(1986) Deadwood (52 page)
Authors: Pete Dexter
And a little later, "What's wrong?"
"My friend sleeps like the dead," he said. w She pulled a few inches off his peeder. "There's nobody could sleep through this," she said. "You'd be smart to enjoy it."
"He isn't like other people."
"Oh," she said, "that friend."
Charley looked at the back of her head, and then at the south end of town. "He told me once he would burn up," he said.
She said, "There's some out here that aren't afraid to die."
Charley thought it over. "I don't know."
"He didn't seem afraid," she said.
"I can't find the road to get a fix where his house is," Charley said later. She put her mouth back over his peeder and her head began to ebb and flow, and he felt himself ebb and flow with her. And then he saw it, four hundred yards farther east than it should have been. He did not know how he'd gotten so turned around.
It was the road, and the fire was long since finished with the Bottle Fiend. "If he slept through," he said, "I hope it was all the way. Like one of his dreams."
"There's nothing to do about it now," she said again.
And then, later, she said, "You know, if you look at a fire in a certain way, it's pretty."
He found the soft-brain in the morning, in the ashes of his house. The clothes were burned off him, and the hair, and his fingers and toes were only stubs. By the time Charley got to the house the scavengers had come and gone, scattering the bottles all over the ground. They collided as he walked through them and made flat musical sounds. The soft-brain had thought there were secrets inside. Charley knelt beside the body and straightened the arms. The skin did not feel like skin, and he was afraid to pick the soft-brain up, that something would break inside him.
He could not stand to break his bones.
He eased himself onto the ground and looked out over the town. Everything from Chinatown to the jail was gone; the only way to tell the hotels from the shacks was the size of the piles of ashes. The wind came up out of the gulch and caught one of the bottles just right, and hung a long, low note in the air.
Below, the scavengers were going through the ashes, looking for gold and watches and tins of food. There were shots from the badlands; two men ran up the street.
At the south end of town the fire had spared Bullock and Star's brickworks, and the half block next to it. The houses on the west— Mrs. Langrishe and her neighbors—were spared too.
What had she said,
The place could use the permanence of brick?
He stayed on the hill most of the morning, until the first soldiers arrived to protect against looters. Then he stood up, so stiff he could barely walk, and made his way back into town.
He found a fireman's shovel lying under a few inches of water in the Whitewood Creek, and took it back up the hill and buried the soft-brain. He dug the hole deep and wide, with enough room for some of the bottles.
The soft-brain had thought there were secrets inside, and planned to give them to God.
He picked some of the prettiest, and some of the ones with the signs of the fire, and then put them in the hole with him and replaced the dirt. He marked the grave with four smooth stones, stacked one on top of another at the head.
There was no wood for a marker, and it did not occur to him until he was halfway down the hill that he did not know the Bottle Fiend's name.
M
alcolm Nash had given up his ministry in 1880 and come briefly under the tutelage of the writer Ambrose Bierce, who spent that year in Deadwood and then left for newer places, ending up in Mexico.
Charley was drawn south too, but he traveled slower and farther, and found Panama.
The boy stayed in the Hills, filing dispatches for the
Black Hills Pioneer
, and later the
Cheyenne Leader
. He saved his stories and sent them to Charley twice a year in envelopes that were yellowed in the months they spent traveling. Somehow it seemed to fit, that the boy had become a reporter.
Charley bought a drugstore, and when the Americans came, building their canal, he made a fortune. Everything in Panama was unhealthy for Americans, even the sun. Charley had never intended to make a fortune in Panama, but money was in the habit of falling his way; somehow he was always downhill. He'd only bought the drugstore for the location, and something to do.
The store sat on the eastern edge of a small fishing town called Pelican, on the eastern side of the isthmus, and overlooked a bay of the same name. The town was built on a rock plateau, a hundred feet above the water. From the porch you could close your eyes and feel the size of the ocean, and the world beyond it.
Charley had arrived in Panama in 1883, and by then he'd known he was going blind.
The first envelope came the next year, six months after he'd written to Merchant's National Bank in Deadwood to forward his funds. There was no letter from the boy then, there never was.
Just the stories, written in long narrow columns, and cut from the paper.
Malcolm Nash, correspondent
appeared over each one.
The first envelope included a dramatic account of the death of Al Swearingen, who died penniless in Denver, falling under the wheels of a train he was trying to hop. It was arranged first among the stories, although there were others—humorous incidents concerning the malfunctions of the local telephone system, for instance—that were written earlier.
Charley was never sure what the boy wanted him to know—that he had learned to write, or the news itself.
When the second envelope arrived, half a year later, he undertook to teach one of the village children to read English. He chose a small girl who hung on his fingers when he walked to the store for fish or beer.
She learned slowly, but he was patient. He was kind to her, and bought food for her family the year the fish disappeared from the ocean. He made presents for her on her birthdays and for Christmas, and told her stories of the Americanos and the places they lived.
In the beginning the stories were long and colored, but as he grew old and his eyes clouded, the stories were told in only a few words, and she came to understand that all the colors had fallen away from him, leaving only the moments. A woman who performed tricks in the air, an animal pulling a boat underwater, dead children who spoke in his bones. A man who loved bottles.
She knew he told true things.
She heard the stories a thousand times, but she always listened. He had fed her family the year the fish disappeared from the ocean.
She visited him in the mornings, on the porch of his store, sitting at a table he had built long after his sight was gone. Sometimes she read him old newspaper stories; she knew them all by heart.
Sometimes he told her his stories.
And as she grew into her middle years, she saw new meanings in them. She saw that even among the Americanos, he had been a foreigner.
In the afternoon she left him to his beer. Sometimes he sent for a whore. It was said he liked to be bitten. He kept himself clean, walking each evening down the steps to the ocean to bathe. It caused him great pain to climb back. There had been much leg-shooting in his life.
The last envelope arrived in the fall of 1912. The old man was dying, and used morphine to ease the way. There was a letter with the newspapers, the only one he ever got. She could not read it all—the hand was old and unsteady—but she did what she could.
He listened without a word, facing the morning sun and the ocean. It was from a woman named Agnes Lake, and much of it concerned her trip to Deadwood to find what had become of him. It said she loved him, it said they had mending hearts.
She saw the words moved the old man, and filled him, and she was sorry she could not read them all.
It pleased her to see him this way, though, and she thought it was fortunate the letter had come when it did, before he died. Not so fortunate it had to be God's will—he was a kind man and had been living unloved a long time, as foreigners always lived—and things had to happen sometime.
May 3,1985
Earleville, Maryland
Also by Pete Dexter
'This masterful book is such a formidable achievement, it
creates its own frame of reference. Other writers must
now be measured against Pete Dexter."
—San Francisco Chronicle
TRAIN
Train is an eighteen-year-old black caddy at an exclusive L.A. country club. He is a golf prodigy, but it is 1953 and there is no such thing as a black golf prodigy. Nevertheless, Train draws the interest of Miller Packard, a gambler whose smiling, distracted air has earned him the nickname "the Mile Away Man." Packard's easy manner hides a proclivity for violence, and he remains an enigma to Train even months later when they are winning high-stakes matches against hustlers throughout the country. Packard is also drawn to Norah Still, a beautiful woman scarred by a hideous crime, a woman who finds Packard's tendency toward violence both alluring and frightening. In the ensuing triangular relationship kindness is never far from cruelty. National Book Award winner Pete Dexter has created a startling, irresistible book that crackles with suspense and the live-wire voices of its characters.
Fiction/0-375-71409-X
VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES
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