Paradise Sky

by Joe R. Lansdale

  It was a cool night, and the door flaps was wide open and spread back so you could have rode a circus elephant in there without having to duck your head, which was something I’m sure had been done in the past.

  Wild Bill and his friend Charlie Utter showed up. I had been introduced to Charlie briefly one night at the Gem, where I was bouncing. He was a dandy, like Wild Bill, only a shorter version. Even Calamity Jane came, and she was all dressed up in women’s clothes. It was the first time I had ever seen her that way. Her hair was fixed a little, and her face was washed. Normally she was dressed in buckskins, her face twisted up in a scowl, hair tucked inside a hat like a caged animal, a revolver stuck in her belt, and foul words flowing out of her mouth like loose sewage.

  I had bought myself a new black hat, and it fit me better than the old one. I was tricked out in a fire-red double-breasted shirt with blue buttons, and I was wearing dark blue pants with a thin blue stripe in them. In the style of Hickok I had tucked the pants into my boots, which was shiny with polish. I had on a coat made of dark leather with fringes on it.

  By the time I had checked my guns, the music had already started, and people was dancing. It was the dandiest sight you have ever seen. They was flashing elbows and lifting knees and a’gallivanting about the place, kicking up their heels like young horses. The faster the music got, the faster the dancing crowd got. And dang if Wild Bill wasn’t out there dancing himself. He was at first with Charlie, and they was a reeling about like regular fools and starting to wave their arms in all manner of flapdoodle, and then women was dancing together, and then it all switched out, and men and women come together, and then the men. One man did a big jump and tried to land with his legs wide split, but ripped his pants and had to leave, clutching the back of them together with a thumb and forefinger. No one was kind about it. They laughed that poor fellow right out of the tent.

  I seen Wow and Cullen, too. Wow was dressed in American clothes and was quite light on her feet, though Cullen danced like he had his shoestrings tied together. He had ended up with a green shirt and orange trousers and some two-tone shoes, brown and white with big red ties in them. It made him look a bit like a circus clown and in some ways reminded me of a painting in Mr. Loving’s book of a court jester called Hop-Frog.

  Everyone danced and changed partners, so that it finally come mostly to men and women together, though it didn’t seem to be by design. Just whoever come up in the shuffle was grabbed. This man with that woman and this woman with that man and so on, and pretty soon it ended up that Wild Bill was dancing with Calamity Jane. If they wasn’t having a good time it was the best performance I’ve ever seen. They had big smiles and was starting to hop like rabbits. They was obviously drunk as flies in persimmon wine.

  The band started growing. New members with new instruments fell into place. There was a fellow picking up a beat with a pair of spoons and another scratching on a washboard with thimbles, and one guy had two pieces of cow ribs he was snapping together. The band was made up of white folks and black, and even a Chinaman who had a triangle and a stick he was whacking it with. Fortunately the horns, fiddles, banjos, and such covered up the clanging noise. A bit of the music would run off the rails now and again, but it always managed to come back.

  I was ready to get out there. I turned to Win, who was lovely in a dress green as sin, with little green shoes and a green pin through her mound of hair. I said, “Would you oblige me a dance?”

  “I would, sir,” she said. “Let’s get to it. And I hope you know how.”

  “I’ll figure it out as we go.”

  Win looked at Madame, who nodded her consent, and away we went.

  Now, I am going to brag on myself here and say I am a natural dancer. I caught that music and rode it like a bucking horse. The notes was butterflies, and I had the net. We started prancing a little here, a little there, picking up speed, like we was windup toys. Charlie Utter, drunk as a bull moose and dancing with himself, sashayed by us, totally out of step with the tune, and fell over a barrel and lay on the floor not moving.

  We didn’t pay him no mind. He was one of a handful of drunks and dizzy folks who had fallen out. Me and Win was on display for sure. We reeled and spun and bounced and even went vulgar with a hump or two in the air. I don’t know what come over us there, but we did it, and when I looked at Madame she give me the eye, so we quit that foolishness.

  Me and Win was the toast of the dance. We caught everyone’s eye, or at least Win did, cause when she’d spin that green dress would fly out and about, and she was moving fast as a child’s top. Around and around she spun, and me with her, us linking arms and kicking, moving sprightly about to such an extent everyone started trying to mimic us; and damned if the band didn’t pick it up a step. It led to some of the kids doing cartwheels and handstands and the like. Everyone had caught the disease. It got even wilder as the drink got to flowing more loosely, and me and Win had to stop finally and take our rest and have some punch that wasn’t spiked with liquor, and that amounted to one bowl that was served up by the Congregational church ladies. It was not a popular bowl. We found ourselves there primarily with the kids and a few women and henpecked husbands, sipping punch from cups and looking sour due to the drink being heavy on the lemon.

  As you would expect, with there being drunks and women and music, some fights broke out, and some of the deacons from the Congregational church, following the laws of their creed, just beat the ever-living dog shit out of a couple of them and threw them out of the tent. When I went out once to find a place to relieve myself, I discovered them rowdies in a ditch behind the tent, and in fact found I was making water on one of them. I retreated quickly because the damp seemed to be bringing him around.

  On my way back to the tent, I seen that Wild Bill had Calamity Jane bent over an outside water barrel, which he had dragged beneath a tree. Her dress was hiked up, and he was going at it like he was a hammer and she was a nail. It disgusted me, to tell you the truth, not because they was taking their pleasure, but cause they was so drunk I don’t think they even knew they could be seen clear as a hot pie in an open window. I lost a smidgen of respect for Bill after that. Not because of Calamity, but because I seen him then as two-faced and a little too prone to drink. Being a legend was wearing, I reckoned.

  Back under the tent, I found Win, and we went at it again, danced to near every song until my legs and feet began to hurt, those new high-heeled boots I had not really being made for that kind of springing about.

  It finally come to me that I hadn’t seen Madame in a while, and we went looking for her. We found her passed out on a smattering of hay by the side of the tent wall, a cup hanging on her finger, her tongue dangling out like a drying towel. What she had been drinking had not been provided by the Congregational church.

  “She takes a nip now and then,” Win said.

  “One nip after the other, it appears.”

  “That describes it,” she said.

  It was about then I seen that poor man that had been on the stick and then a crutch—the one with his head peeled and his face scarred up from burning and maybe being rough-carved with a dull knife. He was over by one of the punch bowls. He had a dipping cup and was doing some serious dipping, throwing it down like he was trying to put a fire out in his belly. He didn’t have the crutch no more, and in fact had a very fancy cane and expensive clothes and a bowler hat.

  Win caught me looking at him, said, “He is mysterious. He never speaks unless he’s got business, and lately his business has been good.”

  “Shoveling horse manure?”

  “He quit that,” she said. “Way I heard it, he earned enough to buy a claim, and two weeks out he hit it. It was hard work for him, too, having that limp, but it and shoveling what the horses left seems to have been good for him. He’s gotten stronger than he used to be. Hired him three Chinamen and two white men to dig for him. Stands around and watches them, is what I hear.”

  I looked at him again. There was
something oddly bothersome about him, and he had his eyes laid on me as steady as a man sighting down the barrel of a rifle. But then again, he was that way with everyone. I think had my scalp been peeled, my face worked over like that, and me given a limp, I’d have had a suspicious nature myself. I was glad for him, though. At least he had money, and if he was wise about it, wouldn’t end up begging for coins with a tin cup, which was often the case for such that was in his kind of condition.

  I collected my guns, and me and Win went out of the tent, took a walk back along Main Street. We went up to her shack because she wanted to get something there, and that turned out to be a picnic basket and her flute.

  “Are we hunting rats?” I asked.

  “Not hardly,” she said. “I arranged us a picnic. I figured Madame would be on the ground after a snort or two. As for the flute, I just like it. I was taught by a white girl who didn’t have anything in her life but to play it and the piano, sing, and dress up nice. She was all right. She was Madame’s daughter. Her name was Jane, and she died of diphtheria.”

  “Madame’s gonna be mad when she wakes up,” I said.

  “Oh, I’ve seen this before,” Win said. “She couldn’t be woke up if you poured a bucket of cold water on her and fired a cannon over her head. She has to come around on her own time, which will be sometime tomorrow morning, well after the birds first sing. Though I suppose we should gather her up before the night wears too thin. We got time for that, though. The dance is just getting wound up.”

  We went to the livery, where I kept my horse. There was a colored boy there, around twelve, and he was in charge of things. I gave him a few coins to saddle Satan. I usually came in about once a day to check on him, and when I had time I took him for a ride along Main Street, out and about a bit, without getting too much out in the wilds, where the Sioux and the Cheyenne roamed. Not to mention Blackfoot and Crow.

  The boy’s name was Easter, like the Resurrection, and he got Satan ready and hitched him up to a one-horse rig I rented. He had been teaching Satan to pull the rig for me and so far had not lost an eye in the process. Damn horse liked him from the beginning, which is more than I can say for how Satan had treated me.

  Easter gave me an apple for Satan, and we took off into the night, under the moonlight, along Main Street and out of town, venturing a little far, but we both felt brave about it.

  We took a side trail. It was rugged, but Satan managed it all right, and the buggy held together. We had the buggy top down, and we could see the sky and the source of all that moonlight, a moon so big it filled the eyes, though there was a few drifting clouds, soft ones, almost clear. They tumbled along the heavens like cotton-soft dreams.

  I parked the buggy under a tall tree, got out our goods. I gave Satan his apple, proud of the fact he had learned to pull a wagon and a buggy good, and he didn’t try to bite my hand off for a change.

  We put out the food. The picnic was simple. It was good bread and sweet cheese, a jar of apple jam, a big bottle of sarsaparilla, glasses to pour it into, and there was a striped ground cloth and some metal plates and forks and spoons. Win had also brought a blanket for us if the air got too nippy. She cut us big slices of bread, slathered them with apple jam. It was delicious. This was my first taste of sarsaparilla, and from that point on it was my desired drink when I could get it. I can’t say as I remember all we talked about, as most of it was kind of silly, as it often is when you’re getting to know someone. But finally we talked about our lives and how it was we wanted more than a hoe and row to use it on. We had dreams, and we both agreed they was big as white people’s. We also agreed that out here in the wilds we was more like everyone else than anywhere we had been before. Yet neither of us was all that set on Deadwood. That’s how the talk ran.

  Win said she planned to find some way to take care of Madame, as the old woman had taken care of her all this time, and now she was starting to get old and miss a step. I agreed she should do that. After a while Win brought out the flute and started playing. It was a strange and lonesome tune she played, full of all the sorrowful feeling you could have, and I certainly had me a list of sorrows. My ma and pa was in that song, their deaths, and me being chased by Ruggert, losing my friend Mr. Loving, and the deaths of them soldiers, which I still partly blamed on myself. The more she played, the sadder I got. Pretty soon there was tears in my eyes, but it wasn’t a terrible way to feel. It was like that music, them notes she was playing, was getting down inside of me and taking hold of that sadness and pulling it out and tossing it away from me. At least for the time being. It was both a good feeling and a painful one, kind of like having a bad tooth pulled or a bullet dug out.

  After a time she quit that tune, played a livelier one. I got up and danced a little to it. I did it in a funny way, and Win got tickled and couldn’t play no more. I dropped down on the cloth then, and when I did she grabbed my head and pulled my face to hers and kissed me. It was for me the finest moment in my life. That kiss was like fire. It lit my lips. It lit my head. It lit my heart. It lit my soul. I was ablaze with passion.

  That first loving kiss, the one that comes out of you from the source of your personal river, and the one that comes from her that is the same, there’s never another moment like it; never another flame that burns so hot. It can never be that good again, ever. All manner of goodness can come after, but it’s different. And that’s a good thing, because if we burned that hot for too long, we’d be nothing but ash.

  What followed some might think was better than that kiss, us taking off our clothes and all, bringing ourselves together with excitement on that picnic cloth, under that blanket with the weather turning cooler and cooler and there being the smell of pine and oncoming snow in the air, but it wasn’t better than that kiss.

  Don’t misunderstand me. It was well worth doing, and if I was making me a list, it would be listed second in goodness and something that works better in repetition, but everything in my life from that point on lay under the mountain of that single kiss, and try as I might, I have never climbed that high again.

  17

  We gathered up Madame just as the dance was winding down and the drunks was piling up under the tent and around it. She couldn’t walk, so we hefted her like a tow sack of potatoes out to the buggy. She wasn’t a small woman, so it was something of a strain. We got her in it, and then I rode them home in the buggy. When Win and I had Madame in bed in the one room they shared, Win took the pistol out of Madame’s purse, which had been strapped to her arm, and showed me the pistol wasn’t loaded.

  “You’re the first man that she didn’t carry bullets in the gun for,” Win said. “Usually she expects to shoot them, and actually shot at one, but he was swift. With you she felt confident enough to just run a bluff.”

  “Well, how many men you seen?” I said.

  “Let me say it this way. You seen more of me than any of them.”

  “I like that,” I said, and I did, though I will be honest with you and say it wouldn’t have made me no never mind. What had come before for either of us was way back then, far as I was concerned. What we had done and was doing was now.

  This was the beginning of a routine, though we was a little less open about it due to Madame. Madame liked to get herself a bottle now and then, though Win made a point not to provide it or encourage it. But when she was in her cups, me and Win seen each other, either in my little room or up on that hill beneath the tree and the big wide sky. It was no trouble for the buggy, if there was enough moon and starlight or if the lanterns on the sides of the buggy would stay lit.

  Under our tree it was shady in the day and dark at night, and there was a slope that went off one side of the hill that was covered in green grass when the spring come, the soil around there being tucked full of natural richness.

  It was good times, but during them I thought all the while on what Wild Bill had told me. I needed to make some major money or have a real job if I planned to get married. The thought buried itself in my
head like a chicken bone in a dog’s throat. I couldn’t cough that thought up no matter how hard I tried.

  I thought about it more and more when I had to knock heads over at the Gem Theater and on long days when I was emptying stinky spittoons. I had to keep stashing enough money back for me and Win to light out from Deadwood, set our sights on something better. The better thing seemed to me Mr. Loving’s money he had left me, provided it hadn’t all been stolen from me. I tried to keep in mind that Mr. Loving had a lot of faith in his cousin, but when it come to taking advantage of the money or giving it to a colored man with big ears, I feared he might lose some of his loyalty. But if the money was there, it was a good nest egg, and I was thinking of having my own farm, which was something I knew how to do.

  Plans was one thing, life was another.

  As a rainy spring moved on and summer limped in, and the muddy streets dried and became spotted with holes deep enough to lose a leg in, I was feeling at the top of my game, having stuffed myself tight with plans and ambition.

  One night, working at the Gem, a big man came in. And when I say big, I mean big. You will think I exaggerate when I say he was about seven feet tall. It is your privilege to doubt me. I didn’t wrestle him to the ground and put a ruler to him, but I am a fair judge of height and weight from my time with livestock, and that was my figure. He was broad-shouldered, had a chest like a nail keg and legs like tree trunks. I reckoned him for three hundred pounds, thereabouts, and I might add we’re talking lots of muscle and trim on the fat. His hat seemed to sit on top of his head and was in danger of falling off at any moment. His feet was so big his boots looked like rowboats to me.