Paradise Sky

by Joe R. Lansdale

  There was placer mines right there in the big middle of things. As we come by, I seen a man at one spot, a woman at another, eyeing us as if they thought we might at any moment fly off the handle and steal whatever goods they had dug up. The woman, who was fifty if she was a day, wearing a big blue bonnet, stood with a Winchester in her left hand and a rock in the other. When I looked her way, she tossed the rock at us and winged Wow, who was at the wagon reins this day. After bouncing off Wow’s arm, the rock landed on the seat. Wow scooped it up, swiveled from her position, and with a fine throw beaned the old woman hard enough in the head it knocked her down, slinging her bonnet to the wind. She was up in a flash, tossing more rocks at us, but by that time we was out of her aim and the strength of her arm. To our advantage, she was unwilling to move too far from her claim.

  “This is a real nice town,” Cullen said from the back of the wagon. “If it was to catch on fire.”

  We had the cover rolled back now, and Cullen and the three China girls was sitting back there like frogs on a log. Wow was clucking at the horses as they plodded through the mud. I rode Satan closer to the wagon. “Don’t you know they’re glad to see two coloreds and some China girls?” I said.

  “I don’t know that old woman is glad to see anybody,” Cullen said.

  We passed a building on a hill marked as a Congregational church. There was ragged, crooked stairs that climbed up to it. On a kind of porch, I could see what appeared to be a small buffalo, but as we passed I seen it was someone under a buffalo robe, having passed out there either from exhaustion or too much rotgut whiskey. We rolled past a place called the Gem Theater, which was two stories high and not a bad-looking building.

  Now, for us colored and China folk, the only place we could go was somewhere on the edge of town, which is how it always was. It was a thing that caused a boiling anger in me and in some ways made me wish I had stayed with the army. We was about finding that place when a man with a tree limb under one arm for a crutch, the skin on his head peeled back from a probable attempt at scalping, limped out from between two buildings and nearly got hit by the horses hauling the wagon. Wow pulled them up, and the fellow put the spy on me so hard I could almost feel his eyes crawling under my skin. His jaw was broke on the left side, and the bone had heaped up there like a snake coiled under leaves. His skin was burned and puckered along the same side of his face, and the other side was a series of ridges made by scars, most likely carved there by a knife. There wasn’t no way to know how he might have looked once, and I felt sorry for him. He not only had that face and a limp, his clothes looked to have been taken off a smaller man than himself. They was wore through with holes, and one of his boots had a flapping heel. He made it across the street with some effort and hobbled between the buildings and out of sight. Wow clucked to the horses and continued.

  I seen a place called the Big Horn Store and ragged buildings that served this or that, mostly whiskey, and finally we come to a place that was somewhat cleaner and more organized. This was the Chinaman section of town. The air had a smoky aroma and a peculiar nose-twitching scent that I later learned was opium, and all this was hitting us as we parked in a yard where we was charged a bit of money for currying the horses and storing the wagon. It was a considerable bite in the loot me and Cullen had laid by, so it struck me we was going to have to find work, and pretty damn quick. I still had enough for a meal, and there was a chop suey place near us, but the idea of eating there made me nervous.

  I said to Wow, “That China fellow that cooked a man in that stew we ate—that ain’t regular with the China folk, is it?”

  “He was a savage. Been around whites too long,” she said.

  “Haven’t we all?” I said.

  “Yeah, but he took it to heart,” Wow said. “And he cooked the meat too long.”

  When we got ourselves over to the chop suey house, it took about five minutes before all the women, including Wow, discovered they could have jobs as whores out back of the place or as someone who served up the food. It seemed there had been an angry customer the night before, a white fellow, and he had got into the opium, mixed it with whiskey, and had gone wild with a bowie knife, killing off about a quarter of the whores. He was took out and hanged by a couple of white boys who had been waiting in line for their turn, but in the end it was a rough way for there to be a job opening.

  But that was the case, and the girls took it. Wow was the only one said she was going to work at the chop suey house, not the bedding, at least for as long as she could afford it. As for Wing Ding, or whatever the peg-leg China girl’s name was, she found in Deadwood she was worth more than back at Ransack. Here there was plenty of men that was missing limbs and eyes and such, and they liked the camaraderie of someone they felt was more an equal.

  Anyway, we settled in there, and after a day or two of asking around, I got a job at one of the saloons, Mann’s No. 10. Cullen got a job driving a honey wagon, which he’d pull up to houses and businesses, go in and empty the slop jars and such into it. It was nasty labor, but it paid all right, cause no one else wanted to do it, including me. Swamping at the saloon was bad enough, emptying spittoons and mopping out vomit and blood and whatever was wet on the floors, but driving a wagon full of shit wasn’t something I wanted even part-time.

  14

  Me and Cullen took to living in the China quarters. We was accepted there well enough. There was a few other colored spotted here and there, some with placer-mine claims. Any of them that had a mine wasn’t friendly, as they had this feeling anyone that spoke to them or associated with them might be claim jumpers. In truth, that was often the case.

  We had a small room in the center of the China folk, and we locked and bolted it up like we had the crown jewels in there, but we didn’t actually keep much stored for fear someone would decide they needed it. Locks are for honest people, when you get right down to it, and the thing about Deadwood was, it was a collection of some of the meanest, orneriest, and most thieving son of a bitches that ever stood on this earth. It wouldn’t have surprised me to come in after a day of swamping to discover our entire shack had been stolen.

  The room was tight but large enough for us to lay out bedrolls at night. We had two chairs, which we had to stack together and hang on nails on the wall when we wasn’t using them. We had a board that swung down on chains for an eating and writing table, and we had a kerosene lamp hung on a nail.

  The walls was double-planked and filled with all manner of junk to make them firm. I found one of the boards would peel back, and I pulled out and threw away the junk that was in there and took to wrapping my Winchester and a few odds and ends in a blanket and stuffing them behind the wall. Like most men in town, I toted my money and pistols with me—the LeMat and the Colt, anyway. The service revolver I kept back in that stash with my Winchester. When I put the board up and pushed the loose nail back in place, you couldn’t tell it wasn’t a proper part of the wall. Cullen also had a few goods he kept in there. It wasn’t a cheerful place.

  You woke and slept to the smell of food cooking. China folk was always cooking, feeding miners at all hours. It was nice to wake or bed down to those smells, though when you didn’t have the coin to buy a bite to eat, it could also be depressing. Cullen and me had full run of the whores we had brought with us, as they considered it lifetime payment for what we had done to save them, but in time I drifted away from that, except for the now-and-again occasion. I didn’t like them thinking they owed me nothing, especially their bodies, for what we’d done.

  Cullen found he could live with that situation, and he not only partook of their joys but also soon came to have quite an affection for Wow in particular. I could see how that could come about, and had he not moved in on her, I might have. She was a little dumpling of a woman with a head that belonged on a broad-shouldered six-footer and a face made for going away, but inside that head was some real brains and personality. She had a smile that could make her seem right pretty as compared to others who
was fair of features but dull of spirit, and vain to boot.

  Wasn’t long before they was a couple, and she didn’t go back to whoring. She kept slinging that chop suey.

  Time passed from summer into fall, and that’s when I decided that I’d carry on as a swamper, but as a sideline, I was going to become a ratter. This, however, turned out to be a job with some competition.

  Deadwood was prone to a horde of vermin, and sometimes at night, men, and women, too, would sit on their porches with a lantern lit and watch rats run along the edges of the street. This led to a number of low-caliber rifles being used to pop them, and in the act of that at least three people, two men and one woman, had died in the practice of rat tapping, as it was called by some. A few small dogs and cats had met their demise in much the same fashion.

  Rat tapping and rat trapping also jobbed up a mess of young boys who was paid by the pound of dead rats brought to the general store in tow sacks. The bags was weighed up, same as gold nuggets, and the boys was paid off, sometimes in penny candy. This led to a clutch of the little heathens running around at night with two-by-fours whacking at rats and causing a general disturbance. But they was less of a worry than the rats themselves.

  Them critters scuttled about in squeaking, sniffing, scratching, biting hordes. They came at night and hustled along with great excitement. They’d climb right up on you if you had a crumb on your shirt or a spill of beer on your pants. We even had them come directly into the saloon through the open doors, as if they was there to belly up at the bar and order a beer. They was bold, I tell you. The working girls in them places would scream, and so would some of the men, and then the revolvers was drawn, and rats was shot, or shot at; the quicker ones scampered to safety while the patrons ducked and hoped they didn’t catch a round of hot lead.

  Night I decided to be a ratter was the same night I was at the Gem Theater, my job having expanded from Mann’s No. 10 during the days to the Gem at night. It was a busy place, what with troupes of Shakespearean actors, recitations of this and that, singing groups, jugglers, acrobats, and magicians. They all came through Deadwood, and the best of them usually ended up at the Gem Theater, which is not to say that some nights the entertainment there wasn’t of a more unprofessional nature. It frequently was, and that’s the case concerning the night I’m talking about.

  I was emptying spittoons, and a fellow come down the aisle during an act, striding toward the stage, where a woman was howling like a wolf over a deer corpse, this being some of that less professional entertainment I mentioned. All of her bellowing was done to the numbing tinkle of bad piano; it couldn’t have been no worse if the player was playing with his toes.

  This man coming down the aisle had a pistol, and he started firing off shots at the piano player. I could understand this, as that was some racket that fellow was putting out, and combined with the woman’s hollering, I could see how a fellow might fly off his bean. But unfortunately for the music world, it turned out the piano player was a better shot than the other. He pulled a little gun and popped a shot at him and laid him on the floor, leaking blood. We all gathered around the shot man, who said, “That singer is my wife. She run off with that goddamn piano player.”

  By then the piano man had come over and was standing with the rest of us over the dying man. His gun was taken from him by a big bruiser who served as a bouncer for the theater, and a heavy hand was laid on his shoulder.

  The dying man said, “I am dying. There’s a cloud settling over me. I chased them here, and I’ve been undone. But boys, you got to get a preacher and make this cad marry her, and now, over my dead body. You got to promise me that.”

  He talked just like that, I do not kid, and the men around him started nodding, and promises was made. When the old boy died, which was pretty quick after that, a preacher was brought in, and the howling woman was hustled over in her little feathered outfit, and her and that piano player was married right away, for what it was worth. When that was done, the dead man was laid out on a table, his hat was put on his chest, and a wad of dark cloth was stuck in his wound to stop the leaking. The bullet hadn’t gone out the other side of him, so it wasn’t as messy as you might think.

  The preacher said some words over him, and his bravery was attested to, though the piano player made a few grumpy sounds during this. The preacher went on and on, extolling the virtues of this fellow who he had never met. You would have thought they’d grown up together and had spent many a night on the trail and had fought a grizzly bear to death in tandem, the two of them having only pocketknives and each other’s asses to ride all the way down the mountainside. It was a preaching to beat all preachings. A few men was sniffling, and there was a couple who had gone beyond that and was right-out blubbering. I was a little sick to my stomach.

  When this finally got over and we could put our hats back on, the dead man was given to what passed as the town undertaker, and the body, supported by four volunteers, was carted out.

  I mention all this to give you the tone of the place and to get back to the bouncer, who was a husky white Southern boy; a redhead with a bad attitude. He come by me carrying that piano player’s gun, shoved me with a shoulder, saying, “Out of the way, boy.”

  I had a spittoon in my hand, and I had on heavy gloves I was using to hold the lip of it, and I brought it around and clocked him. He was lucky I had already emptied it and was returning it or he would have been covered in tobacco spittings. He dropped so fast I figured him dead, as only the week before I seen a man throw a beer glass and kill a fellow. They was going to hang the glass tosser, but he said he had to pee, and they let him go out back. He was never seen again. Such was the vigilant law enforcement in Deadwood.

  A crowd gathered around the bouncer—Red, as he was known—and I felt a little better when he rolled on his side and spat out blood. Soon a stout man come shoving through the crowd. I recognized him right off as Al Swearengen, the owner of the place and my employer.

  “I seen what you done,” he said, “and it was a good whack.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “I put my full arm into it.”

  “Listen, put that down, come over to the office, and see me.”

  I put the spittoon down and followed him into a very nice office with ornate furniture and a painting of a naked woman on the wall doing something with a swan. He said, “Take a chair there.”

  I took a chair in front of his desk. I studied the girl and the swan. She had one leg halfway wrapped around it, and the swan was looking back at her. I couldn’t figure if he was surprised by the leg wrap or if he was somehow in charge.

  Swearengen gathered his hands together, made a steeple of his fingers. He was a man that would look oily fresh from the bath. His hair had enough grease on it a small moth had got hung up in it. I started to point it out, then decided not to. Swearengen pursed his lips as if in thought. I could tell right off he was the kind of man that would try and give you goat shit and tell you it was raisins.

  “Now, listen here,” he said. “Red, he’s a pocketer.”

  “What?”

  “He steals from me.”

  “Oh.”

  “I need a new bouncer, and a man your size might be just the ticket. Red, he’s done here. I was trying to decide if I was going to fire him or have him whipped. I’ll count that spittoon as a licking, and when he wakes up, I’ll kick his ass free. So the job is yours.”

  “Well, sir, I don’t know.”

  “Look at it this way,” he said. “Red there could press charges.”

  “To who?” I said.

  “To me,” he said. “I’m the law in this saloon.”

  “I see,” I said, and did see, and didn’t like it.

  “But you come to work for me as a bouncer instead of a swamper, and I will say he shouldered himself into you on purpose.”

  “He did,” I said.

  “I know. I would like to have you take the job. Lot of men here are scared of colored.”

  “Lot of me
n here hate colored,” I said. “That ain’t exactly the same thing.”

  “You got that working against you, I admit,” he said. “But I pay well.”

  He told me what he paid. It was good, but I still had my doubts. I tried another tack.

  “I was considering a ratting job,” I said, and I took the tone that there just couldn’t be any profession more glorious and profitable.

  He didn’t fall for it, though. I seen a smile work its way across his broad face, and his dark eyes lowered like he’d just realized he had my neck in a noose; no one in their right mind would see a ratting job as a high profession.

  “You would in fact be dealing with rats here, but the two-legged kind.”

  I didn’t say that I thought he himself might be a prime example. I just sat silent, which is sometimes the best thing to do, as Wow had said.

  “Tell you what,” Swearengen said, pursing his lips, looking at the ceiling like he had just called in a favor from the heavens. “I’ll put five dollars a week on top of that offer I made you, like a cherry on a hot pie, on account of you got the colored factor—meaning, of course, you’re putting your balls on the block a little more than someone else might be.”

  “You mean someone white,” I said.

  “There you have it.”

  I studied on that and thought maybe I might be able to still swamp during the day at Mann’s No. 10 and possibly start a ratting career as well, at least part-time. With two jobs and a bag of weighed rats once or twice a week, I could put me together a nest egg that could allow me to move on from Deadwood in a little more style than I might otherwise.

  “I’ll take it,” I said.

  That’s how I come to bounce at the Gem Theater and realize that Swearengen had maybe fooled me after all. It was good pay, but it was a dangerous job, right up there with kissing rattlesnakes and milking a she-bear’s tits.