Freddie looked at her in surprise. “I beg your pardon?” he said.
“I’m sorry. You were working on a letter-I saw it when I sat down. Perhaps I shouldn’t have looked, but-”
Mirth burst from Freddie. “My sister!” he laughed. “My sister Elisabeth!”
She seemed a little surprised. “You addressed her in such passionate terms-I thought she was perhaps-” She hesitated.
“A lover? No. I will rewrite the letter later, perhaps, to make it less strident.” He laughed again. “I thought Elisabeth might understand my ideas, but she is too limited, she has not risen above the patronizing attitudes of that little small town where we grew up-” Anger began to build in his heart, rising to a red, scalding fury. “She rewrote my work. I sent her some of my notebooks to publish, and she changed my words, she added anti-Semitic nonsense to the manuscript. She has fallen under the influence of those who hate the Jews, and she is being courted by one, a professional anti-Semite named Forster, a man who distributes wretched tracts at meetings.” He waved a fist in the air. “She said she was making my thoughts clearer.” He realized his voice had risen to a shout, and he tried to calm himself, suddenly falling into a mumble. “As if she herself has ever had any clear thoughts!” he said. “God help me if she remains my only conduit to the publishers.”
Josie listened to this in silence, eyes glimmering in the light of the lantern. “You aren’t an anti-Semite, then?” she said. “Your Superman isn’t a-what is the word they use, those people? — Aryan?”
Freddie shook his head. “Neither he nor I am as simple as that.”
“I’m Jewish,” she said.
He ran his fingers through his hair. “I know,” he said. “Someone told me.”
Bells began to sing in his head-not the bells of pain, those clanging racking peals of his migraine, but bells of wild joy, a carillon that pealed out in celebration of some pagan triumph.
Josie looked up, and he followed her glance upward to the pistol belt above his head, to his Colt, his Zarathustra, the blue steel that gleamed in the darkness.
“You’ve killed men,” she said.
“Not so many as rumors would have it.”
“But you have killed.”
“Yes.”
“Did they deserve it?”
“It is not the killing that matters,” Freddie said. “It is not the deserving.” A laugh burbled out, the strange rapture rising. “Any fool can kill,” he said, “and any animal-but it takes a Caesar, or a Napoleon, to kill as a human being, as a moment of self-becoming. To rise above that-” He began to stammer in his enthusiasm. “-that merely human act-that foolishness-to overcome-to become-”
“The Superman?” she queried.
“Ha-ha!” He laughed in sudden giddy triumph. “Yes! Exactly!”
She rose from the chair, stepped to the head of the bed in a swirl of skirts. She reached a hand toward the gun, hesitated, then looked down at him.
“Nicht nur fort sollst du dich pflanzen sondern hinauf,” she said.
Her German was fluent, accented slightly by Yiddish. Freddie stared at her in astonishment.
“You read my journals!” he said.
A smile drifted across her face. “I wasn’t very successful-your handwriting is difficult, and I speak German easier than I read it.”
“My God.” Wonder rang in his head. “No one has ever read my journals.”
That is her Jewish aspect, he thought, the people of the Book. Reverence for thought, from the only people in the world who held literacy as a test of manhood.
Josie glanced down at him. “Tell me what that means-that we should propagate not only downward, but upward.”
Weird elation sang through his head. “I meant that we need not be animals when-” He recalled the decencies only at the last second. “-when we marry,” he finished. “We need not bring only more apes into the world. We can create. We can be together not because we are lonely or inadequate, but because we are whole, because we wish to triumph!”
Josie gave a low, languorous laugh, and with an easy motion slid into his lap. Strangely enough he was not surprised. He put his arms around her, wild hope throbbing in his veins.
“Shall we triumph, Freddie?” she asked. Troy burned in her eyes.
“Yes!” he said in sudden delirium. “By God, yes!”
She bent forward, touched her lips to his. A rising, glorious astonishment whirled in Freddie’s body and soul.
“You taste like a narcotic,” she said softly, and-laughing low-kissed him again.
It was an hour or so later that the shots began echoing down Tombstone’s streets, banging out with frantic speed, sounds startling in the surrounding stillness. Freddie sat up. “My God, what is that?” he said.
“Some of your friends, probably,” Josie said. She reached out her hands, drew him down to the mattress again. “Whoever is shooting, they don’t need you there.”
Is that Behan’s motto? Freddie wondered. But at the touch of her hands he felt flame burn in his veins, and he paid no attention to the shooting, not even when more guns began to speak, and the firing went on for some time.
In the morning he learned that it had been Curly Bill Brocius who was shooting, drunkenly fanning his revolver into the heavens; and that when the town marshal, Fred White, had tried to disarm him, Brocius’s finger had slipped on the hammer and let it fall. White was dead, killed by Brocius’s modified gun that would not hold the hammer at safety. A small battle had developed between Brocius’s friends and various citizens, and Brocius had been slapped on the head by Wyatt Earp’s long-barreled Colt and arrested for murder.
The next bit of news was that Marshal White’s replacement had been chosen, and that Deputy U.S. Marshal Virgil Earp was now in charge of enforcing the law in the town of Tombstone.
It is like Texas again! Freddie wrote in his journal. It is not so much the killing, but the mad aimlessness of it all. Would that Brocius had been more discriminating with those bullets of his! Would that he had shot another lawman altogether!
The good citizens of Tombstone are overstimulated, and to avoid the possibility of a lynching the trial will be held at Tucson. I believe that law in Tucson is no less amenable to reason than was the law in Texas, and I have no fear that Brocius will meet a noose.
But while Brocius enjoys his parole, Tombstone must endure the Earps, in their black uniforms, marching about the streets like so many carrion crows. It is their slave souls they hide beneath those frock coats!
But I stay above them. I look down at them from my new rooms in the Grand Hotel. My landlady on Toughnut Street did not approve of what she called my “immortality.” Though she was willing to accept as rent the gambling winnings of a known killer, she will not tolerate love in her back room. The manager of the Grand Hotel is more flexible in regard to morals-he gives me a front room, and he tips his hat when Josie walks past.
But I must train his cook, or indigestion will kill me.
How long has it been since a woman held me in her arms? Three years? Four? And she was not a desirable woman, and did not desire anything from me other than the silver in my pocket.
Ach! It was a mad time. Life was cheap, but the price of love was two dollars in advance. I shot three men, and killed two, and the killing caused far less inconvenience than a few short minutes with a dance-hall girl.
Nor is Helen of Troy a dance-hall girl. She cares nothing for money and everything for power. The sexual impulse and conquest are one, and both are aspects perhaps of Jewish revenge. It is power that she seeks. But most atypically, her will to power is not based on an attempt to weaken others-she does not seek to castrate her men. She challenges them, rather, to match her power with their own. Those who cannot-like Behan-will suffer.
Those who act wisely, perhaps, will live. But I cannot be persuaded that this, ultimately, will matter to her.
“I don’t understand,” Freddie said, “how it is that Virgil Earp can be Town Marshal and Deputy U.S. Marshal at the same time. Shouldn’t he be compelled to resign one post or another?”