Epitaph Read online

  “How’d I get to be so damn lucky?” he asked now, voice low and soft.

  She came to him, and he bent almost in half to receive her wiry arms around his neck. When he straightened up, she shrieked a laugh as he lifted her off her feet. “Maybe I’ll just stick you in my saddlebag and take you along!” Virg said. “How’d you like that?”

  “I’d like to see you try!”

  He set her down, planted a kiss on the top of her head, threw his saddlebag over his shoulder, and grabbed his hat off a peg by the door. Allie followed him outside and stood on the porch, shading her eyes with her hand.

  She’d seen two men killed by Virgil Earp in the line of duty, and she knew what every cop’s wife knows: The next time shots are fired, it could be her man staring empty-eyed at the sky.

  “Be careful!” she hollered.

  Virg didn’t look back, but he raised his hand in acknowledgment.

  THERE WAS A TIME when Mattie Blaylock looked forward to hearing Wyatt’s footsteps on the porch. She’d been walking the streets in Dodge when he took her in, and she was grateful in the beginning. Wyatt seemed glad of her, too, for a while.

  He hardly looked at her when he came in now. Mattie didn’t say anything either. She just sat there in her chair, rocking in the shadows.

  He reached past her and yanked the drapes open. She turned her face from the sunlight.

  “Place stinks,” he said, raising the sash to air it out. “It’s past four. Why ain’t you dressed?”

  “Why do you think?” He could be so damn stupid. “Headache.”

  “We got a posse,” he told her and went into the bedroom to collect what he needed.

  “How’s your tooth?” she asked. Making an effort.

  “Same.”

  “You find Doc?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Huh,” she said.

  Tombstone was the biggest place she’d ever lived in. Not finding a person who’d been in town for a whole day was an idea that took getting used to.

  Wyatt came back into the front room, a bedroll under one arm, the rest of his gear in a saddlebag. Hand on the doorknob, he paused to look around the house, making a list of her sins. Dust. Clothes on the floor. Dishes waiting. Chamber pot unemptied.

  “Clean this place up,” he said. Then he added, “Clean means clean, Mattie. It don’t just mean less dirty. It means clean.”

  “Go to hell,” she muttered, but she waited until he was gone to say it.

  She waited a good deal longer before she got out of the rocking chair. She tried to pick a few things off the floor, but leaning over made the migraine worse. So she poured herself another dose of laudanum, pulled the curtains closed, and went back to bed.

  WHEN STRIFE FIRST APPEARS, SHE IS SMALL

  TROY, A CITY BUILT ON RICHES

  OF ALL THE WITLESS, OBTUSE QUESTIONS ADDRESSED to John Henry Holliday in his short, unlucky life, the one he currently despised most was a simple rhetorical pleasantry: How are you? He’d never been to Tombstone before, but he was known to about half the gamblers in town, and every one he met had opened the conversation with “Well, if it ain’t Doc Holliday! How the hell are you, Doc?”

  “Just fine, thanks,” he always said, but producing that genial reply required iron self-control, for what he wanted to ask in return was “Are you blind or stupid? Look at me.” Skin like parchment. Hair half-grayed. So thin, he looked like a beanpole wrapped in cream-colored linen. Not content with destroying his lungs, tuberculosis was now eroding his vertebrae, two of which had collapsed in a stunning explosion of pain one evening when he attempted to pull Kate’s chair out for her after dinner. That small act of gallantry had cost him two inches in height, and he’d yet to find a tailor capable of concealing the resulting hump.

  John Henry Holliday had recently turned twenty-nine. On a good day, he looked fifteen years older. On a bad one, he felt about three weeks shy of a hundred.

  How are you, Doc? I’m miserable, jackass. How are you?

  The constant gnawing ache in his chest became briefly worse when he emerged from a quiet restaurant on Third Street. Squinting into the fierce glare of Arizona’s afternoon sunlight, he took shelter under the broad brim of a panama hat, though not before the sudden brilliance set off a violent sneeze. Leaning on his walking stick, he bent at the waist, rendered motionless by the sharp, familiar pain of tearing pulmonary adhesions. Laughter could cause this, or an unusually intense coughing fit. Sneezing was the worst, for it ripped his lungs away from the chest wall with a pang that could only be endured, not countered.

  “Jesus, Doc! Damn, you look like hell!”

  He turned at the sound of that dear, familiar voice and straightened as much as he could. “Morgan,” he said, offering his hand, “I feel even worse than I look, but it was worth every moment of that wretched journey to see you again.”

  Grinning, Morg lifted the lapels of Doc’s coat and whistled at a pair of pistols. “You carrying two now? Hell if that hardware don’t weigh more’n you!”

  “Luke Short tells me Tombstone is about twice as dangerous as Dodge, so I have come prepared.”

  “Luke’s not lying,” Morgan admitted. “Thanks for coming. Wyatt’s gonna be real glad. Where you staying?”

  “The Cosmopolitan, of course.”

  “Was I right about that piano? Nice one, ain’t it!”

  “The best I have ever played. I am perishin’, Morg. Let me buy you a drink—assuming Wyatt hasn’t turned you into a temperance man.”

  “Doc, he don’t even try anymore. And listen to this! My fine, upstanding, teetotal-Methodist brother has a quarter interest in the Oriental Saloon’s gambling concession! He don’t drink up the profits, so he’s making enough to bank faro games in a few other saloons, too. Him and Mattie own their house. And you ain’t gonna believe this: He’s wearing a badge again. Deputy sheriff. Working for Charlie Shibell.”

  Doc coughed his surprise. “How did he talk himself into that?”

  “Long story, and I ain’t got time to tell it. Him and Virg and me got a posse going out. Stolen livestock. Wanna come?”

  “I believe I will decline the offer, but I appreciate the invitation.”

  Morg glanced at the cane. “Hip giving you trouble again?”

  “It’ll be better after I’ve had a little more rest.”

  “Well, I gotta go,” Morgan said, moving off with a backward skip. “Hot damn! Wyatt’s gonna be real happy to see you! Soon as we get back, we’ll come by the Cosmopolitan.”

  “Take care, y’hear?” Doc called, leaning on his cane as Morgan Earp trotted off, dodging horses and wagons and foot traffic with thoughtless, easy grace.

  “You, too,” Morg yelled back. “I mean it, Doc! This place is dangerous.”

  AT LEAST EIGHTY PROFESSIONAL GAMBLERS had converged on Tombstone in its first year: wolves drawn to a herd of highly skilled hard-rock miners who got paid a stunning four dollars a day. Nearly two thousand men were working in a dozen silver mines, and competition was fierce among those who wished to feast on their wages.

  John Henry Holliday was still living up in northern Arizona when he ran into the famous gambler Luke Short in a Prescott saloon. Luke had warned him off Tombstone, for the town was being snarled over by two groups of loosely organized sporting men. “There’s easterners like us, but then there’s a bunch from the California slope, west of the Rockies. Vicious young bullies. It’s not like working in Dodge, Doc. I won big one night. Four of the Slopers came after me and took the cash before I could get back to my hotel. I went to the town marshal—Fred White, his name is—but they all had alibis for each other.”

  Luke had been on the gambling circuit a long time and he backed down to no one, but he was a small man with no taste for quarreling. “There’s a mountain of money in Tombstone,” he told Doc, “but it’s not worth the risk. Seems like somebody gets killed damn near every night.”

  “Word is,” Doc said quietly, “you were called upon to add to the tally.�
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  “Charley Storms.” Shaking his head at the memory, the spruce little gambler sat back. “Took a dislike to me after he lost, and got loud about it. Bat Masterson was there, and you know Bat. He always tries to sweet-talk an idiot before things get physical. He settled Storms down and got him to leave, but ten minutes later, Storms comes back with a pistol. He was drunk and he was slow. I was sober and fast enough. Grand jury decided not to indict, but afterward . . .”

  “Couldn’t stand the sight of the place?”

  Luke shrugged. “You and Mike Gordon?”

  “What have you heard?”

  “The usual dime-novel horseshit. Insults, a showdown, and another notch on the deadly dentist’s gun!”

  Doc closed his eyes and pulled in as deep a breath as he could—always a mistake. When the coughing passed, he drank off the last swallow of bourbon in his glass and waited a moment for the warmth to help. “You know Miss Kate and I had a saloon over in New Mexico?”

  Luke nodded.

  “Well, one evenin’, Mr. Gordon got it into his thick-boned, liquor-addled, hayseed head that one of our bar girls would enjoy spendin’ some private time with him. He was not an attractive suitor, and Miss Lucy was disinclined to accept his very insistent invitation. Mr. Gordon became cross, and Kate was on him like a duck on a June bug. Most men would have had the sense to get out and stay out.”

  “But not Gordon.”

  “He left but—like your Mr. Storms—it was only to find himself a gun. Came back shootin’ at Kate and Lucy. I stopped him.”

  “Jesus. Justifiable homicide?”

  “That was the judgment, but afterward . . .”

  “You couldn’t stand the sight of the place.”

  They both fell silent for a time.

  Luke shook the mood off first. “Bat Masterson gave up on Tombstone, too. The Earps are still down there, last I heard. Course, there’s always three or four of them around and even one Earp by himself is fearsome enough to inspire courtesy. Me? I look like easy pickings. I’m going back up to Dodge.”

  He didn’t have to spell it out. Tombstone would eat John Henry Holliday alive.

  Luke left Prescott the next day. A few weeks later, Doc left as well. Drifting south. Looking for warm, dry weather. He settled in Tucson, a little mountain town with a good climate and enough cash in circulation to support a small fraternity of professionals. He did all right for himself, too, making a decent enough living at the poker tables. There wasn’t a reason in the world to visit a mining settlement so dangerous it scared Luke Short. Then he received a letter from an old friend.

  Wyatt has a bad tooth, Morgan Earp wrote. He dont say so but he is nervis to go to another dentist. Can you come to Tombstone? We are doing good here. There is a liberry and they got a real nice piano at the Cosmopoliten hotel.

  Ordinarily, the dentist would have told Wyatt to come to Tucson for treatment, but before making up his mind, he telegraphed a single question:

  IS PIANO A STEINWAY STOP

  Morgan’s reply came about two hours later:

  CHICKERING SQUARE GRAND STOP

  Close enough, Doc thought, and bought himself a ticket to Tombstone. He wanted to play a first-rate piano before he died.

  This ambition he had fulfilled in the company of the pathetic child who was currently being called Mrs. Behan. As for her “husband,” Doc had taken a dislike to the man before they even boarded the coach at the Tucson depot. John Behan was a talkative, pushy, self-important little jingo who misinterpreted courteous murmurs for genuine interest. His enthusiasm for Tombstone was tiresome and at the end of their shared journey, Doc had seen no reason to stay in the city for more than a week. His agenda was uncomplicated: take care of Wyatt’s tooth, host a party for his friends, and stamp the dust of Tombstone from his feet before anyone got a chance to kill or rob him.

  Now, however, he had begun to reconsider his plans.

  For one thing, he’d underestimated how punishing the journey here would be. Climbing back into a stagecoach when the bruises were still fresh held no allure. Seeing Morgan Earp—albeit briefly—had lifted his spirits. And after a night’s sleep, he found himself receptive to the exuberance of a mechanical engineer with whom he’d just shared a restaurant table.

  “We, sir, are sitting on what may be the richest silver strike in world history,” the engineer informed him as they lingered over a well-prepared meal in a very decent restaurant. “Tombstone will dwarf the Comstock strike before it’s over. The ore assays at over forty-five hundred dollars’ worth of silver to the ton and we’re hauling a good twelve tons out of the works every day. Drilling still has to be done by hand with a steel and a hammer, and the ore is broken up with picks and extracted by the shovelful, but from that point on, processing is completely mechanized!”

  There were underground tram systems. Sixty-horsepower hoists. Stamping mills, roasters, dryers, and retorts. Ironworks, lumber mills, cartage companies. Capitalists were pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into the operations, but with refined silver at $1.20 an ounce, they were extracting millions. In the engineer’s opinion, Arizona would produce enough wealth to bring the whole nation back to prosperity.

  “All Tombstone needs is water and some good people,” he declared, “and it’ll turn into a garden spot!”

  The same might be said of hell, Doc thought, though it seemed unkind to say so in the face of such confident optimism.

  Doc himself was too familiar with the natural history of these western boomtowns to be quite that sanguine. A handful of men would stake out a grid in the wilderness and place gloriously deceptive advertisements in eastern newspapers, touting the location’s business potential. Empty lots would be sold to the first hardy settlers, who arrived with the tools of their trade or a wagonload of stock. Soon, crudely lettered one-word signs leaned against tents or raw board shacks. BLACKSMITH. BARBER. GROCERIES. LIQUOR. AMMUNITION.

  Often, that was the end of it. Cattle drives went elsewhere; a railroad surveyor chose a different route; a promising seam of ore narrowed and disappeared. Tents were stowed. Shacks were abandoned. Folks moved on.

  Sometimes, however, a local industry flourished and a second wave of boomers would arrive. Proper walls went up around wooden floors. Roofs were shingled. Window glass was shipped in. Proprietors’ names were emblazoned upon elaborate signs painted on false fronts, and it didn’t matter that no one was fooled by those phony second stories. Even the pretense of impressive architecture could be gratifying in the middle of nowhere. A few men might make money in astonishing quantity for a while, but more often than not, the boomtown would dwindle into a mere village or disappear altogether within a few years.

  Would Tombstone be different? It was too soon to tell. The streets remained unpaved. Wandering pigs snuffled through horse manure. Horseflies were a plague. Stray dogs fought for restaurant scraps in the alleys. The afternoon wind sent alkaline dust stinging into the eyes, and John Henry Holliday was not the only man in town with a chronic cough.

  Even so, a stroll through Tombstone was impressive. There were dozens of restaurants. Several good hotels. A pharmacy. Two chartered banks. Three local breweries. A pair of ice factories. Saloons, gambling halls, and brothels were certainly in evidence, but families had settled here as well, and there were shops that sold them groceries, dry goods, clothing, and furniture. A sign on a vacant lot announced plans for a school. The Episcopalians and Methodists already had churches; the Catholics were building one. At the edge of town, on a street called Toughnut, the foundation of a hospital had been laid near the pitheads, and . . . There it was!

  The library.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen so many books. Five hundred? Six? At first he simply sat in one of the upholstered chairs, catching his breath and gazing at the shelves. Then he browsed the collection and borrowed a copy of Trollope’s The Way We Live Now. If I don’t finish it before I leave town, he told himself, I can mail it back from Tucson.

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bsp; Book in hand, he returned to Allen Street, where he noticed some very fine gabardine on display at a haberdashery. Between his new hump and the most recent loss of weight, nothing he owned fit, but if he had one of those new double-breasted suits made, the additional fabric might give the impression of a few extra pounds.

  My own false front, he thought as he walked on.

  Admittedly, after Tucson’s peace, Tombstone’s industrial noise was wearying. The miners worked two ten-hour shifts, with time between to let the dust settle and the fumes dissipate. At any given hour, half were off duty, and Luke Short was right: There was a mountain of money here. But why compete with the Slopers for play against miners? he asked himself as he read the signs on office windows.

  Tombstone had attorneys and physicians, bankers and accountants. Surveyors, geologists, metallurgists, hydrologists, chemists. At least six kinds of engineer. Intelligent men, literate men. Men capable of conversation, not just vulgar, repetitive, ignorant bombast. Men who gambled in quiet, carpeted rooms with crystal chandeliers and silk-upholstered chairs, where attentive waiters provided good cigars and excellent liquor to a clientele unlikely to assault or rob the player who won a game.

  All around him, buildings were going up. The scent of raw pine boards reminded him of Atlanta after the war, when the city was getting back on its feet. The streets and boardwalks of Tombstone teemed with people in a hurry, people with big plans and great expectations. He found himself smiling at the bustle, stepping more quickly, feeling less hobbled and enervated, more lively and mettlesome. It was as though he’d laid down a burden—

  He stopped. And took a step back. And stumbled into a stranger, to whom he apologized without hearing his own voice. Hardly knowing what he was doing, he moved away from the crowds and noise and light and into a strange private silence where he was even more alone than usual.