(1986) Deadwood (34 page)

"That's where she is," he said. And then he closed his eyes again, as if he had seen all he could stand.

Bullock had a further thought then, that the blood had to come from somewhere. He stood up and went to the drawer, where Solomon had laid out a shallow bowl of water, a cake of black soap, and a washing rag before he'd left. He set the bowl on the floor beside Solomon and rubbed the soap back and forth against the washrag until it made a dirty-looking lather. Then, beginning with his head and working down, Bullock washed off the blood.

It had dried, and even in the cool early-morning air Bullock began to sweat. He worked a small section at a time, cleaning in circles a few inches wide, then washing out the rag in the water and lathering the soap again. It was slow, hard work. Solomon let himself be moved and cleaned, but did nothing to help. To scrub the blood from under his arm, Bullock had to hold the arm up with one hand and work with the other. It was something like brushing a horse, and something like scraping paint.

"Whatever it is that happened," Bullock said, "don't say a word to anybody. You can tell me when you're ready, but as far as anybody knows, you were here in your room since supper."

Solomon opened his eyes at the sound of Bullock's voice, and seemed to understand what he said. "Unspeakable," he said.

"That's what I mean," Bullock said, "unspeakable." He washed Solomon's stomach, but left the blood on his privates. He could take care of that himself when he regained his senses. Nobody would see it there, at least Bullock didn't think so. With Solomon's new interests, you couldn't tell. "You hear what I told you?" he said.

Solomon looked at him, and returned to the here and now. His voice lost its passion; it seemed to have lost its direction too. "I won't say a word," he said.

"Not a living soul," Bullock said. "Except me, when you're ready."

"Nobody," Solomon repeated. And Bullock looked at his partner and saw there wouldn't be any more talk of novels, or flower collections. The game had passed fast enough, he thought, and unless Solomon had stumbled into something tonight that couldn't be ignored, Bullock's problem was over.

"Who saw you tonight?" he said.

"Ci-an," Solomon said. Bullock still didn't know what Ci-an was, but he didn't think there was anything that happened at three or four o'clock in the morning in Chinatown that couldn't be ignored. And even washing the blood off Solomon Star, and listening to what was probably a report of a Chinese butchering, it never occurred to him that Solomon could have had a part in it.

Bullock felt happy, as if it were himself who had been sick and cured. "You see," he said, "what happened to you, Solomon, you forgot who you were for a little while. That's all. A man is one way or another, and it can't change reading a book."

Solomon stared at him, listening.

"What I mean is, there's some people that weren't meant for books and flowers," he said. "There are some that weren't meant to do any damn thing that looks good at the time."

Solomon stared and listened, as if Bullock still hadn't hit the chord.

"You weren't meant to
enjoy
things," he said. And when he looked again, he saw that he had finally hit home. Solomon was nodding, understanding, rocking back and forth on the floor. And then, without a sound, he began to weep.

Bullock felt sorry for him, but he knew it was in Solomon's own interests. That's what he told him. "It's in your interests to know it," he said. "Now you can go back to work."

The China Doll was found in the morning by the old woman. The servant had argued the night before with her husband, and had begun to talk even before she entered the room with her towels and broom. She was two steps inside before she saw what was on the floor, and another two steps in before she realized what it was.

She screamed then, a high, hollow scream that brought other Chinese from every corner of the house. The servants came first, then the whores and Children of Joy, then Tan's nephews and wife. The servants held their hands tight against their mouths, and some of them cried.

The whores and Children of Joy did not grieve. The China Doll had lived in a room of her own with a window to the street, she had been given a servant. She was beautiful, while they were plain, and she had taken her meals alone in her room. And they had heard of the white man, Bismarck, who was rich and wanted to buy her from Tan.

It was not spoken here, in her room, but the China Doll's loss was not their own.

After several minutes, Tan himself entered. He was dressed in Chinese clothes, not the American pants and coat he seemed now to prefer. All the servants were suddenly quiet.

Tan crossed the room slowly and picked up the girl's head. He held it close to his chest and called her "little sister." "I will avenge you, little one," he said, and then looked around the room in a way that scared even his wife, who had seen him come into their apartment early in the morning, and had seen the blood on his hands. And who knew his only true passion was money. She was a wise woman, as old as Tan, and understood men well. She understood it was in this acting that they were most dangerous.

So she stood quietly while Tan spoke of his love for the dead girl. He spoke of her drawings and her songs and her beauty. "Where will we find another so lovely, little sister?" he said. The servants and whores and the Children of Joy stood with their heads bowed until he had finished speaking.

Then he sent a servant for pillows, and placed the parts of Ci-an's body on them and ordered the servants to carry them to the death house. The death house was a small, eight-sided building on the Whitewood. It was supervised by Tan's blind uncle, who also played the piano. Inside were the ribbons and plumage and horns and drums for funerals. And the zinc-lined boxes that were used to send the dead's bones back to China.

In the seven months since the first Chinese set foot in the northern Hills, only nine had died—ten, if you counted the disgraced Song. But he never was counted, or remembered aloud. All of the dead had been poor. Servants of one class or another, and unable, even in death, to pay for more than a few ribbons on a pine box and a short ride to the cemetery.

It disheartened the others to see this, as they were poor too but assumed against reason, as all real people assumed, that they would someday return to China to be buried. It disheartened them too because a long funeral was as important as a long life. They all hoped to please Tan in life, so he would take care of them afterwards.

The China Doll was brought to the death house by four servants. Tan himself carried her head. He instructed his uncle to arrange the funeral as if he himself had died.

The uncle obeyed. He removed the girl's eyes and heart, and placed them in one of the zinc-lined boxes for shipment home. Then he took the bones of her arms and laid them in the box too. The rest, including all the flesh he had cut away from the bones, went into a small gold-colored coffin. It took the uncle an entire day to prepare the box and the coffin, and Tan stayed in the death house with him until it was finished.

The funeral began early in the morning. Six horses led the march through town, each carrying feathers of a different color. They were followed by a band of silver horns and drums, and then by the coffin itself, which was carried by four men. The rest of the Chinese followed, even the emaciated old men from the opium dens, some of them believing it was their own funeral. Each Chinese wore a pink ribbon tied to his sleeve.

They took the box from one end of the town to the other, stopping for demonstrations, and then finally to the graveyard. Several dozen white men had joined the procession by then, and walked behind the Chinese, applauding the horn-players and the speeches.

At the grave site a pig was butchered and skewered over a fire. Before it was eaten, Ci-an's coffin was lowered into the ground and covered with dirt. The women lay tiny flowers on the grave, believing the dead could smell them there at night.

Tan spoke then, for more than an hour, of his love for Ci-an. He cried and threatened and vowed revenge. The Chinese stood quietly while Tan spoke, although almost to a person they believed by now that Tan had killed the girl himself.

They were respectful, though, not wanting to anger him. They could see for themselves the rewards for staying in Tan's graces.

B
arring episodes of the road, the Northwestern Express, Stage, and Transportation Company stage ran from Cheyenne to Deadwood in six days. The charge was forty-four dollars. It was forty-four dollars from Cheyenne, or from Bismarck or Fort Pierre or Sidney, Nebraska.

The coach had one driver and one messenger, warranteed gentlemanly, and carried eight passengers in the winter. In the summertime, when tempers were quicker, the limit was six. There were rules posted at the station forbidding the discussion of politics, religion, or shooting. The consumption of alcohol was also forbidden, unless the bottle was proffered to all passengers, and those that chewed were requested to spit leeward.

For every passenger the company lost to highwaymen, three of them killed each other. Or froze. It was not ordinary arguments that led to most of the gunplay, however, it was stomach problems. And in spite of Northwestern's rules, the casualties stayed constant.

The violence was built in. The huge Concord coaches were hung to their frames on leather braces to smooth the ride, and the motions that resulted were unfamiliar to anybody but children, who were used to swings, and trapeze artists. And there was something instinctive when a man threw up on your feet, even if you were on the edge of doing the same yourself, that made you want to shoot him. Especially if you were on the edge of doing the same yourself.

The stage stopped sixteen times between Cheyenne and Deadwood, for meals and fresh horses, and passengers were served hard-tack, beans, and pork at each stop as part of the forty-four-dollar fare.

It was the pork that gave Agnes Lake summer complaint. It tasted tainted, but she'd eaten it anyway. She'd paid for it. She sat stone-complected now, between a peddler and a farm boy, staring across the aisle into the face of a man named Captain Jack Crawford, who said he was returning to Deadwood to settle accounts with the killer of Wild Bill Hickok.

The man on Crawford's right was smoking cigars. She judged that he did not mean it to be offensive. He had a silver flask in his hip pocket, which he somehow timed to finish just as the coach came into each new station. Each time he drank, he offered it around the coach. It was a rule of the Northwestern Express, Stage, and Transportation Company.

And each time he offered it to the man named Captain Jack Crawford, the captain retold a story of promising his mother on her deathbed never to allow liquor to pass his lips. Agnes Lake did not drink whiskey herself, but the captain was pushing her in that direction.

She did not complain out loud, though. Not when he told the story of his promise, not when he told the story of his friendship with Bill Hickok. "If only I had been present when it happened," he said. And she noticed the awkward places he fit that into his story, and knew him for a liar.

He looked at her now and saw her discomfort. "It's nothing to be ashamed of, ma'am," he said, "to have a regurgitation. I have seen the hardest men in this country caused to do the same until they got their sea legs."

She stared at him, unblinking. Agnes Lake had cold eyes, but the captain was immune. "If you want, I could signal the driver to stop," he said. "He'd do it, on account of you being a lady." Everyone except Agnes Lake and the captain had already been sick, and the inside of the coach was sour enough now so the senses did not need Captain Jack Crawford's further suggestion.

The other passengers moved in their seats, trying to put it out of mind.

"I am quite comfortable," she said, looking into his eyes. She cramped, low in her stomach, and broke into a sweat. Her eyes were steady and calm. She had fallen once from the trapeze, thirty feet to the ground, and seen herself on the way down. She had seen other things too; some of them were comical. You never knew exactly when you would hit the ground, but that hadn't made her afraid to look.

And she stared into his eyes. The things that made Agnes Lake afraid—the things that had always made her afraid—were things that she couldn't see. She crossed her legs now, relieving the cramps, and looked out the window.

Captain Crawford watched the outline of her big legs under the skirts and then looked out the same window. "This is the richest country in the world," he said. "I've been from one end of the map to the other, ma'am, and this right here is the richest and the wildest and the best."

Agnes Lake stared at pine trees and wondered how the place had looked to Bill. Some of his letters—there were eight, and she carried all of them in her handbag—sounded like Captain Crawford, and some of them, when she thought back over them later, were telling her that he was dying. She knew she should never have let him out of her sight.

Agnes Lake was forty-two years old when she married Bill. She had been to Europe and Africa and Egypt, and to every city in America of sufficient population to attract a circus. She walked the tightrope and performed on the flying trapeze, and did tricks on horses that no one else did—man or woman. She could stand on a saddle horse at full gallop. With her own horses at canter, she could do flips on their backs, forwards and backwards. She was born with balance everywhere in her body, and had known it since she was three.

She was as strong as most men, but it was unnoticeable except in her legs, where she was stronger than any man. Bill had liked the muscles of her calves and told her not to be ashamed. He would find her like that out of nowhere, and touch her heart. No one else had ever seen that she was ashamed.

And he could say that one moment, and the next he would be staring at the sky, expounding on the nature of the problems it caused to be famous, like there was some secret to it that only the two of them knew. And that was as far from her interests as the moon.

"Are you able to continue?" the captain said. She brought her gaze back inside the coach and saw he was pale. She smiled now, but the smile seemed to bring back her cramps. "It wouldn't be any inconvenience whatsoever to notify the driver to pull over," he said. "It's been a long time between stops."

When she didn't answer, the captain leaned across the man with the flask and put his head out the window. He shouted twice, and she heard the driver shout back. She could not decipher the words, if it was words they were shouting.

As she watched, the trees on the side of the coach where Captain Crawford was conducting his conversation with the driver got closer. Then there was a sudden drop, as a wheel went off the road, and then the back end of the coach was going sideways and the driver was shouting at his horses. She heard the panic in his voice, she heard it as the horses themselves would hear it. Something fell past the window—she glimpsed it in her side vision—and then the farm boy next to her fell into her lap.

The coach lost a wheel and dropped again, farther this time, and she watched the faces across the aisle. She was not afraid. Captain Crawford rolled into the aisle and covered his head, and the boy in her lap began pushing against her legs, trying to right himself. His hands touched her thighs, but in the confusion and noise he did not notice their structure. The man with the flask and cigar fell into the aisle on top of Captain Crawford, and the boy rolled off her lap and joined them.

The coach hit a fallen tree and stopped. She saw it all; the others lay in their seats and on the floor, waiting for another concussion, until the driver opened the low-side door. Then they began to untangle themselves and open their eyes. Captain Crawford was first out of the coach. He stepped past the driver without a word and headed into the bushes.