Blood Storm

by Bill Brooks

“I’m looking for someone,” Cole said. “A woman.”

  The angling light of sun caught in his gray-as-crawfish eyes as he squinted up toward Cole, his hands jerked up from his knees, and his throat seemed to slide down inside the loose skin of his grizzled neck. “Hell, mister, I hope you ain’t set yer sights too high because there is only two kinds of women in Deadwood . . . fat whores and skinny ones. Take yer pick! Har! Har! Har!”

  “Her name is Lydia Winslow.” A wagon filled with freshly sawed boards of lumber rumbled past. The boards slapped hard against one another as one of the wheels hit a rock in the road. It sounded like pistol shots.

  “To hell and Jesus!” shouted the driver, and he cracked a bullwhip over the head of a team of mules whose velvety ears shone golden in the sunlight.

  Some of the joy went out of the old-timer’s face at the mention of Lydia Winslow’s name, his mouth stopped moving, the soft, pliable skin under the rasp of dirty whiskers lay still. “You talkin’ of Liddy Winslow?” He brought a rough hand to his mouth, drew it down across his stained lips, and shook his head in a slightly agitated way. “God damn, mister, I was you, I’d steer clear of Liddy’s fer a while. She’s had some trouble lately. Fact, she’s sorta suspended operations.”

  “How so?” Cole asked, watching the movement of the old man’s eyes. The eyes of a man can tell a different story than his mouth. The eyes shifted past Cole. He could see black flecks floating in gray centers, jagged lines of bloody veins running through the white.

  “They say some of her gals have been murdered,” he said. The knot of his throat percolated, then settled back again just above the top button of his soiled shirt. “Last one they found had a butcher knife stuck in her.” He shuddered his shoulders. His lids closed against the light, pulling his bushy brows downward. Then he shook his head once more, and opened his eyes again and looked at Cole. “There’s plenty of other places a man could take his pleasure. I’d avoid Liddy’s I was you.”

  “Why is that?”

  “They say she’s put out a reward for whoever it is killed them gals. Word has it King Fisher and some others like him has already hit town. You ever heard of King Fisher, mister?”

  “Yeah, I have.”

  The old man spat again, even though he had no tobacco in his mouth, and rubbed the palms of his hands against the sides of his legs. “King Fisher is a killing son-of-a-bitch,” he said, some of the words catching in the phlegm of his throat. “If Fisher has come after that reward money, he’s liable to shoot somebody just to say they was the one who killed them gals. Anyone doing their business down to Libby’s is liable to wind up on King’s gun list. You wanna get your ashes hauled, I’d do it at Becky Cash’s, or Big Nose Nel’s Queen of Clubs. Hell, I’d even take up with Calamity Jane first.” He struggled with a chuckle. “She’s less attractive than a chamber pot, even to an old coot like me.” His eyes glittered. He was obviously enjoying whatever it was traipsing through his mind. “But at least with ol’ Janey, you wouldn’t run the risk of dying because of it, less it were from the clap, maybe.” Then his laugh became lost in a wheeze. The old man reached in his pocket and took out a fresh plug of tobacco and set about filling his cud with it.

  Cole was still considering the presence of King Fisher in town. He had the instincts of a bird of prey when it came to knowing where the reward money was being offered. If Fisher had come, it must be in answer to Lydia Winslow’s newspaper advertisements.

  The sun went back behind the clouds and, just that quick, drops of rain the size of half dollars clanged off the tin roof of the livery.

  “Well, so much fer a pleasant day,” said the old man, then grabbed up Cole’s Dunn Brothers saddle and took it inside. He had the limp of a man who knew what it was to have horses fall on him.

  Cole was left to his own fate, standing there in the sudden downpour. Welcome to Deadwood, he thought.

  Chapter Seven

  The rain lasted less than five minutes, then the clouds parted once more and the sun broke through beautifully against a sky as clear as blue glass and a rainbow formed itself at the far end of the cañon. It was a touch of rare beauty set against a backdrop of such a scarred place. Several patrons of the Jersey Lil Saloon had stepped outside to observe the rainbow. The air smelled clean and new, and the sun mirrored itself in the puddles of rain lying in the rutted street.

  Among the curious clientele of the Jersey Lil that had been drawn by the spectacle of the rainbow was a slightly built man who wore blue-tinted spectacles. Cole gauged him to be about five-foot-six. He was well dressed in a frock coat, fresh white shirt, creased trousers, and polished boots. His features were sharp, bony, but the skin was sallow. He had a straight thin nose and heavy sandy mustaches. There were other things about him, too. Cole noticed that his hands were well attended, as was the rest of his appearance. He had clean fingernails, an unusual affectation on the frontier. But it was the blue-tinted spectacles that first drew attention. Not only did they hide the man’s eyes, but also gave him an air of mystery. And though he posed no outward sign of threat, Cole got the feeling he was dangerous. Standing next to him was a woman of robust build; her left hand was hooked through the crook of his arm. The woman was paying more attention to the man in the blue spectacles than she was to the rainbow.

  They seemed an odd couple, the two of them. He stood at least a head shorter than she and hardly matched her in size and bulk. She had thick, short-cut hair tinted a deep reddish color. She wore a black velvet dress that fitted tightly against her figure. The swell of her breasts was exposed by the low cut front of the dress. Her skin was slightly ruddy and healthy in appearance, unlike that of the man’s. She had a plain but not altogether unattractive face, a prominent nose, and red full lips. She held a little yellow parasol in her right hand. Even though his eyes were hidden behind the blue-tint glasses, Cole knew the man had taken notice of him as he passed by. He heard the woman say: “Come’n, Doc, let’s go back inside.”

  And then in a voice that was soft, almost feminine, he replied: “In a moment, Kate. I haven’t seen a rainbow in years.”

  Cole knew then who the man and the woman were. He saw a sign across the street that advertised the Deadwood Hotel & Billiard Parlor. He needed a room and a change of clothes, although he’d have to buy another shirt after having used his spare as bandages for Rose. He needed a decent meal and bed that didn’t hold the company of graybacks. These were just a few of the things he needed before introducing himself and his reason for being in Deadwood to Lydia Winslow. But the thing he most needed was a bath with enough hot water to burn through the soreness the Black Hills Stage Company had pounded into his carcass for the last two hundred and forty-six miles.

  The man at the hotel counter looked him over when he asked about renting a room. “You’re lucky,” he said. “We got one vacancy on account of Juno Smoke being killed last night in the Variety Club.”

  “Unlucky for him,” Cole said, “but lucky for me.”

  The clerk grinned. “Miner stuck him with a stiletto over a card game. They say Juno’s blood squirted high as the ceiling. Juno fancied himself a prize fighter, but I guess he didn’t count on fighting no knife.”

  “I’ll take the room,” Cole said.

  “Don’t mind his stuff. I’ll come and pick it up later.” The clerk handed him the pen to sign the register.

  “How much for the room?”

  “Dollar fifty a day, clean sheets included. We got the best rooms in town. Ask anybody.”

  Cole laid $5 on the desk. “I’ll take the room for five days, and, if it’s as advertised, I might stay longer.”

  The clerk stared at the money, knowing it was short of the asking price, then handed him a key.

  “And if I fall to the same fate as Mister Smoke, you can keep the change and rent the room to someone else. How’ll that be?”

  That seemed to satisfy him. “Top of the stairs, down the hallway to your left. Last room on the end. There’s a stairway just across the ha
ll from you that leads down the back and out to the privy in the alleyway.”

  It was a skeleton key that would have fit any one of the doors. Cole took it and slipped it into his pocket.

  “Anything else you’ll be needing, Mister . . . ?” He glanced down at the signature on the register. “Mister Cole.” Then he peered at Cole through the dark circles that formed his eyes. “A woman, maybe?”

  “No, thanks,” Cole said, and climbed the stairs.

  It was a common room, bare of all but the essentials: a cotton tick mattress upon a bed of iron springs, a single plain chair, a tin wash basin, and a china pitcher of fetid water resting on a roughly hewn commode. Lying next to the pitcher were a towel and a yellow bar of soap. A small framed mirror hung from a nail above the commode where a man could shave if he wanted and had his own razor. And, of course, Mr. Juno Smoke’s belongings, which Cole collected and piled in the hallway.

  He laid his saddlebags on the bed, propped the Winchester in a corner, and hung his hat on the chair before pouring water into the basin and washing his face and hands, then strung wet fingers through his hair before drying with the towel. When he looked up, he saw his image in the mirror: the clear, almost colorless eyes of his father and his father before him, a square of face that needed the burned red stubble scraped clean, the sweep of mustaches of the same deep rust color that draped along the sides of his mouth. He saw weariness and a man who needed a shave and a bath and his mustaches trimmed—the face of the Cole clan. He saw what Zee Cole had seen the night she died, the same face that the man he had killed out on the trail to Deadwood had seen just before he died. It was the same face that some Confederate boys coming out of a stand of hardwood trees had seen as they swept down on the Union position at The Wilderness and a lot of other places where they had set about killing one another. It was a face less inclined to either sorrow or joy than it once was. What had happened to all the years? Cole wondered. How had it come to be that he was in this place at this time?

  As he stood there, staring at the image that seemed both his and not his, he remembered one young boy in particular in that bloody campaign. He could not have been more than thirteen or fourteen and carried the Rebel flag on a tree branch. He was leading a small company of Rebs up the Union’s right flank at Pickles Gap. He had lost his cap as he charged out of the trees, holding his flag, the wind tearing through his long wheat hair as he ran. His screams rippled through the meager gray ranks, and they, in turn, set their voices to the yell. It was not so much a yell as it was a howling curse. And in that small, spare, frozen moment, Cole could not bring himself to pull the trigger on him. He had seemed only a boy playing a boy’s foolish game, and he could not kill him. All around him the crack and pop of rifle fire had pierced the air and the smoke from Union guns and Rebel guns had lifted over the Union line in a thick blue cloud that obscured vision and scorched throats. The whine of Minié balls had split the air, kicking up dirt and snapping leaves off the trees. It was a horizontal rain of lead, killing and maiming everyone in its path, cutting men down like marionettes whose strings were suddenly broken.

  Somehow, miraculously, through a break in the choking smoke, the young flag bearer had emerged, the ragged bunch of butternuts behind him, and on they had come directly into the Union guns. And still Cole couldn’t pull the trigger on him. He was just a boy. But someone did shoot him, for his head had suddenly jerked backward just as he was leaping over the dead body of a fallen Union man. A bloody spray of red had flown from his golden head. The flag he had carried fluttered to the ground like some great wounded bird. Dead or dying, his legs had continued to carry him several more paces. Then he had become entangled in his cherished flag, fell, and had come to rest just inches from where Cole had been kneeling. And for a long, full moment, the war had stopped. The flat pop of rifle shots had faded, and a calmness had descended upon that small square of ground there in front of Cole as he had looked down into the open eyes of the dead Rebel flag bearer. A halo of bright red blood had soaked the ground. His right hand was stretched out before him, nearly touching the toe of Cole’s boot as if he were reaching for Cole, reaching for someone to take his hand and hold it in those final fateful seconds. Only death had come too quickly for such sentiments, and he, like a lot of other boys, had died alone.

  As he stared into his own eyes in the mirror, Cole remembered something that he had long tried to forget. Just before the boy was shot, their eyes had met for the briefest moment and he had stopped yelling as though in that moment he’d forgotten that they were at war and that their only reason for being in that place was to kill one another because of the color of their uniforms. And for a long, fateful second, he was just a boy in the wrong place at the wrong time; they both had been. The memory touched a spot in Cole that caused him to take in a deep breath and let it out slowly. It was a spot next to the one he kept for Zee and his son Tad.

  He was drawn up out of the well of remembering by a knock at the door. He slid the Remington out of its holster and held it behind his back before opening the door.

  The man was tall, slump-shouldered, wearing a coat made out of dyed black sheepskin. He wore a pinch-brimmed fedora pulled down tightly to his ears. He had brown eyes that were flecked with green and pocked skin around his jaw and neck. His ears were prominent and he had the flat nose of a boxer. His thick, meaty hands rested at his sides. Before Cole could ask, he pulled back the lapel of his coat and showed a small badge cut from a silver dollar.

  “I’m Constable Johnny Logan,” he said. His long dark mustaches lifted, then fell back into place when he spoke. “I saw you get off the stage today.” When Cole did not reply, he continued: “I watch and see who gets off the stage. It’s part of my job . . . to see who’s coming into town.”

  He fell silent, his eyes searching Cole, waiting for Cole to tell him who he was and why he was there. When he didn’t, Logan said: “Ever since she put it in the papers about the reward she was offering, they’ve been riding into my town. I figure you’re one of them. Tell me if I’m wrong.”

  He didn’t say who she was, but they both knew.

  “You’re wrong,” Cole said.

  “No. I don’t believe I am.”

  “Believe what you want.”

  His gaze slid to the hand Cole was holding behind his back with the self-cocker in it. “If you was just another gambler or a gold panner,” he said, “you wouldn’t be coming to the door, holding a pistol behind your back. I could arrest you, run you out of town.”

  “No. I don’t believe you will do that.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Because if you were going to, you’d have already done it.”

  Something determined left Logan’s gaze, and the left side of his face twitched, stretching the muscles in his neck. “I’ve got my hands full here,” he said. “I don’t need men like you to make my job harder than it is.”

  Cole took the opportunity to ask him the obvious question: “Seems you could have saved yourself all this trouble of worrying about the gun artists showing up in town if you had found whoever it was that killed Miss Winslow’s girls in the first place.”

  Cole saw the knot form along his jaw line, saw the color of anger rise in his face. “If you know that much,” he said, “then I’m right about your reasons for being here. Your type always comes to gather over the carcass. And as far as those gals of Liddy Winslow’s, they’re just fancy whores whose living or dying don’t mean a whit in the long scheme of things. People get killed here all the time and for a variety of reasons. I don’t have the time or inclination to spend all my energies looking for someone who has a bent against sporting gals.”

  “It would seem to me the reward alone would make you interested.”

  He took a deep breath, then let it out, his irritation with Cole growing. “I get paid regular, mister, every week, for pinning on this badge, and I get to run a faro game over at the Jersey Saloon, and I get to go home and sleep at nights when I’m done working
. It’s honest, steady work. I don’t need no more than that.”

  His answer didn’t make sense to Cole, but he said nothing.

  “I’ll tell you this,” Logan said. “I figure you for trouble. You and the others that already arrived and are bound to come. The way I see it, comes to trouble out there on those streets, I’ll shoot you without warning, you give me reason.”

  Cole knew the type. Men who were brave enough to wear a badge and back up their authority with a gun, but not so brave they’d give an opponent an even chance. They were the kind of men who would walk up behind you and shoot you in the back of the head, then arrest you for whatever law it was they thought you had broken. He harbored no doubts that Constable Logan was probably very dangerous.

  “I’ll keep your warning in mind,” Cole said. “Now, if you will excuse me, I’d like to see about the chances of a hot bath and a meal.”

  Logan looked at Cole with the dull, vacant look of a man who had already written him off as someone to share a drink with and a cigar. Then he touched the brim of his hat and turned and walked away. Cole could hear his heavy steps on the stairs as he descended them. Then he heard him say something to the desk clerk in a muted voice.

  He closed the door and stretched out across the bed, suddenly weary from the stage ride, the sleepless nights, old memories, and thoughts of men like Constable Logan and Miguel Torres and King Fisher—any one of whom might kill him if given half the chance.

  Chapter Eight

  Sometimes a man sleeps the sleep of the dead, and other times he visits with the ghosts. It’s those other times when he forces himself to come awake and sit on the side of the bed and smoke a cigarette. The times when he can’t seem to escape the gloaming images, all the dead faces, and whiskey rivers. And in that hour of deep lonely, he also remembers the women, too. Women who’ve held him and loved him for a night at a time. Maybe he forgets most of their names, but he never forgets them completely. And remembering that much at least helps him get through the worst of it, the long nights.