(1986) Deadwood by Pete Dexter

whole life his wife had never had comforts.
    But the reasons had faded in the winter, and now there was nothing but the Lord. Who he realized he'd misunderstood. No man understood the Lord. Henry Hiram Weston Smith had read the Bible from one end to the other. There were nights he dreamed whole chapters, but where he used to see God in those dreams, now he just felt Him. Preacher Smith was afraid to look on Him, even in his sleep, for fear of what he would see.
    He had cast aside portions of the Bible, and never read from it now when he preached, although he never preached without it in his hand. Once or twice in a service, a little piece of it would slip into his sermon—there was comfort in the New Testament, and the miners needed comfort—but he didn't hold it out for them, like it was a gift they could take if they wanted it. The greatest misunderstanding in the world was that salvation was there for the asking.
    Preacher Smith was thirty-one years old, and he looked fifty.
    "Thou created us in Thy image," he said now. "Grant us Thy strength for the tests ahead . . ." It had come to the preacher lately that the image was closer than he had previously thought. He had watched men go soft-brained from the winter's cold and hate, kill themselves and each other, and he had begun to see the Lord in that too.
    "Keep us to the good, Lord," he said. "Do not let us stray." As he said that, Jane Cannary set the hat on the crate next to his feet. He saw her there, but never looked down. He was coming to the important part now, to the idea of an evil side to the Lord. It wasn't two different things, the Lord and the Devil. He had been on this spot all morning getting to it, and now it was coming. They were one and the same.
    Jane made a noise in her throat and spat. He didn't look down, but she had distracted him, and he was losing track of it. There was a way the Lord could be evil and still be the Lord, and he had almost gotten to it. He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate.
    "Look down here, you old fool," Jane said. When he didn't answer, she made another eagle scream, which opened the preacher's eyes. He stared down, and the homeliest woman he had ever seen was standing at his feet, open-chested, like a messenger from the
    Lord's bad side. "There's plenty of time to preach," she said. "Now pick up this damn money before these sheep-lovers change their mind and take it back."
    He looked in his hat then, and saw there were several dollars in folding money and gold dust. He didn't know what kind of message it was, but something was still changing between him and the Lord. And even with all he had seen, there was something the Lord had to show him yet.

    Boone may went looking for Lurline Monti Verdi. he had been with Jane twice before, in Cheyenne and Sundance, and both times he hadn't felt right until he'd been with a regular woman to wash out the taste. It was something about her that made him feel little. He needed to smell Lurline's toilet water and feel her underneath him again, where he decided things right down to when she breathed.
    Lurline wasn't in her room at the Gem. He walked in without knocking, and it was just as he'd left it the day before. She hadn't made the bed, or even swept the pieces of mirror glass off the floor. Lurline was always cleaning something, picking some speck of food off his coat or face. She hadn't been back.
    He thought of Wild Bill then, and the way she'd looked at him out the window. Boone felt bad. He didn't like the idea of his own woman—which she was whenever Boone wanted her to be—running off with Bill and his fancy friend. He wondered if she'd done them both, and the feeling that started when he woke up with Jane got worse.
    He sat down on her bed and took Frank Towles's head out of the sack. What had the bartender said? Maybe Frank's spirit was angry and he ought to see Madame Moustache about it? He thought about that and decided to live with the ghost a while longer.
    "Goddamn