Doc Read online

  Getting Grier was easy. So was finding a couple of cattlemen to fill out the table. The invitation to Bob Wright required something different.

  “Doc wants to play you,” Kate told him. “Five-card stud. No limit. Interested?”

  Unbuttoning his shirt, Bob gave her one of his Aw, shucks looks. “Oh, I’m not much of a card player.”

  She laughed appreciatively, and her knowing skepticism was rewarded by his sly smile when she came over to pull the shirt down off his shoulders.

  “Anyways,” he said, “from what I hear, Doc Holliday’s too good for me.”

  “Don’t be so sure!” She sounded sincere because she was. “Doc don’t get much real competition. It’s all drunks and fools. He’s tired of being sick, and he’s bored. He wants a real game. That army captain with the fancy horse? He’s in. Doc’s got some kinda beef with him.”

  Bob frowned. “Eli Grier? He’s courting my daughter.”

  Kate blinked, then smiled briefly. Later, Bob would remember that smile and the faint indulgent pity it signified.

  “That’s the one,” she said. “I lined up a couple of other players, but Doc asked for you, special.”

  Most men looked better dressed; Bob was the exception, better built than you’d guess when you saw him on the street. Sure of himself in bed, and with good reason. First time around, he tried to jew her fee down. Kate told him to go to hell. “Awright,” he offered, “double or nothing—if I can’t make you come.” To her surprise, he won the bet. He’d been one of her regulars ever since. He paid more often than not, but either way, Kate found it satisfying to see that mask of tame, inoffensive harmlessness drop like a magician’s silk scarf once the bedroom door was closed.

  Doc had been too damn sick to be much use to her lately; tonight, Kate found it easy to let Bob get past the professional distance she normally maintained. Which is why, laughing and out of breath, she meant it when she told him, “Your wife is a lucky woman.” She almost regretted slipping the knife in, but Doc had insisted. “First you,” she said. “Now Grier …”

  God, he’s good, she thought, watching. Silence was the only tell.

  Eyes wide in merry astonishment, she purred, “Oh, Bob! You don’t really think Grier’s interested in your little girl, do you?”

  He got up, keeping his back to her. Funny how men thought it was modest to stand that way. She admired the view while he dressed. Good shoulders, broad back. Power in the ass and thighs. Prosperous men generally got fat. Big George Hoover already had. Bat Masterson was getting there. Bob Wright could buy and sell them both, but he still had the body of a young freight driver. Bob had other hungers to feed.

  When he’d finished with his string tie, he turned to display the perfect poker face. Mild. Amiable. No threat to anyone.

  “Tell me more,” he suggested, “about that poker game.”

  God’s honest truth: Elijah Garrett Grier never meant to cuckold Bob Wright. For one thing, Eli Grier truly liked and admired Bob. And you might not think it, but they had a lot in common, though one man was a storekeeper and the other a soldier.

  In long, enjoyable conversations, they had come to believe that combat and commerce presented similar challenges and drew on similar talents; the tactical brilliance Elijah Grier displayed in battle had made Bob Wright an astonishingly successful entrepreneur. Others saw risk and danger; they saw openings and opportunities. Others stood stunned in the face of shifting complexity; they cut through to solutions that seemed to arise without thought or effort. Neither was drawn to frontal assaults. Both inclined toward flanking maneuvers. With every story they exchanged, it became clearer that they were a match, each man’s achievements shining a favorable light on the other’s.

  Bob was only three years the older, but he understood where Eli’s troubles lay. “The army’s running out of wars, son,” he told the captain. “It’s time to resign that commission! Business is in your blood, and there’s money for the taking out here. You’d do well in politics, too. West Kansas will go Republican someday. A war record like yours’ll be a real asset.”

  You have to back tactics with strategy, you see, and Bob always kept the long game in mind. One day he’d be voted out of the legislature, and it would be handy to have a son-in-law there in his stead.

  When Bob Wright invited Eli to dinner that first Sunday, they both expected that the captain would be courting Bob’s daughter. Who better to marry Belle than a man with Bob’s best qualities and none of his unsightliness? Eli had seen Isabelle Wright at the store, of course. Pretty, if sulky, and sometimes obnoxious. Still … there were a lot of advantages to marrying the Belle of Dodge, principal among them a rich father-in-law who was already talking about taking Eli on as a partner. Bob wanted to open a new store down in Texas, at the Great Western trailhead. It would make outfitting cattle companies more efficient at both ends of the season, reducing costs and attracting business.

  “You put in a couple of grand yourself, we’ll call it fifty-fifty,” Bob told Eli, and it was a generous offer.

  What Elijah Garrett Grier lacked, besides two grand to invest, was the ability to keep his eyes on the prize. Traits that made him masterly in combat—his total concentration on what lay right in front of him; the quickness with which he adjusted to changing circumstances—those were the very traits that sapped his ability to stick with a job if it took much more than an hour.

  He got distracted, that was the problem. He never seemed to finish anything. And he wasn’t lazy, either! If anything, he was too ambitious. He’d start something, and then somebody would ask a question, or need his help with some task he knew he could handle easily. He’d say yes to each new demand, thinking he’d get it done in a few minutes and then go back to what he’d been doing before, except three or four other things would come up, and by the end of the day, he’d have nothing to show for all his effort and no idea what had happened to the time. It was a failing as mysterious to Eli himself as it was disappointing to his family.

  Despite Old Man Grier’s frustration with his youngest son’s shortcomings, he was furious when Elijah up and joined the army right after the attack on Fort Sumter. Mrs. Grier wept. The older Grier boys sneered and called the decision harebrained. Neighbors shrugged and shook their heads, but the laborers at the carriage factory nudged one another and speculated leeringly about why a rich kid like Eli Grier had done such a thing.

  Truth was, Eli didn’t have one single reason, not really. Like so many young men before and after him, he craved adventure and distinction in equal measure. He desired to be tested in some fundamental way and to be found true. But enlisting was also a way for the youngest Grier to circumvent two looming difficulties: a girl who needed marrying within the month and a gambling debt he might not have to repay if he joined the army and died gloriously in battle.

  What surprised everyone, Eli included, was the sheer perfection of his temperament for war.

  Cunning in combat, he would go still in the saddle, eyes on the field, effortlessly commanding the attention of armed and mounted men. They would watch him, waiting breathlessly for the moment when his eyes lit up and he would grin, his face shining as he revealed with terse words and small gestures exactly how they would turn disadvantage into victory. Men followed that slim, spoiled, scatterbrained boy with the ancient, angry joy that warriors have felt since divine Ares lifted the first spear and made it fly. Medals and commendations accumulated. Even Old Man Grier admitted that Elijah had found his calling.

  By rights, Eli should have been a colonel or even a general by now. Indeed, he had been promoted to major twice, but as decisive and effective as he was in sudden skirmishes, peace paralyzed him. Wars ended, that was the problem. Tedium set in, and that’s when things went wrong.

  Major Grier had been busted back to captain twice—both times for ignoring trivialities that defeated his capacity to give a good goddam. Some sonofabitch by-the-book commander would get a wild hair about inventory or payroll records. Money would be
missing. Eli’s careless accounting would be blamed. Last year, there’d even been suspicion that Eli had taken cash after a catastrophic card game. Only the fact that his family was rich made the accusation too absurd to pursue.

  Which was fortunate, because he did occasionally borrow from the strongbox.

  Well, more than occasionally, truth be told. The first time, it was only overnight. A jack-high straight flush, and the money was returned—no one the wiser, including Eli himself. The risk of being caught added welcome piquancy to the games, for every time he sat down at a poker table, he faced annihilation. Exposure and disgrace would be far worse than an honorable death in combat, but with the South whipped and with the last of the Indians penned up on reservations, only gambling offered him that perfect balance of deliverance or doom.

  Until he met Bob Wright’s pretty little wife, Alice.

  At dinner that first Sunday, Elijah Garrett Grier made no decision to turn his back on Belle, and the trailhead store in Texas, and his own promising future. Rather, they disappeared from his mind as though they had never existed. In their stead was the mystery and challenge of Alice.

  She was oblivious to his attention at first, then mystified, then skeptical. Slowly he made her believe in his interest and his admiration. At last there came a day when she turned her face to him as a rosebud to late-spring sunlight: soaking up warmth, releasing stored energy, unfolding. Coming alive again, after a dark and deadening winter.

  Laughing, she would run like a girl, flop down next to him on a blanket warmed by summer heat, and show him what she’d carried back in her apron. Propped on an elbow, she would feed him wild blueberries and recall how she used to gather plums and grapes for jams and conserves and jellies that would bring color and sweetness to meals eaten on gray winter days. A bride so young she grew two inches after the wedding, she had faced frontier life with industry and resolve and no word of complaint about Bob’s long absences. She’d birthed babies and raised children alone, and buried three all by herself. She sewed and mended and knit and washed and ironed. She baked bread and pies, and salted meat, and put up crocks of pickles. She always had a kitchen garden, and grew peas and beans, onions and pumpkins and okra, sweet corn and tomatoes and yellow squash …

  “I was never idle when I was young,” she said, her sad eyes wistful.

  “You’re still young,” he told her, touching her cheek, but he had seen his own lost purpose in the guarded blue eyes of Alice Wright and understood her melancholy. It was not youth she missed but intensity and meaning. Bred in the Missouri backcountry to pioneer self-reliance, she had become nothing more than the principal ornament in the Honorable Robert C. Wright’s grand new house: proof of his prosperity, as pointless as the dusty rosewood piano, silent in the parlor.

  Now when Eli Grier sat at her table—with the children around them and not three feet from her husband—they both felt the exhilaration that comes of gambling with your very life. Behind every ordinary word exchanged, with each passing minute that sustained the pretense, hidden within all the bland courtesies, there was a shining silver wire stretched between them, vibrating with the constant delicious terror of discovery and damnation.

  A whispered word. A phrase written on paper and slipped into a waiting hand. A place chosen, the time agreed upon. Excuses found, reasons given. Illicit hours stolen from duties and obligations.

  She was afraid, at first. Eli’s horse was familiar. Alice’s movements were noted. After a time, however, it seemed plain to them that Bob must have known.

  “He knows, and he doesn’t care,” Alice said.

  There was in her voice both bitterness and elation.

  “You’re going to need law,” Bat Masterson insisted. “First off, there’s going to be enough money at that table to buy a small railway. No sense tempting thieves. Second, Holliday is dangerous as hell, but I can handle him.”

  Third, Eli Grier thought, the house rakes off a percentage and if the game’s in the Lone Star, Sheriff Masterson is half the house.

  As the date for the game drew closer, Reasons First and Second receded in significance, leaving Reason Third in high relief. There would be no cash at the table: chips only, for this was to be a gentleman’s game, with all players presumed good for their losses the next day. That was lucky, since it eliminated Eli’s need to acquire money for his stake. Yes, there were rumors about the dentist—

  Jesus, what was his name again? Eli was awful with names. He had to be introduced three or four times before a name got a grip—yet another failing that had annoyed Eli’s old man, who always bragged he never forgot a face or a name.

  Anyway, the dentist was a gentleman from Atlanta, so Eli wasn’t worried by Sheriff Masterson’s warnings. The Grier and Cook Carriage Company had done business with Georgia’s upper crust for decades. Eli himself had spent nearly two years in Atlanta after the war, serving as liaison between the army’s general staff and that smoldering city’s impoverished aristocrats. He was familiar with the breed, and rather fond of it.

  Most of Sherman’s army had truly hated Georgians—not just for the savage cruelty of slavery and for their antebellum arrogance but for the stubborn defense the state militia persisted in presenting long past the point when there was a snowball’s chance in hell that they wouldn’t be crushed. Every time Joe Johnston pulled back, dug in, and made yet another attempt to delay the inevitable, Sherman’s men felt as though they were being forced to murder ragged skinny veterans, and gray-haired old men, and thin-faced fourteen-year-old cadets from some goddam military school. “What in hell’s it gonna take to make them bastards quit?” That was the question on every Yankee tongue, and the answer was this. Nothing short of the cold, deliberate destruction of everything that stood or grew or moved between Chattanooga and Savannah.

  If anything, the victors’ hatred intensified after the war, for if Georgians had resisted every step toward their defeat and lost everything they’d fought for, if they starved and struggled and scratched for a living with bare white hands in scorched red earth in the years that followed their surrender, there remained to them one possession that could not be stolen, destroyed, or set alight: an unyielding and unassailable pride that had not just survived but deepened in the aftermath of conquest.

  It was infuriating, the insolent malevolence in eyes that stared coldly above slight smiles. Go ahead, those smiles said. Take everything of value. Burn the rest. I am still the better man.

  Unlike his brother officers, Eli understood the cool, correct courtesy and appreciated the grave, impenetrable mockery. Once, he’d thanked an Atlantan for some small deference and had been informed, with exquisite politesse, “A gentleman is judged by the way he treats his inferiors, sir.”

  The remark was, he thought, the most perfect expression of Southern hauteur he’d ever encountered. It aroused his admiration as did a well-bred horse or a fine oil painting, though most men wouldn’t have gotten the joke and the rest would have been insulted.

  For all his ferocity in battle, Eli Grier never took offense. Hell, nothing said to him during two years in Atlanta came close to what he used to hear at any given breakfast with his father. Southern tempers could flare to killing heights in an instant, but the anger burned out just as quickly. There was something almost sexual about that explosive release of male violence, and you did well to be aware of murderous rage lurking beneath polished gentility. In Eli’s experience, however, if you were circumspect and capable of apology, you’d get along with Southerners just fine.

  Sitting down at the table in the Lone Star Dance Hall and Saloon that night in late September, Elijah Garrett Grier was actually looking forward to sharing an evening with such a gentleman. At first the dentist did not disappoint. Knife-thin and pasty-pale, he had Georgia’s familiar blurred and lazy accent and its casual, careless courtesy, though it was immediately apparent that he was consumptive and in considerable misery, given the way he dosed himself from a bottle delivered, without his asking, to his elbow.
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  “I offered Sheriff Masterson all my custom if only he and his partner were to rename the Lone Star,” the dentist said with a charming, crooked grin. “I should dearly like to write home and tell my kin that I only drink in Moderation.”

  Eli smiled. He felt sorry for the man but certainly did not fear him. They chatted amiably, waiting for the others to arrive. It came as something of a surprise to Eli that they had met earlier that year. Eli begged pardon and confessed his debility, and was assured that no offense had been taken. It was merely a brief encounter at the Green Front back in May, the dentist told him between bouts of coughing. They had exchanged a few remarks about Roxana. No reason to recall the conversation now.

  The time passed pleasantly until Bob Wright showed up. It was Bob, businesslike, who made introductions all around when the two cattlemen arrived. With self-deprecating humor, Eli told the newcomers that the odds were twenty to one that he’d be able to remember their names, admitting that he was a special kind of idiot about such things. For some reason, however, John Holliday’s name finally stuck. Maybe it was the irony of a man so sick being called Doc.

  The game began around midnight amid noisy conversation and raucous laughter. Bat’s prophecy of trouble had attracted a number of spectators to the Lone Star that evening, and they drank in gleeful anticipation of the local outbreak of hell rumored to be imminent. Unfortunately for the Lone Star’s profit, the first hours of play were disappointingly quiet. Despite the stakes, most folks drifted away to seek their entertainment elsewhere. Interest in the table was confined to the men sitting around it and to the Hungarian whore who watched the action with unwavering attention—not surprising, given the side bet she and Eli Grier had.

  When Eli realized that Kate was Holliday’s woman, there was a moment of unease before he lost all respect for a man who probably pimped her and certainly shared her. By that point in the game, it was apparent that Doc Holliday was neither a card sharp nor the ferocious exemplar of Southern spleen that Bat Masterson had promised. The Georgian was a decent player, but he’d been drunk when he sat down and he continued to drink as the evening progressed. Eli took pride in gambling sober and considered that the real threat was one of the cattlemen. Johnson. Or was it Johansen? Jensen, maybe. Dammit, something with a J …