(1986) Deadwood (33 page)

Handsome Dick moaned, deep and helpless. His lips were pitiful. When he saw Dr. O. E. Sick he began to cry. The doctor sat down on the bed with him and put his hand on Handsome's forehead. "I never felt nothing like this," Handsome said. "I didn't know nothing like this existed."

The doctor lifted Handsome Dick's eyelids, one after the other, and then he pressed the nails of his fingers to see if the blood would come back after he let go. Then he moved down the bed and looked at the leg. Handsome's pants leg was pushed up over his knee as high as it would go, and Dr. Sick reached into his bag and came out with a knife.

Handsome closed his eyes and sobbed. Dr. Sick paid no attention. He cut the pants leg, bottom to top. Handsome Dick opened his eyes. "That feels better," he said, blinking tears. "You're a wizard."

The doctor paid no attention. He poked the skin around the entrance wound to see if the blood would return when he stopped. Then he rolled Handsome Dick over and looked at the other side. It was swollen now, and blue, and the blood had caked black in the opening. The swelling was such that you could not see the splinter of bone. "The bone's broke bad," the doctor said.

Handsome Dick moaned. "I ain't going to lose the leg . . ."

Charley was reminded in some distant way of Captain Jack Crawford. The doctor shook his head. "We got to clean out the wound," he said. "Remove bone fragments and splint you up."

Handsome Dick nodded at all that, and the doctor reached into his bag for the needle. He gave Handsome a shot of morphine, pushing it in at the vein in back of his knee. Charley watched, and in one minute Handsome's face uncontorted itself. Then a sly look came into his eyes. A moment later he winked at Lurline, who had been sitting by the window, looking like she could use a shot of painkiller too.

"Don't smile at me, either of you," she said. Boone had left mad. "I been disillusioned."

"I shall suck thy breasts," Handsome said.

Handsome's eyes closed around his thoughts. He was smiling now. "Pay him no attention," the doctor said to Lurline. "He don't know what he's saying now."

"Well," she said, "if he ain't responsible, I don't guess I can blame him."

The doctor looked through his bag and found a tin of black powder. He loaded some onto the blade of the knife and sifted it into the wounds, front and back. Handsome Dick opened his eyes and watched.

"Is that medicine?" Handsome said.

The doctor paid no attention. He went over the wounds twice, making sure each of them was covered with powder. When he had finished, he told Lurline to wet a towel. There was a pitcher of water in the corner, and she dipped a towel into it and then wrung it out.

"You hold him over there," he said to her, "and you hold him there." He pointed Charley to the far side of the bed. Charley did what he was told, but it brought him into it farther than he wanted to be. What he wanted was to leave the doctor with Handsome Dick and find his way back over to Chinatown. He put his hands on Handsome Dick's narrow shoulders, realizing the singer had never done a day's work in his life. He pictured how Handsome would have looked to the farmer he killed, whose whole life was work.

The doctor bent Handsome's knee until there was six inches between the wound and the bed. "What is that medicine?" Handsome asked. "Am I cured?" Then he rolled his eyes until they settled on Lurline, who was holding the other shoulder. "I shall taste thy loveliness," he said.

Lurline smiled at him and then looked at Charley. "You can't blame him for honest passions," she said. "He ain't responsible."

Dr. O. E. Sick found a match in his pants pocket and lit it against the bedpost. Handsome Dick moved his gaze from Lurline's loveliness toward the sound of the strike. He was late, though. By the time Handsome focused on what the doctor was doing, the match was already in the powder. There was a small sound when it lit, like somebody blowing out a candle, and then his leg was smoking.

The doctor had done the leg, front and back, before it hit Handsome's sensibilities. When it did, he screamed and bucked and buckled, but there wasn't a muscle in his body, and they held on to him. Dr. Sick waited five seconds and then wrapped the smoking part of Handsome's leg in the towel. It did not seem to stop the pain, and every time Handsome yelped there was surprise in it.

Dr. Sick looked into his bag again and found a pair of tweezers. He used them and the knife to look into the hole where the bullet had left the leg. Twice he located little pieces of bone, which he removed and dropped on the floor next to the bed. Handsome passed out.

Charley felt dizzy and dry. When the doctor stopped to examine his work, Charley said, "I believe I'll have a drink, unless you think he's about to confess . . ."

The doctor paid no attention. He wrapped the wounds in gauze, and then pulled the leg straight and built Handsome a splint from two pieces of the chair Charley had broken when they'd fought. He wrapped it with wire from his bag.

Then he brought out a small bottle of morphine and gave it to Lurline. "Don't administer this but three, four times a day," he said.

"He ain't staying here," she said.

"He can't be moved," the doctor said.

"The hell he can't," she said. "Somebody's got to move, so's I can conduct my business affairs."

The doctor looked up at her, interested. He said, "I was told that you were a musician."

"I am," she said. "Shit, singers need to sleep too." Handsome groaned and moved.

"If that wrapping starts to stink," the doctor said, "come get me and I'll change it." He looked at Lurline in a sympathetic way. "You might save this man's leg, miss," he said.

"How come he can't stay with Charley?" she said. "He was the one that shot him."

Charley got up then, lame in his own legs. He thanked the doctor, who paid no attention. "If he dies," he said to Charley, but without taking his eyes off Lurline, "I'll send you the billing."

Charley smiled at Lurline and stumbled out the door. When he got to the street he stopped and looked back up at Lurline's window. The light went out, but Dr. O. E. Sick stayed. He waited five minutes in the mud to make sure.

Lurline was sweet, but she would break your heart if you let her.

Charley walked through the mud, feeling tired. Too tired to go back to Chinatown. He passed Wall Street, which led there, but then he thought about bedding down alone, and he was too tired— in a different way—for that too.

And so he turned around, and followed Wall Street until he came to their theater. It was dark from the outside, not a lamp on anywhere. Charley let himself in the front door. There were no windows on the first floor. The Chinese, now he thought about it, didn't have much use for windows at all. He walked slowly through the theater, bumping into chairs and a piano, things he would have felt in front of himself sober.

He found the staircase and headed up. Somewhere, a long way off, a woman was snoring. The China Doll's room was third on the left, facing the street. It had one of the two windows in the whole building. Charley ran his fingers lightly along the wall, counting the doors. At the third one, his fingers came away wet. He stopped, dead still, dead drunk, and listened. Snoring, a long ways off.

In the dark, he thought he saw the farmer's face. And then Handsome Dick's face, pained and sweaty, and then Charley heard what Handsome Dick said. "Will it grow back?" From what he'd seen, the joke was not far from losing its humor.

Charley turned the door handle, thinking of the extra weight that would be to carry around. He had never wanted to shoot a man, and making one a cripple was no great favor either.

And with his mind still on amputations, he pushed open the door and saw a human leg on the floor.

He took a step in, and noticed a stickiness to the floor when he lifted his moccasins. He moved more carefully now, not feeling anybody else in the room, but doubting himself. He stepped in and to the side, and then went flat against the wall. Nothing moved.

He waited a full minute and then looked again at the floor. The leg lay on its side, smaller and smoother than Handsome's. He stared at it for another minute, seeing there was something wrong with the proportions. It seemed to him that the foot was missing, but moving closer he saw it was no such thing. Moving closer, he saw that the leg had a foot, but it was tiny. It could have belonged to a seven-year-old child. He looked around the room then, seeing her hand first, then the rest. From the blood, the killing had started in her bed and then moved across the room toward the window.

From the blood, that was where it ended.

There was a knife on the stool in front of the painting easel. Paper drawings of artificial flowers lay on the floor next to the flowers themselves. The room was motionless, and he was motionless in it. It seemed like it was already a memory. He walked out the door and sat down on the stairs. Where were the Chinese when the girl had screamed for help? Of course, she might not have screamed at all. Charley cradled his head in his hands and remembered her. There was something held back, and something sad. He did not understand what went on in a Chinese heart, that something like this could happen. The Indians made more sense.

He found the door and walked down the stairs, and then outside. It was five o'clock in the morning, and when Charley turned the corner at Main Street, he saw the sky in the north was lit the color of peaches. Deadwood was the only place Charley had ever been where the day broke in the north. He stared that way for a minute and then turned his back on the sky, and headed south, uphill, toward the Grand Union Hotel.

Seth Bullock heard Solomon come in, so late that his first thought was that Solomon was getting up. His second thought was that something had happened. Bullock listened to his partner, waiting for familiar sounds. Outside, it was dead still. There wasn't even a cat in the street. He knew Solomon, right down to the number of steps he took between his dresser and his closet; he knew the order he hung up his clothes. But the steps from the next room lacked purpose. Solomon did not go to his closet or his drawers; he wandered the room, from the window to his bed and then back to the window.

Bullock got out of his own bed and put on his boots. He slept in his pants, in the event of late-night emergencies. For late-night emergencies, the sheriff liked to be punctual enough to take the prisoner from the citizenry before they hung him, but late enough to miss getting shot at in the capture. Seth Bullock did not intend to die on the caprice of a common drunk.

He walked out into the hallway that connected his room to Solomon's, feeling heavy-legged and slow. He had not slept well during the night, thinking of the letter he had written to Solomon's wife. "
My confidential advice in this matter
" he'd said, "
would be for yourself to join us in the Hills, for I am sure your sobering influence will return Solomon to bis sensibilities, if anything can.
"

He had laid in bed thinking of Solomon's sudden affliction with views and flowers, and what the letter would do to that. He told himself that business partners had obligations to each other. Bullock settled that for himself a dozen times, but it would not let him sleep.

He knocked once on Solomon's door, not wanting to wake Mrs. Tubb. Then he tried the door. It was unlocked. In fact, it hadn't been closed. Solomon was sitting on the floor in the corner, cross-legged and naked, dark-faced and dirty. The sight affirmed the decision to write his wife, and Bullock felt himself relieved to have it off his conscience. "Look at yourself," he said.

Solomon didn't look. At himself, or at Bullock or at anything else. His eyes were shut tight. "Solomon?"

Solomon shook his head slowly back and forth. Bullock stepped closer, noticing his clothes scattered here and there on the floor, as if they had fallen off while Solomon was walking around the room. His shirt was by the bed, as muddy as Solomon himself. "Solomon, look at yourself," he said again. "This isn't you . . ." As he spoke, he reached down and picked the shirt up off the floor, and then he saw that the stains weren't mud. He took the shirt to the table where Solomon wrote his letters and lit the lamp. The lamp turned the room orange, and even as the match struck, he saw it was blood.

Bullock looked into the corner again, and saw the blood there too. It was all over Solomon's face, caked in his hair and hands and in the hair of his body. He got closer and studied his partner's head. It had to be a head wound, blood didn't flow uphill. He couldn't see the opening, though. "Solomon," he said slowly, "where are you hurt?"

Solomon opened his eyes, but not to look at anything in that room. From the expression on his face, Bullock half expected to hear him invent a new language, but when he finally spoke it sounded reasonable. Particularly coming from a man sitting naked and blood-covered on the floor at five o'clock in the morning.

"Something unspeakable has happened," he said. Bullock sat down and waited. In the history of their partnership, Solomon had never used the word "unspeakable" except as it referred to money. As in, "This merchandise, sir, is an
unspeakable
aberration of our contract, and we hereby refuse delivery."

That's what it was,
unspeakable
meant Solomon would not accept delivery.

"Unspeakable," he said again.

"What?" Bullock said. He had visions of drunk miners vandalizing the new kiln.

Solomon stared into the wall, seeing the unspeakable. Bullock took his partner's shoulder in his hand and shook it. Solomon's head bounced, like a man asleep in a stagecoach. When Bullock had stopped, Solomon said, "There are pieces of Ci-an all over the floor."

Bullock closed his eyes. "You been to the opium dens," he said. "Seen things that weren't there." Solomon shook his head slowly, back and forth. "There isn't a Cheyenne in three hundred miles," Bullock said.

"She's cut to pieces," Solomon said.

"Where?"

"Chinatown," he said.

"What in the world, Solomon?" Bullock said. "What in the world are you doing in Chinatown?"