "is take the head in tomorrow and pick up the reward. Thirty dollars for no work at all." He smiled at Charley. "It ain't heavy, even for a fancy."
Charley looked him in the eye, motionless. Boone May pushed the head toward him, Charley stepped away. "You ain't afraid to touch it," Boone said, "it ain't nothin' but a head." He slid it another six inches. "You git the head and the bag both for a hundret and seventy dollars, I'll even put it inside for you. All you got to do is take the package in and pick up the reward, make yourself thirty dollars."
He waited for Charley to answer, then shook his head. "Frank Towles is been nothing but trouble since I kilt him," he said.
Harry Sam Young mixed Boone another gin and bitters. "Maybe you shouldn't of cut off his head," he said. "Maybe it's bad luck."
Boone turned one eye on the bartender, the other one looked adjacent. Charley felt his own weight change with the bug-eyes settled on something else. "I didn't have no choice," Boone said. There was a whine in his voice now. "The way it happened was a shotgun, blew most of Frank's neck off, so's he was only attached to himself by a thread. It just didn't make no sense to bring it all in together, especially now I got to go all the way to Cheyenne to collect on him."
"Must of been close range," the bartender said.
"About two inches," Boone said. "But nothin' to do with it has been right since I pulled the trigger."
"You believe in the spirit world?" the bartender said after a while. "There's a faro dealer over to Jim Persate's place, a French woman named Madame Moustache, who talks to the spirits of the dead. Maybe she could talk to Frank for you."