Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  I decided I should try to go right to the morning of the day the gunfight happened, so that there were fewer variables to deal with—and because, since I was a historian of the Old West, that day was already firmly fixed in my mind. I had visited it many times in my imagination, reading and re-reading accounts of the gunfight and the events leading up to it. I had the edge, a jump on visiting Tombstone, Arizona, October 26, 1881.

  I set up my own tape recorder, and recorded the words over and over again . . . “October 26, 1881 . . . it is nine in the morning, the morning of the OK Corral gunfight, in Tombstone, Arizona . . . October 26, 1881 . . . it is nine in the morning . . .” And in the background was music, not too loud, a tape loop of tunes recorded by contemporary folk musicians but on acoustic instruments, only songs that were extant in 1881. “Camptown Races” . . . “The Man on the Flying Trapeze” . . .

  It took three days, scarcely resting, with only a few breaks to eat dried food and drink bottled water, the occasional short nap, for the process to really begin. On my few visits to the men’s room, down the hall, I encountered tourists, people who stared at me suspiciously. They’d heard the mantra-like drone from my room, the interminable music . . .

  October 26, 1881 . . . it is nine in the morning, the morning of the OK Corral gunfight, in Tombstone, Arizona. Picturing this room, that day. The street outside, what it must have been like. Envisioning faces familiar to Tombstone in those days—faces I knew from old tintypes and photographs— that would be nearby. Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Big Nose Kate Elder, Mayor Clum, George Parsons, Fred Dodge. Seeing them in my mind’s eye. October 26, 1881 . . . it is nine in the morning . . .

  And then what Collier had called “the absorption” began. Suddenly I was drawn inward, caught up in a drifting sensation—I understood now exactly what Collier meant—and a mounting disorientation. The room around me seemed distant, detached. The sound of my droning voice, those songs, became thick, distorted, as if I were going deaf. Then I ceased to hear them—and heard instead a shouting from the street, the clatter of horse’s hooves. The tinkle of a cheap piano.

  The sounds of Tombstone, October 1881.

  The officiating lady of the whorehouse was a stout woman with flaming red hair contrasting vividly with her blowsy blue dress; she was leaning back in a rocking chair on the front porch, her pale thick-ankled left leg cocked over her right knee, smoking a pipe. She didn’t seem particularly surprised to see me, a stranger, walk out of her house, though she hadn’t marked my entrance.

  “Now did that Marissa bring herself a man up there without consulting me?” she asked, almost rhetorically, as she frowned at her pipe, knocking its dottle clear on the railing. “The wicked vixen owes me a dollar and no mistake . . .”

  “Here is your dollar, ma’am, and good day to you,” I said, my voice trembling as I laid the worn silver dollar the porch railing beside her.

  She chuckled and went back to singing wordlessly to herself. I stepped out into the October morning, into the smell of sage and horse dung and leather . . .

  Believe, I told myself, feeling dreamlike as I stepped off Fifth Street and onto Allen, in the Tombstone, Arizona, of October 1881. Believe!

  I turned left, passing the Golden Eagle Brewery, striding by several shops including a hostelry, Campbell and Hatch Billiards, the Cosmopolitan Hotel, the Eagle Meat Market, Hafford’s Saloon . . . Believe in this. This is no dream. These creaking wagons pulled by oxen and horses; that stagecoach arriving; these weary ladies of the night blinking in the morning light as they stumped blearily to their beds in their high-button shoes; this shopkeeper, with the flaring muttonchops and the red gaiters, opening up his emporium; the smell of alkali dust and new-cut lumber and the smell of horses and the raw rich scent of privies, many privies, blowing in on the sharp desert wind . . . It’s no dream!

  But it was the dream of every Old West historian. To actually visit Dodge City or Virginia City or Tombstone—back then. And this day of days, the day of the most storied gunfight of the Old West! I could get the truth about the gunfight—no one would ever believe me, of course, but I’d know. I’d know who started the fight, and if indeed the Clantons and McClaurys had not even drawn their weapons, as the anti-Earp Tombstone Nugget had claimed, or if it was, as the pro-Earp Tombstone Epitaph had insisted, a straight-up fight with Frank McClaury and Billy Clanton drawing first . . . Too bad I didn’t bring a camera back with me, a Polaroid, say, or—

  The streets of Tombstone rippled; I seemed to glimpse a Cadillac glimmering into visibility, asphalt appearing under my feet . . .

  No! Don’t think of things like that! Focus. Be here. There’s only here and now—October 26, 1881!

  I saw an apothecary’s shop then, across the street. Focus on that. An old-fashioned apothecary’s shop. You have a plan. You must go there and make a purchase . . .

  I went into the shop, and found the apothecary’s assistant—a sallow, sleepy-eyed, greasy-haired woman in a long black dress—and I instantly suspected her of being a laudanum addict. No matter. I made my enquiry and, wordlessly, she sold me what I needed to carry out my plan.

  I stepped out to the wooden sidewalk, shivering in the chill wind, and looked fiercely around, trying to fixate on something that would keep me in this time. I focused on a man walking unsteadily along, across the dusty street, a man in a sombrero. He was a plump-faced white man with an oiled mustache and a small pointed beard; the silver and black sombrero didn’t seem to go with his stained frock coat, his tall black boots. Then I knew the man for who he was. It was Ike Clanton, full up with liquor.

  I understood the dark, intent look on his face, too. There was fear and anger, perfectly mixed, in that expression, the whole framed by the sullen stupidity of alcohol. I knew what was behind that look . . . and how it would lead to the “Gunfight at the OK Corral.”

  Earlier that year, the stage had been robbed, and Bob Paul had been killed. The Earps had learned that the robbers were local ne’er-do-wells surnamed Leonard, Head, and Crane. But the stage robbers had made good their getaway. Wyatt Earp knew that Ike Clanton and the McClaury brothers were close acquaintances of the stage robbers—“acquaintances” at the very least. He’d approached cowboys Ike Clanton and Frank McClaury secretly and said that if they’d ask around, and then tell him how to find the stage robbers, he’d see that Ike and the McClaurys would get the reward money on the quiet, with Earp taking credit for the arrest, and in consequence getting himself elected to the lucrative job of town sheriff. Ike and Frank agreed and traded some information—but before it could be acted on, local ranchers Isaac Haslett and his brother Bill, in need of the reward money, had bushwhacked Leonard and Head, only to be killed, presumably by a vengeful Crane, soon after—Crane vanished and the whole deal between the Earps and the cowboys fell apart.

  Still, Ike was afraid that the leader of the cowboy gang, Curly Bill Brocius, would find out Ike had played along with Wyatt Earp. Rumors seemed to suggest as much. Ike felt he had to bluster and damn the Earps, and call it all a lie, in order to keep his standing in the gang. Earp pal, former dentist and fulltime gambler John Henry “Doc” Holliday, knew Curley Bill, and Crane too, and Ike was afraid Doc had told them. So it was necessary to call Doc Holliday a dirty liar, all around, which didn’t please Holliday. Meanwhile the Earps accused the other Clantons of rustling, and Tom McClaury and his brother of stealing government mules. Though it was hard to convict them with corrupt Sheriff Behan covering up for them, rancor grew on both sides.

  Holliday by now had breezed into town from Tucson, at the request of the Earps, Big Nose Kate in tow. Sometime after midnight, Wyatt Earp ran into Ike Clanton at the Eagle Brewery, where Wyatt ran a faro game. Ike had hinted that Holliday was betraying him to the gang, and telling lies about him, and he was going to have to fight him. “I am not fixed just right,” Ike had said then, meaning he hadn’t been carrying his weapons. “But in the morning I’ll have a man-for-man with you and Holliday.”

  Trying t
o defuse the situation, Wyatt had replied he’d fight no one “because there’s no money in it.” Ike was known for his bluster, after all. There was no need to take his threats seriously.

  But Ike Clanton kept on blustering, confronting Holliday in a restaurant around midnight—and only the intercession of Deputy Marshal Morgan Earp prevented Doc from shooting Clanton down. “You son of a bitch,” Doc told him, “you ain’t heeled.” Meaning armed. “Go heel yourself.”

  Ike kept drinking, guzzling hooch all night long. Weirdly, he played poker with Virgil Earp with something approaching civility, till around 7:00 a.m. But when Virgil got up to go home, Ike gave him a message for Holliday: “The damned son of a bitch has got to fight.”

  An hour later Ike told the bartender at the Oriental that if the Earps and Holliday showed on the street, “the ball would open” and they would have to fight. Having stayed up all night drinking . . . Ike judiciously went on drinking. Going from bar to bar, uttering threats, stoking the fires with his cronies where he could.

  And it was still morning when I found him. Staring at Ike Clanton, in the drunk and belligerent flesh, fixed me firmly in October 26, 1881. Ike glowered at me and swaggered unsteadily off down the wooden sidewalk.

  I followed him, hoping he’d bring me to his brother Billy. A block down, Ike slipped into the Grand Hotel, where he kept a room—to catch a little fitful sleep, perhaps. Not knowing where else to go, and knowing that Ike would eventually meet up with his brother Billy—for they were both there at the OK Corral gunfight—I went into a café next door to Dexter Livery and Feed, across from the hotel, to keep an eye out for Ike’s emergence.

  I ate a hearty breakfast, the food remarkable for its rich taste in some way I could not identify. I over-tipped the owner so there’d be no complaint if I was there for some time, telling the man with the handlebar mustache I might have to wait for some hours, watching the street, as a friend was coming on a mule all the way from San Simon. Looking over the silver dollars, he winked and said I was to make myself comfortable.

  I tried to remember where Billy Clanton had first been seen, after he’d ridden into town that day—but I was overwhelmed by all that had happened, all that I was seeing, and the information would not come into my recollection. So I sat at the window, drinking coffee—as if I’d never tasted coffee before!—and watched the street, the dour shopkeepers and ladies in their stately dresses, silver miners on a day off, cowboys riding through from outlying ranches; I sat there glorying in it all, fascinated with the town’s quality of newness, of enterprising energy.

  About half an hour before noon, his eyes red, his face pale, Ike emerged from the Grand Hotel, swaying, now carrying a Winchester rifle, a pistol on his hip. He wandered down the street, seeming to have no definite destination, and I followed—and was unsurprised when he went into a saloon. I stepped over a sleeping drunk, the man’s urine soaking the sawdust coating the floor for just such eventualities, and posted myself at the bar, the other end from Ike, hoping to see Billy Clanton arrive. Perhaps I should ask around town for him, head him off before he found Ike. But if I missed him—

  Meanwhile Ike was muttering threats to anyone who’d listen and knocking back whiskey.

  Around noon I looked at my goose-egg watch and knew that about now Marshal Virgil Earp was being awakened by Deputy Marshal Andy Bronk, after all too little sleep. “There is likely to be Hell, Virgil,” Bronk would tell him. Virgil, his head pounding, would go out to see about all these threats made against himself and his brothers.

  Minutes later Virgil found Ike outside the very saloon I was in—I watched the encounter through the window. A cold wind was blowing, searching through the half-open door, when Virgil stepped up behind Ike and grabbed the Winchester. Ike snatched at his pistol and Virgil neatly “buffaloed” him, cracking his own six-shooter over Ike’s head, knocking him down. (My historian’s heart was pounding—that was Virgil Earp himself, a big man in a dark suit with a bushy ginger mustache, and the slender man with the black mustache joining him was his younger brother Morgan!)

  “I heard you were hunting for me, Ike,” Virgil said, staring down at the fallen Ike.

  “I was,” Ike said, holding his head. “And if I’d seen you a second sooner you’d now be dead.”

  “You’re under arrest for carrying firearms within city limits.”

  I knew what would happen then. Ike would be dragged by Virgil and Morgan Earp into Judge Wallace’s court. There’d be an altercation there, with Wyatt Earp arriving and calling Ike a “damned dirty cow thief,” and adding, “You have been threatening our lives and I know it.”

  “Fight is my racket, and all I want is four feet of ground,” Clanton would respond.

  The judge would merely fine Ike, and his weapons would be sent over to his hotel room. As the Earps left the court, they’d encounter Tom McClaury outside, who’d come to check on Ike. Earp would demand to know if McClaury was heeled, and McClaury would say that he’d fight Earp anywhere, if he wanted it. Still furious from the encounter with Ike, Wyatt would pistol-whip Tom McClaury for his impertinence, knocking him to the ground. And so the fury on both sides would build.

  Billy Claiborne would find Frank McClaury and Billy Clanton at the bar of the Grand Hotel and tell them that Wyatt had pistol-whipped Tom—

  That was it! That’s where Billy would be, having come in with Frank McClaury. The Grand Hotel. From there, trying to avoid trouble with the Earps—who after all were local lawmen—Frank McClaury would take Billy to the OK Corral to get their horses. At the OK Corral they’d encounter Tom McClaury, his head bandaged, with the same idea, and then Ike, who’d unknowingly doom them with his drunken nattering about the Earps, keeping them in the vacant lot next to Fly’s Photo Gallery and the OK Corral a few minutes too long.

  And local men, having heard talk of a gunfight all night and day, would see the Clantons and McLaurys gathered near the OK Corral, talking earnestly, Frank and Billy with hands on their guns, and suppose them making ready to fight the Earps. And those helpful townsmen would warn the Earps and Holliday that the outlaws were massing for a fight—when in fact they were probably going to leave town—and the Earps and Holliday, assuming Ike’s threats were real, would come marching down the street to “make a fight.”

  And a few minutes later, in a gunfight lasting about thirty seconds, three men would be shot dead by the Earps and Holliday: Frank McClaury, Tom McLaury, Billy Clanton. In Billy’s case, it took him a while longer than the others to die.

  That’s how it would happen, inexorably—unless I could get Billy Clanton out of the line of fire.

  I made my way to the Grand Hotel, getting there before Billy and Frank arrived. I ordered a sarsparilla—no one looked askance at that, for it was still early—and watched the doorway.

  Could I really bring myself to do it? Rather than witnessing this cornerstone of gunfighter history, I’d be interfering with it—perhaps stopping it. Sending up perturbations in the flow of time. Affecting history, perhaps, in bigger ways than I intended—for all I knew, Billy Clanton, if he lived, might get it into his head to assassinate a president, some day.

  Unlikely. These were minor players on the stage of history. No great large-scale change would come about.

  But the urge to witness the gunfight was strong. Perhaps I could witness it as it had been known to happen—and then come back again, and change it next time. Perhaps . . .

  But here was Billy Clanton, walking through the door, coming into the room with me. I knew him instantly—and I saw echoes of my Becky in his face. I could not let him be shot down. I could not forget my mission to save Becky. He was a living reminder of my purpose.

  Both men were dressed in suits for a visit to town, Frank’s a bit too small for him, Billy’s a tad too large. Billy was but nineteen years old—a freshfaced boy, smiling, glad to be in town.

  The smile would fade when Claiborne came in, with news of Wyatt Earp’s pistol-whipping of Tom. I had to intercept Billy q
uickly—tell him that I was a friend of his brother Ike, and Ike was out in the alley with urgent news, wanting to see him alone. I’d take him out there and bring out the ether I’d bought at the apothecary’s, and I’d grab him from behind, dose him before he knew what was up, drag him somewhere and keep him safe there. Maybe the gunfight would go on without him, maybe not, but he would be safe.

  I strode over to him—Frank a dark, bearded man; Billy a hulking, freshfaced youth taking off his Stetson, wiping dust from his eyes. “Blowin’ out there, mister. Say, do I know you?”

  “Why, no, sir. My name is Wells. I have lately become a business partner with your older brother, Mr. Isaac Clanton—and he waits without. He has information he would impart to you, and only to you.”

  “Ike and me have no secrets, mister,” McClaury rumbled.

  “Well, sir, he was hoping you would watch the front door . . . For the Earps are coming.”

  “Are they now? And I’m to watch for them? So be it. But keep your hand on your Colt, Billy, you don’t know this man.”

  Billy shrugged and gestured for me to lead the way. My heart hammering, one hand going into my pocket for the bottle of ether, I led the way out the back, into the dirt alleyway. Billy came out alone with me. And stared at the man waiting there—we both stared at him. I was more shocked by the man’s presence than Billy was.

  It was myself. Dressed just as I was. The only difference was, this version of me, of Bill Washoe, had not shaved in a day or two, and his hair looked lank.

  “What the blue blazes have we got here?” Billy said wonderingly. “Your twin! And I never saw two men more alike. And where’s my own brother? What’s afoot?” His hand went to his gun.

  “Ike will meet you at the OK Corral,” said the other, unshaven Bill Washoe. “There’s been a change my twin here didn’t know about. You’ll talk with Ike there. It’s an emergency—you boys are in danger!”