Gunman's Rhapsody
Page 18
“We can arrange for that,” Hooker said.
“At least lemme stay,” Warren said. “I’m your brother.”
“That’s the plan,” Wyatt said. “What’s for supper?”
“Boiled beef tongue,” Hooker said. “And some dry corn dumplings, and stewed gooseberries.”
Doc finished the drink in one long swallow.
“Hell,” Doc said, “I was hoping for fried pork and biscuits.”
Fifty-eight
Behan and twelve men rode in at eleven the next morning. Three hours after, Wyatt’s people were on the top of Hooker’s bluff a half mile to the west. The horses were lathered, the men looked worn down. Men and animals were gray with dust. From the corner of the main building where he stood, Wyatt could see John Ringo behind Behan, and Pony Diehl, who Wyatt thought he might have seen in the bushes at the water hole. Ike Clanton hovered at the rear fringe of the horsemen. Hooker came out to meet them.
“Morning, John,” Hooker said.
“We’re tracking the Earps,” Behan said. “Somebody said they was here.”
Wyatt, wearing a Colt revolver, stepped around the corner of the hacienda and leaned against it. Behan glanced at him and looked quickly back at Hooker. Ringo saw him, and they looked at each other.
“There were a couple of Earps here, had dinner with me,” Hooker said.
Billy Whelan, carrying a Winchester, stood a little behind Hooker and to his right. The horses in Behan’s posse smelled water and were restlessly tossing their heads and shifting their feet.
“You were eating with murderers, then,” Behan said, “and thieves.”
“I’ve known Wyatt and Virgil a long time. They are men I’m proud to eat with.”
“Would you say that if he wasn’t here?” Behan said.
“I’d say it anytime somebody asked,” Hooker said. “Look at what you’re riding with, back shooters and cattle thieves.”
Behan shook his head as if to deny the charge. He looked around the area, careful not to let his glance linger on Wyatt.
Wyatt still looked at Ringo. Ringo still looked back.
“Where’s the rest of them, Henry?” Behan said. “They under cover someplace?”
“They left here this morning, right after breakfast.”
“You sonova bitch,” Ike Clanton shouted. “You know where they are.”
Billy Whelan levered a round up into the chamber of his Winchester. The sound cut through the hot morning like a bell. Some others of Hooker’s hands drifted into the yard and stood loosely scattered on all sides of the posse. Ringo paid them no attention. He looked silently at Wyatt, and Wyatt looked silently back.
“You can’t ride into a gentleman’s yard and call him a sonova bitch. You want trouble, let’s get to it. Right now.”
“No,” Behan said and made a damping gesture. “No, no. We ain’t here for trouble. We need to rest our horses,” Behan said, “and get something to eat.”
Wyatt and Ringo continued to look at each other.
“I’ll sit at table with you, John,” Hooker said. “But I won’t eat with this rabble you brought with you. We’ll set up a table for them in the yard.”
As the Behan posse dismounted, Ringo edged his horse closer to Wyatt.
“You kill Curley Bill,” Ringo said.
“I did,” Wyatt said.
“Always knew it would turn out like this,” Ringo said. “Now I’m going to have to kill you.”
“If you can,” Wyatt said.
Fifty-nine
In Denver at the foot of 17th Street in Union Station at track 7, Wyatt leaned with his arms folded against the marble wall and waited for Josie Marcus to arrive. She got off the train with her flowery suitcase, wearing a silk dress from San Francisco, her face a little flushed with excitement.
My God!
He took her bag with his left hand and opened his arms, and she seemed to jump into them, pressing herself against him.
My God!
He carried her suitcase in his right hand and held her hand with his left as they walked up 16th Street toward Larimer, to his hotel at the intersection. Josie talked. About the dress she was wearing and the train ride from San Francisco and the way the troubles in Tombstone were being written up in the San Francisco papers. Wyatt listened without exactly hearing what she said. He was listening to her voice, the way he might listen to music, and what he felt, as he heard the voice, made the content irrelevant. At the Broadwell Hotel, they had tea sent up to the room. They drank the tea as Wyatt listened to the music of her voice. Then the music modulated slightly.
“Is it over?” Josie said. “You and Johnny and the cowboys?”
“Almost,” Wyatt said.
“The Examiner says you killed Curley Bill.”
“Yes.”
“And somebody named Cruz.”
Wyatt nodded.
“It said in The Chronicle you killed at least four others.”
“Papers say a lot of things.”
Josie knew that the conversation should go in a different direction.
“Have you seen Johnny?”
“Behan?”
“Yes.”
“Saw him at Hooker’s ranch. Him and his posse.”
“What happened?”
“What do you think happened, it being Johnny and all?”
Josie sipped some tea and paused to add sugar and sipped it again to see that she’d added enough.
“Nothing,” she said.
Wyatt smiled.
“That’s what happened,” he said.
Josie knew better than to press the point, and she didn’t want to spoil the moment, but she couldn’t let it go.
“You didn’t exactly answer my question.”
“I said ‘almost.’”
“Is it Ike Clanton?”
“Ike’s all gas and liquor,” Wyatt said. “He never shot any of us.”
“So you don’t care about Ike?”
“Somebody else will shoot him soon enough.”
“Who, then?”
“Ringo.”
“Why?” Josie said. “Was he involved with Morgan and Virgil?”
“Don’t know,” Wyatt said. “But he was close with Brocius. He said he’d kill me for shooting Bill.”
“Maybe he was just talking,” Josie said.
“No. John doesn’t do that, except when he’s drunk, and he wasn’t drunk. Says something sober, he keeps his word.”
“He won’t find us,” Josie said.
Wyatt was quiet. He drank the tea the way he drank coffee, holding the cup in both hands, his eyes very still, over the rim as he looked at her. His big revolver lay on the night table near the head of the bed. It looked so strange in the chintz and linen room.
“Well, he won’t.”
Wyatt nodded.
When the tea was gone, Josie bathed. When she was finished bathing, Josie came naked to the bed.
“You’re going to go and find him, aren’t you?” Josie said.
“Josie,” Wyatt said, “you’ve been talking since you got here.”
“Do you think it’s time for me to stop?”
“I thought so a while back,” Wyatt said and opened his arms.
Josie hesitated for a moment and then let it go, and put herself into his arms and closed her eyes and kissed him with her mouth open.
Sixty
Ringo was sitting against an oak tree in West Turkey Creek Canyon when Wyatt found him. There was blood on his forehead. His Winchester leaned on the tree beside him. He held a Colt.45 in his lap, and he was drinking whiskey from an open bottle.
Wyatt said, “John.”
Ringo said, “Wyatt.”
He was drunk. Wyatt could tell by the care with which Ringo spoke.
“You come back,” Ringo said.
Wyatt nodded.
“Where’s your horse?” Wyatt said.
“I fell off him a ways back,” Ringo said. “Landed on my head. Horse run off while I was laying there
.”
“He wearing your boots?” Wyatt said.
Ringo shook his head seriously.
“I think I left them in a crib north of Sixth Street,” he said.
Wyatt’s horse, tied to a squat clump of mesquite, nuzzled at the inadequate grass while he waited for Wyatt. The inflexible July heat, six miles from Tombstone, was nearly claustrophobic.
“You come back to settle up?” Ringo said.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
The men were silent for a minute, feeling the hard press of the heat. Breathing the smell of it. Listening to it as if it were audible.
“You’re drunk, John.”
“My natural state,” Ringo said. “Don’t let it bother you.”
“I don’t mean to shoot you while you’re drunk.”
“I’ve shot a lot of men while I was drunk,” Ringo said. “Hell, Wyatt, you wait until I’m sober, you’ll never shoot me at all.”
“We could let it go, John.”
Ringo shook his head solemnly.
“No, Wyatt, we can’t.”
“Why?”
“We ain’t the kind of men let things go.”
They looked at each other. Ringo’s eyes were soft as if they didn’t focus well. Wyatt could hear the faint jingle of harness and the soft sound of the horse’s mouth as the roan browsed on the meager grass.
Had that horse a long time.
“No, John, we’re not.”
Again they looked at each other in the reeking silence of the desert heat.
“But not today,” Wyatt said. “I can’t shoot a drunk sitting on his ass under a tree.”
“No.”
“Hell, John, I don’t even remember how all this started.”
“Sure you do, you stole Behan’s girl.”
Wyatt turned and started toward his horse.
“There’ll be another time, John.”
“No.”
Wyatt kept walking.
“Don’t make me shoot you in the back,” Ringo said.
In the hammering stillness, Wyatt could hear the hammer being thumbed back on Ringo’s Colt. Wyatt turned to his left side and down, pulling his own Colt as he moved. Ringo fired and missed, and Wyatt, from the ground and aiming upward, put a bullet into Ringo’s brain.
The roan looked startled, jerked his head once against the reins that were tied to the mesquite, then went back to eating grass. Wyatt got to his feet and walked over to Ringo.
“So drunk he’s got his gun belt on upside down,” Wyatt said to the empty desert heat. He picked up the whiskey bottle and poured out what was left and hurled the bottle as far as he could into the scrub growth that littered the canyon floor. He heard the bottle shatter when it hit. He stood for another moment looking down at Ringo, who was still sitting against the tree. There was nothing in Ringo’s face. Not death, not peace, not pain. Nothing. Wyatt nodded his head gently as he looked down at Ringo. Then he turned and untied his horse and mounted and rode away.
And I’d steal her again.
Epilogue
Wyatt was with Josie until he died, age eighty, in Los Angeles, on January 13, 1929… Josie died in 1944… They are buried beside each other in the Hills of Eternity Cemetery in Colma, California… Doc died of tuberculosis in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, on November 8, 1887. He was thirty-five… Johnny Behan died in Tucson, Arizona, on June 7, 1912… Virgil died in October 1905, in Nevada, where he was serving as deputy sheriff of Esmeralda County. He was sixty-two… Warren Earp was shot to death by Johnny Boyett at age forty-five, in Wilcox, Arizona, in July 1900… James Earp died at eighty-four in Los Angeles, on January 25, 1926… Celia Ann Blaylock (Mattie Earp) died July 4, 1888, from an overdose of laudanum, in Pinal, Arizona… Ike Clanton was shot to death by a private detective named J. V. Brighton at Eagle Creek, Arizona, in 1887… Bat Masterson died at his desk in the sports department of the New York Morning Telegraph, October 25, 1921… Alvira Sullivan (Allie Earp) died on November 17, 1947, just short of her 100th birthday… Tombstone remains, shadowed by the Dragoon Mountains, twenty miles east of the San Pedro River… The mines are closed now… The primary business is tourism.
Robert B Parker
Robert B Parker first introduced his most famous character, Spenser, ('that's Spenser with an 's' like the poet') in 1973 with The Godwulf Manuscript. Since then the literate (or literary), wisecracking, hardboiled detective has appeared in over 30 (34 and counting) novels.
Spenser has been acclaimed as one of the great detective characters on a par with Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer and Parker is happy to acknowledge the debt he owes to the great hardboiled writers of the 20th century.
Over the past decade Parker has developed two other detectives over a series of novels, Jesse Stone and Sunny Randall, (the latter apparently inspired by the desire to write a book featuring Helen Hunt in the lead role, a desire that resulted in 'Family Honor'. And of course Parker has produced a massive volume of work away from his key detectives, including the authorised completion of 'Poodle Springs', Chandler's unfinished novel, followed by a sequel in 1991, 'Perchance to Dream'.
Robert B. Parker was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He graduated from Colby College in Waterville, Maine, served then two years with the U.S. Army in Korea., then in 1957 earned his M.A. in literature from Boston University. Between 1957 and 1962 he worked in industry as a technical writer and in advertising business then embarked on an academic career. Parker earned his Ph.D. in literature from Boston University in 1971. His dissertation was entitled "The Violent Hero, Wilderness Heritage and Urban Reality: A Study of the Private Eye in the Novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald." In 1976 Parker became a full professor at Northeastern University of Boston but three years later retired to devote himself entirely to writing. By then he already had published five Spenser novels. In 2002 Parker was awarded the Grand Master Edgar Award for Lifetime Achievement from Mystery Writers of America (an honour shared with the likes of Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen) but he's not finished yet…
Parker's style is the sort that creates enthusiasts – the Spenser novels in particular manage to stunningly combine a complex of wide ranging literary and cultural allusion with hard-nosed, pared-down prose and plots that rip along. You can be reading a completely satisfying edge-of-the-seat crime novel which at the same time has references to Shakespeare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, mediaeval courtly love and of course Edmund Spenser. The Spenser novels are also carefully grounded in Boston, providing an cityscape that is as much a character as an atmosphere.
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