by Pete Dexter
Charley closed his eyes. He didn't inquire who it was with the gun. What was revealed was revealed, and you couldn't hurry it, asking a soft-brain questions. To learn, you had to see a thing on its own terms. And sometimes, understanding it, you came to love it.
Bill.
"I shot myself once," the Bottle Fiend said, "it's like having your picture took. You see them same colored bubbles, and one of them's got yourself inside it."
The Bottle Fiend looked at Charley then, and maybe into him. "Don't worry none about Bill, he just took one of them bubbles to heaven." For maybe two seconds there was a connection, brain to brain, and then as fast as it had come, it went, and the soft-brain was soft-brained again. "Don't ever eat poison eggs," he said. "Poison eggs is worse than hanging."
Charley washed himself with soap and sent the Bottle Fiend for two raw eggs, which he used to soften his hair. There was a condition that hair reached where it matted together so thick you couldn't even comb out the wildlife, where all you could do for it was to cut it off. He thought of Bill's hair, which was thinner than his own, and softer. It seemed to clean itself in the rain.
He held on.
He stood up and dried. He put on a clean white shirt, clean
pants, clean socks. The Chinese put starch in everything, and the pants went on like new boots.
"I don't expect you'll be back now," the Bottle Fiend said.
"I'll be back."
"When you ain't so sad," the Bottle Fiend said.
"There are some things I got to take care of," Charley said.
The Bottle Fiend nodded. "He's up on Boot Hill," he said. "He ain't marked yet, but it's the one with all the flowers."
Charley gave him another dollar, and walked to the cemetery. He followed the wagon road over the Whitewood on a little wooden bridge that shifted under his weight, and then he climbed about a hundred yards up the side of a 3500-foot hill on the east side of town. The cemetery was in a natural clearing. There wasn't a grave there that had settled yet. The newest ones, the dirt was still piled a foot above level. The older ones, the dirt had sunk below level, leaving a pocket in the earth, a place that looked like you might want to lie down there too.
Bill's grave was toward the north end of the cemetery, with a nice view of the gulch, where he could have looked things over and told the rest of them up there what was going on. Charley thought he would have liked the spot. The dirt was fresh and pieces of it still held the shape of the spades that had been used to dig it. There were wildflowers at the head and the foot, and a fresh-cut tree stump someone had written on.
A Brave Man; the Victim of an Assassin
J. B. (Wild Bill) Hickok, aged 48years;
murdered by Jack McCall, Aug. 2, 1876.
Charley pictured Bill receiving the news that he'd just been memorialized into old age. He held on. "We should never have gone in that canoe," he said.
Children were coming up the hill now, and Charley stopped. It wasn't worth anything, talking to a grave anyway. He stood still and watched them, four little girls and their mother. The widow who'd sold him milk for Malcolm. He did not recognize them until the smallest broke from the others and ran to him, trailing ribbons. There were little folds in her legs and arms, and her cheeks bounced as her shoes hit the ground.
He waited, half inclined to run away. He did not think he could stand it now, a widow and four babies. The little girl skipped the last steps and grabbed his leg like she meant to eat it. As she hugged him, the others saw who it was, and they came too. He picked up the littlest one, and the others hung on to his fingers and arms.
The widow came last and slowest. She pried the girls off Charley's body but left the little one in his arms. "We was sorry to hear about your friend," she said, looking at the top of one of the blond heads.
"Thank you," Charley said. The little girl felt heavy and wet. "I was in Cheyenne . . ."
"The girls wondered what happened, you didn't come for milk." Charley shook his head.
"The boy got better," he said. "I think he did."
The widow smiled. "That's good news, ain't it."
"Yes, ma'am."
"There's always some good in the bad," she said. "Sometimes it ain't easy to find."
It was quiet then, both of them talked out. "Well," Charley said after a minute, "how is your cow?"
"Fine," the widow said. Then she looked north, to the oldest part of the cemetery. "We come up here to visit the girls' daddy," she said, "but I was going to say a prayer for your friend too."
"Thank you," Charley said.
"The prayers of the young are heard first," she said. "I believe that. They're unspoilt and pure." Charley handed her the child in his arms. The child did not want to let go of his neck, and complained when her mother took her. Charley reached into his pocket and found a twenty-dollar gold piece. He gave it to the widow, putting it in her hand and then closing her fingers around.
"I can't take nothin' like this," she said.
Charley looked one more time at the torn ground and the freshly cut stump. "There isn't anything in this world matters less than money," he said, as much to Bill as her. He looked back at the widow and saw that he'd made her ashamed. "All money comes down to," he said, "is who's holding it. And I don't need anything extra that way right now."
"I never thought of it like that," she said. "I never been the one holding it." The smallest child reached for him from her mother's arms.
He held on.
"Let me give these babies a kiss," he said, "and then I got to go." He kissed the smallest one first. He untangled himself from her arms, and knelt down and hugged the others. Kissing soft faces, getting hair in his mouth, he felt tears coming into his eyes and let them go.
One of the babies said, "Don't you want no more milk from us?"
"I'll be by from time to time," he said, "but I got to go now."
The widow pulled her children away. "We'll see Mr. Utter again," she said. Charley started back down the road off the hill. He heard one of the babies ask when that would be. The widow said, "We'll see him when he comes up here to visit his friend."
Charley walked back to his camp, stopping at the tent bar across the creek for a bottle of whiskey. The barkeep did not remember him without Bill, and took him for a tourist. "That spot you're standing on, friend, is the very place Wild Bill Hickok first set foot in Deadwood Gulch. You're on the threshold of history."
Charley gave him five dollars and picked up the bottle.
"You wouldn't like to try a bottle of pink?" the barkeep said. "That was Wild Bill's favorite."
Charley shook his head and started across the street. "Just a minute, pilgrim," the barkeep said, "a bottle's eight dollars." Charley gave him another five and waited for the change. The bartender kept his money in a cigar box, and when he came out of it he was holding a piece of hair. "Look here," he said, and showed Charley a lock of long, light-brown hair. "This come off Wild Bill himself." Charley looked closer and saw it was true.
He said, "How did you come into possession of this?"
The bartender leaned close. "I got it from Doc Pierce himself," he said. "He attended the corpse." The bartender saw something then in Charley's eyes. "This is all strictly legal," he said. "I bought it, so it's nothing shady . . ."
Charley took the bottle and crossed the street, and then the creek. He pulled Bill's saddle out of the wagon and put that on the ground in front of the tree stump Bill used to sit on while the mercury dried. He found paper and pen and sat down to write.
Nothing came. He tried to picture her standing there, and what he would say, but he couldn't get past clearing his throat. There was too much to tell, there was no way to get at it. He pictured himself hugging her like he did the babies, and that was as far as it went. And in the end, that's what he wrote.
Dear Mrs. Hickok,
I am Charley Utter, Bills friend who signed the witness papers at the wedding. The short one. I have loved Bill like a brother—more than some br
others—ever since we first became partners back at thebeginning of the war, and it has fallen to me now to write informing you of his death.
I wish I could of come in person and told you this, but believe me when I say that my regard for Bill reaches out from the Hills to all that he loved, and more than anyone else to you.
The circumstances of this matter are not clear to me yet, as I was out of town at the time it occurred.
He stopped writing then and read the letter. He thought of explaining what had happened between them, but he couldn't see how you told a woman her husband was dead one minute, and then went into the particulars of a moose-hunt the next. There was enough blood spilled as it was.
He pressed back into the saddle.
The town has carved Bill's name into a tree stump, and bis spot is covered with fresh-cut wildflowers. I was there not more than half an hour ago.
If there are any further instructions on the matter of his burial, please write and tell me what to do. I hope to run into you soon, and provide what context I can.
Sincerely Yours,
Charley Utter
He folded the letter twice and put it in his shirt pocket. He meant to read it again before he let it go. He put Bill's saddle back in the wagon and began to drink. The sun had dropped behind the hill where Bill was buried, and the air turned cool. Not an evening cool, but similar to the cool before a storm. There was a threat in it.
He thought of Bill's words on the day they had come down out of the hills into Deadwood, and saw that they held that same coolness.
He took another drink, fighting off the chill. The way things connected for Bill, he knew this was the place. He might of even known how. What else was he doing with his back to the door at Nuttall and Mann's?
Charley started for the badlands. He took the bottle with him, and stopped first at the Green Front and then at the Senate. Then he walked into Nuttall and Mann's. Harry Sam Young recognized him and put a drink on the bar. Charley tried to pay, but Harry Sam Young refused the money.
"Where did it happen?" Charley said, after a minute.
The bartender pointed to the table. Charley tried to imagine the way it happened, but it was just another room. He couldn't feel Bill there at all. He felt the coolness, though, and the threat, but he had brought that in himself.
"It wasn't a thing I could of done," the bartender said. Charley heard the lie in that, and noted it. You had to take what you found. You couldn't force the truth to reveal itself.
Charley finished the drink and filled the glass from his own bottle. There were tourists waiting for drinks now, but the bartender stayed in front of him. "After he did Bill, he pointed down at Carl Mann, then at me. But the firing pin had broke at the first shot. It was like somebody counting time . . ."
Charley waited.
"That's all I know," he said. "By now, every tourist in Deadwood is eyewitnessed it all. But the truth is, nobody seen it, not start to finish the way it happened." Charley heard something false in that too. "How could they?" the bartender said. "Bill hisself never knew what happened."
Charley finished half of the glass of whiskey. "Bill knew what he knew," he said. He was not as dependable a drinker as some, and it had already affected his thinking. He allowed for that, and held on. It felt like he was holding the door shut against all the years of his life.
"There was talk that you would revenge him," the bartender said a little later.
"I only came in to see what happened for myself," Charley said.
"To what use?" Harry Sam Young was a bartender, and that was a bygones-be-bygones business. Charley wondered sometimes what rules they must have broken themselves to end up in a life where the first thing you did every day, before you washed or counted your money, was to forgive everything from the day before.
"Could it be accidental, that he picked Bill?" Charley said.
The bartender thought it over. "I couldn't say."
Charley heard that for another lie, and noted it.
"There was a hundred people here, and a hundred stories of how it happened . . ."
Charley finished what was in the glass and put a dollar on the bar. Harry Sam Young shook his head. "No charges," he said. "I just want to let this event take its natural course."
Charley felt the whiskey crawling up the back of his head. He smiled at the bartender, a strange-feeling smile. "That part of it's already happened," he said.
Charley developed a plan.
Drink the whole bottle. He had drunk a bottle of whiskey in one night once before, in the mountains near Georgetown, Colorado, during a September blizzard. He remembered what that had done to him, and wanted it to happen again. He remembered lying on the floor of a cabin, looking up at the famous gunfighter Texas Jack Omohundro, who had come to Colorado to hunt grizzly with him, and clearly seeing there wasn't anything anywhere but the two of them, that they were the two parts God had made everything else out of.
He'd said, "Jack, you and I are what everything else is made of."
Texas Jack was working on a bottle of his own. He said, "You want the truth? I hate Texas."
And Charley said, "See there? That's just what I'm talking about."
And that's where Charley wanted to be again, back to the beginning of how things were made. Along the way there, he expected to see every living thing in Deadwood, on its own level, and in the end he would know what he needed to.
That was not his plan when he bought the bottle, but what developed as he sat in the chair by the window of Lurline Monti Verdi's room at the Gem Theater, looking outside. He had found her at Nuttall and Mann's, or she had found him. He followed his feelings, which told him not to sit still with Bill's murder so fresh. "You're the one that was partners with Bill," she said.
She had a peculiar perfume that Charley had never encountered before. Confused flavors. He remembered perfumes, and who went with them. "Yes, I am," he said.
She was clean-looking, he thought, and had plucked the hairs out of her eyebrows to make them thin and willowy. It always attracted Charley to a woman when he could see she had put some effort into her appearance. He liked those that tried.
"Are you in mourning?" she said.
"I'm married," he said.
She smiled at him and there wasn't a disfigurement anywhere. No broken teeth or dead gums. "Nobody has ever hit you in the mouth," he said.
She took that for the compliment it was. "I never allowed fists," she said. "The man that hurts my looks should never sleep comfortable again." She put her hand on his leg as she spoke, and left it there as she studied him. "You ain't the kind anyway," she said.
"No," he said.
"Not even your wife?"
"No," he said.
She pushed her hand up the inside of his leg. "A man that never hit his wife, that don't come up the street every day of the week."
"My wife was born lucky," he said.
"So I see," she said.
They got muddy walking to the Gem. "The owner here is likely to make remarks," she said before they went in.
"I have seen the whore man up close," Charley said, "and he has seen me."
"I didn't ast you for no money," she said. He saw that he had hurt her feelings, and gave her ten dollars.
"That's for your dowry," he said, and they walked through the bar directly to the stairs. Charley saw the whore man at one of the card tables. He looked up in time to see them on the stairs. There was half a second when the whore man was ready to bolt, but then he settled back into his chair and nodded at them both. And Charley noted that too.
"I never been with anybody famous," she said when they were in her room. She sat down on her bed and Charley took the chair by the window. There were miners outside, drunk, and a fistfight was starting in the street below him.
Charley had learned to fight watching Bill, and knew the secrets of relaxation. "I don't think you could count Big Nose George," she said. "They had two thousand dollars reward on him for a while, but Big Nose Geor
ge wasn't known to be famous, except for his nose."
Charley smiled at that and took a drink from the bottle. He liked this woman, and determined to understand her as she was. He determined to understand the whole town. "Of course," she said, "I was with Marshal Cecil Irwin the night he hung George, but that was a temporary sort of famous."
"No," Charley said, "a lawman hanging the right miscreant isn't much in the line of a celebrity."
"I like the way you talk," she said. "It sounds English."
He said, "It is." Charley drank from the bottle and remembered the night in the mountains with Texas Jack Omohundro, and decided to finish every drop. He drank again, but when he checked the bottle it didn't seem to have altered its level. His own level was rising like the moon.
"I noticed this much," she was saying. "The more they tell you before, the worst it is after. I hate a man to come into my room and tell his personal business while he takes off his pants. It's weakness, and in the end they're ashamed and blame the girl."
Out in the street the two miners were circling each other, knuckles out, arms useless and stiff. There were other miners around them, calling advice. "Break his nose, Henry."
"Would you care for a bite of this?" he said, and offered the bottle.
"I drink gin and bitters," she said. "You get sweet breath and a sense of adventure. You ought to try it yourself."
"I tried it," he said, and drank again from the bottle.
"You ain't much of a drinker anyway, by local standards," she said. It made him laugh out loud. But then she said, "Bill drunk too much, didn't he?" and stopped him.
Charley looked at his hands and felt his brain tangle. "He drank what he drank," he said.
She said, "I heard he'd lost his functions."
"Where did you hear a story like that?" It always surprised Charley, the rumors that got around.
