(1986) Deadwood (23 page)

But there was something loose in Jack McCall's eyes that Harry Sam Young had seen before, and he stopped himself in mid-sentence. Jack McCall walked away from him, down the bar, pushing through whores and miners alike. He was holding a gun in his hand now, and the ones who saw it moved out of his way.

At the end of the bar was the poker table. Bill had picked up his cards and was holding them against his chest. Across the table, Pink Buford noticed the change in the way Bill protected his cards, and prepared to abandon his hand.

Captain Jack Crawford saw the cat man and the gun, and backed out of the way.

Jack McCall fired into the left side of Bill's head from a distance of less than a foot. The ball exited through his right cheek, then broke all the bones in the river pilot's left wrist. Telling it later, the pilot would say he saw smoke before he heard the shot.

A moment later, Jack McCall shouted, "Damn you, take that," and Bill's head, which had been turned to the left by the force of the ball exiting his cheek, lowered slowly to the table. He could have been taking a nap. William Massie fell out of his chair, covering his wrist with his body; Charles Rich sat frozen. Only Carl Mann moved, and McCall pointed the pistol at his face and pulled the trigger. There was a snapping noise, but no shot. Mann would sell his half of the business the next week and move to New Orleans.

It was a few seconds before most of the bar patrons realized what had happened—it was nothing out of the ordinary for somebody to fire into the ceiling—and in those moments Jack McCall ran out the front door, snapping his gun at Harry Sam Young and half a dozen others. He turned in the street and yelled at the bar, "Come on, you sons of bitches," and then ran south and tried to take the first horse he saw.

The bar emptied out after him, with no one in a hurry to be at the front. The horse belonged to Mayor E. B. Farnum, who was a considerate man and always eased the animal's cinch when he left him saddled. The saddle turned over, dropping McCall into the mud. He got up and ran into Farnum's store, and hid in back behind freshly butchered meat. The crowd followed him in and took McCall prisoner. Not as much as a piece of penny candy was stolen.

In the crowd now was Boone May, who assumed authority, being the closest thing to a law officer there. He took McCall to the Gem Theater, holding him by the back of the collar. He allowed anybody so inclined to cuff McCall in the face, and by the time they arrived at the Gem, the prisoner was bleeding from the nose.

A miner's jury was already waiting at the bar. al swearingen closed all downstairs activities and forbade howling upstairs while the trial was in progress. Howling had become as fashionable as pink gin. Two hundred men crowded into the establishment to watch, and that many again stood outside, unable to get in. Word of what happened was spreading everywhere in town.

Jack McCall testified that Bill had killed his brother in Abilene, and then threatened to kill him too, if their paths ever crossed again. "As soon as I saw Wild Bill, I knewed it was him or me," he said.

The jury took an hour to decide. Al Swearingen opened the bar while they made up their minds, and then closed down again for the announcement. The foreman was a soft-brain who had once been a Confederate soldier. He was called Swill Barrel Jimmy, and owned what was conceded to be the oldest coat and shoes in Dead-wood, but always wore a clean white collar. "We find the defendant not guilty on account of his mortal grudge against Wild Bill, and self-defense," he said.

And Jack McCall was released. He took a horse that belonged to Al Swearingen and rode for Fort Laramie.

Elliot "Doc" Pierce was called from his house to administer to the corpse. He lived in the quarters behind his barber shop. He brought along his nephews, Mutt and Buster, to carry the body. They went into Nuttall and Mann's and found Bill lying oh the poker table. The cards he had been holding were in his lap. Pink Buford's bulldog was asleep at his feet. There wasn't much blood. Carl Mann, who had looked into the barrel of Jack McCall's gun, was still sitting on the other side of the table, drinking. Everyone else had gone to the trial. Doc Pierce felt for a pulse at the neck and the wrist, and noted to Buster that it was strange to find the most famous man in the West dead with so little company. There was about seventy dollars under him on the table.

He had the nephews carry the body back to the barber shop, and laid it on a table. Doc Pierce sent Buster to Charley Utter's camp for Bill's Sunday clothes, and any other personal effects that would be appropriate for the funeral, such as his derringer.

He shaved Bill and then closed the wound in his cheek and covered it with pancake makeup. It was a perfect cross. He cleaned Bill's nails and cut ten locks of his hair from the back, where it wouldn't show as Bill lay in his box. The nephew came back, and they dressed Bill in a clean shirt and the Prince Albert frock coat that was his favorite.

They laid him in the box with his guns on and the derringer in a coat pocket. The white handles of Bill's pistols looked beautiful against the green lining of the box. They combed his hair. They put Charley's carbine in the box too, trying it on both sides to see which way it looked best.

A. W. Merrick of the
Black Hills Pioneer
arrived sometime after midnight, out of breath, shaking. He asked Doc Pierce questions and wrote down the answers. "What was the hand he was holding?" the newspaperman asked.

"I didn't notice," the barber said.

"Some said it was aces," the newspaperman said, "and some said it was eights . . . Exactly how did you find him?"

Doc Pierce didn't have much use for the printed word. "Lookit," he said, "I got things to do here. How the hell do you think I found him?"

"How did he look?"

Doc Pierce sighed. "This is for the people who loved the deceased," Merrick said. "This is the last they'll hear of him, so it ought to be good . . ."

"Well," the barber said, "Bill was the prettiest corpse I ever encountered. His fingers looked like marble."

The newspaperman was looking at him, waiting. "What else?" he said.

"The place where the assassin's bullet come out, it was a perfect cross." Doc Pierce brushed past the newspaperman then, pretending there was more left to do than there was. "You want to make yourself useful," he said, "you could print up some funeral notices."

By morning, the notices were posted all over town.

NOTICE

Died, in Deadwood, Black Hills, August 2, 1876, from the effects of a pistol shot, J. B. Hickok (Wild Bill), formerly of Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Funeral services will be held at Charley Utters Camp, on Thursday afternoon, 8I3I76, at three o'clock, p.m.

All are respectfully invited to attend.

The funeral was attended by four hundred people, including a large contingent from Crook City, so it was impossible to say later who stole Charley's rifle out of the casket.

All the town dignitaries were there, including Mayor E. B. Farnum, Sheriff Seth Bullock, and owners of all the large businesses. Mrs. Langrishe sang "I Know That My Redeemer Liveth," and then broke into tears.

Jane Cannary was in Rapid City, looking for a bull to ride on Main Street. Captain Jack Crawford had left town for Omaha, and would later swear he was a hundred miles away at the time of the killing.

And as Doc Pierce and his nephews were committing Bill's body to the earth, Charley Utter was asleep in Tigerville, between Hill City and Mystic, waiting to ride the last leg of his race against the Clippinger Pony Express.

The service was conducted by Preacher Smith, assisted by Malcolm Nash, whom he believed to be his disciple. The boy stood silently beside the preacher and stared into the sky, so lost in the preacher's words he could not remember who they were for, and he was the only one at the service who had ever known Bill at all.

S
he watched the funeral from the window of her room. It was afternoon, and she was not allowed outside. Behind her, the old woman combed her hair and talked of family problems. The old woman's breath was like swamp gas, and she talked too much. She was all that Tan You-chau had given her for servants.

The one they buried was Wild Bill. She knew he was honored by his people as a soldier. She did not know which war he had won or whom he had killed. The old woman told her one thing one day, another thing the next. She pretended to understand this place, but she lied by habit, as the women of her class did, and did not know herself what was true and what she had invented.

The old woman had told her, for instance, that the Red People had defeated Pudding, the greatest white warrior, and hundreds of his men, and that the white people mourned him and had sworn revenge. But she watched the white people from her window every afternoon while the old woman combed out her hair, and it was not true.

People in mourning did not laugh in the streets, or do business openly. She compared her own revenge to theirs, and saw theirs was false and unplanned. Not an intention, a comfort. "Hush yourself," she said now, and the old woman fell silent. They were moving the coffin from the camp where the man had kept his sleeping quarters. Four men lifted the box up onto a flatbed wagon, pulled by horses, and they took him south, up the street.

The cemetery was a thirty-minute walk to the southeast, and then a painful climb a hundred yards up one of the hills that marked the boundaries of the town. She had gone there herself, looking for a respectable place to bury her brother Song. First, of course, she intended to send the heart and eyes, and the bones of his arms, home. She did not care then that Tan You-chau had forbidden her brother's burial.

Burial did not matter now. The one in the coffin—together with a smaller man—had put Song's body into the oven, and what she had reclaimed could have as easily belonged to a dog. There was no heart, no eyes, no long bones to send home. She had come to this place to repay her brother's debts, but she had come too late. And she would never go home, either.

She watched the street for the smaller one, to see if it hurt him for Wild Bill to die. She was not white-skinned, and would not put away her revenge.

The old woman pulled the comb through her hair, starting at the scalp and traveling the length of her back. She began to speak of her husband again, who had quit his job and spent all his time in the opium dens. "He was always a dreamer," she said, "and now he dreams of his dreams. It is not my fault that he has changed."

"Hush yourself," she said, and the old woman was silent again. She went through the hair carefully at first, working out each tangle, and when it was smooth she pulled through with even, heavy strokes, grunting at the top of each one. The China Doll did not try to correct her manners. It was not possible to keep things here as they had been in Toishan. She thought of Tan You-chau, who kept only the customs which suited him. He wore the white man's clothes, but he had banished Song over a two-hundred-dollar debt, and Song had died in the hills.

She sat on her heels and watched the last of the white people turn the corner and follow the wagon to the graveyard. The little one was not among them. She wondered if he was dead too.

The old woman spoke of her daughters, who disobeyed her, and her son, who was a coward. He had been born the day after the slave ship docked in British Columbia, and refused the old woman a moment's peace since.

"Hush yourself," she said. Ci-an stood up and walked to her bath. The old woman averted her eyes while she undressed and stepped into the tub. Ci-an was the only Chinese in Deadwood with her own bath. She did not know about the whites. Even Tan's wife did not have a bath in her own room. Of course, Tan did not sleep with his wife.

Ci-an thought of her, fat and passive, as she studied her own body in the water. Her beauty gave her no pleasure now, except in refusing it to Tan. Even while he took her, she refused him. She would lie still on the bed and search the ceiling for the face of her brother. She would not smile or fight, even when he had threatened to sell her to the whites.

He would do that soon, and she welcomed it. Their skin had a rotted smell, and they were mannerless, but one day the little one who had put Song in the oven would come to her room. If he was not already dead.

She held one of her feet and washed between the toes. Her feet were smaller than her hands, and ached when she walked beyond the limits of her room. When she stayed in her room, as Tan wished, they turned numb, almost dead. That was the reward for obedience. She had walked once to the north end of town, and once to the graveyard in the south; and the curved, fragile bones in her feet had hurt until she had forgotten everything else, and lost herself in the pain.

And she saw then that she must wait in her room for revenge to come to her.

The old woman knelt beside the tub and began to wash her back. "A disobedient child pulls at a mother's heart like a child in the grave," she said.

"Hush yourself, old woman," Ci-an said. "You do not know what you are saying."

In the evening, tan you-chau came to her door to take her downstairs. She was dressed in a silk robe and had made her face with rice powder and rouge. She had perfumed her palms. Most of Tan's girls had discarded formal dress. He had sold them all to the white men anyway. Only the singers—the Children of Joy—appeared in whiteface, but being ugly, they made themselves carelessly, more to fool the white men than to preserve themselves against this place. Tan had sold them to the white men too.

"Ah," he said when she opened the door, "the China Doll." That was the name he had given her, and it was written in two languages under the likenesses of her that hung outside. She did not like to be addressed in this way, especially by him who had given her the name. She bowed to him, expressionless.

"Perhaps before you sing for the creek miners tonight, you would like to lie with a man," he said.

She looked at him without interest or fear. "Do you want me to lie on the bed?" she asked. Her obedience angered him. He pushed her and she fell. The coarse wooden floor tore her robe. He picked her up by the sash and threw her, without effort, onto the bed. She lay still. He stood over her, staring, breathing through his teeth.

She did not change expression. Not when he tore her robe, not when he entered her, not when he slapped her face. She lay still and searched the ceiling for the face of her brother. In the end he spit on her breasts. "I will sell you to the cow-eaters," he said.

She lay expressionless on the bed, and did not move to wipe the spit from her chest. He stood up and buttoned his pants. He wore the clothes of the white people, and spoke words of their language. He laughed too much when he was with them, like a child with older children, and drank all the concoctions that were in fashion. He played their games with cards.

It was only among his own people that Tan You-chau was feared. She had seen Tan's two faces, and knew him to be empty inside. She did not need or want to kill him. His own life would be her brother's revenge.

"Do you want me to dress?" she said. "Or may I wash first?"

He said, "Have I made you dirty?"

"Yes."

He stood over her a long minute, until she thought he was going to abuse her again. "You are no use to me," he said finally. "Tonight, after you sing, I will sell you to the creek miners. You are no longer under my protection."

"Then I should wash," she said. "I would not want your new friends to soil themselves, and think badly of your hospitality."

She washed the spit off her breasts, and then cleaned herself inside. She chose a fresh robe from a trunk under her bed and dressed. She never looked in his direction, not once. "Perhaps you will be wearing the clothes of the white people too," he said.

She offered no opinion. She tightened the combs in her hair and checked her face in the mirror. He had not disturbed her makeup, which was all she now saw in mirrors. She had lost the sense of her own beauty, and knew it would never return. That sense was a gift, like the beauty itself, and one without the other was useless.

He waited until she had finished in the mirror, and then stood up. He opened the door, and the sounds from the theater were suddenly close, as if they had been waiting just outside her room. At the top of the stairs she could smell the white men, a smell that made her think of the dead animals they ate.

But she was not afraid of lying with the cow-eaters. She had opened the door of the oven and found Song, and nothing in this life would sicken her again. That was gone too.

She walked behind Tan down the stairs, her head bowed. She heard the noise change when they saw her. She was as beautiful to the white men as to the real people, but the white men did not know that silence was expression enough. They whistled and yelped like wild dogs, they fired shots into the floor.

She did not raise her head.

She followed Tan to the stage and waited while he introduced her to the audience. He did it twice, once in the language of the white men, who laughed at his clumsiness with their words. Tan laughed with them. He was of two faces, and empty inside.

When he had finished, she stepped into the place he had stood and began to sing. The accompanist was Tan's uncle, who was blind. He had been captured when he first tried to leave Kwang-tung, and blinded with acid. Such were the risks of leaving China.

The uncle played the white man's instrument, the piano, instead of his own. It was not an instrument designed to accompany singers. She looked out into the theater—half white, half real people— and sang her mother's song, of a young woman who had lost her betrothed in the war. It was a sentimental song—Tan had forbidden such tunes until late at night, after the white men had drunk many hours—but she ignored his stare and sang the words that came to her.

"He is missing tonight.

I am brave in the night,

But I am afraid of the morning

When I will see that be is gone."

The blind man followed her on the piano, unsure of the notes. The real people bowed their heads, perhaps to memorize the moment, or perhaps trying to remember something from the time before they came to this place. There was nothing so beautiful that it was not more beautiful on reflection. It was the purpose of rice powder and rouge to suggest other times.

Only the white men were unchanged by her singing. Some of them spoke as she performed, some called for drinks from the two bartenders, who were Tan's nephews. The nephews wore white men's clothing too, and sometimes sat in the white people's bars and watched which drinks were served and how they were made. She saw they were as greedy as Tan.

Later, as she sang, one of the white men climbed onto the stage, bowed, and took her into his arms as if to dance. She was grateful for his stink of liquor, which hid the odor of dead animals. The white men in the theater howled, and when she looked down—the bar stood between the theater and the stage—she saw one of Tan's nephews howling too.

The white man was clumsy and strong, and carried her off her feet. She had stopped singing, and now she closed her eyes and waited. She felt him put her down, his hands carefully avoiding her breasts, and then he bowed again, spoke a few words to her in his own language, and left the stage. The other white men applauded him, and he waved his hat in the air to return their courtesy.

After that, there were other white men. Crawling up over the bar onto the stage, each one picking her up off her feet and moving a few steps with her in his arms, and then crawling back down, smiling, while the others cheered. One stepped on her feet, another dirtied her robe. The white men grew more elaborate in their bows, and one fell into the pit where Tan's nephews mixed drinks, and broke his arm. This was also cheered by the white men.

After each interruption, she returned to her songs. She saw Tan at a table with one of the white men. This one had small hands and wore a tie and vest and a round hat. His nose was huge, even for a white man, and she knew from that he was wealthy.

Tan sat with a solemn look on his face, nodding at every word from the white man's mouth. Then they looked at her together, and she knew he was selling her. She put it aside, it was no longer her body, no longer her pain. Her life had become a tool, nothing more, and she would wait to use it. Until the friend of Wild Bill came to her, and she had revenged Song for what they had done to his body.

When she finished singing, she returned to her room and waited for the white man in the suit and vest. Tan brought him to the door, and bowed formally when she answered his knock. The white man bowed too. His nose recalled a tree root, part of something knotted and longer, exposed to view by accident.

"Perhaps you will not belong to all white men if you please this one," Tan said. "He is very rich." The white man held his hat in both hands and smiled. She saw he was afraid to be with real people.

"One is the same as a thousand," she said. She bowed to the man—who, of course, did not speak the language of real people— but did not return his smile.

"It is up to you," Tan said. "You have brought all your troubles to yourself."

"I have no troubles," she said. "Now leave us alone, and perhaps this rabbit will run away."

"Perhaps this rabbit is a fornicator," Tan said.

She shrugged. "One is like another," she said, looking into his eyes for a moment in an open and disrespectful way. "When you have laid with one, you have laid with a thousand."

Tan left the room without another word. The white man stood near the door, holding his hat. She had never seen a white man undressed, but the old woman had told her their shafts grew in proportion to their noses. She sat on her bed and waited to see.

The white man stayed where he was, awkward and afraid. She looked at him to ask what he wanted of her. "Shall I undress?" she said.