I started the next night.
Since winter had set in, I pretty much always carried my LeMat under my coat in its holster, but as bouncer I was allowed to do it open-like. I actually went to carrying both revolvers and tucking the third, the army service revolver, in a pocket inside my coat. I asked Wow to sew leather inside that pocket, and for a reasonable price she did, and then I oiled that leather so if I needed to pull my pistol, it was easy to yank loose. I was told I could carry a shotgun as well, but this seemed like a bad weapon for the work, being as how it could spread out and kill most anything on either side of the intended. I instead took to my loop-cock Winchester, which would be almost as bad if I was to go to firing it with the catch on the loop pushed down. But at least with it, I could take a singular and cautious shot if I chose, and if things called for it I could click the striker into place and open up a line of fire as fast as I could cock it.
As you might expect, the Gem stayed rowdy. Killings was too constant to have any real effect on the people who came there; it was just how things was. The piano player still played, though now he had a wife, and she had come to worry his ear something furious. She no longer sang, having decided marriage made her respectable, which as rumor had it meant she stayed home with a bottle. Her new husband was having to bring in extra income by working longer shifts, which was no treat to my ear as far as I was concerned. If anything, his playing had gotten worse, and had turned angry.
There was seldom a night at the Gem that I didn’t have to ask someone to leave or end up buffaloing them with a blow upside the head with my Winchester barrel or one of my revolvers. It was a living.
But good as that money was, it cost to live in Deadwood, as all the prices was jacked up. Pretty soon I found that I was working nights at the Gem, emptying spittoons at Mann’s No. 10, and on my day off, which was a Sunday, I was ratting a little, but I still wasn’t putting that much away. Now and again Cullen, who had turned into an ace honey-wagon driver and such, would give me an assist with the rats. He, too, had taken on an “associative job,” which meant instead of only driving a wagon that collected night soil, as he preferred to call it, he also had a job where he scraped horse and bull manure off the muddy streets with a large shovel and tossed it in a wagon. All this he took out to a spot where he was paid for it, the buyer having the intent to mix it with ground buffalo bones and turn it into fertilizer. This fertilizer business was owned by a near blind man and a woman who had gnawed her teeth down to the black gums. They smelled near as strong as their product and was constantly wearing it in its fresher state on their clothes and shoes.
One Sunday night after hitting drunks in the head, I went ratting. Cullen wasn’t with me this night, having decided to stay in bed with Wow at the whorehouse, which was most certainly a better decision; fact was, he had moved in with her, leaving me the luxury of more room.
But the bull’s-eye of the matter was, I was about my ratting. I had a heavy bat made of hickory for dispatching the little boogers and was aiming for a three-bag night. But two things happened, both of them life-changing events.
You see, the best rat time was just as the cold winter darkness was coming in over the hills, settling down on Deadwood like a black sack. Lights would get lit, and the street would have a glow, and you would see the rats in rapid march, moving down the byways in search of food and mischief. They was so thick in their packs and so determined to be about their business it was easy to put the crack on them, shove their bodies into a sack to be weighed the next morning at the general store.
I was leaning on the bat, watching them rats starting to stream out of the shacks and such. They was making a thick grouping toward the general store, which is where a large portion of the goods they liked best was kept—the same goods everyone else liked but preferred not to share with the rats. I was about to step out of the shadows, where I was hid between two buildings built so close together there was only enough room for me to stand sideways, and then I paused as I saw a peculiar sight.
It was a young woman, and in the moonlight I could tell she was dark-skinned, though I couldn’t say right then and there she was colored or Mexican or some other blend of the races. She was tall for a woman, and lean. She had a great head of dark hair tied back and it fell behind her shoulders like night tumbling over a mountainside. And I tell you, for me, it was kind of a landslide, cause it was like that hair and that woman fell all over me, knocked me for a loop, and cracked my head. My God, she was something.
She was at the head of the line of rats, knowing, like me, where they was going, but she was a better thinker. She had a large bag held open by a wooden frame. It must have had a mouth on it three feet wide, and there was a stick going into it at the mouth. She was softly playing a little flute. It was like the rats was being called by it, cause they started to come faster and faster, filing into that bag like fish swimming into a tunnel.
When the mouth of the bag was so clogged with rats they was standing on top of one another, trying to force their way in, she all of a sudden held the flute to her side, and with the other hand snapped up the stick, which somehow pulled the bag together. The bag wiggled and squeaked.
I stood there flummoxed. She shoved that bag aside, and a mound of rats humped and squealed past and over her feet in a black boil of rodent meat and moved on. She didn’t move a muscle, unlike the dance-hall girls, who when frightened by a rat or mouse could leap from the floor to the bar and even jump up and grab hold of the chandeliers and other light fixtures that hung in the various saloons about town.
Well, I seen then that there was three other of them bags next to her, and she shoved that stick into the mouth of one and put it in place quick as you could snap your fingers. And what happened but it began to fill up with rats, too. Pretty soon she had four heaving bags of rats.
My next thought was to wonder what she would do with them now, as them bags was big and heavy with them critters, but it was then that I seen an old white woman, pale as the moon, with a bonnet on her head, come along leading a mule that was dragging a sled over the mud. The young, darker woman and the white woman worked together to heap the rats onto the sled, then the older woman rolled the bags on their sides and went to work with a big stick, whacking them furiously, which calmed the rats pretty quick. Next they got on the sled themselves with their bags of rats, and the old woman took the lines and clucked her tongue at the mule, and away they trotted.
I let them go on a piece before I stepped out in the road and followed. I walked along by the buildings so I was in shadow and was surprised to see a match flare. My pistol found its way into my hand.
There in the light, as surprised to eyeball me as I was him, was that man I had seen our first day in Deadwood, the one with the scalped head, burned face, and the stick he used for support. The way he glared at me went into me like an arrow.
We stood there staring at one another so long you would have thought we was long-lost cousins giving each other the once-over, then he stepped back in the shadows, and the match went out. Reason he had fired it was to light a cigar he had tucked in his pie hole. It glowed with a round red light at the tip. He turned away from me, and I heard him clumping away down the alley on his crutch, which he had now in place of the stick.
I put my pistol away, gathered myself, and tried to catch up with the women and the rats. I followed them until they went up a skid of a road that came to a shack built on a hill. There wasn’t no stairs to it, just that mud-slick path. They drove the mule up and onto a firmer lay of land in front of the shack. There was a big barrel out there, and pretty soon they was lifting the bags off together, toting them to the barrel, and one at a time lowering them in. They let the bags settle in the barrel a while, and when they pulled them out I seen water slosh over the sides. They was about the job of drowning what rats the old woman hadn’t beat to death with a stick.
When they was on the third bag, which was fuller than the others and causing them to struggle a bit to lift it to the
lip of the barrel, the younger woman looked down the hill and seen me. She studied me for a moment, half smiled, and waved me up.
I trudged up quickly. When I was within a yard of her, the young woman said, “You watching pretty close. You got a reason?”
I loved her voice. It was clear and as sweet-sounding as the flute she played.
“Curious,” I said.
“Well,” said the old woman. “I’ll tell you this much. It’s the flute.”
“Like in that story,” I said, it being another one of the many I had read when I was with Mr. Loving.
“Pied Piper,” said the old white woman.
The girl giggled a little.
“You’re pulling my leg,” I said.
“All right, the truth,” the old woman said. “It’s a mixture we got that we rub inside the bags. It will pull a rat to it the way a hound will come to a pork chop. That’s all you get, though. The mixture is ours, and it wouldn’t be prudent to share it.”
“I do like the flute, though,” I said.
“We like to think it helps matters,” said the old white woman. She gave me an examination up and down, said, “You going to watch, or you going to help? Or is all of chivalry dead?”
“I’ll help,” I said. I lifted the last bag into the barrel of water, and admit freely my skin crawled a little when them vermin squeaked their last right before going under.
“Now, you ain’t going to get no money,” said the old woman.
“That’s all right,” I said. “I’m just lending a hand.”
I was looking over that young woman. She took my breath away. She was a fine mixture of races, with dusky skin and black hair that managed to be thick and smooth at the same time. She had fine, full lips and a slightly wide nose, and her eyes were like wet, shiny holes in the sky—at least that’s how they looked with only the moonlight to shine them up. She wore a long dress that I figured was blue, though that was guesswork in the moon shadows, and the way she moved was light as an Apache, and it was then that I thought maybe she was part Indian as well, the way her forehead was, the way her eyes was spaced. She was everything that was fine and beautiful in anybody, far as I was concerned, and I won’t lie or exaggerate one inch when I say the sight of her made me feel as if I might swoon. In that moment, like in all those romantic novels that Mr. Loving made fun of, for me it was love at first sight.
“You going to look at that girl or you going to finish with these rats?” said the old woman.
Finishing meant pulling that bag of dead vermin out of the barrel, stacking it back on the sled with the others.
“Come morning we’ll weigh them up,” said the girl. “I see you again, I’ll buy you a stick of penny peppermint candy.”
“My name is Nat Love. And I wouldn’t mind a bite of peppermint.”
“Well, my name is Win Finn,” she said, “and this is Madame Finn.”
“Formerly of the Finns of Georgia,” said the old woman. “But after the war we wasn’t much of anything besides broke and tuckered out.”
“They burned the place down where we lived,” said Win.
“You mean the Yankees?” I said.
“That would be them,” Madame Finn said.
“I have taken the name of the Finn family,” Win said. “But don’t entertain the idea I took it as a slave girl takes a name.”
“Course not. Lincoln freed the slaves,” I said.
“There’s no dearer person to me than Madame Finn,” said Win. “And that includes the poor deceased and magnificent Mr. Lincoln.”
This led to small talk about the rat-drowning barrel, and finally some other kinds of talk, where I gave them a bit of a rundown about myself, leaving out some of the less flattering points, like having to run off over seeing a white woman’s butt. Also, I didn’t mention I was a deserter, but I did say I had been in the army. It was really more than I should have said, I guess, but something about the two led me to talk. They talked, too. We got on the war for a while, and I said something or another about Lincoln, and that got the old lady stirred.
“And a good thing it was he freed the slaves,” she said. “It was a bad thing all around, that business, and I always said so. Not like it mattered to anyone about my opinion, though. Not when there was cotton to be brought in and my family wanted to sit on the veranda and watch it picked. When the war was over, it was just me and this little girl, her mother having died and her father being my own husband.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Madame Finn. “Oh.”
“My mother was a slave that was part Cherokee,” said Win. “She was bought from Cherokee slavers.”
“She was comely,” said Madame Finn, “I will give her that, and I don’t blame her for my husband’s transgressions. She didn’t have any choice in the matter. But look what it wrought—this lovely child. Like a daughter to me. Look here, Ears, tie those rats down, damn it. I don’t want them toppling off the sled when we take them down in the morning. Make sure the knots are as secure as the Gordian Knot.”
When I was finished tightening the bags down, Madame said, “You can go now.”
“Okay,” I said, but I didn’t move and just kept looking at Win. I think Win was amused by me, mostly, and kept giving me a going-over in the manner of suddenly seeing a dog strike a match and light a cigar for itself.
“I said you can go now, Ears,” Madame said.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and I started down the hill, but paused and looked back up. I said, “Miss Win Finn, will I see you again?”
She smiled, and the moonlight lay on her teeth and made them shine. “Our paths could cross,” she said.
Just those words, simple as they was, put a fire in my heart. I worked my way on back to the main street of Deadwood, feeling light and free as a storm-blown feather.
15
I had given up on ratting. That very night I had seen professional ratters, and compared to them I was a joke. Also, I didn’t want to compete with Win, as she was suddenly the apple of my eye, and a shiny apple she was. I decided to take myself back to my so-humble abode, as Cullen called it, and pine over the beautiful Win Finn.
I was fetching myself in that direction, striding along near a rise of dirt and stairs and upper streets and buildings, when I heard a voice say, “I would suggest you men take your leave. It will be far better a choice than taking a bullet between the teeth.”
It was a clear, firm, and fearless-sounding voice, and it was coming from a row of stairs that wound up from Main Street to Williams Street, which was little more than a terrace built into the hillside. There was one man at the bottom of the stairs, and he had moved his back to the stair railing.
It was light enough that night I could see he was a tall one, solid-built, narrow of hip, with hair that dangled down to his shoulders, and he had one of them drooping mustaches. The pearly handles of his pistols gleamed in the moonlight. The pistols was tucked down in the front pockets of his trousers, and the bottoms of his trousers was stuck down in tall boots with heels on them so high they made his already considerable height more than it was by some inches.
“There’s more of us than there is of you,” said one of the three in the street. They was all gangly and hungry-looking, like wolves that had cornered an old bull and meant to make a meal of him.
“Soon there will be less of you,” said the long-haired man, who I thought sounded remarkably calm.
That’s when I seen a fourth man coming down from the terrace above, creeping along the stairs, making his way behind the long-haired bull.
“We just want your money,” said one of the bony fellows, “though we’d oblige them pistols, too.”
“These are Navy Colts, year fifty-one, cap and ball, and you will certainly be obliged to them within the moment.”
It wasn’t any of my business, and I could have gone on, but it was never in me to let someone be bullied, outnumbered, or hurrahed for no good reason than the bullies’ own satisfaction or
greed. I had seen that done enough to folks just because they was dark, like me, and had gotten to the point where I couldn’t even stand for that to happen to a white man.
I stepped out of the shadows slowly, said, “There is a man behind you, sir. He’s coming down the stairs on you.”
The man on the stairs stopped creeping, looked madly disappointed. He said, “Damn. I was almost there.”
“You was, wasn’t you?” I said.
“Thank you, my friend,” said Long Hair, and he shifted so that he was mostly still facing the men in the street, but had put his left shoulder to the one above. “I heard him squeaking along up there, but I appreciate it.”
“I think you’re still in a tight spot,” I said, “so let me spare you the one on the stairs.”
“You asking for dead,” said the man on the stairs to me.
“We will see who’s asking,” I said.
Then the ball rolled. The man on the stairs pulled. He had decided his first target should be Long Hair, but I chose him. I jerked the LeMat, fired, and seen what looked like a black swarm of bees jump out of the back of his head, and then he come tumbling down the stairs as if it was some kind of circus act and fetched up about three steps above Long Hair.
All this was going on as Long Hair pulled his pistols, one with each hand, from his pockets. It was as fast as any pull I’d seen Mr. Loving make, and he, like Mr. Loving, didn’t fire wildly. Took his time quickly is the best way I can explain it. Them revolvers of his snapped a shot apiece, almost at the same time, and two of them men went down while they was still trying to get their guns out of their holsters. The last one had his gun out, and he shot at Long Hair and missed, then turned to me to shoot, maybe thinking he’d nailed his first mark. I shot him before he could fire off another round. My shot hit him in the leg, and he dropped his gun and crumpled down and lay there, grabbed at his wound, rocked and moaned and started begging us to help him, like we had all been boon companions before.