I collected my guns, and me and Win went out of the tent, took a walk back along Main Street. We went up to her shack because she wanted to get something there, and that turned out to be a picnic basket and her flute.

“Are we hunting rats?” I asked.

“Not hardly,” she said. “I arranged us a picnic. I figured Madame would be on the ground after a snort or two. As for the flute, I just like it. I was taught by a white girl who didn’t have anything in her life but to play it and the piano, sing, and dress up nice. She was all right. She was Madame’s daughter. Her name was Jane, and she died of diphtheria.”

“Madame’s gonna be mad when she wakes up,” I said.

“Oh, I’ve seen this before,” Win said. “She couldn’t be woke up if you poured a bucket of cold water on her and fired a cannon over her head. She has to come around on her own time, which will be sometime tomorrow morning, well after the birds first sing. Though I suppose we should gather her up before the night wears too thin. We got time for that, though. The dance is just getting wound up.”

We went to the livery, where I kept my horse. There was a colored boy there, around twelve, and he was in charge of things. I gave him a few coins to saddle Satan. I usually came in about once a day to check on him, and when I had time I took him for a ride along Main Street, out and about a bit, without getting too much out in the wilds, where the Sioux and the Cheyenne roamed. Not to mention Blackfoot and Crow.

The boy’s name was Easter, like the Resurrection, and he got Satan ready and hitched him up to a one-horse rig I rented. He had been teaching Satan to pull the rig for me and so far had not lost an eye in the process. Damn horse liked him from the beginning, which is more than I can say for how Satan had treated me.

Easter gave me an apple for Satan, and we took off into the night, under the moonlight, along Main Street and out of town, venturing a little far, but we both felt brave about it.

We took a side trail. It was rugged, but Satan managed it all right, and the buggy held together. We had the buggy top down, and we could see the sky and the source of all that moonlight, a moon so big it filled the eyes, though there was a few drifting clouds, soft ones, almost clear. They tumbled along the heavens like cotton-soft dreams.

I parked the buggy under a tall tree, got out our goods. I gave Satan his apple, proud of the fact he had learned to pull a wagon and a buggy good, and he didn’t try to bite my hand off for a change.

We put out the food. The picnic was simple. It was good bread and sweet cheese, a jar of apple jam, a big bottle of sarsaparilla, glasses to pour it into, and there was a striped ground cloth and some metal plates and forks and spoons. Win had also brought a blanket for us if the air got too nippy. She cut us big slices of bread, slathered them with apple jam. It was delicious. This was my first taste of sarsaparilla, and from that point on it was my desired drink when I could get it. I can’t say as I remember all we talked about, as most of it was kind of silly, as it often is when you’re getting to know someone. But finally we talked about our lives and how it was we wanted more than a hoe and row to use it on. We had dreams, and we both agreed they was big as white people’s. We also agreed that out here in the wilds we was more like everyone else than anywhere we had been before. Yet neither of us was all that set on Deadwood. That’s how the talk ran.

Win said she planned to find some way to take care of Madame, as the old woman had taken care of her all this time, and now she was starting to get old and miss a step. I agreed she should do that. After a while Win brought out the flute and started playing. It was a strange and lonesome tune she played, full of all the sorrowful feeling you could have, and I certainly had me a list of sorrows. My ma and pa was in that song, their deaths, and me being chased by Ruggert, losing my friend Mr. Loving, and the deaths of them soldiers, which I still partly blamed on myself. The more she played, the sadder I got. Pretty soon there was tears in my eyes, but it wasn’t a terrible way to feel. It was like that music, them notes she was playing, was getting down inside of me and taking hold of that sadness and pulling it out and tossing it away from me. At least for the time being. It was both a good feeling and a painful one, kind of like having a bad tooth pulled or a bullet dug out.

After a time she quit that tune, played a livelier one. I got up and danced a little to it. I did it in a funny way, and Win got tickled and couldn’t play no more. I dropped down on the cloth then, and when I did she grabbed my head and pulled my face to hers and kissed me. It was for me the finest moment in my life. That kiss was like fire. It lit my lips. It lit my head. It lit my heart. It lit my soul. I was ablaze with passion.

That first loving kiss, the one that comes out of you from the source of your personal river, and the one that comes from her that is the same, there’s never another moment like it; never another flame that burns so hot. It can never be that good again, ever. All manner of goodness can come after, but it’s different. And that’s a good thing, because if we burned that hot for too long, we’d be nothing but ash.

What followed some might think was better than that kiss, us taking off our clothes and all, bringing ourselves together with excitement on that picnic cloth, under that blanket with the weather turning cooler and cooler and there being the smell of pine and oncoming snow in the air, but it wasn’t better than that kiss.

Don’t misunderstand me. It was well worth doing, and if I was making me a list, it would be listed second in goodness and something that works better in repetition, but everything in my life from that point on lay under the mountain of that single kiss, and try as I might, I have never climbed that high again.

17

We gathered up Madame just as the dance was winding down and the drunks was piling up under the tent and around it. She couldn’t walk, so we hefted her like a tow sack of potatoes out to the buggy. She wasn’t a small woman, so it was something of a strain. We got her in it, and then I rode them home in the buggy. When Win and I had Madame in bed in the one room they shared, Win took the pistol out of Madame’s purse, which had been strapped to her arm, and showed me the pistol wasn’t loaded.

“You’re the first man that she didn’t carry bullets in the gun for,” Win said. “Usually she expects to shoot them, and actually shot at one, but he was swift. With you she felt confident enough to just run a bluff.”

“Well, how many men you seen?” I said.

“Let me say it this way. You seen more of me than any of them.”

“I like that,” I said, and I did, though I will be honest with you and say it wouldn’t have made me no never mind. What had come before for either of us was way back then, far as I was concerned. What we had done and was doing was now.

This was the beginning of a routine, though we was a little less open about it due to Madame. Madame liked to get herself a bottle now and then, though Win made a point not to provide it or encourage it. But when she was in her cups, me and Win seen each other, either in my little room or up on that hill beneath the tree and the big wide sky. It was no trouble for the buggy, if there was enough moon and starlight or if the lanterns on the sides of the buggy would stay lit.

Under our tree it was shady in the day and dark at night, and there was a slope that went off one side of the hill that was covered in green grass when the spring come, the soil around there being tucked full of natural richness.

It was good times, but during them I thought all the while on what Wild Bill had told me. I needed to make some major money or have a real job if I planned to get married. The thought buried itself in my head like a chicken bone in a dog’s throat. I couldn’t cough that thought up no matter how hard I tried.