This Old Bill

by Loren D. Estleman

  The manager breathed some air. "You try my patience, Judson. Let me see the script and learn what is required of these bogus savages."

  "I haven't it with me."

  "Then I will send someone for it." He beckoned to a grip leaning against the proscenium arch. "Is it at your hotel?"

  "It isn't written yet."

  Nixon cursed energetically. The grip stopped halfway down the aisle, hesitated, then discreetly reversed directions.

  "There will be a script this weekend," Buntline assured the manager. "I am no stranger to deadlines."

  "This is Thursday. You are scheduled to open Monday. Were scheduled. This production is canceled." He spun on his heels and headed toward his office on the other side of the auditorium.

  "We have a contract."

  Nixon called back over his shoulder, "Speak to my attorney. I am no stranger to lawsuits."

  The journalist fumbled in his vest pocket. "How much to rent your theater next week?"

  "Six hundred dollars." Still walking.

  Buntline produced the folded bills and a wad from his pants pocket and counted them, popping the paper noisily. Nixon froze in mid-step, turned around.

  "I reckon this squares my debt," Will muttered to Jack.

  The other scout ran a finger around inside his stiff collar. "How come I felt safer in Cheyenne country?"

  They shared Buntline's hotel room. There, overcome with fatigue from their long rail journey, the two frontiersmen stretched out fully clothed on their cots while their host turned up the single greasy coal-oil lamp on the desk and, pausing only to uncork a travel-polished flask and help himself to an inspirational sip, began scratching his pen across the top sheet in a stack of foolscap. Texas Jack started snoring the moment his head caressed the pillow. Will, slower to succumb, amused himself for a time watching Buntline, stuck for a device, pacing the cramped space between his "office" and the door, muttering lines and gesturing. The star attraction remembered nothing more until he awoke with a hand shaking his shoulder and stale liquor breath in his face.

  "Time to rehearse, lad. The play is done."

  On the p in "play," spittle flew into Will's left eye. He rubbed it and asked what time it was.

  "Almost nine."

  The scout blinked stupidly at the blackness outside the window. "Awful dark out for nine."

  "Nine P.M., lad. It is still last night, not tomorrow morning."

  "You wrote a whole play in four hours?"

  "Closer to three. I went out once for whiskey." Buntline thrust a sheaf of closely handwritten sheets at Will, who rubbed his eyes again and studied the one on top in the thick yellow light of the lamp.

  The title was Scouts of the Plains.

  "Looks kind of familiar. Didn't I hear these lines in Buffalo Bill last winter?"

  "Call it a revival. The original story was mine to begin with."

  "You got three scouts listed in the cast. Who's this Cale Durg?"

  "I have scouted on occasion."

  "You?" Will was wide awake now. His laugh shook the bed. Texas Jack, still sprawled on the adjoining cot, came awake in mid-snore and shot upright with an astonished profanity.

  "The only place you ever found without help was the unhappy end of a bottle," Will told Buntline, gasping.

  "Perhaps so." The journalist drew himself rigid, his great belly describing an indignant arc between his suspenders. "But I was treading the boards when your stool was still yellow, and at my most intemperate I never tried to settle a six-hundred-dollar restaurant bill with fifty dollars and a handshake."

  "You made your point, Colonel. What do I say first?" Will groped for his boots.

  They rehearsed well past midnight, passing the flask and stopping only once, when Texas Jack choked on a healthy draft in the middle of a temperance speech assigned to his character, and picking their way laboriously through the late pages as Buntline's curlicues grew more exaggerated and difficult to decipher in direct relation to the volume of alcohol he had consumed to that point. The playwright demonstrated his dramatic abilities by assuming all the other roles, pitching his voice high to the scouts' vast amusement on those lines meant for Dove Eye, the beautiful Indian maiden of the piece. The next morning, clear-eyed and ruddy-faced after four hours' sleep and a shave, he left to deliver the script to the printers and hunt up props and scenery while his less adventurous fellow thespians negotiated an uneasy truce with their breakfast.

  Dress rehearsal was Saturday morning. Will and Jack put on their best buckskins in the dressing room they shared, then threaded their way through stacked scenery and carpenters hammering and sawing onstage, where they found Buntline, looking surprisingly authentic in fringe and his favorite knockabout hat with the broad trim turned up in front, coaching a group of ten hollow-cheeked, potbellied extras in brown-dyed cambric with red bandannas tied around their waists to represent breechclouts, tiara-like warbonnets perched on their heads at various exotic angles. The journalist stooped to bend the knee of a brave with stubble on his cheeks and a short cold cigar clamped between his teeth.

  "Higher," Buntline was saying. "Try to touch your chin with your knee. Remember that this is a war dance and that you're angry."

  "I got a hernia," protested the Indian in an accent that suggested the South Side.

  "Good. That should make you look angry."

  Catching sight of the newcomers, he called a break and approached them, swamping his jowls and neck with a soaked handkerchief. "I'm beginning to understand why it is taking so long to subjugate the heathen," he said. "What do you think? Will they pass muster?"

  "They're all chiefs," Jack pointed out. "Who's left to hold the horses?"

  "Dramatic license, lad. The sum total of—"

  Will cut him off. "Where is Dove Eye?"

  "That's her coming in the door. Late, as usual. I have never known a leading lady to be on time for a rehearsal or a performance."

  Buntline had indicated a small woman wrapped in furs proceeding in an unhurried gait up the center aisle of the auditorium. Her complexion was dark and she had high cheekbones and eyes as black and glossy as patent leather. She wore her raven hair in tiny curls framing her forehead.

  "Nez Percé," Will guessed.

  Jack grunted negatively. "Comanch'."

  "Whose-a fault I no gotta the cab?" the woman demanded of Buntline, stopping with only her head showing above the footlights. Her nostrils flared.

  "Zounds, but it slipped my mind completely." He waddled down the steps and took her hand. "Please forgive one who has been away from the theater far too long. From this time forward I shall place three conveyances at your disposal daily and you will have your choice." As he spoke, he walked her up the steps. "Mlle. Morlacchi, allow me to present the Honorable William F. Cody and Mr. T. B. Omohundro. Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack, your Dove Eye."

  Will, who towered over her by twelve inches, removed his Stetson and accepted her imperiously upraised hand. He tried to say something gracious, but only laughter bubbled out.

  She retracted her hand as if bitten. "Something is funny?"

  "I'm sorry." He fought for control. "It's just that I wasn't aware there were any undomesticated tribes in Sicily."

  "I am Neapolitan," she informed him coldly.

  "Of course you are," Jack put in. "I was just telling Will that this lady looks as if she is Neapolitan. Wasn't I, Will?"

  "Oh, yes."

  La Morlacchi smiled radiantly, and touched Jack's palm with fingers greatly unlike a squaw's short strong digits. "Omohundro." She tasted the name. "Is that not italiano?"

  "Well, it is so close it might as well be."

  She made a hoarse sound of amusement in her throat. Her hand lingered a moment in his before she withdrew it. Will cast a sidelong glance at Buntline, the latter beaming from ear to grease-painted ear.

  Opening night. Nixon's Amphitheater breathed nervously, its rafters humming like an expectant mother. The air was tinged with the odor of burning oil. Texas Jack remov
ed his head from the aperture between the curtain and the proscenium and turned a stony face on Will, who was studying his script on a stool covered in papier-mâché bark to resemble a stump. Yellow straw littered the softwood boards at his feet and vague shadows writhed on the painted canvas landscape behind him. He had one moccasined foot propped up on a real log.

  "Will, you seen how many people there are out there?"

  "All of 'em, I reckon. Buntline said it was sold out." He closed his eyes and moved his lips silently.

  "You praying?"

  "Too late for that. I'm getting my cues down."

  The other scout resettled his hat for the hundredth time. He was sweating under his greasepaint; flesh color stained the fur trim on his collar. "You recollect your friend Milligan?"

  "Sure. I guided him on a buffalo hunt last year."

  "He's out front."

  "Thanks, Jack. You surely know how to put a fellow's nerves to rest."

  "Five minutes to curtain," Buntline called out. He was helping the wardrobe woman adjust the headdress on one of the Indians. It kept sliding off his bald pate. Finally she took a tuck in the band and secured it with a safety pin.

  With three minutes remaining, a pacing extra collided with one of the potted trees and knocked it over. Two grips hastened to right it and scoop dirt back into the pot. While they were thus engaged, a corner of the backdrop came loose. Buntline caught it and held it until someone could erect a stepladder and nail it back in place. At one minute Mlle. Morlacchi was running around the stage in feathers and fringe, slashing the air with both hands and spitting imprecations in Italian at the makeup girl for some infraction no one quite understood.

  The overture started. The mysterious frightening region beyond the hanging folds filled with brass and strings.

  "Places, everyone," Buntline said calmly. "Curtain going up."

  The playwright-director-performer took his position on Will's right, thumbs hooked in his belt and one foot planted next to the scout's on the log. Texas Jack stood on the other side. He put his thumbs in his own belt, saw that that pose was taken, then tried crossing his arms. Finally he just let his hands dangle at his sides. Will closed his eyes, mouthed something quickly, rolled up his script and dropped it behind the "stump." A grip hauled on a rope and the curtain rose.

  An awed silence broke in applause. Under its cover the music subsided discreetly. The noise peaked, punctuated by hoots and whistles, then abated. New silence operated like a fan.

  The first line was Will's.

  The audience waited.

  Will said nothing.

  The three men dressed as scouts might have been fixtures. Someone in the auditorium coughed nervously.

  Buntline coughed too, moved his shoulders, lifted and resettled his thumbs in his belt, cleared his throat. "What have you been about lately, Will?" he prompted.

  Will made no response. A bead of sweat the size of a marble started through the grease on his forehead and crept down his nose, hanging from the end like an undecided suicide.

  Jack said loudly, "You've been off buffalo hunting with Milligan, haven't you?"

  The audience roared. Milligan was well known in Chicago. Will started at the noise and glanced around quickly as if roused from sleep. He started speaking then. The spectators shushed one another.

  The words came haltingly at first, then with the mounting confidence of one who had told the story a hundred times. But none of them was in the script. He was recounting the details of his hunt with Milligan exactly as it had happened. The spectators hung on the quaint phrases and queer terminology. They laughed in the right places.

  When the story was finished, Texas Jack leaped in with one of his own, again to the theatergoers' delight, and with a little help from Buntline's inexhaustible store of romantic fiction, the three groped their way through an impromptu first act. When it came time to close the curtain, Buntline signaled to the bogus braves offstage, whereupon all ten hurtled onto the set, swinging rubber tomahawks and shrieking like castrated mongrels.

  "The Indians are upon us!" cried the journalist, unlimbering his pistol, which discharged its powder into the floor before he could raise it. In the smoky confusion following the eardrum-battering din, the untutored extras fell on their faces to a man.

  "Damn good shooting, Durg!" shouted a wag in the back row. The curtain rolled down to tremendous applause and unbounded mirth.

  Scraps of the original play found their way into the second act, in which Dove Eye was introduced and fell in love with each of the scouts in turn. Buntline was seized by the revived hostiles and bound to a potted tree while preparations were made to burn him alive.

  "My candle gutters," he declaimed in his best lecturer's voice. "And yet there is time to deplore my dissolute life. In this miserable doomed sinner you see the sour dregs of that very first flagon of wicked rum I tapped as a callow youth of fifteen. Had I but seen reflected in that dark venom the pathetic and diseased creature I would become, I would have rammed the cork in tight and turned my back forever upon that empty, glittering existence from which my poor dead mother broke her heart and will attempting to dissuade me."

  "Bum him!" rose a cry from the audience.

  "What heights might I have scaled had I not given in to that base seduction?"

  Someone in another seat offered the Indians a match.

  A hearty cheer went up when a torch was finally applied to the dry kindling at Buntline's feet. Curtain.

  "Cale Durg's" rescue in the third act, more Indian attacks, constant gunfire. Sharp-eyed extras stamped at the floor and slapped at scenery ignited by the powder flares while scalps were taken and lariats flew. Buntline's character took a bullet and expired after a brief temperance speech, a turn that brought the audience to its feet in an ovation that shook the theater.

  The play ended, and even Buntline lost count of the curtain calls. Awash in the noise, Will shouted, "Sorry, Colonel."

  "Sorry, hell! This is the biggest thing that's happened since Appomattox!"

  "The newspapers'll eat us alive," muttered Jack.

  "Let them. All of Chicago will come flocking here just to see how truly bad we are."

  "That's the only way," Will conceded. "Words sure won't do it."

  They linked hands with Mlle. Morlacchi and bowed.

  Coals glowing in the fireplace shed red-orange light on the carpet and made looming dark things of the room's furniture. On the mantel a 365-day clock click-clunked against the sifting noise of snow floating down outside the frost-thick window. Drowsy from lovemaking, Will burrowed his back into the mattress and curled a hand around his wife's naked shoulder. "You haven't told me how you liked the play."

  "I didn't think you wanted to hear about it." She was tense under the counterpane, straining to hear Kit's labored breathing through the open door of the next room, which he shared with his sister. The boy had a bad chest cold. "You stopped the play to call out to me how bad you thought you were."

  "That's because when I spotted you I remembered I was just playacting. The audience appreciated it."

  "They agreed with you."

  "They know me in St. Louis, that's why. I think they liked the play even better than the audiences in Chicago."

  "They liked that woman."

  "Dove Eye?" He laughed. "She's the only woman in the cast. They had no choice but to like her."

  "Do you?"

  "I like you, Mama." He squeezed her.

  "That's no answer."

  "She dislikes me as much as she likes Texas Jack, and that's plenty. Not that you'd know it from the words Judson puts in their mouths during the love scenes." He snorted. "One of the Chicago critics found out he wrote Scouts in four hours and said he wondered why it took so long."

  "I know. You sent me the clippings." She listened to the clock. "Is Elizabeth prettier than I am?"

  He was silent for a moment. Then he swiveled to face her. "Christ, Mama, Lizzie's my cousin!"

  "You wouldn't know it from
the way you go on about her in your letters."

  "I never did."

  "You sound like a schoolboy in love with his teacher."

  They were arguing when Kit started coughing, an alarming whoop with a phlegmy rattle. Louisa got up to give him codeine. The boy accepted the spoonful of thick syrup and fell asleep immediately. Will was snoring when she returned, or pretending. She watched his face in repose, so like his son's, the faint light glimmering on skin as smooth as a child's despite constant exposure to weather. She envied the Codys their perfect skin; her own was rather coarse and already drying out at twenty-four. Elizabeth Guss would have the Cody skin, she knew, just as Mlle. Moriacchi's trim figure accentuated her own thickening breeder's frame. And those were just the ones she knew about.

  At length she took off her robe and slippers and climbed in beside her husband, where she listened to his heavy, measured breaths and the clock paying out time and the quietly hissing stream of snow and doubt piling up on the sill outside.

  Chapter Eight

  The passenger unfolded himself from the horse-drawn cab to an astonishing six foot two, resplendent in black cutaway, string tie, ruffled shirt, flowered vest, salt-and-pepper trousers, and high-sheen boots whose heels added yet another two inches to his height. The features under the broad brim of his Stetson were equally arresting; blue-gray eyes, large hooking nose, and a long upper lip pushed into a permanent pout under a flowing moustache that masked the beginnings of jowls where the ends hung down. His hair, darkened with pomade, spilled in perfumed ringlets to his shoulders.

  "Five dollars," announced the driver, handing down the other's valise and carpetbag.

  Their owner paused with his hand inside his coat. "I was advised to give you no more than two."

  "No, it's five."

  He produced a flat leather wallet and removed two singles.

  The driver flexed the muscles under his tight coat. He was several inches shorter than the other man but built square and solid. His nose had been broken more than once. "Give me five dollars, you backwoods dude," he growled, "or I'll tan your hide for you."