Return of Little Big Man (26 page)

But right now, I says, my hat still in my hand, “Ma’am, I wonder, do you know of anybody might rent a room to me and my dog?”

She looks down at Pard and frowns, but what she said was favorable. “Well, you’re all right, ain’t you?” I reckon this was directed at Pard. To me she says, “If I was you, I’d get me one of them little houses.” Still holding that armload of bundles, she nods in the direction of further along Fremont, where there was some shacks of raw lumber. “But if you don’t like Mexicans you won’t be happy, for it’s mostly them from there on.

“I get along with anybody who ain’t nasty,” I told her. “I seen enough trouble in my life to want as little as I can get away with from here on in.”

She laughed quite a bit, and says what I considered remarkable, “Do me and you happen to be related? We sure look at things the same way.”

“Let me introduce myself, ma’am. My name is Jack Crabb, and this here’s my dog Pard.”

“Now, no more ma’am, please, Jack. Just call me Allie. And don’t think me forward. As I say, I got me a husband, a great big fellow in fact. When he first asked me to walk out, I says, ‘Whyn’t you pick on somebody your own size?’” And telling how he laughed, she herself was so amused, tears come to her eyes. Then she settled down and said, “They’re asking twenty a month.” I realized she meant the shacks near the Mexicans. “But they’ll take fifteen, and that’s a fact.”

“I’m real obliged to you, Allie. And give my respects to your mister, for he is a fortunate man.”

She was real pleased at this, but her kind of plain-talking woman in them days wasn’t used to praise, seeing it as flattery whose purpose was suspect. “Get along with you,” says she, “before the neighbors, who happen to be my relatives, get the wrong idea and tell Mr. Earp.”

“Earp?”

“Yes, sir,” she says proudly. “My husband.”

“Am I hearing you right? You are Mrs. Wyatt Earp?”

She laughs again, but this time it ain’t with entirely good feeling. “My man is Virgil Earp! Wyatt’s his younger brother.”

“Oh, I’m real sorry, Allie.”

I had a feeling she was not insulted by the apology, but she just smiled and wished me the best on renting a place, and she went on in her house.

As it happened, me and Pard did get that shack and paid what Allie said we ought to of, to the landlord, an educated higher type of fellow who come to Tombstone to make his fortune the smart way, namely in real-estate speculation and not by working in the silver mines. So living on the same street I frequently run into Virgil Earp’s little woman and become the same kind of friend to her as I had been with them working girls at the Lone Star in Dodge, in saying which I don’t intend no disrespect to Allie (for if she heard me say that, she’d spit in my face), who was of spotless virtue. What I mean is only I was just her friend and nothing more.

Another person I met was Mattie Earp, who was Wyatt’s wife, a modest-looking woman, quiet and reserved, as befitted the companion of an egotistical type like Wyatt, you might say, except that the next female he took up with, and stayed, was completely different. Anyhow, the Earp brothers, and there was even two more, James and Morgan, all lived along the same street, in fact Morg and his woman for a while moved in Allie and Virge’s house, little as it was. The Earps was the closest brothers to one another I ever knowed, one for all et cetera, and I don’t see that as a bad thing in itself, whatever the era, but especially in that one, and in fact I was real envious.

Speaking of the latter, the furnishings of the shack, left behind by the former tenant, was not much of an improvement on Bill’s barrel, which might of made Pard feel at home, but I required at least something to get me off the dirt floor in a region noted for rattlesnakes, gila monsters, and scorpions, so I scouted around town and found a used canvas cot I expect somebody stole off the Army and bought a serape from one of the Mexican women who was my neighbors in the other direction from the Earps, and also a couple tortillas wrapped around a wad of frijoles cooked with chilis, which made me real nostalgic for the time I spent in Santa Fe with a big fat passionate gal named Estrellita, I being only sixteen at the time, with quite a bit more vigor than I had at forty, and often full of pulque, which I hadn’t tasted since. It was just my good luck that I hadn’t went on to become another Bill Crabb.

After our home had been set up this far, I left Pard to guard the premises and went in to the Oriental saloon, where I had last seen Bat. Well, wouldn’t you know he was already employed there, dealing faro for the house, and there was Wyatt Earp, striding around looking important in his role as one of the owners, and when I come up to the table and Bat had a free minute, he says, “They can put you on as barkeep. Go over and introduce yourself to Frank Leslie.”

First I should say I had seen a few saloons in my day but never anything as lavish as the Oriental, where the enormous mahogany bar alone, including the so-called altar, the back-bar with its lineup of bottles and fancy etched-glass mirror and a cash register big as an organ, was supposed to of cost a hundred thousand dollars. They kept on hand a framed article clipped from the
Tombstone Epitaph
on the opening a year before, which said nothing like it could be found this side of San Francisco: “Twenty-eight burners, suspended in neat chandeliers, afforded an illumination of ample brilliancy, and the bright lights reflected from the many colored crystals on the bar sprinkled like a December iceling in the sunshine.”

Bat told me to go see the head bartender, one Buckskin Frank Leslie, who I had not heard of till then but who had already, like so many of them on the staff of the Oriental, had a colorful life and been an Indian scout for the Army in an earlier day as well as a performer in one of Cody’s shows, though he rarely talked about these matters, and had also killed a man in Tombstone the previous summer, which I certainly heard about from Allie Earp next time I run into her and says where I was working.

At the moment though I didn’t know none of this but just saw a brushily mustachioed gent in a barkeep’s red vest over quite a fancy white shirt with studs of what seemed precious gems and cuff links likewise, who was not just pouring drinks but making quite a show of it, holding the bottle high in the air and at an angle that produced an arc of crystalline liquid glittering in the light of them chandeliers and catching it in a glass held as low as his arm could reach and without a lost drop. It was an amazing performance, and I complimented him on it.

“Mr. Leslie, I’ve been of the profession myself for a few years, but never did I see such an exhibition of mixology.”

He thanked me and when I told him what Bat had said, directed me to put on a apron and start right away if I wanted to.

“Mind showing me how to do that trick?” I asked.

“All it takes is practice,” says he. “Better do it outside, with bottles filled with water.”

I went around the bar and took the folded apron he found on a shelf. It was freshly laundered and slightly starch. Everything at the Oriental was of the best quality and well maintained. There was more drinkers at the bar than you would of thought for early afternoon and not in a Kansas cattle camp at the end of a drive. I would of thought more of them might be out at the silver mines, but by then there was a lot of other trades in Tombstone that was practiced near the saloons.

Most of the customers on hand stayed at his end of the bar to watch Frank’s fancy tricks, of which I had seen only the simplest. Sometimes he’d flip a glass end over end as he was just starting the pouring with the bottle in his other fist, but by the time the point of the high-arching stream got there, the glass would be right-side up to receive it, and always without the least splash. That last effect or lack thereof was the one I never did master, however much I practiced.

Though the drinkers had to wait awhile before Frank could serve them, nobody was attracted to the immediate service at my end of the bar, I was acquainting myself with the bottles lined up along the bottom of the altar and the higher ones alongside the big mirror. Quite a few of the potions available was new to me, for most of what I poured in my time at the Lone Star was the plain red whiskey common to that place and day, and we was not above watering it on occasion when the ready supply ran low or, with some of the characters who worked there, as part of their profit-skimming effort. Gin and brandy was also offered for them with those tastes, and on occasion one of the house girls might take a sip of sherry wine instead of the usual weak tea, but much of the elaborate variety of fiery liquids available at the Oriental I was looking at for the first time. For example, Apache Tears, brewed, said the label, right in Tombstone, and Tanglefoot, Bill Cody’s pet word for a drink, appeared to be a real trade name, as was White Mule and Red Dog, Bumblebee, and Prickly Ash Bitters, not to mention a fluid named Cincinnati Whiskey, which of course led me to guilty thoughts of Mrs. Aggie Hickok and the lost money I was supposed to deliver to her.

“Hold on,” says someone standing at the bar behind me. “I believe there’s an outstanding warrant against you in Dodge.”

I turns around and sees the fellow whose idea of a joke this was. “Good day, Wyatt.”

“Hello, Jack,” says he, dressed in the gambler’s black tailcoat. He was not unfriendly, though I seldom seen him smile except at one of his brothers. “Did Bat tell you Luke Short’s here with us too?”

Short was another former citizen of Dodge City and a man who enjoyed some reputation as the “undertaker’s friend,” on account of the habit he supposedly had of shooting his victims between the eyes so laying them out wasn’t a messy job.

“Is that right?”

“And Doc’s here as well,” Wyatt goes on, “and of course Big Nose Kate. Half of Dodge’s turning up in Tombstone.”

“I see Doc and Kate are staying at Fly’s boardinghouse,” I told him, if only to seem knowledgeable, for Wyatt always had the air of lording it over you.

He disregards that, in his way of having said the last word on a subject, and asks, “Are you heeled?”

I was thinking about saying, Why, so you could take it away and buffalo me again? But as he was now one of them that paid my wages, I didn’t. “I don’t own a gun,” I says.

“Better get yourself one,” says he. “Us Dodge fellows have got to stick together against the cowboys.”

“I didn’t know there was that many in these parts,” says I. “You mean it’s just like Dodge all over again? I thought most here was silver miners.”

Wyatt frowned, which made his eyes, rarely genial, even colder looking than normal. “The word’s got a different meaning hereabout. In this part of the world ‘cowboy’ is the same as ‘rustler.’” Then he smirks and with a head movement indicates the other end of the bar, where Leslie was still showing his tricks. “You want to keep on Frank’s good side. He’s not only the best mixologist in Tombstone, but he can get unruly when he drinks, and drunk or sober he’s a mean man with a gun.”

I ought to say right here that me and Buckskin Frank always got on fine together, and I never knowed a nicer fellow, for while on duty at the Oriental I never saw him take a drink. When he wanted to tie one on he went to the other local establishments, where he was known for not only shooting at flies on the ceiling but actually hitting a good many. He and Wild Bill would of had some entertaining exhibitions. The “Buckskin” of his nickname come from the fringed attire he wore off duty, in which I believe he was influenced by Bill Cody when he performed in one of the latter’s theatrical shows. He liked Buffalo Bill, so I told him of me and Bat’s visit to the Welcome Wigwam.

“Didja ever offer old Bill a drink?” Frank once asked me.

“Never had a chance,” I says. “He always did the providing.”

“Well, if you done it when I knew him, he would always say the same thing: ‘Sir, you speak the language of my tribe.’”

So you see what an amiable fellow Frank Leslie could be, but the year before while romancing the wife of a man called Mike Killeen, so Allie Earp told me, when Killeen come after him Frank shot him in the face. However, as Mike subsequently died of the wounds, Frank by marrying the widow showed he really cared for her, and Allie always approved of romance, and she claimed, surprising me, her husband Virge was of the same sentimental cast of mind, while his brother Wyatt was never nice to any woman not a harlot, which comment was no surprise to me, though I did remember that in Dodge once he was fined one dollar for slapping around a dance-hall girl who had sassed him (while her own fine was put at twenty bucks).

It hadn’t taken Allie long to make clear the dim view she took of her brother-in-law. She had been aching to get this off her chest with somebody, and the only other people she had to talk to locally was either Wyatt’s brothers, all devoted to him, or their wives, the nearest being Wyatt’s own, that crushed woman called Mattie, who he punched on occasion, so criticizing him to her was only rubbing it in. Virgil though was beyond reproach. Allie always carried with her in her reticule or whatever you call it a little card Virge once give her decorated with a border of rosebuds and bearing a poem I tried to commit to memory, for I thought I might make use of it sometime in my own affair of the heart should I ever have one, coarse a man as I feared I was, but there was too many of them words found only in versifying, like “e’er” and “’twas” and I felt self-conscious even when reading them to myself.

So anyway I had a job and a place to stay for myself and my dog and an old friend in Bat and a new one in Allie, in a new town. Once again I was starting up from scratch, and I was trying to keep from being discouraged by the recognition I had done this more than once. Here I was forty already, pouring drinks for a moderate wage and a good deal less in tips than at the Lone Star, there being fewer spree drinkers in Tombstone, the customers not thirsty after three months of driving longhorns. It would take longer hereabout to collect a nest egg, and meanwhile the opportunities available in a boomtown was being seized by everybody else. The Earps for example had a knack for business, or anyway as led by Wyatt, with real estate in the form of lots on Fremont Street as well as various mining claims of the sort which you don’t go out with a pick and shovel to establish but rather, without getting your hands soiled, trade on paper.