The Messenger

by Bill Brooks

  “They scared you bad, huh?” I said.

  He nodded.

  “You know Davy shot me back in that hotel,” I said.

  He nodded again.

  “I know,” he said. “I was the one who found you bleeding and hardly alive. I was the one who carried you out to that infirmary and dropped you off.”

  “What of the woman, Sara?” I said.

  He shook his head slowly.

  “I couldn’t do nothing but bury her. She lived only for a little while . . . dead by the time I got you to the infirmary.”

  “Why the kindness?” I said.

  “Hell if I know,” he said. “And that’s the truth.”

  It didn’t tote—for a man to do another a kindness like that—but then Dew Hardy was a strange son-of-a-bitch if there ever was one.

  The old crone inside the shack screamed like she was being murdered.

  “She goes out of her head sometimes,” Dew Hardy said.

  “I’m not leaving here until she tells me where Belle and Davy are,” I said.

  The Pinkerton stood slowly—like an old man too long in cold water.

  “I’ve sort of taken to her,” he said, looking toward the shack. “Given the circumstances and all.”

  “Do what you have to,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “There’s love and then there’s gold,” he said. “Tell you how it’s going to be. You promise to let me keep whatever gold we get off Davy and Belle, and I’ll go ask Etta where they are at.”

  I thought on it for a minute. I could kill him, of course, or at least shoot him up pretty good, but what would be the point? I could burn the place, but there was no guarantee she’d tell me anything. I either wanted to return that gold to Deadwood or find Davy and kill him.

  “Go on then,” I said. “Ask her.”

  “It might take a little bit . . . you willing to wait?”

  “Hell,” I said, looking up at the sun.

  He went into the house and I waited.

  An hour passed and he came out again, hitching up his pants and looking like he’d been in a tussle of some magnitude. Three or four times while he was inside I heard the old woman screaming and I had to close my eyes at the thought of what Dew Hardy might be doing to her. But it didn’t sound like screams of a woman in distress as much as one having a hell of a good time.

  “You get it out of her?” I said as he walked over to a piebald mule and took an old saddle and saddled it.

  “I got it in her and out of her,” he said with a grin.

  “Jesus, I don’t need to know the details,” I said.

  He smacked his lips as he tightened the cinch. I noticed the wood grips of a small handgun sticking out of the right front pocket of his jeans.

  “They’re in Cheyenne,” he said.

  I looked toward the house.

  “You kill her?” I said.

  “No. Fact is, she probably ain’t never felt so good.”

  He forked the saddle and the horse’s ears pricked up.

  “We’ll go back to Two Cents,” he said. “And catch the train to Cheyenne.”

  “What about your lady friend?” I said.

  “Oh,” he said, “I imagine she’ll work loose from them knots I tied in an hour or two.”

  “Knots?” I said.

  “Not to worry,” he said. “She prefers it that way.”

  We rode clip-clop back to Two Cents and I couldn’t get the picture out of my mind of that old woman tied up and . . .

  Chapter Eighteen

  Gypsy Davy said: “I got the girl and I got the gold and what more can a man possibly want except to see the shining face of Jesus when he dies? Oh, but you are a pert thing, gal. Pert as I ever seen. And the way you handled that pistola, well, a thing of beauty, it truly was.”

  Belle Moon was in her bloomers, bare from the waist up in the fancy hotel room she and Davy had rented in Cheyenne, a long way from Two Cents—that dung heap. It had been almost two months since they robbed the Deadwood stage, shot the place all to hell, and left the dead in their wake—including a few of their own: Boss Walker and his boy, Bill, Charley Evans, and Frank Skin.

  “Oh, those were some lusty boys,” she said, “Boss and them.”

  “Danged right. Kept them hungry for the sins of life . . . lead them along like pigs to the slaughter. They never seen it come, Belle, did they?”

  “Poor Frank,” Belle said. “That stranger blew off his arm and I guess we killed him out of kindness and done him a good turn, for he surely would have bled out slow and painfully.”

  “Yes, we done Frank a good turn and that’s how we must look at it. Them other boys, too. If we hadn’t assassinated them, they’d sooner or later all end up in prison. We done them good turns, too.”

  “We did it right, Davy. We were merciful in tendering them to the grave,” she said, staring out at the rain drizzling down from a shrouded sky, like some old widow gone to weep at the grave of her lover. Tears falling over her ashen cheeks is the way Belle thought of it—the rain.

  “They were led by their peckers instead of their brains,” she added with a cheery smile whilst holding a glass of the champagne ordered to their room. $10 a bottle and worth every sip. “Such is the curse of men . . . to be led by their peckers instead of their brains.”

  “Does that include present company?” Davy said.

  “Present company excluded, love.”

  He smiled from the bed upon which he reclined, sunk into the comfort of a feather mattress, his head and long hair resting upon a blue silk pillow. He was modest in proportion, a figure nearly as slight as she in size, a somewhat sensual face and mouth, though hidden by his dark moustaches. He’d recently shaved his beard. It had itched too much with lice.

  “I am normally a woman who enjoys a good cocktail, but this champagne will do just fine,” Belle said.

  Gypsy Davy’s stark nakedness compared to the pale of a fish’s belly. He kept his guns nearby, the way he preferred his guns to be.

  “When I pulled you out of that stink hole in Deadwood, you were lucky to drink watered-down booze with them crusty miners and gut-starved cowpokes . . . and look at you now, a real, genuine lady.”

  Belle did not care much to be reminded of their beginnings.

  “Ha! I was a lady long before you were ever a gentleman.”

  “I was never a gentleman, but a two-gun killer all the way. My pappy gave me a pistol the day I was born and taught me to shoot it the day after. Now get your pretty tail on over to this bed and let’s have another go around, you and me, because you know ol’ Davy is glory bound. And if you want to ride along, you best hop this train.” His grin said it all.

  Belle drained the contents of her glass down her gullet and jumped on the bed where the two tangled not once but thrice before they fell apart like an egg cracked open and panting like thirsty dogs.

  “What I want to know is,” she said, “what happens when the money is all spent and the time comes to get more . . . you without a gang?”

  “Thieves and would-be thieves are a dime a dozen,” Davy said. “I’ll just put together a new bunch.”

  “Got anyone in particular in mind?”

  “I was thinking most recent of Blackbird and Little Dick Longwinter . . . neither too bright, but both as hard as swallowing a can of rusty nails.”

  “Little Dick Longwinter!” she shouted with glee. “Is that his name for real?”

  “So he calls himself,” Davy said.

  “Well, it surely would be a long winter if his first name is true.”

  “You’re quite the wit, you are, Belle.”

  “Ain’t I, though. You know it’s quite rare to have both beauty and brains in a woman, don’t you?”

  “I got a good eye for horses and women,” Davy said. “How about some more of that bubbly juice?”

  “The champagne’s clear across the room chilling in a bucket of ice.”

  “So?”

  “I hope you ain’t
planning on me becoming your personal slave.”

  “No, just my woman . . . and a woman is to serve her man.”

  “Well, maybe for now I am your woman,” Belle said.

  “For evermore.”

  She rose from the bed and sashayed across the room in a deliberate fashion so he could watch the wiggle of her buttocks, full and round and just right for a man of his nature. She was once the best white whore in all of Deadwood Gulch according to those who knew such facts. And once Davy had heard her name upon the lips of so many men, he just had to find out for himself. And by God, it was true. He never in all his rambling glory days met a woman who could do it like Belle Moon could, or had such a bloodlust in her.

  “How you feel about robbing and killing?” he’d asked that first night of their romance.

  “Same as I do about riding horses and screwing handsome men like yourself,” she’d replied.

  So he let her in on the plan he had to knock over the Deadwood stage, told her about his gang—Boss and Bill Walker, Charlie Evans and Frank Skin. She did not say it aloud, but knew three-fourths of those boys intimately already in her professional dealings. Boss and his boy Bill were a combo act who never did anything separately, including their whoring. It was fine by her—double team, double pay. Charlie Evans just liked to talk mostly because he wasn’t sure what he was all about on the inside and uncertain with women in general. As far as Belle was concerned, getting paid to listen was a lot easier than getting rode like a pony for the express mail.

  “Why do you come to me if you don’t know if you like women or not?” she’d asked Charlie that first time when he admitted he didn’t know if he could fornicate with her.

  “I’m trying to prove to myself it’s not just something in my head that makes me think otherwise,” he said.

  “Your way of thinking is as confusing as a Chinese puzzle,” she said.

  “I mean it ain’t that I don’t like women . . . I just ain’t sure, and feel all strange around them. Of course I’m relying on you to keep this private between us.”

  “Are you trying to say you like your own kind better than a gal?”

  “I ain’t trying to say nothing.”

  Well, Charlie gave it his best effort, but his best proved not too good. So he’d pay her to tell the other boys waiting downstairs, waiting for him to return to regale them with tales of his sexual prowess. Charlie’s money was as solid as any other man’s even if his pecker was not. So it didn’t matter a wit to her one way or the other. The only fellow of Gypsy’s now assassinated gang that she had not known was the cross-eyed devil, Frank Skin, who, when it came time to put a bullet in him, she gladly did. For, knowing Frank Skin a little, was to know him a lot.

  He had had bad breath and rotted teeth and fingers yellow from cigarette smoking and never had a kind thing to say to her. And once, when they were out of earshot of Davy, he’d whispered hotly: “I’d like to screw you with a gin bottle.” She’d been around enough men to know some were born cruel and stayed that way all their lives. Frank Skin was such a man, clear up to the day she shot him out on the road and watched his head explode like a fat plum bashed by a sledge. It was akin to sexual pleasure to put a bullet into that mean son-of-a-bitch.

  “We’ll leave us a trail of blood,” Davy had said that day on the road. “From sea to shining sea . . .”

  Davy often mused and waxed poetic when he was drunk and happy. He kept a banjo he liked to strum, and his voice was high-pitched and nasal when he sang. He had no true musical talent except what he fantasized. But none of this lacking deterred him from trying. He further enjoyed writing ballads, and had been working on one about him and Belle since they first started their life of crime together.

  Davy and Belle, the Satans from hell

  Ride wild horses on the outlaw trail.

  They sing and they dance & their guns

  Are ablaze just like their romance

  Doggerel, of course. It was as far as he’d gotten before becoming stumped, but he was as nearly proud of it as he was of the carnage and mayhem the two had created.

  “Life is but a short sweet season in the eons of time itself,” he said to Belle as he drank straight from the bottle of champagne. She rolled her eyes.

  “You should have been a play actor,” she said. “You’d ’a’ made a dandy one.”

  The take of the strongbox came to just over $10,000 and they had spent it generously, having journeyed by train to San Francisco, then up to Alaska by steamer where they saw bears ten feet tall and mountains that looked painted against the sky. Davy bought Belle a cross made from the penis bone of a whale, saying, as he tied it around her neck: “Sort of fits you perfect, the whole notion, don’t it?”

  They had lived like a king and queen while in San Francisco, but the police there in that town were good at what they did, and what they did best was catch outlaws, thieves, bunko artists, shysters, counterfeiters, and every other sort of con and criminal activity.

  “We need to be on our best behavior around here,” Davy had warned.

  “I agree,” Bell had said.

  So they pretended to be rich swells from back East and took a suite of rooms at the Palace Hotel on Market Street and ate oysters and lobsters and three-inch-thick steaks in the dining room and washed down pickled elk hearts with good Kentucky bourbon and smoked dollar cigars. Belle’s beauty drew the attention of all the other swells in the place, much to Gypsy’s pleasure, for he enjoyed having other men take notice of Belle and encouraged her to be flirtatious, thinking, as he did, it might lead to some scheme they could pull later on—luring some rich gent up to the room, then at very moment the pair were in flagrante delicto, Gypsy would burst into the room with his gun in hand declaring the gent had seduced Gypsy’s wife—one Belle Moon—and demand some form of recompense or else!

  Gypsy told Belle about his plan.

  “That seems so desperate,” she said. “And besides, the police will find us out quick and clap us in jail. They’re not like those two-bit stars in the Dakotas.”

  “I’m only saying if we should find ourselves in a pinch . . . before I can put a new gang together and go rob the bank here in town . . . the one that sits on the corner . . . that big one made of stone with the big winders.”

  “Bank! What do you know about robbing banks?” Belle declared.

  He nodded with mirth when he told her if Frank and Jesse James could rob banks with aplomb, so could he.

  “Jesse’s dead and Frank’s on the lam,” she reminded him.

  “That means there is more opportunity for us then, don’t it?” Davy said.

  At the time, they had been eating oysters and washing them down with champagne at the Inter-Ocean and Belle nearly choked on a pearl, spat it out, and held it to the light and said: “Look what I found.”

  “You see,” Davy said. “Luck is with us every step of the way.”

  “Well, if anybody could make Frank and Jesse look like pikers, it would be you, Davy,” Belle said still in wonderment at having found a pearl.

  Davy grinned and kissed her cheek.

  “You are one handsome devil,” she said.

  He winked and replied: “Don’t I know it.”

  “I’ve something to confess,” she said, giddy with life. “I was once a married woman.”

  “I ain’t surprised.”

  “How many other men’s wives have you known?”

  “Not nearly enough,” he said with his boyish grin. She believed she had never seen a man as pretty as Gypsy Davy. “When and where was you married, Belle?”

  “I had a husband back in Kansas,” she said. “I was young and too naïve to know better than to hitch my star to one man.”

  “He must have been something to capture a wildcat like you.”

  “He was a sodbuster.”

  “You . . . married to a sodbuster? I don’t believe it.”

  “It’s true. I was just seventeen at the time and innocent as baby Jesus.”

 
“Still, I don’t believe it. I doubt you were ever so innocent, Belle.”

  “Well, I was once.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He got dead.”

  “Do tell . . .”

  “Somebody stuck a knife in him.”

  “How utterly fascinating. Do you know who it was did the deed?”

  “It was me. I caught him cheating on me with a neighbor’s daughter . . . a mere child of thirteen. A precocious little animal he paid a dollar to each time. Thirteen proved to be his unlucky number.”

  “And thus began your wayward life?”

  “And thus it did. I ran away before the law could hang me.”

  “I knew the first minute I laid an eye upon you that you were the devil’s own child.”

  “Know this, lover, the first time you take a life is the hardest. It gets easier after that.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir. Is that a threat?”

  “Take it however you wish . . . but if you cheat on me, well, just say a sharp knife goes in easy.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “Yes, do. How much longer do you think we can live in tall cotton?”

  “The rate we’re burning through it . . . you and those trunks of fancy clothes . . . another week, maybe two or three before we got to go back to work.”

  “Hell, that seems a bit drawn out to me. I miss the action of banditry.”

  “Truth be told, so do I.”

  “Then let’s spend it all and do it quick and get back to the business we both love so well.”

  “Here, have another glass of champagne.”

  “Don’t mind if I do.”

  And so they toasted one the other, for life without action soon becomes dull, no matter the quality, no matter how much of breathing the rarefied air of swells one can breathe, or the salt air of the sea, or watching big bears through field glasses that could eat a man in a single sitting, or seeing mountains so lustrous they did not seem real, nor eating oysters on the half shell dipped in garlic butter, nor endless fornication and rivers of expensive booze. None of it compared to thrill of banditry for them.