Ragtime Cowboys
Authors: Loren D. Estleman
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This book is dedicated to Dale L. Walker: friend, Jack London scholar, and consummate professional historian, and to the memories of Russ and Winnie Kingman and Becky London, whom it was my privilege to know and love.
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CONTENTS
Part One: Forgotten but Not Gone
Part Two: Operating Under the Influence
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The Bible says he who makes two blades of grass to grow where only one grew before has benefited mankind. And that hits Yours Truly.
âCharlie Siringo,
A Cowboy Detective
“I hope you're satisfied with the way your work got done.”
“It got done.”
âDashiell Hammett,
The Dain Curse
They started gobbling everything in sight like a lot of swine, and while they gobbled democracy went to smash.
âJack London,
The Valley of the Moon
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PART ONE
FORGOTTEN BUT NOT GONE
Buffalo Bill's defunct.
âe. e. cummings
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1
There was nothing wrong with his eyes.
He watched a coyote lift its leg against the base of the
HOLLYWOODLAND
sign a quarter-mile away from his window. Men half his age would need binoculars just to identify the animal. And he was watching through stripes the rain made in the chalky dust from the gypsum refinery down the street. It was like trying to make out his reflection in a mirror streaked with toothpaste.
No, there was nothing wrong with his eyes; but he'd trade one for a new set of joints and one good piss.
Just then the roof sprang a new leak. The water broke through in a sudden trickleâjust the way his pizzle worked, when it workedâand splattered one of the few dry spots of floor left. Other holes, some as big as a man's fist, had rusted their way through the galvanized iron, letting the water pour into pots, pans, and a Hog Heaven lard bucket. He was running out of containers. Casting about, he spotted the blue enamel camp coffeepot on the woodstove. He'd been using it to heat water since his electricity was turned off, but his wash-up could wait till the sun came out. He took off the lid, dumped the water into the sink, and placed the pot under the new leak.
He went ahead and emptied all the containers, then pulled his chair up to the Smith-Premier typewriter that looked like a toy piano, right down to the black and white keys, and listened to the water bing-bonging against metal, like slugs hitting the stove and Dutch oven and soup tins in the line shack in New Mexico where they said Billy Bonney had come to roost in '80. He and the other members of the P.C. had clobbered the place with long rounds and buckshot for three quarters of an hour before somebody got the bright idea to go down and check the place out. All he found was a lot of ruined gear and a dead armadillo that had chosen the wrong day to crawl in out of the heat.
When an animal expert told him armadillos were unknown north of Mexico before 1900, he'd said, “Well, maybe that critter we cooked and ate was a possum with a bad case of shingles.”
He stuffed his pipe to smoke out the mildew stink. His pouch leaked tobacco. Buffalo scrotum wore like iron, but nothing lasted forever, including the beast itself. He raised the chimney from the lamp and held the bowl bottom-side up over the flame, drawing on the stem. Once it got going, there was no excuse for delay. He cranked the platen and read what he'd written; sat back, folding his arms and puffing up gales of smoke, then tore loose the sheet and threw it in a tight ball into the Hello Sunshine crate he used for a trash bin. The oranges on the label went on smiling their asses off. They didn't give a shit.
He wore his daily uniform of blue flannel shirtâthe roomy pockets were good for tobacco and extra cartridgesâwhipcords, and Arapaho moccasins: dependable range wear he preferred to any suit of clothes made to his measure in St. Louis. The creature comforts were all a man cared about at the finish.
He tried again, rolling in a new sheet and stabbing the keys with two fingers:
“Kid” Curry had a cross-eye and you never knew whether he was shooting at you or someone else until the slug hit home.
He shook his head again and sent that page after the last. There wasn't anything wrong with what he wrote, just with the subject. He was plumb written out on the Wild Bunch. Once he put a memory on paper it ceased to be real, as if it was a story someone else had told him. Considering how many books he'd written, he was on the point of rubbing out his entire life. Maybe that was what happened when a fellow got old and forgetful, not remembering if he'd eaten and disgracing himself in his pants. Maybe they were all memoirists.
The only time things came back to him, really came back like he was watching them from the front row of a picture house, was when he dreamed, or when something familiar brought them bearing down on him like the
Sunset Limited,
which was dreaming too, he decided. But when he reached for them on purpose, they were as dead as Old Man Pinkerton, the only person in history ornery enough to have bitten himself to death.
He sat back again, puffing tobacco and scraping his gaze along the shelf of his books for inspiration. Water stained, every one. Could've been worse; he'd just gotten them out from under the last new leak before they soaked up enough to swell up like a dead steer.
No help there. They were headstones erected over the graves of murdered memories.
He wondered what Ince was up to.
The man had been a pest in the old days, sending him weekly wires pleading for permission to make a picture play out of one of his titles. But he'd been proud then, not wanting to see some jasper with painted lips and false eyelashes prancing around in front of a camera pretending to be him, and eventually Ince had gotten tired of being turned down and stopped writing. A year ago, that was: He couldn't believe it was 1921. Now he'd sell him the whole bunch for the cash to fix the roof. Tomorrow he'd run down to the library and see if he was listed in the directory.
Then all he'd need was a nickel for the phone.
He disregarded the knock at first, thinking it was a new note courtesy of the rain; as the receptacles filled, the pitch changed. If he were musically inclined, he'd have experimented by moving them around, raising or lowering the levels of the water, reaching for some tune he recognized. It was no more a waste of time than trying to coax a story out of his worn-out brain, and might have gotten him a job in vaudeville.
When it came again, he got up, threw a rubberized cover over the typewriter in case another leak opened up above it, and went to the door, scooping up his old brown Colt on the way. Los Angeles was filled with Mexicans fleeing the failure of the revolution, and the elderly were the favorite prey of banditti looking for grubstakes.
“Who's there?” He had to shout to be heard through the thick panels. The rain had stepped up, clanging on the iron roof and striking the drip-catchers hard enough to slap water off the surfaces onto the floor.
“Oh, let me in, Charlie. I'm wet through.”
He couldn't tell if the voice was familiar, but at least it came without a Spanish accent. He slid back the heavy bolt and opened the door three inches, thumbing back the Colt hammer in the same motion.
The face was leaner than he remembered, gaunt, the handlebars white, the strong jowls loose now and wobbly. A pair of brows still dark but growing wild drew together over faded gray eyes. “Don't you know me, Charlie? It's Earp.”
“I can see that. Which one are you?” They'd looked alike, that whole pack of brothers, and not even a trained detective could tell them apart at a glance. That was one of the reasons there had been so much confusion among the witnesses as to who did what in that mess in Tombstone.
“The one that's left. You going to let me in or cut loose with that dog's hind leg? It gets me out of my misery either way you choose.”
“I guess it's the Christian thing to do.” He took the revolver off cock and stepped out of the way.
Wyatt Earpâhe knew which one it was now, the irritable one nobody likedâstepped inside, took off his drooping slouch hat, and shook water off it onto the foot mat. He looked around the room. “I can't tell if it's wetter inside or out. I'm glad I didn't come to borrow money.”
“I chopped them holes myself. I slept under the stars so long I can't get used to any other way.”
When Earp bent his head to sweep water off his lapels, the light from the lamp glistened on pink scalp. He'd been vain of his hair when it was yellow, slicking it down with pomade and letting it curl over his collar, but it had quit the field, leaving behind a few pale strands on the crown for seed. “I never could figure what the hell you were talking about half the time. That's one thing hasn't changed.”
A humorless man, Siringo recalled now. He'd met a few like him, and had always felt sorry for them, like someone born without arms. But an armless man could train his feet to act as hands. A man who couldn't appreciate how flat-out ridiculous the world was lived every day out of step with existence.
He had trouble feeling sorry for Earp, though. He'd been meaner than a shithouse rat when he was young, and now that he was old and his looks were gone he was no company.
“I wouldn't turn down a drink.”
“I thought you didn't.”
“That was before Alaska got into my bones. I keep a fire most days even in summer.”
Charlie opened the iceboxâdoing cabinet duty until he absolutely needed to pop for iceâand hoisted out a demijohn.
“Moonshine?” Earp's handlebars drew down severely.
“It's all moonshine now.”
“Just because it's illegal don't mean you have to go blind drinking it.”
“I soak my biscuits in it, and I can still pick the eye off a potato at fifty yards. Fellow I arrested in Virginia retired to Barstow a few years back. He drops off a couple of jugs whenever he's in town and we shoot the breeze. It's just a hobby now, so he don't cut it with lye-ball like in the old days.” He blew the gypsum dust out of a pair of mismatched tumblers and filled them a third of the way, drawing the cork with his teeth and shouldering the jug.