My Calamity Jane Read online

  “What’s it like working with Frank Butler?” one asked.

  Annie groaned.

  “You must have a very close relationship by now,” another said. “But how close?”

  Annie glanced over her shoulder, where she could see Frank pause his sweeping and lean over to say something to Jane. He did not look at Annie.

  “Well?” the young woman asked. “How close?”

  Not as close as Annie had thought. Not as close as she wanted to be.

  The truth of that feeling bloomed in her stomach, and then sank with the understanding that Frank was (probably) being cold to her for a reason, and she didn’t know him nearly well enough to be able to guess what that reason might be. Except . . . she did know the Wild Bill’s Wild West was his great love, and she had just received an immense round of applause on the stage he’d worked so hard to build.

  Was he . . . jealous? Threatened?

  “You’ll have to ask him how close we are,” Annie said with a wink, even though a sharp pain sliced through her heart. She’d liked him. Really liked him. She’d been ready to kiss him, after all, and then he’d pulled away. Now, here he was—well, over there, but you know what we mean—feeling threatened by her success simply because she was a girl. Didn’t her success make the show’s prospects better for everyone?

  Some of the young ladies groaned. “Annie, please. He’ll never tell us. All he does is sign autographs and say nice things about our hair, and then he goes off with Wild Bill and Calamity Jane.”

  Annie shrugged. “Then I guess you’ll never know. But I will tell you this.” She leaned forward. The young women leaned forward, too. “There’s no business like show business.”

  “Miss Annie!” A reporter pushed his way through the throng of young women. “We want a photo for the paper!”

  Annie lifted her rifle to rest on her shoulder and smiled as the camera flashed, and she blinked away stars.

  “What’s it like performing with Wild Bill’s Wild West?” the reporter asked, pencil poised over a notebook. “Where did you grow up? How did you learn to shoot like that? And what’s your last name?”

  Annie worked through the assault of questions, starting to answer the last one first, but she paused.

  Mama and Grandpap Shaw didn’t approve of her joining the show. Her sisters and brother were supportive, but still, she needed to protect them from newspapers and anyone else who might bother them. They liked their privacy.

  She couldn’t give the reporter the name Mosey. She needed a different name for the stage. Something strong and memorable, but mostly something meaningful to her.

  She’d been thinking about that elderly man from the train lately, the one who’d reminded her that people could be kind and compassionate, the one who’d cared for her when he had every right to take her back to the Wolves after learning she’d run away.

  Annie wanted to be like that: good-hearted and thoughtful, helping people who weren’t as fortunate as her.

  “Well?” asked the reporter.

  “Oakley,” she said. “My name is Annie Oakley.”

  NINETEEN

  Jane

  “Get in there, girl,” her pa said, pushing her. Jane did as she was told. (Although her name wasn’t Jane but Martha, and this was obviously a dream, since she hadn’t been Martha for a while.) She scurried into the house and took a quick look around: Lena was at the stove making dinner, a stew made of mostly onions. Elijah was nowhere to be seen, probably off begging or stealing, she didn’t even want to know. Silas was coughing. (Silas was always coughing.) Hannah was sleeping, because Hannah could sleep through anything, and Sarah Beth was crying, because that, too, is what Sarah Beth always did.

  But at least the moon wasn’t talking to her. It had been haunting her dreams a lot, lately.

  Her pa shuffled in behind her and slammed the door. His cheeks were red, his eyes bloodshot and swollen-looking. Her heart sank. He was fall-down drunk. Again. “What is that you’re wearing?” he slurred.

  “One of your shirts.” She did not mention that she was also wearing a pair of boys’ breeches that she’d stolen off a clothesline a few houses over.

  “You’re dressing up as a boy?”

  “So I can do the manly work. I’m strong enough.” She dug into her pocket and produced a handful of coins. “I can muck stalls and dig ditches and run a message across town twice as fast as any dumb boy. I made almost a dollar today.”

  “You’re a little girl,” he said with sadness in his voice. “You should be at school. Not digging ditches.”

  She nodded. They should all be going to school, but then who would take care of things?

  Her pa reached for the money, but she pulled her hand back. “We’re buying flour for bread. Butter. Some cloth to make Lena a dress.” Lena had been wearing their mother’s old dresses, which were far too big and bold for Lena, and Jane couldn’t stand to look at them one more day.

  Her pa grabbed her wrist and slowly uncurled her fingers from around the coins.

  “Don’t,” she said, but he did anyway. “You’ll just drink it up.”

  His expression darkened. “I’m doing the best I can, girl.”

  “It’s not good enough. We’re hungry.” She glared up at him.

  “It’s not my fault,” he growled. “I didn’t ask to be stuck here with a half-dozen children.”

  “We didn’t ask it, neither,” she retorted. “But it’s your job, seeing as you’re our pa.”

  “I don’t got a job no more,” he said.

  She took this to mean he’d lost his position at the livery, which he’d only been working at for a month.

  “Why can’t you keep a job for more than two minutes?” she accused him.

  “The boss didn’t like me.”

  Jane shook her head. “It’s because of the gawl-darned wolf.”

  He went still. “What did you say?”

  “The wolf you got inside you. Like Ma did that night she—” Jane swallowed, but then pressed on. “The wolf makes you drink. You got to stop drinking, Pa. You got to keep a job.”

  “The drinking’s the only thing that makes the wolf bearable.” His eyes narrowed. “Don’t you talk that way, girl, like you think you’re better than me. You’re too much like your ma.”

  “I am not,” Jane protested. Her ma had been a hard woman, the kind of mother who would laugh if you skinned your knee instead of kissing it better. Jane had loved Charlotte Canary, because she couldn’t seem to help it, but she didn’t want to turn out like her. “Take it back. I’m not like Ma.”

  “You are. Putting on airs. Telling me what to do. You think you’re special, but you’re nothing. You’ll always be nothing. You’re lucky I ain’t already turned you out on the street. You look like a street rat, right enough.”

  A lump rose in Jane’s throat. She knew he was right—she was nothing. If for no other reason than because he’d said so. But instead of crying, she launched herself at her father, fists flailing, screaming loud enough to make Lena drop her spoon into the soup, and make Silas stop coughing, and wake up Hannah, and cause Sarah Beth to cry all the harder.

  “Take it back!” Jane roared. “Take it back!”

  He pushed her off so hard she slid across the floor to the far wall. The wolf in him rose to the surface, stretching his shoulders wide and hunching his back unnaturally. His fingers curled into claws. His eyes turned golden.

  Jane went still, all her bravery vanishing like smoke.

  Her pa stumbled away and breathed deep until he came back to himself. Then he said, “Get out, girl, and don’t come back.”

  It was almost a relief to hear those words. She’d been expecting this. So she shoved out the door and into the street. She could hear Lena and Sarah Beth bawling inside, but she didn’t let that stop her. She simply ran and ran, faster than any boy in town, until she came to the sheriff’s office.

  She’d had a run-in or two with the sheriff in the past year, and it hadn’t been pleasant,
but she thought he was honest. He was sitting at his desk, chatting with a tall man with curls and a big black hat, and a silver star on his chest.

  She didn’t ask who the second man was. She just said what she’d been practicing, over and over in her head for weeks.

  “I’d like to report a garou,” she said. “A bad one.”

  The words that changed it all.

  Jane opened her eyes to moonlight on the wall. She could see the moon outside the window, like it was looking in on her. It was almost full.

  “Not yet,” she whispered. “Not yet.”

  In the bed on the other side of the room, Annie was sleeping, hard, by the sound of it, her breathing deep and even. Jane got up quietly and went to the basin on the dresser to splash cold water on her hot face. In the mirror her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were bloodshot and swollen. But that’s not what Jane noticed when she looked at her reflection.

  What she noticed was this: she’d grown a mustache. Overnight. And her eyebrows were bushier. And the backs of her hands.

  She clapped one hairy hand over her mouth, then turned to check on Annie.

  Still sleeping. Probably dreaming about hunting garou. The girl was surprisingly bloodthirsty when it came to wolf people. Which was going to be a problem, seeing as Jane was fast becoming a wolf person.

  Jane rummaged in the top drawer for an old bandanna and tied it around her face, then hurriedly got dressed. She could see in the dark, she realized, as easily as she could see in the daytime, maybe even better. One good thing about becoming a garou, it occurred to her, was that she’d be able to sneak in and out of places more easily. A useful skill. Now she could be as quiet as a dog’s fart, silent but deadly, a whisper in the—

  BAM. She banged her big toe on the footboard of her bed—loudly, and hard enough that it would surely be bruised come morning. Her eyes watered. She blinked over at her roommate.

  Annie didn’t wake.

  Jane sighed in relief and put her boots on (which hurt, gawl-dang). Then she crept to the window. She pulled it open and stepped carefully onto the roof of the hotel—the room she shared with Annie was on the second floor. From there she climbed down to hang off the edge of the roof until she let go and dropped like a sack of potatoes onto the street. Something twanged in her ankle (the other one from the hurt toe). Jane couldn’t help it—she swore up a blue streak that would have had your grandma looking for the soap. Then, once she’d determined that the ankle wasn’t broken, she got to her feet and glanced up again at the window.

  No light. No movement. She was clear.

  Jane stuffed her hat onto her head and hobbled off down the street.

  (We’d like to pause here to reflect that it would have been a great deal easier for Jane to have simply gone out the door of the hotel room and down the stairs and exited via the front door. It was the dead of night by this point and fairly quiet. But Jane thought of herself as sneaking out, and in order to sneak out a person had to go in a sneakier fashion than merely using the door.)

  She made her way straight to her favorite saloon. At first the barkeep was quite alarmed on account of the bandanna around her face and how folks didn’t much wear bandannas around their faces unless they were planning to ride somewhere dusty or rob somebody, but then he recognized her and poured her a whiskey.

  After a shot or two, she didn’t feel the mustache anymore. The hair on her hands was gone, too.

  “Say, you don’t happen to know when the moon is going to be full?” she asked the barkeep when she felt it was safe to talk again.

  He shook his head. “Sorry.”

  She thought again about her pa. She hadn’t meant to get him killed. She’d only wanted him to change—to be better than what he was. To take care of them. She hadn’t wanted to become like her ma, and now she was turning out just like her pa. “I’m sorry, too,” she murmured.

  “Full moon starts tomorrow,” said a voice, and of course, there was Jack McCall, sitting a few stools down, smiling his persistent smile.

  Jane found she didn’t even have the energy to give him a hard time about the way he always turned up out of nowhere. “Hullo, there, Jack.”

  “Hullo, Jane.” He slid down to sit beside her.

  “How do you know when the moon is going to be full?”

  He stared at her blankly, as if he didn’t understand the question. He was a mite puny in the thinker and trigger-happy—that was the essence of Jack McCall.

  “Because I am a garou hunter. That’s what I am. Yep.”

  Jane accepted this answer. “Full moon tomorrow, you say?”

  “Yep.”

  Shoot. She was out of time. “Shoot.”

  “Shoot what?” he asked. “Are you all right? No one’s bothering you, are they? Because I’ll give them what for.” He seemed to genuinely like Jane, accepting her as she was without judging, so she sort of liked him back. And right now he seemed downright concerned.

  “I just meant shoot as in, that’s a shame,” she slurred. “Seeing as I have a . . . friend, see . . . who was recently . . . bit by a garou . . . and the full moon is bad news.”

  “That does sound bad,” he agreed, but then he appeared to have an idea. He dug around in his pockets for a minute. “I got an idea,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “This.” He pulled out a crumpled pamphlet and slapped it down on the bar. “This could help your . . . friend.”

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “It’s about the cure.”

  “The what now?”

  “The cure for the garou.”

  She snorted. “There ain’t no cure for the garou. Everybody knows that.”

  “Yeah, but there is. Some person off in Deadwood has been curing garou left and right. It’s a special injection, and they stab it into a woof, and the woof ain’t a woof no more.”

  “Get out,” said Jane.

  Jack McCall got up and started for the door.

  He really wouldn’t know dung from wild honey, she thought. She waved him back. “No, I mean, not get out, get out, but I don’t believe you.”

  He scratched behind his ear. “I wouldn’t have believed it either, but I saw it with my own two eyes.”

  “You’ve been to Deadwood?”

  Jane had been hearing about Deadwood, largely as a place men went to try to get rich off some new gold that had been found in the Black Hills. It was out in the Dakota Territory, a town that wasn’t technically part of these United States seeing as how it was in Indian land (more on that later), and as such didn’t play by the regular rules. It had always sounded to Jane like her kind of place.

  Jack McCall nodded. “I was there, right before I came to be here. I saw a man turn into a garou, and then they gave him the shot—the cure—and he went back to being a regular man. Garou no more.”

  Jane felt dizzy at the thought. “Garou no more.”

  Jack McCall smiled. “So you tell your . . . friend to get herself to Deadwood, lickety-split. Get the cure. And then everything will be all right.”

  “Deadwood.” Jane stood up unsteadily.

  “Hey, why don’t you take this?” Jack McCall pushed the pamphlet into Jane’s hand. She pressed it to her chest.

  “Thanks, Jack. I gotta go see about something just now,” she said, and lurched off toward the exit. And after she was gone, Jack McCall kept on smiling. Because he had done exactly what he’d been sent to do.

  On the way back to the hotel she tripped over a dog on the boardwalk, which almost sent Jane sprawling face-first into the mud.

  “Hey, I’m walking here!” she said to the dog.

  And then the funniest thing happened. The dog said, Sorry sorry sorry with a wag of his tail. Then the dog said: My master said, Stay, so I am staying, because my master said, Stay. He is a good and smart master.

  The dog was talking to her. With its mind.

  That was new.

  “Uh, okay, then I’m the one who’s sorry,” Jane said. “I’m sure your
master is good and smart. You stay right there.”

  I know a joke, said the street dog. A squirrel walks up to a tree and says, “I forgot to store acorns for the winter and now I am dead.” It’s funny because the squirrel gets dead.

  Jane roared with laughter. “That’s a good one!” she cried. “Good dog!”

  The dog’s tail thumped against the boardwalk. I just met you but I love you.

  She scratched the dog behind the ears. The feel of the fur under her fingers reminded her of something. Something hair-related.

  Oh, yeah.

  “I gotta run,” she said, and strode off toward the hotel.

  Two minutes later she was standing in front of the door of Edwina Harris’s room. She checked for a mustache, but the skin under her nose was smooth. Hands, smooth. Eyebrows of the normal amount. She blew into her hand to check her breath, which bore the smell of whiskey. But that couldn’t be helped.

  She gathered her courage, and knocked.

  A few minutes later Winnie opened the door wearing a gray dressing gown, her long pale hair braided over one shoulder. She looked bleary with sleep, and Jane remembered that it was the middle of the night.

  “Sorry, I can come back in the morning,” she said.

  “No, it’s all right. Come in.”

  Jane went in. For a minute, she stood silently, staring at the floor, trying to find the proper way into this important conversation, but then she thrust the paper at Winnie and said, “What does this mean to you?”

  Winnie took the paper and went over to the nightstand to retrieve her spectacles. She put them on and sat down on the edge of the bed to read the pamphlet. “This is about the cure for werewolfism.”

  So it was true. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.”

  Winnie’s voice became gentle. “Can’t you read this yourself?”

  Jane kept her eyes focused on the floor. “Never learned. Do you think it’s true?”

  “I don’t know. I would have to investigate. I have heard some rumors about garou flocking to the Dakotas. I assumed it was because the laws concerning garou don’t apply there.”

  Jane nodded. “What else does it say?”