This Old Bill

by Loren D. Estleman

  Showing elaborate attention to detail, the passenger put away the bills and returned the wallet to his inside pocket. His teeth shone in a becoming smile.

  Will pushed through the revolving front door of the Brevoort Hotel a few minutes later and shouldered his way through the hooting crowd that had gathered on the sidewalk. For a moment he watched the tall man in elegant clothes literally mopping the gutter with the bruised cab driver, holding him upside down by his legs and the seat of his pants and swishing his head around a brackish puddle.

  "What you doing, Wild Bill?" Will asked casually.

  "Just tidying up a little," replied the tall man.

  "Figure to be done soon?"

  "With you in a minute."

  A red-painted trash barrel stood on the corner, half full of paper and fruit peels. Hickok hoisted the howling cabbie and dumped him seat-first into the barrel with his legs thrust heavenward. As an afterthought he got out his wallet again and stuffed the two singles into the stunned man's mouth. He stooped to wipe his boots with a white linen handkerchief, then picked up his bags and joined Will on the sidewalk.

  "How was your trip, Wild Bill?" They were entering the hotel now, the crowd having parted for them.

  "Boring as hell. The railroads sure took all the fun out of traveling."

  Hickok signed the register with a flourish. While the bell captain was lifting his luggage, Will laid a hand on the shoulder of a fat man with muttonchop whiskers and longish hair in a Prince Albert and striped trousers, an exact copy of his own attire. "Wild Bill, this here is Arizona John Burke, my partner."

  Hickok grasped the fat man's pudgy hand in his own corded one. "What happened to Buntline?"

  "Oh, he's back doing dime novels," Will said. "Things got complicated after they arrested him on some old bail-jumping charge and we had to change the title of the play to keep the courts from attaching the receipts. He's out again, but if he comes near the theater and the detectives see him we'll all be working for free."

  "I've followed your exploits ever since Hays City, Mr. Hickok," gushed Arizona John. "I'm delighted to welcome you to the show."

  "Yeah. There a bar in this hotel?"

  They adjourned to the dimly lit room, where Hickok and Will ordered bourbon and branch and Burke contented himself with bock. Hickok glared at a group of well-fed men in business suits jammed into a back booth until they stopped staring at the longhairs and busied themselves with their drinks.

  "Arizona agrees with me that we got to sign some more famous names in order to keep this show popular," Will explained. "We were big in Chicago and St. Louis and Boston, but they've seen us here in New York. That's why I wired you to come join up. We've rewritten Buntline's old part to fit you."

  Hickok bolted his drink and caught the bartender's eye. "I come to take a look-see, but now I'm here I don't know. Playing pretend just don't seem manly."

  "Hell, Wild Bill, it's just like spinning a yarn, only bigger. I read that write-up of you in Harper's a few years back. I didn't notice you tripping over the truth."

  "It ain't the same."

  "Sure it is. I got plans. We're going to sign some real Indians, dress them in authentic warbonnets and buckskin leggings. Eventually we'll go outdoors, bring in some horses and buffaloes, make a real exhibition of it. Show folks in the East what it's like on the frontier. Arizona says there's never been anything like it."

  "I done it two years ago in Niagara Falls."

  Will peered closely at his friend. Age had caught up with the gunman, thickening his waist and scratching deep lines from his nose to his mouth. Flesh sagged under his chin. He was drinking as hard as ever, but without enjoyment, and there was something in his eyes.

  "Goddamn injuns I hired didn't know the first thing about herding buffaloes," Hickok recalled. "Bastards got away from them while they was fixing to drive them into the arena, and we chased 'em all over town till they finally run up a blind alley. Meantime the grizzly busted out of the cattle car and went straight for the nearest hot-dog cart. By the time we got him back in the cage we had to sell the buffaloes to settle damages and raise train fare out of town. I recollected all that coming over, which is how come I'm thinking twice now."

  "Then why are you here?" asked Will.

  "I'm sick to death of marshaling. I had it with matching fire with every vagrant who ever read about me in Beadle's Dime Library and shooting stray rats and sitting with my back to the wall and a hideout derringer up my ass. I need a vacation, but I can't afford one. Pick out whichever answer suits you."

  Burke said, "Does that mean you're in with us, Mr. Hickok?"

  He looked at Will, cocking his head toward the third man. "What'd you say he's called?"

  "Arizona John."

  "He ever been to Arizona?"

  "I never asked. John?"

  Burke hesitated, then shook his head.

  "I'll sign on one condition," Hickok said. "You keep him the hell away from me."

  Will kept him the hell away. That afternoon, the bell captain delivered the new script of Scouts of the Prairie, formerly Scouts of the Plains, to the gunman's room. Hickok accepted it with a grunt and pushed the door shut in the hotel employee's face, ignoring his unobtrusively outstretched hand. Finding his entrance cue, he pulled the cork from his traveling flask with his teeth and read while filling a water tumbler with the red liquid.

  "Fear not, fair maid," his first line read. "You are safe at last with Wild Bill, who is ready to risk his life, if need be, in the defense of weak and helpless womanhood."

  He cursed when the glass brimmed over and slopped whiskey onto the writing desk.

  "Good house, Papa!" cried the little boy in the balcony, making a trumpet of his hands.

  The audience laughed and beat its palms thunderously. Will paused in the middle of his first exit to smile broadly and wave at the child and his mother.

  "That your boy?" Hickok asked backstage.

  Will said it was, flushing proudly under his makeup. "He and his mother are here on a visit. What do you think of a four-year-old boy with that kind of gumption?"

  The gunman, decked in frontier costume, grunted. He wore little greasepaint and no rouge, having threatened to geld the makeup man who had approached him with the jar. "You ought to cut his hair. He looks like a girl."

  The audience gasped when Hickok stepped onto the stage. He had on his favorite buckskin shirt studded with turquoise and gypsum, cinched at the waist with a broad leather belt with a square buckle, the fringed hem hanging to his knees. A brace of revolvers closely resembling his famous pearl-handled Navy Colts rode in the belt with the butts turned forward, and his wealth of glistening curls threw off halos from the footlights. No one had yet accused him to his face of looking like a girl. He blinked in the glare of the calcium spot and strode away from it toward where Mlle. Morlacchi, attired as Dove Eye, awaited his opening line. The circle of light followed him.

  He delivered his first speech, and his second and his third, not listening to the actress's responses, impatient to get his next line over with. As he spoke he paced, but the spotlight stayed with him. Someone in the seats tittered.

  "That tears it." In the middle of one of Dove Eye's impassioned pleas he faced front, drew one of his revolvers, and hurled it at the source of the offending illumination in the balcony. There was an explosion, the light died, and bitter smoke rolled out into the auditorium. A woman who had been sitting in the shower of glass screamed.

  Watching from the wings with Texas Jack, Will said, "I had a nightmare like this once, but I woke up."

  For the campfire scene, the only lamp burning onstage was concealed in a "fire" rigged from strips of red and yellow crepe surreptitiously fanned into motion by a grip stationed under the open trap. The show's newest member had by this time settled into his role. Feeling in control now, Will passed the whiskey bottle to Hickok, who took a greedy pull, made a face, then spat out the mouthful and flung away the vessel. It bounced on the floor without shatte
ring and rolled into the backdrop, jiggling the sky and hills.

  "You think I'm the worst fool east of the Rockies," he accused Will in a voice that carried to the back row. "I can tell whiskey from cold tea. Give me real whiskey or I'll tell no stories."

  The spectators laughed and applauded. Real whiskey was provided. Face flushed from the stimulation, the gunman glided weightlessly into his next scene with Dove Eye, with whom he promptly fell in love somewhat more energetically than the script demanded. Will sent in the Indians to rescue her from her rescuer. The instant the curtain fell she clawed her way out of Hickok's embrace and pelted him with curses in English and Italian.

  "She's too little anyway," growled Hickok when she had stormed into the wings, leaving behind a respectful path cleared by the players assembled backstage.

  "She's big enough to take you down a notch," Texas Jack pointed out.

  Hickok lunged for Jack's throat. Will grabbed his arm. "They're engaged."

  Arizona John Burke, standing nearby, slumped his fat shoulders at the announcement. Hickok noted the reaction.

  "Well, well," he reflected. "I guess she ain't so little at that."

  Scouts of the Prairie rolled into Titusville, Pennsylvania, on a glory road paved with Arizona John's eye-catching posters and columns of print in the local newspapers. Pirate editions of Ned Buntline's Buffalo Bill books and the Beadle chain of Wild Bill titles sprang up all around the nation's first oil boomtown, and a local dressmaker added fringe to a line of blouses she had despaired of selling and went out of stock six hours after placing a card advertising them in the window. A drifter claiming to be William F. Cody was arrested peddling hanks of hair said to be pieces of Chief Tall Bull's scalp on the main four corners after Will had complained to the police that he was a gentleman and not given to taking scalps. "Buffalo Bill's Scruples," ran the headline on Burke's subsequent press release. It worked. The company's first performance played to a sellout crowd of oil barons, field workers with black fingernails, and their families. Between shows, Will looked up from the stacks of slightly greasy bills he was counting on the desk in the theater manager's office to ask Burke what the commotion was outside.

  "It's the supers," reported the publicist. "They're threatening to quit."

  "Wild Bill again?"

  He nodded. "He gets bored onstage and shoots at their legs because he likes to see them dance. They're refusing to lie down when they're supposed to be dead because they're afraid he'll blow their heads off."

  "He doesn't have any bullets in his pistols."

  "You ever catch one of those powder flares at close range?"

  "I'll talk to him. Anything else?"

  "Those oilfield roughnecks were by again this morning. They're wondering will you pay the hospital bills of the ones Wild Bill knocked down with that chair in the saloon yesterday."

  "They started it. You don't whistle at Wild Bill and ask him does he wear hair ribbons on Sundays." He handed the stacked bills to the poker-faced manager, who banded them and squatted in front of the black metal safe behind the desk. The key on the end of his watch chain rattled in the lock.

  "The ticket clerk's scared they'll burn down the theater if they don't get some promise of recompense. I'm not so sure he's wrong."

  The manager glanced up, alarmed. "You pay damages. It's in your contract."

  Will said, "Tell them to come by the hotel tomorrow morning and I'll see what I can do."

  "I thought we were leaving for Rochester tonight."

  "We are."

  There was no sign of Hickok when the train pulled into the Rochester station. Will saw that his bags were delivered to the hotel along with everyone else's, turned in, and rose early to supervise the restrained chaos of staging at the theater. At a quarter past four he returned to the hotel to learn that Hickok still hadn't checked in. He went looking.

  The bar he eventually entered was as dark as any adobe saloon in Arizona or New Mexico, but the air was damp and smelled of fish. A lone fog horn cleared its throat out on Lake Ontario, as isolated and hard to place as an owl hoot in the woods. Will ducked to avoid rusty hanging lanterns as he worked his way through the smoke and buzz of voices, squinting at the jowly, stubbled faces in the greasy light. He found the owner of the one he was looking for dealing stud at a back table ringed with huddled forms in peacoats and shabby wool jackets that smelled like uncured hides.

  "Wild Bill, you are a hard man to locate," Will said.

  Hickok skidded a card across a table. "That's the general idea. How come you did?"

  "I'm a scout, or did you forget? You cut a pretty wide swath of busted windows and bloody noses along the lake-shore."

  He plunked down the remainder of the deck and picked up his hand. "Jack opens."

  The man with the designated card flipped a white check into the center of the table. Will said, "We got a show at eight o'clock. You missed rehearsal."

  "I knew that. You didn't have to come tell me." He matched the bet and raised five.

  His friend scooped a vacant chair from under the next table and spun it around. "You want to talk?"

  "Sit at this table, you play cards," grunted a stevedore in a sweat-stiffened pullover to Hickok's right.

  Will went to the bar and exchanged money for a stack of checks. Returning to the table, he sat down and watched the others play out the hand. Hickok raked in the pot, dealt a fresh round. Will opened.

  "You changed, Wild Bill," he said, frowning at his hand. "I knew you to raise some hell out on the plains, but you been in civilization before. You know better."

  Hickok said nothing. The man who had opened the last hand kicked up the bet. Reluctantly the stevedore saw the raise.

  Will matched it. "I'm having trouble finding supers. It's hard hiring someone who's scared to turn his back on one of the featured players."

  "I just like to hooraw them now and again. You get tired saying and doing the same things every night." He saw the raise and sweetened it another five. The player across from him hesitated, then met it. The stevedore folded.

  "It ain't like you." Will added one red check to the pot and then another. The man who had seen Hickok' s raise said something foul and threw in his hand. That left only the two plainsmen.

  "Strutting around in front of all them people like a honky-tonk bitch. It ain't work for a grown man." The gunman met Will's raise. "Call."

  His friend turned up a pair of tens and three odd face cards. Hickok had a queen-high straight. He scooped in his winnings.

  "I don't think that's what's riding you," Will persisted.

  The other refilled his glass from a bottle that was three-quarters full of red whiskey. His eyes flicked over the other two men seated at the table. "Clear out."

  The stevedore glared. "Don't we get a chance to finish even?"

  "You're even now. I been watching you two play partners all day. You're lucky you caught me in a generous mood."

  "Hold on!" barked the other player, scraping back his chair. Hickok sat back, unbuttoning his Prince Albert with his left hand. The plain handle of a Colt showed above the red sash around his waist. The two men got up and left without further discussion.

  The gunman drained his glass and set it down with a thump. Then he filled it again from the bottle. "You been hitched a couple years now, ain't you, Will?"

  "More than a couple. I got a daughter, seven, and you saw the boy, and another daughter new as a shiny gold coin. Moving the whole kit and kaboodle out here to Rochester next season." He paused, wondering where the conversation was leading.

  "What's it like?"

  "Rochester? You're sitting in it."

  "Bein' married."

  Will shrugged. "It could be better. I've had it worse." Slowly he looked up from his checks, and his face split in a wide grin. "By God, you're on the scout, ain't you? Or maybe you got someone all picked out. How come hell froze over and nobody told me?"

  "Just thinking."

  "Since when?"

  "Si
nce I turned thirty-eight. I got one good suit and a saddle with a bad cinch. Seems to me a thirty-eight-year-old man ought to have more."

  "You'd have more, you didn't spend all your time around saloons."

  Hickok glanced up, startled. "I don't got to give that up, do I? If I get hitched?"

  "Depends on who you get hitched to. Stands to reason you got to give up something. You can't just keep going on the way you been."

  The gunman cut the ace of spades from the deck idly. "Well, I don't want to do that."

  They took a cab to the theater, where a hyper Arizona John met them on the sidewalk and hustled them inside, chattering about Ned Buntline's genius in having written a play with scenes so easily rearranged while its two stars were off seeing the sights. Texas Jack was playing a love scene with Mlle. Morlacchi when they reached the wings. Will watched the betrothed couple pawing each other in the footlights for a moment, then turned to his friend with a smile. "They sure do put on that romance stuff with enthusiasm, don't they?"

  Hickok was grim. "Ain't they foolish? What's the sense in getting out there and making a show of yourself?"

  "Beats grading track." Will slapped him on the shoulder. "Let's go climb out of these city duds and get ready to make a foolish show of ourselves."

  Finishing his first scene, Will strode backstage in costume to find Arizona John standing alone among the ropes and lumber. "Where's Wild Bill?"

  Burke said, "I'll let you look. I'd rather go rattlesnake hunting in a dark cave."

  A quick round of the dressing rooms failed to turn up the gunman. Finally Will buttonholed a pale-faced young grip and asked him if he'd seen Hickok.

  "Yes, sir. He left while you was onstage."

  "Did he say where he was headed?"

  "No, sir. But he left a message for you."

  Will waited. "Well?"

  The boy scraped his shoe in the sawdust. "He said to 'tell that long-haired son of a bitch I am done with him and his show business for good.'"

  Burke came in on the last part of the message. Will said, "Tell the others, will you, John?"

  "They'll be disappointed," replied the publicist, deadpan.