Paradise Sky

“I stashed my goods here and went strolling about, looking for a friend I know. I’m supposed to stay with him, but this place is like a rat maze. I was about to get my bag and find a tree to sleep under when those ruffians came along.”

I led him to my room, which, as I said, had become all mine since Cullen had moved in with Wow. Wild Bill pulled his bottle from the carpetbag, took a swig, offered me a jolt, but I declined with good nature, saying I didn’t have the stomach for it.

“Suit yourself, Nat,” Wild Bill said and swigged some more, saying, “I am always prepared for snakebite this way. I figure one bites me, I already got the cure in me or enough liquor to kill the snake.”

“You ain’t got no place, Bill, you’re welcome to fetch up here for a few days, seeing how we’ve rode the tiger together.”

“I thank you for that,” he said, “but a friend of mine, one dandified fine son of a bitch name of Charlie Utter, has laid me out a campsite. Only thing is I have no idea where, but I will catch up with him tomorrow. So I may take you up on that offer for one night. I came here pla

“Mining is nasty work,” I said.

“Yes, and though there can be a reward of considerable size, it strikes me as easier to take your share at a card table after the miners have cashed their gold into chips. That way they do the work, and I spend the money.”

“For me, no cards and no mining.”

“What else is there in Deadwood, Nat?”

I told him about my jobs, and because I couldn’t help myself, I told him about Win, how I had met her and how I was smitten with her, and that so far the only thing we had done together was drown rats.

“It’s a start,” Wild Bill said. “I suggest you lay about a plan to meet up with her and woo her, but leave the rats out of it. I also suggest you make a move to get out of the bouncing and the spit-emptying business. A woman needs something more respectable. Life is short. I myself was recently married to Agnes Lake, a retired circus performer.”

“I’ve heard of her,” I said.

“I was charmed by her, for she is quite flexible,” Wild Bill said, “and she owns the circus, having inherited it from a former husband who was murdered in what I believe was a business dispute. I might add his will left her with a considerable bankroll as well as horses, tents, and elephants. But I find that even a good woman gets on my nerves after a time, even a flexible one, and I told her I was off to make my fortune. Part of my departure might be due to the fact that despite her profession she is quite the lady and wouldn’t suck a dick if it were coated in peppermint oil. She was far more interesting as a performer and willing to show me her stretching abilities prior to marriage, but that marriage license put the respectable brand on her, and damn if she isn’t trying to live up to it. Her retirement put a damper on my ardor. Did I mention she could put both legs behind her head?”

“You said she was flexible.”

“Well, she is a lady and my wife, and I don’t want any of that misunderstood,” he said, “but outside of the flexibility and the money, she is one boring bitch. Shit, I am already drunk. It must be from not eating. You got anything to chew on, Nat?”

I had a strip of moldy jerky, enough for us both. I cut it in two with a pocketknife and gave him half.

“I will never forget this, Nat, though I ask you, unless we were seen and recognized by them that came out on the street, make no truck of what happened tonight. I have a reputation enough without suddenly finding out I have killed some backshooter’s brother, nephew, or asshole buddy. Being a gunman at my age lacks the charm it did at twenty-five.”

“I will keep it tight to myself,” I said, and until this very moment I have. I figure by now it’s a promise without purpose.

Wild Bill drank some more of his snakebite medicine, and when he spoke he became even more theatrical in tone. “You know, I am losing my sight. I shot on instinct alone tonight. I seem to have gotten a fever in my drawers—the French disease—from one of the night ladies, and it has gone to my eyes. I am especially troubled in the dark. Pretty much moon-blind. I waver some days on the value of feminine charms versus the value of my sight. I usually come down on the side of romance, but I can’t help but have a doubt now and then.”

“That eye problem wouldn’t be a thing to be let known,” I said. “Not with your reputation.”

“You’re right,” he said. “I have in recent years become quite a talker. Perhaps even a blowhard, revealing far too much about this and that. But while I’m drunk and laying it out there, I want you to know that in spite of the pleasures of my wife’s bed and her amazing flexibility, due to her decline in those activities I haven’t always been true. In a night of need, and with too much liquor in me, I took an offered enjoyment that was less joyful than one might think and marred by a stink I still smell upon myself after many a bath. I tell you, once she took her pants off, it was like being trapped in a barn with a herd of shitting cows.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” I said.

“God help me, I fucked Calamity Jane. In the midst of it my stupor began to wear thin, and I saw her face really good, and for a brief moment thought I had been so drunk as to mount my own horse. But because I was quick to figure, even in my drunke

I didn’t have a guess, and I told him such. I also had no idea who Calamity Jane was, and I had never known a man so worried about his reputation and yet so prone to soiling it.

“It is because of my upper lip. It hangs over my teeth a bit, and that is why I was called Bill, as in duck bill. I grew the mustache to hide it. I think it works well. What do you think?”

“I think it does,” I said.

“This meat isn’t very good,” he said, referring to the jerky. “But the bugs seem fresh.” He laughed then and went on like that for some while—about this and that, some of it making sense, some not so much—and when the bottle was finished he pulled out another that was half filled with laudanum. He took a couple swigs of that, corked it back up, held the bottle up to the lantern light, said, “That’s it,” and collapsed. He was out for the night.

I blew out the light and tucked myself in, contemplating on the strangeness of the night, and then slept deep, without dreams, the best gunman ever known lying crumpled near me on the floor, a corked bottle of laudanum clutched in his fist.

Next morning when I awoke, Wild Bill and his carpetbag was gone, but he had left a nice hunting knife on Cullen’s former bed, and there was a rough written note on a torn piece of sack paper.

It read:

It’s yours, and I owe you a big favor if you ever need it, Nat. I also believe I may have said some inappropriate things about some women I know, including my wife, and I would oblige you to indulge me and forget what I said. I think I exaggerated Calamity’s aroma, and for that I apologize, though I would not want you to think she was all perfume. Also not saying about my upper lip would be good, too.

Wild Bill

I kept that note for quite some time, though I never showed it around. Over the years, wettings and heat and crawling time took care of it, so now I have only the memory of it. I no longer have the knife. I’m not sure what happened to it.