Wild at Heart

by Layce Gardner

  Calamity took off her hat and closed her eyes. Wild Bill and Pete followed suit. I dipped my chin in reverence and watched Calamity pray. She uttered softly, “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray to God my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray to God my soul to take.”

  Wild Bill opened his eyes and lifted his face to the ceiling. “Brother, if you can hear that, grab on and hold tight.”

  Calamity finished with, “Amen.”

  “Amen,” said Pete.

  “Amen,” said Wild Bill.

  “Amen,” I echoed.

  ***

  Dark had closed in by the time I screwed my courage to the sticking point and made my way up the stairs to Belle’s domicile. It seemed that one at a time we were climbing those stairs and facing Belle, only to be shot down. First Calamity, then Pete and now me. I wasn’t going to ask for Belle’s hand in marriage or for her to love me. I was drunk, but I wasn’t stupid. Besides, I had vowed never to love any woman like that. Not in this lifetime. I had too much baggage, too many skeletons locked away.

  I knocked lightly on Belle’s door. The others were downstairs drinking and laughing at tall tales and didn’t hear when Belle told me to enter. I stepped inside her room and softly closed the door behind me.

  The oil lamp on her dresser was lit and the flame jumped around, casting long dancing shadows across the far wall. She had cleaned up the pieces of the broken water pitcher and the jagged ends were in a pile on top of the dresser. Belle was lying in bed on top of the quilt, fully clothed with the exception of her feet. Her bare feet were crossed at the ankle and her toes were the most delicate things I had ever seen. I wished I were a great painter. I could do a hundred canvases all of just the study of those toes.

  “It’s you,” she said.

  I had to resist the urge to run to her feet and kiss them. “Yes.”

  “I suppose you are here to make my life more miserable.”

  “That is not my intention,” I answered. I walked to the dresser and looked at myself in the mirror. I was buying time, trying to set my thoughts in order. My nose was barely above the edge and all I could see was my own dark eyes and the top of my head. I wet my fingers in the basin of water and tried to smooth my hair down.

  In the mirror, I saw Belle’s reflection sit up. She leaned on one elbow and looked me over. I could tell by her face that she didn’t know I could see her. Her face was unmasked, her emotions unguarded and what I saw in her eyes was…I don’t know the word for non-love, but that is what it was. She looked at me with curiosity, maybe even friendship, maybe with some pity, but certainly nothing even closely resembling love.

  I made up my mind and turned to Belle. I pulled myself up to my full height and placed my hand over my heart. Belle opened her mouth, but I shushed her. “Let me speak,” I said. “Just hear me out.”

  Belle frowned but acquiesced with a nod.

  “I know who I am, Belle. I know I am a dwarf. I know I am a laughingstock to most people. I know that even to the ones who are kind and don’t laugh that I am no more than an oddity, an idle curiosity to chat about over a glass of beer or at the supper table. I know that a woman such as yourself, a woman of great beauty, would not want me as her husband. I know all that. I am not here to make myself into a fool by asking for your hand. And I don’t need or want your sympathy.”

  Belle tilted her head when I paused in my speechmaking. “Why are you here then, Charlie? Why are you in my room with your hand over your heart?”

  I cleared my throat. “I suppose I am here as emissary for one who does love you. It is my opinion that you are making a grave mistake. A mistake that would haunt you for the rest of your days if not rectified, and soon. You are in love. I think you’re throwing that love to the dogs to save face. You will be left with your pride and nothing else. Pride can get awful lonely on cold nights.”

  “Pete is a nice man, Charlie,” Belle protested, “but I don’t want to spend my life with him.”

  “I am not referring to Pete,” I said. I walked to the door and reached up to turn the knob. I stopped. “I want to know one thing before I take leave.”

  “What?”

  I looked over my shoulder at her and tried to steady my voice. “If I were of normal height, do you think you could fancy me?”

  Belle’s features softened. The corners of her mouth turned her lips into a sweet smile. I knew at once what her answer was going to be and I think I loved her even more for the lie.

  “You are a gentleman, Charlie, and you are taller in my eyes than any man I have ever met. You will find your true love, I’m sure of that.”

  “I hold no hopes for myself,” I said. “I am not the man I have led you to believe I am.”

  Then she said something that made me think perhaps she did know me. Maybe she knew me even better than I knew my own self. She said, “Love trumps morality, Charlie. Didn’t you know that? Love always trumps morality.”

  I tucked those words away so I could study on them later. “Follow your heart, Belle. You should be with the one you love and she should be with you. Star-crossed lovers and all that.” I stepped out onto the landing and closed the door between us.

  The saloon below had sunk into dark shadows. I brought out my lighting rod and busied myself with bringing down the lanterns, lighting them and hoisting them back up to the hooks on the rafters.

  Wild Bill pushed away from the table and stood. He twisted and turned, working the kinks out of his long limbs. “I got an itch to play some cards. Maybe I can win back my losses. Pete, you want to go see if we can scare up a game next door at the ol’ Number Ten?”

  “Nah,” Pete said, shaking his head. “I don’t want to afflict others with my sadness.”

  Wild Bill slapped him on the back. “You ain’t the first man who lost his heart to a whore. You got to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Come on with me next door. It’ll make you feel better.”

  Pete forced a fake smile. “I reckon I’ll be over in a little.”

  Wild Bill looked around the saloon until his eyes found me back in the far corner lighting a lamp. “Don’t worry, Charlie, I’ll go rob those fools of their money and come back in here and spend it all.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” I said.

  Wild Bill looked at Calamity. “You sticking around?”

  Calamity shook her head. “I’m fixing to leave in a little.”

  “I’ll see you out on the trail then.”

  “I reckon so,” she said. “I’ll stop over and say goodbye on my way out. Maybe I’ll bring you some good luck.”

  “I wouldn’t turn it down,” he said.

  I have noticed in my line of work that the tougher a man’s image the harder it is for him to get a rein on his emotions. Some of the meanest ones don’t even have emotions anymore; they buried them along with a dead wife or family. Wild Bill still had his emotions, but like most men, it was easier for him to cry over the dead than it was to love the living. It was easier to speak his true feelings offhandedly to another man. I think that is why he said to Pete, “Every man could use a friend like Calamity in their corner, Pete. Good friends are few and far between. You would do good to remember that.”

  “Aw, quit your yapping,” Calamity said. “Go rob those poor fools of their money.” She took off her hat and flapped it at him like she was shooing a fly out the door.

  Wild Bill cleared his throat, put one foot forward, raised a hand in the air and recited in a baritone that would have made Edwin Booth envious, “Parting is such sweet sorrow!” His delivery was admirable, and I doubted he knew he was speaking Juliet’s line from the balcony scene. Far be it from me to emasculate him by telling him that either.

  He turned, squared his shoulders and strode out the doors.

  That was the last time I saw him alive.

  ***

  Most men go through several stages of drunkenness before the alcohol overtakes them and dunks them into the last stage. The first stage is mirth. The second is
courage. The third is invincibility. The fourth is moroseness. The fifth and final stage is unconsciousness. After Wild Bill left, Pete and Calamity drank themselves deep into the fourth stage. They sat at the table, trading sips off yet another bottle, both wearing faces that a hound dog would have found pitiful. Calamity shuffled the deck of cards while Pete talked nonstop.

  That was the thing about Pete. If he got enough drinks in him he would wind up too tight and turn into quite the windbag. I was standing idly behind the bar, puffing on my pipe and listening in on their conversation.

  “All’s I ever wanted, all’s I ever dreamed of was riding the Chisholm Trail. I ever tell you I got hired on when I weren’t but fourteen?” Pete asked the question without appearing to expect a response. He continued. “One more ride. That’s all I’m asking. I want to see a stretch of cows in front of me further than the eye can see. Soft prairie grass beneath my feet, saddle to lay my head down on at night, a sky dotted with stars as my canopy…Maybe a soft woman to come home to at the end of the trail. I could get a ranch of my own. A wife, a ranch, a whole passel of children. A man could grow old and happy that way. I’ll sit in my rocking chair in front of the fire with my kids around my feet and tell them all about being a cowboy. They’ll remember me as being tall in the saddle, all right.” He nudged Calamity with his elbow, adding, “I’ll tell them about the time I met up with Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok.”

  Calamity said, “I oughta get a job riding with the Pony Express. I hear the pay ain’t bad.”

  Pete pulled out the chair Wild Bill had been occupying earlier and picked up a hat from the seat. “This here’s Wild Bill’s hat.”

  Calamity looked up. “His hat?”

  Pete placed the hat in the middle on the table like a centerpiece.

  “That’s strange,” Calamity said. “I ain’t never known Bill to go nowheres without his hat. I wonder what that means.”

  “It’s not an omen,” Pete said. “It’s just a forgotten hat.”

  She picked up the hat and looked it all over like maybe it was hiding a rabbit. “I don’t like the change that’s come over Bill. He seems hellbent on his own destruction.”

  “People change,” Pete said sadly. “Things change. Times change. Everything changes so fast I can’t hardly grab hold of nothing before it races on by me.”

  Calamity looked at Pete. “Some things never change.”

  “Like what?”

  “Love,” she said simply. “Love has always been what it is and it’ll never be different.”

  “I beg to differ,” Pete said. “I love the land out here, by God, but it’s being tamed by bob wire. It won’t be but another couple of years and life as we know it will die.”

  “The West will never die,” Calamity said.

  Pete aimed a finger in her direction. “You will die. I will die. The trails will die. The only thing that will be left is the big ranchers who will fence themselves in with bob wire like they was in a cage. A cage of their own making.”

  “Maybe you’ll die, Pete. But I’ll live on forever.”

  He snorted. “And how do you plan on doing that?”

  Calamity looked over at the wall of wanted posters. “People will remember me, by God. I’m a legend. I scouted for Custer. I killed twelve men.”

  “Seventeen,” corrected Pete.

  “That’s right. Seventeen!” Calamity pounded the table with her fist. The bottle danced and tipped toward the edge. She caught it by the neck before it plunged to the floor. She raised it toward her lips, paused and said, “People will remember me. I’ll go get a job riding with the Pony Express and deliver the United States mail to every dot on the map. They’ll write about me in history books. And I scouted for General George Armstrong Custer, did I mention that?”

  “After the scalping Custer just took, history will be too embarrassed to have that in any book,” I said.

  Calamity turned to the bar, looked up and down its length until her eyes lit on me at the far end. “What do you think, bookworm? Are Calamity Jane and Wild Bill going down in history?”

  “Mortality is an awful thing to have to consider, especially when drunk,” I said.

  “Answer the question.”

  “Calamity Jane and Wild Bill will be remembered, yes,” I said.

  “See!” Calamity said to Pete. “I ain’t the onliest one who thinks so!”

  “However,” I said, “they aren’t real, are they?”

  Calamity’s expression could have curdled fresh milk. “What do you mean?”

  “They aren’t real people. They’re just legends. Make believe. Imaginary.”

  “Of course I’m real. I’m sitting right here, ain’t I?”

  “Don’t play dumb with me. You know as well as I do that Calamity Jane is fictional.”

  She unsnapped the thong of her holster. “How about this, Charlie? How about I put a couple of bullets in you and you can tell me just how fictional they are?”

  I called her bluff. “You couldn’t shoot a dwarf.”

  “Sure I could. I just have to aim lower.”

  I puffed, took my time blowing out the smoke and asked, “Whatever happened to Martha Cannary?”

  Pete piped up. “Martha who?”

  Without looking at Pete, I said, “I think you better go next door and deliver that hat to Wild Bill.”

  “He can come get it his own self,” Pete said.

  Calamity took my cue and tossed the hat to Pete. “Go on and get out of here. Go give Bill his hat.”

  Pete stood and looked us both over, sensing something was wrong but not quite being able to put his finger on it. I urged him along by saying, “Go on, Pete. Calamity and I got some business to settle just between the two of us.”

  Pete drug his feet out the door like a scolded kid being sent off to bed without his supper. Once he was gone, Calamity ambled over to the other end of the bar. She sat on the stool with her elbows on top of the counter and looked down its length at me. “Who are you?”

  “Now that is strange,” I said. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

  “You know who I am.”

  “I know who you say you are. I know who that poster says you are. My question is: Do you know who you are?”

  “You’re not dealing with a full deck, are you?”

  “I don’t blame you for covering up your real name. I understand that even better than you’ll ever know. But like Sir Francis Bacon once said, ‘It is not the lie that passeth through the mind that doth the harm, but the lie that settleth in.’”

  “He got it wrong. It’s the bullet that passeth through the brain that does the harm.” She laughed at her own joke, but it was a hollow laugh. She turned somber, leaned her back against the bar and crossed her arms. “Why don’t you tell me how it is that you got that ace of hearts after I got mine.”

  I moved back behind the bar and up on the platform where I was standing across from her at eye level. “You dealt it to me.” I picked up my trusty rag and began to polish the wood.

  She stared at me long enough to go cross-eyed. Finally, she said, “Fess up. I ain’t mad. I just want to know how you pulled that ace without me knowing it.”

  I tucked the rag away and came around to the front of the bar, “The first rule of cards is to always know who you’re playing against.” I climbed up onto the stool next to her.

  “Hell, I was only playing against you and Wild Bill and Pete.”

  “You aren’t the only one who is skilled in sleight of hand, you know.” I waved my hand in the air, waggled my fingers right in front of her face, then pulled an ace of hearts out of her ear.

  Calamity jumped off the stool like the card in my hand was a live rattlesnake. “How’d you do that?”

  “Same way you always do it. With perhaps a bit more skill.”

  “You’re him, ain’t you?”

  “Who?” I asked innocently.

  “You’re that famous riverboat gambler. The dwarf that got hisself shot at and
jumped to his watery grave in the Mississippi.”

  “Ah, you must mean C.B. Dupre.”

  “That’s the name. Everybody called him English Dupre on account of his accent.”

  I waggled my eyebrows and said in my best British accent, “God save the Queen.”

  She laughed and slapped the bar top. “I just got chiseled by the best riverboat gambler of all time.” She looked me up and down, then asked, “I heard tell you jumped overboard when they caught you cheating. They say they shot you full of holes as you swam for shore. What really happened?”

  “English Dupre took a dunking that night, that much is true. When I dove into the cold churning water with bullets spraying all about me, I had what you might call an epiphany. As I sunk to the bottom of the river, I realized that I needed to change my life—if I lived through the night. You see, I had made myself into a gambler and a damn good one if I do say so myself. I could do parlor tricks and pull cards all night long. But it only took that one man to catch on to me and…As I kicked to the surface of Old Man River and swam for shore, I made a promise to myself: I would never gamble again. You might say I was baptized in that river and born again. I dove in the water as English Dupre and emerged anew as Charles Engleman.”

  “You gambled tonight.”

  “Indeed, I did. But it was for a good cause.”

  She went behind the bar, pulled a mug off the shelf and drew herself a beer.

  I brought a deck of cards out of my pocket and shuffled them. “I want to show you something.”

  “Another trick?” She blew the foam off the top of the mug and sipped.

  I fanned the cards out in front of her, face down. “Pick one. Look at it, but don’t let me see it.

  “I heard tell of this trick,” she said. “You’re going to read my mind.”

  “I’d die of boredom if I could read your mind.”

  She slipped a card off the end and held it up to her face, careful to not let me have a peek. “Jack of spades,” I said.