Doc: A Novel (42 page)

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.

“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 …

And soon it didn’t matter, for the cards loved Elijah Garrett Grier that night. Early on, he drew two, and filled a ten-high straight that would pay off two outstanding loans. Half an hour later, he held a pair of queens, drew three, and was astonished to find himself holding a very timely full house.

“Ladies over nines,” he announced, and another bill was paid.

A while later, those three sweet nines showed up again—two dealt, one drawn. The hooker was pacing now, smoking one cigarette after another, glaring at Holliday, who was down by $1,500 and looked awful.

An hour or so later, Johnson or Johansen or Jensen, or whatever the hell his name was, slapped his final hand onto the table and stood.

“That’s it for me,” he declared. “Gentlemen, it’s been a pleasure.”

“The pleasure is all Captain Grier’s,” Holliday remarked affably, though Bob Wright had also taken a fair percentage of the cattleman’s losses.

The Texan snorted, tossing back a drink before bidding good-bye to his opponents and three grand. Doc Holliday gathered the cards and began to shuffle, surveying the chips in front of the remaining players.

“Ovid tells us that Fortune and Venus befriend the bold,” he said, “but they are fickle gods, Captain Grier. You might consider quittin’ while you’re ahead, sir.”

“Goddammit, Doc!” Kate cried. “What are you—?”

“Roll me a cigarette, will you, darlin’?” Doc said mildly. “ ’Pears you have lost your bet with the captain. Perhaps you should retire an’ prepare for the consequences.”

Eli grinned, expecting Hungarian fireworks, but Kate had stopped pacing. For a few moments she watched the dentist’s hands as he shuffled the cards. Divvy, tumble, riffle … Riffle, arch, release … A corner of her upper lip lifted slightly—contempt? Without another word, she pulled a small silk pouch from the carpetbag she always carried and measured tobacco from it onto a thin, fine square of paper.

“Looks like you’ve got more’n enough now to buy into that store we’ve been discussing,” Bob Wright observed, staring at Eli. “About time you thought about marrying, wouldn’t you say? Wonderful institution, marriage. A wife, children … Why, they make life worth living.”

Kate choked and gave a startled laugh, shaking her head. Doc laid the deck down, slumped back in his chair, and struck a match.

“Wha’s so funny, darlin’?” he asked, his words now more slurred than blurred.

Mumuring something in French, she leaned over the table to accept the light, twisting her neck to smile with luxurious satisfaction as her breasts came within inches of Eli’s face. Before she straightened, she looked the other way and kissed Bob Wright on the mouth. Then she moved behind Doc Holliday and bent to kiss his neck, before reaching around to place the lit cigarette between his lips.

“Why, thank you, darlin’,” Doc said, blind as Homer to her wantonness.

He picked up the deck again, but for the third time that night, drawing in the first smoke set off a coughing fit so violent, he was nearly shaken from his chair. Bent almost double, he turned from the table, unable to go on. It was appalling, and the rest of them just sat there, not knowing what to do.

“Jesus, Doc,” Kate whispered, pouring him a drink. Still coughing, he shook his head, watering eyes aimed at the floor. Then, to everyone’s horror, he hawked bloody phlegm into the brass spittoon at his feet.

Revolted, and having lost better than $4,700 to Eli and Bob, the second cattleman took that opportunity to gather his remaining chips and stand. “I’m afraid I’ve had enough,” he said.

“Not me,” Doc gasped, still game. Wiping his mouth, he turned back to the table, white-faced and blue-lipped. “Evenin’s hardly begun …”

Kate poured him another drink. Doc drained the glass she offered. Somewhat recovered, the dentist dealt. Two down, two up.