by Pete Dexter
He died in no time at all. The boy forgot the whore man, and in the time it took him to walk over, the horse had passed to the other side. Malcolm was still holding the broken-handled pistol, but he'd forgot it was there too. "Mr. Hickok's horse," he said.
Charley said, "Damn near Mr. Hickok's friend," although in truth the ball had been a long ways from finding him.
"He can kill me if he wants to," the boy said.
Charley said, "He doesn't need your permission for that." He saw the boy was having trouble holding on to his feelings.
"I'll leave the train," the boy said. "I'll tell him what I done, give him my mule, and set out on my own."
Charley went over to the wagon where Bill had left the open bottle. He took a drink and offered one to the boy. "The Indians would cut you up and leave you staked out to dry with your peeder in your mouth," he said. As it turned out, that was an unfortunate choice of warning.
It turned out, the boy had been in the back of the whore man's wagon, encumbered with the soft parts of several women, and felt a mouth on his member. It wasn't the first time, all of them liked to do him like that. But the whiskey had made him reckless, and with all the nipples and legs and hands to occupy him—the boy said he loved to kiss their hands; Charley said, "You don't have to tell everything"—he didn't notice who it was doing their business down there.
"It was a lot of giggling," he said, "and I had a head of steam. But when the seizure passed I looked down, and Mr. Al Swearingen had his mouth where it should of been one of the ladies."
Charley was twice glad he hadn't drunk from the whore man's glass. The boy told him the story while they were waiting for Bill to come out of the bushes. Malcolm was standing shoeless in his long Johns, still holding the gun. The whore man hadn't come out of the peddler's wagon. Charley didn't like him in there with a Springfield needle gun, so he walked over and kicked the side.
"Come out of there, Mr. Swearingen," he said, "or I'll burn it." There was a gathering of whores watching now, even some of the Chinese. Charley never saw such hopeless faces. Something moved in the wagon, but nothing came out. A minute passed.
"You got that boy's gun away from him?" the whore man said.
"What I got is kerosene."
Another minute went by. "It ain't my wagon," the whore man said.
"Or mine," Charley said. "I'll give you one minute." The whore man came out the back, yellow-toothed and nervous, smoothing his hair. He hadn't cleaned the wetness from his beard yet. One of the whores giggled, but he shot her a look and it died.
"Where's the boy?" he said.
"Let it alone," Charley said.
"Tell that boy that him and me got unfinished business," he said. "He owes me for the girls. It ain't no free ride with Al Swearingen, tell him that."
Charley turned around for one more look at the whores, and then he went back to the boy. He was sitting cross-legged on the ground beside old Peerless. In the dark the horse seemed bigger. "Listen," Charley said, "there's no reason your sister's got to know about this."
"What I heard," the boy said after a bit, "was it ruins you for girls."
"Where'd you hear that?" Charley said.
The boy shrugged. "I heard once you been with a man you don't want a woman no more."
"You weren't exactly with him," Charley said.
"I been sittin' here, thinkin' of every girl I seen over there, and I don't want one of them," he said.
Charley said, "Shit, that's not your manhood talking, that's good taste."
Then the boy looked over at Peerless, like he'd just remembered he was there. "And now I went and shot Mr. Hickok's horse. In my whole life, things never gone so bad all at once like this."
Charley stood right over the boy, the old horse was still giving off heat. "You want me to explain to him what happened?" Charley said. Bill'd had that horse a while.
"No," the boy said, "I got to tell him myself." Charley started off, thinking he'd need some room to do it. "The trouble is," the boy said, "I don't know how it happened. Things just never went to hell before like that, all of a sudden."
Charley said, "You keep your eye out for Mr. Swearingen so it doesn't get worse."
The boy laughed. "He ain't even a man," he said.
"Malcolm," Charley said, "the first thing you learn will be the first thing you know, but listen to me on this. When they're bad, there's things that kind will do to you that nobody else could think up."
But the boy wasn't paying any more attention than the horse was, so Charley took a walk up the hill to catch a last look at the day. He met Bill coming out of the bushes, buttoning his trousers. Bill put his death eyes on him, cold and steady. "It's me," Charley said. Bill was stone blind at dusk.
"I heard the shot," he said. Charley saw him wipe a tear out of the corner of his eye. "You just get settled down to piss, and then somebody's shooting, and the piss ducks back inside and you got to start all over . . ."
"Maybe they got a physician in Deadwood Gulch," Charley said. "Or Belle Fourche. They got to have medicine in Belle Fourche." Bill smiled at that. Something had told him there was an issue to be settled in the Black Hills, maybe between him and God, and he couldn't see anything as inconsequential as a doctor getting in the middle of two such forces.
Besides, he'd been to doctors. In Cheyenne, and before that. He had a saddlebag full of pills and medications. "I hate to be in the bushes with my peeder out when the shooting starts," he said. A little later he said, "It's not as easy to forget there's people around as it used to be, you notice that? You can't just walk forty yards into the trees and feel like you got it all to yourself. Somebody is always grabbing a gun over a whore to remind you it ain't all yours, and who you got to share it with." He dropped a line of spit between his moccasins.
"You always liked it quiet, Bill," Charley said. "You spent a life in pursuit of quiet." Charley didn't talk that way except to get Bill off his pessimism and morbidity.
Bill reached out and grabbed the back of Charley's neck, and Charley kicked his feet out from under him, and they rassled on the ground until Bill got Charley's windpipe. Bill let him get him in some holds before he ended it, though—Charley knew he'd let him—so by the time Bill let go they were both good and stretched. They lay on their backs, breathing hard and wet. Bill was chuckling.
"What I was saying," he said, "I don't mind the noise, it's just getting to be a weaker class of people all the time that's making it."
"That's true," Charley said.
Bill said, "It's got too damn easy to make noise."
"Bill," Charley said after a while, "the boy shot old Peerless." Bill sat up in the dark, Charley stayed where he was. There was a warm place over Charley's eye where they'd cracked heads. He touched it and found a lump about the size of a spoon. "He got all excited in the wagon with the girls, and somehow the whore man ended up suckin' on his peeder."
"So he shot my horse?"
"He was shootin' at me, thought I was the whore man, and hit Peerless instead. Got him dead in the heart." Bill sighed and pulled his knees up to his chest and circled them with his arms. Charley's legs had been broken, and he always noticed the things other people could do with theirs.
"That was a consequential animal," Bill said. Charley sat up then and his nose started to bleed. He'd tried to butt Bill, but Bill had sensed it coming and got underneath him. "I had him a long time."
"Six, seven years," Charley said. "Since Kansas, at least. He was there at Abilene." It seemed like the time to mention Abilene, where Bill shot Mike Williams. Mike was the only man Bill ever killed by accident, to Charley's knowledge. He was a policeman-—they'd had an election and the winners hired their nephews as policemen, after Bill had made the place safe to be a policeman—and it was the luck of things that when Phil Coe came after Bill in the street, Mike Williams came around a corner and Bill shot him through the head, thinking it was one of Phil Coe's brothers. Then he shot Phil.
The newspaper wouldn't let it h
eal. It brought Mike Williams back from the dead every week, like a blood relative. The editor called him a fine specimen of Kansas manhood, and declared a "Crusade to Rid Abilene and the State of Kansas of Wild Bill and All His Ilk." Those were the exact words, because for a while after that Bill called him "Ilk."
It wasn't the newspaper that got Bill and Charley out of Kansas, though. It was a petition. It was left with the clerk at the hotel where they stayed, three hundred and sixteen signatures asking Bill to leave, not a word of gratitude for what he'd done. He sat down in the lobby with the petition in his lap, running his fingers through his hair. He read every name—there were six sheets of them—and when he finished a sheet, he'd hand it to Charley and he'd read it too.
It was the worst back-shooting Charley had ever seen; they even let the women sign. Bill shrugged and smiled, but some of the names hurt him. He thought he had friends in Kansas, and looking at the names he saw they were all afraid of him.
What ran Wild Bill out of Abilene was hurt feelings. This business with the horse might of hurt him too, it was hard to tell. "The heart?" he said.
"He never felt it," Charley said. "Never believed it if he did." Bill ran his fingers through his hair. There were leaves and twigs in it from the rassling. He stood up and slapped the same from his britches, and headed off down the hill for the wagons. Charley waited a minute and went down there too.
Al Swearingen had sent some of his whores out for firewood and built himself more fire than he needed. The Chinese had smaller fires. Most nights, the Chinamen let their girls out among the rest of the wagons, but with the shooting they kept them close and shouted at them in Chinese when one got too far away. Charley admired the excitement in their language.
They had their own manners, too. The first time Charley saw them eat, it was a day and a half before he could look at food again. Charley wasn't any paper-collar, and everybody west of Boston ate with their fingers. He'd sat down to feed with all kinds of human beings, including Indians, but he never saw anybody but the Chinese put their fingers inside their mouth, at least not three at a time up to the second knuckle.
On the other hand, if you lined up fifty Chinese to take a bath every day for a month, every day the same Chinaman would get the water first, the same Chinaman would go second, and so on right through to number fifty. They had a way to arrange everything, and an order to everything, and Charley expected that was a kind of manners too.
That's how their wagons always ended up in the same place. They drove in every night behind the Americans and then went off to themselves. The head Chinaman had the youngest girls, although in truth there wasn't much reason to pick one over another. From the point of looks, it was a dead heat. There was one, though, that the head Chinaman kept to himself.
She rode alone in the back of his wagon, and nobody ever got a look at her except at night, when he'd let her out. Just a few minutes. He stayed at her side and wouldn't let anybody close, so you might see her climbing in or out of the wagon, or you might see her hobbling along beside the Chinaman out beyond the light of the fire, face like a statue from Egypt, but you'd never get close enough to see what it looked like. Charley heard that Al Swearingen had tried to buy her, but the Chinaman wanted too much money.
When Charley got back to the wagon, Bill was sitting on old Peerless. He'd found a fresh bottle. The boy was five feet away, digging a grave. The ground Was wet and heavy—it rained every day of the spring there, but it wasn't hell storms like the ones Charley had experienced in his previous visit to the Hills—and the boy was throwing mud over his shoulder at a pace that figured to kill him in three minutes.
"Sit down and watch this," Bill said, and he slapped a place next to him on old Peerless's belly.
Even in the dark, Charley could see that the horse had begun to swell. He sat down on the ground instead, then reclined to an elbow to stop the hurting. He didn't know how, but in the last few years the leg problems had crawled up into his hips. When he was settled Bill handed him the bottle, and when he'd taken a drink he called the boy off and asked if he wanted some too. The boy's labor had produced a trench nine feet long east and west, and he was digging off toward the south now.
He put the shovel down and took the bottle. He drank three swallows as fast as gravity let him, and gave it back. He couldn't last long at that speed either. "You plantin' a garden, Malcolm?" Charley said in a soft way.
The boy didn't answer. He just picked up the shovel and began throwing mud again. Bill took the bottle out of Charley's hands and had at it. "You never seen anybody bury a horse before?" Bill said.
The boy dug south for six feet, and then started west. He was breathing hard, and now and again Charley could hear it catch in his throat. There was a family resemblance about this. Back in Colorado, the boy's sister would sometimes cut firewood until her hands bled after Charley went into the mountains and got drunk.
For a while, Charley and Bill just sat still, watching. The boy came nine feet west, until he was even with the place he'd started, and then spaded his way back north to meet it.
"What kind of a missionary have you become?" Charley said.
He stopped digging again and took another drink. Charley could see they were going to need another bottle. "I intend to give him a proper burial before I leave here," the boy said. "I kilt him for no reason, and it's the least I can do to set it right."
Charley dropped off his elbow and lay on his back, and looked up at all the stars in the sky, trying to empty his mind. Against all efforts, he began to laugh.
The sound of that set something off in Bill too. As long as Charley had known him, however bad things got, Bill always found something to smile at, but there weren't five people in the world who ever heard him laugh like he did then. He laughed and rocked back and forth on old Peerless's belly until he fell off. The whole time the boy was still digging. If anything, the sound of it seemed to drive him harder. When he could talk again, Bill said, "And this is the easy part. Think of the box he's got to build."
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 m
y 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.
