“Courting Calamity.”
A free illustrated epilogue to Calamity.
When Mar Hickok inherits a leather-bound journal and a silver disc from her grandmother, she hits the road in search of her legendary ancestor—Calamity Jane—and the alien gunslinger who rode beside her. Across ghost towns and empty plains, Mar discovers she’s not the only one unearthing the secrets of the Wilder West … and may be trading one kind of danger for another.
The following novelette was originally distributed to Calamity readers and website visitors as a free epilogue.
Table of contents:
Chapter 1: Nashville, Tennessee
Chapter 2: Cheyenne, Wyoming
Chapter 3: Fort Casper, Wyoming
Chapter 4: Independence Rock and The Devil's Gate, Wyoming
Chapter 5: Piedmont, Wyoming
Chapter 1.
Nashville, Tennessee.
When Gram died, she left me a shitty car, an old-ass book, and a silver disc she always kept under her pillow. When Momma died, all she left me was a name.
Momma named me for a calamity. Or so she said. She lied as oft as not and not just to me. She was a train wreck, Momma was. But on this point, I believed her. Maybe because I was made during a one-night stand and I don’t think she ever knew the name of my daddy. I certainly never heard it, if she did. Or maybe was because I was born during a blizzard that shut the whole city down. One of those rare Southern snowstorms that crush whole swaths of Dixie under two inches of ice we call snow in our ignorance. Whatever the reason, Momma always told me I was named for Calamity Jane—the West’s favorite bad-ass bitch, she used to say. And like I said, on this point I guess I believed her.
Like Jane, I never used that old-lady name our moms gave us: Martha. Was a name school teachers and cops used on me from time to time. Not friends or lovers or anyone I cared to know. Sometimes my phone rings and an unknown voice asks for Martha Hickok and I tell them they’ve got the wrong fucking number. Ain’t no Martha here.
Momma had a beat up postcard of Calamity Jane she used to keep on the shade side of her car visor. Was all peeling and swollen around the edges and unevenly faded. I used to pluck it out from over the visor when Momma would leave me in the car while she was at work, trying to figure how that old lady in the picture got them boy clothes and a rifle. And what my great-great grandpa Bill Hickok saw in all that roughness. Wasn’t much of a lady in that picture for a little girl to see. Maybe more lady than I saw in my own Momma, sometimes. But there I was, eight years old sitting in some hot-ass car behind a bar, wondering what kind of girl becomes a woman like that.
After Momma died, I didn’t have to wait in the car anymore. Gram wouldn’t have allowed that. But I suppose the damage was done. Gram and PopPop did their damnedest to raise me proper. Even put me in one of them private schools where the girls wear skirts and the boys try to lift them. And maybe I turned out ok. I’ve got a decent job at one of those honky-tonks where the bands call out to the tourists all night, asking folks where they’re from and what for. Atlanta and Dallas and Louisville and Charlotte and wherever, they’ll answer back. But all I hear in those names are places maybe I should be instead of here.
Momma was run down in the middle of the street, stumbling drunk back toward the car where I was sleeping. More than half my lifetime ago. I just remember blue lights and some huge black man with the gentlest voice I ever heard. PopPop went a few years later, never quite the same after losing his little girl. His heart faded until one afternoon during a Titan’s game it just ran out. Gram was tough, though. She only got stronger with every loss until the time came I stepped out on my own. Was something about that sad smile she gave me when I hugged her in the doorway. Was like her labors were done and she could finally rest. And she did.
The house got split between me and my aunt who I’ve still never met. So that squared up my finances for a while. Gram still taking care of me, I guess. But the car? Shit. She should’ve scrapped that thing a long while back. Momma’s old car. Piece of shit of the first order, it is. I think it was a Honda back when badges still hung on the hood and the trunk. Must’ve been half a million miles on that thing. But still ran. Not purred, to be sure. But ran.
The book Gram left me was something I never held before but I’d seen more times than I can count. In those first months after Momma died, when Gram’s house seemed bigger and emptier than it ever had before, Gram used to sit on the edge of my bed with that book. Was a leather-bound thing and all hand writ on the inside in some flowing and fast cursive I couldn’t read. She used to flip through it, treating it gentle as one might a baby, and then close it tight, her hand pressed on the cover like some devotional. And then she’d tell me the most amazing bedtime stories. Stories of cowboys and Indians and of my namesake Calamity Jane, riding through some make-believe Wild West with a tall creature as fit to ride out of Star Wars as some Clint Eastwood picture. The Green Man, she called him. And that Jane didn’t have no momma either, not in those stories, but was a big wide world she rode through. And adventures she had, plenty. Gram was a great storyteller. Painted a hell of a picture for a little girl.
But truth be told, was the disc which interested me more. I remember standing in Gram’s bedroom, the little house all packed up around me, and slipping that disc out from under her pillow where I knew she kept it. A hundred times I’d seen her holding that disc with such reverent hands, a smile on her face, eyes closed as if they were dreaming. It was faceted on one side. About the size of a CD but much thicker. More like a coaster, maybe.
But smile as oft as she had holding that shiny thing, seemed just a piece of metal to me, right then. And a disappointing one, at that. For all the times I’d seen her draw it out and hold it with such love and tenderness—and for hours, sometimes—wasn’t anything I saw in it but my own reflection bouncing back like off some bug’s eye. But Gram loved it. So I would, too.
Scott—he’s one of those musicians that ask folks where they’re from in the honky-tonks—was helping me box up the house and he saw me holding that little disc. I didn’t know how to tell him what it was. But that night at the bar, when some tourist called out their far off hometown, was a loneliness hit me like I’d never felt before. Worse, even, than I felt those nights so long ago when Gram’s stories soothed my heartbreak. And Scott must’ve seen me sink all of a sudden, as I did, and he came over to me between sets and sat me at a table far in the back of the joint. Gave me a hug and a shot of rye and said a lot of things I didn’t hear. Was like the rest of the world left me at the end of a long tunnel and wasn’t a bit of sound or feeling that came down it.
At the end of the gig, he took me home and stayed over to make sure I was ok. Not sure I said anything to him the whole time.
When I woke the next morning, it was raining and was just the nasty alley bricks of the building across from mine that I could see through the window. Was winter outside and the cold was slicing through the closed window and my sheets, same as they weren’t there at all. But it just wasn’t in me to move.
Scott brought me coffee and I drank it. And sometime after lunch I finally sat up. Was just me in the bed. And that old leather book of Gram’s. Must’ve stared at it for ten minutes if a single second before picking it up. Gentle as I saw her handle it, too.
Was a hole in me wide enough to drive that piece of shit Honda through. Caressing that worn brown cover, I prayed was some story of the Green Man still on those pages to help fill it. Like it had when Momma left me. Like when Gram kept me from losing myself all those years ago.
The book was all writ in cursive. Hard as all hell to read. But I was surprised to see the book wasn’t a storybook like I expected. At least not like any I’d ever seen before. Was more like a journal or a notebook. On the first page—I never could make out the name of the fellow who wrote it all down, scrawled as his name was like some fancy John Hancock—was the stamp of some Buffalo newspaper I’ve never heard of. And was three long, dated entries which told of him meeting my namesake, Calamity Jane, in the summer of 1901. There were notes scrawled in the margins, too, saying he followed her back West from the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo to Deadwood, South Dakota.
Two days I sat there, in my bed, with that book. Read it cover to cover. And if Scott didn’t check in on me from time to time with a sandwich or some coffee, doubt I would’ve stopped to eat or drink at all. Only stopped one time when I’d read so much cursive for so long I gave myself a migraine. Looked up and it was three in the morning, music from the bars half-a-block away bleeding into the room. I pounded some Advil, slept for a few hours, and was back at it before the sun or Scott broke into my room the next morning.
When I was done, I walked out into my tiny, messy living room. Scott was asleep on the couch. Piles of laundry leaned against walls. Beer and whiskey bottles littered the room. Was dark again outside and through those windows I could see headlights passing through the rain.
Was raining the night Momma was hit.
Gram told me stories. Fairy tales. To put me back together again. But that old book? Those were interviews. Those told of real times and places and people. Was like being told Harry Potter was real and Hogwarts was a goddamn option. Out there was an alien cowboy and a lonely little girl who conquered the Wild West. It was all true. And here I was, heartbroke and lonesome with no family and no future and little at all to remind the world I was passing through it.
I was named for a calamity. And I’d become one. Just like Momma.
I woke up Scott. And seeing as I’d forgot to put on pants, he was a sight happy to see me up and about. But I told him to get dressed. That I needed his help.
We were going to Wyoming to look for the Green Man.
Chapter 2.
Cheyenne, Wyoming.
We were on the road out of Nashville before midnight and by sunrise we’d crossed five states. Scott had done his share of the driving through the night but we were both so exhausted when we stopped for breakfast at a diner in Lincoln, we ate with our heads halfway to napping on the slick linoleum tabletop. And with his head hung like that over some eggs and a steaming coffee, Scott admitted he didn’t really understand a bit of what we were doing so far from home at so ungodly an hour.
I took over the drive and spent the day leading us westward through Nebraska. This was already as far as I’d ever been from home. I didn’t know they even made states this big. So I passed the day telling Scott some of those stories Gram used to tell me. Stories of young Calamity Jane and her alien gunslinger, the Green Man. The stories that got me through the hardest time in my life.
I started by telling him one of my favorites. The one where Jane charges into battle alongside the Lakota Sioux. When Gram used to tell me this one, she used to make a big fuss of talking all rhythmically, like the braves did in those old John Wayne movies she grew up watching. That used to pull me right out of a funk, to the point of tears I’d laugh so hard as she stood beside the bed, channeling Red Cloud or Crazy Horse. Then she’d crouch down, telling Jane’s part of the story from my level, even as she raised her laser gun into the sky. Of course, Gram’s laser gun was a flashlight but that didn’t trouble me none. I was twelve. Not so old a flashlight couldn’t still play lightsaber or searchlight or cowboy laser gun if it needed to.
Of course, I wasn’t Gram. I didn’t have her way with the stories. And I’d read the journal—or transcript or interview or whatever that book was. I read the parts Gram skipped in tailoring the tale for a tween on the verge. But as I kept on with the telling, my versions got more exciting and animated. And I realized how much I still wanted to hold that laser, or to smear war paint on my cheeks, or to face down a Wild West villain. I still wanted to be a cowgirl. I’d just forgot.
I was telling him Gram’s old stories fast as I could remember them. There was the one where Jane and the Green Man shot up half of Cheyenne in a running gunfight, like something out of Desperado. Or Grand Theft Auto, I told Scott—turns out he’s not really into Westerns. And the one where she fought like a wild animal or all the ones where she and the Green Man argue like Lucy and Ricky with rifles.
I told him about the time Jane tangled with two different aliens and bested them both. And about the Green Man’s totally freaky psychic horse. And how that young Calamity Jane was every bit what I wanted to be when I was a girl. How she had this foul mouth and foul temper and a deadeye and didn’t take no shit. How she didn’t have any family or any friends except a loyal horse and her badass green cowboy to help her conquer all. She was just a little teenage girl in a bloody man’s world surrounded by posses and spaceships and everything that little teenage girls in the Wild West shouldn’t be any part of. But she always got by, whatever came her way. And how when I was a little teenage girl, myself, wasn’t too many times at all I could’ve heard stories like those.
I told him, too, about this one part I read for the first time just two nights before—a part Gram never read to me—where some thug tried to force himself on her. Tried and failed, thank God. It was an ugly scene and I had trouble telling it. And things were quiet in the car for a bit after we talked on that. Scott, I think, wasn’t sure what to say. And I didn’t want to say more. But I kind of wished Gram had read me that story a long time ago.
But I don’t think Scott saw what I saw in those stories. He made a fuss about aliens not being real and certainly not a part of the Wild West. And I don’t think he meant to, but he made me feel a little foolish.
No, I told him, I didn’t think we were going to drive across the border and find some green-skinned alien cowboy high on horseback any more than I thought we’d find a 160-year old Calamity Jane running a truck stop. But when I thought about how reverently Gram held that book, or about the details in the reporter’s transcript of his conversations with Jane—there had to be some kind of evidence, didn’t there? Something maybe only I’d be able to find? These were real places. These were real people. There must be some trace.
And all the while I was telling tales, I remember catching myself fidgeting with Gram’s disc. Scott asked about that, too, but I didn’t know what to say. I never knew what it was, but the book told that it was the Green Man’s. That it was something alien and that Jane cherished it just as much as Gram and PopPop had. That it had worked for her in a way I apparently couldn’t quite manage. And I don’t think I wanted to admit that last part, most of all.
Driving through Nebraska was a strange experience. It was lovelier than I expected and hinted sometimes at what I was hunting for. The Platte river—where farther upstream Jane once fought alongside those Sioux I was telling Scott about—snaked in and out of sight alongside the highway. And soon the farms and silos gave way to a distinctly barren, Western landscape. Nebraska rose underneath us like a mountain, becoming a moonscape as it climbed toward that high plateau called Wyoming.
It had snowed the week before and suddenly it was white every which way we looked. Except up. The sky was bigger and bluer than I’d ever seen it. Five thousand feet we rose in that last hour of driving—our ears popping all the while—with not a house or a barn or a tree or anything in sight except for the big rigs powering up the continent in my rearview.
If Gram were still alive, she’d call me a goddamn fool for driving up into the high plains in the dead of winter. Except she would’ve said it nicer. No less intensely, but nicer. And I’ll admit, about an hour into that uphill climb, nothing but wasteland in every direction and Momma’s piece of shit car rattling underneath me, I had second thoughts of my own. But here, entering this whole other world, I was also sure I’d made the right decision. Maybe just because it was my decision to make.
I don’t know what I expected as we crested the hills overlooking Cheyenne. But I certainly expected something bigger. The sun was low and red and I think if I’d blinked I would’ve missed Cheyenne. Except I didn’t miss it. I turned down some undulating road and over train tracks emblazoned with a ridiculously gigantic Union Pacific marque. I didn’t even know the Union-Pacific was real. Somehow that giant red, white, and blue shield was all I needed to know I’d made it to the West. The land of boots and cattle and Calamity Jane and green men.
I parked at the local depot museum and jumped out of the car. And how the winter air of those high plains just sliced right through my Southern-girl cold-weather clothes. Took my breath away sure as a punch in the gut.
I must’ve screamed from the shock because Scott ran around the car to see what was the matter and laid himself low on the ice caking the parking lot. He went down so hard and so fast it was like he just blinked out of existence—except for the smack of his ass on the ice and the groans of a grown man humiliated, spread eagle in the street.
We weren’t prepared for the cold. All I had was this pilled scarf I found in Gram’s closet and an old cape that Momma used to use as a blanket for me when she’d leave me in the car on cold night. And boots, of course. Can't work in a honky-tonk without boots on. So when I helped Scott up to his feet, I just leaned into him, cursing against the cloud of breath circling my head. He was a bit stiff on the contact but soon enough he put his arms around me. He even vigorously rubbed my arms up and down, warming me through the cape. And when I finally stood apart, I looked down to find that disc in my hand. I didn’t remember taking it with me from the car but I wasn’t surprised. Like my fidgeting on the drive, I just felt like I should keep it with me.
We wandered over to the main road and I was struck all of a sudden by the realization that she’d been here. My Calamity Jane. My great-great grandpa’s Jane. My namesake. She’d been right here. She maybe even fought her way up and down these streets. Or holed up in one of these hotels that still have the ground-level bars where the saloons and brothels once made their trades. There was even an empty lot, a hole between two buildings where the facing edifices stood like scars, that could’ve been the left-over from the explosion Gram used to act out with a jumping-jack leap and loose-lipped, “Fa-boom!”
And I found I wasn’t that cold anymore. My face was. But I felt a warmth deep inside me. That leather book described all this. Well, not exactly this, but close enough. There was a Federal Marshall’s office, just like in Jane’s account of Cheyenne. And was a proper old hotel, three-stories with a lobby and façade all like she said there would be.
Scott made some quip about not seeing any aliens around and I warned him that too much talk would just make him colder. But he was right. I shrugged and looked up and down those quiet, cold streets, half expecting I’d see a young teenager girl sporting a Stetson and Springfield facing me off down the way. But this wasn’t what we’d come for. Jane had been to Cheyenne, but a Cheyenne long gone. Replaced one brick and timber at a time until it was new again. My search for Calamity Jane and her Green Man would do better out on the plain. In someplace older. Someplace where signs of her passing might remain.
So we ducked into a bar around the same time the sun finally sank out of sight and took with it ten precious degrees of heat. The place was a dive and that was fine by me. Was like seeing a Wyoming version of the bars I’d spent years working in. But I picked it for the name—Boone’s. That was the family name of Jane’s rivals in a bunch of Gram’s stories—and in the journalist’s interviews. But Gram and the old book left it a little unclear how that rivalry worked itself out. Well, except for the part where they came head to head and blew up a whole town. But that was early on and I wanted to see if there was any hint how it might’ve ended.
So while Scott ordered us a round, I did a slow circuit of the bar, checking any photos or prints on the walls. Most of it was the same Budweiser neon bullshit we’ve got in the honky-tonks back in Tennessee. But here and there were pics of old-timey, bearded men by a train or holding out rifles in such a fashion it wasn’t clear if the men or the gun were the intended subject of the photo. But nothing of Jane or a green, antennaed alien. Was only one photo of a cow to suggest anything like a cowboy at all.
I joined Scott at the bar and we toasted a long trip completed. Except it wasn’t. And except Scott immediately started to make fun of all the effort it took to get somewhere only to find nothing at all. But I ignored him—wondering, not for the first time, why he came along if it was such a bother—and started shooting questions at the bartender. He was an older guy, just the prime age to creep me out with all the gross come ons I typically get when I’m behind the bar. He sported a beard that would’ve made ZZ Top proud and a tee shirt that reminded passersby that, yes, he loved America. And he answered my questions with a combination of brevity and annoyance that I recognized immediately as part of his professional disposition.
But then I asked him about Calamity Jane, specifically, and he got more chatty by a mile. He still wasn’t very forthcoming or friendly but I had his attention. So I followed up with a question about aliens and Scott hid his face behind his hand. And the bartender just stared at me for a long time before finally saying he didn’t know what I was talking about. Said New Mexico was the state for that kind of thing. Or so he’d seen on The X-Files.
So I plucked out the disc from my back pocket. Metal as it was, it wasn’t cold at all from all that time outside in the below-freezing air. And I told him I’d read that aliens in these parts once carried discs like this. And these same aliens once ran afoul of the Boones. And he nodded. And he laughed. Told me his last name was Crown, not Boone. And then, like I’d stopped talking, he just turned away and didn’t speak another word to us all night. Even when we paid the tab. But he did eye that disc enough I told Scott, “We’re on to something.” And he told me he’d be happiest if he could be on to a bed.
I stole a Boone’s matchbook—seriously! They had matchbooks!—and froze my ass off while we tried to find a hotel. We were so exhausted we settled for the world’s shittiest motor lodge. But it had a kind of space-age all-plastic bathroom that sort of matched our alien theme for the trip, so it could’ve been worse. And despite the cold and the smell of mildew, I fell fast asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. And I dreamt of a teenage cowgirl who’s path I was following. And when she looked at me, she was me.
Chapter 3.
Fort Casper, Wyoming.
In Gram’s stories, Wyoming was this rough and raw place, big and empty except for the occasional posse or tribe or spaceship filling out the map like the sea monsters and dragons in Treasure Island or Game of Thrones. But a day into the state, we didn’t find any sea monsters or spaceships. We found a Starbucks. Just a few blocks from the state house and Boone’s bar as we headed out of town. It was a spot of ordinary in an otherwise very foreign place—the ice, the cold, the people, the landscape. The mochas and the trucks were about all that was familiar.
The highway heading north out of Cheyenne climbed higher onto the plateau with just two black tracks for tires cut through the ice on either side of the road. And there were these giant signs every few miles to alert us if wind conditions threatened to throw us off the road. Even the wind was bigger here! At least there were even larger sections of fencing—ten or twenty feet tall and each a quarter-mile long—looming over the road, drifts piled up behind them ready to catch us if the wind picked us up.
But within half an hour or so heading north, ice on the highway cleared and the snow fell away and brown earth and grasses peeked up around us on all sides. It was gorgeous! Mountains and mesas cut up the landscape and this one peak stood high above the rest off to the northwest. I was driving, so Scott messed with his phone to figure how far off it was—fifty miles, when we first saw it. Clear as if it was right next to the road.
I told Scott that, according to Gram’s stories and the journal she left me, somewhere in these hills was a sod hut where Calamity Jane and her Green Man hid out before they turned south toward Cheyenne. It probably wasn’t anything more than a pile of dirt after more than a century and a half, and there weren’t any clues in that journal as to where it might be anyway, but it warmed my heart to think I’d come so far to be so close to where those two kept together so long ago.
Scott tried looking up sod huts on his phone but he didn’t have any signal on that stretch—it came and it went in the wild. I told him not to worry about it. But I also told him that there were some sweet moments in that hut—like back at Cheyenne, really, that were some of my favorite parts of Jane’s adventure. He just rolled his eyes and said something about me being “such a girl.” So I told him, too, the story of the gunfight they had somewhere out on that landscape. How furious and close to death it’d all been. And about the terrible things Jane and her Green Man had done to survive. That seemed to get his attention. That and this one moment where I swear he almost held my hand.
It was right around then, when we were just twenty miles or so from that mountain, that we pulled onto the shoulder so Scott could get a few pictures. I wrapped myself up in my cape and lay across the hood of the car, the sun warming me up a little in that cold winter air. He scrambled across the road, cursing because he couldn’t get his camera to work with his gloves on. The sky was so bright it hurt to look at. But I tried to imagine what Jane might’ve seen when she looked up at this same sky. This same clear blue and indigo sky—big as shit—and not another human being for miles and miles in every direction. And no noise except Scott cursing from the far side of the road.
Right then, a big rig rocketed by and just about sucked me right off the hood of that old piece of shit car. Scared the crap right out me. But in a second I was laughing so hard at that Scott ran over to make sure I was ok. No, this wasn’t the same Wild West Jane and her Green Man rode through. Not at all. But she was here, a long time ago. And I was here now. I squeezed myself tight inside my cape and took a long breath of absolutely frigid air. I don’t know if I’d ever been happier.
Around every bend on that highway there was some new view that was unlike anything from the piece of town we grew up in. Scott kept saying it reminded him of Hoth, some place from Star Wars. I kept thinking of the moon. Vast and treeless and so dusted in snow there was hardly any color to be seen, even where the dirt and rock showed through. And there were hardly any other cars on the road, either, except the occasional big rig and this one white pickup I kept spotting in the rearview.
I kept track of our pace by ticking off the towns between Cheyenne and Casper. And sometimes it was easy to miss them. Most weren’t more than handful of houses and a gas station clinging to side of a hill or in the snowy shadow of a mesa or a cliff. But I realized I was smiling this big dumb grin as we got closer to Casper. Bigger still as we slid through town to the Fort Casper historical site at a horseshoe bend in the river.
Scott dropped me off and went back for gas, leaving me totally alone in a snow-covered parking lot. The Museum was closed for the holiday so I tromped around the lot for a while, not quite sure what to so. It was unspeakably quiet, there—maybe the snow was sucking up all the sound. But there was a huge bronze statue of an Indian brave battling a buffalo and a wagon wheel atop some kind of Mormon monument—signs of two cultures I’ve never heard called out in those honky-tonks back home. I took a few pictures with my phone, not quite sure what to do.
But all the while I circled that lot, I couldn’t take my eyes off of Fort Casper—or what was left of it. It was just over a low fence, standing much as it must’ve a hundred and sixty years ago when Jane led her war party of Sioux and Comanche Indians down on a garrison of what she called Galvanized Yankees and their gray alien warlord. And between that wooden stockade and me there was probably a hundred feet of perfectly unblemished snow. Snow that would show every footstep.
It didn’t look at all how I imagined it. In Gram’s stories, the stockades were a hundred feet high and sprawling like castle walls. Or maybe that was all on account of my having been twelve when she first told me. From the parking lot, the walls were maybe low enough you could touch their tips with an up-stretched hand. And most were just the backsides of log-cabin shacks.
I did a few turns around the parking lot not knowing quite what to do. This didn’t seem right. This wasn’t the fort Jane attacked. And I felt stupid for coming all this way and standing alone in a freezing parking lot. I took out my phone to see where Scott was but there wasn’t any signal. What would he do, anyway? Wouldn’t he just agree this was all a waste and drive me away?
I walked up to the fence and looked more at that fort. There were some bare teepee poles not far off and fort buildings and stockade just behind. I could see what looked like a Navy mast rising over the building, flags snapping against it in the wind. And snow whipping around everywhere in little tornadoes.
But through a gap in between some of the buildings, I could make out the end of a bridge.
Seeing the bridge quieted the flutter of nerves in my stomach. The teepees and the fort and the monuments and all that reconstructed noise… those were just backup band to that bridge. That bridge was once the center of a gigantic battle on the Platte. A battle where my fifteen-year-old namesake Calamity Jane faced off in single combat with a gray-skinned monster. How often had Gram told me that story? How often had I drifted off to sleep imagining myself standing on that bridge, her rifle in my hand and her curses on my lips. I could conquer anything in those dreams. I could recover any loss. And here I was, in sight of the real bridge and hesitating on account of some mismatched expectations?
Fuck it. If anything here was left over from Jane and her battle it must be that bridge. So I hopped the fence and sank to my knees in the powder. The snow was dry in a way I’d never felt snow before. Certainly not like that wet slush we get down South. But either way, it didn’t feel all that cold. I just clutched that metal disc—still warm despite the freezing weather—and stomped forward through that perfect snow.
I tromped through the teepee poles, letting my hands drift over the smooth wood and imagining I was Jane among the Lakota, painting my face with the braves. I walked through the open fort, dodging tiny cyclones of dusty snow and looking for the scars alien weapons should’ve left on the old wood. Reverently, I approached the end of the bridge, hauling myself up through the snow and onto its buried planks.
I stood there, at the fort end of the bridge and hugged myself tight under my cape. When Jane was here, in the 1860s, this bridge extended all the way across the North Platte. And through the bare trees I could just make out the frozen bend and the far bank. But at some point between then and now, it’d been cut short and only fifty feet of the bridge remained. But standing right there in the middle of that remnant, I closed my eyes and thought about Gram’s stories. I clutched that disc, too. And it was like I was back there, standing where that gray alien once stood in front of his fort and his soldiers. And across from me, down a long stretch of boards almost to the other side of the river, stood this little girl. A whirlwind of hundreds, maybe even thousands, of Indians rode behind her on the far bank. Overhead, between us and the furious summer sun that stung my cold cheeks, a thunder of mortar and artillery and sci-fi weaponry filled the sky, bombarding both the tribes in front of me and the garrison behind. And that girl just stood amongst it all like a conqueror—her feet apart, her rifle held at the ready, and the Green Man’s weird alien horse a sentinel at her back, still as a stone.
My heart was racing. This was what I was looking for. This! And then all that sound fell away. The crash of the weapons and the whoops of the warriors quieted and all I could hear was just the small breathing of that young girl. Her breath shook. Her fingers flexed as they squeezed the stock and barrel of her rifle a little too tightly. And when the wind stirred the hair around her face, there was a flush across her neck. But her eyes were fixed. They were fixed on me. As fixed as I’d ever seen anyone look on anyone or anything. Her lips were moving, too. She was screaming—and from the look on her face, nothing nice—but I couldn’t hear her.
She was right there.
Wasn’t she?
A shadow passed over me and I looked up to see a Gray Man fly over my head, his duster billowing behind him as he flew. I saw Jane raise her rifle.
I tried to call out but my voice was gone.
Scott called out to me from across the grounds and in an instant I was back in that winter cold, back in that sanctified fort. I looked about in a panic, kicking snow every which way, but Jane was gone. That gray alien was gone. The soldiers and the Indians and all the battle were replaced by snow, barren trees where the bridge once was, and a jumble of mobile homes just beyond the quiet fort.
Scott stood there shivering, making some joke about the gas station’s name—the Kum and Go—and looking around like he didn’t know what any of this was. I closed my eyes, again, but there just a red glow under my eyelids, now.
He helped me down off the bridge and I looked around at the site with fresh eyes. Like I hadn’t just walked through it from the parking lot five minutes ago. The fort was completely different than I’d seen it on that bridge. And there wasn’t any sign of battle on the timbers, neither. The stockades stood unblemished. The building, all unbroken. Except for the name of the fort itself, there wasn’t any signal the battle on the Platte took place at all. And there certainly wasn’t any marker suggesting that some teenage girl had led it.
But I looked back toward that bridge. I’d seen her there. I know I had. I’d seen something that was, not just this pale imitation. Here in the snow, I was a tourist. But up on that bridge, I’d been a witness. Maybe because of that disc in my hand. Maybe because I knew the stories so well. But it was just like Gram told me. Just like Jane told that reporter a hundred years ago. I saw her face down the devil all by herself.
I was on the right track. I knew it! All proof of her was gone from Cheyenne and Casper but I was on her trail. On the Green Man’s trail, too.
I screamed and stamped my feet in the snow. We’d planned to stay the afternoon in Casper but forget that. I wanted to push on toward Independence Rock and the Devil’s Gate and the ghost town of Piedmont. Right now!
I started to drag Scott back toward the car but he took my arm to stop me. I thought this might be a follow up to that almost-holding-my-hand moment we had on the drive up, but the look on his face sure didn’t match that expectation. I followed his look and saw a white pickup truck stopped behind our Honda, idling noisily in the otherwise utterly quiet air. Its windows were tinted so we couldn’t see anyone inside.
I was about to ask Scott what we should do if that truck was security or something when a smaller truck pulled into the lot behind it. The white pickup idled forward and away as the smaller truck pulled in next to our clunker, a little blue-haired woman leaning out the window and yelling for us to get away from the fort. Turns out the lady who ran the museum lived in one of those trailers close by. But all while she was calling for us, waving her arms like some inflatable outside of a car dealership, that bigger white pickup just idled around the parking lot, finally gunning it away.
Chapter 4.
Independence Rock and The Devil's Gate, Wyoming.
It was already early in the afternoon and we wanted to try and hit Independence Rock and get back down to I-80 before dinner. So with that old blue hair saying some passive-aggressive old-lady shit under her breath about “kids these days” and us having “no respect for history,” we piled back in the Honda and slid out of Casper. Emphasis on the slid, cause the ice was wet now in the high plain sun. And all the while Scott drove, I searched around and checked the mirrors for that creepy white pickup. Was it the same one I’d seen on the road out of Cheyenne? It wouldn’t be the first time some redneck followed me, confusing stalking with flirting before I returned the favor by confusing a kick in nuts for some action.
I felt myself pressing down deep in the passenger seat, trying to hide, I guess. Just hunched down, turning the disc over and over again in my cold hands, the sky and the roof upholstery and my slitted eyes jumbled and kaleidoscoped in the facets of that weird alien thing. This didn’t feel like those horny boys following me home from the honkeytonks at all. This was worse. Like the night that police officer woke me—in this very same seat, even—and told me Momma was gone.
I was so shaken by the damn truck and that batty old lady that we were twenty minutes out of Casper before I thought to tell Scott about that moment of the bridge. That moment when I’d closed my eyes and felt transported back to that battle and saw the gray alien from Gram’s story. And saw Calamity Jane. Scott was driving but the roads were clear enough he was able to throw me some sideways glances.
But it had something to do with the disc, I told him. It never got cold and when I was on that bridge, I’d been holding it tight. Maybe that’s what it did for Gram? Scott asked if the disc ever did that for Jane in Gram’s stories or in that journal and I had to admit, no, it didn’t. But if it was alien, then who was I to say what it could do or even that it had to do the same for me that it had for Gram or Jane or anyone else? For Jane it played music. For me, YouTube?
We breezed through Alcova—traveling further back in time with every mile, or so it seemed—and before long I could see Independence Rock ahead, down a long stretch of highway. It wasn’t quite what I expected. The bare-rock hills behind and all around it made that stony dome seem so much smaller than Gram’s stories had painted it. But it stood apart all the same, more notable for not being a part of any stretch of rippling hills. A smooth blister of granite punched right out of the dirt.
And just beyond, much clearer that I expected it would be, I saw a clear cut in the rolling hills that could only be The Devil’s Gate. I sat so far forward in my excitement that I was fogging the windshield and Scott had to beg me to sit back. But I didn’t care. This was the site of one of my favorite parts of those stories. Where Calamity Jane and her alien gunslinger first really started to understand each other. First started to really joke with each other and trust one another. And if there was any place in all of Wyoming where proof of their passing might be found, it was here. Carved into the face of that dome or inside that rough pass.
There was this rest-stop style parking lot just shy of the rock and barbed wire and a cattle gate inviting tourists to explore one the Oregon Trail’s great landmarks. But I skipped all that noise. I stuffed some Hot Hands into my boots and gloves and just about ran through that lot and gate, down a path of crunching gravel and ice, to the foot of that huge stone. And as I slid to a stop in the grass at the base of the monument, bunnies scattered in every direction. Like they just blinked into existence by my being there. Little rabbits even shot straight up the face of the rock, gravity more of a suggestion than a rule.
I heaved great clouds of steam into the air around me as I took it all in. I was an ant next to a stone. But the late day sun threw my shadow large upon the face of the rock. And I started hopping in place, laughing as I did, because this wasn’t any fucking reconstruction. No historical interpretation or blue-haired old bitches to tell me I was disrespecting history. This was the real deal, cut from the Earth by time and weather. And all across it, faint in some places but clear as if they were new in others, the initials and messages and etchings of thousands of people were cut into the stone. Men and women, immigrants all, who camped here on their way to Oregon or California or Washington. And somewhere among, the scratches of a girl headed the other direction, and of an alien watching over her as she mingled and laughed with the pilgrims.
“Woo!” I shouted. And I thrilled to hear my call echo off that smooth rock, like Jane calling back to me from the past.
Some tourist wandering around the bend of that giant stone aimed a distinctly Midwestern frown at me. But I didn’t care. I was already jogging around the rock, leaning in to scan every etching I found. On the north face, I climbed up on the wrought-iron cages protecting the oldest and most precious markings. And on the back of the rock I hurried through a shadow that was already stretching a hundred yards into the neighboring pasture.
I flew through another cattle gate on the south side of the rock and scattered a hundred rabbits in every direction. I stretched out my arms and flew through them, my black cape become magpie wings as I swooped. And all across the face of the mountain—half-shrouded in dirt and grass down low or blinding against the blue sky and low sun up high—were the hard-carved messages of thousands watching me.
When I came back around the front of the rock, I saw Scott shivering right where I left him half-a-hour before. I took him by the hand and drew him close to the granite. I told him how Jane and her Green Man came across this giant rock and a train of settlers camped there. And how, like those settlers, Jane has left her mark in the rock—JCGM, I think it was. Initials etched into stone that, thanks to the dry weather on these high plains, might’ve survived more than a century and a half until now. It was one of Gram’s sweeter stories. Jane and her Green Man had really bonded, here. After some bloodshed, of course. Because, westerns.
He smiled and made some dick comment about needles and haystacks. So I just left him there to pout. I ran my hands across the smooth stone. Cold as ice. Quiet and untouched like time never tread here.
He was right, though. The chances of us finding Jane’s marks were slim. I didn’t even know where on the rock to start looking. And rushing around the monument as I was, I wouldn’t see but a fraction of the carvings. But with the light starting to fade—we maybe had 30 minutes of daylight left—I started moving more slowly across the face of the thing, skipping the bigger, more ostentatious markings, hunting for smaller, more intimate signs. I knew it was here. If there was any truth in Gram’s stories or that interview, then…
JCGM.
Jane Canary. Green Man. Four simple initials. The J almost an I it was so poorly shaped. The M with a chip taken out of it. But there it was. Low on this bulge of rock right where the monument folded in on itself toward the south, maybe two feet off the dirt. Faint, too. But unmistakable.
Scott was almost out of sight around the rock when I looked back toward him. I didn’t have any words. Just my fingers against my lips, holding in tears and laughter and screaming out.
Jane was here. Right here.
I screamed! Some kind of whoop I don’t think I’ve ever made before. And I clutched my fists so tight I just about popped those Hot Hands. I leaned in and put my face against that stone, my forehead right on the rock.
“Jane,” I whispered.
“Mar?”
Scott ran over and I reached out a hand for him, my eyes still closed and my forehead still on that cold-ass stone. He took it. And we said nothing for a long time.
There wasn’t any magic or weird scifi shit, here. I took a deep breath of the cold air, filled my lungs with the scents of stone and dust and rabbit crap and sweat. The scents of a place unchanged.
I crouched down in the snow and just admired the letters, tracing them with an outstretched finger. Smooth as the granite around, they were. But charged. And damn if my finger didn’t seem to sparkle when I took it away—like I’d reached right into the hourglass of time itself. Or maybe it was the tiniest bits of the chisel Jane used to make these marks. Either way, I’d touched someplace she’d touched. Someplace she’d shaped. Was almost like touching her.
Scott snapped a lot of pictures, too. And for all the cold around me, I felt so warm inside. Was like that torn up postcard in Momma’s Honda was come to life, except younger and with an alien cowboy at her side. I laughed and watched those letters redden in the sinking light. This was no silent vision on a bridge. No warrior-girl from a story, acted out by Gram in the near-dark of my bedroom. These marks were real. They were true. And I found them.
Scott suggested any number of folks heading west might’ve had that combination of initials. I evil-eyed him with all my womanly powers and he didn’t say another word about it.
The sun was near setting and Scott finally convinced me it was time to go. We didn’t have a hotel or anything planned for the night, but we also didn’t have any signal out here, either, and he was nervous about the rest of the drive down to Rawlins in the dark. But as we walked away, my eyes kept fixed on that bulge of rock and those initials, so faint after just a few yards it was like they weren’t there at all. Like how any of us might fade on the leaving. But distance didn’t make them not so. And with the rock lit up in warm tones and the high plains all around streaked in long shadows, that lonely spot might’ve been the loveliest place in the world.
When I fell back into the car, everything was so much lighter. I felt perched on those shitty springs—buoyed. The setting sun flooded the car like it does in those movies where it always seems dawn or dusk and as I held that disc to the light it bounced around the car like off a disco ball. A disco disc! Was the first time Scott laughed about the whole thing, right then.
Maps or no, we left Independence Rock behind us—still lit up like a beacon even as we drove into shadow—and we hunted down the next few miles for the turn off to The Devil’s Gate. But in all the snow and fading light, wasn’t shit to be seen. Finally, I convinced Scott to pull into an overlook—the only exit we could pick out—and we slid through snow and gravel and ice toward a wooden fence and some collection of weird deer.
Beyond, some miles off and all dim and beautiful in the fading light, that slice though the rocks seemed more menacing and lovely than I’d imagined. It was easy to imagine Jane and her Green Man perched up in there, picking off their enemies, far off.
I got out of the car and leaned against the fence, scanning that distant pass, when all of a sudden the deer took flight. Bolting, like a flock of birds, away from the road and toward that distant cut through the stony hills.
I started to say something to Scott about it when I heard the crunch of tires through snow and gravel, the rev of an outsized engine.
“Mar—”
I turned in time to see the white pickup slide to a shuddering stop across the drive leading back to the highway. And to see the doors fly open, the bartender from Boone’s dropping to the icy gravel with a rifle held in one hand.
“You folks need any help,” He asked, smiling like the devil, crunching ice as he started walking slowly toward me.
Scott looked back and forth between us but that bartender—what was his name? Wasn’t Boone. Crown, maybe?—he only looked at me. And that smile? Wasn’t like anything I’ve ever seen before. Not even the worst smile a man ever shone my way stunk like his.
“We’re ok, mister. Thanks,” Scott said.
The bartender nodded. “Who the fuck is talking to you?”
Scott started to step between the bartender and me when the driver of that truck came around the huge hood and cracked him across the jaw with the butt of a shotgun. Blood sprayed and froze and fell tinkling to the ice. He screamed and in the enormity of Wyoming it seemed to hardly make a sound.
“Scott!” I hollered. But I only heard him groan in response, fallen out of sight on the far side of the Honda. And that man that hit him, he just laughed.
“No, I reckon you need some help,” that bartender said, keeping on toward me.
“I think you might have us confused with someone else,” I said, quieter than I care to admit.
“No, no, no.” he said. “You’re just who we’re looking for. I’m certain of it.” And his smile cracked to show a darkness deeper than that gate behind me. “I’m damn certain. Ain’t no way I could forget a sight pretty as you.”
Scott started to say something but that driver cracked him again. I couldn’t see the hit but I could hear it. The sound of wood and brass on bone. The sound of air pushing through wetness.
The bartender stopped a few feet from me.
“Give me the disc.”
“What?” I said, genuinely confused.
“I ain’t going to ask twice,” he said. And with that he took the rifle up in both hands, close against his chest.
I backed up and bumped against the fence—gasping a little when I did—and looked around in a panic. I could hear Scott scratching against the ice, though I could only see the giant redneck standing over him, and I could hear a truck passing on the road south, hidden over a small hill. And I could see hundreds of miles of the high plains all around me, red in the light reflected down off the clouds by a sun that already quit the day.
I just shook my head—
Before I knew what was happening, the bartender was on me. He swung his rifle across my chest, hammering my arm and ribs with the body of it so hard I went down, scrapping against the rough wood of the fence before slamming into the frozen gravel and rock of the parking lot. He punched me in the gut and put all his weight onto me, crushing the wind right out of me.
Then that bartender pressed down the ice-cold barrel of his rifle against my throat, choking me. Was like having my neck crushed under some vice. The world spun. The purple sky overhead narrowed like some vignette. I turned my face against the gravel and tried to fight away, but I couldn’t move under his weight. And under the belly of the Honda, I could see Scott being beaten by the driver, too. Despite the thunder of blood in my ears and the crunch of gravel as I fought, I could hear him screaming.
Was something warm in my pocket, then. Not warm. Hot. Hot like the burners of an oven. Scalding, through my jeans. Burning deep into my bones.
The bartender flinched, lifting his bulk off my waist, the barrel off my neck.
“Fuck! What the fuck is that?” he hollered, clutching at his thigh, a circle burnt into the denim near his crotch.
I reached up and grabbed the fence, pulling myself back just enough to thrust my hand into the pocket where that alien disc was burning a hole through my clothes. Except it didn’t hurt to touch. Instead, all the sound fell away, like back on that bridge. All the pain in my leg, too. And I locked eyes with that bartender—him screaming something at me but nothing I could hear—and I told him, in a voice much younger than my own:
“You woke up the wrong fucking passenger, mister.”
A screech filled all the world. A screech so high and so loud the gravel around us shook off its ice. The truck’s headlights flashed in silent alarm until they exploded into glitter. Its windshield and windows split by rivulets before crumbling to powder. It was a screech so painful the bartender just about crushed his own head trying to muffle it. Finally, he arched backward in agony—his head and boots almost closing a circle—and blood and little bits of meat blew out of his ears and he crumpled to the ground.
The screech died as quickly as it began. Just the wind sounded in the West.
I scrambled to my feet and grabbed up the bartender’s gun off the ground, screaming in terror and rage all the while. Trying to fill up the world with my noise same as that disc had done. And I went wild, losing track of myself as I beat that bartender with his own rifle, with my fist, with my boots, with my own fingernails digging into his throat.
Scott pulled me away.
I kicked and fought him but he took the gun from me. He stopped me. He beat out the fire simmering around the hole in my jeans and my cape. And he hugged me. He hugged me tighter than even Gram did that night when Momma left us. So tight I couldn’t fight back.
He brought me back to myself.
He held me close. I turned my head against his coat and saw the white pickup truck in ruins. The men in pools of blood draining from their ears.
The Honda stood untouched.
I looked up and touched the sides of Scott’s face. There was no blood running from his ears. From his nose and cheeks, there was plenty, but not from his ears.
“What was that?” He asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I just—”
I reached into my pocket, the disc’s shining facets visible through the hole it burnt through my clothes. And when I plucked it out, the cold air hit my unburnt skin like a damn knife.
“The Green Man,” I told him.
Chapter 5.
Piedmont, Wyoming.
The first cops on the scene were something of cowboys, themselves. Their hats weren’t quite Stetsons and their guns weren’t quite Colts but they had this air about them. This way of talking to Scott and me that was so different from any cop I’ve ever talked to before.
They separated us for a while but let us sit in the back of their patrol cars with the heat on as the world outside got dark and cold as the dark side of the Moon. The Devil’s Gate was lost in this outer-space blackness I’ve never seen before. Even the fence at the far end of the overlook parking lot was swallowed up by all that black. Just those blue and white police lights lit up the world—the shattered pickup, my frozen piece-of-shit Honda, and the pools of blood left behind by that bartender and his asshole friend, now shining and icy black. Ambulances had long since carried off those monsters.
I tried to pick out any stars in the sky but couldn’t. Not from inside the patrol car, anyway. There wasn’t a solitary sign of life anywhere on the horizon, and hardly a moon, but those blue flashing lights were enough to drown out the sky.
A medic had tended my throat and ribs—which, mercifully, weren’t broke. And the cops offered me a hotel room down the highway some and I guess I told them that was okay. However it happened, I ended up riding for close to an hour with some old cop, “Good” on his badge like that should put me at ease. His beard lit up in the dashboard light giving him some kind of a blue chin halo and his eyes were squinting pits, even in the dark. But he was nice enough—after all the questions about what happened, anyway—and, when I needed, he stopped off at a truck stop so I could piss.
In the hard light of that truck stop toilet, I was a rough damn sight. There was this hateful and jagged red near all around my throat, thicker and more purple across my windpipe. I looked like some guillotined wench stitched back together. Or a Frankenstein’s monster, maybe. And when I lifted my shirt, I was all purple and red and black, from bellybutton to my tits. That asshole had worked a number on me. And in just a few seconds, at that.
I barely recognized myself. But in that moment, beaten all to hell in some frozen truck stop, I wasn’t even sure if that was a bad thing. I fingered the fringes of the hole in my jeans pocket—a hole stopped up by a Wyoming Highway Patrol tee shirt I’d jammed down my jeans and cinched at the waist under my belt—and didn’t know how to feel about what happened. Grateful? Relieved?
Fucking terrified? All that blood and those fucking monsters were still alive.
I came out and saw Officer Good leaning against the big windows facing the parking lot, his breath and a cup of coffee steaming up the cold, cold glass. He seemed out of place in that tacky truck stop, his cowboy posture and Wild West machismo at odds with the pornographic hats and camouflage “vegun” tee shirts on display around him. I walked up to him and he held a second cup of coffee out to me, tipping his hat all gentlemanly and shit, too, as he did.
I huddled up under my cape and sipped the coffee.
“Quite a thing, a little girl like you taking down those two boys all by your lonesome,” he said.
I didn’t say anything. I was exhausted and bruised and weary of retelling my tale of the confrontation at the overlook. Sure as hell wasn’t about to go into the magic alien disc that dropped that bartender and his goon, either.
That cop watched me for a while, then told me the officer who went with those thugs back to the hospital in Cheyenne finally got them talking. That the bartender was furious. Kept raging that I had something that belonged to his family. Something owed to them, he claimed—though without suggesting just how. Officer Good asked if I knew what any of that meant. I just shook my head.
“There’s lots of legends in these parts,” he told me in this fantastic Western drawl right out of some Clint Eastwood flick. “And ain’t all of them what you might call traditional cowboys and Indians tales.”
I nodded but didn’t offer anything. Last I needed that night—or that morning, I guess it’d become—was someone else coming after me.
That old cop, though, he just nodded out toward the dark. Past some idling big rig and on toward the lightening horizon. “I grew up around here,” he told me. “Beyond Green River, on toward Utah. All the kids knew the stories of the green cowboy. Used to play at it when I was little. Used to pretend the girls we fancied were that spitfire Calamity Jane on the prod with us. My boys did, too. Used their lightsabers and nerf guns to fight off Indians and robots and villains. Fighting them Piedmont Boones.”
I tried to figure what this old lawman was hunting at. Those deep, wrinkled eyes of his were so grooved, like puckered lips from years of looking into that high plains' sun. And his mouth was fixed straight, like he hadn’t smiled since those boys of his grew and were gone.
“I told you, that bartender said his name was Crown,” I said. “Not Boone.”
Officer Good just nodded. “Wyoming is a big small place, ma'am. Ain’t never been too many folks around here what don’t relate to each other. Crowns and Boones, included.”
He took a long draw from his own streaming coffee, sighing a great big fan of condensation onto the glass with the heat of it. “Grudges can last a long time in such a place.”
I watched the morning light start across the ice outside.
The cop put his coffee down and smiled. “But I sure am a sight pleased to hear those stories wasn’t all horseshit.”
“What?” I asked him, surprised at the turn.
“Miss Hickok, I’m sorry for your troubles, but I’m right glad you came home.”
I saw Scott sliding across the parking lot in Momma’s crappy car. I couldn’t see him well through the windshield but he looked tired. And bloody.
That old cop reached into his coat pocket.
“You decide you want to keep on, I’m sure my boys remember those stories I was telling about.” He pushed a business card into my hand. “Them Boones wasn’t the only family knew Calamity Jane as a girl. Or so my gramma used to tell.”
And with just a nod for a farewell, he stepped out into the coldest air I ever felt.
The card read: “Adam Good. Stillwater fishing. Piedmont, Wyoming.”
I hustled through the cold and dove into the passenger seat of the Honda. Scott hugged me awkwardly across the armrest and we stayed like that for a little while, him wincing a little from bruises or worse I couldn’t see. They’d interrogated him quite a bit more than me, it seems. But at some point in this early morning, Officer Good called them off and Scott was sent to find his way to me. Turns out whatever that alien disc did to those men wasn’t fatal—though it might’ve robbed them of their hearing for the rest of their miserable lives—and there wasn’t nothing we’d done that wasn’t self-defense in the eyes of the Wyoming Highway Patrol. God bless the West, huh? Winning a stand-off still measured a better part of justice.
Scott held my hand and told me how sorry he was. For not believing me. For not believing in me. He wanted to see the disc and we turned it over in our fumbling hands for a while. The lightening sky outside, the fluorescents of that truck stop, and the runners from a handful of big rigs, too, bouncing off those facets and curves. And I kissed him. No more waiting for him to muscle up the courage. I’d almost been killed in a fucking parking lot, a hundred miles from nowhere. Was too little time in life for waiting.
He started to turn the car east. Toward home. Toward the past.
I corrected him.
The sun rose behind us and the world turned all the colder and whiter and icier as we pressed on west. And rolling down that highway, all white without even a tint of black asphalt showing through, was one of the scariest things I’ve done. And not because of the icy conditions. But because going home was sensible and safe. I’m glad Scott was behind the wheel and that he didn’t argue with me about it. Factories the size of cities and tunnels cut through mesas and cliffs that dwarfed the odd roadside Holiday Inn punched right out of the whiteness like pencils stabbed up through a sheet of paper. And we pushed on, farther from home and more into the strange.
But big as Wyoming is, we crossed half the state in what felt like very little time. It was big and small, like Officer Good said. And right then, I felt it. We traveled so fast and passed through so much emptiness and the horizon was always so very far.
We didn’t talk very much about what happened the night before but I know we were both thinking about it. Scott had a raw and crusty scar across his nose and cheek. And I caught him checking my marks. But even when we’d looked at that disc, together, we didn’t speak of it. Or of those men who came after us and how brutal it’d been. Already it was fading into something that had just happened. Like losing Momma. Or Gram. Or leaving Nashville. It just was and it was behind us and all that was left was moving on.
The first time we tried to pull off the highway, our bumper ground into a foot of snow and we stopped quick as we could, afraid we’d be stranded if too much of that powder got under the car. The second time we pulled off, a truck must’ve gone the way before us because, snowy as the road was, our little import could clear the drifts and grip the tracks better than on that icy interstate.
We snaked away from the highway down a road we could barely make out, across a cattle gate and along a frozen creek, and into land untouched. In the distance, low mountains rolled under a clear sky. Utah, perhaps. And up close, more rabbits and weird deer and magpies than I’d ever seen ran and bounded and flew. And stopped to watch us.
We moved barely faster than at idle but it wasn’t long until the old charcoal kilns and the ghost-town ruins of Piedmont stood out of the snow ahead of us.
From the very beginning—since that night when I finished pouring over that transcript in my bed—this was where I wanted to be most of all. Oh sure, I wanted a sign of Jane and her Green Man and I looked for and found them in Casper and at Independence Rock. But this was where it all started. Where Jane’s boss and the Boone family’s rivalry came to a head, where the Green Man and Jane first joined guns, and where they first fought together. Fought a battle that kept on until last night, in a parking lot overlooking The Devils Gate. And just like Jane and her Green Man, there we laid low our enemies.
Scott and I sunk knee-deep into the snow as we wandered among those ancient ovens. The kilns were just like Jane described them in her journal. House-sized domes blackened on the inside from careers spent cooking up fuel for the railroads. And three of them stood tall and perfect, like you could gather up some wood and fire them up, today. But a fourth stood shattered. Like a bit of eggshell jammed up through the earth, curved and broken and remembering a violence that took place long ago. I stood in the shadow of that shattered kiln and looked across the way at what was left of the old town. Jane and her Green Men blew it all up in the summer of 1867. And what that explosion must’ve been to decimate however many other kilns stood back then, and that town so far off.
Scott stood still as a statue. Not even a chatter in his teeth. He said something quiet about us finally being here. About us finally being so far down the road. Bruised and torn and all, I smiled at that. Uncomfortable and tired and cold as hell, I smiled.
I walked up and laid hands on one of those kilns. Being here didn’t prove Jane or her Green Man were real. I was beyond that. I didn’t need proof more than what happened last night. And just like that, I felt the disc’s warmth in my pocket—my other pocket. But I liked the feel of my hands on these stones. Knowing she and her alien fought here. Killed here.
We wandered among the ghost town, then. What was left of it. Nails sticking out through boards dehydrated by a hundred years up in this desert, snow drifting down through roofs fallen in or emaciated by the cold and time. One of these ruins might’ve been Harthra’s ranch—the house Jane lived in until she met the Green Man. One of them might’ve been the barn where he kept his flying engine. That spaceship the Green Man was so obsessed with. And one was certainly the saloon where they came face to face with the Boones. Or even the general store owned by a man named Good.
Among the sagebrush and the timbers, the snow was sometimes waist deep. But dry. I even dropped Gram’s old book, once, and it cut a perfect rectangle down through the snow as it fell. And when I plunged my hands down into the snow, that old leather book came up dry.
And I stopped for a bit, there. That book cradled in my arms, those dry skeleton houses all around me, and realized I was standing on the main street of a town almost forgotten. But not. A town where legends once walked. Where Martha Jane Canary once hid herself to work among men on the rail, courted with Tom Somers, and where she bickered over killing a man with a green alien gunslinger. And it was in one of those more distant ruins where they first met. Where she was at her most vulnerable and most in need of rescue. And from which she emerged never needing rescue again.
I leaned against the frame of one of those ghost-town haunts and opened up Gram’s book. And Jane’s words spoke to me. Not from the disc or from any vision. But from her lips, put to paper by some newsman, and kept safe from woman to woman down the line to me.
Goddamn! Hurt something awful. The barn spun and I’ve got some weak recollection of my body flopping all around like a fish, whether from my own jerking or from Jimmy’s manhandling, I don’t rightly know. But was blood in my mouth, all the same. My blood. And as my wits come back, I felt Jimmy pulling at my belt, wrestling them dungarees over my hips. Boy, that’s a terror you’ll just never know. No man will. And no girl should. Turns my stomach even today, God knows how long on, to think on Jimmy Burns and how close he come to it.
And that’s when I saw him. The Green Man, I mean. My eyes was all foggy and tear-soaked but I could still make out his tall, slender figure just fine in that open barn doorway. His long arm holding Walker’s pudgy body two full feet off the dirt. Was a right beautiful thing.
The sky had whitened and it was hard to tell the up from the down. But this was where they met. And where he saved her. And somehow, across a century and a half, he’d saved me, too. And goddamn if I was ever going to need someone to save me again.
Right then, a pickup cruised down the snowy trail through the middle of Piedmont, its windows down. And a man not much older than me leaned out, asking if we were ok. Said we were on his land but that his dad told him we might be coming.
I held the disc in my pocket and told him we were fine even while Scott stood there and said nothing. And the man in the truck laughed and pointed at Momma’s piece-of-shit car. “Well, be careful and don’t get stuck out here in your little buggy.”
I didn’t know how to tell him, that piece-of-shit was a time machine. And that it always had been.
