Epitaph (20 page)

IT WASN'T UNTIL THE OLD MAN
got into the cattle business that the family really made good. Billy was only sixteen on his first raid, but the old man liked how he handled himself. “Best of the lot,” the old man always said. “Good-looking, too, with a temper and some real guts.” Ike, on the other hand, was useless. That was the old man's opinion.

Nobody was inclined to argue the point with him, not even Ike, who generally took things as he found them. The old man was just part of a world that included rattlers, scorpions, and a hundred kinds of cactus. You had to be careful in a world like that. You had to know what to watch for, what to listen for, what to avoid. Ike had made a particular study of his old man and knew when bad spells were coming on. After their mother died, Ike taught Billy and the girls how to see them coming, too.

“It's like thunderstorms,” he told them.

The old man would get quieter and quieter, like that heavy, windless heat before a storm. Then there'd be a rumble of orders and threats, like thunder in the distance.
Shut your goddam mouth, or I'll shut it for you! Don't speak till you're spoken to! Do as you're told, God damn you, and be quick about it!
The old man's mood would get darker and darker, like clouds piling up, and he'd get angrier, like wind rising. Then he'd explode. Lightning would strike the nearest target.
Give! Me! My! Due!
the old man would yell over and over, a blow landing with each word, until he'd spent his fury on that week's unlucky child. Muttering would
signal an end to the storm.
That'll teach you to talk back, you mouthy little bitch.
Or
Shoulda put you in a sack when you was born and drowned you like a sick pup, you worthless little bastard.
Then it was over, like a storm blowing itself out or passing on, out of sight.

You could learn to live with rage like that. It was predictable. You could see it coming and take cover. That's what Ike tried to teach his sisters and his little brother Billy.
Do as you're told. Don't talk back. Say whatever the old man says.

Mostly the girls took his advice, but when they didn't, Ike stepped in and took the beating for them. He was proud of that, but there'd been a price to pay.

“HOW LONG YOU WORKED FOR HIM?”
Sherm McMasters asked Curly Bill once.

“Old Man Clanton? Must be a coupla years now,” Bill said.

They were bringing a herd north after a raid into Mexico. The younger boys were settling the animals into a draw for the night while the older ones made camp. Ike had the cook fire going, with the beans heating in a kettle. There was a Dutch oven in the embers. Biscuits tonight. Say what you would, Ike was a damn fine cook.

“Pay's good,” Sherm acknowledged, “but he's a tough man to deal with.”

That made Curly Bill smile. “Sherm, the old man's easy as pie. Right, Ike?”

Ike nodded. “Do what he tells you. Say what he says.”

Ringo was lying on his back, head propped against his saddle, holding a book up to make the best of the sunset and the firelight. “The old man's like everybody else out here. Nobody goes west except failures, misfits, and deluded lungers.”

“Failures, misfits, and lungers,” Ike said, adding chilies to the beans.

“That may be stretching things some,” Sherm said, but he was real quiet about it. He wanted Curly Bill to hear but wasn't taking a chance
on setting Ringo off. Old Man Clanton might take a horsewhip to you, but Ringo would kill you.

“I think Juanito may have the right of it,” Curly Bill decided after a time. “A fella's doing well back east, he's likely to stay put. I wager there are very few men who wake up in Philadelphia, say, or Cincinnati and look into their mirrors and think, I'm prosperous and my life is wonderful. I guess it's time to turn my back on all this good fortune and head west!”

“Head west,” Ike said.

Ringo's book went down against his thighs. “Ike,” he said wearily, “we could replace you with a goddam parrot and nobody'd notice the difference.”

“Parrots can't cook,” Ike pointed out. “They can talk, though. I saw one at a carnival once. And an elephant, too.”

“Jesus,” Ringo said, and went back to his book.

The boys came straggling in for supper, but later that night Curly Bill's mind returned to Ringo's notion, for Bill was getting on toward forty and past the age when sleeping on the ground is easy.

Take the inhabitants of Texas, he thought, staring up at the stars. A man might wind up in Texas for any number of reasons, but few of them were based on solid achievement elsewhere. In Texas, your Pilgrim Fathers were leftover Mexicans, a bunch of land-hungry German immigrants, and hardscrabble Scotch-Irish backwoodsmen. After the war, you added your white trash and bankrupt planters driven off their land by Yankee troops and carpetbagger taxes—all of them resentful about the way the war had ended. Course, there were Yankees in Texas, too. They were apt to be cheerful about the outcome of the conflict, but generally arrived in Texas just as broke. The past fifteen years had not been easy ones, what with the depression and the droughts and so on. Round the population out with orphans and runaways looking for others of their kind to gang up with—Johnny Ringo was a fair example of that. Anyway, “failure” might be too hard a word for those who'd come west. Unlucky, maybe.

If things had turned out just a little different, Bill himself might've been a ranch foreman by now. As it was, he held a similar sort of position, standing between Old Man Clanton and the boys. Settling disputes. Defusing fights. Keeping the business running, day to day.

Still and all, it was true enough that most men went west in search of a fresh start after a poor showing elsewhere. They might even go so far as to adopt a new name in an attempt to restore an unblemished record—a circumstance with which Curly Bill himself was familiar, for while he'd stuck with “William” after moving to Texas, he had so recently and so abruptly shifted from Graham to Bresnaham to Brocius that he was still unsettled as to how to spell his newest surname.

There were those who said Johnny Ringo's name was really Johann Rheingold. Juanito had denied that with a certain amount of heat, declaring that he had no love for Dutchies and sure as hell wasn't one himself. As far as Bill knew the story, Ringo got his start in Texas during the Mason County War, when the sons of German settlers ran afoul of the great-grandsons of Ulster clansmen, who considered cattle raids an old and honorable form of enterprise and entertainment. Mexican cattle were fair game for rustlers, but the Dutchies of Mason County objected to their well-bred European short-horns being run off and branded as mavericks. When Ringo got arrested for cattle theft, his young friends sprung him. The Rangers caught up with him later on and when they did, they had him on a murder charge. In those days, however, frontier jails were still in the experimental stage, hardly capable of holding a stray dog captive if it spotted a rabbit a few yards away. Ringo got loose and lit out for Mexico, where he picked up a little Spanish while drinking and lying low. That's where Curly Bill noticed him in a cantina and recruited him for a raid on a Sonora herd for Old Man Clanton.

Seemed like a good idea at the time.

Juanito wasn't like the rest of the boys. Juanito was intricate. He was sick a lot. Headaches. Stomach pains. He was fine when there was action to take his mind off his troubles, but when things got peaceful,
Ringo got moody. When he got moody, he drank. And when he drank, Lord have mercy!

Once, in a bar up north near Prescott, Ringo offered to buy a man a whiskey. All that fella said was “No, thanks. I've got a beer.” Ringo shot him in the neck. Just like that. Walked away like he'd swatted a fly. And he had this trick where he'd smile at a new kid who was looking to get into the gang. “You're all right,” Ringo would say. “I like you. You're all right.” Then he'd slug that kid in the gut with no warning at all. The new kid would drop to his knees, sucking air, and Ringo would walk away like nothing had happened.

The first time Ringo did that, it was so sudden and over so quick, nobody had time to react. Now, though, the boys all expected it, so they'd wait, grinning, and laugh their heads off when it happened. The new kid would be kneeling in the dirt with his eyes bugged out, and when he got enough breath back to ask what in hell he'd done to deserve
that
, the others would tell stories about how Ringo did the same thing to them once. Juanito always felt better afterward. And the kid who got punched was probably used to getting hit back home.

The moon was setting by the time Curly Bill was ready to drop off. He listened for a time to the cattle and the horses, to the night birds and the breeze. Fished a couple of stones out from under his bedroll. Turned onto his side.

Boys will be boys, he thought. His crew were just boys with fists, knives, pistols. And Johnny Ringo wasn't the only one with a warrant or two tied to his tail.

Y
OU SEEN THESE?” FRANK MCLAURY ASKED HIS
brother, slamming a collection of torn and crumpled papers onto the table.

Tommy smoothed out the least-damaged flyer and read it with growing dismay. Lieutenant Joseph Hurst was offering a reward for information leading to the arrest, trial, and conviction of the thieves who'd stolen six army mules, which were last seen in the possession of Frank and Thomas McLaury.

“They're tacked up all over the county,” Frank told him. “I found one on our own damn fence post out front!”

“Well, it doesn't say
we
stole the mules,” Tommy pointed out, but if Hurst's careful wording skirted a straight-up accusation of theft, the nuance was lost on Frank. “I promised him I'd bring the mules back and I didn't, so what was he to think?”

“That wasn't your fault,” Frank countered, for Billy Clanton had shown up early the next morning, paid Frank for changing the brands, and taken possession of the animals again. “You couldn't have returned them.”

“True,” Tommy admitted, “but that would be hard to explain to a judge. And the fact is, we received stolen property. That's aiding and abetting, Frank.”

Frank knew that was true, but he was the kind who just couldn't
stop picking at a scab until it bled again, and the longer he thought about Hurst's flyer, the angrier he got.

All through supper, he fulminated about abuse of federal power and the army's interference in decent citizens' lives. While Tommy washed the dishes, Frank found paper and a pencil and stayed up late that night, composing an essay on the subject. Tom entertained some hope that this might get it out of Frank's system, but the next morning, Frank woke up with the phrase “damnable despotism” on his tongue and added it to the piece before he even went outside to take a piss. Later on, while he was fixing the roof of the horse shed, he came up with a line about how his honor had never been impugned before and he didn't propose to start tolerating it now. That sounded good, so he dropped the hammer, climbed off the shed, went back inside to rewrite the whole thing, and made Tommy listen to the essay again.

This was tedious but not alarming until later that day, when Frank managed to talk himself around to the notion that Lieutenant Hurst had stolen the mules himself.

“He stole 'em and he sold 'em for his own gain,” Frank declared, “and now that army sonofabitch is trying to pin the crime on us!”

“Billy Clanton stole those mules, and you know it,” Tommy cried, boggled by this turn. “Frank, there are
witnesses
who
saw
the mules out in our coral!”

“Well, it's their word against ours!”

Tommy sighed, for there are people—his brother among them—who can become so convinced of their own rendering of events that believing something is tantamount to proof. Arguing only makes them dig in deeper. So Tommy stopped talking and hoped the whole thing would blow over, but Frank not only added the accusation against Hurst to his essay, he copied it all out again neatly. Then he saddled up and rode to town, determined to get it published.

FRANK'S FIRST STOP
was at the office of the
Tombstone Epitaph.
He expected the editor to be sympathetic to the interests of one of the few
Republican voters who lived outside Tombstone, but John Clum read the essay and handed it back.

“Mr. McLaury,” he said, “in my opinion you would do well to forget the whole thing.”

“I didn't ask your opinion,” Frank said. “I told you to print mine.”

“I will be happy to print it on flyers and you can tack them up wherever you please, but nothing goes into my newspaper unless I decide to put it there.”

“Are you saying you won't print it?”

“My decision is in your own best interests, Mr. McLaury. Your speculation could be construed as libel. Lieutenant Hurst could take legal action against you.”