by Pete Dexter
The sun moved across the floor, and he moved to avoid it. He sat in a chair at the side of the window and watched the street for her.
The sun dropped behind the mountains and the bottle lay on its side, empty, before he realized she wasn't coming back.
In two weeks the number of smallpox cases was twenty-two. All the cots in the pesthouse were occupied; the three latest victims lay in blankets on the floor. Still, no one had died.
Every morning Jane began at the Gem Theater—there were two cases there—and then went to the pesthouse. Her first three patients—the two upstairs girls and the gambler—had reached the crossroads and recovered. The girls were badly scarred, which she said was probably in their best interests. She fought disease, she fought turpitude.
The gambler, in fact, had gone delirious and reached under her skirts, and she'd hit the back of his wrist with the butt of her pistol. "I don't consort whilst I'm curing the sick," she said. "I stay pure so I can heal. I give you your life, now don't make me take it back."
She knew every patient by name, and what stages of the disease they were in. She could predict when they would come to the crossroads a day in advance, and she was always there with fixer. She loved them best in that moment when she forced the bottle into their mouths, and made them live.
All day she went from bed to bed, cooling foreheads, mothering the girls; She mopped the floor and emptied pails and fed those who could eat. She hung a pulley from the ceiling and put the gambler's wrist in traction. He had tried to leave when his fever broke, but she lay him back down, saying the germs from the cured helped the stricken fight the disease.
She couldn't stand to lose even one.
At night she went to the bars in the badlands, collecting for the sick. She took off her hat and walked among the gamblers and tourists and upstairs girls, moving in close to them until they gave up their money.
And she drank as she made her rounds, sometimes from the fixer, sometimes local whiskey. Glass-washing became common in the badlands.
"God give me the touch to cure," she said, and some believed her, and some didn't, but nobody wanted her breathing too long in their face. Once Jane took over smallpox, charity and fear went arm in arm.
Her eyes were rubbed red, night and day, and whole evenings passed in the bars without her eagle scream. She was seen to yawn in public. There were rumors she had the African sleeping sickness.
She spoke less to the tourists—only to ask them for money—and sometimes sat alone, drinking from her fixer and talking endearments to herself. "You are the only one that can cure it," she would say. "God sent you."
Nobody interrupted her. It was better her talking to herself than issuing eagle screams, or toe threats, or mourning Bill, and as the days went by there was a sentiment she was right. "The Lord works in strange ways" was heard in unlikely places.
There were places in the badlands, in fact, where men gave up their seats when they saw her walk in the door. There were places where she was bought drinks without begging them. And she took the chairs and the drinks as her due, and never thanked a soul.
The news of the first deaths came five weeks after the first case was discovered in the Gem Theater. Two men and two women died the same morning in the pesthouse. Swearingen heard it from the upstairs girl who brought his meals. Her name was Lu-Lu, and she had once worked for Charley Utter in Lead, before he'd turned the business over to Boone May and Lurline, who killed it and almost each other in less than a month. Lu-Lu kept herself cleaner than most, and he paid her two dollars a day to come to his room with food and water and empty his bucket. Al Swearingen hadn't been out of the room since his wife left Deadwood with all his money.
He sat at the window, day after day, watching the boy come and go from the bench across the street, worrying that his bartenders and dealers were stealing from him downstairs. He had detailed visions of revenging himself on his wife.
The girl came in with his lunch and told him there were four dead at the pesthouse. "And I knowed one of them," she said.
He lost his knack for breathing again, and thought of his wife to restore it. He'd noticed early on it restored his functions to think of bringing her to justice. He sat down on the bed and put his face in his hands to concentrate. Lu-Lu put the food on the table by the window and sat beside him. She didn't believe his wife had gotten away with all the money.
"Poor Mr. Swearingen," she said. "Did you knowed one of them too?" She patted his leg, and he sat still. She had seen men in grieving before, and rested her hand on his thigh. "Which one was it?" He didn't answer, and she floated her hand farther up his leg. "You know what makes a body feel better?" she said.
She leaned into him then, pushing her chest into his arm, and felt him shake. His breathing was deep and passionate. She stuck her tongue in his ear—it tasted bitter and old—and he hit her flush on the jaw. She rolled off the bed onto the floor, trying to get to her tongue with her fingers, watching the blood spill all over her dress. It was a new dress, shipped all the way from Chicago.
She cried out, but the pain it caused stopped her, and she covered her mouth with both hands, and her nose ran and her eyes watered and the blood streaked over her cheeks and neck. He came after her, dropping to his knees on the floor, reaching for her neck. She held tight to her mouth, and it kept him off.
He pulled her hair, bringing her closer, and hit her again. She had been hit before, but never serious, not in the face. Lurline said it again and again, "The man that hurts my looks should never sleep with both eyes closed again," and she'd thought that protected her too.
Swearingen's fist caught her on top of the forehead and rolled her into the wall. The blow knocked her hands away from her mouth, and the blood followed her, wherever she went. She tried to say she was sorry, but her tongue had swollen and the words caught behind it in her mouth. He was coming after her again, eyes like the Fourth of July, smiling. She tried to smile back, but the blood ran into her lap.
He bent over her and reached for her neck. She let his hands settle there, trying to please him, and the pressure forced her chin back. She felt him take over her weight. She saw the ceiling, then the far wall, the door. Her head glowed and shook, and her eyes played tricks. The ceiling opened up and became the sky, the walls moved farther away. The door opened, and a preacher in black clothes stood there to take her to heaven.
She tried to smile, but the muscles in her face had froze. The preacher held up the Good Book, and suddenly the pressure in her head changed, a deep hammering replaced the glow, and the preacher spoke, it sounded like a hundred miles away.
"I have come for you now," he said.
Swearingen screamed. That sounded closer. The pressure changed again, and she felt cooler. She felt herself dropping, a long way to the floor. "The path to good is through evil," the preacher said.
She felt the footsteps as Swearingen ran across the room, she heard the glass break as he went through the window. The preacher walked past her and looked down at the street. He didn't seem to notice she was there.
She sat halfway up and moved her hands. Her fingers stuck to each other, her chin stuck to her shoulder. The front of her new dress was soaked and heavy and it clung to her chest. She wasn't dead.
She started to cry.
The preacher turned away from the street with a satisfied look on his face. She got off the floor and he watched her. The bleeding slowed and she wiped at herself with the sheet on Al Swearingen's bed. "I have driven the evil side of the Lord from this place," he said.
And she looked at herself and saw what he meant. God had taken his revenge, and she was forgiven. She crossed the room and kissed the back of the preacher's hand, leaving a little spot of red blood between his knuckles.
She tried to thank him, but the words died in the back of her mouth, behind her tongue. He looked into her eyes a long time, and she knew he understood her. And loved her, and forgave her.
And she knew she was saved.
The de
aths in the pesthouse continued for two weeks, and then stopped. There were nine in all. Jane took them all personal, and refused to attend the funerals. She pulled a gun on Doc Pierce and his nephews when they came for one of them, a ten-year-old child. She said the baby wasn't dead until she agreed to it. Doc Pierce had to send for the child's mother—an upstairs girl at the Green Front—to talk Jane out of the body.
In the bars at night, Jane turned sullen. She sat alone, sometimes staring at her hands, sometimes staring at tourists. She drank harder than she had when there was more work. The disease's
course was run. Since the first victims died, there had been no new episodes. She talked about moving on. "I got the gift to cure," she said, "but my work's about done here."
Now that the new cases had stopped, the bartenders agreed with her, and one of them invented a story that there was sickness in Cheyenne.
She considered that, and him. "What symptoms?" she said. "Burnin' brow? Sweats? Is there disfigurements?"
The bartender shook his head. "That's all I heard, that there was sickness."
Later that night Jane shot a roach off the bar. She said they were carriers of disease, worse than flies. "If it wasn't they liked to sit in dog shit," she said, "flies never would of got a bad reputation."
The next night, every bartender in the badlands had heard of the disease in Cheyenne. They knew the symptoms, which were identical to the pox that had come through Deadwood, and the numbers of victims. They said there were over two hundred.
The news lifted Jane's spirits. She went spot to spot, confirming the numbers. "A city like Cheyenne, it could be five hundret victims before I get there," she said.
The bartender she was talking to at the time said, "The sooner the better." And a little later he said, "Your work here's good as done, Jane. They ain't nobody caught the pox in three weeks."
She sighed at the misfortune in Cheyenne. "The pox takes the good along with the bad," she said. "That's the trouble with it. The only one it won't take is me, I'm immuned by the Lord to cure."
Later she shot her guns into the floor and screamed her eagle scream, and prepared herself for the trip. "All right," she said, "I'm going to need about two hundred and ten dollars to buy fixer for them poor victims in Cheyenne." She passed her hat up and down the bars in the badlands all that night and the next. She only collected thirty dollars, but nobody stole the hat.
And so the last time Charley ever saw Calamity Jane, he gave her a dollar. It didn't seem like much, but it was what she wanted. He put it in her hat at the Gem Theater, where he sometimes stopped at night, now that Al Swearingen had flown out of the second floor window in a rain of glass, got on his horse, and galloped off into the Hills.
The hat was passed up the bar and then around the tables where Charley was sitting. Charley put his dollar in without touching the insides—there was fresh life growing out of the stains in there. Jane was standing at the end of the bar, her hands wrapped around two glasses of local whiskey, watching the hat to make sure nobody stole money from the sick. She looked worse to Charley than the last time he'd seen her, but Jane always looked worse than the time before. It could of just been there was always something you hadn't noticed before.
Her skin had yellowed and her stomach hung like a boulder in the moment before it goes over the side. Charley knew stomachs, and this kind resulted from local whiskey. It wouldn't be long before she was throwing up blood, if she wasn't already.
Her eyes followed the hat, and when Charley dropped the dollar inside she looked at him, and for half a minute forgot the hat as it went past and around the table. Her eyes were narrow and black; he saw she couldn't remember who he was.
She put one of the drinks on the bar and crossed the room, pushing an upstairs girl and a tourist out of the way. Charley nodded, Jane nodded back. "I been through a lot," she said finally, "and I don't recollect your name."
"Charley Utter."
She nodded. "I thought it was you." She didn't remember.
"Charley Utter," he said again. "Bill's friend."
She nodded again; it wasn't there. Him or Bill. "I am a screamin' eagle from Bitter Creek," she said, "the further you go the bitterer it gets, and I'm from the head end."
Charley said, "I know where you're from."
She looked confused. "You come here from my hometown?"
"No," he said.
'"Cause I ain't from there anymore. This right here is my hometown now, where my husband is buried."
He said, "I heard you nursed the sick."
"Some of them died, but it wasn't my fault. The Lord picks who He wants and leaves us the rest."
She staggered, and nearly fell. There were miners around her, a few tourists, all of them moved at once, not to be touched.
"It's tired you out," he said.
She brought a glass to her lips and drank everything inside it. "That's true," she said.
And then, because his kindness embarrassed her, she screamed her eagle scream and left him there at the table, without another word. At the bar she took the money out of her hat and stuck it down the front of her britches, and then patted herself there to make sure it was secure.
"I ain't never been robbed," she said, to no one in particular. She put the hat on her head and picked up the drink on the bar and walked to the door. Before she went through it, she stopped and fired her gun once into the floor, and screamed an eagle scream.
"I leave tomorrow," she said, "at sunrise."
And she did.
The next night at eight o'clock the bartender at the Gem Theater looked at the door and smiled. Jane had been reported mounted and headed south, into the Hills, at six o'clock that morning. "Just now is when she always come in," he said.
"I expect she'll find something to do when it gets dark," Charley said. "If there's a bar in the Hills, she's headed there right now."
The bartender smiled. "Headed the other way," he'said.
"She had a good heart," Charley said. "All that was wrong with Jane, she needed an epidemic to bring it out."
"You wasn't in here enough," the bartender said. "That scream was the bane of the badlands. Stole drinks, scared tourists, the woman never told the truth yet."
Charley looked around the room. "Like the rest of these war heroes."
"Jane was the worst," the bartender said. "Ain't nobody told the lies she did."
Charley shrugged. "She didn't mean anything by it," he said. "She nursed the sick . . ."
"She mentioned that," the bartender said. "Here and there and everyplace betwix. The less disease there was, the more miraculous the cures."
Charley pulled his hat down over his eyes, the way Jane liked hers, and looked at his drink. The bartender crossed his arms. "You think it was wrong, what we did," he said after a while.
Charley looked up.
"Tellin' her there was pox in Cheyenne," the bartender said. "You wouldn't of done that, if you was us."
"You invented it?"
"Not me, but I went along."
Charley shook his head.
"You wasn't here listening to that eagle scream every night," the bartender said. "Tellin' people she was married to Wild Bill."
"She didn't mean anything by it," Charley said. "She was just lonely without an epidemic."
The bartender said, "Well, she's gone now. She's on the road to Cheyenne. Live by the lie, die by the lie. She got what she deserved, although I don't know what Cheyenne done to deserve her."
Charley thought of her, drunk and probably lost by now in the Hills, maybe asleep on her feet with the horse. And he saw that in some way it was what she wanted.
"What we did," the bartender said, "was strictly self-protection. We didn't mean nothing by it either." Then he poured himself a drink, and touched his glass to Charley's before he drank. "You got to admit this," he said, "whoever named her Calamity knew what they was doing."
"She named herself," Charley said.
Jane rode straight through the night, an
d did not rest until the sun had gone down the next. She woke before daybreak, drank her coffee unsweetened by liquor, and started out again.
If her horse hadn't died, she would have made Cheyenne in five days. As events happened, it was eight. She arrived in town with a supply train, sharing the back of a wagon with half a dozen cats and a load of cheese. Her healing fever was such, she didn't mind the indignity.
She never drew her pistols once on the trip from Deadwood, she offered no eagle screams into the night air, for fear of waking the driver. Once in Cheyenne, she jumped from the wagon on lower Main Street, and walked into the first bar she saw. "I am here to heal," she said. "Where's the victims?"
She went from place to place, bars to sporting houses; there was no pox. She stopped a preacher on the street and explained what she had come for, and Who had sent her. "Could you direct me to the pesthouse?" she said.
He looked at her, up and down. He was tall and handsome and gray-haired. "If we had such," he said, "you may be assured I would direct you."
The woman with him tittered at that; Jane saw they wasn't married. She walked past him into another bar, and then another, until she satisfied herself they were hiding the truth.
She slept at the west end of town, under the stars. She found a half-built store there, and curled herself into a corner. She spent her nights in the store, her days returning to the saloons, waiting to overhear news of the disease. It was there in Cheyenne, she felt it.
And fourteen days after she arrived, she walked into one of the sporting bars and heard what she had come for. She stood where she was, listening, and then found her eyes had puddled and wet her cheeks.
Two of their girls had caught the pox.
In June of 1879, a dead chinese was found floating face-down in the shallows of the Whitewood Creek, caught there in a tangle of wood. There was construction all over town that spring, new houses were built all the way up into the Hills. There was a new store every week. All of it was made from the same pine, and all of it looked the same.