by Pete Dexter
"Your brother?" she said.
"Well, him too," Charley said. "But I was speaking of the Bottle Man. My brother Steve is thirty-six years old, and he's never shot anything on purpose yet." Mrs. Langrishe did not pursue the matter. The Bottle Fiend caught up, and they started back up the hill.
"So you abandoned the mail line?" she said.
Charley shrugged. "It's hard to say in these matters who abandoned what." She laughed at that and gave him that feeling he was clever in a way he didn't quite see. He smelled her and watched her all the way up the hill.
The house was two stories. It was whitewashed and had a porch and an ice-blue door. There were windows everywhere, more windows than house. It didn't look safe. She held the door for them, but the Bottle Fiend would not come inside. Even when Mrs. Langrishe offered him a glass for his whiskey, he shook his head and refused to move. "Relieving a bottle fiend of his bottle is no inducement," Charley told her.
"Well, perhaps I could find a bottle for him inside," she said.
The Bottle Fiend said, "Perhaps indeed."
They looked at each other for a minute, and then Mrs. Langrishe and Charley went inside. The Bottle Fiend stayed where he was. Charley followed her into a sitting room and put the packages on a chair. The walls of the room were covered with pictures and marquee signs from shows Jack Langrishe had done in the East. There were certifications of appreciation, and the key to the city of Gary, Indiana, hanging over the piano. The windows went from a foot above the floor almost to the ceiling, all of them closed. The room had a natural coolness.
"Mr. Langrishe must still be at the theater," she said. She sat down on the davenport and patted the seat next to her. The heat poured off Charley again. They sat so close her face was out of focus. "My husband has been consumed with the theater since the storm," she said.
"It was an opening night, all right," he said. He got that unintentionally clever feeling again. She tittered, and he saw that he was right.
"Poor Jack," she said. "He's there night and day. Rehearsing the players, overseeing the new roof. The reviews of Camille ruined his disposition."
"I don't believe I saw the reviews," he said. "I've been lying low . . ." She had a copy on the table, under a picture album. It was from the Black Hills Daily Times. "Miss Flowers" it said, "is poor at dying, because she generally dies too hard. Her positions are not good in her passion scenes; when she should swell out like a mountain she sinks in like a gulch. That's wrong in this country—Camille is not her forte."
She leaned over his back as he read the review. "He is completely consumed," she said, in a way that made Charley think of eating, and then of the inside of Mrs. Langrishe's mouth. And then, against his will, he thought of her biting him.
He wondered if Lurline had turned him left-brained forever.
While he was thinking that, Mrs. Langrishe hung a short, soft hum behind his ear, a sound that could have been taken two ways. It seemed to Charley that everything about Mrs. Langrishe you could take two ways.
"What consumes you, Mr. Utter?" she said.
There, she did it again.
Charley swallowed and tried to think of what was consuming him. It wasn't much of a time to think. "Something," he said.
"But what?"
Charley shook his head. "It isn't one thing, like the theater," he said. "What's after me now doesn't have any focus." She left her hand on his shoulder, and moved it to the side of his neck. He felt his own pulse where her fingers touched him.
Nothing had any focus. Not himself, not her face. Charley saw that she was nodding. "I understand," she said.
He opened his mouth, wondering what would come out next, and at the same time he looked past Mrs. Langrishe's shoulder, trying to see something clear before things got more out of focus, and found himself staring at the Bottle Fiend, who was pressed into one of the windows in a way that had flattened his face.
The sight startled Charley—his nerves weren't good when he was drinking regularly—and Mrs. Langrishe felt the change in him, and looked back over her shoulder too. She issued a little cry then, and later on Charley would not be able to say for sure if it was the sight of the soft-brain pressed into the window that caused it, or the sight of him falling through.
He came into the living room and rolled across the floor. The glass seemed to follow him, maybe chasing him. The Bottle Fiend had been open-eyed and open-mouthed as he fell—that much Charley would swear on the Bible—but by the time Charley got to the place on the floor where he had finally stopped rolling, the soft-brain was drawn into himself, curled into a tight ball with his eyes squeezed shut. He looked like he expected to continue the fall momentarily.
There were small cuts on the Bottle Fiend's arms and hands, and one that looked more like a tear across his neck. Charley touched his arm, but the Bottle Fiend would not open his eyes. "Are you alive?" he said.
The Bottle Fiend did not answer.
"Are you cut somewhere I can't see?"
The Bottle Fiend lay motionless on his side. The glass spread out behind him like broken wings. Charley felt his eyes fill, he had no idea why.
Mrs. Langrishe bent over the soft-brain from the other side. "He's cut," she said.
Hearing that, the Bottle Fiend opened his eyes. He sat up and looked at his arms and hands while Mrs. Langrishe went into the back of the house for bandages. Charley said, "This is the last time I take you anywhere polite," but the soft-brain didn't seem to hear him.
He was staring at the cuts like a banker that had found six piles of money all at the same time. When he did speak, it was more to himself than Charley. He said, "I got inside."
"You might of used the door," Charley said, but then he saw the soft-brain wasn't talking about houses. He thought he'd broken into a bottle.
Mrs. Langrishe was back in a minute carrying a bowl of water, alcohol, and bandages. She sat on the floor between Charley and the soft-brain and began to wash him up. She cleaned the cuts one at a time, beginning at his neck and then working down. First with water and then alcohol, and then she wrapped them in cotton gauze. The Bottle Fiend watched her and from time to time, when he reached in to touch one of the openings in his skin, she pushed his hand away.
It was a thing about women and injuries that Charley had noticed before, that once you turned one over to them, it was theirs.
"I got inside," the Bottle Fiend said again. He looked around the room, and then at Mrs. Langrishe. He began to smile.
"This is a house," Charley said. "A bottle is a bottle." Mrs. Langrishe stopped working on the Bottle Fiend's arm and gave Charley a look. "He thinks it's a bottle," he said, and looked to see if that explained it. "My friend doesn't look at things the same as most people."
"I surmised that," she said, and returned to the cuts. She wiped away some blood and stared into the soft-brain's palm. Then she reached in, as delicate as fate, and pulled out a long sliver of glass.
Charley noticed her nails were painted red and thought of them on his chest. That's where Lurline put hers. She never did anything where you needed a mirror to see the mark.
"You see," Charley said, "to him, there's secrets in bottles."
Without looking up, the Bottle Fiend said, "There is secrets in bottles, sometimes I heard them." The cuts Mrs. Langrishe hadn't attended yet bled and ran down his arms to his elbows and fingers, finding the lowest places, and dropped from there onto the floor.
Mrs. Langrishe's floors, like anybody else's, were soft and warped, and the blood ran into the cracks between the boards. The Bottle Fiend was looking at the walls now.
"Do you like my pictures?" Mrs. Langrishe said.
The Bottle Fiend shut his eyes. "It's all right," she said. "You can come back sometime and look at them closer." As she said that, she smiled at Charley.
"Whence do they come?" the Bottle Fiend said.
"People paint them," she said. "Artists."
"No," he said, "I mean, whence do they come?"
Mrs. La
ngrishe stopped and thought. "From secrets," she said after a while. "Secrets inside painters." Charley saw that made sense to the Bottle Fiend. He wondered if Mrs. Langrishe knew about his secrets too.
"There's secrets inside me," the soft-brain said.
"There's secrets in everybody," she said, and looked at Charley. In the accident, his peeder had temporarily lost its sense of purpose, but it recovered itself now. She seemed to know that too.
"I knowed Bill was going to get shot," the soft-brain said. "But that ain't a secret now."
"No," she said, "not now."
Charley sat on his heels and looked at the Bottle Fiend's face. He waited for what had happened to Bill to reveal itself, but the Bottle Fiend shook his head. A line of blood appeared from the bandage on his neck and ran into his shirt. "A man with a little-bitty gun said so," he said.
"Does he take baths?" Charley said. The Bottle Fiend touched his ears.
"It wouldn't help nothing," he said. "It ain't a secret now."
And that was as much as he would say. Mrs. Langrishe wrapped him from the top down, the tip of her tongue working into her upper lip as she tied the little knots. Charley's legs had begun to hurt, and he took a seat back on the davenport. From there he admired her posture and her concentration, and he noticed the Bottle Fiend had relaxed and put himself in her hands. God had made him a soft-brain, but He'd given him instincts to protect himself. The soft-brain looked at the walls while she tied her knots. "Where is that from?" he said. He was looking at one of the marquee posters.
"It's from a play," she said.
The soft-brain scratched his head. "I never been to a play," he said.
"You'll have to come," Mrs. Langrishe said. "Perhaps Mr. Utter would come with you."
The soft-brain nodded. "We'd be delighted," he said.
That night Charley gave the Bottle Fiend one of his shirts. The Bottle Fiend's regular shirt was covered with blood from the accident, and it didn't have a collar anyway. They both took baths—he had to pay the soft-brain for them both before he would sit in the tub—and met Mrs. Langrishe and her husband at the theater door.
Charley stepped between Mr. Langrishe and the Bottle Fiend before they could shake hands. "He can't shake right now," Charley said. "He's injured his arm."
"Sorry to hear it," Mr. Langrishe said, and looked behind them for the next customers.
"Excuse my husband," Mrs. Langrishe said, as she walked them to their seats. "He is so absorbed in this place . . ." She walked between Charley and the Bottle Fiend, with a hand on each of them. She squeezed Charley's arm when she said that.
The program for the night was not exactly a play. Jack Langrishe had brought in some cancan girls from Cheyenne to fill the week between Camille and Othello, and among them was a woman named Fannie Garrettson, who had taken up living quarters with Handsome Banjo Dick Brown, the most famous singer in the Black Hills. Banjo Dick was known for the song "The Days of Forty-Nine," which he sang first and last at every performance. Sometimes he cried at the closing words:
My heart is filled with the days of yore, and oft I do repline,
For the days of old, the days of gold, the days of forty-nine.
The song had been written during the California gold rush, but miners were miners, and loyal to what came out of the ground, and not the ground itself.
While the theater filled, the Bottle Fiend turned in his seat, looking at the people in back of them, then at the walls, then at the ceiling. Jack Langrishe had constructed another canvas roof, although this one had less sag. It reminded Charley of the fine line between stubborn and stupid.
The ladies in the audience were dressed like they'd planned it from last week. Some of them had brought opera glasses. Charley smiled, thinking he might buy the Bottle Fiend opera glasses. The lights dimmed then, and Jack Langrishe came out onto the stage, comfortable in the wash of applause, and announced the evening's program and his plans for the cultural affairs of Deadwood. In the end, in a voice that hung in the air after he'd quit, he said, "No one will stop us from building a theater of the arts as great as the cities of Europe."
Charley leaned toward Mrs. Langrishe, smelling her evening perfume, and asked, "Who is it against him?"
"Critics," she whispered. "He means critics."
"Ours is the highest purpose," he added, "and it will not be denied or deterred by the naysayers." So it was the critics, all right. When he had finished, the cancan girls came out. Charley looked sideways and saw the Bottle Fiend was open-mouthed and spellbound.
Mrs. Langrishe moved in the dark, and he thought she was going to whisper again. When he leaned toward her, though, her hand dropped on the top of his leg, found a comfortable spot and nestled in.
She left her hand there through the cancan dancers, and while her husband introduced Handsome Banjo Dick Brown. It struck Charley as elegant, the way it lay there, light and graceful and still, while his peeder pushed up at it from underneath and her husband lectured from above.
She left it there through Handsome Dick's first number—"The Days of Forty-Nine"—and then the second. She left it there right up until a red-headed man in farmer's clothes stood up in front of them and shouted, "I'll have my Fannie back," and threw an axe past Handsome Banjo Dick Brown's left ear.
Handsome Dick was singing "Oh, Susanna" at the time. He stood up off his stool and pulled his pistol from underneath his coat, and fired five shots into the audience.
The red-headed man's name, it developed, was Ed Shaughnessy, and he had lived with Fannie Garrettson for six weeks on a farm outside Cheyenne before Handsome Dick had found her in town one night and taken her to Deadwood. Charley's first thought, as Ed Shaughnessy stood up and threw the axe, was that the soft-brain had more social graces.
Then Charley saw the first shot hit. It went in right under his eyebrow. The red-haired man fell back on his seat, and hung there while Handsome Dick, aiming carefully, put four more shots into his chest. Handsome Dick always got even, he bragged on that.
The screaming didn't start right away—nobody knows what's real in the theater—but then the ladies heard the balls going into Ed Shaughnessy's body, and they knew.
At the first shot, Mrs. Langrishe made the same noise that came out of her when the Bottle Fiend fell through her window, and she made it again every shot afterwards. Charley moved to protect her, but there was no need. Handsome Dick was a shootist; from the way he held his pistol high in his hand Charley guessed he had learned somewhere in the South.
Mrs. Langrishe's hand—the one that had been on Charley's leg—moved to her own throat. The skin there was soft-looking and took Charley's attention for a moment, even while the shots were still in the air. Charley thought of the Bottle Fiend then, but when he turned to look, the soft-brain hadn't moved a finger. His mouth was open half an inch, his head was still as a scared rabbit in tall grass. He hardly seemed to breathe.
Handsome Dick fired his fifth shot and sat back down on his stool, leaving one round in the chamber, and picked up his banjo. When the event was reported later in the Times and the Pioneer— the Pioneer also carried a letter from Fannie Garrettson pointing out that while she was notorious enough for living with Ed Shaughnessy, she'd never married him, so there was nothing wrong with running off with Handsome Banjo Dick Brown—it was treated as an act of heroism to pick up his banjo and finish "Oh, Susanna."
Charley did not see that it said much for a man to kill another man and then to give it no consequence at all.
When Charley looked again, Mrs. Langrishe had covered her face. Ed Shaughnessy's body had fallen off the seat and was lying now on the floor, eyes up. Charley had begun to feel sorry for him, looking at his clothes, and thinking of the work he must have done.
He reached over to pat Mrs. Langrishe's shoulder, but she pulled away from him and then left the theater. Charley checked the Bottle Fiend. His eyes were still going from the stage to the man on the floor, and then back to the stage, afraid he might miss something, and C
harley left him there and went after Mrs. Langrishe.
He was ashamed to admit it, but he wanted to get her hand back on his leg. He met Sheriff Bullock in the aisle, followed by Doc Pierce and his two nephews. Doc Pierce whispered to him, not to interrupt the performance, "Where is the deceased?"
Charley stepped out of the way, and the coroner and his nephews headed past him toward the front.
Charley found Mrs. Langrishe outside, standing against the door. He touched her arm, but it was tight against her side and would not be moved. She was not crying, but her breathing came in rushes, as if she were. "You've had a shock," he said.
She turned and stared at him. "What a wonderful eye you have, Mr. Utter," she said.
Charley did not know how to take that. "What I meant," he said, "a lady like yourself isn't used to a shooting, in your own place . . ."
She looked at him, and he thought he saw some of the red of her hair reflected in her eyes. "You're correct, Mr. Utter," she said. "I am not used to a shooting in my own place. I am barely used to soft-brains falling through my parlor windows, believing my house is a bottle."
"He didn't mean to," Charley said.
She continued to stare at him, and he was positive he saw the color red. It seemed to flare now, like a fire. "That is your whole idea of manners, isn't it?" she said. "He didn't mean to."
Charley read women as well as most, but he hadn't come across any before that blew so hot and cold. He thought she must be scared to death of this place. "You've had a shock," he said again, and regretted it as soon as it was out of his mouth.
"I have been in shock all day," she said. "I have been in shock since the moment I came across your unfortunate person, walking the streets drunk at high noon, and tried to be kind to you."
"He isn't unfortunate," Charley said, "he's only interested in different things, and distracted."
She closed her eyes. "I was speaking of you, Mr. Utter," she said. Charley felt his cheeks flush. He had been called names before— after all, he was married—but nobody ever said he was unfortunate. It embarrassed him to think that he had appeared that way to her.
