Paradise Sky

“This is a real nice town,” Cullen said from the back of the wagon. “If it was to catch on fire.”

We had the cover rolled back now, and Cullen and the three China girls was sitting back there like frogs on a log. Wow was clucking at the horses as they plodded through the mud. I rode Satan closer to the wagon. “Don’t you know they’re glad to see two coloreds and some China girls?” I said.

“I don’t know that old woman is glad to see anybody,” Cullen said.

We passed a building on a hill marked as a Congregational church. There was ragged, crooked stairs that climbed up to it. On a kind of porch, I could see what appeared to be a small buffalo, but as we passed I seen it was someone under a buffalo robe, having passed out there either from exhaustion or too much rotgut whiskey. We rolled past a place called the Gem Theater, which was two stories high and not a bad-looking building.

Now, for us colored and China folk, the only place we could go was somewhere on the edge of town, which is how it always was. It was a thing that caused a boiling anger in me and in some ways made me wish I had stayed with the army. We was about finding that place when a man with a tree limb under one arm for a crutch, the skin on his head peeled back from a probable attempt at scalping, limped out from between two buildings and nearly got hit by the horses hauling the wagon. Wow pulled them up, and the fellow put the spy on me so hard I could almost feel his eyes crawling under my skin. His jaw was broke on the left side, and the bone had heaped up there like a snake coiled under leaves. His skin was burned and puckered along the same side of his face, and the other side was a series of ridges made by scars, most likely carved there by a knife. There wasn’t no way to know how he might have looked once, and I felt sorry for him. He not only had that face and a limp, his clothes looked to have been taken off a smaller man than himself. They was wore through with holes, and one of his boots had a flapping heel. He made it across the street with some effort and hobbled between the buildings and out of sight. Wow clucked to the horses and continued.

I seen a place called the Big Horn Store and ragged buildings that served this or that, mostly whiskey, and finally we come to a place that was somewhat cleaner and more organized. This was the Chinaman section of town. The air had a smoky aroma and a peculiar nose-twitching scent that I later learned was opium, and all this was hitting us as we parked in a yard where we was charged a bit of money for currying the horses and storing the wagon. It was a considerable bite in the loot me and Cullen had laid by, so it struck me we was going to have to find work, and pretty damn quick. I still had enough for a meal, and there was a chop suey place near us, but the idea of eating there made me nervous.

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, Ma

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 ma

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.