Epitaph (33 page)

ACROSS TOWN, JUST WEST OF SIXTH,
the bellboy of a small Tombstone hotel was knocking on a door at the end of a second-floor hall. It was a hesitant and quiet knock, not an insistent pounding or a businesslike rap, for the bellboy had just turned fifteen and he was new to this job, the nuances of which were full of mystery. The hotel was on the border between the vice zone and the nice part of Tombstone; like the hotel itself, the women who lived here were on the edge of being
bad. What they did wasn't illegal, but it wasn't respectable, either.

The bellboy couldn't decide what to call this new one. He'd had enough church back in Illinois to know that she wasn't a good girl, but whore didn't seem right either. Sometimes she only went to dinner with men, or she just went dancing with them. She didn't always . . . entertain them in her room.

Was she alone, the bellboy wondered, or was somebody else in there?

That was another problem. He didn't know how to refer to her visitors. They weren't miners or cowboys. They dressed nice and had manners, and they tipped well, too, so he didn't want to do anything to annoy them. Were they gentleman callers? Clients?

He knocked again, a little louder this time. “It's the bellboy. There's someone downstairs wants to see you.”

“Tell him to come back at eight.”

“No, ma'am— I mean miss— I mean . . . It's not that kind of . . . person. It's that little kid again.”

A silence. The sound of bedsprings creaking. He waited, trying not to imagine what she looked like before she put on her dressing gown.

She came to the door and opened it a crack.

“He's crying,” the bellboy told her, doing his best not to look . . .
down.

She closed her eyes, and lifted her face, and stood very still for a few moments. “Tell him, ‘Sadie says you have to go home.'”

HER ONLY REGRET WAS LEAVING ALBERT.
Otherwise, life as a demimondaine suited her admirably, so far. She was Becky Sharp, in
Vanity Fair.
She was
La Traviata
—the Lady of the Camellias—except she had no intention of dying tragically at the end of her story. She was certainly not a whore. She just . . . took lovers. Like Sarah Bernhardt.

In her first two weeks, she'd seen a mining executive, a lawyer, and a very sweet geologist. They were grateful and generous. She enjoyed their company and their admiration. She liked the look on their faces
when she stepped out from behind her dressing screen and dropped her wrapper. She liked to be seen. She liked sex, too. Not as much as Johnny did—it was a sickness with that man—but enough to enjoy what she was doing.

“You can have any man you want,” Randolph Murray had told her the night after the Markham troupe left San Francisco. “Just look into his eyes. Think,
I want you
, and he'll be yours.”

She hadn't quite believed him then. Now she knew that it worked like a charm, except with the one man she really wanted.

She had imagined it a thousand times. The knock on the door. Wyatt standing just beyond it, twisting his flat-brimmed hat around and around in his hands.

“This is wrong,” he would say. “I shouldn't be here.”

She would pull him inside and change his mind. She would make him forget that woman he lived with. Even in her imagination, he would finish too soon the first time. She would make allowances: the long waiting, the urgency.

“You're rushing,” she would tell him. “It is more tender when you take your time.” Then she would teach him what a woman wants.

When they were done—both drowsy, both satisfied—she would ask, “Wyatt, are you sorry?”

“No,” he would say. “No.”

The next day, they would leave Tombstone together. She would send Albert a letter to explain everything.
Your father needs women
, she would write.
Wyatt needs
me.

Over and over, she thought: I want you. Come to me.

But the knock on the door was never Wyatt's.

I
T WASN'T LIKE HE DIDN'T KNOW. AT NEW YEAR'S, JOSIE
had told him straight out that she was thinking about leaving Behan. He'd figured she was just mad at Johnny again. Fighting was part of what kept the fire going for couples like Doc Holliday and Kate Harony. The Behans were battlers, too.

Besides which, the governor still hadn't announced his appointment for sheriff of Cochise County, and if Johnny Behan got the nod, Wyatt could be working for him soon. That was a $10,000-a-year bridge he didn't want to burn.

He had no intention of getting tangled up with a flighty girl who changed her mind four times an hour. Sure, there was a spark—he wouldn't deny that. But he was used to keeping a tight rein. It was a mistake to let your feelings get away from you. Look what happened when he let himself feel sorry for Mattie Blaylock! He ended up living with her, and they were miserable, but he didn't see any way out of it. He had enough trouble at home without borrowing any from Johnny Behan.

So he'd stayed well clear of the Behans' mess until the afternoon he found young Albert standing in the middle of Sixth Street with his little head cranked back and his face all smeared with dirt and tears.

“Sadie? Sadie! Come home!” the kid was hollering up at a second-floor window. “Sadie,
please!
Come
home!
”

Wyatt had worked all night at the Oriental. Then he'd taken Dick Naylor out for a few hours of exercise. All he wanted was to go to bed, but he couldn't just ride by like he didn't see the kid.

“What's the trouble, son?” he asked.

The question seemed to make things worse. Snot running, mouth wide, the child was gripped by soundless sobbing until he pulled in a big, gasping breath and wailed, “It's n-n-ot my fault! It's my f-f-father's fault!”

“What is? What's your father's fault?”

“Everything!”
Al yelled, rage trumping sorrow. “He's a cheater! A-a-and he
cheats
, and I
hate
him! A-a-and now he made S-S-Sadie go, too!”

Confused, Wyatt asked, “Who's Sadie?”

“She's
Josie!
” Al screamed, as if Wyatt had misunderstood on purpose. “Sadie is her se-e-cret name, and you can only use it if you love her, and she's up
there
, and she won't come home!”

Hell, Wyatt thought. What's she doing in a hotel like that?

He knew the answer but couldn't dwell on it—not with Albert gulping and hollering and crying so hard he could hardly breathe. Wyatt had all but raised Morgan, and he knew that when a kid gets that worked up, all you can do is wait it out—unless you're the kind of grown man who'd belt a child until he's hurt too bad to whimper.

Wyatt Earp had spent his whole life trying not to be that kind of man, so he dismounted, and got Al out of the street, and made him sit on the boardwalk, and sat down next to him, and tried to patch the story together. Al seemed to think that the problem started after Fred White was shot, though the boy didn't understand why that was so.

“Sadie stopped talking to him,” he said, still weepy. “And Dad
knew
he was in trouble and he was trying to make it up to her, but then—it was like she was
scared
of him. And I
knew
everything was getting ruined, because that's what happened before my mother left! He stays out late, and they cry, and then they get scared, and then they leave! And it's his fault!”

It took some work not to laugh when the boy called Johnny “a no-good son of an itch,” which was probably Al's first attempt at vulgarity. Another man might have bawled the boy out because the Bible said to honor your father. But some fathers don't deserve it, and nobody knew that better than Wyatt Earp.

“You like ice cream?” he asked when Al ran out of steam. He nudged the boy with his elbow. “Course you do. Everybody likes ice cream, right?”

“And cake.” Al wiped his nose on his sleeve and sucked in a shuddering breath. “You love Sadie, too. I know you do.” He started to cry again, but it wasn't anger anymore. It was sadness. “You know what I wish?” the boy asked. “I wish you were my father and Sadie was my mother.”

Wyatt set his jaw and looked away. Then he cleared his throat. “Al, that's the nicest thing anybody ever said to me.” He stood then and unwrapped Dick's reins from the post. “Wanna ride him down to the stable?”

“Sure,” Al said, brightening up. “Ice cream after that?”

Wyatt nodded, though his face was still. “Sure,” he said. “Ice cream after that.”

It took three dishes of peach before the boy was willing to go home. He was still mad at his father, but what choice did he have? His mother had a new husband and a new baby. She didn't want him back. “Sometimes you just have to make the best of things,” Wyatt told him. He took Al home, and when they got there, he had to sit and listen to Johnny tell how he was fed up with Josie and glad she'd left, and how she was more trouble than she was worth, and so on. Course, Johnny always said everything about six times, so it was well after dark when Wyatt finally got back to his own place.

And there was Mattie, sitting in that rocker of hers.

Waiting for him, like a rattler.

“Last,” she said, her voice low and tense, like she'd been patient all this time and was just beginning to lose her temper. “I'm always last.”

He hung his hat on the peg and kept his back to her, afraid of what he might say if he looked at her.

“Everything comes before me,” she said, still quiet. “Your brothers. Your friends. Your investments. Your horses. Your
whore.
”

He turned at that. “If you're talking about Josie—”

“Yes, I'm talking about her!” Mattie said, getting louder. “Yes, I'm talking about that Jew bitch! She was always a tramp, and now she's your whore.”

And you were a two-bit streetwalker before you moved in on me, he thought, but there was no point in pouring kerosene on a fire.

He took off his coat and hung it next to his hat. “Mattie,” he said wearily, “I have never laid a hand on that girl. Hell, I haven't laid eyes on her since New Year's.”

“You expect me to believe that? You must think I'm as stupid as you are. Behan's
using
you, Wyatt! It's just like up in Dodge, and you're too dumb to see it. Behan and that little Jew tramp. You think I don't know what you're doing, but I know. I see what you're doing.” She was hitting her stride now. “You leave me alone for days, but you never leave me any money. Why do I have to go begging for my medicine? You want me to crawl, don't you. You want me to beg that Jew at the pharmacy for my medicine. Goddam Jews—they're all in on it! They're trying to kill me, so you can marry your little Jew whore.”

In years to come, people would say he'd stolen Johnny Behan's girl, and that was the reason for the bad blood between them. They'd say he abandoned poor Mattie Blaylock for that hussy Josie Marcus, that he'd jumped from one woman's bed into another's. But on the night he left Mattie, all he wanted was
quiet.
An orderly home. A pleasant word when he got there. A decent meal. Was that too much to expect? Was that too much to want?

“You're probably turning Jew, too.” Mattie was saying. “You're such a goddam tightwad, you'll fit right in.”

It came to him: He could afford to walk away from this house.
He had mining interests. Gambling concessions. Good prospects of an excellent political position. He could take a room over at the Cosmopolitan, where maids kept the place clean. Restaurants would be glad of his business, and he wouldn't have to pretend to like the food. He could come and go as he pleased, without all this endless, hopeless, pointless strife.

Silent, almost in a trance, he went to the bedroom and reached up for the carpetbag slumped on top of the wardrobe. Out in the front room, Mattie kept on about the Jews and her medicine and how stupid he was, but when he didn't come back out into the sitting room, things got quiet.

She was right behind him. He could hear her breathing.

“Don't you dare leave me,” she said, her voice low and mean.

He wondered if she'd stab him. That's how bad things were between them. He thought she might pull a knife and stab him in the back.

Turning, he said, “Mattie, I can't live like this anymore. You can stay here. I'll give you money to live on. But I'm going to leave.”

Her face was white. “You bastard,” she whispered. “You cold, rotten, heartless bastard.”

He didn't even shrug. He went back to packing while she yelled and wept. When his bag was full, he returned to the front room for his coat and hat.

“Go on, then! Leave!” she snarled. “Go to your Jew bitch! That's what you've always wanted, isn't it! You
never
wanted
me!
”