This Old Bill

by Loren D. Estleman

  Two days later at a rival theater an actor billed as "Wild Bill Hickok" felt a rough hand on his shoulder in the middle of a performance and turned in time to see the fist that unhinged his jaw and drove his front teeth down his throat. Other blows broke his nose and cracked two ribs. Witnesses described the assailant, who fled before security arrived, as tall and mean-looking, with hair to his shoulders and a slight limp.

  Autumn dampened the air inside the cramped vault of the New York Central and Hudson River Station, its walls humming not with the prayers of the pious but the echo of hurrying footsteps and the shriek and bang of high-carbon wheels and loose couplings, muffled slightly by exhaling steam. Will and Arizona John Burke searched the faces of the passengers alighting from the train. The steam slowed to a trickle and stopped entirely, and they were still waiting. Will mounted the step and peered down the aisle between the two rows of seats. A colored porter was busy sweeping the runner at the other end of the car.

  "Excuse me, but is there anyone else aboard this train?" The employee stared at the long-haired apparition stuffed incongruously into city clothes. "Just the crew, suh."

  Scratching his beard, Will stepped down to find a man in a conductor's uniform standing with Burke. "Is your name Cody?" asked the conductor.

  Will said it was. The conductor jerked his head. "I have something for you in Baggage."

  As he walked, the railroad man favored the outside edges of his feet, as if the soles hurt. He led the way to a boxcar just ahead of the caboose, undid the padlock with a key on a large ring taken from his belt, and heaved open the sliding door with a noise like coal skidding down a chute. Will peered through the gloom inside the car at the faces of the men getting up from the bare floor, shielding their full black eyes from the sudden light with callused hands. They had flat features and stoic mouths and their black hair fell in braids to the blankets drawn over their shoulders.

  The scout whirled on the conductor. "These men had tickets to ride in the coach!"

  "Complain to Mr. Harriman." He leaned against the side of the car and rubbed one foot through the thick leather Oxford. "On my train savages don't sit with the decent passengers."

  "I'll take your advice when I dine with Mr. Harriman next week."

  The conductor paled a little and stood upright, forgetting his feet. The Indians were standing at the open door now. They smelled of rancid grease and fresh sweat. "What you want them for anyway, kitchen help?"

  "They're my actors."

  "Oh." He stood around for a while as the cargo was unloaded, then left, hobbling and cursing under his breath.

  Will escorted the Indians to a clothing store, where he made them take off their blankets and put on ready-made suits. They tugged at their crotches and muttered in broken English about cutting away the material there so their organs could breathe, but Will lectured to them through their interpreter that this was not a custom in civilization. At the hotel the clerk consulted briefly with the manager, then placed the Indians in one small room on the ground floor next to the kitchen. He charged Will double the regular rate and insisted that the guests enter and exit the building through the alley. They slept naked in the stifling heat from the kitchen and ate what their host ordered for them in their room because the restaurant refused to serve them. Will explained bitterly that this was a service due their high tribal standing. They listened to this diplomacy with no expression on their faces.

  As supers they asked no questions and enlivened rehearsals with embellishments from their own ritual experience. Arizona John held his breath opening night, envisioning a massacre if the audience failed to appreciate them. But from the moment of their entrance—first to awed silence, then explosive applause, and even a cheer or two for the savages—their place in theatrical history was peacefully assured. One critic even remarked grumpily that it was the most well-behaved uprising in memory. Burke used the quote in his publicity, hoping by it to attract the more fainthearted women.

  "How are the Indians?" Will asked him one night toward the close of the 1875-76 season. The scout was in costume, dabbing carefully at the beads of sweat blistering his greasepaint. It was close in the wings for April. Out front the professional actor Will had signed to fill the gap left by Hickok was delivering a moody soliloquy on the unpredictable nature of hostiles to a packed house. From here the speech sounded stagey and hollow.

  Arizona John shrugged. His hair was nearly as long as his idol's now, accentuating his apple cheeks and fat neck. "They keep blowing out the gas light in their dressing room instead of turning it down. One of these nights we'll all go up in a roar. But next to Wild Bill they're Sarah Bernhardt." His voice was dull. The company had just received invitations to the wedding of Texas Jack and Mlle. Morlacchi.

  "Good old Wild Bill. I hear he shed his new wife already and went prospecting in the Black Hills."

  "Jealous?"

  "A little." Will smiled. ''A lot. But I'm thirty, and that's old out there. Here I'm just a whippersnapper."

  "Still, killing Indians is heaps easier than looking after them."

  "How would you know, John? The only Indian you ever killed was one you worked to death on your father's farm."

  His cue was coming up. He tugged down the hem of his buckskin shirt, another work of art from Louisa's skilled seamstress's hands, drew his revolver and inspected the blanks. He had had two misfires that week.

  "Oh, damn! This came while you were dressing. I forgot." Burke held out a Western Union envelope.

  "Hold on to it, will you, John? I'll read it after this act."

  "I was trying to make myself clear to one of the Indians when the boy delivered it. I think he said it was urgent." Sighing, Will accepted the envelope and opened it.

  Burke was watching the play. "There's your cue, Will." Then he turned and saw the scout's face.

  Chapter Nine

  He left the cards and telegrams unopened in a big pile on the parlor table and had the flowers taken away, all but a modest spray of yellow roses from Texas Jack, who had taken time out from his wedding plans to send them along with a card bearing just his name. These he placed in their vase on the mantel next to Kit's picture. The boy had liked Jack.

  Will studied the photograph in its frame of black lace. He had had it taken just last month, Kit leaning against a studio boulder in a little tailored suit, holding one of his father's rifles. His red-gold hair was arranged in sausage-like curls that hung to his collar. It was after that that Will had insisted his hair be cut, over Louisa's shrill objections.

  "I'll not have a boy of mine scuffling in the schoolyard over something so inconsequential as his hair," he had said, and she had acceded then, horrified at the thought of anyone laying a hand on their son. Later she had blamed the haircut for the chill that ushered in the illness.

  Audiences in St. Louis, New York, and Rochester had claimed the boisterous child in the balcony as their own, and if the press had harbored any suspicions about Arizona John's story concerning the boy's daring escape from gypsies and return home using his inherent tracking skills last year, it had suppressed them and published the account faithfully. Reporters welcomed any fresh opportunity to remark on the boy's handsome brown eyes and ringlets.

  "Good house, Papa."

  "Were you addressing me, sir?"

  Will looked away from the photograph to the colored butler in livery and white gloves standing in the doorway. He shook his head and the servant bowed slightly and departed on silent feet.

  He topped off his glass again with sherry from the decanter and drank. It tasted like colored water. He wished it were panther piss from the filthiest bug-ridden saloon on the plains, that scorched and cauterized pain like a hot iron, two hundred proof clear or cloudy brown, anything but this scarlet that put him in mind of the killer that had entered his home on the fevered air.

  A thin, tearing, nasal cry sounded from the upstairs bedroom. Orra, the baby, had awakened in her usual fashion. Will poured again.

  Louis
a entered as he was setting down the empty glass with a double thump on the table cluttered with unopened envelopes. She glared at the two-thirds-empty decanter but said nothing. She had lost a great deal of weight in just a few days. Her cheeks were shadowed and there were purple marks under her red-rimmed eyes. New lines forked up her neck from the collar of her black dress. She was just twenty-eight.

  He shifted his weight heavily in his creaking chair. "What's wrong with Orra?"

  "Nothing."

  "How come she's crying?"

  "Babies cry. It doesn't always mean something."

  "Arta with her?"

  "She's asleep in her room."

  The 365-day clock grew loud on the mantel. It had traveled a thousand miles and been wound four times since Will's troupe first played St. Louis. He got up, swaying a little. "I'm going out."

  "Where?"

  "Wherever the air hasn't been breathed once already." He rang for the butler and demanded his hat and coat.

  "It's late," said Louisa.

  "It's just now got dark."

  He saw the whiteness of her nostrils then and lurched forward, catching her just as she crumpled forward and almost losing his own balance under the sudden burden. The Negro came to the doorway carrying the master's outerwear, saw him holding his wife, started to withdraw.

  "Turn down Mrs. Cody's bed," Will snapped, curling an arm behind her knees and lifting her. "She's fainted."

  "Yes, sir." The butler's livery rustled.

  As her husband was lowering her to the mattress, Louisa threw an arm around his neck, burying her face in his chest. "Oh, Will, he's dead. Our boy is gone."

  Something in her voice cried out for him to contradict her. Now, Mama, Kit's just playing one of his tricks; he'll pop in any minute now, grinning the way he does when he gets one past us. But Will had seen them lowering the little coffin into the ground and heard the hollow thump of the first shovelful of earth striking the lid. He patted her back. "It's just us now, Mama. Just us and Arta and Orra." The baby had gone back to sleep in her cradle at the foot of the bed. He paused to listen for his daughter's faint breathing, then gently disengaged himself from Louisa's arms and unclasped the brooch at her throat. She was unconscious again, but her color was normal; he remembered then that neither of them had slept in days. He unbuttoned her shoes, feeling as he slid them from her slim, black-stockinged feet the familiar warmth that heralded the swelling at his crotch. Alarmed, he straightened, then swiftly drew the sheet and counterpane up to her throat and left the room. He found the butler sitting at the table in the kitchen. The colored man stood up awkwardly.

  "Fetch the nurse to look after Orra and Arta while Mrs. Cody is sleeping," Will directed. "I'll be gone a spell."

  "Yes, sir. May I inform Madam when she awakes what you'll be about?"

  "Cutting the bear loose."

  He left the servant standing in the kitchen with furrowed brow.

  Elizabeth Guss lay awake listening to the Westchester town clock clanging out the small hours. Travel made her restless, and she and her father had returned only the afternoon before from Rochester and Kit Carson Cody's burial in Mount Hope Cemetery. She kept seeing Will's face at the funeral, wearing the expression of a boy whose father had just dealt him an unexpected blow for no apparent reason. At length she gave up on sleep, put on her robe and slippers, and padded downstairs to select a book from her father's library. She was passing the entryway on her way back to the stairs when she heard a strange noise outside the door.

  Colonel Guss, who had led troops south near the end of the war on the heels of night riders and marauding rebel deserters, would never report what he had seen, but he had instilled in his daughter from childhood a healthy fear of curious sounds in the night. She seized a fireplace poker before going to the door. It was quiet outside. The air had an early-spring snap to it and it was too early for crickets. Nothing moved in the pale light from the gas lamp on the corner. She stepped back inside and started to close the door. An animal growled at her from under the porch.

  She paused. The shadows were black in the foliage between the sidewalk and the house, but something rustled behind her rosebushes. The noise it made fell between a snarl and a moan. She choked up on the poker, walked to the edge of the porch, and peered over the railing. Her cousin was kneeling in the soft damp earth beside the steps.

  "Will, what's wrong?" She lowered the poker. "Where is Louisa?"

  "Shh. She's asleep."

  "You'll catch your death."

  "I'll have to. I waited for it, but it didn't catch me. Train was too fast." He laughed and vomited down the front of his shirt. A rank stench of half-digested liquor rolled up into her face.

  She put down the poker and her book and hurried down the steps, clutching her robe together at her throat. Cold air squirmed up her bare legs under her nightgown. In the light coming through the door she saw that Will's funeral suit was smeared, as if he'd been crawling around in the dirt for a while, and his glistening shirt was plastered to his chest. "Gimme a leg up, will you, Chips? My stirrup's busted."

  Elizabeth had no idea who Chips was. She got her cousin's arm over her shoulders and a grip on his back and tried heaving him to his feet, but he wasn't cooperating and she had to half drag him to the foot of the steps. There she poked and pleaded and finally persuaded him to grasp the railing and raise himself semi-upright, leaning on her. On the way up she stopped twice to rest. The railing creaked when she propped her burden against it. Inside she left the door open, struggled down the entryway and into the parlor, where she deposited Will on the settee, the oak frame bowing alarmingly under the impact. She hurried back out to retrieve the book and poker from the porch and close the door.

  "Lizzie? Is that you?" Guss's voice floated sleepily down the stairs.

  "Just securing things, Father," she called back.

  "I thought you did that hours ago."

  "I came down for a book."

  She pulled off Will's coat and sodden shirt and got a blanket from the hail closet and put it over him.

  "Who's got the watch?" he inquired.

  "That's all taken care of. You sleep now."

  "You're a good scout, Chips, but your voice is too high. A body'd think.. ." He snored.

  She looked at him, at the smooth youthful features of the boy caught writing his name on a wagon sheet. "You should be West, Will," she said. He went on snoring. She went back upstairs, forgetting her book. Hours later she told her father that Will had probably contracted some sickness on the train coming over from Rochester.

  "He'll be a lot sicker when he wakes up," said the Colonel, buttering a morsel of toast the size of his thumbnail.

  The world turned an angry face to the sun. Bismarck rattled the German saber at France and France rattled hers back. Alexander II, Czar of Russia and father to the Grand Duke Alexis, watched unrest spread through the Balkan slaves in the land of the enemy Turk and stroked his beard in thought. In the States, authorities followed the trail of New York rascal and fugitive from justice Boss Tweed south toward Cuba. President Ulysses S. Grant, his sad bearded visage dragged long by the weight of half a dozen Congressional probes into charges of misconduct, opened the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia with an entreaty "to appreciate the excellences and deficiencies of our achievements," then yielded the floor to an artillery salute. George Armstrong Custer, having earned Grant's disfavor for testifying against his Secretary of War, was denied the supreme command of the first all-out offensive against the Plains Indians but tossed the bone of his old regiment, the 7th Cavalry. Sitting Bull, the great Hunkpapa Sioux medicine man, announced that the seven lodges of the Sioux tribe were gathering at the Powder River and issued a blanket invitation to the Cheyennes and Arapahos to leave their reservations and join them in the last holy war against the white Long Knives.

  The telegram from General Sheridan's headquarters caught up with Will Cody in Wilmington, New York.

  Wilmington theatergoers were jolted out of
their willing suspension of disbelief when the star of the drama vaulted onstage in the middle of a love scene, decked in a striking Mexican-cowboy ensemble of gold-embroidered black velvet and hat with a red plume and waving a yellow Western Union flimsy, bellowing, "I'm through playing at war! I'm going west to take part in it!"

  He read the wire aloud in his powerful baritone, pumping such emotion into Colonel Mills's orders in cold print that when he finished, the audience leaped to its feet, applauding mightily. Flushing to his hairline, Will bowed deeply and exited. When the excitement faded, his fellow players resumed the scene where they had left off. It was only after the last curtain that some of the spectators wondered what that bit of business with the telegram had had to do with the rest of the play.

  Days later, the conductor on the Chicago-to-Omaha run fetched his apprentice from the caboose and took him through the last day coach to prove he'd just punched a ticket for a man in a suit that looked like a widow's hat with trim.

  "Takes all kinds to keep the rust off the rails, boy," the conductor said later. "That's a fact you won't learn in no school."

  The Mini Pusa, or South Fork of the Cheyenne River, had been nicknamed the Dry Fork on a day like the one the 5th Cavalry began its march through that valley in June 1876; grass grew through cracks in the yellow bed and varmints had honeycombed the banks with their burrows. Distant buttes swam in the heat of the Wyoming sun, under which the waist-high grass covering the bluffs had burned to match the bronze of the sky. Horseflies lapped blood and sweat from the necks of men and mounts alike. In camp the troopers on sentry duty listened to their flesh bake and gazed enviously at the trapezoid of cool shade where the officers had gathered under the canopy in front of the commander's tent. Had they been able to hear the conversation, they would have been content to remain where they were.

  General Wesley Merritt glowered down at the two messages spread side by side atop the map on his folding camp table, a lock of his carefully brushed hair falling down to uncover his balding pate. He had a large head with eyes sunk deep under a brow like a carapace and a satanic moustache whose tips swung below his chin.