Bloody Season (26 page)

Tombstone was mostly adobe when he got to it, but some frames were going up on Fremont and Allen streets. Lumber was packed in from the Huachucas and was as valuable as silver in an area where a man made his own shade. No prospector or woodcutter, Ringo got in quickly with the local cattlemen who drank tanglefoot in the saloons, and laid bets on how soon the silver would play out or Geronimo would tire of white men crawling like ants over his mountains and burn the place to the ground. He took an instant liking to a fellow named Curly Bill Brocius, a big, buffalo-headed cowboy with a square grin and the endearing habit of turning his poke wrongside out on the bar and calling for everyone to drink until the last coin was gone; but he was more drawn toward a surly half-breed called Pony Deal, who wore a couple of hideout pistols under his canvas coat and a bowie knife that had sliced through the stitches in the leather scabbard on his hip. He could match Ringo swallow for swallow, and unlike Ringo he was as dangerous sober as he was drunk. A couple of ugly incidents took place in Ringo’s presence between Deal and others that would have come back on them all had Tombstone been the county seat at the time and under public scrutiny. Ringo, who apologized to women for keeping his hat on at poker for luck, had no use at all for Pete Spence, whom he had once seen beating a Mexican whore with his fists in a corner for biting him.

Most of them deferred to a bandy-legged old crank with a brown bald head and a broom-thatch of white whiskers fanned out and cut square across his cravat, or where his cravat would have been had he worn one and not a preacher’s black coat buttoned to the throat even in the hottest weather. His name was Clanton. If he had a Christian name Ringo never learned it, because everyone called him Old Man Clanton to separate him from his three sons: Ike, the eldest, bearish and goat-whiskered with a tobacco lump taken root under his right ear; Phin, cow-eyed, with his father’s Quaker brow and not enough sense to move his foot when he was pissing on it; and Billy, the youngest, a bull-shouldered oaf of eighteen or nineteen and a school-yard bully. It was months before Ringo saw their sister Mary, a colorless young woman who hardly ever left the house where she cooked and cleaned for her father and brothers. Ringo enjoyed Ike in spite of his big mouth but didn’t trust him, didn’t think about Phin at all, and was irritated by Billy, although he didn’t show it. For all his swagger Billy was no bluff like Ike, and he always had a pistol on him. Ringo had lived too long to pick fights with men who might be as ready to defend themselves as he.

The first time Ringo addressed the old man, he demanded to know if Ringo was from Missouri. When he answered that he was, the old man snapped, “Reb or Yank?”

Ringo, adept at turning aside questions about his past, replied that Cole and Jim Younger were his cousins. It was the right thing to say to another man from Missouri. Before the week was out he was riding with the Clantons and Curly Bill below the border after grandee beef, a new vocation there. This was home stuff to him, and he showed them some things about boxing strays in gullies under a rustler’s moon and used his Winchester to send three vaqueros galloping home to light a candle to the Holy Virgin. The drive north was uneventful.

Tombstone was no-man’s-land, a place to rest and drink and gamble and gather news. The cowboys’ headquarters were in Charleston to the west and, in summer heat, Galeyville, forty-five miles east in the Chmcahua foothills. There he made the acquaintance of the McLaurys: Tom, a man nearly as courtly as himself and a range banker who advanced loans out of a money belt and depended upon his brother to collect them, and Frank, a few years older but much shorter, with a short man’s short fuse and an image of himself as big as Billy Clanton. He had a reputation as a gunman, although he had never killed anyone so far as rumor knew, and Ringo himself, who changed horses occasionally with the others at the McLaury ranch in Sulphur Springs Valley near the border, had seen what looked like an acre of brass cartridge shells catching fire in the sun where Frank stood to practice. Ringo was polite with both of them.

He enjoyed the company of Frank Stilwell, a fixture in Charleston who liked to show off his collection of stolen Wells Fargo weapons, with which he was building himself a fair name as a highwayman. In his middle twenties and beardless, he strode around in store clothes sucking on a big cigar like a newspaper cartoon of a boy imitating Pierpont Morgan—a double caricature. His stories of youthful daring entertained Ringo without convincing him, and Ringo was relieved to see when they held up their first stage together that when Stilwell drew a bandanna up over his face the bravado stopped. He was as professional a thief as Ringo had known.

After Cochise County was formed and Tombstone made the seat, the cowboys gathered often in the house Johnny Behan shared with his common-law wife Josephine Sarah Marcus in Tombstone. Behan was part owner of the Dexter Livery & Feed and had been appointed sheriff by Governor Fremont. As the county’s tax administrator, he often depended on Curly Bill and others to help his deputies convince area ranchers of the importance of public revenue. Ringo played poker at his house often but stood back from his political glad handing and amplified Irish charm; it was the sort of welcome that blew away with the first change of wind. Ringo was far more impressed with the sheriff’s trim, dark-eyed woman, who walked through every room as if she were crossing a stage, and whose waist-length hair smelled of fresh herbs when she bent over the table to empty ashtrays. But he never jumped another man’s claim and so remained only polite.

With Mexico a short jump away and the nearest law with teeth in it as far off as Prescott, Tombstone was a bandits’ gift from God. They owned the sheriff and the local Wells Fargo agent and made their beds between fat Mexican cattle and stagecoaches so heavy with bullion their wheels cut ruts in rockface. In the days when they were riding highest Ringo’s cousins, rotting now in prison, and their friends Frank and Jesse, hiding out somewhere in Missouri, never knew times like these. Ringo alone of all his partners knew that they were running out.

Others had come into the region, among them the Earp brothers, blond giants who operated together like parts of the same animal to knock an apple off every tree in the county from prostitution and gambling to timber stands and mineral rights, and had got themselves badges to license their weapons to protect the harvest. Close behind them came Doc Holliday. In Holliday Ringo saw something familiar, a man of some culture and learning whom drink made dangerous, and who drank a great deal to stun the thing that was eating out his insides. He was everything in Ringo that Ringo avoided or else made his peace with and so stayed alive. Yet he did neither, and in fact sought Holliday’s company for a drink or a few hands of faro every time the two were in town—drawn to him as a man who fears heights is drawn to a steep cliff to look down dizzy at the treetops far below. And like that man he wrestled with the almost overpowering urge to step off. The sheer heady rush of it made him drink more in Holliday’s presence, and the more he drank the greater grew the danger and the headier the rush. The stepping-off would have to come. Meanwhile he bet more than he could afford and smiled in his moustaches when Doc told about the Cornish Jack who got drunk and lopped off his own phizzle with a shovel because he thought it was a bald-headed mouse.

The Earps posed a more insidious threat to the good thing the cowboys had in Cochise County. Ringo recognized in them the same single-tracked ruthlessness that ran beneath Curly Bill’s outward good humor, the same need to seize and wring the last ounce of silver from the region without swinging a pick. It was rich, but not rich enough to support two rival bands of like determination, and from the outset Ringo knew that they could not work together, although they might try.

That must have become apparent to Curly Bill as early as the summer of 1880, when a tinhorn who called himself Johnny-behind-the-Deuce killed a smelting engineer named Schneider in Charleston. Curly Bill and Ringo were in Tombstone when he was brought in, found that they both owed Johnny-behind-the-Deuce money, decided after knocking back a few that the dead man was a dear friend, and elected to square all their debts with one rope. But before they could organize a mob, the prisoner was on his way to trial in Tucson in the company of Wyatt Earp, then serving as deputy sheriff, his brothers Virgil and Morgan, and temporary officers Doc Holliday, Sherman McMasters, Turkey Creek Jack Johnson, Shotgun Collins, Jack Salmon, and Fred Dodge. When he learned of it, Curly Bill stood in the middle of Allen looking like a man who had soiled himself waiting his turn in a whorehouse. No one laughed.

In November of that year Curly Bill got drunk and shot City Marshal Fred White in the belly, so close the powder-flash set White’s trousers afire. Curly Bill was arrested, then released on White’s deathbed testimony that he had shot himself accidentally with Curly Bill’s pistol while attempting to disarm him. Back in Charleston, Curly Bill boasted that he had tricked White with the border roll, and Ringo, who knew the hazards of exaggeration, grew sad, because he knew too that if there had ever been a chance of striking up a relationship with the Earps it was gone now, because they had been close to the dead man and the claim was bound to get back to them. Curly Bill knew it too, and avoided Tombstone for a long time after that.

Sometime Charlestonians Billy Leonard, Harry Head, and Jim Crane mucked up an assault on the Benson stage the following March, killing driver Bud Philpot and a passenger named Roerig but failing to secure the bullion. Thanks to Marshall Williams, who sent a revealing telegram to San Francisco for Wyatt, Ringo and most of the cowboys on the San Pedro knew of the transaction involving Ike Clanton, Frank McLaury, Joe Hill, and Wyatt Earp as soon as they made it, to deliver the three robbers to Earp in return for the reward. Curly Bill was at this time recovering from an altercation in Galeyville in which a friend had fired a ball into his neck that came out his face, and Old Man Clanton had himself wound up to drag through the cactus any man who accused his son of treachery, so it fell to Ringo and Pete Spence to devise a fitting punishment.

It waited for other business. In June, a party made up of Pete Spence, Pony Deal, Frank Stilwell, Ike, Phin, and Billy Clanton, and led by Ringo, crouched sweating in the broken shale atop Skeleton Canyon in the Guadalupes and waited for a column of Mexicans in sombreros and bandoliers to lead their mules out of the shadows into the sunlight below. When they were all clear, Pony Deal screeched like a hawk and the men above emptied their Winchesters and Henrys into the column. The reports clattered off the canyon walls and lead twanged against stone and the mules brayed and plunged and the Mexicans tried to jerk their rifles from the packs and gave up and ran or drew pistols and sent hopeless balls toward unseen targets well out of range and shot the mules to make breastworks and spun and staggered and doubled over and fell and clawed at the cliffs and died or lay whistling through punctured lungs with their jaws shot away waiting for the gringos to come down and walk through and put balls in their heads. Nineteen Mexicans perished there for seventy-five thousand dollars in silver bullion smuggled from the gringo mines up north. Some of those who found the black and bloated bodies days later blamed the attack on Apaches. Others wondered loudly what use Indians had for silver.

Among the latter were the vaqueros who trailed Old Man Clanton and five others driving a herd of stolen cattle through Guadalupe Canyon in July. Imitating the Skeleton raid, the Mexicans poured lead into them from the rocks above, killing all but one, including the old man and Jim Crane, one of the men who had tried to hold up the Benson stage. Curly Bill and Ringo were engaged in treeing Sonora with the McLaurys and the younger Clantons to celebrate Curly Bill’s recovery and got the story from a Yaqui mescal peddler. About that time, Crane’s partners Leonard and Head tried to stick up the Haslett brothers’ store in Huachita and the brothers shot them to pieces. When that news reached Curly Bill, busy with the others burying the putrefying corpses in the canyon, he cut out a bunch of hard riders including Ringo and Pony Deal and galloped to Huachita to clean the Hasletts’s plow. After the party rode out of town shooting out windows and riddling signs, locals counted seventeen bullet holes in Ike Haslett’s broken body and twenty-two in his brother Bill’s.

If Ike Clanton and Frank McLaury were more aggrieved than the others by the deaths of the stagecoach raiders, they didn’t show it, possibly because they’d been questioning the wisdom of their understanding with Wyatt Earp and were relieved. Phin blubbered over the loss of the old man, but Ike seemed glad enough to be free of his querulous ways, and although Billy had to be restrained from going after the bushwhackers and slaughtering any odd Mexican that crossed his trail, he had always been embarrassed by his father and made no show of sorrow. Curly Bill naturally assumed leadership of the San Pedro cowboys after that.

Pete Spence surprised everyone with his imagination when he suggested Ike and Frank’s proper accounting for having conspired to betray Leonard, Head, and Crane. Cornering the pair, Spence and Ringo and Curly Bill encouraged them to draw the Earps into a face-off in Tombstone, at which time the rest of the cowboys would back them up and clear out the only opposition worth mentioning in Tombstone. Ike and Frank demurred at first, but they had already begun to suspect that their transaction was known, and eventually agreed in the face of some heavy hints on Curly Bill’s part. Joe Hill was in Mexico and so was left out of the arrangement. When the face-off came, of course, the two would find themselves alone against the Earps, and either way it went was bound to show profit for the rest. Johnny Behan, whose woman Josephine had been stolen from him by Wyatt, now a deputy marshal working under his brother Virgil, could be counted on not to interfere with any genuine conviction.

Nobody expected things to go as smoothly as that. When the smoke cleared and Ike was still running, the cowboys celebrated having rid themselves of both McLaurys and Billy Clanton and figured Behan and the county would see to the Earps and Holliday. They didn’t, but when Frank and Tom’s moneybags brother Will came out of the wainscoting waving a bounty for the Earps and their friends, Ringo got drunk and challenged Holiday to a Texas bandanna fight, only Billy Breakenridge and Jim Campbell broke it up and Wyatt tumbled to the rifles at Ringo’s back and called Holliday off. Ringo paid a ten-dollar fine for carrying firearms in town.