Wilde West

by Walter Satterthwait

  “My goodness, O’Conner. It was a private conversation. I really don’t think it would be fair to Mr. Holliday—to Dr. Holliday—to use it as a diversion for your readers.”

  “Okay, okay. Off the record.”

  “We discussed poetry.”

  O’Conner frowned, dubious. “Poetry?”

  “Yes. Doctor Holliday was of the opinion that Shelley was a poet superior to Keats. I suggested to him that this was absurd. Shelley had of course some talent as a versifier, and certainly he possessed enthusiasm, but he lacked finally the maturity which true poetry—”

  “Wait a minute,” O’Conner said, eyes narrowed, head cocked to the side. “Hold on. You told Doc Holliday that what he said was absurd?”

  “Well, I could hardly let him get away with that, could I? I mean, one has only to place their poems side by side to see—”

  O’Conner was frowning. “How come I’m having a hard time believing all this?”

  “Your innate skepticism, perhaps. You’ve only to ask Dr. Holliday.” Oscar smiled. “I’m sure he’ll verify what I’ve said.”

  O’Conner looked at him for a moment and then he grinned. “You’re good, Wilde. I’ve gotta hand it to you. You’re good. And whatever else happened, there’s no denying that you had a drink with Doc Holliday.”

  “Or that he,” said Oscar, “had a drink with Oscar Wilde.”

  From the Grigsby Archives

  February 25, 1882

  DEAR BOB,

  How are you, you old bastard?

  We been busy here in El Paso. We had a killing here night before last, one of the local hookers. Susie Morris, maybe you remember her, the redhead with the big honkers worked at Sadies place. Come to think, I believe you had her once yourself—that time you was here to pick up Sid Carver & we spent all of Saturday night & most of Sunday at Sadie’s? I never drunk so much rotgut whiskey or dipped my wick so many times ever in my life. Its a wonder the two of us are still alive. Anyway, Susie isnt, shes dead as a doornail.

  I never seen anything like it before. I still get sick just thinking about it, & you know how I got a pretty strong stomach. He used a knife on her, whoever it was did it. Doc Amundson figures on account of the blood that he cut her throat first & thats what killed her, but then its like he went crazy. He took a knife to her innards, filleted her like a catfish, & tossed everything out onto the ground. All her parts, I mean. Well, not all of them, because according to Doc, he walked off with her privates. Just cut them out & maybe stuck them in his pocket & sashayed out of there. This was in the alley around the corner from Sadie’s place, by Buchanon’s livery stable.

  Did you ever hear of such a thing?

  We dont got no idea at all who done it. Probably it was some hopped-up Mexican from across the river, which means well never get him. Makes me madder than hell that some loco bastard could do that to poor Susie & get away with it. I been in this law & order business too long, maybe.

  Your friend Doc Holliday is in town this week, gambling over to the Longbranch. I had me a talk with him, warned him I didnt want no trouble, & he just nodded & looked right through me with them funny black eyes of his. He is one spooky son of a bitch, Bob. I wont be sorry to see him leave, Ill tell you.

  We had another famous visitor this week, that English poetry fellow, Oscar Wilde. Maybe you heard of him. He gave a lecture on art at Hammersmiths. I didnt go myself, but Connie did, & she says he was smart as a whip. I met him at the Mayor’s house & he looks like a pansy-boy to me, if you want the truth. He acts like one too, very lah di dah. But hes sure a big one—must be six foot four or five. I reckon pansy-boys can come in just about any size, though.

  Well, time for me to mosey on. You take care of yourself. When are you heading down this way again? You let me & Connie know & well fix up the spare room. (Ill let Sadie know too, so she can warn the girls!) Are you writing to Clara these days? If you are, you send her our love & tell her from me & Connie that we hope the two of you can work things out & get yourselves back together. Youre too old & ornery to be on your own.

  Sincerely,

  Earl

  INSIDE THE NARROW HORSE-DRAWN CARRIAGE, swaying an irritating beat or two behind the sway of the carriage itself, beginning to feel like a strand of seaweed tugged left and right by the rhythms of a relentless tide, Oscar Wilde was displeased.

  “Look, Vail,” he said, “couldn’t we just give all this a miss? There must be some more engaging way to pass the time. Peeling an orange, say.”

  “Peeling an orange,” repeated Vail, and chuckled. In the dimness, magically, he would slowly disappear and then slowly reappear as bars of light, cast through the carriage windows by the streetlamps, slid obliquely across the interior. Business manager for the tour, he was a squat plump man who spoke in hearty gusts through snow-white dentures clenched around a squat plump, and now unlighted, cigar. His head was round and lumpy and it was topped with a gray toupee, flat and shiny and seamless, which curled upward at the sides and back, making it resemble a halibut in rigor mortis. At the moment, fortunately, this was entombed beneath a squat plump derby hat. “You kill me, Oscar. You really do. You think these things up ahead of time, or do they just come to you?”

  “Henry invents them for me. He writes them down on my cuff.”

  “‘On your cuff,’” Vail repeated, and chuckled again. “‘Henry invents them.’” He shook his head in admiration. “You kill me.”

  “I mean, is this visit really necessary?” Oscar asked. The carriage swayed again, bypassing some obstacle in the road. A cadaver, no doubt. Another gunfight victim.

  “You handle the Art, Oscar boy, and you let me handle the business. This Tabor guy is the big cheese around here. Richest guy in the state. Used to be lieutenant governor. Won’t hurt to butter him up some.”

  Oscar nodded. “Now there’s an image to conjure with. A lieutenant governor dripping butter, like a scone.”

  “Not Left-tenant,” Vail said. “Loo-tenant.”

  “According to O’Conner,” Oscar said, “he was never elected to office. Some other fellow died and this Tabor bribed his way into the post.”

  Vail shrugged. “A lieutenant governor’s a lieutenant governor. Listen, Oscar boy, you got a real future on the circuit. You could go a long way. I mean it. You got class, you got wit. The way you wrap these yokels around your little finger, that’s a real talent you got. So this guy wants to shoot the breeze with the famous poet. What’s the problem? A little shoulder-rubbing never hurt anybody, right? You give him a couple minutes, you keep him happy. No big deal.”

  Oscar smiled. “I appear to be dripping some butter myself.”

  “Hey, I mean it. Sincerely.” A pale rectangle of light glided over and illuminated a pair of eyebrows knotted sincerely together below the derby’s brim.

  Oscar said, “There’s a name, you know, for the sort of person who makes someone happy for a few minutes in exchange for cash.”

  His sincerity evidently spent, Vail was looking out the window at the houses slipping past in the night. “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “Business manager.”

  Vail looked at him, blinked, and then chuckled. “You kill me, Oscar.”

  “How, exactly, do I address him?”

  “Huh?”

  “Tabor. What do I call him? Lieutenant?”

  “You call him Governor.”

  “Bit of a misnomer, isn’t it? He was never actually a governor, and he was only the lieutenant thing for a few months.”

  Vail shrugged. “Respect for the office.” He sat back and clasped his hands together atop his round stomach.

  “Why not Your Highness? Or Your Majesty?”

  Vail considered this for a moment. “Nah,” he said finally. “That’s overdoing it some.”

  Oscar laughed.

  It was a genuine liveried butler, the first Oscar had seen since London, who opened the front door to Tabor’s huge brick sprawl of a mansion. Tall and thin, middle-aged, he stood with stif
f, typically butlerian arrogance; but when he spoke—“Yes, gentlemen?”—it was with the nasal twang of an American, and Oscar very nearly giggled.

  Vail took the cigar from his mouth. “Jack Vail and Oscar Wilde, the poet, to see Mr. Tabor.”

  “Yes. Mr. Tabor is expecting you. May I take your coats?”

  “Long as we can get them back,” said Vail, and chuckled around his cigar. His elbow thumped merrily into Oscar’s liver; he wasn’t tall enough to reach Oscar’s ribs.

  At Vail’s remark, the butler produced a smile whose wan politeness managed to convey bottomless depths of contempt; no British butler could have done it better. Vail, naturally, never noticed. He handed the man his topcoat, as did Oscar, and the butler draped them on a towering rack that could easily have held the coats of the entire House of Commons. Vail gave the man his derby; in the lamplight his toupee shone with a soft piscatorial glow.

  As they followed the butler down the hallway, Oscar leaned to Vail and whispered, “Poet isn’t a tradesman’s title, you know, like plumber.”

  “It pays to advertise,” said Vail from the side of his mouth.

  The breeze outside had ruffled Oscar’s shoulder-length hair. He ran a hand back over it—wouldn’t do to meet His Royal Governorship in a state of dishevelment—and looked around him.

  The house was obviously new—the smells of cut lumber and varnish still laced the air—but it had been designed to impersonate a Georgian manor.

  They’d got it all wrong, of course. The scale was off, for a start; everything was overlarge. The entry way was too wide, the ceiling too high: the place was cavernous.

  And the colors were not only dreadful in themselves, they defied probability and clashed with each other. The carpet that ran (for far too long) down the parquet floor was a dreary brown, like dead leaves in an autumn rain; the flocked wallpaper (flocked, no less!) was a particularly hideous green.

  Past the entry way, across an expanse of foyer the starkness of whose white marble floor was somewhat softened by a few passable Oriental rugs, an enormous wooden stairway with ornately carved mahogany balusters and handrails climbed upward to meet a wide landing, then divided at right angles into two, one rising off to the right, one to the left. The carpeting that angled up the treads and risers was a red plush which would have been more appropriate in a bordello. The stairway, by itself, occupied as much space as most London houses.

  At the bottom of the stairs, the butler turned right.

  So, thought Oscar: too big, too gaudy. The home of an extravagant giant. An extravagant giant who lacked taste.

  Mr. Horace Tabor may have lacked taste, may have been extravagant; but in person he was no giant. A short man running to fat, he sprang up almost greedily from a red leather wingback chair in the library. Grinning beneath a mustache that was a good deal wider than his egg-shaped face and that looked like a sparrow frozen at the moment of taking flight (and so provided an intriguing contrast to Vail’s defunct halibut), he held out a plump eager arm to Oscar. “Mr. Wilde! Good to meet you.” Pumping Oscar’s arm enthusiastically. “A real pleasure.”

  He seemed atumble with nervous energy: wide darting eyes, busy hands, that ridiculous grin. Anxious to please, like a shopkeeper on the verge of bankruptcy. (Which, according to O’Conner, he had once been.)

  “How do you do,” said Oscar. “You know Mr. Vail, of course.”

  “Sure, sure. How are you, Vail.” He shook Vail’s hand with the same exuberance. Like a child, really. American men remained adolescents until the age of sixty. (At which time they became toddlers.) “Listen,” said Tabor, “grab a seat, take a load off. Baby’ll be down in just a minute.” With an expansive gesture, like a music hall conjurer, he indicated the two chairs opposite his, and identical to it, across a square of carpet that might have been a genuine Persian. Still grinning beneath that paralyzed black sparrow, he shook his head and said, “Women. Why do you figure they like to keep us waiting?”

  Oscar said, “It’s the revenge they take upon us for our insisting that they be beautiful.” He sat down and the taut new leather chirped beneath him.

  “I get you,” said Tabor. The man’s grin was capable of expressional nuance: all at once it became knowing, and, inexplicably, he winked.

  Tabor turned to the butler, who stood off to one side, practicing his disdain. “That’s okay, Peters. You can take off now. I’ll pour.”

  The butler nodded and padded silently away. The moment he disappeared, Oscar could no longer remember what he looked like. The mark of a first-rate butler, he decided. Good: remember that.

  “Get you a drink?” Tabor grinned at Oscar. “Whiskey? Brandy?” The man hadn’t stopped grinning since his guests had arrived; any moment now his cheeks would cramp. And what had been the significance of that wink?

  “The brandy’s the real thing,” Tabor said. “Coniac. Direct from Paris, France.”

  Pity the Countess wasn’t here; she’d enjoy this little man. “By all means, then, the brandy.”

  “Vail?”

  “Same for me.” Vail sat back comfortably and crossed his legs. Nothing pleased him more, Oscar had noticed, than relaxing in the homes of the rich and powerful. Truth to tell, Oscar didn’t at all mind it himself.

  Tabor scurried to the serving table and splashed three or four ounces of amber liquid from a crystal decanter into each of two large balloon glasses.

  Oscar glanced around the library. One more wingback chair remained, sitting expectantly upright beside a small Hepplewhite table that separated it from Tabor’s. This chair, doubtless, was Baby’s. (How on earth could anyone live with an adult person named Baby? How could any adult person named Baby live with herself?) The four walls were lined with leather books that had been carefully arranged by the color of their bindings: there were blocks of blue, blocks of red, blocks of green. The chromatic approach to literature. The brown block was the largest, filling whole shelves, and here the books had been arranged by size, from tallest to shortest. He wondered whether anyone had ever actually read any of them. Or, for that matter, opened them.

  Tabor returned and handed a glass to Oscar, another to Vail. He sat down opposite them, lifted his own glass from the table to his right. Leaning forward eagerly, elbows on his thighs, the balloon glass in both hands between his knees, and still grinning (amazing, that), he said, “So tell me, Mr. Wilde. What do you think of Denver?”

  “Most impressive.” He sipped his cognac. It was indeed French, and quite good. Perhaps there was hope for Tabor after all. If only he’d stop baring his teeth.

  Tabor nodded as though he had expected nothing less. “Population now is over sixty thousand. We’ve got over a hundred hotels, more than a hundred restaurants, six newspapers, and at least ten railroads, last I counted.”

  “The mind boggles.” Curious how Americans were so fascinated by these statistics, the dull arithmetic of progress.

  Tabor’s grin became rueful, almost embarrassed. “Course, it’s not London yet, or even New York.” The grin grew hearty again. “But if things keep up like they’re going, who knows? Why not? Anything can happen.” He took a sip of brandy and was able—quite a trick—to maintain his grin without spilling a drop.

  “I had thought,” said Oscar, “that the American ideal was a kind of pastoral existence, a sort of enormous garden spot, a demi-Eden, inhabited by honest, independent yeomen.”

  Grinning, Tabor shook his head. “Those days are gone. Progress is the thing today. Industry. The railroad, the cotton gin, the steam tractor.”

  “The road to Hell,” Oscar said, “is paved with good inventions.”

  Tabor’s grin began momentarily to falter; Vail said quickly, “So everything’s arranged for Wednesday, Governor? The train and all?”

  “Yep,” said Tabor, and his grin returned. “You bet you. I’ve got a first-class compartment for six, and a second-class seat for the valet.” He turned to Oscar and the grin became knowing again. “Say, you mind if I call you Oscar?”
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  Very much, Oscar thought, but smiled graciously. “Not at all. Tell me something, Mr. Tabor.”

  “Horace.”

  “Yes. There won’t be any trouble, will there, about my valet? He’s a black man, and we had some difficulties with the train authorities in—where was it, Vail? West Carolina? East Virginia?”

  “South Carolina.”

  “Wherever. They refused to let him eat in the dining car.”

  “No problem at all,” grinned Tabor. “Long as he can afford to pay. Say, they tell me you’re traveling with a countess?”

  Oscar nodded. “Countess Mathilde de la Môle, of Plaisir.” He smiled. “That’s not terribly far from Paris, France.”

  Tabor winked again. “A real looker, they tell me.”

  With some difficulty, Oscar ignored the implication, and the lickerish gleam, behind Tabor’s wink. “A most attractive woman, yes. She’s traveling with her escort, a Colonel von Hesse.”

  “Von Hesse? A Dutchman, huh?”

  “He’s a German.”

  “Like I said. How come—” Tabor, glancing over Oscar’s shoulder, suddenly cut himself short, set down his glass, and bounced to his feet. “Baby!” he said, and his grin was abruptly wider than before, which should have been physiologically impossible.

  Both Oscar and Vail stood up, both turned toward the library door.

  “What’s this I hear about a countess?” she said. She stood smiling at the entrance in a gown of scarlet and gold that was as bright and festive, and as undeserved, as a Christmas gift. The shimmering silk clung to haughty breasts and arched rib cage and flat stomach, and then, below the voluptuous flare of hip, belled out and fell in flounced tiers, billowy with hidden petticoats, to the floor. Without actually being tall, she gave the impression of regal height: she held her slim imperious body gracefully erect, her head proudly poised atop the long slender Nefertiti neck. Her hair was red—no, russet—no, auburn—a lovely, deep mahogany shade that gleamed and glistened in the yellow lamplight. And there was a mass of it, there were piles of it, rich and shiny, there were glittering titian curls of it cascading down to outline the strong feline curve of her cheeks and spill out across her firm square shoulders.