(1986) Deadwood by Pete Dexter Read Free Book Online Page B

else. "You seen Wild Bill yet?" The sheriff stiffened. "You plannin' on usin' him now, instead of me and W.H.? You tryin' to insult me and W.H. to get rid of us?"
    "There's enough work to go around," Bullock said.
    "Well, he ain't muddy," Boone said, "I admit that. That dandy with him, he might keep canaries."
    Bullock shrugged. He'd been thinking about Bill that afternoon, trying to decide how to fit him into Deadwood Brickworks, Inc. It wasn't a question he could be useful. Anybody could be useful when you decided where they fit. That was what business was.
    Solomon Star didn't fathom that. He saw the trading end of it clear enough. He saw the holes where money fell through and he knew ways to catch it before it hit the ground. But he didn't have a view of the future. He couldn't see that everything had to go somewhere.
    Solomon came back into the office carrying a bag of roasted peanuts. There were peanut-sellers on every block in the city. He took off his coat and hat and straightened his vest and checked his pocket watch. It was an Elgin. Then he saw the head on Seth Bullock's desk.
    "I wouldn't believe all them stories about Wild Bill," Boone May said to the sheriff. "I heard stories about Frank Towles here, and he went off crying like a baby . . ."
    "What insult to God is that?" Solomon said, pointing at the desk.
    "It's Frank Towles," Boone said. He watched Solomon Star, and was grateful to see there was still somebody that cared about a human head. He didn't know what the paper-collar was to the sheriff, but they had the same office and he decided to make his case to him too. "Sheriff don't want to pay me the reward on him, and I think he's got an obligation."
    Solomon Star sat down at his desk and looked at the papers on top of it. Not like he was studying them, like he was trying to remember what they were. "He give a greaser two hundred and fifty dollars not more than an hour ago," Boone said.
    Seth Bullock reached into a desk drawer and came out with a pair of fireplace tongs, made in Baltimore, Maryland. To Boone they looked like giant tweezers. The sheriff worked the small end, and the big end opened, wider than Frank Towles's head, and then closed around it. He picked the head up with the tweezers and dropped it in Boone's lap. "When I need you for something," the sheriff said, "I'll come find you."
    Boone thought it was just like Seth Bullock to have a head-mover in his desk. "I'll be in Cheyenne," he said. He put the head back in the bag and pulled the cord that closed the top. "And I ain't forget-tin' who caused the inconvenience." It didn't have the right sound for a warning, though. It sounded half like a question.
    Seth Bullock didn't move a muscle, he just stared. Boone stood up, looking for something more to say. He didn't like things to end sounding like questions. He didn't like nobody looking at him the way the sheriff was. "I wouldn't be countin' on Wild Bill too much," he said. Bullock still didn't answer. Boone said, "I wouldn't be countin' on nothing." But it still didn't sound like it should.
    Boone walked out, passing the paper-collar, who was still sitting there staring at the top of his desk, and brushed him across the ear with the sack. He jumped about half a foot.
    When the door shut, Solomon Star got up and went to the back of the store. He kept a pitcher of water there, and a bowl and some black soap on a cabinet, the only furniture he'd brought from his office in Bismarck. Seth Bullock had promised they would return for the rest of it.
    Bullock followed him back now. Solomon poured water into the bowl and then worked the soap into it until the top was dark and bubbly. He got a washcloth out of one of the drawers in the cabinet, wet it, and centered it over his hand. He made the hand into a fist and began to scrub his ear.
    Bullock looked at the faded yellow picture Solomon had hung on the wall. It was his mother, holding him on her lap. She had a jawline, the only one he'd seen like it