The Night Listener and Others (8 page)

The effort had made him a trifle breathless, but he grew more breathless still when he looked at the first painting. There he was, Eustace P. Saunders, seated next to Jack Binns, who was holding his hand and gazing lovingly into his eyes, which gleamed orange in the firelight. He could almost hear the words, spoken in a soft, gentle drawl—”Yore skin’s jes’s soft ‘n purty…”

Eustace looked for a long time, until he could hear not only his lover’s voice, but the crackle of logs burning in the fire, smell the biscuits and coffee he had cooked for Jack and himself, feel the soft wind blowing across the Badlands.

After a time, the vision faded, as it always did, and he turned to the next picture, and the next, and the next, until at length he arrived at the end of the book, in which Maria, at first held for ransom, eventually wins the love of the wild outlaw, reforms him, marries him, and stays with him in his vast and honest land. In the final illustration, she stands outside their modest cabin, built with their own toil, and waves to her husband and lover as he rides off to begin his day’s work on the range—

“He turned his face toward her as his horse galloped into the dawn.”

But now instead of Maria, a plain white blouse, a long leather skirt, and a bandanna replacing her Eastern finery, this painting, like all the others, bore the image of Eustace P. Saunders, dressed in Western garb, waving goodbye to Jack.

“Why can’t it be that way?” said Eustace, tears forming in his eyes for his lost love, his love never found.
“Why?”

Then it came to him. It could. In the West, land of promise and dreams, anything was possible. He didn’t have to go on painting his desires, for in the West he could live them.
The Desperado
had told him that, and he believed it as he had never believed the tales of the Christ he had learned at his mother’s knees. With all his heart, he believed in this primitive kingdom where none would say him nay.

He did not go into the West, however, with the stated nor even the conscious intention of seeking love. He went, as he put it to Arthur Hampton and others, in order to breathe in the heart of the West, to immerse himself therein in the hopes that his art could faithfully portray the country’s sights and sounds and spirit. To this end, Eustace took along a great many supplies: innumerable sketch books, rolls of canvas, oils, watercolors, and more. His baggage totalled a dozen large trunks, for, since he did not truly intend to return east, he thought it prudent to bring as many of his possessions as possible, all the fewer that would need to be sent for later.

His destination, chosen after only brief deliberation, was Deadwood, South Dakota, the same area in which
The Desperado
was set. Eustace traveled alone, beginning on a bright April day a series of train rides that brought him to Deadwood four days later than had been scheduled, an hiatus that, rather than discouraging him, only further whetted his appetite for his final destination. A transfer from the St. Paul Railway to the Northwestern in Rapid City proved to be the final stumbling block, but, after receiving assurances from the conductor that all his trunks were safely aboard the baggage car, Eustace P. Saunders arrived in Deadwood late on a Friday afternoon.

He had no time to drink in the aroma of the West, which, to his way of thinking, was rather soured by the smell of horse droppings which carpeted the dirt street next to the ramshackle railroad station, for he had to immediately attend to his trunks, which had been unceremoniously dumped onto the platform by the baggage car man, who, without a wave of regret, pulled the massive door closed as the train rattled out of the station toward its next stop. Eustace sought and obtained the attention of a noble young scion of the West, and gave him a quarter dollar to go to the hotel and inform the manager that Mister Saunders had arrived and needed a cab for his luggage. When a half hour passed and the loiterer did not return, Eustace asked the man at the ticket window for directions to the hotel, and if he would be kind enough to watch Eustace’s trunks while he fetched a cabman.

The man replied through a mist of tobacco spittle that he was closing up and had no leisure to observe luggage, but that he would stop at the hotel and inform the proprietor that a guest was in need of teamster service.

After another half hour, a rickety wagon drawn by two horses dropped anchor in the Sargasso of horse dung. Painted in faded letters on two of the remaining sideboards was the legend
Barkley Hotel, Deadwood.
The coachman, a living embodiment, Eustace thought, of the Old West, jumped down from his box, entirely oblivious to the way his boots sank into the equestrian mire.

“You Sanders?” he said through a broken picket fence of yellow teeth, making Eustace think that perhaps the art of dentistry had not penetrated this far west.

“That’s Saunders,” Eustace replied. “I have some trunks.” And he gestured to the small mountain on the platform.

“Holy jacksh_t,” the man expostulated. “Never seen so g_dd_m many in my f in’ life!”

Muttering vociferously, the rustic nonetheless carried them one at a time from platform to wagon, dropping only one in the reeking miasma. Eustace opened his mouth to protest, but a harsh glare from the man made him slap his mouth shut. When the trunks were loaded, the frontier coachman climbed onto his box and fixed Eustace with a withering stare. “You comin’ or ain’tcha?”

Eustace glanced tremulously at the surface he had to cross to arrive at the coach, then said to himself, “I am, after all, in the West, where a man’s character is not diminished by the presence of honest soil on his boots,” and stepped boldly into the muck, wincing only once when part of the gelid mass crept over the edge of his shoe.

Despite the presence of horse manure in his heel, Deadwood struck Eustace P. Sounders as a veritable fairyland. This then was the West, and these bold men and women who lined the wooden sidewalks were the pioneers of their age. He felt a tingle of hormonal as well as intellectual excitement as he recalled the second plate of
The Desperado:

“It was a new world to her, and one she feared to enter.”

He wished he could open the trunk that contained the
Desperado
oils and gaze at it right now (they were the only finished works that he had brought with him, for how could he have his maid discover them when she prepared his other work for delivery to the West!). But he could see it in his mind’s eye well enough—Eustace P. Saunders riding into the town in a stagecoach, looking out from its windows at the rough men lining the street in front of the saloon, leering at him with unnameable desires in their heads beneath their ten-gallon hats.

And God, yes! There was a saloon now, and, glory of glories, on the other half of the building that housed it was the Barkley Hotel. It had been everything he had dreamed it would be, a rough-hewn, clapboard edifice of three stories, with loungers out front waiting no doubt for the sun to go down. But none of them, he noticed, wore a gunbelt. It was a bit of a disappointment.

As Eustace walked into the hotel, the imprecations of the teamster dying away behind him, the idlers eyed him, but Eustace felt that it was more out of curiosity than from any interest in a lasting bond of manly friendship. Ah well, he thought, Maria Prescott too had been looked on with mere curiosity upon her arrival in the West, as primitives are apt to gaze upon a rare and lovely flower without understanding its potential for pollination.

The manager of the hotel, Mr. Owen Barkley, was rather more solicitous than had been the grizzled coachman, and Eustace was relieved to find that he had indeed been expected, even though Barkley addressed him as Mr. Sanders, perpetuating the error the coachman had made. Barkley himself showed Eustace to his room on the second floor, a clean if spartan chamber boasting the scant amenities that most third-class Eastern hotels would have offered.

“And what brings you to our little town?” asked Barkley, a fat and florid man in his early sixties.

“Art, really,” Eustace replied.

“Art?”

Eustace then spoke of the magazines and books he had illustrated, and Barkley’s eyes glowed. “I’ve got that Chambers book—my sister back East sent it to me last Christmas. And we’ve got lots of your magazines in the lobby—
Country Gentleman, Harper’s,
lots of them—d_mn good pictures in them too. An artist, eh? My, that’s really something.”

They chatted all during the time it took for the coachman to bring up all twelve trunks, and it took only until trunk number three for Eustace to inquire about outlaws.

“Outlaws?” Barkley said, as though the word was foreign to him. “I’ll tell you, Mr. Sanders, there sure aren’t many outlaws these days. We’re pretty d_mn civilized now out here. But when I was a youngster, well, things
were
mighty different then…”

It took until trunk number five for Eustace to persuade Barkley to end his reminiscences of gunfights past. “Please do try and think of some in the present day,” Eustace pleaded. “You see, the reason I came out here was to sketch and paint some of the more, shall we say, adventuresome of your denizens, in order to add as much verisimilitude as possible to my work.”

“Uh-huh.” Barkley nodded. “Uh-huh. So you’re lookin’ for some bad men. Well, I tell you, anybody commits crimes nowadays our country sheriff— that’s Zed Dorwart—arrests them pretty d_mn quick, so they’re either behind bars or hung.”

“But isn’t there anyone,” Eustace persevered as trunk number six arrived, “who has eluded the law, who is secreted in some hole-in-the-wall, as it were?”

Barkley thought for a moment. “Nope,” he said.

Then the coachman-cum-teamster-cum-porter spoke up. “Them Brogger brothers are mean sonsab_tches.” This uninvited comment earned the menial a glance from his employer sharp enough to send him out of the room with more haste than was his wont.

“The Brogger brothers?” Eustace repeated. “Now who are they?”

Barkley shook his head grimly. “You don’t want to get mixed up with the Brogger boys,” he cautioned. “They’re not outlaws, they’re just crazy.”

It took until trunk number eleven for Eustace to wheedle the full story of Olaf and Frederick Brogger from Barkley. They were two brothers in their early thirties. Born of a Norwegian father and a Scotch-Irish mother, they were hated by the god-fearing Norwegians in the county because they gave Norwegians a bad name. Rejecting the farm life of their father, they had purchased a small spread where they raised enough stock to get by, though many said that it was not their skinny herd of cattle, but thievery around the Deadwood area that brought them the little money they had. Nothing had ever been proven, however, though it was felt that the Broggers had more luck than skill or intelligence.

“Mean as coyotes but a lot dumber,” was Barkley’s studied opinion. “Used to come to the saloon, bother people. Zed told ‘em not to come back no more, so they went down to Terry, but even the women there won’t have nothin’ to do with them. Cause fights, sometimes people been found beaten, but they won’t say who ‘twas done it. One time a few years back Zed found a feller beat somethin’ awful—died without comin’ to. He’d been in an argument with Fred Brogger a few days before.”

“Fred—is he the worse?” Eustace inquired.

“You could say. Olaf ‘s quieter, but still waters run deep. Fred’s the loud one, and Olaf does what he says.”

Th poor lad, thought Eustace. No doubt influenced by his evil older brother to follow a life of crime. And he thought of the illustration on page 362, of Jack Binns placing a protective left arm around Maria’s (now Eustace’s) shoulder, while his right hand pointed a pistol at his former partner in crime, Texas Bill Wyatt—

“So,’ Wyatt sneered, ‘throwin’ over yer old pard fer a skirt!’”

Jack Binns had seen the light. Love had made him do so. And Eustace had read time and again that love was capable of a great many such things.

“I’d like to meet them,” he told Barkley.

The hotelier’s eyes grew wide, and his face even more pink than before. “No sir. You stay away from them two. Bad medicine, both of ‘em. Some of the other things you hear said about them, why, I wouldn’t even repeat to a Christian gentleman.”

Through the door came box number twelve, and its bearer let it drop onto the straw mat floor with a weary sigh. “That’s all of ‘em,” he said, extended his hand for the silver dollar that Eustace deposited therein, and left the room.

“Hope you have a good stay,” said Barkley. “We got a fine restaurant downstairs, and the saloon is open till midnight. You need anything, just pull that cord on the wall.”

“Now that you mention it,” Eustace said, wiggling his toes, “do you have a bootblack in town?”

Rather than go through his trunks to find another pair of the several he had brought, he waited until his shoes came back, and in the meantime removed his soiled socks and washed his feet in the basin. Freshly shod, he descended to the restaurant, a surprisingly comfortable room that could have been uprooted from New York’s west side, had it not been for the more rowdy clientele. Eustace ordered a steak with potatoes, and watched the people, some of them cowboys surely, finish their meals and pass through the swinging doors into the saloon side of the building, from whence came the strains of ragtime music and frequent hearty shouts.

His meal finished, Eustace joined the throng, sitting at a table well away from the bar, where the most active customers sat and from which the loudest yells (often good-natured curses) emanated. He suspected that the sherry he nursed had been sitting on some dusty under-shelf for many years, as it seemed to have turned to a syrupy vinegar.

He had just made up his mind to take a chance on the beer, when he heard a familiar voice behind him. “You’re askin’ about the Buggers.”

Eustace turned and saw the wizened old gentleman who had carried his trunks. “I beg your pardon?”

“The
Buggers.
The ones youse talkin’ about with Barkley.”

“Do you mean the Broggers?”

“I calls ‘em as I sees ‘em.” Without being invited, the man sat across the small table from Eustace. His aroma, as before, told Eustace that he was less than fastidious in his toilet habits. “You wanta see ‘em?”