(1986) Deadwood (10 page)

Bill stumbled into a crate. It looked like the one the Methodist had been standing on that morning, and nobody but a blind man could have missed it. "There's Custer, or Hill City," Charley said. He had never seen Bill stumble over anything before. "This doesn't have to be where we are."

Bill stepped over the crate and they continued uphill toward the theater. "It's the time of day," Bill said. "This half-light, it isn't one way or the other, is why a person can't see."

There was a boy sitting at a table near the front door of the theater, collecting a dollar and a half a customer, but Mrs. Langrishe herself met Bill and Charley at the door and told the boy they were her guests.

The Langrishe Theater was lamp-lit, the back was pitch-dark, and Bill's confidence seemed to change as soon as the contrast allowed him to see again. The stage was built of pine slats, maybe half an inch between them, and was not likely to support anything heavier than a tenor. Stakes had been pounded into the ground for seats, and small pieces of four-by-eight had been nailed to the tops to make them more comfortable.

Mrs. Langrishe walked them down to the front, a hand on Bill's arm, a hand on Charley's, and showed them to their seats. She had changed perfumes to something you couldn't take two ways. Charley thought it might have been gypsy.

"I hope you enjoy Bronson Howard," she said to Bill. "Mr. Utter has told me of your affection for the great Bard, and I hope this small amusement we offer tonight will distract you enough to bring you back for something more weighty."

"Well," Bill said, "if it isn't the great Bard tonight, maybe next time around. You can't live in the past." And he gave her a formal smile.

"I had no idea," she said, a little color coming into her cheeks now, "what a . . . gracious man you were, Mr. Hickok. The reputation pales beside the man."

Bill nodded politely. "This very afternoon," he said, "I shot ounce glasses off the head of Mr. Pink Buford's bulldog, Apocalypse." Mrs. Langrishe nodded, the same nod Bill had used on her. She had forgotten Charley was there, and Bill had already forgotten her. He closed his eyes and swayed. A line of sweat crossed his forehead.

Charley could hear the wind picking up outside. The canvas roof had a foot or two of play in it, and billowed out and then in, like death-bed breathing.

Mrs. Langrishe climbed a wooden scaffold to the stage. "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen," she said. There were sixty or seventy seats in the room, every one of them occupied. She waited while the audience gave her a small round of applause. Some of the finest clothes Charley had ever seen were assembled in that theater.

"Tonight, as you know, is the premiere performance of the Langrishe Theater, and it is our pleasure to bring you a light comedy of manners, Bronson Howard's
The Banker's Daughter
." There was more applause for that, and then again when she announced the players. Her husband, Jack, was the banker. He had powdered his face and stuck on a moustache, but he still looked short.

When the introductions were over, Mrs. Langrishe talked for a moment about the importance of theater to a community, and then, looking right at Bill, she said she hoped to see them all again soon.

When the audience clapped this time, as she left the stage, Charley joined in. He didn't know why, but it seemed like she had done something brave. He looked sideways then, just in time to see Bill's eyes jump open at the sound of the applause. That was the only way you could have known he was already asleep, if you saw his eyes. Bill sat dead still, figuring things out, and then, just before the daughter came on stage to begin the play, he slowly stood up, turned to the room, and nodded.

Then he sat back down and nodded to Charley.

The daughter was too old to be a daughter, but they'd dressed her in skirts and painted her cheeks pink. Charley saw they had done the best with what they had. He applauded with the audience again.

The daughter twirled once, showing bloomers, and then put the back of her hand against her forehead and said, "Alas." She had the play book in her hand, but said that from memory.

"Shit," somebody in back of them said, "I hate it when it starts with 'alas.'" The sound of the wind covered the voice then. The wind and the rain. The canvas slammed up and down, gaining more leverage as it loosened the boards.

Jack Langrishe came on from the other side of the stage, reading from a book. "What is it, my pet?" he said. "Why do you look so sad?"

And at that moment the roof blew off the theater. There was a long rumble of thunder, and then a noise like an explosion, and then the rain was coming in as thick as bear piss, blowing sideways with hats and leaves and sawdust and little pieces of board that were left by the carpenters.

On the stage, Jack Langrishe stopped what he was doing and stared straight up. Charley had the feeling he was looking a long way beyond the roof. Hats rolled across the floor, and some of the ladies made blinders of their hands to protect their eyes.

Lightning flashed, and froze the audience in green light. On the stage, the banker's daughter was fighting the wind for her skirt. The rain beaded up on Jack Langrishe's face and rolled down his cheeks without streaking his powder.

Charley and Bill had grabbed their hats at the sound of the explosion, and they sat and watched the scene while the rain made little gutters of the brims. There was a fair amount of noise in the theater—mostly thunder and the popping sound from the torn canvas—but nobody screamed, and nobody left.

And then Jack Langrishe cleared his throat. Being an actor, he could do that loud enough to be heard over a thunderstorm. As much as was possible, the audience turned themselves away from the wind and looked up. About half the floor lamps were still lit, and that and the lightning gave the actor's motions a jerky look that struck Charley as theatrical. Jack Langrishe took the banker's daughter by the arm then. "What is it, my pet?"

The daughter stared at him. "What is it, my pet?" he said again.

"Oh, shit," she said.

There was a long crack of thunder, and when it died people were laughing. Ten minutes later it began to hail.

The play lasted most of an hour, the storm quit about halfway through. The wind died, the rain stopped, and before it was over there were stars in the sky. That's how fast things turned in the Hills. At the end, Mrs. Langrishe stood in the door and shook hands with everybody who had come. The street behind her was under half a foot of moving water. Her dress was soaked through and stuck to her person everyplace there was a hold. Her hair had come loose and her eyes seemed to be bleeding black. Charley had never seen a woman look more beautiful. She thanked him for coming, and then Bill, but she used two hands to shake with Bill.

"I hope we can have something more amusing for you next time," she said.

"Drier," Bill said. "Next time make it drier."

Mrs. Langrishe put her hand over her mouth and began to laugh. "You are clever, Mr. Hickok," she said. She gave him that peeder-hummer smile, but Bill didn't notice. "Perhaps sometime you would like to take part in one of our plays," she said.

Bill shook his head. He said, "I did acting three months in a production of Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show, but it didn't suit my disposition."

"Perhaps it was the selection of material," she said. Charley noticed that everything Mrs. Langrishe said sounded like it meant two things. "We could offer you something more suited to your tastes. Perhaps the great Bard . . ."

"Well," Bill said, "if it was the great Bard, me and Charley might be interested."

She touched Bill's hand, just the tips of her fingers against his wrist. That was something Matilda did too, when Charley was leaving Colorado on business. He wondered if he was beginning to miss her. "
Taming of the Strew?
" Mrs. Langrishe said. Bill said, "It would be our honor."

Bill was sitting on the tree stump holding a glass of gin and bitters when Charley woke up in the morning. Bill was wearing his guns and his pants. His body was silver-colored, and there was a little bottle on the ground next to him, with a silver-stained rag next to it. "That reprobate with the head and the bug-eyes," Bill said, "you remember him?" Bill always knew when Charley woke up, it was like he could hear his eyes open.

Charley got up slowly, feeling the weather in his legs. "Did you shoot him?" Bill had gone back to the badlands after the play, Charley had gone to bed. There was something about getting rained on that always made him tired.

Bill shook his head. "Not yet," he said.

Charley said, "What's the circumstances?"

"Everywhere I went last night," he said, "he was standing off to the side or in a corner, studying my habits. A man that size trying to hide in corners, it's unseemly." He touched his shoulder and then checked the finger, to see if what was on him had dried.

"Mercury?" Charley said.

"It's a safety measure," Bill said. He drank some of the pink gin and stood up. "I got an idea about him," he said, "that he's somebody I have to watch."

"Then shoot him," Charley said. "Give him fair warning and finish it. You can't have someone in the corners every minute."

Bill picked up his shirt and put his arms into the sleeves. The way he dressed when there was trouble, there was never a time when both hands were away from his guns. "Captain Jack mentioned it too," he said. "That there were scoundrels looking for all our scalps."

"What scoundrels?" Charley said.

"He didn't say, except they were close at hand. Captain Jack doesn't talk specific."

Charley climbed out of the wagon, Bill finished his drink. "He talks like a woman," Charley said. "A gossip that won't name names."

Bill smiled at that. "I wish there was a general reluctance to bring my name into things," he said. "The trouble is accuracy. You can't explain what you did to anybody, especially a reporter, because things don't come out the same in words. And the words you give them, they get it wrong. I tremble to think what the writers do after a body dies."

"The only ones you can trust to know what you mean are your pards," Charley said.

Bill shook his head. "Women know you best," he said. That led his thoughts a different way, and he picked up the bottle of mercury and stared at it. "Agnes sees me better than I see my own self."

Charley let that settle, and then he said, "What about this corner-hugger?"

"He doesn't know me at all," Bill said. "If he did, he'd let me alone."

Charley reached into the back of the wagon and came out with a clean shirt and his toilet. Bill went with him to the bathhouse, and they sat in hot tubs while the soft-brain told them about poison eggs and hangings. Bill listened to it without expressing judgment one way or the other. When the soft-brain was finished, though, Bill said, "If it was me, I believe I'd burn myself up. I don't want my picture taken after I'm gone."

"They took my picture once," the soft-brain said.

"They do me alone at first," Bill said, "and then the man that operates the machine always sets things up in back so a volunteer can pull the trigger on it, and he stands in next to me, like we were pards."

"It don't hurt to get your picture took," the soft-brain said.

"Not too bad," Bill said.

"I seen my soul when they did it," the soft-brain said. Bill sat up in the tub. He was interested in the soul. "It's true," the soft-brain said. "There's little floating circles, all pretty colors, and inside them was my soul. When you die, they float up out of your body to God."

Charley said, "You believe there's circles inside you?"

"That's where I seen them," he said. All three of them were quiet then until the soft-brain said, "I got to get my picture took again."

"I wouldn't advise it," Bill said. "You don't want to do something like that unless there's a reason, like if you were famous and had to. A picture is the beginning of misstatement and misunderstanding.

You got people looking at it with all different opinions, and they make up stories to go with them."

The soft-brain nodded, like he could see the problem. "There's stories on me already," he said.

"Like what?" Bill said. He was saying more than he usually did, but there wasn't anybody there but Charley and the soft-brain to hear it.

"Soft-brained," the soft-brain said. "I heard people say the Bottle Fiend was soft-brained."

Bill smiled. "Who's this Bottle Fiend?"

"Me," the soft-brain said.

"They just call you soft-brained because of your hobby," Bill said. "They don't see how anybody would eat poison eggs or hang hisself, so they say you're soft-brained."

"I shot myself once, too," the soft-brain said. "It took the wrong angle, though. That's what Doc Sick said. I heard people say, though, 'A soft-brain shoots himself in the head, so what?'"

Bill stood up and reached for a towel. "Listen," he said, "there's some soft-brained in everybody."

"That can be proved in federal court," Charley said.

The tone of his voice made Bill sit back down. "Was there something happened last night?" he said. Bill had memory lapses when he drank which he didn't like to acknowledge.

"I came to bed after the flood," Charley said, "but earlier in the festivities you put it in Captain Jack Crawford's head that we were going on a moose-hunt."

"That's not so bad," Bill said.

"It's not all," Charley said. "When we get back from the hunt, you volunteered us for
Taming of the Shrew
."

"Under what conditions?" he said, calm and even. Bill accepted all news the same stoic way, that's what made him who he was.

"There were no conditions or attachments," Charley said. He stood up in the tub and gave Bill a bow, to show how he'd done it. "You said, 'It would be our honor.'"

"Son of a bitch," Bill said.

"I could see it if you had designs on the lady," Charley said, "but you hardly looked." He got out of the tub and wrapped himself in a towel.

Bill closed his eyes and thought. "Did I say when?" Charley shook his head. "That's to the good side," Bill said. "We'll leave it like an accident, like your bun fell off the dinner table."