Territory (16 page)

She looked up as Doc came through the door, her eyes sparkling. “Come and look, Doc! I can’t decide.”

Meaning she had decided, but she would give him the comfort of pretending he had some say in how his money was spent. He leaned on her chair, close enough to smell jasmine. There were eight watches in the velvet-lined tray. The assistant’s face had a touch of pleading in it. One way or another, Kate could always reduce a man to pleading.

Doc contemplated the selection: engraved, brilliant-cut, ornamented with relief-work. He spotted the one she wanted in a moment. Raised lilies offcenter on the oval case lid, with a patterned bezel all around the edge. It looked ridiculously expensive, but very handsome and modern.

Doc pointed to the watch next to it, which looked costly, too, but more restrained. “That’s pretty.”

He felt Kate go still for an instant. “It is, isn’t it? But the face isn’t so nice.” She snapped it open to show him.

It was a clock face like any other. “No, I see that. What’s that one next to it like?”

Kate snapped the lily watch open quickly. It had numbers and hands. He thought about being dissatisfied, just to see how she’d talk him out of it. No, he felt too good. “Elegant,” he said. “Reminds me of you.”

Kate looked up with a flash of dimple. “Thank you, sir.”

Doc plucked the watch from the tray and pinned it in the lace on Kate’s breast. His knuckles brushed the skin under the lace for an instant, and he looked into her eyes from inches away. She met the look, wide-eyed, lips parted. If the jeweler’s assistant hadn’t been there, Doc would have consigned luncheon to the Devil.

He left the shop forty dollars lighter, but with Kate close beside him, her arm through his and the swell of her bosom brushing his sleeve. “Happy?” he said, and regretted it immediately. He hadn’t meant to suggest that he was buying her happiness, or any other part of her.

But she was in a good mood, too. “Hungry,” she replied. “I hope they have chicken cutlets.”

“If not, I shall step out back and personally wring some pullet’s neck.”

Kate laughed, probably at the thought of him in a hen yard.

“Hold it, Holliday,” someone growled behind him. But the growl was insufficient.

“Good day to you, too, Morg,” Doc said as he turned.

Morgan wore his rough gear, not his town clothes: a colored shirt, twill trousers tucked into high boots, a leather vest, and a drab coat. His concession to town life was that he’d left his gunbelt at home. Gingery stubble showed on his chin and cheeks. Doc wondered if Wyatt had only now let him off chasing Leonard, Head, and Crane. “Damn,” Morgan said. “How’d you know it was me?”

“Because you sounded marvelously like yourself.”

Morgan tugged his hat brim and grinned at Kate. “Good morning, Miz Holliday. You look good enough to eat.”

Kate shook her head, but twitched the dimple into view again. “Mr. Earp.
You
look like a saddle tramp.”

“Purely temporary. Give me an hour with the barber, and I’ll be so fine you won’t be able to keep your eyes off me.”

It was only Morgan, but even so Doc felt his hackles stir. “The sooner you start, the better you’ll be, then. I’d invite you to join us for lunch, but they won’t let you look in the windows of the Maison Doré in your present state.”

Morgan laughed. “I’ll just keep you company on your way.” They stepped three abreast into the bustle of Allen Street.

A pistol fired from overhead. Doc pushed Kate back toward the jeweler’s. He felt his revolver in his hand; when had he reached for it? At the corner of his eye he saw Morgan go for his, heard him swear when he brought his fist up empty.

On the second-floor balcony of the Cosmopolitan Hotel, a man stood black against the sky. Doc aimed; but the figure swayed, staggered toward the railing. In the street a woman screamed, and men shouted. Slowly, slowly, the figure collapsed across the railing and tumbled over. He landed in the street with a thump and a puff of dust not ten feet from the toes of Doc’s boots.

Doc scanned the second-floor windows for the shooter. Then a noise, part gasp, part cough, drew his attention to the ground.

“Damn,” said the corpse, and wheezed again. “Didn’t look so far from up there.”

It was Curly Bill Brocius, and there wasn’t a mark on him.

For a moment the people in the street gaped, silent. Then Brocius swept them with a grin. “April Fool’s.”

A man at the front of the crowd began to laugh, then another. The explanation spread like running water, in talk and laughter, down Allen Street. Two men put their hands out and helped Brocius to his feet. Traffic began to move again.

That it actually was the first of April didn’t make Doc feel better. He jammed his gun back into his waistband under his coat, wishing he’d taken a shot at the silhouette on the balcony after all.

Brocius looked up from beating the dust out of his clothes. He beamed. “Why, it’s Holliday and brave young Morgan Earp! What’d you think, boys? Pretty convincing, eh?”

Doc nodded. “Not bad. Try again, and I’ll help you along a little.”

“Hell,” Morgan said, stepping close to Brocius, “I’d like to see how well you drop right here.”

Damn Morgan—he had no sense of what a man would stand for. Or he did, and didn’t care to use it, which was thoughtless. Shooting Brocius hadn’t been one of the things Doc had planned to do this afternoon.

Brocius studied Morgan, his smile looking forgotten on his mouth. “Now, Mr. Earp. You wouldn’t be proposing a quarrel between us? And you having nothing on you to bring it with.”

Morgan’s hands hovered at his hips, where his gunbelt wasn’t. Doc stepped forward and said pleasantly, “He did bring me, however.” He caught a powerful smell of alcohol. “And unlike yourself, I am painfully sober.”

Brocius looked offended and jerked his head toward the hotel balcony. “You don’t think a fellow can do a trick like that if he ain’t dead drunk, do you?”

“I should bring you in for disturbing the peace,” Morgan said.

Brocius threw his head back and laughed. Doc caught Morgan’s arm as he cocked it for a punch and shoved it back to his side. “Oh, my,” Brocius got out between gasps. “That’s a pretty picture. The Earp brothers and their sportin’ pal keepin’ the town quiet, while they make it as much as a man’s life is worth to ride the Benson stage!”

Morgan grabbed Brocius by the collar before Doc could stop him. “You lying sack of shit!”

Brocius kept laughing. “You haven’t killed everybody who knows. What were your brothers gonna spend that money on? A brand-new whorehouse?”

Morgan shoved, and Brocius staggered backward and sat down in the dust, still whooping. Again, Morgan reached for the pistol he didn’t have.

Doc pulled him away. “Try not to make a fool of yourself. At least not in public.” He looked around to see who else might have heard Brocius.

Kate stood at his shoulder. Her eyes moved from Morgan to Brocius, and at last, to Doc.

He opened his mouth to tell her … what? To deny it? To say that Brocius was drunk, that he and the Earps had a standing quarrel? Nothing he could say would change what she knew. Her face told him as much.

Brocius got to his feet and walked unsteadily across the street, into the Alhambra Saloon.

Morgan began, “Damn it, Doc—”

“Shut up,” Doc told him. He turned back to Kate.

She clenched her teeth—he could tell from the shape of her face. He took a step toward her, but it didn’t seem to bring him any closer. Then she gathered her skirts, turned, and strode away up the street.

Mildred sat at the kitchen table and drummed the pencil on the pile of paper in front of her. She suspected she’d got something wrong in the last few pages, but she wasn’t sure; possibly she only had to think a little harder, and the words would start to fly out of her pencil again.

She turned to the previous pages, covered with her hasty writing (how jealous she was of her yesterday self, who could hardly write fast enough to keep up with her invention!). She would read the chapter from the start to remind herself where she was, and by the time she reached blank paper, she’d know what to write.

On the second page, she read:

“Hush!” Constanza pleaded, her dark eyes full of terror. “Oh,
señorita,
pray do not say such things where others may hear! Don Alfonso has his spies in every house!”

Constanza’s speech caused Regina’s nerves to thrill with fear, but she lifted her fair head in a semblance of disdain. “Alfonso Castillo does not rule over us, or over anyone on this
rancho.
Are you a serf, that you fear him and call him ‘Don’? We are Americans now, Constanza. We bend the knee to no one.”

“You have not seen,
señorita.
He beat a man, a
vaquero,
nearly to death, and the law did not stretch out its hand and touch him.”

“Retribution comes even to such as he, Constanza. One day he will pay for all his crimes.”

“… her dark eyes full of terror” wasn’t right. “Huge with terror”? “Ablaze with terror”? Much more stirring; but eyes didn’t really blaze.

Mildred didn’t like the start of the next paragraph, either. She drove her pencil through “Constanza’s speech caused” and made it, “Regina’s nerves thrilled with fear.” “He will pay for all his crimes”—should that be “for his crimes”? No, it sounded so bald. “For his every crime”?

Now the first paragraph seem to have happened so long ago that no one could be expected to remember it. The whole beginning of the chapter, in fact, might have occurred sometime before Noah. Mildred groaned and started over.

It was no use—her blank page arrived, but her muse was still missing. She was convinced she’d taken a wrong turn with the story … but where?

She didn’t know what she was doing, that was the problem. “Stampede at Midnight” had been a fluke. How could she have read stories all her life and still not understand how they worked? Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, and Charles Dickens had taught her a great deal about humanity, but didn’t seem to have helped in the matter of tale-telling. Still, writing “The Spectre of Spaniard’s Mine” ought not to be as difficult as, say,
Great Expectations.
Unless
Great Expectations
had been the easiest thing in the world to write. If so, she’d jab the blasted pencil into her eye and put herself out of her misery.

That made her think of Luther King. Her whole inner self skidded away from the memory, like slipping on ice.

She stood up and looked out the kitchen window. A fine, bright day, too fine to be indoors. Perhaps that was why she was having trouble concentrating. No, she was concentrating—but there didn’t seem to be any story to concentrate on.

Harry, who’d been organizing his thoughts on paper admirably for years, might shed light on the problem. But could she reveal to Harry Woods that his best, most serious-minded typesetter was writing blood-and-thunder tales for an illustrated weekly her mother wouldn’t have kept in her house as fire-starter? She could never show her face in the
Nugget
office again.

Maybe fresh air and exercise would do what reason wouldn’t. After all, the premise of “Stampede at Midnight” had come to her as she walked across town. It might work again.

She hurried into the bedroom, unbuttoning her apron as she went. Her dresser mirror showed her a pale, frowning woman whose hair looked as if she’d been clutching it distractedly—which was so. Mildred yanked her hairpins out, pummeled her curls with a brush, and twisted them into as smooth a coil as they would make.

She reached for her black velvet hat, but stopped in midstretch. The first of April was spring on anyone’s calendar, and black velvet was for winter. She slid a cardboard hatbox off a shelf and lifted the lid.

David had bought the hat for her … last May? After he died, the silvery straw with the turned-up brim and the scarlet silk poppies was impossible to wear. Widowhood was her season.

She lifted the hat out of its tissue. She shouldn’t wear it now—David wasn’t a year gone.
We can’t afford it,
she’d objected when he brought it home.

You’ll get plenty of wear out of it,
he’d said.
It’s always summer here.

It wasn’t, of course. And they really couldn’t afford it. But that only meant she mustn’t let it go to waste. She pinned the hat on. The poppies cast color into her cheeks.