“Peeder” is Deadwood’s idiolect
for “dick.” When I asked Pete if the term was a euphemism, like Norman Mailer’s
“fug” in The Naked and the Dead, he
deadpanned: “How would you like to grow up in South Dakota with the first name,
Peter?”
Childhood onomastic traumas aside, Dexter’s second novel is a brilliant addition to the
growing South Dakota literary tradition of demythologizing its frontier past.
Dexter greatly admires septuagenarian Frederick Manfred’s Buckskin Man tales, a
pentalogy that includes King of Spades, about Black Hills justice
in 1876—also the starting date of Deadwood.
Dexter here explores the ambiguities of Wild Bill Hickok’s
last days. Going blind, his “peeder” messed up by syphilis, “wild” Bill puzzles
over how to come to terms with the contradictions of being one of America’s
first media celebrities.
Harper’s Weekly (a
kind of post-Civil War Ur-People magazine) is stroking the boredoms of urbane
America’s East with confected tales of Hickok’s charisma. But Bill’s no Clint
Eastwood, eager to have his day made with a dollop of macho manliness. He’s
more worried about whether he’s infected his bride, Agnes Lake, a circus
trapeze artist he’s just married in Cheyenne. She’s back in St. Louis, waiting
out Hickok and his pal Charley Utter’s schemes to hit it rich in Deadwood,
which is in the frenzy of a gold strike.
And there’s Calamity Jane, feeding herself on the fantasy that she is Wild Bill’s wife, breaking
her bones riding bulls on the main street of Rapid City and “retiring” into a
self-appointed role as the Florence Nightingale of the deadly frontier smallpox
epidemics (when she wasn’t “charging the Army boys a dollar a turn, half the
regular rate”—all-around public servant.)
When we first meet Jane, it is the morning after she has
bestowed her questionable favors on bountyman Boone May, stuck in town because
he’s trying to sell cut-rate the head of Frank Towles—so May won’t have to go
all the way to Cheyenne to collect the bounty. This is what he saw, the morning
after:
“Her skin was pale and bruised and old. She was a big-boned
girl, but fat. Spindly legs, soft-looking arms, no chest to her at all. He had
never seen a woman black and blue so many different places. It looked like
they’d dragged her all the way from Chicago. And she was as ripe as live body
gets.”
A visual calamity, of
world-class proportions. When Boone returns from a gulp of fresh air, he
counsels Jane to take a bath. Jane is not impressed, “’I give it a bath once,’
she said, pulling the blanket back over her body, ‘and a Cheyenne peeder come
floating out.’” When Boone searches the tent for Towles’ head, he has trouble
locating it because Jane has been using it for a pillow overnight.
Those were grotesque days out in the Black Hills, before
Mount Rushmore, and Dexter is deft at weaving a tapestry of chaos that is
almost too funny to be true.
Yet he collected the basic material in ten days at the
Carnegie Library in Deadwood, the best archive, he says, next to the University
of Nebraska for data on the region’s gory, “glory” days. Dexter’s been
fascinated by talk about Deadwood ever since he grew up in Sioux Falls and
Vermillion in the 1950s; he finally got to take a good look when he was 18, in
1961, at the annual “Days of 76,” a blowout he says makes the student
migrations to Fort Lauderdale look like Sunday school picnics.
Marjorie Pontius, the
Deadwood librarian, first showed him what amounted to a civic guest register, a
chronological listing of how individuals met their deaths in Deadwood in its
wide-open mining days. The local papers were, so to say, gold mines on the
quality of life and death in early Deadwood. Dexter’s SuperCreep, one Captain
Jack Crawford, is straight out of the old yellowed files. Don Quixote Dexter is
proud to let such a phony “paper-collar” hoist himself on his own windmill with
racist doggerel about pacifying Indians:
They
talk about peace with the demons,
By
feeding and clothing them well,
I’d
as soon think an angel from heaven
Would
reign with contentment in hell.
And
some day these Quakers will answer
Before
the great Judge of all
For
the death of daring young Custer
And
the boys that around him did fall…
Pete has found a Midas formula for turning dross into the gold of comic invention.
Chinese call girls joined Mexes and injuns in the gold-prospectors’ trinity of
contempt. The section “China Doll” recounts the mid-life crisis of Solomon
Star, the sheriff’s partner in a plan to bring stability to Deadwood through
the town brickworks.
Star’s feeble efforts to buy the radiant Chinese girl (after
shedding a wife in Bismarck) set in train a sequence of violent events that
culminate in a conflagration that destroys much of Deadwood and prompts Charley
to “move up” to Lead, where his beddie, Lurline Monti Verdi, fronts as madam
for Lurline’s House of Distinction.
The characters and events Dexter has culled from Deadwood’s
Carnegie Library are obviously much closer to real history than the dizzily
upbeat Disneyland images of the West most of our compatriots unencumber their
minds with.
Yet it’s more than a mock. Charley and Agnes come together in a touchingly decent “mending hearts”
club as they ease the grief of losing Wild Bill to an assassin’s bullet.
I asked Dexter who Dorothy and William Selz of Vermillion, S.D.,
were (he dedicates the novel to them): “She was my American lit professor at
the University of South Dakota. She and her husband taught me the most
important things I’ve ever learned—to be patient, kind and truthful—not in
their courses, exactly, but in listening to me when I was one wild young son of
a bitch.”
Wild Bill and Charley (and
Agnes in a postscript sort of way) managed to remain patient, kind and truthful
in the Deadwood of 1876. In that maelstrom of marauding and malarkey, they kept
civilized values alive. A feat.
That’s what Wild Bill means, Dexter is saying: maintaining
civilized values amidst the self-aggrandizing noises of the Captain Jack
Crawfords, those paper-collars on their perennial cons.
That’s where this “non-fiction” novel connects with Dexter’s
bread-and-butter work as a thrice-a-week columnist for the Philadelphia
Daily News. He says he used to prowl around
looking for “original stories” to illuminate the contradictions of life in the
big city. Lately, he has retreated to a more “reactive” kind of commentary,
keeping tabs on big figures like Mayor Wilson Goode and his Osage brush with
immortality, or the sheriff’s office hack who devised a scam by working both
sides of the forced tax-delinquent sale of houses.
Dexter’s first novel, God’s
Pocket (Random House, 1983), about crime, metro-journalism and
tensions between Philly’s ethnic neighborhoods, didn’t do too well—10,000
copies, more or less, condemned to a limbo of first-novel brush-off by the
faint praise of a back-pages review in the New York Times. One hopes better things for Deadwood, a much richer, more resonant work.
Pete’s already at work on his third novel, down on his
six-acre spread overlooking the Chesapeake Bay near Earleville, Md. (pop. 40).
It’s set in Milledgeville, Georgia, where he lived between the ages of six and
eleven—a venue already given a certain magic as the home-place of another of
his favorite writers, Flannery O’Connor.
From Welcomat: After Dark, April 23, 1986
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