The Bold Frontier (4 page)

On stage, Cody didn’t fool around with memorized dialogue. He just extemporized a narrative of some of his experiences. He was no actor, but he received an ovation anyway. (Buntline portrayed a white renegade; he managed to slip a temperance lecture into one of the character’s long monologues.) From time to time, thrilling action broke up the talk. The scouts bravely slew a lot of Indians portrayed by “supers in cambric pants.”

The reviews weren’t good. The Chicago
Times
called the production “a combination of incongruous drama, execrable acting, renowned performers, intolerable stench, scalping, blood and thunder.” When the show eventually arrived at Niblo’s in New York, the local critics were even more unfriendly (some things never change). Said one: “As a drama it is very poor slop.”

It made no difference. Buffalo Bill was an American original, and the public fell in love with him. The love affair would last a long time.

Cody was a genuinely brave man. He fought in at least sixteen battles with Indians during his lifetime, the most famous being that with the Cheyenne, Yellow Hair (not Yellow Hand), in 1876. Contemporary accounts indicate that he realized he was spoofing himself and the West, just a little, when he organized his first arena show in 1883.

It became known as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World—and eventually brought to amphitheatres all over America, and then Europe, such sights as simulated stage robberies and personalities such as Annie Oakley and Chief Sitting Bull.

And if the show was still not exactly the truth any more than the dime novels had been, it was
enough
of the truth so that it can honestly be said that no other entertainment, and no other man, did more to implant the myth and magic of the American west in the minds of his countrymen and millions of others besides. The working cowboy did part of the job of course. But he was anonymous. (And until recent years, we’ve seldom seen him written about or depicted as he really was—often still in his teens, or barely out of them; frequently black.) Cody remains
the
Westerner.

Bad management cost him the fortune he made in show business. His death in 1917 was messy and unheroic; the cause was uremic poisoning. But he was a showman to the end, making his last appearance two months before he was buried.

Personal problems linked to flaws in his character vexed most of his later life. But he has a just claim to immortality, because he bequeathed the West to the whole world. The rest—from Zane Grey and Max Brand to John Ford and Sergio Leone—is history.

I’ve always loved the Western in all of its permutations.

Well, not
every
one. As a kid, I went faithfully, not to say eagerly, to the Saturday matinees. I couldn’t see too many of those one-hour programmers from Republic and Columbia, Monogram and PRC—with one exception: the pictures featuring singing cowboys in embroidered shirts who hopped on their too-pretty horses to chase crooks driving vintage convertibles back and forth across strange hermaphroditic landscapes, half old, half new. There is a lot of never-was in Western fiction and film, but that sort of thing was too ridiculous even for a true believer.

Still, a believer I remained, thanks to pulp novels about Texas Ranger Jim Hatfield, richly detailed
Saturday Evening Post
serials by Luke Short, and Errol Flynn pictures scored in epic style by Max Steiner, a Viennese who seemed to understand the West better than most Americans.

When I broke into writing, I divided my time between science fiction and Western stories, and wrote a couple of dozen of the latter, novelettes mostly, published by the great old Popular pulps. I can still remember haunting Indiana drugstores whenever a new shipment of magazines arrived; I knew the delivery schedules by heart.

There is one thrilling moment in my memory in which, for the first time, I discovered my story, and my byline, among those featured on the cover (bright yellow, incidentally) of a magazine which proclaimed above its name:

Frontier Fiction by Tophand Authors

I didn’t really believe I was a “tophand author”— I was twenty-one or twenty-two at the time. But it was heady to find someone else saying it, even as hyperbole; and saying it about one of my Westerns to boot.

So I’m proud to have a small place in this company of men and women who, no matter how diverse their literary approaches, share belief in the verity set down by a Victorian poet and printed as the epigraph to this piece:

Westward, the land is indeed a little brighter.

H
E CAME SUDDENLY, WRENCHINGLY
out of the dream.
Oh God it’s cold.

His bare feet stuck from under the comforter, which had pulled out while he slept. Two woolen blankets on top of the comforter, and his nightshirt on top of his union suit with its whiff of mothballs, and he still woke with rattling teeth and shivering shanks.
God God it’s cold.
But then it was always cold in White Pass, except in high summer.

Why do I stay here?

Because he was sheriff. Because he didn’t have any other place to go.

No, wrong. There was a place. But not, somehow, the energy to reach it. He always blamed it on his age. He’d be 46, next birthday.

He put his bare feet on the old crocheted rug beside the bed. His tin-plated clock showed half past six. He shuddered going to the window, where he lifted the blind and gazed with despair on the frozen mud and dirty snow piles along the main street. Above the false fronts and shoddy cottages of the town, the Sierra ramparts looked down, heartless as gravestones, and just as cold.

Downstairs, he heard loud, excited voices. An ore wagon creaked past in the street, traces jingling in the frosty air. It had snowed night before last. A howler of a storm, a foot or more dumped on the trails and high passes. He stood scratching his paunch, which had lately grown till it was impossible to ignore, and wondered about the hurrah below. Sure didn’t sound like the normal conversation of the snatch-and-grab breakfast table …

The drab furnished room depressed him unbearably. He sat on the edge of the bed, arms crossed, hands tucked in his armpits, and hung his head. He’d been having a dream, all about home.

In the dream, the sky was cloudless and hot. The sea grape and palmetto stirred gently in the noon breeze. Little nervous sandpipers scurried up and down the sand, and hungry gray pelicans soared and dove for prey, splashing the bright smooth water of the Gulf into the air like flung sapphires. Sitting here, growing old in White Pass, he could feel the blessed heat of the Florida sun …

He thought about his boyhood and young manhood as he pulled on his worn pants and plaid shirt. He thought of picking up great clattery handfuls of shells on the beaches, and putting them in jars just because they were pretty. He thought of crabbing from an old skiff in Red Fish Pass, between two of the long narrow coastal keys. He’d had a decent enough business, clerking in the mercantile with the prospect of buying it when the owner gave it up. Why had he left? Why had he left the sunshine and slogged all the way out here to this?

With a curious look of contempt on his face, he touched the reason. A clipping from an Atlanta newspaper, years old, crackly and yellow. It was part of an article about Mr. Horace Greeley of the
New York Tribune.
He had underlined the famous charge of the journalist.
Go west, young man, and grow up with the country.

He was over 30 when he married. He’d courted Marthe Schiller, the teacher at a one-room schoolhouse in Hillsborough County, south of Tampa. Marthe was a sturdy, square-jawed woman of German descent, with eyes as blue as the Florida heavens; they relieved the severity of her face. He first admired Marthe because of her book-learning; he was poorly educated, leaving school eagerly at age 10. When love came, it came quickly, completely, generously: he wanted to find a much better existence for them. Although Florida was home, life there was a hardscrabble existence, in a beautiful but poor place to which man had added exactly nothing except towns that seemed to consist mostly of windowless shanties, impoverished farms populated by scrawny red cows, and the sad-eyed black folks who seemed all but abandoned by the world in the hovels you found at the end of nearly every sandy track into the scrub; abandoned, that is, until there was a need for bending the back in the pitiless sun doing work even the dirtiest, most ignorant white cracker wouldn’t touch. That was the real Florida if you looked at it with clear vision.

Greeley’s charge inspired him. It was inspiring a lot of Americans, single and married. He and his wife of one year set out for California. Eleven months later, marooned in White Pass by another snowstorm, Marthe died of influenza.

That was nine years ago. He was still here. Longing for Florida and somehow incapable of going back.

Maybe it was the responsibility. The job. Which he cared for as little as he cared for the town. He picked up the yellow metal star with the word Sheriff stamped in, and pinned it on his plaid shirt with a little puff of his lips, as though he’d just tasted something bad.

He walked downstairs and turned into the dining room, where the Widow Thorne’s three other boarders of the moment were already ravaging the plates of eggs, thick tough sowbelly slabs, fresh baking powder biscuits. “Morning, Lou,” said Bill Toombs, the recent widower who ran the hardware. “Morning, sheriff,” said a man who stopped for a night every month or so; a drummer with a handlebar mustache and showy Burnside whiskers. Lou Hand greeted both of them, then the 13-year-old boy, Will Pertwee, who sat at the end of the table, watching him with a peculiar intensity.

“Sheriff, did you hear?” Will asked. He was a shock-haired kid; an orphan. Jesse gave him room and board in exchange for his work around the place.

The door to the kitchen opened. Jesse Thorne looked in, rosy-faced in the heat rolling out in blessed waves from the unseen stove.

“More coffee here? Why, good morning, Lou. Sleep well?”

“No, I nearly froze. I’m getting old, Jesse. Blood’s too thin.”

“If you got thin blood, a place at this altitude ain’t no good,” announced the drummer. Lou shot him a look as if to say, Tell me something I’ve not heard before.

Will Pertwee was practically jumping out of his chair. “Sheriff, did you hear, or didn’t you?”

“Hear what?”

“About the gent who came to town last night. Walked in ’cause he had to shoot his horse up at Five Mile Wash. It’s Bob Siringo.”

Bill Toombs was watching him, resting his fork in the gooey yellow residue of his eggs. The Widow Thorne looked stricken, noticeably pale; even women knew the name of the notorious gunman who had been through trials for murder at least four times, had done a stretch in Nevada Territorial Prison, and was said to have done away with up to a dozen enemies.

“How do you know it’s Bob Siringo?” Lou Hand said with a deadly heaviness filling his belly, where only a moment before there had been the first pleasurable and diffuse warmth produced by Jesse’s strong coffee.

“Well, I don’t,” Will said with a grin, as if he knew very well what the whole conversation implied for Lou. “But he sure
looks
like Bob Siringo. I mean, he’s a ringer for that drawing on the dodger hanging in your office.”

Lou swallowed. “And where is the man?”

“Staying at the Congress Hotel.” Will Pertwee leaned so far forward, his chin nearly upset his glass of buttermilk. “Guess you’ll have to look him up and see he behaves, huh?”

“Not necessarily,” Lou said. “Not if he is behaving.”

It came to him that, in his customary fashion, he’d left his .44-40 Frontier Model Colt and gunbelt hanging on the bedpost, where he always kept them. That was his morning routine, to walk downstairs for breakfast without the gun. Other times, it was of no importance. This morning the absence of the familiar pressure against his thigh seemed of keen, even dangerous significance.

Jesse Thorne gave him a long, quizzical look. She was a heavy, handsome woman, ten years younger, with red-gold hair and large slightly tilted gray eyes. She had a soft, billowy breast; Lou had always fancied the buxom kind.

Jesse was self-educated, and religious in a quiet way. She read the Bible every evening before she retired, but he hadn’t learned this until they’d been acquainted for over a year. She wasn’t prudish, though. She loved to dance, and play cards, and mix up a rum toddy on cold nights. She didn’t belong to a regular church, no doubt because they’d have scorned her, and her habits, as un-Christian.

Lou and Jesse often shared cups of hot tea of an evening, when White Pass was quiet—as it usually was—and they enjoyed playing hands of rummy once or twice a week. In the all too short season of warmth, they walked in the high meadows and occasionally had a picnic supper on a Sunday evening. Now Jesse gave him that long, level look full of anxious concern. “Lou, could I see you privately a moment?”

With a nervous, unconscious brush at the lock of oiled hair carefully curled over his forehead in the fashionable mode, Lou exchanged the table for the hot haven of the kitchen. There he was warm, actually warm, for the first time since arising. The kitchen, old but spacious, smelled of flour, and skillet grease, and all the good odors of the best part of a home.

“Do you think it’s really Bob Siringo?”

“I don’t know, Jesse.”

“If it is, will he cause trouble?”

“Don’t see why he should. Maybe he’s simply passing through.”

“Won’t you have to find out? Talk to him?”

“Not unless he causes a ruckus. The morning will tell, I imagine.”

“Well, I just wanted to say—” She cleared her throat while avoiding his eye. “You’re my dear friend, and a good sheriff. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.”

“Oh, I don’t think it will.” It was a hope, not a certainty. He was frightened. After Marthe died, his ambition for heading on down to California had died too, and in those first dull-headed, glaze-eyed weeks after his wife’s burial, he’d accepted the offer of old Sheriff Jeffords, who needed a deputy because his previous one, Neddy Wattle, had died. In bed. Of old age.