Telegraph Days: A Novel

by Larry McMurtry

  Naomi rolled her big eyes and smiled her seductive smile.

  “I’ve always been lucky, when it comes to men,” she allowed.

  “If you’re so lucky, who are you tupping with now?” I asked. Much as I liked Naomi I felt a tiny prickle of jealousy. I wanted to be the one who was lucky, when it came to lovers.

  “My Aurel,” Naomi cooed—and the prick became a sting, if not a deep one. I had always found Aurel Imlah attractive, but had just assumed he loved Mrs. Karoo. I guess Naomi had tested that assumption and found it to be false.

  “They are brother and sister,” Naomi said, when I mentioned Mrs. Karoo.

  Just then three muddy tots came racing into our laps.

  “Pita ate my mud pie!” Jean complained. Little Pita did sport a rather muddy mouth, but Naomi showed no alarm.

  A little later, with the sun just setting, we all walked home.

  “I am big—I like a big fellow,” Naomi admitted. “Aurel is big, if you know what I mean.”

  I suppose I did know what she meant, but with the three tots scampering around I saw no need to elaborate on the matter.

  7

  I HAD NEVER supposed that my brother, Jackson, would turn into much of a husband, but I was wrong. His tots crawled around on him like little possums. My sister-in-law, Mandy, looked as if she had a good-sized pumpkin in her belly—soon there’d be another to crawl around on Jackson.

  One thing hadn’t changed for the better about Jackson: he was still hard to talk to.

  “Is Teddy Bunsen going to sit there being sheriff his whole life?” I asked.

  “I don’t know—why?” Jackson asked.

  “Because you’ve been a deputy about long enough, don’t you think?” I said. “It’s high time they made you sheriff.”

  Jackson looked startled—evidently the possibility that he might be sheriff someday had never occurred to him.

  “But if I was sheriff, what would Teddy do?” he asked.

  “Now that’s wrong thinking—unambitious,” I told him. “If you’re going to live your life in a little hole like this, then the least you ought to settle for is the office of sheriff.”

  Jackson and Mandy had a nice enough life, by their standards; but Jackson and I were more or less the last of the Courtrights, a proud family. Few Courtrights had been content to spend their lives at the deputy level. Whatever his feelings on the subject I wanted more for Jackson than he wanted for himself. I wanted him to be sheriff. I knew he was a good deputy, arresting many drunks, and helping to keep the public order. Still, I wanted more—and wanted Jackson to want more.

  “I’m not like you, Sis,” Jackson pointed out, as we were enjoying a filling meal of fried okra, turnip greens, mashed potatoes, and a small wild turkey that had fallen to Jackson’s gun.

  “Apparently not,” I admitted. “I guess I got what’s left of the ambition in the Courtright family. Father never had much, that I can recall.”

  “Father was a gentleman,” Jackson remarked, as if that explained everything.

  “Father was a gentleman and you’re a good deputy,” I said, wondering why the Courtright men were so dull.

  “What about you, Nellie?” Mandy asked. “Will you really stay with us?”

  I suddenly realized that the answer was no. I wouldn’t stay with them—not long. It was fine to come home to Rita Blanca, which, as Bill Cody had noticed, was the perfect Western town. But soon enough, my days would start hanging lifeless. Even if I secured a little copulation it wouldn’t be enough.

  “I suppose I’m too ambitious, Mandy,” I told her. “I need some hustle.”

  I don’t think I had ever admitted that to myself in quite such a blatant way before. After all, I had been running Bill Cody’s businesses for over three years. Pretty soon I’d get in the mood to run something else.

  Mandy was looking at me seriously.

  “I hope you don’t want more from life than there is,” she said solemnly.

  Then Jean and Jan jumped in my lap, smelling young.

  “I probably do, Mandy,” I said. “I probably want more than there is.”

  8

  I HAD BEEN back in Rita Blanca about two weeks, and was already seriously considering moving on, when the deacons of the community ganged up on me one morning and got me to agree to be the mayor of the place. When the whole passel of them cornered me in the little telegraph office, all dressed in their best clothes, I could tell something serious was afoot. Ted Bunsen, who had become a deacon himself, came right out with the offer.

  “We need a mayor,” he said. “The job’s yours if you’ll take it.”

  “I’m flattered, folks—but why me?” I inquired, after they had finished describing the desperate situation they considered the town to be in.

  “You’re organized!” they said, like a chorus.

  I suppose I was, and I suppose it showed, since that had been the first comment Bill Cody had made about me, when he showed up more than three years back.

  Somehow hearing it again, from my old town mates, made my heart sink a little. Would I always just be the organized one, in any community I settled in? Why couldn’t I be the beautiful, adventurous one?

  “We need you to find a reliable schoolteacher and get a school going,” Hungry Billy mentioned. “Your own brother’s tykes will need schooling soon, and there’s plenty of other tykes running around without their ABCs.”

  “Yes, and we need to find a preacher and get a fire wagon of some kind,” Joe Schwartz said. “Dry as it’s been this whole town could burn if a big prairie fire headed this way.”

  When I asked if they had a salary in mind they all looked nervous, since it must have been obvious just from the way I was dressed that Bill Cody had been paying me a lot more than they could afford. But they hemmed and hawed and came up with the low figure of four hundred dollars a month, which was one hundred dollars more than I had been expecting. It was a solid salary and left me with no real reason to turn the deacons down.

  “I accept, but for six months only,” I told them. “I’ve been feeling some pretty strong wanderlust lately—it may be that after I get things organized here I may want to strike out and see the world.”

  They all looked pleased as punch at my acceptance, so we shook hands all around, though my old beau Teddy Bunsen made so bold as to kiss me on the cheek. The look in his eyes suggested that under certain circumstances he might try to do better. Would I give him the chance?

  9

  BILL BONNEY—or Billy the Kid—got off on the wrong foot with me faster than I could snap my fingers, and here’s how it occurred. I was in my office, scribbling on a novel I had decided to call The Good Deputy, when I glanced down the street toward the jail, where the good deputy himself, my brother, Jackson, was standing outside talking to a tall youth who had just dismounted from a not particularly impressive nag. Pretty soon Ted Bunsen came out of the jail and walked over to where the two men were conversing. It was a rather blowy, dusty day, but the two lawmen and the stranger were well accustomed to dust, as anyone needs to be who lives out on the plains.

  Then the three men, seemingly amiable, walked across the street toward the general store, where they were soon joined by Hungry Billy Wheless, who hurried out to shake the stranger’s hand. Then they all wandered around in the street for a while, pointing to this thing and that. It occurred to me, as I watched, that the stranger must be asking questions about the Yazee raid. At once Jackson pulled out his pistol and swung his arm, more or less as he had on that fateful day when the Yazee brothers met their end.

  That sort of thing was always happening in Rita Blanca. A cowboy or two would ride in and want to see where the big fight had occurred. Gawkers like this young stranger were just the kind of people Bill Cody meant to sell tickets to, once he got his model of Rita Blanca up and going.

  For a time I stopped paying attention and went back to my scribbling, but in fact I had managed to rough out only a paragraph—in the story my hero and his fami
ly were proceeding up the Missouri River by boat, accompanied by Bill Hickok and some thirty immigrants, most of whom would be lucky to last a year—when who should come flying up the street but my nieces, Jean and Jan. Neither of them was much taller than a low-slung pig, but they were racing at top speed. When they finally got there and jumped into my arms they were so out of breath they couldn’t speak. I could feel their little hearts fluttering when I hugged them.

  “Billy the Kid,” Jean gasped.

  “Billy the Kid,” Jan chimed in. “Ma said tell you.”

  “Okay, you told me, many thanks,” I said, giving the stranger a little stronger scrutiny. From what I could see he could have been any stranger off the trail, but I thought I ought to go take a closer look—who knows but what I might be able to fit this famous young killer into my Good Deputy somewhere? The tykes wanted to send a few telegrams to an imaginary rabbit they were corresponding with, but I lugged them out, one under each arm, and carried them with me down the street.

  Billy the Kid had a rifle, none too new, which he liked to lean on as he talked. He wore an old black hat that didn’t fit his head, and sported a dusty jacket that his long arms stuck out of about a foot. A small pistol had been casually stuck in his belt. Evidently Hungry Billy had been given permission to photograph him—the big camera was being set up as I approached. Jean and Jan, shy all of a sudden, wiggled free and raced off to find their mother. Young Mr. Bonney was nearly as snaggle-toothed as Zenas Clark; on Zenas I found it appealing but in the case of the Kid it wasn’t.

  The group of men had been chatting away, but of course that stopped when I walked up. In the course of history I suppose we gals have shut down millions of conversations, just by showing up.

  Nobody said anything for a moment, and then Ted Bunsen decided it might be his responsibility to introduce me.

  “This here’s Nellie Courtright, she’s our mayor,” Ted said.

  “Mayor?” Bill Bonney said, with a rude guffaw. “The way I hear it she’s Bill Cody’s heifer,” he said, at which point I walked up to him and slapped his face, not gently.

  “I’m nobody’s heifer,” I told him bluntly. “If you can’t be respectful you can leave.”

  Bill Bonney looked startled and took a step back. Close up he looked young, and he was young. Probably he had never been close enough to a woman to be slapped by one before.

  “You don’t need to be touchy, missy,” he said. “It was only a poor joke.”

  “I’ll decide what I need to be touchy about,” I said. “I doubt you would have made that remark if Mr. Cody had been here.”

  “Well, he ain’t here, is he?” the youth said. “Anyway, I withdraw the remark.”

  “Sis, lay off,” Jackson said, which was a mistake. “Billy just wanted to know about the Yazee shoot-out.”

  “Don’t be instructing me, Deputy,” I warned him. I expect my face was red—I have always been quick to react to insult. Bill Bonney’s face got red too—he had misjudged how much trouble his casual remark would get him into.

  I decided to let them all escape, so I motioned to Billy and showed him exactly where I had been standing when the Yazees bore down on us. He seemed grateful for my tolerance and sort of awkwardly tried to work his way back into my good graces by parading his gunfighter’s expertise.

  “The Yazees had never been bested, so they got cocky,” he said. “I’ve seen it happen before.”

  He spoke as if giving us a lecture.

  He marked off where each of the horsemen had fallen and walked out in the middle of the street and paced around.

  “They didn’t bother to spread out,” he said. “That’s what gave the deputy his chance. If they’d come at you twenty yards apart I doubt the deputy could have got more than two of them. Bunching up like they did was foolish behavior. They didn’t bother to study their move, so now they’re dead.”

  Billy kept glancing at me, and with every glance he seemed to shrink a little. Probably the last thing he had expected to encounter in Rita Blanca was a talky woman mayor. He seemed to be relieved when Hungry Billy took charge and posed him for some tintypes. Hungry Billy was mighty excited—he planned to be selling those tintypes for years.

  Bill Bonney held no attraction for me, but I soon enough stopped being mad at him and mellowed sufficiently to invite him to lunch at Mrs. Karoo’s.

  Perhaps it was the writer in me. Here was one of the most famous characters ever to come out of the American West. I wanted to get to know him a little better. I thought I saw some slight menace in his eyes, but what I mainly saw was a rough boy who had had no steady upbringing. His manners were crude—probably his spirit was too. I doubt that he had much opportunity to be anything but crude.

  That said, it became clear that he was a kind of specialist when it came to gunfights. He spent nearly three hours muddling around the Yazee sight—Hungry Billy showed him the little Yazee museum and didn’t even require him to pay the quarter.

  After lunch, which he consumed even more rapidly than most of Mrs. Karoo’s diners, I got him to accompany me back to the telegraph office, where I conducted what I believe to be the longest interview Billy the Kid ever gave. I made it into a pamphlet, and over the years, it outsold my Banditti booklet, though not The Good Deputy when that best seller finally came out.

  “What’s the main thing about being a gunfighter, Bill?” I asked, at the end of the interview. We had, by then, got on easy terms.

  “Being willing to shoot people, that’s the main thing,” he told me.

  “That’s it?”

  “Sure,” he said. “A lot of folks talk about shooting people, but then when it comes to it they don’t.”

  “But you do?”

  He smiled—the smile had some sadness in it.

  “I do,” he said. “I do.”

  “I hear that conditions are unsettled in Lincoln County,” I mentioned. I knew that that vast New Mexican county was where Billy’s reputation had been made.

  “It’s wild right now,” he said. “Wild. But I suppose it will quiet down when somebody finally kills me.”

  I confess I was shocked at the casual way he alluded to his own death.

  “When somebody kills you?” I said. “So you expect it, then?”

  He didn’t answer, but he looked at me as if he thought I must be slightly dense.

  When I mentioned that I had known Wild Bill Hickok, Bill Bonney let a wistful look come into his eyes.

  “He was a gent, I hear … a real gent,” he said.

  “That he was,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t mind being a gent and dressing fancy,” Bill said. Then he grinned. “If I live that long.”

  Billy rode off about dusk on his unimpressive horse. I guess you could say he was just one more tourist, who had ridden all the way from Lincoln County to see where a famous gunfight had happened. The most famous killer in the West had visited the perfect Western town. Bill Cody would have made an exhibit of it, if he’d had the time.

  I was just on my way to Tombstone when news came that Sheriff Pat Garrett had shot Bill Bonney down.

  It was the biggest news anywhere. Billy the Kid, dead! Dead as Custer, dead as Hickok, dead as the Yazee gang!

  Looking back on it I wish I’d asked that wild sad boy to stay for supper.

  10

  GENERAL W. T. SHERMAN didn’t have too much to recommend him—at least not to me, who had been brought up to admire the elegance of Robert E. Lee—but at least there was no hem and haw in him. He got right to the point. Before I even knew he was in the vicinity he rode right up to the mayor’s office, which was also the telegraph office and my writing room, and rapped on the windowpane, although there was a big Closed sign hanging not an inch from where he rapped.

  This occurred at about eleven o’clock in the morning, when it was, as usual, windy.

  I was scribbling on The Good Deputy and had finally got my characters off the Missouri River—they were now well lined out along the Santa Fe Trail
and I was trying to decide what calamity to visit on them next. I considered a buffalo stampede, a prairie fire, a plague of grasshoppers, all of which could easily have occurred over that vast stretch of country. But in fact, though the travelers were certainly due a fresh calamity, I felt more like writing a love scene, though love scenes always raise the issue of plausibility. Could my heroine, Marcie Jones, wander off from the party, encounter a handsome Pawnee youth, and exchange a few passionate kisses—or would it be more likely that she would begin a liaison with the blacksmith’s helper, a stripling I had decided to call Jasper? I had about decided to go with the blacksmith’s boy, reasoning that I could always conjure up a handsome Indian a little later in the story, when General Sherman rapped. He had three soldiers and a pack mule with him.

  I opened the window and gave the man a frosty look.

  “If you can’t read that sign, then you need specs,” I told him.

  “I have specs,” he informed me. “I read the sign. Then I looked in the window and there you were. I think it’s about time you opened up and did your duty.

  “I’m General William Tecumseh Sherman,” he added, reaching into his coat pocket, from which he extracted three messages and handed them to me. I saw that they were written in a neat and legible hand.

  “I am not in the army and do not enjoy being ordered around,” I told him, “but I’ll send your telegrams and then I’ll thank you to honor my sign.”

  The general, a sharp-featured man, looked in and spotted my tablet.

  “I suppose you are writing a book—most women are, these days,” he commented.

  “If I am there’s no need to discuss it,” I pointed out.

  “If I remember right you used to work for Buffalo Bill Cody,” he said. “I’ve heard you were starchy and I see it’s true. But I have no leisure for jawing. Do you know where Esther Karoo lives?”