by Andy Conway
Calder looked at him blankly. Not because he did not understand the word, but because he could not match the intensity of Bill’s agitation to the matter of a missing squaw.
“It means, Calder, you get her back here and no one knows a God damned thing about it!”
A thought came to Baynard Calder. Was Buffalo Bill romantically attached to this squaw? Was it all about love, as with most things that went wrong in the world? He decided to keep that thought filed in the back of his mind, ready to be taken out and read again should it apply to any future developments.
“Should be easy to find, an Indian squaw,” he said. “How many can there be in Birmingham?”
Buffalo Bill did a strange little half laugh to himself, as if he were about to explain a particularly adult problem to a slow child. “Well, ah, she is, in fact... white.”
Calder heard the words, and understood them, but that was not the problem. The problem was that he could make no sense of those words when he matched them to the fleeting memories of a squaw he’d barely looked at and the newspaper photograph in his hand.
“She’s a white squaw?”
“My interpreter, yes!” cried Bill, as if he’d already explained everything.
“She’s a white woman who speaks Indian?”
“Lakota.”
“How the hell?”
“She lived with the Sioux. For years.”
Calder knew it all now. “She was kidnapped and raped by the Indians. I see.”
But Bill was shaking his head, again frustrated. “Not kidnapped! And certainly not raped, you damn fool! She just appeared one day on the Plains. Fell from the sky. That’s why they call her Bright Star Falling.”
“Fell from the sky?”
“Not literally, God damn it! It’s some Indian story. I don’t know what the hell it means any more than you. It’s just what they say about her!”
“Okay, Colonel Cody. I got it. So she’s a white woman who dresses up like a squaw.”
“She was.”
“Was?”
Buffalo Bill sighed, took a handkerchief from his buckskin pocket and mopped the film of sweat from his brow. “She might have white woman’s clothes. That might be how she walked out with no one seeing her. I can show you her lodge. Her squaw clothes are lying on the floor and there’s a trunk open. I know she had a dress in there. It’s gone.”
Again, Calder felt that uneasy suspicion that the connection between Buffalo Bill Cody and Bright Star Falling might be something more than employer and hired performer.
“So I’m looking for a white woman, in white woman’s clothes, in a city of, what? Near on a half million people? Half of whom are white women in white women’s clothes.”
Buffalo Bill turned and shot him a sour look.
“Well, Mr Calder, if you cut out all the children, and all the old women, and every white woman whose hair isn’t as red as a Colorado sunset, it might make things easier for you. But I’m not an investigator with the world famous Pinkerton agency like your good self, and I wouldn’t want to tell you how to do your job.”
“Yes, sir,” Calder croaked. “Perhaps I should take a look at her lodge now.”
He felt a sudden, urgent desire to be far away from his employer and out there in the city with his gun at his side, even a city he didn’t know. He’d tracked down many dangerous adversaries in his time, and a harmless white girl who thought she was a squaw would present no serious problems.
As he stalked through the camp in the Colonel’s wake, he reined in his confidence. There was something about the strength of Buffalo Bill’s agitation that sounded a warning. This girl might be a more dangerous adversary than he thought. It might serve him well to keep that in mind.
13
THE GIANT CROWD LEAVING the show piled onto horse-drawn trams, all heading for the city. Katherine could see they might wait an age before they could push onto one and make their escape. She glanced back, expecting to see Buffalo Bill himself parting the crowd on his white horse, hunting her down.
Peter seemed to sense her anxiety. “Over there,” he said, pointing to the row of horse-drawn cabs lined up for the private traffic. Gentlemen and their ladies — the sort who paid for the better seats in the show — were climbing into them. Peter pulled her over towards them and she hesitated. It seemed alien to her to take a private cab, like a white lady. The only urge she felt was to steal one of the horses and ride it away bareback.
He pulled her across the stream of humans, his hand holding hers so tightly. She almost fell over a little boy, knocking his flat cap off his head. Peter pulled her into a small cab. It had a single horse and was smaller than the grand ones they had travelled in last night.
Peter called out, “Council House Square!”
She sat with a bump as they pulled away. The cab crawled alongside the river of people streaming across the street, and she thought with mounting anxiety how they might be quicker to walk. But soon the crowds thinned and they pulled clear, the horse cantering away, its iron shoes crunching in the gravel of the road’s surface.
Night was falling. She would feel safer in the shadows. Hidden. She heard no cluster of horses’ hooves in pursuit, no cry of the chase, only the steady, measured clip-clop of their own horse. Other carriages passed, sometimes riding alongside, more and more of them the closer they came to the city. When the iron shoes of the horse began to ring on the cobbled stones of the streets, she knew they were close.
Peter Wethers examined her, curious, like a man watches an animal he hunts, observing its movements, learning its heartbeat, ready for the moment to strike.
He smiled to put her at ease, she thought, and she found herself smiling back.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“The city. Where you were last night.”
She nodded. It was the only place she knew here. Would Buffalo Bill think the same and send Agent Calder to come looking? The Pinkerton agent stayed in the shadows until needed — you might forget he was ever part of the entourage — but when an Indian strayed off reservation, he would be unleashed. And he had never failed to bring them back.
Calder would come for her. She knew this.
Peter dug into his waistcoat pocket and pulled out two gold rings.
“Here. Wear this.”
He put one on his own finger and then slid the other onto hers.
“What is this?”
“We have to find a hotel to stay in. We have to look like we’re married.”
She looked at the band of gold winking on her finger. She had seen white women wear them. How strange that this was their custom to show they were married. A winyan would wear her braids down her breasts instead of her back and every man would know she had chosen to be married. But with the whites it was a more permanent arrangement. A winyan could choose any man and move into his lodge, or he into hers, and that meant she was married. And once she told him to leave her lodge, she was no longer married and would place her braids behind her. In the white world, it was not enough for the woman to choose who might be her husband. In the white world, it was the man who chose, and he needed to prove this marriage with rings of gold. Without the rings of gold, they could not share a lodge.
They came to the Council House where the city fathers had cooed over them, their wives avoiding her like a dangerous animal, and where the city ruffians had thrown stones.
The sharp pang of memory pierced her soul again.
The carriage circled into the square where she’d had her violent attack of memory. Tiyata! Tiyata! The strange white church that unnerved her, the columns of the Town Hall that called out to her.
The carriage pulled up and Peter held her hand so she could climb down to the street, as if she were an old woman who could not use her own legs. The lamps around the square were lit and glowing like campfires. They were before a building that looked over the square, which had the words Corbett’s Temperance Hotel written onto its face in giant letters.
Next doo
r, a crowd filed into the red-panelled Theatre Royal.
The strange white church loomed over them. It had columns like the ones on the Town Hall opposite, but its columns were not as friendly. The church whispered threats. A building could talk to you like that. This was something the white men didn’t know, even though they built them.
Somewhere in this city was the tower she had seen in her vision. And it was still calling to her.
14
AGENT BAYNARD CALDER examined the shabby contents of Bright Star Falling’s abandoned tipi, Buffalo Bill at his shoulder with the curiosity of a cavalry officer watching his Indian scouts reading a trail. But there was little here to offer the detective any clues.
It looked like the lodge of any Indian, he guessed, as much as he’d ever been inside one. It smelled of smoke and grease and just a tinge of that rank stench that Indians gave off. On this matter he wondered if he was becoming used to it, or was it just that Bright Star Falling only had a tinge of Indian about her anyways.
In her trunk — now did any tipi have a trunk of belongings, unless it had been taken as plunder from a massacred wagon train? — there were a few artefacts she’d left behind: some handbills of previous shows, a cracked hand mirror, a sewing awl, eagle feathers painted blue, but nothing that might point to where she was now.
How could there be anything like that? Wherever she intended to go, whatever pointed her there would be with her. Absconders always had that one thing in common, at least.
His heart skipped a beat when he pulled a blue moleskin notebook from the floor of the trunk, almost missing it because it was the same colour.
“What is that?” said Bill. “A clue? By God, is it a clue?”
Calder winced at the Colonel’s stupidity. Of course, a man whose stock in trade was simplified stories and tall tales would be just the kind of man to think a Pinkerton agent’s work turned on the discovery of a tiny clue that would reveal everything needed to solve a case.
He flicked through the pages of the notebook, knowing that it would give him nothing at all, unless the final page contained an entry addressed to him, giving him exact directions as to her whereabouts. Something he felt sure would not be there.
Indeed, it wasn’t.
At the front of the notebook were entries written in a different hand.
Buffalo Bill leaned in right over his shoulder, both of them squinting to read it under the light.
“Great Scott, that’s an army journal.”
“Seventh Cavalry,” said Calder.
The entries by the soldier stopped after a dozen or more pages, and it was easy to see why. They were dated 1876, mostly complained about a general called ‘Hard Ass’ who rode them too hard over Wyoming country, and ended with talk of an excursion to a place that no one had known until just over a decade ago, when it had become burned into the heart of every white person in the world.
“Dear God. Little Bighorn,” said Bill.
“Did you know?”
“I did not.”
“Kinda funny, ain’t it, Colonel Cody,” said Calder. “All this time you’ve been performing your show about Custer with these Show Indians, and here’s one of them probably killed him herself.”
“I doubt any squaw killed Custer,” said Bill, marching around the tipi and putting on that offended voice that stupid people developed when they’d just been made to look stupid.
“Maybe not. But I reckon one or two of them might have mutilated his body afterward, God rest his soul.”
“Well,” said Bill, hands on his hips, and accepting the fact with disturbing alacrity. “I wanted genuine Sioux braves in my show, so I guess I’ve always kind of known that some of them must have been there. I had Sitting Bull himself on my American tour.”
Calder held up the notebook. “Even so, this kind of makes it different, don’t it?”
“Bright Star Falling is a good girl,” said Bill. “I don’t like the idea of her taking anything from the body of a dead soldier, but I know in my heart she would never have mutilated one.”
Calder tried to swallow a broad grin that was cutting right across his face. Buffalo Bill was such a sentimental snake-oil merchant, he’d think anything that would keep his show on the road and wouldn’t care if Agent Calder had pulled out Bill’s dead mother’s skull from the squaw’s trunk.
“I’ll keep this. It may give me a clue,” he said slipping it into his jacket pocket. “Now, if you don’t mind, sir, I’m gonna need the help of some people who know what’s happening in this town.”
He stepped out of the tipi and stalked off across camp.
“Where are you going?” Buffalo Bill cried.
Agent Calder was going to where every story invariably started. Where every investigation began.
“To the nearest bar!”
15
UNDER THE SHADOW OF the big white talking church, Katherine reached in her purse for her Running Away Money. A collection of coins — just enough to make an escape if she had no horse. A woman needed Running Away Money. There was always someone or something she might have to run from.
I have run away, she thought. I have finally run away.
But Peter paid the cab driver and the man had already tipped his hat and whipped his horse on before she could find the right coin.
Her notebook. She cursed and felt keen loss, like a finger had been lopped off. Her book of dreams and visions, scribblings and incantations. She had left it in her tipi.
Perhaps I no longer need it, she thought. Perhaps it brought me here.
“We’re Mr and Mrs Wethers,” Peter said, offering his arm.
She walked into Corbett’s Temperance Hotel with him and found it to be a tiny place. Peter took off his derby hat and placed it on the wooden counter where an old man with kind eyes smiled at him.
“Good evening, sir. We’d like a room for the night. My wife and I.”
The man with the kind eyes looked from Peter to her and said, “And your baggage, sir?”
“Mislaid at the station, I’m afraid. They’ll send it on, once they find it.”
“What a terrible pity,” said the old man. “I do hope they find it soon.”
“For the moment, a room will suffice. In the morning we’ll make enquiries.”
The old man nodded, as if he understood, and Katherine bit back the urge to ask what he meant. What enquiries?
But it seemed the transaction was concluded. Peter signed for both of them and the old man led them up rickety stairs to a second floor room. She rushed to the window and found it looked out over the square.
Statues of old white men looked down on carriages that sailed through a river of human life. So many people. You could walk across this city every day and not see the same person twice.
Was this really home? she wondered. The buildings singing to her that same Tiyata song, and the insistent call of something further, something on the other side of the city, calling, calling.
Peter and the old man were talking but she could make no sense of their words, mesmerized by the familiarity of the place, trying to unblock the dam that held back her lake of memories.
Peter came and stood beside her. She had a vague sense that he had ordered some food to be sent up to them, but she had been so hypnotized by the view from the window that she wondered if she’d only hoped it.
“I like the Town Hall,” she said. “The Greek columns.”
He nodded and gazed at them for a while and then said, “And how do you know what the Greek style is? Have you ever been to Greece?”
She shrugged and thought about it. “I don’t know. I know it like you know that this is called blue.” She tugged at the cuff of her dress. “Or that that is called a man and this a woman.”
“You think you’ve been here before?”
“This is my home. I know this place.”
“And yet you don’t know it.”
“I know that Town Hall. I know that Council House. But the white church I don’t know. I f
eel it doesn’t belong there.” She was struck by a sudden thought that gave her hope. “Perhaps it’s new and was built after I left this place. When was it built?”
“Seventy years ago,” he said sadly, as if he didn’t want to disappoint her.
“Oh.” So it had always been there, as long as she’d been alive. And yet she felt it so keenly: those other buildings she remembered, but this had never been there.
She looked out at its sad, stained stone. It was old and tired and had been there long before she was born. So why did she feel it was something new? Why did she feel she had known this place without that church there?
Her vision came to her again. A giant man made of iron. A stone goddess bathing in a pool, a waterfall cascading, guarded by stone beasts that had the wings of eagles and human heads.
“What shall we do?” she said.
He pointed to the left. “Just behind the Town Hall there is the city library. You know what that is?”
She smiled. “Is that the white man’s house where they keep the magic talking paper?”
Peter looked embarrassed for a moment, then caught the twinkle in her eye and laughed. “I’m sorry. Of course you know what a library is. It opens in the morning. We can go and research what buildings in the city might look like this tower you’ve seen in your dreams.”
Gangs of dark figures clustered here and there in the square below, carriages sailing through, a woman was singing down there somewhere. The base of the white church was taken up by a number of shops, as if they had been carved into the stone, and she wondered at the kind of people that could turn their holy sites into places where you sold food and trinkets.
Peter went to the bedding box and pulled out rough blankets, which he placed on the sofa in the corner.
“I’ll sleep there tonight. You’ll have the bed.”
She smiled inside. Did he think she was an old woman? She had always slept on the floor when he had slept on soft beds.