My Calamity Jane Read online

  “Oh, right.” Annie scratched her head. “So . . .”

  Frank sighed. “I think I should get to the point.”

  “The point being that Jane is going to Deadwood and we’re all going after her, with the exception of Mr. Utter,” Annie said.

  “The point being that you’re no longer necessary in Wild Bill’s Wild West,” said Frank.

  It took Annie a moment to register those words. Then:

  “What?” Annie quickly covered her mouth. “Sorry,” she said, her voice muffled behind her hands. “I think I have a concussion. Did you say I’m fired?”

  “I said it more nicely than that, but in essence—”

  “Why?” Annie glanced around the room, as though she might find something to help her cause, but the only things she found were her gun, her pillow, and the shiny pink rock Jane (apparently) had left in place of Annie’s ten dollars. She grabbed the pillow and brandished it at him. “Is this because Jane is gone? Or because you’re jealous that the papers like me better?”

  “I’m not jealous!” Annoyance tinged Frank’s tone. “And they don’t like you better. It’s just that you’re new and different.”

  Annie scowled. “You’re different, and I’m not fired.”

  He shrugged. “Look, Annie, I’m sorry. I was hoping it would work out, but I don’t think you’re a good fit for the group.”

  Annie’s scowl deepened, and she clutched the pillow so hard her knuckles whitened. “What does Mr. Hickok think?” The question ground out of her.

  Frank eyed the pillow warily. “I’m afraid Bill and I are on the same page.”

  “He’s not even here. How can he be on the same page?”

  “We talked about this before I came over. And he agrees that you’re not a good fit for the group. Remember, he voted against you to begin with. And now I’m afraid I have to change my vote.”

  Why did people think they were allowed to change their votes? “You can’t change your vote.”

  “You don’t make the rules.”

  “Someone has to make rules, and you’re not doing a good job with it. So I’ll make the rules, and I say the first vote stands.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “Yes! I’m in, and that’s final.”

  Frank threw up his hands in exasperation. “Stop trying to change the rules. You’re out of the group, Annie.”

  “Didn’t you see me in the show? They loved me. They really, really loved me.”

  “Maybe so,” Frank said, his voice more even now, “but as you know, the show isn’t the only thing we do. We also hunt garou.”

  “And I’m good at that!” Well, she assumed she was, since she was good at most things.

  “Yes,” he said. “You’re good at that, too. But you have the wrong attitude about it.”

  “How?” Her voice went embarrassingly shrill. “I have a great attitude. I have the best attitude of anyone in my whole family.”

  He closed his eyes and exhaled slowly. “You hate garou.”

  “Oh, should I love them? They’re monsters!”

  He took a step back as though she’d hit him. “That’s the problem right there, Annie. You think they’re monsters. I think they’re people.”

  “How can they be? They change into wolves and they eat livers and they go around biting real people to make other garou.”

  “Real people?” Frank asked. “Real people?”

  “Yes, real people!”

  “You don’t think garou are real people?”

  “No! They’re cruel, awful creatures.” Tears stung her eyes. Why was he being like this?

  His voice rose, too. “Then you don’t think I’m a person.”

  “What?”

  “I’m a garou!”

  “What?” She could barely ask the question. All the air had been sucked out of her.

  Frank’s eyes went wide as he seemed to realize what he’d just admitted. And to her. But the words were out, and he repeated them carefully so there was no mistaking them. “I’m a garou.”

  “No, you’re not.” Now she spoke in a whisper, unable to stop herself from stepping away. Her hands shook, and the pillow—which she’d intended to hurl at him later—dropped to the floor. “You can’t be.” Everything was spinning, and in spite of the morning sun pouring through the window, a sharp chill crawled over her arms and cheeks and throat. Suddenly, she couldn’t breathe right; air kept getting stuck in her shut-tight throat, because if she could breathe, then she could scream, and if she screamed, then the Wolves would be angry and—

  “Well, I am,” Frank was saying, oblivious to Annie’s terror, “and the fact that you suddenly think I’m a monster when you didn’t five minutes ago is exactly why you aren’t a good fit for this team. The problem is you, Annie. It’s not me. You’re not as nice of a person as you think you are.”

  With that, Frank turned and strode out of the room.

  The door slammed, and Annie collapsed to the floor.

  Annie didn’t move for three hours. Well, she did move, but it was mostly small shudders from her crying and full-body quakes as she recalled the terror she’d experienced every day for two years at the hands of the Wolf family. They were monsters.

  And Frank was apparently one of them. Sweet, kind, funny Frank.

  He couldn’t be a wolf. Clearly he’d been mistaken. Confused. Maybe it was a phase. But why would he say he was a garou if it wasn’t true? No one would admit to that unless they were sure.

  Frank wasn’t like anyone in the Wolf family, but if he was a garou . . .

  A hollow pit of uncertainty formed in Annie’s stomach. Maybe she needed to talk to him again. But no, she couldn’t, because he thought she was a horrible person for hating garou, and anyway, he was on his way to Deadwood.

  Wait, he was on his way to Deadwood because of Jane? Why was Jane going to Deadwood? What was happening with Jane? Annie hadn’t even had a chance to ask. Some best friend she was.

  Then again, Jane had stolen ten dollars. Maybe Annie didn’t know Jane as well as she’d thought, either.

  After a while, Annie realized that huddling on the floor would get her nowhere. She’d been fired, and she had only two dollars and fifty cents (and a pink rock) to her name, which meant she needed to get a job so that she could get home.

  And then what?

  The idea of returning home was crushing. After everything she’d given up to come here, Mama and Grandpap Shaw would say they’d been right all along.

  But it wasn’t that Annie couldn’t do the show. She was good at the show. It was that Frank was a garou and somehow she was the problem.

  You’re not as nice of a person as you think you are, he’d said.

  She pushed that away.

  First things first. She needed to find a job and get enough money to have options besides walking all the way back home.

  Annie washed her face and headed out to the post office. With the outrageous prices they charged for stamps (three cents, people), they surely had enough money to hire her.

  “We’re not hiring anyone,” said the man at the counter. “But we do have mail for you.”

  “You do?”

  “Annie Mosey?”

  Her chest squeezed up. She’d been Annie Oakley for only a day, believing that changing her name would change her life, but even that was gone now. “Yes,” she said.

  The man passed an envelope to her, and her heart sank. It was the one she’d sent to her family, addressed to them, with her return address here in Cincinnati. “I don’t understand.”

  “It was refused,” the man said. “So it was returned.”

  “Refused?”

  He nodded. “Yep. Made it there, then got refused, and came right back. Do you know how much money returned mail costs us?”

  “And that’s why you can’t give me a job?” But she didn’t care about the job anymore. She was busy staring at her letter, the words return to sender scrawled on the ba
ck.

  A lump formed in her throat as she imagined Mama scowling down at the envelope and then thrusting it back at the postman in disgust.

  Annie had officially been abandoned by everyone she cared about. Frank and Mr. Hickok had left her. Jane had left (and robbed!) her in the middle of the night. And now her family wouldn’t even take her letters.

  Or her money.

  Annie tore open the envelope to find the hundred-dollar bill she’d won in the contest. It was enough to get her wherever she wanted to go, but where was that?

  She couldn’t go home. She might have been able to endure the shame of getting fired, but now, with this stinging rejection in her hands, she knew she had no place there anymore. Her family didn’t want her.

  Frank and the Wild West show didn’t want her.

  You’re not as nice of a person as you think you are.

  Gah! Why why did she keep thinking about that? And why had that been the last thing he said to her?

  What if it was true?

  Annie turned her thoughts to Jane. Yes, Jane had robbed her, but she was the only person who hadn’t rejected her. And there was the matter of that ten dollars and this shiny pink rock. Surely Jane wanted that rock back. Annie wanted her ten dollars back.

  And if Deadwood just so happened to be where Frank was going, too . . .

  Nope. Annie was going to Deadwood for Jane.

  She’d help Jane with whatever Jane’s problem was, and maybe Jane would have some insight as to what to do about Frank. If anything. Jane could talk him into letting Annie back into the show.

  You’re not as nice of a person as you think you are.

  It was like a song she couldn’t get out of her head, even though he was the garou all of a sudden. Him. He was the problem, not her.

  Annie gave a heavy sigh and pushed out of the post office.

  All right. She had to get to Deadwood. The train was gone for the day, but there was more than one way to get to the middle of nowhere.

  Back at the Bevis House, Annie gathered her belongs and settled her account with Mr. Frost. Then she went to the livery. Black Nell, Mr. Ed, and Bullseye were all gone. But Charlie’s horse was still there, as well as Silver, the cranky-looking donkey.

  She looked between Charlie’s horse and Silver, then back again.

  Silver let out a long, squeaky fart.

  Holding her breath until the stink cleared, Annie saddled Charlie’s horse. But she wasn’t a thief (unlike her only friend Jane, who was totally the reason Annie was going to Deadwood), so Annie picked through the change she’d gotten from Mr. Frost and tacked a five-dollar bill to the back of the stall.

  Then she was on her way to Deadwood—and, um, Jane. Yeah. Definitely going for Jane.

  PART TWO

  Deadwood

  (In which all heck breaks loose.)

  Mid-Logue

  If this story were a movie and not a book, this would be the part where you’d see a map of the Old West circa 1876, with a dotted line that starts at Cincinnati and follows our characters from Ohio to what is now South Dakota. Annie, because she was the most direct person, took the most direct route: her dotted line was a train from Cincinnati to Chicago, and then from Chicago to Bismarck, North Dakota, and then a long and dusty 242-mile trail that stretched from Bismarck to Deadwood. This was “the fast way,” but then the wagon Annie was riding in got a broken axle. Then they lost half their supplies crossing a river and had to stop and hunt for a while to make up for it. Then there were a bunch of folks who came down with dysentery and a bunch of other folks who got bitten by snakes. Then the oxen just keeled right over and died. So the fast way wasn’t really that fast.

  Jane, on the other hand, had never taken the fast way in her life. True, she wanted to get to Deadwood and be cured of the garou, and the sooner she accomplished that, the sooner she could be back with Bill and the gang, doing the show again, and everything could go back to—if not exactly normal, then the way it had been before. Jane took the train to Chicago also, earlier than Annie did, but in Chicago Jane blew through the rest of Annie’s ten dollars in less than a week, and therefore she had to stop here and there to work for some more cash before moving on. So Jane’s dotted line to Deadwood was a mess of wiggles and curlicues, through some of the most rough-and-tumble places in the Old West, like Dodge (but Jane got the heck out of there), Kansas City, and the seedier parts of Nebraska.

  Bill and Frank took the train to Chicago, too, and afterward their dotted line simply followed Jane’s. They always juuuust missed her, and eventually they lost her trail. So they gave up the chase and proceeded on toward Deadwood, where they figured they’d eventually run into their friend.

  All this to say, all three of our heroes made their separate ways to Deadwood, where coincidentally (or just because it makes things simpler for us) they all arrived in town at roughly the same time.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Jane

  Jane was so close she could practically taste it. (We’re pretty sure Deadwood tastes like a mix of mud and whiskey, which would have been fine by Jane.) At long last she found herself in Crook City, which was only about eleven miles outside of Deadwood. Of course she didn’t have anywhere near a hundred dollars saved up (or, cough, anything saved up), but she’d figure things out when she got there.

  Along the way she’d found work as a scout, sometimes, and a messenger, at others, but as a bullwhacker, mostly. This was a job in which a person used a bullwhip (because Jane’s skills in this area were, well, legendary) to drive animals down a trail. Along this particular stretch of road Jane had been driving a team of oxen pulling a wagon of wannabe miners, every single one of them sure he was going to get stinking rich on Black Hills gold.

  There were garou among them, too, Jane suspected, on their way to Deadwood for the same reason she was. Every time there was a full moon a few of the men disappeared during the night. Herself included.

  There was a full moon rising tonight, in fact. After seeing herself through a few of them, Jane could actually feel the full moon coming on. Every month it was the same. Jane did her best to keep to Bill’s “SO YOU’RE A WEREWOLF—NOW WHAT?” guidelines. She found a safe place to stash herself—a room where no one would bother her, or, in tonight’s case, a big tree a few miles away from town. She’d prepare for the change—she’d clear a room of breakables, for instance, and test the strength of the chains she’d bought that first night on her own to make sure there wasn’t a weak link. She’d lock herself up as tight as she could manage. And then she’d wait.

  She never remembered much about the nights she spent as a wolf. She always woke up sore and itchy, her throat dry, her wrists and ankles marked by the chains. But she hadn’t hurt anyone, which counted for a lot.

  She’d felt the moon coming all day. Her body felt bloated and tender in places. She’d developed a painful spot on one side of her nose. (Spots, dear reader, is the old-fashioned word for pimples, which means that Jane was experiencing your typical teenage breakout. Although maybe it’s not so typical, seeing as she’s a character in a young adult novel, but we’re just going to put it out there: Jane had a zit.) She was cranky and craving something salty. That’s when she figured out it wasn’t only the garou stuff she’d been suffering from, but another condition that befell Jane every twenty-eight days or so. Especially in the Old West, this part of being a girl kind of sucked.

  But the moon was still coming, so she headed out to the designated tree well before sundown to chain herself up. The next thing she knew, she was waking up in the middle of Main Street naked as a jay, right as the sheriff was coming out of his house in search of his morning coffee. She was arrested on the spot for indecency and public drunkenness (although she hadn’t had that much to drink the night before, but she’d take it over any other explanation) and thrown in the Crook City jail.

  This was a problem, seeing as the full moon is a three-night affair and she’d only made it through night number one.

  “You got
a cell way in the back, away from the prying eyes?” Jane asked the sheriff. “I don’t want to be disturbed tonight.”

  He gazed at her thoughtfully. “You a woof, then?”

  Her breath caught. “I’d appreciate if that didn’t become common knowledge,” she replied. “I haven’t hurt anyone . . . have I?” Because she’d been loose last night. Who knows what might have happened?

  “Not that I’m aware,” he said.

  She let out a sigh of relief.

  “You’re headed to Deadwood to get yourself sorted out?” he asked.

  “Yessir.”

  He stroked his beard in a way that reminded her of Bill. “I don’t know if I believe in this cure business. But I guess it’s worth a try. I do happen to have a cell way in the back. You can be a guest there until the next party comes through that’s headed to Deadwood, and then go along with them.”

  She nodded. “Thank you, sir.”

  She spent all afternoon in that cell in the back, glad for the solitude and the strength of the iron bars. She slept off and on. She had another dream. This one of her mother.

  The dream was born from a bit of a memory from when Jane was four or five. Her mother was in one of her gentler moods and teaching Jane to ride, sitting behind her and showing her how to balance on the horse’s back.

  A good dream. Her ma’s hands guiding Jane’s hands on the reins.

  Her ma’s voice in Jane’s ear.

  “You’re a natural,” she’d said that day. “You’re a natural horsewoman, Marthey.”

  But today, in this particular dream, her ma said, “Come to me, baby. Come on.”

  Which didn’t make no sense.

  Her ma was dead.

  Which led Jane to another series of memories, these ones not so good. Her mother’s rough laugh as her pa shouted at her not to be so careless—“If the neighbors find out, Char, we’ll get run out of town!”

  To which Ma said darkly, “Let ’em come.”

  They had gotten run out of that town, eventually. And the next town. And the next, until her pa had decided to move them out of Missouri for good and off to a fresh start. Which in this day and age meant going west.