The Last Ride of German Freddie (3 page)

“I will bid you good-night, then,” he said formally.

She turned to face him, lifted her face toward his. “You can come in, if you like,” she said. “Johnny won't be back for hours.”

He looked into her eyes and saw Troy there, on fire in the night.

“Good-night, miss,” he said, and touching his hat he turned away.

*

She is a Jewess! Freddie wrote in his journals. Run away from her family of good German bourgeois Jews—no doubt of the most insufferable type—to become, here in Tombstone, a goddess among the barbarians.

Or so Brocius tells us. He says her name is Josephine Marcus, sometimes called Sadie.

I believe I understand this Helen now. She has sprung from the strangest people in all history, they who have endured a thousand persecutions, and so become wise-cunning. The world has tried with great energy to make the Jews base, by confining them to occupations that the world despises, and by depriving them of any hope of honor. Yet they themselves have never ceased to believe in their own high calling; and they are honored by the dignity with which they face their tormentors.

And how should we think them base? From the Jews sprang the most powerful book in history, the most effective moral law, Spinoza the most sublime philosopher, and Christ the last Christian. When Europe was sunk in barbarism, it was the Jewish philosophers who preserved for us the genius of the ancients.

Yet all people must have their self-respect, and self-respect demands that one repay both good and bad. Without the ability to occasionally revenge themselves upon their despisers, they could scarcely have held up their heads. The usury of which the Jews are accused is the least of it; it was the subtle, twisted, deceitful Jewish revolution in morals that truly destroyed the ancients—that took the natural, healthy joy of freedom, life, and power, that twisted and inverted that joy, that planted this fatal sickness among their enemies. Thus was the Jewish vengeance upon Rome.

And this is the tradition that our Helen has inherited. Her very existence here is a vengeance upon all that have tormented her people from the beginning of time. She is beautiful, she is gay ... and what does she care if Troy burns? Or Rome? Or Tombstone?

*

When next Freddie encountered Josie, he was vomiting in the dust of Toughnut Street.

He had felt the migraine coming on earlier, but he was playing against a table of drunken stockmen who were celebrating the sale of their beeves and who were losing their money almost as fast as they could shove it across the table. Freddie was determined to fight on as long as the cards fell his way.

By the time he left the Occidental he was nearly blind with pain. The clink of the winnings in his pocket sounded in his ears like bronze bells. The Arizona sun flamed on his skull. He staggered two blocks—people turned their eyes from him, as if he were drunk—and then collapsed as the cramp seized his stomach. People hurried away from him as he emptied the contents of his stomach into the dust. The spasms wracked him long after he had nothing left to vomit.

Freddie heard footsteps, then felt the firm touch of a hand on his arm. “Freddie? Shall I get a doctor?”

Humiliation burned in his face. He had no wish that his helplessness should even be acknowledged—he could face those people who hurried away, there could be a pretense that they had seen nothing, but he couldn't bear that another person should see him in his weakness.

“It is normal,” he gasped. “Migraine. I have medicine in my room.”

“Can you get up? I'll help you.”

He wiped his face with his handkerchief, and then her hand steadied him as he groped his way to his feet. His spectacles were hanging from one ear, and he adjusted them. It didn't help—his vision had narrowed to the point where it seemed he was looking at the world through the wrong end of a telescope. He shuffled down Toughnut toward his room—he rented the back room of a house belonging to a mining engineer and his family, and paid the wife extra for meals that would not torment his digestion. He groped for the door, pushed it open, and stumbled toward the bed. He swiped off the pyramid of books that lay on the blanket and threw himself onto the mattress. A whirlwind spun through his head.

“Thank you,” he muttered. “Please go now.”

“Where is your medicine?”

He gestured vaguely to the wooden box by his wash basin. “There. Just bring me the box.”

He heard her boot-heels booming like pistol-shots on the wooden floor, and fought down another attack of nausea. He heard her open the velvet-padded box and scrutinize the contents. “Chloral hydrate!” she said. “Veronal! Do you take this all the time?”

“Only when I am ill,” he said. “Please—bring it.”

She gasped in surprise as he drank the chloral right from the bottle, knowing from experience the amount necessary to cause unconsciousness. “Thank you,” he said. “I will be all right now. You can go.”

“Let me help you with your boots.”

Freddie gave a weary laugh. “Oh yes, by all means. I should not die with my boots on.”

The drug was already shimmering through his veins. Josie drew off his boots. His head was ringing like a great bell. Then the sound of the bell grew less and less, as if the clapper was being progressively swathed in wool, until it thudded no louder than a heartbeat.

*

Freddie woke after dark to discover that Josie had not left. He wiped away the gum that glued his eyelids shut and saw her curled in his only chair with her skirts tucked under her, reading by the light of his lamp.

“My God,” he said. “What hour is it?”

She brushed away an insect that circled the lamp. “I don't know,” she said. “Past midnight, anyway.”

“What are you doing here? Shouldn't you be with Sheriff Behan?”

“He doesn't own me” Spoken tartly enough, though Freddie suspected that Behan might disagree.

“And besides,” Josie said, “I wanted to make sure you didn't die of that medicine of yours.”

Freddie raised a hand to his forehead. The migraine was gone, but the drug still enfolded his nerves in its smothering arms. He felt stupid, and stupidly ridiculous. “Well, I did not die,” he said. “And I thank you—I will walk you home if you like.”

She glanced at the book in her hands. “I would like to finish the chapter.”

He could not see the title clearly in the dim light. “What are you reading?”

“
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.”

Freddie gave a little laugh. “I borrowed that book from John Ringo. I think Twain is your finest American writer.”

“Ringo reads?” Josie looked surprised. “I thought you were the only person in the whole Territory who ever cracked a book, 
Herr Professor.”

“You would be surprised—there are many educated men here. John Holliday is of course a college graduate. John Ringo is a true autodidact—born poor but completely self-educated, a lover of books.”

“And a lover of other men's cattle.”

Freddie smiled. “That is a small flaw in this country, miss. His virtues surely outweigh it.”

The drug had left his mouth dry. He rose from the bed and poured a glass of water from his pitcher. There was a strange singing in his head, the beginnings of the wild euphoria that often took him after a migraine. Usually he would write in his journals for hours during these fits, write until his hand was clawed with cramp.

He drank another glass of water and turned to Josie. “May I take you home?”

She regarded him, oval face gold in the glow of the lamp. “Johnny won't be home for hours yet,” she said. “Are you often ill?”

“That depends on what you mean by 'often.'“ He shuffled in his stocking feet to his bed—it was the only other place to sit. He saw his winnings gleaming on the blanket—little rivers of silver had spilled from his pockets. He bent to pick them up, stack them on his little shelf.

“How often is often?” Patiently.

“Once or twice a month. It used to be worse, much worse.”

“Before you came West.”

“Yes. Before I—before I ‘lit out for the Territory,’ as Mr. Mark Twain would say. And I was very ill the first years in America.”

“Were you different then?” she asked. “Johnny tells me you have this wild reputation—but here you've never been in trouble, and—“ Looking at the room stacked high with books and papers. “—you live like a monk”

“When I came to America, I was in very bad health,” he said. “I thought I would die.” He turned to Josie. “I believed that I would die at the age of thirty-five.”

She looked at him curiously. “Why that number?”

“My father died at that age. They called it ‘softening of the brain.’ He died mad.” He turned, sat on the bed, touched his temples with his fingers. “Sometimes I could feel the madness there, pressing upon my mind. Waiting for the right moment to strike. I thought that anything was better than dying as my father had died.” He laughed as memories swam through the euphoria that was flooding his brain. “So I lived a mad life!” he said. “A wild life, in hopes that it would kill me before the madness did! And then one day, I awoke—” He looked up at Josie, his face a mirror of the remembered surprise. “And I realized that I was no longer thirty-five, and that I was still alive.”

“That must have been a kind of liberation.”

“Oh yes! But in any case that life was at an end. The Texas Rangers came to drive the wild men from the state, and—to my great shame—we allowed ourselves to be driven. And now we are here—” He looked at her. “Wiser, I hope.”

“You write to a lady,” she said.

Freddie looked at her in surprise. “I beg your pardon?” he said.

“I'm sorry. You were working on a letter—I saw it when I sat down. Perhaps I shouldn't have looked, but—”

Mirth burst from Freddie. “My sister!” he laughed. “My sister Elisabeth!”

She seemed a little surprised. “You addressed her in such passionate terms—I thought she was perhaps—” She hesitated.

“A lover? No. I will rewrite the letter later, perhaps, to make it less strident.” He laughed again. “I thought Elisabeth might understand my ideas, but she is too limited, she has not risen above the patronizing attitudes of that little small town where we grew up—” Anger began to build in his heart, rising to a red, scalding fury. “She 
rewrote my work.
 I sent her some of my notebooks to publish, and she changed my words, she added anti-Semitic nonsense to the manuscript. She has fallen under the influence of those who hate the Jews, and she is being courted by one, a professional anti-Semite named Förster, a man who 
distributes wretched tracts at meetings.”
He waved a fist in the air. “She said she was 
making my thoughts clearer.”
He realized his voice has risen to a shout, and he tried to calm himself, suddenly falling into a mumble. “As if she herself has ever had any clear thoughts!” he said. “God help me if she remains my only conduit to the publishers.”

Josie listened to this in silence, eyes glimmering in the light of the lantern. “You aren't an anti-Semite, then?” she said. “Your Superman isn't a—what is the word they use, those people?—Aryan?”

Freddie shook his head. “Neither he nor I am as simple as that.”

“I'm Jewish,” she said.

He ran his fingers through his hair. “I know,” he said. “Someone told me.”

Bells began to sing in his head—not the bells of pain, those clanging wracking peals of his migraine, but bells of wild joy, a carillon that pealed out in celebration of some pagan triumph.

Josie looked up, and he followed her glance upward to the pistol belt above his head, to his Colt, his Zarathustra, the blue steel that gleamed in the darkness.

“You've killed men,” she said.

“Not so many as rumors would have it.”

“But you have killed.”

“Yes.”

“Did they deserve it?”

“It is not the killing that matters,” Freddie said. “It is not the deserving.” A laugh burbled out, the strange rapture rising. “Any fool can kill,” he said, “and any animal—but it takes a Caesar, or a Napoleon, to kill 
as a human being,
 as a moment of self-becoming. To rise above that—“ He began to stammer in his enthusiasm. “—that merely human act—that foolishness—to overcome—to become—“

“The Superman?” she queried.

“Ha-ha!” He laughed in sudden giddy triumph. “Yes! Exactly!”

She rose from the chair, stepped to the head of the bed in a swirl of skirts. She reached a hand toward the gun, hesitated, then looked down at him.

“
Nicht nur fort sollst du dich pflanzen sondern hinauf,”
she said.

Her German was fluent, accented slightly by Yiddish. Freddie stared at her in astonishment.

“You read my journals!” he said.

A smile drifted across her face. “I wasn't very successful—your handwriting is difficult, and I speak German easier than I read it.”

“My God.” Wonder rang in his head. “No one has 
ever
 read my journals.”

That is her Jewish aspect, he thought, the people of the Book. Reverence for thought, from the only people in the world who held literacy as a test of manhood.

Josie glanced down at him. “Tell me what that means—that we should propagate not only downward, but upward.”

Weird elation sang through his head. “I meant that we need not be animals when—“ He recalled the decencies only at the last second. “—when we marry,” he finished. “We need not bring only more apes into the world. We can 
create
. We can be together not because we are lonely or inadequate, but because we are whole, because we wish to triumph!”

Josie gave a low, languorous laugh, and with an easy motion slid into his lap. Strangely enough he was not surprised. He put his arms around her, wild hope throbbing in his veins.

“Shall we triumph, Freddie?” she asked. Troy burned in her eyes.

“Yes!” he said in sudden delirium. “By God, yes!”

She bent forward, touched her lips to his. A rising, glorious astonishment whirled in Freddie's body and soul.

“You taste like a narcotic,” she said softly, and—laughing low—kissed him again.

It was an hour or so later that the shots began echoing down Tombstone's streets, banging out with frantic speed, sounds startling in the surrounding stillness. Freddie sat up. “My God, what is that?” he said.