by Mark Warren
Morgan, Williams, and Dodge rode up and sat their horses stiffly, each man with an elbow cocked high, his hand gripping a pistol butt. A crowd had started to gather on the boardwalk in front of the saloon. The two cornered men grudgingly removed their coats.
“Morg, climb down and go through Stilwell’s pockets,” instructed Wyatt, and then he stepped close to Spence. “Turn around.”
When Spence did not comply, Wyatt holstered his gun and spun him. Spence lashed out with an elbow, but Morgan changed course from Stilwell and slammed Spence facedown into the street. Dodge dismounted and placed a boot on Spence’s back while Morgan rifled his pockets.
“You damn Earps are gonna pay for this!” Spence screeched.
Wyatt walked to Stilwell. “Your turn.” Stilwell started to back away until he saw Breakenridge and Neagle coming in at a gallop. Bolstered by their presence, he faced Wyatt and smiled.
“You got nothin’ on me, Earp,” he snarled, but he lost his smirk when Wyatt pulled the boot heel from his pocket. Stilwell licked his lips. “That s’posed to mean somethin’ to me?”
Morgan wedged between them, his face inches from Stilwell’s. “Is everybody in your crowd as ignorant as the two of you?” Morgan threw him face down into the street.
Breakenridge dismounted but stood back, pulling up his belt and frowning. “What’re you doing there with Frank, Wyatt? He’s a sheriff’s deputy, you know.”
“Ain’t you heard, Breck?” Morgan laughed. “He’s a deputy and a damned stage robber.”
“Go find their horses,” Wyatt said to Breakenridge. “We’re taking them to Tombstone.”
“We ain’t gonna rest up a spell first?” Breakenridge asked. “We just got here.”
Wyatt turned to face the deputy. “No, we ain’t.”
On the front porch of Wyatt’s house, Virgil and Wyatt sat in the rocking chairs John Vermillion had pieced together from the lumber scraps of house construction. The late afternoon light brought out a honey-gold hue from the desert around them. A light breeze from the west brought the scent of woodsmoke. Savoring their cigars, the two brothers watched two dark-skinned girls carry armloads of stove wood along the sandy road toward the Mexican district. The brothers didn’t speak as Mattie set a tray on the ground between them and then returned to the house. Virgil tried the lemonade she had brought out.
“She don’t look too good,” Virgil said, glancing at Wyatt. Then he held up his glass, studying the flecks of fruit and sugar suspended in the water. “Lemonade’s good though.”
Wyatt’s eyes were fixed on Pete Spence’s house across the street and next door to Virgil’s. “How is it we come to live in the same neighborhood with a stage robber?”
Virgil followed Wyatt’s gaze. “He didn’t like being arrested, did he?”
“Son of a bitch threatened all of us when he left the courthouse. Same as Frank McLaury did.”
“You mean ‘Frank Stilwell,’ don’t you?”
Wyatt picked up his glass and shook his head. “Stilwell doesn’t have the sand. It was McLaury. He told Stilwell he’d never speak to ’im again for lettin’ us arrest ’im.”
Virgil made a sound deep in his chest—something meant to sum up the likes of Spence and McLaury. “Frank McLaury seems like he was born all in a lather about somethin’, and he don’t know what. But Spence is sly. He’s a damned snake. I doubt we’ll see him coming if he decides to make good on that threat.”
Wyatt sipped from his glass and then set it in the dirt. “How’re we gonna make any headway with these Cow-boys when all they gotta do is get their friends to lie on the witness stand?”
Virgil made the sound in his chest again and watched Allie back out of their front door and sling a basin of gray water into the yard. Their dog jumped down from the porch and sniffed at the water, as Allie looked across the intersection at the two brothers. Allie’s posture was stiff, poised as if she might yell out something to her husband, but she only clamped the bowl under one arm and went back inside. The dog climbed back onto the porch and curled up next to the wood box.
“Hell,” Virgil said, his voice sounding tired now. “I don’t know. Long as men will lie in a courtroom, we ain’t got much of a system, do we?” He continued to stare across the street where Allie had stood. After a moment he set down his half-drunk glass, made the deep grumbling sound in his chest, and pushed up from the chair. “Hell, I’d better go.” He started across the intersection, squaring his shoulders and setting a deliberate pace.
Wyatt picked up both glasses and carried them to the house. Side-stepping inside, he eased the door shut with his boot. With both Louisa and Warren back in California and Morgan rooming with Fred Dodge again, the new abode was a house of cards. Whatever room Mattie occupied seemed filled with a misery that made Wyatt want to walk quietly past that door. In the kitchen he set the glasses on the sideboard and looked at the open doorway of the bedroom. He would have liked to have heard some movement to suggest Mattie might be doing something—anything—but the room was still and quiet, just like the rest of the house. Wyatt moved quietly to the threshold and looked in, but he stopped short of entering the room.
“Lemonade was good,” he said, his words seeming to come back at him like a senseless exercise in breaking a silence.
Mattie sat on the side of the bed, her fingers fumbling idly with the tie sash of her robe. Her bloodshot eyes remained fixed on her hands, the corners of her mouth pulled down in a dedicated scowl. On the floor beside her was a corked brown bottle.
“Want to put something on and walk down to the ice cream parlor, Mattie?”
Mattie gripped the edge of the bed frame and turned angry eyes on him. “No.”
The word hung between them, sufficient to undermine anything else he might say. Wyatt walked into the room, draped his coat over his arm, grabbed his hat, and left the fragile atmosphere that had become a permanent fixture inside the house.
The heat of the day was lifting, and the coming evening brought with it a cool crispness that hinted of autumn. Before he had passed the back entrance of the O.K. Corral, he heard a piano and a chorus of men’s voices pouring out of the Capitol saloon at the corner. Across Fourth Street, the ice cream parlor showed no activity. When he reached the window, he leaned close to the glass and verified that the shop was empty. Then he read the paper notice fixed to the door: All melted. No ice till next week.
The revelry of song swelled across the street—the Irish miners pouring their hearts and accents into an anthem of their homeland. The sound was like a magnet pulling in more laborers from Allen Street. Among the latecomers were Johnny Behan and Sadie Marcus.
Behan’s head was lifted to the music, mouth open as though he were breathing in the notes of the song. When Sadie jerked from his grip, Behan spat a string of angry words at her and waved her away. Continuing alone, he picked up his pace as he neared the celebration spilling out of the saloon. Unmoving, Sadie stood alone in the street and searched her purse for something. Wyatt walked into the street and headed toward her. When he stopped ten feet away, she still had not seen him.
“Miss Marcus.”
Turning at the sound, she blinked, her moist eyes reflecting the yellow light glowing in the saloon windows. When Wyatt approached and pulled a handkerchief from his coat pocket, she took the linen with an embarrassed smile.
“Can we get off this street?” she whispered.
He offered his arm, and they turned the corner onto Fremont and started east with no destination in mind. They walked past the red-light district and then on to a winding trail that wove through a maze of yucca, sage, and agave scattered among the loose rock. The path dissolved into an incline of scrubby soap-berry and left them perched above the broad plain of the Sulphur Springs valley with no remarkable feature but the emptiness of the land that terminated in the distant mountains, mute and gray.
Standing with their backs to Tombstone, they listened to the wind keen over the flat land below them. From a nearby shrub a n
ight bird twittered, its wings fluttering as though it were caught in the brush. Then it shot free into the air and flew careening from side to side low over the land until it was lost to sight in the growing dark.
Wyatt had never experienced the comfort of silence like this—not with a woman he barely knew. He imagined that she, like himself, was trying to take from this place some measure of relief from past disappointments.
“You’re married, aren’t you, Wyatt?”
“Close enough, I reckon.”
She glanced at him, and then she refolded his handkerchief and touched it to her eyes. “Is it what you had hoped it would be?”
He had never been asked such a question. Of course, the answer was easy enough, but it was this moment of putting it into words that made him realize what separated him from the people he deemed important in any town he had lived. It was family. Not the one a man had no choice about . . . but the one he tried to build.
She bowed her head and folded her arms across her stomach. “I’m prying, aren’t I?”
“I reckon it’s hard to answer when you don’t like what you’ll hear yourself say.”
She looked at him with a question narrowing her eyes. “You’re a man. You can just pick up and start over anywhere you want. Why don’t you? Other men do it all the time.” She turned back to the broad valley, and her voice grew smaller. “Women just stay behind and learn how to surrender their last shred of dignity . . . just to stay alive.”
He looked at her curiously. “I heard you were an actress. From San Francisco.”
She laughed, but there was more misery in that laugh than when she had cried. “I ran away from my parents in San Francisco. I was only thirteen, pretending I’d be an actress.”
Wyatt nodded. “That took something . . . to leave like that.”
“Not really. I was gravely deluded . . . about Johnny.”
“You ran off with him?”
She blinked back more tears. “I thought I had met the most charming man in the world.” She laughed ruefully. “And I guess I had. I just didn’t yet know what ‘charming’ really means.”
Wyatt frowned and tried to read her face in the dark. “And you’re still his fiancée?”
“That’s his word for me,” she admitted. “I think you know what I am.”
Wyatt’s face stung for a moment, as if hit by an icy wind. Sadie smiled wanly.
“You didn’t know our sheriff had other business ventures?”
Her confession was like a private room into which she had just invited him to hear the truths rarely shared. With anyone else he would have been silent, aloof. But she had included him in that space, and he would not treat the invitation lightly.
Wyatt forced an even timbre into his voice. “All this time . . . you been doing that for Johnny?”
She nodded. “Prescott. Tiptop. And now Tombstone.” She pressed the cloth over her eyes and began to sob. He wanted to touch her, but his hands hung useless at his sides.
“What about being an actress?”
She sniffed and wiped at her cheeks. “I was just a stand-in . . . for a season. We traveled and put on our shows, and Johnny would show up and—” She turned her sad smile to the vast openness of the desert.
Wyatt took off his hat and ran a finger around the sweatband. “You seem to me the kind of woman who could do most anything she sets her mind to. It’s easy enough to see you’re blessed with looks. But there’s more to it under that. You’re more alive than most.”
Staring out at the valley, her eyes seemed to glow from an internal light. “This is only the second time we’ve talked,” she said in a whisper, “and yet you can say that?”
Inside his mind, he listened again to the words he had said to her. He had not spoken from such a place since Missouri . . . and Aurilla. The image he had carried of his dying wife was like an old battle scar he could not hide. Now, when he allowed his gaze to rove freely over Sadie’s face, he was surprised how quickly the memory of Rilla was swallowed up by the rest of his past. He saw an unexplainable familiarity in this woman’s dark silhouette, as though everything he had gone through . . . and everything she had endured . . . they had somehow done it together, in separate lives, in different parts of the country.
“Nobody really knows who you are,” he said, “but sometimes, maybe when you least expect it, you get a chance to show somebody the part of yourself that counts . . . and maybe that person can see the value of it.”
“I’m not sure I understand that, Wyatt.”
“I ain’t sure we’re meant to.”
She smiled at that. “You don’t usually talk this much, do you?”
He looked down at the hat in his hands. “I reckon not.”
He believed she was smiling now, but he couldn’t be certain in the dark. Before he said something he might want to think through, he turned to face Tombstone. The lights of the town shone brightly against the dark land—like stars floating low over the desert. It was, he realized, the first time he had attached any concept of beauty to the mining village.
“You have a way with words, Wyatt. Johnny has that, too; only you can’t believe him.”
Wyatt nodded. The cool air was perfect now, making his skin feel clean. The Arizona sky had blackened to ink, and the stars swam like jewels suspended in a bottomless lake.
“You can believe me,” he said.
She turned to stand with him, and they watched the lights blink and shimmer through the heat still rising off the land. She slipped her arm through his, and the only sound was the wind.
CHAPTER 14
Fall 1881: Tombstone, A. T.
Another stage was waylaid near Charleston, and, though McMaster had not been able to get word to Wyatt before the holdup, the Cow-boy informant did volunteer the names of the men who had perpetrated the crime: Curly Bill, Spence, and Stilwell. Virgil deputized Wyatt, and they arrested the latter two, only to see a parade of Cow-boy witnesses take the stand and, yet again, lie for the accused.
Outside the courthouse, Stilwell flashed a snide smile at the Earp brothers until Frank McLaury grabbed his arm. “Stilwell,” McLaury declared loudly, “I told you I’d never talk to you again if you let these town-shits arrest you.” He spat and faced Morgan. “You boys ever try that on a McLaury, somebody’s gonna find your bones out in the desert.”
“Give us a reason to come find you,” Morgan said, smiling, “and we’ll show you how to make a capon out o’ a cocky little rooster.”
John Ringo walked from the building and stopped two feet in front of Wyatt, his body turned in profile, his lips pursed and his eyes narrowed as if he were working out the details of a riddle rolling around inside his head. He looked down at the hat in his hands, which he began to turn slowly as if appraising the shape of the brim.
“Getting to be too damned many lawmen in this part of the country,” he said loud enough to be heard by all around him. He took his time fitting his hat to his head and then turned his morose smile on Wyatt. “Way too damned many.” Ringo lipped a crudely rolled cigarette, snapped a lucifer into flame with his thumbnail, and lighted the twisted end of the paper. Exhaling a plume of smoke over the flame, he flipped the match into the street. When he stared at Wyatt again, there was a cold and predatory hardness in his eyes. Wyatt ignored the performance, turned, and walked south toward Allen Street.
The bar at the Grand Hotel never provided music this early in the day. Only a handful of patrons occupied the room. Wyatt ordered a cup of coffee and took it to a table to read the town’s rival newspapers.
“Like some company, Mr. Earp?” It was the whore he had carried from the fire. She smiled down at him, somehow displaying equal measures of gratitude and sauciness.
Wyatt lowered his newspaper. “Thought I’d read the paper a bit.”
She pushed her lips into a playful pout. “Am I not ever gonna be able to repay you?” When she saw he would not answer, she pulled out a chair and sat down. “If you’re still looking for Sadie, she’
s moved out.” Her smile widened at the change in his eyes. “She moved out on Johnny, too.”
“I reckon that’s her business,” he said.
“Oh, really? Then why do I have the feeling I won’t see you drinking your coffee in here after today?” She leaned closer and lowered her voice. “She’s at a boardinghouse on Safford Street.” Turning sultry, she slid her hand across his sleeve, but Wyatt’s attention had shifted.
Frank and Tom McLaury, Joe Hill, Billy “the Kid” Claiborne, and Ike Clanton filed into the room and grouped at the bar. Ike slapped the bar with the flat of his hand and ordered drinks.
The whore shielded her face with her hand. “Oh, God,” she drawled. “Spare me a go-round with Ike Clanton.”
The conversation at the bar ceased when Frank spotted Wyatt in the mirror. The two McLaurys and Claiborne twisted at the waist. Tom turned back to nurse his drink, but Frank’s eyes burned a hole into Wyatt’s corner of the room. He picked up his glass and walked his cock-sure walk to Wyatt’s table. Ike and Claiborne followed in his wake.
“I want to talk to you, Earp,” Frank said.
“Yeah, me, too,” Ike blustered.
Wyatt drank from his coffee mug and quietly set it down. “Then talk.”
McLaury glared at the girl. “Well,” she announced, rising, “I have to go see the doctor about a little problem.” Giving the Cow-boys an icy smile, she sashayed away.
Tom called from the bar, “Frank, I’m going to Bauer’s to price the beef.”
Frank turned but made no response, except to tap Claiborne’s arm. “Go with him.”
Claiborne scowled but mustered no complaint. Scuffing his boots, he followed Tom out the door. Joe Hill slapped Claiborne’s shoulder as he passed, and then he carried his drink to Wyatt’s table. The three Cow-boys pulled out chairs.
“No need for that,” Wyatt said. “You won’t be here that long.”
Ike Clanton hesitated, but McLaury perched a boot in his chair. “How many people have you told about that damn deal you tried on us?” Frank said.
Wyatt let his eyes go cold. “Same as I told you before. Just Virgil.”
