Doc Read online

  That shut Morgan up, but Doc’s eyes opened and he gazed at Wyatt for a long time.

  “What?” Wyatt asked, a little unnerved by the way Doc was looking at him.

  “That is your ghost life, Wyatt,” Doc told him, and closed his eyes again. “That is the life you might have had. This is the life you’ve got.”

  Eddie Foy’s favorite girl, Verelda, was pregnant last month, Dong-Sing wrote on Wednesday. Eddie doesn’t know that she got rid of the baby.

  Dong-Sing’s father would wonder, Who is Eddie? Who is Verelda? Why does my son tell me such things? Or maybe he wouldn’t wonder at all. Maybe he didn’t even read Dong-Sing’s letters because they had become incomprehensible as the years passed. Maybe he just took the money and sold the paper the letter was written on.

  It was hard for Dong-Sing to keep in mind what his father would understand. It was difficult even to remember what his father looked like. Children who were babies when Dong-Sing left Kwantung must be grown by now—married, with children of their own. Dong-Sing himself had noticed some gray hairs recently and realized that he was getting old. He had waited a long time for a bride, but his family never sent one, and now it was illegal to bring Chinese women into America.

  I fear I will never have sons, he wrote to his father when the law was passed, in ’75. All the Chinese in Kansas are men. I will be no one’s ancestor.

  The only women in Dodge who would have Dong-Sing were whores who worked in the cribs behind the saloons. Even black ones charged him a lot, and they all did extra things to ensure that they would not have a yellow baby.

  Whatever you worship will consume you, Dong-Sing wrote one week. Bob Wright worships money. Wyatt Earp worships justice. Eddie Foy worships applause. Doc worships home and family, as I do. How will this consume us?

  In China, family was everything. In America, most people were all by themselves and liked it that way. Doc was alone, but he cared about his cousins and aunts and uncles. Without them he was almost as lonely as Dong-Sing himself. So Doc adopted friends to be his family. Dong-Sing understood that, of course. Just last year, he had adopted his nephew Shai-Kwan and set him up in business in Wichita to ensure that someone would light a joss stick for Jau Dong-Sing when he was gone, and sweep his grave on Ching-Ming Day. What puzzled Dong-Sing was why Doc chose such low-class people to be his friends, instead of cultivating influential or well-connected persons.

  Sometimes Doc walked out to the cemetery to stand alone at the grave of Johnnie Sanders and clean it up a little. This was unwise, for the nigger boy’s life was one of misfortune and bad luck. His spirit could only be malevolent.

  I have warned Doc about the danger, but he does not believe that an uneasy spirit can make a person sick. To Dong-Sing, the truth was there to be read in the stained handkerchiefs and the sour smell of Doc’s shirts and bedsheets. Belle Wright goes out to that grave, too, Dong-Sing noted. She has started to cough sometimes, just like Doc. I liked Johnnie Sanders when he was alive, but his spirit is angry and dangerous.

  Maybe he is bringing bad luck to Wyatt Earp, too, Dong-Sing thought.

  That would explain a lot.

  Wyatt wasn’t really sure how he and Mattie wound up living together. After she worked off her debt, she told him that she’d have to go back to the street. He was sorry for her, but that didn’t mean he wanted her to stay with him.

  Trouble was, when Lou and Morg moved to their own place next door, Wyatt was alone in the house and didn’t have that excuse anymore.

  “Mattie,” he said, feeling awful about it, “I don’t even have a dog.”

  “You could have one now, Wyatt. I could take care of it,” Mattie told him. “I could take care of you. I can clean, and I know how to cook. You wouldn’t have to eat at restaurants all the time. You could have home cooking.”

  He didn’t want a dog. And he liked eating in restaurants. He liked that the waitresses knew what he wanted and brought it to the table without him asking. He liked staring out the window while he ate, keeping an eye on things while the people around him made conversation. He enjoyed the way Morg and Doc teased each other like brothers when Doc was feeling good. When they talked about what they read in books, he liked to listen without the need to say anything.

  He liked being alone in crowds. He liked keeping watch, walking the beat, knowing what was buttoned up and where trouble was brewing. He liked the last hour of the night, when the drunks had passed out and the card games were over and the sun was coming up. He liked how the feel of the city changed. The south side, sleeping its night off. The north side, waking up to open its shops and stores.

  On duty, he held himself responsible to every citizen of Dodge and gave their town his whole attention. Minute by minute, all night long, he was alert—as ready as Dick was, waiting for the starter’s gun. When his shift was over, he felt he’d earned the sense of belonging only to himself.

  For a few days after Morg and Lou moved, he lived alone and liked it. When he opened the door to the tiny rented house, he liked the silence inside. He liked that everything he owned—little as it was—was right where he left it. He liked the way he could pick up the threads of his simple life and ease back into unobserved solitude. He liked going to bed without having spoken a word to anyone, and he liked to sleep, dreamlessly, alone.

  He hated how everyone noticed now when he got off work. He hated the leering, the joshing. “How’s married life?” everybody asked. He’d answer, “Well, it ain’t all bad,” and that’s exactly what he meant, but there’d be more laughs, as if he’d told a joke. He hated that everybody was paying attention to him.

  When he got home, there’d be a meal on the table and Mattie would be waiting for him, watching his face with those big sad eyes, like a dog expecting to get kicked but helpless to leave its master. If he was late, she’d blame him for making her worry and complained about how the meal was spoiled, though he really didn’t notice that the food was worse.

  She wasn’t a terrible cook, but she made him stuff he didn’t much like, and it hurt her feelings if he didn’t eat it all. Her coffee was awful and he started putting milk in it, on top of the sugar, to kill the taste some. If they went out, he had to remember to put milk in his coffee then, too, so she wouldn’t know he didn’t like hers. She kept the little house tidy, but he could never find anything anymore. When he asked where something was, she seemed annoyed and acted like he’d criticized her.

  She was trying her best. He could see that, and he wanted to appreciate what she did. But he didn’t, not really. That was the damnable misery of it: he didn’t want what she had to give. It was a sadness to him, seeing how hard she tried to please him, because what would have pleased him most was if she just wasn’t there.

  One time, over breakfast in the Iowa House before the night shift began, Wyatt talked all this over with Doc. He thought the dentist would understand how one thing led to another, and there you were, waking up beside a woman you never would’ve chosen.

  “Could you get rid of Kate? If you really—?” Doc just looked at him, and Wyatt felt ashamed, but he needed to know. “I mean, this ain’t anything I wanted, Doc! But I can’t—I don’t know …”

  “You can’t be mean enough to throw her into the street?” Doc paused to stir honey into his tea. “Alas, poor Dido, who tried to seize with living love a heart long numbed to passion.”

  Wyatt guessed that was some kind of poetry and ignored it, same as he ignored Doc’s coughing. “You get used to it,” Doc had said about the cough. “You can get used to anything.” Including not understanding half of what Doc said.

  “But Kate—she’s still working,” Wyatt whispered, even though they were alone at a long wooden table. “How do you—? I mean, any man you pass on the street might’ve …”

  “Ah,” Doc said, lifting the cup and blowing on the tea through a slight crooked smile. “So, we are discussin’ male pride now, not female virtue.”

  “You know what I mean,” Wyatt said irritably. �
�Why are you with her, Doc?”

  “Wrong question,” Doc said, coughing briefly.

  “Well, what’s the right one then?”

  “Why is she with me?”

  “Is that a joke?” Wyatt could never tell.

  “You are not the only one with a ghost life, Wyatt.”

  For a time, holding the teacup in both hands, Doc looked out at the little stretch of Front Street visible through the restaurant window. “It’s a fairy tale in reverse,” he decided. “Once upon a time, there was a little girl who was raised at the imperial court of Maximilian of Mexico, surrounded by luxury and refinement. When she grew up, she was meant to become the cultured and decorative wife of a fine gentleman. A count, perhaps. Or a prince. She would have servants to supervise and a household to oversee, and children to rear in a home filled with books and art. That is the life Kate might have had, Wyatt.”

  When Doc’s eyes came back to Wyatt’s, they were as level and hard as his voice was musical and soft. “In the life she’s got, about the best she can hope for is a consumptive dentist from Griffin, Georgia. The dentist, by the way, calls himself lucky to have her. Consider yourself warned, sir, and mind your tongue.”

  You didn’t think you was so lucky the last time you two had a fight, Wyatt thought, but he nodded.

  “And then,” Doc went on, “there was a revolution in Mexico. In six months’ time, Kate lost everything and everyone she knew. She went from Mexico City to Davenport, Iowa. Her father and mother sickened and died within weeks of each other. She was separated from her sisters and fostered by a family she’d never met before. They didn’t care about her grief. Didn’t speak any of the six languages she already knew. Couldn’t even say her name properly. They put her to work in the daytime, and at night … Her foster father ruined her,” Doc said with quiet venom, “and such a betrayal ought to earn that vicious sonofabitch—a place in the—very deepest—circle of hell.”

  He’d been fighting the cough for a while and gave in to it at last.

  “So: there she was,” Doc said, when he could go on. “Orphaned, pregnant, on the run, with no more than a few words of English. She found a man to marry her, but he left. The baby came early, and he died. She’s been makin’ her own way ever since.”

  Hearing it made Wyatt feel ashamed somehow, though none of it was his fault. “All these girls have some story,” he said, to make it less important.

  “Yes, sir! Yes, they do,” Doc said, suddenly hot. “Every one of them has a story, and every story begins with a man who failed her. A husband who came home from the war, good for nothin’ but drink. A father who didn’t come home at all, or a stepfather who did. A brother who should have protected her. A beau who promised marriage and left when he got what he wanted, because he wouldn’t marry a slut. If a girl like that has lost her way, it’s—because some worthless no-account—sonofabitch left her in—the wilderness alone!”

  When he was done coughing, Doc stood abruptly and dropped a dollar on the table, which was far more than he owed. Still, he didn’t leave, tarrying instead to watch a crib girl make a deal with a drover out on the boardwalk right in front of them. Misdemeanor, Wyatt thought, and he’d have gone to arrest her, except for what Doc said next.

  “They break my heart, these girls. They are so brave. Wyatt, you have to admire their nerve, at least! They go off alone into alleys and small rooms with violent, dangerous, lustful men twice their own size … Shall I confess my crime, Marshal?”

  Wyatt looked up.

  “City ordinances be damned,” Doc told him. “I am never entirely disarmed. And I just play cards with the bastards.”

  Personally, Wyatt didn’t think it took all that much nerve to lie back and let a man do what he wanted for a minute or two. The whores at his brother’s place seemed to him hard and mercenary, or loose and indifferent, or silly and stupid, but he had to admit he didn’t know much about any of them.

  Doc Holliday was an educated and thoughtful man, so Wyatt made an effort to match up what he’d seen with what Doc said. There might be something to it, he guessed.

  Later on, he asked Mattie Blaylock about her life before, and what her story was. At first she just looked at him like she couldn’t decide if he was dumb or trying to trick her.

  “Honest,” he said. “I want to know.”

  “Well, they was doing it to me anyways,” she told him. “Might as well get paid.”

  It wasn’t much to go on, but he did his best to treat her like she was a lady, the way Doc treated Kate.

  I sent to San Francisco for yue hua wan for Doc. I did this at my own expense, Dong-Sing thought while he worked, though he never would have written such a boastful thing to his father. Doc was grateful. He thanked me for my generosity, but he does not want me to go to such trouble. He has asked for the pharmacist’s address in San Francisco and promised to obtain the medicine for himself.

  According to the Chinese pharmacist, Doc’s illness was complicated and difficult to treat. Deficiency in yin accounted for the cough and the frothy pink sputum, while deficiency of yang and damaged Jing Luo combined to produce a tidal fever and night sweats, but also coldness and poor appetite and general weakness.

  The pharmacist sent dried milk thistle, sage, kelp, licorice, lavender, ginseng, and sorrel, to be steeped in boiling water with black tea. Jau Dong-Sing brewed the medicine up and encouraged Doc to drink it when he came by to eat noodles.

  I am happy to help him, since he has always treated me with respect. I hope that he will be better soon, Dong-Sing thought, pouring more bleach into the wash water. Sometimes his handkerchiefs are difficult to clean.

  Joker

  “It may have been the most vile, undrinkable, horrifyin’ beverage in the history of mankind,” Doc told Morgan, who felt bad for laughing so hard but couldn’t help himself. “And Mr. Jau—poor soul—he is watchin’ me with such eager anticipation! ‘How you like dat, Doc?’ he asks me. And at that very instant, I was thinkin’: I sincerely believe I would rather die than choke this down three times a day … But I could hear my mamma’s voice. Now, sugar, it was very kind of Mr. Jau, and if you can just get through the next twenty seconds without up-chuckin’ …”

  For the third time in half an hour, Doc laid his dental tools on the office table and turned away to cough and curse for a while, which gave Morgan time to catch his own breath. Somehow Doc made having consumption seem funny; Morg was damned if he understood how, but when the two of them were alone like this, he ended up laughing himself blue about half the time.

  He poured Doc a drink and knew to wait until Doc could answer before he asked, “You ever tried Wistar’s? That’s supposed to be pretty good for a cough.”

  “Morgan,” Doc said, “I have tried them all … Balsam of Cherry. Borax water. Kerosene and lard. Turpentine and sugar. Calomel. Bunchberry juice. Fish liver extract. Root of pitcher plant. Everything but eye of newt—which may have been in Mr. Jau’s concoction, now that I think of it.” He paused to clear his throat. “Laudanum stops the cough, but it stops everything else, too. Can’t work when I’m that fogged.” Doc picked up his tools. “Bourbon does the job, and I tolerate it better. Light?”

  Morgan lifted the lamp again and held it so there was no shadow on the denture Doc was finishing: two front teeth, cleverly linked in a gold setting.

  “It’s like a little sculpture,” Morg marveled. “Or … jewelry, almost.”

  “Jewelry is mere adornment,” Doc said, peering through a magnifying glass that was clamped into a brass stand on his desk. “This will change your brother’s life in a small but significant way. If it’s the last work I do, I’ll die a happy dentist.”

  Consumption was one thing. Death was another. Morg banged the lamp down.

  Doc looked up, surprised; he sobered when he saw Morgan’s face. “What?”

  “You keep joking about dying, and I wish you’d quit. It’s like you’re trying to get used to the idea,” Morg said. “Making friends with it, almost.”


  Doc stared, but he sounded impressed when he finally said, “Well, now, ain’t you somethin’.” He lifted his chin toward the lamp. Morg held it up, and Doc went back to work on the denture. “There was some bleedin’ after the race,” he admitted quietly, “but it wasn’t arterial. And it’s over. Took time for things to settle down afterward, is all.”

  True enough, the cough didn’t sound as awful as it had right after the fall. Doc’s color was better, too, but Kate said he still wasn’t sleeping well, and that made him cross.

  Cross ain’t the half of it, Morg thought. Doc would tear into folks, sudden as a dogfight, and he was taking some real chances during card games. He swore he wasn’t starting anything, but Doc’s idea of “clarifyin’ a point of contention” came awful close to spitting in a man’s eye. “Doc,” Morgan had warned a few nights ago, “you gotta be more careful. I won’t always be around—” To protect you, he was going to say, but Doc cut him off and snapped, “Well, neither will I, and I am damned if I will spend my time listenin’ to ungrammatical, repetitious, imbecilic nonsense without a challenge!”

  Still, he was cheerful enough right now, whistling softly while he smoothed away an almost invisible burr on the gold bezel that held the teeth.

  It was interesting to watch the work, and Morg was glad to be allowed back into the office. He’d been banned after Wyatt’s first appointment. Doc only let him come back today because it was the final fitting for the denture.

  Wyatt didn’t feel a thing when that first tooth was pulled, but Morgan still had a knot on the back of his head from where he hit the doorknob going down. When he came to, Doc was furious with him. “Dammit, Morgan, I didn’t know whether to shit or go bust! There’s Wyatt in the chair, and there’s you on the floor, and there’s the Eberhardt boy with eyes like saucers, sayin’ ‘I pump drill now, sir?’ I can’t have it, Morg—not while I’ve got a patient under ether. It’s too dangerous!” So Mattie Blaylock came with Wyatt for the next three appointments. She was real good about things, too, cooking him soft stuff like eggs and soup for a few days after each session, while his mouth was sore.