Epitaph (69 page)

“Laudanum,” Wyatt said.

“Poor soul,” Doc murmured.

“Virgil is doing well,” Sadie told him, changing the subject. She never liked to think about Mattie. “Allie is fine, too. So is James.”

“Bessie's dead,” Wyatt said.

“It wasn't tuberculosis,” Sadie said quickly. “She had tumors.”

“So I recall. Please, give James my condolences.” Looking at Wyatt, Doc asked, “You ever go back to Arizona?”

Wyatt shook his head. You were right about the pardons, he meant. They cut me loose.

“I was arrested,” Doc told him without rancor. “Colorado tried to extradite me. Bat Masterson pulled some strings. He was very kind. I would not have thought it of him. But he was very kind.”

Wyatt glanced at the lobby clock. “I'm sorry, Doc. We got a train to catch.”

“Of course,” Doc said. “I am going up to Glenwood, myself. The sulfur springs are believed helpful for my condition.”

Sadie stood, leaning over to kiss him on both thin cheeks before he could protest or pull away. “Well, now. Aren't you the sweetest thing!” he said, with something of his old charm. “Take good care of each other, y'hear?”

Wyatt offered his hand again. This time Doc took it.

Even then, a few months before he died, his grip was surprisingly strong.

THEY MOVED ON,
and kept on moving.

Emil and Hattie backed a series of saloons and hotels in mining towns, but Wyatt's big break came when he heard that the Santa Fe Railway was about to begin service from Los Angeles to San Diego.

“Suppose . . .” he said. “Suppose we try California?”

Sadie liked the idea of living on the coast again. Wyatt had built up enough capital to look his father in the eye. So they moved to San Diego, and for once in his life, Wyatt Earp got into something big right from the start. When the rumored railway arrived, the town exploded, filling up with entrepreneurs and shipping magnates, lawyers and bankers, thugs and criminals, musicians and writers, gamblers and whores.

San Diego never slept in the heedless, restless years that would be remembered as the Gay Nineties. There was ragtime in the dance halls, vaudeville in the theaters, band concerts every night. Everywhere you looked, something exciting was happening.

Wyatt Earp
rode
that town, thriving on the action and distraction.
With forty thousand people looking for rental houses, you could charge sixty dollars a month for a shabby little shack, but the real money was downtown. He plowed cash into lots along the streetcar lines and sold them a year later for ten times what he'd paid. At the city's peak, he was grossing $7,000 a week: turning real estate deals by day, running high-stakes faro games in fancy saloons by night.

He wasn't concerned when Sadie took to gambling to fill the long hours he spent managing his many businesses. She was an idiot about games—indifferent to odds, ignorant of strategy—but she was having fun and he didn't count the cost. Admittedly, she sometimes seemed a little blue. When he noticed, he'd take her dancing or they'd go to see a show. And she brightened up considerably when Wyatt won a racehorse on a bet, for Sadie liked the track as much as Wyatt did. He'd always dreamed of breeding horses and with money rolling in from his real estate holdings and the gambling halls, he could afford to invest in good bloodlines. She loved the beautiful animals he bought, the gorgeous silks, the betting and the screaming excitement of the races themselves. Together, they traveled the western race circuit—Santa Rosa, Santa Anita, and Santa Ana; Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, and Cincinnati—staying in glamorous hotels and eating at fine restaurants. It was fun for Sadie to rub shoulders with high society and there was always an illicit thrill when she was introduced as Mrs. Earp to some big shot.
Miss Josephine Marcus
, she'd think with a secret smile,
now starring in the role of Wyatt Earp's wife!

The costumes her role required were splendid. Elaborate broad-brimmed hats; elegant wasp-waisted dresses with immense leg-of-mutton sleeves; bustles and high-buttoned shoes. When their horses lost, there was always tomorrow; when they won, Wyatt would buy her lavish jewelry. A ruby bracelet. A diamond brooch. An emerald ring.

But never a plain gold band.

Of course, she never asked for one. She had her pride.

For all anybody knew, she and Wyatt were married, though that didn't stop other women from throwing themselves at the famously
dangerous Wyatt Earp. Tall and straight in tailor-made suits, he was broad-shouldered and square-jawed, with a silent aura of physical confidence few modern males could match. By the 1890s, the Wild West had become something you paid admission to see at Buffalo Bill's show, but Wyatt Earp was the real deal. Men were impressed, but women were enthralled. They'd watch him demurely through their lashes or stare at him with frank curiosity. Sadie knew exactly what they were thinking, for she had once thought it herself.

My, my, my . . . what would
that
be like in bed?

I taught him everything he knows, she'd think bitterly, and it maddened her to imagine other women enjoying the benefits of her tutelage.

“I love him, Doc, but he's not the same man!” That's what she said back in Leadville when she and Doc had those few minutes alone. “What happened after I left Arizona? He used to be so . . .” So shy, she thought. So awkward. Capable of blushing, for heaven's sake! “So upright,” she said. “So—so—”

“So Methodist?” Doc suggested.

“Yes! But he drinks now, Doc, and he . . . well, he does things. And he doesn't seem to care about—about what others think.” About what I think, she meant.

Doc fell silent for a time, trying to decide how much to say. In the end, he simply took her hand. “Try to remember him as he was, sugar. Try to remember the man Morgan looked up to.”

Now Doc was dead and here she was—five years later—living with someone she hardly recognized. She hated his drinking. She hated the endless wheeling and dealing. She hated being shut out of his life. Most of all, she hated the other women.

Oh, she could have taken lovers. She was still beautiful. She still had admirers in those days. Rich men, important men. But she didn't want them. She wanted Wyatt. And she wanted him to want her, only her.

He'd given her fair warning. “I am not a good man,” he'd said, and
he meant it, but she'd thought he was just being modest, or Methodist, or something.

He's only human, she would tell herself when he disappeared for an hour and came back smelling of someone else's perfume.

Then she'd hit the roulette table, blow two grand, and make him pay her debts.

“IT WASN'T JUST SAN DIEGANS,”
a journalist wrote later. “The whole world experienced a sort of money insanity in those days. Any financial scheme that merely promised a return drew international crowds of eager gamblers who liked to call themselves investors.”

The first sign that the fun was over came when a few downtown properties were offered at a small discount to their initial asking price. Within a week, the real estate market shifted from “Grab it now, before the price goes up!” to “Wait a little while. It'll go down more.”

Property values dropped, and kept on dropping. Being mortgaged to the hilt seemed to make sense during the boom, but now everybody owed more on their property than it was worth. Buildings recently bought for a hundred thousand dollars couldn't scare up ten grand. New construction stalled. Ambitious projects were abandoned, half-finished. Why put up another lavish home or impressive office block when so many others already sat empty?

It wasn't just the big shots who were getting killed. When credit was easy, working men with families bought their own little piece of the dream, and lost everything when they lost their jobs.

Foreclosures clogged the courts. There were burglaries in the dark and holdups in broad daylight. Before long, people were packing up, sneaking out of town at night, leaving homes and mortgages behind. Whole sections of the city were abandoned. Arson became epidemic. Small stores failed. So did big ones. Banks went over the edge and took depositors with them.

And exactly twenty years after the Crash of 1873, the whole dismal catastrophe repeated itself.

IF ANYONE HAD ASKED WYATT EARP
for financial advice in those days, he would have said, “Invest in sin.” Vice is always the last to leave a dying town, for desperate men will rent female solace for an hour, slam down a shot of whiskey, and throw their last five dollars onto a craps table, hoping for a miracle.

On paper, his real estate investments were hit hard, but he had income from a whorehouse and saloons. He owned his horses outright and continued to race them. Like his father-in-law before him, he stayed solvent longer than most, and he was pretty sure he could ride the downturn out.

“Good times always end,” he'd learned to say, “and bad times never last.”

But the depression dragged on, year after year. One by one, he sold the properties and the horses off. Sadie's gambling debts mounted—a fair measure of his own drinking and philandering, which did not achieve the level of Johnny Behan's but were nothing to be proud of, either. They had a real battle once. He caught her stealing cash from his wallet. She laid into him for the women.

By that time, San Diego's business district was a ghost town. And there was a lawsuit over a promissory note that Wyatt was likely to lose. Then they got word that Sadie's father was sick.

“Suppose . . .” Wyatt said one night. “Suppose we move up to San Francisco. Might be nice for you. Living closer to your family.”

So they moved on.

W
YATT, I'M SO GLAD YOU'RE HERE,” MRS. MARCUS
whispered, her soft old face blotched with crying. “It's his heart, Sadie. He don't got long.”

Leaving Wyatt with her mother, Sadie went into the bedroom and found her sister sitting at the bedside. “Oh, so now you come!” Hattie said bitterly. “Now, when you can be the heroine?”

“Girls!” their father whispered. “Don' bicker.”

Inside the old man's chest, was a heart as swollen and hollow as a cream puff. Even so, his eyes sparkled when he asked Sadie about the racehorses and the journey from San Diego. Her answers were full of inaccurate cheer, but it wasn't long before he murmured, “Go on now, girls. Go help your
mutti
.”

Hattie left. Sadie watched at his bedside until she was sure he was asleep, then crept out and closed the door behind herself.

“How is he?” Wyatt asked. She shook her head and broke down, weeping silently in his arms, her whole body shaking.

Then, without a word, she went to the kitchen, put on an apron, and began to cook as though lives depended on it. Sometimes she let her mother or her sister help. Mostly it was just Sadie in the kitchen by herself. Chopping, peeling, mashing, stirring, beating, scrubbing. Flour up to her elbows. Hands in dishwater.

“Nobody's hungry,” Wyatt would tell her. “Sadie, take a rest!”

“We gotta eat,” she'd say, sounding just like her mother. And that was that.

Henry died a few days later. For a week, streams of visitors trooped into the apartment above the bakery to be with the Marcus women. Sitting
shivah
, it was called.

Josie never left the kitchen. There was too much food. A lot of it was going to waste. Wyatt was at a loss until Hattie's husband, Emil—the other odd man out—clapped him on the shoulder one night.

“Our job is to say yes to whatever our wives want right now. Whatever it is, just agree!”

“But why does she keep cooking?” Wyatt asked.

“It's what she has to do,” Emil said. “Grief takes everyone different.”

It could be worse, he meant. At least she's not shooting anybody.

FOR ALL THE SADNESS
OF HENRY'S PASSING,
they would remember that island in time fondly. In the cramped little apartment above the bakery, in tears and in memories, in simply holding one another and being together after frantic years of hustle and distraction, Wyatt Earp and Sadie Marcus found each other again.

Then, on December 2, 1896, the newspapers found Wyatt.

It was just supposed to be a night out on the town—some fun after all the sadness. Wyatt had agreed to referee a $10,000 championship prizefight between Tom Sharkey and Bob Fitzsimmons. There was a nice fee involved. They needed the money. Sadie had no interest in boxing, but she dressed up and they went to dinner at the Grotto Café. Meanwhile, a few blocks away, fifteen thousand people had gathered to see the fight.

At ten
P
.
M
., Wyatt stepped into the ring and took off his coat. The audience gasped. Wyatt frowned. A police captain in charge of the event approached, but Wyatt still didn't understand what the fuss was about.