The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories (14 page)

"That depends on what you mean by 'often.'" He shuffled in his stocking feet to his bed—it was the only other place to sit. He saw his winnings gleaming on the blanket—little rivers of silver had spilled from his pockets. He bent to pick them up, stack them on his little shelf.

"How often is often?" Patiently.

"Once or twice a month. It used to be worse, much worse."

"Before you came West."

"Yes. Before I—before I 'lit out for the Territory,' as Mr. Mark Twain would say. And I was very ill the first years in America."

"Were you different then?" she asked. "Johnny tells me you have this wild reputation—but here you've never been in trouble, and—" Looking at the room stacked high with books and papers. "—you live like a monk."

"When I came to America, I was in very bad health," he said. "I thought I would die." He turned to Josie. "I believed that I would die at the age of thirty-five."

She looked at him curiously. "Why that number?"

"My father died at that age. They called it 'softening of the brain.' He died mad." He turned, sat on the bed, touched his temples with his fingers. "Sometimes I could feel the madness there, pressing upon my mind. Waiting for the right moment to strike. I thought that anything was better than dying as my father had died." He laughed as memories swam through the euphoria that was flooding his brain. "So I lived a mad life!" he said. "A wild life, in hopes that it would kill me before the madness did! And then one day, I awoke—" He looked up at Josie, his face a mirror of the remembered surprise. "And I realized that I was no longer thirty-five, and that I was still alive."

"That must have been a kind of liberation."

"Oh yes! But in any case that life was at an end. The Texas Rangers came to drive the wild men from the state, and—to my great shame—we allowed ourselves to be driven. And now we are here—" He looked at her. "Wiser, I hope."

"You write to a lady," she said.

Freddie looked at her in surprise. "I beg your pardon?" he said.

"I'm sorry. You were working on a letter—I saw it when I sat down. Perhaps I shouldn't have looked, but—"

Mirth burst from Freddie. "My sister!" he laughed. "My sister Elisabeth!"

She seemed a little surprised. "You addressed her in such passionate terms—I thought she was perhaps—" She hesitated.

"A lover? No. I will rewrite the letter later, perhaps, to make it less strident." He laughed again. "I thought Elisabeth might understand my ideas, but she is too limited, she has not risen above the patronizing attitudes of that little small town where we grew up—" Anger began to build in his heart, rising to a red, scalding fury. "She
rewrote my work.
I sent her some of my notebooks to publish, and she changed my words, she added anti-Semitic nonsense to the manuscript. She has fallen under the influence of those who hate the Jews, and she is being courted by one, a professional anti-Semite named Förster, a man who
distributes wretched tracts at meetings.
" He waved a fist in the air. "She said she was
making my thoughts clearer.
" He realized his voice has risen to a shout, and he tried to calm himself, suddenly falling into a mumble. "As if she herself has ever had any clear thoughts!" he said. "God help me if she remains my only conduit to the publishers."

Josie listened to this in silence, eyes glimmering in the light of the lantern. "You aren't an anti-Semite, then?" she said. "Your Superman isn't a—what is the word they use, those people?—Aryan?"

Freddie shook his head. "Neither he nor I am as simple as that."

"I'm Jewish," she said.

He ran his fingers through his hair. "I know," he said. "Someone told me."

Bells began to sing in his head—not the bells of pain, those clanging wracking peals of his migraine, but bells of wild joy, a carillon that pealed out in celebration of some pagan triumph.

Josie looked up, and he followed her glance upward to the pistol belt above his head, to his Colt, his Zarathustra, the blue steel that gleamed in the darkness.

"You've killed men," she said.

"Not so many as rumors would have it."

"But you have killed."

"Yes."

"Did they deserve it?"

"It is not the killing that matters," Freddie said. "It is not the deserving." A laugh burbled out, the strange rapture rising. "Any fool can kill," he said, "and any animal—but it takes a Caesar, or a Napoleon, to kill
as a human being,
as a moment of self-becoming. To rise above that—" He began to stammer in his enthusiasm. "—that merely human act—that foolishness—to overcome—to become—"

"The Superman?" she queried.

"Ha-ha!" He laughed in sudden giddy triumph. "Yes! Exactly!"

She rose from the chair, stepped to the head of the bed in a swirl of skirts. She reached a hand toward the gun, hesitated, then looked down at him.

"
Nicht nur fort sollst du dich pflanzen sondern hinauf,
" she said.

Her German was fluent, accented slightly by Yiddish. Freddie stared at her in astonishment.

"You read my journals!" he said.

A smile drifted across her face. "I wasn't very successful—your handwriting is difficult, and I speak German easier than I read it."

"My God." Wonder rang in his head. "No one has
ever
read my journals."

That is her Jewish aspect, he thought, the people of the Book. Reverence for thought, from the only people in the world who held literacy as a test of manhood.

Josie glanced down at him. "Tell me what that means—that we should propagate not only downward, but upward."

Weird elation sang through his head. "I meant that we need not be animals when—" He recalled the decencies only at the last second. "—when we marry," he finished. "We need not bring only more apes into the world. We can
create
. We can be together not because we are lonely or inadequate, but because we are whole, because we wish to triumph!"

Josie gave a low, languorous laugh, and with an easy motion slid into his lap. Strangely enough he was not surprised. He put his arms around her, wild hope throbbing in his veins.

"Shall we triumph, Freddie?" she asked. Troy burned in her eyes.

"Yes!" he said in sudden delirium. "By God, yes!"

She bent forward, touched her lips to his. A rising, glorious astonishment whirled in Freddie's body and soul.

"You taste like a narcotic," she said softly, and—laughing low—kissed him again.

It was an hour or so later that the shots began echoing down Tombstone's streets, banging out with frantic speed, sounds startling in the surrounding stillness. Freddie sat up. "My God, what is that?" he said.

"Some of your friends, probably," Josie said. She reached out her hands, drew him down to the mattress again. "Whoever is shooting, they don't need you there."

Is that Behan's motto? Freddie wondered. But at the touch of her hands he felt flame burn in his veins, and he paid no attention to the shooting, not even when more guns began to speak, and the firing went on for some time.

In the morning he learned that it had been Curly Bill Brocius who was shooting, drunkenly fanning his revolver into the heavens; and that when the town marshal, Fred White, had tried to disarm him, Brocius' finger had slipped on the hammer and let it fall. White was dead, killed by Brocius' modified gun that would not hold the hammer at safety. A small battle had developed between Brocius' friends and various citizens, and Brocius had been slapped on the head by Wyatt Earp's long-barreled Colt and arrested for murder.

The next bit of news was that Marshal White's replacement had been chosen, and that Deputy U.S. Marshal Virgil Earp was now in charge of enforcing the law in the town of Tombstone.

 

It is like Texas again! Freddie wrote in his journal. It is not so much the killing, but the mad aimlessness of it all. Would that Brocius had been more discriminating with those bullets of his! Would that he had shot another lawman altogether!

The good citizens of Tombstone are over-stimulated, and to avoid the possibility of a lynching the trial will be held at Tucson. I believe that law in Tucson is no less amenable to reason than was the law in Texas, and I have no fear that Brocius will meet a noose.

But while Brocius enjoys his parole, Tombstone must endure the Earps, in their black uniforms, marching about the streets like so many carrion crows. It is their slave souls they hide beneath those frock coats!

But I stay above them. I look down at them from my new rooms in the Grand Hotel. My landlady on Toughnut Street did not approve of what she called my "immorality." Though she was willing to accept as rent the gambling winnings of a known killer, she will not tolerate love in her back room. The manager of the Grand Hotel is more flexible in regard to morals—he gives me a front room, and he tips his hat when Josie walks past.

But I must train his cook, or indigestion will kill me.

How long has it been since a woman held me in her arms? Three years? Four? And she was not a desirable woman, and did not desire anything from me other than the silver in my pocket.

Ach! It was a mad time. Life was cheap, but the price of love was two dollars in advance. I shot three men, and killed two, and the killing caused far less inconvenience than a few short minutes with a dance-hall girl.

Nor is Helen of Troy a dance-hall girl. She cares nothing for money and everything for power. The sexual impulse and conquest are one, and both are aspects perhaps of Jewish revenge. It is power that she seeks. But most atypically her will to power is not based on an attempt to weaken others—she does not seek to castrate her men. She challenges them, rather, to match her power with their own. Those who cannot—like Behan—will suffer.

Those who act wisely, perhaps, will live. But I cannot be persuaded that this, ultimately, will matter to her.

 

"I don't understand," Freddie said, "how it is that Virgil Earp can be Town Marshal and Deputy U.S. Marshal at the same time. Shouldn't he be compelled to resign one post or another?"

"Marshal Dake in Prescott don't mind if his deputy has a job on the side," said John Holliday.

"I should complain. I should write a letter to the newspaper. Or perhaps to the appropriate cabinet secretary."

"If you think it would do any good. But I think the U.S. government likes Virge right where he is."

Holliday sat with Freddie in the plush drawing room of the Grand Hotel, where Holliday had come for a visit. Their wing chairs were pulled up to the broad front window. Freddie turned his gaze from the bright October sunshine to look at Holliday. "I do not understand you," he said. "I do not understand why you are friends with these Earps."

"They're good men," Holliday said simply.

"But
you
are not, John," Freddie said.

A smile crinkled the corners of Holliday's gaunt eyes. "True," he said.

"You are a Southerner, and a gentleman, and a Democrat," Freddie said. "The Earps are Yankees, not gentle, and Republicans. I fail to understand your sympathy for them."

Holliday shrugged, reached into his pocket for a cigar. "I saved Wyatt from a mob of Texans once, in Dodge City," he said. "Since then I've taken an interest in him."

"But why?" Freddie asked. "Why did you save his life?"

Holliday struck a match and puffed his cigar into life, then drew the smoke into his ravaged lungs. He coughed once, sharply, then said, "It seemed a life worth saving."

Freddie gave a snort of derision.

"What I don't understand," said Holliday, "is why you dislike him. He's an extraordinary man. And your two greatest friends admire him."

"You and who else?"

"Your Sadie," John Holliday said. "She is with Wyatt Earp this moment, across the street in the Cosmopolitan Hotel."

Freddie stared at him, and then his gaze jerked involuntarily to the window again, to the bare façade of the Cosmopolitan, built swiftly and of naked lumber, devoid of paint. "But—" he said, "but—Earp is married—" He was aware of how ridiculous he sounded even as he stammered out the words.

"Oh," Holliday said casually, "I don't believe Wyatt and Mattie ever officially tied the knot—not that it signifies." He looked at Freddie and rolled the cigar in his fingers. "I thought you should hear it from me," he said, "rather than through the grapevine telegraph."

Freddie stared across the street and felt flaming madness beating at his brain. He considered storming across the street, kicking down the door, firing his Zarathustra, his pistol again and again until it clicked on an empty chamber, until the walls were spattered with crimson and the room was filled with the stinging, purifying incense of powder smoke.

But no. He was not an animal, to act in blind fury. He would take revenge—if revenge were to be taken—as a human being. Coldly. With foresight. And with due regard for the consequences.

And for Freddie to fight for a woman. Was that not the most stupid piece of melodrama in the world? Would not any decent dramatist in the world reject this plot as hackneyed?

He looked at Holliday, let a grin break across his face. "For a moment I was almost jealous!" he laughed.

"You're not?"

"Jealousy—pfah!" Freddie laughed again. "Sadie—Josie—she is free."

Holliday nodded. "That's one word for it."

"She is trying to get your Mr. Earp murdered. Or myself. Or the whole world."

"Gonna kill him!" said a voice. Freddie turned to see Ike Clanton, red-eyed and swaying with drink, dragging his spurs across the parlor carpet. Ike was in town on business and staying at the hotel. "Come join me, Freddie!" he said. "We'll kill him together!"

"Kill who, Ike?" Freddie asked.

"I'm gonna kill Doc Holliday!" Ike said.

"Here is Doc Holliday, right here," said Freddie.

Ike turned, swayed back on his boot-heels, and saw Holliday sitting in the wing chair and unconcernedly smoking his cigar. Ike grinned, touched the brim of his sombrero. "Hiya, Doc!" he said cheerfully.

Holliday nodded politely. "Hello, Ike."

Ike grinned for a moment more, then remembered his errand and turned to Freddie. "So will you help me kill Doc Holliday, Freddie?"