The Last Woman Standing (15 page)

CHAPTER 17

AUGUST 1881

Upon reflection, escaping my partnership with Johnny was a
brocheh
, a blessing. I did call myself Josephine Behan for a bit. I wanted to believe in us, Mr. and Mrs. John Harris Behan of Tombstone, an entity that never existed, much to my shame. Afterward, Albert told me that if I would wait for him to grow up, he would make amends. How that sweet boy came from such a father I’ll never know.

For the next three weeks, I alternated between weeping and railing, no fit company for even the softest shoulder. I’d put all my eggs in one leaky basket. After four days, Kitty and Harry suggested the door. I found a room at a boardinghouse that was one step above a jail cell but within my meager budget. I could hardly stand myself for being so gullible.

When I wasn’t beating myself up, I was aching for Johnny’s touch, missing the way we spooned each morning. He’d walk his lips up the back of my neck and behind my ear to that sensitive, ticklish spot. I awoke wanting Johnny (and having him, his hand reaching down between my thighs while I was distracted by his lips).

I swore I’d never sleep with Johnny again, even when he came sniffing around to deliver “rent” money on my house where he and Albert continued to live. He turned up everywhere I went, begging forgiveness without offering me any more security than before my view of Mrs. Dunbar’s skinny ribs. But that didn’t mean my body agreed with me. My desires didn’t end until Wyatt stopped that backward-looking nonsense with a period and an exclamation mark.

One morning I awoke in my dim room, looked in the warped shaving mirror, and realized my eyes could not get any puffier without doing permanent damage. I didn’t have the energy to brush my hair or lace my corset. I could tell by the way my breasts fell that I was losing weight. I had to find a reason to pull myself together before I disappeared entirely and was no longer the most beautiful woman in town. Call it vain, but it was go back to Johnny, go home, or cut a new deal with my future. Mining wasn’t really an option: me with a pickax?

I realized I had to take responsibility for myself. If my rough encounter with Curly Bill had taught me anything, it was that I required protection. My damsel-in-distress act was now wearing thin. There was only so long I could be tied to the railroad tracks with the engine roaring my way. If I fainted now, who would catch me? I feared it would be someone less cultured than Johnny and more dangerous. At night, cowboys circled beneath my window as if I was a table scrap. I feared what might happen to me, without kin or clan at the edge of the world.

Bedazzled by my own beauty from the time I began to develop at twelve, I had no real skills beyond my value to men. I discovered that being free to choose my own man was not quite the liberation I’d anticipated, and began to wonder if I would have to sell my own flesh in order to eat flesh again. That was when I recalled Madame Mustache’s offer that I had so swiftly rebuffed. She’d been my Cassandra, suggesting the day might arrive when I could no longer rely on Johnny. She’d alluded to his death by rattler or errant gunshot, but I realized she’d anticipated that our match would falter. This was not magical foresight. She must have been aware of Johnny’s infidelity long before I did. She’d probably profited from it under her own roof, taking her cut from Delia.

I sat on the edge of my cot with its graying sheets and knew that as bad as things were, I was too stubborn to quit. I regarded my trunk and my carpetbag and imagined them in the San Francisco foyer. I felt physically sick, like I couldn’t pour myself back into that woman I was, that I’d rather live a dismal day here than a proper day under my mother’s roof.

To a point, I was grateful that she’d made it so difficult to return home. Even Madame Mustache must have known I was exaggerating when I explained that Ma would welcome me back to San Francisco with open arms.

Despite such limited options, I rejected marrying a bachelor from the Tombstone Hebrew Association. Dave Cohn, Tombstone’s earnest tobacconist with his constellation of moles, sparse blond beard, and shop-worn yarmulke, had certainly smiled at me. A young miner with the fringe from his
tallis
visible beneath his coat pinched my cheek while I was at the hardware store and promised me a silver menorah when he struck it rich. I may not have been a virgin, but I was of the faith, so an exception could easily have been made that would have returned me to the road of respectability. But I was no more inclined to keep a kosher house in Tombstone than in San Francisco, and I hadn’t risked outlaws and Apaches to spend my days stacking shelves and serving customers for pennies an hour placed in the housekeeping jar.

I’d visited the fair and I couldn’t backtrack. Some might cluck that Johnny had spoiled me for proper society, but despite my comeuppance, I felt like I was just beginning to get the hang of living. What would it be like to never experience the pleasures of the bedroom, only the duties of a wife, like my sister Rebecca?

Determined to make my own way, I craved more star-filled nights and passionate kisses. I just didn’t know how to make that leap, or if it was even possible. When I ran out of money to pay my room and board and the owner made the lewd suggestion I knew he’d make, I faced a difficult choice. I could beg from Johnny, seek out Wyatt (who’d been strangely silent in the aftermath of my disgrace), or accept the madam’s protection and her offer: the room beside Delia’s.

I’d been trying for so long to conceal that crack in my character, denying its truth, that I almost didn’t believe it happened. But it did.

I had never turned a trick, but if that was what it took to stay in Tombstone and not be stuck in false propriety in a flimsy saltbox, so be it. Before I could think any more about it, I returned to Madame Mustache’s yellow house that very morning. Somewhat surprisingly, though she was happy enough to receive me and show me to my room—she was, above all, a businesswoman, and I would surely be good for business—the madam didn’t gloat. On the contrary, she treated me with what almost amounted to kindness.

Still, Medea had nothing on my rage that sweltering Tuesday night in early August when I reported to work for the first time. Now I possessed the key that the madam had given me. Pausing, I heard the giant, teeth-gnashing sound of boulders being broken at the mill. When I opened the lavender door—advertising the house’s business with the subtlety of a striped barber’s pole—I was desperately ashamed. I feared what I would find there and the stranger I would become.

It was midnight. It had been so hot that people, like lizards, crawled out from under their rocks only in the night’s relative cool. Most of the proper women—the wives of mining executives, doctors, and lawyers—had left for San Diego or Los Angeles or anywhere but this desert at Mexico’s backside. I’d spent most of that day wrapped in a wet sheet, but now, here I was in a borrowed apricot silk dress carrying a bag with indoor slippers, rouge flushing my cheeks, and my eyebrows plucked into surprised arches.

April (the maid who’d been so frightened of the Apache war cry) greeted me in the foyer. Wearing a starched white pinafore (and a smirk), the girl took my things as I entered. She removed my street boots and offered my new slippers with white-gloved hands.

Neither Madame Mustache nor Delia appeared to receive me, though I could smell heavy perfume. Perhaps someone had just glided the parlor door shut. Seeing the prominent hall mirror, I couldn’t bear to glimpse my reflection. It was as if, sitting
shivah
for my own
neshama
, or spirit, I’d cast a sheet over the mirror as I’d seen my brother, Nathan, do upon my departure. I mourned the relatively innocent girl who’d first entered Madame Mustache’s establishment.

April led me up the stairs. I kept my eyes on the ruler-straight part at the back of her drab blonde hair, pulled tightly into two schoolgirl braids wrapped with pale ribbon. The bow at her back was tied in a knot that she couldn’t possibly have made herself. April, too, was acting her part in this pantomime—the anonymous servant with no past, ascending one stair at a time, unhurried and blank.

As I climbed the narrow steps, I remembered with sickening clarity my first night in Tombstone when Johnny had led me up the staircase at the Grand Hotel. I recalled the melancholy Miss Timberline with her jet-black hair and heavy silver jewelry, mined without a pickax. Above her, Old Man Clanton smugly secured his vest over his thick waist, his wiry beard bushy enough to hide a canary.

Anxiety surged through me. What would I find on the other side of the door at the top of the stairs? I could hardly breathe, thinking about it, as much from tension as from the fact that I’d tightened my corset to fit into the borrowed apricot silk tailored for some tiny acquaintance of the madam (who knows whom?).

April arrived at the landing. She stood by the door waiting for me to advance, her white gloves encircling the mahogany knob. I couldn’t read her inscrutable face. I recalled Mama’s mythology lesson about Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guards Hades, keeping the living from entering and the dead from escaping. The hot air suffocated me. April awaited my nod and then slowly opened the heavy door, crafted to buffer noise, providing the ultimate privacy for those within.

April closed the door behind me. I entered a bedroom decorated in lime green and peach. Apricot-colored roses filled crystal vases, perfuming the air. Heavy, horizontally striped curtains covered windows overlooking an alley—not that there was any light this late at night. The chamber was smaller than Delia’s and more cramped, especially because Wyatt Earp was stretched out on the milk-colored coverlet like a toy soldier in a doll’s house. He’d made himself comfortable and had propped his boots on the footboard, rested his hat on the lampshade, and hung his coat on the adjacent high-back chair.

Setting aside the
Tombstone Epitaph
, Wyatt smiled and said, “Surprise,” in a low, steady voice.

“That’s an understatement,” I said.

So, he was to be my first client. Wyatt Earp. I’d fallen this far. This straight-arrow lawman whom I’d idolized, respected, and romanticized from day one was first in line to purchase me. All those months that I’d thought we shared a connection I’d been fooling myself. I felt sickened and saddened and shocked at my own stupidity. Beauty had its price. Just leave the cash on the nightstand.

My hands began to flutter like agitated birds in a too-small cage, and I didn’t know where to hide them. I didn’t need rouge to color my cheeks. I had shame for that. “Everything is a surprise to me now, Mr. Earp. Frankly, I would welcome fewer surprises.”

“Pull up a chair.”

“Do you want me to shed my clothes first?” I asked, trying to take some control of a soul-crushing situation that led in only one direction: my submission. The wayward daughter always realizes her mother’s wisdom too late. I felt Mama’s presence at my back, which was damn inconvenient. If I was going to be abased, I might as well pile on the guilt, too. I added the tears I caused Mama to my shame, although I was beyond tears. I imagined Madame Mustache somewhere in the house twirling her whiskers like a villain in a cheap melodrama. True, she’d offered me the opportunity, but I alone had taken it. If I wanted to kick anybody, it was me.

“Hold your horses,” Wyatt said, raising both his hands as if I’d pointed a pistol at him. “That’s not why I’m here.”

“Then why are you here?” The sense of rejection I suddenly felt surprised me. “If you plan to tell me I’m on the wrong path and ship me back to San Francisco, forget it.”

“I’m not about to tell you how to behave, Miss Josephine. You seem capable of walking right off a cliff by yourself.” Wyatt smiled without showing his teeth. The expression lit up his eyes. I struggled to return his gaze, crippled by self-contempt. I wanted to believe. I wanted to feel safe in his company, as I had at the ice-cream parlor and the tobacconist’s. However, we were upstairs at Madame Mustache’s, behind a closed door with April likely listening through the keyhole.

Wyatt wasn’t a man for grinning just to set folks at ease, but it occurred to me that he also seemed awfully comfortable in this whorehouse. There. I’d admitted it: whorehouse, brothel, cathouse. Not quite a crib where a single woman might service dozens of cash-strapped miners a night, but in that spectrum. I’d crossed the threshold and become another person, a soiled dove, or so I thought.

If I was now another person, who did that make Wyatt? No longer a friend, but a customer? After opening myself up to Johnny and being gambled away to Curly Bill, I felt raw and exposed. Even kindness and concern inspired suspicions. My beauty seemed more a currency than a quality. I doubted everyone, even the trustworthy. Most of all, I doubted myself. My instincts stunk.

I was in no mood to be teased about my predicament. It vexed me that Wyatt had found me in this pastel boudoir. With every breath, my breasts pushed nearly to my throat thanks to this ridiculous corset. It was shame enough without seeing myself through Wyatt’s steady gaze.

I felt the pressure of tears forming behind my eyes when Wyatt said, “I am not going to let you sell yourself into flesh slavery, either. You are a smart girl, but you don’t know where you’re heading. I do. You are not going to become one of Madame Mustache’s whiskers on my watch.”