by Ian Weir
What I didn’t know—and had no reason to imagine—was that Strother Purcell might have survived. This possibility would not occur until the night of April 26 (I was a journalist, in those days, and kept note of precise dates and details) when two encounters took place: one with a crippled devil in a saloon, and one with an old man in a reeking antechamber of Perdition. Each of these was so unexpected and uncanny that—looking back—I can only suppose that fate had brought them upon me.
I don’t suppose I used to believe in fate. At least, not Fate as those old Greeks understood it: Fate with a capital F, and blood in its eye. Fate fixed and immutable and fuck-all you can do, with great cosmic wheels turning and those Christalmighty horrors shrieking you to your destruction, those hags—what were they called?—with teeth and talons and hair streaming back, hell-bent on vengeance and...Furies. That’s what they were—those old Greeks called them the Furies. Well, I had no truck with that sort of thing. I still cherished—fool that I was—a young man’s conviction that he could shape his own destiny. And I’d never laid eyes on a hag of retribution, not unless I counted my sainted Ma—which I oughtn’t to do, not really. It wouldn’t be fair.
But I would encounter my first Fury in that San Francisco spring of 1892, in the form of a runaway child-bride. I’d do so sooner than I could imagine, although I wouldn’t recognize her for what she was. This understanding would come only later, when the disaster was already far advanced, the catastrophe that would consume us all in ways I could never have anticipated, and in the meantime—
Jesus. Listen to me—rambling and maundering, like an old drunk in a saloon.
We were speaking of Wyatt Earp.
He was the gunman I had my eye on, not Strother Purcell. And Wyatt was a different proposition. For starters he was still alive, which can be useful in a hero, up to a point. Even better, he was not yet Wyatt Earp. Not the Wyatt Earp you know, anyway—Earp the Lion of Tombstone. The one who rears up into your mind’s eye, steely of resolve and epic of mustache, emerging through the shroud of gun smoke with reedy tubercular Doc Holliday and all that multitude of doughty Earp brothers, Virgil and Morgan and whoever the other ones were—the ones whose names their own mother could hardly keep straight, whatever her name was.2 That Wyatt Earp would not exist for another fifteen years, when W.B. (Bat) Masterson—his old compeer from Dodge City days, now reinvented as a newspaperman in New York City—sold a series of articles to Human Life magazine about famous gunfighters of the Western frontier, and wrote about Wyatt Earp in the second one.
Wyatt would take his own crack at inventing Wyatt Earp in 1896, putting his name to a series of ghost-written reminiscences in the San Francisco Examiner. But the hack who did the writing—one of Hearst the Boy Wonder’s hand-picked crew—made a botch of the opportunity. Take my word. I read the drivel, four years after having made my own approach to Earp.
Which brings us back to April of 1892.
“Your story needs to be told,” I said to him. “And I am the man to tell it.”
He eyed me down the side-slope of that mustache. “The hell are you?”
“Weaver,” I said. “Barry Weaver. The writer.”
We were side by side at the trough in the Gentlemen’s off the lobby of the Occidental Hotel, where Earp had come cantering to lunch with a consortium of property developers. The Occidental sprawled across one whole block of Montgomery Street, an establishment much too grand for the likes of Missus Weaver’s boy—or for the likes of Missus Earp’s, if he’d just admit it. This was one of Wyatt’s endless efforts to ingratiate himself into the capitalist elite; I’d been tipped to it by a Reliable Source, and arrived just in time to catch him with his business in hand.
“Don’t have time for writers,” he said. This, from a man who was reputed to have sat with the newspapers spread out at breakfast each morning in his Tombstone days, reading aloud any mention of his name. He hefted John Peter in his palm. “What kind of writer?”
“A newspaper writer. I write for the newspaper.”
“Yeah? Which one?”
“Books as well.”
“Books.”
“Novels.”
Another slantways look, eyes narrowing. Those pale blue eyes, destined to become so famous. He’d have been in his mid-forties, at this point. Fair hair shading to silver, but still a man in the prime of life, square-jawed and handsome and six-foot-one. And that mustache. Christ. Falcons could have perched on the handlebars, one on either side.
“Novels,” he repeated. It was the tone of voice that holds a word between thumb and finger-tip, as you’d hold the tail of a small dead rodent. “My wife reads novels, time to time.”
“Maybe she’s read one of mine.”
“Possible. Don’t know as I’d call it probable.”
“I’ve written several.”
“Wouldn’t put it past you for a second.”
Rising on tiptoes, he reeled himself back in. He wore a dove-grey suit and tan shoes and a derby hat, which he adjusted in the mirror. After Tombstone, Earp had spent several years in San Diego, speculating in the property market, until a sudden downturn wiped him out. Another man might have recalibrated his ambitions, having taken the hint that he was woefully out of his depth amongst financiers: a bully-boy with an air of plausibility and a certain steadiness of nerve, who had reached the pinnacle of his abilities as a head-cracker and faro-dealer in the boomtowns of the Southwestern frontier. Not Wyatt Earp. He picked himself up, and now here he was in the Bay Area, managing a racetrack in Inglewood, and placing shrewd bets—he knew horseflesh and gambling, give him that much—bent once again on reinventing himself a Man of Business and winning the esteem of all those sleek-bellied Republicans. This was ever the defining feature of his character. That, plus being as thick as two stout planks, and an asshole.
One last try.
“Wyatt—if I may call you—Mr. Earp. The thing of it is...you’ve got a story, and a story needs to be told. Tell it first, or else someone else will do it. And then that one becomes the truth of who you are.”
The gaze was narrow and impressively fixed. For a moment, I thought I’d gotten through.
“I’m Wyatt Earp,” he said. “That’s who I am. And you?” He hawked contemplatively. Turned and gobbed: dead centre in the sink. “You look like shit brung home on a stick.”
*
It was a miracle I didn’t look worse.
The previous evening had begun at Sverdrup’s on East Street and degenerated from there, ending in sodden ignominy on the paving stones outside a blind pig in Maiden Lane. In between I had visited Bottle Koenig’s and a selection of other Barbary Coast armpits, having decided that nothing would suit the gaiety of the occasion short of getting my throat slit, ear to ear. We were celebrating my forty-fifth birthday.
I came close to achieving my goal at a concert saloon in Dupont Street, where I reared up to champion the honour of a Mormon whore named Prairie Rose against insults tendered by a stork-legged poltroon. Or so I’m told. My recollection of events being patchy, I’m going on eyewitness reports from my companions. These were fellow scribblers, for the most part, some of them employed by Hearst the Boy Wonder down at Geary Street, which is to say a clutch of dipsomaniac lying bastards who would never twist a fact when they could invent one outright, bless their hearts. Bill Lundrigan might have been one of them—I believe he dropped by, though I couldn’t swear to that. If Bill came, he’d have brought Ernie Thayer with him—Mighty Ernie, author of “Casey at the Bat,” the greatest one-poem wonder in America. Yes, I knew all those fellows. I knew Ambrose Bierce. There was even a rumour that Bierce might condescend to join us, but rumours are rumours and Ambrose was Ambrose, and he didn’t.
The trouble began with a misreading of Prairie Rose’s business card. Rose was a waitress, strictly speaking—one of the so-called Pretty Waiter Girls who plied the clientele with enlivening beverage as they savoured the artistry of the performers, who ranged from bad singers who kept their laundry o
n, to worse singers who didn’t. But the serving of drinks was supposed to be a kind of undercard to the main event of a Pretty Waiter Girl’s occupation, for which cards were at present much in vogue. Prairie Rose’s was a fine one. It featured her name in red letters within a border of interlacing thorns—a whimsical and engaging visual pun, and well above the run-of-the-mill standard in such cards, which were mainly designed on a freelance basis by local hacks. Included was the address of the establishment and particulars concerning Rose’s terms of service: $2 EACH, OR THREE FOR $5.
“And there’s three of us,” a voice was insisting, behind us. “Me, him, an’ him. Five dollars!”
“It’s two dollars for each go,” said Rose. It was late and she was mortal tired already. “Not two dollars for each customer.”
“Where does it say that?”
“Right there, sweetheart. On the card.”
“The hell it does. The card says—”
“Oh, good grief. Try askin’ the man who wrote it.”
That’s when I got involved, apparently.
I recall turning around on my stool, and squinting up at the man who harangued poor Rose. He was two-or three-and-twenty, a gangling ginger with thinning hair and a way of standing spavined and bow-legged, as if he’d just been buggered by a dray-horse. His mother, I thought, should have named him Ichabod.
“You tell ’im, Barry—wouldja?” Rose said wearily.
“The lady’s right, friend,” I might have said, urbanely. “The subject is apposite and implied, but the reference is to the act, not the actor. But look—I take responsibility for any confusion, so why don’t I buy you a drink?”
Yes, that is what I might have said, if I hadn’t been stinking drunk and forty-five, with a table of newsmen to impress. Instead, I snarled: “It says so clear as goddamned day, in English. Can’t you read?”
Ichabod grew ominously squinty. “You wrote this? Then you’re a Fucki’ Nidiot. Two dollars a customer—two dollars each.”
“Two dollars each poke.”
“And who takes the poke? The customer!”
His lumpen companions whooped. By golly, this was logic, eh? Ichabod was further emboldened. “Two dollars for me, and five for the three of us. Black and white, clear as day, next case. And if you keep sticking your nose in other people’s business, old man, there’s someone gonna pull it for you.”
Despite my condition, the notion nagged: this Ichabod seemed oddly familiar. I’d seen him somewhere. And there was still a way out of this dispute, if I’d had the sense to take it.
The concert saloon had gentlemen standing by to deal with disturbances—men larger and lumpier than either of Ichabod’s chums, and a barkeep named Olaf who kept an axe-handle near to hand for special occasions. Prairie Rose was catching Olaf’s eye already; all I had to do was keep my head down. Instead, Young Weaver reared onto his hind legs: “Oh, yeah?”
The ancient battle-cry of the Fucki’ Nidiot.
Here the evening became blurry and excruciating. Ichabod had taken my nose between thumb and forefinger with more vivacity than I would have credited. He then twisted it clockwise, looking around to his lumpen companions with a bray of triumph.
A mistake. As Ichabod brayed, Young Weaver brought his right fist up with—as the boxing writers say—a sockdolager to the coconut. And whether said fist was clutching a beer mug at that moment—as was afterwards maintained by certain witnesses—I do not presume to say. Ichabod dropped like a steer, to be lugged insensate from the field. And huzzahs were offered up to the victor, who gazed about in triumphant stupefaction.
We proceeded to several more establishments. Libations flowed and the tale of my conquest was told and retold, the adversary growing in stature each time until he was a stork-legged Goliath and Young Weaver a latter-day David. At some point I staggered back to the concert saloon. Seeking out Prairie Rose, I proclaimed that I would demonstrate the true meaning of THREE FOR $5, which feat I would perform straightway on the nearest tabletop, in contempt of five-and-forty winters on my head.
Or so I’m told. And to tell the truth I do have a hazy recollection: the whoops of the men and the bone-weary disappointment on Rose’s face as I lunged to clutch her hand—et tu, Barry?—and I remain to this day ashamed of myself. Prairie Rose was in fact a Mormon’s wife from Utah named Lucinda something—Dalkins was her maiden name, I think, or at any rate the one she went by. She had fled a marriage that had curdled; a big-boned gal no longer young who had a sad, sardonic wit and dreamed she might open a dress-maker’s shop. The two of us had evolved onto terms that could almost be called a friendship; and God knows we have few enough friends in this world, without proposing to mount them in concert saloons.
I’d misjudged my lunge, however. I went clear past Rose, and ricocheting off the table staggered wildly into the arms of Olaf the barkeep, who with Nordic utterance took matters and Young Weaver in hand, and escorted him headfirst out the door.
I don’t remember getting home that night. There are vague recollections of wobbling down an alleyway in the slanting San Francisco rain. Stopping to piss, and finding my fingers too numb with cold to manage buttons. Laughing out loud, and afterwards growing sorrowful and weeping. I remember staggering and stumbling and falling, and failing most pathetically to get back up again. I have a notion that someone came to my aid, more sensitive than I was myself to the inadvisability of passing out gob-down in a mud-hole. One eye in a ruined face peered at me through the fog, and two hands were hauling me upright. I recollect—or think I do—a mighty waft of unwashed humanity, and an arm like an oak limb under my armpit, and a pair of vast hobnailed boots tramping alongside my own.
When I foundered back into consciousness, it was morning. I was inside my room on California Street, sprawled in skull-splitting daylight half-on and half-off the bed. Someone, it seems, had helped me up the stairs. They’d helped me through the door and off with my clothes—coat and boots, at least, though not the trousers. These were in a sodden tangle about my shins. Evidently my Good Angel had given up at this point, though not before setting a basin on the floor beside me, into which I now vomited.
2.
My wife, Wyatt Earp had said to me at the trough. My wife reads novels, time to time. Meaning the lovely Josephine Sarah “Sadie” Marcus Earp, which was debatable.
Not that she read novels—I didn’t doubt that for a second. And no man with eyes in his head would dispute that she was lovely. But don’t try to tell me that Josephine Sarah “Sadie” Marcus was ever Josephine Sarah “Sadie” Marcus Earp. No one else believed it either, not that you’d find anyone who’d say so—not to Sadie’s face, and most surely not to Wyatt’s. He may not yet have become Wyatt Earp, but he had still killed five men—six, if you included Johnny Ringo—and he had that look about him that said: Why, hell, he’d be game to make it seven, counting you. Not that anyone in San Francisco cared much, either way, whether she was actually married to Wyatt or not. Oh, there were those up Nob Hill who might affect to care. The Gold Rush heyday was a generation gone and the city was home to more and more with upwardly aspirations, the better to look down from a height on the likes of thee and me. That’s not the same as caring, though. That’s just judging.
But Sadie cared. She cared a great deal about being seen as Missus Earp, and about much else besides: exactly as you’d expect from a baker’s daughter who had been born in New York City but grew up right here in San Francisco, and was staying with Wyatt these days in a leased house at 720 McAllister Street, less than a mile from the street where her parents still lived, and where Hyman Marcus had gone door to door with his baskets of newly baked buns.
This gave Young Weaver his angle of approach. “Your husband may think his deeds speak for themselves,” I said to her. “The thing of it is—the problem we’re facing—they don’t.”
“You talked to my husband already?” she said, weighing Young Weaver with her stare.
“Two days ago.”
“And?”
/>
“Today I’m speaking to you.”
We were outside the house on McAllister Street. A small house, bordering on shabby, but a step up from the dump on Ellis Street where she and Wyatt had stayed on first arriving back in San Francisco. I’d done my research, though catching Missus Earp like this—first try, rounding the corner just as she’d stepped out the door—involved a stroke of luck as well. But Fortune, as we all know, favours the brave. And the well-prepared. And—above all else—the plausible.
There stood Young Weaver on this April morning: scrubbed and shaved and oiled and earnest and plausible as hell. “Deeds don’t speak, Missus Earp,” I said. “Deeds don’t say a blessed word. It’s people who do the talking. And we both know what sorts of things they’ll say, if left too much to their own devices.”
It was a fine clear day, but cool, with a wind gusting in from the harbour. There was frost in the air, of a sudden, and a bite of it in Sadie’s voice. “I don’t believe I’m following your meaning.”
But she did. She followed me precisely. I drew up another brimming bucket from the Well of Earnest. “They’ll tell Lies, Missus Earp—all manner of untruths. Unless you’ve caught their fancy first, with a truth that suits them better.”
“What exactly have you heard, Mr.—whaddid you say your name was?”
“Weaver, ma’am. Barrington Weaver. Barry.”
“And you’re—what—some sorta writer?”
“I am. And what counts is what I haven’t heard.”
“Which is?”
“The truth as you would hear it.”