Telegraph Days: A Novel Read online

  “What fool told you that?” I asked.

  “Mrs. Thomas, down at the general store.”

  “Mrs. Thomas is a sweet old soul but she can’t see, so she makes up rumors,” I told Bertha.

  “She said you ordered a fine white wedding dress out of Beau Wheless’s big catalogue—I often have to refer to that catalogue myself,” Melba put in. “I don’t know why you’re being so discreet about it—we all look forward to weddings down here in Rita Blanca, and I bet you’d make the sheriff a fine wife.”

  “What we mostly get is funerals,” Bertha observed. “A wedding would be a nice change.”

  That just shows you how hard it is to keep anything secret in a small town like Rita Blanca. The truth is I had decided I might as well keep a decent wedding dress on hand in case someone dandy like Zenas Clark came along. Billy Wheless lent me the big catalogue and I made my choice and sent my order off. It would probably have taken a while for the dress to actually reach Rita Blanca—if I didn’t happen to be in a marrying mood when the dress came, I could just hang it in the closet until some man I could get attached to came along.

  It irked me plenty that the McClendon sisters, of all people, found out about my order.

  “You two are jumping the gun,” I informed them. “Sheriff Bunsen and I have no immediate plans to marry.”

  “Why not, ain’t he steady?” Bertha asked.

  Steady as a rock, I thought. But who wants to marry a rock?

  19

  I GUESS EVERYBODY likes to get their name in the papers—I know I do, but the distinction is hard to achieve if you’re starting from the vantage point of Rita Blanca. I figured Charlie Hepworth’s interview might be my only chance to achieve widespread publicity, so I did what I could to make myself presentable before he arrived. I brushed my hair and donned a frock that would have been considered daring at any cotillion in Virginia.

  It may be that I overdid it a bit with my daring frock, because the first thing Charlie Hepworth did when he crowded into my office was drop his pants.

  “Charlie, your britches are falling down,” I told him, momentarily failing to grasp his intent. I thought his pants were down around his ankles because of some defect in his suspenders, but it took only one glance at his privates to convince me that my theory was way off. He had a serious stiffie working and had obviously crammed into my office with copulation in mind.

  “Charlie!” I said, in sterner tones, trying my best to sound shocked.

  “Let’s hurry up and board the boat of pleasure!” he declared, trying to shove himself between my legs.

  “The boat of pleasure—in a desert?” I asked. “You need to be more accurate with your language.”

  In fact I was hard put not to laugh at the poor man. Charlie’s prong was about the length of one of his stogies, after he’d smoked most of it. I’m tall for a girl—at least a foot taller than Charlie Hepworth. Even if I had consented to his embrace—which I didn’t—he would have had to climb up on a stool to achieve his goal, and there was no stool handy.

  When men turn up crazed with lust and point their peckers at you, the first rule is just not to laugh. Laughing at a man who has offered you the solace of a stiffie is sure to have bitter consequences.

  I liked Charlie Hepworth, which didn’t mean I had the slightest intention of stepping into the boat of pleasure with him, as he poetically but foolishly put it.

  “Can’t this wait till after business hours?” I asked him. “Billy Wheless is coming with what looks to be a sizable order. I doubt we’ll row that boat of pleasure very far before he arrives.”

  Charlie, in his rut, had evidently forgotten that there were people on the planet other than ourselves. The fit was on him to a high extent—the notion that mere commercial enterprise might interfere with the enterprise he was interested in caused him to go red in the face.

  “Why, the fool!” he said. “What could he want?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I admitted. “Maybe he’s running low on spittoons, or needs to order several dozen fly swatters. I need him to order some rose water, myself.”

  “Don’t you have a Closed sign you could hang out?” Charlie asked, sounding desperate. “We won’t need but a minute.”

  “Speak for yourself, Charlie,” I told him. “On the rare occasions when I row off in the boat of pleasure I require considerably longer than a minute, if I’m to get where I’m rowing toward.

  “You better pull your pants up, honey,” I added. “Billy’s closing in.”

  Charlie gave up and stuffed himself back in his pants, which were none too clean. The fit was leaving him; soon he was once again a normal reporter named Hepworth.

  “Can’t blame a man for trying,” he said.

  “Did I say I blamed anyone?” I asked.

  “Why no … you didn’t,” he said, seemingly surprised. “You even called me honey, which was nice of you.”

  “You might consider getting better suspenders, though,” I advised. “And launder your pants a little more often.”

  Long years ahead, in another place, Charlie Hepworth and I worked together again, but I musn’t get ahead of the story.

  “When are we going to do that interview you mentioned?” I asked him. The interview, after all, had been the reason for the meeting—though it was only my reason, I now realized.

  “Maybe the next time you feel like calling me honey,” Charlie said, and then there was Hungry Billy Wheless, with his long list.

  20

  TWO DAYS LATER the big news rush in Rita Blanca was over, and we citizens were forced to wonder if anything would ever happen in the town again. The Indian—if there was an Indian—didn’t kill anybody or leave any more lances in our street. Ros Jubb failed to arrive and claim her goggles—Aurel Imlah took another look or two but all he found was one sandal. It might have belonged to one of Ros’s sepoys but there was no guarantee that it had. After all, anybody can lose a sandal.

  Zenas and I managed to copulate at our leisure a couple more times, but a bittersweet quality had crept into our lovemaking. Oh, it was a fine pleasure to bounce up and down on Zenas in the hayloft, but the facts we had to face were bleak: Zenas didn’t love me enough to stay in Rita Blanca, and I didn’t love him enough to leave. If we kept on copulating I expect we’d soon make a baby, and I’d be the one to stay home with the child while Zenas went on rambling where he pleased in search of copy. I’d get fat and jealous and Zena would succumb to a girl here and a girl there until I got wind of it, at which point I’d murder him.

  So we enjoyed ourselves for two more days and then Zenas crammed himself into the stagecoach with the other reporters—he never shed a tear as he was leaving.

  I leaned in the coach and gave Charlie Hepworth a sweet kiss on the cheek.

  “Bye, honey,” I said, which astonished the other reporters, including Zenas.

  Charlie shed the tears that Zenas didn’t bother to summon and the stagecoach went bouncing away.

  I was still the telegraph lady of Rita Blanca, and very proud of my job, while my brother, Jackson Courtright, the hero of the Yazee fight, took a turn for the worse and became a drunk, for which behavior there was little excuse. Jackson’s inability to shoot a pistol accurately was not apt to be discovered for some time, if ever: he could just live out a useful life as a deputy, collaring drunks and now and then sweeping out the cells or giving the gallows a little touch-up with his paintbrush.

  I didn’t realize that Jackson had taken to drink until I saw him topple down one of the few flights of stairs in Rita Blanca. The stairs were behind Leo Oliphant’s saloon; they led to the second floor, where Mandy Williams lived. Mandy happened to be the local painted lady, although she didn’t really paint herself much. But she did receive gentlemen callers and she did charge them for certain pleasures. One of the men she received more and more often was my brother, Jackson, the famous spendthrift—a deputy sheriff known to be reckless with his fifteen dollars a month.

  I had ju
st eased my last bull snake out of the office for the morning—I was watching him, if it was a him, slide into a hole under a rock when I heard the sound of a falling body and looked up just in time to see Jackson tumble down Mandy’s stairs. The fall alarmed Mandy and it alarmed me. I came rushing over and Mandy came rushing down. She was a sorrowful woman with short hair that had never decided whether to be brunette or blond.

  Mandy got to Jackson’s stretched-out body first and put her head to his chest long enough to convince her that the boy wasn’t dead. I already knew that much; I could hear my brother snoring. To say that he reeked of whiskey would be an understatement. He smelled so strongly of liquor that you would think he had taken a bath in it, with his clothes on!

  “What’s your notion, Mandy—is he usually this drunk when he pays you a visit?” I asked.

  “Well, he’s never sober when he pays me a visit, Miss Courtright,” Mandy admitted.

  “You don’t need to call me Miss Courtright,” I told the young woman. “We’re the only two reasonably sensible women in Rita Blanca—if we can’t just call one another by our first names, what’s the point?”

  Mandy Williams saw that I meant it—she favored me with a sweet, shy smile. Being the one whore in Rita Blanca probably didn’t provide her with many reasons to smile. I suspect she would have been shocked if she’d known about the kind of things Zenas and I had just been doing in Joe Schwartz’s hayloft. Her own practices with her customers were probably sedate by comparison—but I saw no need to go into that, just then.

  “I’m just plain Nellie,” I told her, with a smile that let her know I didn’t look down on her because she happened to be a whore.

  “Jackson’s about the sweetest fellow in town,” Mandy told me. “I saw he was too drunk to do much and tried to make him comfortable on my settee, but before I could get his boots off he ran out the door and fell.”

  “He’s just a boy, Mandy,” I told her. “Ever since he got famous he’s been under a strain. Maybe the humble life is the best life after all.”

  That may not have been the most diplomatic thing to say to Mandy Williams, who had probably seen more of the humble life than was good for anybody—but I was just coming to understand that my brother was much too young and immature to be as famous as he was. A single action had made him famous—what we had to do now was figure out how Jackson Courtright could get through the rest of his life just doing the normal things that all of us had to do.

  “Do you like Jackson, Mandy?” I asked. The question took the nice young thing aback—maybe, in her profession, it was impossible just to like a fellow. The commercial aspect probably got in the way. And yet I had heard that whores sometimes fall for cowboys and vice versa. I had been more or less managing Jackson’s life since he was about three, when I was often called to chase him down. But now I was twenty-two, with ambitions of my own, and I was tired of managing my brother. I would be happy to pass the chore on to a nice bride of some kind, and it occurred to me that Mandy Williams might make a likely candidate, who seemed so sweet and shy. Most women have a little meanness in them, but Mandy looked to me to have only the necessary minimum.

  There lay Jackson Courtright, drunk as an owl, an eligible bachelor of seventeen who stood sorely in need of a steadying hand, preferably not his sister’s. And there stood Mandy Williams, pretty, quiet, with not much bosom maybe but with a graceful neck and lovely blue eyes. Maybe she was just the bride for Jackson. Maybe—of course this was a long shot—they could even be happy together. Maybe each would turn out to be just what the other needed.

  “Mandy, I’ve got a plan,” I told her bluntly. My motto, as I’ve already said, is act, don’t think. “When Jackson wakes up let’s tell him you proposed and he accepted.”

  Mandy Williams’s lovely blue eyes got wide.

  “Now that’s bold, Nellie,” she said.

  “Only the brave deserve the fair,” I told her. It was a tag of poetry I had picked up somewhere.

  “I doubt that being married to Jackson could be worse than what you’re doing,” I told her. “You’d just have one young man to manage, and I bet you could manage him fine.”

  “Yes, and I could save him some money, to boot,” Mandy told me. “I wouldn’t have to charge him every time he showed up with a stiffie, which is sometimes twice a day.”

  “Good point,” I said. “I just ordered a fine wedding dress.”

  “For me?” she asked. “You mean you had this planned?”

  “No … I ordered it for me, but we’re about the same size and my nuptial prospects just went bouncing off in a stagecoach. You might as well use the dress and marry Jackson.”

  Something like a look of happiness shone in Mandy Williams’s eyes for the first time since I’d known her. We two girls had worked up a fine little plot.

  When Deputy Jackson Courtright woke up from his snooze, the first thing that he discovered was that he was engaged. To my relief he seemed pleased by the discovery.

  “It’s about time I got to be the one engaged,” he said. “You must have been engaged fifty times—that’s not my way of doing things.”

  “You do like Mandy, don’t you?” I asked, a little nervously, once I got Jackson alone for a few minutes. Mandy Williams had gone back up those stairs as sprightly as if she were walking on air. From having nothing but the task of deflating a lot of stiffies in Rita Blanca, she now was engaged to a scion of the Courtrights.

  “Mandy, why, she’s the sweetest!” Jackson said. “I’ve been wanting to marry her from the minute I saw her, but I didn’t figure she’d have me.”

  “She’ll have you—and it’s not because you’re a big hero,” I told him. “She’ll have you because she likes you, and because you’re mostly nice.”

  “Leo Oliphant will just have to find himself another whore,” Jackson said—the practical side of things was always quick to assert itself with Jackson.

  I walked back to my telegraph office whistling merrily. On the whole I’d managed a nice little plot very well. I’d soon gain a sister-in-law to help me out with my unsteady brother.

  I had hardly got back to the office when the line got active and the message read thus:

  PLAN TO VISIT RITA BLANCA AFTERNOON THURSDAY NEXT STOP SEEKING ATTRACTION FOR WORLD RENOWNED WILD WEST PAGEANT STOP EAGER TO MEET DEPUTY COURTRIGHT POSSIBLE EMPLOYMENT STOP WILL REQUIRE NOURISHMENT FOR HORSE AND SELF STOP WILLIAM FREDERICK CODY BUFFALO BILL

  The first thing I thought of was how happy the McClendon sisters would be—their idol was coming to town.

  To me, Buffalo Bill sounded like somebody who might need to be taken down a peg, but I soon passed on the news to the McClendon girls, at which Bertha fainted dead away and Melba got the heart flutters and had to fan herself briskly until she got her emotions under control.

  It irked me, for some reason. Buffalo Bill Cody wasn’t even there, and already he was causing trouble.

  BOOK III

  Wild West Days

  1

  AMONG THE COURTRIGHTS I’ve always been noted for my ability to dislike certain people on sight, before I’ve even bothered to ascertain whether they smell bad or have false teeth that don’t fit or dribble tobacco juice on their shirts or reek of bad hair tonic. Some men possess all those failings and more, but even one will usually cause me to mark a fellow off my list.

  I had pretty well convinced myself that this Buffalo Bill Cody was probably somebody who needed to be put in his place. The very fact that Bertha McClendon had fainted at the mention of his name suggested vanity to me. The man might well have an irksome personality. When Thursday came I got ready to be icy and stiff, but then up Bill Cody trotted, on a fine gray horse, beautifully dressed, handsome as a god, friendly as a collie, and all my tough resolves turned into toffee.

  Bill Cody was so appealing that I suspect he could have persuaded Eve to hold off on the apple, at least until he had managed to outflank Adam. The whole town turned out to greet him, and he behaved as graciously to e
veryone as if he’d been a natural prince. Both the McClendon sisters pressed him to sign their autograph books, which he did, with a bold flourish to his script.

  Bill was friendly and polite to everybody and yet, now and then, he would look at me and let his eyes rest on mine, as if to suggest that he had come to Rita Blanca mainly to meet me, the telegraph lady, perhaps with romance in mind—but the first words this paragon of men actually said to me were anything but romantic.

  “Are you organized, Miss Courtright?” he asked, once the crowd thinned and he had an opportunity to stroll over to the telegraph office.

  It was not what I had expected to hear: for a moment I just stared at him.

  “You look organized,” he concluded, “and on top of that you’re far too pretty a female to be left to wither away out here in the sandburs and the wind. I think I better just hire you—we can figure out the details later.”

  I felt a hot blush coloring my cheeks. “Hire me to do what?” I managed to ask.

  “Help me get my Wild West pageant going,” he said. “Is your brother that shot up the Yazees hiding somewhere? Sharpshooters are mighty popular now—I’m going to need several once I get my pageant running. Right now your brother’s got a high reputation.”

  “He can’t shoot,” I said. I thought I might as well spare Jackson the embarrassment of a tryout which would reveal the sad fact to the famous man himself.

  Cody looked amused but not surprised.

  “So it was beginner’s luck, was it?” he asked. I nodded.

  “Come out here and stand up straight so I can look at you,” he said.

  I blushed again—no gentleman had ever summoned me like that.

  “My, but you’re a beauty,” he said, once he’d looked. “I’m not a bachelor by law, but I have the bachelor attitude. Let’s enjoy a kiss.”

  We did enjoy a kiss, a better kiss than I was used to receiving from total strangers.