Paradise Sky

“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 Ma

“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 Ma

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-ski

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 tu

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.