(1986) Deadwood by Pete Dexter Page A

you, Frank," he said, staring into the face. It was looking less like Frank every day. As a matter of fact, it was looking less like a face.
    Boone began to see a plot. He'd take the head all the way back to Cheyenne, and every day it would change a little more, look a little less human, until the day he got there it wouldn't look like nothing.
    "Goddamn you, Frank," he said again. "You'd do that to me, wouldn't you?"
    And that is how it happened that Al Swearingen came to the door of Lurline Monti Verdi's room, meaning to hit her in the eye for missing her obligations the night before, and found Boone May instead, talking to a head. He stood in the door until Boone looked up.
    "Where's Lurline?" Swearingen said. Boone May didn't try to put the head away or hide it behind him; there wasn't an ounce of social grace in his body. "Boone? You seen Lurline?"
    "The last I seen your sorprano," Boone said, "she was running skirts-up down the stairs in the direction of Bill Hickok. That was yesterday."
    Swearingen looked around the room, then walked over the window and looked there. "She didn't sing last night," he said. "I paid her to sing, and she didn't set foot in the Gem all night long."
    Boone shrugged. "Well, I ain't got her under the bed," he said, "besides which, I got business problems of my own."
    Swearingen didn't ask what problems, because it might of had something to do with the head. He didn't trust Boone May; there wasn't nobody he wouldn't kill. Swearingen included. He pictured what that would be like, trying to talk him out of it. Floating his words out toward that monster head, they'd get as far inside as snowflakes.
    Boone was telling it anyway. "The sheriff won't give me my two hundret dollars from Frank Towles," he said. "Going to make me ride all the way to Cheyenne." Boone shook his head. "I don't know what's got into him, thinking I got nothing to do but ride to Cheyenne. He's quick enough to come running when he needs something done."
    Swearingen said, "Seth Bullock ain't nothing different from me, except his business location." Swearingen didn't like Boone May or Seth Bullock either, but with Bullock it wasn't because he couldn't of talked him out of killing him.
    He was beginning to think that Bullock was smarter than he was, that Bullock had figured out something about Deadwood that he hadn't thought of. Swearingen couldn't imagine what it was. The money came to the badlands. If a pilgrim had a hundred dollars, where else did you want to be to get it away from him?
    There was something about Seth Bullock, though, that wasn't in a hurry. Swearingen didn't trust anybody that didn't scramble for spilled money. It was like he knew he would get it all later.
    "Maybe he thinks he's got Wild Bill now, he don't need W.H. and me," Boone said.
    "Wild Bill ain't going to change Deadwood," Swearingen said.
    "Well," Boone said, "he's been here one night, and you lost your sopranie, I can't find nothing to fuck on a Sunday morning, and Seth Bullock won't give me two hundret dollars for Frank Towles's head. That ain't bad for a start."
    "I come in the same time he did," Swearingen said. "I was eight days on the train with him and about twenty wagons of China whores, and he never touched none of them or none of mine."
    Boone May looked at him a long time. "That don't sound normal," he said.
    "He drinks," Swearingen said, "but he don't have nothing to do with the girls."
    "I heard he got married," Boone said.
    "I'm talkin' about his health here," Swearingen said. "I don't think he intends to live long."
    "He eat?"
    Swearingen nodded.
    Boone said, "And I seen him drinking."
    "I told you that already."
    Boone closed his eyes and thought. Swearingen felt relief to be out from under his stare. Those were terrible bug-eyes, and they didn't even operate together. "Well," Boone said after a while, "it ain't a cancer. If he was to fuck and drink but not eat, then it could be a cancer. Or just drink, but not to fuck or eat. But this