The Last Woman Standing (14 page)

I did not allow myself to wait for what would happen next, but leapt from the bed toward the window and grabbed my shawl. I hoped my fear was all in my imagination and that I would be alone in the room. But there in the early morning light lay Curly Bill. He was naked atop the coverlet: his muscular biceps flexed, his hands rested behind his head, his armpits and the meeting of his mighty thighs furry pelts.

I screamed for Johnny, then waited to hear his response or his boots rushing across the living room to my aid. It was oddly quiet in the next room, except for some stifled giggling. My voice rose with panic as I called again. To my horror, there was no response, except what might have been the sound of a scuffle. When the loft stairs creaked, an unfamiliar voice hissed: “You, back to bed,” apparently to Albert.

Untouched by my horror—entertained, even—Curly Bill leered at me from Johnny’s side of the bed, flexing a beefy bicep for my benefit. “I won you fair and square in the last hand,” he said.

“That’s impossible.” My voice squeezed tight with fear. Once I found my breath, I pointed to the door and yelled, “Get out of my bedroom!”

“I’m not going anywhere. I had aces over jacks. Johnny had two pair.”

“Johnny would have to possess me to gamble me away, you devil, and he doesn’t.” It was unpleasant enough having the man under my roof; sharing a bed with him was inconceivable. I would not submit. Or, at least, I would not surrender quietly. I imagined those couples that Curly Bill had forced to dance naked and flushed with horror: it had seemed altogether different when read in newsprint. I had no leverage over this man except Johnny, and he wasn’t running to my rescue.

“You’re as good as hitched, Mrs. Behan, living together under the same roof.” He twisted a snail-like curl on his damp forehead. He patted my side of the bed with his meaty hand. “Come back to bed, darling.”

“Get out of here!” The door was on his side of the mattress. I felt guilt and shame. Had I somehow invited him into my bedroom by going to sleep while the men were still in the house? Had I sent a signal of which I wasn’t aware? Had my smiles in service of Johnny’s politicking signaled an invitation that I didn’t intend? Or worse: Had shacking up with Johnny before marriage signified a willingness to ignore all legal convention? It did me no good to surrender to my doubts. However I felt, I knew I had to remain strong, aggressive even, so I said: “You reek.”

“You smell nice, too, Miss Josephine. And you’re even prettier when you’re angry.”

“You have not seen angry yet. I am not a horse to be bartered.”

“But I will ride you.”

“You will not.”

“You know that you want it.” I knew I did not, but had I asked for it by leaving the protection of my home for Tombstone? I was momentarily struck dumb. “Don’t be coy with me, Josie girl. You know you’re a fine piece of horseflesh: all that flouncing about and eyelash flutter and wiggle. Why give it away free to that little man Behan, when you can have a real man with something worthwhile in his pants and gold in his pockets?”

Curly Bill lunged across the bed and seized my wrist. I screamed as if I was on the verge of being scalped. While the grinning brute held fast to me while kneeling atop the mattress, I thrashed and yelled with a new edge of desperation, calling Albert, too, and again for Johnny—this time, as if the call for law enforcement might have more impact than the ties of love, I called “Sheriff.” I heard no movement from the other room. It was silent, an audience engrossed in the heroine’s tragic predicament—Aida in an opera, not Josephine in an operetta.

Appearing disgusted with me and the racket I was raising, the beast released his hold on me and got to his feet. “I’m going. It was just a joke. You’re no fun at all. You should have played along.” A red bruise circled my wrist.

But Curly Bill showed no signs of moving. He stood at the foot of the bed, undressed and aroused, his smile having taken a nasty, sneering turn. He looked me in the eye. “Remember this,” he said, lowering his voice, “I know where you live.”

Only then did the outlaw climb back into his clothes and boots, making a slow show of it. At the door, Curly Bill paused to leer at me again before exiting.

“I told you my Josie wouldn’t buy it,” I heard Johnny say.

“It’s my turn now.” I recognized Ike by his slurry voice and hyena laugh. “You’ve been flaunting that fancy dancer from San Francisco for months, Sheriff Slicker-than-shit. I’ll teach her how to ride. You got your cash. Now give us a little fun.”

“Shut it, Ike,” said a voice that I didn’t recognize. “You’re so drunk you couldn’t even tickle her with that limp rope.”

“Not like your old man and Timberline,” said another with a similar twang. “Your pa’s a goat with that old bitch.” As I heard chairs scrape outside and something crash, I flung a jug at the wall to register my anger heard. I was shocked, ashamed, and humiliated—but I wasn’t going to let one more man through that door as I sat down with my back against the wood, nursing hot tears.

CHAPTER 16

MAY THROUGH JULY 1881

Johnny and I never recovered from our night with Curly Bill. That didn’t exactly make us unique—just ask the dancing preacher over in Charleston if his congregation ever showed him the same respect following their Sunday prayer meeting with Mr. Brocius. As I said, the rustler’s antics were always more amusing when they happened to someone else, preferably in another town. And, while Johnny was a natural-born storyteller, he’d failed to mention the darker side of his family history. When I pried further, he shut me down. Even his smooth tongue couldn’t turn that awful night around. Maybe that was Johnny’s tragic flaw: he loved company but lacked loyalty. I guess it was a little late to discuss
that
with the first Mrs. Behan.

The next week, Curly Bill’s peculiar sense of humor got him into more trouble. On the way to the mining village of Galeyville in the mountains about a hundred miles east, he shot Jim Wallace’s horse out from under his outlaw buddy. Wallace had to walk the rest of the way into town. Like me, the weary cowboy failed to appreciate the joke. But unlike me, he had a gun and was fully clothed. The Arizona newspapers reported that on May 25, after a round of drinks at the saloon on the banks of Turkey Creek, the drunken pair quarreled, insults slung and apologies withheld. Wallace apparently had had enough bullying, and while Brocius threatened to fire, Wallace took the initiative, shooting his companion first. The bullet entered the left side of Bill’s neck and exited his right cheek. His jawbone shattered.

When I heard news of the “tax collector’s” grave injury, I rejoiced. While rumors that the cowboy was on his deathbed were exaggerated, I knew the wounded brute wouldn’t be coming to collect his debt at my house anytime soon. That in itself was a tremendous relief. But in the aftermath of his poker-night antics, the damage to my affections for Johnny had already been done. I just didn’t know how to extricate myself. The prospect of leaving Johnny after investing all of my father’s money in the house we shared worried me to no end.

Meanwhile, Johnny and I pretended that nothing had changed. We attended the Redpath League’s Grand Ball at the brand-new Schieffelin Hall on the corner of Fremont and Fourth to benefit the Irish (Johnny was on the committee and wore a green ribbon on his chest). We dined out a little more often, even returning to the Grand, but not sipping unlimited Champagne. Though the romance had faded, any change in Johnny’s demeanor was undetectable out in public. We finally had a roof under which to make love, but the act seemed tainted after Brocius laid his curls on Johnny’s pillow.

The injured outlaw became the proverbial elephant in our bedroom. I could understand why he’d bullied Johnny into that joke. Curly Bill was the kind of belligerent prankster who would have shot a man who didn’t laugh. Johnny, feeling physically threatened, didn’t want to be that man. But I couldn’t forgive him for abandoning me. Even if Brocius wasn’t rising from his sickbed anytime soon, I doubted Johnny could or would protect me from the other cowboys with whom he increasingly associated.

My trust in Johnny, already frayed, became too thin to support our better selves. At home, talking became as good as arguing. Johnny’s expectations—that I would have food on the table whether he showed up for dinner or not, that I would spread my legs or roll over on demand in this pose or that pose whenever he entered the door—ended our short honeymoon even before we wed.

Our love was burning out into ashes just as a devastating fire threatened Tombstone. A cigar spark ignited a whiskey cask at Allen Street’s Arcade Saloon. That scorching afternoon topped one hundred degrees, and the flames spread swiftly. The fire feasted on the flimsy wood-frame buildings, destroying a swath from Fifth to Seventh Streets and Fremont to Toughnut. The volunteer fire department lacked the necessary equipment, trucks, and hoses that Mayor Clum was just then buying on a trip east. The next day, I read in the
Epitaph
that the blaze consumed sixty-six businesses and cost $175,000 in damages, but fortunately, no lives lost. The newspaper survived, too.

While the town pulled together, Johnny and I struggled to survive the blaze. It’s an odd thing how a man who doesn’t want to be saddled with a particular woman anymore keeps upping the ante until she walks away from him as if it were her choice. In that, Johnny was typical. He didn’t exactly want to dump me, but now that money was coming in and he wore the sheriff’s badge, I didn’t add value to any of his schemes. He didn’t want to marry me, although he didn’t have the guts to admit it. Instead, he gave me a demonstration of the fact, as if one were needed.

I don’t recommend ending an engagement by discovering your oily partner clamped onto another man’s wife. That’s what I recall about July 11, which became an anniversary of sorts—a day I would come to observe with a sense of relief for having dodged a bullet. I’d taken Albert to Tucson for a visit to the ear doctor. When we returned home earlier than anticipated, dripping with sweat and thirsty and out of sorts, I expected the house to be empty and Johnny at work. I heard something in the bedroom that sounded like a cornered raccoon. I went to see what the racket was about and staggered when I glimpsed Mrs. Dunbar’s chicken legs stretched over Johnny’s broad shoulders. With his muscular buttocks bared, Johnny kneeled and grunted on our brass bed (which came with a lifetime guarantee).

Disgust and horror surrendered to anger and rose up my spine like lava. I felt more exposed than the naked pair: he was the only man who’d seen my bare breasts, shyly at first, then brazenly, comfortably, and joyously. My nipples were his nipples, twisted and toyed with by sure fingers, but now I knew the awful truth. He had seen me, squeezed me, taken my virginity, and moved on. I wasn’t his one and only; I was his one of many.

Despite Johnny’s candied words, I was nothing special to him. I was not a unique beauty of rare quality, but merely another conquest. The injustice stung, but a more hideous realization followed. From the first moment I’d arrived in Tombstone, my status must have been apparent to everybody except me. Even Kitty must have known that first Friday in San Francisco, awaiting my comeuppance, the surrender of youth and beauty to a charming womanizer.

How could Johnny betray me after I’d traveled so far and sacrificed so much? After I told him every secret in my heart, every fear, small and large, every dream and nightmare? I would only realize much later that his rutting had little to do with me, and everything to do with his own nature. But that broiling afternoon I felt intensely small and unworthy and abandoned, like a disgusting wad of tobacco chewed up and spit out. I didn’t know whether to yell at Johnny or berate myself for being the fool my mother always believed me to be.

But I wasn’t alone in that stifling bedroom. As shame and anger fought inside me, Albert’s strangled exclamation awoke me to responsibility. I covered the boy’s eyes from the barnyard spectacle. This wasn’t only happening to me: it was a setback for this beautiful, sensitive child struggling to overcome his parents’ acrimonious public divorce following his sister’s tragic death. Albert was striving to view his father in a better light than the one his mother shined on her ex-husband—and this primal moment only confirmed her low opinion.

Our once-happy home ended that day. Over Johnny’s sweaty back, I nodded to the wide-eyed Mrs. Dunbar, the wife of Johnny’s business partner at Dexter Livery Stable. I saw every rib on her scrawny body. But I didn’t blame her—it was Johnny who couldn’t recognize a good woman ready to follow him to hell and back. Or at least Tombstone in the summer, which was close enough.

Johnny had his rear to us, athletically occupied, grunting and oblivious to our presence. I wanted to scream that he would never find a better woman than I, or one who loved him more, but my voice failed me. And good seemed less important than having gymnastic tendencies, in which case I had to defer to the flexible Mrs. Dunbar. I turned on my heel and exited the house without stopping for so much as an extra pair of drawers, still holding Albert’s clammy hand.

We rushed together down Safford Street and away from the house we shared together. Hot and sweaty and fatigued, we both cried. Albert slowed down as we put more distance behind us and the new cottage. Then the boy stopped. I didn’t know where I was going, except away. I looked into his eyes, realizing he already knew that he couldn’t run any farther than the corner of Dust and Ash. I wrapped my arms around him, but it was too hot, too humid, too soon. He pushed me away, shrinking from my touch. Any comfort I could give him was only temporary. I was not his mother and I never would be. And I could only guess that he had fewer illusions about his father than I. “I must go back,” he said, and left me there, sweating through every pore, crying to bust my tear ducts, alone and feeling every inch of my isolation and abandonment.