This Old Bill

by Loren D. Estleman

  "You have a severely inflamed prostate and I don't even want to think about your liver. Your condition, moreover, is being weakened by an eclipse of the moon."

  "Save that for the newspapers. What are my chances?"

  "There is a time when the greatest of physicians must commend his patient to a higher power."

  He closes his eyes and breathes. Just as the doctor thinks him asleep he opens them. "How long?"

  "The sand is slipping slowly. .."

  "How long, damn you?"

  "About thirty-six hours, sir."

  He breathes again. "All right. Who's outside?"

  "Your wife, your daughter Irma, May, and Lew Decker, her husband."

  "I know who Lew is. Ask him to come in."

  The doctor withdraws carrying his bag, his rubber soles insinuating on the plank floor.

  Waiting, the old man considers the glob of yellow light on the blankets and wonders at its remote familiarity. Then he remembers that the sunlight lay like that in the room where his father died. Damn fool kid. He should have held his hand, and to hell with the bonnet.

  He closes his eyes and is returned instantly to the plains. Not the scene of his youth, however, but a garishly lit circle with a painted canvas backdrop and an audience humming in the darkness around the edge and music that tingles the soles of his feet. Always this is the screen against which his best memories are projected, containing friends and enemies dead and buried before he ever set foot inside an open-air arena, orange and cracked and leaping jerkily like the images on his one and only film now crumbling away in some storage vault. The bloodsuckers have got their hooks into his dreams along with everything else.

  Someone in the unseen bleachers calls his name.

  "Will? You wanted to see me?"

  At first, still under the influence of his dream, he thinks the voice is Ned Buntline's, come to awaken him in the cool shade of the Army wagon. Fat, funny Ned Buntline, Homer to a generation of moldering heroes. But Buntline's remains are pickled in alcohol, and the pages of his precious history have gone brown and flaking, as dead as Hickok, as dead as Custer. As dead as he. He looks at his brother-in-law's funereal face and gestures feebly at a deck of cards on the bedside table.

  "The doc says I've got thirty-six hours. Let's play high five."

  BOOK TWO

  1872-1883

  BUNTLINE'S SPECIAL

  "Oh, Mama, I'm a bad actor!"

  —William F. Cody, 1872

  Chapter Six

  In spite of its foreignness (and to some degree because of it), New York City put Will in mind of the kitchen in his mother's old boardinghouse. In his youth he had experienced this same fifth-wheel sensation as his mother and his five sisters scurried from the stove to the table and back, stirring pans, fetching knives, and hauling smoking pots, exposing the young plainsman to the dangers of accidental stabbing or trampling or scalding. But there the resemblance ended.

  A brief stopover in Chicago to visit Phil Sheridan had not prepared him for the splendor and terrors of the world's fastest-growing center of commerce, where spired towers pierced anthracite clouds and trains racketed along the Sixth Avenue elevated railway, showering sparks and soot to the macadam street. Handsome brownstone tenements containing the city's new rich sniffed at that new innovation, the apartment house, taking shape on East 18th Street and along Central Park, with its dubious promise of life on shelves like books and bottles of patent medicine. Horse-drawn cabs and trolleys clogged the avenues and boulevards. The lone horseman was rare, and was most often a police officer in domed helmet and uniform buttoned to the neck. And there were people, more in a single block than Will had seen in some whole towns on the frontier, their speech where they congregated in doorways and on corners a clangor of strange, unmusical accents. He calculated that there were far too many pedestrians to fit inside at one time, like eleven suits for a ten-suit closet with one always out being brushed.

  J. G. Heckscher and Schuyler Crosby, veterans of the celebrated Bennett buffalo hunt, shared his cab. They called his attention to the creeping steel skeleton of the Brooklyn Bridge under construction and Boss Tweed's infamous quarter-million-dollar courthouse that thus far had cost New York taxpayers in excess of thirteen million. But Will was like a wolf cub on its first venture outside the den, dazzled by the world's immenseness and variety and unable to take it all in.

  "Where is this charming Mrs. Cody we've all heard so much about?" Crosby asked.

  "Home, looking after our children. St. Louis is civilization enough for her."

  In fact, there had been quite an argument about it, Louisa maintaining that travel was dangerous for children and ignoring Will's rejoinder that he and his brother and sisters had made the journey by wagon from Iowa to Kansas without incident. The upshot of it was that he was made to feel like a deserter for taking Bennett up on his invitation and leaving his family behind.

  The cab halted before the looming benevolent paternity of the Union Club. Meekly, Will followed his companions inside, and later, in an alcoholic fog, to Heckscher' s tailor, where he exchanged his Chicago suit of clothes for a full dress suit. His reflection in the full-length mirror appalled him. He inquired after a barber to shear his suddenly conspicuous long hair, to the horror of his New York friends.

  "All you need is a silk hat," said Heckscher, and snapped his fingers at the tailor, a small man with a natty moustache and narrow Eastern European features, who asked what size. The New Yorker raised his eyebrows at Will.

  "I just generally keep trying them on till I find one that fits," the scout admitted.

  "Seven," estimated Schuyler Crosby. "No, seven and a half if his hair's to fit inside the crown."

  "Seven and a half," Heckscher agreed.

  The hat was produced. Deftly the tailor scooped Will's locks inside and placed it on his head. Will tilted it in his rakish fashion and admired the result in the mirror. With his neatly sculpted goatee he looked like visiting royalty. His face and neck were very dark against the starched sterile whiteness of his collar.

  "A transformation," said Heckscher.

  "One wouldn't know you from any Fifth Avenue swell," Crosby chimed in.

  "Just don't tip your hat to the ladies or you'll cause a riot."

  The tailor said the suit would be ready tomorrow. Will changed back into his other clothes and accompanied his hosts to the ground floor via the perpendicular railway. His second ride in the cable-strung cage unnerved him no less than the trip up, especially when the car stopped and his internal organs were still moving. Crosby, noting the pallor under Will's tan, advised him to brace his back and shoulders against the frame next time.

  He waved away the counsel. "I've felt the same astride a bucking horse, where there's no frame to brace yourself against."

  He saw his first stage play that evening, a melodrama entitled The Black Crook, and joked during intermission that he was glad he'd left his guns in his hotel suite, or the actor who portrayed the villain so convincingly might have been dead many times over. Heckscher laughed—after a beat that made Will slap his back and roar. The other theatergoers in the lobby stared. Later the three retired to the club, where James Gordon Bennett, Jr., greeted them, his lively face flushed from drink, crumbs in his well-trimmed moustache. He pressed on Will a treacherous mixture of brandy, absinthe, and ginger ale, and gazed wide-eyed as the frontiersman put it down in a draft. Will was used to grain alcohol as strong as a randy buffalo bull. Afterward he switched to rye whiskey and the party sat in deep brown leather chairs with high backs recalling their excursion West with Will as guide and listening to his account of the hunt with the grand duke. At midnight he returned to his suite, threw himself fully clothed on his stomach on the bed, and fell asleep while still bouncing. Such late hours were unknown on the plains.

  He awoke at eight and dined in the suite on steak and eggs and hotcakes and sausage and gallons of steaming black coffee, luxuries forgotten since his late mother's last big spread. Then he went o
ut under a pale winter sky supported like a tin ceiling on the spires of the brown and gray buildings and walked clear down to the Battery, where he watched ships sailing into and out of the harbor, their sails bellying like laboring horses. He bought roast chestnuts from an Italian vendor and flipped them into a tin cup held by a shivering monkey attached by a silver chain to an organ grinder's instrument.

  "You suppose' t'row pennies," the grinder complained.

  "He can't eat pennies," replied an astonished Will. But he plinked a handful of coins into the cup.

  He listened to a political speech for Horace Greeley in the park, then found a photographer's studio on Canal Street and had his picture taken for Louisa in his city clothes standing in front of a painted backdrop representing a landscape. He got lost on his way back but made no effort to ask directions. He had been lost before, and not where there were hundreds of people from whom to enlist aid and food and drink for the buying. He walked for blocks and blocks, gazing up at the rococo architecture, reading advertising signs, and ignoring the stares of passersby made curious by this giant with hair to make a woman envious and his overcoat hanging open on the coldest day of the year. Eventually, he spotted a landmark he recognized and wound his way back to the hotel to find a welcome familiar bloated little figure in a vest and cutaway waiting for him in the lobby.

  "Colonel!" Will seized one of Ned Buntline's carefully tended hands and squeezed until the little journalist's eyes watered.

  "You're looking well turned out for a rude hero, lad." Buntline kneaded his bones back into place with his other hand, admiring his friend's vest and tiny gold horseshoe hanging from his watch chain. The biographer's hair and moustache were a tad grayer and his eyes were unnaturally bright for the time of day. Tobacco ash rested in the creases of his paunch. He transferred a stack of periodicals from under his left arm to the scout's hands. "Just so you realize your Boswell has not been idle."

  Will shuffled through the material. Each buff cover bore a different steel engraving of a sharp-profiled frontiersman in long hair, goatee, and buckskins, posed in various heroic attitudes. He read the titles: Buffalo Bill's Best Shot, Buffalo Bill's Last Victory, and Hazel Eye, the Girl Trapper.

  "Who's Hazel Eye?" he asked then.

  "You rescue her from savages in the last chapter."

  He paused to study the last item in the sheaf, which was not a novel like the others but a slim playbill bearing the simple legend Buffalo Bill and a list of names opposite colorful western sobriquets, a few of which he recognized. The proper names were all unfamiliar.

  "I thought that might arouse your native curiosity," Buntline observed. "I'll wager you had no idea you were this season's theatrical lion. Perhaps you and I can stroll over to Niblo's Garden and view it this evening."

  Before Will could reply, the white-haired desk clerk addressed him obsequiously and handed him three messages. Schuyler Crosby had invited him to lunch at Delmonico's and his Union Club friends were holding a reception in his honor in the ballroom of the Fifth Avenue Hotel that evening. The third message was from Heckscher' s tailor, informing him that his dress suit was ready. He itched to wear it in public. "Tomorrow night, perhaps," he told Buntline, and added quickly, when the other's face fell, "Is it too early to stand you to a drink?"

  The journalist beamed. "When I was five it was too early. Had I but known of the dark abyss that awaited me at the bottom of that first bottle. But there is reason for everything on God's good earth, and who are we to question His vast design?" He took his friend's elbow. "The bar is this way. Mind the end stool; it has a short leg."

  Will's grand entrance at the Fifth Avenue underscored his quasi-royal status, but he soon found himself undone on the dance floor by the new steps from Europe and fled to the bar, where he sat with his curls spilling over the sober black cloth on his shoulders and told stories to a growing crowd of listeners while the bartender struggled to keep his glass full.

  He spent part of the next day at Central Park, which was still under construction, walking among trees already dwarfed by the buildings beyond while snow fell in flakes the size of gold pieces. Red-faced masons at work on the footbridges wondered at the foolhardy soul who scorned a roof and a fire without being paid to, but the bare ground felt good under his aching feet. His high-heeled boots, which he wore to spare his new patent leathers, were not designed for walking great distances comfortably, especially when those great distances involved many blocks of concrete and macadam. But a man who had hiked a thousand miles on the whim of a band of armed Mormons suffered less than most. Nevertheless, he took a cab back to his hotel.

  More summonses awaited him, some bearing signatures he didn't recognize but assumed belonged to people he had met at the reception. This time he begged off, pleading exhaustion, and sent word to Buntline through a uniformed page to stop by the hotel that evening and they would attend the theater. He stayed in the rest of the day and wrote a long letter to Louisa.

  The play was based on Buntline's books and featured a flamboyant actor named J. B. Studley as Buffalo Bill. Although Will failed to reconcile the brave youth he saw fighting back the deranged crowd of slavers intent on murdering his father at the Salt Creek Trading Post with the terrified little boy he had been on that occasion, he blinked back tears of anger as the actor portraying Isaac Cody was "stabbed" and stamped and applauded along with everyone else in the audience when the hero bested border rough Jack McKandless in a duel with yard-long bowie knives, despite the fact that the latter incident was borrowed from Wild Bill Hickok's inflated memoirs. He had to keep reminding himself that that was he, Will Cody, facing death between the flickering footlights and the painted backdrop. It sickened him slightly for unknown reasons. For the first time he understood the aversion of the Indians he had helped capture to having their pictures taken.

  But he couldn't disown a tiny surge of satisfaction mixed with his embarrassment when he heard his own name whispered a few seats away and a young couple leaned forward, plainly staring at his profile in the light shed from the stage. He pretended not to notice as that same name buzzed down the row and across the auditorium, punctuated by nudges and womanly gasps. Buntline, enraptured with his own words as usual, sat slumped in his rolls of fat with his chin tucked into his wattled throat and appeared to take no notice of the growing excitement. But when the curtain came down and the lights went up and the audience demanded to see the hero of the drama, it was the journalist who clamped an iron hand on Will's bicep and pulled him to his feet.

  The walk to the stage seemed interminable, and despite the thunderous applause pressing him from behind like a wagon on a downgrade, he considered the journey from Mormon territory back to Kansas shorter. The lights had dimmed again, but the naked white shaft of the calcium spot blinded him. The audience was standing now. He found the steps with someone's help and mounted the boards, terrified of stumbling and falling. But he made his way to center stage without incident. The cheers and clapping reached a peak and subsided. The spectators sat down. Someone coughed. Will squinted into the spot. He folded his hands in front of him, behind him, crossed his arms over his chest, thrust his hands in his pockets. They had taken on a life independent of his own. The silence grew painful. He cleared his throat, mumbled something, cleared his throat again, raised his voice. His speech lasted thirty seconds; afterward, he had no idea what he'd said. A pause followed his words, then more noise than ever. Someone took hold of his elbow and steered him toward the wings. His hand was seized and pumped, and as his eyes adjusted themselves to the dim illumination backstage he saw that the man doing the pumping was J. B. Studley, his impersonator. Up close the actor's makeup was as thick as bear grease on a Sioux brave and his long wig and pasted-on beard and moustache looked glaringly false. He was a half inch shorter than Will in spite of two-inch heels and lifts in his boots. Ned Buntline was standing next to him, beaming.

  "You had them in the hollow of your hand, lad," he said. "If you were running for President you'd h
ave the vote of every man in the theater."

  Your mother is convinced you'll be President someday. I hold lower goals for you.

  Others in the cast shook his hand. He experienced the semi-traumatic sensation of exchanging polite words with Jack McKandless, miraculously arisen from the dead. The small, swarthy woman who had played the part of the Indian maiden said something pleasant to him in Brooklyn-accented English. One of the renegade Cheyennes had blue eyes and freckles under the walnut stain on his face. Will clasped hands with a tall bald man in a gray three-piece suit who introduced himself as the manager of the theater and offered him five hundred dollars per week to portray himself in the production. Astonished, Will politely declined.

  "Wise decision, lad," whispered Buntline, propelling him toward the stage door. He had their coats on his arm and was carrying their hats. "Never take the first offer."

  Six weeks swept past in a swirl of colors and glitter. Will saw his first opera, commenting to Commodore Bennett that while the diva's voice was impressive, he knew a Cheyenne shaman who could yell louder. He addressed the journalists who followed him all over town by their first names, and those whose names he didn't remember he called "hoss." He dined on enough banquet chicken to sprout wings and lay eggs (or so he swore), appeared at fancy balls for his customary one dance, then repaired to the bar and spun tales for his party, sent clippings about himself from the Times, the Sun, the Post, the Journal, and Bennett's Herald home to his sisters and Louisa. For a masked ball held in his honor at the Academy of Music, he donned a Musketeer costume and watched enthralled as a group of actors dressed like bears towed a six-foot cotton snowball across the dance floor to the frenetic strains of the saber dance. The snowball split open and the Grand Duke Alexis strode out in full uniform. It was another actor, of course, but Will cried out in recognition just the same and embraced the impostor as if he were the genuine article.