Spin

by Peter Zheutlin

  “Can you steer your wheel steadily using just one hand?” she asked.

  “Yes, Miss Oakley, I have often found myself steering single-handedly when the paths have been smooth.”

  “Would you have the nerve to allow me to shoot a target you held in your other hand?”

  My journey had been filled with dangers, but this seemed to be a danger of another order. I wasn’t sure and gave Colonel Cody a nervous glance. He was grinning like a Cheshire cat.

  “Miss Londonderry, let’s step outside and allow me to show you something,” said Miss Oakley, sensing my apprehension. “Bill, will you serve as my assistant?” Cody smiled broadly. I had the feeling he had been through this routine before.

  Outside, rifle in hand, Miss Oakley motioned for the colonel to walk a ways from the tent. When he’d walked about fifty feet she called out, “Right there. That will do.” Without another word, Colonel Cody removed two coins from his pocket and held one in each hand between his thumb and index finger. He extended his arms, then bent them up at the elbow so that the coins, glinting in the sun, were about a foot away from each ear. With no other word spoken between them, Miss Oakley raised the rifle, looked down the barrel and without so much as a second’s hesitation fired off two shots that blew the coins right out of the colonel’s hands. He didn’t even flinch. His trust in her was absolute. Her faith in her aim was absolute, as well.

  Mark and I stood in stunned silence.

  “I never miss, Miss Londonderry,” she said with a wry smile. “Your life will not be in my hands, but in yours. Here is what I suggest. We will each be on a wheel in a ring circling in opposite directions. You will hold a small piece of plywood, about a foot square, on which will be painted a target. Hold it in the hand closest to the outside of the ring, out in front of your body. When we are on opposite sides of the ring I will put a hole in that target. I won’t fire unless I am sure I have a clear shot. But we will need to practice. Are you game? Believe me, this is easy as pie for me. The novelty is only in the bicycle.”

  What could I say? For months I had been hailed as a woman of remarkable courage and pluck. I had been presented with an extraordinary opportunity to build my fame, earn a tidy sum of money, and would have a story I could tell for the rest of my life. I couldn’t say no, but I had misgivings aplenty. The colonel approached.

  “The last thing I would do is put you in danger, Miss Londonderry,” he said in a kindly voice. “For Miss Oakley this is about as difficult as hitting the side of a barn from ten paces. But I understand your concern. Think it over and, if you are ready, come back tomorrow morning so you and Miss Oakley can prepare. The show opens in two days.”

  You won’t be surprised to learn that the next morning I had ridden back out to the fairgrounds. We started simply enough by riding our wheels in opposite directions around a ring; I was to keep to the outside, riding counterclockwise, allowing Miss Oakley, riding clockwise, to pass inside to my left. Once comfortable doing so, she asked me to continue but steer only with my left, inside hand. I hardly noticed when she took hold of her rifle and began circling, steering with her left hand, the rifle in her right by her side. We did this for perhaps an hour when she then produced the first of a couple of dozen plywood targets that had been prepared by the show’s carpenters.

  “This is just for practice, Miss Londonderry,” she said reassuringly. “I want you to be accustomed to steering with your left hand while holding the target in your right well in front of you and facing across the ring. If you are steady, during the show, by the fourth or fifth pass I will fire. It will happen so fast you’ll hardly notice. I will not signal you as that will only have the effect of making you tense up and raise the risk of injury. The longer we circle each other, the more the suspense will build for the audience.”

  I must be crazy, I thought. But I could hardly back down now and maintain my self-respect. We practiced for close to two hours. Then, without warning, during one of our practice rounds, as I concentrated on keeping my bike steadily moving in a circle while extending the target in front of me, I was startled by the report of the rifle and nearly lost control of the wheel. But there was a method to Miss Oakley’s madness that I recognized straight away. By the time I heard the shot, the bullet had pierced the precise center of the target and lodged itself somewhere in the densely packed hay bales that surrounded the ring for exactly that purpose.

  I brought the wheel to a stop, the target firmly in my hand. My grip was so tight from fear I had trouble releasing it! Miss Oakley pulled alongside and put one hand on my shoulder.

  “If you knew I was going to fire, you would have been too tense. This way, there was no time to react. I wanted you to see that you could do it, and, Miss Londonderry, you did it!”

  Basking in the approval of a woman of Miss Oakley’s fame, I felt a surge of confidence, in myself and in her. We practiced another dozen times, and each time it became easier as she shot a hole right through the center of the target without exception. I was ready.

  Since I was to be with the show for two performances a day for six days, Colonel Cody suggested I stay at the fairgrounds with the rest of the troupe and that I spend a last night at the hotel, pack my things, and return the next day. He said he would dispatch one of his men to retrieve my steamer trunk in the morning. I readily agreed.

  It would be hard to exaggerate the enormity of the logistics in running the Wild West Show. There were more than two hundred performers, including dozens of horsemen. Some were former U.S. cavalry officers; others were experienced cowboys from all over the West. There were, of course, dozens of Indians—Cheyenne, Sioux, Mandan, and Apache. The famous Chief Sitting Bull himself had joined the cast for a few months back in the mid-1880s! But there were also riders from all parts of the world where horseback riding was a great tradition: Cossacks from Russia, Mongols, and Arabians. And it took an army of laborers and other staff to support the show. There were carpenters, cooks, ditch diggers, manual laborers, a couple of nurses and a doctor, wranglers, farriers, messenger boys, laundresses, costume makers, and even a barber and, for the women, a hairdresser. More than four hundred people and perhaps half as many animals, mostly horses, that needed to be fed, tents and cots to sleep on, blankets, cookware, latrines, water troughs, saddles, stirrups, and ropes, countless hay bales, rifles, tomahawks, headdresses, costumes, and the huge canvasses on which Western backdrops had been painted in meticulous detail. Though Colonel Cody was a modern thinking man, sleeping tents were segregated by sex and race. Dozens of them were set up in rows, forming a small, temporary village. Each slept about ten to twelve; privacy was the one thing in short supply. And all of this, the equal of a small city, had to be taken down whenever it was time to move on, and set up in the next town. And imagine that the show wasn’t just an American hit, but popular all over Europe, as well!

  When I saw Mark that evening, he was excited for me and had no reservations about my taking up Colonel Cody’s offer to stay on the fairgrounds. In fact, I think he was a little bit jealous. But he promised to come to at least two of the shows. We were both aware that right after my stint in the show it would be time for me to return to the road, for time was a-wasting. And though neither of us had said so much as one word about it, we both knew I would not be leaving San Francisco by myself. Unspoken, we had a mutual understanding that we would ride together south toward Los Angeles; exactly how long we would remain together was a question yet to be answered.

  Lest you wonder why my plan was to head to Los Angeles and not directly east toward Chicago, the reason is simple. Though the mileage would be longer, the riding would be easier going around the Sierra and Rocky Mountains than over both of them, especially since wintry weather can afflict both at the higher elevations well into summer. And so I had decided my route would take me south, then east across the desert to El Paso, where I would turn north and ride along the eastern slope of the Rockies. Somewhere near Denver I would find the best route east toward Chicago.

&n
bsp; * * *

  The next morning, after one of Colonel Cody’s men had hauled my trunk off from the hotel, I headed downstairs to retrieve my bicycle for the short ride to the fairgrounds. Mark was with me, and to our delight, there in the lobby was a poster and handbills advertising the Wild West Show with a hand-drawn depiction of me on my Sterling holding the plywood target in my right hand and steering with my left:

  COME SEE MISS LONDONDERRY, THE PLUCKY GLOBE-GIRDLING WHEELWOMAN FROM BOSTON, SPECIAL GUEST OF COL. BUFFALO BILL CODY, AS SHE PERFORMS AN ACT OF DEATH-DEFYING COURAGE WITH “LITTLE MISS SURE SHOT” ANNIE OAKLEY!

  I learned that the Wild West Show even included a portable print shop capable of turning out handbills in just a matter of hours. They were all over the city that morning. You can imagine the thrill of seeing myself portrayed in such a way as part of the greatest show on earth!

  The six days I spent with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show exceeded even my highest expectations. The crowds loved the routine Miss Oakley had devised for us, and my confidence grew with each performance. It seemed everyone knew who I was, and the favorable press continued day after day. Everyone treated me like a star, and Colonel Cody generously added to my purse beyond what he had promised when we met for the last time in his tent to say goodbye. It all seemed like a most pleasant dream. But the time had come to leave the beautiful city between the bay and ocean. It was now the second week of April.

  * * *

  Before leaving San Francisco, I arranged with Taber Studios, a professional photography studio, to have some photographs taken and turned into lantern slides that I could use to spice up the lectures I planned to give as I made my way east, another way to earn money. I had purchased dozens of such slides in Jerusalem and at the various Asian ports and taken them with me aboard the Sydney. Some were depictions of the bloody battles of the Chinese-Japanese War, some of exotic people, and some simply scenic. All together I had about a hundred, plenty around which to build my lectures. Taber Studios provided two actors, employees of the studio, actually, for this one, which, I was sure, would be hit.

  No time I spent traveling was more enjoyable, more deeply pleasurable, than the time I spent in San Francisco. Appearing in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show cemented the fame I had longed for, and added generously to my purse, as well. Whether I conformed precisely to the terms of the wager, I was increasingly hopeful that the pressure would be on Colonel Pope to make good on the prize money or face a backlash of bad publicity. And I was quite in love with Mark Johnson. We’d been together for several weeks since leaving Yokohama and were kindred spirits. He placed no burdens on me and embraced my independent, rebellious nature. Like Susie, he seemed to understand me as few others ever had and always treated me as his equal. Meeting, in short succession, three of the most famous Americans alive, thrilled me no end. When each of them died in the ensuing years—Miss Anthony in 1906, Colonel Cody in 1917, and Miss Oakley in 1926—I mourned as news of their deaths transported me back to the finest, most exciting hours of my life.

  * * *

  Los Angeles is, in a direct line, less than four hundred miles from San Francisco. The roads in California were generally better than in most of the country, and a strong rider such as Mark could, even if riding leisurely, have made the trip on a bicycle in less than a week. Even a less experienced rider could easily have made it in less than two. For reasons I leave to your imagination, we arrived in Los Angeles on the tenth of April, six weeks after leaving San Francisco. We did not seek the most expedient route nor the straightest one. Spring in California is positively intoxicating. The hills, which brown in the summer heat, are lush green. Wildflowers proliferate. The sun kisses the cheeks nearly every day, all day. Romance is in the air.

  I had a commitment to deliver my first lecture since arriving back in the States, save for the more informal talks I gave to earn my keep at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, at the opera house in Stockton on April 11. I arranged for my trunk to be shipped by rail the day before our departure from San Francisco.

  Our first day of riding, we crossed to the east side of the bay by ferry, covered more than fifty miles by wheel, and spent the night in the small town of Tracy. The next day I suffered an accident on the Niles Canyon Road that was very nearly disastrous.

  We were coasting downhill at a smart clip, came around a bend, and found ourselves face-to-face with a runaway horse pulling a small wagon coming from the opposite direction, forcing both of us into a fence trimmed with barbed wire lining that section of the road. Mark, a far more experienced rider than I, managed to break his fall by rolling onto his shoulder. I made the mistake of trying to break my fall with my arms outstretched, but I could not keep my face from striking the ground, which left me with several small cuts and bruises. Our bicycles were luckily undamaged, and after collecting ourselves and cleaning the cuts with a small cloth, we were able to continue. It could have been so much worse, and I knew straight away that there would be mileage in making it worse!

  Upon reaching Stockton we found a local physician, who examined me for signs of any internal injury. A rarity in the day, the doctor was a woman, a Dr. Lomax, and when I introduced myself, she gave a wave of her hand and said she had been reading about me in the papers for weeks. And apparently she’d been paying close attention. With a knowing grin, she looked at me and said, “You are almost a doctor yourself, are you not, Miss Londonderry? Trained at Harvard, I have read.” She clearly knew it was a crock. “But they say the doctor who treats himself has a fool for a patient, so I’d better have a look.”

  After looking me all over for signs of bruising and removing a few small stones that had embedded themselves in my upper lip, which had started to swell, she rendered her verdict.

  “I think you will be no worse for wear, Miss Londonderry,” she told me. “But I recommend a day or two of bed rest just in case. You don’t want to aggravate your situation.”

  “But I am scheduled to lecture at the opera house this evening,” I replied. “Hundreds of people will be there. I can’t disappoint them.”

  “Well, I do not recommend it, but I suspect my recommendation will not deter you.”

  She was right, of course. Sporting a black eye and some facial bruises, my body sore and my lip swollen, I delivered my lecture to a full house that evening, beginning with an explanation of why I looked the way I did.

  “There was not one vacant seat,” read the story in the next morning’s paper. “The audience was composed almost entirely of men and the majority of them seemed to take more interest in Miss Londonderry—who is a shapely young woman—in her abbreviated cycling habit than they did in the images that were thrown on the screen,” a reference to the lantern slides I showed using what we called a “magic lantern” back in those days. It’s a device that used an electric arc as a light source capable of projecting images from glass plates onto a screen.

  After the weeks in France in which I was repeatedly described as manly or masculine, or even as neither male nor female but some “third sex,” I was happy to be back in a land where men (and women) might appreciate my womanhood again!

  But by the next morning, it wasn’t only my face that was bruised. Bruises appeared on my torso, too, and I felt unwell. Mark and I returned to Dr. Lomax’s clinic, located in her home. By then I was also running a fever, and I accepted Dr. Lomax’s recommendation that I recuperate there. Mark lodged with a friend he had made at the lecture the night before.

  Prior to leaving San Francisco I had tossed into my steamer trunk a stack of letters bound in twine that had made their way to me at the Palace Hotel. I was too preoccupied to open them, and honestly, I wasn’t keen on reading letters from home anymore. I wasn’t interested in anything that would take me backward; I was only interested in pedaling forward. I had no longing for home, not even, I admit to you with some sorrow, for Grandpa and the children. I was, despite my current condition, happy to be in a little bubble into which my old life would not intrude. But, bored
and with nothing to do as I took bed rest at Dr. Lomax’s, I asked Mark to bring me the letters the next day. There must have been close to a hundred of them, far more than I had realized, and most, many dozen, were proposals of marriage from men I had never met! Some had read about me in the papers, some had seen me at the Wild West Show, and in each the writer made his case for matrimony. Men who claimed to be rich promised a life of luxury. Some professing their love of wheeling promised adventure. Some, more backward than the rest, said that a woman as attractive as me should not go through life without a husband and children, and promised a large, happy family. A few were alarmingly forward about their desires. All of these letters made a rapid trip into the dust bin.

  I was relieved that there was no letter from Susie. I felt badly about our last encounter and hoped we would at some point move beyond the sadness that accompanied it, but I didn’t want the intrusion. There were, of course, letters from Grandpa and my brother Bennett, letters filled with little bits of news, assurances that the children were well, and the like. But I read them dispassionately and with considerable ambivalence. After all, with every day that passed, I would be riding closer and closer to the inevitable return to the very life I had been so desperate to escape, utterly unsure of what the future would bring and how, or if, I would manage to slip back into my old life and pick up once again all of the burdens I had happily dropped nine months ago.