by David Boop
“Dead?”
“Fun,” Magpie Man said, bringing his eyes back to Stands Twice.
“Like a magpie,” Stands Twice said.
Magpie Man smiled, his dry lips cracking from it, and then he turned all at once: a covered wagon behind the rest of them was limping into camp.
“Hide,” Magpie Man said to Stands Twice.
Stands Twice did, but he watched, too.
Magpie Man worked on one of the hind wheels of the wagon with the two men, and then they built a fire from the pulled-down stall, and Magpie Man told them the story of marauding Indians killing his family, burning his cabin. He could speak their language, too. Because magpies are always listening.
Then they all slept curled close to the fire, and when Stands Twice shook awake, it was dark and the fire was embers. Magpie Man moved from sleeper to sleeper, holding his hands over their nose and mouth until they stopped kicking. Until the last one. This last one, the last of the two children, he would suffocate him nearly all the way, then shake him awake, hug him close, then do it again. This went on until one time, it went too far, and the boy couldn’t be shaken awake.
“You can come in now,” Magpie Man said.
Stands Twice edged in, watching Magpie Man, and he could see it, now: this dead man with a bird for a heart doing versions of this in every town, and having children too, leaving them behind, those children growing up to chew through the town the same way, but not before having children themselves, so that one birdheart would leave a flock of killers for the next generation, and an even bigger flock for the next, and on down through the years.
That morning, when Stands Twice had woken to the soldier’s spinning guns, he’d known immediately, without even having to think it, that there was nothing Indians could do against that kind of firepower. Not when they were starving. Not when so many were already dead from the white scabs.
This, though, this was better than any gun, wasn’t it?
A warm flush spread up Stands Twice.
“This is why,” he said to Magpie Man, “this is why I had to live this long, through the scabs and the bullets and the hunger and the treaties. To do this.”
Magpie Man smiled his bird smile, his eyes not blinking even once.
“But they’ll shoot you,” Stands Twice said. “They’ll shoot you before you can even have any children.”
Magpie Man just stared at him.
Stands Twice looked at him and then past him, far back, to the first white men any of them had even seen. These white men had shot an antelope out in the grasslands, and then thrown it across the back of their horse. Stands Twice and the other children had stalked beside the horsemen in a creek bed until the men came to a tree. What the white men did then was cut the antelope here and there on its back legs and tail, and then tied loops of rope through that loose skin, and tied the other ends of the rope to the trunk of the tree. Then, with even more rope, they reached into the antelope from the back, tied into some bone and looped the other end of that rope to a saddle, backed that horse away until the skin peeled off the antelope all at once, stripping it down to the muscle.
Then they cut the meat they wanted off, rode away.
Stands Twice and the other children crept in, studied the naked antelope. The skin they took back to camp, to show the holes, act out what had been done. The old men laughed at this, gave the hide over to be tanned and then stretched it into a drum, because that had been a special antelope, they said. That antelope had played a trick on the white men—it had convinced them that its skin didn’t matter, that it was trash that could be left behind. But now the skin would last down through the years, provide the heartbeat for many ceremonies.
The skin would last.
Stands Twice smiled a slow smile.
“They’ll shoot you,” he said again to Magpie Man, “but it won’t matter, will it?”
He sharped the knife from the dead woman against a stone all day, then, when it was dark, he cut a long section of skin up from the inside of his forearm and draped it over the willow rack he’d tied together with grass.
Next was the back of his calves, then the top of his thighs.
It burned and made him bite down hard enough his mouth bled, but he kept cutting and pulling.
His chest, in as big of sections as he could, and his hip on the right side.
“I’m kind of bulletproof, see,” he explained to Magpie Man.
Magpie Man just watched, and waited, his eyes hungry, the stiff fingers of his right hand opening and closing.
When the skin was dry enough on the rack, Stands Twice carved off his braids, fashioned an awl from the smallest of the boy’s fingerbones, and used his hair to sew the patches of his skin into a shirt.
It wasn’t pretty, and there was no beadwork, and the skin hadn’t really been tanned, but it was the best he could do, especially with the flies crawling all over his exposed muscle.
He draped it over Magpie Man’s head, forced it down over his face and ears. It hung there stiff and uneven.
Magpie Man looked down to it.
“They’ll shoot me?” he said.
“It won’t matter,” Stands Twice said, patting him on the chest.
It made the medicine shirt stick to Magpie Man, so Stands Twice patted all over. The shirt formed to Magpie Man, became his own skin almost.
He nodded, looked up with a smile.
“How can I repay you?” he said.
“You’re going to town?” Stands Twice said.
Magpie Man nodded.
“You’re going to have lots of children, and they’ll all be like you, and they can have their own children?”
Magpie Man nodded.
“And they’ll all be…mischievous?”
Magpie Man smiled his smile.
“You don’t owe me anything,” Stands Twice said, and then pointed the direction Magpie Man should go.
After he was gone, Stands Twice stood and stood, unable to sit down anymore because all the missing skin hurt. The scabs forming were stiff, and cracked and bled every time he moved.
“I’m ready,” he said to the four directions, but got no response.
Far off through the grass, a pair of coyote eyes watched him, because of the blood scent he leaked into the air, but the coyote turned away after a moment, padded off.
“Well then,” Stands Twice said, and then, working calmly, he piled the four new bodies and the two older ones into the wagon and set it on fire, careful to stomp out any embers that drifted too far. Magpie Man walking into town against a backdrop of flames would give away what he was, wouldn’t it?
The next day when the sun was high he kicked through the ashes, found they felt good on his raw places, so he packed ash against all the places he was bleeding. He wondered if now, without his skin, he could get shot and die, or if he would just get shot and have to live with that bullet burrowing through him. He looked to the four directions, decided on one, and stepped that way once, twice, all year, for enough winters that he quit trying to count them, and sometimes if you’re still at night, after the fire’s died out, if you wait and only look beside where he’s crouched out there in the darkness, you might see the shape of him moving back there.
He’s drawn in because he misses people, because he misses hearing words, because he misses hearing these stories. That’s why we speak them loud like this, so if he’s around he can hear. Maybe you’ll see him, maybe you won’t, but who you definitely will see, who you can’t help seeing, are the children of the children of the children of that one magpie, spreading down like a fan through the years. They’re the ones pulling people into dark alleys, to chew the face meat away. They’re the ones holding their hands over the noses and mouths of the cities, choking them down breath by breath. They’re the ones whose eyes flash with humor when someone falls down, and can’t get back up. They’re the ones who walk into crowded places and get a glint in their eye when they realize there’s only one exit.
We couldn’t ma
ssacre the soldiers back like they massacred us, no, but we learned something from the white scabs. We learned that you just have to send one bad magpie into town. Sometimes one is enough, and if you wait long enough and if you’re hungry enough—that’s one thing the treaties did to us that can’t be taken away: they left us hungry, they taught us to creep up close, to part the tall grass and look through it, and to wait.
BLOOD LUST AND GOLD DUST
Travis Heermann
They call me Colorado Charlie Utter, but I mostly just go by Charlie, or Mr. Utter, if we ain’t pards. I’m gonna tell you this story, niños, because I was there, but it ain’t about me.
And it ain’t about the time Wyatt Earp came to Deadwood. But he did, for a spell.
And it ain’t about my friend Wild Bill’s murder, but maybe it kinda is.
And it ain’t about the smallpox epidemic, or the trouble with the Indians, or the blizzard that nearly suffocated us all under six feet of snow.
But maybe those things helped bring it down on us. I can’t rightly say, though, as I’m just a wagon driver and a bullwhacker.
It started the day I heard some hang-about blathering on about how Wyatt Earp, the Kansas lawman the papers loved to carry on about, had showed up in Deadwood and was dealing faro at the Bella Union, where “mirth is high and jokes are low.” By the time I got there, the crowd of ’neckers had already spilled out into the street. I pushed through them far enough to get a glimpse of Earp, coolly dealing cards to a handful of wide-eyed miners. He looked just like his picture in the papers, with a sweeping mustache and flinty eyes.
The howl of a coyote-that-wasn’t announced the arrival of Calamity Jane. She sauntered in, hooked me by the arm, and dragged me up to the bar. “Buy me a drink, you fuckin’ dandy. I’m a bit embarrassed today.”
She called me that on account of my hand-tailored, fringed buckskins, silver belt buckle, and my “bizarre habit” of bathing and shaving daily. I couldn’t abide filth, was all. First I laid eyes on her was in a saloon in Fort Laramie, about the roughest looking human being I ever seen. Most days, she was blind as a bat from looking through the bottom of a glass. Tall, built like a busted bale of hay, and as obnoxious as a badger, but after all the caring for the sick she done when the smallpox hit, everybody knew Jane’s heart was purer gold than anything they could pan out of Deadwood Creek.
Today, she was only mildly squiffed, her hair slightly less unruly than a patch of tumbleweeds.
She told the bartender, “Shot of booze and slop it over the rim.”
“Make that two.” I slapped a dollar onto the bar.
She grinned at me as she tossed it back. “Potent enough to kill an ordinary alderman.”
“I’d be better off with lead in my gut.” I tossed it back anyway and let it burn.
“One more,” she said, this time with a catch in her voice, and I knew what was coming.
“You’re damn right one more.”
With two glasses full again, we looked at each other.
“To Bill,” she said.
“To Bill.”
We drank, and the tears were in her eyes, just like always.
She looked deep into her empty glass. “There has never been anything fuckin’ finer in the way of physical perfection than Wild Bill Hickok. Prettiest corpse I ever seen.” She wiped a trickle of snot.
Wild Bill Hickok had been gone three months now, but the wound still bled—for both of us. When the maudlin hit Jane, most often I had to carry her back to whatever dark corner she was using to bed down. The rest of the times, she ended up in an alley riding bareback with the first half-blind soul to cross her path.
Some half-soaked yayhoo, howling at the ceiling like a poor-tuned fiddle, slewed up to the bar. “I’m a wolf, and it’s my turn to howl!”
Jane squared on him. “It’s your turn to shut the fuck up.”
The poor, ignorant soul howled again.
Against his ear, Jane’s Colt said, click.
His howl trailed off.
Jane’s grin lacked humor. “Once more and it’ll be your last this side of hell. Now, apologize.”
“Wh-whut?”
“I said, apologize. You see, friend, I’m a howling coyote from Bitter Creek. The further up you go, the bitterer it gets, and I’m from the head end.” She aimed her six-gun at his feet. “I run the howling business around here. Now apologize before I shoot your fuckin’ toes off.”
His tail went so far between his legs he could almost suck on it.
We might have been launched into another of Jane’s legendary hootenannies had not one already started outside.
The hullabaloo drew everyone into the street, where we became witness to a spectacle unprecedented even for Deadwood—two women engaged in the screamingest, scratchingest, hair-pullingest dustup I had seen in many a moon. They spilled out of the Gem Saloon across the street with their crowd of cheering onlookers, betting in progress. Between the two of them, they weren’t wearing enough clothing to wad a shotgun. One was barefoot all the way to her ears, and the other wore about as much as if she was dressed in a pair of suspenders.
When I brought the wagon train from Cheyenne back in July of ’76, along with my pard Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, and a dozen dainty daughters of sin—all of them ahorseback with a foot in each stirrup—the fanfare at the sight of them twelve women set a thousand lonely miners and layabouts a-whoopin’.
On this day, though, a cold, pissing rain had turned the habitually muddy street into the vilest, reeking cesspool of rottenness anybody ever whiffed. A river of rubbish, slops, and emptied chamber pots, tromped into an impassable quagmire by horses, mules, and oxen like the world ain’t never seen. You could lose a wagon in it.
From the balcony, the proprietor of the Gem, Al Swearengen, a notorious blackguard bereft of human decency, a lanky hunk of leather with slick, black hair and mustache, watched the affair with a greedy smirk. Beside him, Swearengen’s wife wore a shady eye herself, like most days. Swearengen’s girls, mixed in the crowd, were a motley crew of ungainly features and uncertain ages. If dark eyes made women beautiful, Deadwood’s were top-shelf, as long as you didn’t object to one eye being darker than the other.
The two combatants were covered in what we’ll call mud, but that didn’t seem to dampen their temper. Blood flowed from lips and scratches.
That’s when Seth Bullock showed up, true to his duty as acting sheriff. Tall and erect with steel-gray eyes, eyebrows like a razorback’s mane, a face full of angles, nose, and chin, he pulled his pistol and fired it in the air.
The noise brought the affair to a sudden cessation. The larger girl, Emmaline, halted in midpunch.
But then the smaller one, Cassie was her name, jumped into that pause and latched onto Emmaline’s ear with her teeth. Emmaline screamed. Swearengen’s sapheads, Dan and Johnny, yanked the girls apart by the hair. As Emmaline clutched her ear, blood flowed between her fingers and down her neck.
Bullock shot another hole in the sky. “What the hell is going on?”
His shot distracted everyone but me. I saw something made my skin crawl and my throat cinch tight. Cassie had bitten off a chunk of Emmaline’s ear, but didn’t spit it out. She was chewing with satisfaction, quiet and sly in Johnny’s grip.
From the balcony came Swearengen’s gravelly voice. “Just a little entertainment, Bullock. Fifty dollars to the winner. Betting is free.” He flicked cigar ashes onto the crowd.
Bullock’s bushy mustache twitched. “This is a goddamn disgrace, Swearengen, even for you.”
“Beg to differ, Sheriff. Been advertising this little soiree for a week.”
Bullock shook his head and addressed the crowd. “How about you all take it inside before I start arresting people for disturbing the peace and public drunkenness?” He pointed at Swearengen. “Starting with you.”
Swearengen scoffed and chuckled. “Pull the other leg.”
“How about a sconce full of lumps?” Bullock said, pistol still
in the air.
The moment hung there. Then Swearengen said, “Is that the inestimable Wyatt Earp I see before me?”
Earp stood at the edge of the crowd. “Who’s asking?”
“Al Swearengen, proprietor of the Gem, finest saloon, theater, and entertainment house this side of the Missouri. The best whiskey, the friendliest girls, and drinks on the house for the next fifteen minutes.”
“Huzzah!” yelled the crowd.
Earp flashed a look at Bullock.
Darkness like the shadow of a grizzly crept into Swearengen’s voice. “What are you doing here, lawman?”
Earp said, “I’m not here as a lawman. But I hear there’s opportunity aplenty for them that can grab onto it.”
Swearengen said, “If you’ve a strong grip, Mr. Earp, you come to the right place. Now, everyone, we don’t want our fine patrons to run afoul of our august constabulary…”
The crowd filtered back into the Gem. The two women glared at each other with a hatred that made me glad neither had a knife.
Bullock approached Earp. “Seth Bullock, acting sheriff of this camp.”
We weren’t even a proper town, on account of this was Sioux land, and sacred to them to boot. Eight months prior, Deadwood Gulch had been wilderness. Now it boasted six or ten thousand souls, counting prospectors and all the painted ladies, gamblers, saloon barons, and thieves lined up to fleece them.
Earp said, “Wyatt Earp. Pleased to make your acquaintance, Sheriff.”
Their gazes met like two axe-heads striking edge-to-edge. Bullock could outstare a riled-up rattler and a charging buffalo at the same time, but Earp held steady, with a dangerous glint in his eye, like waiting for the spark to catch on an old flintlock. He had more guts than a smokehouse.
Deadwood was in clamoring need of law. Two days before, I’d seen a bill posted outside the Gem Saloon, where the Board of Health met—Deadwood’s only governing body, of which Bullock was one. The bill read thusly:
No person shall discharge any cannon or gun, fowling piece, pistol, or firearm of any description, or fire, explode, or set off any squib, cracker, or other thing containing powder or other explosive material without permission of Mayor E. B. Farnum.
