The Messenger

by Bill Brooks

  Burt cracked another grin.

  “So you was married, or did I hear that wrong?”

  “You heard right.”

  “Where she at now?”

  “Butte, Montana Territory,” I said.

  “Divorce you?”

  “Death divorced us.”

  He sort of nodded. “Sorry to hear.”

  “Not as sorry as me.”

  “Kids?”

  “Had one. He’s dead, too.”

  “Again, sorry to hear. You’ll have to forgive my ignorance, prying into your affairs.”

  “You’re forgiven.”

  He poured me a drink, noting I guess how much my hands shook.

  “Here’s too olden times, back before life became brutal.”

  “It always was, don’t you think?”

  “We had us some good times. You remember Bigfoot Simmons?”

  Bigfoot was an ace shooter and probably killed more damned buffalo than any man alive. I never saw anyone with his eye or ability in long shooting.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Well, he ended up taking his own life in a hotel in Cleveland, Ohio. Shot himself in the brains. I guess when the buff ran out and he didn’t have nothing else to shoot, he just shot himself out of sheer boredom. I think about him sometimes and wonder if maybe we won’t all end up that way, civilized as everything’s becoming.”

  “You think?”

  “I do,” he said, and we swallowed down our whiskey.

  Burt refilled our glasses. “Every day we live, we just got those memories of how it was even as we’re watching how it’s getting to be. Why, do you know, they already got telephones in some of the hotels in Cheyenne?”

  I said I did not know that.

  He shook his head. “I hate to think what this country will be like twenty years from now.”

  “You think either of us will live that long?” I said.

  He looked at me down the length of his long nose. “I plan on it, but you might be a little less likely, looking at you now.”

  “You ever had it real good once, you’ll know why I’m the way I am now.”

  “Love of a woman . . .” he said without finishing the thought.

  He poured us another. My hands were starting to shake less.

  We talked about the old days there in the Texas Panhandle before he went his way and I went mine.

  “You remember that gal, Juanita?” he said.

  “The fat one?”

  “No, the skinny one with the crossed eyes.”

  “I remember one of them was crossed.”

  “That’s the one.”

  “What about her?” I said.

  “Nothing. She just come to mind is all.”

  “You were in love with her, weren’t you?”

  “Hell, I thought I was till I caught her going at it with Bigfoot in his wagon.” He looked suddenly forlorn, then brightened again quick as a storm cloud passing through an otherwise sun-filled sky. “You know what we ought to do?”

  “What?”

  “Go get us each a bath over in Chiney town, let them Chiney gals wash us.”

  “I’d just as soon sit here and drink your whiskey,” I said.

  “We’ll get another bottle and take it with us,” he said.

  “Lead the way,” I said.

  And so we went to Chiney town and let the Chiney gals wash our hair and everything else as well.

  Chapter Six

  The next couple of days were a fog of liquor and sex. The Chiney gal in the tub with me was the first woman I’d had who wasn’t my wife in fifteen years. Her skin was smooth, the color of almonds, her hair like black silk. She was small and pretty, and, if I’d been sober and of a different frame of mind altogether, I might even have fallen in love with her.

  But my heart still belonged to Ophelia and probably always would, and I chalked up my unfaithfulness to the liquor. When I came fully sober again, I came to in my shack, alone and feeling empty. Money only buys you company for so long, even if it is somebody else’s money, and my Chiney gal was probably washing another man’s hair about now, and I wasn’t even a recent memory to her.

  I felt as dry and wasted as the deserts down in Mexico.

  As if summoned, Burt returned, only this time it was snow he shook off his hat as he stood in the room, and it was snow that melted off his boots, leaving little dark puddles on the floorboards.

  “I see you survived,” he said.

  “I see you did, too.”

  He had the look of the cat that ate the canary.

  “Take more than a couple of Chiney gals to do me in,” he said.

  “You don’t have a whiskey on you, do you?” I said.

  “I ain’t no sot.”

  “I reckon I am.”

  “I reckon,” he said.

  “What you doing here?” I said.

  “Come to see if you wanted some work.”

  “I think I’m all set,” I said.

  He looked around at my impoverishment, not even so much as a single can of beans on the shelf above the single-plate potbelly stove. “Well, I can sure see you’re living high and mighty and a fellow of your means would see honest work as beneath him and all.”

  “What sort of work?” I said.

  “Riding messenger on my run to Cheyenne.”

  “Messenger?”

  “You still know how to shoot, don’t you?”

  “Is that what I have to do, shoot somebody?”

  “You might.”

  “I’ve got no gun.”

  “I’ve got a sweet little ten-gauge over at the office you can use. It’s got sawn-off barrels and a sawn-off stock and you can hide it under your coat.”

  “Why would I want to?”

  “You wouldn’t. I’m just saying if you wanted to. Say if you were going to walk into a bank and rob it, and you didn’t want nobody to see you had a shotgun.”

  “Oh.”

  “Anyways, my regular messengers . . . both of ’em . . . are unavailable at present. One’s down with the gout and the other is being chased by an irate husband and I don’t know of anybody I could put stock in except you to see the job through.”

  “You think you can put stock in me?” I said, doubtful of my own condition.

  “I always knew you to be a stick-to-it fellow. I never knew you to quit nothing once you put your hand to it. And I also never knew you to run from a fight if there was one. That’s the sort of man I need riding in the box with me.”

  “Well, hell, you make me sound almost princely,” I said.

  “You want the job or not?”

  “What’s the pay?”

  “Oh, now you’re choosy of a sudden?”

  I nodded.

  “Fifty dollars. I’ll give you half now and half when we get back.”

  I tried to picture it, me riding hung over atop a stage wagon. It hurt my already hurting head.

  “Well?” Burt said, impatient.

  “Let me check my schedule,” I said.

  “Hell,” he said, and walked out.

  I sat there, thinking about it for a long time. Until I began to shiver again. I pulled on my clothes, boots, coat, and hat, and headed down the road toward town. Maybe if I had something to do, I wouldn’t think about having nothing to do. I was flat broke and even a suicidal man gets hungry.

  I found Burt in the stage line office. Out front stood a four-horse team of chestnuts hitched into the traces of a Concord, its top painted red and its belly painted yellow.

  I stepped inside and Burt looked up from his desk. He was signing papers of some sort. There were five passengers in the office as well. Two of them were a well-dressed couple. The male looked like he had money and the female looked like she did, too. Both handsome and not seeming to fit the usual types Deadwood seemed to attract. Then there was what looked like a rancher with his peaked hat and lace-up boots sitting on a bench along one wall, smoking a cheroot whose smoke wreathed around his head like a small blue clou
d. Of the other two fellows, one looked hard and well-used, with a face that looked like it was chiseled from flint. He was wearing a short, blanket coat and I could see the end of a leather holster poking below the hem. The last fellow was a Chinaman dressed like Chinamen dressed in cotton clothes, coat, and a silk cap. He had a rope of black hair hanging partway down his back and he averted his eyes as if he were in the presence of kings.

  “I’m glad you were able to clear your schedule,” Burt said, and nodded toward the 10-gauge leaning in the corner near his desk. I walked over, hefted it. It felt about right. I cracked it open and saw both chambers were seated with shells.

  “You got any more shells for this?” I said.

  He looked at the passengers, then at me.

  “You planning on starting a war?”

  “I’d rather have more and not need them than not to have them and need them,” I said.

  He pulled a wax box from a drawer and set it atop his desk.

  “Take all you want,” he said.

  I took them all, shook them out, and divided them equally into my coat pockets. They balanced me out the way I thought I should be.

  “Let’s get them loaded up,” Burt said, all officious.

  So I went out and held the stage door open, after pulling out the step, and waited for them to load up. All, except for the Chinaman who climbed up on top of the stage, knowing he was probably not welcome among the white passengers inside.

  The weather had socked in heavy in the gulch. Thick gray clouds and mist, as though heaven itself had lowered down so common man could reach it because there wasn’t any other way most of the inhabitants of Deadwood were ever going to rise up and get to a higher sort of heaven.

  Then Burt and me loaded the luggage into the boot along with some mail sacks. Then we went back inside and took a hefty strongbox from inside a safe and carried it out to the stage, and it took all the muscle we had to get it up into the box where Burt locked it into the floor by way of an eye bolt and metal strap with a big brass lock.

  He handed me the key and said: “You hold onto this since you’re the one with the blaster.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “It means they’ll have to kill me to get the key.”

  He grinned his usual grin, then said: “You coming, or what?”

  I climbed up the left-hand side and settled in next to him, my head like a dinner bell being clanged.

  “Hold on,” he said, and let loose the footbrake, then snapped the reins yelling: “Git up there girls!” Then off we went into the icy fog, and it didn’t take but a few minutes to feel like we were lost in a world not of our own making.

  I could smell the pitch of pine sweet in the air and wouldn’t have been surprised if an arrow came and found one or the other of us.

  “Keep a sharp eye,” Burt said.

  “I don’t know how I could see anything in this,” I said.

  “Keep a sharp eye anyway.”

  I said I would. The rocking of the stage on its suspension made me queasy even though I hadn’t eaten or drunk anything for the last twenty-four hours, although I couldn’t remember exactly.

  “You look about sick,” Burt said, and took a small pint bottle out of his coat pocket and handed it to me. “Try a taste of this.”

  I read the label.

  “This is peach schnapps,” I said.

  “I know it,” he said. “Good for the stomach and the cold.”

  “It’s what women drink,” I said.

  “Give it back if you don’t want any.”

  I pulled the stopper and took a swallow. It turned warm inside me, like a soft sweet heat flowing down into my belly.

  Burt reached for it, and I handed it back. He took a drink, then handed it back and I took another.

  “See,” he said.

  “See what?” I said.

  “You feel better already, don’t you?”

  “I reckon, some.”

  “See,” he said again.

  “It ain’t so bad if you don’t mind drinking like a woman,” I said.

  “I don’t mind,” he said, and cracked the bullwhip out over the horses just for the hell of it I think.

  It sounded like a pistol shot.

  Chapter Seven

  We’d changed teams twice and were on our way to Broke Creek station when Burt said: “There’s something I ought to tell you about before we get there.”

  We’d gone almost sixty miles and evening was falling fast because of the time of year it was. The weather had cleared somewhat, but it was still cold and damp. A ridge of mountains stood off in the distance that looked like some kid had drawn them there with a pencil, and the sun was glazed and lying low.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “Walsh,” he said.

  “Who’s Walsh?”

  “Fellow that runs the station in Broke Creek, ain’t you listening?”

  “I’m trying to.”

  “Anyway, it’s an odd situation and I just thought I’d warn you about it.”

  “You haven’t said anything yet.”

  “I’m getting to it.”

  “Go ahead then.”

  In spite of trying to measure it, we’d already drunk down the schnapps and tossed the bottle off into the brush a long way back. I think I’d have broken a man’s legs to get some more.

  “This Walsh is a married fellow and has his wife there, working for him, and he’s got a big nigger that works for him and some Mexican boy, too.”

  I shrugged.

  “But he’s also got this woman there, too . . . somebody he keeps for his pleasure. Her name’s Sara something or other.”

  “I imagine it causes quite some dinner conversation,” I said.

  “I imagine so. But the thing I wanted to warn you is how jealous Walsh is of her. He nearly beat that Mexican kid who works for him to death over her. I’m surprised that the boy still works for him.”

  “Or hasn’t cut his throat,” I said.

  “Or that,” Burt said.

  “I don’t aim on making hay with somebody’s woman,” I said.

  “I know it, but just so you know what the deal is.”

  “He must be something, this Walsh,” I said.

  “He acts like he is, but to me he’s just a big blowhard bully.”

  “Let’s whip his ass when we get there,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “Pure principle.”

  Burt grinned. “We ought to, shouldn’t we?”

  “I was just kidding.”

  “It’s a good idea.”

  “You do it then.”

  “I might.”

  “If he kills you, do I still get my money?”

  “I’ll have to check with the company, see how that works.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  We made the last incline just as the sun winked out beyond the mountains and threw a fire up into the sky setting it momentarily ablaze. Below us we could see the station’s buildings, all but one on the west side of a wide rippling creek. Every time I saw a tributary I was reminded all over again about the bear.

  “That cabin sitting by itself,” said Burt, “is the one the woman lives in. I’d stay shy of that cabin was I you.”

  Burt had to hold back the team on the descent and work the foot brake to keep the damned rig from getting out of control. He did it like he’d been doing it all his life and we soon enough hit level again.

  But we didn’t go far before we saw the body.

  “That looks like the Mexican kid,” Burt said, hauling back on the reins. The main house stood a hundred yards beyond. “Something’s damn’ wrong.”

  “Jealousy,” I said.

  “Maybe so, but why would Walsh leave him way out here? Why wouldn’t he drop him down a well or something?”

  I was already getting that old feeling coming over me—the one that whispered danger in my ear.

  “Let’s just leave the stage here,” Burt said, setting the foot brake and tying off the rib
bons. He pulled his coat back and I saw what looked like a pearl-handled Merwin & Hulbert riding his hip bone.

  I climbed down my side and Burt climbed down his. But I didn’t wait for further instructions. I was already moving cautiously toward the house, the rabbit ear hammers of the 10-gauge thumbed back and set to go. Darkness was coming on fast now that the sun had set and even the shadows were being swallowed. I saw lights on inside the house.

  I heard Burt saying something to the passengers behind me, but it wasn’t until I heard another man’s voice command him to throw his hands up that I turned to look over my shoulder in time to see the fancy-dressed dude step from the coach, a pistol in his hand aimed at Burt’s head. I caught a glimpse of the woman, too. She was pointing a gun at the others that had stepped from the coach. Even the Chinaman had dropped down from the top.

  I could have pulled the triggers on them but I would have had to have taken out Burt with them and I didn’t want to risk that. Instead, I stayed to the shadows, moving toward the house, trying as I went to come up with some sort of plan. I was never one for plans. I most generally just did whatever needed doing.

  The man and woman ordered Burt and the others to march toward the house. Voices carried at night more so than in the day, it seemed, like they do across water. I ducked into the shadows along one wall of the house, flattened myself against the wall, and waited.

  The fancy-dressed man shouted at the house.

  “Come on out, boys! I got these here, but there is another loose.”

  The door burst open and I heard boots clomping on the porch, men’s voices asking: “Which way did he go, Davy?”

  “Around there somewhere. Look for him, god damn it!”

  It was dark and I didn’t know how many were looking for me, but I started to move again, toward the open spaces beyond the house, figuring to get far enough away, then circle back around. Suddenly gunfire crackled in the dark like firecrackers set off and I dropped to the ground as bullets zipped the air overhead. I looked back and saw the muzzle flashes from their guns and pulled both triggers. Somebody screamed. I got up and kept running.

  Then one of the gunmen yelled: “He shot Bob’s arm off, Davy!”

  “Well, go get the son-of-a-bitch before he shoots all your arms off!” came the reply.

  “How we supposed to find him in this dark?”