(1986) Deadwood by Pete Dexter

Author:Pete Dexter [Dexter, Pete]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781400079711
Publisher: Vintage Contemporaries
Published: 2005-01-15T05:30:46+00:00

He woke up sick and sorry and alone, Lurline was gone, her black and red undies hung on the bedpost. He lifted his head to see them better, and it felt like something heavy and sharp-edged was balanced in there, and it fell frontwards as he moved.

He stood up slowly and looked at his body. There were dark blue bruises up and down the insides of his legs and on his chest. Scratch marks that slid down his stomach like rain on a window. He looked closer at his legs, and saw the imprint of her teeth.

His pants were over by the window. He broke a sweat getting into them. The bottle was on the floor, lying on its side. A fly sat on its lip. There was a puddle of liquor collected inside, near the neck. The whole room smelled like whiskey.

He found his shirt under the sheets, wrinkled and smelling of Lurline's perfume. He sniffed it, and the humming began in his peeder. His moccasins were back under the chair. As he bent to pick them up, the weight in his head moved again, and he froze until it settled. He found a comb in the dresser and ran it through his hair, and then walked out the door, down the steps, and into the barroom of the Gem Theater.

The whore man was standing behind the bar. He smiled at Charley, and there was a difference in him from the night before, as if he knew the condition of Charley's body, or as if somehow they were the same, now that Charley had sinned.

"The price for the night is ten dollars," the whore man said.

Charley stopped in the middle of the room. There were eight or nine tourists already drinking away the morning, but no whores— except one asleep on the piano—no gamblers of consequence. The whore man's words carried to every corner of the room.

Charley walked to the bar. "I don't recall your name," he said to the whore man.

"Al Swearingen," the whore man said. "We met on the wagon train you come in on."

"I didn't forget where we met," he said, "or the conditions. I forgot your name."

"Swearingen," he said. "I own the Gem and every girl in it." He smiled, and Charley remembered how his beard had looked, still wet with the boy's jizzom. He put that thought out of his mind, having done all the thinking about jizzom he cared to last night. "And you ain't got Wild Bill around to protect you now."

Charley took the pearl-handled knife out of his belt and held it sideways in front of the whore man's nose. For half a minute the only thing that moved was the whore man's throat. "I tell you this one time only, Mr. Swearingen," he said. "Don't ever ask me for nothing when I'm wearing a wrinkled shirt. I don't like to be addressed by a whore man before I get a bath and a change of clothing, so everybody can tell us apart.

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