by Pete Dexter
On her first night in Deadwood, though, she'd run into Boone May at Nuttall and Mann's Number 10, and bunked down with him. She was comfortable with Boone. She had the feeling that nobody homelier than herself would notice how she looked.
She got up now and dressed, leaving the front of her shirt unbuttoned, and crawled out of the tent. The preacher was still out there on his packing crate, his arms reaching into the air now, pulling at the air while he asked God's protection. It reminded her of a child pulling on its mother's skirts, trying to get her to notice it was there.
She stood up and tucked her shirt into her pants. She strapped her gun belt around her waist, and then slid it to the left until the buckle was in back and the pistol lay at an angle across her lower stomach. She thought it fit her, to wear her protection over her womanhood. She tied a wide yellow scarf around her neck and pulled her hat down right to her ears. The hat was perfectly round. She thought it softened her face.
She walked from the tent to the preacher in long strides, unmindful of the mud. "Let this day be peaceful, Lord," the preacher was saying, "so that we may preparest ourselves for the hardships we have found in this place . . ."
Jane pushed her way through miners, paper-collars, tourists, even a few ladies—not upstairs girls, but ladies—and got to the packing crate. She picked up the preacher's hat and screamed her eagle scream. It was a noise that nobody but Calamity Jane could make. She caused it by pulling air into her voice box instead of blowing it out, and nobody who ever heard it denied it sounded like an eagle.
It was a noise that stopped people from whatever they were doing, particularly talking with the Lord. The congregation looked up from the mud, almost in unison, to see what it was. Then, together, they took a step back. There wasn't many of them who had come across anything this remote.
She closed the distance with an exaggerated stride and pushed the preacher's hat at the first miner she reached. "Limber up, pilgrim," she said. "The old mountain goat looks broke, and I intend to collect about ninety dollars for him." The miner stood still, looking at her, and she kicked him in the leg. "I said git down into your pokes now and come up with some cash."
The miner reached into his pocket and found his purse. He picked a tiny piece of gold out and put it in the hat. A few of the miners who panned in the Whitewood had claims that could make them fifty dollars a day. Most of them sat on their heels in the water all day for two or three dollars, enough to find something to eat.
Most of them already knew that they weren't going to make a go of it placer-mining. Their hopes went a different way now, that the little pieces of ground they'd staked out and claimed would be worth more to somebody else.
Jane passed through the miners, getting money for the preacher. He had stopped when she'd done her eagle scream, but now, even while she was walking through the crowd with his hat, he started again.
The preacher's name was Henry Hiram Weston Smith, and he had been in the Hills almost a year. First in Custer, then Hill City, then Deadwood. As the gold strikes moved north, Preacher Smith moved with them. He'd wintered in Deadwood, and it had taken the life out of his face. The weather, or the things he'd seen.
He had reasons besides preaching for coming to Dead wood, and he was ashamed of them. There was gold here, and in her whole life his wife had never had comforts.
But the reasons had faded in the winter, and now there was nothing but the Lord. Who he realized he'd misunderstood. No man understood the Lord. Henry Hiram Weston Smith had read the Bible from one end to the other. There were nights he dreamed whole chapters, but where he used to see God in those dreams, now he just felt Him. Preacher Smith was afraid to look on Him, even in his sleep, for fear of what he would see.
He had cast aside portions of the Bible, and never read from it now when he preached, although he never preached without it in his hand. Once or twice in a service, a little piece of it would slip into his sermon—there was comfort in the New Testament, and the miners needed comfort—but he didn't hold it out for them, like it was a gift they could take if they wanted it. The greatest misunderstanding in the world was that salvation was there for the asking.
Preacher Smith was thirty-one years old, and he looked fifty.
"Thou created us in Thy image," he said now. "Grant us Thy strength for the tests ahead . . ." It had come to the preacher lately that the image was closer than he had previously thought. He had watched men go soft-brained from the winter's cold and hate, kill themselves and each other, and he had begun to see the Lord in that too.
"Keep us to the good, Lord," he said. "Do not let us stray." As he said that, Jane Cannary set the hat on the crate next to his feet. He saw her there, but never looked down. He was coming to the important part now, to the idea of an evil side to the Lord. It wasn't two different things, the Lord and the Devil. He had been on this spot all morning getting to it, and now it was coming. They were one and the same.
Jane made a noise in her throat and spat. He didn't look down, but she had distracted him, and he was losing track of it. There was a way the Lord could be evil and still be the Lord, and he had almost gotten to it. He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate.
"Look down here, you old fool," Jane said. When he didn't answer, she made another eagle scream, which opened the preacher's eyes. He stared down, and the homeliest woman he had ever seen was standing at his feet, open-chested, like a messenger from the
Lord's bad side. "There's plenty of time to preach," she said. "Now pick up this damn money before these sheep-lovers change their mind and take it back."
He looked in his hat then, and saw there were several dollars in folding money and gold dust. He didn't know what kind of message it was, but something was still changing between him and the Lord. And even with all he had seen, there was something the Lord had to show him yet.
Boone may went looking for Lurline Monti Verdi. he had been with Jane twice before, in Cheyenne and Sundance, and both times he hadn't felt right until he'd been with a regular woman to wash out the taste. It was something about her that made him feel little. He needed to smell Lurline's toilet water and feel her underneath him again, where he decided things right down to when she breathed.
Lurline wasn't in her room at the Gem. He walked in without knocking, and it was just as he'd left it the day before. She hadn't made the bed, or even swept the pieces of mirror glass off the floor. Lurline was always cleaning something, picking some speck of food off his coat or face. She hadn't been back.
He thought of Wild Bill then, and the way she'd looked at him out the window. Boone felt bad. He didn't like the idea of his own woman—which she was whenever Boone wanted her to be—running off with Bill and his fancy friend. He wondered if she'd done them both, and the feeling that started when he woke up with Jane got worse.
He sat down on her bed and took Frank Towles's head out of the sack. What had the bartender said? Maybe Frank's spirit was angry and he ought to see Madame Moustache about it? He thought about that and decided to live with the ghost a while longer.
"Goddamn you, Frank," he said, staring into the face. It was looking less like Frank every day. As a matter of fact, it was looking less like a face.
Boone began to see a plot. He'd take the head all the way back to Cheyenne, and every day it would change a little more, look a little less human, until the day he got there it wouldn't look like nothing.
"Goddamn you, Frank," he said again. "You'd do that to me, wouldn't you?"
And that is how it happened that Al Swearingen came to the door of Lurline Monti Verdi's room, meaning to hit her in the eye for missing her obligations the night before, and found Boone May instead, talking to a head. He stood in the door until Boone looked up.
"Where's Lurline?" Swearingen said. Boone May didn't try to put the head away or hide it behind him; there wasn't an ounce of social grace in his body. "Boone? You seen Lurline?"
"The last I seen your sorprano," Boone said, "she was running skirts-up down the sta
irs in the direction of Bill Hickok. That was yesterday."
Swearingen looked around the room, then walked over the window and looked there. "She didn't sing last night," he said. "I paid her to sing, and she didn't set foot in the Gem all night long."
Boone shrugged. "Well, I ain't got her under the bed," he said, "besides which, I got business problems of my own."
Swearingen didn't ask what problems, because it might of had something to do with the head. He didn't trust Boone May; there wasn't nobody he wouldn't kill. Swearingen included. He pictured what that would be like, trying to talk him out of it. Floating his words out toward that monster head, they'd get as far inside as snowflakes.
Boone was telling it anyway. "The sheriff won't give me my two hundret dollars from Frank Towles," he said. "Going to make me ride all the way to Cheyenne." Boone shook his head. "I don't know what's got into him, thinking I got nothing to do but ride to Cheyenne. He's quick enough to come running when he needs something done."
Swearingen said, "Seth Bullock ain't nothing different from me, except his business location." Swearingen didn't like Boone May or Seth Bullock either, but with Bullock it wasn't because he couldn't of talked him out of killing him.
He was beginning to think that Bullock was smarter than he was, that Bullock had figured out something about Deadwood that he hadn't thought of. Swearingen couldn't imagine what it was. The money came to the badlands. If a pilgrim had a hundred dollars, where else did you want to be to get it away from him?
There was something about Seth Bullock, though, that wasn't in a hurry. Swearingen didn't trust anybody that didn't scramble for spilled money. It was like he knew he would get it all later.
"Maybe he thinks he's got Wild Bill now, he don't need W.H. and me," Boone said.
"Wild Bill ain't going to change Deadwood," Swearingen said.
"Well," Boone said, "he's been here one night, and you lost your sopranie, I can't find nothing to fuck on a Sunday morning, and Seth Bullock won't give me two hundret dollars for Frank Towles's head. That ain't bad for a start."
"I come in the same time he did," Swearingen said. "I was eight days on the train with him and about twenty wagons of China whores, and he never touched none of them or none of mine."
Boone May looked at him a long time. "That don't sound normal," he said.
"He drinks," Swearingen said, "but he don't have nothing to do with the girls."
"I heard he got married," Boone said.
"I'm talkin' about his health here," Swearingen said. "I don't think he intends to live long."
"He eat?"
Swearingen nodded.
Boone said, "And I seen him drinking."
"I told you that already."
Boone closed his eyes and thought. Swearingen felt relief to be out from under his stare. Those were terrible bug-eyes, and they didn't even operate together. "Well," Boone said after a while, "it ain't a cancer. If he was to fuck and drink but not eat, then it could be a cancer. Or just drink, but not to fuck or eat. But this . . ." He rubbed his chin, going over the symptoms. "It could be torpid fever," he said.
"He don't look like that," Swearingen said. "His carriage's good. Torpid fever's yellow-skinned and swoped posture."
"All I know," Boone said, "if he don't intend to live long I wisht he'd hurry up with it. It's a lot of wasted thought he's already caused if he's about to die."
"There's a time for everybody," Swearingen said. He was thinking of the boy. He had been thinking of the boy, one way or another, since they hooked up at Fort Laramie.
Boone stood up and put Frank Towles's head back in the bag. "How much did you say?" Swearingen said.
"Two hundret dollars," Boone said, and sat back down. Al Swearingen was one of maybe four people Boone knew who had two hundred dollars. Probably had it in his pocket. "I could let you have it for less," he said. "You could take it back with you when you went to Cheyenne again."
"I just been to Cheyenne."
"I'll take a hundret and fifty," Boone said. "I ain't anxious to see that place right now."
Swearingen smiled at him. "Sitting Bull been visiting you in your dreams?"
"Shit," he said.
"What about Wild Bill?" he said. "You scairt of Wild Bill Hickok?" Boone didn't see where it was going. "All the things I ever heard about you," Swearingen said, "nobody ever mentioned scairt."
Boone put one of his bug-eyes on him then, full weight. "If there was a legal warrant for Wild Bill," he said, "I'd put his head right here on the bed next to Frank Towles."
Swearingen looked back and believed him. He remembered the way his oysters tried to climb back up inside when Bill ordered him into his own wagon and made him hand the reins to a whore. "What if it wasn't a legal warrant?" he said.
"What if it wasn't?" Boone said. He'd forgotten the cool feeling in his own balls the night before, when Bill had caught his eyes in the bar. He wished Al Swearingen would get to what he was going to say about the two hundred dollars. Wild Bill had took enough of Boone's time already.
"I heard that he come to Deadwood to the same purpose he went to Abilene and Cheyenne," Swearingen said.
"He ain't got the authority here," Boone said.
"Not yet."
"Don't play the larks with me," Boone said. "Say what you're going to say."
Swearingen said, "If you was to put two heads there on the bed, what would that cost?"
"Frank's worth two hundret dollars, at least," Boone said. "I already told you that."
Swearingen shook his head. "If he was there with the other head we was talking about, that might be worth two hundred dollars," he said.
"To who?"
"If it was the head we was talking about," he said, "to me."
"A hundret dollars each," Boone said.
But Swearingen saw what he was thinking. "No," he said, "two hundred for both of them, and you can keep Frank Towles."
It seemed different to Boone, put that way. The line between right and wrong was the law, and once you was on the safe side of it, there wasn't much you couldn't do, if you used common sense who you done it to, and kept it out of view. The thought he could end up staring at the sky through tree limbs never entered Boone's mind while he was working, because he stayed on the safe side of the line.
Taking Wild Bill seemed to cross that. If worse came to worse, you couldn't even say you mistook him for somebody else, with that head of hair. Boone had never killed anybody popular before. He wondered if you took their place afterwards. He was considering that when he happened to look down at Frank Towles's head in his lap. "You only take somebody's place," he said out loud, "if they're a better class than you."
Swearingen nodded, like he'd been thinking the same thing. Boone didn't like that. He wished there was some way to kill Al Swearingen instead, and collect two hundred dollars for that. He pictured Swearingen trying to talk him out of it. It didn't make sense to kill Wild Bill instead of a whore man.
Like everybody else in Deadwood, Boone May sometimes wished the world was a more logical place.
The first respectable people charley utter encountered in Deadwood, unless you counted Captain Jack Crawford, were Jack Langrishe and his wife, Elizabeth. They came to Charley's camp on the Whitewood about five o'clock Sunday afternoon to meet Bill. They said they'd been rehearsing all day.
"Yes, ma'am," Charley said. He took off his hat to make her acquaintance. She was a confident-looking woman, half a foot taller than her husband, with hair like a barn fire. Mr. Langrishe wore a suit and a string tie. He had a handshake that could of cracked Brazil nuts.
"I have come to Deadwood," Mr. Langrishe announced, "to bring cultural matters to the Black Hills." His voice resembled Captain Jack's.
"The place could use some cultural matters," Charley said, and realized he was still staring at the missus.
Jack Langrishe smiled. He said, "My wife, as you can see, is an actress. The rest of my troupe is still at the theater, preparing for tonight's perfor
mance." Langrishe pointed up the street and Charley nodded, as if he knew exactly what Langrishe was talking about.
"When we heard that Mr. Hickok had arrived in the city," Mrs. Langrishe said, "it seemed an act of providence." She smiled at Charley and a humming began in his peeder. Her being an actress, he guessed it was nothing personal.
"Well," Charley said, "Bill will surely be glad to hear you came by. He enjoys a good play more than most." They seemed to be looking behind him now, so Charley stepped out of the way.
"I was wondering," Mrs. Langrishe said, "if Mr. Hickok was about. We would like to invite him—invite you both—to tonight's opening. It just seemed too fortuitous that you had arrived in time."
"I'm afraid Mr. Hickok is attending some business," Charley said, "but I'm sure he'll be back." Freckles floated down into Mrs. Langrishe's blouse like sparks from the roof. "I will be glad to forward your invitation."
Mrs. Langrishe was looking at him again in a way that would have been uncomfortable if she wasn't an actress. Maybe her husband didn't care if you entertained his wife, as long as he'd got to break your knuckles first. As a rule Charley did not entertain married women, but he was human.
Her skin was as white as Matilda's, her teeth were white another way, and set off the tip of her tongue. He thought there must of been bones in those bosoms to hold them up. He moved his eyes off her, an act of will. Mr. Langrishe offered his hand again, which Charley took. "We will save you two seats in the orchestra," he said.
As soon as Charley got his eyes off Mrs. Langrishe, he began to smell her. Her perfume had to come from a thousand miles away. He smelled the perfume, but he couldn't smell her underneath it, so she didn't use it instead of soap. He thought he could feel the heat of her body. Jack Langrishe was crushing his hand again; he noticed that and squeezed back just enough to get his knuckles off the top of each other.
