(1986) Deadwood

by Pete Dexter

  Charley felt dizzy and dry. When the doctor stopped to examine his work, Charley said, "I believe I'll have a drink, unless you think he's about to confess . . ."

  The doctor paid no attention. He wrapped the wounds in gauze, and then pulled the leg straight and built Handsome a splint from two pieces of the chair Charley had broken when they'd fought. He wrapped it with wire from his bag.

  Then he brought out a small bottle of morphine and gave it to Lurline. "Don't administer this but three, four times a day," he said.

  "He ain't staying here," she said.

  "He can't be moved," the doctor said.

  "The hell he can't," she said. "Somebody's got to move, so's I can conduct my business affairs."

  The doctor looked up at her, interested. He said, "I was told that you were a musician."

  "I am," she said. "Shit, singers need to sleep too." Handsome groaned and moved.

  "If that wrapping starts to stink," the doctor said, "come get me and I'll change it." He looked at Lurline in a sympathetic way. "You might save this man's leg, miss," he said.

  "How come he can't stay with Charley?" she said. "He was the one that shot him."

  Charley got up then, lame in his own legs. He thanked the doctor, who paid no attention. "If he dies," he said to Charley, but without taking his eyes off Lurline, "I'll send you the billing."

  Charley smiled at Lurline and stumbled out the door. When he got to the street he stopped and looked back up at Lurline's window. The light went out, but Dr. O. E. Sick stayed. He waited five minutes in the mud to make sure.

  Lurline was sweet, but she would break your heart if you let her.

  Charley walked through the mud, feeling tired. Too tired to go back to Chinatown. He passed Wall Street, which led there, but then he thought about bedding down alone, and he was too tired— in a different way—for that too.

  And so he turned around, and followed Wall Street until he came to their theater. It was dark from the outside, not a lamp on anywhere. Charley let himself in the front door. There were no windows on the first floor. The Chinese, now he thought about it, didn't have much use for windows at all. He walked slowly through the theater, bumping into chairs and a piano, things he would have felt in front of himself sober.

  He found the staircase and headed up. Somewhere, a long way off, a woman was snoring. The China Doll's room was third on the left, facing the street. It had one of the two windows in the whole building. Charley ran his fingers lightly along the wall, counting the doors. At the third one, his fingers came away wet. He stopped, dead still, dead drunk, and listened. Snoring, a long ways off.

  In the dark, he thought he saw the farmer's face. And then Handsome Dick's face, pained and sweaty, and then Charley heard what Handsome Dick said. "Will it grow back?" From what he'd seen, the joke was not far from losing its humor.

  Charley turned the door handle, thinking of the extra weight that would be to carry around. He had never wanted to shoot a man, and making one a cripple was no great favor either.

  And with his mind still on amputations, he pushed open the door and saw a human leg on the floor.

  He took a step in, and noticed a stickiness to the floor when he lifted his moccasins. He moved more carefully now, not feeling anybody else in the room, but doubting himself. He stepped in and to the side, and then went flat against the wall. Nothing moved.

  He waited a full minute and then looked again at the floor. The leg lay on its side, smaller and smoother than Handsome's. He stared at it for another minute, seeing there was something wrong with the proportions. It seemed to him that the foot was missing, but moving closer he saw it was no such thing. Moving closer, he saw that the leg had a foot, but it was tiny. It could have belonged to a seven-year-old child. He looked around the room then, seeing her hand first, then the rest. From the blood, the killing had started in her bed and then moved across the room toward the window.

  From the blood, that was where it ended.

  There was a knife on the stool in front of the painting easel. Paper drawings of artificial flowers lay on the floor next to the flowers themselves. The room was motionless, and he was motionless in it. It seemed like it was already a memory. He walked out the door and sat down on the stairs. Where were the Chinese when the girl had screamed for help? Of course, she might not have screamed at all. Charley cradled his head in his hands and remembered her. There was something held back, and something sad. He did not understand what went on in a Chinese heart, that something like this could happen. The Indians made more sense.

  He found the door and walked down the stairs, and then outside. It was five o'clock in the morning, and when Charley turned the corner at Main Street, he saw the sky in the north was lit the color of peaches. Deadwood was the only place Charley had ever been where the day broke in the north. He stared that way for a minute and then turned his back on the sky, and headed south, uphill, toward the Grand Union Hotel.

  Seth Bullock heard Solomon come in, so late that his first thought was that Solomon was getting up. His second thought was that something had happened. Bullock listened to his partner, waiting for familiar sounds. Outside, it was dead still. There wasn't even a cat in the street. He knew Solomon, right down to the number of steps he took between his dresser and his closet; he knew the order he hung up his clothes. But the steps from the next room lacked purpose. Solomon did not go to his closet or his drawers; he wandered the room, from the window to his bed and then back to the window.

  Bullock got out of his own bed and put on his boots. He slept in his pants, in the event of late-night emergencies. For late-night emergencies, the sheriff liked to be punctual enough to take the prisoner from the citizenry before they hung him, but late enough to miss getting shot at in the capture. Seth Bullock did not intend to die on the caprice of a common drunk.

  He walked out into the hallway that connected his room to Solomon's, feeling heavy-legged and slow. He had not slept well during the night, thinking of the letter he had written to Solomon's wife. "My confidential advice in this matter" he'd said, "would be for yourself to join us in the Hills, for I am sure your sobering influence will return Solomon to bis sensibilities, if anything can."

  He had laid in bed thinking of Solomon's sudden affliction with views and flowers, and what the letter would do to that. He told himself that business partners had obligations to each other. Bullock settled that for himself a dozen times, but it would not let him sleep.

  He knocked once on Solomon's door, not wanting to wake Mrs. Tubb. Then he tried the door. It was unlocked. In fact, it hadn't been closed. Solomon was sitting on the floor in the corner, cross-legged and naked, dark-faced and dirty. The sight affirmed the decision to write his wife, and Bullock felt himself relieved to have it off his conscience. "Look at yourself," he said.

  Solomon didn't look. At himself, or at Bullock or at anything else. His eyes were shut tight. "Solomon?"

  Solomon shook his head slowly back and forth. Bullock stepped closer, noticing his clothes scattered here and there on the floor, as if they had fallen off while Solomon was walking around the room. His shirt was by the bed, as muddy as Solomon himself. "Solomon, look at yourself," he said again. "This isn't you . . ." As he spoke, he reached down and picked the shirt up off the floor, and then he saw that the stains weren't mud. He took the shirt to the table where Solomon wrote his letters and lit the lamp. The lamp turned the room orange, and even as the match struck, he saw it was blood.

  Bullock looked into the corner again, and saw the blood there too. It was all over Solomon's face, caked in his hair and hands and in the hair of his body. He got closer and studied his partner's head. It had to be a head wound, blood didn't flow uphill. He couldn't see the opening, though. "Solomon," he said slowly, "where are you hurt?"

  Solomon opened his eyes, but not to look at anything in that room. From the expression on his face, Bullock half expected to hear him invent a new language, but when he finally spoke it sounded reasonable. Particularly c
oming from a man sitting naked and blood-covered on the floor at five o'clock in the morning.

  "Something unspeakable has happened," he said. Bullock sat down and waited. In the history of their partnership, Solomon had never used the word "unspeakable" except as it referred to money. As in, "This merchandise, sir, is an unspeakable aberration of our contract, and we hereby refuse delivery."

  That's what it was, unspeakable meant Solomon would not accept delivery.

  "Unspeakable," he said again.

  "What?" Bullock said. He had visions of drunk miners vandalizing the new kiln.

  Solomon stared into the wall, seeing the unspeakable. Bullock took his partner's shoulder in his hand and shook it. Solomon's head bounced, like a man asleep in a stagecoach. When Bullock had stopped, Solomon said, "There are pieces of Ci-an all over the floor."

  Bullock closed his eyes. "You been to the opium dens," he said. "Seen things that weren't there." Solomon shook his head slowly, back and forth. "There isn't a Cheyenne in three hundred miles," Bullock said.

  "She's cut to pieces," Solomon said.

  "Where?"

  "Chinatown," he said.

  "What in the world, Solomon?" Bullock said. "What in the world are you doing in Chinatown?"

  "That's where she is," he said. And then he closed his eyes again, as if he had seen all he could stand.

  Bullock had a further thought then, that the blood had to come from somewhere. He stood up and went to the drawer, where Solomon had laid out a shallow bowl of water, a cake of black soap, and a washing rag before he'd left. He set the bowl on the floor beside Solomon and rubbed the soap back and forth against the washrag until it made a dirty-looking lather. Then, beginning with his head and working down, Bullock washed off the blood.

  It had dried, and even in the cool early-morning air Bullock began to sweat. He worked a small section at a time, cleaning in circles a few inches wide, then washing out the rag in the water and lathering the soap again. It was slow, hard work. Solomon let himself be moved and cleaned, but did nothing to help. To scrub the blood from under his arm, Bullock had to hold the arm up with one hand and work with the other. It was something like brushing a horse, and something like scraping paint.

  "Whatever it is that happened," Bullock said, "don't say a word to anybody. You can tell me when you're ready, but as far as anybody knows, you were here in your room since supper."

  Solomon opened his eyes at the sound of Bullock's voice, and seemed to understand what he said. "Unspeakable," he said.

  "That's what I mean," Bullock said, "unspeakable." He washed Solomon's stomach, but left the blood on his privates. He could take care of that himself when he regained his senses. Nobody would see it there, at least Bullock didn't think so. With Solomon's new interests, you couldn't tell. "You hear what I told you?" he said.

  Solomon looked at him, and returned to the here and now. His voice lost its passion; it seemed to have lost its direction too. "I won't say a word," he said.

  "Not a living soul," Bullock said. "Except me, when you're ready."

  "Nobody," Solomon repeated. And Bullock looked at his partner and saw there wouldn't be any more talk of novels, or flower collections. The game had passed fast enough, he thought, and unless Solomon had stumbled into something tonight that couldn't be ignored, Bullock's problem was over.

  "Who saw you tonight?" he said.

  "Ci-an," Solomon said. Bullock still didn't know what Ci-an was, but he didn't think there was anything that happened at three or four o'clock in the morning in Chinatown that couldn't be ignored. And even washing the blood off Solomon Star, and listening to what was probably a report of a Chinese butchering, it never occurred to him that Solomon could have had a part in it.

  Bullock felt happy, as if it were himself who had been sick and cured. "You see," he said, "what happened to you, Solomon, you forgot who you were for a little while. That's all. A man is one way or another, and it can't change reading a book."

  Solomon stared at him, listening.

  "What I mean is, there's some people that weren't meant for books and flowers," he said. "There are some that weren't meant to do any damn thing that looks good at the time."

  Solomon stared and listened, as if Bullock still hadn't hit the chord.

  "You weren't meant to enjoy things," he said. And when he looked again, he saw that he had finally hit home. Solomon was nodding, understanding, rocking back and forth on the floor. And then, without a sound, he began to weep.

  Bullock felt sorry for him, but he knew it was in Solomon's own interests. That's what he told him. "It's in your interests to know it," he said. "Now you can go back to work."

  The China Doll was found in the morning by the old woman. The servant had argued the night before with her husband, and had begun to talk even before she entered the room with her towels and broom. She was two steps inside before she saw what was on the floor, and another two steps in before she realized what it was.

  She screamed then, a high, hollow scream that brought other Chinese from every corner of the house. The servants came first, then the whores and Children of Joy, then Tan's nephews and wife. The servants held their hands tight against their mouths, and some of them cried.

  The whores and Children of Joy did not grieve. The China Doll had lived in a room of her own with a window to the street, she had been given a servant. She was beautiful, while they were plain, and she had taken her meals alone in her room. And they had heard of the white man, Bismarck, who was rich and wanted to buy her from Tan.

  It was not spoken here, in her room, but the China Doll's loss was not their own.

  After several minutes, Tan himself entered. He was dressed in Chinese clothes, not the American pants and coat he seemed now to prefer. All the servants were suddenly quiet.

  Tan crossed the room slowly and picked up the girl's head. He held it close to his chest and called her "little sister." "I will avenge you, little one," he said, and then looked around the room in a way that scared even his wife, who had seen him come into their apartment early in the morning, and had seen the blood on his hands. And who knew his only true passion was money. She was a wise woman, as old as Tan, and understood men well. She understood it was in this acting that they were most dangerous.

  So she stood quietly while Tan spoke of his love for the dead girl. He spoke of her drawings and her songs and her beauty. "Where will we find another so lovely, little sister?" he said. The servants and whores and the Children of Joy stood with their heads bowed until he had finished speaking.

  Then he sent a servant for pillows, and placed the parts of Ci-an's body on them and ordered the servants to carry them to the death house. The death house was a small, eight-sided building on the Whitewood. It was supervised by Tan's blind uncle, who also played the piano. Inside were the ribbons and plumage and horns and drums for funerals. And the zinc-lined boxes that were used to send the dead's bones back to China.

  In the seven months since the first Chinese set foot in the northern Hills, only nine had died—ten, if you counted the disgraced Song. But he never was counted, or remembered aloud. All of the dead had been poor. Servants of one class or another, and unable, even in death, to pay for more than a few ribbons on a pine box and a short ride to the cemetery.

  It disheartened the others to see this, as they were poor too but assumed against reason, as all real people assumed, that they would someday return to China to be buried. It disheartened them too because a long funeral was as important as a long life. They all hoped to please Tan in life, so he would take care of them afterwards.

  The China Doll was brought to the death house by four servants. Tan himself carried her head. He instructed his uncle to arrange the funeral as if he himself had died.

  The uncle obeyed. He removed the girl's eyes and heart, and placed them in one of the zinc-lined boxes for shipment home. Then he took the bones of her arms and laid them in the box too. The rest, including all the flesh he had cut away from the bones, went
into a small gold-colored coffin. It took the uncle an entire day to prepare the box and the coffin, and Tan stayed in the death house with him until it was finished.

  The funeral began early in the morning. Six horses led the march through town, each carrying feathers of a different color. They were followed by a band of silver horns and drums, and then by the coffin itself, which was carried by four men. The rest of the Chinese followed, even the emaciated old men from the opium dens, some of them believing it was their own funeral. Each Chinese wore a pink ribbon tied to his sleeve.

  They took the box from one end of the town to the other, stopping for demonstrations, and then finally to the graveyard. Several dozen white men had joined the procession by then, and walked behind the Chinese, applauding the horn-players and the speeches.

  At the grave site a pig was butchered and skewered over a fire. Before it was eaten, Ci-an's coffin was lowered into the ground and covered with dirt. The women lay tiny flowers on the grave, believing the dead could smell them there at night.

  Tan spoke then, for more than an hour, of his love for Ci-an. He cried and threatened and vowed revenge. The Chinese stood quietly while Tan spoke, although almost to a person they believed by now that Tan had killed the girl himself.

  They were respectful, though, not wanting to anger him. They could see for themselves the rewards for staying in Tan's graces.

  Barring episodes of the road, the Northwestern Express, Stage, and Transportation Company stage ran from Cheyenne to Deadwood in six days. The charge was forty-four dollars. It was forty-four dollars from Cheyenne, or from Bismarck or Fort Pierre or Sidney, Nebraska.

  The coach had one driver and one messenger, warranteed gentlemanly, and carried eight passengers in the winter. In the summertime, when tempers were quicker, the limit was six. There were rules posted at the station forbidding the discussion of politics, religion, or shooting. The consumption of alcohol was also forbidden, unless the bottle was proffered to all passengers, and those that chewed were requested to spit leeward.