The Last Woman Standing (19 page)

Wyatt removed his boots. We smiled at each other. And then, slowly, we unbuttoned, unlaced, unwrapped, wriggled out of, and set aside the clothes that were between us. All the cotton and the wool, the silk and the leather, the ruffles and the rough, fell into one pile. Standing on the soft bedclothes, I approached him with my hands behind my head, following my nipples as they approached the warmth of his skin, feeling the heat before we even touched.

Leaving his hands at his sides, Wyatt waited until I brushed against him. I heard his deep intake of breath. He reached around me, the roughness of his palms pleasurably scratching my sides, grazing my hips, and cupping my bottom. He bent his knees, raising me up, my arms ringing his neck, as he pierced me. There was such a groan between us that the unsettled horses chittered nervously at their stand.

CHAPTER 21

OCTOBER 1881

Apaches raided outlying areas, frightening prospectors on remote claims. Curly Bill recovered enough from his May injuries to pilfer cattle. The tensions between the Earps and the Clantons and the rest of the cowboys simmered. But on those nights when Wyatt booked a room at the Cosmopolitan Hotel, our trysts began late in the coolness of the night and lasted until deep into the morning, when Morgan would bang on the door to raise Wyatt for another day at the Oriental, and give me a wink. It was as if he’d known from the moment he handed me off the stage that this is where I’d arrive, as if he knew the future. But, if he’d really had foresight, he would have insisted Wyatt pack up and get out of Tombstone while the getting was good, and followed him down the road.

During that time, I might have known that Wyatt returned home in the mornings to get clean clothes (and dirty looks) from Mattie. But we didn’t dwell on that. The situation was temporary. All situations were temporary. At lunchtime, Virgil’s wife, Allie, cooked for all the brothers and their womenfolk. They sat down together in a little house on Fremont Street only a few blocks west of Fly’s Photography Gallery. Allie could, and would, beg to differ, but I knew where Wyatt stood with Mattie, which was his business, not that of Virgil’s wife. I understood what Wyatt and I did together was making love, the hard stuff, not cheap beer.

After those long nights, I’d stroll to the San Jose nearby in a happy haze and rest. Then I’d typically amble over to socialize with Mollie and hear the daily news and gossip, and knock heads with Doc if he was in town. The week leading up to the gunfight, he’d been in Tucson playing faro at the Augustin Feast and Fair when Morgan tapped him on the shoulder and requested Holliday’s company back in Tombstone. I learned this from Doc’s girlfriend, Mary Katherine Horony. She sat in the green-velvet lady chair at Fly’s Photography Gallery a little after noon on October 26 wearing a fringed, multicolored kimono over her camisole and petticoat. Still, little was left to the imagination: she was a big-boned, high-breasted woman, a little past thirty, with a large oval face as flat as a platter, with a domed forehead. Although her nickname was “Big Nose Kate,” her nose was not large but long, the bridge beginning high on her forehead and ending in a small curved beak at the tip.

Kate was nosy, radiating the kind of curiosity that could get you killed if you hung around the wrong places with secretive people. Born in Pest, Hungary, a doctor’s daughter, she’d been orphaned in Iowa, and then stowed away on a riverboat to Saint Louis. Kate despised rural life. Her strong features had nothing on her temperament. After a legendary bender and brawl the previous July, Kate had—either coerced by Johnny Behan or fueled by drunken rage—signed an affidavit drawn up by the sheriff that declared Holliday a coconspirator in the failed Benson stagecoach robbery that killed Budd Philpot. Kate recanted when she sobered up the next day, but the damage was done. Johnny arrested Holliday.

When Johnny liberated Doc for lack of corroboration, Holliday gave Kate money and sent her packing back to Globe, Arizona. She didn’t want to return to the boardinghouse she ran there, practicing the bedroom arts far from Doc’s gaze. And yet Kate was the only woman in Doc’s life, as he often told me, for good or ill. She alone could soothe his consumptive coughing fits and get him breathing right again, but it had been four months since Kate had hung her corset at Fly’s.

Kate and I bonded over our shared dislike of Johnny, whom she didn’t find sexually attractive. She sat drinking coffee in that fuzzy hungover way that gripped a town where many folks retired drunk as the sun rose. Kate was thumbing through Mollie’s photographs appreciatively, returning again and again to one of me draped in red curtains with just a little more shoulder visible than the other pictures, and a faraway look in my eyes—as if I could see the future, and it was a pleasure.

“Too much clothes,” Kate said, shaking her head. “I appreciate the composition, but I’ve seen nuns wearing less.”

“Where was that?” asked Mollie. “In Buda or Pest?”

“Don’t tease,” Kate said. “I’m trying to talk sense. There’s money in these pictures. Haven’t you ever heard of French postcards? I know you have, Mollie. You’re too shrewd by half. Send them to New York or, better yet, London or Paris, and you will make money without any man drooling on your flesh, unless you prefer their slobber.”

“I prefer spit,” I said, trying to sound more jaded than I was to impress Kate.

“Since when, baby girl?” Mollie stared at me until I looked away.

“At least she’s no longer a virgin,” Kate said. It shocked me to hear my business discussed so openly, and only made me aware that it had always been a topic of conversation in rooms I didn’t occupy. “I bet cash money that first night at the Grand Hotel. I lost big.”

“Can we remove the focus from between my legs?” I sat across the studio on the chaise, wrapped in a freshly laundered Mexican shawl the color of old blood, and a peasant skirt borrowed from Marietta Spence. Mollie intended to create a portrait of me as a senorita.

“You put the conversation there,” said Kate.

“Let Josephine focus, Kate, or I’ll toss you out of here,” Mollie said, but with a cushion to her tone that made it clear she never would. Mollie had borrowed massive silver earrings for the shoot, and the heavy jewelry tugged my earlobes. I had to keep my neck straight and the crown of my head upright to maintain balance. Behind me, Marietta Spence sat sideways on a chair, scraping a comb across my scalp to create a straight center part. The house cleaner’s fingertips smelled of corn as she pulled my oil-slicked hair into a tight braid at the base of my neck. She was gentler than Mama when plaiting my hair, and Marietta’s attentions relaxed me.

“Josephine, I do not know how you didn’t see through Smiley,” Kate said, using one of her many nicknames for Johnny. “I’ve hosted Be-Handy in Globe often enough. He’s quite the little athlete. He considers himself a Southern gentleman, but I don’t think what he does with a walking stick is quite what his beloved grandmother had in mind.”

“Spare the child,” said Mollie. “I don’t see the point.”

Kate was never one to apply the brakes: “And all those yellow roses? When you arrived on the stagecoach, a beauty queen expecting her bouquet—well, he took them from Delia’s room at Madame Mustache’s when she was done with them. If Delia never saw another rose, it wouldn’t be too soon. And that goes for all the flowers of the field: she can get hives just looking at a daisy. She had a soft spot for Johnny, too. Delia just doesn’t rely on him for rent money.”

While I no longer loved Johnny, Kate’s comments still stabbed like a dental probe into an abscess. Did knowing more about Johnny make him easier to hate, or did it just make me more mortified for being such a foolish tenderfoot? Bile rose and burnt my throat. Kate laughed generously and deeply, and said, “We have all been fools for love, Josephine. I don’t mean to pillory you, but to invite you to join our sorry sisterhood. None of us is safe. Doc is my second dentist. And, Lord love the man, I’m the only woman for him. Mollie exchanged her first husband for Camillus. How we pick ourselves up and grab the reins defines us, and I consider myself pretty well defined. You’ve dumped that scum-sucking, two-timing creep, but still, I would remind you that he has his finer qualities. He’s a charming storyteller who could talk Abraham Lincoln out of his beard, and persuade him to purchase slaves. Even I, who betrayed Doc at Behan’s hands, cannot blame Smiley for seizing the opportunity I gave him. I was drunk. He was canny. He’s neither Curly Bill nor Johnny Ringo, but a small, dapper man driven by self-interest and that lizard in his pants.”

“How is that supposed to make Josephine feel better, Kate?” Mollie approached her camera, preparing to begin the shoot.

“I didn’t realize that was my job, Mollie. I’ll try to improve next time.” Kate rested her Moroccan slippers on the coffee table. “But Josephine does take a pretty photograph. These haven’t quiet captured her beauty yet, though. Still, too much clothes.”

Marietta smoothed the hair on either side of my part and came around to wrap the
rebozo
, or shawl, correctly across my chest, giving the free end a twist over my right shoulder. I placed my hands in my lap, the left cupping the right. As directed, I looked straight into the lens, balancing the earrings and clearing my thoughts. I pushed aside Johnny and men and false roses, considering only the mesa, the open spaces, the tight white sky, and the woven shawl made by the
abuelita
, the dear grandmother, I never had. I breathed deeply, relaxing my lips, my chin, and my brow. I focused my gaze on the camera as if it were a friend I considered an equal, looking beyond the lens into the trust I felt for Mollie.

The door flew open and I flinched. A Winchester rifle appeared, followed by Ike Clanton. His skin had a sickly, sweaty glow. He was hatless and disheveled, his trousers wrinkled, his coat collar askew, as if he’d been up all night. He reeked of perspiration and alcohol. Waving his rifle, he asked, “Where is that sonofabitch?”

“I’m looking at him,” Kate said.

“Don’t play with me, woman.”

“I wouldn’t if you paid me, Ike. Which sonofabitch is that?” Kate asked, tossing the pictures to the table without rising from her plush chair.

“Doc,” he said, yelling over the din of horses clopping outside on their way to the O.K. Corral. He continued to yell once they’d passed. “That damned sonofabitch has got to fight.”

“I haven’t seen that damn sonofabitch,” said Kate. “But when I do, I’ll tell the cocksucker you’re looking for him.”

“You do that.” Ike retreated the way he’d come, banging his rifle into the side of the studio door that opened on the empty lot with a view of the rear of the O.K. Corral. Once he disappeared into the clamor of hooves bound for the stable, Kate said, “Ever since that Mexican posse ambushed Old Man Clanton last month in Guadalupe Canyon, Ike has been out of control. He’s a headless chicken. The Mexicans butchered Papa like the tough old steer he was for sneaking Mexican cattle across the border.” Kate stood up quickly, pausing to hold her head after an attack of vertigo. “Better tell Doc that he’s going to have company later.”

Kate disappeared behind the door that connected to the boardinghouse to wake up Doc. Twenty long minutes later, Doc entered the studio, dressed in a tailored black suit over a fresh peach-colored shirt. His ash blond hair was slicked back, his mustache combed, his cheeks pink from shaving. Mollie offered him coffee. Doc requested brandy. She filled a tumbler, which he inhaled, his nickel-plated pistol visible in his waistband. He pulled on his gray greatcoat and was headed for the studio door when Kate returned from the opposite direction wearing a snug blue dress. “My apologies, Kate, I will be unable to take you to breakfast. You’ll have to eat alone,” he said as he opened the external exit, inviting a great yawn of cold air.

Mollie rushed to shut the door to keep out the dirt and then turned to face the room. Kate raised Doc’s glass, motioning to Mollie for a refill. “I hate waking Doc up,” she said. “I’d rather stick my head in a lion’s mouth. The breath would likely be sweeter.” She downed the brandy. “When I told him he had a rifle-carrying visitor, Doc said, ‘If God will let me live to get my clothes on, he shall see me.’ He is not one to be rushed. And if you ever seek a male model, look no further than my man, although he won’t have time for it today. It’s going to be a hell of an afternoon, and your Earps are going to feel Ike’s wrath, too.”

“Can I have a drop of medicinal brandy, too?” I asked.

“What ails you?” asked Kate. “You’re not going to grab a pistol, too, are you?”

“I fear for Wyatt.”

“I have more reason for concern than you do. Doc’s already dying: the question is whether that death will be fast or slow. Wyatt has an almost supernatural power to emerge from danger alive. I’m worried for everyone around them, including us. Sisters, we are the sty in the eye of the storm. Morgan didn’t drag Doc back to Tombstone because he was lovesick. From what I can gather, Ike was liquored up and thirsting for a fight, the way men do—standing on each other’s pickles and beating their breasts. He said this. He said that. There isn’t enough rope to hang all these men. They are fighting to be the top of the dung heap. No one will win.”

“And some poor mother will lose,” said Marietta in her heavily accented English, to my surprise. I’d forgotten she was still in the room.