Blood Storm

by Bill Brooks

  In the nightmare Cole had just awakened from, the fuzzy-faced boys of the 32nd Michigan Volunteers had been crossing a low, swampy area, the fetid water up to their waists, the muck sucking at their boots, making every step an effort. Some of the boys were afraid cottonmouth snakes would slide through the coffee-stained water and bite their legs. They could hear the bullfrogs croak, then stop, then croak again. The mosquitoes rose like clouds off the water, taking their toll on their arms and faces and working their misery into their eyes and noses. Their clothes were damp and rotting away, their flesh sloughing off their bones. It was in the false dawn of morning, when the light tricks you into believing that you are safe from the night and a warm breeze plays among the Spanish moss that hangs from the cypress trees like the molted hair of dead Southern belles. Cole wasn’t sure why they were crossing that swamp or how they had gotten there or what their purpose was for being there. But he knew that they were surrounded by the floating shadows of Confederates dressed in tattered uniforms as gray as the very dawn itself. And through the swirling mist he could see a gallery of faces, faces that were drawn with hunger and hatred, their yellow eyes burning brightly, their mouths set in ghostly grins of broken and missing teeth.

  It seemed like they had been in the water a long time. No one talked. A great silence impaled them with fear, a fear so heavy it lay against the chest and pinched the heart. The water and the muck pulled at them, wearing them down so that once they made the other side, they’d be easy prey for the waiting Rebels. And then, suddenly, a large man in a slouch hat and a butternut jacket torn at the shoulder had hovered above Cole. And he saw what he was holding: a Springfield musket with a long, rusty bayonet attached to the muzzle. Before he could move, he plunged the steel into Cole’s guts, pinning him to the ground, his weight behind it. Cole thought that it would hurt. Only he didn’t feel any pain. He knew somehow that he was going to die. And in knowing that, he knew something beyond pain, something indescribable. He had looked up into his face and saw there was no hint of compassion, no expression of forgiveness in the glazed eyes of the man forking him to the ground, for the war had cost him what it had cost everyone. They were not brothers or men of the same color or even men of the same country. They were simply men who had lost themselves, who had come to understand only one thing: survival. And that need had brought them to this moment: one man killing the other so that one could live, for another day, another hour, another minute. Cole had closed his eyes and waited for the end.

  He awoke against the pull of the dream, his mouth dry, the rest of him soaked in sweat. He sat up on the side of the bed, the room deep in darkness. He struck a match to the lamp on the little stand next to the bed. The flame guttered low, flared, and filled a corner of the room with dull buttery light. He adjusted the wick and closed the glass chimney down around it, his hands unsteady, his breath short, labored. Reaching into his pocket, he took out the Ingersol, checked the time. It was nearly 9:00 p.m. Then he rolled himself a shuck and used the lamp to fire it. The smoke felt good and powerful against his lungs and he realized that he was grateful to be alive—grateful and ashamed at the same time. He thought of those who were still lost and wandering aimlessly in the dreams of the living, those still seeking release from the world of his mind: Zee, Tad, the Rebel boy who had carried his flag, the men who’d died by his hand, faces and memories, hard to forget, hard to remember. From the earth we are born, and to the earth we return, he thought, but what of our souls?

  He dressed, took his hat from the back of the chair, and left down the rear stairway. The night air was cold and black, the sky filled with stars. He walked out to the street, where a few heelers and loafers were hanging about. Almost everyone else was staying inside the dens of iniquity where they could indulge their desires and conduct their business, one seeking the other, desirous men and wanton women, Johnny-Behind-The-Deuce and bottom dealers, billiard boys and raccoon-eyed miners. Pieces of the dream were still with him like broken bits of glass shattered inside his skull, wounds that would never heal completely.

  He stepped inside one of the saloons. Whiskey sounded good to him just then. The room was long and narrow, a fancy oak bar running down one side with a backbar, a mirror reflecting the bottles and the faces of the men staring at themselves as they stood, drinking their whiskeys, one foot resting on the brass rail. Suspended from the ceiling were old wagon wheels that supported oil lamps and could be lowered or raised by ropes. Opposite the bar were the poker tables. Farther down, a faro rig was set up and men were bucking the tiger. And in the back, a keno game was going on.

  Cole noticed a chair hanging high up on the wall, suspended from a peg. On either side of the chair were the stuffed heads of a bison and a black bear. The black bear’s yellowed ivory teeth were exposed in a frozen snarl, the glass eyes staring impassively. One of three bartenders lifted his chin and said: “Name’s Irish Murphy, what’ll it be?”

  “Whiskey,” Cole said. “Mash whiskey, if you have it.”

  The bartender’s eyes were blue, creased in a broad face, and he was wearing a white apron. “Sartainly,” he said, and took a bottle from the bar behind him, poured a glass full of it, and shoved it across to Cole. “Will Jack Daniels do you, sar?”

  “Tennessee whiskey, but it’ll do me just fine.”

  He drank the first glass and had Murphy pour a second.

  “Come for the gold, did ya?” Murphy asked, his face was as expectant as a child’s, his accent cheerful, and full of Irish charm.

  “No. I came for the whiskey.”

  Murphy’s grin was huge, his cheeks florid. He had large arms and a thick chest beneath an apron that was tied around his neck and again around his waist. “Yer smarter than most, then,” he said, tippling the bottle for a third time when Cole failed to protest. “Oh, some will get lucky, strike it rich. But most will end up with whatever gold they do manage to muck out of them blackened hills being taken by the professionals, the gamblers, and the sporting girls. Them’s the real miners.”

  “Tell me,” Cole said, “why do you have that chair hanging up there on the wall?”

  Murphy’s gaze traveled upward to the chair, and a pleasant expression settled into his face. “Oh, that’s ol’ Bill Hickok’s chair. The one he was sitting in when Jack McCall came up from behind him and relieved him of his salad days.” His right hand contained a damp rag and he ran it in circles over the polished bar. “He was quite a talent, you know,” Murphy went on. “The boss says he’s honoring Bill by keeping his chair up where nobody can ever sit in it again. Personally I think he keeps it there for show, to draw a crowd, don’t you know? A fellow from Denver came in last month and offered to buy it for a hundred dollars, but the boss said he wouldn’t sell it for a thousand. Although I think he would, if someone was to offer him that much for it. The man would be a fool not to . . . it’s nothing more than an old chair.”

  “I heard they let McCall off on a verdict of self-defense,” Cole said.

  Irish Murphy nodded, his blue eyes crisp in the smudgy light. “That they did, and it’s a crying shame, for the man was as guilty as Judas. It wasn’t no legal jury, of course, just some drunks and miners who thought Bill was too much a dandy to begin with.” Murphy was now looking up at the chair. “Jack left town right after. There was talk that some of Bill’s friends would carry out their own justice. Personally I never believed it. There are very few tried and true men that come to Deadwood, Bill included, I’m sorry to say. God rest his soul.” He snapped out the rag and flipped it over his left shoulder. “I’ll tell you this,” he said confidentially, leaning over the bar in order to speak low. “Talk has it that McCall was a hired man, an assassin for some of the hard element here in town that didn’t want to see Bill become the law and take things over.”

  Just then, a commotion started up by the front door. Several miners led by a rowdy teamster swept into the place. The teamster was short, wiry, dressed in a butter-soft fringed jacket and canvas trousers stuffed into the
tops of long boots. He wore a billed cap and the butt of a pistol was exposed from his waistband.

  “Oh, piss and feathers,” said Murphy at their appearance. “It’s that damn’ Calamity Jane and her friends!”

  Cole looked but still couldn’t make the determination that the teamster was, in fact, a woman. She had a narrow, homely face that was bereft of any femininity. The hair was short and dark and chopped and sticking out from beneath her cap. There was nothing in her gait or manner to suggest womanly qualities. Unlike Rose, this woman appeared to him to be a mistake of Nature.

  “She’ll cuss the air blue and try to pick a fight with any man that looks at her wrong,” Murphy said. “And it don’t take much for a man to look wrong at Calamity Jane.”

  “I’ve heard it said she and Bill were an item,” Cole stated, turning his attention away from the arrivals that had taken up chairs in the back of the room.

  “According to her version,” Murphy said with a wink, “she and Bill were husband and wife. Longtime lovers. She saved his life, he saved hers.” He hunched his large shoulders. “Depends on which night she’s telling it, and to whom. Depends on how drunk she is or ain’t and who she’s trying to get to buy her drinks that night or bed down with. Me personally, I never seen the two of them together . . . would’ve been surprised if I had. Bill Hickok was sartainly no saint, but he wasn’t no blind man, neither.”

  Cole’s interest was more in the hard element that Irish Murphy had mentioned as possibly having a hand in killing Hickok. If there was a certain element trying to control the illicit trade in Deadwood, then maybe there was some connection to the killings of the women who had worked for Lydia Winslow. How, or who this element was, and what role they might have played in the killings, would only be an unfounded guess, but still the mention of such an element intrigued him. When he met Miss Winslow, he could ask her what she knew of such men.

  “Tell me something, Irish,” he said. Murphy’s features were like tight muscles as he continued to stare toward the back of the room, where Jane and her crew were in the process of raising general hell.

  “What’s that, sar?” he said, twisting his head back around in Cole’s direction.

  “This hard element you spoke of, concerning Wild Bill’s killing . . . do you know any of the parties that might be a part of this group?”

  Cole saw the last traces of humor fade from Murphy’s eyes as he blinked twice. “No, sar, I would not. Nor would I care to find out. Men that would lay Bill Hickok low are not men I’d want to make the acquaintance of. Bill may have had his faults, but he wasn’t afraid of anyone. It would take some real nerve on the party that’d want to assassinate him.” Then he leaned forward again and said: “If I were you, sar, I’d be watchful of who I asked about sartin matters, if you want to keep on breathing the air of our lovely little burg.”

  “To tell the truth, Irish,” Cole said, “it seems strange to me that you’d have heard such a rumor and not have heard any names to go with it.”

  Murphy’s gaze danced over the rest of the room beyond Cole’s shoulder and down along the bar before leaning toward him again. “I only just arrived myself, a week or two before it happened. No one seemed to be all that stirred up over it. Except there was this one odd little fellow who claimed he was Bill’s best friend, a man named Charley Utter. Colorado Charley, they called him. He told me soon after it happened that he thought Cross-Eyed Jack was put up to the whole thing by some of the local bosses, men who control most of the gambling and confidence games. Charley claimed they didn’t want Bill to get elected as the law because of his reputation, and so they paid McCall to put a bullet through his brain, which he did right smartly. Anyway, Charley didn’t say any names. He was commonly drunk the day he told me and it was not even yet ten in the morning.”

  “Why’d he tell you, if you were just new in town? Why not someone he knew and trusted?”

  “Drunks talk to the men who pour them their whiskey,” Murphy said. “It ain’t unusual. I’ve had men tell me things I would be reluctant to tell a priest . . . things about their wives, for instance. Who can say what it is about liquor and loneliness that makes a man want to speak so freely?”

  “Where could I find this Charley Utter?”

  A slight bit of relief returned to Murphy’s eyes. “Oh, that I couldn’t tell you, sar, other’n to say he left town shortly after paying for Bill’s funeral and seeing that he was properly buried up on Mount Moriah. Some say he left and went back to Colorado. Others have said he went back East, to Boston or New York, where he had come from originally. I haven’t seen him around since that morning.”

  Just then, Jane was heard to yell an insult to someone in the back of the room and a voice yelled back for her to shut the hell up, followed by a lot of laughter and more swearing and more laughter. The mash whiskey had worked its wonder and Cole thanked Irish Murphy for his time and laid a pair of silver dollars down on the bar that Murphy picked up with fingers thick and reddened as sausages.

  “Come back again anytime,” he said, the Irish lilt of his voice ringing above the noise of the crowd.

  Cole stepped back out into the night and felt the chill air through the linen duster, felt it crawl along the back of his neck. The whiskey helped warm him. Yellow light spilled from the windows of the hurdy-gurdies and saloons all up and down both sides of the street. The town was cranking up for another night of revelry and hell raising. Cole could hear the drunken, boisterous chorus of the miners singing their sentimental songs of home and sweethearts left behind. The lovesick and homesick men were joined in song by their chippies—the closest those men were ever going to get to a sweetheart in such a far-flung camp as Deadwood. But Cole knew the loneliness of such men, and he didn’t blame them for wanting to raise a little hell and have the company of a woman, any woman, to share the long, cold nights with them. He wanted to go and join them and forget about the reason he had come to the gulch. Ever since he’d arrived in town, he’d been getting a bad feeling about the place. He didn’t reckon it would get any better the longer he stayed. But the conversation with Irish Murphy had given him a hook at least to hang his hat on as far as the killings went, and he knew he needed to forget all about joining the rowdy miners and their painted ladies for at least this night. It was time to pay a visit to Lydia Winslow.

  Chapter Nine

  John Henry Cole found the address Lydia Winslow had given in the letter—24 Front Street. It was a small white clapboard house at the north end of the gulch, sitting by itself next to an empty lot. It was freshly painted, and its small square windows revealed light seeping through the parts of maroon drapes. There was a white picket fence guarding the structure. It might have been the house of a parson or a bank president.

  He opened the gate and went in. There was a set of three wooden steps leading up to the door. Just as he reached the first one, the door suddenly opened to a quadrant of saffron light. A man, one hand still holding the doorknob, stood there, silhouetted against the light. For a brief moment he did not move. Then he descended the steps and walked past Cole without greeting. He wore a greatcoat, but Cole recognized him as he brushed past. He wasn’t wearing his blue glasses now, but it was the same man who earlier in the day had been standing in front of the Jersey Saloon watching the rainbow—Doc Holliday. Although Cole had never personally met Holliday, his reputation as gambler and gun artist was known to him. He also knew that he supposedly was a consumptive and a drunk who had a penchant for meanness. He had never heard or read anywhere that Holliday had actually killed anyone in a gunfight, although he had read of a shooting scrape for which he had been run out of Dallas. The territory was full to overflowing with men like Doc Holliday, men of little known fact and a whole lot of rumor who did little to dissuade the public of their dangerousness.

  A mulatto girl answered Cole’s knock. She was tall but finely put together with a cinnamon skin and dark freckles dotting the bridge of her nose, her eyes a soft gray. She wore a dark blue blouse
and a long black skirt, and several silver bracelets encircled her forearms. Large gold loops dangled from her earlobes.

  “Yas, suh?” she said, her eyes fixed upon Cole.

  “I’ve come to see Miss Winslow.”

  “Miss Liddy not be seein’ any gentlemen callers tonight, suh.” She had a voice that reminded Cole of bayous and tall cotton under a hot dry wind. It was a soft Southern drawl he’d not heard since the war.

  He glanced down the street, and saw Holliday pause in the light of a saloon window to tip a small silver flask to his mouth as he leaned against the wall of the building. His cough erupted in the air, then he wiped his lips, and moved on into the waiting shadows. “That man,” Cole said, “the one that just left here. He was a gentleman caller?”

  Her eyes shifted downward. “No, suh, he a friend of Miss Liddy’s.”

  “Well, you might go and tell her another friend is here to see her.”

  “Who should I say be calling?” she asked, her gaze once more lifting to meet Cole’s eyes. Her lips were slightly separated and he could see the porcelain of her teeth, even and white against the dark ruby mouth.

  “Tell her Ike Kelly.”

  “Yas, suh,” she said. “You wait here.” Then she closed the door gently, but all the way.

  Cole glanced back down the street in the direction he had last seen Holliday. He was gone. The door suddenly flew open. The interior light shone brightly.

  “Ike!”

  Cole saw then why Ike Kelly had said the first time he met her, he knew he was going to fall in love. She was uncommonly beautiful. Her russet hair was combed straight back from her oval face, pinned by a pair of silver and abalone shell combs. Her eyes were the green of emeralds, her skin smooth and white and flawless.

  When she saw that Cole was not Ike, she looked sharply at the mulatto girl. “Jazzy Sue, I thought you said . . .”