“I’ll take my horse,” Frank McLaury said, and took hold of the reins with his left hand.
“You’ll have to keep him off the sidewalk,” Wyatt said.
McLaury and he looked at each other.
“Watch toward Allen Street, Frank,” Tom McLaury said.
Virgil Earp had rounded the corner of Allen and Fourth, his hat pulled low against the cold, carrying a ten-gauge shotgun. He walked slowly toward them and leaned on the wall of a doorway across the street.
“Bob Hatch said you was down here, Wyatt.”
“Just clearing this horse off the sidewalk,” Wyatt said.
“Town ordinance,” Virgil said. “No horses on the sidewalk.”
Frank backed the horse off the sidewalk and into the street and wrapped the reins around the hitching rail in front of Spangenberg’s. Wyatt stood quietly watching. Virgil stayed where he was in the doorway, the shotgun over his forearm, the double-barrels aimed loosely toward the cowboys. Most of the dozen or so people who had crowded around to see what was going on when Ike had stumbled in there with his head bleeding, had backed away out of any line of fire that might develop. The McLaurys went back into the gun shop. Wyatt could see Billy Clanton feeding shells into his cartridge belt from a box that Frank McLaury was holding. Wyatt turned and walked past McLaury’s horse, across Fourth Street, and joined his brother in the doorway.
“Guess you’re still covered by that temporary marshal appointment,” Virgil said.
“Guess so,” Wyatt said.
“Seen you let crimes like that pass, though,” Virgil said.
“Horse on the sidewalk. It’s unlawful, unsanitary, and dangerous to the citizenry,” Wyatt said. “Damned horse coulda stepped on somebody’s foot.”
“You’re pushing this kind of hard,” Virgil said, still staring across the street at the gun shop.
The wind had picked up, and both men were glad to be sheltered in the doorway. An occasional spat of snow drifted in on the wind.
“It’s going to happen, Virgil. Might as well move it along.”
“Might not happen.”
“It’ll happen,” Wyatt said.
“You want it to happen,” Virgil said.
“Hell, it’s about me and Josie,” Wyatt said. “We both know that.”
“Maybe. But you think Ike knows it, or the McLaurys?”
“Nope. But Behan knows it.”
Ike Clanton came out of the gun shop with his brother, and Billy Claiborne and the McLaurys, and walked silently past, without a glance at the Earps, toward Allen Street.
“Might make less of a mess,” Virgil said as his eyes followed the cowboys, “if you and Johnny settled it between you.”
“He won’t go against me straight out,” Wyatt said.
“No,” Virgil said. “He won’t.”
“So he stirs up the cowboys and hopes they’ll do it for them.”
“He think you’ll be alone?” Virgil said. “He think you don’t have brothers?”
Wyatt looked out of the doorway at Fourth Street. Now and then an isolated snowflake drifted past.
“How about Doc?” Virgil said.
“Doc will be with us if he feels like fighting.”
“If he hasn’t got a hangover,” Virgil said.
“Or maybe if he has,” Wyatt said.
“If there’s a fight.”
“There’ll be a fight,” Wyatt said.
“You want it to come?” Virgil said.
“Time to lance this boil,” Wyatt said.
“More than that,” Virgil said.
“Maybe.”
Forty-two
“Don’t mind if I do,” Doc said. “You ready, Wyatt?”
Wyatt nodded. He felt himself steadily clarifying, as if some sort of internal telescope were slowly coming into focus. He had the big Colt Peacemaker in his belt. It seemed to be just right there, as if when he took hold of it it became him, part of his hand, an extension of his reach. His collar was turned up, and he felt warm and steady inside the wool mackinaw. He could feel the strength in his muscles. His heartbeat was steady. His legs felt springy. His hands felt soft and comfortable. There were people coming out of Hafford’s, and going into Hafford’s, and walking past on both Allen and Fourth Streets. But they seemed now insubstantial, not invisible, but immaterial as he leaned his back against the wall of the saloon again and waited. It would come; it was like an empty railroad car that had been started on a downgrade, moving persistently faster, becoming always more inevitable. One had only to wait its arrival at the bottom of the grade. Except for the weather, it was the way he’d felt when he faced down Clay Allison in Dodge.
“Where are they?” Doc said.
“Dexter’s Corral,” Virgil answered. “Look.”
The cowboys came out of Dexter’s and crossed the street and entered the O.K. Corral. As they disappeared into the livery area, J. L. Phonic walked up Fourth Street and stopped in front of Virgil. The collar of his long black coat was turned up against the wind. His smallish townsman’s hat was pulled down hard on his head.
“You need them, I can deliver ten men with Winchesters right now,” Phonic said.
“Don’t expect to need them,” Virgil said. “Those boys stay in the O.K. Corral, we won’t bother them.”
“Why those boys down on Fremont Street right now, near your rooming house, Doc?”
“Looking for me, probably,” Doc said.
“They’re heeled,” Virgil said.
“Sure,” Phonic said.
“Well, I guess we better go down there and disarm them,” Virgil said.
He handed the shotgun to Doc.
“Keep that under your coat, Doc. Don’t want people getting the wrong idea and going off too quick.”
Doc gave his cane to Virgil and stowed the shotgun, holding it inside his coat with his left hand.
“Here we go,” Virgil said.
Things at large were going very fast now, but the small details were getting steadily slower. Everything Wyatt looked at seemed leisurely and somehow stately. The wind had stopped. The movement of his brothers and Doc as they began the walk down Fourth Street was timeless and made no sound. Johnny Behan appeared and spoke to them and was brushed aside. A two-horse hitch moved past them going silently in the opposite direction, moving as if it had wound down, the big draft horses nearly balletic in their slow elegance. He could feel the steady rhythm of his pulse, the easy flow of his blood. There was nothing on the periphery anymore. The buildings along Fourth Street disappeared as he walked, and he felt Virgil and Morgan and Doc to his left. They walked abreast, Wyatt on the far right. He knew there was coldness and the smell of snow. Now and then a random and singular snowflake would drift in front of him. He felt the weight of the six-shooter in his belt. Everything seemed to be happening soundlessly at the bottom of a clear lake. They were at Fremont Street. It had taken no time at all, and yet it had moved more slowly than it seemed possible to move. Wyatt didn’t want it hurried. If Josie were with him here in this crystalline moment there could be no heaven to match it. As it was, he felt as if his life had compacted into a density that no harm could penetrate. He opened his hands wide and let them relax and stretched them again for the sheer physical surge of it. Everything was profoundly intense, nearly magical. Ike was there with Billy Clanton and the McLaurys, clustered in the alley together beside Fly’s. Virgil’s voice came from beyond a vast emptiness. Something about “Throw up your hands…” and then, “Hold on, I don’t mean that…” and then gunfire. His big Army Colt ahead of him, an extension of himself, the hammer thumbed back, bucking slightly as the hammer fell. Around him, barely penetrating his focus, other guns were firing as if at a great distance. Frank is hit, and Billy Clanton, and his brother Morgan. Ike closes with him for a moment. Wyatt tosses him aside. Ike runs. Tom shoots from behind his frightened horse. More shots. Hammer back. Pull the trigger. Again. The bullets seem to surge from his deepest self in a leisurely way. Doc staggers and curses and fires again. Clinging to his horse, firing over him, Frank takes a few steps into Third Street and falls. The horse shies off, his reins trailing, and trots down Third Street. Tom is down in the alley. Billy Clanton is on the ground, his back against the wall of Fly’s, still cocking and firing. Another shot. Billy slumps. Then vast silence. As if time had stopped. Virgil was limping, a bullet through the calf. Morgan was in pain, a bullet in his shoulder. Billy Clanton was dead. Tom McLaury was dead. Frank was dead. In the utter stillness the smell of cordite was thick in the narrow alley. Wyatt still held the gun with its hammer back, moving the gun slowly before him back and forth, scanning the silence. Part of the silence, at one with it, as the occasional snowflake spiraled down, and the clean desert air that filled his lungs began to clarify the gun smoke.
Forty-three
“I need to talk with you,” Behan said, his voice distant, and surprising in the sulfurous quiet.
There was no one else to talk to but Wyatt. Ike had run. The McLaurys were dead, and Billy Clanton. Dr. Goodfellow was probing the wound in Virgil’s calf. Morgan, in pain from his shoulder wound, was being loaded into a hack. Doc had retreated to Fly’s boardinghouse with a bullet burn creasing his hip.
“I won’t be arrested,” Wyatt said. His own voice seemed to come from somewhere else.
“I’m the sheriff, Wyatt. I got to arrest you.”
“If you were God, Johnny, I wouldn’t let you arrest me. I’m not going away. I’ll be around for the inquest.”
“I warned you,” Behan said.
“You fed us bullshit,” Wyatt said. “You told us you’d disarmed them.”
The hack with Morgan in it moved past them and Wyatt watched it as it went. The street was filled with people now, many of them men, many of them armed.
“I told you I
Wyatt shook his head.
“Don’t talk to me now, Johnny. I can’t talk to you. You got to get away from me.”
Behan tried to hold Wyatt’s eyes and couldn’t and hesitated another moment and turned and walked away. Wyatt watched him go as he headed east on Fremont Street until he turned the corner by the post office at Fourth Street disappeared. He realized he was still holding his revolver. He could tell by the weight that it was empty. He opened the cylinder, ejected the shell casings, fished absently into his left-hand coat pocket and came out with a handful of fresh bullets. As he fed them one at a time into the cylinder, the coroner’s people were gathering up the three dead men and loading them onto the back of a wagon. Wyatt snapped the cylinder shut and put the gun in his right-hand pocket. Another hack, carrying Virgil, moved slowly past him.
“They find the slug?” Wyatt asked.
“It went on through,” Virgil said.
“Good,” Wyatt said and the hack moved on.
Fremont Street in front of the alley was crowded now. To Wyatt the crowd was a phantasmagoria, as intangible as the projections of a magic lantern. It was what followed reality, trailing in the absolute fact of the gunfight, like the wisps of gun smoke that had already disappeared, dispersed by the fresh fall air. The coroner’s wagon began to move away with the corpses of the McLaurys and Billy Clanton, and when it was gone Wyatt was the only embodiment of the facts that had transpired, alone in the insubstantial crowd of miners and cowboys that meaninglessly milled and chattered around him. People may have spoken to him. If they did he didn’t hear them. He put the leftover shells back in his left-hand coat pocket, and put the newly loaded revolver in his right-hand coat pocket. Then he turned and went to find Josie.
Forty-four
“Of course.”
Wyatt’s coat hung on a chair near the bed. He reached over and took paper from his inside coat pocket and unfolded it.
“
“Maybe if Behan were running the hearing…” Wyatt said.
“Thank God he’s not,” she said.
Josie put her head against Wyatt’s shoulder. He held her hand. They were quiet together in the still-moonlit room.
“Do you think Johnny put them up to it?” Josie said.
“Yes.”
“Is it about me?” Josie said finally.
Wyatt thought about her question.
“It’s about you and me,” he said after a time. “There’s been a lot of push and shove between us and the cowboys. And it’d be hard to get along with both sides. Johnny tried, but after you and me turned out to be what we are, it was pretty easy for him to slide over to the cowboys. I think he stirred them up, Ike especially, because Ike’s pretty much a fool drunk and easy to stir up.”
“Is he through trying?” Josie said.
“Not likely,” Wyatt said.
“What do you think Johnny will do?” Josie said.
“He’s got the rest of the cowboys to rile. Brocius, and John Ringo, for instance, are a little different than Ike and the McLaurys.”
“Are you afraid of them?”
Wyatt shrugged.
“Thinking about that doesn’t do me much good one way or the other,” he said.
“And you have friends,” Josie said.
“I do,” Wyatt said and smiled. “And my brother Warren came in from California. He’s planning to stay awhile.”
“Is he like you?” Josie said.
“He’s more like Morgan.”
“Kind of likes trouble?” Josie said.
“Kind of.”
“If only Johnny would just come out in the open,” she said.
Wyatt shook his head.
“It’s not Johnny’s way,” Wyatt said.
“I don’t know what to wish,” Josie said. “I can’t wish that we hadn’t met.”
“No, you can’t wish that,” Wyatt said. “Whatever comes of all this, we are worth whatever it costs.”
“Then I wish someone would kill Johnny.”
“Someone would have to murder him,” Wyatt said. “He won’t come at you straight on.”
“Could you murder him?”
“No.”
“You’ve shot men before.”
“It’s not just what you do, it’s how you do it,” Wyatt said. “And I think I promised you I wouldn’t.”
“I know,” Josie said. “I know.”
“Shooting the sheriff is serious business. There’s some law out here now. Hell, I’m supposed to be part of it sometimes.”
“Maybe Doc,” Josie said.
“That’s up to Doc,” Wyatt said. “I won’t ask him to do my shooting for me… And I don’t want you asking him.”
She rubbed her cheek against his shoulder.
“You know me quite well, don’t you?” she said.
“I know you’re talking different than you did when you made me promise not to shoot him.”
“I didn’t know it would get down to you or him.”
“Things do,” Wyatt said.
“And you knew they would.”
“Yes.”
“And you promised me anyway.”
“I love you,” Wyatt said.
“God, I’m such a little girl.”
“You appear to me to be growing up fast,” Wyatt said.
“What if I talked to Johnny?” Josie said.
“I don’t like that, but even if I did, it don’t really matter anymore. Thing like this has got a life all its own. The balls been opened. It’ll run until it’s done running.”
“And we just wait for it to happen?”
“We can do a little better than that,” Wyatt said. “We can be ready for it.”