Bloody Season

by Loren D. Estleman

  The Tombstone-trained eye might have spotted Charleston notables Frank Stilwell and John Ringo among the cowboys standing in the rear with their hats in front of them, but for the most part the mourners were strangers to the deceased. Proper funerals were rare entertainments in an area whose cemetery contained more nameless corpses than Gettysburg’s.

  The procession down Allen Street and north to the hill bore more spectacular distractions. The Tombstone brass band, plumed shakos and gold frogs on red velvet, led off with tubas, a trumpet, a bass drum, and a slide trombone, followed by twin eight-thousand-dollar hearses with glass sides and glowing side-lanterns and hard rubber tires; Ike and Mary in a hired trap with Phin Clanton riding the axle; Billy Claiborne following in a buckboard; and others strung out behind in buggies and on foot, the rest of the column deteriorating into a rabble with children kicking apart green horse-apples at the end and mongrel dogs snapping at heels and stopping to urinate against the boardwalk. Strings of firecrackers snapped and spat sparks, shying horses and starting small fires in the chaparral that were quickly tramped out. A bow-tied Sheriff Behan, Undersheriff (and Nugget editor) Harry Woods, and Deputy Billy Breakenridge accompanied the procession on foot with shotguns cradled.

  On the rocky slope studded with Spanish bayonet overlooking town, two gravediggers in overalls with cuds in their cheeks leaned on their shovels and watched as the caskets were lowered by ropes into a hole twelve by eight by six and the last handful of earth thumped the lids. Then they came over and began tipping sand and gravel and clumps of yucca into the cavity. The wind pasted their brims to the crowns of their hats and caught and carried smoking dust from the disturbed earth, spreading it across the graves farther down. A shovelful landed in the middle of Tom McLaury’s face and skidded over the glass.

  Ike Clanton shook hands and supported his sister’s elbow as Phin helped her up to the crest of the hill where the carriage waited. Ike hung back a little, watching the laborers. The hole was half-filled now.

  “Well, Billy, good-bye,” he said. “You never did have the sense God gave a loafer wolf, to run when you’re outmanned and outgunned.” He pulled on his hat and turned away.

  The band, playing “Tenting Tonight” as it left town, sounded tinny in the Oriental, where Wyatt Earp sat at the faro table in the gaming room dealing to Tom Fitch and flicking long white fingers at the sliding counters in the cue box to keep track of the cards dealt. He had on a black Prince Albert and an empty beer glass stood at his right elbow. Blue smoke from his cigar haloed his head and curled in the shaft of sunlight slanting through the leaded-glass windows.

  Fitch bet and lost the last of a modest stack of chips. “Is there a room where we can discuss your case in private?” he asked then.

  Wyatt waved his cigar around the room, appointed in brass and varnished mahogany with a Brussels carpet. “It does not get a deal more private than this.” At that hour they shared the establishment with a bartender polishing the white china beer pulls in the main room and a miner with his arm in a sling feeding coins into a bronze baroque slot machine in the corner. Little Egypt, clad in veils and beads, monitored his luck from a gilt-framed painting mounted high on the wall.

  Fitch rolled his shoulders. Thickening in middle age, his complexion darkened and cracked from years of stumping for office on the Utah salt flats, the attorney had gray hairs like steel shavings in his impressive black handlebars but none in his heavy brows, which moved independently of the rest of his face and each other. They fascinated judges and distracted juries and he would sooner lop an arm than pluck a hair from either of them.

  “Spicer has set the hearing for the thirtieth,” he said. “It fixes to be a long one.”

  “How long is long?”

  “Two or three weeks. I have never known one to last longer than a month.”

  “That won’t do. I and Virge have placed all our mining and water interests on the block to stand this ten thousand bail. We cannot live on what the women take in sewing.”

  “You have the gambling concession here, and your brother Jim has his saloon.”

  “Lou Rickabaugh has the concession. I have a quarter interest. And no one is tripping over his spurs just now to play with me. They are all afraid that a ball with my name on it will smear their brains across my board.”

  “That will pass.”

  “I will tell Lou you said so.”

  “How are Virgil and Morgan coming along?”

  “Virge is walking some. Goodfellow says Morg will make out fine if Virge doesn’t kill him first.” Wyatt played with his chips, riffling them in the stack. His fair hair lay flat on his scalp and curled at his collar with red glinting in it. “Tom, how’s our chances of walking out of this hearing without chains on?”

  “I don’t know. When this town was more adobe than timber the business would have been just a formality. A year ago it would not even have come to a hearing. Then it would have been judged a fair fight because all the holes were in front, and if you were not lynched first, no one would have volunteered to ride you all the way into Tucson for trial. But now that Tombstone is a county seat you are skidding pretty close to the mouth of the law.”

  “I was under the apprehension that we are the law. Or was until Clum took away Virgil’s post.” The last words were bitten off.

  “That was the council. You still have his support in the Epitaph.”

  Wyatt belched.

  “You have few enough friends here without throwing him off,” Fitch said. “As long as Behan and the cowboys have the Nugget you will need the vigilante sheet.”

  “I am a businessman.”

  Fitch brushed tobacco off his vest. “I approve of your attitude, about the four of you representing the law. If you keep to it I can get you through this. And it’s good news about Virgil walking. I’ll want him on the stand to back up your testimony.”

  “What about Doc?”

  “They will bring him into it anyway. I was fixed to study the law once and took to spending time around lawyers. I know how it’s done.”

  “Let them. We will play down Holliday’s participation in the fight so that it won’t mean anything.” Aware of the clicking and whirring from the slot machine, Fitch leaned forward and dropped his voice. “You will testify that the first shot on your side came from your pistol. Billy Clanton shot first and you returned fire and those were the first two reports.”

  “There will be others testifying different.”

  “They will be sufficiently confused among themselves because it all happened so fast.”

  “Thirty seconds by my count.”

  “The strategy is that you and Virgil and the other two were acting in your authority as city peace officers. That will be easier to sustain if two temporary deputies did not start the shooting. Particularly two with their reputation for belligerence.”

  “I never wanted things to come to that pass. Virge didn’t neither.”

  “There is no help for that now.”

  Wyatt’s cigar had gone out. He relit it, turning the end in the match flame. “I guess you know what you’re about,” he said, puffing. “I was not born in Illinois to hang in Arizona.”

  “Stop by the office later. Your statement is being transcribed and I want to go over it with you before you sign it. I am planning to introduce a motion—”

  Wyatt was looking past him. Fitch turned in his chair and saw Billy Breakenridge entering, blinking a little in the dimness after the bright sunlight outside. He was slender, and the skyward tilt of his hat on the back of his head and the upsweep of his dark handlebars lent him a joviality he didn’t possess. Two points of his deputy’s star showed past his coat. He looked around, nodded at Wyatt, then turned and took a seat in the main room, leaning his shotgun against the table. The bartender brought him a beer.

  “Services must be over.” Fitch turned back, hoisting his brows. “Is that true what they tell about Breakenridge?”

  “He is some tight with that Charleston cro
wd just like his boss.”

  “No, I mean the other.”

  Wyatt blew a ring and tapped some ash into his beer glass. “Leaves that many more women to go around.”

  “That is what comes of bunking with cowboys, I suppose.” The attorney stood. “Shall I accompany you back to your house?”

  “No, business will be picking up now that the planting is finished.”

  “My advice is not to go out on the street alone.”

  “I won’t be.” Wyatt gestured with his cigar toward the man at the slot machine, who turned and showed Fitch a blue muzzle resting inside his sling. The lawyer looked up then and recognized the ruddy face and red chin-whiskers, not of a miner, but of Sherman McMasters, a friend of the Earps who rode shotgun for Wells Fargo.

  “I am a gambler,” Wyatt said. “Not some woolly-headed nigger.”

  Fitch traded the muted opulence of the Oriental for the puckered street and its brassy sunshine. The wind was blowing from the direction of the Mexican quarter and brought with it a hot smell of tortillas and guacamole to mingle with the manure stench on Allen and sour mash fumes from the alleys behind Hatch’s and the Eagle Brewery. It was a ripe town, stinking of prosperity. He touched his hat to Kate Fisher, who was lifting her skirt above a surprisingly trim ankle to mount the boardwalk. She nodded and continued up Fourth to Fremont and let herself into Fly’s boardinghouse.

  Doc was sitting at the cramped writing table in their room when she came in, using a steel card-cutter to trim the blurred edges off a deck he had been carrying since Prescott. He had won forty thousand dollars there, although most of it playing faro with someone else’s deck; but the town itself was lucky for him. Kate hung up her cape and bonnet.

  “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

  Raise 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 b
oth 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.