Wilde West (40 page)

One day, perhaps, I'll show you the flame that roars at the center of the universe.

The moon, nearly full, splashed white light across the flagstones. Overhead, the bare branches of oak trees clucked and sighed. Oscar looked up through them to the sky. The Milky Way swept across the blackness, an extravagant scattering of diamonds hurled against velvet. And over there was Orion. And there was Ursa Major. Or was it Ursa Minor? One of them, he remembered, had some sort of chummy relationship with the North Star.

No matter. What did stars signify?

Tomorrow! Tomorrow amid the whispering pines he would ask her to come away with him! They would sit on the banks of the babbling brook and dip their feet into its laughing water. Tomorrow atop the pine needles they would pledge their troth.

But didn't pine needles cling to one's clothing? Didn't they irritate one's skin? Well, presumably a woman like her, as practical as she was beautiful, would ferry along a blanket.

Yes, tomorrow he would tell her his plans, show her how the two of them, together, would become the toast of London.

Tomorrow—

He heard a faint rasp to his left, a foot scraping against stone, and he turned.

The figure by the balustrade, looming out of the shadows of the nearby oak, was monstrous. Something inhuman, something gross and foul that came lumbering toward him like a beast,
like a bear
…

Oscar's heart juddered.

And then a voice came from the shadows, an uncanny whisper: “Poet.”

And as the man stepped out onto the moonlit veranda, hands in his frock coat pockets, Oscar heard himself exhale a hiss. “Dr.”—his voice was strangled; he cleared his throat—“Dr. Holliday. I didn't see you there.”

So. Only a trick of light and shade. Ursa Accidentalis.

Acci-dentalistic.

But the wordplay was desperate, defensive: Oscar's heart still clapped against his chest.

Why all these bloody
bears
?

“I came for the lecture,” Holliday whispered.

“Ah.” Oscar cleared his throat again, something he seemed to do quite a lot whenever Holliday was in the vicinity. By now the man must be convinced that Oscar was consumptive. “This wasn't the one you heard, then, while you were in San Francisco.”

Holliday nodded. “One of them.”

Oscar raised his eyebrows. “You've heard it before?”

Holliday nodded. He wore tonight, below his beautifully cut black frock coat, a three-piece suit, this just as black and just as beautifully cut. Oscar wondered who his tailor was. Patently, not the same man who dressed the majority of Coloradans. This one obviously had taste. And eyes and fingers.

He smiled. “Well, it's very flattering that you'd come to listen to it again.” Dentist or gunman, Holliday was clearly a man of discernment.

Holliday smiled his ghost of a smile. “When I find something I like,” he whispered, “I stick with it.”

“Do you?” Oscar smiled. “Personally, when I find something I like, I immediately attempt to find something else. One should avoid habits of any sort, I think, and especially the good ones. But if one
must
have habits, then attending my lectures is, I suspect, a habit of the forgivable kind. I thank you. And, by the way, I thank you again for your intervention back in Denver. It's difficult to believe, I know, but I have a feeling that the large furry gentleman was beginning to take a dislike to me.”

Holliday nodded his ghost of a nod. “Seen him again?”

Oscar remembered the shambling figure he had seen, or fancied he had seen, at the Denver train station. “No.” And realized:
bear.
And realized that since he had left Denver, down some dark corridor at the back of his mind, the figure had continued all along to shamble.

This
was why he had lately been suffering an invasion of bruins.

“Keep your eyes opened,” Holliday whispered.

“I shall, yes. But I do thank you.”

Holliday nodded faintly once again. In the moonlight his black clothing, his black hair and black mustache, those jet-black empty eyes—they all conspired to make him seem somehow a creature of the night. An almost elemental being who in some unaccountable way shared the night's substance, its darkness, its mystery, its promises and its threats.

How, exactly, did one converse with such an individual? What, exactly, did one say?

But it was Holliday who renewed the conversation. “Saw you talking to Mrs. Doe,” he whispered. “A handsome woman.”

“Isn't she? Do you know her?”

Faintly, Holliday shook his head.

“An extraordinary woman, I think. Not only handsome, as you say, but remarkably perceptive as well.”

Faintly, Holliday nodded.

“Totally unlike any of the women one meets in London. I wonder what they'd make of her there. I mean, if she were ever to travel to England. Which is thoroughly unlikely, of course—why would she? But I should think that if it ever did transpire, she'd go over rather well in London.”

Holliday nodded.

“She's engaged, I gather, to that fellow Tabor. Do you know him?”

Holliday shook his head.

“Splendid chap, I suppose. But somehow, you know, he doesn't seem quite right for her. I can't imagine why I say that. I barely know him—or her, either, of course. It's merely a feeling I have. Call it an intuition.”

Holliday nodded.

All at once Oscar realized that he was seeking Holliday's approval, trying to pry from him an opinion that would validate his own. It was Holliday's stolid indifference, his ultimate lack of opinions of any sort, which had suddenly made Oscar uncomfortably aware of what he had been attempting.

Yesterday Holliday had rescued him, and today Oscar was turning him into a father confessor.

Well,
rescue
was perhaps too strong a word; certainly, Oscar would have done a creditable job of Biff-bashing, had that proven necessary. And
father confessor
, too, was a bit off the mark. Oscar was hardly confessing, or even admitting, to anything. He was merely attempting to elicit Holliday's judgment of Tabor and Elizabeth McCourt Doe.

But why on earth would he
want
to elicit the judgment of this …
gunman
? A gunman of discernment, perhaps, when it came to clothes, and to lectures, but still a gunman.

“Ah,” he said. He cleared his throat once more. (Soon the good doctor would be prescribing lozenges and syrups.) “Well,” he said. “It's been, as always, a great pleasure chatting with you. I hope—”

The French doors opened behind Oscar. He turned.

Young Ruddick stepped onto the Veranda. He glanced at Holliday, turned to Oscar, and said, “Oscar, that awful Marshal
Grigsby
person is here. He
has
to talk to you, he says.” He glanced back at Holliday and frowned slightly.

Oscar said to Holliday, “Well, I must run. I hope that one day we'll have another opportunity to chat.”

Holliday nodded. “Be seeing you.”

Inside, Ruddick closed the door. As they walked across the floor, he said, “Oscar, who
was
that man?”

“Dr. Holliday,” Oscar told him. “He's—”

Ruddick abruptly stopped walking, causing Oscar to do the same. Irritating. “
Doc
Holliday?” Ruddick said. “The
gun-
fighter?”

“Yes. Fascinating chap. Quite a raconteur. Where's Grigsby?”

“But he was in El
Paso
,” Ruddick said.

“Hmm?” Oscar looked around, couldn't spot the marshal anywhere among the Manitouians.

“And in Leavenworth, too,” Ruddick said. “I
saw
him there. I thought he was a
reporter
or something, like O'Conner.”

Oscar turned to him. “What are you saying?”

“Doc
Holliday.
I saw him in El Paso, and then a few days later in Leavenworth. He was in the audience both times.”

And Holliday had been, by his own admission, in San Francisco.

“Are you certain?” Oscar asked him.

“Of
course
I am.”

Oscar looked back at the French door. He could see nothing through the glass. He could only make out, framed like a photograph along its surface, brightly lit beneath a spectral chandelier, looking sleek and dashing and more than a little alarmed, his own reflection.

“H
OWDY, MATHILDE
,”
GRIBSBY SAID
to the ringlets of gleamring blond hair, the opposed white arcs of naked shoulder blade fanned above the band of bright blue satin.

She turned, a glass of ehampagne held between both hands, and she smiled broadly up at him. “Bohb!” She reached out and touched his arm. “How are you?”

He grinned, deeply pleased by how deeply pleased she seemed to be. “Just fine. Yourself?”

“Very well, thank you. When did you arrive?”

“While ago. I was over at the hotel, thought I'd step out and take a gander at this blowout here.”

After checking into the Woods and learning at the front desk that he had received no telegrams, Grigsby had drunk a quick bourbon in the bar and then limped painfully upstairs to his room. He had lain down—for only a moment or two, he had told himself, only time enough to rest up his hip a bit. Almost immediately he fell asleep. He had slept away the entire afternoon, the first time in years he had been able to sleep in the daytime.

She was good for him, this French countess.

In more ways than one—when he awoke, the pain in his hip had contracted to a memory of itself, a dim trivial blur, meek and powerless. And, even more surprising, he hadn't felt the need for a drink to get his head cleared and his stomach settled. (He had put one away anyhow, of course, down in the bar; but that had been just a bracer, what he called a heart-starter.)

At the front desk, the clerk had handed him a packet of telegrams.

One of these in particular, Grigsby thought, just might hold the answer to all the questions he'd been asking lately.

At the moment, his pain in retreat, his hopes advancing, he felt strong and fit and convinced that he could go without drinking for the rest of his life. If he wanted to.

And maybe he would. Maybe he'd do exactly that. Clean himself out, stay off the booze. Maybe even stop smoking. Why the hell not?

Mathilde was laughing. “Gander. Blowout. I once believed that I knew the English language.”

“Seems to me you know it just fine.”

With her glass, she indicated the rest of the room. “Are you familiar with all these people?”

He nodded. “Some of 'em.”

He and she were standing near the entrance to the ballroom, beside a long trestle table supporting platters of food and iced silver buckets of champage. Grigsby glanced around, at the men plump and stiff in their penguin suits, the women plump and stiff in their billowing gowns.

They might look dumb—they did look dumb—but these were the movers and shakers of central Colorado, the mine owners, the cattlemen, the railroad men, the bankers. These were the solid citizens who had brought industry and civilization to the frontier. Naturally, along the way, they had raped the land, killed off the Indians and the buffalo, fouled the rivers with poisons and sewage; but they reckoned that this was a fair price to pay for progress. And, since they were the ones setting the price, the deal had gone through.

“Would you like some
champagne
?” Mathilde asked him. She smiled. “I warn you, it is like no
champagne
I have ever drunk before.”

Grigsby smiled. “Don't mind if I do.” A little champagne never hurt anybody. Stuff was like soda pop, not like real liquor at all.

“Allow me,” she said, and smiled.

As she moved around the table, Grigsby looked once more toward the crowd. He didn't like these people. Never had. They had grown rich, most of them, through swindle and fraud and outright theft; and yet they were the first to bitch and bellyache about law and order.
Their
law,
their
order. Once they had their pile together, they didn't want anyone else messing with it.