Текст книги "Paradise Sky"

Автор книги: Joe R. Lansdale

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I said to Wow, “That China fellow that cooked a man in that stew we ate—that ain’t regular with the China folk, is it?”

“He was a savage. Been around whites too long,” she said.

“Haven’t we all?” I said.

“Yeah, but he took it to heart,” Wow said. “And he cooked the meat too long.”

When we got ourselves over to the chop suey house, it took about five minutes before all the women, including Wow, discovered they could have jobs as whores out back of the place or as someone who served up the food. It seemed there had been an angry customer the night before, a white fellow, and he had got into the opium, mixed it with whiskey, and had gone wild with a bowie knife, killing off about a quarter of the whores. He was took out and hanged by a couple of white boys who had been waiting in line for their turn, but in the end it was a rough way for there to be a job opening.

But that was the case, and the girls took it. Wow was the only one said she was going to work at the chop suey house, not the bedding, at least for as long as she could afford it. As for Wing Ding, or whatever the peg-leg China girl’s name was, she found in Deadwood she was worth more than back at Ransack. Here there was plenty of men that was missing limbs and eyes and such, and they liked the camaraderie of someone they felt was more an equal.

Anyway, we settled in there, and after a day or two of asking around, I got a job at one of the saloons, Mann’s No. 10. Cullen got a job driving a honey wagon, which he’d pull up to houses and businesses, go in and empty the slop jars and such into it. It was nasty labor, but it paid all right, cause no one else wanted to do it, including me. Swamping at the saloon was bad enough, emptying spittoons and mopping out vomit and blood and whatever was wet on the floors, but driving a wagon full of shit wasn’t something I wanted even part-time.

14

Me and Cullen took to living in the China quarters. We was accepted there well enough. There was a few other colored spotted here and there, some with placer-mine claims. Any of them that had a mine wasn’t friendly, as they had this feeling anyone that spoke to them or associated with them might be claim jumpers. In truth, that was often the case.

We had a small room in the center of the China folk, and we locked and bolted it up like we had the crown jewels in there, but we didn’t actually keep much stored for fear someone would decide they needed it. Locks are for honest people, when you get right down to it, and the thing about Deadwood was, it was a collection of some of the meanest, orneriest, and most thieving son of a bitches that ever stood on this earth. It wouldn’t have surprised me to come in after a day of swamping to discover our entire shack had been stolen.

The room was tight but large enough for us to lay out bedrolls at night. We had two chairs, which we had to stack together and hang on nails on the wall when we wasn’t using them. We had a board that swung down on chains for an eating and writing table, and we had a kerosene lamp hung on a nail.

The walls was double-planked and filled with all manner of junk to make them firm. I found one of the boards would peel back, and I pulled out and threw away the junk that was in there and took to wrapping my Winchester and a few odds and ends in a blanket and stuffing them behind the wall. Like most men in town, I toted my money and pistols with me—the LeMat and the Colt, anyway. The service revolver I kept back in that stash with my Winchester. When I put the board up and pushed the loose nail back in place, you couldn’t tell it wasn’t a proper part of the wall. Cullen also had a few goods he kept in there. It wasn’t a cheerful place.

You woke and slept to the smell of food cooking. China folk was always cooking, feeding miners at all hours. It was nice to wake or bed down to those smells, though when you didn’t have the coin to buy a bite to eat, it could also be depressing. Cullen and me had full run of the whores we had brought with us, as they considered it lifetime payment for what we had done to save them, but in time I drifted away from that, except for the now-and-again occasion. I didn’t like them thinking they owed me nothing, especially their bodies, for what we’d done.

Cullen found he could live with that situation, and he not only partook of their joys but also soon came to have quite an affection for Wow in particular. I could see how that could come about, and had he not moved in on her, I might have. She was a little dumpling of a woman with a head that belonged on a broad-shouldered six-footer and a face made for going away, but inside that head was some real brains and personality. She had a smile that could make her seem right pretty as compared to others who was fair of features but dull of spirit, and vain to boot.

Wasn’t long before they was a couple, and she didn’t go back to whoring. She kept slinging that chop suey.

Time passed from summer into fall, and that’s when I decided that I’d carry on as a swamper, but as a sideline, I was going to become a ratter. This, however, turned out to be a job with some competition.

Deadwood was prone to a horde of vermin, and sometimes at night, men, and women, too, would sit on their porches with a lantern lit and watch rats run along the edges of the street. This led to a number of low-caliber rifles being used to pop them, and in the act of that at least three people, two men and one woman, had died in the practice of rat tapping, as it was called by some. A few small dogs and cats had met their demise in much the same fashion.

Rat tapping and rat trapping also jobbed up a mess of young boys who was paid by the pound of dead rats brought to the general store in tow sacks. The bags was weighed up, same as gold nuggets, and the boys was paid off, sometimes in penny candy. This led to a clutch of the little heathens running around at night with two-by-fours whacking at rats and causing a general disturbance. But they was less of a worry than the rats themselves.

Them critters scuttled about in squeaking, sniffing, scratching, biting hordes. They came at night and hustled along with great excitement. They’d climb right up on you if you had a crumb on your shirt or a spill of beer on your pants. We even had them come directly into the saloon through the open doors, as if they was there to belly up at the bar and order a beer. They was bold, I tell you. The working girls in them places would scream, and so would some of the men, and then the revolvers was drawn, and rats was shot, or shot at; the quicker ones scampered to safety while the patrons ducked and hoped they didn’t catch a round of hot lead.

Night I decided to be a ratter was the same night I was at the Gem Theater, my job having expanded from Mann’s No. 10 during the days to the Gem at night. It was a busy place, what with troupes of Shakespearean actors, recitations of this and that, singing groups, jugglers, acrobats, and magicians. They all came through Deadwood, and the best of them usually ended up at the Gem Theater, which is not to say that some nights the entertainment there wasn’t of a more unprofessional nature. It frequently was, and that’s the case concerning the night I’m talking about.

I was emptying spittoons, and a fellow come down the aisle during an act, striding toward the stage, where a woman was howling like a wolf over a deer corpse, this being some of that less professional entertainment I mentioned. All of her bellowing was done to the numbing tinkle of bad piano; it couldn’t have been no worse if the player was playing with his toes.

This man coming down the aisle had a pistol, and he started firing off shots at the piano player. I could understand this, as that was some racket that fellow was putting out, and combined with the woman’s hollering, I could see how a fellow might fly off his bean. But unfortunately for the music world, it turned out the piano player was a better shot than the other. He pulled a little gun and popped a shot at him and laid him on the floor, leaking blood. We all gathered around the shot man, who said, “That singer is my wife. She run off with that goddamn piano player.”

By then the piano man had come over and was standing with the rest of us over the dying man. His gun was taken from him by a big bruiser who served as a bouncer for the theater, and a heavy hand was laid on his shoulder.

The dying man said, “I am dying. There’s a cloud settling over me. I chased them here, and I’ve been undone. But boys, you got to get a preacher and make this cad marry her, and now, over my dead body. You got to promise me that.”

He talked just like that, I do not kid, and the men around him started nodding, and promises was made. When the old boy died, which was pretty quick after that, a preacher was brought in, and the howling woman was hustled over in her little feathered outfit, and her and that piano player was married right away, for what it was worth. When that was done, the dead man was laid out on a table, his hat was put on his chest, and a wad of dark cloth was stuck in his wound to stop the leaking. The bullet hadn’t gone out the other side of him, so it wasn’t as messy as you might think.

The preacher said some words over him, and his bravery was attested to, though the piano player made a few grumpy sounds during this. The preacher went on and on, extolling the virtues of this fellow who he had never met. You would have thought they’d grown up together and had spent many a night on the trail and had fought a grizzly bear to death in tandem, the two of them having only pocketknives and each other’s asses to ride all the way down the mountainside. It was a preaching to beat all preachings. A few men was sniffling, and there was a couple who had gone beyond that and was right-out blubbering. I was a little sick to my stomach.

When this finally got over and we could put our hats back on, the dead man was given to what passed as the town undertaker, and the body, supported by four volunteers, was carted out.

I mention all this to give you the tone of the place and to get back to the bouncer, who was a husky white Southern boy; a redhead with a bad attitude. He come by me carrying that piano player’s gun, shoved me with a shoulder, saying, “Out of the way, boy.”

I had a spittoon in my hand, and I had on heavy gloves I was using to hold the lip of it, and I brought it around and clocked him. He was lucky I had already emptied it and was returning it or he would have been covered in tobacco spittings. He dropped so fast I figured him dead, as only the week before I seen a man throw a beer glass and kill a fellow. They was going to hang the glass tosser, but he said he had to pee, and they let him go out back. He was never seen again. Such was the vigilant law enforcement in Deadwood.

A crowd gathered around the bouncer—Red, as he was known—and I felt a little better when he rolled on his side and spat out blood. Soon a stout man come shoving through the crowd. I recognized him right off as Al Swearengen, the owner of the place and my employer.

“I seen what you done,” he said, “and it was a good whack.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I put my full arm into it.”

“Listen, put that down, come over to the office, and see me.”

I put the spittoon down and followed him into a very nice office with ornate furniture and a painting of a naked woman on the wall doing something with a swan. He said, “Take a chair there.”

I took a chair in front of his desk. I studied the girl and the swan. She had one leg halfway wrapped around it, and the swan was looking back at her. I couldn’t figure if he was surprised by the leg wrap or if he was somehow in charge.

Swearengen gathered his hands together, made a steeple of his fingers. He was a man that would look oily fresh from the bath. His hair had enough grease on it a small moth had got hung up in it. I started to point it out, then decided not to. Swearengen pursed his lips as if in thought. I could tell right off he was the kind of man that would try and give you goat shit and tell you it was raisins.

“Now, listen here,” he said. “Red, he’s a pocketer.”

“What?”

“He steals from me.”

“Oh.”

“I need a new bouncer, and a man your size might be just the ticket. Red, he’s done here. I was trying to decide if I was going to fire him or have him whipped. I’ll count that spittoon as a licking, and when he wakes up, I’ll kick his ass free. So the job is yours.”

“Well, sir, I don’t know.”

“Look at it this way,” he said. “Red there could press charges.”

“To who?” I said.

“To me,” he said. “I’m the law in this saloon.”

“I see,” I said, and did see, and didn’t like it.

“But you come to work for me as a bouncer instead of a swamper, and I will say he shouldered himself into you on purpose.”

“He did,” I said.

“I know. I would like to have you take the job. Lot of men here are scared of colored.”

“Lot of men here hate colored,” I said. “That ain’t exactly the same thing.”

“You got that working against you, I admit,” he said. “But I pay well.”

He told me what he paid. It was good, but I still had my doubts. I tried another tack.

“I was considering a ratting job,” I said, and I took the tone that there just couldn’t be any profession more glorious and profitable.

He didn’t fall for it, though. I seen a smile work its way across his broad face, and his dark eyes lowered like he’d just realized he had my neck in a noose; no one in their right mind would see a ratting job as a high profession.

“You would in fact be dealing with rats here, but the two-legged kind.”

I didn’t say that I thought he himself might be a prime example. I just sat silent, which is sometimes the best thing to do, as Wow had said.

“Tell you what,” Swearengen said, pursing his lips, looking at the ceiling like he had just called in a favor from the heavens. “I’ll put five dollars a week on top of that offer I made you, like a cherry on a hot pie, on account of you got the colored factor—meaning, of course, you’re putting your balls on the block a little more than someone else might be.”

“You mean someone white,” I said.

“There you have it.”

I studied on that and thought maybe I might be able to still swamp during the day at Mann’s No. 10 and possibly start a ratting career as well, at least part-time. With two jobs and a bag of weighed rats once or twice a week, I could put me together a nest egg that could allow me to move on from Deadwood in a little more style than I might otherwise.

“I’ll take it,” I said.

That’s how I come to bounce at the Gem Theater and realize that Swearengen had maybe fooled me after all. It was good pay, but it was a dangerous job, right up there with kissing rattlesnakes and milking a she-bear’s tits.

I started the next night.

Since winter had set in, I pretty much always carried my LeMat under my coat in its holster, but as bouncer I was allowed to do it open-like. I actually went to carrying both revolvers and tucking the third, the army service revolver, in a pocket inside my coat. I asked Wow to sew leather inside that pocket, and for a reasonable price she did, and then I oiled that leather so if I needed to pull my pistol, it was easy to yank loose. I was told I could carry a shotgun as well, but this seemed like a bad weapon for the work, being as how it could spread out and kill most anything on either side of the intended. I instead took to my loop-cock Winchester, which would be almost as bad if I was to go to firing it with the catch on the loop pushed down. But at least with it, I could take a singular and cautious shot if I chose, and if things called for it I could click the striker into place and open up a line of fire as fast as I could cock it.

As you might expect, the Gem stayed rowdy. Killings was too constant to have any real effect on the people who came there; it was just how things was. The piano player still played, though now he had a wife, and she had come to worry his ear something furious. She no longer sang, having decided marriage made her respectable, which as rumor had it meant she stayed home with a bottle. Her new husband was having to bring in extra income by working longer shifts, which was no treat to my ear as far as I was concerned. If anything, his playing had gotten worse, and had turned angry.

There was seldom a night at the Gem that I didn’t have to ask someone to leave or end up buffaloing them with a blow upside the head with my Winchester barrel or one of my revolvers. It was a living.

But good as that money was, it cost to live in Deadwood, as all the prices was jacked up. Pretty soon I found that I was working nights at the Gem, emptying spittoons at Mann’s No. 10, and on my day off, which was a Sunday, I was ratting a little, but I still wasn’t putting that much away. Now and again Cullen, who had turned into an ace honey-wagon driver and such, would give me an assist with the rats. He, too, had taken on an “associative job,” which meant instead of only driving a wagon that collected night soil, as he preferred to call it, he also had a job where he scraped horse and bull manure off the muddy streets with a large shovel and tossed it in a wagon. All this he took out to a spot where he was paid for it, the buyer having the intent to mix it with ground buffalo bones and turn it into fertilizer. This fertilizer business was owned by a near blind man and a woman who had gnawed her teeth down to the black gums. They smelled near as strong as their product and was constantly wearing it in its fresher state on their clothes and shoes.

One Sunday night after hitting drunks in the head, I went ratting. Cullen wasn’t with me this night, having decided to stay in bed with Wow at the whorehouse, which was most certainly a better decision; fact was, he had moved in with her, leaving me the luxury of more room.

But the bull’s-eye of the matter was, I was about my ratting. I had a heavy bat made of hickory for dispatching the little boogers and was aiming for a three-bag night. But two things happened, both of them life-changing events.

You see, the best rat time was just as the cold winter darkness was coming in over the hills, settling down on Deadwood like a black sack. Lights would get lit, and the street would have a glow, and you would see the rats in rapid march, moving down the byways in search of food and mischief. They was so thick in their packs and so determined to be about their business it was easy to put the crack on them, shove their bodies into a sack to be weighed the next morning at the general store.

I was leaning on the bat, watching them rats starting to stream out of the shacks and such. They was making a thick grouping toward the general store, which is where a large portion of the goods they liked best was kept—the same goods everyone else liked but preferred not to share with the rats. I was about to step out of the shadows, where I was hid between two buildings built so close together there was only enough room for me to stand sideways, and then I paused as I saw a peculiar sight.

It was a young woman, and in the moonlight I could tell she was dark-skinned, though I couldn’t say right then and there she was colored or Mexican or some other blend of the races. She was tall for a woman, and lean. She had a great head of dark hair tied back and it fell behind her shoulders like night tumbling over a mountainside. And I tell you, for me, it was kind of a landslide, cause it was like that hair and that woman fell all over me, knocked me for a loop, and cracked my head. My God, she was something.

She was at the head of the line of rats, knowing, like me, where they was going, but she was a better thinker. She had a large bag held open by a wooden frame. It must have had a mouth on it three feet wide, and there was a stick going into it at the mouth. She was softly playing a little flute. It was like the rats was being called by it, cause they started to come faster and faster, filing into that bag like fish swimming into a tunnel.

When the mouth of the bag was so clogged with rats they was standing on top of one another, trying to force their way in, she all of a sudden held the flute to her side, and with the other hand snapped up the stick, which somehow pulled the bag together. The bag wiggled and squeaked.

I stood there flummoxed. She shoved that bag aside, and a mound of rats humped and squealed past and over her feet in a black boil of rodent meat and moved on. She didn’t move a muscle, unlike the dance-hall girls, who when frightened by a rat or mouse could leap from the floor to the bar and even jump up and grab hold of the chandeliers and other light fixtures that hung in the various saloons about town.

Well, I seen then that there was three other of them bags next to her, and she shoved that stick into the mouth of one and put it in place quick as you could snap your fingers. And what happened but it began to fill up with rats, too. Pretty soon she had four heaving bags of rats.

My next thought was to wonder what she would do with them now, as them bags was big and heavy with them critters, but it was then that I seen an old white woman, pale as the moon, with a bonnet on her head, come along leading a mule that was dragging a sled over the mud. The young, darker woman and the white woman worked together to heap the rats onto the sled, then the older woman rolled the bags on their sides and went to work with a big stick, whacking them furiously, which calmed the rats pretty quick. Next they got on the sled themselves with their bags of rats, and the old woman took the lines and clucked her tongue at the mule, and away they trotted.

I let them go on a piece before I stepped out in the road and followed. I walked along by the buildings so I was in shadow and was surprised to see a match flare. My pistol found its way into my hand.

There in the light, as surprised to eyeball me as I was him, was that man I had seen our first day in Deadwood, the one with the scalped head, burned face, and the stick he used for support. The way he glared at me went into me like an arrow.

We stood there staring at one another so long you would have thought we was long-lost cousins giving each other the once-over, then he stepped back in the shadows, and the match went out. Reason he had fired it was to light a cigar he had tucked in his pie hole. It glowed with a round red light at the tip. He turned away from me, and I heard him clumping away down the alley on his crutch, which he had now in place of the stick.

I put my pistol away, gathered myself, and tried to catch up with the women and the rats. I followed them until they went up a skid of a road that came to a shack built on a hill. There wasn’t no stairs to it, just that mud-slick path. They drove the mule up and onto a firmer lay of land in front of the shack. There was a big barrel out there, and pretty soon they was lifting the bags off together, toting them to the barrel, and one at a time lowering them in. They let the bags settle in the barrel a while, and when they pulled them out I seen water slosh over the sides. They was about the job of drowning what rats the old woman hadn’t beat to death with a stick.

When they was on the third bag, which was fuller than the others and causing them to struggle a bit to lift it to the lip of the barrel, the younger woman looked down the hill and seen me. She studied me for a moment, half smiled, and waved me up.

I trudged up quickly. When I was within a yard of her, the young woman said, “You watching pretty close. You got a reason?”

I loved her voice. It was clear and as sweet-sounding as the flute she played.

“Curious,” I said.

“Well,” said the old woman. “I’ll tell you this much. It’s the flute.”

“Like in that story,” I said, it being another one of the many I had read when I was with Mr. Loving.

“Pied Piper,” said the old white woman.

The girl giggled a little.

“You’re pulling my leg,” I said.

“All right, the truth,” the old woman said. “It’s a mixture we got that we rub inside the bags. It will pull a rat to it the way a hound will come to a pork chop. That’s all you get, though. The mixture is ours, and it wouldn’t be prudent to share it.”

“I do like the flute, though,” I said.

“We like to think it helps matters,” said the old white woman. She gave me an examination up and down, said, “You going to watch, or you going to help? Or is all of chivalry dead?”

“I’ll help,” I said. I lifted the last bag into the barrel of water, and admit freely my skin crawled a little when them vermin squeaked their last right before going under.

“Now, you ain’t going to get no money,” said the old woman.

“That’s all right,” I said. “I’m just lending a hand.”

I was looking over that young woman. She took my breath away. She was a fine mixture of races, with dusky skin and black hair that managed to be thick and smooth at the same time. She had fine, full lips and a slightly wide nose, and her eyes were like wet, shiny holes in the sky—at least that’s how they looked with only the moonlight to shine them up. She wore a long dress that I figured was blue, though that was guesswork in the moon shadows, and the way she moved was light as an Apache, and it was then that I thought maybe she was part Indian as well, the way her forehead was, the way her eyes was spaced. She was everything that was fine and beautiful in anybody, far as I was concerned, and I won’t lie or exaggerate one inch when I say the sight of her made me feel as if I might swoon. In that moment, like in all those romantic novels that Mr. Loving made fun of, for me it was love at first sight.

“You going to look at that girl or you going to finish with these rats?” said the old woman.

Finishing meant pulling that bag of dead vermin out of the barrel, stacking it back on the sled with the others.

“Come morning we’ll weigh them up,” said the girl. “I see you again, I’ll buy you a stick of penny peppermint candy.”

“My name is Nat Love. And I wouldn’t mind a bite of peppermint.”

“Well, my name is Win Finn,” she said, “and this is Madame Finn.”

“Formerly of the Finns of Georgia,” said the old woman. “But after the war we wasn’t much of anything besides broke and tuckered out.”

“They burned the place down where we lived,” said Win.

“You mean the Yankees?” I said.

“That would be them,” Madame Finn said.

“I have taken the name of the Finn family,” Win said. “But don’t entertain the idea I took it as a slave girl takes a name.”

“Course not. Lincoln freed the slaves,” I said.

“There’s no dearer person to me than Madame Finn,” said Win. “And that includes the poor deceased and magnificent Mr. Lincoln.”

This led to small talk about the rat-drowning barrel, and finally some other kinds of talk, where I gave them a bit of a rundown about myself, leaving out some of the less flattering points, like having to run off over seeing a white woman’s butt. Also, I didn’t mention I was a deserter, but I did say I had been in the army. It was really more than I should have said, I guess, but something about the two led me to talk. They talked, too. We got on the war for a while, and I said something or another about Lincoln, and that got the old lady stirred.

“And a good thing it was he freed the slaves,” she said. “It was a bad thing all around, that business, and I always said so. Not like it mattered to anyone about my opinion, though. Not when there was cotton to be brought in and my family wanted to sit on the veranda and watch it picked. When the war was over, it was just me and this little girl, her mother having died and her father being my own husband.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Madame Finn. “Oh.”

“My mother was a slave that was part Cherokee,” said Win. “She was bought from Cherokee slavers.”

“She was comely,” said Madame Finn, “I will give her that, and I don’t blame her for my husband’s transgressions. She didn’t have any choice in the matter. But look what it wrought—this lovely child. Like a daughter to me. Look here, Ears, tie those rats down, damn it. I don’t want them toppling off the sled when we take them down in the morning. Make sure the knots are as secure as the Gordian Knot.”

When I was finished tightening the bags down, Madame said, “You can go now.”

“Okay,” I said, but I didn’t move and just kept looking at Win. I think Win was amused by me, mostly, and kept giving me a going-over in the manner of suddenly seeing a dog strike a match and light a cigar for itself.

“I said you can go now, Ears,” Madame said.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and I started down the hill, but paused and looked back up. I said, “Miss Win Finn, will I see you again?”

She smiled, and the moonlight lay on her teeth and made them shine. “Our paths could cross,” she said.

Just those words, simple as they was, put a fire in my heart. I worked my way on back to the main street of Deadwood, feeling light and free as a storm-blown feather.