Return of Little Big Man (27 page)

By the way, I soon met Virgil, who looked a lot like Wyatt only heavier, and I had a brief scare when Allie, who could be a joker, introduced me as her new boyfriend, and big Virge glowered down at me for an instant before winking and saying, “My sympathies, sir.”

And now it was little Allie who didn’t right away get the joke, complaining, “Aw, Virge...” She really was stuck on him, and I never saw Virgil with any other woman. He was my favorite of the brothers, because he was the most genial, though I should say that didn’t mean he couldn’t turn ornery when riled. Allie told me they was en route to Tombstone by wagon when the driver of a stage going the other way too close and too fast raked one of the Earp horses, leaving a long gash in its side, and Virgil turned the wagon around and catching the man at the next station beat him half to death. I should also say that Virge was the Earp most often wounded, though one of the others was to be murdered in time to come. Wouldn’t you know that Wyatt never suffered a scratch his life long?

On the subject of getting into business on my own, which if you recall had been my idea back in Dodge, which I hadn’t had much success at and then had gotten distracted, I figured Tombstone was an even better place to do it, but I needed at least one partner in any sort of venture. Once again I went into the matter with Bat Masterson. He said Tombstone was probably big enough to accommodate still another saloon–gambling hall, but he didn’t know how long he’d stay in town, preferring a more northern climate as he did, so told me to talk to Luke Short.

Short had operated the gambling concession at the Long Branch in Dodge, and I was acquainted with him, though not closely. Here at the Oriental, like Bat, he dealt faro.

I didn’t intend to bother him while he was playing, but late one night, or early morning, when my own shift come to an end and I was ready to head home, I instead hung around waiting for Luke to take a break, for a fellow in his profession slept all day and wasn’t easy to find for a talk.

But when I went into the gambling room, Luke was having an argument with another gambler called Charlie Storms, and it had gotten to a point hot enough to boil over had not Bat Masterson stepped between the men and in his familiar role as the voice of reason escorted Charlie, who was pretty drunk, back to the latter’s room in one of the nearby hotels.

Luke had followed along to the sidewalk, it being always a prudent idea to see where an enemy of yours went after leaving you if he was still mad, so I took advantage of this opportunity.

“Luke,” I begun, “seems to me a fellow with your experience might want to open a place of your own in town here.” Luke Short had the right last name: he wasn’t much bigger than me.

But now he wasn’t paying no attention. “Bat’s coming back,” he says, looking down the street. “I guess he got the son of a bitch tucked in.” He waits for him and when Bat reaches us, repeats the same thing.

“Let’s hope he stays there,” said Bat in his usual confident way, then proposes we go have a nightcap, but I beg off, not having been part of this anyway and after a night’s work being eager for a sleep and not further association with that which I had been pouring, and smelling, for hours.

So I says goodbye to both men, who had turned to go inside the Oriental, but hadn’t taken two steps when someone roughly pushes me aside, grabs Luke’s arm, and pulls him into the street.

It was Charlie Storms, who appearing from nowhere and though staggering drunk managed to steal up quiet and unnoticed. I guess town living had again dulled my senses, but the street was unpaved and there wasn’t much light except what come out of the Oriental.

Charlie was carrying a short-barrel Colt’s, but he did not have full command of himself and was unsuccessfully trying to free the muzzle from its entanglement with the front sight in a buttonhole of his coat. Meanwhile though, he was detaining Luke Short, the smaller man, with his left hand.

I grabbed at him, but Bat pulled me away. “Let ’em finish it out here,” says he. He had separated them inside the Oriental so they wouldn’t cause any damage to the furnishings. He didn’t care what they did in the street.

I’m making the event ten times as long as it took: in fact, by the time Bat told me the above, it was all over, Luke having drawed his own gun, put it against Charlie’s side, and blowed a hole in him, and while he was falling give him another .45 slug for good measure, though it were needless, Charlie being dead when he bit the dust.

I guess it was from trouble of this nature that the Oriental had acquired a bad name locally. Allie for example said she was sorry to hear I worked there. She considered it so unrespectable she didn’t use the sidewalk in front of it, and this was a place her brother-in-law had a business interest in! Of course Wyatt had devoted friends like Bat and Doc Holliday, but he also made a lot of enemies wherever he went, and it was such he invariably blamed for any difficulties.

One fellow he especially didn’t care for was Johnny Behan, who had gotten the appointment as county sheriff which Wyatt had craved but claimed not to have sought due to Behan’s promise that if Wyatt didn’t contest him for the top job, he would name him chief deputy and then step down in time. How a cynical man like Wyatt Earp could believe a promise of this kind just goes to show you every person has a weakness of mind on certain subjects, me included as you know.

Anyway, Behan once appointed lost no time in handing the job to a crony of his own, and from then on there was one incident after another in which Behan was on one side and Wyatt, which always meant the other Earp brothers as well, on the other.

To run through each episode would wear you out to hear about this long after they happened, for I was often confused at the time of their occurrences, and you’d need a program of the theatrical type to list all the characters, and you still might not keep straight who was what and why, or even identify consistent names, like was Curly Bill Brocius the same fellow as Curly Bill Graham, and was Pete Spence’s name really Spencer, and for that matter even the McLaury brothers, principal figures, was sometimes the McLowerys, and then you had a Billy the Kid, who was not the notorious one of the Lincoln County War in New Mexico Territory but a local lout name of Billy Claiborne. Even Wyatt’s new girlfriend was called either Sadie or Josie. But I am getting ahead of my story.

Meanwhile me and Pard was living a quiet life out Fremont Street on the edge of the Mexican district, giving me a chance to brush up on the Spanish I had learned more than thirty years before from Estrellita but hadn’t used much since, and I would buy fresh-made tortillas from the ladies there, who on learning I was single, could parley in their lingo, and had a better job than any of their men, who worked in the silver mines for low wages and frequently met with accidents, why, they would point out the desirability of the married state and the availability of their daughters, age twelve on, for a man who wasn’t getting any younger. But with all respect to them nice women, I still wasn’t ready to undertake what would be my third marriage, with still another type of female, in this case with her relatives at close hand, as had been true of my Cheyenne bride Sunshine, which always meant you had family responsibilities you might not of bargained for, and the gal I found most appealing, with her big dark eyes and long shiny black hair, with a hint of Indian blood in the slight slant of her eyes and soft tan color of skin, had a Ma only a decade and a half older than her but weighed twice as much, as well as three little brothers who was snotty unless you give them money.

Now one night I was coming home from the Oriental, having turned the bar over to Ned Boyle, the all-night man (Tombstone saloons never closed), going out Fremont when passing Fly’s boardinghouse I hears the sound of someone crying, and it was past midnight but there was one of them bright moons you get in the desert, so I could see the figure of a woman, hand at her face, standing slumped against the side of the house, where between Fly’s and the house of a city councilman name of Harwood there was a narrow vacant lot shortly to become famous under the wrong name.

A woman’s tears will get to me every time, even when I can’t be held accountable for her grief, so I goes up to her and says, “Ma’am, I’m at your service.”

She lowers her hands and even in the restricted light I can see her left eye is surrounded by a big black ring that had to of come from somebody’s fist.

“The goddam dirty son of a bitch,” she begins and then continues with a flood of language as filthy as I ever heard from the foulest-mouthed man, and I was afraid she’d wake up the people in both houses, who would believe it was me she was talking about.

So I done my best to calm her down, but that process was complicated by not only her rage but also her state of drunkenness, by reason of which she was slumped against the building. When she tried to straighten up so as to give further vent to her spleen, she instead crumpled and fell to the ground.

She was somewhat bigger than me, and in one of the mysterious facts of life in which the end wagon in a train has to travel faster than the lead, just to keep up, drunks weigh about ten times what they do when sober, but I got her to her feet and against the wall again.

I says, “Hush now, you don’t want to wake up these fine people.”

That was the wrong note to strike for sure and only caused her to cuss all of Tombstone for five minutes, finally ending with an indecent reference to somebody named Doc.

I don’t know why I was so thick, maybe being tired after a long day’s work, but I asks in disbelief, “Doc Goodfellow?” Who was the local sawbones, one of the rare examples of somebody who had a name describing his own character, with an office over the Crystal Palace saloon, from which bullets now and again come up through the floorboards, endangering the patients already there by reason of gunfire wounds.

“Doc Holliday, that ———!” she yells, and only now do I recognize her as the woman called Big Nose Kate. She weren’t in so bedraggled a state when I last seen her, also maybe her honker hadn’t looked so large at a time of day when it wouldn’t cast a big shadow. Fact is, it wasn’t that huge at any time. Abusive names for women of her kind was in fashion then, as I said when listing some of the harlots of Dodge. It was either the pedestal or the gutter. You wouldn’t of found anybody who referred to Miss Teasdale as Crazy Amanda.

“Oh,” says I. “Well, I expect you’ll work it out. Now I got to get me home.”

But she grabs ahold of me, and she says, “I’m coming along. I’ll let you have a free one, and then I want you to kill that low-down bastard for me.”

“You’re asking me to kill Doc Holliday?”

“Lisshen,” says she, trying to get me to walking while her own feet was slipping under her. “Wait till he’s cold sober. Nobody can get the jump on that son of a bitch once he’s had a few.”

I had a few hours to carry out Kate’s wishes, for Doc started drinking before sundown and continued to do so while playing faro or poker all night. He was most dangerous, Frank Leslie told me, in the morning whether winning or losing, for that was when he was drunkest and meanest, and not only did he pack at least one hair-triggered Colt’s where he could get to it in a hurry but he hung a dagger down his back on a loop of string around his neck under the collar, so you had to watch he never reached back as if to scratch an itch or tilt his hat brim forward, else suddenly a knife handle would be sticking from your chest with blood spouting out around it. Or anyway so they said, which was probably somewhat exaggerated in the fashion of the day, as was the story according to Allie Earp, who didn’t like Doc (mostly because he told her to go to hell once when she asked him to look at a bad tooth), that he was run out of his native Georgia after he shot down one too many colored fellows for walking down the same street as him.

As if I was going to carry out Kate’s wishes or for that matter collect my reward for so doing! Frankly, I had rather face Doc Holliday’s weapons than enjoy Kate’s favors, at least at that point. Though as I said she had certain feminine attractions when sober, soaked with liquor as she was now, she smelled too much like what I had been pouring for the previous twelve hours, and I happened not to be aroused by a woman who used foul language.

But the fact was I couldn’t get rid of her, for as if she weren’t making enough noise to begin with, she really begun to sound off whenever I tried to pry her fingers off my arm, screeching and screaming, and now lamps was being lighted in the adjoining houses and someone yelled from an upper room at Fly’s that the next sound we would hear was the discharge of a double load of buckshot, so I never had no choice but to jolly her into if not silence then at least a drunken mutter, by saying I would be pleased to murder Doc.

As we was making our way out Fremont Street, passing Allie’s house, I was praying Kate didn’t start up again, for she knowed Allie and fought with her sometimes, blaming the Earp brothers for Doc’s problems, which was okay with Allie so far as Wyatt went, but she wouldn’t let nobody say a word against her Virge.

But we finally reached my shack without further incident. Old Pard was waiting outside. I don’t know what he did all day, maybe went out to the desert and chased lizards or hung around the neighborhood looking for some tail from a Mexican bitch, but he was always there when I come home. Right now, though, he appeared right dubious of my companion and steered clear of her, even to the degree that he was slow to come get the meat scraps I brung him as usual. He never cared for the smell of alcohol, which I think is why he come with me in the first place, to get away from my brother Bill.

Now if I had wanted to have my way with Kate I would of been out of luck, for soon as she spotted that cot of mine in such moonlight as come through the open door, she went and fell onto it with a force I was afraid might split the old canvas, and begun to snore with the sound of a tuba soon thereafter. Pard couldn’t take much of that and left the shack.

I didn’t have noplace for myself but the earthen floor, which I wasn’t happy to sleep on, owing to the easy access of vermin, especially now the dog was outside, but tired as I was I rolled up in the serape and soon drifted off despite the concert.