I’m about to die, I realized. The strangest calm fell over me—a peace of subdued acceptance. In that clear-headed quiet, I shut out the muffled sound of panic and realized that although I could hear the crick flowing hard around the wagon, the current didn’t tug at my body. The water around me was absolutely still. Something was blocking its flow, and that something could only be the upturned wagon. The water was shallow enough where I lay—perhaps two or three feet deep. I felt the slimy stones beneath my hands and knees and pushed carefully upward, praying I’d find air above my head.
I did. My head broke the surface into a pocket of breathable air, trapped along with me under the wagon. I drew a shuddering breath. Then I pounded on the wood overhead with all my might.
“Calamity!” I could hear Joe crying out near one of the wheels. “Calamity Jane! Are you killed? Say something to tell us you ain’t killed!”
Damn it all to Hell, I thought. Now the cat’s out of the bag for good.
I yelled loud as I could, “I’m fine, curse you! Get this wagon flipped so’s I can get out of here!”
A second later I heard hooves trotting boldly through the water and Wild Bill’s voice shouting orders, all the cool detachment gone from him as he chivvied the men back into the water and set them to prying at the wagon.
“Margaret Bird,” Bill called. “I’ll get you out, girl. Don’t you worry.”
“I ain’t worried, you bastard!” I shouted back. “I’m cold as your grandma’s boot and more soaked than the sheets in a whore house. And it’s black as Satan’s balls in here!” Panic was rising fast in me, now that I knew I wasn’t crushed to death nor drowned. I feared I might be holed up in that wagon till the end of time, though, like being buried alive—and I had to wrestle down the urge to scream in giddy fear. “Get this thing off me, you worthless shits! The fuck you waiting for? For it to grow a pair of god-damned wings and fly off me?”
At that moment the wagon heaved and tipped and crashed back over on its wheels. The violet dimness of dusk seemed bright as full noon; I sat on my ass in the shallows, hands bracing me up behind my back, and stared in wide-eyed wonder as coils of potato peels whisked away from me, traveling fast downstream. A pair of boots splashed down beside me. A moment later, Wild Bill hooked his arm through mine and hauled me up onto weak, shivery legs. Bill turned me around and marched me to the shore, though God alone knows how I managed to walk through the shallows. My legs was like water themselves.
With every step, I let fly another cuss. It was the only expression I could find of my terror, my disbelief—my sheer joy in finding myself alive. “Fuck, shit, damn, cock, fuck, damn, balls!” My boots squelched out cold water with every step.
“Margaret,” Bill said softly beside me.
“Balls!” I yelled back. “Fucking big bouncing balls!”
“Margaret!”
I blinked and looked around me—really looked and saw what Wild Bill saw. Dodge and Doc McGillycuddy was right there in front of me, standing side by side like a palisade made of two sharp, stoic stakes. Neither of them looked the least bit glad to find me still among the living.
“Your language,” Dodge said, “is unbecoming of a lady. And a woman has no business with this expedition.”
“I knew you would prove a distraction,” the doctor muttered, as if to punctuate Dodge’s condemnation.
Bill still held me by one arm; I felt him draw up like a rattler ready to strike. “See here,” he said. “She near about died under that wagon. You’d cuss just the same, if it’d been you trapped under there. And you sure wouldn’t come down on me—or any of the other men—for cussing under such circumstances.”
Dodge narrowed his eyes at Bill, an unmistakable warning.
Bill chose not to heed it. “Leave off,” he said to the commander. “A few unladylike words should be forgiven, all things considered.”
Murmurs of agreement rose from the soldiers. Dodge’s dark eyes slid sideways, as if he thought to glare around at his men, but his head never turned. He looked at me squarely then and said, “Young lady, you’d best keep yourself clean and respectable from here on out. If you don’t, you’ll be sent back to Fort Laramie just as soon as the supply wagon is empty.”
Then he and the doctor turned as one and strode away.
Shivering with anger as much as cold, I stood with my arm hooked through Bill’s and watched them go. When they was far enough away that they wouldn’t hear, I whispered, “Balls!”
Beside me on the dark bank, Wild Bill laughed.
California Joe loaned me a change of clothing and soon enough I was dry. I was welcomed at my friends’ fire, too, and set down with a big dish of potato stew and some newly made flat bread, still warm from Cookie’s fire.
“Thought we just about lost you there,” Sam said. He dealt out cards for a round of faro, including me in the game without my having to ask.
“Thought I’d lost me, too.” I’d never been so frightened in all my life, though I smiled casually and propped my boots up heel-on-toe beside the fire pit, as if I hadn’t a care in the world.
“Word’s out about who you really are,” Sam said with a note of contrition.
I waved his concerns away. “Wasn’t nothing I could keep secret forever. And ain’t nothing Dodge can do about it now.”
A long, lean shadow moved toward us from the direction of the murmuring camp. An instinct in me—an automatic yearning—caused me to look up from my cards with a hunger that expected to be fed. Wild Bill appeared on the edge of the firelight’s ruddy circle.
“Hullo,” he said. “Mind if I join in your game?”
The boys made room for Bill. He sank down opposite my place. My vision seemed to slow, and time to stretch, so that every flicker of the flames was distinct, a slow spread of red fingers on a grasping hand. And every movement Bill made as he surveyed his cards left a trace of itself across my heart. His eyes sliding sideways, the corner of his mouth turning up in brief consideration, the curl and extension of one finger as he tapped and touched the upper edge of a single card, then moved on to another. All the while my feet remained propped, slowly wagging to a rhythmless, unheard song—as if I cared nothing for any of it, as if nothing in the world (least of all Bill Hickock) could break through the tight-shut doors and windows of my poor heart.
“How you feeling now, Miss Jane?” Bill asked at length.
So he had realized, too, that my secret was out. Word of Calamity Jane was already flying around the camp; no use trying to pretend I was anybody else. “Proper as can be expected,” I said, “under the circumstances. And you know, Bill, I feel right good, in spite of being dunked and trapped like a half-drowned rat. That… that sickness that plagued me before. It’s all gone now.”
He looked up from his cards. His eyes met my own and he smiled, slow and warm, which sent a tremor right through me, a sweet burning down in my gut that felt better than the fire, better than any whiskey. “That’s powerful good to hear,” he said, and returned to studying his hand.
Bill said little else to me that night, but I felt a sort of good-natured comfort settle down between us, like a hen brooding warm and content upon a nest. The emotion that now bonded us together couldn’t be called anything other than brotherly—for Bill’s part, at least—but I was happy to have that much. I considered it rightly won, that gentle affection. After all, I had overcome the demon of liquor, and though I’d lost none of my proclivity for cussing, I did feel washed and made new, cleaner and more wholesome than I’d ever been before. I was well on my way toward winning Bill’s heart. Till it was mine, I would remain content with the easy peace between us.
It wasn’t only Bill who warmed me. Sam and Joe was fine companions, roping me right into their game and their confidences as if we’d grown up together and had always been a threesome. Long as it had been since I’d seen Cilus and Lije—or even heard word of their whereabouts—Sam and Joe felt like my true brothers that night. The only real brothers I ever had.
> “Dodge a-comin’,” Wild Bill said quietly, never looking up from his hand.
I tucked my cards under my thigh and affected a casual, patient air, making believe I was only watching the three men play their game of faro. Dodge stalked silently past our campfire with his hands clasped behind his back. The doctor trailed a scant step behind. As one, they both turned to look at me with sharp consideration, with a pinched uneasiness that spoke loud and clear of mistrust. I smiled like an innocent girl and waved a greeting, and they moved on, vanishing in the darkness between fires.
I can’t tell you what pulled me from my bed that night—what soft, dark whispering called me out of sleep and tempted me from the confines of my tent with its black roof and its smell of close, slumbering breath. I crept out alone and tucked my blankets back inside, and stood up in the midst of a silent encampment.
A round, white moon gently touched the meadow where we had arrayed ourselves. Trampled grass smelled sweet and damp beneath the acrid memory of dung-fire smoke, and here and there an ember still glowed red-orange, smaller than a candle flame in the staggered fire pits. I felt instinctively—but didn’t see—the slow tramp of night sentries moving in their cautious circuits. I felt, too, the comfortable, chummy weight of horses tethered in their lines. I imagined I could smell the dry-grass perfume of their hides, their soft and patient breath.
Somewhere in the darkness, Bill’s tent stood. Somewhere he lay sleeping with his red hair fanned out across his roll, his eyes moving slowly beneath their lids, tracking a distant dream.
The stars was bold, forceful, spilled across the sky like nuggets of gold in a stream. I stood and stared straight up into that sky—for how long, I cannot say—till the sheer number of stars made me dizzy. Faintly, I could see the long black void that the Indians call the Spine of Night, and the pale powdery glow that surrounds it. I thought that glow must be made from many hundreds of thousands of stars, so far away that all that was left of them was a scattering of light. And then the thought of so great a number and such unimaginable distance made me dizzier still, but pleasantly so, and I swayed in awe on knees that trembled, swayed before the beauty and majesty of the sky.
Remade. Whole. Washed clean and new. The worst of what I was—what I had been—lay behind me now. I had ridden away from my past. Only good things waited on the trail ahead, and I would claim them all.
Now, remembering, I don’t know why the crick called to me. Maybe I knew full well at the time, and have forgotten over intervening years. Perhaps I thought I had something to prove to the water that had tried to claim my life. Perhaps I felt some kinship with it now. It could well be that I was still rather fearful and wanted to put my terror to rest—the last black mark upon my soul. Maybe I just thought I needed a bath. But one way or another, I left the impossible, vast view of the sky alone. I returned to the bank where hours before I had thought myself drowned and dead.
The camp lay silent as a tomb, so I counted it safe enough to strip off my clothes and lay them aside on a flat rock that stuck halfway out from the bank. Boots, woolen stockings, britches and shirt, my short-legged drawers—I piled them up neatly, loosed my black hair from the bun I kept it in, and walked out into the water.
The crick was cold—so cold it made me gasp from the first step, and the water wasn’t even up to my calves yet. I pressed on, biting my cheek, breathing harshly through my nose till I was used to the water’s bitter chill. And then, when I made it halfway across the crick and the water reached up to my behind, the cold didn’t matter no more. I sank down slowly, letting the current push against my chest, my back, even my face.
The crick had a respectable force, but with my toes curled around the smooth stones in its bed, I could stand up to the current all right. I faced the mad rush of dark water, leaned against it, felt my hair fan out behind me and tug at my scalp as it danced along the rippling surface. When I rose up, my skin was had raised in goose flesh all over, and my pale bareness was beaded by drops that sparkled like morning dew. I raised my arms and examined them. The light of the stars, hundreds of thousands, glinted on my skin. My small breasts, which had never been remarkable, was covered now in diamonds, and the black hair at the joining of my thighs was gemmed like a virgin’s throat.
It was the first time in all my life—the only time, truth to tell—I ever thought myself beautiful.
When the water had run off me, I lowered myself again, and stood and held my arms wide like a queen before her subjects, though there was no one to see me except the trees and the little bats flitting overhead. The moon hung low against the horizon, a soft golden glow between the trunks of pines. The moon seemed to bow down before me. Again and again I dunked and arose, and each time I shimmered more than the time before. I felt nothing of the cold. All I cared for was the beauty of the night, and that beauty shone off of me—it was me, and I was, at last, as pure and pretty, as worthy as any other girl on the frontier.
I would have gone on like that forever, admiring my own firm and naked skin, but I heard a shout from the shore. A low, male voice—wordless but rough with outrage, even disgust. I dropped down into the water, crouching so only my eyes and nose remained above the surface. I hugged my arms tight around my body, shielding my breasts with my big, ungainly hands. A pair of sentries stared back at me from where my clothing waited. One turned and hurried off into the meadow, but he wasn’t gone long. Moments later, Dodge appeared with Dr. McGillycuddy on his heels—his bristling lapdog.
Now the jig was up, and no mistake. I lifted myself so my mouth came clear of the stream and said, “Sirs, if you’ll please turn your back so’s I can get dressed proper, I’d be much obliged.”
The men did not turn their backs. I could feel hot hatred burning out of Dodge’s glare, though I was far enough away that I couldn’t actually see the glint in his eyes. I didn’t need to. His tense neck and shoulders spoke plain enough of his offense.
I waded toward them, hunkering low, trying to shield myself from their eyes as the water grew shallower around me. But they kept on staring, kept up their steely silence, till finally there was nothing for it but to stand up straight. I lowered my hands and made them look at my nakedness. It was nothing to me; I couldn’t even count how many times I’d bared myself before men’s eyes. I reasoned, if an eyeful was what they wanted then I’d sure as Hell give ’em one.
My flagrant display of nudity was too much for Colonel Dodge. He found his voice at last. “You are,” he said in his stiff, formal manner, as if pronouncing a sentence on a prisoner, “Calamity Jane.”
“The one and only,” I spat back.
“I wanted no women on this expedition, but a woman of your ill repute least of all.”
“Well, at least your potatoes got peeled.”
Night air gnawed at me with fangs of cold; I shivered hard, but I made no move toward my clothing. Mad enough to spit nails at Dodge, I resolved to make him face my nakedness—my femaleness—whether he liked it or not.
A pack of men drew up around us, clamoring to see—not to lay eyes my nudity, I think; just to learn what the midnight stir was about. I caught sight of Sam Young and California Joe among the crowd, and their expressions of pained confusion pained me in my turn. They knew as well as I did that they couldn’t stand up to Dodge; they could say nothing to defend me. If they tried, it would mean the end of the expedition for them, too, and they needed the pay desperately.
“You will be sent back to Fort Laramie in the morning, along with the wagon,” Dodge said.
Finally I reached for my shirt, but I took my sweet time shaking it out. “Sent back? All the way to Fort Laramie? Why should I go there, when Deadwood’s only a day or two ahead?”
“Do not question me, young lady,” Dodge said. His words carried more than a hint of danger.
A long, lean shadow slid through the crowd. “With respect, sir,” Wild Bill drawled as if it made no difference to him whatsoever, “it would be wiser to send the wagon on ahead to Deadwood. Shorter tr
ip. Easier on the horses.”
I wanted Bill to look upon me naked, of course, and to do more besides—but not like this. Not with me disgraced and soaking wet, shivering in front of a crowd of soldiers. I hugged my shirt against my skin and shrank back, trying to screen myself behind some brush that clung to the river bank while I struggled to pull my clothing onto my damp, resistant body. Bill didn’t even peek at me—not once. I couldn’t say whether he understood my need for privacy, or whether my bare hide held as little interest for him as the cast-off core of an apple.
Dodge said, “Mister Hickok. When I have a use for your opinion, I will be sure to ask for it.”
“Seems like a waste to me,” Bill said, “to bring a man of my particular talents along on an expedition of this sort, and then disregard his opinion.”
Dodge bristled. “That is enough, Hickok. The whore goes back to Laramie at sunrise.”
I had my britches on now, and my shirt buttoned up enough that I could claim some small shred of decency. I rounded on Dodge, got right up in his face, for what did I have to fear by then? “You can go straight to Hell,” I said, loud and wild so all the men in the camp could hear me.
McGillycuddy made a small choking sound. Colonel Dodge only watched me with emotionless calm.
I said, “I ain’t going back to no god-damned Fort Laramie. Sam and Joe, pack up my things for me. Saddle up my mare. I’m leaving tonight, and going my own damn way!”
“Now, hold on.” Bill stepped close to me, grasped me by the arm. His grip was strong, his hand large enough to encircle even my thick, tough limb. “Hold on, Calamity. You know it’s too dangerous to travel alone. This is Sioux territory. I know better than anyone how deadly the Indians in these parts can be.”
“No Indian has killed me yet,” I said. Brave words, but my guts felt quivery inside at the thought of riding unaccompanied through Sioux territory.
Bill said, “I hate to think what they’ll do to a woman alone if they catch you.” He turned to Dodge and the doctor. “I’m going with her. I’ll see her safe to Deadwood. Then I’ll come back and find you along the trail. Won’t take me more than four days at most.”
Calamity Page 24
