“It is a long ride. You and Billy might fall asleep.” The silence was spoiled by Morgan’s singing. “Can you bake a cherry pie, Billy-girl?”
Breakenridge glared.
Chapter Six
Wyatt Earp and his brothers and their women called her Mattie. She had been christened Celia Ann Blaylock, a mannish-looking strawberry blonde with iron-curled hair and deep-set eyes that seemed always in shadow. She did fancy sewing, took in laundry, and had a temper that was slow to blow and then impossible to cap when it did. She had been with Wyatt since 1870, shortly after his first wife Urilla died delivering his stillborn child. Mattie and he had traveled together to Deadwood and Dodge City and all the other places on the circuit, and although like Virgil and Allie they had never taken vows, she had been known as Mattie Earp in all of them.
When word reached Tombstone that the Earps were returning from their manhunt, she peeled hurriedly out of her faded calico and brushed and put on the one good dress she had brought from Dodge, a black velvet brocade with a high ivory-lace collar. She fretted over the trunk creases in the skirt, brushed her hair, pinched color into her cheeks, and put a drop of vanilla extract behind each ear. Wyatt hated scents of any kind and never knew the true source of the fresh natural smell he admired in Mattie, or had admired until recently. Morgan’s woman Lou arrived in time to help her with the buttons in back. Lou was wearing a shift made from leaf-print percale that looked as good as new calico with a close row of bone buttons down the front.
Heavy boots struck the porch boards while Lou was adjusting Mattie’s collar. The three brothers came in carrying their saddlebags and carbines, looking more alike than ever under skins of brown dust with clumps of mescal stuck to their coats and their hats sweat through at the crowns. Morgan kissed Lou and curled an arm around her waist, grinning like a young boy. Virgil said, “I don’t smell nothing cooking.”
“The food is across the street, and is that all you have to say to me after seventeen days?”
He swung around, swept Allie out of the doorway in both arms, and kissed her hard, his whiskers rasping. “Ouch.”
Mattie hugged Wyatt, smearing the front of her dress. He leaned his Winchester in a corner and tossed his saddlebags into his leather easy chair, the best piece of furniture in the little house. Dust rolled off them in a thick cloud. “Where are the papers?”
She detached herself and lifted the stack from the table. “I saved them all.”
He transferred his bags to the carpet and sat down with the newspapers in his lap. “Get the water boiling and dig out my best shirt.”
She hesitated. Allie’s frank gaze met hers, then moved away. Mattie went out after the washtub.
Wyatt felt Allie watching him and looked up. “You’d best go home and fix a bath for Virge too.”
“I don’t take orders from any man but my husband,” she said, her chin tilting.
Virgil said, “Go home then, goddamn it. I want a bath.” She looked at him quickly, then hugged Lou and left. “Taking up with that little Irish mick was the worst mistake you ever made,” said Wyatt.
“At least I take mine one at a time.”
Morgan laughed. When Wyatt looked at him he took Lou and went out.
Wyatt read the close print swiftly while the kettle on the cookstove bubbled, refolding each paper cracklingly when he was finished with it and laying it on the floor. Virgil smoked a cigar from a box of General Arthurs on the table, his first since they had all run out of tobacco on the trail. They had been out two weeks and three days and had given up on Leonard, Head, and Crane when their tracks crossed the Mexican border and disintegrated among the rocks south of it. By that time they had lost Bat Masterson when his horse pulled a tendon and he turned back.
“What do they say about Luther King?” Virgil asked, when Wyatt flung aside the Tucson Weekly Star.
“Nothing we never heard on the way here. Walked out the side door bold as Sam Grant while his honor Under-sheriff Harry Woods was letting Johnny Dunbar draw up a bill of sale for Luther’s horse. Harry Jones was there overseeing the transaction.”
“We can get the lay from Jones. The talk is Johnny Behan’s galloping his wife.”
“Meantime Woods is fixing the stage holdup on Doc in the Nugget.”
Virgil blew a ring. “Doc and Billy Leonard was some tight in New Mexico.”
“Woods is saying Bob Paul had an oar in too. He changed seats with Philpot so Philpot would die in his place.”
“That is crazy talk. If Paul was tied in they would have just not shot at him and took the bullion peaceable as you please.”
“It’s Behan’s doing. He knows I am running against him next year and everyone knows I backed Paul in the last election. It is no secret that Doc and I are friendly. They are the same as claiming I tried to hold up that stage.”
“You think Doc done it?”
“I quit trying to think for Doc in Dodge.”
Mattie was pouring water in the steel washtub. Steam rolled out and clouded the flaking mirror nailed over the dry sink. Wyatt stood and undid the buttons on his shirt. The limp material came away from his underwear with a peeling sound. Virgil squashed out his cigar in a china saucer.
“I will meet you later in the Oriental,” he said.
His brother glanced at Mattie, who was busy arranging one of his good white shirts on the ironing board, and lowered his voice. “I might be someplace else.”
Virgil nodded.
Virgil emerged from his white porcelain tub scrubbed pink all over except for the brown ending in a V at his collarbone and across the tops of his wrists and the darker turnip color of his genitals. Allie was in bed already. She complained when he joined her without toweling off first, soaking the sheets and her flannel nightdress as he pushed the garment up under her arms and took her, fumbling first for her breasts and then her crotch and then driving himself up inside her, hot and bursting, his skin smelling of soap. His pace quickened, he exploded with a shudder, and then he rolled off and went to sleep with his broad hairy back to her.
She lay awake, waiting.
The first raised voice she heard was Mattie’s, thin and harsh and carrying, the words indecipherable from across Fremont. Wyatt’s was deep, slower, edged. Crockery crashed.
Virgil was snoring. Allie slid out from under the counterpane and stood, pulling down her nightdress. The floor was clammy under her bare feet. She padded to the window in time to see Wyatt bang his front door behind him. He had on his gambler’s black broadcloth over a white shirt starched plank-stiff, and his stovepipe boots gleamed with grease and lampblack. Pounding along the boardwalk he almost collided with his friend Fred Dodge rounding the corner of First and swept on past without stopping. Soon he was out of sight.
Allie used Virgil’s tepid bathwater to scrub away the stickiness between her legs and dressed quietly. Her breath frosted in the crisp air of twilight as she crossed the street. She rapped on the front door and waited. After a minute she pulled the latchstring and let herself inside.
She was alone in the house. Something crunched underfoot and she looked down at the scattered shards of a Wedgwood platter she had seen Mattie wrapping carefully in white muslin before leaving Kansas. The back door sagged open on its leather hinges. She went that way, passing a tub full of stagnant water and Wyatt’s trail clothes in a muddy heap on the floor next to it. Through the open door she heard a slapping noise, as of someone beating a thin rug. A breathless feminine grunt accompanied each blow.
Allie stepped into the backyard and watched Mattie, still in the black dress with her hair in her face, whipping the rusted pump, disused now that pipe had been lain from the Chiricahuas in the east, with something white.
“Mattie.” Allie lunged and caught the thing on the backswing, tugging it from Mattie’s grasp. It was one of Wyatt’s good dress shirts, crusty from starch but smeared now with orange rust.
“It had a spot!” Mattie was shrieking. Her eyes were feral in her horsey face. “He tore it off because i
t had this little spot on it after I washed and starched it so careful!”
“Mattie.”
“Me washing and ironing shirts for him to show off in for that whore!” She fell to her knees, beating the base of the shuddering pump with both fists.
After a while Allie helped her up and into the house, leaving the spoiled shirt waving on the end of the pump handle.
The woman’s name was Josephine Sarah Marcus. She had been called Josie in Brooklyn and San Francisco and still signed herself that way in letters to friends back home; but the Earps, who named everything from scratch and so made it theirs, called her Sadie. She was tall and wasp-waisted and wore her dark hair straight down her back to her seat in a time when most women of marriageable age pinned theirs up. Her eyes were large and sleepy-lidded in a dark oval face and she walked with her chin elevated, calling attention to her long neck. She spoke with a stage inflection that effectively disguised her native Brooklyn accent and did not correct people who assumed she had been born in England. She was nineteen.
She had moved to California with her parents, been seduced by an actor with the Pauline Markham theatrical troupe during its San Francisco engagement, and run away from home to join the troupe on its tour of the territories. The romance had faded quickly, but she stayed on and came to Arizona with the company in 1879, appearing as the cabin boy in H.M.S. Pinafore. There she had fallen in love again and left the show to live for a time with Harry and Kitty Jones, but was now residing in a house of her own on one of the sites that the Townlot Company under Mayor Alder Randall had sold several times without regard to who held the original papers. To date, no attempt had been made to dispossess her. The reason was standing outside her door.
When Wyatt knocked she was expecting him. Tombstone was a close neighborhood for all its population bloat, and the return of the Earps, after the excitement of the attack on the Benson stage and Luther King’s escape and the rumors about Wyatt’s friend Doc Holliday, crackled up and down Allen Street like telegraph. She had hooked herself into a blue silk dress that left her bosom uncovered, and before opening the door she tied on a yellow crepe bonnet and drew a yellow open-weave shawl over her shoulders.
Wyatt’s face was sunburned, gunmetal-colored where he had just shaved, and the rush of air when she opened the door brought with it a crisp tingle of lime-water and starch. His whiskers tickled when he kissed her and his embrace strained her ribs, but she held him almost as tight, nuzzling her cheek against his stiff shirt. When they separated she took his arm and they went out into the Tombstone twilight.
On Allen Street the piano music coming from the Eagle Brewery and the Oriental collided with a clatter and someone in the Alhambra whooped when his lot came up in keno. The couple entered the Maison Doree Restaurant in the Cosmopolitan Hotel, where the Creole waiter who showed them to a corner table scowled at a fork and ordered the entire setting taken away and replaced down to the linen tablecloth. When that was done, by a Chinese busboy in his fifties, the waiter turned down the gas flame over the table and ghosted away until they were ready to order. The violinist played “Mollie Malone.”
“Virgil’s horse dropped dead from under him in old Mexico,” said Wyatt, opening his menu. “That’s when we turned back. The both of them was too much weight for Morg’s horse and when Bob Paul’s gave out too we footed it leading the rest. After two days without water or food we wished we never left those carcasses behind.”
“How ever did you manage your way back?” Sadie’s lids weren’t sleepy now. She laced her long-nailed fingers under her chin.
“We have all of us been in tighter scrapes. It is a question of keeping your head.”
“You are too modest.”
“It’s a fault,” he agreed.
“Well, I think it is like a play. Antony pursuing Brutus.”
“Antony never had to worry about what was going on in Rome while he was away.”
“What happened was not your doing.”
“I never said it was. The plan was to have Luther King behind bars and not down there cutting the bear loose with Leonardhead and Crane by now.” It had become common practice locally to run the names together like a variety act.
“The Nugget says Doc Holliday helped him escape so he would not give him away.”
“The Nugget is a pack and parcel of lies and has been since Johnny made Woods his little Mary. A lady like you should be reading Ben-Hur.”
“I am a divorced woman and no lady.”
“You have to be married before you can be divorced.”
“Are you and Mattie married?”
“Leave her out of it.”
The harsh edge in his voice made her draw back. “Look out for Johnny,” she said. “He is more dangerous than any road agent.”
“Johnny will shoot off his own foot someday.”
“He is too clever for that.”
“Being too clever is Johnny’s long suit.”
It was for love of Johnny Behan that she had left the Markham troupe and lived with him as his wife after moving out of the Jones house. She smiled; the cabin boy once again. “Are you going to avenge Doc’s good name? Like MacDuff?”
“Doc is no King Duncan.”
The waiter returned and Wyatt ordered ham in champagne sauce for himself and Gulf of Mexico shrimp for Sadie. She always ate lightly when she was with him. A dusty bottle of French wine was brought and he went through the tasting ritual and pronounced it satisfactory. The waiter filled their glasses, set down the bottle, and was gone.
The restaurant was filling up. John Clum arrived with his wife on his arm and nodded to Wyatt on the way to their table. A group of San Pedro cowboys in freshly brushed suits sat scratching the rungs of their chairs with their Mexican spurs before heading over to the Bird Cage, and a waiter startled a couple seated near the kitchen when he set fire to a brisket of beef swimming in brandy. Luke Short, Wyatt’s friend from Dodge City, dined alone in a corner with his ubiquitous straw hat hung on the back of his chair and his right hand out of sight under the table with likely a pistol in it. His gaze held Wyatt’s just long enough to acknowledge his presence. He moved around town in his own bubble since shooting down Charlie Storms in front of the Oriental in February.
Wyatt spotted Harry Jones threading his way between tables and hailed him over. As always the lawyer resembled a professional pallbearer in black swallowtail and a frayed white collar curling up at the points. He shook Wyatt’s hand and leaned down to kiss Sadie’s cheek and borrowed a chair from an adjoining table, folding himself into it like a jointed toy on a stick. His long yellow face looked tragic under the gaslight. At that point Sadie lost interest. The talk was about to become political.
“What happened in Johnny’s office?” Wyatt asked.
“I was all caught up in that bill of sale,” Jones said. “Dunbar was there and Woods, and either one of them could have swung the door for King and drawn him a map out of town for all I saw of it.”
Wyatt watched him, not believing a word. Jones had supported Behan’s appointment to sheriff earlier that year. But politics came easily to a gambler and he played the hand as dealt.
“Dunbar is Johnny’s partner. You should have seen you was outmanned.”
“I didn’t know that there was anything to it but a man selling his horse to make bail. I thought all of Behan’s vices were contained to women.”
His bitterness excited Wyatt, but he retained his gambler’s mask. He wondered how much of the talk about the sheriff and Kitty Jones was gossip. He wondered if it mattered. “I hear you are thinking of turning Republican.”
“Not while that senile old bastard is sitting in Prescott. Sorry, Sadie,” he added. She nodded absently. She wasn’t listening.
Wyatt said, “Fremont won’t live forever.”
“He already has.”
“Who will you support for sheriff next year if not Johnny?”
“Who said I had to support anyone?”
“This territory is fu
ll of lawyers. I never met one that wouldn’t rather be governor.”
“Is that what you want?”
“I am no lawyer. Sheriff is good enough for me. Johnny fancies himself higher.”
“Little cock-of-the-walk,” Jones said.
The waiter brought the dinners. Jones started to excuse himself, but Wyatt touched his arm. When the waiter left: “Harry, who put up that story about Doc and the Benson stage?”
“It is no story. Holliday is as guilty as Cain.”
“That is your answer?”
“It is the truth. He left town that day at four o’clock with a Henry rifle and a six-shooter, and did not come back until past ten. His horse was badly done.”
“That is thin.”
“Doc never leaves Tombstone unless he has a better game somewhere else.”
Wyatt sat back. “Thank you for coming over, Harry.”
The lawyer didn’t rise. “You should know they are saying that you failed to find Leonardhead and Crane because you didn’t want to.”
“Who is?”
“There is talk.”
“Where do you stand?”
“If I gave it any credit I would not have come over.”
Wyatt looked at his ham. “Are you seeing Billy Breakenridge anytime soon?”
“Why?”
“It isn’t important. I will talk with him myself.”
Jones got up, bending again to kiss Sadie. She asked him to give her love to Kitty.
“Johnny will take care of that,” said Wyatt.
The skin tightened across the lawyer’s cheeks. He hovered a moment, his hands twitching at his sides. Then he left the restaurant.
“I cannot feature a cuckold.” Wyatt picked up his fork.
“He is always the wild card.”
Sadie said, “Kitty told me Johnny has offered to deputize him. What does that mean?”
“It means he gets a cut off every dollar he collects in county taxes. Billy Blab packs Curly Bill with him when he visits the ranches so he doesn’t come back with his own pockets turned out.”
“Is that why you want to talk with him?”
Bloody Season Page 7