Wyatt in Wichita

by John Shirley

  He had not had his land then, nor his cattle, but he had known he was a Laird. His Uncle Fergus had told him so.

  “You are a Pierce,” Fergus had told him, when his father had died. “You are the one we have been waiting for—the one ready to take the world back again. We had it all, once. We were Lords of the old world, up North in England—they called us Lairds … Then come that Bloody Mary, and we had to run from her. And we lost it all…”

  “My ma used to say,” Dudley began. “That with flowers, why, gather them while ye—”

  Pierce gestured for Dudley to shut his mouth and rein in his mount. Dudley immediately fell silent and backed his horse a half-dozen steps, to give Mr. Pierce some semblance of privacy.

  “Uncle Ferg … it’s Abel …” Pierce seemed to address the flowery rise in the soil, as if it were his uncle’s grave, though that grave was thousands of miles back in the Old States.

  Dudley yawned, and dozed gratefully in the saddle, as his boss talked to a dead uncle.

  “Uncle Fergus, what do I do, now, with those blowhard politicians in Texas making noise about me? And here I’m made to look a fool up in Kansas too. This boy Earp has struck my men down, and shamed us all. My respect’s gone up the spout. But he’s an odd stick, and I’ve found such men to be dangerous. He’s said to be the brother of two lawmen, and I’ve got enough of the law to bribe already. Now you know me, I can take the gaff and I don’t give a continental what anyone thinks, but I’m stumped, with the trouble I’m having down south I’ve got to linger up here for awhile … But maybe I should ‘shoot, Luke, or give up the gun.’ What do you think? Should I have him kilt?”

  Dudley came out of his doze with a start when Pierce spoke of killing a man. He noted that Mr. Pierce had gone silent, his head bowed; he knew that meant Pierce was listening to his uncle. Dudley listened himself, then; he’d always hoped to hear a ghost, like the spiritualistic people did. He heard only the nickering of the horses. But as if the horses were translating for Uncle Fergus, Mr. Pierce said, “I see. I see. Yes sir, when you’re big as the plains, you can afford to wait. Too much worry from the law already. Don’t be wakin’ snakes till you got to. Yes sir. I’ll wait. We’ll look for our chance, and it’ll come, and we’ll punish that boy, and it’ll be him taking the gaff. Yes sir. Yes sir I hear you. And I’ll need that Burke anyway, for some other business … I’ll send for him, sure … I thank you.”

  Pierce tipped his hat, and rode back toward town. Dudley drifted after him, noting, in the distance, the silhouette of a rider heading in the direction of Wichita—a tall, slender rider on a fine long-legged sorrel.

  * * *

  Wyatt had been the Faro banker in his brother James’s gambling hall for almost two months before he heard the story.

  “That’s right,” said the wheezing bourbon peddler with the mutton-chop whiskers, placing his bet on the Faro table, “I saw Ben Thompson himself playing Faro in Abilene. Not a week later I was up in Ellsworth and I heard this Wyatt Earp shot it out with Thompson—and the way I heard it, he hauled him, covered in blood but still kicking and a-howling, right to the calaboose. Then this Earp shot it out with Abel Pierce over a lynching! Left a pile of corpses on the ground!” He added in a confidential tone, “I understand he’s a cousin or something to the very fella that owns this gambling emporium.”

  “Is that so?” Wyatt said, paying off in chips when the man won the round.

  “That’s right …” The peddler paused to wheeze. “I’ll place my bet right there … Say what’s your name, young fella?”

  Wyatt just smiled. His brother James, the owner of the establishment, came over to inspect the game. James was a bit stooped; he drank more than he ate, as attested by the broken veins on his red nose and his gaunt frame. But he wore a fine dark blue three-piece sack suit, the best Wichita could offer, and a matching homburg. “I’ll take over, for awhile, Wyatt,” James said. “You look wore to a thread.”

  Wyatt was more jangled than tired. He liked saloons and gambling halls, for their action and easy manners, but the constant pall of cigar smoke—James was puffing his own stogie, adding to it—and the incessant shouts of glee and disappointment and the thumping of the small brass band in the corner got to be a bit much after seven or eight hours. His eyes were watering and he was developing a cough and his ears buzzed.

  “I’ll take you up on that, James. I’ll send Percy in if I see him …”

  James nodded, tilting his hat back and clamping his cigar on his mouth. “Who wants to get luckier than a cowboy with a spring widow?” James called out. “Place your bets!”

  “Say did you call him Wyatt?” the peddler asked, with some mortification, before his voice was swallowed up by the noise. Wyatt made for the door.

  The street could contend with the gambling house for noise, and though it was September, it hadn’t rained for a while and the moody plains wind was whirling up yellow dust devils. Texas drovers, in sombreros and vaquero hats, whooped as they staggered from a saloon toward the bridge over the Arkansas River. They were off to Douglas and Main, Wyatt supposed, to find the bawdy houses down in Delano. James’s wife Bessie had one of the less showy establishments there, with several girls who’d taken the last name Earp—taking the name of the Madame of the house was a common practice. To Wyatt, who was trying to put his past behind him, this was a source of unexpressed misery: Several local whores calling themselves Earp. James really ought to put a stop to it, he reflected.

  He found himself strolling almost instinctively for the center of the hubbub. A couple of gunshots echoed from across the river—probably just playful shooting, though Wyatt well knew it could wind up in unintended killing.

  A bullwhacker drove a couple of oxen by, snapping his whip, nearly running over a drunken Texas cowhand who was laughing as he chased a wheeling, wind-flipped sombrero down the street. Wyatt continued up the wooden bridge over the shallow Arkansas River, thinking he would just see if Bat Masterson was still playing cards in “Rowdy Joe” Lowe’s place. Maybe he could persuade Bat to take the air with him. They had things to talk over.

  He had reached the Delano district, where sporting women, faces garishly painted and some wearing only their slips, leaned out the upper windows of the Gay and Winsome Dance Hall, calling out to passing prospects. It took him a moment to realize that, “Hey, tall and slim, come on in and show me if you’re that bony all ’round!” was directed at him.

  He waved in friendly but noncommittal response, and was just about to enter Rowdy Joe’s when two men came tumbling out the door, flailing wildly at one another. The smaller one, sprawling in the dirt, was trying to grab a fallen pistol with one hand, kicking at the other drunk the while. Wyatt picked up the gun and tossed it out of reach, thinking to stop at least one killing.

  The men rolled about on the ground, thrashing at one another and cursing, right to the toes of Wyatt’s boots, forcing him to step over them. He was tempted to step in—something in him fairly ached to do it—but he reminded himself he was no longer a constable or a deputy anywhere. He was just an unconvicted horse thief and a former bawdy house bouncer. He sighed, and walked into the saloon.

  Every poker and Keno table was thronged with dusty, mostly drunken men, and wreathed with smoke set off by yellow rings of lantern light. A patchily bearded old man in a blue Union Army cap, which he might or might not have worn in the war, was sawing on a fiddle in the corner; with the laughter and catcalls and groans of the men gambling and the old man’s loosey-goosey playing it was impossible to make out the song.

  Wyatt had to weave his way through the crowd for a couple of minutes, carefully sidestepping drunks. It would be a shame to get into a fight for a mere jostle.

  His way was blocked by a grubby, squat man with a burlap shirt and mismatched shoes—Wyatt knew him to be Luc Montaigne, a half-crazed French Canadian known in Wichita as “Champagne” Montaigne. The Canuck waved an old Champagne bottle filled with water, or beer—never champagne. James claimed Mo
ntaigne had been carrying the same bottle, its label peeling away, for more than a year. Montaigne had rheumy blue eyes and a mouth wide with the meaningless, perpetual grin of a hound. “James Earp’s son, Wyatt! Have a drinka champagne, mon ami!” Montaigne crowed.

  “I’m James’s brother, not his son. What you got in there today, Luc?” Wyatt asked.

  “Champagne, by way of beer, c’est superb!”

  “Well you’re cutting a swell, for sure. That’s too fine a drink for me, I’ll leave it to the aristocrats.” He patted the rummy on the shoulder and slipped past him, peering through the smoke.

  He found Bat Masterson at a table in the far corner playing poker with a cattle buyer in shirt sleeves and a gambler in ashy-blue frock coat. Bat was wearing his coffee-colored derby and three-piece chocolate colored suit, though it was warm in here. Like Wild Bill, he sat in a saloon with his back to the wall—Bat’s gunfight with Corporal King had convinced him to sit where he could keep an eye on the whole room.

  Wyatt walked up to stand where he couldn’t see anyone’s cards and caught Bat’s eye. Bat nodded and threw down his cards with disgust. “One of you gents has stolen a precious item from me!”

  The tinhorn gambler across from him looked up in alarm. “What’s that? Stolen what, sir?”

  “My luck! Either that or it has deserted me out of sheer boredom with this lackadaisical game!” Bat grinned to show he was joking and the other men laughed in relief.

  He got up, picked up his remaining chips and took them to the chip counter, cashed them in with the pretty but child-sized Chinese girl who wore a black dress and black-plumed hat.

  “Drink?” Bat asked, returning to Wyatt. He walked with a slight limp, a legacy of King’s bullet. He tried to disguise the limp with a gold-headed cane he carried in his left hand.

  Bat had asked about the drink out of ritual politeness; he wasn’t surprised when Wyatt shook his head.

  Outside, as they strolled down the boardwalk toward the bridge, Wyatt observed, “I’ve never seen you play anything but poker …”

  “I’ve got more sense than to play Keno—seeing as it’s ‘adjusted’ to improve the odds for the house.”

  Wyatt nodded. “Could be I’d own a saloon sometime. But I’d have more windows, and keep ’em open.”

  “Does get devilishly close in there, especially when some of those fellows choose to play cards right off the trail, before they think about bathing. If they ever do.”

  “They should be dunked in that river right there—” Wyatt broke off, hearing a gunshot, turning to watch a small crowd shoving its way out of “Red” Beard’s place, across from Lowe’s. Five women in drawers and slippers, two of them bare breasted and one in a tattered approximation of a scarlet ball gown, were lining up in an unruly row in the middle of the street. Trail hands, whistling and laughing and waving money in the air, mobbed the boardwalk to watch the whores. A man carrying a snare drum, and a trombonist from the saloon’s small brass band took up positions behind the row of women. The percussionist commenced a drum-roll as a short cowboy with knee-high boots and a tall white hat, raised his gun in the air, shouting something hard to hear in the hullabaloo. “… if yew gents have … bets … is ready to commence the race!”

  “You don’t mean to tell me …” Wyatt said, shaking his head.

  “I do,” Bat said, laughing as the mustachioed cowboy fired his gun in the air and the women, as drunk as the men, began gracelessly running toward the bridge. Two of them stumbled and fell almost immediately—one laughing as she tumbled, the other bursting into tears. Four made it to the bridge led by a fierce-looking red-head, the girl with the tattered gown, the skirts held daintily up with her hands so she could run, white legs flying as she tapped the bridge post and returned, nimbly dodging another woman’s attempt to trip her. The redhead triumphantly leapt into the arms of the mustachioed cowboy and the trombonist made a donkey braying sound with his horn to announce the end of the race.

  “She done it again! Hilda’s took the record, sure!” the cowboy shouted, firing his gun again. Blue gun smoke drifted above the false fronts, and the crowd began to work its way back into the saloon for celebratory drinks, the trail hands arguing about their bets. The losers in the race straggled after, forgotten.

  “Started about a week ago,” Bat said, grinning. “Whore races.”

  Wyatt snorted and walked up onto the bridge. He didn’t think it was funny, himself. Someone’s daughter, turned into a racing beast. Another thought of Sarah—quickly pushed away. “You done for the night?” Wyatt asked. “Ready to head back to the other side of town?”

  “I am. It’s early but I’m still shaky from last night. Jim and Ed were in town and we tied one on.” Nearly to the bridge, hands raised against gusting dust, they passed a rectangular building, still yellow from the newness of its unpainted wood, the sign on its false front declaring it the Evening’s Contentment Hotel. More than two dozen cow ponies were tethered out front on a hitching post made for ten; they stepped on each other’s fetlocks, shifting irritably, ears flicking, blinking in the wind.

  “I considered staying at that hotel,” Bat remarked, “when first I started coming to this side of town—just to save money—but I was told I’d have to share a room with five cowboys. When the season’s on, they sleep half a dozen and more to a room, trading lice.”

  “They ought to put those ponies in a livery somewhere,” Wyatt grumbled. “That’s no way to treat a horse.”

  Sensing Wyatt’s mood, Bat said nothing more, and they walked in silence across the bridge and along the main street. The clamor of the party end of town diminished to a distant mutter and tinkle.

  They passed a closed ice cream parlor, a lady’s milliner, a gentleman’s pool hall, and were nearly to their hotels, which stood across the street from each other, when Wyatt suddenly said, “Look here, Bat—James has offered to invest some money in the freight business but it’s not enough for me to pay for all the horses I need, the newspaper notice and employees too, so I was looking to take a partner for a little investment and to help me drive. Virgil’s riding shotgun for the stage, Morgan’s off somewhere … Might you want to partner up with me?”

  “I might too,” Bat said, “if it comes to that.” The ambivalence of this response was not lost on Wyatt.

  He was ambivalent about it himself. Not sure what he ought to go into, now. But he knew there weren’t enough freighters in this part of Kansas and he had a fear of missing the best chance. There were men making powerful money in Wichita, and there were men who languished and were always hungry—and there wasn’t much in between. You had to watch for an opening and take your best shot. But he also knew himself to be restless, like his father, and wondered if he could stomach the tedium of a hauling business. But what else would he do?

  A shout from across the street drew their attention: a big, bellied, balding, lantern-jawed man, in trousers barely kept up by red suspenders, was thrashing a spindly boy on the front porch of Black’s Hotel. It was Doc Black himself doing the thrashing. The boy was shoeless, wearing a ragged shirt that might’ve been white once, and a pair of fraying trousers held up with a belt of twine.

  “Why that’s ‘Doc’ Black,” Bat said. “It seems he—”

  But Wyatt had already started across the street and heard nothing more but a roaring in his ears.

  Black had knocked the boy down, and was dragging him to his feet by his collar. “So you’re stealing food from my larder!” Black snarled. “I hire you off the streets and you steal from me!”

  He shook the boy by the collar and raised his hand to slap him again. Wyatt saw that the boy’s face was bloody.

  “Drop that hand, Black, and leave the boy be,” Wyatt said tone-lessly as he stepped onto the porch.

  Black dropped the boy instead and whirled, the raised hand becoming a fist which he shook under Wyatt’s nose. “Poke your long nose some place else, feller, or I’ll break it for you!”

  “You’ve got no
call to beat a boy half to death!” Wyatt snapped. He was dimly aware that Bat had come to stand close by with a hand to the gun he kept under his coat, just in case he had to back Wyatt’s play.

  “I hired him to empty the toss pots and clean the floors and he steals meat from me!”

  “He …” The urchin was sitting up now, wiping blood from his nose. He was a thin, buck-toothed kid, who might be anywhere from eleven to thirteen, with a prominent chin, a tousle of curly black hair and no sign of weeping about him, despite the beating. He glared defiantly up at the two men. “He said he’d feed me and he didn’t—I ain’t eaten nothin for two days! I only took what he said he’d give me anyhows!”

  “Well,” Wyatt demanded, looking sharply at Black, “what about it? The boy says he was owed some food. You starve a boy, you make him desperate!”

  “Why I gave him a piece of bread and butter this morning—or I meant to. Now get your skinny rear off the porch of my hotel!” He turned to reach for the boy again.

  Bat chuckled, knowing what was coming.

  Wyatt caught the big man’s wrist in his left hand, spun him back face to face, and swung a right to Black’s jaw, rocking him back. “I said desist!”

  Black got his feet solidly under him, blinking in amazement. Then he roared wordlessly and rushed at Wyatt, who sidestepped and clipped Black on the side of the head as he went by, making him grunt with pain. Wyatt had felt the blow himself: his knuckles were stinging badly. As Black turned to rush him, Wyatt set himself to fight—shaking his head at Bat who looked at him questioningly, wondering if he should step in—and just managed to block a left-hand jab from Black. He wasn’t so lucky with Black’s roundhouse right, which caught him a glancing blow on the jaw, making him stagger and sending blue flickers through his eyesight. Black bared his teeth—a kind of animal grin—and snatched up a chair, swung it hard at Wyatt’s head. Younger and faster, Wyatt ducked and the chair shattered on a post beside him.

  The boy rushed in, windmilling his small, dirty fists at Black’s side. Black swiped him with one pudgy paw and knocked him back again—Bat caught the boy and dragged him off the porch.