The pants and shirt laid out for him were similar to Masterson’s outfit, but clean and pressed. Alan tugged the clothes on, cursing under his breath, dreading how hot he was going to be, wearing long underwear. The boots pinched uncomfortably. He left the vest and jacket draped over the metal bed frame, and ignored the hat Masterson offered him. “If this New Bodie is so isolated, how do you know who I am?” he asked.
“Oh, I’ve seen you in New Hell.” Masterson winked and grinned at him again. “Now come along, I have a client for you. And a good thing too. ’Cause that’s ten you owe me for the clothes.”
Reluctantly, Alan followed him out of the room, unwilling to be left in this new hellhole by himself. He’d learned the hard way that traversing any city, town, even a building, was best done first with someone who could show you the ropes.
The lobby of the Unlucky Strike Hotel seemed luxuriously appointed, with chairs upholstered in deep green velvet, and a fancy rug spread in the lobby. Then Alan saw the bullet holes spattering the walls, the half-shattered and canted chandelier, the broken pulley fan; a closer look at the velvet revealed just how threadbare it was. But it was the bullet holes that worried him. Not more than ten minutes at a time had passed without at least a couple shots fired.
When he hesitated inside the lobby doors, Masterson’s hand snaked back, caught the front of his shirt, and yanked him out onto the boardwalk. “What’s the matter?” Masterson demanded.
“Am I going to be shot at?”
Masterson shrugged. “Probably. That’s life in New Bodie. Stop fretting. No one’s going harm you as long as you’re with me.”
“Why?” Alan asked. “Who are you?”
“I told you who I was, now come along. You bellyache more than a penniless drunk.”
William Masterson…. Alan rolled the name around in his head, realizing he needed to stop thinking about his own lifetime and start thinking more broadly. Two hell-horses were tethered at the hitching post outside the Unlucky Strike Hotel. They watched him with small, evil eyes and bared fangs. Alan shuddered and edged by as close to the wall and as far from the beasts as he could. A charnel-house stench rolled off their sweaty amalgamated bodies, and Alan covered his nose and looked away.
“What’s that?” He squinted at the horizon, shielding his gaze with an up-thrown hand. “Looks like a dust storm?” He knew he sounded more worried than he meant to, but any kind of storm in hell was dreadful. Or worse, it wasn’t a storm at all, but the approach of something bigger and more dangerous. Like Erra and the Seven. There was nowhere in hell so isolated they couldn’t visit whenever they chose.
Masterson didn’t even bother glancing the direction Alan pointed. “That’s the boundary of New Bodie, you might say.”
“A dust storm?”
Masterson snorted. “It’s not the dust storm you have to worry about, son, it’s what’s causing it.”
“All right,” Alan said. “I’ll bite. What’s causing it?”
“A stampede of the biggest, orneriest, fire-breathing, man-eating hell-cattle you ever did see. They roam the desert out there waiting for some dumb-as-shoe-leather tenderfoot to try to leave here that way.”
“But, you said you leave here,” Alan objected.
“Regularly. But I told you, I’m special. And I don’t go that route.”
A large stagecoach clattered by, pulled by six hell-horses, and Alan jumped back from the proximity of it. Masterson walked on, and Alan had to hurry to catch up. A bunch of miners pushed out of a noisy saloon as he passed, the batwing doors slapping to and fro behind them. Alan stumbled through their midst, trying to ignore the glares and the insults flung at him. Boot heels stomped on the boardwalk around him.
“I’m sorry,” Alan apologized as he smacked into one large, bearded man.
Meaty fingers shot out, knotted in Alan’s shirt front, and hauled him close. Alan gagged on the man’s rancid breath. “Sorry?” the man wheezed. “Who asked you for an apology?” His other hand drew back in a fist, and Alan flung his arms up in front of his face.
“I thought you liked free things,” Masterson’s voice said calmly from over Alan’s shoulder. “Don’t make that apology he gave you pick up a price tag.”
Porcine eyes squinted malevolently at Masterson, clearly weighing options. The big miner growled behind twisted lips and hurled Alan sideways. Alan slammed hard into the saloon wall and barely caught himself. He gasped at the pain in his shoulder.
The miner ignored Alan entirely, gave Masterson one last glare, spat at his feet, then strode into the street with his unsavory companions. Alan tried to smooth out his shirt front.
“Dead Hat Joe. Mean one. Not much on brains though.” Masterson glanced curiously at Alan. “Just how’d you survive in New Hell?”
“I didn’t,” Alan reminded him curtly, then he shrugged. “Not very well. I stayed in the Hall of Injustice as much as I could.”
“You’re not going to enjoy that luxury here, I’m afraid. You want to strap on a gun?”
The idea shot a tremor of fear through Alan’s gut. He pointed one finger at Dead Hat Joe’s retreating back. “That was the closest I’ve ever been to a fight in my life, and you want me to carry a gun?”
Hands on hips, Masterson frowned. “What kind of privileged life did you lead anyway?”
“Not privileged. Just … civilized.”
Masterson snorted. “Bet you a pretty pine coffin you’re begging for shooting lessons by the end of the week. Come on, Mister Civilized.”
Ahead, a red awning overhung the alcoved entrance to a theater called simply the Ungrand Opera House. Posters proclaimed an ongoing performance of The Girl of the Golden West, directed by the composer himself, Giacomo Puccini. The open front doors beckoned, and Alan paused to peek inside. The small theater offered an intimate setting. Only a few rows of wooden benches stood in front of the orchestra pit and stage, backed by an open floor area for the rest of the patrons to stand. He could just make out a balcony of more opulent box seats that ringed the stage, but the red velvet seats and curtains appeared a hundred years old: ragged and faded, instead of lush and elegant. His glance jumped to the splintered gold-painted wood of the balcony and the rents in the walls, and his eyes widened as he realized they were evidence of more bullet holes. A lot of them.
The onstage set featured the interior of a saloon. A baritone was singing to a woman, the lone woman in a crowd of men. At least, that’s what Alan thought he was supposed to be doing, but it was the worst, most out-of-tune singing he’d ever heard, and he cringed, shrinking back until the horrible noise ended abruptly as a man ran out on stage.
“No no no no no no!” the man cried. Dark-haired, mustachioed, his curly hair frazzled, he proceeded to rant at the singer in rapid-fire Italian. The baritone quailed under the tirade, but the woman stomped her booted foot and crossed her arms. Young, blonde, petite and curvaceous, in some sort of a cowgirl costume designed to make her fit in with the boys, he supposed, but it just made her look cute. Like a college co-ed dressing up for Halloween. She looked down the opera house main aisle, straight out at Alan. Their gaze met. She smiled, apple cheeks dimpling, and Alan smiled back. He had the urge to wave at her, but he stopped himself.
A tap on the shoulder made Alan jump. Masterson nodded toward the angry man on stage. “That’s the composer himself. Poor guy. He’s gone off his nut, and I can’t say I blame him. He’s stuck directing the same opera over and over, cursed with the worst soprano, an awful tenor, an over-the-hill baritone, and an orchestra cursed with instruments that can’t stay in tune. They’ve never finished a performance. The cowboys keep coming back, hoping for something better. By the middle of the first act, they know that’s as good as it gets, and they shoot up the place. Puccini and the gang fix the place up and start in again the next day. You notice the empty buildings?” He gestured around the street. The buildings within a block radius seemed to be boarded up or abandoned. “Even residents in New Bodie have standards,” Masterso
n said. “No one wants to live or work within earshot of the rehearsals.”
“Who’s that blonde woman in there?”
“Minnie?”
Alan found himself smiling. “Minnie.”
“No, that’s the character she’s playing. The soprano is Sally Lockett.”
“Oh,” Alan muttered. Then he smiled again and tried out her name. “Sally.”
Masterson rolled his eyes and caught Alan by the sleeve, hauled him along. “Come along, son. You haven’t heard her sing and, trust me, you don’t want to.”
*
Their destination bore a simple legend: Josie’s. The first thing Alan noticed was that the interior seemed to be decorated with fewer bullet holes than either the opera house or the hotel. The second thing he noticed was the man playing solitaire at a far table: a tall, lean, sandy-haired man, sporting a broom of a moustache over thin lips. He was dressed neatly compared to the other residents in New Bodie. Even Masterson’s garb looked shabby next to this man’s white shirt, red brocade vest, black coat, and string tie.
“This him?” the man asked.
“Yep,” Masterson said.
The man raised his eyes from his cards, and Alan felt like he needed to take a step back. It was a casually appraising glance that couldn’t have lasted more than a couple seconds, but Alan knew the man had sized him up in that brief moment, and it unnerved him. He wasn’t used to having his measure taken so completely in a bare whisper of time. The man turned up a couple cards, shifted another across the exposed piles, then looked up again. Pale blue eyes fixed on Alan, and he said, “I hear you’re an attorney.”
“Yes, sir.” Alan winced. He hadn’t meant to throw the “sir” on there, but it had just slipped out.
“Looking to hire an attorney,” the man said. “Harry Piper’s lost one too many times, and he claims my faro tables are rigged.”
“Are they?”
The man gave a short bark of laughter. “In hell? Don’t be ridiculous. Trying to cheat here is an exercise in futility. Hell itself cheats whenever it feels the inclination. You don’t act like you been down here long, but you had to have noticed things don’t work the way you expect them to.”
“Well, yeah,” Alan said, remembering his office in New Hell. “I learned fast not to take the elevators in the Hall of Injustice, and there was this coffee maker … worst coffee you ever tasted when it did work, which was only part of the time, the rest of the time it …”
Masterson and the other man were starring expressionlessly at him. Alan shut up. He swallowed and got back to business. “My name’s Alan Bensinger.”
“Wyatt Earp.”
“Wyatt…” Alan gaped. “Wyatt Earp? The Wyatt Earp?”
Earp scowled at Masterson. “You didn’t tell him?”
Masterson grinned innocently and spread his hands.
“You were really at the O.K. Corral and all that? With Doc Holliday and –” Alan broke off. “You don’t look like Wyatt Earp.”
The man raised an eyebrow. “Is that so?”
“Yeah, well, I’ve seen the movies, you know, Burt Lancaster and Kurt Russell, Henry Fonda….”
Masterson cleared his throat.
Alan shut up. “Sorry,” he said. “I guess that’s kind of silly, isn’t it? I mean they’re just actors, you’re the real thing.” He spun toward Masterson. “That’s why I know your name. You’re Bat Masterson!”
“Yeah, and I know,” he held up a hand to forestall any comments, “I don’t look like Gene Barry either. Or Joel McCrea for that matter. Rather wish I did.”
“How do you know what they looked like? Never mind, never mind,” Alan said quickly. Excitement ran though him. Now this he could do. He’d never been offered the chance to defend anyone famous back in New Hell. New Bodie was looking up. “So you want me to represent you? Well, you’ve come to the right man, Mister Earp. You see, I can win any case.” Alan grinned. “I got this deal, see, as part of my torment, as long as I lie in court, it’s a cinch. A done deal. We can make up whatever story you want, and if I tell it, it’ll stick.…”
The blue-eyed man paused mid-deal and gazed at him coldly, and Alan trailed off. He’d been in a lot of hostile courtrooms, but that icy stare not only disapproved, it completely dismissed him. The same glance flicked toward Masterson, and Earp said, “Throw him out.”
Alan’s mouth dropped open.
“Now, Wyatt,” Masterson said, “give the kid a chance –”
“You heard me.”
Masterson sighed and grasped Alan’s sleeve again without further ado and tugged him bodily toward the exit. The man at the table kept playing solitaire without watching them go.
“Now wait a minute, wait!” Alan’s objections went unheeded until they were outside in the stifling heat. “What the hell was that about? Man needs a lawyer, I tell him I can’t lose, that his case is a sure thing, and he fires me?”
“Gotta be hired to be fired, son,” Masterson said. He spread his hands. “You didn’t make it that far. Sorry. But trust me, around New Bodie, you won’t lack for work. Plenty of mining claim disputes, murder charges, robbery, assault and battery, rustling… Just set yourself up, put up a shingle, and the clients will be pouring in.”
“But –” Alan deflated. “I don’t know anything about mining law.”
“You have something against learning?”
“No, I …” Alan glanced back into Josie’s. “What’d I do wrong, Mister Masterson?”
Masterson’s expression grew serious, and he said simply, “Wyatt don’t take to lying, that’s all.”
“I don’t either, that’s what got me sent here, I’m sure of it, but….” He heard the old bitterness coming out in his voice and cut himself off. Masterson wouldn’t want to hear about his past, and he sure as hell didn’t want to tell it. It was too depressing. “So, now what?”
“You can’t throw a stone around here without hitting a saloon or a cantina. Go get yourself a drink.”
“Anything like the drinks in New Hell?”
“Worse.”
“No thanks, then.” He recalled how, once upon a time, shortly after he had arrived in hell, he had thought he might be able to drink himself into oblivion. That hope had died fast. Alcohol had been no relief whatsoever. He couldn’t get properly drunk, and all it had done was turn his gut into a sea of churning snakes and make him even more miserable. If that was possible.
“Go take in a show then.”
Alan remembered the blonde singer and smiled to himself.
Masterson groaned and shook a finger at him. “Just remember I told you so.”
“What?” Alan said.
“You haven’t heard her sing.”
*
She wasn’t singing when Alan returned to the opera house. Another argument was in progress, this time between Sally Lockett and the composer of the opera, Giacomo Puccini. In Italian. Alan couldn’t understand a word they were saying, but he thought she was marvelous. Fiery, passionate, beautiful – and she seemed to be winning whatever dispute they were having, as Puccini grew redder and redder. Alan liked a woman who knew how to use words.
Then, almost as if she sensed his presence, she looked his way. And that dimpled smile crossed her face again, in clearly surprised pleasure. She’d remembered him! At least he thought so for a moment, until she summarily ended the discussion by slapping Puccini hard and storming past him backstage. Alan’s shoulders slumped.
Puccini held his cheek and stared after her. The members of the chorus and the large rotund tenor slunk off the other way while he was distracted, but the movement caught the composer’s eye, and he cried out in a heavily accented voice, “No! We must rehearse again! Andiamo!”
No one noticed Alan at all, and, as the conductor raised his hands to the small rag-tag orchestra at the composer’s command, Alan solemnly left the theater. Maybe she smiled at all strangers, anything to break the monotony of rehearsals.
He walked right into her outside the t
heater doors. “I’m so sorry!” he began, but she shushed him with a finger across her lips, grabbed him familiarly by the hand, and pulled him away from the theater entrance.
She’d changed clothes somehow, he noticed. She wore a dress now, a blue and white checkered affair that seemed to cling to all the right places. Her blonde hair had been swirled on top of her head where it seemed to stay as if by magic.
“You’re new here, ain’t cha?” she said. “Ain’t seen you ‘round before.”
He stared at her a moment, trying to reconcile the image of an opera singer talking like that. Then he remembered Masterson wincing at the thought of her singing. Alan shrugged it off. “Yes,” he said.
She smiled again, batting her eyelashes at him. “Well, why don’tcha buy a girl a drink?”
By the time she’d had two drinks (and he hadn’t touched the one he’d felt compelled to buy out of old-fashioned courtesy), he’d learned that, growing up, she’d wanted to be just like Jenny Lind. “You know, the Swedish Nightingale?” she had said, and Alan had nodded as if he had the slightest clue who she was talking about. She’d studied to be a singer, but the War Between the States had broken out, and her teacher had gone off to fight. She’d died herself of typhus that same year.
“I guess it was enough training though, ’cause here I am, stuck singin’ that cursed opera for that cursed composer.” She downed the rest of her glass as if it were water, and Alan grimaced.
“How can you drink that stuff, doesn’t it…?”
“Curdle in my belly?”
“That’s not exactly what I was going to say, but…”
“Well, sure it does, honey. I haven’t been able to get good and soused since I arrived down here, and let me tell you, that is hell. You try singin’ to an audience full of riled up cowboys who wanna hear something good and get stuck with me and that damned opera. Think we can do Lucia di Lammermoor or La Traviata? Oh no, just La Fanciulla over and over and over. And after they boo and shoot the place up, I can’t even drown my sorrows in a good whiskey.” She shrugged, a lithe raising of her petite shoulders. “But I keep figuring, maybe one of these days, one good drink will somehow slip in among the bad, you know? Keeps me hoping.” Her smile turned shy, and she looked up at him from under those big lashes. “Sort of like meeting a man like you. Keeps me hoping.”
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