I’M SORRY, HONEY,” JOHNNY SAID. “I KNOW I MISSED New Year’s Eve, and now I’m going to miss Valentine’s Day, too, but it’s county business. I can’t help it.”
Josie had been on her best behavior since he’d pounded some sense into her last November. “Duty calls,” she said. “How long do you think you’ll be gone?”
“Hard to tell. I need to find Curly Bill Brocius and settle things down.”
Freshly acquitted of murder, Curly Bill might have preferred the dreamy peace of opium, but folks in Tombstone were still pretty sore about Fred White’s death. Unable to visit Ah-Sing’s hop joint, Bill was making do with liquor—a lot of it. Under its influence, he and his friends were making a good deal of trouble in Charleston and Contention. Deputy Sheriff John Harris Behan’s cordial relations with Bill and the boys were well known; both small towns were asking for his help in dealing with the crime spree.
“As long as I’m down near the border, I’m going to ride over to Bisbee and introduce myself. That copper find has been confirmed,” he said. “The executives are moving in already, getting the new mines started.”
“I understand,” she said. “The papers say electricity is the future. Copper wire is the next big thing.”
“Bigger than gold or silver,” Johnny agreed.
“There’ll be a lot of votes down in Bisbee,” she said, and wished him safe travels when he left later that afternoon.
The trip went well, though it took longer than he’d expected. Curly Bill agreed to quiet things down; no arrests were necessary. Johnny continued on to Bisbee, where he made a good first impression on the movers and shakers in Arizona’s next boomtown. He stopped in at ranches along his route, making sure the voters were happy with his work. All of them promised loyalty in ’82. He was looking forward to telling Josie his good news when he got home.
In his absence, a great deal had changed. As anticipated, the city of Tombstone had been named the seat of government for the newly created Cochise County, though the governor’s appointees had not yet been announced. What Johnny Behan did not expect was to be greeted at his own door by a stout and scowling Mexican woman of middle years, who happened to be cutting up vegetables at the time.
“Who are you? ¿Quién es?” he asked.
“Me llamo María Elena,” this formidable person told him. “The lady, she say you pay me one dollar a day. You owe me eighteen dollar already. I cook. I look after el chico.” With her paring knife pointed at him in emphasis, she made her meaning very clear when she added, “¡No más!”
“Where’s Al?” he asked. “Mi hijo—dónde está?”
This brought a shrug. Reassurance, not indifference.
“Con la lady,” he was told. “He come back later. You eat now.”
ACROSS TOWN, JUST WEST OF SIXTH, the bellboy of a small Tombstone hotel was knocking on a door at the end of a second-floor hall. It was a hesitant and quiet knock, not an insistent pounding or a businesslike rap, for the bellboy had just turned fifteen and he was new to this job, the nuances of which were full of mystery. The hotel was on the border between the vice zone and the nice part of Tombstone; like the hotel itself, the women who lived here were on the edge of being bad. What they did wasn’t illegal, but it wasn’t respectable, either.
The bellboy couldn’t decide what to call this new one. He’d had enough church back in Illinois to know that she wasn’t a good girl, but whore didn’t seem right either. Sometimes she only went to dinner with men, or she just went dancing with them. She didn’t always . . . entertain them in her room.
Was she alone, the bellboy wondered, or was somebody else in there?
That was another problem. He didn’t know how to refer to her visitors. They weren’t miners or cowboys. They dressed nice and had manners, and they tipped well, too, so he didn’t want to do anything to annoy them. Were they gentleman callers? Clients?
He knocked again, a little louder this time. “It’s the bellboy. There’s someone downstairs wants to see you.”
“Tell him to come back at eight.”
“No, ma’am— I mean miss— I mean . . . It’s not that kind of . . . person. It’s that little kid again.”
A silence. The sound of bedsprings creaking. He waited, trying not to imagine what she looked like before she put on her dressing gown.
She came to the door and opened it a crack.
“He’s crying,” the bellboy told her, doing his best not to look . . . down.
She closed her eyes, and lifted her face, and stood very still for a few moments. “Tell him, ‘Sadie says you have to go home.’”
HER ONLY REGRET WAS LEAVING ALBERT. Otherwise, life as a demimondaine suited her admirably, so far. She was Becky Sharp, in Vanity Fair. She was La Traviata—the Lady of the Camellias—except she had no intention of dying tragically at the end of her story. She was certainly not a whore. She just . . . took lovers. Like Sarah Bernhardt.
In her first two weeks, she’d seen a mining executive, a lawyer, and a very sweet geologist. They were grateful and generous. She enjoyed their company and their admiration. She liked the look on their faces when she stepped out from behind her dressing screen and dropped her wrapper. She liked to be seen. She liked sex, too. Not as much as Johnny did—it was a sickness with that man—but enough to enjoy what she was doing.
“You can have any man you want,” Randolph Murray had told her the night after the Markham troupe left San Francisco. “Just look into his eyes. Think, I want you, and he’ll be yours.”
She hadn’t quite believed him then. Now she knew that it worked like a charm, except with the one man she really wanted.
She had imagined it a thousand times. The knock on the door. Wyatt standing just beyond it, twisting his flat-brimmed hat around and around in his hands.
“This is wrong,” he would say. “I shouldn’t be here.”
She would pull him inside and change his mind. She would make him forget that woman he lived with. Even in her imagination, he would finish too soon the first time. She would make allowances: the long waiting, the urgency.
“You’re rushing,” she would tell him. “It is more tender when you take your time.” Then she would teach him what a woman wants.
When they were done—both drowsy, both satisfied—she would ask, “Wyatt, are you sorry?”
“No,” he would say. “No.”
The next day, they would leave Tombstone together. She would send Albert a letter to explain everything. Your father needs women, she would write. Wyatt needs me.
Over and over, she thought: I want you. Come to me.
But the knock on the door was never Wyatt’s.