(1986) Deadwood (14 page)

"
At nine-twenty-five, the band fell again. Dr. Otterson, in charge of the experiment, notes a glorious rose-colored light about the remains, and there is a faint mint odor through the eye-bole.
"

"Mint?"

"Mint," Charley said. "It's a damn sight better-sounding than worm food, isn't it?"

"It sounds better than life," Bill said.

"
Ten-twenty-five
," Charley read. "
Feet incandescent and semitranspar-ent. Body surrounded by gold mist. .
.
"

"Then what?" Bill said.

"That's the end of it," Charley said. He turned the page to make sure. "Right after that it says, "
reported by Colonel Olcott.
'"

Bill said, "Did you notice that everybody we met in this place is a colonel or a major or a professor?"

"Or a captain," Charley said, meaning Jack Crawford.

The Bottle Fiend pulled another bucket of water off the stove and divided it between Bill and Charley. "I never tried to burn myself," he said. "I just et poison eggs and shot myself in the head. And I tried to hang."

"It isn't dignified to burn yourself," Charley said. "People talk bad about you afterwards. This story in the paper, the deceased was already dead, and it was the family and friends that did it." Charley had a vision of the soft-brain chaining himself to a tree and dropping a match in a pile of wood, like Mons Jensen.

Bill had closed his eyes to concentrate on the heat in the water. The Bottle Fiend was nodding, as if he was thinking over what Charley said on burning, but when he spoke again, it was as if they were still talking about newspapers.

"I know something's going to happen next," he said. "The newspaper don't know it, but I do."

Charley said, "Nobody can predict the future."

"I know something's going to happen," the soft-brain said. Charley waited and finally the soft-brain told him. "It's somebody wants to shoot Bill."

Charley was looking at Bill, and he never opened his eyes. He did smile. "Who told you?" Charley said.

"A man with little bottles," the soft-brain said. "He give me the little bottles and then took them away when I cut myself. He give me a gun too, and said to shoot Wild Bill when he was sitting in the bath. A little-bitty gun, little-bitty bottles. I know who he meant."

Bill had stopped smiling and opened his eyes. He was drunk and tired, but he could always put it off to do what needed to be done. "What was this man's name?" Bill said.

The Bottle Fiend shrugged. "I don't know names," he said.

"Where was he?"

The Bottle Fiend looked at the ceiling. "In a room," he said after a while. "There was little bottles, and he had a knife. He give me the bottles, fair and square, and then took them back when I got cut."

"Where?" Bill said.

"My finger," he said, and held it up. It was wrapped in a piece of dirty cotton.

Bill said, "Will you do something for me, sir?" The soft-brain nodded. "When you see the man again, you tell him Wild Bill said there's about to be a cheap funeral in Dead wood."

The Bottle Fiend looked at the ceiling again, maybe picturing it.

Bill settled back against the tub and closed his eyes. That fast, he was drunk again.

"You know," Bill said after a while, "we got to study cremation. That sounds like the ticket." He took another drink of the gin, and the Bottle Fiend sat quietly and watched them.

Once, maybe twenty minutes later, he said, "I don't remember what you said, about the man with little bottles."

"Don't concern yourself," Bill said. "I'll get you some bottles. It's no consequence at all."

The old man's hands hurt him at night and kept him from sleeping much, but even so, the first thing he heard every morning was the boy, banging around his camp in the dawn light, making breakfast. He wondered how a person made that much clatter lighting a fire.

Before the sun broke the hills, the boy was in the creek. Every morning. He sat on his haunches in an uncomfortable way, and none of the ordinary panning motions was ordinary for him. He was jumpy, and he tried too hard. He panned gold like there was somebody watching him.

Which in fact there was.

The old man saw him on Friday, sitting on a horse above the trail that followed the Whitewood into the city. The old man only saw him for a moment, but he recognized the beard and the posture. It was the man from the Gem Theater. He sat on a horse the same way he stood on his feet. It was him. There was nothing wrong with the old man's eyes.

He had been to the Gem six times in the last six weeks, but not regular, like every Saturday morning. He went when he wanted. Sometimes he paid the girls, sometimes he paid the man.

There was nothing wrong with his peeder, either.

He was there again on Sunday. He came in the afternoon with two others, and stayed in the trees away from the trail, not to be seen. When they had gone, the old man walked down to the water. The boy was as grim as the creek he was panning.

He had froze his mind on keeping on, and had forgot what he was keeping on at. He had worked Number 12 seven days then, taken maybe five dollars' worth of gold out of the claim. If a luckier man was to fall in, there might be that much in his pockets when he climbed out. The boy had no luck, though. That was as clear as the fact he had no talent.

Not that the two were unrelated.

"Even the Lord rests on Sunday," the old man said.

The boy was slopping gravel over the sides of his pan and never looked up. "I don't care about religion," he said. "I care about what I can see."

The old man sat down on the bank and watched him work. "It ain't that clean a line, sometimes," he said, "what you can see and what you can't."

The boy shook his head, like he had been accused. "I ain't seen nothing lately," he said, "but silt and gravel." The old man saw the skin on the boy's hands was cracked at the knuckles, and he knew how it hurt to work with broke skin.

"You ought to go slower," the old man said. "Look around more, get the feel of what's around you . . ."

"I know everything about this wet bastard creek I need to," the boy said. "I know I staked a claim, and I intend to work it until it gives up its gold."

"It ain't no hurry," the old man said, seeing he would not be warned.

"Maybe not for you, old man," the boy said. "But I got things to do." The old man stood up and walked back to his camp. He would have told the boy about the man who come out twice to watch him, but he could see the boy didn't want him there, and wouldn't listen anyway. He would have told him, but the old man did not like to be called "old man."

The man from the Gem Theater was back again that evening, with the others. The old man was in the trees, collecting kindling, and heard their horses. The boy had stayed in the creek until dusk, and then gone up the hill and taken off his boots. He'd gone to sleep without supper.

The men on horses stopped in the trees above the boy's camp again, but only for a few minutes. They tied the horses there and walked down. The old man moved to a place where he could watch. He had a scattergun in his cabin, but there was nothing he could do with it but get himself shot.

They moved down the rocks to the tent slowly, trying not to make noise. They needn't have bothered, the boy slept like he was buried. They came slow, and when they were a few yards from the tent two of them took the guns out of their holsters. The old man thought they would shoot the boy in his sleep and take what they wanted, but they stopped at the entrance to the tent, and the man from the Gem Theater held on to the roof and kicked inside. There was a grunt, but nothing else. The man from the Gem kicked again.

"Wake up, boy," he said. "Al Swearingen is here to collect his debts."

The old man could hear the boy talking inside the tent, but he couldn't tell what he said. The man from the Gem Theater kicked again, and then backed up several steps in a hurry as the boy came out after him. One of the others hit the boy across the back of the head—the old man thought he'd hit him with his gun, but the light was going fast and he couldn't say for sure—and the boy dropped on the ground.

The man from the Gem Theater walked away, and the other two dragged the boy after him. They had him under the arms. They draped him across the boy's firewood and took off his trousers. There were no sounds at all from the boy, not even a groan. The man from the Gem Theater unbuttoned his own pants and got down on the ground behind the boy. "Now," he said to one of the men, "put that knife in his mouth so he'll notice it when he wakes up."

The old man turned away and sat on the other side of the tree. In a few minutes he heard the boy. He never groaned, the old man was surprised at that, it was a gagging noise. "That's Mr. Bowie in your mouth, boy," the man from the Gem Theater said. "Don't move nothin' . . ."

The boy made that noise again, strangled, like he was trying to get out the words. Then he cried out—half a cry really, something had cut it off—and the man from the Gem Theater was talking. "Where's Wild Bill tonight, boy?" he said. The boy made the strangling noise again. "No, no," the man said, almost gentle, "I brung my friends tonight. . ."

The old man stood up, quietly, and made his way back into the trees, trying to get away from it. The farther he went, though, the louder the boy's cries got. He had walked fifty yards before it was quiet again, and he sat down there. There was a scream a few minutes later, a long, scairt scream, and then it was quiet.

The old man thought of his scattergun again, and that maybe there were things that signaled you were supposed to get yourself shot. The scream was the last of it. The old man waited in the trees, and a long time later the men came back up the hill. "We ought to finished it," one of them said.

The man from the Gem Theater said, "I know it."

"I wouldn't had nothing to do with this business," the first one said, "if you said you was going to leave him alive."

The man from the Gem Theater said, "There's things you give away without knowing why. We give that boy his life."

"You give him his life," the first one said. "If it was me, I'd go back down there and finish it."

The old man heard them get on their horses. He thought of the scattergun, but he didn't want to kill anybody. He was sixty-seven years old, and didn't want that over him now. He didn't know what he did want, except to wait for the mining companies, and sell them Number 11 Above Good Hope, and then move into town and eat his breakfast in the hotel. Maybe visit the Green Front once a week. He didn't expect he would be going back to the Gem.

He made his way to his cabin in the dark, stumbling over tree roots and rocks, but he moved quiet. He didn't want to make noise now. The air was dead still; the only sound from the boy's camp was the creek. He made a fire so the boy could see he was there, and sat down in his chair by the door. There was still no noise from the boy's direction, nothing but the creek. He tried to act natural, like he had just got back from town. He made himself a pot of coffee and ate half a pound of New York cheese. It was thirty cents a pound at Farnum's, and he ate it for dinner every night. He sat on his chair holding coffee in a tin cup in one hand, the cheese in the other. The mosquitoes never bothered a man that ate cheese every night.

He looked in the direction of the boy's camp, but there were clouds that night, and no light at all from the sky. The thought hit him that the boy might be hurt serious. The old man didn't want to bust in uninvited—the time for that was past—but if the boy was hurt. . .

He walked to the edge of the fire's light and stared down toward the boy's tent. He listened; he thought it over. It wasn't likely the boy had gone back to sleep, so he was either hurt or morose. The old man decided to wait. He let the fire die, and when it was gone he went inside his shack and lay in bed. The scattergun leaned against the door, and he thought again that he might of been supposed to go down there and get himself shot.

He woke in the morning at first light, put on his boots and his trousers, and walked outside. The clouds were still there, heavy and low, and the air smelled the way it did before a storm. He looked down to the boy's camp and saw it was empty.

The old man walked down the gravel slope and looked inside the tent. He had took his clothes and personals, left the pan and shovel and the rubber boots. There was dried blood all over the cot. The old man pulled his head outside the tent; he'd already seen more than he wanted. There was blood on the ground, too. It led from the firewood to the tent. The old man wondered what they had done to him that bled this much and didn't kill him. He wondered that, and he wondered what it had to do with him. "What was a body supposed to do?" he said out loud.

He walked back up the little hill to his own camp. "All I could of done," he said, "was to get shot myself." He sat down on the chair near his door and looked out at the Whitewood Creek, where the boy would have been by then, ignorant and clumsy and strong, holding his silent argument with the nature of how things were. He missed the boy, and felt the loss. And he had lost something besides the boy, sitting in the trees, listening to the sounds of what they did to him.

The boy walked along the creek back into town, his tongue was cut deep and swollen, and the metal taste was as strong as when the knife was inside his mouth. He. did not let himself think about the rest of it.

He'd done too much of that after what had happened in the whore man's wagon on the way out, thought about it until it crippled his talk and his feelings, until he stuttered and couldn't decide what to say. He'd felt himself close to something bad then, and he knew if he thought about this now, he would find it.

He walked past half a dozen miners on the way in, most of them sitting in chairs outside their tents or shacks, usually with a rifle or scattergun propped against a tree nearby. The boy saw something humorous in that, men worried that somebody would steal their ground, something that was always there. Only one or two of the miners were working their claims; the boy saw there wasn't much left in the stream.