Bloody Season

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Earp, will you walk with me a ways?”

  Wyatt slackened a notch. “If it is not too far. I have a game in the Eagle Brewery to close.”

  They turned the corner together. Ike was looking down at the scuffed toes of the boots he had had made in Tappanier’s in June.

  “I was not fixed right when Holliday come up on me in the lunchroom. I am now if he is still about.”

  “He has gone to bed.”

  “We will have man for man in the morning then. This fight talk has been going on for a long time and I guess it is about time we fetched it to a close.”

  “I’ll fight no one if I can get away with it,” Wyatt said. “There is no money in fighting.”

  They stopped in front of the door in the beveled corner of the Eagle Brewery. Liquid yellow lamplight angled out, throwing their shadows into Fifth Street. Ike’s eyes were dead in his fleshed face.

  “You must not think I won’t be after you all in the morning.”

  The two separated there and Ike went to the Occidental, where he played poker until daylight with Tom McLaury, Johnny Behan, and Virgil Earp, who dealt with his big Colt’s Army resting in his lap. The betting was lively and the talk was all of the game.

  Harry Jones found Wyatt Earp with his coat off counting money into stacks on his table in the Oriental gaming room. The door to the black iron safe stood open and the room was shafted with light, with dust motes floating around in it. The time was just past noon. The chairs were on the tables in the main room, and the bartender, Frank Leslie, was pushing dust and broken glass into little heaps on the oiled floor.

  “What does this mean?” Jones asked.

  Wyatt hoisted his eyebrows. The lawyer’s long yellow face was more animated than usual.

  “Ike Clanton is hunting you boys with a Winchester rifle and six-shooter.”

  “Hunting where?”

  “Haring up Fremont when I saw him last.”

  “He say anything?”

  “He said, ‘As soon as those damned Earps show their faces on the street today the ball will open.’ Should I round up the Citizens’ Committee?”

  “No, I will go down and find him and see what he wants.”

  “I bet it is that little cock-of-the-walk Johnny Behan set him to it.”

  “Johnny hasn’t the balls.” Wyatt snapped an India rubber band around each of the bricks of bills and returned them to the safe.

  Jones said, “If he didn’t have balls I would not have cause to hate him.”

  Wyatt rose and put on his mackinaw. It covered the slick red cedar handle of his .44 and he arranged it so he could grasp the pistol through the slit in the side pocket. “You lost your best chance to euchre him at Doc’s stage-robbery hearing. You were there when Harry Woods and Johnny cooked up that charge. All you can do now is skeedaddle back to that wife of yours and hogtie her to see she does not kick over the traces again.”

  “Yes, this town is full of wife-stealers.”

  Wyatt’s blue gaze stayed on him until Jones left the room, moving awkwardly with his cheeks striped scarlet.

  At that moment, Virgil Earp, who like Wyatt had risen at noon from a morning bed, stepped up behind Ike Clanton on Fourth Street between Fremont and Allen and laid the barrel of his Army along the mastoid bone behind Ike’s right ear. Ike’s knees buckled and Virgil caught the Winchester in his free hand while Morgan, who had accompanied his brother there, bent and tugged the Frontier Colt’s out of Ike’s trousers.

  Virgil looked down at the man crumpled on the boardwalk. “I hear you are hunting for us, Ike.”

  Ike hissed air through his teeth. His hat had slid over his eyes and he started to bleed behind the ear. When he raised a hand to it, Morgan kicked his elbow.

  “Get up, you son of a bitch. We are taking you to Judge Wallace.” The younger Earp’s eyes were red and sunken and his face was gray. He had not been to bed.

  The courthouse on Fremont was in the possession of the portraits of Garfield and Fremont, a dead president and a deposed governor. The front of the room milled with idle attorneys and that class of citizen that finds a legal show as good as a Toughnut Street cockfight in any age. Justice Wallace was not present. Virgil and Morgan half-carried Ike behind the railing and deposited him on the clean pine bench along the east wall. Virgil handed his brother the Winchester.

  “Don’t shoot him until I get back with the judge.”

  He had not been gone a minute when Wyatt entered and sat down on the bench nearest the railing. “Well, Ike, you found us.”

  “I will even up with you for this.” Ike sat bent over with a dirty handkerchief doubled twice and pressed behind his ear. “If I had a six-shooter right now I would make a fight with all of you.”

  Morgan was standing at the end of the bench, holding Ike’s Winchester with the butt resting on the floor. He stepped away from the wall and spun the pistol he had taken off Ike, offering the handle. “If you want to make a fight right bad I will give you this one.”

  Ike started up off the bench. Jim Campbell, one of Behan’s deputies on permanent assignment to the courthouse and a sometime prizefighter, shoved him back down hard enough to split the pine. He was rawboned and wore his handlebars curled and his hair cropped close like John L. Sullivan. “No fuss in here, boys.”

  Wyatt stood and approached the railing. His knuckles yellowed as he gripped it.

  “You cattle-thieving son of a bitch, if you are so anxious to make a fight I will go anywhere to make one with you, even if it’s over to the San Pedro among your crowd.”

  “Fight is my racket.”

  “Then I will pay your fine for you and we will do it right here.”

  “All I want is four feet of ground.”

  Wyatt left the building. Crossing Fremont he bucked a current of spectators coming to see Ike Clanton fined for carrying firearms on the street. One or two of them asked Wyatt for details but got no answer. On Fourth he met Tom McLaury coming up from Allen. Tom, the dandy of the Charleston delegation, was wearing a good pearl Stetson with a silver band and a cowhide vest over a dark blue flannel shirt hanging outside his trousers, the tail lifting in the strong wind. He was taller than his brother Frank and his moustaches were trimmed as carefully as Wyatt’s.

  Wyatt stopped in front of him. “I just promised your friend Ike I will fight him anywhere and there is a piece of it for you too.”

  “I have no differences with you.” Tom smiled tentatively.

  “Don’t weasel. You and that cow-thief brother of yours have been making fight talk against us for weeks.”

  “I have never said or done nothing against you. I don’t know where you got that. I am a friend of yours.”

  “Are you heeled?”

  “This has to do with Hattie, ain’t it?”

  Wyatt stepped closer. Their hat brims were almost touching. “I asked are you heeled.”

  “No, I have got nothing to do with anybody.”

  Wyatt slapped him left-handed, drew the American with his right, and slammed the barrel along Tom’s left temple under his hat brim. The hat rolled off and Tom fell back, raising his palms. Wyatt struck him again with the pistol and he lost his balance. The American flashed down and up and down again. Tom was down on the boardwalk now with both arms crossed over his head.

  The stream of pedestrians had clotted around the scene. Wyatt stood over the dazed man, breathing loudly, his pistol dangling from his hand. Then he returned it to his pocket and shouldered a path through the crowd.

  “I could kill the son of a bitch.”

  He was out of cigars. The counter in Hafford’s was deserted and he bounced a quarter on top and helped himself to a handful of Humos from a tin next to the bronze cash register. He was standing in front of the building smoking when Frank McLaury, Ike’s brutish younger brother Billy, and a pale Tom McLaury passed him without a word heading up Fourth off the boardwalk. Frank was leading a strawberry roan with a saddle and bridle. Wyatt ground the butt under his heel and fo
llowed.

  They were all inside Spangenberg’s gun shop by the time he reached it. Frank McLaury’s horse was standing on the boardwalk with its head stuck through the open doorway. It lifted its tail and dropped a load of apples on the boards.

  On the other side of the shop window, Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury were busy thumbing cartridges into the empty loops on their belts from a box on the wooden counter. Wyatt passed his right hand through the slit in his coat pocket, gripped the handle of his pistol, and reached up for the roan’s bit with his left. The horse blew.

  Tom McLaury, standing just inside the door, turned. Billy and Frank came forward from the dim interior. Billy’s hand rested on the Colt’s in his hip scabbard.

  “Ordinance, boys,” Wyatt said. “Horses shit in the street.”

  “Let go of my horse!”

  Frank’s voice was shrill. Shorter even than Johnny Behan, he wore his trousers high so that his sack coat hung almost to his knees and his pistol rode even with his elbow. His face was feral under the flat brim of his hat.

  “When he is where he belongs.” Wyatt kept his hand inside his pocket and backed the roan off the boardwalk. He flipped the reins one-handed over the hitching rail, snubbing them with a yank.

  Frank said, “That’s the last horse of mine you will ever lay hands on.”

  “Bald talk for a Mississippi mule thief.”

  Ike Clanton joined them. Weaponless now, he wore his hat at a comic angle, allowing for a white bandage that was the cleanest thing on him.

  “Who cut you loose?”

  “I paid my fine.” He started into the shop.

  Wyatt laid a hand on his arm. “If you come out of there heeled I will bust your head clean open.”

  Before Ike could reply, Virgil and Morgan appeared with their coats open and their pistol handles twisted outside the flaps. Wyatt let go and Ike joined the others inside.

  Virgil said, “Let’s go down to Hafford’s.”

  “Doc up yet?” asked Morgan.

  He was dying faster than usual that morning, striping the sides of the dry sink with bloody sputum and shreds of shattered lung. . .

  PART THREE

  SAN PEDRO

  You never saw such people. Those banks of beautiful ladies, shining in their barbaric splendors, would see a knight sprawl from his horse in the lists with a lanceshaft the thickness of your ankle clean through him and the blood spouting, and instead of fainting they would clap their hands and crowd each other for a better view; only sometimes one would dive into her handkerchief and look ostentatiously brokenhearted, and then you could lay two to one that there was a scandal there somewhere and she was afraid the public hadn’t found it out.

  —Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, 1889

  Chapter Eleven

  She was born Maria Katharina Horony on November 7, 1850, in Budapest, the first child of Katharina Boldizar of Debrecen and Michael Horony; and came to the United States with her parents and four surviving brothers and sisters in 1863, arriving in Davenport, Iowa, two days before her thirteenth birthday. A brother, Imre, had died of a fever at age four, and another, Julius, grew thin and pale in the tween-decks during the ocean crossing and finally faded into a dry husk that was sewn into sailcloth and weighted down with two handwrought fireplace dogs that had been in her father’s family for a century and slid between the waves. Michael himself, the patriarch, bought a small farm and burst his heart between the potato rows seventeen months after their arrival. In the Horony family, Death was a hideous old uncle who came Sundays to drink the strong tea in the parlor and laid his bony hand on the knees of young and old and then left with apologies for his short stay and promises to return.

  Mary Katherine, as she was then known, for the entire family had by that time passed through the crucible of Americanization, matured quickly, and at fourteen was often mistaken for a grown woman when she appeared in town with her mother on errands in mourning black. In the 1860s mourning was fashionable, and thanks to the Widow of Whitehall and the alarming chain of coffins steaming up the rails from Manassas and Sharpsburg and Antietam and the Wilderness, the shop windows and catalogues were strung with silks and broadcloth and velvet-palmed gloves becomingly cut and dyed with India ink; the stately adolescent, unaware then of the effect, cut an arresting figure on the streets of Davenport in lace-trimmed black bonnet and cape and ankle shoes with onyx buttons ordered from Montgomery Ward. Her face in those years of comparative slimness was an exotic oval, not at all the moon it would become, her forehead high and domed, her eyes like an angelic little boy’s, and her lips full and bent permanently into a smile in imitation of her mother, who believed that a pleasant expression prevented a face from aging. If she had the long thick nose of her Magyar forebears, that defect only added to the overall handsome mannishness of her appearance.

  With young womanhood came stays, which squeezed an early tendency toward matronliness into the hourglass beloved of a healthy young nation with an overfondness for Rubens’s cherubic nudes. A fascination with prints and colors asserted itself as soon as Michael Horony’s memory was respectfully put down in camphor and cedar. This coaxed a bloom not only from her cheeks but from her mother’s as well, for the little income strained out of mulish earth by a widowed mother, a half-grown son, a distracted daughter, and three small children was not to be squandered on bright scarves and calico that cost as much as three bolt-ends of stout gingham. Her father’s razor strap was employed almost as frequently during these years as it had been when he lived.

  By then Mary Katherine had divined the meaning, if not precisely the import, of the looks she drew from men. Davenport was a major stop for steamers plying the Mississippi River, and although while in town her mother made certain that neither of them passed near the levee, Mary Katherine flushed at the appreciative expressions that came into the otherwise poker faces of silk-hatted gamblers and the rubber, professionally cheerful faces of derbied drummers when she passed them farther inland and felt her mother’s gloved hand tighten around hers and hasten her on past. She detected pomade and whiskey on their persons, smells associated with her father; and her veins ran warm.

  One month before her seventeenth birthday Mary Katherine dressed for town; and if Katharina Horony thought her daughter’s cape too much for the balmy early-autumn climate, she made no mention of it. If she had, Mary Katherine had a cough handy by way of explanation, although not severe enough to banish her indoors, as that would have made it all for nothing. For under the cape she wore her best dress over another one more serviceable, two petticoats, and three pairs of drawers, enough clothing to fill the small portmanteau she had elected to leave behind for want of a way to smuggle it into town.

  Her chance came in the mercantile while her mother was comparing cloves of garlic under the patient eye of the proprietor behind the counter. Wandering toward a stack of ladies’ hats in the corner next to the dress material, Mary Katherine pretended interest in the dyed ostrich plumes, then when the merchant turned away to weigh the cloves, opened the door carefully so as not to disturb the bell looped to the handle and left the store. From there she ran the three blocks to the levee as fast as two legs bound in five layers of linen would let her. There the USS Oleander was loading. For an anxious half-hour while she knew her mother was looking for her she stood among the passengers waiting to board, then eased onto the bottom deck while the man taking tickets was arguing with a fat woman who insisted that her son, nearly six feet tall with a blue shadow on his chin, was under twelve and so eligible to ride half-fare.

  The bottom deck was an adventure in odors. For a girl reared near a port, there was nothing novel about the smells of baled jute and molasses in barrels and freshly sawn lumber; but when they came together with various fine scents emanating from parasoled women on the arms of men in striped vests and planters’ hats, with water slapping the hollow hull and the boat actually shifting beneath her own tread when she crossed the deck, they assumed an encha
ntment befitting the oils of China. The aroma was not to be matched and had only to be encountered again to return an aging fancy-woman to a youth in which nothing was beyond reach. She was, however, dismayed to learn that even on this fine whitewashed craft with its great painted paddles floating gently astern, the stench of fish overlay everything, from the barrels of salted salmon resting in the hold. It reminded her unpleasantly of the voyage across the ocean and of her brother Julius quietly dying in his rope hammock.

  But the past was no fit opponent for the present. The throated steam whistle, often heard in town but never before from directly overhead, with its vibration buzzing beneath the soles of her feet, opened the future.

  A deckhand closed it. After observing her for some minutes wandering unescorted between the decks, he asked to see her ticket, and when she took too long searching for it in her tiny reticule he escorted her to the bridge. The pilot was a red-bearded man in his forties with a long brown face under a beetle-black derby, a joint of charred bulldog pipe nailed into the center of his face, and a tan leather coat with distressed elbows worn over a pinstripe shirt without a collar. He, too, had a fishy smell, like everything else aboard except the passengers. Standing at the wheel he heard the deckhand’s report, interrupting him once to reach up and tug the whistle, then dismissed him.

  “What’s your name, lass?”

  He had a thick, burring speech from which she had to sort the words before she answered.

  “Kate.”

  “What’s your surname, Kate, lass?”

  The glassed-in cabin was strong with him. “Fish.”

  “Fish?”

  “Fisher. I’m Kate Fisher.”

  He rotated the wheel slightly. His pipe gurgled. “Well, Kate Fisher, lass, what are we to do with ye?”

  “I’ll work for my passage.”