Paradise Sky

  “You’ll have your bullet and enjoy it,” said the long-haired man, strolling over to him.

  I come over for a look. The man who had plummeted most of the way down the stairs was surely dead, and the two in the street Long Hair had shot had both took it through the heart and was pumped out of blood already. The man on the ground was still rolling around and moaning and making quite a spectacle. I was sort of embarrassed for him.

  “Shut up some,” said Long Hair to the man, putting a foot on the fellow’s hat, it having dropped off during his writhing. “There’s folks trying to sleep.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the man on the ground, and he rolled about some more, but was mostly silent as he did it.

  Long Hair picked up the wounded man’s pistol and tossed it under the stairway. He caught up with him as he was trying to roll his way down Main Street. Long Hair bent over him and said, “You have been spared, and I reckon we could get the judge, or some kind of law, but why don’t we let that bullet be your law? You get you some help if you can, but you will then be gone from this gulch, for if I see you again, on the street or in any establishment about town, I will kill you without remark. Is that fully understood? I would not want there to be any confusion.”

  “None, sir, none,” said the man. “Oh, God, it hurts.”

  “I bet it does,” Long Hair said. “And to tell the truth, looks to me my dusky friend clipped an artery in the leg there. Minor at first, but it’s growing bad as you roll.”

  “Oh, oh,” said the man, and then he stretched out and quit moving after saying “Mama.” The ground around him turned dark.

  “He has bled out,” said Long Hair. “The devil is handing him a pitchfork and a slop bucket this very moment.”

  “I was a bit hasty with the shot,” I said. “I was trying to shoot his kneecap off.”

  “Well, you have done him in, but he would surely have done you had the opportunity been reversed.”

  People had come out on the street, but when they seen us, two men holding guns and a bunch of dead men lying about, they went back into their shacks and hidey-holes, one of them pausing long enough to say, “Good evening,” and seeming to mean it.

  “Who are you, sir?” asked the long-haired man of me.

  “Nat Love,” I said, slipping the LeMat back into its place.

  “Mr. Love, they call me Wild Bill. But my given name is James Butler Hickok. You may call me Wild Bill.”

  Well, now, I about messed myself, but I took his hand, and we shook. He threw an arm around me, said, “I have a bottle among my possibles, but it is hidden in a corner crack between buildings, as I have yet to figure out where my lodgings are. I have no place to offer you to drink except the great outdoors. But I will tell you square—and I would only say this to a man who had saved my life, and I beg you not to tell—truth is, I’m frightened to death of the goddamn rats, and they are everywhere.”

  “I know a place,” I said.

  We went on then, leaving them four dead there for the undertaker to pick up and tote off to the graveyard on the hill, or possibly to be dropped down some abandoned mine shaft, or into some varmint hole. I can’t say I felt any real sympathy for them.

  We got Wild Bill’s possibles, which was a carpetbag and a rolled-up blanket with the butt of a rifle sticking out of one end. He had hidden them, as he said, between two buildings that was built so close together they was almost as one.

  “I stashed my goods here and went strolling about, looking for a friend I know. I’m supposed to stay with him, but this place is like a rat maze. I was about to get my bag and find a tree to sleep under when those ruffians came along.”

  I led him to my room, which, as I said, had become all mine since Cullen had moved in with Wow. Wild Bill pulled his bottle from the carpetbag, took a swig, offered me a jolt, but I declined with good nature, saying I didn’t have the stomach for it.

  “Suit yourself, Nat,” Wild Bill said and swigged some more, saying, “I am always prepared for snakebite this way. I figure one bites me, I already got the cure in me or enough liquor to kill the snake.”

  “You ain’t got no place, Bill, you’re welcome to fetch up here for a few days, seeing how we’ve rode the tiger together.”

  “I thank you for that,” he said, “but a friend of mine, one dandified fine son of a bitch name of Charlie Utter, has laid me out a campsite. Only thing is I have no idea where, but I will catch up with him tomorrow. So I may take you up on that offer for one night. I came here planning to do some mining, but upon arrival have decided a pick handle doesn’t fit my hands as well as a deck of cards or a pistol.”

  “Mining is nasty work,” I said.

  “Yes, and though there can be a reward of considerable size, it strikes me as easier to take your share at a card table after the miners have cashed their gold into chips. That way they do the work, and I spend the money.”

  “For me, no cards and no mining.”

  “What else is there in Deadwood, Nat?”

  I told him about my jobs, and because I couldn’t help myself, I told him about Win, how I had met her and how I was smitten with her, and that so far the only thing we had done together was drown rats.

  “It’s a start,” Wild Bill said. “I suggest you lay about a plan to meet up with her and woo her, but leave the rats out of it. I also suggest you make a move to get out of the bouncing and the spit-emptying business. A woman needs something more respectable. Life is short. I myself was recently married to Agnes Lake, a retired circus performer.”

  “I’ve heard of her,” I said.

  “I was charmed by her, for she is quite flexible,” Wild Bill said, “and she owns the circus, having inherited it from a former husband who was murdered in what I believe was a business dispute. I might add his will left her with a considerable bankroll as well as horses, tents, and elephants. But I find that even a good woman gets on my nerves after a time, even a flexible one, and I told her I was off to make my fortune. Part of my departure might be due to the fact that despite her profession she is quite the lady and wouldn’t suck a dick if it were coated in peppermint oil. She was far more interesting as a performer and willing to show me her stretching abilities prior to marriage, but that marriage license put the respectable brand on her, and damn if she isn’t trying to live up to it. Her retirement put a damper on my ardor. Did I mention she could put both legs behind her head?”

  “You said she was flexible.”

  “Well, she is a lady and my wife, and I don’t want any of that misunderstood,” he said, “but outside of the flexibility and the money, she is one boring bitch. Shit, I am already drunk. It must be from not eating. You got anything to chew on, Nat?”

  I had a strip of moldy jerky, enough for us both. I cut it in two with a pocketknife and gave him half.

  “I will never forget this, Nat, though I ask you, unless we were seen and recognized by them that came out on the street, make no truck of what happened tonight. I have a reputation enough without suddenly finding out I have killed some backshooter’s brother, nephew, or asshole buddy. Being a gunman at my age lacks the charm it did at twenty-five.”

  “I will keep it tight to myself,” I said, and until this very moment I have. I figure by now it’s a promise without purpose.

  Wild Bill drank some more of his snakebite medicine, and when he spoke he became even more theatrical in tone. “You know, I am losing my sight. I shot on instinct alone tonight. I seem to have gotten a fever in my drawers—the French disease—from one of the night ladies, and it has gone to my eyes. I am especially troubled in the dark. Pretty much moon-blind. I waver some days on the value of feminine charms versus the value of my sight. I usually come down on the side of romance, but I can’t help but have a doubt now and then.”

  “That eye problem wouldn’t be a thing to be let known,” I said. “Not with your reputation.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “I have in recent years become quite a talker. Perhaps even a blowhard, revea
ling far too much about this and that. But while I’m drunk and laying it out there, I want you to know that in spite of the pleasures of my wife’s bed and her amazing flexibility, due to her decline in those activities I haven’t always been true. In a night of need, and with too much liquor in me, I took an offered enjoyment that was less joyful than one might think and marred by a stink I still smell upon myself after many a bath. I tell you, once she took her pants off, it was like being trapped in a barn with a herd of shitting cows.”

  “I’m not sure I follow,” I said.

  “God help me, I fucked Calamity Jane. In the midst of it my stupor began to wear thin, and I saw her face really good, and for a brief moment thought I had been so drunk as to mount my own horse. But because I was quick to figure, even in my drunkenness, that I wouldn’t be looking my horse in the face if I was about the business of breeding, I knew I could discard that possibility. Sometimes I wake up with that face burned behind my blinding eyes, and now she is following me about like a kitten. I haven’t the iron about me to treat her rough. The word is getting out, though, and I’m ashamed of myself, not only for what remark of it might do to Agnes, my wife, but for what it might do to my reputation. It is bad enough my pecker had to suffer through it, but my reputation could also be abused. You know why I’m called Bill and not James, my true name?”

  I didn’t have a guess, and I told him such. I also had no idea who Calamity Jane was, and I had never known a man so worried about his reputation and yet so prone to soiling it.

  “It is because of my upper lip. It hangs over my teeth a bit, and that is why I was called Bill, as in duck bill. I grew the mustache to hide it. I think it works well. What do you think?”

  “I think it does,” I said.

  “This meat isn’t very good,” he said, referring to the jerky. “But the bugs seem fresh.” He laughed then and went on like that for some while—about this and that, some of it making sense, some not so much—and when the bottle was finished he pulled out another that was half filled with laudanum. He took a couple swigs of that, corked it back up, held the bottle up to the lantern light, said, “That’s it,” and collapsed. He was out for the night.

  I blew out the light and tucked myself in, contemplating on the strangeness of the night, and then slept deep, without dreams, the best gunman ever known lying crumpled near me on the floor, a corked bottle of laudanum clutched in his fist.

  Next morning when I awoke, Wild Bill and his carpetbag was gone, but he had left a nice hunting knife on Cullen’s former bed, and there was a rough written note on a torn piece of sack paper.

  It read:

  It’s yours, and I owe you a big favor if you ever need it, Nat. I also believe I may have said some inappropriate things about some women I know, including my wife, and I would oblige you to indulge me and forget what I said. I think I exaggerated Calamity’s aroma, and for that I apologize, though I would not want you to think she was all perfume. Also not saying about my upper lip would be good, too.

  Wild Bill

  I kept that note for quite some time, though I never showed it around. Over the years, wettings and heat and crawling time took care of it, so now I have only the memory of it. I no longer have the knife. I’m not sure what happened to it.

  I seen Wild Bill frequently after that, and he was always friendly and would have me at his table for a drink, even though a colored man was not usually invited by others. Sometimes his companions would stand up and leave us to it when I arrived, not wanting to share a drink with a nigger, though they wouldn’t have said that in my presence or Wild Bill’s. I had a reputation of my own by this time, it coming from how I handled myself at the Gem.

  I appreciated Wild Bill’s friendliness and never so much as said a thing about them men we killed, same for the note, until now. I also managed to help him dodge Calamity a few times, though I felt small over that, as she seemed a nice enough woman. I admired the way she could handle a cuss word, and her ability to string them together was unmatched by mule skinner, miner, and bullwhacker alike. When she come around, Wild Bill often found he had forgotten to do something or another, or needed the outhouse, whatever excuse he could muster. I was sometimes given the job of serving her whatever lie Bill had cooked up in that moment. I’d have to tell her his lie and have her look at me with her kind eyes and her hard face, made that way by time and men and alcohol. What good looks there might have been had fallen behind the crags of her bones, and lay there in hiding, unless you stared at her long and hard and she turned her head just right.

  However, the main thing in my life back then was that I took to watching Win Finn like I was a viewer of rare birds. I would check on her during breaks or the few times when I was off work or at night, in hopes of seeing her and the old lady about the ratting business. I was fortunate to come across them at times, and made it a now-and-again job to help her drown the rats, though I never grew used to it. The ratting business all went to hell, however, when some half-breed figured out there was a major nest where the bulk of them was housed, and he burned it out with coal oil. This didn’t entirely eliminate the rat population, but it put a dent in it, and what with them boys and their clubs and the men with their popping rifles and Win and Madame Finn with their traps and drowning, the rat infestation was knocked down to a gray dribble.

  It was then that the two women became laundresses, and though I could hardly afford it, I took to having my shirts cleaned by them at a dear price. It was worth it, though, and one day as I brought in some shirts, Madame Finn said to me, “Son, let me have you aside here.”

  She took my shirts and put them on the board outside next to a big pot of boiling water set over a fireplace built of rocks. The shirts was boiled in there like pears for jam.

  Me and Madame walked down the hill, and at the base of it, out in the street, she said, “You hear me on this. You must have the best of intentions with Win.”

  “I don’t know it’s a mutual feeling between me and her, but on my end my intentions are purely good,” I said.

  “To speak bluntly, Mr. Ears—”

  “Nat.”

  “—a man finds he sometimes has needs, and so does a woman, and them things can lead to something don’t neither of you need, something that can turn wrong on a cat’s hair.”

  “I don’t follow you.” That was a lie, but it seemed the right thing to say.

  “Yes, you do,” she said. “You are thinking of linking up with my girl like the beasts of the fields.”

  “I ain’t never thought of such a thing for a moment,” I said. Which was, of course, a big goddamn lie. It’s about all I thought about.

  “I will tell you this,” said Madame, and she put her face close to mine as she spoke. “You ask to see her, it will be with a chaperone, and I will be well armed with a pistol.”

  “You think she would see me under courting circumstances?” I asked. “You can carry two pistols if you like.”

  “I hoped she might choose more wisely than riffraff,” she said, “though it’s natural she would gravitate to a colored boy. You are not hard to look at, though you could easily hang laundry on those ears. I suggest you let your hair keep growing and get yourself a bigger hat.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  By this point my hair had grown out considerable and was as bushy as mulberry bramble. I had also taken to wearing leather chaps I didn’t need over blue-and-red-striped pants. Like Wild Bill, I had bought me some boots with high heels on them at a dear price, and they gave my already goodly height a greater measure. I thought I looked pretty good, though my hat didn’t quite fit me anymore on account of the thickening hair. I tended to pull it down tight over my bushy head so that the hair fanned out like a parasol half open. During the day the hat would ride up on the hair and finally sit atop it like a bird on a rock.

  “There is a dance being held this Saturday,” Madame said, “and you may ask her to that if you must. No one cares what color you are at a barn dance, because it costs
a dollar to get in. But you should do the asking with me nearby. I will not have done to her what was done to her mother.”

  “She’s not a slave,” I said.

  “That is why it will not be done, Ears. Times are different.”

  That’s how I come to walk back up that hill and go directly to Win and say as if it was my thought all along, “There is a dance this Saturday, and with you and your chaperone, Madame Finn, I would love to invite you to attend.”

  “I would be delighted to come,” she said, and there wasn’t a moment of hesitation. I hadn’t actually expected a positive answer, and so quickly. I stood there stunned.

  “You will come by to walk us to the dance, then?” Win said.

  “I will. Whenever it is.”

  “The time can be found out,” Win said.

  Well, now, if I was floating the first time I met her, I was flying now. I went down the hill and hadn’t gone far when Win caught up with me and took my elbow. She said, “I want you to know I asked Madame to ask you to ask me to the dance. I thought I should start out being honest.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” I said.

  “I didn’t know anyone else who is of the same color.”

  “I was the only pig left at the slaughterhouse?”

  She laughed. “Well, you got a kind of ignorant country charm about you, but we should start soft, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose we should,” I said.

  “I look forward to it, then,” she said.

  16

  It was a tent dance, and it was a big tent, striped red and yellow, having once belonged to a circus. It was lit up with all manner of lanterns and candles and things that led one to think a fire could get started real easy. The ground had been covered in sawdust and patches of hay around the sides. There was barrels to sit on and stools and assorted chairs and overturned buckets. The tent had a musty smell to it, and I could almost imagine the animals that had paraded beneath it. In fact, on this night a whole different batch of animals paraded about. A band was brought in, one with horns and fiddles and banjos and the like, and there was food and drink and people was dressed up in their finest, which meant there was a lot of color and a rustling of women’s dresses. Even the China folk was there, though except for Wow none of them came to dance. They came to see what this crazy business was about and mostly stood over to one side near the hanging tent wall.