by David Boop
I envisioned some doughty desperado dragging a twelve-pounder about the streets, flaunting the mayor’s express permission to give it go as the occasion might require. Of course, a man could carry whatever hand howitzer he wanted.
Now that Bullock and Earp had the measure of each other, I could breathe again. Jane had been standing next to me throughout the proceedings. We traded glances. This could get interesting.
With Swearengen and the crowd filtering back inside the Gem, Earp muttered, “The love of decency does not abide in this place.”
* * *
Bullock, Earp, Jane, and myself bellied up to the Gem’s bar, a couple of rough-cut planks stretched across barrelheads. Swearengen poured us drinks, and Bullock chewed on his mustache. The love lost between them wouldn’t fill a thimble, I reckon because Bullock had a soul.
After a dousing with water to clear the mud, the two shivering women balled up their fists to recommence hostilities on the theater stage. Cassie still had Emmaline’s blood on her lips and hunger in her eye.
Just then a scream rose from the back, and bloodcurdling don’t cover it.
The Gem was a wide-open space, thirty feet across and hundred feet deep, with rooms above and in back for the girls to ply their trade.
Johnny Burns, Swearengen’s box herder, ran for the noise, Bullock and Earp hot on his heels. Jane ran back, too, lips tight and one eye twitching. She had a soft spot for the “upstairs girls,” made friends with some of them, and didn’t take kindly when they came to harm—an occurrence all too regular.
The screamer slumped against the wall, across from an open door.
Bullock took one look inside and, backing away, almost stumbled over her. “Jesus Christ!”
Earp stood there looking like he’d taken a ball peen hammer ’twixt the eyes.
Over Earp’s shoulder, in the shadows of the room, Shorty Muldoon knelt, with his face dark and wet from the nose down, grinning at us like he’d just eaten a piece of berry pie. He was naked, and so was Lucinda Mae, sprawled across the bed, but she was dead as a can of corned beef, opened up. I reeled away from what I saw in there, the parts of her were missing—the softest parts.
“Hey, Bullock, want to try a piece?” Shorty said, like he was inviting us to supper.
“Jesus Christ!” Bullock said again. The ’neckers crowded in for a peep. “Everybody, get the hell back!” He pulled his smoke wagon and let one fly.
Shorty turned back to his repast, but just then Jane shouldered up through the crowd, took one look, and with a cannonade of profanities, pulled her guns and let fly. Through the smoke, he spun away, faster than I’d ever seen anybody move, ’cept maybe Wild Bill. Then there was nothing but his bare ass diving through a window. Jane sent another round after him to unknown effect.
Earp and Bullock pushed past everyone and charged out the back door in pursuit. I shoulda followed, but my legs wouldn’t pony up.
Swearengen parted the crowd using profanity like a plow. “Shorty fucking Muldoon. There goes the fucking night.” He turned on the crowd. “Everybody, come back in an hour. We’ll have this sorted out and be back open for business.”
The girl who’d screamed, Kansas City Katie, still rocked against the wall, tears streaming.
The men shuffled off to the Bella Union or Nuttall and Mann’s No. 10, muttering amongst themselves. I heard exclamations from the far entrance of “Goddamn, it got cold out!”
In the lantern light of the Gem’s back-room-turned-slaughterhouse, bone-chilling winter poured through the shattered window, wetness splattered the floor and one wall. I covered my mouth and nose with a handkerchief, but it couldn’t hold back the eerie odor of death and the grave. The air in that room was so cold it hurt to breathe.
I pointed to dark splatters on the wall. “That look like blood to you?” It looked more like coal oil or runny tar, but threads of ice spread from it across the bare wood. It stood out against all of poor Lucinda Mae’s blood. Stranger still, a patch of her flesh was frosted over, a hand-shaped patch on her thigh.
“I know I hit him,” Jane said, voice trembling. She staggered back into the now empty main room, clamping a bear trap on her sobs. Lucinda Mae was one of them she called friend. I tried to offer Jane comfort, but she threw my arm off. “Get the fuck offa me! What is wrong with this place?”
I couldn’t answer.
Jane went on. “Shit ain’t been right since Bill died. First that, then the raid on the Sioux—which the poor redskins didn’t fuckin’ deserve—then the smallpox, then that deranged girl wandering in the woods for four days eating bugs. Feels like a fuckin’ pile o’ evil just stinking to high heaven.”
“A big ol’ pile of shit,” I echoed. A couple weeks before, one of the girls from the Bella Union disappeared. Then turned up again four days later, walking along the trail, got picked up by a couple of gamblers riding into town. She said she’d been living on bugs. Wouldn’t say what she was doing out there. Trouble was, she wouldn’t take normal food no more after that. Only bugs. Except for the business end of a shotgun she ate a week after that.
Jane had walked her own share on the trail of madness. How many nights had she wandered Deadwood Gulch, blind drunk, howling her grief, like a coyote calling out in desperation? Sometimes that howl would raise the gooseflesh all the way to my nuts. Sometimes I could swear something answered.
At the bar, she clamped her head in both hands. “And, that prissy fuckin’ General Crook buying up all the groceries, there ain’t flour to make a fuckin’ biscuit don’t cost two dollars.”
When General Crook brought his command through Deadwood, half of ’em afoot for eating their horses, they’d bought up all the flour, bacon, coffee, everything they could find. Eggs were a dollar apiece now, flour ten dollars a pound. No game within ten miles. Them with the poorest claims would soon be eating boot leather.
Two pistol shots echoed outside through the rising wind.
Jane kept talking. “But things come to live in a pile of shit. Maggots and bugs and such. What if…what if evil is like that? What if it draws things…”
Deadwood Gulch had drawn Wyatt Earp here, just like it had drawn Wild Bill. Hell, it had drawn me. People didn’t come here because they favored the company of civilized folk. What else had it drawn here?
A thought glimmered through Jane’s inebriation. “Fuck!”
“What you talking about?”
“Don’t crowd me, I’m trying to remember…” She rubbed her temples to massage something loose.
I happened to glance at the two women on the stage. One of the other girls tended to Emmaline’s mangled ear, while prim, proper little Cassie sat a chair, arm thrown casually over the back, still barefoot up to her ears, foot bobbing absently, her gaze plastered all over poor Emmaline like she was a Christmas goose, just waiting for a chance to dig in to a nice roasted breast.
Something cold settled into my belly, a foreboding.
Just then, Bullock and Earp burst through the back door, snow swirling around them amid a blast of frigid air. They shook their heads.
Bullock’s eyes glinted like they had fire behind them. “Son of a bitch got away, but he won’t get far. Stupid bastard left his boots and britches.”
The temperature had dropped twenty degrees in the last ten minutes. The wind outside howled like it was living.
Bullock said, “Hey, Charlie. Doesn’t Shorty Muldoon got digs in Whoop Up?”
I couldn’t get Shorty’s eyes out of my mind, just before he went for the window. They were wrong. Black. Like it wasn’t Shorty looking out from inside…
“Charlie!” Bullock snapped.
I stumbled back out of that nightmare and nodded.
Deadwood was, as had been said, “three miles long and fifty feet wide,” a strung-out collection of camps along the creek, not a town. The Badlands, where we stood, looked like a pile of fruit crates dumped in a yard, some of them propped up on broomsticks. Buildings clung to the ridges with their forepaws. Whoop
Up lay a few hundred yards from where we stood, the place Shorty Muldoon and his pards all scratched away at a claim that left them poor as hind-tit calves.
Swearengen looked at Bullock with an expression as black and deadly as I’d ever seen. “You find that stumpy shit stain. We’ll stretch his skin on the fucking wall. Then we’ll use his nut sack for gold dust.”
Bullock clomped toward the back door, mad as a peeled rattler.
“Wait,” Earp said. “I reckon you’ll need a hand.”
“I can handle Shorty Muldoon,” Bullock said.
“You sure about that? A man with at least two bullet holes in him who can still run like a jackrabbit?”
“A jackrabbit who don’t bleed blood,” I said, cold beetles crawling up my back.
Bullock chewed on his mustache. “Let’s go, then.”
Looking outside, we couldn’t see across the street for the snow. A moaning wind drove snowflakes into my cheeks like needles. I never seen weather change with such speed.
Earp said, “People will be piling on the firewood tonight.”
Bullock said, “When it’s over, we’ll have to bury them that couldn’t.”
Jane seized Bullock’s sleeve, eyes gleaming. “Listen! I got it!”
Bullock scoffed. “Got what?”
“When I was scoutin’ for the Army, I heard stories. There was this Ojibwe tracker, Jim Charging-Hawk, told me about this thing, like an evil spirit, comes to camps where people are starving, where there’s famine, suffering, and it makes ’em…”
“Makes ’em what?” Earp said.
“Makes ’em want to fuckin’ eat each other. It comes in the winter, mostly. They’s stories of whole camps disappearing, where all they found in the spring was bones.”
“Bullshit,” Earp and Bullock said.
Jane sniffed and spat a wad of chaw. “You fuckers don’t have to listen to me. Let’s find Shorty ’fore he hurts anybody else.”
* * *
Heading for Whoop Up through a thickening whiteout, the four of us clung to the boardwalk, but it was drowning in mud. The wind’s razor teeth nipped at my fingers and ears.
The saloons and brothels we passed hooted and hollered, as if the Mother of all Blizzards was not chomping at every scrap of shelter right that second.
In such a storm, a fella’s mind can wander off. I took enjoyment in my share of booze and sporting ladies as much as the next fella, but a queer realization swept over me that that’s all Deadwood was. A frenzy of taking, a plague of locusts descending, eating everything, shitting the place up, and then moving on. Here we were, eating the guts out of the Black Hills, a land sacred to the Sioux, and when the gold was gone, what next?
By the time we reached Whoop Up, eight inches of snow numbed my feet, and we’d only gotten lost once. Amidst the collection of tents, shanties, and sluice boxes, a bonfire blazed high.
As I checked my Colt, my skin stuck to the steel. I couldn’t remember the last time I fired it, and I’d never drawn down on a man. But it was a shiny new Peacemaker cartridge model, so I wasn’t worried about fouled powder.
Eight or nine men huddled so close around the bonfire, they were lucky to keep their beards.
“Shorty Muldoon!” Bullock called.
Nobody moved.
Jane wore an expression like a meat axe. “Speak up, you sons-a-bitches!”
They turned around, and my nuts cinched up and disappeared.
Earp pulled his long-barreled .45, his hand rock steady.
The miners’ faces were gaunt, gray, eyes full of dark intention.
The day Wild Bill Hickok and I came to Deadwood, Bill told me—it was such a strange thing—he told me, “Charlie, I don’t think I’m going to leave this camp. I’m gonna die here.” Three weeks later, the greatest gunfighter who ever lived was shot in the back of the head playing cards. That same feeling swept over me, that I was going to die here, but I’d be damned if I let some evil spirit cash in my chips.
Shorty Muldoon stepped out of the white, a naked, bony ghost of his bow-legged former self, caked with blood and ice. His ribs, joints, cheekbones, even his hands looked swole up, blackened like from frostbite. “Look, boys! More meat on the hoof!”
They loosed a hungry growl, like a table full of vittles just sprang on ’em.
Then they rushed us.
I got no recollection of who shot what. All I knew was Swill Barrel Johnny and Texas Ford came at me. I must have fired at least once, but then they seized my arms. A powerful chill crept through me at their touch, like dunking my arms in icy slush. I managed to kick free of one, but not before the second bit down on these here two fingers. Ain’t nothing like feeling your own bones crunch. I got ’em loose before he chomped ’em off.
Swill Barrel Johnny said in his Cornish burr, “What do ye say, Charlie? Give us a bit of haunch, won’t ye?”
Jane spewed profanity and bullets. That black, ichorous stuff sprayed from each hole. Only with a skull full of lead did they drop for good.
Fortunately, the dog-bit fingers were not my shooting hand. I emptied my pistol into Swill Barrel Johnny’s skull, then pulled my Bowie knife and stabbed it through Texas Ford’s ear.
Bullock went down with two of the cannibals on him. Earp charged in, kicking and blasting, until Bullock got to his feet, bleeding from a nasty bite on his forearm.
That’s when more of them came out of the tents, charging toward us through the icy slop. These had been busy eating some of their own. They came at us with their gory faces and slaughterhouse stench, but we beat them back. Without time to reload, all we could do was hammer them with our pistol grips. The blizzard became a storm of black blood and screaming that wasn’t just the wind. My fingers and toes went numb. My face froze into a mask of hollering as skulls cracked under the butt of my pistol.
Then it was over. I was still hollering, I think. How many of them ran off into the swirling veils of white, I got no recollection.
Snow gathered on our shoulders as we stood knee deep in carnage. Somehow, the warmth of the bonfire only a few feet away wouldn’t reach me. In the slicing wind, we reloaded. Its howling threatened to toss our words out into nothing.
“You all ever seen anything like this?” Earp said.
“I never even heard of anything like this!” Bullock said.
“I have!” Jane said. “But you wouldn’t fuckin’ listen!”
“All right then, Jane,” Bullock said. “What do we do?”
“How should I know?” Jane spat. “I ain’t no fuckin’ medicine man.”
“We got to find them all,” Bullock said. “They’re going to raise the kind of hell we can’t even imagine. On a night like this, people will be helpless.”
“Seth,” I said, “what if they’s connected—the snow and the eating. This thing Jane spoke of.”
“The wendigo,” Jane said.
I went on, because I’d had time to ponder on this. “That thing. What if it’s kinda like the stories where the Devil comes and takes over some poor soul’s body?”
“You’re talking a lot of horseshit,” Earp said.
“You’re talking about possession,” Bullock said. “There’s stories in the Bible. You think Shorty is possessed by this wendigo?”
“Like I said…horseshit,” Earp said. “Heathen superstition.”
“What explanation do you got?” I said, yanking out my handkerchief and wrapping it around my bitten fingers. The bleeding had mostly stopped, on account of the cold. “This ain’t natural. Can’t you feel it? There’s a presence. Something bigger than these miners, like something came down out of nowhere, out of the Canadian tundra, all the way from the moon for all I know. A thing made of hunger and sadness and fear and greed all coming together and squirming like a nest of rattlers. It didn’t come here by accident. Somebody called it. We called it. Souls cry out in this valley every day. Beaten, fallen women. Brokeback miners. Them poor fuckers that die in alleys with their throats cut for a poke full of gold dust.”
Earp said, “How about we continue this indoors?”
Screams filtered through the dark and howling wind.
Jane looked into the swirling white, stricken, a wounded coyote howling for something to come and take its life. “Goddammit,” she muttered. Then she cocked both pistols. “God damn it!”
“We got to finish this,” Bullock said.
“What if,” I said, haltingly, trying to cipher it all, “what if, you know how one person can bring smallpox into a camp, and pretty soon…”
“It spreads,” Jane said.
“If we take out Shorty—” Bullock said.
“Goddammit, I liked Shorty,” I said. “Up until he ate a woman right in front of me anyhow. Little sumbitch could play a hell of a mouth harp.”
“Which way did he go?” Earp said.
Jane pointed at a set of bare footprints filling with snow. “That way. Towards the Number 10.”
* * *
Heading back down the gulch, we faced a gale wind. My mustache and eyelashes froze stiff as porcupine quills. Tears froze to my cheeks.
By the time we saw the lights of the Saloon No. 10, knee-deep snow masked the street mud. Every step was a frigid, exhausting slog. I couldn’t feel my face, my ears, my whole body shivering like a lizard looking for a hot rock.
We walked into the No. 10 like four frozen specters, shivering too bad to hold our guns. The place was full of patrons but quiet as a sick cow in a snowbank.
“Shorty Muldoon,” Bullock said. “Seen him?”
Billy Nuttall, standing behind the bar with a haunted look, gestured toward the poker table in the back.
Sitting at the table with his back to the door, in the chair where Wild Bill Hickok had been shot in the back of the head, his flesh as gray as a month-old snowbank, his hair a frozen bramble, was Shorty Muldoon.
Nuttall leaned over the bar. “We didn’t know what to do with him. He just walked in, naked as the day he was born, and sat down.”
The three other former poker players stood away from the table, their hands shaking, but not like they were doing the shaking, more like they were being shook, too fast to see, like a guitar string. Their faces lost their edges, like my eyes were blurred, but only just their faces. People edged away from them. Then the moment passed, and for a moment they seemed normal again. Up until they walked up to three other patrons, seized them by the shoulders with irresistible strength, and tore out their throats with their teeth.
