Oscar crossed his arms over his chest and he nodded. “Well, Biff, I think that’s an excellent plan. Really top drawer. You fulfill my every expectation. I was just saying to Elizabeth—Elizabeth, this is Biff, the chap I spoke about—I was just saying to Elizabeth that if I know my Biff, he’ll have devised something truly inventive for the two of us. And you know, funnily enough, the subject of gut-shooting did come up. I said—didn’t I, Elizabeth?—I said, I wonder whether Biff has given any thought to the idea of gut-shooting? I mean to say, gut-shooting has a purity, a classic simplicity, that might elude the average chap. But it hasn’t eluded you, eh, Biff? Well done!”
Biff was looking puzzled again.
“Naturally, though,” said Oscar, “before we get to all that, I know you’ll want to continue where we left off, back in Denver. Believe me, Biff, the interruption of our boxing match was as distressing to me as it was to you.”
“You don’t listen good,” Biff said. “There ain’t gonna be no boxing match. I’m gonna shoot you. Right smack in the belly.”
“Oh, I know that, Biff. I expect nothing less from a man of your caliber.” Oscar chuckled. “Caliber, eh? Isn’t it wonderful the way our words will sport with themselves? But Biff, seriously now, there’s a time and a place for everything. And clearly this is the time for us to finish what we began back in Shantytown. I know how you’d hate for Elizabeth or for your good friend Darryl to think, even for a moment, that you were perhaps frightened by the idea of a boxing match.”
Biff guffawed once more. Without taking his eyes off Oscar, he said, “Darryl?”
“Uh-huh?”
“You figger I’m ascared of this pissant windbag?”
“No sirree, Biff. You ain’t ascared-a nobody.”
“Then I guess it won’t bother you none if I go ahead and put a bullet in his guts.”
“Well, shit, Biff, that’s just what I been sayin’ all along.”
Biff shook his head in mock sadness. “Gee, dude, I’m real sorry about it, but looks to me like it’s okay to blow yer belly out.”
Beside him, Darryl hooted with laughter.
Oscar slipped his hands into his trouser pockets and shrugged. “Fine, then, Biff, if you insist. But I’m astonished, I confess, to see you reveal this timidity. Particularly in front of a lady whose charms you covet. There you are, a true-blue American, a man obviously in the prime of health, and yet you quake in your boots at the idea of a few rounds of fistfighting with an English poet. Biff, I’m dreadfully sorry to have to say this, but your behavior leaves me no choice. You, sir, are a coward.”
Shaking his head, Biff guffawed again. “You figger you get me riled enough, I’m gonna do somethin’ dumb. Maybe yer dumb enough to figger you can whup me. But none of it makes no never mind to me. You’re a dead man, dude.”
“Come now, Biff. It’s your country and not mine. I didn’t invent the rules.”
“Rules?” Another guffaw. “There ain’t no rules. Darryl, seems to me like the dude here is downright harda hearin’.”
Darryl grinned. “How you figger that, Biff? He’s the one doin’ all the talkin’.”
“That’s what I mean,” said Biff. “He can’t hear how dumb he sounds.”
Biff guffawed and Darryl hooted. In different circumstances Oscar might have relished the mot himself.
“Okay, dude,” Biff said. “Time’s up.”
Oscar knew then that the scene had played out. His one chance, and not a very good chance at that, had been to provoke the giant into a fight. That chance now was gone. That chance had never existed.
So it came to this. He had traveled some eight or nine thousand miles, over the sea and across the prairies and the forests, to meet Death in the form of an ignorant lout wearing a greasy buffalo fur coat. He should have been frightened, should have been awash in the clammy sweat of terror; he was not. When all hope goes, he perceived, fear leaves with it.
He was, however, sorely disappointed. That his life would end like this, in farce, seemed to him perhaps the most tragic of tragedies.
And what of Elizabeth? Although at the moment his fondness for her was somewhat diminished (she and Tabor discussing him as if he were a packet of lamb cutlets!), certainly he had no wish to see her ravished and murdered by this mindless brute.
And what of Mother? Who would entertain the old dear?
Where was Dr. John Holliday when you really needed him?
Biff was broadly grinning. He glanced for a moment to Elizabeth McCourt Doe, then looked back at Oscar. “Tell you what. You get down, right now, on your hands and knees, and you beg me for it, and I’ll shoot you in the head insteada the belly. That way you die quick, without watchin’ your guts spill out for an hour. But see, you gotta beg me for it.”
Here was an opportunity to tack an artful ending onto this sorry comedy, to give it one small note of nobility and panache. He raised his head and stood at his full height. “It’s an extraordinarily generous offer, Biff. It does you credit. But much as I’d like to oblige you, I’m afraid I can’t. I learned years ago that kneeling wreaks havoc with the creases of my trousers. It’s one of the reasons I left the Church of England.”
“Too bad,” said Biff, and cocked his pistol.
And, off to the right, stepping from around the gray trunk of a pine tree, wearing his sleek black topcoat and holding in his hand a bright silver revolver, Dr. John Holliday said in a whisper that somehow carried across the small glen with perfect clarity, “Drop the guns, children, and grab yourselves a cloud.”
With a small startled squeak, Darryl tossed his gun away, and shot his hands toward the sky.
Biff hesitated. His revolver still pointing at Oscar, he glanced toward Holliday without moving his head.
Holliday whispered, “I hate to repeat myself.”
Biff wheeled toward him, moving his big body into a crouch, bringing his gun to bear, and Holliday’s gun exploded. Oscar watched Biff as several things happened simultaneously. Biff’s gun went off and so did his hat, popping straight up into the air as a small black hole appeared in the exact center of his forehead and pennants of gray and brilliant red fluttered for an instant from the back of his skull. He stood upright and then, with a look of utter amazement on his face, his arms opening wide as though he were about to embrace an old friend, he toppled backward and crashed to the ground.
Stunned, Oscar felt his stomach roil. He stared stupidly at the lifeless bulk of Biff as Holliday approached.
To Elizabeth McCourt Doe, Holliday said, “You all right, Mrs. Doe?”
“Yes,” she said softly, her voice hushed. “Who are you?”
“Elizabeth,” muttered Oscar, still staring at the recumbent Biff, “this is—” He stopped, suddenly overcome by the pre-posterousness of introductions at a time like this.
“John Holliday, ma’am. A pleasure.”
Oscar turned to him, gaping. A pleasure?
“Best thing now,” Holliday whispered, “would be for you folks to head back to the Springs. I’ll take care of this.” He nodded to Biff’s body. He held the gun loosely, down at his side—he was no longer worried, evidently, about Darryl (who, eyes darting, seemed to be trying to disappear within his gray duster).
Oscar said, “But … the man is dead. Surely, the police … the authorities, Grigsby, someone … surely someone should be notified.”
Fractionally, Holliday shrugged. “More trouble than it’s worth. Means the two of you testifying. A trial. Might take weeks. And it comes to the same thing in the end. He’s dead, and we walk away. Self-defense. But you’d be using up a lot of time.” Another faint shrug. “Up to you, though.”
“Oscar,” said Elizabeth McCourt Doe, “help me up. We’re going back.”
Moving slowly, as in a dream, Oscar offered her his hand. She took it and arose from the blanket. Oscar turned to look back at Biff. He was still dead.
Elizabeth handed him his coat. He took it and, without thinking, without quite knowing that he did so
, he put it on.
Biff’s angled stovepipe hat lay on its side in the pine needles a few yards from his body. For some reason the hat, battered and abandoned, seemed more poignant, more emotionally resonant, more final than the man’s lifeless form.
Oscar turned to Holliday. “How did you know? How did you manage to get here in time?”
Another faint shrug. “Saw the two of them headed this way from the Springs. Thought it might be a good idea to follow them. Lost the trail for a while after they left their horses, back on the road.” Below the handlebar mustache, he smiled his ghost of a smile. “I’m not much of a tracker.”
“Oscar,” said Elizabeth McCourt Doe.
He turned to her.
She was squatting down, her hands along the hem of the blanket, the wings of her fur coat spread out atop the pine needles. “You’re standing on it.”
“Oh. Sorry.” He stepped off the blanket.
“What about the basket?” he asked her. This was insane. A man had been shot to death, his brains splashed across the forest floor, and the two of them were jabbering about the picnic paraphernalia.
Standing now, folding the blanket, Elizabeth McCourt Doe looked at Holliday. “Do you drink champagne?”
Holliday nodded his infinitesimal nod. “Now and again.”
“Then you’re welcome to it,” she said. “The basket, too. With my compliments.”
A similar nod. “Obliged.”
Oscar turned to Darryl. He stood, silent and still, his glance darting from Oscar to Holliday to Elizabeth McCourt Doe to Biff, and then back to Holliday.
Oscar said to Holliday, “What about him?”
Holliday looked at Darryl, looked back to Oscar, shrugged slightly. “He won’t be saying anything to anybody.”
“No sir,” Darryl ventured eagerly. “No sir, I surely won’t.”
Oscar said to Holliday, “You’re not going to—”
Holliday faintly smiled. “Kill him? Don’t expect so.” He asked Darryl, “You won’t be giving me any grief, will you, Darryl?”
“Uh-uh, no sir, no sirree, not a speck of it.”
Holliday said to Oscar, “Soon as he helps me get rid of that”—a small nod toward Biff—”I’ll send him on his way.”
“Oscar,” said Elizabeth McCourt Doe. “We have to go.”
Oscar nodded numbly. And then remembered: “My watch.”
Holliday looked at Darryl. “Give the man his watch, Darryl.”
“Yessir, yessir,” said Darryl quickly, reaching into his duster. “It just plumb slipped my mind.” He sprang forward and handed the watch to Oscar.
Elizabeth McCourt Doe turned to Holliday. “Thank you, Mr. Holliday. For everything.”
Holliday nodded.
Pocketing his watch, still feeling somewhat numb, Oscar said, “Yes, well, I suppose … thanks … are in order …”
Holliday nodded. “Be seeing you, Poet.”
Twenty or thirty yards from the glen, as they walked through the forest back to their carriage, Oscar muttered, “It’s Doctor.”
“What?” she said.
“It’s Doctor Holliday. Not Mister.”
“He has the strangest eyes,” said Elizabeth.
“Sorry?” Oscar was distracted once again. Nearly back in Manitou Springs now, the two of them had not spoken since they climbed into the carriage.
“Doc Holliday. He is Doc Holliday, isn’t he?”
Oscar nodded. Again and again he had watched Biff’s absurd hat levitate from his hair as the lead slug pocked his forehead. Again and again he had seen the flurry of tissue spurt from the back of Biff’s massive skull; had seen the giant open wide his heavy arms to enfold Death in his embrace before he toppled to the earth.
“I’ve never seen eyes like that,” she said. “They seem so melancholy. He must’ve suffered terribly in his life:”
Oscar turned to her. “Well, now that the two of you have been properly introduced, you can invite him to breakfast I’m sure he’ll be happy to have you clasp him to the comfort of your bosom. Of course, you’ll need to discuss it with Tabor first.”
She slipped her hand from her muff and placed it on his arm. “Oscar. Don’t.”
“If you’ll recall, you once made a similar remark about my eyes.”
“Oscar,” she said, “you’ll spoil everything.”
“Spoil it? How can one spoil a thing which is already rotten?”
She removed her hand from his arm. “Oscar. Listen to me. What you and I have together takes nothing away from what Horace and I have. And what we have, Horace and I, takes nothing away from us, from you and me. Horace is staying over in Manitou Springs tonight. I have a room to myself at the Clarendon, in Leadville. We enjoy each other, you and I. We get along. This’ll be our last chance to spend some time together.”
He faced forward. “I had been hoping,” he said, “for rather more of your time than merely another night.”
“But that can’t be. Things are the way they are, Oscar. The world is the way it is. Wishing and hoping and dreaming doesn’t change it any.”
“Then I prefer to live among the wishes and the hopes and the dreams.”
“You prefer illusions to reality?”
“Infinitely. Reality is tawdry and dull.” He turned to her. “And treacherous.”
“That’s not fair. I never made you any promises. And you knew from the beginning that I was engaged to Horace.”
Against these statements, both true, Oscar had no defense. He said stiffly, “A man has been killed, Elizabeth. It seems to me that you’re displaying a signal lack of dismay at that fact.”
“He was going to kill us, remember? And you’re the one who brought up the subject.”
All of this was true, as well. It was infuriating, arguing with a woman who persisted in dealing with facts.
Oscar chose to withdraw himself from the contest—which clearly served only to drag him down to her level—by turning away in disdainful silence.
From the corner of his eye he saw her reach into the pocket of her fur coat.
“Oscar, this is the key to my hotel room. It’s on the third floor, room 303. You can get to the third floor of the hotel directly from the Opera House, without going out into the street. There’s a connecting passageway at the back of Horace’s box.”
“How convenient that must be. For both of you.”
“Here, Oscar. Take the key.”
“No, thank you. I already possess an abundance of keys.”
“Oscar, come and see me after your lecture tonight. I’ll be waiting for you. Here. Take it. I have another one.”
“I daresay. Many more of them, I’ll wager.”
She laughed, surprising him. “No,” she said, “just the one.”
He felt her hand dip into his pocket and then slide out. “If you change your mind,” she said.
“I frequently do change my mind. A mind is a thing, like a cravat, that is designed to be changed. But about this I am adamant.”
“I’ll be waiting,” she said.
“You shall wait, I’m afraid, in vain.”
Neither of them spoke again until they arrived at the Woods Hotel. There, wordlessly, Oscar handed her the reins and stepped down from the carriage. He turned and looked up, at the beautiful mass of titian hair, the beautiful violet eyes, the beautiful wide red mouth, and he felt something wrench, irrevocable, within his chest. “I shall probably never forget you,” he said. “I will, however, attempt to do so.”
It wasn’t as eloquent an exit line as he would’ve liked; but after having discarded four or five others over the past ten minutes, this was the only one which remained.
The wide red mouth smiled at him. “I’ll be waiting,” she said, and softly flicked the reins against the backs of the horses. The carriage wheeled away.
Upstairs in his room, Oscar saw that Henry had already packed everything. An hour remained before he had to catch the train to Leadville. He spent most of it retching into the toil
et; and he did not know, he could not tell, which sickened him the most: his horror at the death of Biff, or his grief at the loss of Elizabeth McCourt Doe.
WHAT HAD FALLEN AS rain three days ago in Denver had fallen here, in the jumbled heights of the mountains, as snow. Alongside the railroad tracks it lay dingy and dirty, peppered by the cinder and grit sprayed from the smokestacks of passing trains; along the steeply sloped ground before the steeply sloped pine forest, it lay a brilliant white, dazzling in the late afternoon sun. It draped the drooping boughs of the trees and it lay blue and gray beneath them and, even muted by shadow, it turned the tall shaggy trunks to silhouettes.
The carriage was climbing at an impossible angle, the trees all leaning drunkenly in the direction of the train’s passage, the entire world atilt. This seemed to Oscar, after the events of the morning, altogether appropriate. A universe that so easily admitted, so easily permitted, betrayal and sudden death was a universe which was patently askew. He would not have been surprised to look out the window and see the trees dangling, topsy-turvy, from the sky.
He glanced around the carriage. Once again, most of the others had withdrawn into themselves and their silences. Opposite him, von Hesse and the Countess were reading: von Hesse, his Chuang Tzu; the Countess, Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma.
Sitting in the left front seats, facing back, were O’Conner and Ruddick. Ruddick was scribbling across the pages of his notebook; at the window a subdued O’Conner was playing gin rummy with a subdued Vail, who sat opposite him in the window seat to Oscar’s left.
Oscar sighed. (Discreetly; he had no wish to advertise his distress.) All the others, even the perpetually inebriated O’Conner, appeared complete within themselves. Whole. Entire. Sound. None of them seemed to be, as Oscar felt, adrift and rudderless, storm-shattered, bobbing and yawing mindlessly, helplessly, hopelessly. Le Bateau Ivre.
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