Little Big Man (47 page)

“The only thing,” I says, “is I wonder that sometimes when walking,
your guns just don’t slip on through and run down your trouser legs.”

“Ah,” says he, “you open the loading gate and catch it onto your pants-tops.”

He was warning up to me through this technical talk, a man generally being fascinated by his own specialty and the tools for it. Bill proceeded to lecture me on the merits of the various means of toting a pistol: silk sash, shoulder holster, hideout rig inside the vest, derringer harness along the underside of the arm, back pockets lined with leather, and so on. He even claimed to know a fellow who carried a small pistol in his crotch, and when cornered he would request to take a leak before dying, open his fly, and fire. The trouble was onetime he got overhasty and shot off his male parts.

I learned an awful lot that afternoon. I had thought I was pretty handy with a gun before reaching K.C., but I was awful raw alongside of Wild Bill Hickok. Of course, I could see he was a fanatic. You had to be, to get so absorbed in talk of holsters and cartridge loads and barrel length and filing down the sear to make a hairtrigger and the technique of tying back the trigger and earing the hammer to fire, etc.,
etc.
He had forgot about that drink and even his suspicions and commenced to call me “partner” and “hoss,” rather than that sinister “friend.”

I got tired after a bit and reminded him we was going to wet our whistles again, and started up, but he says: “Sit down, old hoss, I’ll get them.” And makes for the bar, despite the fact that the saloonkeeper had sometime since returned from the storeroom and could have fetched the bottle over.

One thing that amused me: Wild Bill carried that silk hat of his with him rather than leave it behind. I figured this was the last bit of suspicion he held towards me, that maybe I would swipe that article. Or maybe it was just that he didn’t want to forget and sit upon it when he come back.

Now he had got within six feet of the bar and was already in the process of giving his order, when that drunk I have mentioned at the middle table suddenly reared up, revealing a pistol at the end of the arm that had been crumpled under him, thrusts it purposefully in the direction of Hickok’s tall, broad back, and pulls the trigger. I would estimate the range as fifteen feet. Now this was quick. I mean if you had sneezed you would never have knowed anything happened, for in the next instant the “drunk” was sprawled once again in exactly the same position he had just emerged from, the difference
being that blood was leaking out of a small hole between his eyes, adding to that pool of liquor.

He had fired all right, only his bullet went into the ceiling, for in the time between his rearing up and pulling the trigger, Wild Bill had seen him in the mirror back of the bar, turned, flipped his silk hat into the left hand, revealing the pistol he had carried under it in his right, and killed the man. Then he put the hat upon his head, went over, and inspected the corpse. The other fellows gathered around, and shortly in come Marshal Tom Speers, and Speers says: “Know him, Bill?”

“No,” says Hickok, expelling the empty cartridge and replacing it with a new load. Then he shrugs, gets that bottle from the bar, and joins me again.

Somebody says: “That’s Strawhan’s brother.”

Now I was some agitated by this event, being no stranger to violence but not having looked for it here. I gulped the drink Hickok poured me with his calm hand, and coughed, and says: “The name mean anything to you?”

He shrugs again, sips his whiskey, and his eyes is heavy as though he is going to fall asleep. Finally he answers: “I recall a man of that name in Hays.”

“Have trouble with him?”

“I killed him,” he says. “Now then, about that S & W you carry. It is a handsome weapon, but the shells have a bad habit of erupting and jamming the chambers. I’d lay the piece aside and get me something else: a Colt’s, with the Thuer conversion.…”

Meanwhile, Speers had got two fellows to drag the body out and he says to Wild Bill: “Drop by the station later when you have a minute.”

I reckon the marshal had to make a report. Hickok gives him a little wave of the hand—the left one, of course. I should have known something was up when I seen him carrying that hat in his right, which he reserved absolutely for his gun. Pointing, gesturing, scratching, going for money—think of everything you do with your right hand: he did none of these, but kept it totally free at all times. The one exception was shaking hands, in which case he barely touched your fingers before whipping his back.

Not that afternoon, but later on I asked Wild Bill if he had really suspected that apparent drunk or if he always crossed a room gun in hand.

“I did, indeed,” he answered. “I suspect any man whose gun hand
is out of sight, be he even dead. I am wrong ninety-nine times out of a hundred; but I am right once in that same space, which pays me for my trouble.”

Hickok was a marvelous observer of anything which pertained to killing. He noticed now how I had been shaken by the incident, though otherwise I don’t think he would have recognized me if I had gone off to the outhouse and come back. He was like an Indian in his single-mindedness. For example, he never reacted at all to the quality of the whiskey we was drinking, which was fairly rotten. And later I come to realize that he had talked about General and Mrs. Custer in that apparently interested way only because he suspected me of being out to get him and playing for time. Actually he did not care anything about them or anybody else as persons.

But he could be considerate, if it fell within the area of his obsession. So now he says to me: “It is always harder on a man to watch trouble than to be in it. Best thing for you to do now is go get yourself a woman. Come on, I’ll show you the best place in town.”

He had to stop first at a restaurant and eat a big steak, because he said it was funny, but trouble give him an appetite, but other than for those two references, I never heard Wild Bill mention the shooting of Strawhan’s brother, though in the street and at the restaurant, various individuals who had heard about it congratulated him and others got out of his path in a marked way.

This place he took me to was a dancehall, though by the time we got there it was early evening, for he ate that steak slow and with great relish and afterwards had some pie, and it took so long that I come back to normal, for after all, killing was no novelty to me. So I had some baked ham, for the steak looked mighty tough. The ham was no better, I might add, and I complained to the management, but Hickok seemed to find the grub just perfect.

Then we went to the dancehall, and as I say it was early, with us being the first customers and the girls come straggling out of a door at the back, yawning and stretching for I figure they had just got up after sleeping the day. At the entrance there was a sign reading:
PLEASE CHECK YOUR FIREARMS
, and when we walked past it, a big man in a striped shirt come out and states: “Sorry, fellows, that means what it says.”

Wild Bill just looks at him with his clear blue eyes and says in his quiet voice: “Is Dolly around?”

“You’ll have to check them weapons,” says the other. And then, I
guess because he allowed Wild Bill was an imposing-looking fellow, he explains: “They’ll be all right with me. You see, I put one of these here tags on each piece and write on it who it belongs to.” He goes into his vest pocket undoubtedly to get that tag and pencil, and knowing Wild Bill’s principles, I thought oh my God, there goes another one!

However, just at that moment, a big woman appears from the office. In her forties, heavy-set with a great high bosom, to show the grand divide of which her red satin dress, embroidered with black beading, had been cut low. She had a wealth of black hair piled upon her head and a faint mustache of the same color.

She cries “Billy!” in her bass voice, comes over and hugs Hickok, pushing the breastwork into his waistcoat and planting a fiery kiss on his cheek. Then she tells the bouncer: “Mr. Hickok has the privilege.”

“Hickok!” says he and his face goes to pieces and he makes himself scarce. Which shows you how a reputation worked. That man was a bouncer by trade and done a good job: I later seen him beat up three rough and drunken buffalo hunters with only the help of a middle-sized club. But soon as he heard that magic name, he was beat so far as facing the individual who owned it.

“Who’s your cute little short-armed pal?” the woman asks Bill, and he gets my name for the first time and tells her.

Then Dolly grabs me, smothering my face in her spongy cleavage, and damn if she don’t slide her hands around onto my posteriors and grind and bump her treelike thighs against me. I don’t say it wasn’t somewhat interesting, for she was quite a bit of woman, though it was also rather disquieting as if an aunt got fresh with you, and in addition I had my pride to think of, so I pushed her off.

“Ooo,” says she, making a coy thing of her heavy lips, “he’s a spunky little fox, ain’t he now?”

Hickok says, laughing: “You got a nice girl for him? He’s nervous, you see.” So she calls the women over, and they was a good deal better-grade than you could find on west of there until you got to San Francisco. One or two was right pretty, even, and all was fairly clean-looking and showed no old knife-scars or bad pock-marks. Dolly run a first-rate place, I’ll say that for her.

I looked them over, and some made lewd remarks to me while others acted standoffish and even cold, for as a group they had to appeal to all tastes, but the one I chose wasn’t either forward nor
snotty. She was kind of sad and wistful-looking, in figure short and slight, with dull reddish-brown hair that appeared to have been set to curl but come out rather wispy. Some faint freckles showed in the tender skin underneath her eyes. She wore a red dress that exposed her shoulders and her legs to the knee, and the heels of her slippers was run over so she stood slightly bowlegged.

Don’t sound spicy-looking, do she? Well, she wasn’t. But neither was I in need of a whore at that point. That was Hickok’s idea and not mine; and I’ll tell you when a fellow like him suggests something, you take it under consideration, especially when you have just seen him shoot down a man with such little ceremony.

So not feeling any desire, I chose this here girl as the least desirable when it come to the fleshly, and we danced some to the pounding of a baldheaded man on a tinny piano, who was addressed like all such as the “Professor.” I ain’t much of a dancer, and you wasn’t supposed to be in a place like that, where your partner would shove out her belly and roll it against yours for a minute and then drag you off down the back hall and into her little cubicle or crib from which the expression “crib-girl” derived.

Now that’s what this little gal done hardly had the music commenced, come grinding into me, only she didn’t have no stomach worth the name, and was instead raking me with her sharp hipbones, and being I was skinny too, the last thing it brought to mind was lust. So I pushes her away, meanwhile trying to jig a little in my heavy boots, for the Professor was beating out a lively tune, but she takes this action as indicating that I was raring to head for the crib, and wearily, mechanically, yet with positive force, pulls me down the hall.

Her cubicle had an iron bed in it and a rickety chair that would have collapsed had there been space to do so, for its width consumed the distance between bed and wall, and as to the length of the room, you can gather that from the fact that its door had to swing out into the hall.

She lit a coal-oil lamp on a bracket, and I set upon the bed, being there was no place further to go, and in one movement she shucks her dress, hangs it on a hook, and mother-naked, takes a seat upon my knee.

Now I had knowed she was right young, but not until this moment did I realize to what degree. Her flat little bosom, her slender
flanks and bony knees: she wasn’t just skinny, she was hardly more than a child, which condition her facial rouge had misrepresented.

I asked how old she was.

“Twenty,” says she.

I leaned back to put some distance between our heads. “Go on,” I says.

“Well, eighteen, then.” She lays further into me and begins to work at my collar.

So I dumps her off and stands up, which a wider man could not have managed, and I don’t see how a man of Hickok’s length could have stood erect under that low ceiling.

I guess she was worried I was about to leave, so she assured me in consternation that she knowed how to do everything and anything, and never had a complaint yet.

I says: “All I require at the moment is the truth about your years. I can’t use nothing more at this time, on account of I believe I picked up a dose the other day, but I’ll be glad to give you the dollar anyway.”

“Dollar?” she cries indignantly, and all thoughts I had of her basically innocent and wistful ways had to change. “You cheap bastard, it costs five times that to let your pants down in this house.”

“Well,” I says, “damn me if I would pay five dollars to top the Queen of Russia.” I was amused by her anger. Them freckles lit up and her hair went redder. She reminded me of someone. “No, indeed,” I goes on, “let alone some skinny kid of fourteen.”

“I’ll be seventeen any day now,” she says. “And you get on out of here with your dollar or I’ll call Harry and have him throw you out.”

I was took by something in this little gal. Still not lust, for I have always preferred them seasoned and sturdy for that purpose. I guess I just liked her spunk.

I says: “All right, I’m good for the fare. But I’ll tell you what I want for it. I just want to sit here long enough so my friend will think I had a good time. You’ll get your money and not have to work for it.”

That was O.K. by her when she saw I meant it and creased her little paw with the cash. In fact, I reckon she liked it a whole lot better: there wasn’t much opportunity in them days to make five dollars by setting.

Now since she had revealed her cockiness once, she didn’t go back to that drab, melancholy style no more, which was merely a role. I have said they tried to offer all types at this place. I reckon she appealed to the hombre who liked to imagine he was laying some little overworked servant girl, maybe an orphan to boot, under the back stairs.