Adobe Moon Page 4

  While Nicholas fulfilled his role of captain from horseback, Coplea drove one Earp wagon, with Wyatt handling the other, trading off with Morgan or James when he rode out to scout for food. The hunting proved to be no easy feat, however, the overland route having suffered from the passage of those preceding them. Game was scarce. Many of the trees had been hacked down, and the water was sullied by the refuse and debris of ill-prepared crossings.

  More often than not, Wyatt was forced to ride out of sight of the train to locate meat. On those occasions when he returned without a kill, no one voiced a complaint. Most of the migrating families lived under the thrall of tales about marauding Indians and thought it a blessing to have any fresh meat at all.

  In the evenings Wyatt tended to the draft animals, picketing them in the best available grass close to the wagon ring. Much of the work was essentially farm labor—the only difference being that it was mobile. Wyatt abided it, for he liked seeing new places. The stark land unfolded before him like the prelude to some grander story. Vast swales of river bottom gave rise to birds whose names he did not know. These he watched take to the air with a God-given grace in a liberation much like the one into which he was now stretching.

  He began to catalogue every bluff and tapered defile as a landmark to remember, until they became so numerous and redundant that he began to understand just how immense this new country really was. That his gaze could reach so far across the endless land gave him a new grasp of vision. He felt at home here, a place where he could both expand and sharpen his vision, and he contemplated how he might one day profit by it.

  Away from the rutted trail, the prairie was still raw and untouched, and Wyatt learned to see the land’s components as untapped resources of income. A man with ambition and know-how could thrive in such a place. The ambition, he knew, was beginning to take form in him. As for the know-how, that would come in time.

  They had barely forded the Missouri at Council Bluffs, when Wyatt was already considering wagon-mastering for his immediate future. Eventually the railroads would kill the enterprise, but for a time, he reasoned, it could be lucrative. Such a job relied on two physical elements at which he was a natural: handling horses and hunting. It was dealing with people that he wondered about. He watched his father’s varied tyrannies. The explosive imperatives he imposed on these strangers bred hatred for the old man. There were better ways, Wyatt knew, to inspire allegiance. Fear might prod men to action, but it did not promote loyalty.

  When Nicholas camped the train a mile outside Omaha City, Wyatt and Charlie Coplea took the two percherons into town to replace a bag of meal gone rancid. From a distance the town appeared as a stalled carnival on an otherwise desolate plain. Only the deep, lazy cut of the Missouri connected it to anything else in the world. Wyatt would always remember the idea that came into his head as he neared the town: In a place like this, a man could make up just about any life he wanted.

  This was surely a comfort to some men—to know that, if who you were turned into flat disappointment, you could start again as somebody else in a place like Omaha. Not that Wyatt could imagine appropriating such a bargain for himself. He did not have the creativity for it. As his sixth-grade schoolteacher had once told him, he was too direct to playact.

  “You ain’t said a word all day,” Coplea said, sidling his horse up to Wyatt’s as they neared the town. “You ain’t sick or nothin’, are you?”

  Wyatt turned to look into Coplea’s simple face and shook his head at the uselessness of such a question. “You didn’t take your meals with us today. Maybe I ought to be askin’ you that.”

  Charlie turned away with a sheepish look on his face, and they slowed their horses to a walk and let the animals settle their breathing. “I might be sick o’ being yelled at,” he admitted. He turned back quickly to check Wyatt’s expression. “I don’t mean no offense to you . . . but your paw ain’t a easy man to work for.”

  Wyatt said nothing. He kept his eyes on the nearest building ahead. A dog was chained there, its head lowered over its front paws. Only the dog’s eyes moved to mark their progress.

  “I don’t reckon it’s any too easy being kin to ’im neither,” Charlie added.

  Wyatt almost smiled. “Never dull, I’ll say that.”

  Charlie’s face screwed up like he’d been presented a book written in Chinese. “You ever think on headin’ up a train like this’n, Wyatt?” Wyatt shrugged with a tilt of his head. Coplea started nodding even before he spoke again. “Hell, you’d be a natural at it.”

  “Maybe,” Wyatt said.

  Coplea’s brow lowered as though any contrary thought deserved a debate. “Hell, yes. People’d wanna do what you asked ’em. Hell, they respect you.”

  At the emphatic whine in Charlie’s voice, the dog raised its head and watched them pass. The horses’ hooves clopped a syncopated rhythm for a time, until they turned on to the main street.

  “You thinkin’ on leadin’ crossings yourself, Charlie?”

  Charlie thought about that as he soaked up the town. “Nah . . . not me.”

  Music tinkled from a gray clapboard building where the street turned to sludge. People moved through the thoroughfare and along the walkways in every garb imaginable. It was strange to hear so many conversations mixing in the air after days of listening to sand catch in axle grease and squeal out notes that flew above the heavy rumble of wagon wheels like the cries of frantic birds.

  Rough-sawn boards had been laid like child’s work along the sidewalks, linking up at intervals to provide makeshift bridges over the mud slop from store to store. The men and women using them were like ants on a stick taking their turns in single file. Wyatt felt anonymous, as no one paid these newly arrived young horsemen any attention.

  He reined up and watched, fascinated, as men, women, wagons, pigs, dogs, and all manner of livestock negotiated the sucking mire running through the center of the town. The stench of human waste hung in the air. He had never seen so many signs tacked to buildings, most of the lettering rendered by hands either uneducated or in haste. There was no charm to it. Nor was there a sense of community to the mass spontaneity of human activity all around them. It was as though the town had surrendered to chaos.

  A group of men wearing leather-billed caps unloaded bulky crates from a freight wagon into a building, their swelling forearms bearing witness to a history of heavy work. And yet there was about them a debauched softness, too. Something far down the scale from the steel-tendon hardness of laboring every day, hours on end, in a sun-scorched field. Wyatt sized them up, as all men appraised one another when they met on the frontier. He did not underestimate them, but neither did he shrink from their brawn.

  Across the street a plump woman, bare breasted and hair gone wild around her shoulders, leaned from an upstairs window and yelled to the men. When one of them called back and laughed, his voice boomed off the false-fronted buildings with the depth of a parade drum.

  “Wade on in, Wyatt,” Charlie sang as he booted his horse ahead. Wyatt watched the thick-boned percheron sink into the mud above the fetlocks and compromise its gait with a bandy-legged stiffness. It seemed that even to enter this raunch of Gomorrah required a token surrender of dignity, if only by the demeaning of a man’s horse.

  He clucked through the side of his teeth, and his mount lurched forward, eager to catch Charlie’s horse. Wyatt held the steed back with a gentle word and the proper tension on the reins. He wanted to see everything about this town.

  At the dry goods store they dismounted, but there was nowhere to tie the horses. Wyatt took Charlie’s reins and dug into his pocket for the paper and money his mother had entrusted to him.

  “I’ll watch the horses,” he said. “Here’s the list for what we need.”

  Coplea pocketed the money and nodded toward his tack. “You keep an eye out on our rifles. There’s shirkers here’d love to own our guns for us.” Coplea hesitated at the door, kicked at the jamb, and lifted one boot to inspect its sole.


  “It don’t matter none,” a voice called from inside. “Bring it on in.”

  As soon as Charlie stepped into the darkness of the one-room store, Wyatt swung the horses’ flanks into the sunlight, where they would not cool down too fast. He put a hand on the butt of his over-and-under and tamped it a quarter inch deeper into its scabbard. His father had given him the gun when Wyatt was thirteen. Outdated then, it was still an unwieldy weapon, but he was not prepared to lose it in Omaha City.

  “God . . . damned . . . son . . . of a bitch!” The words huffed out—like the breath of a man trying to talk as he swung an axe. Wyatt turned to the street, where a tall man with thick moustaches and a swag belly strode past him. His arms swung in stiff, aggressive thrusts, and his head hunched forward with single-minded purpose. His frog eyes bulged, though seemed to take in little. The knuckles of his clenched fists stood out like white pebbles. His boots sank into the mud and sucked back out, leaving open wounds in the street behind him. Wyatt followed the man’s progress deeper into the town until his broad back disappeared in the mill of bodies.

  A profane laugh turned Wyatt to his right. Three men stood in an open doorway under a crude, hand-painted sign that read “Last Kaintuck Whiskey East of the Rockys.” Two of the men, seemingly pleased with their lot in life, wiped at their crooked smiles with the backs of their hands, while the grim man in front of them stared out past Wyatt, a long-barreled revolver hanging straight down from his hand like the stilled pendulum of a broken clock. Other men began to fill the doorway, and their collective banter was that of a circus audience come to witness the main event.

  By the time Coplea brought out the bag of meal, Wyatt had moved the horses into the alley. Coplea stopped, looked around, and lifted his chin when he saw Wyatt. Charlie’s face screwed up into a question as he set the bag on his bad knee.

  “Better step back inside, Charlie,” Wyatt suggested. Coplea let the bag ease to the rough-hewn bench under the window, balanced it there with one hand, and followed Wyatt’s gaze to the men gathered outside the saloon.

  On the far side of the street the tall mustachioed man had returned, this time walking along the pedestrian boards, his gaze jumping back and forth from his precarious footpath to the saloon cattycornered across the intersection. Swinging in his right hand was the same kind of pistol Wyatt had seen among James’s relics from the war.

  The world seemed to dissolve at the edges of a half sphere that lowered around the two antagonists, as an irreversible prophecy claimed them. As if by an audible signal, each man walked toward the other as though his momentum might decide the moment. Neither spoke. Or if they did, Wyatt did not hear them. He heard nothing but the sudden, sharp explosions—four of them—amplified all out of proportion between the buildings along the street.

  The mustachioed man reeled in a half turn, fell to his knees, then tumbled forward into the slop of the street, his face slapping into the mud with blind indifference. The grim-faced man stood for a moment and then back-stepped, stumbling on the tread boards. As he scrambled to catch himself and stay upright, the gun fell from his hand and clattered to the thick planks with little more sound than the tap of a coin. The onlookers parted for him as if the touch of death were contagious.

  He crumpled against the saloon wall then abruptly straightened one leg, which spasmed like a sleeping dog’s. Blood spread across the front of his trousers, spurting in diminished arcs. Then he was still. The death scene cleared into crystalline detail as clouds of smoke melded into a common canopy and channeled away at the first opportunity of a breeze.

  “God A’mighty,” Coplea breathed, gawking at the still body lying in the saloon entrance. He turned to Wyatt, who stared at the dead man who lay facedown in the road. The man’s hat was tipped forward, angled off the back of his head as though he were greeting someone.

  Among the people gathering to the bodies, someone broke the silence with a summation so laconic as to constitute sacrilege. “Opened up his brisket, by God!”

  Coplea looked away, took in several sharp breaths, and limped back into the alleyway where the horses waited. Wyatt watched him lean on the side of the building, both his arms stiff against the wall, his head sagging from his shoulders. Coplea’s breath came faster now, and his body stiffened and arched forward. He backed his boots from the building just before his stomach emptied.

  Wyatt turned back to the crowd in the street, where men on the outside wormed their way closer to see the body. More people hurried down the street, and those close by were yelling what they knew to those running to see for themselves. The feeling was almost festive. Then the knot of men in the street unexpectedly opened for a moment, and Wyatt saw the prostrate man’s bulging gut torn open like a burst melon. Someone had opened his shirt. From the wound spilled a bright blue bubble of tissue not meant for the sun.

  Wyatt walked to the sack of flour Coplea had abandoned, heaved it to his shoulder, and carried it to his horse. He lashed the burlap tightly behind the cantle of his saddle.

  “You all right?” he asked Coplea. Charlie nodded but said nothing. Wyatt checked the knots and waited for his companion to recover, but Coplea continued to stare down between his boots. “You paid already?” Wyatt asked.

  Coplea nodded again and then looked at Wyatt, his eyes searching for something he did not know how to ask for. “There’s more just inside the door.” Wyatt started to retrieve it but turned back when Coplea called his name. The skin on Charlie’s forehead was beaded with sweat. “You know . . . I done cut the meat out of every animal I ever kilt for food,” he began in a whispery monotone. “But I ain’t never seen nothin’ like that.” He spat and nodded past Wyatt toward the street. Wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve, he shook his head. “You ever see anything like that, Wyatt?”

  Wyatt turned back to the crowd and watched the postmortem antics of those left to the living. He felt strangely remote, as though he were witnessing the event before him from a private, unseen perch. He thought back to that moment when the two men had surged forward toward one another, as though making a show of their hostilities, each one to the other. Wyatt saw the flaw in it—a kind of vanity. The only show now was what this circus of a town was making of the two dead bodies. There was a more deliberate way to handle a fight, he knew, to ensure that the man handling it prudently would walk away.

  The Earp campfire flickered through the wheel spokes at the periphery of the wagon ring. The train had fallen into its slumbered curfew with the spillover of bedrolls in every conceivable place. One man had draped canvas over his wagon tongue like a sloping tent, though there would be no rain. The stars spread across the prairie sky thick as the blades of grass beneath.

  Wyatt sat cross-legged on a swatch of grass between two hog-sized boulders that hunched just below a rise. Behind him the horses stood still as churchgoers awaiting a pastor’s word. The night air was still spring cool, and a pack of coyotes pooled their voices into a looping cacophony off to the west. The loneliness of the sound made him think of Virgil still chained to the war and unaware that his family had struck out from Iowa.

  Wyatt turned to check on the stir and nicker of the horses. They parted to the sound of a low, gravelly voice, their starlit backs silver along the chine, weaving amongst themselves in liquid ripples. Nicholas chose his steps through the loose rock, his manner subdued and uncharacteristically attentive to the space around him.

  When he reached Wyatt’s position, he stood for a time looking over the dark rolling plain, neither of them speaking. An owl warbled from the creek bottom, and for a moment gave them a common thing on which to fix their thoughts. Nicholas sat on the lower rock.

  “Coplea told me what you seen.” Despite the vast landscape before them, the father’s words hovered there like a third person, pressing, insistent. The world narrowed to a dark room bounded by stone, father, and son.

  “Wyatt, there ain’t nothing to do but accept the world the way it is and make sure you ain’t at the short end.”<
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  Beneath the stars Nicholas’s voice seemed less pedantic, as though conjuring up thoughts he himself had forgotten. Wyatt looked at him, but the rough silhouette of his father looked the same as it always had. He could not imagine this man on the short end of anything. Nicholas simply would not accept the humiliation.

  “Wyatt, them men you seen today . . . you’ll see more like ’em. Until a place gets civilized proper, anything goes with some. They’ll wait till you turn around and steal your goddamn soul if they can. And they ain’t gonna lose any sleep over your dead body lying in a gutter. To them . . . you’re just a source of whatever it is they need. Whether it’s your money or the bloodlust their drunken disappointments need to slake.”

  Wyatt tried to imagine himself standing in the slop of that Omaha street—the tall, bulge-gutted man stalking him, cold death in his eye. The more Wyatt’s mind painted the picture, the more he felt disconnected from it. Not because it could not happen, but because he would not buy into the boiling fever of it. He would stand outside, looking in. Leveling a measure of sanity into the act where there was none elsewhere to be found. This, he understood, could tip the scales in a man’s favor.

  “Wyatt, look at me.” The fire and brimstone was back in Nicholas’s words. “If you ain’t sure about a man’s intentions, keep your goddamn eyes on him and be ready, you hear me? If you let a man get the best of you out here, he’ll kill you. You be ready. If it comes to it—where you know he’ll hurt you if he can—you kill him and to hell with everything you’ve been taught. The Bible ain’t got the answers for every situation a man gets into.”