Bloody Season (7 page)

“You ought to have come out and watched,” she said. “It was a sight.”

He took his fingers off the nickel-plated Colt’s on the corner of the table and returned to his labor. The pistol lay on an envelope addressed in his elegant hand to Atlanta, Georgia. “I intend to miss every funeral but my own,” he said.

“You talk as if you were dead already.”

“It will save me the trouble of adjusting later.”

She hesitated. “I am going to Globe.”

He sheared a hairline strip off the pasteboard in the clamp, then replaced the card with another and lined up the edge with the heel of his hand.

“I thought you might want to come with me,” she said.

“The sheriff would just take me off the stage and stick me in jail.” He worked the scissors again.

“He won’t do that. He is afraid of you like everyone else in town except that Wyatt Earp.”

He clamped in another card.

“Your streak has gone cold here,” she said.

“Wyatt would lose his bail money.”

“What do you care? He almost got you killed.”

“Almost is a crime, all right.” He inspected the last card, then laid it down and selected another.

“Stand clear of him, Doc.” She was leaning over him now, a hand on the table. He smelled lilac water. “He will get you shot or hanged and that Fort Griffin fire trick won’t work twice.”

“I have bets laid from here to Valdosta that a ball or a rope will do for me before the cough.” The card moved as the blade came down and he ruined it. “Shit!” He shoved the cutter away and reached for the open bottle on the table. She grabbed his arm.

“There is no good talking to you. That goddamn foxy con man has cast an evil spell over a poor sick man that has to drink to stay alive!”

He jerked the arm free, slopping whiskey over the deck of cards and his pink shirtsleeve. A flush climbed his face then and she saw it and tried to back away, but he swept the bottle around by the neck and laid the side of it along her temple with a thud. She lost her balance and fell. He was up before her, backhanding her across the face with his free hand and then reversing directions and slapping her with his open palm so that it stung clear to his elbow. She sprawled on her side and started crawling. He followed her and bent over her and went to work on her with his fist. When she crossed her arms over her head he kicked her in the ribs. He upended the bottle, shaking out the contents, plastering her hair and darkening her dress. When it was empty he threw it at her and it struck her forearm with a clunk, slid down her hip, and rolled on the floor. The air swam with ferment. He kicked at her again, but missed this time and stumbled forward, almost falling on top of her.

He was wheezing, legs bent, arms hanging, his vest ridden up his narrow back, and inside of him the old familiar sensation of feral cats shredding the wall of his chest. He was bleeding through his trousers where the scab on his right hip had broken open.

The room was quiet then, except for his whistling breaths and her sniffling and sucking down blood and snot. She had voided her bladder; he could smell it. Sitting there on the floor soaked and bleeding and stinking of piss and bad whiskey and lilac water she made him feel ashamed, the only person on earth who could do that except maybe Wyatt and one other. He started to apologize and help her up. She wrenched her arm out of his grasp.

“Beat a woman!” she shrieked. Her left eye was closing and when she swept the back of a hand across her nose it came away smeared. “Kill an unarmed man! Where is your decency?”

“I coughed all that up with my lungs years ago,” he said, and went down on one knee, his eyes glazing over.

PART TWO

THE TRANSACTION

Bad local government is certainly a great evil which ought to be prevented, but to violate the freedom and sanctity of the suffrage is more than an evil. It is a crime which if persisted in will destroy the government itself. Suicide is not a remedy.

—James A. Garfield, Inaugural Address, 1881

Chapter Five

R
aise the dead. Turn the earth out of their pockets, strip them, scrub off the paint and powder and flush the yellow juice from their veins and stand them up in good Tucson boots scarred at the toes and running down a little on the outside of the heels. Spin the clock in the other direction. Stuff the blood back into the holes and the balls and smoke back into the barrels and sit the risen dead on their mounts and wagon seats and reverse them out of town. Day to night to day to night to day, flashing like Camilius Fly’s magnesium powder, day to night, Wednesday to Tuesday to Monday, faster and faster, day to night, October to September to August and the rainy season back to the heat and then the thaw and then snow. Make it March on the night the trouble started and let the dead tell their side.

Bud Philpot had the cramps. His stomach would gurgle and clench and bend him double so that he lost sight of the road except for the pale patch blurring between the traces. Worse, his fingers were frozen thick as sash weights and he couldn’t feel the reins between them. Driving a six-hitch team was like playing a piano and a man required his sense of touch. The lines would go slack in his hands and the team would slow down.

The sky was skittle-black, without stars, and the coach’s yellow side-lanterns reflected flatly off the flakes turning and tumbling out of it to the white tenting below. Snow clung fuzzily to the dormant mesquite bushes lining the road like heaps of bone. The horses panted and billowed white steam.

“Rein up, Bud, and go take a dump.”

The cramps were loosening a little. Philpot cracked his face enough to cock a grin at Bob Paul, the big clean-shaven man riding next to him with a Stevens ten-gauge across his blanketed lap. It was a young face with an old man’s mobility, the muscles underneath worn smooth and loose like the mechanism of a broken-in Winchester. “It’s a temptation,” he said, “but if I was to commence shitting now I won’t never stop and likely freeze to the ground and you’ll have to bust me loose with the butt of that splatter-gun.”

“Well, give me your seat then. I would just as soon die in a stage wreck as anyplace, but I would not want folks saying that Bob died of Bud’s runs.”

Philpot drew rein and leaned back on the brake. His fingers were too stiff to tie off and he handed both sets to Paul and let him climb over, sliding sideways into the messenger’s seat with a twinge in his bowels that made him curse.

Paul was an old driver and handled the horses by varying tension on the reins and with a series of vocalizations elaborate enough to signify language. He kept the shotgun across his thighs, adjusting its position now and again with an elbow when the vibration threatened to pitch it off. The coach was hauling seven passengers inside with the freight and an eighth in the dickey seat on top in the rear, huddled into a company bearskin with his hat pulled low. His name was Peter Roerig.

The Benson road, two ruts in the iron earth between the Dragoons to the east and the Whetstones to the west, was a succession of bootjacks and inclines lined with desert growth and rough as a slag heap. Philpot swore and clenched his sphincter at the jogs and lurches. It felt like he had a rock jammed up him.

A mile outside of Contention, Paul slowed down to climb a grade. The horses smelled woodsmoke from Drew’s Station and he fought them, bracing his heels against the footboard and applying and releasing the brake. The wheels jerked and pulled and slid on snow pounded flat and slick by the team’s hooves.

“Whoa, boys!”

In the light of the side-lanterns coming off the snow on the ground, a group of men in big hats and bandannas with yellow beards spilling out around them moved out from behind a skeletal clump of chaparral on the shoulder. Snow dusted their brims and the shoulders of their oilskins and their rifle barrels glistened black and wet.

At the shout, Bob Paul let the reins fall slack and swept up the shotgun. One of the rifles crashed. Philpot grunted, slapped his chest, and slid off the seat. Paul stuck out his left hand with three lines in it to snatch Philpot’s collar and heaved him back up. The stink of excrement washed over him in a wave. Other rifles had opened fire; balls were splitting the air around him. Feeling no pressure on the reins, the horses bolted up the grade, whinnying and splattering mud and snow into Paul’s face. He shouted at them and let Philpot slump to free both hands and stood on the footboard and worked the brake. Behind him the clattering reports faded, deadened by snow and distance, then stopped.

The lighted windows of the station were hanging ahead when he got the animals down to a canter. He reined in before the adobe building.

“Bud?”

Philpot was sitting with his chin inside his rough collar and his hat canted down in front of his face. Paul tore off the hat. The driver’s head drifted toward his shoulder and his body leaned over sideways. The front of his coat glittered with blood from a ragged hole over his heart. Paul left him there and climbed down. He was surrounded by a crowd, the station having emptied out at the noise of gunfire. It grew as the passengers helped one another down, everyone talking at once.

“Stand away!” Paul jerked his shotgun at the newcomers. The coach contained eighty thousand in silver bullion bound for the railhead in Benson.

“Who’s dead?” someone asked. “Is that Bob Paul?” He recognized the station keeper’s pockmarked face.

“No, I’m Paul. Bud Philpot got it.” He started counting heads among the passengers. “Everybody all of a piece?” Someone said, “That fellow on top fell off back there.” Paul said, “I caught him. Not that the favor did him any kindness.”

“Not him. The one in back.”

He glanced up at the empty dickey seat.

“He wasn’t moving when we left him.” The passenger speaking was an angular young man in a checked suit and chesterfield splashed with mud.

“Christ.” Paul told the station keeper to watch the coach and started back on foot.

“They’ll cut you down,” the keeper called.

“Do I look like I’m carrying bullion? They are horseshit and pony tracks by now.”

Snow fell with a sizzling noise. The big clean-faced man was a shadow, then a sensation of movement behind a curtain. After five minutes he returned, the shotgun dangling. The lights of the station shadowed the pouches in his broad face.

“Wire Tombstone,” he told the station keeper. “Tell them the shipment is safe but we got two dead.”

The snow slacked off after midnight. It had stopped falling when seven horsemen approached the station at a walk, iron shoes creaking on the fresh fall. At the base of the grade Bob Paul swung a lantern and they drew rein. He recognized Sheriff Behan’s big sombrero and greeted Billy Breakenridge, shook hands with Virgil Earp when he swung down with a grunt, and nodded to Wyatt and Morgan, both part-time fellow shotgun messengers. Marshall Williams, the Wells Fargo agent in Tombstone and a sunny entity by nature, smiled a greeting and rolled a cigarette. Paul didn’t know the seventh man, medium-built under a buffalo coat and slouch hat, with a round face, moustaches curled down on the ends, and kindly blue eyes that glinted in the lantern light as if hunting mischief. He was not thirty. All the men wore big hats and heavy coats and clanked when they moved. They had brought two packhorses with them. The fellow in the buffalo coat had a Sharps rifle in his scabbard.

Virgil said, “Bob, this here is Bat Masterson. He is a good man to have on the road if you keep an eye on him and see he does not tie any tin cans to your tail.”

Masterson pulled a small hand out of its glove to accept the shotgun messenger’s big paw. “Adobe Walls,” Paul said. “I heard about you. I thought you’d be older.”

The glint deepened. “I came near to not getting that way on that occasion.”

“Well, I cannot promise you Comanches, but there are four or five white men I would admire to turn over a mesquite flame. They murdered a good Wells Fargo man and a paying passenger.”

“Where are they?”

“Laid out up at the station. Coyotes this winter are thick as mosquito wigglers.”

“What have you found?” Behan remained in the saddle with his arms folded on the pommel.

Paul stepped off the road and raised his lantern. A scattering of brass cartridge shells caught fire in the glow. Wyatt picked one up and flicked snow off the flanged end. “Winchester short. They used up enough of them to kill just two.”

“I count seventeen,” Paul said. “Here is where one of them waited with the horses.” He carried the light into the mesquite. The new snow lay bowl-shaped in depressions where the earlier fall had been trampled. He hooked something out of the brush and held it out.

Virgil turned the item over and handed it to Wyatt. It was a triangle of black cloth with lengths of frayed rope sewed around the edges.

Paul said, “I thought they was yellow whiskers. They each was wearing one.”

“The trail is hours old,” said Behan, when the men returned to their animals. “The snow will melt come morning and we will have nothing but lathered horses to show for our trailing.”

Wyatt mounted. “Bat can read sign like an Apache. I am no poor shakes at it myself and neither is Virgil.”

First light was a metallic sliver over the Dragoons. Bob Paul swung a leg over the black he had brought back from Benson after delivering the stagecoach and the party set out, the horses shuddering and snorting milky vapor.

The sky cleared at dawn. The sun warmed the earth and drew forth a fog that burned off by mid-morning, the droplets prisming into brilliant colors in the moment of dissipation. The snow dissolved into patches that became brown puddles in the afternoon. By then all of the riders except Behan, hanging back with Breakenridge, had shucked their coats and rolled them behind their cantles.

Now and then they stopped while Masterson rode his paint around in a circle, leaning out of the saddle, or dismounted and went ahead on foot to study the ground. Sometimes he was joined by Wyatt.

“These fellows are not new to life on the scout,” said Masterson, stepping into leather. “Doubling back and using riverbeds and rock face. Johnny would have lost this one thirty miles back.”