Territory (53 page)

“Not now. Don’t ask it of me, Doc.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m in a fight I can’t win without you.”

“With whom, and what about?”

“You don’t believe me, do you?” Wyatt said with a bitter grin. He put his fork down. “All right, listen. I’m not the only one in town who boils black cats. Do you understand? Those others are prepared to make a fight. And if I don’t defend what’s mine, they’ll take it. They’ll put us in the ground if they can.”

“You don’t think your brothers and I can do our own defending?”

Wyatt leaned over his plate. “What’ll you do? Christ, Doc, you won’t even know when it comes at you. As long as you stand with me, I can protect us all. I’m gaining on ’em now.”

Doc wondered how he could tell. What were the markers in this game? Did one pile up the bodies of one’s enemies like chips at the card table? Or was advantage something harder to measure, something intangible to anyone but the players? Doc thought back over the conversation and realized that he wasn’t even sure he and Wyatt were talking about the same thing. Witchcraft and black cats. They couldn’t really be talking about that.

Wyatt watched him, regret in his face. “I’ve gone about it wrong, I know. But I swear to God I never meant you harm. You’ve helped me in some mighty tight spots. Will you do it again?”

There was an aching tightness in Doc’s throat. His only real friend turned out to be next door to the Devil himself, and was asking forgiveness for something they both knew he’d do again as soon as it seemed good. None of which changed the fact that Wyatt was indeed his friend. Dear God, did one laugh or cry at times like this?

“I know some of what you can do,” Doc said, “having been on the receiving end. What else is there?”

Wyatt took a mouthful of eggs and swallowed them before he replied. “It ain’t like a steam engine, that you can say will pull so much weight up such-and-such grade.”

“Fine. What is it like?”

Wyatt shrugged. “I can do what I need to, when I need to do it. I call it, I guess I’d say, and it comes.”

“Not unlike Elijah and the wrath of God.” If that was how Wyatt thought of himself, Doc wanted to know.

But Wyatt frowned and didn’t answer. Perhaps he’d weighed himself according to that biblical scale, and been troubled by the results.

Doc drank his coffee in silence, and let Wyatt eat in peace. When Wyatt slowed down, Doc said, “When did it start?”

Wyatt wiped his moustache with his napkin. “Somewhere between boy and man. I could feel where my family was, like I had a string tied tight between me and them. Nearly drove me crazy. I tried to run off, thinking that would break the string.”

Doc asked the appropriate question with his eyebrows.

“That’s how I found out my pa was the same way. He knew right where I was.” Wyatt shook his head. “I wonder, though, if he still is. Seemed like the better at it I got, the less he had.”

“But that’s not all you can do.”

Wyatt looked out, past Doc, past the walls of the Can-Can, to a view Doc couldn’t see. “There’s strength in things. In the ground, even. It’s like food to me. That’s what I could feel in my family, at first. Now I feel it everywhere.”

“That’s it? You
feel
things?”

Wyatt huffed out through his nose. “Feeling’s no damned good unless it leads to doing. I’ve found there’s ways to help my dealings along, make ’em come out right.”

“And you employ those ways.”

Wyatt’s gaze came back to Doc’s face, but for a moment Doc wasn’t sure Wyatt recognized him. “Does God give a man his senses so he won’t use them?”

“So you have no doubt of the identity of the giver?”

Wyatt focused on him and smiled a little. “I can’t send this back, can I? Until I know otherwise, I’ll assume the best.”

They were at the back of the room, but even so Doc could hear a faint clamor of voices from the street, the knocking of boots on the sidewalk. Wyatt’s head came up, like a dog testing the air.

“What do your senses tell you now?” Doc asked. But Wyatt was already up and heading toward the door.

Doc dropped his napkin over the congealing mess on his plate, pushed back from the table, and followed Wyatt.

The stationer’s clerk wrapped and tied Mildred’s box of paper, then cast a sullen look out the window onto Allen Street. “This won’t keep off rain,” he grumbled, poking the bundle.

“It’s fine. The box can get water spots; I don’t mind.”

She might as well not have spoken. The clerk, muttering under his breath, trotted into the back room.

Mildred sighed, picked up the box, and headed for the door.

As she reached it, three men hurried past toward Fifth Street. Then two more. A gig stopped in the middle of the street, its driver staring toward Fifth. She heard a low-key hubbub of voices, hooves, and footfalls.

“Here, missus!” the clerk called behind her. But she stepped out the door.

The rain had settled to a sullen, heavy mist. Near the corner of Fifth and Allen a crowd grew, blocking traffic in the muddy street. Her first thought was for the president; but news of him would come through the telegraph office, and that was behind her.

At the center of the crowd was a buckboard with two men on the seat, drovers in work clothes. The two mules between the shafts laid their ears back as people pressed too close.

The driver was thick-bodied, bearded, and dour. Beside him sat a much younger man, small, with a light-colored moustache. There was a bandage around his head, just showing beneath his hat, and he sat hunched as if his stomach troubled him. He was sweating and white-faced.

As Mildred came in hearing range, the young man shook his head at something someone asked him.

“It was Mexicans,” he said. “I saw ’em close.”

“Smugglers?” called a voice near the buckboard.

“Hell, no. Mexican army regulars. And they could hit what they aimed at, all right.” At that the young man shivered. “My God, we were sleeping, most of us. We were sleeping.”

“What happened?” Mildred asked a dark-skinned drover beside her. He shook his head and leaned toward the buckboard.

Mildred tucked her parcel and her umbrella tighter under her elbow and squeezed sideways through the crowd. She got to within a few yards of the wagon before the gapers were too tightly packed to pass.

Ike Clanton shoved up to the buckboard on the other side. His absurd cherub-curled rusty hair was flattened with damp, and beads of moisture hung from the ends of his upturned moustache and the waxed point of his imperial. He was pale except for a patch of red on each cheek.

He clenched both hands on the wagon’s footboard. “This is our wagon,” Clanton said. “My pa was driving it.”

“So I brung it back,” the young man answered. “You take it as it suits you.” He sounded as if ownership of the buckboard and the rest of daily life were far from his thoughts.

Clanton thumped the side of the wagon with his palm. “Why didn’t my pa bring it back? Where is he?”

“Jesus goddamn,” said someone off to Mildred’s right. “Look at this.”

“There’s dozens of ‘em,” said another voice.

The young man peered into Clanton’s face, then around the street, as if wondering where it came from. “Gray’s ranch, with the rest of ‘em. Except Earnshaw. He didn’t get a scratch.”

“Why didn’t he come in with the wagon?”

“Earnshaw?”

“No, damn you! My pa! Old Man Clanton!”

The young man frowned. “They’re all shot dead. Buried at Gray’s ranch. Will Lang, Dixie Gray, Charley Snow, Jim Crane, and your pa.” He scrubbed a trembling hand over his face. “No, that ain’t right. They buried Charley there in Guadalupe Canyon. He was too far gone to move.”

Jim Crane. Five men, and one of them Crane. Where was Jesse Fox, and what had he done?

“You’re lying,” Clanton croaked. “It’s a lie.”

The crowd around Mildred shifted, and she saw the side panels of the buckboard. She thought she saw light reflected off drops of water or bright new nailheads. The crowd closed again.

It was only from the afterimage that she realized what it was. Light through a score of bullet holes.

Not one man with a gun. The drover said it was Mexican soldiers. Mexico had made official protests about Arizona rustlers raiding over the border; the Mexican government might have sent a troop to search them out.

Had Jesse not found Crane, then? Jesse Fox wasn’t in the list of dead. But they might not have recognized him.

Old Man Clanton was rumored to deal in stolen stock, but not in men’s lives. Will Lang raised cattle near the New Mexico line and was well thought of. Dixie Gray, barely grown, with his game leg; had he gone with the party as a lark? They weren’t gunmen or thieves. They were ordinary men, working for a living. Their capital crime was to share a camp with Jim Crane, last of the men who could say for sure who had stopped the Benson stage.

Clanton grabbed the side of the bench seat, as if he meant to tear it and the men out of the wagon. The young drover winced and pressed an arm against his middle. The driver jerked the reins. The mules balked and fussed, and the onlookers pressed backward.

A man caught Clanton’s shoulder from behind. For an instant Mildred
didn’t know him—hatless, pale, unshaven, a gash and a purpling bruise on one cheek, shadows under and in his eyes. It was Jesse.

He seemed to be wearing someone else’s waistcoat. It hung too wide and too long over his crumpled shirt. As shabby as he’d been when she’d first seen him, it hadn’t been a patch on this.

Jesse pulled Clanton back and kept both hands on him as if the man might run away. But the fight had gone out of Clanton. He stared at the wagon as if he just now understood it. Was he seeing the bullet holes and imagining his father’s body twitching and jumping in his bedroll under a rain of gunfire, or springing up only to fall and jerk and jerk as the bullets snatched at him—

Mildred squeezed her eyes shut and breathed hard and deep. Harry would use “massacre” in the head. What size type would he order? It would be tomorrow’s lead.

There, she wouldn’t faint, or be sick.

Someone had finally gathered his wits and cleared the crowd out of the buckboard’s path. The driver looked to Clanton for instructions, but Clanton stood working his hands, not meeting his eyes. The driver shrugged, growled at the mules, and the buckboard creaked and splashed down Allen Street.

The clot of onlookers fragmented, spread out like sugar dissolving in tea. Mildred crossed the street.

Jesse hauled Clanton back onto the sidewalk. Mildred could see his fingers digging into the cloth of Clanton’s coat.

“Let loose of me,” Clanton snapped.

“Where did you get it?” Jesse asked him, almost too soft to hear.

“What?”

“The bag for Crane.”

Color rushed into Clanton’s face and drained again. “I don’t know what—”

“Yes, you do. Who gave it to you?”

Clanton peered into Jesse’s face as if it were much farther away than it was. His expression changed, crumbled. “Wyatt Earp,” he said. Jesse let go of him.

Mildred knew neither of them had seen her. She stepped back into the doorway of the cigar store.

As if Clanton had conjured him, Wyatt Earp pressed forward out of the dwindling crowd. Doc Holliday followed after.

Earp looked down at Clanton, his face flinty. “I’m sorry about your pa.”

Clanton frowned. “You’re sorry.”

Earp nodded. “For your loss.”

“You’re sorry. Jesus,” he asked mildly, “d’you think I’m a half-wit? That I don’t know what you done?” Clanton paused for breath, and to squint into Earp’s face. It might have been hewed from rock.

Clanton stepped back, almost tripping over Jesse, and raised his voice. “I’m gonna make you goddamned sorry before I’m done. I’m gonna send you to hell. I’m gonna send all you God-damned Earps straight to hell.” He flushed an unpleasant purple and clamped his mouth shut. Then he flung himself away and half ran up the street after the buckboard.

“Good day, Mr. Earp, Dr. Holliday.” Jesse’s voice was steady and cool, his face almost as impassive as Earp’s. But Mildred saw a flash of light in Jesse’s eye, as if reflected off something that wasn’t there.

“Mr. Fox,” said Earp. There was no warmth in his voice, not as there had been in the ice cream saloon. Holliday settled for a nod and a raised eyebrow.

“What a dangerous place this has become,” Jesse said.

“Decent folk have nothing to fear in Tombstone.”

Jesse laughed, a sound like a blacksmith’s hammer striking steel. “Even God Almighty doesn’t make that kind of guarantee. He didn’t make it to those men in Guadalupe Canyon.”

Earp’s jaw shifted, clenched. “Fellows who take other men’s cattle can’t expect to die in bed.”

“They were stealing cattle?”

“The Mexicans wouldn’t have been there otherwise.”

“Ah. Is that why
I
was there?”

Earp said nothing. Mildred thought the muscles around his eyes tensed; that was all.

Dr. Holliday watched them warily. Could Holliday feel it, too—the pressure of air and stillness around Earp and Jesse, like a container for some dangerous experiment? The street noises seemed muffled, but the shift of Earp’s boot on the sidewalk, the rub of Jesse’s sleeve, their breathing, were almost painfully clear.