(1986) Deadwood (48 page)

He stood still, feeling his pulse in his hand and his head. Then he saw the boy, on the bench across the street. He wore the preacher's coat and the preacher's hat and sat with both his hands folded across the Bible in his lap. Waiting.

It reminded Swearingen of cats, or Indians. He pulled the curtains shut and began to pack. He pushed a handful of clothes and a Bible into an old valise he kept under his bed and then stood still again, looking around him, wondering what else he would need.

She banged on the door. "I ain't through talkin' to you," Jane said. "You'd best change your attitude, whilst I'm still in a forgiving mood."

He moved close to the door, not to be overheard, and pressed his cheek against the wood. "Get my wife," he said.

"What?"

"Get my wife."

"She can't help you now," Jane said. "I'm the only one . . ."

"Get my wife," he said again.

There was a long silence, and then she said, "I might just turn this whole damn floor into a hospital. Ain't no reason nursin' has got to go on four miles from the nearest bar."

"All right, but get my wife."

"All right what?"

"Whatever you want."

There was another silence. "I want a signed paper," she said.

He hugged the door.

"A deed," she said. "Your word ain't worth nothing. Don't never trust a whore man, that's the first thing I learned."

He opened the new bottle of local and sat down on the bed. He took a long drink, leaving her at the door. In a better world he could have opened the door and shot her, but everything he did—everything since the day he'd left the boy alive by the creek—turned back on him now, moving him someplace unprotected. He found a glass on the floor and filled it. He drank in one motion, watching the room reveal itself through the bottom of the glass as the liquor disappeared, until it was all gone and he could see the window, waiting for him.

He realized then he'd forgotten how to breathe. Not himself, exactly—he could do it as long as he thought about it—but his body. He lay back and watched his chest move up and down, and every time he stopped concentrating, his chest stopped too.

Swearingen was suddenly too tired to get up. Too tired to roll this way or that in bed, or to take off his boots. He was warm and then he was cool. He was tired of looking at the world and he lay on the bed with his eyes closed, afraid to sleep for fear of forgetting to breathe.

Sometime later it came to him that he was alone. That Jane was gone from the other side of the door. He thought about what she had said.
If you want to live, you'd best put yourself in my hands . . .

He pictured her snake hair and her red eyes. It was clear, almost like a real picture, and as he watched, her hair turned golden and her eyes turned kind, and he saw it was true. She was the only one that could save him.

He called for her.

There was no answer. "Jane . . ." He opened his eyes and sat up.

Time had passed, he knew his chances had passed too. There was business on the street, the noises sounded a hundred miles away. Someone knocked at the door—not Jane, it didn't shake the walls. He got up slowly and stood on the other side.

"What do you want?"

"I don't want nothin'. What do you want?" It was his wife. She lived alone in the apartment in back of the Gem, and kept a gun in every room. She'd swore to kill him if he ever put a hand on her again. He saw now that his problem with her was connected to the rest of what had happened, that it was another way to get him alone and unprotected. "You there?" she said.

He moved the chair that was wedged under the doorknob and opened the door. She was standing with her hands on her hips, and when she saw him it startled her. He hadn't seen her startled in a long time. "What is it?" he said.

He knew he was someway marked, he didn't know how.

He stepped to the side to let her in, but she stood where she was. She had a hand in the pocket of her skirt; he saw the outline of a gun. "You aged twenty years," she said. Her eyes fixed on his, as if that was where it showed.

He almost reached for her then, to pull her inside, but he remembered what was in her skirt. "There's disease in the hallway," he said.

She said, "You gone soft-brained too."

He stepped farther away. She put her head into the room and looked left and right. She took a step in, then another, and when he could, he closed the door and locked it.

"I never seen you like this," she said. There was no worry in it at all.

"I got to leave."

She looked around the room as if she hadn't heard him. "There's contamination in this place," he said.

She smiled at him.

He said, "I got some of it inside me already."

"You look sick," she said, matter-of-fact. "But mostly you look old."

He wanted to hit her; he waited until it passed to speak. "I put my money in the bank," he said.

Her mouth fell open. "You? You trusted somebody else to hold the money?"

"It's fireproof," he said.

She laughed and he saw the happiness in her eyes. "There ain't no such thing," she said.

"It is," he said. He felt it rise up again. There was something about Swearingen, or his wife, that he always wanted to hit her when she got happy. He waited until it passed. "I need you to get my money," he said.

She sat down on the chair he had used to secure the door and picked up the bottle of local. "They ain't going to give your money to me," she said. She smelled the lip of the bottle and made a face. "They gave money away to wives, it wouldn't be anybody would put their money in banks."

"I'll write a note," he said.

She smelled the bottle again. "This is what made you old," she said.

He took the bottle out of her hand and put it back on the floor. "It don't matter what made you how you are," he said. "What matters is what you do now."

She thought that over, and he was grateful to have her listening again. There was a time she listened to everything he said. Of course, there was a time when she didn't carry a pistol in the pocket of her skirt, too.

He checked the window and the boy was gone. "I'll give you a note for Jim Miller," he said, "don't give it to any other party."

"I don't know Jim Miller."

"Miller and McPherson," he said. "Tell him I want a bank draft for all of it but five hundred dollars."

"They ain't going to let me in Miller and McPherson's," she said.

"He'll charge a tenth, but I can't argue," he said. "Let him have what he asks."

"I think you ought to go yourself. It's too much confusion in this . . ."

He saw that she was afraid of the bank, and it made him want to slap her. "There's no confusion," he said. "I'll write it down. All you do is put it in Jim Miller's hand."

"I don't know him."

"Ask for him. Say who you are and you'd like to see Mr. Miller."

She looked at her skirt. "I don't have nothin' to wear to Miller and McPherson's. They'll ask me to get out."

Swearingen sat down on his bed again and covered his eyes with his fingers. "I got a hundret and seventy-two thousand dollars in that bank," he said, sightless. "They ain't going to notice what you're wearing."

The number stopped her. Al Swearingen never told anybody how much he had, he just said when something was his. She looked at her clothes again, and the little room where he lived since they had quit each other.

"You had that and lived like this?"

"I live the fashion I want," he said.

"Holed up on the second floor of a whorehouse, scairt to go outside to collect your own money?"

"Events have moved against me," he said.

"You got old overnight."

He removed his fingers and stared at her. "You ain't exactly covered with morning dew yourself."

"You never wanted me pretty," she said, and he saw some of her pleasure had gone out of his circumstance. "You never wanted me to be nothing."

He found a pencil and a piece of paper on the desk and wrote the note. When he'd finished, she was crying. "Don't be long," he said. "I don't want the boy to see you coming out the bank."

She looked at herself again. "I got to get cleaned up, to go see Jim Miller."

He started to argue, but saw it was useless. He put the note in her hand and closed her fingers around it. "What happens later?" she said.

"Later don't matter," he said. "What matters is now."

She put the note in her skirt pocket, with the gun. He checked the window again and returned himself to bed. When she had gone he stood up and pushed the chair under the doorknob. He noticed that his breathing was coming of its own accord again. The boy was still gone from the bench across the street, and the smell of disease was gone from the room.

He waited for his wife to return from the bank. It seemed like an hour passed, but time moved strange speeds when you laid in bed during the day. He slept, picturing her changing clothes before she went out of the badlands. He woke wanting to hit her.

More time went by. He saw that she had taken a bath first, maybe washed her hair. The sun moved into the afternoon sky and lay in a casket shape across the floor. He wondered if the woman could have gone to Goldberg's first and bought herself a hat.

He picked up the bottle of local and watched the sun spread across the floor. It was not until he'd filled the glass twice that he saw the casket was growing to a size to fit him. Shortly after that, he again forgot how to breathe.

The sun moved across the floor, and he moved to avoid it. He sat in a chair at the side of the window and watched the street for her.

The sun dropped behind the mountains and the bottle lay on its side, empty, before he realized she wasn't coming back.

In two weeks the number of smallpox cases was twenty-two. All the cots in the pesthouse were occupied; the three latest victims lay in blankets on the floor. Still, no one had died.

Every morning Jane began at the Gem Theater—there were two cases there—and then went to the pesthouse. Her first three patients—the two upstairs girls and the gambler—had reached the crossroads and recovered. The girls were badly scarred, which she said was probably in their best interests. She fought disease, she fought turpitude.

The gambler, in fact, had gone delirious and reached under her skirts, and she'd hit the back of his wrist with the butt of her pistol. "I don't consort whilst I'm curing the sick," she said. "I stay pure so I can heal. I give you your life, now don't make me take it back."

She knew every patient by name, and what stages of the disease they were in. She could predict when they would come to the crossroads a day in advance, and she was always there with fixer. She loved them best in that moment when she forced the bottle into their mouths, and made them live.

All day she went from bed to bed, cooling foreheads, mothering the girls; She mopped the floor and emptied pails and fed those who could eat. She hung a pulley from the ceiling and put the gambler's wrist in traction. He had tried to leave when his fever broke, but she lay him back down, saying the germs from the cured helped the stricken fight the disease.

She couldn't stand to lose even one.

At night she went to the bars in the badlands, collecting for the sick. She took off her hat and walked among the gamblers and tourists and upstairs girls, moving in close to them until they gave up their money.

And she drank as she made her rounds, sometimes from the fixer, sometimes local whiskey. Glass-washing became common in the badlands.

"God give me the touch to cure," she said, and some believed her, and some didn't, but nobody wanted her breathing too long in their face. Once Jane took over smallpox, charity and fear went arm in arm.

Her eyes were rubbed red, night and day, and whole evenings passed in the bars without her eagle scream. She was seen to yawn in public. There were rumors she had the African sleeping sickness.

She spoke less to the tourists—only to ask them for money—and sometimes sat alone, drinking from her fixer and talking endearments to herself. "You are the only one that can cure it," she would say. "God sent you."

Nobody interrupted her. It was better her talking to herself than issuing eagle screams, or toe threats, or mourning Bill, and as the days went by there was a sentiment she was right. "The Lord works in strange ways" was heard in unlikely places.

There were places in the badlands, in fact, where men gave up their seats when they saw her walk in the door. There were places where she was bought drinks without begging them. And she took the chairs and the drinks as her due, and never thanked a soul.

The news of the first deaths came five weeks after the first case was discovered in the Gem Theater. Two men and two women died the same morning in the pesthouse. Swearingen heard it from the upstairs girl who brought his meals. Her name was Lu-Lu, and she had once worked for Charley Utter in Lead, before he'd turned the business over to Boone May and Lurline, who killed it and almost each other in less than a month. Lu-Lu kept herself cleaner than most, and he paid her two dollars a day to come to his room with food and water and empty his bucket. Al Swearingen hadn't been out of the room since his wife left Deadwood with all his money.

He sat at the window, day after day, watching the boy come and go from the bench across the street, worrying that his bartenders and dealers were stealing from him downstairs. He had detailed visions of revenging himself on his wife.

The girl came in with his lunch and told him there were four dead at the pesthouse. "And I knowed one of them," she said.

He lost his knack for breathing again, and thought of his wife to restore it. He'd noticed early on it restored his functions to think of bringing her to justice. He sat down on the bed and put his face in his hands to concentrate. Lu-Lu put the food on the table by the window and sat beside him. She didn't believe his wife had gotten away with all the money.

"Poor Mr. Swearingen," she said. "Did you knowed one of them too?" She patted his leg, and he sat still. She had seen men in grieving before, and rested her hand on his thigh. "Which one was it?" He didn't answer, and she floated her hand farther up his leg. "You know what makes a body feel better?" she said.