Bloody Season (20 page)

“What do you want?”

“Can’t a man visit his wife of a morning?”

“I am not your wife.”

“You were quick enough to use my name at the Papago Cash Store when we were together.”

“I asked you what you wanted.”

“You are squatting on a lot belonging to me,” he said. “I have come to dispossess you.”

“This house is mine.”

“The lot is in my name.”

“I put it in your name,” she said.

He showed straight white teeth behind his moustaches. “That was short sight. I’ll not have you rolling with that murderer on my property. You can move your house or move out.”

“You are drunk.”

“You used to prefer me this way. You said it slowed me down so you could catch up.”

“You are no gentleman.”

“At least I am not a whore. I have the papers to serve if you care to see them.” He unbuttoned his coat.

He was reaching inside it when Morgan came through the door and struck him in the face. Behan fell backward off the porch, arms windmilling, and sat on the ground. He put fingers to his mouth and brought them away to look at the blood. When he started to rise, Morgan stepped off the porch, bent his knee up under Behan’s chin, and struck him low in the stomach. He jackknifed, throwing up. Morgan had him by the collar when Sadie inserted herself between them and pushed at Morgan’s chest. “You will kill him!”

“That was the plan.” But he lowered his fist, bleeding at the knuckles. Behan tore himself loose from Morgan’s other hand and picked up his sombrero.

“You are a particular woman,” he said to Sadie. His eyes had glassed over and the lower half of his face was a smear of blood and vomit. “You will only roll with an Earp.”

Morgan started toward him. He turned hurriedly and crossed Fremont, tripping over his boots.

“He has been drunk and boasting of his intentions since yesterday,” Morgan said.

Sadie fingered the brooch at her throat. She wondered how much Morgan had heard of her conversation with Johnny. “If he had waited one more day he could have walked in and taken the house and lot without conversation.”

“It wasn’t them he was after.”

“Just like a morality play.” She kissed him. The gesture surprised Morgan, who hadn’t meant that at all.

Chapter Fourteen

“T
here is little Johnny Behan, the great horse thief of Arizona Territory.” Behan, puffy-lipped and swaying, passed Doc’s table in the Oriental without comment and ordered a whiskey at the bar. Doc called out to Buckskin Frank Leslie behind the bar to give the sheriff plenty of extra ice for his eye in case Morgan Earp stopped in. “Or was it Sadie done that?”

Glaring back, Leslie said something in a low voice to Behan. The bartender was all fierce handlebars and pale gray eyes and wore a Peacemaker on a special belt rig that left the pistol exposed. Parker, Joyce’s partner, sat on a high stool under Custer’s Last Fight with his bandaged left foot elevated and resting next to the beer pulls. His big toe was still suppurating where Doc had shot the top off the first joint in October.

“Quit riding him,” Virgil said.

He was sitting across from Doc, sharing his bottle. Although his calf had healed to the extent that he could venture out without his cane, he had fallen into the practice of extending the leg between tables. Passersby had to walk around it or trip.

“What good is a balky little ass if he is not for riding?” Doc’s voice carried.

Virgil leaned across the table, cursing when his leg twinged. “Don’t borrow trouble. A shooting scrape now will put us all in front of the grand jury.”

Doc said loudly, “Johnny wouldn’t know a trigger from his little cock.”

“I will shoot you myself, you one-lung bastard.” Virgil spat the words.

Doc paused with his mouth full of whiskey, then swallowed, his Adam’s apple working up and down visibly like a slow bobbin. His eyes dulled.

Wyatt came in during the silence and sat down, exuding cold fresh air from his horsehair trail coat with the hair side in. He helped himself to a swallow from his brother’s glass and pulled a face. “I looked for you both in the Alhambra. I thought we were through sending Joyce and Parker our business.”

“It is like Ritter’s embalming parlor over there,” Doc said, still watching Virgil. “Things picked up as soon as we came here.”

“I saw. If McLaury waits long enough we will wind up gunning each other and save him coin.”

The moment ebbed. Virgil sat back and belched into a meaty fist. He had taken on flesh during his recuperation, puffing his jowly Earp face and pushing white shirt out under his vest all around. His star lay flat on a roll of material. “If he is like his brothers he will be a year getting anything done with it.”

“If he is only just six months we will be away from here.”

“Sell that timber?”

Wyatt shook his head. “The English son of a bitch was never going to pay me until he took a profit off his first load. That is like buying a bed and never paying for it until you get around to sleeping in it.”

“He smelled how bad you want to sell.”

“I will bust the smeller of the next man that offers me such a transaction.”

Doc said, “I told you to salt the place with silver nuggets.”

“I am in trouble enough now.”

“That variety girl has made a padre of you.”

Doc produced a deck and dealt three-handed poker until they were joined by Sherman McMasters and Turkey Creek Jack Johnson, a friend of Wyatt’s from Deadwood. They brought their luck with them and Virgil ran out of chips after eleven o’clock. He got up to go home.

“If you’ll wait out a few hands I’ll go with you,” said Wyatt, who had thrown down most of the winning cards.

“I would be here until sunup waiting for you to climb down off that tiger.”

The air outside was cold and sweet after the smoke trapped under the Oriental ceiling. The stars were hidden and there was a raw-iron taste of snow on the wind blowing in off the Whetstones. Yellow light from the saloons scalloped Allen and fanned out the corner front of the Eagle Brewery on the other side of Fifth. Opposite the Oriental on Allen, the two-story adobe under construction by the Huachuca Water Company was dark and jagged, its pane-less windows like eye sockets in an ivory skull. Virgil pulled down his vest, stuck his hands inside the pockets of his ulster, and started across Fifth. His leg ached, but not unpleasantly.

He didn’t hear the crashes, only their echoes throbbing in the mountains. Light flashed and a rockslide struck him from the left, staggering him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw one of the Eagle windows belly in and fall apart and then he was aware of a warm wet sheet sliding down his left side under his clothes. He took his left hand out of his pocket. Something that was black under the corner gas lamp forked down the back of the hand and ran between the fingers and pattered in the dust at his feet.

Five men erupted out the doorless opening of the Huachuca Water Company building and broke in two directions, three running down Fifth toward Toughnut, two loping east along Allen. Long bronze barrels caught the light as they ran.

For a moment Virgil stood on the spot, uncertain. He had been headed toward the Eagle Brewery. That thought eroded more slowly than his strength. Finally he turned and recrossed the street to the Oriental, where Wyatt and Doc and others were just coming out on the bound with their pistols out. It was a funny thing, but Virgil was most concerned with the thought that his leg had stopped hurting.

“Wyatt,” he said, “I’m hit.” And then someone was saying, “Catch him!” and darkness lapped him.

This time Allie Earp was there ahead of the doctors. In a dress that Virgil had given her for Christmas, and which she had put on to greet him in when he came home, she hurried ahead of the men who were carrying her husband and held doors for them while they swept through the lobby of the Cosmopolitan and laid him on his stomach on a table in the dining room. She had an eerie sensation of having lived through it before; it came and went and came again, so that certain thoughts and motions seemed trod on many times, but only at the moment of occurrence. She couldn’t predict it. Dr. Goodfellow arrived soon afterward, followed by Dr. Matthews, the latter winking uncontrollably, and they cut away Virgil’s ulster and frock coat and vest and shirt and underwear like butchers flaying a carcass, exposing torn meat and polished spine, the bone unbearably clean and white against the blood and the dingy gray of his long johns. Allie gasped when she saw it, and gasped again when his sleeve came away along with a handful of buckshot and splinters of shattered bone.

Virgil was conscious. “Never mind, Allie. I’ve got one arm left to hug you with.” His voice was thin and distorted, the right side of his face flattened on the table.

Goodfellow and Matthews turned him over. The tabletop was slick with blood and so were the doctors’ arms and shirtfronts before they were done. Both had their sleeves rolled almost to the shoulders. Allie, her world narrowed to details, saw that while Matthews’s wrists were pink and hairless, Goodfellow’s showed a healthy black matting to the elbows; the arms of a pipe-cutter rather than a surgeon.

They bulged when he tore a tablecloth into strips and tied one around Virgil’s upper arm and knotted it so that the flesh showed white above and below it. When that was done, the bleeding from the other terrible wounds seemed to increase. The air in the room was musty with the odor of it.

Wyatt came in then, his eyes blue nailheads in a face nearly as pale as his brother’s.

“He was hit more than once.” Matthews rummaged in his pebbled bag and handed Goodfellow an amber bottle of ether.

Wyatt said, “There were five blasts.”

“Amazing,” said Goodfellow, drawing the cork. “If he were standing a couple of feet closer you might as well have just called Harry here. He’s the coroner.”

“He never fell. He walked back across the street to tell me he was hit.”

“He is like a bull. That’s a help.” Goodfellow leaned toward Virgil with the bottle. Virgil pushed it away with his good hand.

“Wyatt, when they get me under don’t let them take my arm off. If I have to be buried I want both arms on me.”

“No one is burying you today, Virge.”

“I need your word.”

“All right.”

Goodfellow held the mouth of the bottle under Virgil’s nostrils and told him to breathe normally. He obeyed, and soon his lids were flickering. The surgeon tamped the cork back in.

“Amputation may be necessary. I have never seen worse damage to a limb.”

Wyatt said, “You heard him.”

“You must understand that the elbow is gone.” Matthews winked. “Even if we can save the arm it will be a useless appendage for the rest of his days. He may wish we took it off just to have it out of the way. That is, if he lives.”

“Jim gets on all right, and he has not been able to use his since the war. If Virge dies it won’t matter.”

Goodfellow looked at Allie, who nodded. “Please yourself,” he said. “Tell the hotel staff we need clean towels, as many as they can supply. If they are short, have them boil more or borrow them. Then stay out. There is a deal of bone that must be removed and we must stop the bleeding.” Blood was tapping the floor now like drips from a leaky roof.

Wyatt and Allie went out and Wyatt talked to the clerk at the desk. Morgan and Jim were in the lobby with Lou and Mattie, Wyatt’s woman, who had been with Allie when the news came about Virgil. After some conversation with Morgan, Lou stayed to wait with Mattie and Allie. The men left. Wyatt had not spoken to Mattie once.

The shotgun blasts that had shredded the biceps and ligaments in Virgil Walter Earp’s left arm and obliterated the complex structure of the elbow had also flayed open the lateral and lumbar region of the trunk, increasing blood loss and the risk of infection. Stray pellets had lodged subcutaneously down the left thigh and created an epidermal lividity like a strawberry mark as far as the knee. While Matthews regulated pressure on the tourniquet to prevent gangrene, Goodfellow plucked out the pellets with forceps and flushed the cavities with alcohol and dressed the side and removed four inches of bone from the arm, using tweezers for the smaller spurs. By the time he had the arm swathed in gauze and towels, the bandage on the patient’s side had bled through and had to be changed. Matthews kept hotel employees busy boiling and fetching towels that wound up in gory ruined heaps on the floor. Several times the patient showed signs of awakening and had to be put under again. Because of the volatile nature of ether, the doctors had ordered the fire in the hearth extinguished, and as Goodfellow bent over his labor his breath curled and steam rose from the wounds. From time to time he warmed his stiffening fingers in the vapor. Both men were sweating in spite of the cold. Rivulets snailed down Goodfellow’s nose, quivered big as marbles on the end, then dropped into the bloody orifices with audible splats. Matthews merely stank. The coroner gave off a sweetish stale smell of corrupting corpses; or so it seemed to his companion, a relentless saver of lives who considered death an intolerable affront to his profession. The floor grew tacky under the soles of their shoes.

At length Goodfellow straightened, his bones cracking. Matthews seized the moment to uncork another bottle from his bag and handed it to his colleague, who sniffed at it.

“Grain alcohol?”

“I get it in samples from San Francisco. Patent medicine.” A schoolyard smile flaked years off the coroner’s high-domed face.

“Filthy stuff.” Goodfellow tipped it up, swallowed, waited for the heat to start spreading, and returned the bottle to Matthews, who swigged at it and winked.

That confounded tic, Goodfellow thought.

They summoned the clerk and two waiters to help them move the patient to a bed in a room on the ground floor. Allie and Lou followed from the lobby. They had sent Mattie upstairs when she couldn’t stay awake. Mattie spent most of her time sleeping these days.

“We could not stop the bleeding, only slow it down,” Goodfellow told Allie. He had washed up and put on his old shabby coat over his incamadined shirt, but he had neglected a crusty brown smear on the side of his large nose. He was not old but looked it, with coarse oily pores, a pendulous lower lip, and scales in his beard. Matthews, no great hand at diplomacy, had left. “If he survives these next twenty-four hours his chances are fair. He’s a big man, and strong. The heavy coat spared him the worst of it.”