Buffalo Girls (37 page)

B
ARTLE
B
ONE HAD BEEN A CHEERFUL MAN ALL HIS LIFE; HE
had never really been able to understand Jim Ragg's melancholy. What was there to be so low about? With the rising of the sun in the cool morning, a fresh day presented itself: to Bartle a fresh day was a gift that might produce any manner of wonders. He and Jim could encounter a great animal—an old silvertip, for example. They might run into ten or fifteen young Sioux out looking for sport, in which case there could be a fight to the death, or a race for their lives. They might be challenged by a blizzard or a flood. They might stumble into some town and discover a pretty woman with a tooth for pleasure; they might spot some gold in the bottom of a creek.

Even if no adventure presented itself, they always had their minds. They could just sit around and talk about matters practical or impractical; or at least they could sit around and
he
could talk: Jim had rarely delivered himself of the kind of speculative remarks that Bartle favored. Calamity occasionally liked to speculate, but Jim Ragg just liked to travel. On the whole, even when they had come out on the short end
of
a fight, Bartle had seldom found cause to take the dark view of life. Even at its worst it was something interesting to wake up to.

The melancholy that he had felt since Jim's death was thus an
unfamiliar and a distressing thing. Every day he felt sure he'd wake up and recover his old lift. But after a month and a half in Belle Fourche doing nothing, he knew he might as well face the fact that his old lift was just gone. He would walk outside, relieve himself in the snow, and not be able to think of another thing to do. Belle Fourche was a dull town; there was not a person in it who excited his curiosity. But as Calamity often pointed out, he wasn't chained to Belle Fourche. The whole west lay around him under its great ring of sky. He could go anywhere, if he could just summon some of his old interest in going. But a lack of interest in going—or in staying, either—was at the heart of his problem. In the meantime, as Calamity plainly let him know, he had become poor company.

“Jim's the one who died,” she pointed out one morning. She had persuaded him to load his gun and go hunting with her. A miner who had got drunk in Dora's saloon the night before claimed to have seen three moose between Deadwood and Belle Fourche. No one gave the claim much credit except Doosie—she always got excited at the prospect of a different animal to cook.

“Go kill me one!” Doosie commanded. “And don't forget to take the sweetbreads.”

It was a bitter day, the skies like slate. Bartle had even lost his old indifference to cold; they had marched five miles before he even stopped shivering. Cold didn't bother Calamity—she had a bottle in her pocket, but was not nipping much.

They hunted all day, making a wide semicircle, first west, then south, then east of Belle Fourche. They saw no moose—they also saw no elk, no antelope, no deer. By nightfall they reckoned themselves to be ten miles southeast of town and too tired to make it back. Calamity was so tired she even considered throwing away her rifle.

After an hour spent attempting to arrange a decent camp, they were even more tired, as well as hungry and discouraged.
The camp was a shambles, the arrangements windy, the wood supply low. Jim Ragg had always made the camps, arranged the fires, seen to the wood, and secured windbreaks when possible; he was meticulous about his camps. True, on their walk down from the Missouri, he, Bartle, and Calamity had made several inadequate camps but then it had been fall, and not so cold.

“We'll be lucky not to freeze tonight,” Calamity said. “This fire won't last till morning. It's been a year since I slept out in weather this bad.”

“Hug your dog,” Bartle suggested. Cody had supplied them with a skinny grouse for supper.

They didn't freeze, though Bartle had a crust of ice on his beard when morning came. Calamity had to flounder around for an hour to gather enough firewood to thaw them out. Even the sun was the color of ice; the wind had picked up, meaning worse might come. They had not meant to camp and had brought no coffee.

Once Bartle would have considered such circumstances of no consequence at all; now he found them painful, unrelieved by any element of excitement. He and Calamity struggled upwind for four hours before finally reaching town. Doosie greeted them critically; she had expected them to bring meat, and instead they had arrived shivering and starving.

“It's a good thing we got Ogden to depend on,” she said. “Ogden don't never come home without meat.”

That stung, but Bartle let it pass. He spent what was left of the day in the saloon, warming himself inside and out. Calamity slept awhile and then came down and joined Bartle and Johnny in a card game. Johnny was fresh, they were tired—he won all the money they had, and some they were never likely to see. What troubled Johnny worse than the difficulty of collecting was the dead look in Bartle's eyes. Calamity was the more rowdy of the two by far.

When Johnny left to see if a whore might be standing around
one of the other saloons, Bartle decided the time had come to say his piece. A night in a cold camp had helped him arrive at a conclusion he knew he should have arrived at sooner.

“We should never have come back here,” he began.

Calamity didn't appreciate anyone telling her what she should or shouldn't have done; she had never welcomed advice.

“Speak for yourself,” she said. “I got no complaints about Belle Fourche.”

“I don't mean the town, I mean the west,” Bartle said. “There's nothing to do. We walked all day and didn't even see a deer. There's no game. There's no beaver. There's no Indians that are of any account.”

“There's gold,” Calamity pointed out.

“I ain't a miner,” Bartle reminded her.

“You can drive a wagon,” she said. She was getting the sad feeling that Bartle wanted to leave.

“Well, but who wants to drive a goddamn wagon?” Bartle asked. “Who wants to be a goddamn cowboy? Or anything else there is left to be, in these parts?”

“I admit it's thin,” Calamity said.

“Too thin,” Bartle said.

“Thin or not, I'm too young to die,” Calamity said. “I can't speak for you, but you will die unless you learn to build a fire better than you did the other night—if you can't beat that, you best give up winter travel.”

“I'll give up winter travel in these parts,” Bartle said, getting a little aroused by her brash tone. “I'm ready to go back and sign on with Billy. He's the only honest one of us, anyhow.”

Calamity stiffened at that. “I like Billy Cody but I consider myself fully as honest,” she said.

“Well, maybe I should have said smart, not honest,” Bartle admitted. Calamity's temper rose quickly; she looked as if she might suddenly reach the point of pulling her pistol. He had had to disarm her many times over the years; there was always the
possibility that he'd move a little slow, one of these times, in which case he might receive a bullet wound.

“Then go ahead and be a showman,” Calamity said hotly. “I ain't ready for it—anyway he wouldn't hire me. He'll remember that I fell off the stage!”

Calamity still felt embarrassed by her fall—many times she wished she could do the stage ride over; if only she could, she'd take more care with her balance this time.

“You ought to come, Martha,” Bartle said more gently. “Better to be honest showmen than a couple of old drunks. This west is full of braggart drunkards now. You can go in any saloon between here and Laredo and scratch up five or six. They'll be talking about how they fought at the Alamo or Adobe Walls or the Washita or the Rosebud or the Greasy Grass.”

“All the whites died at the Alamo,” Calamity said. “All the whites died at the Greasy Grass, and plenty of them died in the other fights—I heard it was just Custer's damned luck that kept him from getting wiped out at the Washita.”

“Don't you suppose I know that?” Bartle said. “I know where the graves lie. That wasn't my point.”

“Well, I don't know what your goddamn point is, but I'm sure I despise it,” Calamity said. She was getting angry.

“Youngsters Ogden's age won't have our information,” Bartle said. “They want to see it. Otherwise they'll believe the drunks—of course maybe some of the drunks was in some of those fights. That ain't the point either.”

“You're so full of goddamn points today!” Calamity exclaimed—the rush of anger, on top of so much whiskey, left her feeling a little sick to her stomach.

“Your points won't save you in a blizzard—you just need to give some attention to building fires,” she added, remembering how bleak she had felt as the cold evening descended on them—shaky as they were, any cold evening like that could well be their last evening.

“I'd rather be a showman,” Bartle said. “Why not? It's a job, and it pays.”

“I never thought I'd hear you wishing you had a job,” Calamity said. “I think you just like them English whores.”

Bartle didn't admit it, but Calamity was right: he did miss the English whores. After a lifetime in the uncrowded west, he had discovered there was something to be said for cities. The music halls in London had a hundred times more to offer than any western saloon. He missed the noise and the singing; he missed the clowns and the burlesque; certainly on cold nights he missed his Pansy. Now that they were far away, he began to remember all the girls on the London streets. There were plenty of other girls as nice as his Pansy; there might even be some who would prove less fickle.

“Jim Ragg would have a stomping fit if he heard you turned into a showman!” Calamity said, growing angrier the more she thought about Bartle's plan to desert her.

“Be fair now,” Bartle said. “You saw how Jim hated to leave those beaver. If he'd lived I expect he'd have ended up working in a zoo himself. For a man that's run wild all his life, feeding tame animals is about as silly as working in a zoo.”

“He didn't stay in London but I guess he'll be staying in Dubuque for a while,” Calamity said, feeling morose suddenly; she had an ache for her dead friend. Jim was no talker, but he had been a staunch friend. They had been a kind of gang—a little gang—she and Jim and Bartle. Blue and Dora had joined the gang sometimes, sometimes not. They had seen some sights together over the years. Now she and Bartle were the only ones who could keep the old life going, and Bartle didn't want to. He wanted to leave, to play-act for Billy Cody.

“I ain't going back to England,” Calamity said. “You go on, if you want. I'll stick it out in the west.”

“We could always come west and summer,” Bartle suggested. He hated making Calamity sad; it was happening more and more often.

“There's nothing wrong with a show,” Bartle went on, trying to coax her into a better humor. Once he had been able to coax her out of her worst moods, but lately his coaxing hadn't been working so well.

“You could just play yourself in the show,” Bartle said. “Billy's thinking of having me play Kit Carson, since Lewis and Clark didn't work out.”

“What a spectacle, you playing old Kit,” Calamity said. “I thought you despised him.”

She didn't like the way things were getting so mixed now, what was real, or what had been real, mingling more and more confusingly with what was made up. Although she was annoyed with Bartle, she still considered him a better man by far than Kit Carson; it was depressing to think of the one playing the other.

“I think I'll just march down the Platte and see if I can locate No Ears,” she said. She found that she missed the old man.

“No, don't do that until it warms up,” Bartle said. “You've got a warm room at Dora's. You ought to stay.”

Calamity was tired of talking, tired of everyone giving her advice she didn't want. They were always cautioning her—they acted as if she hadn't taken care of herself all the years of her life. She got up suddenly and went out on the cold porch to smoke.

Of course, she had come back from England intending to do just what Bartle suggested: accept her room at Dora's, and stay. All the time in England, and on the long voyage home, she had thought of nothing but how comfortable she would be in her room at Dora's. She had looked forward to being back and having her room as much as she had ever looked forward to anything.

Now she had it; and it only demonstrated how foolish it was to look forward to things. Once you finally got what you were looking forward to getting, something would always have changed so that it didn't seem as nice or as important as it had seemed when you were merely imagining it. Life was too slippery, and people too changeable.

She had always assumed that when her wandering years ended she would live with Dora—and Dora had always encouraged her to assume it. Now she was there, and Dora seemed pleased to have her; Dora would never ask her to leave—there was no question of that.

What changed the whole situation was that Dora had married. Calamity didn't blame her for it, either. After all, the boat could have sunk or something; Dora had no way of knowing whether she would ever show up again. With Blue farther away than ever, Dora had herself to think about.

Ogden, the big boy she had taken, was a nice enough ox; he had first place with Dora now, that was plain. Soon the child would come, and then the child would have a big claim on Dora's attention. She herself might be perfectly welcome to remain with the household, but it wouldn't be she and Dora together—just them!—as she had hoped. Dora had got herself a family; Calamity could choose to live with it, but she would never be part of it. Ogden was a little scared of her at the moment, but Ogden might change, he might not want her smoking or cussing or getting drunk around his new child.

It struck Calamity that she was probably being prideful to be so stiff about Billy Cody and the Wild West show. Billy might not approve of her falling off the stagecoach, but he liked her and would never refuse her work, even if the work was just tending to the horses or helping the blacksmith or something. She ought to drop her pride and go with Bartle; she might improve her shooting or her riding and end up famous, like Annie Oakley.