The Last Ride of German Freddie (7 page)

Their Dunsinane was a rocky hill barren of life but for cactus and scrub. They hid the horses behind rocks and dug themselves in. Within an hour the larger outfit had found them: the Earps had been reinforced by two dozen riders from the Sierra Bonita, and it looked like a small army that posted itself about the hill and sealed off every exit. The pursuers did not come within gunshot: they knew all they had to do was wait for the Cowboys' water to run out.

Ringo's crew had a smaller store of water than their enemies probably suspected, and one night on the hill would surely exhaust it. “We shall have to fight,” Freddie said.

“Yes.”

“Few of those people have any experience in a combat. Holliday and Virgil Earp are the only two I know of. The rest will get too excited and throw away their fire, and that will give us our chance.”

Ringo smiled. “I think we should charge. Come down off the hill at first light screaming like Apaches and pitch into the nearest pack of them. If we run them off, we can take their horses and make a dash for it.”

“Agreed. I will have to follow you—otherwise I can't see well enough to know where I'm going.”

“I'll lead you into the hornet's nest, don't you worry.”

Freddie sought out Josie, lying in the shade of some rocks, and took her hand. The sun had burned her cheeks; her lips were starting to crack with thirst. “We will fight in the morning,” he said. “I want you to stay here.”

She shook her head, mouthed the word “No.”

“You are the one of us they will not harm,” Freddie said. “The rest of us will charge out of the circle, and you can join us later.”

The words drove her into fury. She was in a state of high excitement, and wanted to put her pistol practice to use.

“It is not as you think,” Freddie said. “This will not be a great battle, it will be something small and squalid. And—” He took her hands. She flailed to throw off his touch, but he held her. “Josie!” he cried. “I need someone to publish my work, if I should not survive. No one else will care. It must be you.”

She was of the People of the Book; Freddie calculated she could not refuse. At his words her look softened. “All right, then,” she said. He kissed her, but she turned her sunburned lips away. She would not speak for a while, and so Freddie wrote for an hour in his journal with a stub of pencil.

They spent a rough night together, lying cold under blankets, shivering together while Cowboys snored around them. As the eastern sky began to lighten all rose, the horses were saddled and led out. The last of the water was shared, and then the riders mounted.

Ringo seemed in good cheer. Freddie half-expected him to give the Crispin's Day Speech from 
Henry V,
 but Ringo contented himself with nodding, clicking to his horse, and leading the beast between the tall rocks, down the hill toward the dying fires of the Earps' camp. Freddie pulled his bandanna over his nose, less to conceal his identity than to avoid eating Ringo's dust, then followed Ringo's horse down into the gloom.

The horsemen cleared the rocks, then broke into a canter. They covered half the distance to the Earp outfit's camp before the first shot rang out; then Ringo gave a whoop and the Cowboys answered, the high-pitched yells ringing over the dusty ground.

Freddie was too busy staying atop his horse to add to the clamor. His teeth rattled with every hoofbeat. He wanted a calm place to stand.

Other, better horsemen, half-seen in the pre-dawn light, passed him as he rode. A flurry of shots crackled out. Freddie clutched Zarathustra tighter. Startled men on foot dodged out of his way.

Abruptly the horse stumbled—Freddie tried to check it but somehow made things worse—and then there was a staggering blow to his shoulder as he was flung to the ground. He rolled, and in great surprise at his own agility rose with his pistol still in his hand. A figure loomed up—with dust coating his spectacles Freddie could not make it out—but he shot it anyway, twice, and it groaned and fell.

The yells of the Cowboys were receding southward amid a great boil of dust. Freddie ran after. Bullets made whirring noises about his head.

Then out of the dust came a horse. Freddie half-raised his pistol, but recognized Ringo before he pulled trigger. “Take my hand, Freddie,” Ringo said with a great grin, “and we're free.” But then one of the whizzing bullets came to a stop with a horrible smack, and Ringo toppled from the horse. Freddie stared in sudden shock at his friend's brains laid out at his feet—Ringo was beyond all noble gestures now, that was clear, there was nothing to be done for him—Freddie reached for the saddle horn. The beast was frightened and began to run before Freddie could mount; Freddie ran alongside, trying to get a foot in the stirrup, and then the horse put on a burst of terrified speed and left Freddie behind.

Rage and frustration boomed in his heart. He swiped at his spectacles to get a better view, then ran back toward the sound of shooting. A man ran across his field of vision and Zarathustra boomed. The man kept running.

Freddie neared a bush and ducked behind it, polished his spectacles quickly on his bandanna, and stuck them back on his face. The added clarity was not great. The Earps' camp was in a great turmoil in the dust and the half-light, and people were shouting and shooting and running about without any apparent purpose.

Fools! Freddie wanted to shriek. You do not even know how to live, let alone how to die!

He approached the nearest man at a walk, put Zarathustra to the stranger's breast, and pulled the trigger. When the man fell, Freddie took the other's gun in his left hand, then stalked on. He fired a shot at a startled stranger, who ran.

“Stop, Freddie!” came a shout. “Throw up your hands!”

It was Holliday's voice. Freddie froze in his tracks, panting for breath in the cold morning air. Holliday was somewhere to his right—a shift of stance and Freddie could fire—but Holliday would kill him before that, he knew.

Troy is burning, he thought. You have killed as a human being. Now die as one. Freely, and at the right moment.

“Throw up your hands!” Holliday called again, and then from the effort of the shout gave a little cough.

Wild exhilaration flooded Freddie's veins—Holliday's cough had surely spoiled his aim. Freddie swung right as he thumbed the hammer back on each of the two revolvers.

And, for the last time, Zarathustra spoke.

*

The Earp posse caught up with Josie a few hours later as she rode her solitary way to Tombstone. John Holliday shivered atop his horse, trembling as if the morning chill had not yet left his bones. He touched his hat to her, but she ignored him, just kept her plug walking south.

“This was Freddie's, ma'am,” Holliday said in his polite Southern way, and held out a book bound between cardboard covers, Freddie's journal. “You figure in his thoughts,” Holliday said. “You may wish to have it.”

Coldly, without a word, she took the worn volume from his hand. Holliday kicked his horse and the posse rode on, moving swiftly past her into the bright morning.

Josie tried not to look at the bodies that tossed and dangled over the saddles.

*

What have I found to cherish in this detestable land? Josie read when she returned to Tombstone. Comrades, and valor, and the woman of my heart. Who came to me 
because she was free!
 And for whom—
because she is free
—Troy will burn, and men will spill their lives into the dust. Every free woman may kill a world.

She will not chain herself; she despises the slavery that is modern life. That is freedom indeed, the freedom to topple towers and destroy without regard. Not from petulance or fear, but from greatness of heart! She does not 
seek
 power, she simply wields it, as a part of her nature.

Can I be less brave than she? For a gunman, or a philosopher, to live or die or scribble on paper is nothing. For a girl to overturn the order of the world—to stand over the bodies of her lovers and desire only to arm herself—for such a girl to become Fate itself—!

This Fate will I meet with joy. It is clear enough what the morning will bring, and the thought brings no terror. Let my end bring no sadness to my darling Fate, my joy—I have died a million times ere now, and will awake a million more to the love of my—of my Josie—

*

The words whirled in her mind. Her head ached, and her heart. The words were not easy to understand. Josie knew there were many more notebooks stacked in Freddie's room at the hotel, volume after volume packed with dense script, most in a frantic scrawled German that seemed to have been written in a kind of frenzy, the words mashed onto and over one another in a colossal road-accident of crashing ideas.

There was no longer any reason to stay in Tombstone: her lovers were dead, and those who hated her lived. She would take Freddie's journals away, read them, try to make sense of them. Perhaps something could even be published. In any case she would not give any of the notebooks to that sister Elisabeth, who would twist Freddie's words into a weapon against the Jews.

She had been Freddie's fate, or so he claimed. Now the notebooks—Freddie's words, Freddie's thoughts—were her own destiny.

She would embrace her fate as Freddie had embraced his, and carry it like a newborn infant from this desolation, this desert. This Tombstone.

THE END

Afterword: The Last Ride of German Freddie

The genesis of this story appeared on the late, lamented GEnie bulletin board—or possibly on its successor, Dueling Modems—where I mentioned (in Joe Haldeman's topic, I believe) that it would be fun to see a story in which Friedrich Nietzsche became a Western gunfighter and tested his theories of the übermensch to destruction on the frontier.

I intended this as a joke, but when I started thinking about it, I realized that this wouldn't be a bad idea at all for a real story.
 
A
crazed
idea, yes, but still a good one.

As is the case with most of my dabblings into alternative history, everyone in the story, from Wyatt Earp to Fellehy the Laundryman, was an actual inhabitant of Tombstone during the period of the Earp-Clanton war. Aside from introducing Freddie as a witness, and eliminating some characters (like Bat Masterson and Texas John Slaughter) who were present but had no effect on the action, I followed history very precisely up till the moment of Freddie's intervention in the O. K. Corral gunfight.

The events in Tombstone in 1881 were chronicled faithfully in the Eastern press, and resulted in nationwide fame for the Earps and their friend, Doc Holliday. The press also popularized the term ‘cowboy,’ which afterward took on its modern meaning.

The greatest fun I had writing the story was pastiching Nietzsche's prose style—or rather, Walter Kaufman's English version of Nietzsche's style.

I hope that German Freddie, wherever he is, forgives me the liberty.

Walter’s web page:
http://www.walterjonwilliams.net/

Subscribe to Walter’s newsletter:
http://walterjonwilliams.us8.list-manage1.com/subscribe?u=ae29e4e66fb1cb836a2fa3932&id=d6305e79f3