The Last Woman Standing (6 page)

“Can’t say I have.”

“When the Englishman killed her husband, the widow challenged him to draw at fifty paces. She was a crack shot, but her antagonist chose the weapons. At high noon, the Englishman handed the widow a paper parcel that matched his own. At the word
fire
, the lady opened her package, shrieked like a banshee, and dropped dead right there without a shot fired.”

“What was in the package?” I asked, hooked.

“The wily Brit had gift-wrapped a live mouse. Can you beat that?”

“Can’t say I can, Johnny,” Wyatt said, seeming no more impressed than I with the story’s punch line, and then, without missing a beat, he cut to the chase: “I hear you have something to say to me.”

“You’re all business, Wyatt.”
Well, maybe not all business,
I thought. But I wasn’t part of the discussion, so I just observed the two men. It seemed that Wyatt had turned serious the moment Johnny entered the cottage, and he maintained his poker face as Johnny launched his sales pitch: “I have a proposition that could make us both rich. You’re a fine deputy sheriff, as brave and quick as any from here to Dodge City. There’s not a man to contest that.”

“Only you’re deputy sheriff now, and I’m not,” Wyatt said, shifting his big frame in the parlor chair. It was an awkward moment; Wyatt let a pause hang between them without breaking a sweat. Silences didn’t seem to unnerve him the way they did Johnny.

“Tombstone isn’t Dodge City,” said Johnny.

“I appreciate the geography lesson.” Wyatt looked over at me.

“What I mean is that, unlike Dodge, we’re not a cow town that welcomes drovers at trail’s end a few times a year. We’re smack-dab in the middle of ranching territory. Raising cattle is as much our tax base as the silver business. We may have a Republican governor now, but the majority of Arizonans are Democrats like me. When it comes to picking a new sheriff, Governor Fremont might be looking for a Republican like you, but he has to placate his constituents.”

“I’ll place my bets on the governor.”

“Sure thing, Wyatt, but why not spread your risk? I’m running for sheriff when Tombstone becomes the seat of this new county they’re finagling. I figure you are, too. Here’s my proposition: I run for sheriff, and I promise to make you my deputy.”

“Well, that’s an interesting twist, given that I’ve already been the deputy, and I’m lined up for the top job. Considering Fremont’s political affiliation, I’m sitting prettier than you at the moment. I can’t make sense of this marriage, since we represent opposing parties.”

“Then let me clarify. The sheriff’s office isn’t pure politics.” Johnny rushed his words, combing his goatee with his fingers. “It’s more like a wedding of opposites: part of it is tax assessing and collecting, the other part’s law enforcement. Hell, the job is a silver mine without the hard labor and the pickax, what with getting a cut of the tax-collecting business. The more you collect, the more you make. That’s where I come in. With my rancher connections and yours on the business side, we can reap bigger benefits than either of us can alone. We’ll do an even split on the commission and fees. While I’m soothing ruffled political feathers, you’ll be making the streets safe for those Eastern bankers and mining executives.”

“Smells good,” Wyatt said.

“I figured you’d like my plan.” Johnny pulled me closer; as he looked down at me with a crinkly smile, triumph flickered in his eyes.

“I was talking about Miss Josephine’s strudel.”

“Feel free to take some home for Mattie,” Johnny said. That’s about when I lost interest in their business talk—it was news to me that Wyatt was taken. It surprised me how much it stung, even when I was sitting there wrapped in a Johnny Behan blanket. Without noticing my sudden stiffness, Johnny prodded, “What about my idea, Wyatt?”

“I need time to figure out how
that
smells.” Wyatt stood up.

“According to my sources in the legislature, we have some time before the government sorts out the new county,” Johnny said. “Just don’t chew on the offer too long.” He pushed me off his lap like a cat as he stood up. “Josie, please get Mr. Earp’s hat.”

I crossed the room and stretched up to reach the still-damp Stetson. When I delivered it, Wyatt looked down and thanked me for the hat and coffee with punctilious manners, no eye contact. I worried that I’d exaggerated our intimacy in the kitchen. I could have sworn he felt the same electricity I had when our hands touched. And who was this Mattie that Johnny mentioned? Maybe there was an Earp sister starching Wyatt’s shirts, stuck away somewhere on the outskirts of town.

Wyatt nodded good-bye to Johnny, who poured another whiskey and showed no sign of showing him out. I accompanied Wyatt to the door and then followed him out onto the porch to get some fresh air and catch his eye one last time. The afternoon was dark and foul-tempered, but Wyatt walked straight out from under the roof, catching the rain with his broad shoulders.

I watched Wyatt enter the road—a trim, tall, determined figure. I smiled to think of that hard man disappearing into the murk, preferring ice cream to whiskey. When I couldn’t see him any longer, I looked across Safford Street toward the Dragoon Mountains. Lightning cracked like a mule-driver’s whip, and I thought I could distinguish Cochise’s Stronghold, where the woods rose up to meet the mountain’s granite domes and steep cliffs. A decade earlier, Johnny had explained, Chief Cochise had retreated to those crags with his braves, ferocious and double-crossed. The government executed Cochise’s brother, two nephews, and his father-in-law in attempts to pry the Apache leader loose from the sheer rock.

With my arms crossed over my chest, I watched the fireworks, loving the unpredictable ferocity of the brilliant blue lightning bolts cracking the horizon. I heard Johnny call from within and looked down to discover that my feet were wet from the rainwater on the porch. Dusk threatened, and I’d have to run to collect Albert from school. But first, I needed my boots and raincoat—and to rescue the strudel from the oven before it burnt.

CHAPTER 7

JANUARY 1881

When I next saw Wyatt—in late January—he didn’t see me. He stood on Allen Street in front of Vogan’s Saloon and Bowling Alley. He cradled a rifle in the crook of his arm, holding off a lynch mob hungry to hang the teenage gambler Johnny-Behind-the-Deuce. I blundered into the riot while testing Albert on his spelling, looking more governess than deathly beauty. I’d become accustomed to domestic life on the fringe of action, but I was restless and ready to stir up trouble of my own. Anything that happened in Tombstone I pretty much read about in the newspapers or heard about from Johnny.

While I tended Albert, Johnny fought crime and collected taxes, wheeling and dealing as deputy sheriff. When he wasn’t wearing his badge, he was tending bar at the Grand or playing poker. Since women considered “wife material” weren’t received in bars, I saw my man only on his night off or between shifts. I’ve never been short of imagination, and because Johnny was so social, I couldn’t help but suspect that Miss Timberline or some such experienced femme fatale spent more time with him than I did.

Johnny had yet to set our wedding date, and I was anxious to leave that Safford Street cottage where I was as underfoot as a braided rug. But I was just stubborn enough—I won’t say upstanding, because that would be giving me too much credit—not to shack up with Johnny even though we’d pretty much done everything that Rebecca deemed kosher before marriage on the Joneses’ living-room sofa. That might have been another reason I’d worn out my welcome.

Among the greatest pleasures of those early months was getting to know Albert, who in no way resembled his father. The boy’s pale, transparent skin laced with delicate blue veins would have been beautiful on a girl. Large and wide-set, his pale-gray eyes stared out above an overly generous mouth set beneath a solid column of nose. It was a face he would grow into in time, but in a beef jerky–tough town where the fathers’ rough-and-tumble ways filtered down to the sons, he was at a loss for how to compose it. His face betrayed him with a series of flushes and twitches that he tried to conceal beneath his longish blue-black hair. He was profoundly unhappy. I tried to ease his pain as much as I could.

I warmed to Albert immediately, but not as a mother. He already had one of those. The first Mrs. Behan had remarried that fall and released Albert to Johnny while she started a new family in Tucson. Most weekdays I walked Albert to school. He returned to the Joneses’ house for lunch by himself, and then I’d accompany him back in the afternoon, enjoying the opportunity to stretch my legs. That’s how we wound up on Fifth Street that day, arms linked like he was my little gentleman. I walked on his left since he’d lost most of the hearing in his right ear from scarlet fever. This disability, and the misunderstandings it generated, was another source of embarrassment for him.

The two-syllable words on Albert’s vocabulary list bored him, so I was peppering the boy with my hardest words:
epidermis
and
loquacious
and
subterranean
. True, if he’d misspelled them, I may not have known the difference. I was not much of a speller, unlike my Hen, but I could use almost any word in a sentence. Given our preoccupation, we weren’t paying much attention as we stepped down Fifth Street toward the Oriental Saloon. Assuming Albert was slowing his pace to delay his return to class, I didn’t notice how empty the street was for that time of day. No loungers catcalled from the boardwalk, no fancy girls paraded the boards, and no cow ponies rushed past.

Albert spotted the mob first. He nudged me and pointed. A wall of men, maybe five hundred miners and ranchers, marched toward us on Allen Street. They carried guns and rifles and were calling for the prisoner’s head. Albert rushed toward the action. I caught his collar at the same moment I felt a tug at my sleeve.

“Albert’s mum,” the gentile giantess Delia hissed. I hadn’t seen her since the day I arrived, but I immediately recognized her. The reedy redhead wore watermarked yellow silk and carried a parasol. She stood close, her musky perfume nearly gagging me. “They’re after Johnny-Behind-the-Deuce,” Delia whispered, although she didn’t have to, since the roar of the mob drowned out everything else.

As I looked up into Delia’s dilated eyes, she explained what had happened. Itinerant gambler Johnny-Behind-the-Deuce had cleaned out local mining engineer Henry Schneider during an all-night poker game in nearby Charleston. Afterward, Schneider was standing outside grousing and discussing the weather with friends. Johnny agreed it was cold. The popular engineer told the professional gambler to mind his own business. Johnny refused. Cheating might have been mentioned. Schneider pulled a knife. Behind-the-Deuce raised him a pistol. Schneider died, and the crowd from Charleston craved revenge, following the fugitive nine miles to Tombstone.

“What has that got to do with me?” I clutched Albert’s hand. “I have to get the boy to school.”

“School is suspended this afternoon, Albert’s mum,” Delia said gently, as if I might be in shock, if not outright stupid.

“Then I have to find Johnny and tell him.”

“Johnny knows. That’s the business of deputy sheriffs.”

Delia guided me toward a lemon-painted, two-story frame house. My grip on Albert’s hand remained tight despite his attempts to squirm in the opposite direction. As we neared the building, Delia addressed me in a measured, calm voice. “If you want to help Johnny, spare the boy and yourself. Slip upstairs with me and pray a stray bullet doesn’t call us home.”

I gazed at the gaudy house with its lavender door. “What would Johnny say?”

“I hope he’ll say you’re alive.” Delia led me over the threshold. I pulled Albert along, his eyes lingering on Allen Street and the scrum of gesticulating men.

Once inside, we shuffled past a parlor concealed by pocket doors. Melancholy cello music escaped from within. As Albert and I followed Delia upstairs, my chest tightened. I realized that I’d betrayed Johnny’s trust by shepherding his son into what could only be a brothel. Ascending these steps reminded me of our fight on the Grand Hotel stairway, and I felt ashamed. I was once again out of my depth, following a woman I hardly knew in order to escape a mob on the street, with a brokenhearted boy in my care. I heard my mother’s disapproving voice:
this was exactly where your footsteps led when you left home on Shabbat.
And yet, now that I was here, what choice did I have? Outside was a lynch mob, inside—this!

On the landing we turned sharply into a freshly painted room—pearly pink—with fresh yellow roses arranged in crystal vases on every available mahogany surface. An embroidered satin quilt smothered a large canopy bed, which I made an effort to avoid, pushing Albert wide of its path. The room faced Allen Street. Tall, shuttered French doors opened onto a balcony where a young blonde, hardly more than a child, lay on her belly. She peered between the wooden gingerbread slats that decorated the terrace, then swiveled her head to report: “The Earps took Johnny-Behind-the-Deuce into Vogan’s Bowling Alley, Miss Delia.”

I watched Delia’s reaction to the news: stone-faced, she took a nip from a medicine bottle on her bedside table. She paused, considered, and took a longer swig. She dabbed the brown liquid from her mouth with an embroidered handkerchief. While Delia hesitated, Albert dropped my hand. He slithered out to join her maid, April, who was only twelve or thirteen, as she avidly watched the action below with a pillow tucked under her thin arms.

I crawled out after Albert, only half believing it was for his protection. I’d been stuffed away in the Safford Street house for too long, and this was the result. I was tired of being a mouse in a closet while Tombstone’s thrills raged around me. Damn Mama’s caution, her intrusions into my thoughts. Since I was dead to her, I’d live for me.

Once flattened on the balcony with my head raised on a bolster, I threw my left arm over Albert’s shoulder to protect him from gunfire. He shrugged me off, knowing as well as I did the futility of the gesture should bullets fly. Sensible citizens would have closed both the doors and the wooden shutters and hidden behind a solid mahogany wardrobe.

From the balcony, we had an unobstructed view of Wyatt. He guarded the street in front of Vogan’s Saloon and Bowling Alley, a narrow brick building that could safeguard the accused behind impenetrable walls. The deputy US Marshal appeared larger than any other man on the scene, though I knew that was physically impossible. With his jaw set, he focused on the oncoming mob’s miners and cowboys united to lynch Johnny-Behind-the-Deuce for gunning down Schneider.

Wyatt must have come in a hurry, because he was hatless. A shotgun rested in the crook of his arm, lock open, but it was as threatening as if his forefinger stroked the trigger. I couldn’t keep my eyes off him. I wasn’t alone; Albert stared, too. When outnumbered, Wyatt’s fearlessness compelled men and women alike—and incensed his enemies.

Wyatt’s older brother Jim emerged from Vogan’s, where he tended bar right-handed. His useless left arm dangled from his mangled left shoulder, a parting gift from the Confederates. Wyatt had wanted to enlist in the Union army alongside his older brothers, but his parents vetoed the plan; he was too young. Jim leaned in close and whispered to Wyatt, who nodded without looking away from the mob, and then advanced toward the boardwalk’s edge.

To the west, the street was empty. Shutters banged. A dog yelped. To the east, five hundred frontiersmen pushed forward on foot, led by John Ringo. Gentlemanly and tall, the cowboy gripped his saddle rope, slinging a noose. I never forgot him after that day, though I relied on April to fill in the blanks on who was who in that sea of angry and aggrieved faces. Black armbands marked Mr. Schneider’s mourning buddies. They had followed Ringo from the killing in Charleston to Tombstone. The millionaire mine owner Dick Gird, one of Tombstone’s three original founders, fumed beside Ringo. The New York native had gathered his local employees, graveyard-shift miners milling around before they hoisted shovel and ax, rallying for one of their own. On the fringes stood curious citizens drawn to the noise. Some people couldn’t resist joining a throng once it started to form.

“Where is he?” the mob cried.

“At Vogan’s!” a bystander yelled from the street below our perch. The mob wheeled, filling Allen Street from curb to curb.

“Go in and drag him out,” cried someone in the back, echoed by others: “Drag him out!” “Go in!” “Drag him out!”

April gasped, but I couldn’t tell if it was excitement or terror. I reached for Albert. This time he grabbed my hand back. We didn’t know the man hidden behind the bricks across the street, but we feared for his life. And I trembled for Wyatt, standing so solitary. “Boys,” he said in a deep, calm voice, “don’t you make any fool play here; that little tinhorn isn’t worth it.”

Wyatt’s calm had no impact. From the back came hollers of, “Earp can’t stop you.” “Go in!” “Drag him out!” The pressure from the rear urged the front lines toward Vogan’s. And then the stamping started. The commotion was outside but felt like it pounded inside my chest. I panicked and looked back toward the room where Delia clung to the creamy velvet curtains. She seemed to swoon as the stamping became rhythmic and ferocious.

“The Apache War Dance,” April said, her voice quivering as if from past experience. From behind, Delia said, “No more,” and retreated deeper into her bedroom.

Shouts and shrill whistles followed. A whiskered old man in a stovepipe hat started the cry:
“Yi-yi-yi-yi! Y-a-a-a-hoo!”
As he tapped his mouth in the Apache yell, the crowd joined in. The stamping increased. A stifled sob escaped April’s lips, as if she were hiding in a cabinet and didn’t want anyone to hear, but horror overcame her sense of self-preservation. When I reached over Albert to pat her shoulder, she flinched.

Across the street, Wyatt swung his shotgun so it faced the crowd, snapping the lock shut and touching the trigger. But that was one gun against an armed crowd: the men carried rifles and pistols, glinting in the wintry sun. In the back, the men aimed their firearms at the sky and began blasting, aggravated by the pressure of those in the front retreating in the face of Wyatt’s double-barrel. We buried our heads in our hands, but no bullets hit nearby, so we looked up again.

The whiskered old coot whooped again:
“Yi-yi-yi-yi! Y-a-a-a-hoo!”
The crowd returned his cry, magnifying it. April whimpered again, the strain intolerable, and this time Albert reached out to comfort her.

Down below, a bearded cowboy in a beaded buckskin jacket said, “Rush him.” A second cowboy called out from behind the first: “He’ll quit! If he don’t, blast him! String up the tinhorn and finish the job!”

Wyatt covered the crowd with his shotgun, swinging it back and forth at chest level. “Don’t fool yourselves,” he said to his challengers in the front row, using that same unnaturally calm voice. His jaw was tight. He looked from one face to the next, making it personal. “This man’s my prisoner. You know I’m not bluffing.”

They were at a standoff. The stamping continued, and guns in the rear popped like Fourth of July fireworks. April whimpered, covering her head with her hands. I urged her to go inside and see to Delia. The girl wriggled backward, leaving Albert and me alone. We watched Wyatt scanning the crowd, tight-eyed and tense. I had never witnessed such bravery—not that it was the kind of courage required on the sedate streets of my San Francisco. Even among this throng, who’d confronted Apaches, bears, and enemies in war—whether Rebel or Union or Mexican—Wyatt’s valor registered. He had a steel spine.