TEAT ONLY HAD TWO HOPES IN LIFE: TO MARRY TRIX, AND to go with Mr. Cody and be in his Wild West show. Neither would be easy to achieve, he knew. Trix was the most popular whore at the Hotel Hope; though he had reason to believe that Trix was fond of him, it was rare that he got to spend much time with her.
Mr. Cody had been friendly on a number of occasions, and had even tipped him once for fetching his cigars from the buggy on a day when it was raining, but that was not the same as being asked to be in his show. Teat worried every day that Mr. Cody and Dr. Ramses would get up and ride out of Miles City without taking him with them, in which case he would be down to one hope.
In the meantime, while waiting for his hopes to come true, Teat had been assigned to Calamity, who had yet to recover her spirits after her desperate ride in the blizzard. She had become ill, and rarely got out of bed. Many times Teat saw her weep, though she seemed, from what he could see, to be undamaged. Some people got their feet frozen off in blizzards, or even their hands, but Calamity still had her hands and feet.
Hearing the lady weep made Teat want to go away. He wished that Trix would immediately agree to marry him, and that Mr. Cody would take them both someplace they could be happy far from Montana.
It was clear to Teat that no one in Montana was able to be happy. The feeling the men brought with them into the Hotel Hope was a feeling of sadness, and that was also the feeling of most of the women who lived there; it was the feeling, as far as he could tell, of most of the people who lived in the town.
Miss Dora, the kindest person Teat knew, was herself unhappy unless Mr. Blue was visiting, and he wasn’t visiting very often. Skeedle’s children had died; she would cry whenever she thought of them. Doosie had long been parted from her family and was mainly in a low mood—so low, some days, that she would forget to cook. The thin whore named Ginny rarely felt well and almost never smiled.
Trix was much the most cheerful person at the hotel, which was one reason Teat had determined to marry her. He himself needed a lot of help staying happy, and Trix was the only one who tried to help him in his efforts.
“Teat, go outside and dig a hole or something,” Trix would say, if she found him looking gloomy. “What does a cute boy like you have to be gloomy about?”
Teat took Trix’s words to be command; he went outside and attempted to dig a hole in the icy ground, but Miss Dora looked out the window and saw him. In a minute she came to the back steps and informed him that Trix had only been teasing. “It’s the wrong season for hole-digging,” Dora said, amused by the boy’s literalness.
Teat’s family had been wiped out in a pointless skirmish around the time of the battle of the Rosebud. He showed up in town with a trader who claimed to have gotten him from the Crows. He was an appealing boy: Dora had liked his looks and persuaded the trader to leave him with her. He had been with her now for six years and was a good worker, though a little small for his age—he must have been at least fourteen. At some stage, too little food or too much misery had affected his physical development, though not his brain. He had learned to read English almost without help, and when there was nothing to do could always be found in the kitchen, reading stories to Doosie out of the magazines Dora took. Everyone liked the boy.
One of the biggest problems Teat had to contend with at the Hotel Hope was his name. Miss Dora had thought he ought to change it—she had suggested several names, but Teat was nervous about making such a change. He discussed the matter with No Ears, explaining that his name had nothing to do with bad morals, as some white people seemed to think. He had been a dark baby, as dark as a cow buffalo’s teat, thus his name.
Privately No Ears thought the boy’s parents had been in error to name him Teat—a name derived from some part of a he-buffalo would have been more appropriate, since the boy himself was a he. But he knew that naming was an imprecise affair; parents experiencing all the bother of a new baby often chose the first name that came into their minds. Witness his own name, Two Toes Broken. If the horse had not stepped on his tiny foot, he might have started life under an entirely different name.
No Ears didn’t discuss his reservations with Teat. He was a nice boy with excellent manners, and if he wanted to keep the name, that was all right.
Morning was Teat’s favorite time at the Hotel Hope. Dora kept the doors closed until two. Often the last customer didn’t depart much before dawn, and after a busy night it took some time for the staff to make the place presentable again; time, too, for the girls to make themselves presentable. Usually they would begin to drift down in the late morning, to drink coffee and experiment with one another’s hair.
In Teat’s tribe, only warriors had taken as much trouble with their hair as Trix and Skeedle and Ginny. They were always examining Miss Dora’s papers and magazines, looking for pictures that might suggest interesting new ways to fix their hair. Teat, who was busy at that hour emptying cuspidors and sweeping out debris, was often required to give his opinion on a particular experiment. Once he had been laughed out of the house for innocently suggesting that bear grease might improve the look of their hair. The women had laughed so hard that his feelings had been a little hurt. What was wrong with bear grease? In his tribe everyone had known that it was good for your hair—but the women in the Hotel Hope saw matters differently.
Trix knew Teat was in love with her; it was good news, as far as she was concerned. He was such a nice-looking boy, and so well mannered, that it would be a feather in any woman’s cap to have him in love with her. “Teat’s my real sweetheart,” she was fond of saying, even in company—and in a way, she meant it.
The first time Dora heard her say it she immediately asked Trix to come to her room for a little chat. Trix was a child of the California gold fields; she had grown up in San Francisco, where attitudes about romance were somewhat more advanced than they were in Miles City. Dora had never been to San Francisco, but she assumed that such a great city would breed more advanced attitudes than one could expect to find in a frontier town on the plains.
“I wouldn’t be calling Teat your sweetheart in front of the customers,” Dora cautioned.
“Well, he is, why can’t I say it?” Trix said, rather hotly—Trix was young and defiant. To Dora she looked Italian.
“It might get him hurt, that’s why,” Dora said. “A good many of the customers want to think you’re their sweetheart. That’s why they come—to have a sweetheart for a few minutes.”
“I guess I can pick my own sweetheart,” Trix complained, still hot. “My customers just come to slobber and squirt off. They’re ugly. Who wants an ugly sweetheart?”
“Nobody, but plenty of people have one,” Dora said. “Be in love with Teat—I don’t care. Just don’t mention it in front of customers. They don’t like Indians in this town, and plenty of hard men show up here. If one of the hard ones decided he was in love with you, and then got jealous of Teat, what do you think would happen?”
“I don’t know what would happen,” Trix said, defiance replaced by a look of uneasiness. Her black eyes snapped when she was angry, but they weren’t snapping now.
“What?” she asked timidly.
“They’d probably just shoot Teat down,” Dora said. “Or else make up a party of drunks and take him out and hang him.”
Trix left in tears at the thought that such a fate might befall Teat. Dora mentioned the matter to Calamity one morning, hoping to get her interested in something. Calamity was still low. She spent her days in bed, staring out the window at the snowy plains. Dora had seen her low before, but never for so long. Nothing interested her, nothing pleased her.
“You think I ought to send Teat away before something bad happens?” Dora asked.
“No. If they get after him just send him up here,” Calamity said. “I’ll shoot it out with ’em. I’d just as soon go out in a gunfight as to just get old and die.”
“Don’t you vex me—you will if you talk about dying,” Dora said. “Here you’ve got a clean room to rest in, and Billy Cody sent you candy. Don’t be talking about gunfights.”
In fact, Billy had been the soul of courtesy. He had sent Calamity candy three times, visited her often, and offered her employment in his show. Calamity had scarcely responded, though the candy had disappeared little by little.
“I got no complaint about Billy,” Calamity added—she felt a little guilty about having received him so listlessly. After all, she had risked her life coming to hire on; why couldn’t she just say she’d hire on? Somehow the words stuck in her throat, along with all other words.
“Billy’s perfect,” she said, a little later. “If you had good sense you’d marry him.”
“We won’t talk about that,” Dora said quickly. “I can’t marry him, and anyway he is married.”
“Won’t marry him, you mean,” Calamity said, stirring a little at the thought of Dora’s stubbornness in refusing good-looking Billy Cody.
“Won’t or can’t—it’s between me and Billy,” Dora reminded her, feeling her temper rise. It almost always rose when she and Calamity got on the subject of matrimony. Calamity, who had never got within a mile of being married, nonetheless felt perfectly free to advise her on the matter.
“You won’t even go to work for him, yet you expect me to marry him!” Dora said more loudly, her temper rising higher.
“Oh, shush down and bring me a rifle,” Calamity said. “I want to be ready, in case I have to shoot.”
Dora turned toward the window; when she turned back, Calamity saw tears on her cheeks—once again she had gone too far.
“Can’t you get mad without crying?” Calamity said meekly.
“No—I can’t and you know it!” Dora said.
“Don’t bring me the rifle,” Calamity said. “You might shoot me with it. I think I’ll get up and get drunk.”
It took another hour for her to actually get out of bed and into her clothes, but she did it. Then, while she was downstairs at the bar in the process of fulfilling her resolution, the door to the kitchen swung open and T. Blue walked in, his cheeks red from the chill, and his spurs jingling.
“Howdy, cowboy,” Calamity said, feeling better already.