The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King

by The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King- A Novel of Teddy Roosevelt

  “It’s still hard to fathom,” I said. “How much does he owe?”

  Buffalo Bill stroked his long hair with one of his beautiful hands. He didn’t need a gunman’s glove inside his tent. And he didn’t need to inspect his books. “Nine hundred dollars and ten cents.”

  I took out my checkbook and scribbled a check for that amount. I’d surprised this son of a bitch. He couldn’t quite grasp my devotion to the boys. “His debt is erased, Colonel. But that won’t solve the problem. Martinson has nowhere else to go.”

  “You’re wrong,” I said. “He has a ranch in Wyoming. He’s been dyin’ to return there.”

  Cody laughed. It wasn’t savage or bitter. “And get caught in the middle of a range war, where his celebrity will be uncertain. He’s in the show business, and he’ll stay with my tents. . . . But I have a resentment, Colonel. Rough Riders. You stole that appellation from me. I had my own Congress of Rough Riders ever since my European tours—gauchos, Vaqueros, Cossacks, Mexican cowboys.”

  The press had pinned that title on my cowboy regiment, and the title clung.

  “Cody,” I said, “you’ll have to sue every publisher in America if you want that title back, and you still won’t get it.”

  He brooded for a moment. He wasn’t a showman in his heart of hearts. He was a man-killer, another Wild Bill, in a world where man-killers had become fossilized. And so he dreamt of Hickok, while he curated the Wild West. That’s why he was so successful. It wasn’t his strengths as an impresario. It was the dream of violence that lay embedded in every one of his acts. A two-gun man hovered under his tents—Hickok’s ghost.

  “Colonel, I’ll still give you five thousand for the cougar,” he said.

  I walked away from Cody and his lavish tent without a single word of goodbye.

  I PLANNED TO HOUSE Josephine at Sagamore Hill, have her roam the forest and the seashore. I hired a special warden from the Boone & Crockett Club to watch after her while I was away with Edith and the bunnies at the Governor’s Mansion in Albany. But she broke into the chicken coop, plunderer that she was, and also ran down every woodchuck and rabbit in our little preserve. The warden had to have her caged. It was a calamity, holding her like that. Josephine couldn’t prosper without human company. She was used to my lads, used to me.

  I couldn’t keep a mountain lion at the Governor’s Mansion, but I did. I let Josephine have the observatory as her lair, and she prowled on the banisters, sniffed every corner she could, battled spiderwebs. The bunnies adored her. Edie was less felicitous about her former rival from Tampa Bay. My wife was adamant when Josephine curled up under the quilts, near my legs.

  “Dearest, I will not sleep with a lion in our bed. You will have to choose your mate.”

  “But she’s still a child,” I groaned, “a baby girl.”

  Edith glared at me. “Quite a baby! She’s six feet long.”

  “Five and a half,” I insisted.

  “Theodore.”

  I had to lock Josephine out of the bedroom. She crouched there, whimpered half the night, scratching on the door. Edith relented—a little, or none of us would have slept. Our handyman built a crate for her, and that was her nighttime residence, near the foot of our four-poster.

  After breakfast, I marched along Eagle Street with Josephine at my side, past the mansions of Dutch town’s wealthy merchants, who had little love for me and my pet cougar. Arriving at the Capitol, with its red-capped twin towers, we bounded up the marble stairs to the Governor’s Office on the second floor, as legislators and hucksters panicked at my sudden appearance and bolted out of our way.

  “The Boy Governor,” one of these lads shouted within earshot, “with his celebrated carnivore.”

  I paid these rascals no mind—they were bought and sold by the local barons and Black Horse Cavalry. The Legislature hadn’t evolved since my time as the Cyclone Assemblyman—it had slipped back into the antediluvian mud, with the assistance of Senator Platt. Hence, I wasn’t surprised when Platt himself appeared as my first appointment of the morning.

  “Senator, I’m dee-lighted. What are you doing in Dutch town?”

  The Easy Boss didn’t answer right away. I’d had my antique Commissioner’s desk from Mulberry Street delivered to the Capitol. And Josephine lay sprawled across the top in all her feline glory.

  “I’m attending an undertaker’s convention,” Platt said. “Governor, you ran a corking campaign!”

  I let him imbibe his own beliefs and then I rattled him. “I did not. We won by the skin of our teeth. Tammany would have stolen the State if my Rough Riders—and Josephine—hadn’t rescued your stinking ship. You’ve let the corporations prosper, while you hurt the little man.”

  “The little man,” he said with contempt. “Are you now some kind of a socialist?”

  I bowed to the Easy Boss. “No, Senator Tom. I’m the Boy Governor. Isn’t that what your barons call me?”

  “Because you behave like a boy,” he said. “Who else but a man with a boy’s desires and delights would let a lion run rampant in the State Capitol?”

  “She isn’t rampant at all. You should be kinder to Josephine. This lion won the election for us.”

  “She did not,” snarled Senator Tom. “It was all decoration. You wouldn’t be here without the corporate chiefs you despise so much.”

  “That’s a lie,” I said, as Josephine began to grow restless with Boss Platt in the room. She growled—it was a grating noise, full of anger and mistrust.

  The Easy Boss paid scant attention to my cat and her growls.

  “Well, Governor, go and ask Pierpont Morgan. We had to borrow ten thousand from him at the last minute, so we could secure additional troops in questionable precincts.”

  Pierpont. Then I really was in a fool’s paradise.

  “If you keep attacking the corporate trusts,” Platt said, “you’ll not have a single donor. And there won’t be a second term.”

  “I’ll still have Josephine.”

  “Sonny,” he said, “I ain’t so sure.”

  He doffed his hat to my pet cougar and was gone—but his imprint remained. There was a knock on the door, and Little Haynes, who’d been the cloakroom attendant ever since I could recall, entered without his eternal air of humility.

  “Haynes,” I growled, “what the devil do you want?”

  “Ah, Governor, you will have to address me as Commissioner Haynes.”

  “Commissioner of what?” I had to ask that simpleminded man.

  “Health, Governor. It’s what is called a pocket appointment in local parlance, sir. Senator Platt appointed me with a scratch of his pen.”

  The Senator and his cronies had been imbibing Haynes with every sort of illegality. “Haynes, he does not have the power to appoint you, not even to the cloakroom.”

  “Ah, but he will get the Legislature’s approval, Governor. And meanwhile, I have both badge and title. And you are strictly forbidden to bring that lion to the Capitol.”

  I threw this fraudulent Commissioner out of my office. But I couldn’t battle Senator Tom, the State Legislature, and Edith. And so I found a solution, sad as it was. The Boone & Crockett Club had created its own preserve, the Bronx Zoölogical Gardens, on 261 acres of abandoned farmland near Fordham Road—it was the largest zoo in the world, without a rival to its Beaux Arts pavilions and massive wrought-iron gates. I’d been to the London Zoo, with its two-headed turtle and other freakish attractions. I’d visited Berlin, with its little battalion of six-legged deer. Even Prague, with its pink lioness. All the animals were kept in tiny cages. Gone was their natural habitat. These zoölogical parks weren’t parks at all—they were seductive prisons. That’s not what I had planned for the Bronx. We had granite ridges, forests, meadows, and plains we often had to sculpt with our own hands. We intended to breed buffalo in the Bronx and then return our buffalo to the Great Plains. We had an Antelope House and a Lion House—enormous pavilions—to entertain and educate our visitors, but these animals could also
wander in our local wilderness, with its own river, lake, and streams. My brothers at Boone & Crockett convinced me that this Noah’s Ark on dry land would be the perfect habitat for Josephine. She would have a pavilion all her own, with a pair of keepers, who would wander across the Bronx plains with her at will. And I, as Chief Executive of New York and founding member of Boone & Crockett, could visit Josephine at any hour—even if the gates were shut—and as often as I wished.

  I had a companion, too. Miss Nan Fowler, Pulitzer’s undercover agent and prize reporter. Pulitzer had wanted to send her to Cuba to cover the conflict, but the War Department knew of her affiliation with me and wouldn’t accredit her as a correspondent. “TR has enough attention for two lifetimes,” said the generals. So Nan sat out the war. She looked haggard upon my return from Cuba, with a certain dullness in her eyes. She could have unmasked the corruption of Senator Tom and Boss Croker of Tammany Hall, but she didn’t write a word about the election, not a word. Nor did sheand arrived at Josephine’s visit me in Dutch town. And without warning, Nan sent me a wire from Pulitzer’s headquarters on Newspaper Row.

  MUST INTERVIEW MISS JOSEPHINE.

  DEMAND AN EXCLUSIVE WITH THE CAT.

  I couldn’t even tell if Nan had gone mad. There she was at the Fordham Gate, her hair all awry, her lipstick smeared in a crooked line. She hadn’t prospered while I had been away; I did read her undercover tales from time to time, but her usual flair was gone; she wrote as if she had just come out of a static dream.

  She curtsied and clapped her hands. I wanted to shake some sense into her.

  “Miss Nan,” I asked, “why the sudden interest in our regimental mascot?”

  “Mascot, Governor? You’re not the kind of man who would keep souvenirs of a war. She must mean a great deal to you.”

  “She does, dammit,” I said.

  Now Nan smiled. Her teeth were crooked. I should have noticed.

  “Yet you donate her to a zoo for others to gawk at.”

  “It’s a scientific haven,” I said. “I helped build this zoo—we all did, at Boone & Crockett.”

  Dr. Martin Faraday, the head zookeeper, met us at the gate. He’d overheard our conversation.

  “Mrs. Fowler, you mustn’t chide Governor Ted. He made the right decision, a difficult one. Yes, Josephine is still a cub—her spots haven’t completely disappeared. But she’s also a predator. She’s devoured chicken hawks, I believe, broken their necks. Female cats are quite possessive. She might rip off the arm of any unfamiliar person who comes close to the Governor.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” Nan said.

  We marched across the gravel path. Construction was still going on at a furious pace—there were ditches everywhere, potholes, and piles of dirt. We passed a lone ostrich behind a wire fence—looking both fierce and defenseless—and arrived at Josephine’s pavilion; it had an enormous gallery for visitors and a cage where the cougar could roam. A pair of young wardens were playing with Josephine outside her cage, feeding her scraps of meat; otherwise the pavilion was empty. It looked like a well-lit cave stuffed with sand and straw.

  Josephine kept grabbing at the meat, even after she noticed me. She’d been rolling around in the straw. I wasn’t coy with her, or shy. And I didn’t really care how Miss Nan described this meeting in Pulitzer’s rag.

  “Jo,” I whispered. My sweetheart of a cub didn’t even purr, not once, or caterwaul, to reveal some sign of displeasure at my sudden disappearance from her life. She stopped chewing, and glanced at Nan out of the corner of her eye. Still, she stood there, like a huntress—no, a predator, as Dr. Faraday had predicted. And then she yawped—it was near a human cry. She did a somersault, much faster than any man could behold. She swatted at me with one paw, but that swat was as soft as a kiss. She had no shame. She stood on her hind legs, not lazily, like a dancing bear, but with the swiftness of a cougar, grabbed my shoulders with both paws, and licked my face in front of Faraday, Nan, and her two feeders.

  “Aw, Jo,” I said, and her purring was louder than the croak of a frog in an icehouse.

  I asked Faraday and the wardens to leave. The younger warden glanced at me.

  “But that’s breaking the rules, Governor—one of us has to be present at all times if we have a visitor.”

  Faraday shook him off with a nod. “Take you time, Governor. We’ll be outside the pavilion.”

  I hadn’t come unprepared to the Fordham Gate. I put on my colonel’s gauntlets and wrestled with my cub. We rolled around in the straw and dust; she attacked my gauntlets with mock savagery, while I serenaded her in the thick of battle. “Josephine, my Jo.”

  I rolled over once and espied Nan, who studied us both with a quizzical look.

  “Well, Mrs. Fowler, I thought you came here to interview my pup.”

  “Governor, believe me, that is my intent. But Josephine can’t growl her retorts.”

  “Maybe I can,” I said. And she laughed for the first time, again revealing her crooked teeth.

  “What future does this animal have—in a cage?”

  “A cage within her own pavilion,” I said. “Like a princess.”

  “Look at her, Mr. Ted. Miss Josephine is a wounded cat.”

  I put down my gauntlets for a moment. “Wounded cat? What does that mean?”

  “She’s in love with you—that, sir, is mortal business.”

  I didn’t know how to answer Nan. “I can’t keep her—I’ve tried. And I can’t give her back to the Riders from Arizona who gave her to the regiment. Both of them are currently behind bars. I’m one of the founders of this zoo. We collected a fortune to have a deluxe domain for wildlife, a habitat. These animals will live much longer under our dominion, Nan.”

  “Yes, yes, but how often will you visit Josephine?”

  “Jumping Jesus, as often as I can.”

  I WAITED FOR THIS PHANTOM interview to appear in the World. Nan didn’t disappoint me. She rarely did. She called it “The Roughest of Rough Riders.” And she didn’t rely on the luck of a photographer’s flash pan. She’d drawn her own sketch of Josephine, whiskers and all. And she endowed Josephine with the gift of speech. My big cat answered Nan’s questions like a veteran trooper.

  You can call me Josephine, or Jo. I didn’t get to see Cuba, Ma’am. Mascots weren’t allowed in the tropics. But I trained with the Colonel, accompanied him and the Riders on their regimental runs near San Antonio, on the plains outside Tampa, and along the dunes at Montauk Point. I also sat with the Colonel at the bar of the Menger Hotel, in order to eat the heart out of those generals at Fort Sam who tried to cause havoc in our regiment. But the Riders are not Regular Army and had to disband. A regimental mascot can’t exist once a regiment is gone. Now I live in the wilds near Fordham Road, with my own palace. Come visit if you can.

  The interview was a sensation, of course, and it drew endless lines outside Josephine’s pavilion, lines that stretched right to Fordham Road and beyond. Suddenly Josephine had become the Bronx Zoo’s star attraction. I didn’t like it. I thought of Cody. Wasn’t this a version of Cody’s Wild West on the plains near Fordham Road? I received a note from Nan.

  FORGIVE ME, GOVERNOR.

  I DID NOT MEAN TO CREATE SUCH A STIR.

  I WANTED TO PUNISH YOU, I SUPPOSE,

  AND ALL I DID WAS PUNISH JOSEPHINE.

  Our experiment with the Bronx buffalo failed. They could not feed on fake prairie grass. The local wardens had to feed them genuine grass from the Great Plains. And still they grew spindly, one by one. Several died. We could not reproduce their natural habitat in the Bronx. The Brooklyn Eagle lambasted us, called us amateurs and wild experimenters, even said Boone & Crockett was filled with charlatans and racketeers.

  Nan never attacked me once.

  I visited Josephine again, among that furl of people. I waited until the pavilion emptied out. I wrestled with my little girl, rolled around in the straw. But her shoulder blades seemed kind of thin to me, not packed with muscle. She licked me a-plenty,
purred, and grew silent as I was about to leave, as if I had become one more illusion in a land of illusions.

  I voiced my concern to Dr. Faraday.

  “Governor, I won’t lie,” he said. “She bonded with you, and it’s a real dilemma. We’ve given her playmates—other cougars—and all she does is attack them with her paws, not to maim, just to declare her own distance. My wardens sit with her for hours, and she’s fond of them, but they’re not Rough Riders.”

  I was gripped with a grief I couldn’t control. “I’ll have to take her back,” I said. “I’m not sure how to handle it, but I will.”

  “I understand,” he said. “Still, I’m sorry to hear that. We’ll just have to prosper without her.”

  But I stalled, you see. I was so damn occupied, battling the Easy Boss and his army of plutocrats. They broke the unions, swallowed up little manufacturers in their wake, until not a soul could compete with them. I fought back—like a lioness. I harangued the Legislature. “Gentlemen, you have become carrion that the Easy Boss serves up to his plutocrat friends. I will not abide that.” I vetoed bill after bill. And Josephine vanished from my daily agenda until I got a call, not from Faraday, mind you, but from Nan.

  “Governor, come quick.”

  NAN HAD BEEN TO SEE my little girl every day, had stood in line for hours. And when I arrived at the Fordham Gate, she got in front of Faraday, seized my hand, and we walked to Faraday’s little palace, his own pavilion, with a tiny hospital, a study room for scholars, and a morgue. Josephine lay near a wheezing tiger, on the mattress of an enormous crib, in the hospital’s surgical station. Her tongue was out, slaked with foam. Her brown eyes had gone blood-red. Faraday’s entire little team of veterinary surgeons were there in their waxed mustaches and starched white coats. I couldn’t get an answer out of them that made sense. Her heartbeats were too rapid—or too slow. They spat out the names of a few sedatives and tonics, powders they had concocted themselves.

  “Governor,” one of these surgeons said, “at first I thought she had bronchitis. She’s had trouble breathing. . . .”