Bloody Season (13 page)

“You let me and Doc see to that. You did your part.” He put on his Prince Albert and smoothed the skirt over his American. “There is food in the kitchen if you care to rustle yourself something while we’re out.”

“Thanks, I’ll go home where if I break something it is already paid for.”

White teeth showed behind Wyatt’s handlebars. “First morning I woke up here I thought I was back in Jim’s whorehouse in Dodge.”

“Jim’s place was never like this.”

“Jim’s girls were never like Sadie.”

The play was about a girl who was in love with a boy accused of being a thief. At the end the detective who had been following him since the first act took pity on his story and let him go. Wyatt preferred Shakespeare, but Sadie admired the girl’s ruffled pink dress. After the curtain he saw Sadie home and walked from there to James Earp’s house on Fremont. There, the oldest of the five brothers, forty and thinning on top, with neat horseshoe moustaches laid over a round beard, opened the back door and stood aside in his vest to let Wyatt enter. James’s left arm, crippled by Confederate grapeshot at Fredericktown, hung stiff at his side. Of the Earps he was the only one shorter than six feet.

“I sent Nellie and Hattie over to spend the night with Allie,” he said.

Wyatt nodded. The big kitchen was full of family and two outsiders. Virgil was there with his cravat undone, and Warren, the youngest, slumped in a ladder chair with one arm hooked over the back and his right ankle resting on his left knee in a pose Wyatt recognized as one of his own. Warren was smoking a General Arthur and when he turned his head to greet the brother he most admired, lamplight glistened on his downy upper lip.

Doc sat at the bare table dealing himself blackjack from his lucky Prescott deck. Across from him, sideways to the table, sat Kate with her hair plastered flat to her big skull and a cape over her shoulders, looking a good ten years older than the last time Wyatt had seen her. Both of her hands were wrapped around a thick white china mug.

“Drink it,” Virgil said. “Don’t warm your hands on it.”

“I am up to here with coffee.” Her voice creaked.

“That is the idea.”

She made no effort to raise the mug. Her nose and eyes were running.

“Warren.”

Warren arose with primal grace and scooped a blue stoneware bath pitcher off the table and upended it over the woman’s head in the same movement. She squealed and spluttered and absorbed more of the icy water in her hair and clothes than reached the washtub at her feet. Virgil caught the mug before she dropped it, dumped its diluted contents into the tub, and refilled it from the pot boiling on the stove. He thrust it into her hands. “Drink.”

Her teeth chattered a full five seconds before she could get the word out. “B-bastard.”

“Bitch. Drink.”

She raised the mug in both hands and gulped.

“How long?” Wyatt asked.

“Better part of an hour,” said James. “I’m running out of coffee.”

“Salt?”

Virgil belched. “Shit. I forgot.”

James caught Warren’s eye. “In the shed.”

Warren set down the empty pitcher and went out. He returned carrying a five-pound canvas sack and chunked it in the center of the table.

James said, “We aren’t curing a side of beef.”

“If you wanted it in handfuls you should of said.” Warren sat down.

Virgil pried the mug out of Kate’s hands, tipped a handful of caked salt from the sack inside, and leveled it off with coffee from the pot. Kate glared at the mixture with eyes shot pink.

“I won’t drink that.”

He struck her ear with the heel of his hand. She reeled and would have fallen off the chair, but he hooked his fingers in the matted hair at the back of her head and pulled back hard and jammed the mug against her teeth. “Drink it or I’ll shove it up your wobbly ass, cup and all.”

She struggled, but he had her braced over the back of the chair, starting her eyes and exposing the whole of the blurred line of her throat. When she opened her mouth to gasp he tilted the mug. Coffee streamed down her chin and stained the front of her dress. Her throat worked and she coughed like a swimmer inhaling water but he slanted the mug until it was empty and stood back, releasing her hair. She choked and sprayed snot. A sound like a steam pump drawing began deep inside her. “Watch your boots,” warned Virgil, retreating another step himself just as Kate bent forward and spewed into the washtub between her feet.

When it was over she remained in that position, head hanging, hands dangling between her knees, vomit dripping off her chin. Warren made a disgusted sound and got up and opened the door to let in fresh air.

Virgil scooped a towel off the back of the chair Warren had vacated and threw it at her. “Clean up.”

A minute went by before she stirred. Then she picked up the towel and began mopping her face mechanically. By then the Earps were gathered in the corner by the cook-stove. Doc pocketed his cards and got up to join them.

“What do you think?” Wyatt asked.

Virgil said, “I think she is going to be one sick whore.”

“Not that.”

James lit a cigar one-handed and flipped the match atop the stove among the curled corpses of its ancestors. “A whore is what she is. Whores always know what’s best for whores.”

“When they are sober,” Doc said. “I sure am sorry about this, Wyatt.”

Wyatt said, “The best way you can show it is to fire her out of town as soon as this thing is done. She has already cost Virge and me five thousand in bail money that is not doing either of us good sitting in the courthouse safe.”

“I have been in jail before. I could have stood it.”

“Billy Blab would be out back taking a leak when the stranglers came for you. And I would be a sorry sheriff’s candidate with a friend in jail for murder.”

“Think Billy squats to make water?” Warren was grinning.

Virgil rubbed at a coffee stain on his shirtcuff. “I talked with old man Fuller today, Doc. You caught up with him hauling water into town at four o’clock the day of the Benson stage thing. You hitched your horse to the back of the water wagon and rode in with him, got in about six.”

Doc had paused to tip up a pocket flask whose silver plate had begun to flake off, exposing dull tin beneath. He heeled the cork back in. “Did I stop for a drink?”

“The stage was in the valley by six and you could not have got to Drew’s in time to stick it up at ten,” Virgil said. “Fuller will swear to it in court.”

“His boy Wes is no friend.” He put away the flask.

“He is less of a friend to the old man. Others remember that you were dealing faro at the Alhambra that night. Kate is the only witness to say different.”

“And we have Kate,” said Wyatt.

“Yes,” Doc said. “We have Kate.”

They kept Kate through the night. The coffee ran out by midnight and after that they flushed her out with warm water and salt and rewarded her afterward with a glass of brandy that she picked up once in both hands and set down empty. Virgil and Wyatt took turns talking to her in low voices and occasionally cuffing her while Doc skinned Warren at monte and James read George McClellan’ s memoirs in the parlor. He fell asleep with the lamp burning. Kate made three trips to the outhouse while Warren stood guard outside. At dawn James’s wife, Nellie, returned with her daughter Hattie and helped Kate clean herself up and lend her an old dress and shawl for the walk to the jail to finish sobering up. Nellie, herself a former prostitute, was a big woman and she scrubbed her down and buttoned her up with masculine thoroughness and a minimum of sympathy. She had overseen Hattie’s whipping for her indiscretion with one of the McLaurys with similar detachment.

Doc touched Virgil’s arm as the latter was escorting Kate out. Her face was bloated and blotchy and her eyes were smudges, but she was steady.

“She has no need to be locked up. She will stick now that she has seen the elephant. She always does.”

Wyatt said, “We cannot count on that. Virgil will see to her comfort.”

Virgil opened the back door. “Let’s go, Kate. I am arresting you for public drunkenness and throwing up in the tub that Nellie boils Jim’s shirts in.”

Doc told her good night.

The bloat had gone down and she was dressed in new calico and a bustle, with a lace handkerchief in her sleeve, when she laid her hand on the Bible in Justice Wells Spicer’s courtroom on Fremont a few days later. She took her seat in the maple chair beside the bench and identified her signature sprawled on the bottom of a whiskey-stained square of paper for the county prosecutor, a wide man with a hangman’s noose of brown beard spilling to his watch chain. He asked her if she was aware of the contents of the document.

She brushed lint off her skirt. “I remember signing some sort of paper when I was out tossing drinks with little Johnny Behan and Milt Joyce. I disremember what was written on it or if there was anything written on it at all.”

Spicer, rumpled and balding with unremarkable features crowded into the center of a spoon-shaped face, gaveled the room to silence, warned Sheriff Behan against uttering obscenities in a court of law, and eventually dismissed the case against John Henry Holliday for attempted stage robbery and murder.

Back at Fly’s boardinghouse, Kate found her carpetbag by the door and Doc stretched out in his vest on the bed. His eyes were open and especially luminous, always a sign of imminent seizure. A bottle stood on the floor near his hand.

“Look around for anything I missed,” he said. “You have two hours before the Kinnear stage leaves for Benson. You can take the train anywhere from there.”

“I have friends in Globe.” She didn’t move.

“Go to Globe then.”

“I haven’t money for a ticket.”

“Your gloves are there on the table.”

After a moment she stepped to the writing table and picked up the kid leather gloves, stained at the fingertips now and missing a pearl button, that she had ordered from Chicago after Doc’s big score in Prescott. A thick sheaf of crisp paper currency slid out of one.

“It is another five hundred I owe Wyatt,” he said.

She put the gloves and the bills in her reticule. “I will write when I get settled.”

“If you want.”

At the door she turned. “Who will look after you when you are in a bad way? Not Wyatt.”

“The same person who did it before you.”

“You were not so bad then.”

“Nothing was.”

“You and Morgan are always talking about Billy Breakenridge.” Color climbed her cheeks. “If people knew about you and Wyatt maybe they would talk about you.”

Another time he would have been off the bed and clouting her. He didn’t move. She knew then that he was sick.

Emboldened, she said, “You will write asking me to come back.”

He said nothing.

She let herself out carrying her carpetbag.

And she would come back.

Late-summer heat lapped at the puddles left by the monsoons and cracked their beds when they were gone. On its heels came the winds of autumn, hot and dry when they blew up from old Mexico and coldly carnivorous when they swept down from the snow peaks of the Rincons, pushing icy rain before them. It stitched up the sand and brought an odor of scorched earth and rusty iron. In the mud near Hereford on September 8, four men stopped the Bisbee stage in an arroyo, removed the Wells Fargo strongbox and a mail sack containing $2,500, and took $750 in cash and jewelry from the four passengers. The driver was a weatherworn intimate of the saloons in Tombstone and Charleston who identified two of the robbers as Pete Spence, a neighbor of the Earps on Fremont, and Frank Stilwell, lately Deputy Stilwell of Cochise County.

Sheriff Behan placed Billy Breakenridge in charge of a posse made up of Deputy Dave Neagle, local Wells Fargo agent Marshall Williams, Fred Dodge, and, at Williams’s insistence, Wyatt and Morgan Earp. They followed tracks sunk deep in gray mud through the Mule Mountains to Bisbee, a miners’ sprawl of adobe dugouts and frame shacks pegged into the side of a hill, where Breakenridge dismounted first, muttering something about catching a bite.

Morgan said, “Don’t let us find you catching it with Stilwell.”

Breakenridge turned, opened his mouth, then closed it and moved off.

“Little cunt,” Morgan said.

The remaining group broke into two parties. After twenty minutes, Wyatt, Williams, and Dodge entered a saloon with clay walls and a mud floor, where Wyatt sat down at Stilwell’s table, laid his American on top of it, and told the man sitting there he was under arrest.

“What for?” Stilwell refilled his glass from the clear bottle on the table.

“For losing your bootheel back there on the trail and having a new one put on here. Fred found the old heel in the Mules and we just came from the bootmaker’s.”

Stilwell bent his mouth into a smile. He was cleanshaven—an anomaly on the frontier—but for a brown stubble, and wore a slouch hat on the back of his head and one of his trademark short cigars screwed into a corner of his mouth. The cigar was a prop; he was scarcely older than young Warren. He wasn’t wearing his star but the holes were plain in his vest.

“I collect taxes for the county,” he said. “I have no need to go around throwing down on stages.”

Fred Dodge, a gambler acquaintance of Wyatt’s who looked uncannily like Morgan Earp in his slicker and parlor handlebars, lit a cigarette and dropped the match sizzling into Stilwell’s glass. “Who said anything about a stage robbery?”

Wyatt said, “Frank, everyone knows you have throwed down on so many the horses gee up to your voice quicker than they do to the drivers’.”

“Why trouble over it, Wyatt? You know I will be cut loose ten minutes after I see Johnny.” He frowned at the match floating in his whiskey.

“Troubling over things is what I do best, Frank.”

“Don’t get tight-ass with me. You are just out to make Johnny look small.”

"He doesn’t need help.”

"I count that raw talk for a friend of that stage-robbing tinhorning whore’s-son of a lunger Doc Holliday.”

“He is standing behind you, Frank.” Wyatt sounded dreamy.

Stilwell’s color started to change. Then the bent smile flickered back and he crooked a finger to flip ash off the end of the cigar without taking it from his mouth. The column fell to the table. “The place is backed into a hill and even he is not skinny enough to slide down the stovepipe.”