Paradise Sky

Though it was a tight squeeze there with Wow and Cullen, and I felt I was stretching their hospitality, I made no rush to head out again, though I had firmly made up my mind to track down Ruggert and the big Jew and kill them both. I was tempted to do it slowly and in some horrible fashion, and had dreams of tying them down and putting hot coals to the bottoms of their feet and forcing a gun barrel up their ass and firing until the trigger didn’t work no more. Actually, that was just some of the things I considered.

To be honest, my spirit, though not broken, had been twisted considerably. It was a day-to-day measure to regain my piss and vinegar and to think about starting out after them. I remembered that Weasel said he and Golem were to join Ruggert in the Kansas Territory, but that was a long ways off, and they could be any place there, if they went there at all. I decided if they was going to Kansas, Dodge was likely.

I couldn’t presume what Ruggert would have left to do with his life now. He had chased me for some time, and if he reckoned I was done in, and if he had stored some money secretly for himself, he might go from Kansas back to East Texas and take up residence again. I had no idea what the crazy Jew might do. A man who thinks he’s made of mud is not someone with average plans. It was all guesswork. But I was determined to find them. I should have killed that bastard Ruggert when I first realized who he was. Mercy has its limits.

Due to Bronco Bob being a talker, there was questions about things and all that had befallen us. Bronco Bob, having been the one who shot his mouth off in the first place, handled it well, explaining how I was set upon by those fellows, and he and Cullen come along just in time, and then we had to seek Win out and rescue her. He told in detail about how those boys died on account of their own actions and went into great detail about Cullen and his shotgun, having the fellow Cullen shot flying through the air from the blast, which any one of us knew was a lie, knowing full well them shotgun blasts didn’t push, they tore right through you. That was a detail the crowd was willing to let pass. The highlight of his story, and I am certain he told it many times, was my horseback ride with the reins in my teeth, shooting like a madman and hitting what I shot at. My pursuit of the younger one up on the hill became a little windy, and it turned into a glorious shoot-out, and of course it had been no such thing. I had told Bronco Bob exactly what happened up there, but I reckon he figured it sounded too much like murder, which I suppose it was. I never corrected him on his version of events. The part about his own self, and how he was wounded and how bad it was, swelled in the telling, too. Bronco Bob even favored his arm a little to make sure it was known he was well in the fight. He had a way of letting his arm dangle and twisting his mouth in just the right way so you might think the bullet had cut fresh; it gave his story a feeling of truth, and mostly it was true, though the wound had been nothing and was pretty much done with by the time we returned to Deadwood. I have never known a man that wanted to be a hero more than Bronco Bob, and in my eyes he had been one and didn’t even know it. He claimed I had been set upon for my prize money, and as they had taken it and I hadn’t gotten any of it back, the bodies not carrying a coin of it, that was a good enough story. He left Ruggert’s claim that I had stared at his wife’s butt and made advances on her out of the telling, not wishing to give any of the ex-Confederates in our midst any ideas that I might in fact be uppity. Bronco Bob said he was writing a book about it. Deadwood Dick and the Dark Riders of the Black Hills, and What Befell Them. He did, too, some years later, but I’ll come back to that.

Some of the fellows went out there to Split in the Rocks, as it was called, and seen what was left of the bodies, and come back saying Bronco Bob had told it true, even as to where the bodies was. They found bones they figured belonged to Weasel, which they left (ain’t nobody in town had liked him anyway), and come across the marker for Madame. The killings actually gave me a bigger name than I had right after the shooting match, and people took to treating me nicer. This irked me more than being treated like a black animal, because it wasn’t based on my character, just on my ability to kill folks.

The days turned into weeks, and I hadn’t worked a lick and didn’t know how much more I could ask Wow and Cullen to put up with us. I was thinking on this one day when Cullen came up to me, said, “You might think you are a hindrance to us, but you aren’t. You stay long as you want.”

“I appreciate that,” I said. “I believe I will be leaving very soon, but I’d be obliged if Win could stay for a while, at least until I take care of some business.”

“I know what the business is,” he said.

“I’m sure you do.”

“She may stay as long as she likes,” he said. “As long as you would like for her to.”

Well, it wasn’t but a few days later that Cullen figured he had enough to buy him a spot of land with a cabin on it at the edge of the town. The cabin was built of whole logs and split logs, and there was dried-mud patching. It didn’t have no shingles, just an open roof, because the man who owned the property died from eating too many sweet potatoes—that’s what his wife told me—and never got the roof on it. She said she was selling on account of she was going back to Alabama. “I didn’t like my husband much, really,” she said. “And it’s kind of a relief.”

It made me wonder if something other than butter had been on those sweet potatoes.

It was a pretty big place. Me and Cullen roofed it ourselves, though I must admit my side of the roof was a little uneven.

Thinking Ruggert was in Kansas Territory was a high wish, but I felt I had to go there and see. I talked to Win about it, and she listened. Usually, that was all she did, as her willingness to talk, or even play her flute, which I had recovered from the wagon, wasn’t there. I laid out what I intended like she knew what I meant.

When I finished, she turned her head, for she had been eyeballing a corner in our room like it might be a path to glory, and said, “You kill him, Nat. You kill him good.”

I couldn’t have been more startled to discover green manure could be turned to gold.

“I will,” I said.

Then she went through that hole in the wind again, became silent as stone.

A few days before I was to leave, Cullen volunteered to go with me.

“Ain’t no man I’d rather have with me, Cullen. But you got a woman here, and I need you to look after Win best you can, and I will at some point need you to mail me those papers you’re keeping.”

“Wow can do that,” he said. I could tell he was serious about going, but I could also feel he didn’t really want to. He had Wow, and he had a life in Deadwood.

I told him no, I couldn’t do that.

He let out a sigh of relief, and I didn’t blame him.

I rode over to Charlie Utter’s camp, told him I was leaving Deadwood. Charlie shook my hand firmly, and his eyes got wet. He told me they sent that money to Bill’s widow, Agnes, added they hadn’t gotten nothing back from her on the matter, not even a goddamn two-word thank-you note.

“I’d have been happier with ‘Fuck you’ than silence,” he said.

He also afforded how the mail was slow sometimes, and maybe that was the problem, but he didn’t sound sincere about it. He said he was saddened by all that happened to me and Win, and that did sound sincere. He forced some money on me. I didn’t want to take it, but I did. It was well needed and much appreciated.

“I’ll pay you back, Charlie,” I said.

“No, you won’t. Because I won’t take it. It’s yours. Good luck to you, Deadwood Dick. At least you will miss a Black Hills winter. It is a frozen hell of snow and sleet and a wind so sharp it’ll blow up your ass and freeze the turds inside you.”