Bloody Season (22 page)

The room the pair led Wyatt into was the same one they had just left. A lamp shed a greasy globe of light that barely reached the walls and Urilla was shrieking silently....

He jolted awake with a tongueless shout. He gaped around, and for a moment the bed was stained with Urilla’s blood. Then it faded and the cool air in the hotel room chilled the slippery flesh under his soaked nightshirt. It was March 1882, not October 1870; and he was in Tombstone, Arizona Territory, not Lamar, Missouri.

A bar of moonlight lay across the clock on the mantel. Twenty past ten. He had been asleep for less than ten minutes, although it seemed much longer. He had turned in early after a long day spent quartering the town with Morgan in search of Frank Stilwell, Hank Swilling, Pete Spence, and Johnny Ringo, all of whom had been seen earlier. All but Swilling, who had been found not guilty of the murder attempt on Virgil, were still wanted on Judge Stillwell’s warrants. But there was no sign of them, and in the evening Wyatt and Morgan and their women had gone to Schieffelin Hall to watch the Lingard Opera Company performing Stolen Kisses. They had bought the tickets to celebrate their release after the court in Contention had remanded the Clanton-McLaury murder case back to Tombstone. Wyatt hadn’t liked the opera; the music was forgettable and the actors trumpeted their lines, and anyway he preferred Shakespeare. Sadie and Lou had enjoyed themselves, however. Lou had even unbent so far as to wish Sadie good night when they dropped her at Mrs. Young’s boardinghouse. Wyatt had wanted to invite Sadie back to the Cosmopolitan, but Mattie was staying with Virge and Allie and the day had been frustrating enough without a scene in the hallway. Morgan had then kissed Lou and went off to Bob Hatch’s billiard hall for a game with the owner. The dream was too real. Rather than pick it up where he left it, Wyatt swung his feet to the floor and dressed in the same white shirt and black suit he had worn to Schieffelin Hall. He checked the load in the big American and pocketed it with the handle turned out.

The cherry wood bar in Hatch’s saloon separated the billiard parlor from the rest of the establishment. Wyatt paid for a beer and carried the glass around the end of the bar and took a chair against the wall. Morgan, bent over a rear table in his vest, glanced across the felt at his brother. The Chesterfield lamp suspended over the table caverned his eyes under a carapace of white brow.

“It’s too early to go to bed,” Wyatt said.

Morgan nodded and shot. The six ball glanced off a cushion and came to rest against the four ball with an apologetic click. He grunted.

Hatch, all wrists and Adam’s apple without collar or cuffs and only the lower half of his ecclesiastical face visible inside the cone of light, stepped away from his spot in front of the alley door to take his turn. He had on his hat with the brim turned up all around. Morgan circled behind him and chalked his cue. He winked gravely at Sherman McMasters, watching with a drummer named Berry by the stove next to the bar.

The room was stark, sawdust-floored and all naked yellow plaster above the wainscoting with an embossed tin ceiling and a pronghorn head staring agate-eyed from the east wall, Morgan’s hat hung on one antler. An iron cuspidor stood under it on a stained rubber mat. The upper half of the door to the alley was paneled in glass, the only window in the room. The two lower panes were painted over.

Icicles of glass tipped out of the upper frames, shivering down as silently as Urilla’s nightmare screams under the bang. The butt of Morgan’s cue skidded on the floor and he fell forward. Berry shouted and glass tinkled in a pause, and then a second report swelled the room. Plaster pounded out of the wall above Wyatt’s head, powdering his hat and shoulders.

Blue smoke turned in the air. Morgan lay on his face in the sawdust and glass splinters. Berry sprawled on his side next to the stove, the ball that had passed through Morgan lodged in one thigh and his weak heart stopped by the shock. He had come west in search of his health. Wyatt, moving the instant the second ball slapped the wall above him, hurled himself behind a table and tore his pocket freeing the American. He cocked, shattered a door panel, cocked, misfired, cocked, collapsed one of the painted panes—triangles of milk-glass tumbling—cocked, misfired, cocked, misfired, said, “Shit!” and crab-ran to his brother while McMasters and Hatch and another man who had come in from the saloon clawed at the bolted door and swung out into the alley. They returned after a moment dragging their pistols and put them away to help lift the wounded man.

“Don’t, I can’t stand it.”

“His back’s broken,” Wyatt said.

Goodfellow and Matthews arrived minutes later. The surgeon pulled back Berry’s lids and felt his neck and turned away toward Morgan as they tried lifting him again. This time they got him up—Morgan cursed—and Hatch held open the door to the card room, which contained a davenport. They set Morgan down on it. The mohair quickly turned dark.

“Put my legs straight.”

“They are straight, Morg,” said Wyatt.

“They’re my legs, damn it.”

Wyatt adjusted them.

“Is Bob here?”

Hatch spoke up.

Morgan smiled. “This is the last game of pool I’ll ever play in here.”

“Damn it, Morg,” said Wyatt.

“Tell Ma and Pa. I don’t want them getting it in the papers.”

“They won’t.”

Matthews was unbuttoning Morgan’s shirt. He motioned him away with a feeble gesture. “Wyatt.”

Wyatt bent over him.

“You were right, Wyatt,” he said. “I can’t see a thing.”

The latch split on the second blow and the door whacked the wall on the other side, throwing crooked a framed Stephensgraph of the Blessed Mother and sucking dust balls out of corners in the current. The nickel-plated Colt’s Lightning hurtled into the room towing Doc behind it. He towered there in his tall-crowned hat, the tails of his greatcoat spreading behind him like buzzard’s wings.

“Where is he?”

The woman was looking, not at the weapon, but at the skull face of the gringo who was holding it, his eyes molten in their sockets. She thought it was Señor Muerte come to claim her children and she pulled them closer. They wriggled, unable to breathe. She was reciting the Rosary in rapid Spanish, staring up at the skull face and not aware that she was saying anything. He was taller than the doorway; from the floor where she crouched with her dusty skirt drawn down over her knees and her arms around the boy and girl, he seemed to stretch to the sky, big in the boots and shiny pistol bending his wrist under its weight and narrowing up to the terrible skull. His teeth were bared in a rictus.

There was another man standing behind him. An ordinary one this, not as tall, and one of the flesh; but of course Señor Muerte always had a mortal helper to ferry the soul into the Afterlife. This was the reason one weighted down the eyelids of the dead with new centavos, to give to the ferryman for the ride so he did not push off and leave the soul standing on the shore between worlds. She would have crossed herself, but she was afraid to let go of the muchachas.

Turkey Creek Jack Johnson looked past Doc at the plump young Mexican woman cowering on the plank floor with her arms encircling a barefooted boy and girl in dirty cut-down clothes. The girl was light-haired, probably half American. He lowered his shotgun.

“Squatters,” he said. “I tell you, McLaury’s hauled freight out of here.”

“Donde esta Señor McLaury?”

The woman went on reciting. Doc rolled back the hammer and repeated the question.

She stopped. “No sabe.”

He pointed the pistol at the light-haired girl. “Donde?”

“Por favor, señor!” And then her Spanish got too fast for Turkey Creek Jack to follow. Some kind of heathen chant.

“She don’t savvy Will McLaury from a buck nigger. Let’s go, Doc.”

“No, she knows.”

“She’s just a dumb puta.” He was studying the woman’s face and was satisfied when there was no reaction that he had calculated her right.

“Maybe if I shoot the girl.”

“Shoot the boy if you have to shoot one of them,” Turkey Creek Jack said. “He is all Mex.”

“Does the girl look a little like Ringo to you?”

“He has not been in the territory long enough.”

“Quien es el padre de la muchacha?”

The woman went on chanting. She was rocking on her heels now with her eyes shut tight. The children stared with black-olive eyes at the two strange Americans with fine clothes and shiny guns.

“No, I guess she doesn’t.” Doc seated the hammer.

They withdrew, leaving the door standing open. Turkey Creek Jack could hear the rhythmic Spanish all the way down the block. All of these greasers were half Indian.

Doc kicked open several more doors on Fremont, terrifying Pete Spence’s wife Marietta, who said she hadn’t seen her husband in days, finding several houses empty, and interrupting Harry Jones—whose wife Kitty was in Tucson—with a girl from the Bird Cage. When Doc came out of one of the vacant houses trailing Turkey Creek Jack, Wyatt Earp was standing out front. Wyatt hadn’t changed clothes and his brother’s blood had dried in a brown crust on his white shirt. The sky was bleeding out behind him.

“Stand away.” Doc said.

Wyatt said, “Having off like this is a sound way to get yourself killed.”

“I have been looking for just such a way for years.”

“I need you alive.”

“You place too much store in keeping folks alive. You let Ike run and he ran straight to Johnny Behan. You let Ringo go off with Billy Blab and he shot Virge and killed Morg. Your high morals come too dear for me.”

“Stilwell killed Morg. He was seen running with Pete Spence and some others.”

“Ringo was in it.”

“Virge and Jim are taking Morg’s body home to California on tomorrow’s train,” Wyatt said. “I am seeing them as far as Tucson. Warren is coming and so is Sherm McMasters. I want you along if you will come. You too, Jack.”

“To carry the coffin?”

“To fill some others.”

The sun broke behind Wyatt, an open wound on the flats south of the Whetstones with their shadows clawing the valley. Doc scabbarded his pistol and stepped down off the porch.

PART FOUR

THE PALLBEARERS

It is often said that every nation has the government it deserves. What is much more certain is that every nation has the newspapers it deserves.

—Matthew Arnold,

Civilization in the United States, 1883

Chapter Sixteen

“S
tilwell and Ike Clanton are here.” Sherman McMasters wiped coffee from his red whiskers. He had managed to sleep aboard the train and his thoughts were always slow to turn over when he had slept during the day. “Well, hell, they are standing trial for that Bisbee stage holdup. Are we fixing to blast our way into the Tucson courthouse?”

Wyatt rested a hand on the table and leaned closer. His breath smelled of stale tobacco. “I mean here at the station. Warren saw them.”

Morgan Earp had boarded the westbound train at Contention in an unlined white pine box with the lid nailed shut and Colton, Calif. scribbled on the foot in thick carpenter’s pencil in the head porter’s round hand. The others had left the buckboard and buggy and horses at the livery and ridden in a coach to Tucson, where there was a supper stop. Lou wore a black dress and veil and the men had on black armbands and guns under ankle-length dusters. Mattie and Allie wore capes and broad hats tied with scarves under their chins to protect them from cinders. James and Nellie and her daughter Hattie had taken an earlier train.

“How do you want to handle it?” McMasters asked.

“First let’s get Virge and Allie back on board.”

The couple were eating alone at a table in the dining room of Porter’s Hotel near the depot. McMasters occupied a corner table with a view of both entrances and his Winchester leaning against it. Wyatt carried a sawed-off Stevens ten-gauge shotgun mounted on a brass frame. When Virgil and Allie were finished they walked ahead across the platform with Wyatt and McMasters following. They were not hiding their weapons under their dusters now, but carrying them in both hands out in the open. Virgil leaned a little on his wife as they walked. His left arm hung in a black sling.

Warren, getting rawboned now like his brothers, no longer just lanky, and sporting proper moustaches, was standing by the passenger coaches with a Winchester. Wyatt caught his eye and Warren pointed across the track with his chin. It was dark out and steam from the oily black boiler curled white in the lights of the station.

Doc climbed down from another car as Allie was helping Virgil up the steps. Doc had his coat wrapped around his right arm with a shotgun inside it. “Stilwell’s on the other side,” he told Wyatt. “He’s heeled.”

“Rifle or pistol?”

“Pistol.”

“What about Clanton?”

“I never saw him.”

Wyatt reached up and touched his brother’s good arm.

“Turkey Creek Jack is to stay with you and Allie until the train starts moving. Remind him.”

“I guess I am not so crippled I cannot protect my own wife.”

“Morg was not crippled at all.”

Virgil nodded. His face had grown fat, pigging his eyes, which had lost some of their blue directness.

“So long, Virge. I’ll be seeing you soon.” Wyatt stuck out his free hand.

Virgil took it. “Take care of yourself, Wyatt.”

“I intend to.”

The whistle brayed, summoning passengers. Wyatt and the others started up the track toward the engine. They spread out as far as the platform would let them. Mcasters’s shortness spoiled the formation a little. Steam churned around their legs.

“There!” Doc raised his shotgun.

The acetylene lamp mounted on the front of the towering engine made a stick figure of the man running through it, throwing his shadow thirty yards. The shadows received him on their side of the tracks.

Wyatt gestured with his shotgun and the men turned left toward a line of coaches standing on a siding. The westbound was pulling out now, its wheels scraping for traction on the greasy rails. A jet of steam reflected light off a face in the shadow of the stationary cars. McMasters and Warren Earp fired their Winchesters. The reports rattled with the levers working between them. Doc’s shotgun boomed.