Epitaph

by Mary Doria Russell

  On the outside, Doc was over the concussion, but his mind still wasn’t working like it did before. He had a job at the Alhambra dealing faro for a few hours in the evening, but Doc wasn’t sharp enough to play poker at all, and that scared him. You could tell. Playing piano was the only thing that seemed to make him feel better, but this week Doc had gotten it into his head to learn something new, just to see if he could. The dentist would go over and over some little chunk of music until he had it perfect. Problem was, when that took longer than Doc thought it ought to, it nerved him up worse.

  Doc generally practiced in the afternoon, when the Cosmopolitan was mostly empty, so folks wouldn’t get tired of him playing the same damn thing a hundred times. Morgan himself knew to be patient because eventually Doc would put all the little bits of music together and then . . . there would be beauty. That was worth waiting for.

  In the meantime, Morgan read.

  “Hey, Doc,” he said when Doc finally closed up the keyboard and seemed to be in a better mood. “You ever notice? You don’t hardly cough at all while you’re practicing.”

  “I’ll be damned . . . You’re right,” Doc said thoughtfully. “Must’ve been the same for Chopin. He gave recitals almost to the end.”

  “Maybe it’s because you don’t talk while you play.”

  “Yes, that’s possible. Steadier respiration, I suppose.”

  “Anyways, what kinda name is Show Pan?” Morg asked. “Sounds Chinese.”

  Which made Doc laugh, and cough, and ease up a little. “It’s French, though Chopin himself was born in Poland . . .” His voice trailed off as he looked past Morgan toward the music room door.

  Morgan got to his feet. “What’s wrong, Virg?”

  “Either of you seen Wyatt?”

  “He was down in Millville to talk to Richard Gird,” Morgan said, “but he sent James a telegram this morning saying he was delayed. Why?”

  “It’s Mattie,” Virgil said. “Real bad this time.”

  MANY THINGS HAD BECOME CLEAR to Mattie Blaylock while she waited for Wyatt to come home with her medicine. He wanted to kill her. He wanted her dead so he could run off with that Jew slut.

  And he’d put bugs under her skin. She could feel them crawling.

  “Bastards. Awful little bastards,” she muttered, scratching, scratching, scratching.

  “Wyatt, please!” she wailed. “I need my medicine!”

  The pillows! She hadn’t looked there. She seized them, one by one. Gripped the ticking. Tore them open.

  Feathers flew. Sticking to her face, pricking her skin.

  Nothing. Nothing. Nothing!

  “Where did you hide my medicine, you bastard?” she screamed. “Where did you hide it?”

  Dropping to her knees, she peered under the bed again. Maybe she hadn’t looked hard enough before. She dragged the china chamber pot out and dumped its contents on the floor. “You ruined my life!” she screamed, throwing the pot at Wyatt and his Jew slut.

  It shattered against the wall.

  “Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus. Gentle Jesus, save me!” She wanted to weep, but her mouth was so dry. She was crumbling to powder. Why had they ever left Kansas? Kansas had grass and flowers. Arizona is dead, she thought. He wants me dead, too. Dead and dry and crumbling.

  “Christ!” she snarled, ripping off her blouse, her nails digging for the bugs under her skin.

  Lurching to her feet, she yanked the drawers out of the bureau, throwing clothes on the floor. Too tired to stand, she sank onto the wet carpet and laid her body on the dampness, moaning in pleasure. It was cool and wet. So good. So good! Better than anything she’d ever felt. Better than any man ever made her feel.

  “Oh, Jesus,” she cried. “Wyatt, please, where did you hide it? I need my medicine!”

  THE OTHER GIRLS WERE WAITING outside Wyatt’s house, their arms wrapped tight over their bosoms, their faces stiff. You could hear Mattie yelling, all the way out on the street.

  Winded by the run from the Cosmopolitan, Doc gasped, “When did this start?”

  “About an hour ago,” Allie told him.

  “She chased us out,” Bessie said.

  “Morg, it’s different this time,” Lou said. “I’ve never seen her like this.”

  Doc leaned against the veranda post, coughing into a handkerchief. When he got his breath back, he nodded and Morgan opened the door.

  The house had been ransacked. Chairs overturned. Tables knocked over. Clothing everywhere. Mattie was half-naked, feathers stuck to her sweat, arms bleeding from long ragged scratches.

  One step into the front room, the stench hit them.

  Piss. Puke. Crap.

  “My God,” Morg gasped, his own coughing as bad as Doc’s.

  The dentist handed him a handkerchief and Morg held it over his nose and mouth as he moved from window to window, shoving them open one-handed.

  “Where have you been?” Mattie screamed. “You were humping that Jew slut, weren’t you! I need my medicine!”

  Breathless and white, Doc knelt next to her on the filthy carpet. “Mattie, honey, that’s Morgan. Wyatt’s been delayed. He’ll be home soon.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” she wailed, fingers raking through her tangled hair. “Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus. I need my medicine, Doc! Where did he hide it?”

  Empty brown bottles were lying all over the house. Doc handed one to Morgan and said, “Take this to the pharmacy. Tell Mr. Rabinovich that I have a patient who needs three six-ounce bottles, right away.” When Morg hesitated, Doc said, “It’s all right. Mattie and I will be fine, won’t we, Mattie honey.”

  “Oh, Doc!” she wailed. “Oh, Doc! He wants me dead. That bastard brought me here to die.”

  Ashen, Morgan went back outside. “When did she get so bad?”

  Lou and Allie looked away, but Bessie said, “She’s been using it all along. I warned Wyatt back in Dodge. I told him she was just looking for a meal ticket, but he took her in anyways. And this is the thanks he gets.”

  “I need my medicine!” Mattie was yelling. “God damn you! I need it now!”

  BY NIGHTFALL, the story was all over Tombstone. Nobody said anything, but Wyatt could feel eyes on him as he rode through town. All the good feeling he had from getting Dick Naylor back left him. He worried that something bad had happened to one of his brothers, so it was a relief to see Virg and Morg waiting for him outside the Dexter Stable.

  They told him about Mattie while he took care of Dick Naylor.

  “Doc wanted to bring her to the hospital,” Morgan said, “but we figured you didn’t want more gossip than there already was.”

  Virgil said, “We’ve got her at our place. She’s sleeping now.”

  “Doc had two Mexican women come clean your house,” Morg said. “They scrubbed the floors and walls and washed the curtains. We had to burn the carpet. The mattress, too.”

  “Jesus, Wyatt!” Virgil cried softly. “How long’ve you been living like that?”

  “Hell. I don’t know,” Wyatt said, halfway between misery and anger. “It just sorta creeps up on you.” He closed Dick’s stall, and they walked outside. “I thought I left enough for her. She’s going through it faster than she let on, I guess.”

  He scrubbed at his face with both hands and was about to say something more when they heard a small boy calling, “Dad? Dad!”

  A moment later, Josie Marcus came down the stable’s center aisle by herself, a shawl around her shoulders. When she saw the Earps, she said, “Al, go see if your daddy’s horse is in the corral.” She waited until the boy had run outside before asking, “Have any of you seen Johnny? He was due home for supper hours ago.”

  “I just got back to town,” Wyatt told her.

  Virgil and Morgan exchanged quick glances before looking at their feet.

  Men were often tongue-tied in her presence, but Josie knew the difference between a shy reticence and a kindly reluctance to tell an unkind truth. “Oh,” she said, and there was no drama in her voice. The brothers had s
imply confirmed what she suspected. And what all the whores in town knew. And what the former Mrs. Behan could have told her to expect.

  “Thank you,” she said, straightening her shoulders. “You’ve saved me the trouble of looking for him any further.”

  Tugging her shawl tighter, she turned toward the doorway and called, “Albert! Your daddy’s at a meeting! We’ll wait for him at home, sweetheart.”

  The boy came to her side. Josie sketched a smile.

  “We’ll be on our way, then,” she said. “Good evening, gentlemen.”

  “You two shouldn’t be out alone at night,” Wyatt said. “I’ll walk you home.”

  “Evening, ma’am,” his brothers said, touching their hats.

  SIDE BY SIDE, VIRG AND MORGAN WATCHED WYATT disappear into the darkness with Johnny Behan’s son and mistress.

  Virgil spat tobacco juice into the dirt by way of commentary.

  “Could you blame him?” Morgan asked quietly.

  “I guess not,” Virg admitted. “But that is gonna be trouble.”

  THE BOY SKIPPED AHEAD, excited to be out so late, secure in the protection of two adults who hardly spoke at all, each alone in a misery that was deeply private and humiliatingly public.

  “I heard about your wife,” Josie said after a couple of blocks.

  “She’s not . . . I mean . . . Not really.”

  “Oh. I see. She’s Mrs. Earp the same way I’m Mrs. Behan.”

  When they reached the Behans’ house, Josie told Albert, “Say good night to Mr. Earp, Albert. Then go on in to bed.” The boy did as he was told. Josie offered her hand. “Thank you for escorting us home, Mr. Earp.”

  “Wyatt,” he reminded her.

  “Wyatt,” she said, and went inside.

  SHEER HABIT TOOK HIM BACK to the corner of First and Fremont. The Mexican and Chinese neighborhoods nearby were quiet. It was cold, and everyone was tucked up inside. For a time, Wyatt stood out on the street, just looking at the place he called home.

  Hell, he thought.

  The door opened. Doc came out, his woolen cloak pulled close, like a blanket. “I expect someone has told you what happened.”

  “Yeah. Morg and Virg.”

  “I will hear no word against Mattie Blaylock,” Doc warned. “She has had a hard life. I fear it will be harder yet, before it is over.”

  Leaning on his cane, the dentist stepped off the porch, grunting softly when his meager weight hit his bad hip. A gunshot wound had nearly killed him back in ’77. If he sat still for long, the scarred-up muscles stiffened.

  “Thanks, Doc,” Wyatt said. “I ’preciate what you did.”

  The dentist nodded and put a hand on Wyatt’s shoulder as he passed.

  Alone again, Wyatt walked through the open door. The little house was neat and nearly empty, everything scrubbed and spare. It reminded him of the place he’d rented back in Dodge.

  When he was living on his own. Before Mattie Blaylock moved in.

  He never meant that to be permanent. From the start, he had reason to regret letting Mattie cross his threshold. At her best, she was not easy to get along with, and he could hardly remember her at her best. It came to him then: He could saddle up and ride away. Leave her behind. Just . . . disappear. But Wyatt Earp had never run away from anything before, and he couldn’t see doing it now.

  Besides, he had a future in Tombstone.

  THE EARP BROTHERS ALL LIVED within a few hundred yards of one another, but they didn’t get together all that much. Virg and Wyatt traveled a lot, transporting prisoners mostly. Morgan rode shotgun for Wells Fargo whenever a strongbox was being hauled to or from Tombstone. James couldn’t afford to hire help, so he tended bar at his tavern from dusk until three in the morning. Even so, the four of them were on Virgil’s front porch a couple of nights later. Smoking in the starlight. Talking things over.

  “You ever do anything legal about Mattie?” Virgil asked Wyatt.

  “I let her use my name, is all.”

  “Well, kid . . . time to fish or cut bait.”

  Morgan kept quiet. He knew how unhappy Wyatt was, but Morg himself had found things to admire in Mattie Blaylock. She’d been thoughtful about cooking soft foods when Doc was working on Wyatt’s teeth back in Dodge. And when Doc himself was so sick that winter, Mattie was a good nurse to him.

  “That’s a hell of a thing to ask!” Virg cried, bringing Morgan back to the present.

  “I’m just trying to figure it out!” Wyatt was saying. “Don’t make sense to me why a man would cheat if he had a fine woman at home.”

  “Well, I can tell you why I don’t.” Virg jerked his head toward the house. “Allie would know I’d been up to something before I took two steps into the house and she’d strip the bark off me. What about you, Morg? You ever get a little something on the side when you’re up in Tucson?”

  “Well, I suppose I could if I cared to,” Morg admitted, “but I’m not a good liar. And it’s like . . . like I’d have to pull some kind of shade down between me and Lou. Maybe that’s how women know if you’re tomcatting. They can tell when you pull that shade down.”

  “Yeah,” Wyatt said. “Fine. That’s why men don’t go to whores. What I’m asking is why men do, if they got quality right there in their own bed.”

  “Just don’t know when they’re well off” was Morg’s opinion.

  “James?” Virg said. “You’re the expert, I guess.”

  James Cooksey Earp was the first of the five sons born to Nicholas and Virginia Earp and the most conventional of the brothers, in a thoroughly unconventional way. Nineteen when the war began, he’d enlisted in the Union Army and lost the use of his left arm for his trouble. James had lingered near death for a full year in an army hospital. When he finally turned the corner and began to heal, he counted himself a lucky man, for he emerged from that travail as husband to a Nashville madam named Bessie Ketchum. Overseeing a big, busy brothel like the one she and James had run back in Dodge City was beyond her now. Bessie had retired. Serving beer for a nickel a glass to Chinks and drifters certainly wasn’t what James had expected when he and his brothers set out for Tombstone, but if anybody had asked him about how things had turned out, he would have shrugged with his good side and said with genuine cheer, “Can’t complain! It’s a living.”

  “Why would a man with a fine woman go to whores?” he asked, repeating Wyatt’s question. He followed with one of his own. “We’re talking about Behan, right?”

  “No! Well, maybe, but . . . Just in general, is what I want to know.”

  “Lots of reasons.” James stood, stretched, and spit over the porch railing. “Sometimes a man can’t get all he wants at home. Or he might like things his wife don’t. Or maybe she’s sickly, like Bess. Or she don’t want more kids, so she lets him know it’s just as well if he looks elsewhere for his needs, long as he keeps quiet about it.” He sat down again. “And sometimes, things look good to visitors, but it’s a different story when the door closes. People get tired of each other. Or maybe it was just bad from the start and when they figured that out, it was too late.”

  For a while, they all just sat there, smoking in the darkness.

  “How’s Mattie now?” James asked.

  “Sleeps a lot. But when she’s awake . . .” Wyatt shook his head.

  In fifteen years of tending bar in bordellos, James Earp had seen a lot of whores come and go. Many died young. Suicide. Disease. Murder. Some just sort of disappeared into the alleys, sucking off cowboys and soldiers and miners for drink money or drugs. A few, like Mattie Blaylock, managed to find a man decent enough—or stupid enough—to take them in. They’d set up housekeeping with him before he knew what was happening.

  “Wyatt,” James said quietly, “you’ve kept her off the street for a couple of years. That’s gotta count for something.”

  EVERYONE’S LIFE WAS HARD, one way or another. That’s what Curly Bill Brocius had observed. People found ways to soften things a little. Some ways were better than oth
ers. In Bill’s experience, opium was the best of all.

  The first time he lifted the canvas flap and peered into Ah-Sing’s hop joint, he was surprised to see a white woman lying full-length on one of the low, quilt-padded pallets. Her eyes were vague as she gazed up at him, and he wondered if she was among the services on offer.

  Ah-Sing beckoned to him. “You new, yes? Come in! Come in!”

  The woman touched Bill’s leg when he ducked inside, passing near her. “It’s so good,” she warned, “don’t even try it once.” Bill looked down at her, confused, but Mattie Blaylock was too far gone to say more.

  If he’d cared to, Ah-Sing could have explained—though in Cantonese, not English: “Euphoria is the poppy’s first gift, gently vanquishing the soul’s distress, mercifully muting the body’s pain. What follows is a gorgeous floating languor. Be warned: To experience that sensation even once is to desire it again and again, forever. To be deprived of opium’s beneficence is to endure first longing, then anguish, and finally torment.”

  Of course, Ah-Sing said no such thing. He was a businessman. Repeat customers were the main source of his income. “She crazy,” he told Curly Bill. “You only addict when you smoke three pipe a day.”

  After that first amazing night, Bill tried not to visit Ah-Sing’s tent more than once a month. Well, twice a month sometimes. It was hard to keep track, for rustling did not run to a schedule, and Bill Brocius was a busy man. Organizing the crew for Old Man Clanton. Leading the raids if the old man did not take charge himself. Getting the cattle distributed to the most cooperative ranchers. Paying off the boys. Keeping the peace among them, and keeping them out of Tombstone while they drank and gambled away their cut of the profits. It was a wearisome sort of life, marked by constant belligerence and endless strife.

  All burdens of responsibility fell away when Curly Bill entered Ah-Sing’s world. Even before he lit the pipe, its warmth in his hands was enough to calm him. Soon, he felt like he was wrapped in soft down pillows, though he lay on a hard wooden pallet. His limbs grew heavy even as he seemed to float, dissolving into the air, mixing with the smoke.