Bloody Season (3 page)

Wyatt’s knuckles showed yellow around the cedar handle of his big American. He said, “You sons of bitches have been looking for a fight.”

Billy Claiborne took his thumbs out of his belt and broke for the gallery. Sheriff Behan, having passed around the other side of the boardinghouse, held the door for him.

Virgil lifted Doc’s cane high in his right hand, looking like a giant shepherd in town clothes. “Throw up your hands!”

Doc and Morgan rolled back the hammers on their pistols, the double-crunch dry and loud in the silence.

“Hold on, I don’t want that!” Virgil said, pushing his free hand behind him. Simultaneously Tom McLaury threw open his vest and said, “I have nothing!” Both exclamations were lost in the broken bark of two pistols discharging at almost the same instant. Frank McLaury staggered, clawing at his belly with blood showing black between his fingers. His Colt’s came out in his other hand. Billy Clanton, a hole in his chest, hunched and threw his pistol above his head, turning to clutch at the edge of Harwood’s window with the hand holding the weapon. He began to slide. His horse reared, wheeled, pawed the air, and bolted for the street.

Frank McLaury’s horse was plunging and whinnying, its eyes rolling white. Tom, attempting to use the animal for cover, lunged for the bit chain and missed. Ike fled from the raking hooves and found himself heading straight for Wyatt. He stumbled, caught his balance on the run, and grasped Wyatt’s left arm in both hands, trying to turn him. His breath was raw with whiskey.

Wyatt flung him back. “This fight has commenced. Get to fighting or get away.”

Behan was motioning from the door to the gallery. Ike wheeled with the momentum of the shove and sprinted through the opening. Doc rapped off two quick shots at his heels, chucking dirt and splintering the doorsill.

“Why didn’t you cut the son of a bitch down?” Doc shouted.

“He wouldn’t jerk a pistol.”

When the firing started Virgil had switched hands on the cane again and drawn his Army. He sent a ball at Billy Clanton, already reeling from the wound in his chest, and shattered his right wrist. Billy border-shifted on his way down and fired wild.

There was a lull.

Shots coughed from the direction of the gallery. Wyatt and Doe returned fire through clouds of spent powder. Morgan spun and fell. “I’ve got it!”

“Get behind me and keep quiet!” Wyatt said.

The lot was filled with thick gray smoke like soiled batting, hanging on a doldrum between gusts. Doe backed out into the street, his eyes stinging. Inside the lot the screaming roan bucked and plunged through haze, concealing Frank McLaury momentarily as he tried for the Winchester in the boot but exposing his brother Tom, who jerked his head right and left like a deer caught between hunters and made a dash for the street.

Doe scabbarded his pistol and swung the shotgun level with his hip, palming back the hammers and squeezing both triggers. The muzzles roared. Tom slipped, then recovered himself and swept in a crouch past Doc, who said, “Mother-fucking—” and hurled away the shotgun to redraw his Colt’s. But by then Tom had rounded the corner of Harwood’s house and was lost to sight.

Billy Clanton was sitting cross-legged on the ground with his back against the wall of the house, steadying his pistol across his broken right arm. His shirt was soaked through with blood. A ball slapped Virgil in the calf and he went down, releasing Doc’s cane at last. He rolled onto his left elbow and, using his right knee to support his Army, shot Billy in the abdomen.

The rest of the fight had spilled into the street. Frank McLaury’s horse had dragged him out of the lot with one hand grasping the saddle latigo and the other clawing frantically for the carbine in the scabbard. Wyatt threw a shot at him that missed and branded a slash across the horse’s rump. It shrieked, threw its head, and hauled hooves toward Fifth Street, tearing loose its master’s grip. Frank landed running and made for the other side of Fremont, rebel-yelling and spraying pistol lead across his left arm at Morgan Earp, who had regained his feet and was bleeding down the back of his mackinaw from a ball behind his right shoulder. He returned fire. Doc wheeled from the path of Tom McLaury’s retreat to find himself face to face with a wheezing, wild-eyed Frank slicked with blood from belt to boots. “I’ve got you this time!” Frank sobbed.

“You’re a good one if you have.” Doc turned sideways into target stance, flinging out his right arm at shoulder height with his Colt’s in his hand just as Frank’s pistol barked. Something struck Doc’s right hip like a blow from a willow stick. He winced and fired. Morgan Earp’s pistol exploded at the same instant—all three going bammitybam. A blue hole slapped Frank’s neck under his left ear and another ball knocked more blood out of his belly and he sat down in the street and soiled himself.

Sobbing now too, Billy Clanton tried to recock his Colt’s, but his thumb kept sliding off the hammer. Just then Camilius Fly’s wiry figure in striped shirtsleeves and black vest emerged from the passage between his two buildings and reached down and took hold of the pistol and pulled it from Billy’s bloody grasp.

“Give me some more cartridges,” said Billy.

The sudden silence boxed Doc’s ears. Then the crowd in Bauer’ s doorway boiled out into the street, talking manically and mingling with others come up Fourth and Third. Tom McLaury had collapsed into a pile at the corner of Third with most of the middle of him gone, although he was still flopping. Wyatt bent over a cursing Virgil with his pistol still out and a couple of bystanders were helping support Morgan, whose legs were failing him. Pairs of newcomers got Tom McLaury and Billy Clanton into a cradle-carry and shuffled toward the house on the corner of Third, the wind spreading their coats and exposing white shirts and scarlet braces in gaps between vests and trousers.

“Murder!” Billy was bellowing and struggling with his attendants. “Them damn Earps have went and murdered us!”

Belatedly, Doc leathered his Colt’s and pulled aside his own coattails and peeled down his trousers to inspect his hip, where Frank McLaury’s pistol ball had gouged a furrow through his long johns after taking a piece off his pistol scabbard. The graze stung like tanglefoot on a raw morning.

John Behan came out of the gallery, looking small now under his broad brim. As he approached Wyatt his eyes were like cigarette holes in gray ticking.

“Earp, I am placing you under arrest for murder.”

Chapter Two

A
lvira Sullivan, called Allie Earp in Tombstone although no record of a marriage to Virgil Earp existed, ran up Fremont from the house she shared with him on the corner of First, toward the clatter of guns. She was a small, plain woman with short curling auburn hair who looked far older than her thirty-four years in a sunbonnet and old dress with the skirt gathered in both hands. At the start of the noise she had been sewing a patch onto a miner’s canvas coat, and the sailmaker’s palm she had fashioned from one of Virgil’s old tobacco pouches was still on her hand, looped to her thumb and ring finger. Pillows of dust erupted around her feet and blew away in snatches.

Long before she reached the scene, the last shot had finished echoing in the Huachucas to the southwest. Voices jangled on its heels.

The block between Third and Fourth was jammed with people. The wind was warm with them and shotgun barrels caught the afternoon sun in bronze stripes. Allie inserted herself in the crowd, got turned around, and for a moment became disoriented among the belt buckles and overall-clad bellies reeking of sweat and clay. Panic rose.

A gap opened then and she darted inside, then had to retreat while a boy with dust on his coat and trousers and what she thought at first was red clay caked on his shirt was carried through it, shrieking murder and calling for someone to pull his boots off. Dark spots the size of pennies pattered the earth under his hammocked frame.

The crowd was splintering into sections now, a section to a body. She hurried to the next one. Before she got there she could see that the man being carried was dead, his head swaying with the hair hanging straight down from his scalp, mouth and eyes open, the whites glittering. Her bonnet slipped back from her head as she pushed in fighting for a closer look at his face. Male hands crushed her upper arms, turning her away. She was facing a platinum watch chain strung across a brown pinstriped vest. She struggled, spraining a wrist.

“My God, Mrs. Earp, get away! There has been an awful fight.”

Now she looked up into the long yellow face of Harry Jones, lawyer. “I am looking for Virge,” she said. “Take me to him.”

“He’s all right, Mrs. Earp.”

But he was pulling her through the crowd by one arm toward Fly’s boardinghouse. She pushed her bonnet back onto her head with one hand.

Another crowd was gathered inside the narrow lot next to Fly’s. The air there was foul with spent powder. “Make room,” Jones was saying. “This is Mrs. Earp.”

“Stand back, boys,” bellowed a big man in a dirty sheepskin. “Let his old mother get in.”

She glared at the man, but he had turned away to open a path.

She knelt beside Virgil. He was sitting on the ground with his back against Fly’s wall, red in the face and chewing his moustaches and cursing. Dr. George Goodfellow, small and round with a full beard and his cuffs pushed back past his wrists, had slit open Virgil’s trousers leg and was probing inside a gory hole with silver forceps. The calf was fishbelly white and without hair above the ankle.

“Forget it, Doc,” someone said. “The ball went clean through.”

Goodfellow paused, turned the leg to examine the exit hole on the other side, causing Virgil to take in his breath, said, “Huh,” and returned the forceps to his leather bag after a perfunctory wipe. He poured alcohol into both wounds, releasing a fresh flood of evil language, and bandaged them, rolling the gauze around and around the leg and securing it with a big safety pin. Throughout this operation Virgil held Allie’s hand tightly.

“Virge, what happened?”

“Morg lost his head.”

She had been raised in Nebraska by immigrant Irish parents and met Virgil in Council Bluffs when she was a waitress and he drove a stagecoach. They were not married in the religious or legal sense but behaved as if they were, not an uncommon occurrence on the Great Plains where clergy was rare and spread as thin as prairie dust. She took in sewing, told fortunes with cards, and although she distrusted all of the Earp brothers except Virgil, whom she loved with the considerable energy of an Irishwoman raised in Nebraska, she had been traveling with the clan for seven years, attempting all the while to persuade Virgil to break away. When she met his younger brother Wyatt he was a deacon in the Union Church at Dodge City and an officer on the police force, and she knew that he had used both these positions to make safe the whorehouse he ran there with James, eldest of the five full brothers. She liked Morgan, the third brother, without trusting him, and she seldom thought about the baby, Warren, who was out wandering the territory just now in search of a game or a bar to keep. Daylight work was anathema to the nocturnal Earps, particularly Wyatt, whom she held responsible for most of the clan’s trespasses and despised for the way he treated his woman, Mattie.

Someone had brought around a hack. Virgil squeezed the blood out of Allie’s hand as Goodfellow and Jones helped him onto the front seat. As she got in behind, Jones supporting her elbow, the doctor went back to supervise a similar operation involving another carriage half a block down Fremont. Allie glimpsed a tall man in a mackinaw like Virgil’s leaning on John Clum and Colonel William Herring. Then Jones climbed up beside Virgil and flipped the reins and their team started forward with a jerk and a “son of a bitch!” from Virgil, and the wounded man in the second hack was lost to view.

She hoped it was Wyatt.

Dr. Harry M. Matthews, the Cochise County coroner, was gray and balding, stoop-shouldered from many hours spent hunched over riddled corpses with their pockets turned out in alleys on Allen Street and slashed corpses smelling of violets and spilled stomach contents in cribs on Toughnut Street and flayed corpses bound upside-down with rawhide thongs to Palos Verde outside Geronimo’s stronghold in the Dragoons. He had thick forearms with the hair scrubbed off and a facial tic that from time to time made him turn his head and wink as if someone had just told a lewd joke. He was not yet fifty.

With the aid of an Irish carpenter who had helped carry the bodies into the house he stripped Tom and Frank McLaury, removing buckskin breeches stiff with gore from the latter and a second pair of trousers underneath and using alcohol and cotton to sponge the jelled blood from blue puckered holes and probing inside with his fingers for the lead balls that had made them. Tom McLaury’s trousers thumped when they landed on the floor and the carpenter removed a flat cowhide wallet from the right hip pocket and peeled apart $2,923 in damp banknotes and laid them on an ivory lace shawl covering a table with a brass lamp on it. Billy Clanton, subdued by an injection of morphine, lay quietly on the carpet with an embroidered pillow under his head and his shirt open and a folded towel growing dark on his torso, his lips forming the word murder. His eyes had taken on a glassy sheen behind the lashes.

Robert Finley McLaury—Frank—had been shot twice in the abdomen and once in the head. The first ball had penetrated the small intestine and burrowed into the lumbar muscles in the arch of the back. The second had deflected off the ninth rib on the left side, separated into six fragments, and perforated the stomach, colon, and large and small intestines and nicked the pancreas. The ball in the brain, after entering half an inch below the left ear between the temporal and inferior maxillary bones of the skull, had tunneled through both hemispheres, transfixing the cavernous sinus and superior petrosal sinus, and come to rest among the epithelial cells in the subdural space at the rear of the brain case on the right side. Death from the first injury was probable, given the loss of blood due to internal hemorrhage and the threat of general peritonitis from the contamination of the bloodstream by the feces; certain from the second, because of the extent of the trauma and lack of sophisticated medical equipment that far from Chicago in that year of Christ 1881; from the third, instantaneous.