(1986) Deadwood (51 page)

The cook had followed Bullock out of the hotel. "He run that way," she said, pointing north. "Talkin' that Chinese talk as fast as he can." Bullock took Solomon by the arm and led him the other direction, toward jail. Solomon could have been in Boston for all the attention he was paying.

Mrs. Ellsner came out of her bakery, a dozen ladies behind her. Bullock wondered, in the back of his head, what they did inside. There were always a dozen ladies in Mrs. Ellsner's bakery. One of them called to him.

"Is it safe, Sheriff? We heard the shots, but we thought it was only afternoon mischief in the badlands."

"It was an accident," Bullock said. "A Chinese gentleman was shot in the street."

She stood with her hands on her hips, the wife of one of the town's lawyers. He couldn't remember which one, there were half a hundred now, drawn by the legal disputes over ownership of claims. "Mr. Star's luck with the Chinese is very bad," she said.

Seth Bullock touched the brim of his hat. He walked Solomon into the new jail, a frame building next to the flouring mill, and shut the door. There were two chairs and a table inside. He sat Solomon down in one and took the other for himself. He stared across the table at his business partner for the better part of a minute.

Solomon was someplace else.

"You shot the same Chinese twice now," he said, sounding reasonable. Bullock always took a reasonable tone with those he arrested. Solomon nodded and looked at the ceiling. "I may not be able to call it an accident this time."

Solomon brought himself back to the here and now. "It wasn't an accident ever."

"This Chinese—"

"Tan You-chau," Solomon said.

Bullock was surprised that he knew the name. The names white men knew for the Chinese were the names they'd given them. Like Ding Dong and Hop Lee and Heap Wash. "One's like another," he said.

Solomon looked at the ceiling.

"I got to put you in jail," Bullock said. "The whole town's watching this now." Solomon was someplace else. Bullock made a fist and brought it down on the table.

Solomon never looked. "We trusted each other a long time," Bullock said, reasonable again. "If you told me what this grudge was, I could fix it. Did this Chinese put a curse on you?"

Solomon never looked.

Bullock took the keys out of the drawer in the table and stood up. "I got to put you in jail," he said again. "You see where this has led?" When Solomon didn't answer, Bullock unlocked the door and held it open.

"I'll locate the Chinese and see how bad he's hurt," he said. Solomon walked into the cell and sat on the cot against the wall. There was a faded yellow chamber pot in the cell, a dirt floor, iron grating across the window. Bullock shut the door and locked it. He looked at Solomon and thought of the business. "I should of done this the first time," he said. "For your own good, I should of locked you up."

Solomon never looked.

Bullock went back to his hotel. He found Lucretia in the kitchen and told her to make sure Solomon was fed. "Anything he wants," he said.

Bullock went into Chinatown, looking for the injured Chinese. The place stunk a hundred ways the rest of the town didn't. It was mostly the small animals strung from the windows, he thought, because the Chinese themselves, except for the whores, only smelled dusty.

He pounded on the door of Tan's theater, but there was no answer. He heard movements inside and went to the back. There were three girls there, lined up to use the bathroom. They opened their eyes wide when he asked for Tan, they shook their heads. He imitated a man being shot, they moved farther away. When he turned his back, he heard them giggle.

He crossed the street to the death house, but the old man there was blind, and stood in the doorway, looking over his head, saying, "No, no, no." Bullock imagined how big the old man thought white men were.

He noticed blood in the doorway.

He went back into town hopeful. If the Chinese refused to make a complaint or die, there was no case against Solomon.

He found Solomon on the cot and decided to leave him there for the night. "I found the Chinese," he said. Solomon looked out the window. "He's in their death house."

"He's not dead." Solomon sounded flat and strange.

"I never said he was dead. I said he was in the death house."

"When he's dead, I'll know."

"They'll probably hang you, is how."

Solomon went to the window he had been looking out. Bullock said, "John Manning's in Rapid City till tomorrow, but he comes back and finds the Chinese dead, he'll take it serious. He takes it all serious because sheriffing is all he does."

Solomon gazed out the window; there was no answer. And when Bullock checked back on him, after supper, Solomon was gone.

Solomon Star took the kerosene from the office—Bullock would find the jug they kept it in later, in the ashes of Chinatown— and splashed each side of the death house, feeling the coolness when it dripped onto his fingers.

He lit it with a match and then walked slowly to the Whitewood Creek, waded across it, and sat on the far bank to watch. The fire was slower than he had imagined—for several minutes there was only the blue kerosene flame, no smoke that he could see—but then it took, growing up one side of the death house, turning orange as it reached the roof.

It was in the roof before it was noticed, and Solomon sat still, listening to the screams in Chinatown, trying to pick out the one from inside the house.

Once it turned orange, the fire took the building in five minutes. Solomon watched a piece of the roof blow off and climb into the night sky; he realized he could not remember what her face looked like.

He stood up when he knew the Chinese was dead and wiped off the back of his pants. He wondered if he ought to return to the jail, or if he should sleep in his own bed. He thought of her again; the face was gone.

In a few minutes the first volunteers of the Deadwood Pioneer Hook and Ladder Company No. i appeared, wearing protective hats. But the fire laddies were helpless and soon left the street. There was a town ordinance requiring every building to keep a full barrel of water and two fire buckets, along with a ladder able to reach the roof. The Chinese never obeyed the white men's laws, though. They were afraid white men's laws led to white men's taxes.

Solomon watched another piece of the roof blow into the sky and carry across the street, then blow south, toward the town proper.

The gulch was naturally windy, and the heat from the death house created drafts of its own. The piece of roof dropped somewhere in the town and disappeared. More of the roof rose into the night as soon as the other was gone, and danced across the sky onto the roof of Tan's theater. In a few moments there was fire there too. It started at the top and spread slowly. The heat from the death house backed Solomon away from the creek. The fire grew, and he saw its reflection in the water.

Chinese ran out of the theater. Solomon recognized most of the girls, there wasn't the same turnover of upstairs girls here as in the badlands. It occurred to him there was no place else for the Chinese to go.

Tan's nephews came out of the door, then the old blind man who played the piano. He stood in the street, orange in the flames, and held his face up to the heat as if he could see it. He was crying Chinese words; the language lent itself to sorrow.

Solomon tried to remember how Ci-an's words had sounded, but they would not come back to him now either. He saw it was a kind of forgiveness. The fire spread to the building next to the theater. Children came from that house, some of them crying, and clung to one another in the street.

Solomon caught a flicker of light from the south, and presently there were shouts from there too. As he watched, the light grew and spread, and the wind grew with it, and carried the cries of the Chinese into the darkness of the Hills.

In a few minutes there was an explosion that shook the ground. It would be reported later that the fire had caught on the roof of Mrs. Ellsner's bakery and moved from there to Jensen and Bliss's Hardware, where it found eight kegs of black powder, which blew pieces of the fire and pieces of the store all over Dead wood.

Solomon moved farther away from the creek, back into the hills. Chinatown was empty now, the population running into town proper, and then beyond into the hills at the southeast end of town. The light from the fires lit faces in a different way from the sun, and showed truer feelings.

Solomon had never noticed a bleakness in the Chinese before, and it came to him gradually, as he stood alone on the hill, that he was the cause. He watched the houses disappear, clear to the southern limits of town; he heard cries in the wind.

It seemed to him that the wind gathered the cries, each in its place, and carried them to him, there on the hill, and then beyond, dropping them one by one, somewhere deep in the Hills, where they would never be claimed.

He knew then what he had done, and what he had lost; and one of the cries was his own.

The window in Mrs. Langrishe's attic faced west, away from town. Charley did not see or sense the fire until the eight kegs of giant powder at Jensen and Bliss's went up, shaking every building in the gulch.

His peeder was knee-deep in Mrs. Langrishe at the time. Her eyes were closed under him, and her fingernails were fastened into his back. In a moment she would say, "Oh, Charley," and pull his mouth down to her breasts, and then she would smile at him, looking down somehow even though she was underneath, and watch until he spent himself.

Mrs. Langrishe had one way she liked to have intercourse and about two hundred ways she didn't. There wasn't an inch of bend in her. Charley was with her one night a week, always in this same dead room; and sometimes he thought of Matilda, who had divorced him and married a politician, and sometimes he thought of Lurline, who had married Handsome Banjo Dick Brown.

And he thought of Agnes, here and everywhere else.

Mrs. Langrishe said, "Oh, Charley," and a moment later the explosion shook the house. The davenport moved, the window rattled, and the trees in the hills suddenly showed in the light of the blast.

It was the most interesting thing that had ever happened to Charley in Mrs. Langrishe's attic, and he stood up and went to the window, ignoring the abandonment in her face. There was another explosion, softer than the first, and it turned the yard yellow and shadowy.

"What is it?" she said. The abandonment was in her voice. The yard went black and he heard her feet behind him on the floor.

"Fire," he said.

"They'll put it out," she said. "They always do."

He smiled in the dark. "When this fire quits," he said, "it's because it's finished burning." He found his pants on the floor, dressed, and then stood on the arm of the davenport and pushed open a small door to the roof.

The door was hinged on the outside, and swung back flat against the shingles. Charley put a hand on each side of the opening and pulled himself up until he was sitting on the roof, his legs hanging into the attic. The wind blew the hair off his neck and shoulders and he could feel the heat of the fire on his face.

There were two main fires, one in the town proper and one in Chinatown. Then there were smaller fires, all the way up into the hills. It would burn till it was finished burning. "What is it?" she said, beneath him.

"The end of Dead wood," he said.

He heard her getting dressed, and then her hands were on his legs. "Help me up."

He leaned back into the dark and put his hands under her arms, and then lifted her out onto the roof. She looked old in the yellow glow.

The fire moved up Main Street, taking everything in its way. There were flames thirty feet over the theater, and she watched the walls fold in on themselves and disappear. "Jack will be furious," she said, and when he looked she was smiling.

The wind blew the fires south and east, away from her house. They watched the shacks and jerry-built pine houses disappear, sometimes in only a few seconds. They listened to the cries.

She put her hand on his knee and rubbed her way up his pants leg. Charley paid no attention. The wind had changed—it belonged to the fire now—and blew west into the tents and shacks on the poor side of the hill south of town.

"They'll build it back," she said. One hand had found his peeder, the other was unbuttoning his pants. He shook his head, but didn't stop her undressing him. "It might be all to the best," she said, "to burn it down and start over."

The fire in Chinatown moved south, uphill, taking the badlands. The fire south of town moved uphill too. He tried to find the Bottle Fiend's house, remembering he had told him once, a long time ago, that this would happen.

"What are you looking for, off in the hills?" she said. "The sport's right in front of you." She popped his buttons and pulled his peeder out into the night air.

The Bottle Fiend's home was at the edge of civilization, the last place built before they gave up having the whole hill. Charley didn't think the fire had come to it yet, but he'd lost the road and the trees he'd always used to find it, and could only guess.

"They're building with bricks in Rapid City," she said. "Bullock and Star's got kilns, they'll fill the town with brick buildings and it will look like somebody lives here."

Charley stared at her, thinking of the soft-brain, that he'd told him a fire was coming. She held on to his peeder and the fire in the streets played in her eyes. "It always looked like people lived here to me," he said.

"Not like they intended to stay," she said. "You might get into the brick business yourself. . ."

"No," he said, "I've done all my business in Deadwood."

She put one hand on the shingle next to him and bent herself at the waist until her lips touched the end of his peeder. He saw the fire had excited her—it wasn't something she did on her own. She kissed him and spoke into his lap. "The place could use the permanence of brick," she said.

Her head moved in his lap and he laid a hand against her neck. He stared again at the fire in the hill, trying to locate the Bottle Fiend's place. "There's nothing to do about it now," she said.