Brian Garfield: Sliphammer

Wyatt had a tired, confident, masculine smile that worked slowly across his mouth. His heavy, deep voice was loose at the edges. He said: “Not for me, girl.”

Holliday, without comment, had got to his feet. He was unbuckling the straps of a carpetbag; when he turned around he had a double-barreled shotgun. He walked over to Wyatt and handed him the gun. Wyatt broke it open, inspected the loads, and snapped it shut, setting both hammers on safety half cock.

Warren moved in away from the open doorway. “I wish to Christ somebody’d let me have a gun.”

Holliday drawled, “What for, to shoot off your foot?”

“In my opinion I’m a pretty damn good shot:”

“Sonny, your brother isn’t interested in your opinion.”

“Nobody ever is.” Warren grumbled. He went back to the door. His movements were graceful but self-conscious, in imitation of Wyatt: he carried himself like an open bottle.

Josie said, “Doc.”

Holliday’s glance shifted. “What?”

“Go shit in your hat,” Josie said, and grinned.

Holliday muttered an oath and went back to the card game. Texas Jack, holding his hand of cards down so Holliday couldn’t see them as he went by, looked up and said lazily, “Yew thank yew need any hep, Wyatt?”

And Virgil, his heavily bandaged right shoulder gleaming in the half-light, said, “Maybe you could use a backup, Wyatt. You’re a little tense. A man who’s tense makes mistakes.”

Wyatt shook his head. “Keep your seat, Jack. And”-to Virgil-”please don’t presume to advise me how to handle Frank Stillwell.” With a quick snap of his big shoulders he turned away from the casket and walked over to join Josie, indicating that the discussion was ended. He appeared to have put the Stillwell threat clean out of his mind; Warren faintly heard him say to Josie, in an exaggerated hick-country drawl, “Ma’am, you look slicker’n a schoolmarm’s elbow.” Then both of them laughed and Josie squeezed herself against Wyatt. Warren wondered what it would be like to have those soft breasts pushing against his own chest.

Across the swaying car, Virgil moved away from the wall and came forward to the head of the casket. He braced his good hand against it and stood there, brooding. Virgil had been ambushed a few weeks before Morg’s death-the same shotguns. They hadn’t killed him but Virg’s right shoulder had been smashed, probably beyond repair; in time the bandages would come off but it was doubtful the big man would ever use his arm again. The tracks of pain and bitterness had etched deep creases in his long-jawed face. Warren wondered what he was thinking. Virg had been laid up in bed when Wyatt and Holliday and the others had gone after the ambushers who’d crippled Virg and killed Morgan. Wyatt had killed Cruz at a desert ranch, and the day of Warren’s arrival Wyatt had ridden into Tombstone and announced he had caught up with Curly Bill back in a canyon and left Curly Bill there dead. Nobody had found the body but Warren had no reason to disbelieve his brother. It left one ambusher at large, and Wyatt said that was Frank Stillwell, and now Stillwell was waiting for them in Tucson, a few minutes ahead. What was Virg thinking? A right-hander, he couldn’t be much use with a gun left-handed. Was he, in his mind, talking to Morgan in that quiet, manly, reasoning voice of his?

Warren walked to the casket and leaned both hands on it. “Wondering what he’d want us to do?”

“Something like that, maybe. You know it didn’t make any sense, kid. They had no fight with Morg. It was Wyatt and me that ran the Cat Town quarter. But Morg was at the OK Corral and that’s all they cared about, I guess. He shouldn’t have been there.”

“You’re his brothers.”

“Aeah, but Wyatt and I carried city badges. Morg was a private citizen. It wasn’t his fight.”

“The way I heard it,” Warren said carefully, “that fight at the OK Corral had nothing to do with the law. Would it have stopped the fight if you hadn’t been wearing a badge?”

“Kid,” said Virg, “you keep a civil tongue in your head, hear?”

“I was just asking, Virg.”

Virg nodded. “Wyatt’s not the only one tense. I’m sorry I jumped at you.”

“That’s all right.”

Warren looked around. The light was getting very poor-sundown. Holliday and the three ruffians played cards without talk. Wyatt and Josie stood in murmuring embrace at the back of the express car. Here in the exact center of the car the casket stood across a pair of two-by-fours. It was an expensive diamond willow casket. Eight black horses had drawn the ornate hearse that had brought Morg to the train. Warren remembered the crowd that had come down to see them off-gamblers, whores, politicians, and mineowners-all dressed in black like the pleasent occupants of the express car, black made dusty by the desert wind.

Virg cleared his throat and Warren looked up at him. Virg said, “Let me tell you how it was, Warren, because maybe you got a lot of lies from Doc and the rest of them. It wasn’t like the dime novels will tell it, but it wasn’t like Behan’s Nugget newspaper will tell — it either. Wyatt and I took over Cat Town down there because the town needed somebody to run it, so it wouldn’t get out of hand with tinhorns. We ran clean houses and clean gambling, which is not against the law, and the Tombstone council appointed me city marshal because they figured Cat Town would take orders easier from one of its own. So I had a city badge and brother Wyatt had a federal deputy’s badge because he volunteered to collect the taxes in Cat Town, which was a job that paid high but didn’t offer good chances to live long. I don’t apologize for us, kid, but I want to make you see. You take a tough boom camp like Tombstone and you need a place where folks can blow off steam. That was Cat Town. We weren’t hired to close it down. We were just there to keep the peace. We’re businessmen, Wyatt and me, and you don’t take any profits from dead men.”

“What about the OK Corral, then?”

“I’m coming to that, kid. You’ve spent your whole life in Ohio and I think you’ve read too damn many dime novels about this’ here Wild West of ours. You read a lot about plainsmen and cowboys and other claptrap like that. Your brothers and I, we’ve never been cowboys, never want to be. About the only time we spent riding the range was back when you were half grown, when the price of buffalo hides was so high Wyatt and I made a little fortune hunting buffalo for two months. But out here’s just like back there, at the bottom of things-a man’s still got to make a living, which is what the dime novels don’t tell you when they bleat about heroes of the plains and Indian fighters and all that hogwash. The Earp brothers are businessmen, kid, not penny-dreadful heroes. We’ve owned saloons in every town from Ellsworth to Tombstone. It may not be heroics but it makes a profit, which is a thing that can be hard to come by in a country that gets dumped on its butt by financial panics every other year and half wiped out by blizzards and droughts and a crash in the price of silver. It’s all accounting, kid, whether you’re a rancher or a hard-rock miner or a saloonkeeper. So you had better get a lot of notions out of your head before you go around begging for somebody to give you a gun you can strap on. A gun’s just a tool you use when you haven’t got a more profitable way to settle your quarrels.”

Warren said, “But what about the OK Corral?”

Virg shook his head. His face, in the deepening shadows, was hard to make out.

Finally he said, “That started in Kansas, you know.”

“In Kansas?”

“Back right after the war. Before you were hardly out of baby pants. Texans brought their cows up to Kansas, hating Yankees, and Kansas hired a bunch of people to keep the Rebs in line. Wyatt and I did that kind of work for a while because Kansas paid high to get fighting men. That was some years back and we were some younger and looser than we are now.”