by Pete Dexter
"Pardon me," Agnes I^ake said, "but there's a spot twenty yards up the road—"
'"Secuse me for sayin' so, ma'am," the driver said, "but we got a situation here, and need quiet to think it out." It was quiet for a minute or two, and then the driver cussed and they all lined up again on the tree and pushed until the peddler fell on the ground and the driver's nose bled. "Son of a bitch," he said.
Agnes Lake said, "I do not mean to interrupt—"
The driver had thrown his head back and was holding his nose with the fingers of both hands, his feet spread apart as if to hold the weight. "'Secuse me for sayin' so, ma'am," he said, "but can't you see ever' damn thing in creation's gone to hell?"
Agnes Lake put her hands on her hips and looked around her. Only the messenger met her eyes. He was hurt inside, she saw it clearly now.
She walked to the coach, kicked the blocks from under the front wheels, and climbed onto the driver's seat. "I ain't responsible," the driver said behind her. "She's determined to get her neck broke, and I ain't responsible, and neither is the Northwestern Express, Stage, and Transportation Company, unless she gets off there right now."
She untied the reins and calmed the horses. "Here, now," she said. The horses moved slowly, in a straight line, until the coach was clear of the fallen tree. The empty axle rode a foot lower than the center of the wheels, and a strong wind would have blown the whole thing over. " 'Secuse me, ma'am," the driver said behind her. "Ma'am?"
She kept the horses slow and steady, headed on a diagonal back up onto the road, bringing the one remaining inside wheel within a few inches of the drop in the shoulder. Then she stopped the coach next to the drop, calming the horses again, set the brake, and climbed down. She blocked the front wheels and walked past the driver, who was following her now, trying to talk.
She picked the wheel up and set it on the road.
The driver followed her down and followed her back up. " 'Secuse me," he said. "Ma'am?"
She rolled the wheel down the road to the coach, and then off the road until it rested a foot beneath the empty axle. She wiped her hands, and then fit them underneath the wheel and lifted. The weight of it shook her arms as she fit it over the axle.
No one moved to help. When the lip of the wheel casing slipped over the axle, though, the messenger produced the mallet she had taken from the toolbox. He did not try to hammer the wheel on himself. That was the easy part, and he left it for her to finish.
She liked him for that.
When she had finished with the mallet, he turned to the driver and said, "You think you could find the lady a lock pin so's she could finish saving us, or you going to stand there with your thumb up your sitter and wait for the Indians?"
The driver looked at what she had done. He said, "Son of a bitch," and climbed up into his seat and found a pin in the toolbox to replace the one that had broken. Without another word, he hammered the pin into the axle and then climbed back into his seat and waited for the others to load.
They took the same seats they'd had before, with Agnes Lake between the farm boy and the peddler, staring across the aisle at Captain Jack Crawford. She smoothed her skirt over her legs, and he smiled at her in a secret way.
"There's some women, they can do as much as a man," he said after a while. She put her eyes on him, flat and hard. He didn't care. "I noticed you weren't wearing a wedding ring."
She looked down at her fingers, which were short and thick and strong. There had been a ring, a family ring, but it was too small. She wore it on, a chain beneath her blouse. Bill had hung it there himself, a few minutes after the ceremony. He'd said, "It fits fine." She touched her chest now, pressing the ring into her skin.
"It's a hard country for a woman alone," the captain said.
"I have been alone before," she said.
The news of Wild Bill's assassination reached Jane Cannary at the first bar she entered after her escape from Sister of Mercy Hospital. It was early September. She was walking with a crutch, and had not bathed since she broke her leg.
The doctor at the hospital was a young woman, who had told her that she had been thrown and then kicked by a bull on Main Street. "I expected as much," Jane said, looking at her leg. It was wrapped and heavy, and tied to the ceiling. She had just come to.
The doctor said it was a double fracture. "We thought it was a skull fracture too," she said.
Jane said that was a hoot. "I got double-thickness," she said, and rapped herself on the crown of her head. "They ain't invented the bull yet that could penetrate this."
She was in the hospital five weeks, waiting for the woman doctor to cut her leg off the ceiling. In the end she did it herself, with a letter opener, and hobbled two blocks back toward Main Street until she found a bar. She expected that was how the hospital business ran—when you were well enough to wean, you'd figure a way out. She had taken an interest in the hospital business, watching the doctor for her own use later, but after two weeks it began to repeat itself, and she saw that she had learned all she was going to. The rest was a matter of waiting to leave. That and mending. The break was just above the knee, and sometimes at night it seemed to her that she felt a tiny hammering in there as it was repaired.
And that was one of the first things she explained when she walked into the bar on Main Street. "The human body," she said to the bartender, "is the only true doctor there is. Mine has been working an extra shift, and now desires a drink."
She drank four shots of whiskey in about half an hour, and then her leg started to hurt. "Get the hammer, boys," she said. "I may need to be hit over the head."
The bartender was not interested in healing, though, and the men in the place gave her a wide berth. She got tired of waiting to be recognized and when the bartender had poured her another, she grabbed his wrist and held on until he met her eyes. "I hereby charge you with the duty to keep me away from them bulls," she said.
The bartender squinted and looked closer. "Calamity?"
She nodded and released his wrist. "I'd heard you was in town, riding bulls agin," he said. He started to smile now. "But there wasn't no picture in the paper."
"I didn't give notice," she said. "Sometimes it just comes over me to ride a bull before they can collect the reporters."
The bartender called down to the other customers. "Come over here and meet Calamity Jane," he said. The others looked at each other and stayed where they were. Every third drunk whore in Rapid City claimed to be Calamity Jane. "It's the real goods," the bartender said. "I seen her picture in the paper from last time. Broke her leg riding bulls on Main Street, come look if she ain't lame."
And the others picked up their drinks and came to the front end of the bar for a closer look. She pulled her hat brim down even with her eyes and turned to face them. She rested her elbows on the bar and let her fingers hang loose, an inch above her pistols.
There were half a dozen men, and they moved closer a step at a time. The bartender stood behind, smiling like he'd invented her. "See?" he said. "What'd I tell you?"
She picked her glass up off the bar and drank what was inside it. Without looking back, she held it over her shoulder to be refilled. "All I asked for was a hammer, boys," she said. "I didn't intend to stand parade inspection for you sheep-lovers."
"It's her," one of them said. And they began to smile, the same way the bartender did, and before long, against her wishes, she was smiling too. "I heard you was with Custer the night before Little Big Horn," one of them said.
She scratched her head. "I can't say," she said. "It could of been then, it could of been the night after." She threw down the new drink and began to feel comfortable, everywhere but her leg. She moved from the bar to a chair, and had the men situate her foot on another chair. When the relief came, she noticed she was sweating. She wondered if maybe she'd left the hospital before she was ready.
"I heard you was with Wild Bill too," one of them said. They had all followed her to the table, like there was something they want
ed.
"Me and Bill is as close as a shell in its casing," she said.
One of the customers said he had heard different stories about what had happened.
She felt it coming then. "What stories?"
"I heard Bill had shot the man's family back in Kansas," the man said, "and then I heard the man had no reason at all. Just snuck up out of meanness and did his work."
"What are you saying?" she said.
"Just what I heard of how it happened."
She sat up and narrowed her eyes. She felt dizzy from too long in a bed.
"How he got kilt," he said. "You knew he got kilt, didn't you? Being close, I thought you'd of known . . ."
Jane's hat had fallen back on her head, and she tightened it now, ' down over her eyes the way she liked it.
"Close," she said, "shit, Wild Bill Hickok was my husband." And saying those words, she heard her voice break.
She meant to find her horse and ride directly to Deadwood that afternoon. She did not care about the Indians. She walked on her crutch to a livery off Dakota Street and asked there about the animal. "His name is Warpaint," she said. "A handsome gray stallion, got a peeder on him, he could join the circus. . ."
The man at the livery knew the horse. "The animal-lovers brought him in here about a month ago," he said. "He died."
"Died?" she said. "Warpaint died too?" She grabbed the livery man by the front of the shirt and pulled him close. "What'd he die of?" she said. "He was perfect, the last I saw him."
The livery man let himself be grabbed. "Old age," he said.
"That's a damn lie," she said. "That pretty old gray wasn't but eleven years old."
The livery man did not mind being called a liar, it went with the horse business. "He wasn't gray but in the face," he said. "Didn't have a tooth left in his mouth."
She let go of him and sat down on some hay. Her leg ached and she needed morphine. "The truth is," she said after a while, "I can't do much riding with this broke leg anyway."
The livery man scratched his head. "I'm a widow now," she said, "and I got to travel to Deadwood and make sure they done right by burying my husband."
He stood over her, looking at her crutch. She thought he looked sympathetic. "Perhaps you heard of him," she said. "Wild Bill Hickok."
He looked at her in the same way. He touched the crutch. "You heard of Calamity Jane Cannary?" she said.
"Yes, I did," he said.
"Then you know I'm good to my word. My money's in Dead-wood, but if you rent me a horse and buggy, I'll pay when I return, the day after tomorrow."
He shook his head. "It ain't what I heard, that you were good to your word," he said. "I heard you ride bulls on Main Street."
"I got to get to Deadwood," she said. "My husband's been murdered."
He scratched under his hat. "You probably got a swamp fungus on your head," she said. "Let it alone and stay out of the rain."
He picked up her crutch. "This here," he said. "I'll rent the buggy, four dollars a day, and you can pick this up when you return, the day after tomorrow."
"I can't walk five steps," she said. "What am I supposed to do without my crutch?"
"It's to remind you," he said. "When you take a step, you'll remember you got somebody's horse and buggy."
She left the crutch with the livery man and took the road to Sturgis, where she spent the night with a doctor in trade for morphine, and then approached Deadwood from the northeast the next day. She had not eaten since she left the hospital and felt weak from the toes up. The doctor had given her an extra needle in the morning, for a promise never to mention his name to any living person, and the thought of food turned her stomach queasy.
She drove the buggy without urgency, without the idea of time at all. Her thoughts of Bill were slow and sweet. She pictured his gratitude if she had been at the bar to save him. He would have married her afterwards. She pictured them in front of the church, standing together for the photographers, each of them holding a buffalo gun.
The buggy hit rocks and holes, hurting her leg, but the hurt seemed unconnected in some way she couldn't get a fix on. And it didn't seem like anything she needed to get a fix on. She stopped twice to drink from streams, parking the buggy a yard or two from the water and crawling to the edge. Coming back, she would pull herself up with the wheels.
The second time she stopped, she looked into the water before she drank, and she stayed there, frozen, on her hands and knees a quarter of an hour, staring at her reflection. She was twenty-nine years old, and never had looked at herself and seen pretty before.
The sun moved in the sky and the buggy followed the sun, and Jane sat watching, until it came to her that she was in the middle of circling events and places. She thought if she got enough time on earth, it would all come by again. "The next time," she said out loud, "I won't leave you a minute, Bill. I will be there in the bar when this skunk-lover comes in, and we will see him answer for this cowardice . . ."
The trail flattened and then began to climb. Time hung in the air with the sun, and somehow it moved. Presently, she came around a formation of rocks and realized she was looking at the city. She smelled a trick—it didn't feel like more than an hour since she left Sturgis—but she saw the sun had moved again, and she saw the Gem Theater, and decided not to concern herself further with time.
She sat taller and straightened her leg across the floor of the buggy; she pulled her hat brim even with her eyes, and drove through town. The horse did not like the mud, and she used the whip to encourage him. She did not curse him, though, the way she would have cursed bulls, because horses were more complicated and sensitive. You could say the wrong thing to a horse and he wouldn't move at all.
She drove past the Gem and the Green Front, noticing three new bars in the badlands, waiting to be recognized. It wasn't until she got into town proper, though, that she saw someone she knew. It was Sheriff Bullock, who tipped his hat. She pulled the horses up and tipped her hat back. "Morning," she said. The word seemed to come out slower than it was supposed to.
"Miss Cannary," he said.
"I have been injured and laid up in Rapid City," she said, "and have just now returned to visit the grave of my husband." The sheriff stared up into the buggy, wordless. "My leg was injured, or I'd of been here for the burial," she said.
"I didn't know you had married," he said. "Not that you wouldn't make someone a wife . . ."
She laughed and felt the sun lying across the horse's back. "You knowed about me and Bill," she said. "Everybody knowed about us."
The sheriff was wordless again, and she didn't trust the time to pass at regular speed, or she would have waited him out. "I intend to mourn him now," she said, "and then track the assassin, so's 1 can sleep again at night, knowing Bill's avenged."
"Too late, miss," he said. "Jack McCalPs been arrested in Cheyenne and taken to Yankton for trial and hanging."
The news hit Jane as hard as the assassination itself. "That ain't right," she said. "He's mine, I got privleges in this." The sheriff looked up and down the street, as if he was embarrassed to be seen talking to her. She didn't move. "A widder's got privleges," she said.
"Jack McCall would never of got caught, except for his own self," the sheriff said. "He went into Cheyenne pulling that old rusty gun out of his pants every twenty minutes, anybody that didn't believe he'd done Wild Bill, Jack McCall put his gun under their nose. What I heard, the deputy arrested him twice for it, and then got the U.S. marshal. It was the marshal who said a miner's court wasn't a legal trial and took him back to Yankton."
"It ain't fair," she said.
"It's his own doing," the sheriff said. "A man puts his own head in the noose, you can't feel tender for his neck." The sheriff looked up into the buggy and saw Jane was crying. "Here now, miss," he said, "the law is the law . . ."
She wiped at her cheeks with the back of her hand. "Where is my husband?" she said.
He studied her a moment, deciding if this was any of hi
s business. "The far end of the cemetery," he said.
"By hisself ?" she said. "You didn't put him in next to Chinese or soft-brains, did you? Or miners."
"He's got his own place," the sheriff said. He saw Jane's face change. Like a different person. She opened her mouth then, slowly, and made her eagle scream. Then she whipped the horse and headed south on Main Street, and then turned east on Pine, in the direction of the cemetery.
The sheriff wondered whose horse and buggy she'd stolen. He hoped it was somebody a long way off, who would not think to look in the Black Hills.
Charley Utter cut down the stump marking bill's grave and replaced it with a marker of his own.
Wild Bill—J. B. Hickok. Killed by the assassin Jack McCall in Dead-wood Black Hills August 2nd 1876.
Pard we will meet again in the Happy Hunting ground to part no more. Good bye—Colorado Charley, C. H. Utter
He burned the letters into a piece of good oak and nailed that to a fence post. He was pounding the post into the ground when he heard the buggy. He stopped his work and reached for his shirt, not to offend widows or children visiting the deceased.
Before he got to the first button, though, he heard Jane's voice. "Git up, now," she said to the horse, "git, git, git. . ." He buttoned himself faster and turned around in time to see the horse skid in the mud. Jane whipped him until he straightened. Then she pulled back hard against his bit. He wondered where she'd stolen him.
She said, "Whoa, there, damnit, whoa . . ."
The horse stopped and Charley stood still. "Colorado Charley," she said over the sounds of the horse. "I didn't expect to find you."
Charley didn't answer. "I been hurt," she said, "or I would of been here sooner." He nodded. "It's my leg," she said. "I broke it two places, so they tied it to the ceiling in Rapid City."
Charley noticed the creases in her neck had a green hue. He surmised it was mold. She saw him staring and pulled the brim of her hat down even with her eyes, but there was more wrong than shadows could cover.
