Territory (15 page)

He stared at the blank paper and shook his head. He was a coward. But he had to write this.

March 20th, 1881

Dear Lily,

    I hope this finds you well. I can’t help but think of how unwell you were when I saw you last,

Pottery,
he thought,
and porcelain. And the coefficient of thermal expansion.
That was how he’d put it to Lung the morning he arrived.
My sister is not well.
It was a struggle to say it, even in so mild a form.

and I tell myself you must be better than you were then. You could probably bear worse, but I doubt I could watch you do it. I suppose that’s why I put a few thousand miles between us.

What a bad start for a letter! I remember being taught that letters should avoid unpleasantness whenever possible. But you and I have always told each other what we thought. When I think of you, you’re as I saw you last, in that bare white room, frightened and hopeless. I can’t deny that memory, even for the length of a paragraph.

I beg your pardon; I
haven’t
always told you what I thought. I failed once, and that was the time you most needed to hear it. I’m writing now to remedy that. I hope it’s not too late.

It could be too late. It was an overdose of laudanum that had put her in the private hospital. She’d wept when she was revived—great, wailing, desolate
sobs, as if waking to life was the worst thing she could imagine. He’d stood at the end of the white-painted corridor outside her room and pressed his palms against his ears until they ached, and he still heard her.

I never believed you were going mad. I had no other theory to offer, besides yours, which I also couldn’t believe. So I kept silent in the face of so many learned opinions (and a few unlearned, even more loudly expressed). I couldn’t believe that what you described to me was objective reality, but I couldn’t accept that it meant you were insane.

I was angry at myself for that—I’d toss away even common sense to keep from seeing a flaw in you. But in my heart I knew you weren’t raving.

She swore she had been attacked in broad daylight on the street. Witnesses said she’d been alone when she cried out and fell down unconscious. The doctor used the word “hysteria,” and suggested ice water baths. Insanity wasn’t an unreasonable diagnosis.

She’d been frightened when she realized no one believed her. She was afraid to be alone, afraid to sleep. And she took the laudanum.

Things have happened to me in the last few years that make me think my heart was cleverer than my head. I denied that evidence, too. It was easier to believe of myself what I couldn’t of you—that I was going insane—as if it was Nature’s revenge for my failing you.

But a friend tells me you and I have the same disease, and that you diagnosed it correctly from the start. I’m prepared to guard myself against the more extreme forms of it. I only wish I’d understood then, and been able to guard you.

If you aren’t better I expect they won’t let you have this letter. All of a piece with his visit, your doctors will say; it will agitate her. My visit did upset you, but I think this letter will be a comfort. I think what I’ve written is what you wanted to hear then.

I wish I could say it to you, rather than write it. But I have to deal with the events that caused me to write. I’ll come home as soon as I can, and tell you how it turned out.

With love,

Jess

His shirt was sweat-soaked, but he shivered. Writing the letter had brought back the months in which Lily fell to bits, in which his family had broken into
scrambled fragments without a single matching edge. The months that had separated the life he’d planned to live from the one he had now.

Lung wondered why Jesse couldn’t even say the word aloud—and a word, once spoken, was gone. To confess in something as permanent as ink that Lily’s poison was real, and that he, too, had swallowed it ….

He capped his pen and looked out over Fourth Street, over the buildings and into the hills beyond.

Was it poison? Had it always been? Lily hadn’t thought so at first. But then, that’s how some poisons worked. First the euphoria, then … whatever came next.

He looked again at the candles on the desk in front of him. Lily had slipped into his room carrying a lighted candle that night—how long ago? He’d been fourteen, so she would have been sixteen. Her expression was the one she’d worn when they’d learned that air pressure would hold a card over the mouth of a full glass of water held upside down, or when they’d seen the craters of the moon through a telescope.

“Watch, Jess,” she’d said, and the candle flame went out.

“You blew it out. I’m not stupid.”

In the moonlight through the window, he saw her grin, a fey, wicked look. “No, you’re not. So watch again.”

She’d stared at the wick, her lips thinned, her brows drawn together.

The wick had smoked, glowed—and burned again.

He’d made her do it over and over until she had a headache. She tried to explain to him what she was doing, but he couldn’t do it, couldn’t even put the flame out, which she said was easier.

Think your way inside the wick,
she’d said.
You have to draw pressure around it, draw heat into it from the air.

On the writing desk before him, at the tip of the clean white wick of each candle, a flame wavered and rose.

Jesse looked away, his stomach churning. Then he put out the flame. She was right; that was easier.

 8 

The floor rocked under his feet.

Doc staggered, and the floor shifted again, as if the room were a small boat. He stood spraddle-legged and knees bent, riding the motion until it subsided. Even then, the boards beneath him felt like a platform in a treetop, in a lull between gusts of wind.

The room had no windows, but there was plenty of light; the walls were only framing timbers with the near-regular crosshatch of wood lath between them. The lath looked as if it had never been plastered, and sunlight glared through the gaps. That meant there wasn’t anything on the outside: no clapboards or shingles.

Where the hell was he? There was a door at the end of the room, with a stair landing visible through it. Doc stepped toward it—and the room swayed. When it settled, he slid his foot forward slowly, shifted his weight, and did the same with the other foot. That got him to the door.

The staircase was as much skeleton as stairs, zigzagging down inside a skeletal stairwell. Here, too, the walls were bare lath and framing, like a giant crate for chickens. There was a hole in the wall on the landing below him, cut for a window that had never been framed in. He crept down the flight of stairs, clinging to the rail and feeling the whole structure move beneath him like a rope bridge. When he reached the window, he clutched the wall for support and looked out.

The entire building was like the room he’d just escaped, unfinished and abandoned. And taller than anything he’d ever stood on that wasn’t a mountain.

Far below, lath was falling away from the building like sugar off a doughnut. Then he saw the framing timbers breaking up into splinters and sawdust, and the wind carrying the dust away. The building was coming apart from the bottom up.

The wood under his hands was turning grainy as sand.

He woke with the sheets damp with sweat and tangled around his legs. But the walls were solid and papered, and the bed stayed put when he sat up. His room at Fly’s Boarding House, just as it ought to be. In that case, there should also be …

“Bad dream?” Kate asked, peering around the open door of the armoire. It swung a little on its hinges, and he saw himself reflected in the long mirror on its front: naked, his white body looking as if it didn’t belong to his tanned head and hands. The bones of a man who should have been tall and strong, but was only tall. His hair looked as if a tornado had passed through it, with a rainstorm close behind.

“Oh, not so bad,” Doc replied. “But if this town doesn’t cease building itself, I’ll have to move out to get a night’s sleep.”

He found his pocket watch in its usual place on the nightstand and thumbed the catch for the cover. A hair before eleven. Six hours’ sleep wasn’t bad. Light sparkled on the engraving inside the cover, a text he knew by heart:
JHH from WBSE/1878.
Wyatt had a nice taste in timepieces.

Kate shut the armoire and swept over to perch on the edge of the bed. She was dressed to go out, in a green-and-copper striped walking dress. The frill of lace that filled in the neckline just made him think about what it was hiding. She smiled—a little movement that barely deepened the corners of her mouth and threatened to dimple her cheek.
They call that “roguish,”
he thought, with a happy pang. “Oh, I expect that was me,” she said, “banging the door as I came in.”

“You banged a sleeping man’s door?”

“I wanted him to wake up.”

“Damned vixen.” He shot an arm around her waist and pulled her down on top of him. She laughed, a little explosion transferred from her chest to his. Her skin smelled like jasmine. Everything about her felt soft, smelled soft, looked soft. It thrilled him to think how much of her was iron-hard, and how few people knew both parts.

He pulled her face down to his, and she kissed him openmouthed. But when he tried to slide her skirt up to her thigh, she slapped his knuckles and sat up.

“No, you don’t. Get up, Doc. I want to go out.”

“I thought you’d been out already.”

“I want to go to the Maison Doré for lunch. Come on, shift. If you’re not hungry you can watch me eat.”

Another woman would fuss over his appetite. He loved it that she wouldn’t.
You’re a grown man,
she often said.
I figure you can go to Hell by your own road.
He tried to show her the same courtesy, but it was hard, sometimes.

She pinned a little hat over the looped and twisted structure of her dark hair. Two golden-red cock feathers arched out of the puff of green netting at the hat’s crown, fiery with the light shining through them.

“I need to wash,” he warned her.

“Gracious, I hope so. I’ll wait for you at Heintzelman’s. I’ve gone and lost my watch somewhere.”

“And I am buying you a new one?”

Kate blinked. “That’s awfully sweet of you.” That twitch of her mouth again, as she collected her bag and parasol. Then she was out the door; it banged behind her.

He swung his legs over and stood up. Today was going to be one of the good days, he decided, consulting his inner works. The dream was clearing out of his head, too. Another one he wouldn’t describe to Kate. She turned all gypsy when he told her his dreams, which made him feel as if Fate was crowding him. In Fort Griffin they’d had a hell of a row over it. Well, fighting and making up was what he and Kate did. He liked the making-up, especially. But he didn’t tell her his dreams anymore.

He poured water in the washbasin and shaved and scrubbed himself down. Then he patted bay rum on his cheeks and chin. The sting told him he was awake, alive, and thinking. Some days, that was better than gold.

Doc left the room half an hour after Kate, but he thought she’d appreciate the results. He stepped onto Fremont Street and into the brilliance and racket of midday.

Kate might have slammed his door, but one could understand dreaming of half-finished buildings in Tombstone. At the corner of Fourth Street, the adobe walls were going up for a great barn of an opera house. He’d heard they were going to name it after Ed Schieffelin, who walked through town looking as if he wondered how his big silver strike had turned into this.

On both sides of Fremont, commercial buildings and little houses were springing up, or having second stories and balconies added to them. The air was full of the smell of cut lumber, adobe mud, and paint.

Towns were like people: they got big and slowed down. At this rate, Tombstone would get very big indeed. Doc didn’t think that would suit him.

He bought himself a cigar for after lunch from the shop beside Hafford’s Saloon, then crossed Allen Street to Heintzelman’s. Through the window he saw the jeweler’s assistant bent nearly double, holding out a tray of gold ladies’
watches. Kate was studying them, seated in a straight-backed spindly chair. She looked like a queen of England, only hawk-nosed and sallow and beautiful. All the picture needed was for the assistant to be down on one knee.