(1986) Deadwood

by Pete Dexter

  He sat down and finished what was left in the bottle. In a few minutes Mrs. Langrishe touched the back of his neck, moving his hair apart in back and smoothing the muscles there with her fingers.

  "Would you care to see the rest of the house, Mr. Utter?" she said.

  He shook his head, trying to clear himself of the feeling he'd just lost his last chance. The feeling would not shake loose, so he tried something else.

  "Why not?" he said.

  Solomon Star sat on the bed in his room, watching Seth Bullock search his personal property for weapons. First the closet, then the trunk, then the drawers. "I only possess the one side arm, Mr. Bullock," he said, "and the derringer."

  Seth Bullock didn't answer. He finished in the drawer and then he moved Solomon off the bed and looked under the mattress. When he put the mattress back, Solomon sat back down.

  Bullock stood in the middle of the room, studying the ceiling. "There has never been a false word between us," Solomon said.

  Bullock stared at him then, angry and afraid. He didn't know where to start. "1 thought you were quits with this damn business," he said after a minute. "You said you were through with it." He walked from the center of the room to the closet and looked inside again. Everything in there was spaced and neat and exact, his suits hung in the order of the week he wore them, his shoes reflected the lamp on the table. For some reason, Solomon's shoes were never muddy. There was nothing in his closet to suggest a streak of violence. In Bullock's experience—which was not as wide as was claimed—the violent were messy. "The time's come," he said, "to explain yourself and the Chinese."

  Solomon sat on the bed with his hands in his lap. He was still wearing the suit he'd worn to Mrs. Langrishe's party, still wearing his hat. He shook his head no.

  "I saved you twice," Bullock said. Solomon seemed to go into a trance. He began to rock back and forth on the bed, he didn't seem to hear the words. Bullock said, "If that was anything but a Chinese, I couldn't of got you out of it."

  Solomon looked at his hands and rocked. Bullock raised his voice, which he had never done in Mrs. Tubb's rooming house. It was one of her rules. No hats at the table, no dynamite in the rooms, no raised voices. "Is it all the Chinese or just the one? You know how many slant-eyes there are?" he said. "There's more of them than us. They got a whole country of them . . ." Solomon rocked on the bed. "What happened to that Chinese girl?" Bullock said quietly. Solomon looked at his soft, small hands. Bullock tried to picture them holding the instruments of death, but it wouldn't come.

  Of course, he couldn't picture Solomon pulling a derringer out of his pants pocket and shooting a two-hundred-pound Chinese in Elizabeth Langrishe's living room either. The lack of harmony in that scene had froze him, with the rest of the room, until it was too late to stop it. The Chinese had believed it earlier, and he'd turned and begun to run. The bullet caught him just above the elbow and spun him halfway around. Bullock had grabbed Solomon a second later. Solomon hadn't fought him at all, it was a violence without passion.

  "You got to promise me something," Bullock said after a while.

  "No, I don't." His voice sounded flat and queer.

  Bullock slapped him. It knocked Solomon off the bed, his hat rolled into a corner. Bullock stood still; Solomon got to his hands and knees, and then used the bed to pull himself back up. A drop of blood rolled out of one side of his nose into the gully of his lip.

  Bullock wondered if he'd gone crazy himself.

  Solomon took a handkerchief out of his pants pocket and blotted his nose. The side of his face where the blow landed was puffed and red, and the eye was watering. He was as calm as Bullock had ever seen him.

  "Are you hurt?" Bullock said. He sat down next to him on the bed and examined his nose. "I never intended to put a hand on your person," he said. "Not in this life."

  Solomon seemed uninterested. He studied the blot in his handkerchief, then held it against his nose again. Bullock said, "You see where this has led? Partner against partner."

  "It doesn't matter," Solomon said.

  "We got a business to run." Bullock touched the side of Solomon's nose with the pad of his finger. Solomon didn't move. It was beginning to swell; Bullock thought it was probably broken. "What doesn't matter?"

  Solomon stood up and began to take off his clothes.

  The blood in his nose was thick and slow, and had begun from the other nostril too.

  Solomon hung his coat and pants in the closet. He folded his shirt and put it in one of the drawers Bullock had searched. He stood in the middle of the room, bare-chested in long underwear, and waited.

  "What?" Bullock said.

  "Nothing."

  "Nothing what?" Bullock stood up and followed Solomon around the room asking him questions he wouldn't answer.

  With Bullock off the bed, Solomon lay down. He didn't wash his face or scrub his teeth, he didn't clean the blood off" his lips. He pulled the blanket up around his chin and stared at the ceiling, and Bullock thought he saw a secret smile.

  "In what manner did the Chinese offend you?" Bullock said.

  Solomon didn't answer. Bullock stood in the middle of the room, feeling awkward and strange. "Did I hurt you?"

  There was no answer.

  "Let me get a rag and wash off that blood." He didn't want to leave it like this. He poured a little water from the pitcher into the washbowl and wet a cloth. He sat down on the bed and began to wipe at Solomon's lip and chin. The side of his nose was turning dark and Bullock was careful not to touch it with the cloth.

  "Say something, Solomon."

  Solomon shook his head. Bullock stood up to leave. He put the damp cloth over the top of the lamp and waited until the flame died. He opened the door and looked back into the room.

  "It doesn't matter, Mr. Bullock," Solomon said.

  Bullock stepped back into the room, suddenly wanting to slap him again. "Tell me the damn words."

  He shook his head. "There are none."

  "There's always words. If something happens, there's names for it."

  "Not in this." He spoke slowly. "Nothing matters less than the words. The heart of things is the event, and nothing spoken changes it, Mr. Bullock. You might as well blow back at the wind."

  There was a lamp in the hallway, and the light from it came through the open door and lay across the blanket. Solomon's face lay in the half-dark beside it. It might have been the shadows, but it looked like he was smiling. He closed his eyes and lay as still as the dead.

  "Solomon?"

  He didn't open his eyes, or move in any way.

  And Bullock waited by the door another minute, staring at him through the dark. It took a minute, and then he saw it. He knew he saw it, a secret smile.

  "I got to watch you the rest of my life, don't I?" he said.

  In the spring of 1877, a woman named Nell McCleod was found half naked, wandering in Spear-fish Canyon west of Dead wood. Her face had been laid open by Indians, top to bottom, blinding her in one eye. She was discovered by the horse-trader Brick Pomeroy and his brother Mike, who returned her to her farm outside Deadwood, and there recovered the bodies of four children—all girls—dead several days.

  Charley was sitting on the porch of Lurline's House of Distinction when he saw the story in the Black Hills Pioneer. The services were a week past, and Mrs. McCleod, according to the newspaper, had been taken to the state asylum at Yankton to prevent her from furthering her injuries. He knew right away Nell McCleod was the widow woman he had gone to for milk when Malcolm was hurt, and that her babies were the ones who held on to his fingers and pants legs, as if they knew what was coming.

  He had moved into Lead that year, two miles south of Dead-wood, to oversee the operation of the house. He owned ninety percent, Lurline owned ten, for the use of her name. She claimed to have stolen the cream of Deadwood's upstairs girls for him. They did not look like stolen cream to Charley, but ever since Agnes had left he'd lost interest in those matters, and wasn't inclined to mak
e judgments.

  Once a week he visited the third floor of Mrs. Langrishe's home, once in a while Lurline would come to his room at night and bite his legs, but his heart wasn't in any of it. He thought it was the years catching up to him.

  Lurline had eight girls in all; one of them was sitting on the railing at the other end of the porch. Her name was Lu-Lu, and she claimed to be seventeen years old. Lurline liked to keep her outside because she was the prettiest, except for Lurline herself, and made an impression on the miners.

  Charley read the story in the newspaper again, slower, not to miss any facts. "That poor woman," Lu-Lu said. Charley looked up, wondering how the girl knew what he was reading. "I heard it was in the paper," she said, "how the Indians raped and murdered her daughters."

  Charley looked across the porch, thinking the girl was probably closer to fourteen. The way she said the words, it didn't sound like she knew what murdered and raped meant. Then she said, "They ought to cut the peeders off every buck in the Hills, to get even."

  Charley thought of the woman, the day he saw her at the cemetery. She seemed strong enough then, she didn't ask him for help. The babies had asked, though. He could still feel the little one wrapped around his leg, how hard it was to pry her loose.

  The ground shook, and rattled the insides of the house. The Hearst Company was under the town now, following the gold. The hard-rock miners bore into the quartz with drills and sledgehammers, drilling holes a few yards apart and filling them with giant powder. They cut their fuses different lengths, allowing for the time it took them to burn.

  When it went right, the charges all exploded together. The ground shook and the houses rattled. When it went wrong—when the charges didn't all fire—the miners could either stay where they were, trying to light half-burned fuses by hand, or they could return the next day and hope they didn't drill into a pocket of powder.

  Any man with missing parts was assumed to have been a miner, and the one-handed were always welcome at the eateries and bars in Lead, even without money. The town had turned rich off the Hearst Company and the hard-rock miners, while the placer claims in Deadwood had ebbed. And the towns were as different as their finances.

  A man who owned Lurline's House of Distinction featuring the cream of the Hills' upstairs girls would be close to respectable in Deadwood, but it was a different circumstance in Lead. Lurline had told him there were already petitions to remove the business from city limits.

  If there was one thing Charley hated, it was petitions.

  The ground shook again; there was yelling inside the house. He thought of the widow, trying to remember everything she'd said. You couldn't always tell when somebody was asking for help. He wondered why she'd stayed in the Hills after her husband died, he wondered what the choices were. He would not let himself think of the babies, and their choices.

  "They ought to cut the peeders off all the bucks," Lu-Lu said again, "and then they ought to cut the balls off Captain Jack Crawford and every one of them Minutemen, not that they got any to remove."

  "What do you want with Jack Crawford's balls?" he said.

  She sat forward on the rail, showing the front of her chest. "Them cowards was out there," she said. "Watched the whole thing happen."

  "Nobody's like that," he said.

  "They did," she said. "I heard it twice last night alone, that they stood and watched it, some of them laughed."

  Charley said, "People get things wrong, child. It feeds on itself."

  "It's what I heard," she said. "That they made a secret pact not to tell, but they all went out and got drunk that night and every one of them cowards blubbered it out."

  "Don't believe anything you hear in a whorehouse," Charley said.

  "I believe everything."

  "You're still a baby."

  "Well, then," she said, "what does that make you?"

  Charley chewed on that while Lu-Lu smiled at passing miners. The ground shook and Lurline came to the door, red-faced and out of breath. She said two of the girls were rolling on the floor upstairs, biting until it bled. Nothing took away an upstairs girl's attraction faster than infected bites, and Charley stood up to follow her inside.

  As he went through the door Lu-Lu said, "It's true, what I said."

  He stopped for a moment and looked at her again. "Whatever you heard, it was different from the way you heard it. You can count on that."

  She bunched her mouth into a little pout. "I believe what I believe," she said. He couldn't fathom why it mattered what this girl thought.

  Lurline called to him from inside the house. She said the girls were ruining each other's looks, and had torn down the purple curtains. He heard them crying but stayed a minute longer in the doorway, trying to think of something else to say to Lu-Lu. Nothing came, though, and he headed upstairs to release the whores from each other's jaws.

  That night he walked to Deadwood. He could have taken the gelding, but the sky was clear and the air smelled like rain, and he craved the quiet. He didn't realize he was going to the cemetery until he arrived at the south end of town and had to choose a direction to walk. His legs were beginning to ache by then, and he was thinking of getting out of the whore business.

  He turned right and crossed the little bridge over the Whitewood Creek, and began to climb. Once, halfway up, he stumbled in the dark, and stood motionless until the pain passed. In the pause he considered evening walks, and was against them for anybody who'd ever been shot in the legs. Or bitten by whores. His middle finger, where one of them had gotten him that afternoon, felt like it was the size of a potato.

  He heard a noise above him. He listened, concentrating, but it didn't repeat. He reached behind his coat and loosened the knife in his belt. He was careful up the hill, feeling the ground with his moccasins before he committed his weight. He walked in that way unconsciously, and the pain was gone from his legs and hips. Then he came to the cemetery and stopped and listened again. Something was there, off to the right, hiding.

  He stepped a few feet into the treeline and passed the graves earliest dug, getting closer to the source. He saw Bill's marker in the dark, and beyond that four little piles of dirt in a line, pointed to the north star. It stopped him, those piles of dirt, and for a moment he forgot he was not alone. He turned away.

  It was a moonless night, but in the light from the stars he could see the inscription he'd left on Bill's grave. His eyes blurred and he wiped at them with the sleeve of his coat.

  When he looked up, there was Captain Jack Crawford. He was sitting on a stump a few feet into the trees, behind the last of the four piles of dirt. He was holding his hat in his hands, staring inside it. From the look of the pose, the Poet of the Prairie had been sitting there waiting for him. One thing was certain, all the actors in the Hills weren't in the employ of the Langrishe Theater.

  Charley stepped toward Captain Jack, letting himself kick pine needles and break twigs. Captain Jack looked up slowly, showing Charley his face. "You ought to announce yourself," he said. "I could of mistook you for an Indian."

  Charley didn't answer. He looked at the fresh graves, and saw that they were dug slightly different sizes. At the far end was the baby. Something caught in his throat, and he couldn't have spoken then, even if there had been something he wanted to say. Captain Jack's eyes hung on him like wet clothes.

  "I just came to pay my respects," Captain Jack said. "There wasn't a thing could of saved them."

  Charley looked at the graves. "You don't have to say a thing to me," he said. "I didn't ask any questions."

  "You heard the stories."

  "A whore told me a story, I don't believe whorehouse gossip."

  "It's not just whores."

  The pain crawled back into Charley's legs, starting in the hips and moving down. Captain Jack said, "There's stories all over town, what happened at the McCleod farm."

  The pain had little voices, the voices were the babies'.

  "It isn't right," Captain Jack said, "to circ
ulate stories without giving a man a chance to defend himself. It's got me half ashamed, and there's nothing I could of done . . ."

  Charley's eyes filled again and he pitched his head back and looked at the stars.

  "It's not right."

  Charley took a deep breath, and his eyes came back to the graves. He couldn't keep himself from looking. "It's not right to be babies in the ground either," he said.

  "I'm no coward," Captain Jack said.

  Charley looked at the graves.

  "I got to explain myself in this."

  "Not to me," he said.

  Captain Jack didn't seem to hear him. "I can't tell it in town, every pilgrim and rough in the Hills already got their own version. Rumors and lies . . ."

  Charley was quiet. There were dead babies' voices in his legs and he felt Bill there, watching.

  "By the time we came onto the property," Captain Jack said, "all of them were already dead but the widow and one of the girls. There were thirty Indians that I counted in the yard, we were only eight. The widow was holding the little girl. The Indians were scared of the widow—she was crazy—but they wanted the little one."

  Charley began to walk away.

  "Wait."

  "I can't hear stories of Indians killing babies," Charley said.

  "I'll leave that end of it out." .

  Charley waited.

  "It was over fast, anyway. The widow faced them in the yard, them on their ponies, her holding one of her hands like a claw, baring her teeth. They were scared of her, but they kept at it, poking and teasing, until she dropped what she had on the ground. It was that fast."

  It was quiet in the cemetery and Charley heard the voices clearer. There were little round mouths in there making them. Bill had settled into his place over the brim of Charley's hat and watched, as if it was Charley's idea to accommodate this poser in the first place.

  "It was thirty Indians," he said again, "and we were eight. That's death's odds when none of your men are trained in battle. It was all I could do to keep them from breaking ranks and running . . ."