Epitaph (73 page)

“Suppose . . .” he suggested. “Suppose you take what John's written and polish it up for us?”

A retort about “editing amateur work gratis” formed in Walter Burns's mind, but it was quickly suppressed by the prospect of getting access to research that could be pirated. “I'd be happy to take a look at it for you, Mr. Earp. And perhaps you and I could still work together . . . What if I were to focus my Tombstone story on Doc Holliday?”

“That'd be real good,” Wyatt said warmly. “Doc got blamed for a lot he didn't do. I'd like to square things for him before I die.”

But Wyatt Earp was front and center when
Tombstone: An Iliad of the Southwest
came out, in 1927.

“Listen to this, John!” Edgar cried gleefully, reading in bed. “‘His hair was as yellow as a lion's mane, his voice as deep as a lion's. He suggested a lion in the slow, slithery ease of his movements and his gaunt, heavy-boned, loose-limbed, powerful frame.' Does that sound like a crush to you? Is Burns married?”

“I don't know, and I don't care! Edgar, the man lied to Mr. Earp's face. He said he was going to edit my manuscript and write a book about Doc Holliday.”

Edgar continued to read in a radio announcer's baritone: “‘Roughly molded by the frontier, he had the frontier's simplicity and strength, the frontier's resourcefulness and its unillusioned self-sufficiency.' Is ‘unillusioned' a word? ‘He followed his own silent trails with roughshod
directness . . . Whatever he did, he did in deadly earnest. He was incapable of pretense: cold, balanced, and imperturbably calm.' My God! It just goes on and on! ‘A natural master . . . Brains and courage . . . The dominant qualities of a leader . . . '” Edgar looked up and saw John scowling. “What?”

“Edgar, he said he was writing about Doc Holliday. Mrs. Earp is furious.”

“She wanted a hero. Burns delivered. I can't see why she's upset.”

“Well, she is, and you have to come with me tomorrow. I'm afraid she'll have a stroke if she doesn't calm down about this book. She wants to file a suit against Burns. Mr. Earp is worn out with it, and I can't get her to give the idea up. Maybe she'll listen to you—she still talks about how you got the
L.A. Times
to back down.”

“But I didn't! I just told you to write a letter!”

“Edgar,
please!
”

It came down to this: John Flood loved the Earps. Edgar Beaver loved John Flood. “All right,” Edgar said. “All right, but just this once.”

S
HE WAS HAPPY WITH THE BURNS BOOK IN SOME
ways. She liked that Johnny Behan was portrayed as vain and ineffectual. She was immensely relieved that there was no mention of a southwestern Helen of Troy. Nor was Mattie Blaylock even hinted at. None of the Earps' women figured in the story.
Tombstone
was a story about men, written by a man, meant to be read by the kind of men who wore suits, and worked indoors, and chafed at the modern world's restrictions, and sometimes thought yearningly about just plain
shooting
some sonofabitch who richly deserved it.

Even so, she kept circling back to the lawsuit. Pacing, fuming, crying. “We have to sue that lying sneak! That low-down, lying phony! How could he sit at our table and tell my husband he was writing one thing when he was writing another? It's not fair! This can't be legal!”

When Edgar visited, he let her repeat these complaints three times before he said, “Mrs. Earp, your husband is a public figure. Walter Burns has written a story that's the opposite of libelous. Mr. Earp is portrayed as a fearless lawman meting out frontier justice to bad men. It's a nice clean tale,” he could not help saying, “with a great deal of peppy dialogue.”

Temporarily derailed, Mrs. Earp stood still, but her face remained set in what was becoming a permanent scowl of bewilderment and pique.

“But there's not a penny in it for us!” she cried, pacing again, off
on a new tangent. “And if there's a movie made, we won't get anything from that, either! We are not rich people. My husband is old and ill. We have no savings, and there's no pension from any of the towns he served. Now that this book is out, there'll be no market for an authorized biography. What is to become of me?” she demanded, wringing her hands. “What is to become of me?”

Tired of the drama, Wyatt excused himself to lie down for a nap. Mrs. Earp hardly paused in her vilification of Walter Burns. Edgar listened a while longer, then signaled to John that it was time to go home.

“She's bats, dear boy,” he warned when they left. “This won't end well.”

“I can't just walk away from Mr. Earp,” John said stubbornly. His voice was rough when he spoke again. “He hasn't got much time left. I will see this through.”

JOHNNY BEHAN'S SON,
Albert, had kept in touch with Sadie over the years, but when he saw the Earps in Los Angeles at the end of 1927, he was startled by the changes in them. At seventy-nine, Wyatt was alarmingly thin and obviously sick. The state of Sadie's house was almost as shocking. Dusty, disordered, and just . . . not clean.

As always, there was cake on the table, only it was store-bought—not bad, though not as good as the marble cake Sadie used to make for him. When he finished his second piece, he declined the third and came to the point of his visit.

“I hate to bring this up, but Billy Breakenridge is working on a book with a ghostwriter. He told me they plan to do right by my father. Mr. Earp, they're going to say you and your brothers were all corrupt and the gunfight was an outlaw dispute that my father tried to stop. They're going to say all the men who died at the O.K. Corral were unarmed.”

Wyatt stared at him, astonished. “But . . . Judge Spicer went over all that in the hearing! If they was unarmed, how did Virg and Morgan and Doc get shot?”

“They're going to say you shot them yourself, by accident.”

“But . . . that's plain stupid!”

“That evil little queer,” Sadie muttered. “Albert, Billy Breakenridge sat right where you're sitting, just last summer! ‘I want to talk about old times!'” she said, making her voice high and whiny. “I made him breakfast! Biscuits and strawberry jam, and eggs and bacon and coffee—”

“Al, I don't understand,” Wyatt said. “Me and my brothers, we always worked fine with Billy B. Why would he say that about us?”

“Because he's an evil little queer, that's why,” Sadie muttered.

“There's money in controversy,” Al said. “His writer thinks everybody who bought the Burns book will buy Billy's, too. They're calling it
Helldorado.
It's a catchy title.”

“Billy's probably broke, too.” Wyatt sighed. “We're all old and broke, Al. The best of us died young. The rest of us have lived too long.”

Sadie was still muttering. “That evil little queer! He's an evil little queer.”

“Sadie! Stop it,” Wyatt said sharply. “You're stuck again.”

“It's our story, and everyone is making money but us,” she said, breaking through one circle maze only to wander into another. “We are not rich people! My sister has money. People think we don't need anything because Hattie is rich, but my husband is old and ill, and we have no savings, John!”

Wyatt met Al's eyes before he said, “This is Albert Behan, Sadie, not John Flood.”

She didn't even pause. “There's no pension from Dodge or Wichita or Tombstone. We have nothing! And now that evil little queer is going to take the bread from our mouths!”

Albert left a few minutes later, but Sadie kept on about Billy Breakenridge and how people were stealing from them, and no pension, and so on. Wyatt told her that things weren't as bad as she thought, but when she got like this, it was more useful to say, “I'm hungry,” or “Take
laundry off the line,” or “Read me the paper.” Sometimes chores distracted her, but this time she was hooked good and solid.

Come Sunday, she was still nerved up about Billy B.'s book and started in on it again the moment John Flood came in the door.

“Billy Breakenridge sat right where you're sitting, just last summer! ‘I want to talk about old times!'” she said, her voice high and whiny. “I made him breakfast! Biscuits and strawberry jam, and eggs and bacon and coffee. And now that evil little queer is going to take the bread from our mouths! You sit right down at that typewriter,” she ordered. “You're going to write a letter to Houghton Mifflin. Tell them we want every copy of that evil little queer's book destroyed, or we'll sue. If they publish it, we'll get a lawyer and we'll sue them and that evil little queer for damages. He won't get away with this,” she vowed. “We're going to stop him in his tracks. That evil little—”

“Sadie!” Wyatt roared.

Shocked into silence, she stared at him.

“I'm out of tobacco,” Wyatt said, slowly and distinctly. “Go to the store—
right now
—and get me some tobacco. And when you get back, I want you to keep a civil tongue in your head.”

She stood there. First blank, then confused, then defiant. She settled on belligerent capitulation. “Of course,” she said with theatrical lightness. “Whatever you say. I'll let everyone steal from us and run roughshod over you, if that's what you want. I'll just go get tobacco for you! I'll be your little errand girl.”

Muttering, she put on her hat and gloves, snatched up her purse, and stalked out of the house, leaving two silent men surrounded by dusty furniture and piles of newspapers and unwashed dishes—so unlike the tidy home John Flood had first visited sixteen years earlier.

“I'm sorry, John,” Wyatt said, scrubbing at his face. “She was never
mean
like that, before . . . She gets these ideas and just goes around and around. She's younger than me, but . . .” He looked away, helpless. “Old age takes people strange sometimes.”

Milk-white, John stood. “I—I think I have to go.”

Wyatt got to his feet, which wasn't easy anymore, for his insides hurt something fierce and no amount of whiskey seemed to help.

“You've been real patient with her, son. And real kind to me. I hope you can forgive her and . . . I hope you'll come back.”

John was at the door by then, reaching for his hat. When he turned, it was all on his face. Everything he'd felt. Everything he'd never said.

Coming close, Wyatt offered his hand and when John took it, Wyatt held on for a few moments.

“Give Edgar my best,” he said. “He's a good man. So are you.”

“Yes, sir,” John said, his voice thready. “Thank you, sir. I'll see you next Sunday.”

“HONESTLY, DEAR BOY,
I can't decide if you're a saint or an idiot,” Edgar said.

“Mr. Earp is dying,” John said. “I won't abandon him now.”

“The question is, What happens when the old lion leaves us? What on earth are we going to do about his wife?”

We, John thought.
We
. I'm not alone in this.

ON GOOD DAYS,
she was as cheerful and perky as a parakeet. Her habits of hospitality remained intact, and visitors sometimes brought out her old sparkle. Thoughtless pleasantries bubbled out of her. She could be charming, as long as you wanted what she wanted you to want. But if you refused a fourth piece of cake or disagreed with her about something, there'd be a stunning avalanche of emotion. Uncomprehending surprise, weeping reproach, furious denunciation. She had trip wires, too. Topics that set her off. She was endlessly worried about money and convinced the neighbors were stealing from them. She told horrible kike jokes and laughed uproariously at them herself.

She was different before, you'd remind yourself. Poor Wyatt, you'd think as you left the house.

“How do you stand it?” John asked him once.

“I was no prize, John,” Wyatt said. “She put up with a lot from me.”

THE MAN WHO WOULD IMMORTALIZE
Wyatt Earp didn't know about Mrs. Earp's peculiarities, but Stuart Lake knew other things in 1928. He knew Lowell Thomas was still making a lucrative career out of selling Lawrence of Arabia. He knew the public remained hungry for stories of individual heroism—even now, a decade after losing a generation of nameless men to the Great War's senseless slaughter. He knew people were still fascinated by the Tombstone gunfight, and he knew Mr. and Mrs. Earp thought they'd been cheated by Walter Burns.

So right off the bat, Stu Lake offered to split the proceeds of a biography down the middle.
I'm proposing a fifty-fifty, horse-high, bull-strong, hog-tight deal
, he wrote, demonstrating the lively style he intended to bring to the project.
You do the telling, I'll do the writing and the whipping into shape.
As his bona fides, he offered his experience as Teddy Roosevelt's press agent at the turn of the century: playing up TR's cowboy persona, framing his adventures so they had maximum political appeal.
I am the man for the job
, Lake wrote.
Give me a chance and I'll do you proud.