Bloody Season

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Quit riding him,” Virgil said.

  He was sitting across from Doc, sharing his bottle. Although his calf had healed to the extent that he could venture out without his cane, he had fallen into the practice of extending the leg between tables. Passersby had to walk around it or trip.

  “What good is a balky little ass if he is not for riding?” Doc’s voice carried.

  Virgil leaned across the table, cursing when his leg twinged. “Don’t borrow trouble. A shooting scrape now will put us all in front of the grand jury.”

  Doc said loudly, “Johnny wouldn’t know a trigger from his little cock.”

  “I will shoot you myself, you one-lung bastard.” Virgil spat the words.

  Doc paused with his mouth full of whiskey, then swallowed, his Adam’s apple working up and down visibly like a slow bobbin. His eyes dulled.

  Wyatt came in during the silence and sat down, exuding cold fresh air from his horsehair trail coat with the hair side in. He helped himself to a swallow from his brother’s glass and pulled a face. “I looked for you both in the Alhambra. I thought we were through sending Joyce and Parker our business.”

  “It is like Ritter’s embalming parlor over there,” Doc said, still watching Virgil. “Things picked up as soon as we came here.”

  “I saw. If McLaury waits long enough we will wind up gunning each other and save him coin.”

  The moment ebbed. Virgil sat back and belched into a meaty fist. He had taken on flesh during his recuperation, puffing his jowly Earp face and pushing white shirt out under his vest all around. His star lay flat on a roll of material. “If he is like his brothers he will be a year getting anything done with it.”

  “If he is only just six months we will be away from here.”

  “Sell that timber?”

  Wyatt shook his head. “The English son of a bitch was never going to pay me until he took a profit off his first load. That is like buying a bed and never paying for it until you get around to sleeping in it.”

  “He smelled how bad you want to sell.”

  “I will bust the smeller of the next man that offers me such a transaction.”

  Doc said, “I told you to salt the place with silver nuggets.”

  “I am in trouble enough now.”

  “That variety girl has made a padre of you.”

  Doc produced a deck and dealt three-handed poker until they were joined by Sherman McMasters and Turkey Creek Jack Johnson, a friend of Wyatt’s from Deadwood. They brought their luck with them and Virgil ran out of chips after eleven o’clock. He got up to go home.

  “If you’ll wait out a few hands I’ll go with you,” said Wyatt, who had thrown down most of the winning cards.

  “I would be here until sunup waiting for you to climb down off that tiger.”

  The air outside was cold and sweet after the smoke trapped under the Oriental ceiling. The stars were hidden and there was a raw-iron taste of snow on the wind blowing in off the Whetstones. Yellow light from the saloons scalloped Allen and fanned out the corner front of the Eagle Brewery on the other side of Fifth. Opposite the Oriental on Allen, the two-story adobe under construction by the Huachuca Water Company was dark and jagged, its pane-less windows like eye sockets in an ivory skull. Virgil pulled down his vest, stuck his hands inside the pockets of his ulster, and started across Fifth. His leg ached, but not unpleasantly.

  He didn’t hear the crashes, only their echoes throbbing in the mountains. Light flashed and a rockslide struck him from the left, staggering him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw one of the Eagle windows belly in and fall apart and then he was aware of a warm wet sheet sliding down his left side under his clothes. He took his left hand out of his pocket. Something that was black under the corner gas lamp forked down the back of the hand and ran between the fingers and pattered in the dust at his feet.

  Five men erupted out the doorless opening of the Huachuca Water Company building and broke in two directions, three running down Fifth toward Toughnut, two loping east along Allen. Long bronze barrels caught the light as they ran.

  For a moment Virgil stood on the spot, uncertain. He had been headed toward the Eagle Brewery. That thought eroded more slowly than his strength. Finally he turned and recrossed the street to the Oriental, where Wyatt and Doc and others were just coming out on the bound with their pistols out. It was a funny thing, but Virgil was most concerned with the thought that his leg had stopped hurting.

  “Wyatt,” he said, “I’m hit.” And then someone was saying, “Catch him!” and darkness lapped him.

  This time Allie Earp was there ahead of the doctors. In a dress that Virgil had given her for Christmas, and which she had put on to greet him in when he came home, she hurried ahead of the men who were carrying her husband and held doors for them while they swept through the lobby of the Cosmopolitan and laid him on his stomach on a table in the dining room. She had an eerie sensation of having lived through it before; it came and went and came again, so that certain thoughts and motions seemed trod on many times, but only at the moment of occurrence. She couldn’t predict it. Dr. Goodfellow arrived soon afterward, followed by Dr. Matthews, the latter winking uncontrollably, and they cut away Virgil’s ulster and frock coat and vest and shirt and underwear like butchers flaying a carcass, exposing torn meat and polished spine, the bone unbearably clean and white against the blood and the dingy gray of his long johns. Allie gasped when she saw it, and gasped again when his sleeve came away along with a handful of buckshot and splinters of shattered bone.

  Virgil was conscious. “Never mind, Allie. I’ve got one arm left to hug you with.” His voice was thin and distorted, the right side of his face flattened on the table.

  Goodfellow and Matthews turned him over. The tabletop was slick with blood and so were the doctors’ arms and shirtfronts before they were done. Both had their sleeves rolled almost to the shoulders. Allie, her world narrowed to details, saw that while Matthews’s wrists were pink and hairless, Goodfellow’s showed a healthy black matting to the elbows; the arms of a pipe-cutter rather than a surgeon.

  They bulged when he tore a tablecloth into strips and tied one around Virgil’s upper arm and knotted it so that the flesh showed white above and below it. When that was done, the bleeding from the other terrible wounds seemed to increase. The air in the room was musty with the odor of it.

  Wyatt came in then, his eyes blue nailheads in a face nearly as pale as his brother’s.

  “He was hit more than once.” Matthews rummaged in his pebbled bag and handed Goodfellow an amber bottle of ether.

  Wyatt said, “There were five blasts.”

  “Amazing,” said Goodfellow, drawing the cork. “If he were standing a couple of feet closer you might as well have just called Harry here. He’s the coroner.”

  “He never fell. He walked back across the street to tell me he was hit.”

  “He is like a bull. That’s a help.” Goodfellow leaned toward Virgil with the bottle. Virgil pushed it away with his good hand.

  “Wyatt, when they get me under don’t let them take my arm off. If I have to be buried I want both arms on me.”

  “No one is burying you today, Virge.”

  “I need your word.”

  “All right.”

  Goodfellow held the mouth of the bottle under Virgil’s nostrils and told him to breathe normally. He obeyed, and soon his lids were flickering. The surgeon tamped the cork back in.

  “Amputation may be necessary. I have never seen worse damage to a limb.”

  Wyatt said, “You heard him.”

  “You must understand that the elbow is gone.” Matthews winked. “Even if we can save the arm it will be a useless appendage for the rest of his days. He may wish we took it off just to have it out of the way. That is, if he lives.”

  “Jim gets on all right, and he has not been able to use his since the war. If Virge dies it won’t matter.”

  Goodfellow looked at Allie, who nodded. “Please yourself,” he sai
d. “Tell the hotel staff we need clean towels, as many as they can supply. If they are short, have them boil more or borrow them. Then stay out. There is a deal of bone that must be removed and we must stop the bleeding.” Blood was tapping the floor now like drips from a leaky roof.

  Wyatt and Allie went out and Wyatt talked to the clerk at the desk. Morgan and Jim were in the lobby with Lou and Mattie, Wyatt’s woman, who had been with Allie when the news came about Virgil. After some conversation with Morgan, Lou stayed to wait with Mattie and Allie. The men left. Wyatt had not spoken to Mattie once.

  The shotgun blasts that had shredded the biceps and ligaments in Virgil Walter Earp’s left arm and obliterated the complex structure of the elbow had also flayed open the lateral and lumbar region of the trunk, increasing blood loss and the risk of infection. Stray pellets had lodged subcutaneously down the left thigh and created an epidermal lividity like a strawberry mark as far as the knee. While Matthews regulated pressure on the tourniquet to prevent gangrene, Goodfellow plucked out the pellets with forceps and flushed the cavities with alcohol and dressed the side and removed four inches of bone from the arm, using tweezers for the smaller spurs. By the time he had the arm swathed in gauze and towels, the bandage on the patient’s side had bled through and had to be changed. Matthews kept hotel employees busy boiling and fetching towels that wound up in gory ruined heaps on the floor. Several times the patient showed signs of awakening and had to be put under again. Because of the volatile nature of ether, the doctors had ordered the fire in the hearth extinguished, and as Goodfellow bent over his labor his breath curled and steam rose from the wounds. From time to time he warmed his stiffening fingers in the vapor. Both men were sweating in spite of the cold. Rivulets snailed down Goodfellow’s nose, quivered big as marbles on the end, then dropped into the bloody orifices with audible splats. Matthews merely stank. The coroner gave off a sweetish stale smell of corrupting corpses; or so it seemed to his companion, a relentless saver of lives who considered death an intolerable affront to his profession. The floor grew tacky under the soles of their shoes.

  At length Goodfellow straightened, his bones cracking. Matthews seized the moment to uncork another bottle from his bag and handed it to his colleague, who sniffed at it.

  “Grain alcohol?”

  “I get it in samples from San Francisco. Patent medicine.” A schoolyard smile flaked years off the coroner’s high-domed face.

  “Filthy stuff.” Goodfellow tipped it up, swallowed, waited for the heat to start spreading, and returned the bottle to Matthews, who swigged at it and winked.

  That confounded tic, Goodfellow thought.

  They summoned the clerk and two waiters to help them move the patient to a bed in a room on the ground floor. Allie and Lou followed from the lobby. They had sent Mattie upstairs when she couldn’t stay awake. Mattie spent most of her time sleeping these days.

  “We could not stop the bleeding, only slow it down,” Goodfellow told Allie. He had washed up and put on his old shabby coat over his incamadined shirt, but he had neglected a crusty brown smear on the side of his large nose. He was not old but looked it, with coarse oily pores, a pendulous lower lip, and scales in his beard. Matthews, no great hand at diplomacy, had left. “If he survives these next twenty-four hours his chances are fair. He’s a big man, and strong. The heavy coat spared him the worst of it.”

  “He bought it in Dodge City just before we left. We had an argument about whether he would have need for it in Arizona.” She was looking at Virgil’s face in repose. He was pale and looked very young.

  “It seems we are always fighting,” she said. “One time I sent him to buy a calico bonnet and he came back with a lace one because he didn’t know what calico was. We had an awful fight over it. I guess people listening to us would think we don’t get on.” She scraped the heel of a hand up one cheek.

  Goodfellow looked away. “We will worry about infection later. I will be back at sunup to change the dressing. Someone should stay with him meanwhile.”

  Lou volunteered to sit up with her, but Allie told her to go back to her room and sleep. “You have a husband of your own to stay awake for.” Allie placed a chair beside the bed where Virgil lay snoring quietly now and held his right hand. Twice as big as hers, it felt soft despite the calluses and slightly clammy, looking knuckleless like a baby’s in the glow of the lamp. She heard dripping throughout the night. When the sun came red through the window its rays reflected off a puddle beneath the bed.

  She was sure then that he would die, but she felt neither fear nor sorrow, only a numbness, and beneath it the sensation of having lived through it before.

  A midnight search by Wyatt and Morgan and Doc Holliday of the unoccupied Huachuca Water Company building had yielded a harvest of paper shotgun shells and a trail-polished sombrero with J. I. CLANTON burned in big moronic capitals into the leather sweatband. While John Clum was busy counting pellet holes by matchlight in the awning posts outside the Eagle Brewery in the interest of editorial accuracy, an Irish watchman in an icehouse on Toughnut Street reported seeing a party running past with shotguns shortly after the blasts. He identified Frank Stilwell and Hank Swilling, a San Pedro cowboy, and recalled that they had been in the company of a third man who may or may not have been Ike Clanton—depending upon how much credit one assigned to testimony delivered with Doc’s Colt’s Lightning thrust under the chin. At the Vizina hoisting works farther up Toughnut, a miner wearing a mask of caked dust said he saw the same three scrambling down into the gulch south of Toughnut, but he didn’t think the third man looked anything like Ike Clanton. Several people had seen two men with shotguns running along Allen, but only a railroad man boarding at the Palace lodging house was able to describe one of them as a tall man in an ulster.

  “That snakeshit Ringo,” Doc said. “You should have let me take him before.”

  “I was remiss,” said Wyatt.

  From there the two Earps and Doc reported to Behan’s office, where the sheriff refused to gather a posse.

  “With a city election coming up next week I am disinclined to commit county funds to any personal quarrels you Earps may have,” he said.

  Morgan cursed, and Wyatt stepped in front of Doc. Deputies Breakenridge and Flynn were both present and armed. But Doc was steady. He said, “A rich sheriff that cannot hold a woman in a town like Tombstone may as well hitch his outfit to Billy there.”

  Breakenndge colored. Behan, small behind his big yellow desk with a bottle and glass on the blotter, kept his eyes on Wyatt. “You are not an officer now. If I hear of you Earps cutting out after honest citizens I will swear out that posse, and you will be the men we track down.”

  “Be sure and bring Frank Stilwell,” Wyatt said.

  At the Wells Fargo office the three woke up the night man and Wyatt sent a wire to United States Marshal Crawley P. Dake in Prescott. Hours later Dake wired Wyatt back an appointment as deputy U.S. marshal to replace Virgil.

  John Clum was not running for reelection as mayor of Tombstone. In his place, the Citizens’ Safety Committee put up John Carr and endorsed Dave Neagle, a former deputy sheriff who had fallen out with Behan and who had ridden with the September posse that had captured Frank Stilwell and Pete Spence, for chief of police. The candidates bellowed about law and order through megaphones from platforms strung with torches and bunting to crowds pounding their shoulders and stamping their feet in the cold. On election day—Tuesday, January 3, 1882—Behan deputized cowboys from the lower San Pedro Valley to maintain the polls, and throughout the day they patrolled between Fremont and Toughnut streets carrying Winchesters and Henrys with pistols stuck in their pockets. The committee in answer dispatched two armed men to walk behind each of the cowboys. Clum, a man of rare humor who struggled with great success to keep it out of his columns, remarked privately that it was like paying a reporter to edit his own editor. Carr and Neagle were elected and Behan billed the county two thousand dollars to pay his temporary deputies.


  Three days later, five men in bandanna masks stopped the Bisbee stage in the Mules and rode off with eighty-five hundred dollars earmarked for laborers at the Copper Queen Mine. During the robbery Frank Stilwell’s mask slipped, after which Curly Bill and Pony Deal, the Galeyville half-breed, obligingly lowered theirs. The shotgun messenger identified the remaining two robbers as Ike Clanton and Pete Spence.

  District Court Judge William H. Stillwell—no relation to Frank Stilwell—was a long narrow tobacco-smelling man with a graying pompadour, fat sidewhiskers that his political enemies accused him of touching up with lampblack, and that general air of judgeship that jurists were required to have in the territories if they had nothing else. Wyatt stood in front of the judge’s carved desk alternately pushing out and denting the crown of his hat while Stillwell signed his name to a stack of closely typewritten sheets, rocked a blotter over each signature, and looked at them again.

  “I am not convinced about this Clanton sighting,” he said. “The man kept his mask and Clanton has no history of holding up stagecoaches.”

  “One is all it takes.”

  “I am of the opinion that Clanton’s former friends from Charleston left that hat in the Huachuca building. They would not be likely to bring him along on a robbery with his reputation for duplicity.”

  Wyatt creased the crown of his hat. “I know Bartholomew, the messenger. He has a good eye.”

  “It would have to be exceptional to see through a bandanna at night.”

  “Make it a John Doe if you are doubtful.”

  “I dislike authorizing them. Some men take them as open hunting licenses.” He reread the language. “How is your brother?”

  “Goodfellow says he should make it.”

  “A sighting is a sighting.” Stillwell shuffled the warrants and thrust them out. Wyatt reached for them, but the judge held on. His eyes were like brown marbles. “If I were serving these warrants I might be tempted to leave my prisoners in the mesquite where alibis count for nothing.”