The Last Woman Standing (13 page)

“If you want to learn something new, Miss Josephine, I’ll take you out shooting.”

“After my riding lesson with Johnny, I’m not ready for guns.”

“You weren’t
so
awful, Josephine,” Albert said.

“Thanks for the compliment, little Mr. B., but the world isn’t ready for me to pack a pistol.”

“There’s a right way and a wrong way—and it’s important to learn the difference, Miss Josephine,” Wyatt said. “The first lesson: learn what’s comfortable for you and stick tight. When I’m packing, I wear two guns in open holsters, like this, one on each hip. I shift ’em down low because my arms are long. That’s how it feels right for me. I got one set to go, and one in reserve. That second gun shows I’m serious.”

“I don’t need to see two guns to know you’re serious, Wyatt.”

“What about you, Miss Josephine?” His eyes studied mine. I made an effort to hold his gaze. “What are you serious about?”

The question gave me pause. I’d finished my ice cream, so I couldn’t use eating as an evasive maneuver. I wasn’t serious by nature, but I was passionate enough for two. Right then, I should have immediately thought “Johnny” in theater marquee–size letters. I didn’t.

Wyatt pulled my heart in a different direction, one that conflicted with my current domestic status. Was I suddenly feeling something deeper than I had before? Or was I being feckless and foolish?

Though Johnny and I shared a roof—and there wasn’t a wifely act I didn’t perform—he didn’t seem any more serious about marriage now that he had a regular income as sheriff than he had before. Maybe if I showed an interest in Wyatt, Johnny would become jealous and get busy making us legal. But I knew that wasn’t why I was flirting, if that’s what we were doing. It had nothing to do with Johnny and everything to do with Wyatt. Given the flush I felt, he had me reconsidering things I thought I knew for certain and solid.

Albert pierced the awkward pause with a new question: “Ever kill a man, Mr. Earp?”

“Nope, but I’ve scared a few.” His eyes slid off me. “I prefer talking a man out of gunfire or clocking him on the side of the head to snuffing out a life—but that’s me. And the choice has bit me in the chaps more than once.”

“Are you really as dead a shot as they say you are?” Albert asked.

“Don’t believe everything you hear, young Albert,” Wyatt said, wiping his hands on a napkin, tapping his holsters, and preparing to leave. “I learned my lesson in Kansas City: be fast, be accurate, and be alive.”

Wyatt rose and waltzed around the table, easing out my chair behind me. “Put all three on my tab, Lottie,” he said as he escorted us out the door, down the stairs, and onto the wooden sidewalk. Wyatt paused, a piece of warped board creaking under his boot, as if weighing what to say next.

“Thanks for the ice cream,” Albert said.

“Thanks for the company,” Wyatt said. “Eating ice cream can be a lonely business.”

“Albert and I are always happy to keep you company.” I blushed and added: “And put you out of your misery.”

Wyatt tipped his Stetson and backed away, turning and rambling across the wide road between the horse-and-wagon traffic. He passed Marietta Spence and her old mother carrying brooms and buckets, and gave his hat another tip before leaping onto the opposite sidewalk and disappearing into the Oriental.

Albert and I walked in the opposite direction. Once out of earshot, I said, “That man actually knew Wild Bill Hickok. What do you think about that, Albert?”

“What I think is that the man’s sweet on you.”

“He is not! What a thing for you to say, given your father and all. It was the ice cream that made him so sweet. I’m an almost-married woman.”

“Almost.”

“You are wrong.” I blushed, hoping with every fiber that Albert was right. True, that emotion was disloyal, but I couldn’t smother the genuine smile Albert’s words inspired despite my impassioned denial: “Wyatt didn’t have a word to say to me; all we talked about was guns.”

“Shoot, Josie!” He rolled his eyes.

“Is that a joke? Shoot? It’s a miracle!”

He punched my arm before taking my hand and smiling up at me with a string of even, white teeth. He’d be a lady-killer someday, no pistols required.

CHAPTER 15

MAY 20, 1881

It was one thing to observe the notorious Curly Bill Brocius stomping down Allen Street, cursing and laughing, spitting tobacco, surrounded by his cronies in bright bibbed shirts. But it was another to invite him over to play poker like Johnny did.

I would have called Curly Bill a colorful character of the Western frontier if I was a tourist ignorant that he’d killed Marshal White the previous October. He wasn’t just wild, he was feral. Even if the judge acquitted Brocius after two months in jail, the outlaw was dangerous. Maybe that shooting was accidental. Maybe it wasn’t. But he wasn’t just a harmless public nuisance: he celebrated his freedom by shooting at the toes of a preacher, making the clergyman dance in front of his congregation to the bullets’ beat. Bill had a prankster’s sense of humor, but it wasn’t particularly funny if you were the butt of his joke. I discovered that he had neither manners nor morals—he had no respect, but a surfeit of self-regard. There were bears in the wild that were more civilized. I learned that the hard way under my own roof.

Johnny invited William Brocius, Johnny Ringo, and their ilk over for Friday-night cards, which seemed harmless enough. Since I was the woman of the house, Johnny insisted I stay and play hostess, bake oatmeal cookies a la Harris House, serve a roast—that kind of thing. Curiosity won out over caution. I was eager to throw a party in my own house for the first time in my life. That wasn’t something we did on Perry Street. I had no reason to argue since I trusted Johnny’s protection and infallibility. He was the sheriff, after all.

During pillow talk, Johnny shared his plans for a business alliance with the cowboys. They tended to be Democrats and Southerners like himself, and they were rule benders rather than makers. Johnny’s strategy put him at odds with Wyatt. The Earps disliked Brocius, even if Wyatt and his brothers inevitably drank and gambled with the cowboys in town. When balancing the two prongs of the sheriff’s office—law enforcement and tax collection—it was the latter that prevailed for Johnny. He loved money, and that’s where the biggest profits lay. Wyatt, on the other hand, would always balance the books on the side of the law.

That night, Johnny and I looked happily around our new living room, the deviled eggs I’d prepared on the sideboard. But the room that had appeared spacious suddenly seemed overrun when our guests arrived. Brocius, who was in his midthirties, was oversized in everything he did; he entered following three bangs on the front door at 10:00 p.m., flung his coat on a chair, and slung his guns on the wooden hooks. Suddenly, it was as if his bear-size personality sucked the air out of the room.

Like Curly Bill, most of the Cochise County cowboys were damaged goods. I did not approve of them in general but had never been close enough to be justifiably fearful. That night, I still felt that Johnny knew what he was doing and that he was in control, despite rumors that Bill had murdered at least one man in Texas before he encountered Marshal White. Johnny Ringo, who was part of Bill’s loose circle, had been fourteen when he saw his father take a misstep off the wagon while heading west and shoot his own head off with a shotgun. Their wounds—and those they inflicted—bonded these men together. They were not easygoing men yearning to be yoked to responsibility and respectability. They were rustlers and thieves beyond the pale. Drink became a sort of religion that washed away their sins, as likely to bring chaos as communion. For some reason—whether arrogance or a faith that individuals with common interests would pursue them like gentlemen—Johnny apparently believed he could play with fire and not get burnt.

“Let me plant a kiss on the hostess,” said Curly Bill. Without gaining permission, he grabbed my shoulders in meaty paws and attempted to land his rubbery lips on mine. I managed to twist away at the last second. He only got a portion of my cheek—but it was a very big slice, which he sucked like a peach. His smell repelled me: the foul breath of unbrushed teeth, tobacco, and a rangy ripeness covered in whiskey.

To my surprise, Johnny laughed at this “mischief.” When I glared, he pointed to Bill’s Stetson banded with silver conchos and said, “Take the man’s hat.” I bit my tongue out of deference to Johnny, playing hostess to his host. Still, it surprised me that my man was suddenly free of jealousy just when I could have used his green-fueled outrage. I should’ve known better. Johnny and Curly Bill had already forged an unusual business partnership. Along with his deputy, Billy Breakenridge, Johnny had the inspiration to recruit Curly Bill to collect taxes from the ranchers and rustlers on the range for a percentage of the take. Bill the Bully turned out to be a highly efficient tax collector. Few Cochise County citizens—on either side of the law—had the power to defy him. Since Johnny received 10 percent of all taxes collected, this was a good deal for him. The alliance also appealed to Brocius’s dark sense of humor. He was a stick-up man for the government, ambushing rustlers. The irony appealed to Curly Bill.

The poker game was, in part, a celebration of this lucrative confederacy. Bill straddled a chair at the dining-room table where Johnny had draped a large square of green felt. The cowboy rearranged his black, snail-like curls on his freckled brow—his vanity exceeded that of Napoleon’s Josephine—and popped his cuffs to show he had nothing up his sleeves but wrists. To his left, two sealed twenty-card decks waited beside the seat Johnny set aside for himself. At each place stood a bottle of whiskey—apparently the good stuff, not the home-brewed brown liquor made with snake venom, which often passed for scotch.

The other guests began filing in, their boots pounding on the thin pine floors: Ike Clanton and his brother Phineas, Frank and Tom McLaury, and Deputy Billy Breakenridge. The McLaurys had better manners than the rest at the beginning of the night, but as the cards were dealt and the whiskey cracked, the group got rowdy, egged on by Curly Bill, who seemed to grow larger as the night wore on and the room shrank. Albert remained in the loft, but I can’t imagine he got much sleep.

Johnny presided as the gracious, impeccably dressed Southern host, his pocket watch dangling from a heavy gold chain. He ensured that each guest got what he wanted, keeping the card game moving and the conversation lively. He let the poker players tell their tales. When there was a lull, he contributed an anecdote that was often at his own expense. When conflicts arose, whether it was a debate about cards or who among them was the better shot, Johnny interceded to smooth out tempers. Billy Breakenridge insisted that Curly Bill was the room’s finest marksman, able to shoot a jackrabbit midhop, and a quarter out of a piker’s fingers. Curly Bill called up to Albert to help him demonstrate. But before Curly Bill could rise, Johnny Ringo stood up; he was a quiet, bookish man until he was liquored up. He claimed to be the deadlier shot.

“True, Ringo, if your opponent is unarmed,” said Ike Clanton, laughing like a wheezy hyena. He shared a large adobe with his brothers on the ranch their widowed father built on the San Pedro River. Timing had been everything. The Clantons settled to raise and rustle cattle right before the Schieffelin Brothers and Dick Gird discovered silver nearby in 1879, named the town Tombstone, and launched the boom that primed the local beef industry. Ike pushed back his chair, which clattered behind him, and said, “Let’s pull.”

“Why don’t we go outside and test it, you belligerent braggart,” said Ringo, straightening his belt and squaring his hips, “I’ll even give you a head start—or did you forget your guns in your Pappy’s pocket?”

“Ante up,” Johnny said. “Are we here to play poker or measure our manhood with yardsticks?” I blushed at the comment, realizing that while Johnny may not have been the fastest draw in the West, or the bravest lawman, or the first on the scene, he could talk a snake out of its fangs.

Johnny played cards as I watched, ignorant of the rules but trying to learn on the fly. My man got flushes and three of a kind and even won a hand with two pairs. The cowboys were folding around him, tossing cards and cursing the devil for dealing bad hands. Johnny glowed as he reached forward to scoop gold coins and dusty dollar bills. He separated them into neat piles, each win calling for another shot of whiskey. I began to speculate that this wasn’t an ordinary poker game among friends. They could have played on Allen Street anytime. This night of cards, in the privacy of our home, was intentionally rigged with the mutual consent of all involved. Johnny later hinted as much (without drawing a map) when belatedly trying to justify the party.
Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas,
was all I could think. The game enabled Brocius and the cowboys to deliver kickbacks to the sheriff for the beneficial tax-collecting scheme. As a side bonus, their losses functioned as bribes for ignoring rustling and roughhousing beyond the town limits.

There was no sign of the game ending at 4:00 a.m. Their drunken slurs became impossible to follow, the clashes more frequent, the threats more violent. Phineas Clanton sat on the sofa, his mucky boots on the armrest, his greasy head thrown back. Snorting snores escaped his lips. His brother Ike pelted Phin with biscuits from the sideboard, and then a chicken leg. When Ike raised an empty whiskey bottle from the green felt and stood up to aim, Johnny stopped him. “We’re not in a saloon, Ike. Sit yourself down and play cards.”

“Who are you to tell me what to do?” Ike slurred.

“I’m not going to pull out my sheriff’s badge,” Johnny said, dealing out another hand. “Let’s just say you’re in my house, my rules. No throwing bottles after midnight.”

“That seems fair enough, sir,” Tom McLaury agreed.

“No bottle tossing after midnight,” concurred Tom’s brother, Frank, as he examined his fresh hand, his features revealing nothing. He could have had aces or eights and no one at the table would have known.

“I’m a rule maker, not an order taker,” said Ike. “And I’m certainly not going to take any horse crap from a half-cocked, half-breed, badge-wearing son of an Irish Catholic bastard like you, Behan. You are no Southerner in my book.”

Brocius fanned his cards, then looked up and waded in: “You have a book, Ike? That comes as a mighty shock. How about this: your granddaddy and Behan’s both owned slaves, so I’d say that makes you both princes of the Confederacy. Now, are we going to play cards here or lady-talk?”

My drowsy eyes popped open. Did Curly Bill just say that Johnny’s beloved Grandpa Harris owned slaves? That was a story that the voluble Johnny had skipped. Maybe it was just late and I misunderstood. I didn’t know what disgusted me more, the past or the present. A headache began to thicken above my right eye. So these were the men Johnny was cultivating. He dumped Wyatt for these scoundrels. I glanced at Deputy Breakenridge, who was cleaning his fingernails with a serrated knife, just watching the show, and taking it all in, not interfering. So, this was the law in Tombstone.

I felt nausea coming on as the headache deepened. I abandoned hope that the men would leave before they asked me to cook them breakfast. I touched Johnny’s shoulder, and he didn’t look up, so I slipped wordlessly out of the smoky room into our own.

I rubbed my stinging eyes and removed the false smile I’d plastered on my face until the last hour. I undressed, unfastened my boots, and released my corset stays with a sigh of relief. I never felt entirely free all strapped, my breath shortened and my waist cinched. While the atmosphere among the men in the other room grew increasingly oppressive, my wardrobe reminded me in a visceral way of my limitations in mixed company, trussed like a chicken and expected to behave like a hen.

I stood in my chemise, allowing my body to readjust to its rightful position. My stomach expanded and my breasts fell from my throat; I rubbed the life back into them. This was me, unfettered. I inhaled deeply, gulping like a drowning woman to clear my head, and stretched my arms to the ceiling and then to the floor, sensing each vertebra as I rose back up. I removed my hairpins slowly, shaking the locks loose, left and right, down and back. I rubbed my scalp to relax away my thoughts and concerns: that Johnny had allied himself with these ruffians and invited them, like demons, across our threshold and into our life.

The inky sky had begun to brighten infinitesimally into the cadmium blue of early morning, which gave me enough soft light to slip under the covers without lighting a candle. With my head on my feather pillow, I curled up with the belief that Johnny would wrap himself around me sooner than later; overcome by exhaustion, I fell asleep instantly despite the hootenanny in the adjacent room.

Not much time elapsed before I awoke to the sound of the door opening. Suspenders snapped. Heavy boots thumped on the floor. The sound of the poker party flooded in through the open door. I first thought it was Johnny coming to kiss me good night. But he smelled wrong. Suddenly the room was ripe with sweat and unwashed feet and peculiar cigar smoke. I hoped I might be dreaming until the mattress sank and the bed frame squawked in a way that was unlike Johnny. I experienced a fear and foreboding that was more nightmarish than any dream I’ve ever had, a terror that crawled up my spine and raised the hair on the back of my neck.