Paradise Sky

  We gathered their weapons and tossed them in the wagon, took their horses, which we tied to the back of the wagon, except for one animal Cullen took in place of his, and started back swiftly as we could, considering Win had taken considerable mistreatment and the wagon’s rumblings was hard on her aching body. I will not spend time on what was done to her. I think that is obvious, but she was not only mistreated in as vile a way as a woman can be, she was also sick and bloody and headwise confused. But that is enough. I’ll draw the curtain on that.

  Before we got back we seen some Sioux, perhaps some of them that had painted my face white. There wasn’t too many, and as an Indian is a smart opportunist, they probably decided since we was on horseback and well armed, the scuffle might not be worth the prize, so they let us go without bother.

  We passed Weasel’s body, flocked with vultures, and when we did the birds rose up and flew away. Win asked if we would pause. I helped her out of the wagon, as she had grown mighty stiff. We did that so she could spit on his corpse. She was able to work up quite a wad and frighten a flock of innocent vultures.

  Later, when we come to Madame’s body, Win found the strength to get out of the wagon again and look, to tell us that after the hooligans had done all they wanted, Golem twisted Madame’s neck like a chicken and threw her out of the back of the wagon, which is when he and Weasel went off together before having their divide. It was at that point, looking down on Madame, that some of Win’s mind took flight, and she didn’t say another word during our journey.

  As for Madame, we had tools in the wagon, a shovel and hoe among them, some of our new supplies for a possible farm somewhere. It all seemed silly now, all those tools and supplies and nothing to do with them; it was like they was there to mock us.

  We buried her out there on the plains, and Bronco Bob, who was also an ordained preacher of sorts, said some words over her. We gathered up a few stones and made a mound and went on.

  Rolling into Deadwood, we was a despondent bunch, you can bet on that, and now me and Win had no home. When Madame and Win left their house there was no shortage of squatters waiting to move into it, and my little room was no longer mine, either. We ended up staying with Wow and Cullen in their small place, and Bronco Bob, having money and being white, went to the hotel, coming each day of the following week to check on mine and Win’s condition.

  One day after a visit, I walked with him outside, said, “What do you think, Bronco?”

  “Time could heal her.”

  “What do you really think?”

  “I can’t say for sure. Who can? But since you asked, I’m of the thought her spirit has gone out through a hole in the wind, and it’s not coming back. I say that knowing full well it’s only a guess. I had a cousin that had a very bad experience. She went through that hole, and somewhere her spirit is still rambling. One thing for sure, though: it never came home.”

  “I must be hopeful,” I said.

  “Of course,” he said.

  When I was able to slow down, what had happened to me took hold, and I was laid up for three days, hardly able to move. It was recommended by the China girls that I drink lots of water, and they brewed some foul-smelling stuff to drink as well; it tasted like someone had peed in some dirty water with a dog turd at the bottom. I resisted, but Ching-a-ling, as she was calling herself that week, insisted I drink it. I did, and I am here to say I think it did much for me, renewing my physical energy to such an extent I was out of bed by the end of the week. Or maybe I just wanted to get well so I didn’t have to drink any more of it, and that may have been its most important curing property.

  It was slower for Win, there being more than just bruises and humiliation but an assault upon the spirit, as Bronco Bob called it. Sometimes I’d take her for a buggy ride up to our hill, but it was like riding around with a bag of flour, bless her heart. I had hoped for some renewed vigor by stirring old memories, but no correction of spirit was forthcoming.

  Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and she would be in a corner, her back to the wall, her knees drawn up, and I would have to coax her back to bed, which was a pallet on the floor. I would try and hold her, but she wasn’t having any of that. I’m sure it made her think of other things.

  Though it was a tight squeeze there with Wow and Cullen, and I felt I was stretching their hospitality, I made no rush to head out again, though I had firmly made up my mind to track down Ruggert and the big Jew and kill them both. I was tempted to do it slowly and in some horrible fashion, and had dreams of tying them down and putting hot coals to the bottoms of their feet and forcing a gun barrel up their ass and firing until the trigger didn’t work no more. Actually, that was just some of the things I considered.

  To be honest, my spirit, though not broken, had been twisted considerably. It was a day-to-day measure to regain my piss and vinegar and to think about starting out after them. I remembered that Weasel said he and Golem were to join Ruggert in the Kansas Territory, but that was a long ways off, and they could be any place there, if they went there at all. I decided if they was going to Kansas, Dodge was likely.

  I couldn’t presume what Ruggert would have left to do with his life now. He had chased me for some time, and if he reckoned I was done in, and if he had stored some money secretly for himself, he might go from Kansas back to East Texas and take up residence again. I had no idea what the crazy Jew might do. A man who thinks he’s made of mud is not someone with average plans. It was all guesswork. But I was determined to find them. I should have killed that bastard Ruggert when I first realized who he was. Mercy has its limits.

  Due to Bronco Bob being a talker, there was questions about things and all that had befallen us. Bronco Bob, having been the one who shot his mouth off in the first place, handled it well, explaining how I was set upon by those fellows, and he and Cullen come along just in time, and then we had to seek Win out and rescue her. He told in detail about how those boys died on account of their own actions and went into great detail about Cullen and his shotgun, having the fellow Cullen shot flying through the air from the blast, which any one of us knew was a lie, knowing full well them shotgun blasts didn’t push, they tore right through you. That was a detail the crowd was willing to let pass. The highlight of his story, and I am certain he told it many times, was my horseback ride with the reins in my teeth, shooting like a madman and hitting what I shot at. My pursuit of the younger one up on the hill became a little windy, and it turned into a glorious shoot-out, and of course it had been no such thing. I had told Bronco Bob exactly what happened up there, but I reckon he figured it sounded too much like murder, which I suppose it was. I never corrected him on his version of events. The part about his own self, and how he was wounded and how bad it was, swelled in the telling, too. Bronco Bob even favored his arm a little to make sure it was known he was well in the fight. He had a way of letting his arm dangle and twisting his mouth in just the right way so you might think the bullet had cut fresh; it gave his story a feeling of truth, and mostly it was true, though the wound had been nothing and was pretty much done with by the time we returned to Deadwood. I have never known a man that wanted to be a hero more than Bronco Bob, and in my eyes he had been one and didn’t even know it. He claimed I had been set upon for my prize money, and as they had taken it and I hadn’t gotten any of it back, the bodies not carrying a coin of it, that was a good enough story. He left Ruggert’s claim that I had stared at his wife’s butt and made advances on her out of the telling, not wishing to give any of the ex-Confederates in our midst any ideas that I might in fact be uppity. Bronco Bob said he was writing a book about it. Deadwood Dick and the Dark Riders of the Black Hills, and What Befell Them. He did, too, some years later, but I’ll come back to that.

  Some of the fellows went out there to Split in the Rocks, as it was called, and seen what was left of the bodies, and come back saying Bronco Bob had told it true, even as to where the bodies was. They found bones they figured belonged to Weasel, whic
h they left (ain’t nobody in town had liked him anyway), and come across the marker for Madame. The killings actually gave me a bigger name than I had right after the shooting match, and people took to treating me nicer. This irked me more than being treated like a black animal, because it wasn’t based on my character, just on my ability to kill folks.

  The days turned into weeks, and I hadn’t worked a lick and didn’t know how much more I could ask Wow and Cullen to put up with us. I was thinking on this one day when Cullen came up to me, said, “You might think you are a hindrance to us, but you aren’t. You stay long as you want.”

  “I appreciate that,” I said. “I believe I will be leaving very soon, but I’d be obliged if Win could stay for a while, at least until I take care of some business.”

  “I know what the business is,” he said.

  “I’m sure you do.”

  “She may stay as long as she likes,” he said. “As long as you would like for her to.”

  Well, it wasn’t but a few days later that Cullen figured he had enough to buy him a spot of land with a cabin on it at the edge of the town. The cabin was built of whole logs and split logs, and there was dried-mud patching. It didn’t have no shingles, just an open roof, because the man who owned the property died from eating too many sweet potatoes—that’s what his wife told me—and never got the roof on it. She said she was selling on account of she was going back to Alabama. “I didn’t like my husband much, really,” she said. “And it’s kind of a relief.”

  It made me wonder if something other than butter had been on those sweet potatoes.

  It was a pretty big place. Me and Cullen roofed it ourselves, though I must admit my side of the roof was a little uneven.

  Thinking Ruggert was in Kansas Territory was a high wish, but I felt I had to go there and see. I talked to Win about it, and she listened. Usually, that was all she did, as her willingness to talk, or even play her flute, which I had recovered from the wagon, wasn’t there. I laid out what I intended like she knew what I meant.

  When I finished, she turned her head, for she had been eyeballing a corner in our room like it might be a path to glory, and said, “You kill him, Nat. You kill him good.”

  I couldn’t have been more startled to discover green manure could be turned to gold.

  “I will,” I said.

  Then she went through that hole in the wind again, became silent as stone.

  A few days before I was to leave, Cullen volunteered to go with me.

  “Ain’t no man I’d rather have with me, Cullen. But you got a woman here, and I need you to look after Win best you can, and I will at some point need you to mail me those papers you’re keeping.”

  “Wow can do that,” he said. I could tell he was serious about going, but I could also feel he didn’t really want to. He had Wow, and he had a life in Deadwood.

  I told him no, I couldn’t do that.

  He let out a sigh of relief, and I didn’t blame him.

  I rode over to Charlie Utter’s camp, told him I was leaving Deadwood. Charlie shook my hand firmly, and his eyes got wet. He told me they sent that money to Bill’s widow, Agnes, added they hadn’t gotten nothing back from her on the matter, not even a goddamn two-word thank-you note.

  “I’d have been happier with ‘Fuck you’ than silence,” he said.

  He also afforded how the mail was slow sometimes, and maybe that was the problem, but he didn’t sound sincere about it. He said he was saddened by all that happened to me and Win, and that did sound sincere. He forced some money on me. I didn’t want to take it, but I did. It was well needed and much appreciated.

  “I’ll pay you back, Charlie,” I said.

  “No, you won’t. Because I won’t take it. It’s yours. Good luck to you, Deadwood Dick. At least you will miss a Black Hills winter. It is a frozen hell of snow and sleet and a wind so sharp it’ll blow up your ass and freeze the turds inside you.”

  I thanked him for that parting information, and last on my list of good-byes was Bronco Bob. When I told him, he said, “Nat, I am going with you. You are a source of stories and a man of action, and I plan to write them all down and become rich for it, and you will, of course, receive a cut of the monies.”

  “That would be grand, Bob, but mine may be a rough trail, and I don’t think white audiences much care to read about a colored man and his adventures.”

  “We will see,” he said. “As for the journey, I can handle that, at least as far as Kansas. There I may choose another path. I’ve already sold my wagon and some of my guns, so I have traveling money. I’m willing to share it if the need arises. My days making my living as a shooter are quit. I have run out that string and have lost interest. I would delight in your company, as I have plans to leave anyway.”

  This is how Bronco Bob became my traveling companion.

  The night before the day I was leaving, in bed, I made a small effort to hold Win close, and she let me. It made me feel good to see she was getting better, if only in small doses, but it made me feel, too, that maybe I shouldn’t leave, that I should stay and help in her recovery. But I was too set in my plans to change them; at that point it would have been like turning a petrified tree back into common wood. Wasn’t going to happen.

  Next morning I saddled up my horse, and Bronco Bob come and joined me, and Win even came out in the yard. I kissed her gently on the mouth, without any real response, hugged Wow and Cullen good-bye, and climbed on Satan. I said to Cullen, “Keep Win warm. Charlie Utter says the wind blows hard and sharp and cold come dead of winter.”

  “She will be as warm as we are,” said Cullen, “and I like it warm.”

  “Good enough,” I said.

  As me and Bronco Bob rode away, I turned and looked back, seen Win turn quickly into the house. It hurt my heart to see her so eager to return to her spot in our room. But we hadn’t ridden far when I heard a sharp note cut the air, and then it was followed by a number of sweeter notes.

  I turned on my horse for a look. Win had come out of the house with her flute and was playing us off on our mission. With a smile on my face, I raised my hand to her, and we rode on out of Deadwood to that high, sweet sound.

  25

  Having gone only a short distance, we realized we was being followed. This follower wasn’t so sneaky, as he was riding a mule and coming right behind us, purposely keeping some distance. I turned in the saddle, looked back, and recognized him. It was the boy Bronco Bob had hired to tote his guns and stuff at the match.

  I said as much, and Bronco Bob said, “Tim?”

  “Jim,” I said.

  We slowed down, and Jim stopped coming, halting on his mule, just looking at us. Then Bronco Bob waved him in, and he put his heels to the mule and came riding up to us. We sat there on our animals and talked.

  I tell you, that boy was worse-looking than the mule. He had gone down considerably since I had seen him last, the day of the shooting match some months back. His red hair was long and caked with mud, and his face was spotted with it, too. His knees and elbows, which was bony as an old cow carcass, was sticking through his clothes, and the soles on his oversize boots flapped like nags’ tongues when he came riding up. He was scummy around the eyes, and his teeth was a little green at the gums, like they was little trees with moss growing against them.

  “What in hell are you doing out here, Tim?” Bronco Bob asked.

  “I ain’t got no family. I been living under a porch. I hadn’t done nothing until you seen something in me and hired me, Mr. Bronco. It meant a lot to me.”

  “Hell, boy, you just happened to be handy. It might well have been anybody.”

  “Oh,” Jim said.

  “He just don’t want you to get the big head,” I said, sensing right off that any confidence the boy had gained from having been the aide to Bronco Bob had just run down his leg. It was like someone had told a worm they was too high off the ground.

  Bronco Bob seen how I was heading, and after having had that rare dul
l moment, said, “Yeah, I don’t want you getting all blowed up in your thinking, your head such a size you can’t walk through a doorway.”

  “Yes, sir,” Jim said.

  “Listen here,” I said. “You ain’t doing yourself any good out here with us. We got a long ride ahead of us.”

  “I ain’t got nowhere to go,” said Jim. “Dogs like under that porch where I was sleeping, too, and when it rains I got to find a place higher. Just staying halfway dry and warm is some real work.”

  “You’ll get wet out here, too,” I said. “And where’d you get that mule?”

  “I borrowed it,” Jim said.

  “I bet you did,” I said.

  “It’s as poorly as me,” Jim said. “I was packing out goods for some miners, but they took to butt-fucking me and the mule, so I stole it when I seen you fellows leaving and come after you.”

  “What was that you said about the miners?” Bronco Bob said.

  Jim said it again.

  “We should go back and kill them right away,” Bronco Bob said. This from a man who until a few days ago had never shot at a living human being.

  “They moved on and left the mule to fend for itself cause it’s skinny, but that’s because they ain’t fed it good,” Jim said. “I get older, learn how to use a gun like you boys, I come across them butt-fuckers I’ll kill them myself.”

  “What say you, Nat?”

  I didn’t like it, adding a responsibility, as I hadn’t managed so well my last time out with my charges, but I said, “All right. But we got to decide on something right now. Are you Jim, or are you Tim?”

  “I got called Jim by somebody sometime back, and I’ve kept the name. I don’t recall what I was named when I was little, as my folks run off and left me with a boot-shine kit and a cold potato in a sack. They just moved off and took their tent and supplies with them. I stayed with a Chinaman for a while, but I couldn’t understand him, so I left.”