Telegraph Days: A Novel

by Larry McMurtry

  “I hope we can enjoy more kissing later, in a more private spot,” he told me.

  “I don’t oppose the notion,” I admitted.

  Then Bill got a thoughtful look—I don’t believe our kissing touched him much, deep down. With Bill Cody, as I soon learned, kissing was just the thing that came naturally to mind when he was kissing a pretty girl. Once he’d kissed awhile his mind would soon drift on to other things, as it did that day.

  “If your brother can’t shoot, then we better leave him in peace,” Cody said. “You knew that fool George Custer in earlier days, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, he was my suitor,” I told Cody. “You might be a little more respectful of his memory.”

  Bill Cody had a way of just looking blandly around as if someone made a remark that lacked interest for him. He ignored any comment that he’d rather not have heard.

  “Weren’t you sweet on Billy Hickok too?” he asked. “Seems like Billy was always talking about a Miss Courtright and how lovely she was—you lived down in Virginia then, I believe.”

  “Waynesboro,” I said. “And I was sweet on Mr. Hickok, not that that’s any of your business.”

  I suppose being a famous scout gave Bill Cody the opportunity to meet most of the famous people in the West.

  “Bill Hickok couldn’t see ten feet,” Cody remarked. “When we were onstage in our silly little plays Billy couldn’t manage to say a single word, but he fired off his pistol once in a while, whenever the spirit moved him. It was loaded with blanks but he shot so close to the legs of the bare-legged actors who were supposed to be Indians that they got powder burns—it didn’t sit well with the actors, I can tell you!

  “Billy was a fine fellow, though—I miss him,” Cody said quietly. I thought I saw a tear in his eye.

  I cried a little myself—I missed Billy Hickok too, even if he was more interested in clothes than he was in women. He wasn’t a kisser like Bill Cody, but they both had gentle eyes.

  2

  BILL CODY PERSUADED me to close the telegraph office for a while and take a stroll with him down the main street of Rita Blanca. From where we stood, at my office, we could see right through the town, but Billy wanted to make a closer inspection. He held my hand as we walked—I guess holding a woman’s hand was as natural to Bill Cody as breathing.

  Most people recoil with horror when they’re brought face-to-face with the ugliness of Rita Blanca for the first time—I had recoiled in horror myself—but Bill Cody wasn’t most people. His eyes actually lit up when he saw our sorry shacks and dusty streets.

  “My God,” he said. “This place would be perfect for my Wild West setup, once I get it going.”

  “What are you talking about, sir?” I asked. “All this place is perfect for is getting drunk or getting killed.”

  “No, I see a blacksmith—you could get your horse shod,” Bill said. “And there’s a livery stable where the villains in the story could hide until it’s time for the big shoot-out.”

  I saw the man was serious—he actually saw Rita Blanca as the perfect Western town.

  “You’ve got a general store, a big two-story jail, a barbershop, two or three gambling establishments—and there’s probably a whore around somewhere.”

  “No whore,” I informed him. “She got engaged to Deputy Court-right yesterday.”

  “Well, they’re easily come by,” Cody said.

  “Now, Mr. Cody, just slow down,” I urged him. “I consider myself as quick-minded as the next girl, but what’s this Wild West setup you keep talking about, that you think Rita Blanca’s so perfect for?”

  Cody looked around, and then gave me a gentle hug.

  “I need to wet my whistle before I get into the details,” Cody said. “I see a bunch of saloons—which one would you recommend?”

  “I have no experience to go on—ladies aren’t allowed in saloons, as you should know,” I reminded him.

  Cody just smiled.

  “Wait for me,” he said. “I’ll just go see if I can purchase a bottle of rye.”

  We were standing in front of the jail when he said it—I recalled that Sheriff Ted Bunsen was fond of rye. Rather than let Bill Cody wander into a saloon and be gone for hours, I grabbed his arm and walked him toward the jail.

  “If it’s rye you enjoy I’m sure the sheriff can spare some,” I said. “I happen to know that rye’s his drink.”

  Bill Cody was a fresh capture—I had no intention of letting him loose in a saloon, where he would probably be drawn into drunkenness or card games.

  Ted Bunsen was half drunk himself when Cody and I paid him our surprise visit, but he graciously managed to find a glass that had only one or two dead flies in it—he soon removed the flies and poured Bill Cody a brimming glass of rye whiskey. It didn’t brim for long—Cody drank it off as if it was sarsaparilla, a feat that surprised Ted Bunsen considerably.

  “That was quick,” he said—coming from Sheriff Ted it counted as witty repartee.

  “I am not a mincing drinker,” Cody said, holding out the glass. Sheriff Bunsen refilled it and Cody drank it straight off.

  “Much obliged, Sheriff,” he said.

  The jail was rather low-ceilinged—Bill had to stoop a little as he went out the door. Once we were outside in the dusty breeze Cody lit a thin cigar and offered me one.

  “No, thanks,” I told him. “There are several things you need to learn about me, Mr. Cody.”

  “Name two,” he challenged.

  “I don’t go into saloons and I don’t smoke cigars,” I said.

  Bill Cody smiled and nodded. “Not smoking cigars is why your kisses are so sweet,” he commented—sometimes his tone made me blush. The fact that he said my kisses were sweet left me with the impression that he had made extensive comparisons.

  “I suppose it would cost too much to buy this town and move it,” he mused, as we were strolling up the street. Whenever we passed a citizen, they’d wave. Just having Bill Cody come to town seemed to have lifted everyone’s spirits—including my spirits. His easy good humor was a pleasure to experience.

  But the notion that he might buy Rita Blanca was a notion little short of lunacy.

  “Buy it?” I said, making no attempt to hide my astonishment. “What would you do with it if you bought it?”

  “Sell tickets to it,” he said. “If I had it on Staten Island I can guarantee you that that ferry over from New York would be filled with people who would pay cash money to see what a town in the Old West looked like.”

  Lots of people live in the past, but Bill Cody seemed to be one of the rare few who lived in the future. Here he was in the town of Rita Blanca, a place every one of its inhabitants knew was ugly, and Bill Cody was thinking ahead to a time when people like Georgie Custer and Billy Hickok and maybe the Yazee brothers would be candidates for the museum.

  The Rita Blanca I was standing in, getting grit in my teeth, wasn’t the Old West to me—it was the only West available. But Bill Cody was sincere, and calm as a banker. He was looking ahead to the day when our ordinary day-to-day lives on the prairie would be—what’s the word?—picturesque, like the knights and ladies in King Arthur, or the novels of Walter Scott.

  As we were idling around the office Cody suddenly snapped his fingers, as if he just dropped one idea in favor of a better one—the way he did it reminded me of Father.

  “Do you suppose there’s a reliable photographer in this town?” he asked.

  “Hungry Billy Wheless is a fair photographer—he took the pictures of the Yazees,” I told him. “What do you need to have photographed, Mr. Cody?”

  “Why, Rita Blanca—every stick and stone of it,” Bill said. “I’ll hire young Mr. Wheless, if I can—he can start at the south end of town and come straight up the street, photographing every single building, back, front, and sideways.”

  “You are a curious fellow,” I told him. “Why would you want to do that?”

  “So I can rebuild the town back east and use it in my Wild Wes
t pageants,” he said. “I’ll get some good carpenters and give them the photographs to work from. We’ll find some old wood, so the place won’t look too new. You have to be authentic when you’re putting on shows—particularly when it’s history you’re selling. The spectators are not going to want spiffy new buildings—I need to convince them that they’re seeing the real West.”

  “That’s crazy,” I told him. “What are you anyway, a buffalo hunter or an actor? Don’t you still have Indians to fight, up there in the north somewhere?”

  “There’s a few wild ones still out, but it’s mainly over for the free Indians,” Cody said—he sounded sad about it. “I don’t want to kill them, either. I want to hire the best-looking ones for my Wild West pageant.

  “Some of the Sioux and Cheyenne are mighty good-looking people,” he added.

  “You mean you’re planning to hire the Indians you were just fighting?” I asked.

  “That’s right,” Cody said soberly. “Right now they’re fighting and getting killed, but once I get my Wild West up and running all they’ll have to do is pretend to fight. We’ll do a fake attack on a settler’s cabin, or the Deadwood Stage, and instead of getting killed for their trouble they can be paid cash money.”

  Then Cody chuckled.

  “You look as if you consider that to be a harebrained scheme, Miss Nellie Courtright,” he said.

  “Of course it’s a harebrained scheme,” I said. “Pay fighting Indians to pretend to fight?”

  “Yep, and pay sharpshooters to shoot and acrobats to tumble and trick ropers to twirl big loops and cowboys to ride broncs and all the rest of the folderol that goes with a Wild West pageant,” he elaborated.

  “This is making me dizzy,” I admitted. “Nobody in their right mind would pay good money to see a place that looks like Rita Blanca. Even Yankees aren’t that dumb.”

  “Sure they are—as soon as something’s ended, people will start flocking to get at least a glimpse of what it was like before it was over,” Cody said. “It’s human nature.”

  “I’m a human, and it’s not my nature,” I assured him, but even as I said it I knew my remark was partly a lie. Why read Walter Scott if not to catch a glimpse of what life was like in older times—times that were surely gone forever?

  Just then Mrs. Karoo began to ring the lunch bell.

  “I hope that means there’s some grub to be had, somewhere,” Bill said.

  He took my hand again and was still holding it when we sidled into Mrs. Karoo’s, where he took off his big hat and made his hostess a nice bow. Of course, he was immediately the center of attention, as I suppose he was in just about every gathering he attended. All eyes just naturally seemed to fix themselves on Buffalo Bill, who turned out to possess admirable table manners. He had known Aurel Imlah in former years—the two old buffalo men were soon telling stories about this adventure and that, leaving the rest of us feeling a little left out. The storytelling didn’t put much of a break on Bill Cody’s appetite—he had two or three helpings of everything and even charmed the two Choctaw girls by saying a word or two in their own language.

  Of course, he poured on the charm with Mrs. Karoo, whose cooking he complimented highly, particularly praising the vinegar pie, which he claimed he rarely had a chance to enjoy.

  My weakness is men—there it is. My famous susceptibility was just about brimming over by the time we’d finished eating. I would have crawled up on the hayloft with Bill in a minute, but he himself had no such inclination.

  “Nellie, what I need’s a nap,” he mentioned, as we were leaving the table. I suppose the man’s own enthusiasm had temporarily worn him out.

  “I have to get back to the telegraph office,” I told him. “You’re welcome to nap in my room—I won’t be using it for a while.”

  His answer was a big, long yawn, followed by a sleepy smile.

  I walked him up to my bedroom and even opened the windows for him so he could enjoy a breeze. I suppose I hoped for a kiss, or something, for my trouble, but no kisses were forthcoming. Billy Cody indulged in another mighty yawn and shut the door in my face.

  3

  BEFORE BILL CODY even woke up from his nap, telegrams had started coming in for him from this general or that. I had nearly a dozen wires stacked up by the time Bill came ambling back down the street. I handed him the telegrams but he refused to take them.

  “Maybe I’ll read them tomorrow,” he said. “Right now I need to go hire that photographer and get him started.”

  “One of these telegrams is from General Crook,” I pointed out. From what I had heard, here and there, General Crook was not someone it was wise to ignore, but Cody ignored him anyway. In no time he had Hungry Billy Wheless out taking pictures of Rita Blanca, such as it was.

  By the time I closed the office that afternoon I had received a regular bale of telegrams for Buffalo Bill, but the fellow they were meant for was down the street, supervising the big photography project he had launched into with Billy Wheless.

  About half the citizenry of Rita Blanca came out to watch this surprising activity, most of whom seemed to share my opinion that it was a crazy thing for anyone to do. The notion that someone wanted to make a replica of Rita Blanca somewhere far away and expect people to pay cash money for a chance to look at it seemed so far-fetched as to be nearly incredible.

  And yet it was happening. Aurel Imlah even consented to let his hide yard be photographed—Mrs. Karoo did the same with her rooming house.

  “Doesn’t this all seem a little odd?” I asked Aurel, who smiled.

  “Life itself is odd, Nellie,” Aurel said, which was about as philosophical as Aurel allowed himself to be.

  “I would never bet against Bill Cody, though,” he added. “He’s made a go of everything he’s tried.”

  “I got more than twenty telegrams for him,” I said. “Some of them are from General Crook. Bill won’t even read them, which I consider rash.”

  “He don’t like being bossed,” Aurel said. “Bill’s always done pretty much whatever he wanted to do, and so far he’s gotten away with it.”

  “I think he may offer me a job,” I confessed, a comment to which Aurel Imlah made no reply. If I did accept an offer from Bill Cody it would mean leaving Rita Blanca—I guess Aurel Imlah was the one local I would really miss.

  Meanwhile, down the street, Buffalo Bill and Hungry Billy were working their way along, from hovel to hovel. My brother, Jackson, sat on the edge of the gallows, dangling his feet and watching the action, such as it was. Jackson Courtright was the person Bill Cody had traveled all the way to Rita Blanca to interview but so far he had not exchanged more than a few words with Jackson, who, now that Mandy had agreed to marry him, was a deliriously happy man and probably wouldn’t have left Rita Blanca even if he had been offered a big wage to do so.

  Finally it got too dark to take pictures, though Bill made Billy get a few shots of the wide prairie at dusk. I went down to watch, carrying my sheaf of telegrams, which, once again, Cody refused to consider.

  “The good old military can wait,” he said and was maybe even a touch annoyed that I had brought the matter up again. I had never met a more confident man—he was absolutely convinced that once he got his Wild West, as he always referred to it, up and going, thousands and thousands of people would be eager to pay to see fake fights. Time soon proved him right, but I was not that interested in the West, myself. I was a lot more interested in kissing or other fleshly activities, a preference that slightly set me apart from Bill Cody, who was determined to get rich or bust.

  Just at dark, as Billy Wheless was packing up his camera and photographic equipment, Bill Cody made another of his sly attempts to slip past me into a saloon—moving rapidly, I handed him off at the door.

  “Before you go get drunk I need to get a few things straight with you,” I began.

  “I wonder if Sheriff Bunsen would spare me any more of that good rye whisky,” Billy said, not meeting my eye. “I prefer it without dead fl
ies, but if he doesn’t happen to have a clean glass I could probably put up with the flies.”

  So once again we angled across the street toward the jail.

  “When you rode into this town you acted like you wanted to offer me a job, but that’s the last I heard of that,” I told him. “I’m the telegrapher here—if you mean to offer me a job that will take me away, I’d like a chance to train my replacement.”

  I had already decided that if Cody meant it about the job, Mandy Williams, my soon-to-be sister-in-law, would be my replacement, but I saw no reason to tell Cody that.

  Getting a straight answer out of Bill Cody was not the easiest thing in the world, I can tell you.

  “You would harass a man about these business details just when he’s needing a drink,” Bill said, with a touch of petulance.

  Then he sighed, as if he were the most put-upon man in the world, instead of the most pampered.

  “Get me those goddamn telegrams so I can read them before I get drunk,” he told me. “The fact is I’m tired of being a shuttlecock for the military. It’s show business for me from now on—but if there should be one more spectacular battle I could help win, it would get such good publicity for the shows that I probably ought to do it. I doubt the Sioux have another big battle in them, but Geronimo’s still a menace—I might have to help General Crook try and corner him in Arizona.

  “It’s iffy, though,” he added. “Suppose we can’t corner the old rascal—that could produce bad publicity.”

  “You’re not answering my question,” I reminded him.

  “I do mean to hire you, Nellie,” he told me, with a touch of huff in his voice. “I do, but I need to figure out this military problem first. I’d like to scratch up some good publicity but I also need to figure out this military problem first. I’d like to scratch up some good publicity but I also need to avoid anything that might produce bad publicity.

  “There is that problem when you’re fighting smart Indians,” he added.

  “What problem?”

  “Sometimes they win—ask your friend Georgie Custer,” Bill said. “I might bring Geronimo in, but on the other hand, he might bring me in.”