Doc: A Novel (46 page)

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

I
n 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 F
ORREST
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.

The stench of gore and necrotic lung tissue was suddenly overwhelming. Tom cracked the window open, in spite of the chilly rain. “Tell me when you get cold.”

Eyes closed, John whispered, “Still hot.”

That would change soon: anemia competing with fever for ascendancy.

“Well,” Tom said, sitting again, “my guess is that we can rule out Rasmussen’s aneurysm.”

“Dead by now,” John agreed. “So: Roki—”

“Rokitansky’s hemorrhage, yes, I think so too, and dammit, I told you not to talk! The active bleeding’s stopped. That’s a good sign. If you can hold your own a while longer, we can try the lycopin extract, and you’ll be able to get some sleep—Oh, hell! Now what?”

Out in the front room, Kate was in full cry. They heard Mattie Blaylock tell her sharply to shut up. The door to the bedroom opened. Two of the Earp brothers looked in. Morgan again. And Wyatt, who appeared to have been hit by a train. Already distorted by bruising and cuts, his face twisted when the smell hit him.

Then he saw Doc. “My God,” he said.

“You see?” Kate was yelling. “You see what you did to him, God damn you! You killed him, you lousy sonofabitch!”

At the sound of Kate’s curses, John’s eyes fluttered open. “Wyatt,” he said, sounding pleased to see him. “Kate, darlin’ … Don’t fuss … Not his fault.”

“John! Keep quiet!” the doctor snapped. “And Kate, if you can’t stop running your mouth, I’ll throw you out of this house myself. Calm down, all of you! Wyatt, I don’t know what in hell Kate’s yelling about, but nothing you did caused this. Bleeding episodes are not unusual in consumptives. This has been coming on for weeks—maybe months! The disease has eaten out part of his left lung. The resulting cavity impinged on an artery, but a clot has formed. For the moment, the crisis has passed, but if he starts coughing again, he could bleed to death or die of apoplexy.”

Hugging herself, Kate doubled over with a little moan of fear.

“Jesus, McCarty!” Morgan cried. “He’s sitting right there! He can hear you!”

“He knows what’s going on as well as I do—better!” Tom said. “I’m just telling
you
people what’s happening, so you will shut up, and get out, and let him rest! Am I making myself clear? Everybody! Get the hell out!”

Over the next couple of hours, the bleeding started up twice more. Kate was banished to Bessie Earp’s house. Morg and Wyatt and Mattie stayed at Doc’s. Around three in the morning, Chuck Trask came by to tell Tom McCarty he was needed to sew up a knife wound.

“Spurting or oozing?” Tom asked.

“Just kinda leaking,” Chuck said. “Wyatt? Morg? Are you coming to work? We’re real shorthanded.”

“I quit,” Wyatt told him. This was news to Morg, but Wyatt said, “Nothing to do with you. Go on.”

So Morgan left with Chuck, but before Tom McCarty followed them, he took Mattie and Wyatt to the kitchen and showed them how to measure out four grains of dried lycopin extract and stir it into a glassful of water.

“It’s effective against the cough and mildly narcotic,” he told them, pulling his coat on. “When he wakes up, you make him drink a glass of the mixture, but no more than one glass every two hours. Mattie, can you write?”

She nodded and shrugged: A little.

“Well, try to keep track of when you give him a dose, so he doesn’t get too much. If he’s cold, cover him. If he’s hot, open the window again. I don’t think he’ll be hungry, but I’ll stop by Delmonico’s and have them send over some beef broth with plenty of salt. If he asks for anything, offer that.”

Mattie said she’d keep watch the rest of the night. Wyatt knew he ought to stay, but this was so much like when Urilla was dying … So he went home and slept at last, but poorly. He was already up and dressed when Mattie came in a few hours later.

“Kate came back after McCarty left,” she told him, hanging a damp shawl up on the peg next to the door. “Morg’s back, too. He’s staying with Kate so she won’t be alone when Doc dies.”

“So, you’re sure? He’s …?”

“Never saw anybody that sick who didn’t. Why’d you quit?”

He almost said, Because you were right about George Hoover. Because my father is right and I’ve got shit for brains. Because I don’t know who my friends are. Because I don’t know who to trust anymore, except my brothers.

What came out was “Politics.” Which was true enough.

For the first time since she moved in, he wished that Mattie would talk more, for his own thoughts were loud in his mind. Maybe McCarty was right. Maybe what happened to Doc wasn’t Wyatt’s fault, just like it wasn’t really Wyatt’s fault when Urilla got typhus, but it sure felt like it was, and Mattie wasn’t one to tell him different.

“I’m going next door,” he said.

Morg answered the knock. Kate was slumped at the table, her head in her hands, too weary to look up. Wyatt’s eyes went to the bedroom where Doc lay, dead white and so motionless beneath the covers Wyatt thought that he’d been laid out. It took a moment to see that Doc was breathing in shallow little gasps, but breathing all the same.

Morg said, “If you can stay with him awhile, I’ll take Kate back to Bessie’s so she can get some sleep.”

Probably the first time a woman ever got any sleep in that place, Wyatt thought, but he told Morg he’d sit with Doc, and that Morg should get some rest, too.

“You know about the medicine?” Morg asked.

“Yeah,” Wyatt said. “Go on.”

“Wyatt … you really quit?”

“Yeah,” Wyatt said. “Go on.”

For the rest of the day, he kept watch by himself, listening to the clock tick, dozing sometimes in the chair. Late in the afternoon, there was a short, quiet dream about Urilla, probably brought on by sitting in a sickroom like this. He was telling her, “If I made more money, I coulda done better by you,” and in the dream, he felt more than heard her say, “Don’t fret, Wyatt.”

He woke up slowly, feeling calm. Then he saw where he was, and straightened, and winced, aware of every bruise and cut and aching joint.

Doc was awake, his face expressionless.

“You snore,” he told Wyatt, sounding feeble and aggrieved.

Wyatt started to smile, but it hurt too much and he quit.

Doc seemed to gather himself to say something important, and spoke as firmly as he could, though his voice was somewhere between a whisper and a whine. “Wyatt, I cannot make you another denture. No more fights. You get that mad again, shoot the bastard. Promise me.”

“I promise. How do you feel, Doc?”

Doc’s eyes closed. “Anyone makin’ book?”

“Luke Short was giving ten to one you wouldn’t make it through the night.”

It was a joke. Luke was a gambler who wasn’t even in town anymore, but Doc murmured, “Bet against me? I would’ve.”

Wyatt made him drink a glass of water with lycopin and got him settled back down. A few minutes later, Doc roused again.

“God damn Henry Kahn,” he said, sounding briefly normal. “If he’d been a better shot, he’d have saved us all a lot of trouble.”

There was nothing more for a while, and Wyatt supposed Doc had fallen asleep until a tear formed in the corner of the sick man’s eye and slipped sideways toward the pillow. Wyatt got a handkerchief to dry the pale, bony face. Doc’s eyes opened at the touch, but he was looking at something beyond the room.

“My poor mother …”

This is it, Wyatt thought. When they start talking about their mother, it’s over.

A few minutes later, Doc spoke again.

“Oh, Wyatt,” he whispered, too breathless to sob. “This’s a terrible way to die.”

He said very little during the week after the hemorrhage. “What’s the date?” he asked once. Told it was October 13, he said clearly, “I was supposed to go to St. Francis. Wire my regrets to Alex von Angensperg.”

There was a return telegram the next day.
NIL DESPERANDUM STOP 152 CHILDREN 3 PRIESTS 7 NUNS PRAYING STOP MAY I VISIT STOP

It was Morgan Earp who answered.
NO VISITORS YET STOP KEEP PRAYING STOP

A routine developed. Kate and Mattie took the nights. Morgan and Wyatt split the days. Lou kept them all fed. Tom McCarty came by to check on Doc, morning and evening.

No one else was permitted into the sickroom, but China Joe appeared each afternoon with a bowl of noodles and left instructions that Doc should eat them for a long life and to fatten up. The first time that happened, Doc came close to crying again.

“How thoughtful,” he said. “Thank him for me, please.”

On the first of November, China Joe showed up at the door as usual, only this time he insisted on waiting until Doc was awake. Morgan offered to take a message in, but the Chinaman would not go away until he was allowed to speak to Doc personally, and when he went into the bedroom, he shut the door behind him to keep the conversation private.

Dong-Sing had heard about the rebellion of Doc’s lungs, of course, and now a single glance was enough to tell him that all Doc’s
yin
organs were functioning poorly. He was as white and fragile as a porcelain bowl, and you didn’t have to be an herbalist to see that he was in a dangerous condition.

“Mr. Jau,” Doc said softly. “How kind of you to visit.”

“You no talk!” Dong-Sing ordered. Coming closer, he sat on the edge of the chair by Doc’s bed. “You no worry!” He looked around the little room and waved his hand at the roof and walls. “I no charge rent.”

Doc’s eyes widened.

Dong-Sing held his head up proudly. “All these my house. You no tell!” Leaning close to Doc, he whispered, “That nigger boy? He rich: he dead. Teach me big damn lesson. Colored fella get rich in America, no good! George Hoover, he front man! Nobody know China Joe rich fella. So I safe.”

Having unburdened himself of more English than he had ever successfully strung into a single speech, Dong-Sing took a deep breath and let it out abruptly. Then he nodded once, emphatically, like an American.
There. I said my piece, by God
.

“Kill a chicken …” Doc remembered. “Scare a wolf …?”

“Wolf more damn smart than chicken! Me? I know what what. Now I tell George Hoover, No rent for Doc!” Dong-Sing got even quieter. “You no tell Kate! She got big mouth, tell everybody.”

“You have my word, sir,” Doc told him. “And my gratitude.”