Curly Bill and Ringo (3 page)

“When me and Ringo first arrived in Tombstone from the Mason County War in Texas, Wyatt made motions like he wanted to recruit Ringo as a friend, or maybe as a gun hand. He’d heard how slick Ringo was with a gun and he wanted Ringo on his side in the big trouble he saw shaping up with the cowboys, as the rustlers and outlaws around Tombstone were called. In a scrap like that Wyatt knew an extra gun like Ringo’s would come in mighty handy. But Doc Holliday never liked the idea one bit. He seemed to think Ringo was trying to take his place as Wyatt’s sidekick, and he went out of his way to cause trouble between them every chance he got. Wyatt owed Doc a lot of favors and Doc couldn’t do any wrong as far as he was concerned. He just naturally had to take Doc’s side in all the trouble Doc caused, and that led to a few little arguments between Wyatt and Ringo. But some people thought it was just for show and that Ringo was really giving the Earps information about us rustlers when he seemed to be having an argument with one of them.”

“What do you think?” Miss Sarah asked.

Curly shrugged his broad shoulders. “Ringo ain’t a man to sell out his friends. But it ain’t always so easy to tell who Ringo considers his friends. I always thought me and him were the best of friends, but there were times when he seemed to think we were the worst of enemies. But even on his bad days I couldn’t always be sure whether he was serious or joking. Ringo ain’t a easy man to figger out, and he sure ain’t an easy man to get along with. I remember something old Ike Clanton said one time. He said that as long as we had Ringo, we sure didn’t need the Earps.”

Miss Sarah managed a sad little smile. “I think I know what you mean,” she said in a low voice.

Just then old Darius Winkler charged in from the kitchen with a dirty apron tied about his fat waist, shaking his finger at the big grinning rustler. “Curly, you know we don’t serve nothing here before twelve!” he said, and pulled out a heavy gold watch. “That’s almost two hours away! Why you always come at the wrong time? Over and over I tell you, we serve breakfast six to eight, dinner twelve to one, supper six to seven-thirty! In between these times we don’t serve you nothing!”

“Morning, Darius. How the hell are you?”

Old Darius winced at the language, and mopped his fat oily face with his apron. Then he looked at Miss Sarah and licked his lips, smoothing down his unruly mustaches with a corner of the apron. “Miss Sarah, Don Juan he need help in the kitchen, if you please!”

Miss Sarah got up without a word or another glance at Curly and disappeared into the kitchen. Old Darius followed her swaying form with his moist eyes and again mopped his face. Then he saw the cup she had left on the table and came over to get it. He saw she hadn’t drunk any of the coffee and he sputtered, “Why she want to waste good coffee? No wonder I soon go broke thisaway!”

“Hand me that cup, Darius. No need to let good coffee go to waste.”

Curly took the cup from the plump soft hand and raised it to his lips, eager to put his where hers had been. It was then that he noticed the coffee was cold. He told himself that Miss Sarah had been so interested in his talk that she had forgot all about her coffee. But old Darius hadn’t given him a chance to talk that long. Her coffee must have been cold when he came in. She had sat there thinking about something else until her coffee was too cold to drink, and then had forgot to take the cup into the kitchen with her. He wondered what she had on her mind.

Old Darius was gaping at him, his little eyes popping out in wonder. “You don’t drink neither? What’s wrong with my coffee all of a sudden? You always like before.”

Curly silently handed him the cup and old Darius tasted the coffee for himself, then made a face. “Cold! Why she let good coffee get so cold?”

“Something on her mind, I guess,’’ Curly said, glancing toward the kitchen.

Old Darius mopped his face and pointed the cup at him. “You don’t come back no more till later, Curly! You want coffee, go to restaurant. We too busy here now.”

Curly smacked his lips and sat up with interest. “What’s for dinner, Darius? Old Don Juan cooking up something special today?”

“You come back later and see what we got, Curly,” Darius said, and waddled into the kitchen to check on his help. Curly heard him yelling something at the old Mexican whom everyone called Don Juan because he was very polite and respectful to women, and they seemed to find him attractive in spite of his age and his ugly brown face. The joke had gone a little sour lately because he had been heard in the kitchen talking and laughing with Miss Sarah. That was probably what old Darius was so excited about now—he had caught the old Mexican smiling at her. “I would fire you already, Don Juan,” old Darius said. “But good cooks not easy to find who work for nothing like you do. Except what you eat, and that’s too much.”

Left alone, Curly smoked his cigar and glanced at the chair Miss Sarah had been sitting in. He kept remembering the cold coffee and the way she had looked at him when he said, “If I didn’t know you better ...” A damn fool thing to say to a woman he knew so little about. She was almost as secretive about her past life as Ringo was about his.

Ringo, knowing how Curly liked to talk, had never told him anything that he didn’t want everyone else to know. He had never said anything at all about the years before Curly had known him, which amounted to about the first twenty-five years of his life. But he must have come from a well-to-do family. He always dressed like a gentleman and talked like an educated man. He could read Greek and Latin better than Curly could read English. Sometimes when he was drunk he spouted Shakespeare. But he hardly ever got that drunk. Ringo could hold more hard liquor than any man Curly had ever known, not even excepting old Doc Holliday, who had coughed up his insides long ago and had plenty of room for the stuff.

Doc Holliday headed a long list of Ringo’s enemies. Curly liked to think he headed a very short list of Ringo’s friends. Ringo didn’t make friends easily. You’d think he would have been nice to the few friends he did have, but that wasn’t the case. It was awful easy to get the impression that he didn’t want any friends, not even a few. It often seemed to Curly that Ringo was harder on his friends than on anyone else. He was reserved and polite with strangers and sometimes even with his enemies. With his friends he was usually reserved and rude.

Curly could not have said why he liked Ringo above all other men, because even at his best Ringo was never easy to like. Curly’s affection for him would have been as hard to explain as his preference for certain colors of horses.

Curly got up and went out into the lobby. The desk was deserted and he decided to have a look at the register, already grinning even before he saw the last signature written in it. There was no address, not even a first name. Just Easter.

Then Curly’s dark face grew sober. Why had Ringo decided to use the name Curly had given him as a sort of joke? Was this his way of admitting that he was in fact the one who had killed those three men over in New Mexico? The name there in the register looked almost like a warning of some kind. But a warning of what?

“No, I don’t know anything about it, Curly. You think the county sheriff over at Tombstone might a sent him?”

“More likely a hired gun someone’s brought in.”

“Who’d want to do a fool thing like that?” Uncle Willy asked.

“You’re the only one I can think of who might,” Curly said, studying the rancher’s long sour face. Uncle Willy often had a sour look on his face these days, but his voice was always soft and almost apologetic, like a man who hated arguments or any kind of unpleasantness. “You sure you ain’t sent off for anyone?”

“You got my word on it, Curly. You know I wouldn’t cause you boys no trouble.”

“I don’t know,” Curly said. “Your hands have been acting tough lately.”

“Well, they shore ain’t got no room to. Them boys is stealin’ me blind, their own selves.”

Curly squinted thoughtfully at him, wondering how long he’d known about it, and why he’d picked this moment to make it public. “I swear, Uncle Willy,” Curly said, flicking the ash from his cigar, “you sure have all the luck.”

“Ain’t it the truth. Course, I reckon you knew about it all along and just never said anything.”

Curly’s strong white teeth flashed in a grin. “Well, I didn’t have much room to talk, Uncle Willy.”

“No, I reckon you never, at that, Curly,” Uncle Willy said. He looked down at the ground and his long horse face was grim. “I guess the next thing I know, you boys will be fightin’ over my cows.”

Curly could have told him he was probably right about that. The Lefferts boys and their pals seemed to think that because they were still working for Uncle Willy, they had a right to steal his cows, and that Curly and the Hatchers didn’t have any right to, because they had quit. Every time Curly ran off a bunch, it got that much harder for Pike Lefferts and his boys to find any to steal, and they were swelled fit to bust about it. It was almost as if Curly and the Hatchers were stealing from them.

“Course, I know you and the Hatcher boys has been runnin’ off a few head along,” Uncle Willy was saying, “I ain’t said nothin’ about it, but it can’t go on much longer, Curly. Too dang many people is tryin’ to get fat on my beef, while I’m poorer than the day I was born. I had five thousand head when I come here from Texas, and I soon won’t have a head left, the way things is goin’.”

“Is that why you sent for Easter?” Curly asked.

Uncle Willy raised his head and gaped at him. The movement was so sudden that the loose sagging flesh of his cheeks and throat trembled, “Who?”

Curly hesitated, remembering Ringo’s request. “I ain’t sure who he is. I called him Easter as a sort of joke, and that’s the name he signed in the hotel register. I reckon he liked it better than his own, or figgered it was safer.”

Uncle Willy bent his head and seemed to think for a moment, repeating the name to himself. “Easter. Ain’t that the name of the fellow who killed all them men in a gun battle over in New Mexico a coupla weeks back?”

“That’s the one.”

Uncle Willy looked toward the hotel and bared his long yellow teeth in a grin. “And you callin’ this stranger that. You’re a caution, Curly, you shore are. But ain’t Easter just a name somebody else uses part of the time? Ringo or somebody?’’

“Ringo’s dead.”

Uncle Willy dropped his glance and felt in his pockets for something. Whatever it was, he didn’t seem to find it. “Well, you’d know more about that than I do, Curly,” he said. “I heard both of you boys was dead. But after you turned up, it wouldn’t surprise me if he was still alive too. Seems like somebody said they found him sittin’ under a tree. Don’t seem like no dead man would be sittin’ under a tree, does it? Maybe one who was shot up purty bad, but not one who was dead. When people die they usually thrash around some.”

Curly’s pale gray eyes, the color of smoked glass under the heavy black brows, narrowed slightly. Funny he had never thought about that himself. “You sure you didn’t send for him, Uncle Willy?” he asked again.

The rancher took out a dirty bandanna and wiped his face.

“I already give you my word, Curly. Ain’t much else I can say.”

“All right, Uncle Willy. I just wanted to make sure.”

Uncle Willy changed the subject. “How’s old Parson and Ma Hatcher gittin’ along?”

“About the same.”

Uncle Willy nodded. “I shore miss them, and the boys too. Old Parson was the best foreman I ever had. Worked for me for years in Texas ‘fore we even come to Arizona. They was all like my own family. Course, I can’t blame them for wantin’ a spread of their own.”

He looked down and studied the scuffed toes of his boots, his long face sad and bewildered. He hadn’t said what was really on his mind, which was that he couldn’t understand why the Hatchers would take to rustling his beef, after all he had done for them. Even old Parson and Ma Hatcher were in on it, and seemed even greedier than the boys, who had no thought of the future.

To add insult to injury, they had moved into the abandoned house of a small rancher that Uncle Willy had bought out, or rather paid off, and then told to get out of the country and stop rustling his beef. Curly and the boys had taken over a similarly vacated shack just outside of town, without bothering to inform Uncle Willy. He owned several other empty shacks that had once belonged to small ranchers who were in reality just rustlers preying on the Lazy G. He had bought them out rather than fight them. But the rustling hadn’t stopped. In one way or another, either directly or indirectly, everybody around Boot Hill lived off Uncle Willy’s beef. He hadn’t said much about it up till now, but he had showed signs lately that he was getting tired of it.

Naturally, Curly regretted this alarming change in Uncle Willy, but he hid his uneasiness behind a cloud of cigar smoke and grinned at the rancher’s long sour face. “You’ve got so many cows you won’t even miss a few head along.”

Uncle Willy’s lips pulled down over his eroded yellow teeth and he studied the ground with narrowed eyes, while at the same time his gray brows were raised in a way that made Curly uncomfortable. “It’s got to stop,” he said. “I didn’t mind so much as long as it was just you and the Hatcher boys. But now my own hands is tryin’ to clean me out. I guess they’ve been doin’ it all along, when I thought it was them dang Mexicans. That’s what they kept tellin’ me. Course, that’s the main reason I hired you and Pike and them. The hands I had before didn’t want to tangle with them Mexican rustlers. So I hired you boys to go down there and steal my cows back, and now Pike and them know I can’t call in the law without gettin’ in trouble my own self. But they ain’t takin’ no chances. They’ve as good as told me what would happen to me if I tried to put a stop to the rustlin’. It looks like I’ll just have to turn the ranch and everything over to them and leave with nothin’ but the clothes on my back. Lately I’ve been thinkin’ about tryin’ to sell out and go back to Texas, but who’d buy a ranch the shape that one’s in, with most of the stock run off and the rest branded so many times you can’t tell who they rightly belong to?”