The Last Woman Standing
Read The Last Woman Standing Online
Authors: Thelma Adams
ALSO BY THELMA ADAMS
Playdate
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2016 Thelma Adams
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
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ISBN-13: 9781503935181
ISBN-10: 1503935183
Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant
To my three Ranalds, and my only Elizabeth
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
FEBRUARY 1937
Tombstone kicked my ass and I kicked back. No one expected that of a little Jewish girl from a no-name family. I wasn’t invited to the dance near the O.K. Corral with my husband, Wyatt, and his brothers Earp, or those irascible Clantons, or my ex, Sheriff Johnny-come-lately Behan. I was just a woman—a footnote—expected to tuck my skirts under my tail and inspire male bravery when I wasn’t baking corn bread or childbearing. That was never my idea of the wild frontier life for which I’d run away from a good home. I had big dreams and big brown eyes and lashes like whips. I wanted to straddle my man like a pony and ride into the sunset.
Pardon me for spreading my legs so soon. You hardly know me. But you will.
You may not like me—I’m not the first beautiful girl to be conceited, and my mouth tends to shoot off faster than my brain kicks in. But, you’ll have to admit, I got a long way from folding kreplach in my mother’s kitchen and brushing egg white on the braided challah at my father’s bakery for a lass lacking much talent for singing or dancing or debauchery. And since this all happened in a time before archives, in a territory with a longer past entrusted to the songs of the Apaches, sometimes I think that a lie is as good as the truth if it’s prettily wrapped.
I’ve finally come back to where it all began for Wyatt and me. Not by steamer and train and stagecoach, but by automobile in one straight shot, no Apaches. Not in furs but in wool flannel. It’s my 1937 one-last-look tour with friends who are hoping the trip will inspire some memories that I haven’t already shared, and maybe make me a buck. Wyatt and I were a boom-or-bust couple who never saved a dime. He’s become a cottage industry of myth and legend and outright bullshit. I have the real stories locked away, gleaned not so much from pillow talk as being nosy whenever I had a chance to watch or listen. And I didn’t bunk just with Wyatt—I first took my turn with Johnny Behan: sheriff, politician, and friend to cowboys and ranchers and the anti-Earp gaggle. Johnny hated me for switching partners in the middle of the dance, even if I caught him riding another woman in our bed with his own son, Albert, by my side as witness. Men are funny that way. They put a brand on your ass and expect you to behave while they’re out lassoing another man’s wife. I don’t know how he missed that irony, but as smart as a man is (and Johnny was, book-learned and all, with a head for figures), if he’s a womanizer, there’s never any shortage of lies he tells himself and those who love him.
I’ve always been a good talker and a better listener. I’m curious about people and things. Not so much politics, but how folks jockey for power and goodies when there’s so much joy on this earth to go around. What I learned from Tombstone is that God is in the landscape: in the big sky and the hovering moon, in the scent of mesquite and wood smoke. He’s embedded in the chests of rare men like Wyatt, and in the communion between a man and a woman that leaps like flying embers from the physical to the spiritual until they become one flesh, two hearts.
Now I’m listening to the wind banging loose boards, standing alone in the corner window on the second floor of the Tourist Hotel directly across from the old Oriental Saloon where Wyatt had the gambling concession. I’ve told my friends I’m napping, but I’m really hiding out. I could never sleep at a moment like this: too many emotions. I just wanted to feel them as deeply as I could without all the chatter and explaining. Tombstone hasn’t fared much better than I in the fifty years since we last rolled in the sheets together. The wind has its way with the ghost town, howling just for hell, bowling down Allen Street, churning dust and candy wrappers and memories too tough to die. We’ve crossed into the twentieth century, and I’m a relic, faded and forgotten. I don’t quite know how to wrap my heart around that yet, and I’m lonesome as always since Wyatt died in our Los Angeles bungalow eight years ago.
We had a long run as Mr. and Mrs. Earp—I swear there’s a marriage certificate somewhere—but I’m not eager for my final curtain call. I could say God isn’t ready for me, either, but I’m not prepared for him. I was raised Jewish, but he never spoke to me in a synagogue with all that Hebrew mumbling of men. I never entered a church—not once, my whole life, not even for Wyatt’s funeral at the Congregational Church in Los Angeles. I skipped that formation, spurning the gawkers and celebrity seekers and Hollywood pallbearers. I couldn’t face screen cowboy Tom Mix’s tears without Wyatt beside me. Afterward, I carted his ashes up north. I buried them beside my parents in the Little Hills of Eternity, the Jewish cemetery in Colma, California. The graveyard’s lush stillness offered no peace; beside Wyatt, my empty plot beckoned. I have as yet declined.
Wyatt and I met in Tombstone in 1880 when he was thirty-two and had already made a name for himself in Wichita and Dodge City. He was dead handsome: six feet tall with broad shoulders (I like a man with shoulders), carrying 180 pounds of muscle and grit. He had thick blond hair brushed back from a broad forehead and piercing blue eyes. He called them his truth-seekers, and if you were lying, they made you uneasy. Wyatt was so much better-looking than that dullard Hollywood actor Bert Lindley who played him in that Wild Bill Hickok picture—God forbid he upstage Wild Bill. He was a sum-of-his-parts guy. His deep voice and manly presence tied the package together. A staunch Lincoln Republican, when that still mattered.
Wyatt was fearless like no one else I’ve ever met. I’m hardly alone in this opinion, but you’d be turning up corpses to find someone else who knew him and his bravery as well as I did. He might have been a man of few words, but every word counted. My first impression of him when I hopped off the stagecoach was that he was striking, but somber as an undertaker with his black coat and high collar. I got around that eventually and unbuttoned him. He unbuttoned me, too.
When I arrived in October 1880, I was in Arizona to be with Johnny Behan, who couldn’t have been more different from Wyatt, although they were both handsome in their own ways. I can pick ’em. Johnny was three years older than Wyatt. Where Wyatt was tall, Johnny was short—not much taller than I am, though he tended to wear higher heels on his handcrafted boots. But he was dapper—a snappy dresser—and a born politician who could talk a hen out of her feathers. Likable as all hell, he had a round, pleasant face, merry black eyes, and even, white teeth in a mouth born to smile—and that was a rarity, given frontier dentistry. Johnny had a story for every occasion, which made him good company. And he was quite the kisser. If my knees weren’t so arthritic, I might swoon at the thought, but then I’d stand right up because his tongue had a tendency to wander. Unlike Wyatt, who was kin to the lone wolf despite running with a pack, Johnny despised being alone.
So, when I arrived in Tombstone—just down Allen Street in front of the Wells Fargo office—covered with dust, sucking a hard cherry candy to get rid of the taste of grit and keep my tongue from sticking to the roof of my mouth, I was coming to Johnny. Wyatt had Mattie Blaylock warming his bed. I switched partners that year, but it was a bloody dance. And while you can credit the fatal gunfight near the O.K. Corral to lawlessness or booze or the conflict between cowboys and businessmen, Republicans and Democrats, or just plain male cussedness, if you don’t factor in Johnny’s jealousy of Wyatt, you’d be missing the spark.
When I came to Tombstone, I was afraid and excited to experience the legendary town that, according to reputation, “had a man for breakfast every morning.” I left disgusted because I knew some of those men, and they were too good to be toast. The broad window where I’m standing overlooks the intersection where Wyatt’s older brother Virgil got shot and crippled by the coward Ike Clanton, staggering into the lobby of the Oriental Hotel across the street to be half patched up. Virgil was a good man, even if his wife, Allie, was a shriveled little bitch. She never liked me, but she had her reasons, starting with me stepping off the stage into Johnny’s arms with a big “Look at Me” sign tacked to my bosom, and I had some pair. The arrogance of me: parading through Tombstone, without a sellable skill except my own skin, without a clan to back me up, batting my eyelashes and tossing my curls. It was the arrogance of young beauty: assuming that the whole world will tilt toward you and yield its secrets. If Allie could see me now, old and squat and querulous, she’d laugh her wheezy cackle knowing that I’d got what was coming to me.
Truth is: Allie and I would get along better now, comparing our scars and scratches, our years with stubborn Earp men. Wyatt’s not the only one gone. Virgil is, too, and Morgan, James, Warren, and their half brother, Newton. We women endure like grudges. I’m left to bear witness to the graveyard of the lively town I once knew: boarded-up buildings and rotted wood and tacky neon signs that read
C
AFÉ
and
D
RUGS
. Not that it was ever entirely classy, but it was real.
A tourist bus bounces up in a swirl of exhaust, and the brake groans, clogged with dirt. It disgorges passengers holding their lower backs, wobbly-kneed with cameras strapped to their chests, their heads swiveling to absorb the view. If any of them looked up, they would see me, a plump, old Jewish lady with more wrinkles than curves, white hair piled up in a vanilla ice-cream cone, and no chin to speak of. No one looks at old ladies like me. We’re the invisible women.
Let’s face it: aging is a bitch for everybody. It’s a dumb joke that’s replayed every day when you awaken from dreams where you’re running around in your prime, chasing after men long dead with an ache in your pants, only to find yourself as you really are: creaky and misshapen, breasts touching belly, and alone in the spare bedroom under the roof of distant relations. But for a beautiful woman like I was—and don’t just take my word for it; even our enemies said I was the most beautiful woman to ever step off a stage in Tombstone—it’s even harder. Sometime in your teens men just start turning toward you, waking up to you (and women begin to prickle, although you hardly take the time to understand why)—the rabbi, his son, the wealthier widowers eyed hungrily by the mothers of the congregation for their daughters. You discover your power in the world and you itch to exercise it, to leave your mother’s shadow and find your rightful glorious place in the new world beyond the
shtetl
by the sea, San Francisco, where the German Jews lorded over us Prussian immigrants. And all that time when you should have been gaining character—reading books, learning languages, growing wiser, and mastering hardships—you’ve been busy tossing your curls from one shoulder to the next and rushing headlong into a future that you assume will catch you.
I wasn’t dumb. I was just distracted by the sway of my own breasts. Beauty brings trust in the universe, and then, in that cruel joke, over time it rescinds your power. Your brow furrows, your vanity chisels your features, and the frontier wind batters your skin. That demon strand of gray weaves itself into the brown. Your chest grows and grows in a race with your thighs. One day you’re walking alone down a street and no heads turn, no eyes seek you out, and you’re not a pillar of society or a great thinker or the mother of a brood of scholars, but a little woman in shabby shoes long out of fashion, writing letters to the editors and trying to exert some control over a life that’s disappeared.
Those tourists down on the street tumbling from the bus like circus clowns wouldn’t suspect that I know all the stories they want to hear, not just the cut-and-dried tales of men shooting men at the corner of this-and-that, which the tour guide will drone at them. Oh, no. I know the juice and I drank it. Where those tourists see wormy wood, I see fresh paint. They buy souvenirs—bendy aluminum US Marshal badges and cap-gun six-shooters and Indian warbonnets—but I saw the real thing.
Across the street and a block west from my window, I spy where Vogan’s Saloon and Bowling Alley once stood on Allen between Fourth and Fifth Streets. I had a front-row seat that January for the standoff that occurred right there between Wyatt and a lynch mob aiming to hang gambler Johnny-Behind-the-Deuce after he shot and killed a mining engineer in Charleston. I shouldn’t have been there, and I shouldn’t have been holed up in a cathouse for safety with Johnny’s son, Albert, but that day turned me: I’d never seen a man so absolutely cool in conflict like Wyatt. Admittedly, my father was a baker, so my experience was limited, but still, terrified and tucked up on a balcony on my belly, I watched Wyatt single out one leader in the stampeding crowd. He looked him in the eye and talked amiably and softly in words I could hardly hear over the roar of the mob, his shotgun open on the crook of his elbow, until the mob backed off and there was no more bloodshed.
I lied to myself that day, thinking I was still Johnny’s girl. I’d been in love with love, not Johnny. That day Wyatt became the only law-and-order man in town for me. He stirred me in a way that made me hold my knees tighter together. He knew right from wrong in a biblical sense, and he wasn’t going to compromise.
The same couldn’t be said for John Harris Behan, although his reputation as a coward has been exaggerated. What a character. I haven’t thought about him in a long time, and my anger and jealousy have all but dissipated. He was a people person, a compromiser, a consummate politician who could spin a story to charm your knickers off. That last was probably what he did best. Which is a nice way of saying he was a horndog. I’d only just arrived in Tombstone when my fiancé, who’d lured me from my San Francisco home with a diamond ring and no set wedding date, took me out to dinner at the Grand Hotel right across from Vogan’s to celebrate. He dazzled me. I was nineteen and swoony, and I’d never seen anything like it: crystal chandeliers and cushy carpets and gold-veined mirrors. We were surrounded by silver millionaires and bachelor bankers in ties and tails. There was no shortage of men in that town. I’d never ordered from a menu or drunk Champagne, and Johnny had me in his watch pocket until he doubled up his bet and tried to take me upstairs for dessert in front of all the grandees. I wasn’t ready to give it away, even for a fancy meal, but it was really just stalling, and we both knew it.
