Billy Antrim knelt back on his haunches as he stared up at Henry, who detected a distinct lack of welcome. “Weren’t you farmed out?”
The Kid lied, “I was lonesome for you.”
“Oh, me too. I been pining.” Antrim looked around for a horse. “How’d you get out here?”
“Walked. Took me an hour. You get anything?”
“Tracings this week. Hauled in a nugget a month ago. Where’s Josie?”
“Running errands at the Orleans Club.”
“Well, he’ll never amount to much anyways.” Antrim stood. “Copper mine won’t be hiring none more if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I’m just footloose and fancy-free.”
Antrim squinted his distrust. “I got just the one upstairs room and no provisions, but I guess you can stay overnight.”
Antrim’s upstairs room was over the Two Galoots Saloon, where he seemed customary. A couple of soiled doves in their next-to-nothings were acting flirtatious, but Antrim wouldn’t acknowledge them, only excusing himself by saying, “I have needs like everbody.” He ordered two shot glasses and a full bottle of Old Overholt Straight Rye Whiskey and filled the jiggers for himself and Henry, but the boy was preoccupied by a large hanging picture of a naked female slave in a harem. Antrim noticed and said, “They tell me that’s an odalisque. Don’t ask me how to spell it.”
“She’s pretty,” Henry said.
“Ainunt no she. It’s a picture.” Antrim lifted his shot glass. “Down the hatch,” he said and swilled the whiskey.
Henry found the consequence of imitating his stepfather unpleasant. Coughing, he said, “Harsh as hellfire and never-ending, all the way down.”
“You get used to it.” Antrim poured himself another shot glass and tilted his head back for it. “Ah,” he said; then, “This Old Overholt whiskey was Abraham Lincoln’s favorite. That ought to tell you something.”
“And Abraham Lincoln’s dead, isn’t he?”
“But not from the whiskey. A bullet. Lead poisoning.”
“Are you going to stay here for a spell?”
“Oh, me, I’ll prolly get restless I expect.”
“Want me here?”
Antrim frowned into his whiskey, then drank it. “Not really,” he said.
Silence took up residence for a while. Antrim doffed his dirty felt hat. He wasn’t clean and he’d lost still more hair and the sun had wrinkled his face so that he looked far older than his thirty-two.
The Kid flashed him the insincerest of smiles. “You haven’t asked about the funeral.”
“Whose?” he asked, then said, “Oh.”
“Entire city turned out,” the Kid lied. “There was an uplifting sermon and stirring hymns about the attributes of paradise, but folks kept pestering me about ‘Where’s Cate’s husband?’ Told em you were too stricken with grief, that you thought you might could kill yourself over it.”
“Oh, that would surely gladden you, wouldn’t it, Henry?”
“Was just what came out at the time.”
Antrim ordered them both porterhouse steaks and russet potatoes, wetting each chew with more whiskey. Which began to have an effect on him. He became fractious. “So what’s the real reason you’re here?” he finally asked. He pushed a jigger of truth serum toward the boy, and the Kid pushed it back.
“Wore out my welcome in Silver City.”
Antrim was as skeptical as an examiner. Were he wearing bifocals he’d have been watching the Kid through the bottom half-moons. “Why’s that, Henry?”
“I was selling used clothes.”