by Pete Dexter
She stood with one elbow on the bar, taking the weight off her bad leg, and listened while a whore told her that Doc Wedelstaedt wouldn't touch either victim. "The doctors is all afraid to mix with smallpox," Jane said.
The girl was plain-looking and fat. She said, "Doc Wedelstaedt is the only one that tends the Chinese, that's how come they called him for this."
Jane sighed. She looked at her hands, black-nailed and soft. "For some reason I don't know, God give me the touch to cure and heal,, and I best be about my business."
She was tired and drunk, but she headed out the door and followed the Whitewood all the way to the pesthouse. It was a small, windowless shack in the mud beside the creeks. The door was shut, and there was a sign nailed to it that said, QUARANTINED BY ORDER OF DR. H. WEDELSTAEDT. STAY THE HELL OUT.
Jane read the sign slowly, drinking from a bottle of fixer. She laughed out loud and threw her head back and let go of an eagle scream Bill himself could of heard, up in the cemetery. "I am a screamin' eagle from Bitter Creek, the further you go the bitterer it gets," she said, "and I'm from the head end. Now git before I shoot the toes off your feet." She pulled the sign off the door and tore it in half and walked in.
The only light inside was what came from the door, and it took her a moment to locate her charges. They had been laid on narrow cots in opposite ends of the room. The gambler lifted his head to see who it was, the girl lay still. She went to him first. He had damped his clothes and the sheets with his sweat, and he was blistered everywhere she looked.
He asked for water.
There were sixteen cots in the pesthouse, and she pulled an empty one close to his and sat down to administer her healing. "That ain't what you need," she said. She hadn't brought rags, so she tore some out of the sheet she was sitting on. She used the teeth on her right side, the only place where her uppers touched her lowers, and when she had finished there was a taste of blood in her mouth. She reached in with her fingers and found two teeth that moved when she touched them.
"Don't ever eat fruit," she said. The gambler smiled, but she saw he didn't understand. "I had the prettiest teeth in the West," she said, "but fruit rotted my gums." She poured fixer over one of the rags and wiped the gambler's head. She felt the heat an inch off his forehead.
On the other side of the room, the girl turned in her sleep and began to cry. Jane soaked another rag and pressed it against the gambler's chest. "I got to tend that poor girl," she said.
She crossed the room, the floor giving under her feet all the way across. The air was hot, and Jane broke a sweat on her neck and under her arms. She wiped it away and drank from the bottle of fixer. It was how she stayed immune, cleaning her insides with the fixer. It was the secret of the cure, too. The trick was knowing when. Administered at the crossroads of the disease, it never failed.
In her fever, the girl had pulled most of the clothes off herself, and was lying uncovered on the cot, naked except for her petticoat, moving her head back and forth on the pillow, making a wheezing noise in her throat.
Jane sat on a cot and studied the girl's condition. She was worse than the gambler, close to the crossroads already, if not beyond. She had a pretty, round face and puffy lips. There were bruises on her legs and arms, Jane guessed she had a regular man. Jane washed her forehead with fixer and the girl jumped under her touch.
"There, there," Jane said, "God sent me here to cure you, child." The girl opened her eyes at the sound of the voice, studied Jane's face, and then resumed her death wheeze.
Jane put her hand against the girl's cheek. "You got a fever, all right," she said. "About a hundret and ten degrees." The girl didn't seem to hear. Jane said, "It's time, child."
She looked behind her to make sure the gambler wasn't watching, then she cradled the girl's head in her elbow and lifted her up off the pillow. The girl's head fell back and her mouth opened. Jane fastened down her grip and brought the bottle of fixer slowly to the girl's lips. "You got to drink about half of this now," she said.
The girl opened her eyes again and Jane stuck the neck of the bottle two inches into her mouth, hinged it there, and brought the bottom straight up. The girl choked and spit, and the fixer ran out both sides of her mouth. She fought it, trying to get her head loose, but Jane held on. "There, now," she said, "God sent me . . ."
The girl began to choke deep in her chest, a sign that the fixer was down where it would do its work. Some of it came out her nose. The girl's nails dug into Jane's arms, but Jane held tight until the bottle was half empty.
The girl ceased to struggle.
Jane laid her gently back on her pillow, wiped at some blood where her lip had been cut. "That treatments the only thing that could save you, child," she said. The girl didn't appear to be breathing, and Jane leaned closer, listening at the girl's mouth, and waited a long time.
Finally it came, a little warm air in Jane's ear, it sounded like a tiny sigh. The girl began to breathe. Jane wiped at her head and then moved away a few feet, not to be hit by the regurgitate.
The convulsions lasted most of an hour. Jane sat on the cot, watching. If the fixer failed to purge a victim, it was time to meet God. She wiped the girl's blood off the lip of the bottle and drank from it herself.
She heard the gambler snoring in the half-dark, across the room. It was a peaceful, even sound, but she knew he was dreaming horrible deaths. It was an early symptom of the disease. She put her hand on the girl's forehead again, and it was cooler now.
Jane took another swallow of the mix, and smiled. "When they're coolin' and breathin'," she said out loud, "they're healin'."
She sat and drank another hour, until the girl began to chill. Jane moved into her cot and lay down next to her. She put her arms around her narrow shoulders and pulled her close, smelling perfume and vomit and the disease. It was sweet to Jane, and she pulled the girl's head into the soft junction of her neck and shoulder.
She felt herself nodding, and drank the fixer to hold off her sleep. The girl shook and Jane held her tight, and after a while she began to hum.
"The Battle Hymn of the Republic."
Al Swearingen saw Jane early the next morning, in the hallway outside his room. He was on the way to the bar for another bottle of local; she had just climbed the stairs. Swearingen's nerves were shot and he screamed.
He had been awake all night, watching the street, thinking of the diseases in the air, in his room. Even the local couldn't calm him down. And an hour after daybreak he stepped out into the hallway, the only noises in the place his own feet on the pine floor, and ran into Calamity Jane Cannary.
He heard his own scream, and then saw who it was. Jane's eyes were blood-red and her skin had sagged and paled in the night.
There was blood caked in one corner of her mouth, and her hair was like snakes.
She stopped when he screamed, and squinted at him. "That is the most cowardly thing I seen yet," she said. "A whore man scairt in his own whorehouse. If you've woke my patient, your peeder's as good as shot off."
He stood in the hallway, trying to find his breath. He smelled it then, there was death all over her. "I told you to remove that girl out of here," he said.
She spit on the floor. "There ain't nobody movin' that child until I say so," she said. "She ain't reached the crossroads yet." She stared into Swearingen as she spoke, and gradually her expression changed. Her hand crossed the distance between them and lay against his forehead.
He swayed and closed his eyes. "You might of got it yourself," she said. "What is your dreams like?"
He turned in the hall and went back into his room. It was an act of will not to run. He heard her calling after him, warning him. "Don't trifle with this," she said. He shut the door and locked it. He put a chair under the doorknob and then pushed towels against the crack at the bottom. He stood in the middle of the room, trying to find his breath, and noticed he was sweating. He felt his forehead, and it was damp and hot.
Jane knocked at the door. "Heed me,
whore man," she said. "There ain't nobody immune except me. If you want to live, you best put yourself in my hands." He moved to the far end of the room and stood near the window. Her voice stopped, but there were no footsteps moving away. "You hear me in there?"
He stood still, feeling his pulse in his hand and his head. Then he saw the boy, on the bench across the street. He wore the preacher's coat and the preacher's hat and sat with both his hands folded across the Bible in his lap. Waiting.
It reminded Swearingen of cats, or Indians. He pulled the curtains shut and began to pack. He pushed a handful of clothes and a Bible into an old valise he kept under his bed and then stood still again, looking around him, wondering what else he would need.
She banged on the door. "I ain't through talkin' to you," Jane said. "You'd best change your attitude, whilst I'm still in a forgiving mood."
He moved close to the door, not to be overheard, and pressed his cheek against the wood. "Get my wife," he said.
"What?"
"Get my wife."
"She can't help you now," Jane said. "I'm the only one . . ."
"Get my wife," he said again.
There was a long silence, and then she said, "I might just turn this whole damn floor into a hospital. Ain't no reason nursin' has got to go on four miles from the nearest bar."
"All right, but get my wife."
"All right what?"
"Whatever you want."
There was another silence. "I want a signed paper," she said.
He hugged the door.
"A deed," she said. "Your word ain't worth nothing. Don't never trust a whore man, that's the first thing I learned."
He opened the new bottle of local and sat down on the bed. He took a long drink, leaving her at the door. In a better world he could have opened the door and shot her, but everything he did—everything since the day he'd left the boy alive by the creek—turned back on him now, moving him someplace unprotected. He found a glass on the floor and filled it. He drank in one motion, watching the room reveal itself through the bottom of the glass as the liquor disappeared, until it was all gone and he could see the window, waiting for him.
He realized then he'd forgotten how to breathe. Not himself, exactly—he could do it as long as he thought about it—but his body. He lay back and watched his chest move up and down, and every time he stopped concentrating, his chest stopped too.
Swearingen was suddenly too tired to get up. Too tired to roll this way or that in bed, or to take off his boots. He was warm and then he was cool. He was tired of looking at the world and he lay on the bed with his eyes closed, afraid to sleep for fear of forgetting to breathe.
Sometime later it came to him that he was alone. That Jane was gone from the other side of the door. He thought about what she had said. If you want to live, you'd best put yourself in my hands . . .
He pictured her snake hair and her red eyes. It was clear, almost like a real picture, and as he watched, her hair turned golden and her eyes turned kind, and he saw it was true. She was the only one that could save him.
He called for her.
There was no answer. "Jane . . ." He opened his eyes and sat up.
Time had passed, he knew his chances had passed too. There was business on the street, the noises sounded a hundred miles away. Someone knocked at the door—not Jane, it didn't shake the walls. He got up slowly and stood on the other side.
"What do you want?"
"I don't want nothin'. What do you want?" It was his wife. She lived alone in the apartment in back of the Gem, and kept a gun in every room. She'd swore to kill him if he ever put a hand on her again. He saw now that his problem with her was connected to the rest of what had happened, that it was another way to get him alone and unprotected. "You there?" she said.
He moved the chair that was wedged under the doorknob and opened the door. She was standing with her hands on her hips, and when she saw him it startled her. He hadn't seen her startled in a long time. "What is it?" he said.
He knew he was someway marked, he didn't know how.
He stepped to the side to let her in, but she stood where she was. She had a hand in the pocket of her skirt; he saw the outline of a gun. "You aged twenty years," she said. Her eyes fixed on his, as if that was where it showed.
He almost reached for her then, to pull her inside, but he remembered what was in her skirt. "There's disease in the hallway," he said.
She said, "You gone soft-brained too."
He stepped farther away. She put her head into the room and looked left and right. She took a step in, then another, and when he could, he closed the door and locked it.
"I never seen you like this," she said. There was no worry in it at all.
"I got to leave."
She looked around the room as if she hadn't heard him. "There's contamination in this place," he said.
She smiled at him.
He said, "I got some of it inside me already."
"You look sick," she said, matter-of-fact. "But mostly you look old."
He wanted to hit her; he waited until it passed to speak. "I put my money in the bank," he said.
Her mouth fell open. "You? You trusted somebody else to hold the money?"
"It's fireproof," he said.
She laughed and he saw the happiness in her eyes. "There ain't no such thing," she said.
"It is," he said. He felt it rise up again. There was something about Swearingen, or his wife, that he always wanted to hit her when she got happy. He waited until it passed. "I need you to get my money," he said.
She sat down on the chair he had used to secure the door and picked up the bottle of local. "They ain't going to give your money to me," she said. She smelled the lip of the bottle and made a face. "They gave money away to wives, it wouldn't be anybody would put their money in banks."
"I'll write a note," he said.
She smelled the bottle again. "This is what made you old," she said.
He took the bottle out of her hand and put it back on the floor. "It don't matter what made you how you are," he said. "What matters is what you do now."
She thought that over, and he was grateful to have her listening again. There was a time she listened to everything he said. Of course, there was a time when she didn't carry a pistol in the pocket of her skirt, too.
He checked the window and the boy was gone. "I'll give you a note for Jim Miller," he said, "don't give it to any other party."
"I don't know Jim Miller."
"Miller and McPherson," he said. "Tell him I want a bank draft for all of it but five hundred dollars."
"They ain't going to let me in Miller and McPherson's," she said.
"He'll charge a tenth, but I can't argue," he said. "Let him have what he asks."
"I think you ought to go yourself. It's too much confusion in this . . ."
He saw that she was afraid of the bank, and it made him want to slap her. "There's no confusion," he said. "I'll write it down. All you do is put it in Jim Miller's hand."
"I don't know him."
"Ask for him. Say who you are and you'd like to see Mr. Miller."
She looked at her skirt. "I don't have nothin' to wear to Miller and McPherson's. They'll ask me to get out."
Swearingen sat down on his bed again and covered his eyes with his fingers. "I got a hundret and seventy-two thousand dollars in that bank," he said, sightless. "They ain't going to notice what you're wearing."
The number stopped her. Al Swearingen never told anybody how much he had, he just said when something was his. She looked at her clothes again, and the little room where he lived since they had quit each other.
"You had that and lived like this?"
"I live the fashion I want," he said.
"Holed up on the second floor of a whorehouse, scairt to go outside to collect your own money?"
"Events have moved against me," he said.
"You got old overnight."
He removed his fingers and stared at her. "
You ain't exactly covered with morning dew yourself."
"You never wanted me pretty," she said, and he saw some of her pleasure had gone out of his circumstance. "You never wanted me to be nothing."
He found a pencil and a piece of paper on the desk and wrote the note. When he'd finished, she was crying. "Don't be long," he said. "I don't want the boy to see you coming out the bank."
She looked at herself again. "I got to get cleaned up, to go see Jim Miller."
He started to argue, but saw it was useless. He put the note in her hand and closed her fingers around it. "What happens later?" she said.
"Later don't matter," he said. "What matters is now."
She put the note in her skirt pocket, with the gun. He checked the window again and returned himself to bed. When she had gone he stood up and pushed the chair under the doorknob. He noticed that his breathing was coming of its own accord again. The boy was still gone from the bench across the street, and the smell of disease was gone from the room.
He waited for his wife to return from the bank. It seemed like an hour passed, but time moved strange speeds when you laid in bed during the day. He slept, picturing her changing clothes before she went out of the badlands. He woke wanting to hit her.
More time went by. He saw that she had taken a bath first, maybe washed her hair. The sun moved into the afternoon sky and lay in a casket shape across the floor. He wondered if the woman could have gone to Goldberg's first and bought herself a hat.
He picked up the bottle of local and watched the sun spread across the floor. It was not until he'd filled the glass twice that he saw the casket was growing to a size to fit him. Shortly after that, he again forgot how to breathe.
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.