Doc Page 41

  For those few enchanted minutes, he had felt strong and unafraid. And now this! This was the capper!

  Straightening, throwing an arm around Wyatt, he declared, “Nemo supra leges! That’s what I love about you, Wyatt! One law for everyone!”

  “You’re drunk, Doc,” Wyatt said shortly, for he was embarrassed by the gesture, and Doc was starting to cough again. The sound of that right in your ear was kind of disgusting. Doc seemed to understand and moved away some, but he looked kind of strange.

  “An accurate observation,” he agreed, beginning to choke, “though not—not germane to our discussion—”

  Just then, James showed up, wanting to know what in hell had happened. Morg started to tell him, “That Driskill kid’s family showed up, but Doc …”

  Morgan’s voice trailed off.

  Wyatt was staring past him toward Wright’s General Outfitting, across the street. Morg turned to follow his gaze. Why is Bob Wright up so early? he wondered. Then it hit him.

  “Oh, shit,” he whispered. “Wyatt … no.”

  There was already a crowd. Not the hundreds of high season, but thirty or forty men drawn by Doc’s gunshots, and by the abrupt departure of city deputies from saloons all over town. At first they thought maybe the Earps had some kind of beef with Doc Holliday, but then the word started to get around that a bunch of Texans had tried to kill Wyatt, and that was interesting enough to make it worthwhile to stand in the rain that was starting up, especially when Wyatt yelled, “Bob Wright! You want me dead, you rich sonofabitch? I’m right here!”

  The merchant was at the edge of the crowd talking to somebody and kind of smirking. Bob turned at the sound of his name and stared at the deputy advancing on him. “I got no quarrel with you, Wyatt,” Bob called, but there was something in his eyes …

  “No, you’d rather pay people to do your dirty work,” Wyatt said, unbuckling his gun belt, jerking the badge off his shirt, dropping them both onto the dampening dirt. “Come for me yourself, you sonofabitch!”

  “All right, goddammit!” Bob agreed, pulling his own jacket off. “You’re on!”

  “Wyatt,” Doc called, bent over, one arm braced against a hitching rail. “For the love of God! Your teeth!”

  Morg started forward, meaning to get between Bob and Wyatt, but Bat was on the street now, too, and gripped Morgan’s arm to stop him.

  “Let them settle it,” Bat advised. “This has been coming since the Fourth of July.”

  But Morg wasn’t the only one who’d seen Wyatt this angry before. James knew what could happen, too, and he was already at Wyatt’s side, trying to talk sense to him.

  “Give this to Doc,” Wyatt said, pulling the denture out and handing it to James.

  Bob took that opportunity to throw a sucker punch. It was a solid hit, but poor judgment.

  “You dirty dog!” James cried, backing away. “Go ahead, Wyatt. Kill the bastard!”

  All of this made for a good show and the gathering mob grew noisier as the sky lightened to a dull pewter. At first, the money was mostly on Wyatt. He was eight years younger, fifteen pounds heavier, and ablaze, his face transfigured by rage heaped up, night after night, during years of fruitless, thankless, dangerous work, protecting the lives and wealth of storekeepers and lawyers and politicians who set the price of killing a peace officer at no more than a $12 fine. But Bob Wright had advantages, too. More physical strength than anyone suspected. A slightly longer reach. A deep, cold well of resentful envy and the sudden ferocious desire to take for himself everything priceless that Wyatt Earp had. The regard of other men. Respect. Loyalty, if not love.

  The odds pulled even.

  The rain got heavier.

  The noise of the crowd dropped off.

  When he figured they’d spent enough fury to be controllable, Bat stepped toward the pair, hoping he could make this into a genuine boxing match, with rounds and rests, but there was no talking to them. So he backed off.

  Mud sucking at their feet, both men were staggering after half an hour, and Bob’s age had begun to tell. He continued to punch at Wyatt’s mouth, but every time he took a shot, he opened his own ribs, and there’s a limit to how much punishment those bones can take. When Bob finally went down, he was almost too exhausted to cry out when Wyatt planted one foot and hauled off with the other, kicking with everything he had left.

  “For Christ’s sake, Bat, stop the fight!” Eddie Foy cried. “Sure: he’s going to kill the man!”

  Nobody moved. Not Bat, or Morgan, or his crippled brother James, all of them mesmerized by the stunning realization that Wyatt Earp, who never lost his temper, intended to beat Bob Wright to death before their very eyes.

  Finally Doc Holliday pushed through the crowd, lowered a bloody rag from his mouth, and gripped Wyatt’s shoulder so hard his knuckles went white in the gray morning light.

  “Wyatt,” he said, “stop now.”

  Backhanded for his trouble, Holliday reeled and fell, bleeding from the mouth, but got back on his feet.

  “Wyatt,” he said again, with that whipcrack emphasis he could sometimes produce. “Stop now, or it will be murder, and you will hang.”

  The rain, by then, had turned the street into a soup of horse manure, trash, and gory mud. Mouth agape, the red haze beginning to clear, Wyatt stumbled back from Bob’s body and fell, sitting down hard in the slop.

  “What should I do?” Morg was yelling. “Doc! Tell me what to do!”

  On all fours, hands gripping the ground, John Henry Holliday was struggling to pull air in, but every breath meant fighting a tide of bright red blood going the other way.

  “Get McCarty,” he gasped. “Keep my right side … higher than the left … or I’ll drown.”

  “Somebody go get Doc McCarty!” Morgan hollered, and Chuck Trask took off running.

  Prone in the mud, Bob Wright rolled over slowly. One limb at a time, he worked himself onto throbbing, bleeding hands and rubbery knees, and paused in that position to spit blood and gather himself. With a grunt, he got one foot underneath him and then the other, and lurched upright, a forearm pressing against the fractured rib. For a while he just stood there swaying, face to the sky, letting the rain sluice over him, diluting the blood and mud and sweat. His eyes were almost closed by bruising, but he peered out through the slits of his eyelids, and spit a gob of blood, and saw Doc Holliday do the same. His vision blurred again. Wiping at his face with a shirtsleeve he managed to clear one eye long enough to take satisfaction in the damage he’d done to Wyatt Earp, who was sitting slack-jawed in the mud, watching the dentist retch up red froth.

  “My God,” Wyatt said. “Did I do that?”

  By that time, Chuck had sprinted back with the town doctor at his heels, carrying his medical bag. Ignoring the two panting, filthy brawlers, Tom McCarty knelt in the mire at his patient’s side and put his ear near, trying to make out what John Holliday was saying.

  “Cavitation,” the dentist gasped, after coughing out another gout of foamy blood. “Left lung … Hit an artery.”

  “All right, get him up!” Tom McCarty ordered. “Get him home, out of this rain!”

  Morgan and Bat each took an arm and a leg, Morgan careful to take the ones on the right because he was taller and that would keep his side higher than Bat’s.

  As Doc Holliday was carried away, everyone seemed to wake up to the wet. Soon the street was all but empty, nobody left but Eddie Foy, James and Wyatt Earp, and Bob Wright.

  “Yeah, Wyatt,” Bob told him through pulpy lips, “you did that to Doc Holliday. Tha’s what you’re good at: breaking faces, cracking skulls. Dumb ox. ’S a wonder you got brains enough t’ chew your food. ’S not me wants you dead, Wyatt. Who wins the nex’ election if you’re killed? Not me! Not saloon men, Wyatt. The reformers win, you dumb bastard. George Hoover wins, you stupid sonofabitch!”

  Slowly, painfully, Bob walked back to his house. Eddie took off for Doc’s place, hurrying to catch up with Morg and Bat. Wyatt followed James back to
the bordello.

  Bessie ordered him a bath. The hot water arrived quickly, though China Joe didn’t leave before giving Wyatt a look of open disdain that took a lot of nerve from a Chink. Beyond thought, Wyatt soaked the mud and blood off. James came in about half an hour later with a pile of clean clothes for him to borrow.

  “Here’s your teeth,” James said, voice neutral. “Morg’s staying with Doc. Mattie Blaylock’s there, too. I’m going out to find Katie. McCarty won’t say it, but Morg’s pretty sure Doc’s dying. Kate’ll want to know.”

  The rest of the day passed in a steady gray downpour.

  Around six in the evening, Eddie Foy took Verelda and a bottle of whiskey over to Bessie’s. James led them to the kitchen, where Wyatt was sitting at the table, battered and remote. The room was small, so Verelda stayed in the doorway, curious but unwilling to go all the way in. She didn’t mind Morgan and she liked James, but Wyatt had always scared her.

  “Our boy’s still alive,” Eddie reported, getting glasses down off a shelf. “Drink this,” he said, pouring a shot for Wyatt. “Good for what ails you.”

  Wyatt stared at the glass for a few moments. Then he drank, grimacing at the burn.

  “Well done,” said Eddie. “I believe I’ll join you. James?”

  James nodded, and the three of them had a second shot before Eddie sat back in his chair.

  “A man walks into a bar,” he proposed, like he was onstage. “He’s got a mountain lion on a leash. Man says, Bartender, do you serve politicians in this place? Why, sure, the barkeep says. There’s George Hoover right over there! Man says, All right then, I’ll have a whiskey, and my friend here will have George Hoover.”

  Wyatt looked at him and spoke for the first time since the fight. “If tha’s a joke,” he mumbled, thick-lipped, “I’m too dumb t’ get it.”

  “Wyatt, I’m from Chicago,” Eddie told him. “Let me explain politics to you.”

  He poured them all a third and leaned across the table.

  “The trick of it,” said Eddie, “is that you always ask, Who gains? Cui bono? That’s how the old Romans said it. Who gets the good of it? Ed Masterson dead, killed by a drunk. Damn bad luck for poor Ed, and the citizens are outraged! A city marshal, gunned down dead on Front Street, and everyone’s after asking, What’s it going to take to get a little law and order around here? Then Johnnie Sanders is carried off in that fire, and sure: wasn’t it Big George at the wake, buttonholing everyone in sight, noising it around that it was Demon Rum did the poor boy in? Drunks killing lawmen. Drunks setting fires. So, now, ask yourself: cui bono if another lawman gets killed this season? Who gains, when Dog Kelley only won by three votes last time, and the next election balanced on a pinhead, so it is! Another fine upstanding officer dead, and him a teetotal Methodist, honest as the day is long! About time somebody got tough on the saloons, don’t you know … Vote Reform, son. Vote Reform!”

  Still in the doorway, listening, Verelda finally worked up the nerve to speak to Wyatt. “I don’t think it was George put the price on your head,” she told him. “It’s just a guess, but me? I bet it was Maggie.”

  The men all looked at her curiously.

  Emboldened, Verelda stepped closer, poured herself a drink, and slugged back the shot.

  “Maggie was a bitch even before she found Jesus and swore off booze. Now she wants to be the governor’s wife: Mrs. Governor George Hoover!” Verelda sang with fruity ersatz propriety, waving an imperious hand in the air. “Presiding over Dry Kansas, like the goddam queen of Sheba.”

  He should have slept. The fight, and then the liquor. He hadn’t had a drink in years, and it should have hit him hard, but in a stand-up contest, remorse and self-loathing can battle whiskey to a draw.

  It was long past dark when Bat Masterson showed up at the kitchen door. James let him in. Bessie poured him a drink. Nobody said anything when he dumped Wyatt’s gun belt and star on the table. Wyatt himself barely glanced at them.

  Bat shook the rain off his hat and shrugged out of his slicker. “Took a while, but I convinced Driskill his kid had it coming,” Bat reported. “And I told Bob Wright I’m off his payroll. He can get somebody else to ref his goddam fights. He still swears it wasn’t him put the price on your head, but now he’s claiming he ‘heard from somebody’ the offer was only good while you were wearing a badge—”

  “Horseshit,” James snorted. “You could see it in his eyes, Wyatt. He wanted you dead! Why else was he out on the street at five in the morning? He wanted to make sure Driskill got you!”

  “A look in somebody’s eyes ain’t gonna stand up in court,” Bessie pointed out.

  Bat leaned over and tapped Wyatt’s star. “You put that on, I’ll back you,” he told Wyatt, choosing sides at last. “But if you need work? We can use a faro dealer at the Lone Star. Full-time. Soon as your hands heal up.”

  Wyatt stared at the badge for a while. Finally, stiff and sore and silent, he got up and went to the window, where he watched the rain slide down the glass.

  What the Irishman said about politics made sense. Big George Hoover would have campaigned waving Wyatt’s bloody shirt and he probably would have won. Maggie might well have tried to make that possible. Still … Tobie Driskill had a grudge, too. His brother Jesse had more than enough money to offer a bounty. They might have known George Hoyt down in Texas—

  Except Bat had just admitted that he thought it was Bob.

  And James was right, too. The sons of Nicholas Earp knew what scorn looked like. Wyatt had seen contempt in Bob Wright’s eyes, and felt an unleashed, vindictive malevolence in every blow that landed. He was sure of this much. If Tobie Driskill had killed him last night, Bob Wright would’ve danced on his grave.

  But that could all be true, and it still might have been somebody else entirely who offered the bounty—someone who hated Wyatt’s guts for reasons Wyatt himself would never know. There were a lot of men in that category. He might never find out who put the price on his head in Dodge that year.

  Doesn’t matter, he thought.

  Humiliated, ashamed, certain Doc Holliday was dying, he was sick of it all. Sick of politics. Sick of being hated. Sick of Dodge. Sick of himself.

  “Hell,” he said, thick-lipped. “I quit. They’re gonna fire me anyways.”

  James slumped in relief and shouted, “Thank God!” Then he stood up straight and declared, “To hell with ’em! This town’s played out! Let’s all go down to Tombstone!”

  “James!” Bessie cried. “I ain’t movin’ to Arizona! Dammit, there is nothin’ there but gravel and scorpions—”

  “And silver and miners and money, honey!”

  The two of them were still arguing when Wyatt heard footsteps coming up the back stairs and across the porch toward the kitchen door. “That’s Morgan,” he said, for Morg had grown up wearing Wyatt’s hand-me-down shoes, and he still kind of shuffled when he walked.

  Waiting for the door to open, everybody got quiet.

  This is it, they were thinking. Doc’s gone.

  “Wyatt?” Morg said, standing just outside so as not to drip all over Bessie’s floor. “He’s asking for you. Best hurry.”

  Playing for Keeps

  In the top drawer of Dr. Tom McCarty’s desk, there was an envelope labeled J.H.H. Inside it was a folded sheet of heavy rag paper bearing three lines of neat, copperplate handwriting.

  DR. JOHN STILES HOLLIDAY

  66 FORREST

  ATLANTA, GEORGIA

  Beneath that, in Tom McCarty’s own scrawl, was a note: Pt requests: notify post-mortem; ship body per instructions.

  At the end of September, John Holliday had given Tom that envelope and ten dollars to cover his final expenses. “I would like to be buried next to my mother,” he said, buttoning his shirt over a chest dwindled down to bone. Tom tried not to show what he was thinking, but the dentist saw the look and recited, “Youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies …”

  “Goddammit, John! If you would take better care
of yourself, I am sure you could retard the progress of the disease. Dodge is no good for you, son. Too much dust, too much excitement! And the winters here are brutal. You need clean air and decent meals and complete rest. Now, there’s a sanatorium near Las Vegas that’s had some success with cases every bit as advanced as yours and—”

  “How much does it cost?”

  “Two hundred a month, but that’s room and board and doctors and—”

  “Haven’t got it,” John said.

  They’d had discussions like this before. Tom McCarty respected John Holliday as a gentleman and a professional, but the boy was plain stupid about money, spending it like a drunken drover when he had it and then acting like it was just his fate to be poor when it was gone. As for that woman he kept … Well, Tom knew better than to say anything, though he’d made his opinion known: Kate was a nymphomaniac and a hysteric and a drunk who had mined John Henry Holliday like he was the Black Hills. When Tom heard Kate had taken up with Bob after Alice Wright left town, he thought, Well, she knows when the vein is played out, damn her, but John’s better off without the slut. Now Kate was back again, weeping and frantic, when what the boy needed was calm, quiet care.

  Mattie Blaylock was no angel, but she was the sort of stolid, unemotional woman who made a good nurse, and Tom was grateful for her help. “Mattie,” Tom said, lifting his chin toward Kate, “get her out of here.”

  “Go on, now, darlin’. I’ll be fine,” John mumbled.

  “John, keep quiet!” Tom ordered.

  Wiping his hands on a towel, the doctor waited until Mattie had pulled Kate out into the front room, closing the door behind her. Then he sat on the bed to collect his thoughts. The room looked like the aftermath of a birth, or an abortion, or a shooting. Bloodied, muddied clothes—rags now—were heaped in the corner. John was in the chair, propped up with pillows, hunched over an enamel basin half-filled with foamy red fluid. Almost naked, slick and stinking with sweat, ribs visible from spine to sternum.