by Bill Brooks
“I still got family…well, some anyway, back in Boston and that area.”
“You from there?”
“No, I’m from Ohio originally. Farm kid too lazy to pick corn and milk cows. Came out to this country when I was fourteen. Liked it well enough to stay.”
“You ever going back?”
“This country’s ruined me on anything East.”
“Look at us…”
“Honey, you want to do that some more,” John said to the fat whore, and she giggled, and he said, “By God, a man could fall in love easy enough if he let himself.”
Then Hide Walker, their ramrod, came in and said that the grangers had gone to the city fathers and the city fathers had come straight to him and said they didn’t want no more Texas cattle coming into Empire next season and that he could just forget about it if that was what his plans were.
Hide stomped around saying goddamn this and goddamn them sonsabitches and they could all kiss his sorry ass, and he was nearly as drunk as they were but wasn’t enjoying it half as much.
“I guess I’m going to pay you boys off and let you catch on with whatever you can catch on with.”
John Sears said, “I’ll take mine in silver, I like the weight of it in my pockets.” Hide went and got him his money in silver and gave it to him. Then, still angry, he said, “You know what those sonsabitches said to me? Said, we wasn’t welcome no more and they was going to run all the whores out and turn all the saloons into churches and schools and put up fences to keep us out, and I said, ‘Shit I wouldn’t come back here if you was to give me a elephant to ride.’”
John damn near drowned laughing, and Teddy ached with a bittersweet sorrow of having learned of the death of his father and the death of a part of the West he’d come to love.
“You want my whore?” he said to Hide, stepping out of the tub, soap running off his lean frame.
Hide looked at the whore and said, “I reckon it beats falling off my horse” and stripped down and got into the tub, then said, “I guess this is the end of something I don’t understand no more” and sat there glum in just his hat, pulled down so tight his ears bent over. John Sears couldn’t stop laughing.
“What’re you going to do?” Teddy said to him, “now that there isn’t going to be any more drives north?”
“Well, I’m going to fuck this whore till one of us is about ruined, then I’m going out to New Mexico, I reckon.”
“You heard of something good down that way?”
“There’s always something good somewheres. That country is about as good as any, I reckon.”
Teddy shook their hands, John’s and Hide’s, and said, “I guess I’ll take the train home to Chicago, even though it’s too late for me to do much but see my mother.”
“You finish up your business back there, come look me up,” John said. “Maybe I’ll have something going by then.”
“What about you?” Teddy said to Hide.
“Shit, I don’t have a Chinaman’s clue. Horses and cows is about all I know. I guess I’ll drift back down to Texas and catch on with some outfit or other.”
“You could go with me down to New Mexico,” John said.
“Why, there ain’t nothing but bandits and Mexicans down there, what I heard.”
“All the better…Hard for a feller to get in trouble in a place like that.”
“I don’t know nothing about it. I don’t know nothing about much these days.”
“She’s been paid for already,” Teddy said. “Enjoy…” And he left the place and went and sold his saddle and bought himself a train ticket to Chicago.
He sat waiting in the wind for the rest of what was left of that night and the first light of morning, which, like the color of unpolished silver, crawled silently over the grasslands. Then the sun rose above the horizon and the land all changed with the light on it so that it looked new again, with the dying grass heaving its death song against the wind.
He could see the shanties and the new buildings that had grown up beside them, and remembered the places where tents had once stood. And down at the end of the street he saw the steeple of a church that wasn’t there the year before. Neither was the bank across the street built of brick and limestone, with large plate-glass windows that reflected the morning sun so that the glass looked like liquid gold.
Then before he knew it, the whole land seemed set afire and things began to stir to life. Folks appeared on the street, wagons pulled by horses rambled in off the prairies, dogs set to barking, and shopkeepers swept the sidewalks in front of their establishments.
He sat there on the bench looking at it all, looking down the long twin tracks of steel that would eventually bring the morning flier that would carry him away from this place, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about it all. It seemed strange to him to be leaving the country—like he’d been in it all his life and never anyplace other.
He felt like he’d come to this country one way and was leaving it another. Then he could hear the flier’s whistle a mile out, and watched it turn from being a black dot on the horizon to what it was. Its big cowcatcher engine pulled a dozen cars behind it and screeched to a stop there in front of the station. It shuddered and huffed clouds of steam like a dragon and he could smell cinder on its breath. The engineer leaned out the window of his cab, his face sooty, and looked down at Teddy and nodded.
“Brought her in on time,” he said, a wrinkle of pride across his brow.
Teddy climbed aboard one of the cars, handed the conductor his ticket, and found himself a seat next to the window. He thought he might even change his mind, go find John Sears and tell him he wanted to go to New Mexico with him. But he’d been gone three years into that country already, and in that time he’d lost half his family, so it seemed he should at least go home out of respect—even if it proved temporary. The West wasn’t going anywhere, he told himself. It would still be there if he decided to return. He just knew it would be different than what it had been. It was changing, and would change some more by the time he got back to it.
He crossed one leg over the other and noticed how worn were his boot heels, then caught a glimpse of himself in the window’s reflection. It looked like the face of a stranger staring back at him. He hardly recognized himself sitting there under his old Stetson as he swiped at his black moustaches. He looked like John Sears and a whole lot of other waddies and saddle tramps looked when they were yet young, before they got wind-whipped and horse-thrown and drank too much liquor and whored too much and got blooded by maybe killing a man or three. He looked innocent yet, but not as innocent as before.
The train jerked and shuddered, and soon enough Ellsworth, Kansas, fell away from the windows and there was little to see but a sea of grass. Here and there a few scattered trees that looked like they had wandered onto the plains and gotten lost stood lonely vigil. Occasional thin streams wiggled through the grass, the water clean and clear, and he remembered what it was to drink it. He saw an occasional soddy standing off by itself, a wisp of dark smoke curling from its stovepipe. It could be a mean empty land with a loneliness to it he understood. But it was a free land too. A land where a man didn’t have to answer to anyone’s calling but his own most of the time. If ten million folks moved on it tomorrow, there’d still be free places to wander.
John Sears said it was the goddamnedest most uninteresting place he’d ever seen.
“I’d never want to die here, would you?”
He could see old cattle trails—a wide swath of beaten earth through the grass—trails that no longer would be used. The cattle would stop coming now, and the grass would reclaim the scarred earth for its own. He could see fences where there didn’t used to be any, and it broke his heart a little to see them.
Two hours of watching the same thing, he grew weary of looking at it. Sleep begged for his attention. A cowboy never got enough sleep once a drive began. He felt like now it was all catching up to him because it could, and he settled his heels on the seat acr
oss from him and slept under his hat and dreamed of horses he’d known and women he’d known and old John Sears and the dust of a thousand cattle and not much else.
Chapter 2
With a worried hand she wrote the letter:
Pinkerton’s Detective Agency, Chicago, Illinois…
Three weeks he’d been gone—a week longer than they had been married. Some dark dread troubled her days and troubled her dreams at night, and once she awoke and heard an owl hooting and realized she’d never before in her whole life heard an owl hooting in Cincinnati. But this time she had, and it sent a chill into her and she sat up the rest of the night thinking about it and the last time she’d seen him.
Nibbling at her lower lip, she debated again whether to go ahead and send the letter once she finished writing it. What would James think of her if she did send it? He was such a proud haughty man, and if he learned of the letter, of its intent, he might grow angry with her—angry enough to ask for a divorce. She couldn’t bear to think of him leaving her. Their courtship had lasted years, but their marriage had hardly a life of its own yet.
It was she who had eventually proposed marriage. James knew his way around women—of that she had little doubt. But he’d been reticent to utter the words she so wanted to hear. So finally she put her cards on the table one evening and asked him if he would marry her after a prolonged kiss. To her mild surprise and joy, he’d said, “I guess we oughter.”
She did not want to ruin everything now by causing him to think she doubted his abilities.
Dear Sir,
I write to you with all great haste and would much appreciate a fast reply as to whether you will accept assignment…
She remembered the first time she had looked upon him—there in dusty Abilene when he came to inquire about the huge circus tents of her Hippo-Olympiad & Mammoth Circus. She’d been practicing her tightrope walking, and he stood holding open the flap of the tent, watching her. The outside light gathered around him in such a way that it caused him to verily glow, to seem surreal, ghostly, a heavenly creature. She nearly fell off the tightrope at the sight of his handsome stature.
My husband is the famed Wild Bill Hickok and I fear lately for his life…
The first words he said to her as she balanced on the rope were: “That’s a clever way of getting around.”
He appeared the perfect specimen in every respect.
Normally, I would not worry about my husband, for he is generally quite capable of protecting himself. But lately he has been having much trouble with his eyesight and I fear he might even be going blind…
He stood a full head and a half taller than her—which for her was not unusual since she was a petite woman. He was, she guessed, six feet tall. Cinnamon curls spilled from beneath the broad brim of his sombrero and cascaded down onto his broad shoulders. He had matching moustaches, and he made no apologies for the length of his hair or his beauty. He wore a brace of silver pistols with ivory handles inside a red sash wrapped round his waist. Over this he wore a Prince Albert coat unbuttoned and free of dust and prairie dirt. She would come to learn of his fastidiousness on the train from Abilene to Cincinnati while honeymooning. He wore a white silk shirt, which she would also learn he ordered by the dozen from a St. Louis mail-order house. His voice was light and airy, his hands graceful—the fingers long and tapered. He seemed hardly the blood-lusting shootist that appeared on the covers of Beadle’s and DeWitt’s Dime Novels.
…and now he has returned West to seek new fortune so that I may soon join him to live in wedded bliss. His destination is Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory, for the coming winter—then on to Deadwood Gulch in Dakota in the spring…
He had invited her to join him for supper that evening, and they dined on oysters and calves livers, and James—he told her his Christian name was James Butler—mesmerized her with his stories, some of which she was sure he made up. She had to admit to herself that she was quite taken with the fact of how well-known and respected a man he was. Their meal was interrupted several times by gentlemen stopping by their table to make his acquaintance. The men verily ingratiated themselves, and the wives on their arms were unabashedly adoring.
He seemed to take all the attention with a certain passive interest, fobbing off such adoration as little more than gratitude for his services as city marshal.
Bill made mention, before he left, that there were those out to assassinate him. I in fact begged him not to journey West but to stay here in Cincinnati with me. But he maintained his belief that while many might want him dead, few were capable of such a deed…
She was surprised by her sense of jealousy whenever a woman approached their table and introduced herself to him, even those who were in the presence of their husbands. For it was quite plain to see that such women tried not at all to hide their desire for Wild Bill to take special notice of them. And sometimes, depending on their beauty, he did not make any effort to dissuade such attention, and he often flirted outrageously.
She was further surprised to find herself immediately formulating a plan to nurture their budding friendship into something much more. And when he at last walked her back to the circus grounds that evening, the large tents luminous and billowy as clouds under a full prairie moon, her heart was beating as rapidly as the hooves of a runaway horse.
Like the true gentleman she thought of him as, he bent low and kissed her gloved hand. Only a self-imposed modesty prevented her from inviting him into her wagon for a nightcap. For she knew it would hardly take anything at all to give herself to him completely. But widowhood and wisdom had taught her to play a close hand in matters of the heart, and so she did not give away so easily or quickly the prize most men sought of women on moonlit nights. That would come later and a lot more often than even she was prepared for. She sighed, thinking of how efficient and voracious a lover Wild Bill could be.
…but I fear James is being incautious and vain about his skills to think that he is invincible. I’ve been to the woolly West, and I know the sort of men who inhabit that part of the country. I know that some of them would not hesitate to kill my husband if only for the entitlement of “Killer of Wild Bill.” And I know too that such men are always observant for weakness in their adversaries. It would not take long for such men to see that my husband suffers from a weakness of the eyes and take full advantage of that fact. He is most vulnerable…
“I know we will meet again, Mr. Hickok,” she’d said to him that evening, the moon’s light giving his features the whiteness of bone.
“Do you really think so?” he said.
“Yes, I believe that we are fated toward a greater destiny than simply this one night together, as lovely a night as it has been. Do you believe in such things as destiny Mr. Hickok?”
He confessed that he had come to believe in things of the “spirit nature.” And when she asked him what he meant exactly, he stuttered a bit—from shyness, she supposed—then confessed, “I don’t know how to explain it.”
She said there would be plenty more times when he would have the opportunity to try and explain it to her, and she gave him a quick kiss on the lips. Her boldness seemed to please him. When he smiled, his long blond moustaches lifted and she thought he was going to say something that would hardly be considered temperate. But instead he touched the brim of his sombrero and went whistling off toward the town’s lights. She waited until his happy whistling faded, and went to sleep that night still formulating plans for their future.
Whatever the fees to send a man to protect my husband until he once again returns to me safely—and it would have to most certainly be without his knowledge—I am willing to pay. I will eagerly await your response, dear sir. Most sincerely, Agnes Lake Hickok, General Delivery, Cincinnati, Ohio.
The question still nagged her even as she sealed the letter inside the envelope and addressed it: should she actually send it and risk the wrath of her husband and his possible humiliation if he found out?
He had left only the week pre
vious, but his absence seemed like months already. Theirs had been a whirlwind honeymoon, traveling with the circus wherein she exhibited her equestrian and tightrope walking skills and James put on shooting exhibitions and talked about forming his own Wild West Combination to take East, where “the dudes would pay plenty to see some buffalo and savage Induns.”
It was one of the things she adored about him, his ability to dream of a greater world than the one in which he lived. He was fearless and bold in every way. And he was quite aware of his celebrity. Yet he still managed to maintain a certain dignity and did not take unfair advantage of any man. Sure, if there were those who wanted to buy him drinks and offer him free meals and the best tables in restaurants because of who he was, he did not turn them down. And if some men let him win at poker for the privilege to say they’d gambled with Wild Bill, he did not leave their money on the table. And if lovely women wanted to introduce themselves to him and brazenly show off their physical attributes, he did not avert his eyes. She did not want to think of what else such women might offer him and that he might accept.
But in spite of everything, he had confessed one evening: “I have reached my prime, Aggie. I’ve seen and done things most men can only dream about. And now I want to settle down and live a quiet life. My wild days are over. I want to die in bed, not in some saloon with my face down in the sawdust.” This, merely a month before he said he had gotten the itch to go west again one last time and make his fortune and bring her to him so that they might live in comfort all the rest of their days. He spoke of a gold strike in Deadwood Gulch.
It was her dream as well, for them to live out their lives in a quiet comfortable fashion. But their separation seemed now a rent in the fabric of that particular dream and, ominously, she felt troubled by the rather sad countenance she’d seen when he waved good-bye to her there on the train platform.
She dressed and hurried to the post office, hesitated only an instant more before dropping the letter into the mail slot, wishing it had wings so it might fly to Chicago and be there by morning so Mr. Pinkerton might send her a reply affirming that her fears were justified and send a man straightaway to watch after her darling James.