Telegraph Days (31 page)

Billy kept glancing at me, and with every glance he seemed to shrink a little. Probably the last thing he had expected to encounter in Rita Blanca was a talky woman mayor. He seemed to be relieved when Hungry Billy took charge and posed him for some tintypes. Hungry Billy was mighty excited—he planned to be selling those tintypes for years.

Bill Bonney held no attraction for me, but I soon enough stopped being mad at him and mellowed sufficiently to invite him to lunch at Mrs. Karoo's.

Perhaps it was the writer in me. Here was one of the most famous characters ever to come out of the American West. I wanted to get to know him a little better. I thought I saw some slight menace in his eyes, but what I mainly saw was a rough boy who had had no steady upbringing. His manners were crude—probably his spirit was too. I doubt that he had much opportunity to be anything but crude.

That said, it became clear that he was a kind of specialist when it came to gunfights. He spent nearly three hours muddling around the Yazee sight—Hungry Billy showed him the little Yazee museum and didn't even require him to pay the quarter.

After lunch, which he consumed even more rapidly than most of Mrs. Karoo's diners, I got him to accompany me back to the telegraph office, where I conducted what I believe to be the longest interview Billy the Kid ever gave. I made it into a pamphlet, and over the years, it outsold my
Banditti
booklet, though not
The Good Deputy
when that best seller finally came out.

“What's the main thing about being a gunfighter, Bill?” I asked, at the end of the interview. We had, by then, got on easy terms.

“Being willing to shoot people, that's the main thing,” he told me.

“That's it?”

“Sure,” he said. “A lot of folks talk about shooting people, but then when it comes to it they don't.”

“But you do?”

He smiled—the smile had some sadness in it.

“I do,” he said. “I do.”

“I hear that conditions are unsettled in Lincoln County,” I mentioned. I knew that that vast New Mexican county was where Billy's reputation had been made.

“It's wild right now,” he said. “Wild. But I suppose it will quiet down when somebody finally kills me.”

I confess I was shocked at the casual way he alluded to his own death.

“When somebody kills you?” I said. “So you expect it, then?”

He didn't answer, but he looked at me as if he thought I must be slightly dense.

When I mentioned that I had known Wild Bill Hickok, Bill Bonney let a wistful look come into his eyes.

“He was a gent, I hear … a real gent,” he said.

“That he was,” I said.

“I wouldn't mind being a gent and dressing fancy,” Bill said. Then he grinned. “If I live that long.”

Billy rode off about dusk on his unimpressive horse. I guess you could say he was just one more tourist, who had ridden all the way from Lincoln County to see where a famous gunfight had happened. The most famous killer in the West had visited the perfect Western town. Bill Cody would have made an exhibit of it, if he'd had the time.

I was just on my way to Tombstone when news came that Sheriff Pat Garrett had shot Bill Bonney down.

It was the biggest news anywhere. Billy the Kid, dead! Dead as Custer, dead as Hickok, dead as the Yazee gang!

Looking back on it I wish I'd asked that wild sad boy to stay for supper.

G
ENERAL
W. T. S
HERMAN
didn't have too much to recommend him—at least not to me, who had been brought up to admire the elegance of Robert E. Lee—but at least there was no hem and haw in him. He got right to the point. Before I even knew he was in the vicinity he rode right up to the mayor's office, which was also the telegraph office and my writing room, and rapped on the windowpane, although there was a big Closed sign hanging not an inch from where he rapped.

This occurred at about eleven o'clock in the morning, when it was, as usual, windy.

I was scribbling on
The Good Deputy
and had finally got my characters off the Missouri River—they were now well lined out along the Santa Fe Trail and I was trying to decide what calamity to visit on them next. I considered a buffalo stampede, a prairie fire, a plague of grasshoppers, all of which could easily have occurred over that vast stretch of country. But in fact, though the travelers were certainly due a fresh calamity, I felt more like writing a love scene, though love scenes always raise the issue of plausibility. Could my heroine, Marcie Jones, wander off from the party, encounter a handsome Pawnee youth, and exchange a few passionate kisses—or would it be more likely that she would begin a liaison with the blacksmith's helper, a stripling I had decided to call Jasper? I had about decided to go with the blacksmith's boy, reasoning that I could always conjure up a handsome Indian a little later in the story, when General Sherman rapped. He had three soldiers and a pack mule with him.

I opened the window and gave the man a frosty look.

“If you can't read that sign, then you need specs,” I told him.

“I have specs,” he informed me. “I read the sign. Then I looked in
the window and there you were. I think it's about time you opened up and did your duty.

“I'm General William Tecumseh Sherman,” he added, reaching into his coat pocket, from which he extracted three messages and handed them to me. I saw that they were written in a neat and legible hand.

“I am not in the army and do not enjoy being ordered around,” I told him, “but I'll send your telegrams and then I'll thank you to honor my sign.”

The general, a sharp-featured man, looked in and spotted my tablet.

“I suppose you are writing a book—most women are, these days,” he commented.

“If I am there's no need to discuss it,” I pointed out.

“If I remember right you used to work for Buffalo Bill Cody,” he said. “I've heard you were starchy and I see it's true. But I have no leisure for jawing. Do you know where Esther Karoo lives?”

“Yes—in the house with the hedges around it.”

It was the first mention I had had of Mrs. Karoo's first name.

General Sherman looked around, spotted the house with the hedges, and surveyed the rest of the town without much interest. One of his worn-out soldiers was asleep in the saddle, a fact that the general didn't miss.

“Shake that fool, we can't have a slumbering cavalry,” he said, though without much heat.

“I seem to remember there was a shoot-out here,” he mentioned. “The Yazee gang, wasn't it?”

“Correct—my brother, Jackson, shot all six of them,” I said.

“That's mostly luck, I expect,” the general remarked.

Then he gave me a long look.

“I've met a few Courtrights,” he said. “I suppose you're the prize of the lot, or this town wouldn't have made you mayor.”

“They made me mayor because I'm organized,” I told him.

“Uh-oh,” he said, with a trace of a smile. “If I didn't have seventeen forts to inspect I'd sit under a tree and watch you be mayor for a day or two.”

“You might if you could find a tree,” I observed.

General Sherman looked startled.

“There is that,” he admitted. “I keep thinking I'm in Tennessee, but I'm not, am I?”

Brisk as he was—at least, that was his reputation—he seemed reluctant to go.

“An organized woman is a fright to the mind,” he said, and then he tipped his hat to me and rode up to Mrs. Karoo's, where he stayed about an hour. The soldiers were allowed to dismount—in a blink all three sat down and went fast asleep.

In my family—some of whom lived in Atlanta—General Sherman was regarded as the blackest monster on the planet. He didn't seem a monster to me, but then I was not at war with him.

On his way back down the street General Sherman gave my office a wide berth, but he did stop at the jail. Pretty soon Jackson and Ted Bunsen and Hungry Billy were walking over the shoot-out site with him. His sleepy soldiers even perked up and took an interest. Hungry Billy even managed to get the general to pose with Jackson and Ted for a photo or two, after which the general and his three sleepy soldiers and his pack mule rode off in the direction of the seventeen forts he meant to inspect.

About a week after General Sherman paid us a visit, Sheriff Ted Bunsen showed up at my office and proposed to me one last time. Of course I was scribbling on
The Good Deputy.
It looked as though my heroine, Marcie, might be pregnant by that blacksmith's boy, whom I pictured as a large youth with sturdy thighs.

I myself had yet to be pregnant, which I understand to involve some discomfort such as early vomits and the like. Very few pregnant women turned up in the fiction of the day—particularly not pregnant women who had not bothered to get married—so I knew I was writing a daring passage (daring enough that the preachers would preach against my book) and I wanted to concentrate and push my narrative all the way to the birth of the babe; but I looked up and there was Teddy. He hadn't rapped on the glass, as General Sherman had, but there he stood, good old Ted, a beau of sorts, if rather a dull one.

The life of women is mostly interruption—at least that's how I experienced it. Father used to interrupt me freely, asking me the meaning of a word, or how much water had accumulated in the rain gauge, or if I thought the milk cow was going dry.

Zenas Clark, when I first knew him, thought nothing of interrupting me for no better reason than that he wanted to poke his stiffie in me. If I had known how sparse such attentions would get to be I would have opened my arms to Zenas every time—in later years, I mostly did.

“What is it now, Sheriff?” I asked brusquely.

“It's our engagement—is it still on?” he asked, in his normal nasal voice.

“Well, you'll have to let me think, Theodore,” I said firmly. “The last time it was mentioned was before the Yazee shoot-out, which occurred way back in eighteen seventy-six, as I recall. Then I worked for Bill Cody nearly four years, which brings us well into the eighteen eighties. That's how I figure it.”

Ted did some hasty mental calculations but didn't say anything.

“That's a good long engagement,” I pointed out. “I suppose the main question is whether we still want to attempt marriage with one another.”

“If that's the question, then what's your answer?” he asked.

“I'll be frank, Theodore,” I said. “I am loath to commit myself to the married state until I've sampled the quality of our copulation, which is an act we've accomplished only once and that was a while ago.

“We could hike off to some private spot and have another go at copulating,” I suggested.

Teddy was still beet red.

“I fear I've forgotten how to go about it,” he admitted.

“Oh, honey,” I said. He was so hopeless I found I almost loved him.

Teddy stood as if planted.

“Ted, if it was that hard to do, the human race would have died off long ago,” I reminded him.

“What about the sin part?” he asked, his blush fading a little.

“That's just preacher's talk,” I told him. “A couple that's been engaged as long as we have deserves a modicum of copulation, I suppose.”

“How do we start up?” he asked.

There's such a thing as too hopeless, but I was in a tolerant mood that day.

“First we find a private place,” I said. “Then we lock the doors, so my nieces won't surprise us—you never can tell where those rambling tykes are apt to pop up. Then maybe we'll start by kissing again.”

He had not, as I recalled, been a bad kisser.

“Then when you get a nice big stiffie we'll commence in earnest,” I answered him.

“The jail's pretty private,” Ted told me. “I've turned loose all the drunks, and Jackson's gone off with Aurel to try and locate that bunch of mules that ran off two nights ago.”

“Perfect,” I said.

Actually, the scarcity of copulation was encouraging me to describe it pretty frankly in
The Good Deputy.
The preachers would be beside themselves when they read what I had Marcie do with a cowboy who couldn't wait.

“You run along to the jail and I'll be right behind you,” I told him. “Here come the McClendon sisters—as soon as I've dealt with them I'll come to the jail and slip in.”

Off the man went, and I did deal with the McClendon sisters, who merely wanted to wire some money to a derelict brother. For some reason their hens decided to follow me instead of the sisters, but I discreetly gave one of them a firm kick, which outraged them of course but prompted them to leave me alone.

In no time I was in the jail, where, remembering that I was mayor, I decided to throw caution to the winds—I suppose I rather rushed Ted Bunsen, my old sock of a beau. He was right to admit that he was still a virtual stranger to even the rudiments of copulation. I can't abide clothes at such a time and soon had mine scattered hither and yon over the office, which shocked the sheriff a good deal, I fear. He himself was reluctant even to take down his pants—he thought unbuttoning a button or two would suffice but I disregarded propriety and yanked his pants down myself. Even then copulating with Teddy was no sure thing—he seemed to have no inkling as to how to find the entrance to the cave of joy. Tired of waiting—why can't the fool find it?—I put him in with my hand, and then later, after an eruption and a nap, I put him in again and had some fun myself.

Somehow we forgot to lock the back door. While we were sprawled about, wondering what came next—I saw nothing wrong
with thirds, myself—the back door suddenly opened and a small, friendly-looking Mexican man stepped in. He wore a big yellow hat and he was carrying an old broom.

“Sorry, Señor Ted, I forgot I borrowed this,” he said. He sat the broom down, bestowed a nice smile on me, and left.