Wyatt in Wichita

by John Shirley

  Cudgin grinned at Wyatt; downwind, his grin had a smell. “There they go, to beat the Dutch! Which’n ye think tis thumping so? The little half-nigger—or your Sarah?”

  Wyatt shrugged. He had developed the ability to steer his mind around that snag, and he had gotten quite good at it. He never did picture Sarah with the customers anymore. He had trained his mind to go blank when it came to the actual doing of Sarah’s work. Still, he didn’t like to hear them, below …

  “You some kind of husband to that Sarah, aire ye?” Cudgin went on.

  “Some kind,” Wyatt said.

  When was Walton coming back? He would provide some relief from Cudgin’s company. And Wyatt had a burr under his saddle about his pay. He thought it ought to include some regular money as well as the cut, because he seemed never to have enough to put aside. He had said as much to Sarah, and she’d said, as women tartly will, “Perhaps if you put them cards aside you can put some gold aside…”

  Cudgin fished in the big pockets of his long ragged brown coat, first one side and then the other, at length producing a small jug. “Will you take a pull?” he asked.

  “I thank you, no,” Wyatt said. He was trying not to drink. The memory of his drunken fiasco in Fort Gibson was still painfully fresh.

  Cudgin sucked at his jug, snorted, shuddered, and slapped a mosquito. “Do ye think the constable will come out, some night? To arrest us—or mayhap to have a poke at them girls?”

  “Could be. But Walton uses gunboat so we can move around, go from one county to another, to dodge all that. Friends who give us warning of the law …” Wyatt fell silent, waving away a mosquito humming past his ear. The law was another subject he didn’t like.

  The boat drifted in the faint wind and the fainter current and thumped against the pier, then swung outward again, like the hand on an uncertain clock. “That’s right, that’s right, my big black beard!” Sarah said. Her voice seemed so small and piping, coming from down there. Perhaps he might again approach her about going away from here. She seemed to misunderstand his intentions, before. They were not really scratching out much this way, though it all seemed so easy.

  Then came a roar from below, and the squeal of a frightened girl. A moment later the big man—a tree-cutter, his long brown mustaches seeming to jet from his nostrils—was squeezing himself out of the hatchway. There was a thumping on the narrow, steeply-pitched stairs, and Wyatt was on his feet, seeing that the lumberjack was pulling the girl up by the wrist like a one-armed man dragging a feed sack.

  “Don’t—!” she yelped, as he heaved her up to the deck. It was Prudence, a short, stocky, colored girl with the wavy black hair, wearing only a slip now, and that torn.

  “What’s this shindy?” Cudgin was saying, looking more pleased with the show than outraged, as Mule—that was the moniker of this lumberjack—dragged the girl toward the aft of the boat.

  “This whore sought to refuse me, after I paid my gold!” Mule bellowed, dragging the thrashing girl. “I told her she’d go swimming if I didn’t get mine and still she refused me! ‘You is crushing me,’ she whines, ‘crushing me! I cain’t breathe!’ Breathe underwater, nigger cow!”

  “You! Stop yourself, right there!” Wyatt shouted. Adding, even louder, as he drew his pistol, “Not a step further!”

  “Ahoy, Mule, here comes the shavetail!” Cudgin called in glee, as Wyatt shoved past him and ducked a boom to reach the two figures struggling at the end of the boat.

  But Mule was lifting the girl like a chunk of wood. He tossed her overboard. Mule watched her splashing, and laughed.

  “Damn you!” Wyatt said, and fired a shot past Mule’s head to get his attention.

  Mule jumped and touched his ear; the bullet had carved the shape of a quarter moon from it. He turned and rushed at Wyatt, roaring moonshine fumes; Wyatt sidestepped and tripped him, sending a kick into his rump to help him along. He heard the girl thrashing in the water.

  “Sarah!” she yelled. “Mister …!” The rest was lost to bubbling.

  “Get that girl up from the water!” Wyatt shouted at Cudgin. Wyatt was occupied with Mule, who was getting to his knees.

  “I cain’t swim!” she shouted. “I cain’t …”

  “Get her out, Cudgin!”

  “Why, I …” Cudgin said, scratching in his beard.

  Wyatt pressed the muzzle of his gun to the back of Mule’s neck. “You feel that? You won’t rush me another time. That ball will go right through your spine! Now if you want to walk again, get up and walk off this boat. Go—and do not turn around!”

  Wyatt’s heart was pounding. He was not at all sure he could bring himself to shoot this man through the back of the neck. And if Mule chose to spin around and grapple, the burly lumberjack would have the edge.

  Mule growled, “I will return and see you sunk, or in jail!”

  He stalked off, the boat jittering in the water with his heavy tread; Wyatt followed him to the dock. Still shouting threats, Mule leapt onto the pier and made for his horse.

  Wyatt turned back to find a black-bearded face—so heavily bearded the nose and eyes were near overwhelmed—glaring up at him from the hatch.

  Sarah leaned to look past the corona of her client’s beard. She was wearing only a shift, one freckled shoulder exposed, her curly red-gold hair adrift around her head. “I cannot reach the end of my ride with all this caterwauling!” the sheep-breeder complained. “I need me a refund!”

  “He reached it all right,” Sarah said, pushing past him. She lifted the skirt, showing her pale skinny legs, her knobby knees—and the snail track of semen running down the inside of her thigh.

  “You skedaddle too,” Wyatt said, cocking his gun in the sheep-breeder’s face. The man’s eyes got wide, and he scurried off the boat, making for his buckboard.

  “I told you,” Wyatt said to Sarah, “you are to use the lamb’s slipper.” Condoms of lamb’s intestine were used here at Wyatt’s insistence.

  “I did! But it went bust! He’s got a pecker like ten dollar lumber!”

  “You’ve been re-using them, Sarah? The Doctor told you not to do that. They’ll bust, he said.”

  “Them things is dear, Wyatt! We can’t afford a new one every time!” She looked around. “Where’s …”

  Cudgin had come forward, was gaping after the buckboard clattering up the trail. “You think they’ll bring the constables?”

  Wyatt stared at him. “Where’s the girl, Cudgin?”

  “Why, I … it’d be worth my life to leap into them waters, the humors—”

  Wyatt shook his head in disgust. “You didn’t even look, damn you …”

  “Prudence!” Sarah yelped. She ran to the other end of the boat and knelt. “Prudence girl!”

  They found her after about thirty minutes of searching, Wyatt and Cudgin—who had to be persuaded by a clout on the head to come along—and Sarah, had to pick their way through the brush along the flooded bank.

  It was Wyatt who spotted her. Prudence was floating face-down under the roots of a fallen tree tipped into the river …

  After that, Wyatt felt he had just go ahead and bury her, because she had no kin locally that they knew of, and by the time he was done forcing Cudgin to dig the grave, and they wrapped Prudence in a sailcloth and said their goodbyes—Sarah’s freckles went glossy with weeping; Cudgin ogled at the grave open-mouthed, as if he expected Prudence to climb spectrally out and drag him under for letting her drown.

  The Constable drove up in a buggy, followed by Mule on his horse and two deputies and all the lies Mule had prepared. The constable’s arrival was all that saved Cudgin from the beating Wyatt was planning.

  They were afraid they’d be charged in the girl’s death if they spoke of it, and it ended that they were jailed in Peoria for unlicensed procuring and whoring, and it took all their money to work a release …

  * * *

  “Sarah,” Wyatt said, when they were walking down the street in the thin late-September morning sunlight, wea
ry from a sleepless night in the stifling Peoria City Jail, “I believe the both of us need a new profession.” A stout woman stared at them as she passed on the wooden sidewalk; she peered from under her flowery hat, from within a flouncy yellow dress with the biggest bustle Wyatt had ever seen. She seemed to be biting her lip to keep from calling them names.

  “Your own mama, Sarah,” Wyatt went on, lowering his voice, “only got herself sick and a slave to opium. I don’t want that for you. Think of what happened to poor Prudence! That is no business for any sensible woman. And the judge here knows us now, and hates the sight of us. We will go to stay with my family, and get a new start. I could find a partner, do some freighting, save my money—”

  “You have thought it all out!” Sarah said, her hands trying to make some sense of her hair as she walked. “But you have not thought about my first husband! I was married at fourteen; I already tried me the life of a country woman, the mistress of a farmer—”

  “I have not asked you to farm.”

  “It amounts to the same kind of life. He made me work my fingers till I was sore and asleep standing up. Before we was married, told me he wouldn’t make me do that—same as you say now. So don’t you bother to lie about it, I know what men do. Your father is a farmer; I know how it’d go. I run off from my husband and I’m glad to be shed of him. I am saving money for a house in St. Louis, where I will never have to touch a man, but only order the girls about.”

  “You have put money aside, and not told me?”

  “My mother keeps it for me.”

  “And you think it’s still there? Your mother will have spent every penny.”

  “Shut your bazoo, Wyatt Earp, do not blacken my mother, who did the best she knowed!”

  And so it went, their friendship deteriorating, their intimacy gone. It made Wyatt sick to his stomach, thinking of that bearded gnome’s ejaculate running down Sarah’s leg.

  Being arrested on the boat had shamed Wyatt, though he kept a defiant face before the judge. Wyatt had seen enough of laudanum-addled whores and greasy procurers and stiff-necked judges sniffily handing out inflated fines. He was determined to change directions.

  Sarah was obdurate; she would not go with him. Wyatt was stung by her refusal: she should have trusted him, should have followed him wherever he went.

  He pondered her shrugging him away, lumping him with some pig-farmer, and left her within the week.

  Wyatt got up before noon on a Sunday, while she was still asleep, and put a few things in a bag, slung it over his saddle, and rode to the south, and the west …

  CHAPTER TWO

  About two years later

  “Bat,” said Wyatt Earp, as he shifted on the seat of the wagon, “I am fed up with shooting buffalo, fed up twice-over with skinning buffalo, and will have no more of it.” As he remarked on this to Bat Masterson, who rode his white-faced mare alongside, Wyatt guided the two oxen to the top of the low rise and saw the dusty wooden buildings of Ellsworth, Kansas, clustered on the flat prairie less than a quarter mile away. He stopped the freight wagon, a massive oaken dray piled precariously high with roped-down buffalo hides, to consider the prospect of Ellsworth in summer of 1874.

  Blocky and false-fronted, built mostly of uncured green lumber, with the occasional hump of a sod-roofed dug-out on the fringes of town, the buildings seemed huddled together for protection from the big emptiness of the plains. To one side curved the Smoky Hill River, a thin twist of glossy-brown in this time of drought. Ellsworth had begun to replace Abilene as the major cattle market and hundreds of longhorns roiled in cattle pens south of town—which was downwind most of the time. He could just hear the distant lowing of the cattle, and faintly, the moan of an accordion from one of the saloons. Ellsworth seemed quiet enough, in the late afternoon but Wyatt knew it could be uproarious at night.

  William Bartholomew “Bat” Masterson reined in beside Wyatt, and looked down on the little town with satisfaction, removing his bowler hat to slap away the trail dust. He was a medium-sized wide-shouldered man with mischievous blue eyes, a drooping black mustache, and, generally, a genial expression. “It could be that after a bath, Wyatt, maybe two baths to get it all off, and we eat something besides buffalo and sage hen, why, you’ll say to me, ‘Bat, I need another five hundred dollars to go into the freighting business, and the buffalo have got my money … ’”

  “Buffalo are getting scarce anyhow. I’ll have enough money in hand, already, come sunset, which looks to be in about one hour,” Wyatt said.

  “But you know how you like to turn a card, Wyatt. And if you lose your poke …”

  “I will not lose my poke. As I’ll prove to you if we can only go and claim it. Let us get a wiggle on.” With the wagon halted, the reek of the hides drifted strongly around him, and he yearned to be shed of them.

  He clucked at the two oxen, cracking his whip, and the wagon started rattling down the hill, following the trail through rabbit brush and buffalo grass. Bat rode close beside, his horse clopping. He hummed “Little Brown Jug” as they went.

  When they were nearly to the wooden freight docks at the railroad tracks, near a fly-haunted mountain of stored hides, Bat said, “Those hides, so many as that together, smell so bad, the smells fled around from sour and nearly gone to sweet again. The nose cannot register it.”

  Lost in thought, Wyatt didn’t reply. Bat looked at Wyatt and chuckled.

  “What’s so whimsical?” Wyatt asked, coming out of his study with a frown. He was sensitive to being laughed at.

  “Why, I was just thinking I shouldn’t expect any more talk from you—for a few minutes ago you spoke several sentences to me, like you were in haste to come to a grand total of a hundred words for the totality of our hunting trip.”

  Wyatt snorted. Bat was voluble, sometimes wrote long letters to the newspapers under imaginary names—as they say Ben Franklin had done, to get his start in journalism—and aspired to be a journalist. On occasion he spoke of moving to New York City, a prospect Wyatt found repugnant. “You talk enough for two, three, and four of us, Bat. Just like your brothers.”

  But the next afternoon, though still a bit achy from weeks sleeping in a wagon, a bathed and fed Wyatt Earp was at table in the Generous Lady, chatting amiably enough with a young woman.

  The girl was Celia Ann Blaylock, a stolid blond in a red satin gown that exposed her wide, pale shoulders; she was familiarly called “Mattie,” and she was not especially fetching. There was cold coffee at Wyatt’s elbow, and a deck of cards fluttered absently in his hands as he glanced around the bar. The cattle being penned for the freight trains, and end-of-drive money frittered away, most of the drovers had moved on. Only one other table was occupied: a group of gamblers sat near the dust-coated window. One of the poker players was a city policeman of Wyatt’s acquaintance. Dour and sometimes belligerent, “Happy Jack” Murco had pocketed his badge for the moment, as he sat drinking whiskey and playing poker with John Sterling—a local baggy-pants gambler who was sometimes a deputy—and Ben Thompson, a cattleman known for his moodiness and his eagerness with a gun. In Thompson, easy affability alternated with a taste for feuding.

  Thompson saw Wyatt look his way, and gave a curt nod, for Wyatt had once backed his play in a hair-trigger stand-off with a group of drunken vaqueros. No gunfire had ensued, but Thompson had noticed Wyatt’s dislike of seeing one man facing four alone.

  “What did you do with your team and wagon?” Mattie asked. Her gown—her only gown—was starting to lose its color from many washings; he noticed she’d repaired the seams, in places, with some hasty stitching, the threads not quite matching. There was a finger-shaped bruise on her left shoulder, inadequately covered with a cosmetic powder. One of her customers had gotten too rough.

  Wyatt felt a pang, looking at the bruise—and wondered how Sarah Haspel was doing in Illinois. Was she being ill-treated too? He thought of the girl Prudence, floating face down in the river …

  “You going to sell them oxen?” Mat
tie persisted. She was probably wondering if he had already sold them and thus had the cash on him: totting up in her mind all that he’d made with buffalo hides and oxen. She took no money from him, but it was the habit of a bar girl.

  “Oxen aren’t suitable for long-distance freighting,” he said, cutting the cards and idly dealing himself a hand, “though I’ve seen it done. Mostly they’re too slow. I’ll sell them in the morning and buy a team of horses.” He spoke as if he were a flush businessman, who knew his trade, but in fact he was afraid of getting euchred, for he knew little enough about freighting. He took a sip of coffee and grimaced at the taste. He supposed he might call for some condensed milk, he had seen the Borden’s can back of the bar, but it had likely sat there, open, for a day or two. He would stick with the plain arbuckle. He never drank liquor anymore, other than an occasional short glass of beer. After what’d happened in Arkansas, he’d sworn off strong spirits.

  It was time to say something or seem offish—he knew people thought him offish—so he said: “… I’m sure sick of killing buffalo.” He had started to wonder if the general slaughter wasn’t a mistake; if perhaps the government might not take a hand. A power of buffalo were being killed—all that meat wasted. It was said the Plains Tribes resented it, and he could understand that.

  “You could stick here,” Mattie suggested. “Huck Buford wants someone to buy a share of his saloon. You could go in with him.”