GENERAL CUSTER, GENERAL CUSTER!” THE PARROT SAID. T. Blue felt like wringing the parrot’s neck—a bird that could only say one name deserved to be cooked and served up with dumplings, as far as he was concerned. The novelty of hearing a bird say “General Custer” had worn off several years previously.
But Fred sat on the arm of Dora DuFran, nibbling on an old iron key she had given him. If he wanted to stop nibbling the key and say his two words, there was not much Blue could do about it.
In truth, he was not so much angry at Fred as shocked by Dora, who had just informed him that she intended to leave Miles City and settle in Belle Fourche. From Blue’s point of view it was a most inconvenient plan, since it would mean a considerably longer trip every time he went to see her.
Dora was looking at him with a mixture of hurt and defiance, a look he was quite familiar with. She had always had a tendency toward defiance but had only begun to look hurt since his marriage. Before that he had usually been the one to look hurt, and indeed, he felt rather hurt at the moment.
“Now why the devil would you want to go way off to Belle Fourche?” he asked. “Just as things were getting settled, too.”
“I wouldn’t say they’re settled,” Dora said. “Do I look settled to you? If I do, then you might as well go outside and talk to your horse.”
“I meant settled in terms of a good location for business,” Blue said, aware that they hadn’t been talking about business.
“No, you mean convenient for you,” Dora said. “I’m just the right distance off so I won’t be upsetting your wife—I doubt she even dreams that I exist.”
“But a wife is one thing and a love is another,” Blue said. “I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve explained that to you. If I did I could afford to abandon the cattle business.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” Dora said, scratching the soft feathers on her parrot’s head.
“If I’m right, then what’s the matter?” Blue asked, feeling that they must have had that exact conversation, word for word, before. He had no wish to repeat himself, but when Dora looked the way she was looking it was better to talk than to stand there hoping for peace.
“The problem is I might have wanted to try being the wife for a change,” Dora said.
“You was offered a hundred chances, and you didn’t care to risk it,” Blue reminded her, feeling huffy.
“No, but I might have this time,” Dora said. “I may have turned you down, but I never said I wanted you marrying someone else. So far as I’m concerned you can go fall off the drainpipe and break your other leg—only when you do, look for another nurse. Calamity and the boys are heading for England and I’m moving to Belle Fourche.”
“Hell, why not go to England yourself, if all you want to do is get farther from me?” Blue said. “Go on—be a regular Lillie Langtry.”
“I have to support myself,” Dora reminded him. “I can’t just be taking fancy trips to see the Queen.”
“Billy would buy you a railroad car if you’d go, and you know it,” T. said, feeling even more huffy.
“Let him buy his wife a railroad car,” Dora said. “You’re the one who should be going to England with the show—you’re as good a rider as Texas Jack or any of them other cowboys. The Queen might give you a diamond.”
“I imagine she’d put me in jail,” Blue said. “I’d miss you so much I’d get drunk and sleep in the street. They’re strict about things in England, I hear.”
Dora knew she was being somewhat unfair—after all, T. had pestered her to marry for years; she had turned him down because she couldn’t face the ranch life. He liked the wide-open spaces and she liked towns; it didn’t seem they’d be a very good fit, none of which reduced the hurt she felt when he told her he had married someone else.
Now it seemed he was always around again. He had shown up twice since his convalescence, and his convalescence had ended only the month before. It annoyed her that he just assumed he could show up whenever he wanted to and get a kiss or a bedfellow for a week, or hot meals in the kitchen, or whatever else he might want.
“If I had a diamond I’d give it to you right now, and maybe you’d be sweet,” Blue said. “Why is Calamity joining the show? She can’t ride and she can’t shoot—about all she does is drink and tell lies. Why should the Queen want to hear a bunch of Calamity’s lies?”
“I thought you liked Martha,” Dora said. “She’s an old friend of Billy’s—I guess he just thinks it would be decent to give her a job. She’s expected to drive the stagecoach and she does have experience at that.”
“She don’t that I know of,” Blue said. “She might have driven a freight wagon a few times. If Calamity tries to drive a stagecoach she’ll probably turn it over and spill all the passengers out.
“It might give the Queen a laugh, I guess,” he added, feeling that Dora was at last getting in a slightly better humor.
Dora was mainly feeling that it would be a lonely fall with Calamity gone, Blue in and out; moving to Belle Fourche would at least give her something to occupy her mind—she always enjoyed setting up house, choosing curtains and rugs. There might be more miners and fewer cowboys down that way, but that didn’t discourage her. Cowboys were appealing, but poorly paid—exactly like the one standing in front of her looking hangdog. The girls fell in love with them, ran off with them, neglected to charge them, and provoked fights by encouraging two or three at the same time. The girls behaved better with miners, most of whom were older—it was uncommon to find young men who wanted to spend their days in the mines.
At the same time, she felt sad at the thought of the move. She felt she’d lost something in Miles City; perhaps it had been a way of hoping, a way of thinking about the remains of her life. Blue wouldn’t marry just to unmarry. If he seemed more ardent, more lovestruck than ever, it was probably only because he was restless about settling down. Once he settled, though, and children came, there’d be a turning; he wouldn’t come so often, or care so much. His young wife might not engage his attention, but the situation would—he’d grow up and start wanting to make his mark, and she herself would not get to be involved in it, much less help him make it.
“Dora, won’t you change your mind?” he asked. “Can’t you stay here? Can’t we just be as we’ve always been?”
Dora didn’t answer, though she finally let him take her hand.
But when T. Blue rode west the next morning toward the Musselshell, he could not get his spirits up. They hovered down near his stirrups, though the morning was bright and the plains in their summer fullness, the yellow grass waving. When he first rode west toward the Musselshell, he had had to worry about keeping his cattle, his horses, and his scalp. Now those worries were diminished. Unless he stumbled onto a mad renegade, his scalp was probably safe.
Still, he felt lower in mood than when such a ride had meant danger. There were dangers and dangers, it seemed. The old kind, the kind involving renegades and breakneck races over uncertain country kept one awake and alert, keen to the business of living. Relax and you might be gone, unless you possessed abundant luck.
T. felt he did possess abundant luck: he had swum rivers in which other men drowned, survived stampedes in which other men died, escaped bullets that had gone on to cut other men down. No defeat or contretemps depressed him for long; his energies would bob up and he’d be off at a rapid clip for new sights and fresh pursuits.
The shift in Dora, though, wasn’t to be survived as easily as bullets, rivers, stampedes. He had assumed from her many refusals that she wouldn’t mind if he married, so he had married; it was done, and he had no complaint about his wife, who was young, pretty, competent, devoted. Indeed, he loved her too.
He just hadn’t imagined that securing a helpmate would affect Dora so. When he got annoyed at Billy Cody, tried to climb the drainpipe, and busted himself good, Dora had taken him in, nursed him, and been as sweet as ever. She didn’t exactly send Billy packing, but it was clear who she preferred. Yet in that time something shifted. Dora evidently thought the fact that he stayed with her to get well meant that he was going to stay with her forever. He hadn’t said it, but Dora believed it—the day he pronounced himself well and proposed to go back to his ranch, she turned to ice. He expected anger, he got an icicle—and since then, though he had returned twice, riding the long distance across the plains, Dora had not really melted. He had to strain and joke merely to be tolerated—and yet Dora and he had been sweethearts for twenty years, moving, more or less in step, all the way up the plains from Kansas to Montana.
Was all they had shared just to be memories now, because he had married? It seemed so. Getting saddled up to go home, he stopped and hugged her and asked once again that she not go, not move farther from the Musselshell.
“I’m moving, T.—let’s don’t talk about it,” Dora said, offering her cheek when he bent from his horse to kiss her goodbye.
He had not gone five miles west, and his mood had not lifted a stirrup’s width, when he saw a strange party right in his path. It was Calamity, trying to mount her horse. No Ears held a stirrup steady for her, but Calamity was having a hard time getting her foot in it. Twice she heaved a foot up and both times missed the stirrup and fell down. Her big shaggy dog barked furiously when this happened. The dog seemed to think it was all the horse’s fault.
As Blue approached, No Ears led the horse over by a low stump. He helped Calamity balance on the stump and then positioned the stirrup, but Calamity wobbled at the last second, jumped, missed the stirrup, and kicked the horse in the flank. This spooked the horse; it jerked No Ears down and dragged him for twenty or thirty yards before the old man got him stopped.
The dog barked even more furiously; he seemed on the point of attacking the horse.
“I can’t believe you’re too damn drunk even to get on your horse,” Blue said when he got there. “It’s barely sunup—what are you doing drunk at this hour?”
“Oh, Blue, don’t scold me,” Calamity said. “Don’t you remember all the times we drunk all night?” She was near tears from embarrassment. No Ears had walked all the way from town to find her once he noticed that Satan wasn’t in the livery stable; she had ridden out to watch the sunrise with a cowpoke, whose name she couldn’t remember. But the cowpoke didn’t seem to be anywhere in sight; maybe he had changed his mind in the livery stable and gone back to the saloon—she couldn’t remember that part very clearly. Now she felt trembly and confused and was fearful that she might get sick any minute if she didn’t manage to get mounted and back to town. T. Blue in one of his temperance moods was the last thing she needed.
“You goddamn preacher!” she said. “Help me get up. You’ve toasted the sunrise as often as any man I know, don’t you scold me today. I’ve got to go off to England this afternoon, and it’s upset me.”
Blue was amused—Calamity had him on that one; he was no man to be lecturing ladies on the evils of drink, even ladies who were too drunk to find their stirrup.
“I’ve toasted the dawn, I admit, but I’ve never been too drunk to get on my horse,” he said, more for argument’s sake than anything. In fact, he had spent more than a few nights asleep under his mount, too drunk to remember that he even owned a horse.
But he got down and helped No Ears steady the stirrup—the horse was getting more and more disturbed and might soon bolt if Calamity kicked him in the flank a few more times. Even with his help, Calamity couldn’t hit it, so Blue cupped his hands and got her to put her foot in them; once she managed that, it was no trouble to heave her up. She was sopping drunk all right; her breath smelled like she’d been drinking kerosene, and she had no sooner taken the reins than she dropped both. No Ears patiently retrieved them.
“It’s a good thing No Ears has adopted you,” Blue remarked. “You’ve reached the age where you need a guardian, Martha.”
Now that she was up, Calamity felt like resting for a bit until her stomach felt a little more settled. Satan had already put up with a good deal—he might not appreciate being vomited on.
“You’ll be old yourself someday, and then you won’t be so goddamn fresh,” she remarked, although in fact T. Blue looked rather subdued—for him.
“You better comb your hair a little better before you curtsy to the Queen,” Blue said. “If you ride up looking like you do this morning she might mistake you for Sitting Bull.”
“I intend to buy a wig, for your information,” Calamity said. His manner irritated her so much at times that if she had been armed she might have taken a shot at him—she had taken two or three over the years, all wild.
“Oh, one of them artificial scalps,” Blue said. “Get a red one while you’re at it. We need more redheads in this country. Have a smoke.”
He offered tobacco to Calamity and No Ears, and they all had a smoke and watched the tall grass wave for a few minutes. The buffalo dog wandered off to chase three deer.
Calamity’s stomach settled a little, and she began to notice what a grand day it was. In the afternoon they were to start east to catch the steamboat on the Missouri. The thought made her feel sad. Why had she agreed to leave the plains? What did it matter what the Queen of England looked like? The plains were her home, the ground of her life. What if she never got back? What if she got rowdy in England and got sent to jail? Of course that had happened even on the plains, but they seldom kept her too long in the little prairie jails. The deputies soon tired of feeding her or listening to her rattle on.
In England it might be different. And what if the big boat sank? Even No Ears was apprehensive about the ocean, and No Ears had lived a long life, through pretty chancy times. Only two nights before, in Dora’s saloon, the fat blacksmith Maggs had been talking about how whales could sink boats. He explained to No Ears that a whale was as big as the house they were drinking in—some of them were bigger. Maggs claimed to have seen a whale that would cover the whole parade ground at Fort Kearney. No Ears had been alarmed to hear of a fish that large and had peppered the blacksmith with questions, so many that Calamity had passed out while he was still peppering.
She was soaked from sleeping in the dewy grass; her hands were shaky, and she felt queer. Getting presentable enough to meet the Queen seemed an immense effort in itself—not to mention the thousands of miles of travel that had to be accomplished first.
“I don’t want to go, Blue,” she said. “I wish people would just leave me alone. I just want to stay here with my friends and be buried near Bill Hickok when I die.”
Blue, of course, immediately changed his tack. He was looking a little more like his frisky self, and when he was frisky he would argue with a stump; whichever side of an argument the stump took, Blue would take the other.
“Now, Martha, I was just joking,” he said. “You oughta go on—at least it’ll be a ride.”
“Why do I need to cross an ocean just for a ride?” she asked. “I could start right now here and ride a thousand miles in any direction, if I just wanted a ride.”
“Well, no,” Blue said—he enjoyed splitting hairs when she was least in the mood to have a hair split. “You could clock off a thousand miles south with no trouble, or a thousand miles east, but if you went a thousand miles north you’d need to learn to talk Eskimo, and a thousand miles west would put you about a hundred miles off shore, in the Pacific. I doubt if that black horse could swim a hundred miles, either.”
“Go piss in your ear, Blue,” Calamity said. “I didn’t request a map. I’m glad Dora’s moving. It’s about time she cut you loose and let you wander.”
“Thank you for the smoke,” No Ears said, setting off for town. He had neglected to buy the slicker and decided he had better go do it while Blue and Martha Jane were having their conversation. He had experienced their conversations before and knew they were apt to be lengthy. Though he had little to pack, he did want to take some care in selecting the slicker. He wanted, if possible, to find one whose collar would protect his earholes. Also, some slickers had collars that collected rain like a cup when they were raised. If England was as rainy as had been reported, a little time spent selecting an excellent slicker would be time well spent.
The dog Cody had returned from his chase. He barked at No Ears as No Ears walked away, but the old man kept going and was soon out of sight in the waving grass.
“Cody don’t like the party to be split up,” Calamity observed.
“I don’t neither,” Blue said. “I think we’ve all stuck together this long, we ought to stick together till the matter’s finished. But I can’t get Dora to see it that way—she is just determined to move.”
“If you call being married on the Musselshell sticking together, then hoorah, let her buck!” Calamity said. “I don’t think Miss Dora DuFran looks at it quite that way.”
“No, she takes a stubborn attitude, as usual,” Blue said. “I’m sure you’ll defend her, stubborn or not—you would never be inclined to help me in a matter like this, I’m sure. You’d rather ride off and visit the Queen.”
“I guess it does beat riding around the west listening to you and Dora complain about one another,” Calamity observed. “You two started complaining about one another in Kansas, and here we are in Montana years later and you’re still complaining. I stopped paying it any attention back down the road several years, if you want the truth. I think you two ought to just shoot it out, and whichever one turns out to be the widow will have nobody to blame but yourself.
“If Dora loses, I’ll adopt Fred,” she added. “If you lose, I hope you’ll will me your six-shooter—I gave it to you to begin with, if you remember.”
“We ain’t gonna shoot no duel, and you can have this gun back any time you want it,” Blue said, though he didn’t offer to unbuckle his holster and give it to her. It was a sturdy Colt revolver—Calamity had won it in a poker game somewhere. She had a gun she liked at the time and had given this one to him for his birthday.
“Blue, let’s don’t argue anymore, I’ll start to cry,” Calamity said, feeling that she might cry anyway.
“Oh, don’t cry—I hadn’t meant to be arguing,” Blue said. “It’s just that I’ve got a long ride and I’m chattering in order to put it off a little while. I’m half a mind to go back to town with you—Dora might be in a better mood by then.”
“Or a worse mood,” Calamity reminded him. “Her moods don’t usually float too high on the day that you leave, even if she is mad at you.”
They sat and had another smoke.
“Remember that time you and me and Billy and Jack Omohundro raced all the way from Fort Leavenworth to Fort Kearney?” Calamity asked. “Those were the free days. We didn’t have a bit of business in Fort Kearney either. We just did it to do it.”
Blue did remember. It had been a lark—the four of them just wanted to ride their horses fast. He himself had just served a three-day jail sentence for roping a banker (he hadn’t known the man was a banker and had dragged him only ten yards; three days seemed excessive, but the banker had influence); Cody started bragging on his horse; then Texas Jack Omohundro started bragging on his horse; Calamity never had a horse worth bragging about, but she was always ready for a lark, and the next thing you knew the four of them were racing across the prairies and didn’t stop until they noticed Fort Kearney off to the north.
“Yes, I recall it was a glorious ride,” Blue said. “I hadn’t got respectable yet. I suppose Texas Jack is accompanying you to the palace, ain’t he? He always acted like he belonged in a palace, even when the scoundrel didn’t have a dime.”
“He may go along, I can’t say,” Calamity said. “He and Billy are too pretty to make good partners—they’d both want to hog the mirror.”
“Now, Jack’s a humbler sort than Billy,” Blue said. “Every man I know’s a humbler sort than Billy.”
“I’d say you’re just mad because Dora’s softening up toward Billy,” Calamity said. “You might as well go and have a bunch of kids, Blue—Dora’s checked you off. I expect Belle Fourche will suit her fine.”
Blue denied it vehemently, but it was an old business, he and Dora, and they both knew it. They bantered for a while longer—Blue’s mood improved a little, but Calamity’s continued to waver.
“I used to love leaving, now I hate it,” she said. “I get to wondering if I’ll ever see my pals of the prairie again.”
“Sure you will, Martha—all of them but me will be in England, riding prancing horses,” Blue said. He rode over and shook hands with her—it was an old joke he and Martha Jane liked, shaking hands upon departure, as if they were both just cowboys. In fact, there were plenty of cowboys who didn’t have the grip she had, even when her stomach was not well settled.
Her grip was about all that was still strong enough—the rest of her looked in rough shape, and Blue had to wonder, as he rode west across the sighing plains, if Martha Jane would make it back from her long journey. Her face was bloodshot—she had begun to pick up a touch of age, it seemed; her pals of the prairie might soon be missing her. It worried him and saddened him—Martha Jane had been part of the western life ever since he had known the western life; as he rode on and thought about the possibility of her passing he remembered what she had said about being buried by the side of Wild Bill Hickok, a cold killer who would not likely have deigned to spit on her while he was alive. That was an odd note—he had meant to ask her about it but it had slipped by in the conversation. Now he would just have to save it until she returned from her visit to the Queen.