CURLY BILL BROCIUS WAS FEELING PRETTY satisfied with the day’s accomplishments as he shepherded Ike Clanton and Johnny Ringo out of Tombstone that evening. True enough, Juanito had gotten a little out of hand at the end, but Fred White was a good old boy. As long as you didn’t make too much trouble right inside town limits, the city marshal was willing to turn a blind eye. Course, Fred understood that Bill Brocius couldn’t really order anyone to stay out of Tombstone, Johnny Ringo least of all. All Bill could do was encourage the boys to seek their entertainment in Charleston, about eight miles south, where no federal, territorial, county, or town officials were around to spoil the fun. That was logic even liquored-up youngsters could understand.
Curly Bill himself rarely dealt directly with customers, so he was surprised when Old Man Clanton sent him into the city.
“I’m buying a place in New Mexico,” Mr. Clanton had told Curly Bill last night. “Go into Tombstone in the morning and sell off that new herd. I want better’n five dollars a head and I want cash. Take Ike and Ringo with you.”
One by one, Old Man Clanton was buying up a string of ranches from the Mexican border to the mining towns of southeastern Arizona. The idea was to turn the entire length of the transport route into private property. Posse Comitatus would take the army out of the calculation. Then all you had to do was buy off the Pima County sheriff and your business was secure.
Curly Bill admired the old man’s thinking and was determined to bring equal acumen to his own task. Riding from the Clanton ranch to Tombstone, he’d spent hours in careful consideration of which buyer he ought to approach and how. By the time the city came into view, he had settled on the mining district’s second-biggest meat supplier, for the top man would be satisfied with his status and not inclined to try anything new, whereas the next man down might aspire to improve upon his position and would be more open to strategy.
“Now, Mr. Clanton says I can offer you a real good price on a herd that’s just come in, direct from Mexico,” Curly Bill told Number Two that morning, “but you gotta make up your mind right now. He’s in a hurry to make this deal, and there’s others I can take it to.”
You could see the man thinking. The cattle on offer would not enjoy their customary stay in Sulphur Springs Valley for fattening. Their meat would be stringy and tough. “I don’t know,” he said cautiously. “If the customers complain about quality, it could cost me a contract.”
“Just work the cheap meat into the mix,” Bill suggested. “The miners might grouse about a meal or two—or maybe one man’s stew is fine and his friend’s is chewy. They won’t be able to tell what’s going on.”
“They won’t be able to tell!” Ike said cheerfully.
Ike tended to repeat things that way. It made him sound stupid, but Ike had his reasons, which were good and sufficient, in Curly Bill’s estimation.
“Since you’re getting the herd so cheap,” Bill went on, “you could maybe drop your price to the chow houses a little. They get a sweet deal now, and maybe you get a bigger slice of their business next year. In the meantime, you pocket the difference.”
“Pocket the difference,” Ike said.
Bill waited patiently, watching the decision come closer. “Everybody wins,” he said with an amiable grin, “except the miners!”
“Except the miners!” Ike said.
You could see Number Two wondering if Ike had been born dumb or if his old man made him that way. Then his eyes fell upon Johnny Ringo, who was standing over at the shop window like he wasn’t paying any attention, and Curly Bill’s smile widened. Old Man Clanton was a shrewd one, all right. Ike’s face almost always sported the kind of yellowing bruises that reminded you how it was ill-advised to make the old man unhappy. And Ringo? All he had to do was stand there and a sensible person would take a herd that still spoke Spanish.
“Four dollars a head,” Number Two tried. Half the going price.
“Five twenty-five,” Bill countered.
“Four fifty.”
Over at the window, Ringo blew a little noise of annoyance.
“Four seventy-five,” Two said firmly. “Best I can do.”
Ringo turned and stared with those dead-snake eyes of his. It was about then that Number Two started to sweat. Granted, the day was warming up.
“All right,” he said. “Five fifteen.”
“Toss in an extra twenty for me and the boys,” Curly Bill suggested, upping the ante, “and you got yourself a deal.”
“You got yourself a deal!” Ike said happily.
“Ike,” Ringo said, “the devil himself is going to recommend you to God, just to keep you out of hell.”
Ike’s mouth worked a bit. You could see he was trying to decide if that was good or bad, but he shut up while he figured it out.
“I’m going to the library,” Ringo said on his way out the door.
“Always reading,” Bill said, shaking his head. “Juanito’s a strange one.” Smiling brightly, he returned to the business at hand. “Mr. Clanton requires cash, sir. That won’t be a problem, will it?”
It was, but Number Two came around on that as well. Afterward, Bill and Ike met up with Ringo again and they had themselves a time in the bars and brothels out past Sixth Street before heading over for a real good meal at the Maison Doree.
It was too bad Fred White got drawn into that little standoff with Doc Holliday—what in hell was that all about?—but Ringo didn’t shoot anybody and only broke a glass. Ike’s belly would stop hurting in a few days, and Bill himself was pleased to have something cheerful to report to Ike’s old man.
Yep, he thought as the Clanton ranch house came into view in the moonlight. It was a damn fine day, all around.
IF OLD MAN CLANTON HAD A FIRST NAME, nobody living used it. As far as anyone in Arizona knew, he’d been born with a week-old beard and iron-gray hair. Mean, straight out of his mamma’s womb.
His wife called him “sir.” Once, just after Ike was born, she tried to run away, but the old man tracked her down and brought her back bleeding. “Try that again,” he told her, “I’ll nail your feet to a four-foot plank. That’ll stop you running.”
It was about that time the old man quit shaving himself and started making his wife do it. Once a week, in honor of the Sabbath, he’d lie back and let her take a straight razor to him. He smiled once a week, too, when she scraped that razor’s edge over his neck. It amused him to know that she was that close to killing him but didn’t have the sand to do it.
She was weak. That was the old man’s opinion. She came of weak stock, and she was a bad breeder. Most of her brats lived, but they were worthless, all of them. Except maybe the youngest—Billy was the best of the lot. Alonzo, though . . . There was something wrong with that one, right from the start. The night that ugly little toad was born, the old man took him to a horse trough, meaning to drown him, but Ike came running up, sniveling and promising to take care of the brat.
“Take him then,” the old man said. “Cryin’ little babies, the pair of you.”
Alonzo was feeble-minded and seemed happiest with dogs. Cows liked him, too. They’d walk right up to him, let him pat their noses. He had cow eyes—calm, quiet, stupid eyes—but sometimes he’d panic, the way cattle panic. He’d run in big circles, screaming and screaming with those cow eyes open wide, flapping his hands like chicken wings.
Ike was the only one who cried when Alonzo died.
“Figures,” the old man said. “That just figures.”
WHEN THE WAR BROKE OUT, Old Man Clanton took his three oldest boys—Joe, Phin, and Ike—traveling across the South to enlist in one regiment after another. They’d stay in camp just long enough to get the signing bonus, take off in the middle of the night, and then do it again in the next state over.
The old man didn’t give a damn about abolitionists or the Cause. “Not our fight,” he told his sons. “Fight for niggers or fight for planters and either way, you’re a damn fool. Damn fools deserve what happens to ’em.”
The old man’s drinking got worse when his wife died. Ike was nineteen by then. He might have gone off on his own like his older brothers had, but Ike stayed and that was his misfortune.
True to his watered-down nature, he took his mother’s place, trying to keep the littler kids fed and out of trouble. Billy was only four and he was a handful, but Ike took special care of him.
“Do as you’re told, and don’t never talk back,” Ike always warned Billy. “Just say whatever the old man says, and you’ll be all right.” But Billy never listened to Ike. Billy never much listened to anybody. And what puzzled Ike was, the old man seemed to admire Billy for that.
After the war, the old man took the family to California for a while but he couldn’t make a go of it there, so they doubled back in 1877 and settled in a portion of nowhere called the Arizona Territory. The old man staked out a townsite, called the place Clantonville, and prepared to become rich. He put ads in newspapers, expecting to draw settlers who’d buy parcels of empty land off him and make him mayor. Nothing much came of the scheme, but he didn’t blame himself. His failures weren’t for want of trying, and that’s what infuriated the old man about his son Ike.
“No gumption,” he’d mutter. “No try.”
Course, all of Ike’s try went into keeping the old man happy, but there’s no pleasing some people. Ike opened a little restaurant for miners in Millville, and he did pretty well, but then it was “Getting ideas now? Getting above your old man, are you? I’ll teach you to act high and mighty! I brought you into this world, and I’ll send you to hell whenever I please.”
IT WASN’T UNTIL THE OLD MAN got into the cattle business that the family really made good. Billy was only sixteen on his first raid, but the old man liked how he handled himself. “Best of the lot,” the old man always said. “Good-looking, too, with a temper and some real guts.” Ike, on the other hand, was useless. That was the old man’s opinion.
Nobody was inclined to argue the point with him, not even Ike, who generally took things as he found them. The old man was just part of a world that included rattlers, scorpions, and a hundred kinds of cactus. You had to be careful in a world like that. You had to know what to watch for, what to listen for, what to avoid. Ike had made a particular study of his old man and knew when bad spells were coming on. After their mother died, Ike taught Billy and the girls how to see them coming, too.
“It’s like thunderstorms,” he told them.
The old man would get quieter and quieter, like that heavy, windless heat before a storm. Then there’d be a rumble of orders and threats, like thunder in the distance. Shut your goddam mouth, or I’ll shut it for you! Don’t speak till you’re spoken to! Do as you’re told, God damn you, and be quick about it! The old man’s mood would get darker and darker, like clouds piling up, and he’d get angrier, like wind rising. Then he’d explode. Lightning would strike the nearest target. Give! Me! My! Due! the old man would yell over and over, a blow landing with each word, until he’d spent his fury on that week’s unlucky child. Muttering would signal an end to the storm. That’ll teach you to talk back, you mouthy little bitch. Or Shoulda put you in a sack when you was born and drowned you like a sick pup, you worthless little bastard. Then it was over, like a storm blowing itself out or passing on, out of sight.
You could learn to live with rage like that. It was predictable. You could see it coming and take cover. That’s what Ike tried to teach his sisters and his little brother Billy. Do as you’re told. Don’t talk back. Say whatever the old man says.
Mostly the girls took his advice, but when they didn’t, Ike stepped in and took the beating for them. He was proud of that, but there’d been a price to pay.
“HOW LONG YOU WORKED FOR HIM?” Sherm McMasters asked Curly Bill once.
“Old Man Clanton? Must be a coupla years now,” Bill said.
They were bringing a herd north after a raid into Mexico. The younger boys were settling the animals into a draw for the night while the older ones made camp. Ike had the cook fire going, with the beans heating in a kettle. There was a Dutch oven in the embers. Biscuits tonight. Say what you would, Ike was a damn fine cook.
“Pay’s good,” Sherm acknowledged, “but he’s a tough man to deal with.”
That made Curly Bill smile. “Sherm, the old man’s easy as pie. Right, Ike?”
Ike nodded. “Do what he tells you. Say what he says.”
Ringo was lying on his back, head propped against his saddle, holding a book up to make the best of the sunset and the firelight. “The old man’s like everybody else out here. Nobody goes west except failures, misfits, and deluded lungers.”
“Failures, misfits, and lungers,” Ike said, adding chilies to the beans.
“That may be stretching things some,” Sherm said, but he was real quiet about it. He wanted Curly Bill to hear but wasn’t taking a chance on setting Ringo off. Old Man Clanton might take a horsewhip to you, but Ringo would kill you.
“I think Juanito may have the right of it,” Curly Bill decided after a time. “A fella’s doing well back east, he’s likely to stay put. I wager there are very few men who wake up in Philadelphia, say, or Cincinnati and look into their mirrors and think, I’m prosperous and my life is wonderful. I guess it’s time to turn my back on all this good fortune and head west!”
“Head west,” Ike said.
Ringo’s book went down against his thighs. “Ike,” he said wearily, “we could replace you with a goddam parrot and nobody’d notice the difference.”
“Parrots can’t cook,” Ike pointed out. “They can talk, though. I saw one at a carnival once. And an elephant, too.”
“Jesus,” Ringo said, and went back to his book.
The boys came straggling in for supper, but later that night Curly Bill’s mind returned to Ringo’s notion, for Bill was getting on toward forty and past the age when sleeping on the ground is easy.
Take the inhabitants of Texas, he thought, staring up at the stars. A man might wind up in Texas for any number of reasons, but few of them were based on solid achievement elsewhere. In Texas, your Pilgrim Fathers were leftover Mexicans, a bunch of land-hungry German immigrants, and hardscrabble Scotch-Irish backwoodsmen. After the war, you added your white trash and bankrupt planters driven off their land by Yankee troops and carpetbagger taxes—all of them resentful about the way the war had ended. Course, there were Yankees in Texas, too. They were apt to be cheerful about the outcome of the conflict, but generally arrived in Texas just as broke. The past fifteen years had not been easy ones, what with the depression and the droughts and so on. Round the population out with orphans and runaways looking for others of their kind to gang up with—Johnny Ringo was a fair example of that. Anyway, “failure” might be too hard a word for those who’d come west. Unlucky, maybe.
If things had turned out just a little different, Bill himself might’ve been a ranch foreman by now. As it was, he held a similar sort of position, standing between Old Man Clanton and the boys. Settling disputes. Defusing fights. Keeping the business running, day to day.
Still and all, it was true enough that most men went west in search of a fresh start after a poor showing elsewhere. They might even go so far as to adopt a new name in an attempt to restore an unblemished record—a circumstance with which Curly Bill himself was familiar, for while he’d stuck with “William” after moving to Texas, he had so recently and so abruptly shifted from Graham to Bresnaham to Brocius that he was still unsettled as to how to spell his newest surname.
There were those who said Johnny Ringo’s name was really Johann Rheingold. Juanito had denied that with a certain amount of heat, declaring that he had no love for Dutchies and sure as hell wasn’t one himself. As far as Bill knew the story, Ringo got his start in Texas during the Mason County War, when the sons of German settlers ran afoul of the great-grandsons of Ulster clansmen, who considered cattle raids an old and honorable form of enterprise and entertainment. Mexican cattle were fair game for rustlers, but the Dutchies of Mason County objected to their well-bred European short-horns being run off and branded as mavericks. When Ringo got arrested for cattle theft, his young friends sprung him. The Rangers caught up with him later on and when they did, they had him on a murder charge. In those days, however, frontier jails were still in the experimental stage, hardly capable of holding a stray dog captive if it spotted a rabbit a few yards away. Ringo got loose and lit out for Mexico, where he picked up a little Spanish while drinking and lying low. That’s where Curly Bill noticed him in a cantina and recruited him for a raid on a Sonora herd for Old Man Clanton.
Seemed like a good idea at the time.
Juanito wasn’t like the rest of the boys. Juanito was intricate. He was sick a lot. Headaches. Stomach pains. He was fine when there was action to take his mind off his troubles, but when things got peaceful, Ringo got moody. When he got moody, he drank. And when he drank, Lord have mercy!
Once, in a bar up north near Prescott, Ringo offered to buy a man a whiskey. All that fella said was “No, thanks. I’ve got a beer.” Ringo shot him in the neck. Just like that. Walked away like he’d swatted a fly. And he had this trick where he’d smile at a new kid who was looking to get into the gang. “You’re all right,” Ringo would say. “I like you. You’re all right.” Then he’d slug that kid in the gut with no warning at all. The new kid would drop to his knees, sucking air, and Ringo would walk away like nothing had happened.
The first time Ringo did that, it was so sudden and over so quick, nobody had time to react. Now, though, the boys all expected it, so they’d wait, grinning, and laugh their heads off when it happened. The new kid would be kneeling in the dirt with his eyes bugged out, and when he got enough breath back to ask what in hell he’d done to deserve that, the others would tell stories about how Ringo did the same thing to them once. Juanito always felt better afterward. And the kid who got punched was probably used to getting hit back home.
The moon was setting by the time Curly Bill was ready to drop off. He listened for a time to the cattle and the horses, to the night birds and the breeze. Fished a couple of stones out from under his bedroll. Turned onto his side.
Boys will be boys, he thought. His crew were just boys with fists, knives, pistols. And Johnny Ringo wasn’t the only one with a warrant or two tied to his tail.