by Pete Dexter
Charley and Bill had grabbed their hats at the sound of the explosion, and they sat and watched the scene while the rain made little gutters of the brims. There was a fair amount of noise in the theater—mostly thunder and the popping sound from the torn canvas—but nobody screamed, and nobody left.
And then Jack Langrishe cleared his throat. Being an actor, he could do that loud enough to be heard over a thunderstorm. As much as was possible, the audience turned themselves away from the wind and looked up. About half the floor lamps were still lit, and that and the lightning gave the actor's motions a jerky look that struck Charley as theatrical. Jack Langrishe took the banker's daughter by the arm then. "What is it, my pet?"
The daughter stared at him. "What is it, my pet?" he said again.
"Oh, shit," she said.
There was a long crack of thunder, and when it died people were laughing. Ten minutes later it began to hail.
The play lasted most of an hour, the storm quit about halfway through. The wind died, the rain stopped, and before it was over there were stars in the sky. That's how fast things turned in the Hills. At the end, Mrs. Langrishe stood in the door and shook hands with everybody who had come. The street behind her was under half a foot of moving water. Her dress was soaked through and stuck to her person everyplace there was a hold. Her hair had come loose and her eyes seemed to be bleeding black. Charley had never seen a woman look more beautiful. She thanked him for coming, and then Bill, but she used two hands to shake with Bill.
"I hope we can have something more amusing for you next time," she said.
"Drier," Bill said. "Next time make it drier."
Mrs. Langrishe put her hand over her mouth and began to laugh. "You are clever, Mr. Hickok," she said. She gave him that peeder-hummer smile, but Bill didn't notice. "Perhaps sometime you would like to take part in one of our plays," she said.
Bill shook his head. He said, "I did acting three months in a production of Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show, but it didn't suit my disposition."
"Perhaps it was the selection of material," she said. Charley noticed that everything Mrs. Langrishe said sounded like it meant two things. "We could offer you something more suited to your tastes. Perhaps the great Bard . . ."
"Well," Bill said, "if it was the great Bard, me and Charley might be interested."
She touched Bill's hand, just the tips of her fingers against his wrist. That was something Matilda did too, when Charley was leaving Colorado on business. He wondered if he was beginning to miss her. "Taming of the Strew?" Mrs. Langrishe said. Bill said, "It would be our honor."
Bill was sitting on the tree stump holding a glass of gin and bitters when Charley woke up in the morning. Bill was wearing his guns and his pants. His body was silver-colored, and there was a little bottle on the ground next to him, with a silver-stained rag next to it. "That reprobate with the head and the bug-eyes," Bill said, "you remember him?" Bill always knew when Charley woke up, it was like he could hear his eyes open.
Charley got up slowly, feeling the weather in his legs. "Did you shoot him?" Bill had gone back to the badlands after the play, Charley had gone to bed. There was something about getting rained on that always made him tired.
Bill shook his head. "Not yet," he said.
Charley said, "What's the circumstances?"
"Everywhere I went last night," he said, "he was standing off to the side or in a corner, studying my habits. A man that size trying to hide in corners, it's unseemly." He touched his shoulder and then checked the finger, to see if what was on him had dried.
"Mercury?" Charley said.
"It's a safety measure," Bill said. He drank some of the pink gin and stood up. "I got an idea about him," he said, "that he's somebody I have to watch."
"Then shoot him," Charley said. "Give him fair warning and finish it. You can't have someone in the corners every minute."
Bill picked up his shirt and put his arms into the sleeves. The way he dressed when there was trouble, there was never a time when both hands were away from his guns. "Captain Jack mentioned it too," he said. "That there were scoundrels looking for all our scalps."
"What scoundrels?" Charley said.
"He didn't say, except they were close at hand. Captain Jack doesn't talk specific."
Charley climbed out of the wagon, Bill finished his drink. "He talks like a woman," Charley said. "A gossip that won't name names."
Bill smiled at that. "I wish there was a general reluctance to bring my name into things," he said. "The trouble is accuracy. You can't explain what you did to anybody, especially a reporter, because things don't come out the same in words. And the words you give them, they get it wrong. I tremble to think what the writers do after a body dies."
"The only ones you can trust to know what you mean are your pards," Charley said.
Bill shook his head. "Women know you best," he said. That led his thoughts a different way, and he picked up the bottle of mercury and stared at it. "Agnes sees me better than I see my own self."
Charley let that settle, and then he said, "What about this corner-hugger?"
"He doesn't know me at all," Bill said. "If he did, he'd let me alone."
Charley reached into the back of the wagon and came out with a clean shirt and his toilet. Bill went with him to the bathhouse, and they sat in hot tubs while the soft-brain told them about poison eggs and hangings. Bill listened to it without expressing judgment one way or the other. When the soft-brain was finished, though, Bill said, "If it was me, I believe I'd burn myself up. I don't want my picture taken after I'm gone."
"They took my picture once," the soft-brain said.
"They do me alone at first," Bill said, "and then the man that operates the machine always sets things up in back so a volunteer can pull the trigger on it, and he stands in next to me, like we were pards."
"It don't hurt to get your picture took," the soft-brain said.
"Not too bad," Bill said.
"I seen my soul when they did it," the soft-brain said. Bill sat up in the tub. He was interested in the soul. "It's true," the soft-brain said. "There's little floating circles, all pretty colors, and inside them was my soul. When you die, they float up out of your body to God."
Charley said, "You believe there's circles inside you?"
"That's where I seen them," he said. All three of them were quiet then until the soft-brain said, "I got to get my picture took again."
"I wouldn't advise it," Bill said. "You don't want to do something like that unless there's a reason, like if you were famous and had to. A picture is the beginning of misstatement and misunderstanding.
You got people looking at it with all different opinions, and they make up stories to go with them."
The soft-brain nodded, like he could see the problem. "There's stories on me already," he said.
"Like what?" Bill said. He was saying more than he usually did, but there wasn't anybody there but Charley and the soft-brain to hear it.
"Soft-brained," the soft-brain said. "I heard people say the Bottle Fiend was soft-brained."
Bill smiled. "Who's this Bottle Fiend?"
"Me," the soft-brain said.
"They just call you soft-brained because of your hobby," Bill said. "They don't see how anybody would eat poison eggs or hang hisself, so they say you're soft-brained."
"I shot myself once, too," the soft-brain said. "It took the wrong angle, though. That's what Doc Sick said. I heard people say, though, 'A soft-brain shoots himself in the head, so what?'"
Bill stood up and reached for a towel. "Listen," he said, "there's some soft-brained in everybody."
"That can be proved in federal court," Charley said.
The tone of his voice made Bill sit back down. "Was there something happened last night?" he said. Bill had memory lapses when he drank which he didn't like to acknowledge.
"I came to bed after the flood," Charley said, "but earlier in the festivities you put it in Captain Jack Crawford's head that we
were going on a moose-hunt."
"That's not so bad," Bill said.
"It's not all," Charley said. "When we get back from the hunt, you volunteered us for Taming of the Shrew."
"Under what conditions?" he said, calm and even. Bill accepted all news the same stoic way, that's what made him who he was.
"There were no conditions or attachments," Charley said. He stood up in the tub and gave Bill a bow, to show how he'd done it. "You said, 'It would be our honor.'"
"Son of a bitch," Bill said.
"I could see it if you had designs on the lady," Charley said, "but you hardly looked." He got out of the tub and wrapped himself in a towel.
Bill closed his eyes and thought. "Did I say when?" Charley shook his head. "That's to the good side," Bill said. "We'll leave it like an accident, like your bun fell off the dinner table."
Charley said, "I believe Mrs. Langrishe is not slow to bring fresh buns."
Charley had just pulled on his pants when the first of the upstairs girls came in for her weekly bath. Not all of them took baths, but the ones that did came in on Monday mornings. In the afternoon they did their shopping. It was understood the ladies from the good part of town stayed off the streets on Monday.
The girl was young and blue-lipped and skinny. She walked past Bill and Charley and the Bottle Fiend and began to undress next to the tub in the far corner. The way she did it, it was nothing. The Bottle Fiend went over for his money. "Clean water's fifteen cents," he said. "Hot's another dime." Her shirt came off, and she was skinnier than she'd looked. Her skin was somewhere between white and light blue, and you could see the shape of the bones in her arms and ribs. She was shaking now, cold.
She looked through her purse for change, setting the things inside it on the stool next to the tub. There was a locket shaped like a heart, a man's ring, a shot glass, a comb, perfumed soap. Charley knew firsthand that perfumed soap left an eight-day rash. "Shit," she said. Bill covered himself with a towel and got out of his tub. He didn't need to cover himself, though, she had no interest in that side of the room at all. "I'll git you later," she said. "I left my money back in my room." She pulled her skirt up over her head and then dropped her underthings in a pile around her feet.
You could see the bones in her butt, too. Charley knew it couldn't be healthy when you could see the bones there. He also knew no upstairs girl in the world would leave her money in her room. But it wasn't his business. He tucked his shirt in while Bill got into his pants. "Cold water or hot?" the soft-brain said.
"Hot," she said.
"That's a dime extra," he said, and held out his hand.
"I already told you," she said, "I left my money in the room." Her legs were as thin as her arms, and Charley noticed the needle marks along the veins. He'd thought it was insect bites at first.
The Bottle Fiend looked at her in an uncertain way. Charley took a dollar out of his pocket and handed it to him. "For her too," he said. Charley had pity for anybody attached to morphine, and that heart-shaped locket had caught him by surprise.
The girl climbed in the tub and waited. She never said thank you, she never glanced at Charley or Bill. It looked like it had been two weeks since she ate, but there wasn't anything to do about that. Charley had been around morphine victims, and they just weren't interested. In food, or anything else but morphine. He thought it must be the worst way to go there was.
The boy could not forgive himself for shooting bill's horse. He left the camp and staked an abandoned claim a mile south of Deadwood, in the direction of the city of Lead. Number 12 Above Old Hope. It ran three hundred feet along the Whitewood Creek in shallow water. He registered the claim with the district recorder in Deadwood. It cost him two dollars. The recorder gave him a certificate that said, "Personally appeared before this official, Malcolm Nasb, and recorded undivided right title and interest to Claim Number 12 Above Old Hope of 300 feet for mining purposes. This here is July 20, 1876."
The boy's sister had given him sixty dollars before he left Colorado. He bought his tent and equipment from the old man who worked Number 11, and who had bought them himself from the previous owner of Number 12. The old man had rheumatics of the back and was always cold. His hands were twisted from the work and cold water until they were almost useless.
He sold the boy rubber boots, a pick and a pan and a shovel. A small leather bag made from a bull's scrotum. A frying pan, a fork and a knife, and the tent, which was lined with old calico. He charged him twenty dollars. It was twice what he'd paid the previous owner, who had quit the Hills and gone back to his family in the States.
The mining pan was about a foot and a half across, and five inches deep. The sides angled in to the bottom, which was less than half the diameter of the top. It was made of soft steel and rusted top to bottom. The boy shook his head at its condition. "I intend to buy a new one," he told the old man, "and keep it clean." He had watched Bill and Charley cleaning their guns after hunts.
The old man was patient with him. It was the rust that held on to the specks of gold, which was all there was left in Old Hope, specks. "Don't use it to cook," he told the boy. "You get slick in there, you might as well throw it away."
The old man was patient. He worked his claim one day a week, as the law required to keep title, and the rest of the time he sat on a box in front of his tent, resting his back, trying to rub some of the coldness out of his hands and wrists. The old man was waiting for the mining companies. They could get the gold out of quartz, and he thought they would buy him out.
He watched the boy all afternoon Monday. He saw that he had never worked a placer before—he handled the pan like it was another shovel—but it was after he'd been at it all afternoon and hadn't improved that the old man knew he had no talent. Before dark he walked down the bank into the boy's claim and took the pan out of his hands.
He filled the pan with gravel from the side of the creek, and then walked out into the water and sat on his heels. It hurt his knees to get down. The boy came with him, watching over the old man's shoulder.
The old man put the pan underwater and moved it gently side to side, cleaning out the dirt. He brought it back up and picked out the biggest pieces of rock, rinsing them, then tossing them into the water. Then he dipped one side of the pan into the creek and carefully rocked the contents back and forth until the sand began to spill over the side. "Look for it now," he said. "If there was a nugget, you'd see it now."
The boy watched, thinking of ways to do it faster. The old man rocked the pan until most of the sand was gone. What was left then was a small pile of red and black minerals, heavier than what had been washed out. Red garnets, iron, tin.
"Now watch," the old man said. He moved the pan suddenly. The boy thought he was throwing it away, but the old man held on and then peered into the bottom. The minerals were sprayed out there like the moon at crescent, and the old man poked his finger into the tip, and came out with a speck of gold. He put it in the boy's pouch. "It's always at the fartherest tip of the moon," he said.
The boy took the pan and did what the old man had told him until dark. In the morning, the old man watched him again. The boy had no talent at all. He had a strong back, though, and the old man saw it would be a long time before he gave up. He liked the boy, and was glad for the company.
Boone may had thought it over, and did not want to have business with Wild Bill. He'd decided that while Bill was shooting glasses off the head of Pink Buford's bulldog. It wasn't the shots themselves, it was something in the way the dog trusted him. Boone May had watched Bill for two days, and knew by then all the stories he'd heard about him was true.
Bill Hickok was not born to be killed by his peers. Nobody ordinary would survive trying. That was something Boone May felt, and he trusted it.
He lay awake next to Lurline Monti Verdi all night Monday, and was awake in the morning when Bill came up the street toward Nuttall and Mann's for his morning cocktail.
He thought about Bill, and about dying.
Several times he also thought about Calamity Jane, which was somehow tied into it too. His thoughts were circular. First there was Bill and the dog, and then it was Bill and him in that half second when you realized you was killed but it hadn't happened yet, and then it was him and Jane. Every time he got to that part, he woke Lurline up and tried to wash himself in her again. He wasn't rough or humorous with her, and each time he was done she went back to sleep disappointed.
He got up at the sounds of activity in the street and watched Bill walking to the bar. He wished it was the sissy he had business with. He carried himself straight enough now, but Boone pictured him without Wild Bill.
He removed himself from Lurline's bed for good sometime toward the middle of the day. She was gone, but he could still smell her toilet water on the pillow. It was hot in the room, and he took off his underwear before he put on his pants and shirt. He did that fast, afraid someone would come in the door.
His peeder rubbed against the sewing in his trousers, and he noticed it was tender. He tried to remember how many times he'd took Lurline during the night, but when he considered them one by one they embarrassed him because he hadn't really took her at all. It wasn't like bedding down with Jane, of course, with her trying him out like a new saddle, but in the whole night with Lurline, he'd never once done anything manly.
There was time for that, though. Boone May was never one to let his peeder do the thinking. He had seen where that led, and when Boone cashed in, it wasn't going to be his member that got him into it.
He was looking out the window, thinking of the man he had hung in Hill City, when the Bottle Fiend came walking down the street dragging his flour sack, poking through the mud with a stick for bottles.
Boone had never had reason to talk to a soft-brain, but he saw something in this one, and called to hirn. The Bottle Fiend looked up, found him in the window, and came in the door downstairs. A minute later he knocked on the door. Boone guessed soft-brains wasn't afraid of nothing.
He opened the door. The Bottle Fiend walked in and took off his hat and put that and his stick on the bed. He held on to the sack. The bottles inside made stirring noises whenever he moved, then seemed to settle down when he stopped. The thought hit Boone that the soft-brain might think the bottles was his babies.
