Sliphammer

One

Ten minutes before the train arrived, a rider, cutting it fine, skewed his horse to a halt in piercing lemon sunlight at the crossroads store at Mountain View Junction. He could see the approaching Espee train straining up the long grade from Benson, where the Tombstone road made connections with the Southern Pacific. From this high point on the desert the weather-beaten plain dropped away in all directions except southwest, where brush-studded foothills staircased up toward the barren, dry range of mountains.

The rider had taken three hours to get here from Tucson; his horse was covered with a caked foam of lather and dust, evidence of hurry.

He dismounted, tossed one rein over the trading post’s hitch rail, and loosened the single-rig cinch before he climbed three splintered steps to the porch. By that time the storekeeper had come to the door-a squat Mexican tradesman with too much belly and the cheekbones of a Yaqui.

The storekeeper said, “Bad to ride out a horse like that. Might get him windbroke.”

“I got to meet that train, Miguel. They gonna stop here to take on water?”

“Always do,” said Miguel. “It’s a thirsty grade up to here from Benson. How you been, Kelly? Ain’t seen you since that fuckup down to the OK Corral-when was that, before Christmas?”

“October. You got any cold beer?”

“No. I got a lot of warm beer. Where’m I gonna get ice this time of year?”

“I was just asking,” Kelly said, but he did not turn to go inside. The train was within three miles, throwing back a rich plume of smoke. He could hear the rumble, or perhaps he was feeling it with his feet.

Miguel grunted and moved inside momentarily, walking with the slow care of a fat man who knows enough to conserve his sweat on a hot spring Arizona day. Kelly picked at his flannel shirt, pulling it away from the places where it stuck to him, turning his face advantageously into the tepid breeze, watching the train out of the corners of his eyes. He was a freckled, skinny man with a big Adam’s apple, a bowler hat on his head, and a Wells Fargo badge sagging from his shirt. He was thinking it was a damn stupid-ass thing to do, riding that hard in this heat just to bring word to the Earps on the train. He didn’t care much one way or the other about the Earps. But two of them-Wyatt and Virgil-had worked for Wells Fargo, and the dispatcher had reckoned Wells Fargo owed the Earps fair warning. Which meant somebody had to reach them before the train got to Tucson. Kelly wasn’t brimming with enthusiasm; it wasn’t as if the Earps were still working for Wells Fargo. That had been a while ago; since then, the Earps had had other things to do. Like running the whorehouse district in Tombstone, for instance. All the Earps, particularly Wyatt, were very big on whorehouses and gambling concessions, and of course politics, since one went hand in hand with the other.

Kelly took a wadded plaid handkerchief out of his hip pocket, removed his bowler hat, and wiped his face and ears and the back of his neck. Only late spring-what was summer going to be like?

Maybe reading his mind, the storekeeper spoke behind him, startling him: “Hot enough for you?”

Kelly turned. Miguel stood in the doorway shade, a clay mug in either fist. The fat brown hand proffered one of them; Kelly crossed the porch with two strides, took the mug, and swallowed half the beer from it. With foam on his lips he said, “You were right. Beer’s warm.”

“Ain’t no place south of the Mogollon that ain’t hot.”

“Why do any of us stay in this miserable country?”

“Beats shit out of me,” said Miguel.

Kelly squinted westward. The sun would be setting in a half hour or so; night would bring some relief. It occurred to him he hadn’t stopped to pick up his jacket. It would be a cool ride back to Tucson. Of course he could ride the train, but then he’d just have to come back later for the horse.

The train was a quarter mile down the tracks, slowing. Miguel said, “Funeral party’s on that train, you know. The whole Earp gang.”

“I know. What car they in?”

“Probably the express-they’re carrying the casket.”

“Sure.” Kelly handed the empty mug to him and walked out to the edge of the porch. The high-stacked woodburning locomotive chuffed and clattered; he winced against the piercing steel shriek of wheel brakes; the engine slid past and rumbled expertly to a halt right under the long spigot of the high wooden water tank.

Kelly dropped off the porch and dogtrot-ted back past the eight freight cars to the express. The sliding door stood part-way open against the heat; a pretty young man in a dandy black suit stood in the opening, his face cindered. Kelly didn’t recognize him but there was a faint clannish resemblance to Wyatt and Virgil Earp in the high, handsome features and the dark-blond hair. One of the Eastern Earp brothers, maybe-God knew how many brothers there were altogether.

Kelly stopped, smelling his own sweat, and said, “I got an important message for Wyatt.”

“Yeah? Who’re you?”

“Kelly, Wells Fargo. He’s seen me around.”

Someone inside spoke a muffled question; the young man in the doorway turned his head and spoke inside: “Wells Fargo fellow name of Kelly says he’s got a message for you.”

After a moment the youth stepped back into shadows and the doorway filled with a new shape, older and bigger. Kelly recognized right away the tawny mustache, the illuminated gray-blue eyes, the jut jaw and wide shoulders.

“You ride all the way down here from Tucson?” Wyatt Earp was dressed in black.

“Yeah.”

“I assume it’s important, then. Hell of a hot day for riding. On a horse or a train.”

“Yeah, I guess,” said Kelly, resenting the way he felt so grimy and uncomfortable in Earp’s presence. He puts his pants on the same way I do. But there was no denying the presence. What the Mexicans called machismo. Son of a bitch or not, Wyatt Earp was man-sized.

“All right, Kelly,” Earp said mildly, “you said you had a message for me.”

The lapse startled Kelly; when he swallowed, his big Adam’s apple slid up and down. “About Frank Stillwell. The one you said killed your brother Morgan.”

Earp’s face hardened. “What about him?”

“Stillwell says he wasn’t even in Tombstone that night. Says he had nothing to do with it.”

“And you rode all the way down here to tell me that?”

“No. I rode all the way down here because my boss told me to get word to you that Stillwell’s waiting for you.”

Earp’s jaw clicked. “Where?”

“Tucson. In the railroad yards where this train stops to couple on the cross-country coaches. Stillwells got a rifle and two handguns and he’s been talking around town how he wants to see you tell him to his face that he bushwhacked your brother.”

“I’ll tell him,” Wyatt Earp murmured. “If that’s what he wants to hear, that’s what I’ll tell him.”

Earp wasn’t smiling. As far as Kelly could see, he wasn’t armed. There were no bulges in the tailored black suit. Earp pulled one side of the coat back to dip his fingers into the side-belly pocket of his buttoned black vest; he took out something that glittered and tossed it down. Kelly almost missed his catch. It threw him off balance but he caught it.

Wyatt Earp said, “Thanks for letting me know, Kelly.”

The woodburner engine hooted and Kelly heard the big driving wheels start to scrape. There was a series of loud bangs as the betweeh-car couplings stretched. The express car started up with a jerk but Wyatt Earp kept his stance, balanced and easy, not using his hands, The train pulled forward and Kelly stood in the noise, looking down at the object in his palm. It was a twenty-dollar gold piece.

“Half my month’s wages,” he said aloud to himself. When he looked up at the express car receding in the middle of the train, he felt inarticulate anger well up in him. The caboose went by and he hollered: “Screw you!”

Warren Earp could, see that Wyatt had forgotten all about Kelly before he even turned out of the doorway and walked back to his place by the casket. In Wyatt’s book there were people worth knowing and people not worth knowing; and by tossing the double eagle to Kelly, Wyatt had forgotten him. Warren, who had been studying his brother to learn how to act, had already learned how to overtip common people for small favors, but he did think this time Wyatt had been too extravagant. Twenty dollars was a goddamn lot of money.

When Wyatt vacated the doorway, Warren moved back into it. The express car was so damn hot he thought if he didn’t stand in the wind he’d die-especially in this stinking black suit. Maybe it just took time to get used to the heat, — but it was hard to understand how the hell the rest of them took it so stoicly-all except Josie, who had been complaining ever since they got on the train.

The wind carried ashes back from the smokestack. Warren breathed deeply of the smoke and watched the desert churn past, creosote and crabby cactus and tall, man shaped saguaros riding by in the elongated evening shadow of the train. Everything was powder dry. He turned his face and shifted his gaze inside. The windows were small and dusty; the light inside was bad. Wyatt stood, swaying a little with the lurch of the train, brooding down at the coffin in front of him, obviously knowing the others were anxious to know what the message had been, obviously not caring how long he kept them waiting. Wyatt was watching the casket as if he was waiting for something. Waiting for Morg to start banging on the inside of the box and yelling to get out, Warren thought with a sudden fearful, crazy impulse.

The rest of them were watching Wyatt. They were all afraid to speak, all except Holliday, who evidently didn’t have anything he felt like saying at the moment. Holliday wasn’t scared of anybody; he didn’t care about, anything, even his own life, enough to be scared. Holliday was a shrunken little man with a lopsided face, sick-looking eyes, tiny broken blood vessels in his nose that made it look purple. Back East, Warren had read a dime novel about him, and now meeting him he had been shocked. This Doc Holliday was a dour little man with the mannerisms of a rag-picking tramp, a twisted, humorless being whose thick Georgia drawl was pitched on an incongruously thin, high voice.

Right now Holliday sat on the floor with his back to the car side, drinking from a bottle, playing cards with the three ruffians whom Wyatt in his expansiveness had invited to accompany the funeral party as far as the New Mexico line, where Texas Jack and his two unsavory friends would leave the train and go about their dubious business. The three ruffians had helped Wyatt catch the man named Cruz, the one Wyatt had killed last week.

The railroad had given them the entire express car as a favor to Wyatt and Virgil, who-according to the dime novels Warren had read-had caught several bands of train robbers. The other night Holliday, drunker than usual, had confided in Warren: “Don’t believe the lies you read in that yellow trash, sonny. Wyatt and Virg have got plenty of powerful friends in politics and that’s, how they arranged for the private car. None of us ever stopped any train robberies.” Then, laughing sourly: “Quite the reverse.” But Holliday was a habitual liar. It was impossible to know what to believe. The only sure and certain thing in all the confusion was Wyatt’s rock-hard assurance.

They were all Westerners except Warren; it was as if they all knew some secret he hadn’t yet learned. A few weeks ago he had still been pushing a plow back in Ohio, but then the telegram had come. Morgan Earp had been killed-from ambush, by three shotguns. The folks were too old to go West themselves; they had sent Warren to Arizona because somebody had to represent the home family at the funeral. He came all the way, and arrived to discover that his brothers had decided to ship the body back to Ohio for burial in the family plot. And here he was, back on a train, headed East.

Across the car, half hidden by the casket, Virgil Earp stood with his good shoulder braced against the wall. Virgil was the calm one. Morgan had been carefree; Virgil was level-headed; Wyatt-he was just Wyatt, too big to pin a label on. Warren thought, Where do I fit? Because he was damned if he’d go back to the farm now.

Virgil was over there talking to Josie, Wyatt’s wife. It was hard to tell if she was paying attention. Josie had a little hand mirror; she was fixing her hair with hand-pats, watching herself in the mirror. Evidently she never tired of looking at herself. Not that she wasn’t worth looking at. She was a medium-tall girl with dark cherry-red hair and golden skin, a wide, full mouth and a pointed nose that gave her, with her large brown eyes, a quizzical, pretty look. She had a dancer’s hard, slim body-long legs, tiny waist, bouncy, pointy breasts. She had been a dancer-actress with a traveling troupe of players when Wyatt had met her a year or so ago. Josephine something or other; now she called herself Josie Earp, but Warren had heard they weren’t really married. “Common-law wife,” Holliday had called her in one of his caustic tirades. Whatever that meant, it had been enough to drive Josie out of the room in tears, real or faked. According to Holliday, who seemed to be the self-appointed clan gossip, Josie was the errant daughter of a wealthy San Francisco family who had run off with the acting troupe in rebellion after her parents had arranged her engagement to a boy she loathed. Warren had no idea whether that was true, but it did seem in character. Josie was as untamed as the rest of the Earp clan, in her way: she did as she pleased. She liked to shock people; she had a provocative, sexy walk; when she got bored she was likely to do just about anything for amusement. It didn’t seem to bother Wyatt. He just laughed at her in his lusty way.

Now Virg said something to Josie-Warren didn’t hear what it was-and Josie stiffened and said, very loudly, “Horse shit,” and turned to walk away. Warren watched her buttocks as she walked. She went past the end of the casket and Wyatt reached out and gave her rump an affectionate slap. She went on to the far end of the car, knowing Wyatt was watching her: her awareness of his attention put an extra hip swing in her walk, put more of an arch in her back so that her breasts thrust out against the. fabric of her black dress.

She stopped at the far end and turned around. When she glanced at Virgil, her mouth was sucked in with a tight look of disapproval.

Wyatt said, “Something wrong with you?”

She shook her head mutely. Wyatt’s leonine head turned toward Virgil. Virg, in his unhurried, unrufflable way, smiled slowly and said, “I asked her if she knew how to fry an egg.”

Wyatt laughed. “She wouldn’t know what to do with herself in a kitchen. Would you, girl?”

Josie said, “Horse shit. You tell them to quit picking on me.”

Wyatt said, “Time you learned the difference between what’s funnin’ and what’s serious. Now we’ll talk about what’s serious for a minute. Virg, Doc, pay attention. The message was that Frank Stillwell’s waiting in the railroad yard at Tucson with a rifle and two belt guns.”

Doc Holliday drawled, “Alone?”

“I suppose.”

Holliday nodded. “Yeah, who else would be left? You killed the other two.”

Wyatt said, “He’s the last of Morg’s killers. Save me the trouble of looking for him.”

Josie’s face had changed. She said, “There’s going to be trouble, then.”

Wyatt had a tired, confident, masculine smile that worked slowly across his mouth. His heavy, deep voice was loose at the edges. He said: “Not for me, girl.”

Holliday, without comment, had got to his feet. He was unbuckling the straps of a carpetbag; when he turned around he had a double-barreled shotgun. He walked over to Wyatt and handed him the gun. Wyatt broke it open, inspected the loads, and snapped it shut, setting both hammers on safety half cock.

Warren moved in away from the open doorway. “I wish to Christ somebody’d let me have a gun.”

Holliday drawled, “What for, to shoot off your foot?”

“In my opinion I’m a pretty damn good shot:”

“Sonny, your brother isn’t interested in your opinion.”

“Nobody ever is.” Warren grumbled. He went back to the door. His movements were graceful but self-conscious, in imitation of Wyatt: he carried himself like an open bottle.

Josie said, “Doc.”

Holliday’s glance shifted. “What?”

“Go shit in your hat,” Josie said, and grinned.

Holliday muttered an oath and went back to the card game. Texas Jack, holding his hand of cards down so Holliday couldn’t see them as he went by, looked up and said lazily, “Yew thank yew need any hep, Wyatt?”

And Virgil, his heavily bandaged right shoulder gleaming in the half-light, said, “Maybe you could use a backup, Wyatt. You’re a little tense. A man who’s tense makes mistakes.”

Wyatt shook his head. “Keep your seat, Jack. And”-to Virgil-”please don’t presume to advise me how to handle Frank Stillwell.” With a quick snap of his big shoulders he turned away from the casket and walked over to join Josie, indicating that the discussion was ended. He appeared to have put the Stillwell threat clean out of his mind; Warren faintly heard him say to Josie, in an exaggerated hick-country drawl, “Ma’am, you look slicker’n a schoolmarm’s elbow.” Then both of them laughed and Josie squeezed herself against Wyatt. Warren wondered what it would be like to have those soft breasts pushing against his own chest.

Across the swaying car, Virgil moved away from the wall and came forward to the head of the casket. He braced his good hand against it and stood there, brooding. Virgil had been ambushed a few weeks before Morg’s death-the same shotguns. They hadn’t killed him but Virg’s right shoulder had been smashed, probably beyond repair; in time the bandages would come off but it was doubtful the big man would ever use his arm again. The tracks of pain and bitterness had etched deep creases in his long-jawed face. Warren wondered what he was thinking. Virg had been laid up in bed when Wyatt and Holliday and the others had gone after the ambushers who’d crippled Virg and killed Morgan. Wyatt had killed Cruz at a desert ranch, and the day of Warren’s arrival Wyatt had ridden into Tombstone and announced he had caught up with Curly Bill back in a canyon and left Curly Bill there dead. Nobody had found the body but Warren had no reason to disbelieve his brother. It left one ambusher at large, and Wyatt said that was Frank Stillwell, and now Stillwell was waiting for them in Tucson, a few minutes ahead. What was Virg thinking? A right-hander, he couldn’t be much use with a gun left-handed. Was he, in his mind, talking to Morgan in that quiet, manly, reasoning voice of his?

Warren walked to the casket and leaned both hands on it. “Wondering what he’d want us to do?”

“Something like that, maybe. You know it didn’t make any sense, kid. They had no fight with Morg. It was Wyatt and me that ran the Cat Town quarter. But Morg was at the OK Corral and that’s all they cared about, I guess. He shouldn’t have been there.”

“You’re his brothers.”

“Aeah, but Wyatt and I carried city badges. Morg was a private citizen. It wasn’t his fight.”

“The way I heard it,” Warren said carefully, “that fight at the OK Corral had nothing to do with the law. Would it have stopped the fight if you hadn’t been wearing a badge?”

“Kid,” said Virg, “you keep a civil tongue in your head, hear?”

“I was just asking, Virg.”

Virg nodded. “Wyatt’s not the only one tense. I’m sorry I jumped at you.”

“That’s all right.”

Warren looked around. The light was getting very poor-sundown. Holliday and the three ruffians played cards without talk. Wyatt and Josie stood in murmuring embrace at the back of the express car. Here in the exact center of the car the casket stood across a pair of two-by-fours. It was an expensive diamond willow casket. Eight black horses had drawn the ornate hearse that had brought Morg to the train. Warren remembered the crowd that had come down to see them off-gamblers, whores, politicians, and mineowners-all dressed in black like the pleasent occupants of the express car, black made dusty by the desert wind.

Virg cleared his throat and Warren looked up at him. Virg said, “Let me tell you how it was, Warren, because maybe you got a lot of lies from Doc and the rest of them. It wasn’t like the dime novels will tell it, but it wasn’t like Behan’s Nugget newspaper will tell — it either. Wyatt and I took over Cat Town down there because the town needed somebody to run it, so it wouldn’t get out of hand with tinhorns. We ran clean houses and clean gambling, which is not against the law, and the Tombstone council appointed me city marshal because they figured Cat Town would take orders easier from one of its own. So I had a city badge and brother Wyatt had a federal deputy’s badge because he volunteered to collect the taxes in Cat Town, which was a job that paid high but didn’t offer good chances to live long. I don’t apologize for us, kid, but I want to make you see. You take a tough boom camp like Tombstone and you need a place where folks can blow off steam. That was Cat Town. We weren’t hired to close it down. We were just there to keep the peace. We’re businessmen, Wyatt and me, and you don’t take any profits from dead men.”

“What about the OK Corral, then?”

“I’m coming to that, kid. You’ve spent your whole life in Ohio and I think you’ve read too damn many dime novels about this’ here Wild West of ours. You read a lot about plainsmen and cowboys and other claptrap like that. Your brothers and I, we’ve never been cowboys, never want to be. About the only time we spent riding the range was back when you were half grown, when the price of buffalo hides was so high Wyatt and I made a little fortune hunting buffalo for two months. But out here’s just like back there, at the bottom of things-a man’s still got to make a living, which is what the dime novels don’t tell you when they bleat about heroes of the plains and Indian fighters and all that hogwash. The Earp brothers are businessmen, kid, not penny-dreadful heroes. We’ve owned saloons in every town from Ellsworth to Tombstone. It may not be heroics but it makes a profit, which is a thing that can be hard to come by in a country that gets dumped on its butt by financial panics every other year and half wiped out by blizzards and droughts and a crash in the price of silver. It’s all accounting, kid, whether you’re a rancher or a hard-rock miner or a saloonkeeper. So you had better get a lot of notions out of your head before you go around begging for somebody to give you a gun you can strap on. A gun’s just a tool you use when you haven’t got a more profitable way to settle your quarrels.”

Warren said, “But what about the OK Corral?”

Virg shook his head. His face, in the deepening shadows, was hard to make out.

Finally he said, “That started in Kansas, you know.”

“In Kansas?”

“Back right after the war. Before you were hardly out of baby pants. Texans brought their cows up to Kansas, hating Yankees, and Kansas hired a bunch of people to keep the Rebs in line. Wyatt and I did that kind of work for a while because Kansas paid high to get fighting men. That was some years back and we were some younger and looser than we are now.”

“The Clantons didn’t come from Kansas.”

“They came from Texas, kid, and they carried along that hate of Kansas Yankees, which meant us. One night Wyatt had to throw Ike Clanton out of a saloon of ours. I tangled with Johnny Ringo once or twice. And Doc took some stolen cows away from old man Clanton last summer. Not for law but to sell the cows himself, down in Mexico. Nobody could prove they were stolen.”

“How’d Doc get tied up with you, anyway?”

“He had a girl friend that worked in one of Wyatt’s houses. But that’s a long story. You asked about the OK Corral and I told you. It was Texans and Kansans and we were fighting the goddamned Civil War again, is all it amounts to, because I’ve yet to meet a Texan who really believes the war’s over and Texas lost. So you see kid, it’s not heroes of the plains versus villains with black mustaches, it’s just a goddamned stupid feud between people who ought to grow up and learn better.”

“You were there-at the OK Corral.”

“I didn’t like it.”

“But you were there.”

“I was there,” Virg said in a low, harsh voice. “I was there, kid, and I got nicked by a bullet or two, and I helped kill three men-for no good reason I could think of, and afterwards they put enough buckshot in this shoulder to fill a soda cracker keg, and after that they killed our brother here, and after that Wyatt went out and killed a couple more of them, and now somebody else is gonna get killed, and I just want to know where the spittin’ hell it’s all ever going to end.”

His face completely masked in shadow, Virg wheeled away and tramped back to a dark corner. Warren stared down at the coffin under his hands.

The engine whistled, several short hoots. The train was beginning to slow down. Warren looked toward the shadowy back end of the car. He could make out Josie back there but Wyatt was no place in sight. His glance traveled the length of the car. The poker game was suspended; Holliday and Texas Jack were getting to their feet. Wyatt wasn’t with them, either. Wyatt wasn’t anywhere in the car.

The grab of brakes threw Warren against the coffin. He righted himself and turned toward the half-open door, but Doc Holliday shouldered past him and growled, “Stay put right here, sonny,” and went on to the door with Texas Jack right behind him. Disobediently, Warren followed them and stood behind Texas Jack’s shoulder.

The train racketed to a stop with a sigh of sliding brake shoes. Warren saw a lot of freight cars on sidings in the twilight and a man dimly visible standing on the dusty ground beside the express car.

The man said, “Where’s Wyatt Earp?”

Doc Holliday said, “Buenos fucking tardes, Stillwell.”

“Up yours, Doc. The great man too chickenshit to come out of there behind you?”

Warren shifted to the side; he saw, now, that Stillwell had a rifle pointed right at Doc’s belly and cocked. The rifle shifted an inch and Stillwell yelled, “Where the hell is he?”

“Right here.”

Warren jerked. Wyatt’s deep voice had shot forward from the shadows behind Stillwell.

“Right here, you son of a bitch!”

Stillwell wheeled, frantic. The rifle didn’t turn as fast as he did. Two brilliant stabs of flame lanced from the shadows between two freight cars. Warren felt the concussion of the shotgun’s earsplitting roar.

The double ten-gauge blast slammed Stillwell back. He pitched and toppled, aglisten with raw meat and gristle from rib cage to shoulder.

Warren was unable to swallow. He felt needles in his knees. His eyes refused to blink.

Wyatt stepped into sight. It was too dark to make outhis face. Stillwell was down flat and moaning.

Warren felt weight behind him-Virg, breathing through his teeth, and Josie. Warren felt the hard grip of her hands on his arm. He couldn’t rip his eyes off Stillwell. Stillwell was grumbling deliriously; Doc Holliday drawled cruelly. “Don’t be a poor loser, Frank.”

Wyatt Earp snapped, “He wasn’t playing a game.”

“Sure he was-sure he was. What else you want to call it?”

Warren’s legs began to tremble. The man wasn’t even dead yet. Warren saw Wyatt step across Stillwell and drop the empty shotgun across Stillwell’s legs. Wyatt stood below them, looking up. Behind Warren, Virg began to curse in a dead, flat, obscene monotone.

Somewhere in the ensuing run of moments, Stillwell died. Wyatt bent over him to make sure. Josie breathed, “Sweet, sweet Jesus.” Wyatt reached up for a grip and climbed into the express car.

The engine whistle startled Warren. He turned slowly in time to see big old Virg looking at Wyatt with the kind of stare he might have used on a stranger whom he didn’t know and didn’t want to meet.

The train started up, with a curious half-scared knot of pedestrians starting to appear in the yards. Wyatt Earp slammed the door shut. Warren heard him growl, “I’m sick of Arizona anyway.”