The Old Colts (14 page)

Bat paused, towel at his cheeks. He was as well acquainted with Wyatt Earp as anyone could be. To his knowledge, Wyatt had cottoned to only two males not related to him in his lifetime—himself and Doc Holliday. He was a loner. He was taciturn and immutable. Get on his right side and he would travel with you to Timbuctoo or Kansas. Cross him, even to this day, and you walked into a buzz saw. From what Bat had seen of him in New York, he had altered little. Rather than mellowing him, the years had sharpened his edge.

“I’ll tell you,” Bat said. “But I have to pick my time.”

“Why?”

“You might get mad. And you’re heeled.”

“Sheepshit.”

“If that isn’t a sad, son-of-a-bitching sight,” Bat groaned.

“Sickening,” Wyatt growled.

They had paid four bits apiece to a girl in a booth, then climbed steps to stand at one end of historic Old Front Street—the so-called “replica” thereof. Oh, there was a block-long stretch of wooden, one-story, false-fronted business and entertainments—the Delmonico restaurant, the Long Branch, a grocery store, dry goods and clothing, barber shop, gunsmith’s, a bank, etc. But they were dolled up in new paint and fancy lettering and the plank sidewalk looked as though it had just been laid. If this was history, a three-dollar bill was legal tender. If this was supposed to be a fair reproduction, Big Nose Kate was the Queen of Sheba. If this bore even the remotest resemblance to the main Dodge drag in the good old days, a turd was a chocolate eclair.

Silently, hands in pockets, they clumped along the planks. Inside, the stores fobbed off a wide assortment of cheap doodads on a gullible public. They entered the Long Branch. Oh, it had a bar and a mirror and a buffalo head and tintypes of forgotten frontier reprobates on the walls, but all the costumed lady behind the bar could sell them was soda pop or some fizz called “Green River.”

They took paper cups of the fizz outside and sat down in chairs under the overhang and sipped and cussed and hurled the damn Green River away and propped back against the wall and sat for some time in silence, chewing cuds of sadness and resentment. They felt like ghosts come back to find the graveyard gone.

“Girl in the booth said the suckers start coming next month,” said Bat.

“Um,” said Wyatt.

“They’ll run a hundred thousand of ‘em through here in a summer, at four bits a head. You add that up.”

“They’ve got a stagecoach and sell rides. And every couple hours they put on a shoot-out, a bunch of drip-nose high school kids all dressed up. Blanks. Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp versus a gang of Texas bad guys. Lotsa noise and ketchup and bodies. Guess who wins.”

“Um.”

A waning afternoon sun warmed them. No one else was about. A bit of a breeze from Colorado blew along Old Front Street, bemoaning the past and chiding the present. From their height the two gents propped back in chairs overlooked the new Front Street below and to the left, and the paved area that had once been a dusty plaza bisected by the tracks of the Santa Fe. It was in this plaza, not so long ago it seemed, that Bat had jumped from a train into a bushwhack. By the time he could jerk his gun he was being fired at from differing points of the compass by A.J. Peacock, Al Updegraff, et al. By the time it was over, Updegraff had a slug in the lung, ten pounds of lead had been expended, and Bat had paid a fine of eight dollars for “unlawfully and feloniously discharging a pistol in the streets.” It was in this plaza, a year or so ago it seemed, that Wyatt got the shotgun drop on Shanghai Pierce, the cattle baron, and his trailhands, and marched them before the magistrate.

And it was in this plaza, only yesterday it seemed, Bat and Charlie Bassett backing his play, that Wyatt earned more immortality by bringing Clay Allison to heel. Allison had shot down six Marshals and Sheriffs. Allison rode horses into saloons stark naked and redecorated them with cartridges. Allison had drawn and killed a man while dining in a restaurant and finished his repast at leisure, smoking revolver on the table and corpse on the carpet. Allison was so touchy that once, in Las Animas, New Mexico, when he had a toothache and a dentist pulled the wrong molar, Allison tied the poor devil in his own chair and with his own forceps extracted every chopper in the dentist’s head. But in the end it was the intrepid Earp who walked up to Allison, shoved a forty-five in his ribs, and ran him out of Dodge with tail between legs and the fear of God up his ass.

“Wyatt,” said Bat, “I’ve been thinking. I started thinking in New York—that’s how I got this idea.”

Wyatt waited.

“But before I tell you the idea, I want to say how I feel. I’m more sure I’m right now—now we’re here—than I was then. I mean, sure I’m right.”

Wyatt waited.

“But I don’t want you to get riled till you hear me out. That is, how I feel, what I’m thinking.”

Wyatt reached into his jacket and slid the Colt from his armpit and laid it in his lap. This made Bat uncomfortable.

“Here’s how I feel.” He began to speak rapidly. “Whatever this town is—Dodge, I mean—we made it. You and me. Look at the dough they take in from tourists—all on account of us. If it hadn’t been for us in the old days— what we did—there might not be any Dodge at all—I mean the Texans might have burned it to the ground then, two or three times over. But we saved it, Wyatt—we laid our lives on the line day and night, month in, month out. We brought law and order so the stores and saloons and all could make a hell of a lot of money and the town could grow and—well, look what it is today—thanks to us— and damn little pay we got for it and damn little thanks.”

Wyatt raised the Colt and twirled the cylinder and this made the sun seem warmer to Bat, even hot, so that he found a handkerchief and pushed up his hat and gave his brow a good mop.

“You remember what I said in Grand Central—I said the West owes us plenty and finally we were gonna collect.” Bat began to fan his words like a six-gun. “So that’s what I’m getting at, that’s what I’m going round the barn to say; God I wish you’d put that damn thing away, you’re making me jumpy, now my idea is prob’ly gonna burn you up, we’ve been lawmen and stood for law and order all our lives so breaking the law’s the last thing anybody’d ever expect us to—”

Suddenly, before Bat could move a muscle in reaction, Wyatt was on his feet and hooking a shoe behind a rear leg of Bat’s chair and pulling and the chair went down on the planks with a crash and Bat’s head with it.

He was dazed.

He blinked.

Wyatt was bent over him.

“Goddamn you, Masterson,” he rasped. “When do we hit the bank?”

“How did you know?”

Wyatt returned the Colt to its holster. “Easy. Two and two together. We need big money, both of us. Only one place in Dodge’s got that much.”

“That’s why you used our real names.”

“Sure. Who’d believe it? Earp and Masterson back in Dodge after all these years—much less they’d rob the bank.”

“And you’re willing?”

“I am. I feel the same way about the West. We’re owed. Plenty.”

One leaned against one side of an upright under the overhang of the soda-pop Long Branch, one against the other. Bat rubbed the back of his head.

“We better go check out the bank,” he said.

“Too late today. Tomorrow. We’ll have a lot to do tomorrow. And one thing we get straight now.” Wyatt adjusted his slouch hat. “From here on, I call the play.”

“You? Who says? It was my idea!”

“I say, city boy. You called it in New York—this is my country. I’m here now.”

“What in hell d’you know about robbing a bank?”

Wyatt smiled. “Trust me.”

On the way to the hotel they stopped in at the Beeson Museum
, paid another 50ȼ apiece to a girl at a counter by the door, and idled through three rooms of Indian skulls, skeletons, pottery, warbonnets, bows and arrows, pioneer clothing and cooking utensils, stuffed coyotes, badgers, jackrabbits, beavers, prairie dogs and chickens, eagles, rattlesnakes, cowboy apparel and tools of the cattle trade, rifles, shotguns, handguns until, in the third room, they came face to face with themselves. On a wall was framed a life-sized blowup of a tintype made of them posed together in the ‘70s. Both were shaved and combed and slicked-up and wore white collarless shirts. Wyatt was seated, Bat stood at his right, and their looks, at the photographer then, at their later, corporeal selves now, were what those of young deputy sheriffs should be—long and level and lawful.

“Why, you scamps,” said Wyatt.

“My God I was good-looking!” said Bat.

They were interrupted. A father, mother, son, and daughter wandered into the room and, as Bat and Wyatt moved aside, the tourist family took an interest in the blowup.

“Who’s that?” asked the boy.

The father looked below. “Says here, Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp.”

“Who were they?” asked the girl.

“Killers,” said her mother.

“How many men’d they shoot?” asked the boy.

“Hundreds.”

“Where are they now, Ma?”

“Dead, I expect.”

“Serves ‘em right,” said the girl, and stuck out her tongue at the tintype.

The tourists wandered into another room, but Wyatt had found something else. “See here.”

Bat joined him before a glass case in which stood a Sharp’s rifle, one huge cartridge on the bottom of the case beside it and a card stuck to the glass: “Wyatt Earp’s Buffalo Gun.”

“That was my gun. I recollect now. One time I was short in the pocket and Chalk Beeson offered me forty dollars and I sold it—damn him. I paid a hundred for it. Chalk always was tighter than the paper on the wall.”

Wyatt looked around. They were alone. Reaching around to the back of the case with a long arm he found a knob and turned it. The back opened. Reaching further, he lifted out the ponderous weapon, then stooping, the cartridge, which he dropped into a pocket, then gave the gun to Bat while he found two twenties in his wallet, placed them on the floor of the case, closed the door, and took the Sharp’s.

“There—Chalk’s got his forty back. Now you chin with the girl at the door while I get away with this.”

Bat was amazed. “What in hell d’you want that old ten-pounder for?”

“Might come in handy.”

Bat recollected—in their early Dodge days Wyatt made a practice of hiding shotguns near the doors of stores and saloons up and down Front Street. In an emergency, he said, he wanted something up his sleeve.

“Starting your life of crime early,” Bat remarked.

Wyatt held the rifle behind him. “In for a dime, in for a dollar.”

A thought made Bat grin. “D’you suppose Chalk’s got a big account at the bank?”

They dined that evening at the Popular Cafe on what the menu listed as tenderloin steaks of “Grain-Fed Kansas Beef” and what Bat declared to the waitress was chuck carved off a Texas stray fed on gravel and cactus.

“When I blow a dollar-ten on a steak dinner,” he informed her, “I want my money’s worth.”

“You want me to take it back, sir?”

“To do what with?”

“Well, maybe burn it some more.”

“Burial will do. No use cremating it.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“Let me advise you that in the old days around here you could get a dandy steak dinner at the Delmonico for seventy-five cents.”

“Inflation.”

The Popular was not very this evening, and by the time the two remaining diners were having at slabs of apple pie they had monopolized both waitresses for coffee refills and conversation.

“What are your names, young ladies?” inquired Mr. Earp.

Mr. Masterson jabbed his tongue with his fork.

“I’m Birdie,” said one. “She’s Dyjean, my cousin.”

“Allow us to introduce ourselves,” said Wyatt. “I am Mr. Wyatt Earp. This is Mr. Bat Masterson.”

The girls made a face at each other.

Mr. Earp frowned. “Do you doubt my word?”

“Wyatt Earp lives in California,” said Dyjean. “And I know for a fact Bat Masterson’s a high monkey-monk on a newspaper in New York City.”

“So I am,” said Bat. “More coffee, please.”

“There are trains,” reminded Mr. Earp.

“‘I Love My Wife But Oh You Kid,’” cracked Birdie, cracking her gum.

“If we had a dollar for every liar who comes in here and claims he’s Wyatt Earp or Bat Masterson,” said Dyjean, “we wouldn’t be slinging hash.”

Birdie and Dyjean could not have been called pretty in any context, whether rural or metropolitan, but neither were they homely. The term was “plain.” They were big, rawboned girls with big hands and long necks and deep bosoms and wide hips—excellent breeding stock. They were in their late twenties, one would judge, their uniforms were black skirts, ankle length, with white blouses and ticking aprons, and both wore their ordinary brown hair up in buns. There was little to choose between them, except that Birdie was the sparkier, Dyjean the more placid. They called to mind a team of strong, steadfast horses who ploughed a straight furrow and obeyed the bit—a team far more fit for the farm than the fair. They worked hard and slept sound. They had never sampled sugar. Their last name, Mr. Earp ascertained, was Fedder.

“Miss Dyjean,” said he, “we’re tourists, you might say. Haven’t been in Dodge in years. We’ve seen Old Front Street and the Beeson Museum—now we ought to take in Boot Hill. What time do you young ladies get off work tonight?”

Mr. Masterson swallowed some coffee the wrong way and had to be hit on the back.

“Boot Hill—at night? Oh, gosh, it’d be too scary!” protested Dyjean.

Mr. Earp persisted. “With Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson to protect you? Surely not. What time?”

“Too late,” said Dyjean.

“Too late for you old dears to be up,” chirped the saucy Birdie.

“You’d be surprised,” continued Mr. Earp. “We old dears can be up whenever we want.”

The Fedder cousins flushed and fled into the kitchen, from whence came whoops of laughter.

Mr. Masterson stared at Mr. Earp.

“Why, you old stud!
” said Bat.

“I want what I want when I want it,” said Wyatt.

They stood outside the Popular Cafe using toothpicks to good effect on the last testaments of Texas steak. Bat was astounded by the change a change of geography had wrought in his friend. Wyatt in New York and Wyatt in Kansas were two different breeds of cat. But then, when he stopped to ponder, while cleaning up his second and third bicuspids, so was he. A New Yorker made, if not born, he was a fish out of water here. Up and down Broadway he had put poor Wyatt through the hoops like a Pomeranian, but that was the Pantages circuit and this was Wyatt’s show, so let him run it. Of course, to keep his end up he had to get a word in edgewise now and then.