Bloody Season (25 page)

“You’re telling it you killed Curly Bill?”

“It was Curly Bill, goddamn it.”

“I’m not questioning that, only that he was killed.”

“He fell down in two pieces. If he was not killed it was a fair imitation.” He signed his name with an extra flourish and folded the sheet in thirds.

McMasters fed a branch to the fire. The dead leaves burned off with a rush, firing sparks up the column of heat. “Who do you feature was with him?”

“I never saw him, but Pony Deal and Curly Bill are joined at the hip. And Johnny Barnes had a twin if that wasn’t him I saw drop his rifle when the rest of you took it into your heads to swap fire finally.”

“The rest of us don’t turn away bullets as easy as you,” McMasters said. “I am starting a rumor that you had on a vest made of stove lids, to ride bang into Curly Bill like that and come away straight up.”

Doc said, “It wasn’t Curly Bill.”

Wyatt started the letter to Sadie. “I would place Ike Clanton in that party too, but Clum says he and Phin are in this posse of Johnny Behan’s that no one ever sees.”

“We saw them today,” Doc said.

Warren sat up, shaking himself free of his blanket. “I never tried sleeping at a ladies’ jabbering bee before.”

“It must be the only place you haven’t,” said McMasters.

“Who’s next, Pete Spence?” In the wobbly orange light the youngest Earp looked a little like Morgan, the same high cheeks and loose lock on his forehead.

“If we pried him out of jail,” Wyatt said, “and if Johnny has not already hung a star on him.”

“That never stopped you with Stilwell.”

“Stilwell came around asking for it.”

McMasters emptied his cup. The dregs tasted of lead from the lining. “I have pushed my luck in this place so far it has commenced to balk. I think I’ll head south and stomp on Mexico.”

“Hot as hell down there this time of year,” Wyatt said. “I admit it will require some getting used to after a cherry orchard like Arizona.”

Doc sat up, spat into the fire, and swigged whiskey from his canteen to cut the bloody phlegm. “The placer dirt in Colorado looks promising, I hear.”

Wyatt said, “I’ll send Sadie to San Francisco and pick her up there and then maybe I’ll see you in Gunnison. I and Warren have not seen our parents since before Dodge City and I want to find out how Virge is getting on.”

“You mean after we finish here,” said Warren.

“We’re finished here. There is too much paper out with our names on it to suit me.”

“What about Clanton and Spence and Will McLaury?”

“McLaury is smoke and the others soon will be if they have the brains God gave a tapeworm. I am a businessman. I can’t live on killing.”

“Well, I can’t live knowing them three are above ground.”

“It’s my bet you can. You’re coming with me to California. I told Ma and Pa I’d look out for you.”

“Like you looked out for Morg?”

Wyatt stopped writing. The firelight made a Greek mask of his face.

“Don’t start comparing yourself to Morg. You aren’t Morg and will never be half of him if you go to whining like a poked bitch every time you hear something you don’t like. Getting yourself killed in Arizona won’t make you Morg.”

“Wish to hell we never came to this place,” Warren said. “Wish we never heard of it.”

“I don’t. Except for Morg and Virge’s arm I wouldn’t trade a square inch of it for a hundred acres in Missouri. A man can make something of himself out here if he has the sand for it. Back home we would all be farmers and poor ones at that.”

“Morg would be alive back home.”

“He wouldn’t want to be.”

Doc said, “No one has brought up Ringo.”

Wyatt resumed writing. “Ringo has quit the territory.”

“You don’t credit that.”

McMasters said, “I never saw a man as dead as Ringo still up and walking.”

“I have,” said Doc.

They started turning in after that. Wyatt finished the letter and relit the candle stub from his pipe and sealed it and put it with the others in the oilskin to give to Turkey Creek Jack. Then he knocked out the pipe and set it on the ground to cool and pulled his blanket around him. Miles away a coyote called to the moon, a joyful sound carried and warped by the wind into a dirge. It was hard to tell when it stopped and became the wind itself.

“It was Curly Bill,” Wyatt said.

Doc lay on his back with his eyes gleaming under a spray of stars. “What makes it Curly Bill?”

“It was just him.” Wyatt turned over.

Chapter Eighteen

I
never saw a man as dead as Ringo still up and walking. He was christened John Peter Ringgold in Missouri, and the inevitable shortening was done by classmates when he attended William Jewell College in Liberty, studying Homer and Euclid while others his age were burning in the Wilderness and learning to get along with the stumps of limbs piled up for burial behind the church at Shiloh. In the late summer of 1864 he rode home from classes on one of his father’s mules to find three badly used quarter horses in the stable and his cousin Jim Younger guarding them with a Spencer rifle. Jim had a new black beard and his officer’s gray greatcoat was ragged at the hem and showing two mismatched bone buttons among the brass. His hat was Union issue without band or insignia, and some attempt had been made to block it so that the brim swept up on one side like Jeb Stuart’s.

He took some time recognizing John, for they had not seen each other in four years, and even then he braced him and patted him down for weapons before taking him inside to the kitchen, where a braided length of jug-eared farmer with big hands and a turkey neck and a smear of chestnut beard around his mouth was eating a slice of John’s mother’s cherry pie with his fingers. He was in dirty underwear, no shirt, and shoddy trousers held up with pink braces like a dandy’s and stuffed into new cavalry boots that must have been too small for him by the way he stood pigeon-toed. When the door opened he grasped the amber handle of a Navy Colt’s stuck in the front of his trousers, but he let his hand fall when Jim came in behind John carrying the Spencer.

Jim introduced the farmer as Buck James and the farmer wiped his fingers on his underwear top and took John’s hand in a crusty grip and told him his father was in the parlor and that his mother had left to bring back the doctor. John asked if his father was hurt. The farmer got a look from Jim that said he hadn’t told John anything and the fanner said to take him on in.

His father was standing in the parlor smoking his pipe, a thing he never did in that room, at the request of John’s mother. On the davenport, his thin shoulders propped up on pillows, lay a boy not older than seventeen, narrow-faced with a great dome of smooth forehead like a baby’s. He was naked to the waist with a patchwork quilt drawn up over his chest and a yellow-stained bandage slanting over his left shoulder toga-fashion. When the three entered he followed their progress without turning his head. He had a habit of blinking both eyes rapidly like an owl.

“Jess, this here is Jim and Cole’s cousin Johnny Ringgold,” said Buck James. To John: “He taken a ball at Crooked Crick. Soon’s he can ride we are fixing to throw them Yanks a shivaree they will talk about in Washington City.”

John would remember little worth telling a historian of that first and only meeting with Frank James and his baby brother Jesse, which ended abruptly when John’s mother came back alone to report that the doctor had refused to aid a guerrilla. Fearing betrayal to the Federals, Jim and Buck bundled the boy into a litter lashed together from willow branches and dragged him into Carroll County where the Jameses knew a doctor with Confederate sympathies. John never heard from any of them again, but learned of Jesse’s complete recovery when he was identified among the nightriders who stopped a Union train in Centralia a month later and lined up and shot down the disarmed soldiers in cold blood.

That, and a subsequent engagement in which that same band under Bloody Bill Anderson wheeled and ran down the pursuing regulars, finished John at college. Concentrating on Thermopylae and the conquest of Gaul became increasingly difficult when the roll of cannons to the south was making ripples in his inkwell. But the war ended before he could enlist, and a young man drilled in the hopelessness of history’s lost causes from Ilium to Waterloo was poor clay for the bands of border raiders who traded skirmishes in the woods for bank assaults and train robberies after

Appomattox. Like hundreds of others whose roots had been blasted by mortars and grapeshot and a victory-bloated Union’s tyrannical Order No. 11, Johnny Ringo went to Texas.

It was the place to be when you were young and strong and had few skills not drawn from a book. The cattle industry was in the process of being invented, and any man who could keep a horse under him and hold his water in the face of angry fire was welcome to join the raiding parties dipping across the Rio Grande for Mexican beef and a cut of the market yield in Chicago. Like any good Missouri boy, John had hunted his share of meat on the hoof, but the rangy, hook-horned descendants of Cortez’s cattle were the test of a man; after a few hundred spills and a dozen near-tramplings he grew hard as jerky and developed a leather hide stretched over six feet and two inches of wolf muscle. During drives north he traded fire with vaqueros and rurales and bandits, sometimes all three in one mounted bunch, and his natural abilities with rifle and pistol preceded him. He worked with and for more ex-Confederate senators and colonels than he figured the South could have held on its best day. If his fellow hands were concerned by his soft-spoken good manners and occasional absences from dugout poker matches to burrow in a corner with one of the books he carried in his blanket roll, they extinguished their doubts in the prodigious quantifies of alcohol he consumed when he had cash in his poke. Once he pulled a cork out of a bottle he threw it away. At such times his company was avoided, for the man who when sober would ignore a deadly insult would lash out with his long arms when drinking and beat a man half to death for smiling wrong. In this way he drifted from camp to camp, his welcome lasting only as long as the time between bottles.

Cattle work, once the trade was established and confrontations with the grandees became unnecessary, was not for him. He was too big for the normal cow pony to carry over a long drive and few men trusted him when nothing was happening to keep his mind off drinking. He did some rustling for the small outfits, and when range disagreements like the Mason County Hoodoo War broke out he hired on with the bigger ranches as a regulator. How many men he might have killed during this period, if he killed any, would probably never be known, for no witnesses ever came forward to connect him to any of the deaths.

Legends grew up around him, as they did around quiet men with euphonious names and no apparent past, like vines climbing a condemned corral. It was said that he had ridden with Quantrill in Missouri and Kansas; that he had studied for the seminary in Virginia and learned six languages before he fled to escape a murder charge; that he was born in Texas and had given up a promising career in law with his family firm when his intended bride left him standing at the altar. It was a time of women’s novels and campfire ballads that would not let a man choose life on the scout without some evil romantic quirk of fate to trigger the choice. Somehow the story started circulating, and it would outlast most of the others, that from time to time he received letters addressed to him in a feminine hand that would leave him morose and dangerous to be around for days. Since no one claimed ever to have actually seen the letters, it followed him everywhere and would not die.

He never talked about his people or his past, nor told lies about them that someone could track down and prove false and in the proving uncover a truth. His very silence was taken as evidence that one or the other or both were dark, for in the long and frequent stillnesses west of St. Louis, asking questions and providing entertaining answers came second only to theater and funerals. It would not occur to any of them that the reality might not be worth mentioning. In truth he had loved no woman since his teacher in third grade, although he had bedded several and picked up a dose of clap in El Paso; and he could never kill as many men as had been charged to him.

Gun work was not steady. Ranchers couldn’t stand paying a hand to do nothing when no shooting was going on. Between jobs he robbed an occasional stage. They were easy. But money meant whiskey, and the gangs were continually breaking up to reform somewhere else without Ringo to have to walk around on eggshells. Texas itself began to get too various for him when the Comanches surrendered after Adobe Walls and the Rangers turned their attention to the outlaw element beginning with his friend Wes Hardin. They followed Hardin to Florida, took him off the train in Pensacola, and sent him back to Huntsville for twenty-five years and Ringo rolled his books and Winchester into his blanket and struck out for Arizona Territory.

Ed Schieffelin had gone looking for his own tombstone among the diamondbacks and Apaches in the Dragoons, found a vein of silver as thick as his wrist, and almost before he got back to the San Pedro the city of Tombstone had begun to blister up out of the flats. Johnny Ringo was one of dozens of predatory animals who smelled blood and money and began drifting in that direction in 1879. On the way he stopped in the adobe hamlet of Safford to cut the dust. In a saloon with a plank bar and an earthen floor he sat in on a few hands of poker, couldn’t find his luck, and threw in to drink at the bar. He was joined moments later by a cowboy named Lou Hancock, whose own luck had gone sour after Ringo left. Ringo signaled the bartender to slide another shot glass down the plank. Hancock thanked him but said he was drinking beer. Ringo had two more drinks, began to stew over the answer, then produced one of his ivory-handled Colt’s and shot Hancock. The cowboy’s luck had turned, for Ringo’s aim drunk wasn’t good. Hancock lost a piece off his neck and his assailant finished his bottle and rode out. No one pursued him. There had been no deaths, and on the frontier when one man invited another to drink with him and the other man refused, the matter was out of the law’s hands.