James was moving from table to table in the house saloon, collecting glasses on a tray, wiping up beer slops in the midmorning lull. He hadn’t done the count yet, but the night’s take promised to be good. The town was hopping, what with the Fourth of July festivities and midseason cattlemen splashing cash around.
“He’s a Southerner!” Bessie was saying, as though that clarified everything. She could see the look of exasperation on Kate’s face. “James, you explain it.”
Deftly delivering the clinking tray, one-handed, to the bar, he came over to stand next to Bessie’s chair. “Southerners out here? They’re like wandering Jews, Katie. They’re lonesome for a place they can’t be anymore. Even if they was to go back, everything’s different now. Wouldn’t be home—not how they remember it, anyways.”
Bessie reached up to slide her arms around her husband’s thickening waist and laid her head against his belly. “You’re gettin’ fat and bald but, honey, you ain’t so bad for a Yankee.” She sighed and looked into the middle distance. “Sometimes I think I’ll flat die for want of peonies and roses and sweet gum trees … Course, they’re all gone, back in Nashville. Dug up to clear ground for vegetables during the siege. Or cut down for firewood.”
“Doc ain’t no Jew,” Kate said thoughtfully. She lifted her feet onto the chair opposite her. “He could’ve cleaned up at a game last night, but he just wasn’t interested. Sometimes I think he don’t cares about money at all … He’s stupid about it, almost.”
“That’s Southern, too,” Bessie told her wryly. “Are his people planters, Kate? Mercy! Planters was the worst. Proud as Lucifer! Always in debt, always on the edge, but they still wanted the best of everything—”
That was when Kate figured it out.
“Aristocrats!” she said with a tone of bemused disdain that brought her father’s voice back as though he were standing behind her in the room. “Aristocrats!” he’d cry, throwing up his hands in defeat, unable to make sense of a phenomenon that science was helpless to explain. He was called upon nearly every day to treat aristocratic stomach pains and headaches and nervous disorders. In Dr. Michael Harony’s opinion, most of those ills were a direct result of the strain that comes from living beyond one’s means, as were the habits of gambling all night in hope of making a quick killing, and drinking in the morning to dull the fear of bankruptcy. “They spend like royalty on households and horses and hunts, on clothes and lavish parties and balls. Then they sneak out of their mansions to avoid bill collectors and insult their creditors in the street. It’s absurd!”
By the time Mária Katarina was thirteen, her father had already refused her to a Mexican grandee and a minor Austrian duke, each of whom had inquired about his eldest daughter’s hand, and both of whom kept making excuses about paying Dr. Harony for medical services rendered.
“If a man can’t pay me,” his daughter overheard him say in the rapid Magyar her parents thought she didn’t understand, “he can’t pay his tailor, his groom, his cook, or his butler. He’s mortgaged to the neck on everything he has. By God, he won’t use my money to service his debt and drag my daughter into the bargain!”
“What will become of the girl if you refuse every man at court?” Madame Harony demanded, for the notion of being mother to a duchess had been rather dazzling.
“I haven’t refused every man at court,” Dr. Harony pointed out, “just two of them, both wastrels, and both—” He lowered his voice and whispered into his wife’s ear a bit of medical information calculated to end the conversation. Certainly nobody in the household ever mentioned those two names again.
Not long after that conversation, the question of marriage to an aristocrat was rendered moot. The glorious reign of His Imperial and Royal Highness Archduke Maximilian of Austria—Prince of Hungary and Bohemia, by the grace of God: Maximiliamo Primero, Emperor of Mexico—proved to be somewhat shorter than the list of his accumulated titles.
His court physician was warned to flee Mexico City by a loyal servant just before the volleys of revolutionary firing squads began echoing off palace walls. The Haronys escaped the bloodbath, but it took every jewel, every silver peso, every last centavo they possessed to flee northward, across thousands of kilometers of wilderness, to a place called Davenport, Iowa. There were other Hungarians in Davenport, Dr. Harony assured his wife and daughters. They would, he promised, find shelter with that community. And indeed, they did, briefly, but the destitute family’s luck continued to crumble …
Now Mária Katarina Harony was just plain Kate, sitting in a Dodge City bordello after a long night, asking a madam and a barkeep for advice about the very sort of improvident petty aristocrat her father had despised.
Full circle, she thought. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
She was frankly mystified by how Doc ever managed to take care of himself before she’d taken him in hand. He had inherited property in Georgia when his mother died but sold it to support himself after he came west. That cash was long gone. He never heard from his father; if the old man had anything, the bitch stepmother would get it all. Doc’s uncle was pretty well off, but John Stiles Holliday had boys of his own. There might be a bequest someday, though probably nothing big. So Doc was on his own, same as Kate, but that didn’t seem to matter. He always stayed in the best room at the best hotel in town. He was vain about his clothing and ordered imported English suits through a haberdasher in Atlanta. Doc wanted Kate to look good, too, and bought her French dresses and silk underthings and pretty shoes. Kate herself would have been happier with cheaper clothes and more jewelry. You could sell jewelry.
Doc acted like she was asking him to walk naked down Front Street whenever Kate attempted to economize. That damn wake had cost far more than it needed to, but Doc would spend himself into penury rather than give the slightest public hint that he cared about money.
It was Kate who kept them eating when things got thin. And if that had made a Jew of her, well, so be it! Jews weren’t the only ones liable to be beaten and robbed and run out of town at any moment, without being able to go to the police. You never really owned anything but the clothes you stood up in. If you knew what was what, you made damn sure there was money sewn into seams, or gems hidden in hems—
“Katie!” James repeated. “You going to the parade?” he asked when he had her attention. “I can’t get Bessie to come.”
“It’s bad enough gettin’ squeezed for donations by every damn politician in town,” Bessie said. “Watchin’ Yankees march down Front Street, wavin’ their damn flags, bangin’ their damn drums, and playin’ ‘The Battle Hymn of the God-dam Republic’ is more than I can stomach—Oh, James, no,” she wailed suddenly. “You ain’t really gonna wear that!”
“Course I am!” James said, shrugging into a ragged blue jacket that was moth-eaten and crusty with old bloodstains. “It’s Fourth of July, honey!”
“I keep throwin’ that damn thing out,” Bessie told Kate, “but he keeps findin’ it and bringin’ it back in.” Bess shuddered. “It’s like a woman savin’ the sheets she gave birth on, for Lord’s sake!”
“Come on, Bess!” James urged. “You and Kate can make fun of George Hoover, and blow kisses to Bob Wright, and cheer when I march by.”
“No, sir, I am goin’ to bed.” Bessie groaned and got to her feet. “You two go on. Keep each other out of trouble!”
She watched them leave, Kate fitting nicely under James’s good arm, which was draped casually over the little Hungarian’s shoulders. Bessie wondered sometimes about James and Kate … It wouldn’t have bothered her, of course. There were times when James got randy and Bessie’d simply had enough and wanted her body to herself for a few hours. It was only fair when James turned to one of the girls, but he and Kate seemed close in a different way. He treated her more like she was his baby sister Adelia, and Kate was more at ease with James than she was with other men. They seemed to understand each other, and Bessie was glad, for not many people understood her husband.
James was as hardheaded and stubborn as any of the Earps and—Lord!—he could be sarcastic! But there was a real sweetness to that man: a special sort of gentleness that you see sometimes in people who’ve been hurt bad but who don’t want revenge.
When he left Nashville for the front in ’63, Bessie never expected to see James again, and she went back to work without giving him a second thought. Then one day his brother Virgil showed up at the house with the news that James had been wounded and was likely dying. He kept asking Virg to go see if Bessie would come visit. It was little enough to do, so she went.
“Arm’s no good, honey,” James whispered with the ghost of a grin, “but I bet the rest of me’ll work fine!”
To her own astonishment, Bessie burst into tears.
She’d seen a lot of ruined boys by then, but somehow this one got under her skin. She went to the hospital as often as she could get away from the business, expecting each visit would be the last. James held on, though, week after week, and then he started to gain. Early in the spring of ’64, he asked Bessie to marry him.
“James, you know what I do,” she protested.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I do, honey. You give a lot of boys some real good memories before they die.”
That was James all over. He saw something honorable in her work. He believed Bessie herself to be decent and good. In spite of everything, maybe even because of it, he respected her.
Which was why, in 1878, Mrs. James Cooksey Earp was one of a bare handful of lawfully married women living in downtown Dodge. That was also why, she supposed, both Margaret Hoover and Alice Wright—wives of the two richest men in Dodge—found it possible to speak to her.
Odd, but it was Alice who was more open about it. Alice Wright was a strange one: a small, pretty, reserved woman who made herself noticeable in a group only by her silence. Bessie had seen her around town, of course, and over at Bob’s store, but then one day, Mrs. Wright walked right in the front door of the brothel and asked to speak to Bessie in private. Oh, Lord, Bess thought. She’s gonna ask me to refuse Bob courtesy of the house.
Alice took the offered seat in Bessie’s office, folded her hands into her lap in a composed and determined manner. Head up, eyes level, she said, “I would like to learn how to stop a baby from coming, Mrs. Earp. I expect you know how that works.”
When she got over her shock, Bessie asked how far along Alice was. Alice said she wasn’t pregnant. She just didn’t want any more children. So Bessie gave her the best recipe she had, which was “four ounces of shredded cotton root in a gallon of water. Boil it down to a pint. Drink half a cup every couple of hours as soon as you’re late. It’ll bring on bleedin’ in a day or so.” And from that day on, Mrs. Wright and Mrs. Earp had a remarkably cordial relationship. They weren’t friends exactly—Alice Wright didn’t seem to be friends with anybody, really—but they spoke pleasantly to each other at Bob’s store, in front of everybody. And every month, Alice gave Bessie a triumphant little smile.
Maggie Carnahan, by contrast, was apt to cut Bessie dead in public now that she was Mrs. George Hoover. Bessie had never quite decided if Maggie’s snubs were insulting or pathetic or simply funny. Like Bessie’s mamma used to say, “There’s no worse snob in the world than a planter’s house nigger,” and Maggie Carnahan was Black Irish.
Even before she married, Maggie had set great store by the appearance of respectability. Fresh off the boat from Belfast, she went to work with a cousin who was a lady’s maid in New York City. To this day, Maggie clung to the standards set by three months’ strict training in The Way Things Ought To Be Done, though the job itself didn’t last, for the crash of ’73 bankrupted the New Yorkers Maggie had worked for.
Things went from bad to worse for the girl as she moved west, town by town. By the end of ’75 Maggie had fetched up in Dodge City, where Bessie gave her a job. That’s how George and Maggie met.
Big George didn’t seem bothered by his little wife’s past. “Can’t reform unless you were a sinner first,” he’d declare to anyone who’d listen. Maggie would cringe and look away when he said that. By Maggie’s lights, a fallen woman started out lower on the ladder to righteousness than a saloon owner who’d rotted customers’ stomachs by the thousands. In Bessie’s opinion, the most admirable thing about George Hoover was that he didn’t see a lot of moral distance between selling flesh and selling snakehead liquor. “Vice is vice,” George always said. “One part of hell is as hot as the next parcel over.”
What got Bessie riled was the way George sent his wife around to collect “campaign contributions.” Maggie hated being used as a bagman, and George must have known how it embarrassed her. (Eddie Foy thought that was particularly funny. “Imagine it! An Irish whore, by way of New York and Chicago, dismayed by political corruption.”) Maggie worked hard to make what she was doing seem nicer, and her latest cover was asking for a donation to the City Beautification Fund.
George had added a big glass garden room to their house last year, and that had inspired Maggie’s notion of putting flower boxes all around the Dodge City train station to give newcomers a better first impression of the town. Making that Ulster accent seem cultured wasn’t easy, but Maggie did her level best to sound like a lady from New York when she put the bite on.
“Can’t you just picture it? Flowers make such a difference!” she told Bessie. “If each business donates enough for a flower box, think how pretty it will look! It’s a nice way to show civic pride, then, isn’t it.”
It’s a nice way to wring cash out of every saloon and brothel owner in Dodge, Bessie thought, but she gave generously anyway. Big George was letting it be known that if Dodge went Reform in the next election, he might be persuaded to tolerate a vice zone south of the tracks, as long as the north side of Front was cleaned up and kept quiet. And Bessie felt sure George Hoover was keeping track of precisely how many “flower boxes” had been donated and by whom.
Unbuttoning her shirtwaist, she peeked through her bedroom window’s lace curtain and watched Chalkie Beeson’s brass band getting into position. After the parade, there’d be pie-eating contests, a greased-pig chase, and a full slate of horse races. Women were auctioning off baked goods and quilts to raise money for a school. In the evening, there was going to be an ice cream social with dancing, and fireworks after dark.
The town was getting civilized, and Bessie knew what that meant: time to think about moving again. Just last week, a letter from Virgil came, saying there were rumors of a big silver strike in Arizona, down near the Mexican border. That had James and Wyatt and Morgan all talking about how maybe they should go south in the autumn.
Unlacing her corset, rolling off her stockings, unpinning her hair, Mrs. James C. Earp looked around the cozy, private room she kept aside just for herself and her husband, with its carved walnut bedstead, its pretty curtains and Turkey carpet, and the framed steel-cut engravings of Grecian ruins that reminded her of Nashville.
Dammit, she thought, sliding under the sheet. I just got the wallpaper up.
The blare of trumpets, the shrill of piccolos, and the thud of drums were clearly audible on the second floor of Dodge House, as was the nearly constant crackle of fireworks and the flat bang! of random pistol shots, but the noise outside didn’t disturb John Henry Holliday’s sleep. It just made him sigh and give up trying to get any.
The hoorah had begun before midnight, about the same time the police force was rather belatedly informed that gunfire within town limits was legal on the Fourth. Wyatt was furious when he found out. Public order would be set back by a good three weeks. There was, however, nothing he could do about it, apart from insisting that his men stay on duty for the next thirty-six hours to keep anarchy at bay.
All night long, Texas visitors to Dodge took full advantage of their temporary immunity from prosecution, shooting out lights and breaking windows. They seemed evenly divided regarding the 102nd birthday of the Union so recently preserved at the cost of so many lives and such destruction. About half viewed the Glorious Fourth as an occasion for sullen, resentful drinking followed by fistfights; the rest considered it a good excuse to get loaded and look for someone to beat up. Tired of the gladiatorial drunkenness, Doc had cashed out of an uninteresting game and gone to bed, where he had remained wide awake ever since.
Even without the noise outside, sleep would have eluded him, for Wyatt would be starting treatment soon.
This was the part of dentistry that John Henry Holliday liked most. Planning procedures step by step. Rehearsing the entire session in his mind, moment by moment, to minimize the time a patient spent under ether. By nature, he was inclined to begin with the most difficult aspect of any work so he could truthfully promise his patient, “Today was the worst. It’ll be easier from now on.” When he had a full practice back in Atlanta, however, he discovered that it was good policy to inquire into the patient’s own preference in the matter.
“If there is good news and bad news,” he’d ask, “which would you rather hear first?”
“Bad,” Wyatt had answered, without hesitation. “Get it over.”
So Doc would begin on the right side of the mandibular arch, which was seriously degraded. Start with the extraction. Once that hopeless molar was pulled, excavate the decay in the occlusal surfaces of the other two, drilling to find clean dentin. He preferred to use gold foil for the fillings, but that was like working with flakes of ash; his cough being what it was, the best technique was beyond him now. Silver amalgam would be good enough.
Most dentists would have pulled those bad bicuspids without hesitation; the interproximal surfaces were severely hourglassed. On the other hand, the gingival bone seemed to be intact. He hated to give up on firmly rooted dentition, but he just couldn’t see a way to save those two …
Just past noon, when he was nearly asleep at last, the solution came to him. Suddenly and fully awake, he sat up, coughed for a while, threw on a shirt and trousers, and hurried downstairs to No. 24. There he composed a detailed outline of a novel dental procedure that would involve yoking the bicuspids together with a gold collar, for structural strength, to be combined with a variation on a cantilevered pontic. He added two diagrams—occlusal and lingual—to illustrate the idea, then rolled himself a cigarette and settled back to review what he had written, making several changes to clarify the description.
If the procedure worked as he anticipated, he decided, he would submit an article to Dental Cosmos. A publication like that would be a genuine contribution to the profession. And it would please Uncle John no end.
Wyatt’s case had presented a variety of interesting clinical challenges, but the real satisfaction would come a few days after the patient’s final session. With his gums healing and the trauma behind him, Wyatt would begin to realize how much his teeth had bothered him all his life, how much pain he’d come to accept as normal. He’d eat better, feel better than he had in years. He’d also be able to say more than a few words in a row without thinking of his missing teeth. Occasionally those few words might be addressed to someone with dental trouble: “Go see Doc Holliday.”
By all accounts, Wyatt Earp was as honest a lawman as you could find in Kansas—admittedly, not a high bar to clear. Still, if he told people that Doc Holliday was good at his job, it would count for a lot. And that was as close to advertising as a dentist could come, for the A.D.A. prohibited anything beyond the simple announcement of the opening of his office. He had no legitimate competitors in the region, but like all credentialed dental surgeons, he was up against charlatans who roamed the countryside in colorfully decorated wagons emblazoned with signs that proclaimed the driver to be a “Painless Dentist.”
These shameless frauds were—in all fairness to them—vicious, destructive scoundrels, and John Henry Holliday hated them, individually and as a class, with a pure and unwavering flame.
They would drive into town and attract a crowd with a drummer’s patter, offering to demonstrate their skill by extracting a tooth free of charge for the first person brave enough to volunteer. An accomplice—usually a woman—would act frightened and hesitant but come forward complaining of toothache. In a snap and with a flourish, a horse molar would be held aloft, like the rabbit pulled from a magician’s hat. Proclaiming herself completely free of discomfort of any kind, the woman would urge others to approach and pay in advance to have their teeth ripped out with pliers. Howling victims were ridiculed. “Why, what a big baby you are! That little lady didn’t make a peep!” Half an hour later, the butcher and his girlfriend would leave town before the infections set in, the patients died, and their survivors developed a lifelong horror of dentistry.
It was truly remarkable that Wyatt had decided to go all in. Aside from the expense and the anxiety of extensive dental work, there was the plain trust required to believe that a dentist wouldn’t recommend procedures simply to jack up his fees. In Wyatt’s case, it was easier to list the teeth that didn’t need care, and John Henry was gratified that the deputy believed in his professional integrity—
“Why ain’t you in bed?”
He looked up.
Kate was standing in the office doorway, small fists on her hips, ready to do battle. “You said you was tired. You said you was going to bed.”
“No …” Doc said slowly. “I believe what I said was—”
She stalked in and put her hand on his forehead. “You’re hot,” she told him.
“It’s July, darlin’.”
“You look like shit.”
“Miss Kate, I declare!” he cried, fluttering his eyelashes. “You are such a flirt!”
“China Joe took in seams again,” she said, daring him to deny it.
“Jau Dong-Sing is a reprehensible gossip,” he muttered, lowering his eyes to the papers on his desk, “and I shall speak to him about—”
“You’re losing weight—I can feel it! I don’t need no goddam Chinaman to tell me that. We lost money last night. Your game’s off,” she told him. She dug a hand into her purse and held up ninety dollars. “Do you understand how hard I work to make this much?”
“I have never asked you to—”
“No, but you keep eating—”
“Not much, I don’t.”
“Goddammit, Doc! One of us has to have some business sense, or we’ll both be out in the street!”
He sat back in his chair, arms folded across his chest: a tall, thin, offended version of her small, round, furious self.
“What’s the best a dentist can make in a year?” she demanded. “In a real city, with a big practice! Sixteen hundred? Two grand? Doc, you can win that in an hour! When you’re rested, when you pay attention—”
“Darlin’, if my income is insufficient to satisfy you, you are free to depart at your earliest convenience!”
“Damn you, I don’t want to leave! I just want to understand why in hell you bother with this!”
“Why?”
“Yes! Why?” She grabbed the papers on his desk and waved the crumpled notes at the chair, and the drill, and the cabinet of instruments. “This office, all this equipment—it ain’t never going to pay! Why do you keep spending money and trying to be a goddam dentist when you could—”
“Because,” he said, astonished that he had to say it, “I can relieve sufferin’.”
She stared at him, mouth open.
He stared back, dumbfounded by her surprise.
“Kate … People die in misery for want of a dentist’s care! I bother with all this because I can relieve sufferin’. I can improve lives. Sometimes I can even save them.” He stood and reached over to take the treatment plan out of her hand, flattening the notes against the surface of his desk. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet and tense. “There is nobody for five hundred miles able to do what I can for patients who trust me enough to let me treat them. I am good at my work. I am proud of my profession. And I will thank you not to belittle it.”
For the moment, the argument was suspended, the two of them glaring at each other. In the silence, they became aware again of the noise outside. Gunfire. Strings of small firecrackers crackling. The cheers of drunken spectators egging on a fight.
Kate dropped her eyes first. Seeing his notes, with their careful drawings and orderly numbered paragraphs, she asked, “Who’s that for?”
“Wyatt.”
“He’ll never pay you,” she said dismissively.
“He already is,” Doc said tightly. “Two dollars a week.”
“For crissakes, Doc, that ain’t even ante!”
“Kate, the discussion is closed.”
“You know he bet everything he’s got on that race this afternoon?”
Doc looked up warily and saw the smug expression of a handicapper with inside information. He had money on that race himself. So did Morg. The odds on Dick Naylor were twenty-seven to one, last time he checked.
“He’s going to forfeit,” Kate said with satisfaction.
This was news, and she could see it.
“That big stupid hick didn’t think it out,” she said. “The whole town is filled with Texans trying to kill each other. Listen to them out there! He ain’t never going to get away from work long enough to ride—Dammit, Doc, where are you going?”
Things happened. He reacted. He didn’t intend to defy Kate or shake off her angry solicitude. In quieter moments, he was touched when she nagged him about taking better care of himself, even if her motives were a good deal less than pure. That said, by the time he left the hotel and plunged into the roiling crowd outside, he had forgotten her.
Dick Naylor was entered in the quarter mile.
Post to post, no more than thirty seconds.
The entire population of Ford County appeared to be in town for the festivities, and those nine hundred locals had been joined by upwards of three thousand cowboys. Temperance ladies from Wichita were marching through this throng, holding up neatly lettered placards meant to warn illiterate drovers of the dangers of Demon Rum, while an unknown number of freelance pickpockets and sneak thieves, exported by the City of St. Louis, worked the crowd. Farm families made their way through the crush in open wagons driven by stiff-faced German fathers trying not to provoke an anti-immigrant riot by running over singing, shouting, belligerent Texans. Scandalized German mothers did their inadequate best to shield the eyes of gleefully curious German children from the spectacle of Irish streetwalkers hawking their commodities as shamelessly as the Jewish drummers who offered notions and patent medicines at makeshift tables along the teeming length of Front Street. And all the while, Mr. Jau’s two assistant laundrymen busily sold Chinese firecrackers to idiots who lit the fuses and tossed them under the bellies of horses, just to see the animals go berserk and bolt through town, scattering the citizenry.
Battling through the swarm, Doc scanned faces, hoping to spot Wyatt or Morgan. When ten minutes failed to yield sight of a single lawman, he decided to put the von Angensperg Principle into effect: skip permission and ask forgiveness later. He had to get to the barn, saddle Dick, and ride to the racetrack by three, and he was running out of time. If anyone at the track argued, he’d say Wyatt sent him, and deal with the consequences later.
Tired of the buffeting and shoving, he decided to try for one of the alleys and moved to the edge of the street. He had just reached the boardwalk when a chair crashed through the Comique Theater’s front window.
Ducking low, off balance, he raised his arms against the shower of glass. A moment later, he was spun around and knocked to the ground when thirty-some wild-eyed Texas boys boiled out of the building. He was still struggling to find his footing when he heard Eddie Foy shout, “Doc! I’m coming!”
Minnowing through the mob with lithe acrobatic dispatch, Eddie arrived at his side, hauled him onto his feet, and pulled him backward until the two of them were flattened against the wall of the theater. Once there, they had no thought except to stay out of the brawl.
The Texans were screaming for blood, a quantity of which was already streaming from the head of a limp German fiddler—and if he wasn’t already dead, he would be soon, for the cowboy on top of him was pretty clearly set on opening the fiddler’s throat. “When I tell you to play ‘Yaller Rose,’ ” the kid was yelling, “you by God play ‘Yaller Rose,’ you damn Dutch sonofabitch!”
Wyatt appeared. Calm and workmanlike, he elbowed his way toward the middle of the mob where the German lay. With a spare economy of movement, Wyatt lifted the heavy-hilted knife up and out of the Texan’s raised hand and brought the butt end down sharply on its owner’s head.
The motion was so quick and so effective that things got quiet, and everyone could hear Wyatt say, “You’re under arrest for assault and disorderly conduct,” as though he were remarking on the weather. Kinda hot today. Looks like rain.
He’d reached down to pull the assailant upright and haul him off to jail when one Texan—out of thirty—one approached to object.
Wyatt dropped the unconscious Texan and straightened with a look of contempt so plain and powerful, the drover took a step back.
“Hey!” the drover said, trying for bluster. “Hold it right there, law-dog!”
“Why?” Wyatt asked. “You wanna get your sister to help?”
There were snickers.
Embarrassed, the Texan stammered, “H-hey! Hey! You can’t—”
Wyatt slapped him hard. One cheek, the other.
“Yes,” he said. “I can.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Eddie whispered, pale under his freckles. “They’ll kill him sure.”
“No,” Doc said softly. “No. They won’t.”
And he had no idea why he was so certain, except … it was as though Wyatt knew something that the other man didn’t. Or maybe he knew something about the other man, who was ashamed of it. Yes! And whatever that something was, both of them were agreed as to its significance.
If there was any doubt about what would happen next, the roar of a shotgun ended it. Morgan Earp’s voice sang out nearby. Within seconds, Charlie Bassett, John Stauber, Chuck Trask, Jack Brown, and Bat Masterson arrived, running. Crouched, shotguns shouldered, they pushed through to Wyatt and wheeled to form a cordon around him, backing the mob away.
“Wanna go get your sister?” Morg laughed as he took his place next to his brother. “Jesus, Wyatt, you sounded just like Pa—”
“Shut up,” Wyatt snapped.
Morgan’s face went slack, and he looked like he’d been backhanded.
What was that about? Doc wondered.
“Sorry,” Wyatt said briefly. “See to the fiddler.”
Morgan knelt at the German’s side. “Still breathing,” he reported. “Stauber, fetch Doc McCarty!”
Drawn by the noise and the excitement, the crowd was getting bigger by the moment, and the buzz of comment became louder when people noticed which Texan Wyatt Earp had just arrested. The kid was sitting on the ground, one leg out straight in front of him, the other crumpled beneath him, a circumstance he’d lament when he sobered up. He looked like any of a thousand beardless boys in town that day, but the spur he’d landed on when Wyatt dumped him was heavy silver. His boots were custom-made, and the hat lying in the dirt nearby was an expensive Stetson.
Word got around fast. Dog Kelley and Bob Wright showed up on Doc McCarty’s heels.
“That’s Billy Driskill,” Bob said. “Wyatt, wait! You can’t—”
Wyatt had the kid by the ear, but he was looking at Dog Kelley. “I told you when I started: I don’t care who it is. He breaks the law, I’m taking him in.”
“Dog,” Bob Wright said, his voice low and urgent, “that’s Jesse Driskill’s nephew. His uncle’s worth millions to the city! You’re the mayor—do something!”
“C’mon, Wyatt,” Dog pleaded. “Be reasonable!”
“You want my badge back?” Wyatt asked.
“You’ll get mine, too,” Morg said over his shoulder.
Stauber and Charlie and all the others looked to Morg, and nodded. One by one, every man on the Dodge City police force told Dog, “Mine, too,” ready to back Wyatt’s play, even though none of them was sure yet what in hell was going on.
Doc McCarty was kneeling on the dirt by then, examining the bleeding fiddler. Dog came closer and asked, “How bad is he?”
“He’s young,” the doctor said. “He’ll live.”
“Well, then,” Dog said, clapping his hands once. “No harm done!”
Wyatt shook his head mulishly. “There’s got to be one law for everybody, Dog.”
“Yeah, but—Wyatt, he’s—”
“No, sir,” Wyatt insisted. “There can’t be one law for rich Texans and another law for broke Texans, and another law for Negroes, and another one for Chinamen, and squaws, and Irishmen, and whores, and another one for everybody else. I can’t parse it that way, Dog! I am not that smart! There’s got to be one law for everybody, or I can’t do this job. You want my badge or not?”
Dog glanced at Morgan, who acknowledged the look with a shrug and a nod and a sigh: Yeah, I know what you’re thinking …
It was boneheaded and contrary, and maybe someday Wyatt would learn the ways of the world and how to go along with things he couldn’t change, but not today. Today he was going to take that rich kid in or get fired for trying.
That was when Bob Wright—conciliatory and earnest—approached Wyatt to have a quiet word with him, except Dog Kelley stepped between them.
“Tell you what, Wyatt,” Dog said quickly. “We’ll take the kid straight to court and let him pay the fine. Everybody wins.”
“Wyatt, if it’s the arrest fee you’re thinking of,” Bob said, reaching into his own pocket, “let’s see if we can’t work something out—”
“Bad move,” Doc murmured to Eddie.
“Bob, no!” Mayor Kelley moaned. “He don’t mean it, Wyatt. Not like that—”
“Morg,” Wyatt called so everyone in the crowd could hear him. “Arrest this man. He is attempting to bribe an officer of the law.”
“Mr. Wright,” Morgan said, “I’m sorry, but I’m taking you in.”
“F’crissakes, Wyatt,” Dog cried. “Morgan, no!”
“You want my badge, Mayor?” Morg asked, fingers on his star.
Dog threw up his hands in defeat. “This will not end well,” he warned the Earps, but there was nothing more he could say. Bob Wright was standing right there, his face as blank as an egg, malice rising off him like a stink.
The boy on the ground was conscious enough now to respond to the pain in his ear when Wyatt tugged at it. Getting to his feet blearily, Billy Driskill let himself be led to jail, right behind the only man in Dodge almost as rich as his Uncle Jesse.
“Go on, now,” Bat Masterson ordered the crowd. “Show’s over. Break it up.”
Slowly the crowd dispersed, leaving Dog Kelley and China Joe standing together on the street.
Jau Dong-Sing crossed his arms over his chest and shook his head, the way any American would. “Wyatt Earp one big damn dumb son a bitch,” he muttered.
“A remark like that is a good way for a Chink to get himself lynched,” Dog warned before he walked away, “but I ain’t gonna tell you that you’re wrong.”
Stone-faced and determined to deliver both prisoners to a cell, Wyatt came about halfway to breaking the jaw of a tall, thin, unshaven man standing between him and the jailhouse door. Morg had time to say, “That’s Doc! Don’t hit him!” But something had already made Wyatt pull his fist back. A thoughtfulness, maybe. A look of appraisal that didn’t quite match the man’s coatless shirt and rumpled trousers.
The dentist, too, seemed distracted by events, though sheer force of habit made him say “Afternoon,” to Bob Wright, as though the merchant weren’t being hauled in on a bribery charge.
“It’s after two,” Doc told Wyatt.
Wyatt’s forehead furrowed. “Did I have an appointment today?”
“No! The race! Three o’clock?”
Wyatt glanced at the sun. “Hell. Forgot all about it.”
“Let me ride for you.”
“In the race, you mean?” Wyatt had never seen Doc Holliday ride anything. “You sure?”
“Would I make the offer if I were not capable?” Doc cried. “What does a man have to do to be taken at his word in this town? Do I have to shoot someone? Because I am makin’ a list! Yes, damn you, I am sure!”
“Well, I ain’t,” the Driskill kid mumbled, swaying a bit but watching Doc, who was coughing now. “You don’ look too good, mister.”
“Shut up. Nobody asked you,” Wyatt said, still gripping the kid’s ear. But he was inclined to agree with the boy, and Doc must have seen that.
“I can do this, Wyatt,” the dentist insisted. “It’s a short race.”
“Dick don’t know you, Doc. He’s not an easy horse—”
“Let me try! He won’t finish better if you keep him in the stall,” Doc pointed out. “And he’ll be carryin’ less than he’s used to.”
“Tha’s an a’vantage,” young Driskill agreed. Like anybody gave a shit.
“All right,” Wyatt told Doc finally, not because he thought it was a good idea but because he couldn’t make himself say no to what he saw in the skinny Georgian’s shining eyes. “If you can get him saddled, give it a try.”
Doc nodded and set off for the stable.
“Watch out!” Wyatt called. “He bites!”
Without looking back, Doc raised a hand in acknowledgment.
“Don’t hit him for it!” Wyatt yelled.
Doc turned and stared, motionless, while the crowd moved around him.
“Hell,” Wyatt sighed. He already regretted what he’d just said and expected to be told off for it. “What kinda blankety-blank idiot do you take me for?” Doc would ask him. “Are you sayin’ I’m a mean, stupid, s.o.b. who’d hit a horse for bein’ nervy?”
Instead, what Wyatt saw was the long, slow emergence of something that began in John Henry Holliday’s eyes and lifted the high, flat planes of his cheeks just before his mouth dropped open into the biggest, happiest smile Wyatt had ever seen on that boy’s face.
“I knew you’d say that!” Doc hollered back joyously and, coughing, he disappeared into the crowd.
There are many reasons a horse will bite. In the wild, stallions bite during contests for a harem. Boss mares do so to enforce discipline within a herd. Sometimes it’s just in a horse’s nature to be mouthy, the way a retrieving dog is born with the urge to carry things around. Even a good-tempered saddle horse might snap when startled by an abrupt or careless motion. Mend your ways, such a horse is warning, and a human had best pay heed. It’s not good judgment to pick a fight with something that can tear the muscles clean off your bones.
“Watch how he holds his head,” young Robert Holliday counseled the first time he took his little cousin to the Fayetteville stable to meet Robert’s new gelding. “See the tail? If you know what you’re lookin’ at, you can read a horse like one of your damn books.”
Standing on an upturned bucket so he could see into the stall, John Henry knew exactly what he was looking at: the homeliest pony he’d laid eyes on by the tender age of eight, and if nature had produced another who could take the title away, he had not seen evidence of the achievement in all the years since.
Snickers the little horse was unkindly named, in recognition of the response his appearance provoked. He was a dirty white with flecks of black that looked like dried mud missed by a careless groom. Against that grayish mediocrity, the gelding’s pink-rimmed eyes seemed as bloodshot as a drunkard’s. His unloveliness might have been forgiven had it not been for a protruding and slightly wobbly lower lip that made the poor animal look addled.
“Nothin’ wrong with this horse wasn’t wrong with the fool who rode him,” said Robert.
Faced with inconsistent expectations, defeated by unreasonable demands, Snickers would stand still, looking confused. He’d been beaten for his prior owner’s failures, and having learned to fear men, the gelding no longer waited for meanness to be made manifest. Walk by his stall too quickly or too slowly or too carelessly and, like as not, he’d snake his neck out at you and clamp his teeth on whatever he could catch hold of.
“Hittin’ a horse is plain stupid, John Henry. There’s no excuse for it,” Robert declared with the serene instructive confidence of a ten-year-old boy who’s made a careful study of a single subject and knows all there is to know about it. “Horses are mirrors. They’ll show you back whatever you show them. Watch a man with a horse, and you’ll see what’s inside his own self.”
What the stable hands had, inside and out, was an entirely rational eye-rolling fright. They were scared to death of Snickers. John Henry clearly remembered the worried gray-haired uncle who’d set aside a muck shovel and hurried over to warn young Marse Robert not to let his little cousin John go near that crazy damn horse. Looking back now, he realized, there was irony to be discovered. The old man knew exactly who’d be blamed and beaten if a white child was bitten. It sure as hell wasn’t Snickers.
By contrast, what Robert Holliday had inside, even at the age of ten, was a master’s unconscious self-assurance, along with a basic decency that made him patient with a small, shy cousin who still talked funny. Robert had stepped toward Snickers, speaking low and friendly, not a bit scared, even when the pony tossed his head.
“Hey, now,” Robert said, quiet and firm and kind. “Hey, now. Settle down, you.”
That was the voice John Henry Holliday heard as he approached Dick Naylor’s stall. Part of him wanted to look at his watch again, to see how much time he had to get out to the track before the race began, but he could almost feel Robert at his side, saying, Hey, now. Settle down. Take it slow or he’ll make you pay.
At the sound of unfamiliar footsteps in the aisle, Dick faced around and blew a wary snort, halfway between curiosity and fright. There was no answering exhalation in the barn. That would be a source of concern to the horse, who was down in the last stall, away from the corrals where the cowboys’ mounts were penned.
Standing a few yards away, John Henry let Dick take a good look at him before asking sympathetically, “Y’all by your lonesome in here? Where’d all your friends go? Off havin’ a fine time at the fair, I expect, and here you are with nobody for company.”
He reached into a bucket of carrots hanging on a hook nearby, allowing it to clank a bit against the wall so Dick would recognize the sound. He put a couple of carrots in his pocket, keeping another in the palm of his hand, and waited to see how Dick would take this turn of events.
The horse backed away, nostrils flaring, ears flicking in all directions. Tense and ready to shy, he stretched out his neck, measuring the distance to the stranger’s hand.
“That’s right: you don’t know me, but you’d like this carrot, wouldn’t you … Wyatt sends you his best, but he is fully occupied at the moment, diggin’ his political grave. Aurelius on the plains: one law for everyone!” John Henry marveled. “Your master is a stubborn, sanctimonious Republican jackass, but I admire his principles.”
Dick lifted a hoof and hit at the stall gate.
“No, sir,” John Henry said firmly. “I will not be pawed at, thank you very much! But you want what I have … You got decisions to make, son.”
Irritated by flies, a horse will shake his head, or wag it, or jerk it up and back. Irritated by humans, the same moves in rapid succession can signal equine exasperation.
“Mind your manners,” John Henry warned softly, “or I will eat this carrot myself—see if I don’t.”
At last, there was the long, low, guttural nicker he was waiting for, used by horses to greet one another, heard by humans at feeding time.
“There you go,” John Henry said warmly. He stepped closer and held his hand waist-high to make Dick lower his head and relax, letting the horse nuzzle the carrot from his palm. “That’s right,” he said, his voice low and friendly and calm. “I am not Wyatt, but I am a man with a carrot. Can’t be too bad, can I? Oh, you found that one, too, did you? No, no, no—let me take it out of the pocket. Rip the worsted, and we’ll get what-for from Mr. Jau …”
Lured with a third carrot, Dick let himself be led out into the aisle, stood still for a cross-tie, and even let the stranger examine his mouth, which was a hardened mass of scar tissue.
“Look at that,” John Henry muttered. “Some heartless goddam sonofabitch did you a disservice, and may he rot in hell for it!”
Dick shifted uneasily.
The damage was old and not superficially abraded. Wyatt must have been using a bridle without a metal bit.
“Well, Dick, you have fallen into better hands now, and that is your good fortune. What do you think, son? Ready to return the favor? Shall we go show this burg who owns the fastest quarter-miler in Ford County?”
Dick tossed his head in response, beginning to get keyed up, and just as well, for they’d be racing soon. Running his hand along the horse’s flank, John Henry retreated down the aisle toward the central tack room.
Standing in the dim and shadowy light, he scanned the racks and pegs, trying to decide which saddle was Wyatt’s. “That’s got to be it,” he murmured when he spotted one that was unadorned and worn at the edges but well cared for, with a soft-nose hackamore slung over its pommel. He had just gathered himself to hoist forty pounds of leather and iron off the rack when someone out in the aisle walked past the tack room door.
Motionless, John Henry listened.
Dick Naylor gave a low, troubled snort.
Everybody knew Dick was supposed to run today. Thousands of dollars were riding on the quarter, and there were dozens of ways to meddle with a horse and ruin his chances. It was too late for some, but others were quick. Shove a piece of sponge up the animal’s nostril to impede his breathing. Hit a shin and lame the leg before a bruise could rise. Jam something into the frog of a hoof.
Heart hammering, John Henry lowered the saddle back onto the rack, careful not to let the stirrups clank. Like anyone else in town, he could have carried guns legally that day, but he’d left Dodge House in a rush. His pistol was back at the hotel, behind the front desk. The Philadelphia Deringer in his pocket was only good at card-table distances.
Hoping he could make it through the next fifteen seconds without coughing, he slid a throwing knife out of the sheath in his left boot, stepped toward the tack room door, and leaned carefully into the aisle.
“Back away from that horse!” he ordered. “Do it! Now!”
Kate turned and glared, offended, over her shoulder. “How dare you speak to me like—”
Dropping the knife, he rushed at her, shoving her hard and holding her down when they crashed to the floor.
The hooves just missed their heads. Dick squealed and got ready to let fly again.
Doc grabbed Kate’s arm and dragged her backward, scrambling down the aisle, pulling her crabwise away from the horse.
“God a’mighty!” he cried when they were out of range. “Are you hurt?”
She was sitting on the floor, looking like a five-year-old smacked across the face and still too stunned to weep. “Are you crazy?” she cried. “God damn you, look what you did to my dress! Why did you—”
“Never mind the dress! You were about to be kicked halfway to Colorado.” Doc got to his feet and did his best to help Kate up, although it was not completely clear who was helping whom because he was coughing now. “Are you hurt?”
“Yes! No! I don’t know! What’re you doing in here?” she demanded, rubbing an elbow. “I been looking everywhere, and Wyatt wouldn’t tell me nothing, that stupid sonofabitch—”
Dick stamped and snorted. Doc left Kate to settle the animal down. That was when she started to cry. It was the shock. And the fall. And anger that Doc seemed more worried about the horse than about her. He understood all that, but there was so little time left!
When she saw the saddle, she figured out what he was doing, and then she was like a terrier: nipping at his heels, yapping at him, getting in his way. He paused just long enough to lean over and kiss her on the mouth, but that didn’t even slow her down.
He lost his grip trying to sling the saddle onto Dick’s back, and when he dropped it, he rounded on Kate, shouting, “For the love of God—get out of my road!”
It was a mistake. Producing that much volume set off a coughing fit so bad, it left him bent over, hands on his knees, staring at the floor and gasping like a catfish on a riverbank.
“You see?” she cried, weeping and frantic. “You see? Do you want to die? Are you trying to kill yourself? You can’t—”
The chest pain was searing. He had nothing left for courtesy.
“God damn you, woman! Shut up!”
And Kate did because Doc never spoke to her like that, never spoke to anyone like that. She could see that he was truly angry, and his anger frightened her more than that of any man she’d ever been with, not because he might beat her—who cared a damn about that?—but because he might send her away.
Cold to her core, she held her breath, watching him catch his, and she wailed in pain when he straightened cautiously and said the words she feared most.
“Darlin’, I can’t live this way anymore.”
He wouldn’t look at her. She knew what that meant. He was done with her. Panicking, she started to beg, to promise, to swear that she’d be good, but he shook his head. It was over—she knew it—and nothing she said now would make any difference. The horse pranced and pulled at the cross-ties while she sobbed—great, gulping, terrified sobs. He’ll go to that goddam horse, not me! Kate thought furiously, and she hated Doc for that, so blind with tears that she almost didn’t notice when he came close enough to take her in his arms and hold her while she wept.
“Hush, now,” he was saying softly, over and over. “Hush, now. Hush.”
When at last she quieted, he took a step back, wiped her cheeks with his palms, and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and made her blow her nose.
All the things she’s lost, he was thinking, and what she has is me.
“Darlin’,” he said judiciously, “I believe the time has come for us to define the terms of our association. I am a slender reed to lean upon, but—”
“You ain’t—? I don’t have to—?”
“No,” he said. “No, but if this’s goin’ to work, you have to promise me—”
“I will, Doc! Whatever you say! I won’t argue no more—”
“Kate! Hush up, and listen!”
Her dazzling aqua eyes were as red-rimmed as poor old Snickers’, wet and frightened and fastened on his own. She snuffled in snot and wiped her nose on the back of her hand as a child might, waiting to hear what John Henry Holliday had never told her, what he had never told anyone.
“Kate,” he began, “I know this disease inside and out—”
He couldn’t.
Couldn’t speak of the cadaver he’d dissected, about the way a chance glance at his own body could bring a vision of that tubercular pauper back to him. Couldn’t bear to tell how memories of his mother’s last hours would sometimes grip and shake him, like a dog killing a rat …
“Kate,” he said finally, “I know what is waiting for me at the end of this road. I am askin’ you to believe me: I am in no hurry to arrive at my destination. I know you’re scared, darlin’. I’m scared, too.” He looked away. “Christ, I am so damn tired of bein’ scared …”
Dick Naylor snorted and pawed. Doc went to him and ran a hand down his back, murmuring. The horse quieted, and Doc spoke again, softly and without turning. “A few weeks ago, we buried a fine young man. If there were any justice on earth, Johnnie Sanders would have outlived me, and this wretched world might have been better for his presence in it. Well, none of us knows how much time we have, but I know this,” he said, looking now at Kate. “I do not want to spend another minute of whatever I have left bein’ scared. I can’t carry the fear anymore. Not mine. Not yours. I have to lay that burden down.”
He was silent for a time, but when he came to Kate and took both of her hands in his own, he was calmer and more sure of himself than he had been in a long time.
“This is what I am prepared to offer,” he said. “I will be good to you, Kate, but if you want to stay with me, you have to let me do as much as I can, whenever I can for as long as I can. And both of us have to quit bein’ scared. Will you promise me that?”
For the rest of her long life, Mária Katarina Harony would remember standing in Hamilton Bell’s New Famous Elephant Barn on the Fourth of July in 1878, looking up at Doc Holliday. She would remember how quiet it was. She would remember dust dancing in shafts of light filtering through narrow gaps in the barn’s roof. She would remember how thin Doc looked—even then, when he was forty-five pounds heavier than he would be when he died. She would remember wondering if she had ever before seen his eyes so devoid of humor and irony. She would remember his hands, strong and steady and gentle, holding her own.
She would never understand the man himself but, that afternoon, she understood this much at least: she understood what Doc needed from her, and from anyone who was to be his friend. Her English was inadequate to express it. The austerity of Latin was best. Visus virium: the presumption of strength. And … respect, as well, for the courage it took to produce that illusion.
“Nec spe, nec metu,” she said. Without hope, without fear.
“Athena,” he murmured, kissing her forehead, holding her close. “That’s my girl. That’s my sweet, brave, Hungarian warrior …”
She watched, silent, while he finished tacking up and slipped the cross-ties off and led the horse out of the barn. She had never seen him ride in the six months they’d been together. They’d always traveled by stage or railway. Light and quick, he swung up into the saddle—a motion completed between one breath and the next—and held the reins with relaxed assurance.
“L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace!” he declared with that charming, crooked grin of his. “Wish me luck, darlin’!”
She smiled damply and nodded. He reined over and the horse moved off, their partnership a fluid rhythm, full of grace and joy.
Tout casse, tout passe, tout lasse, she thought. “Ne meurs pas, mon amour, don’t die,” she whispered, but she lifted her voice to call, “Bonne chance!” and started walking toward the fairgrounds, to meet him after the race.
Short horse races, the events were called—not because the horses were short but because the distances were. If you happened to be looking the other way, the contest could be over before you turned your head. Even so, huge bets often rode on the outcome. John Henry Holliday had grown up hearing stories of entire plantations won and lost that way.
And yet there were no fixed rules for such races. Time and place might be determined in advance, though they were just as likely to be “Here and now.” The distance to be run? From this rock to that tree—anywhere from fifty yards to five-eighths of a mile. Who would ride? The owner, some kid, a jockey. How would the race begin? Starter’s gun, tap and go, ask and answer. Who’ll judge the finish? And how will disputes be settled? Frequently with fists; occasionally with pistols.
On the frontier, the short-race horses themselves were not pampered, fragile Thoroughbreds but ordinary working animals, ridden by the men who depended on them daily. They were saddle horses, stock horses, cutting horses—descended from wild Spanish barbs, lost army mounts, and Indian ponies. What they had in common was early speed: an explosive start and the heart to run full-on in a straightaway competition that distilled the excitement of a longer race’s home stretch into half a minute of purified, ecstatic, screaming emotion.
The times were getting shorter. Twenty-four seconds flat in an eighty-rod race was no longer uncommon. Breeders were beginning to produce heavily muscled, powerfully built animals that could break like an arrow from a bow and beat the earth with such force they seemed invincible—until some boy on a random-bred thirteen-year-old gelding with a barrel chest showed up for his first race and won it going away, stunning the favorite and ruining punters who by-God never saw that coming.
And that was what made it interesting.
There were four minutes left when Doc Holliday got to the line, and there might have been an argument about him riding Wyatt’s horse, except that Mayor Kelley was as busy as Deputy Earp, and Dog had sent word from town to let substitutes act as jockeys.
Odds were adjusted to account for the weight Dick Naylor carried. A flurry of additional betting took place.
The track was dry, the race a measured quarter mile, with no heats to thin the field. The posts were taped.
A crowd of bettors—farmers, cowboys, townsmen—lined the distance. Fourteen horses were maneuvered into position.
Behind the line, a gun was raised.
And fired.
Fourteen horses: from a standing start to top speed in three strides. From a resting heart rate of thirty beats per minute to a brutal bastinado of four beats per second. Deep chests and massive hindquarters powering legs like the spokes of a wheel. Each hoof making separate contact with the ground, taking the animal’s full weight for a fraction of a second in a rumbling cavalry charge, streaking toward the finish—
Fifteen seconds into the race, there were five horses out in front of the favorite, Michigan Jim, with Dick Naylor in seventh. Nineteen seconds. Jim and Dick were neck and neck, as the rest of the field began to fade and fall back. Three seconds more, and it was Michigan Jim in the lead, with Dick Naylor gaining, no more than a nose behind.
John Henry would have no memory of the moment he was thrown.
Later he would recall sailing grandly through the air, time slowing strangely until he crashed onto the ground and lay there, stunned, the air slammed out of his cheesy lungs, while the Fates and nearly thirteen thousand pounds of horseflesh wheeled and danced and hammered the ground around him. Weirdly tranquil, he thought, I should protect my hands. But he could not move, not even enough to draw his arms closer to his body. And anyway it didn’t matter. He’d be killed in a moment or two.
Good, he thought, for it did not seem like such a bad end to be trampled to death on a sunny afternoon after twenty-seven glorious seconds on a racetrack.
Through the ringing in his ears, he heard Kate screaming in the distance and was sorry for her. Then he was surrounded by men waving the horses off, while somebody gripped him under the arms and dragged him off the track. Presently, his reflexes took over and he rolled onto his hands and knees, heart lurching, stomach heaving, collapsed lungs sucking wind.
Kate was kneeling at his side by then—almost as breathless as he was himself, having run as far as the horses—but she was neither weeping nor cursing him for a stupid, reckless, idiotic selfish bastard.
Good girl, he thought.
Eventually he got enough breath back to cough, and gasp, and cough some more, and finally to speak. All he asked was “Did we win?”
James Earp was at the track and saw what happened, watching in wonder as Kate took charge of the aftermath. James himself found a rider to catch and cool off his brother’s horse and lead Dick back to the stable, but it was Kate who arranged with a German to take the three of them into town in a wagon, stopping at Doc McCarty’s on the way back to Dodge House.
When Doc Holliday and Kate were settled in their hotel room, James went home, spoke to the cashier and the floor maid to make sure everything was running smoothly. He settled a dispute with a customer over a bill and asked several of the day girls to stay on for overnight business. Finally, quietly, he went in to Bessie, meaning to take a nap for a few hours. The fireworks weren’t until ten.
“How’d the race go, honey?” his wife asked sleepily. “Did Wyatt win?”
“No, but his horse crossed the line second. Doc Holliday was riding most of the time.”
Bessie rolled over, rising on an elbow. “Most of the time?”
“Yeah, well, there was considerable discussion about that.” James had unbuttoned his shirt partway and paused to pull it one-handed over his head and then down off the arm he couldn’t raise. “No question about the winner. Michigan Jim at two to one, with Dick Naylor just behind him, and a bay named Creepin’ Moses in third.”
James climbed into bed, tuckered out.
Bessie was wide awake now. “So? What happened?”
“ ’Bout two strides before the ribbon, some damn hound comes out of nowhere and crosses the track just beyond the finish line. One of Dog Kelley’s coursers. Saw a rabbit or something, poking its head up in the infield, I guess.”
“Mercy!”
“Yes, ma’am! It was a mess. Dick checked up and Doc went flying.”
“Was he hurt?”
“Not as much as you’d think, seeing him hit the ground. I expected he was killed or broke his fool neck, but he just got the wind knocked out of him. He’s scraped up pretty good and he’ll be hobbling for a week, but McCarty says nothing’s broke. Chalkie ruled Doc was still in the saddle when Dick crossed the line. Even the man who came in third thought so. Dick paid nine to one to place.”
“Kate must’ve been beside herself.”
“She was at first, but she got a grip pretty quick. Handled it real well.”
Lying back, Bessie said thoughtfully, “I think they’re going to stay together.”
“Yeah,” James said. “Me, too.”
“You bet against me?” Wyatt asked Morg later that night, still trying to understand how he himself had lost money while Doc and Morgan had come out ahead.
“We didn’t bet against you. We hedged our bets,” Morg said. “Kate says they’ve been doing that on French racetracks for years. You take a hundred dollars and divide it. Twenty to win at long odds, right? Then make a couple of side bets, shorter. Thirty bucks to come in second or better, fifty to come in third or better. Unless the horse is out of the money, there’s a payoff. If he wins, you do real well.”
It made sense. Wyatt just wished he’d heard of the system before the race. He’d put everything he had on Dick to win, and lost it all.
The brightest stars were visible. The first experimental fireworks were being shot off. This could turn into the quietest part of the night or the most dangerous.
“You seen Doc Holliday yet?” Wyatt asked.
Morg shook his head. “Kate’s not letting anybody visit.”
“She told me to go to hell, that’s for sure.” Wyatt wasn’t scared of Kate, exactly, but she’d taken a dislike to him for some reason. No sense in stirring things up. “If you see her leave Dodge House,” Wyatt said, “lemme know.”
The night shift at Bessie’s was wild, and James sent word to Kate just after eleven: We need more girls—can you help us out? Morgan told Wyatt that when their paths crossed just after midnight.
Wyatt took a break a while later and went up to Doc’s room. There was a light showing from under the door, so he knocked softly. The answering “Yes?” was immediate, if weak.
Wyatt stuck his head inside. “Hey, Doc,” he said quietly. “How’re you doing?”
“Like Cousin Robert used to say: if you didn’t get hurt, you weren’t havin’ fun.” His voice was hoarse but he seemed cheery enough. “Not supposed to talk. C’mon in! Sit down! How’s that German fiddler?”
“Back playing at the Commie-Q already.” In fact, the fiddler looked better than Doc, who was sitting in bed, propped on pillows, his face all beat up from where he hit the ground.
“Press charges?” Doc asked.
“No. Somebody got to him. The Driskill kid got off with a fine for disturbing the peace. Bob Wright walked, too. Misunderstanding, the judge said.”
“Pity. Trial would’ve been entertainin’. Rest of the town?”
“Mayhem. No murder. So far.”
“Wyatt, you are good at your job. Everyone’ll go home in the mornin’.” Doc sounded respectful, but reassuring, too. The dentist closed the book on his lap and rolled onto an elbow to cough into a handkerchief. “Put that lamp out, will you?” he asked. “I fear I do not bear close inspection.”
Wyatt didn’t argue the point. Without his shirt and vest and coat and cravat to bulk him up some and make him look dignified, you could see how bony and young Doc was, besides being banged up from the fall. Still, bad as he looked, and coughing about every third word, the dentist was eager to tell Wyatt about the race, explaining about the lope out to the field to avoid a forfeit, and saying how well Dick did, despite having some of the race wrung out of him before he got to the track.
“How was he in the pack?” Wyatt asked. “He snap at anybody?”
“No, sir. All business. Hadn’t been for that damned dog—I should have you press charges against the greyhound—”
Doc cursed for a while, coughing, and getting fed up with the interruptions. When the handkerchief was soggy, he tossed it into a basin on the floor. “Move those over closer, will you?” he asked, motioning toward a pile of clean cloths, but then he went right back to the race.
This was why Kate didn’t want any visitors, Wyatt realized. Doc couldn’t help himself. If there was somebody around, he’d talk. When he talked, he got cranked up. That brought on the cough, and then those things in his chest would rip. The boy’s eyes were watering now, but still shining in the moonlight as he told about the finish.
All heart, Wyatt thought.
“I swear: two more strides, we’d’ve taken the lead,” Doc was saying. “Didn’t use a quirt on him, either—” The coughing got really bad this time, and when it was done, Doc looked exhausted. “Not supposed to talk,” he reminded himself, whispering again. “He’s a wonderful horse, Wyatt. I’m sorry we didn’t do better for you.”
“Hell, Doc. Wasn’t your fault.”
“He had a lot left at the end. You thought about longer races?”
“Well, not for him …”
Maybe it was the darkness. Maybe it was because Doc admired Dick and showed it, so open and boyish like that. Partly it was just to shut Doc up before he made himself cough again. Whatever the reasons, Wyatt found himself telling about the morning he first saw that mare Roxana, and how he once hoped to breed her to Dick.
Doc lay back to listen. Sure enough, the cough quieted. After a time, he shut his eyes, but his face was alight while Wyatt talked about the colts he’d expected from the pair. Milers, quick to break, like Dick, but with Roxana’s stamina to go distance at speed. Caught up, Wyatt went on to tell about how he thought of quitting the law because he kept getting laid off anyways, no matter how hard he worked, and about how he wanted to buy a piece of land and raise fine horses, but the mare’s owner wanted two grand. Even dealing faro part-time, Wyatt was never gonna put that kind of cash together, so who was he fooling?
Doc’s smile had faded by then, and Wyatt figured he was probably asleep, which is why, without really meaning to, he started to tell Doc about that deal with Johnnie Sanders. It was a way to get the matter off his chest somehow, without anybody really knowing. Except Doc was still listening, not sleeping, and he already knew what Wyatt was going to say, the way Morg so often did.
“That’s why you staked him,” Doc said softly. “You were goin’ to buy Roxana.”
“I didn’t mean for Johnnie—I never would have—”
“Not your fault,” Doc said. After a while he added, “I’d’ve done the same.”
It didn’t occur to Wyatt to ask that night if Doc meant he’d have staked Johnnie same as Wyatt, or played for Wyatt same as Johnnie.
Suddenly Wyatt needed to go back to work. Needed to get out of that sickroom, and away from everything he’d just told Doc.
“I should let you rest,” he said, standing. “Can I get you anything before I go?”
“Thank you, no.” Doc’s eyes opened. “Wait! Been meanin’ to ask … How much’s the rent on that cottage of yours?”
“Eight bucks a month. Me ’n’ Morg were splitting it, but—” He didn’t know what to say.
“You need your privacy now,” Doc supplied, eyes closing again.
“Morg, too. He and that girl Lou took the house next door.”
“Who’s the landlord?”
“George Hoover.”
“Well, ask ’bout the other one … that’s almost finished, will you?”
Wyatt promised he would, and Doc mumbled something about them being neighbors soon, and reminded Wyatt to brush his teeth, but by then he was barely awake.
The rest of the night was mostly uneventful. Wyatt made his report to Fat Larry at dawn and trudged home, the three-shift duty over at last.
Mattie Blaylock was asleep, but when he crawled into bed, she woke up and put her arms around his neck.
“Aw, hell,” he said wearily, and got up out of bed again.
“What’s the matter, Wyatt?” Mattie asked anxiously. “I do something wrong?”
“Forgot to brush my teeth,” he said.
When Kate got back from Bessie’s in the morning, Doc was scabby and pale under his bruises, but he was sitting at the table, practicing with a deck: split, square, pivot.
She looked at him, brows up.
“A heavenly sleep … did suddenly steep … in balm my bosom’s pain,” he recited.
Kate took off her hat and tossed it on the bureau before lifting the half-empty bottle at his elbow.
“I’m fine,” he insisted, putting some strength behind his voice. “Sore is all.”
The basin in the corner was filled with sodden handkerchiefs. Most were stained pink. The ones at the bottom of the pile were darker.
“Temporary,” he told her. “I hit the ground hard. Bound to be some minor blood vessels torn.”
“McCarty told you to stay in bed,” she reminded him.
“Trust not the physician! His antidotes are poison, and he slays! Tom McCarty doesn’t know one damn thing about tuberculosis that I didn’t tell him my own self.” He cut the cards and showed her the nine of clubs. “How much have I got in that carpetbag of yours?”
“Six hundred and change.” She sat on the bed to unbutton her shoes.
“Does that count what I won on Dick yesterday?”
She nodded. “But not what I just made.”
They had sworn off fear, but the fall was sobering. Last night, when the bleeding was worst, they’d agreed that she should keep her earnings separate. It was a matter of pride for Doc, and he wanted her to save something. Just in case.
“We can shave forty-eight dollars a month off expenses if we rent a house instead of livin’ here,” he said. Divvy, tumble, riffle … “I don’t suppose you can cook.”
Pulling off a shoe, she looked up. “You had slaves. We had servants.”
“Fair enough.”
Riffle, arch, release … He cut again, right-handed. Nine of diamonds.
“Grier,” he said after a time, watching her undress.
“Not worth it. Word is the family’s cut him off—” Doc was staring. “D’accord,” she said with a shrug. “When?”
“Get me some easy work first. I’d like to take four thousand into the room.”
“Scared money don’t win,” she agreed, arranging pillows against the headboard. She climbed into the bed and laid her head back. “What’ve you got against Grier anyway?”
“It’s a family matter.”
“Don’t be mysterious with me. It’s tedious. He get some cousin pregnant?”
“Oh, nothin’ so melodramatic. The captain’s family is the front half of Grier and Cook Carriage Company, up in Connecticut. My father ordered a buggy from them, just before the war. I helped pick it out. Model Number Thirty-three … Had a lever for raisin’ and lowerin’ the top from the inside. One hundred and sixty dollars. Cash. Paid in advance.” Hands now lax in his lap, he looked out the window. “The war broke out before the buggy was delivered. Grier and Cook started makin’ gun carriages for the Northern army.”
“Smart move,” Kate remarked. “There’s money, and then there’s money.”
“I imagine they did well for themselves.” Shuffling again, he cut left-handed. Nine of hearts. “Anyway, Eli Grier was stationed in Atlanta during the occupation. My mother—You have to understand: Sherman’s men stole whatever wasn’t nailed down or red-hot, and they wrecked the rest. Took a Yankee dollar to buy a few damn radishes in those days, and nobody had hard currency anyway. We were all hungry, but Mamma was just wastin’ to nothin’.”
“A hundred and sixty federal dollars would have been a fortune.”
“Indeed, but my father wasn’t willin’ to swallow his pride and ask for the money back,” Doc said, voice soft with unattenuated bitterness. “Probably had his second wife all picked out by then … So Uncle John went to Captain Grier to ask if our family’s payment might be refunded. Grier promised he would arrange for the money to be returned.”
“And it wasn’t.”
“Not a penny.” There was a long silence before Doc said, “He forgot all about it, most likely. A man with a bad conscience would have remembered my uncle’s name.”
Your mother would have died anyway, Kate thought, but she wasn’t going to say so. She watched the cards dance in his hands. When he cut the deck again, she cried, “Wait! Nine of spades?”
He showed her the card. She laughed, low and cynical.
“And I thought you didn’t cheat!”
“I don’t!” There was a sly, crooked smile. “But I could.”
“Anybody but me sees you do that, you’ll get yourself shot again,” she warned. “Bring me a drink, will you?”
He set the deck aside, poured, and stood carefully. “Nectar for Calypso,” he said, handing her the glass. “We are a little short on ambrosia just now.”
She sat up in bed, and slugged the bourbon down, closing her eyes to feel the liquor’s warmth and forget about the night. Doc slid in behind her and began to rub her neck. She leaned forward, bracing against the mattress, surrendering to the sensation as he worked his way down her back.
“Sternocleidomastoideus … splenius … rhomboidei, major and minor,” he said, thumbs pressing. “Has anyone ever told you what a lovely trapezius you have?”
She snorted. “We’re lucky Texans take off their spurs.”
“Barbarians, to a man … These latissimi dorsi are unquestionably the most beautiful I have ever laid eyes on.”
She smiled, eyes closed. “You’re mad.”
“That’s the rumor … Sweet Jesus! Just look at you!” he murmured. “Round and soft as a ripe peach … Lie back.”
“Mon dieu,” she whispered after a time. “C’est merveilleux!”
“My hand skills have always been considered exemplary.”
She giggled.
“I can stop if you’re too tired,” he offered.
“Stop, and I’ll shoot you myself.”
“I wonder what the odds are,” he mused. The numbers seemed to come to him from nowhere. “Eight to five,” he decided. “Against.”
“Against what?”
“Me dyin’ of consumption ’fore another bullet finds me.”
She twisted around and looked at him, eyes serious. “Don’t talk like that, Doc.”
“No hope, no fear,” he said with a grin, kissing her with each word. “And I am not … dead … yet.”
Every Wednesday, Jau Dong-Sing went to the post office in Wright’s General Outfitting to mail a letter and a few dollars to his father in Kwantung. Since arriving in San Francisco back in 1859, Dong-Sing had written each week. He nearly always sent money, too.
In the beginning, he hoped to elicit a reply. My health is good but I am lonely, he wrote. I yearn for news of home. Though he would not have said as much, Dong-Sing desired to be acknowledged for his contributions to his family’s well-being. He also wished to be reassured that the money he sent had not been stolen during its long journey from America to his family’s village in China.
Letters from home were rare. Paper and ink and postage were too expensive for his family to buy often. When Dong-Sing did receive news, it was never happy or encouraging. Your uncle died. The crop is poor. My joints are stiff and I suffer at night. Everyone is hungry. Yes, we received the dollars. Send more next time.
And Dong-Sing did.
He had prospered in America. It didn’t take much capital to establish a laundry, and you could make good money if you worked hard. When Dong-Sing moved to Dodge City, in ’75, he built a shack near the river using scrap lumber. With a total cash outlay of $5.47, he bought kettles, and washtubs, a stove and irons. Then he went from saloon to saloon to announce in the only English words he knew, “I wash! Two bits!”
By the end of his first week, he had doubled his investment. At full capacity, he could clean and press forty pieces of clothing a day. He charged twenty-five cents per garment, which was less than the Irish washerwomen at the fort wanted, and his skill in ironing was unsurpassed. Pretty soon everybody preferred China Joe’s washing. His business grew and grew. Now there was plenty of hotel trade, which added bed linens to his work. Families were moving into town, too. Ladies like Mrs. Hoover and Mrs. Wright didn’t do their own washing anymore.
I already have two helpers and it is time to hire more, he would write home this week. Tell two strong boys in our village if they come to San Francisco, I will hire them and bring them to Dodge.
It seemed crazy to import laborers from so far away, but white people wouldn’t work for a Chinaman, and Americans were too lazy anyway. Doing laundry was arduous. You had to haul water and stoke the fire with cow chips, all day long. Sheets and clothing were rubbed with yellow soap on ribbed-tin scrubbing boards, then dumped into giant tubs of boiling water and stirred with a big wooden paddle. Heavy, hot, sopping-wet cloth had to be lifted, wrung, hung to dry, and ironed. Even with his helpers, at the end of the day Dong-Sing was too worn out to speak or eat.
In the mornings, though, when he was fresh, he planned letters in his mind as he worked. When you do laundry for people, you learn things about them. You know the size and shape of your customers. You know their habits. You know what people eat and drink from what they spill. You know who is so poor he must have his clothing mended again and again. You know who is so careless of money he leaves coins in his pockets.
Don’t keep the coins, his father would advise. You will be called a thief and punished.
Dong-Sing knew that, and he had always returned the money. Some Americans thought he was such a dumb Chink bastard, he didn’t know enough to keep the cash. Others admired his scrupulous honesty.
Big George Hoover had to have a pair of panels put into the side seams of his shirts and vests to make the buttons close around his belly. He is going to run for mayor again.
Who is Big George Hoover? Dong-Sing’s father would wonder, but he would think, If he is fat, he must be rich. Make friends with him. Get on his good side.
Dong-Sing didn’t need a letter from his father to tell him that.
George Hoover was one of the men who left money in his pocket the first time he brought clothes to China Joe. Mr. Hoover was impressed by Dong-Sing’s honesty. The investment of a few coins—returned instead of kept—had paid off handsomely. Soon Big George would build a bank right down the street from Wright’s General Outfitting; he had warned China Joe about Bob Wright’s bad accounting practices even before Johnnie Sanders was killed.
Knowing things about people is not the same as understanding them, Dong-Sing would admit in the letter he planned to send next Wednesday. Americans simply didn’t make a lot of sense to Jau Dong-Sing. In China, a smart but poor boy like Johnnie Sanders could have studied hard and taken the civil service test to become a bureaucrat. Everyone would have been glad to know him. In China, if a rich man needed a favor, he could go to the bureaucrat who used to be poor and say, “Hey, my good friend! Nice to see you doing so well! I got a problem with some business dealings. Can you help me out?” In America, when Johnnie Sanders tried to better himself, he was killed.
In America, it is dangerous for a colored man to have money, so I pretend I am poor, Jau Dong-Sing wrote when the nigger boy was found. I keep my money with George Hoover, and not in Bob Wright’s safe.
Why don’t you join a tong? his father must have wondered.
Certainly, that would have been Dong-Sing’s preference, but it took twelve men to make a tong. There were only four Chinese in all of Kansas, too few to club together for investments.
Dong-Sing was still a little nervous about doing business with George Hoover, but so far the arrangement was working out well. It was George Hoover’s suggestion that he and Jau Dong-Sing enter into a silent partnership to build small rental houses up on Military Road. Already they had three, with plans to build a fourth. Nobody knew the capital was China Joe’s, and that’s the way Dong-Sing wanted it. Big George orders the wood and supervises the carpenters so white men do not become envious of my wealth, he wrote in his mind.
Renting to Wyatt and Morgan Earp was Big George’s idea, too. He pointed out that they were Republicans and Methodists, and Wyatt was Reform like George. Dong-Sing appreciated that the Earps didn’t get drunk and break things, but he didn’t like the idea of taking the Reform side against Mayor Kelley and Bob Wright and a hotel owner like Deacon Cox. After Wyatt arrested Bob, Dong-Sing got even more nervous about the factions. The Earps might lose their jobs. Then Dong-Sing would have no tenants for two houses.
“You say yes to Doc,” Dong-Sing insisted, even though George didn’t like how much Doc drank. “He good tenant! You say yes!”
Doc likes noodles now. He is a friend who helps me with English, Dong-Sing planned to write soon. Everyone says I sound like him when I talk, and I am proud. I have not told Doc that I am his landlord. I don’t think he would mind renting from a Chinaman, but he might tell Kate and she cannot be trusted. Last week they had another fight. Doc told me to take Kate’s things to Bessie’s house, but I made an excuse and waited. Kate always returns and Doc always takes her back.
Who is Doc? His father would wonder. Who is Kate? Who is Bessie?
When you do laundry for people, you know who sleeps alone and who has taken a lover. You know who is pregnant and who is not. You observe the coming and going of semen and blood, Dong-Sing thought. You can read in these stains the stories of people who hardly notice you and never speak when they pass you in the street.
Dong-Sing was shocked when he realized that Mattie Blaylock was Wyatt’s girl. Dong-Sing had used Mattie himself a few times because she was so cheap, and because he wanted to see what a white woman was like down there.
Working on the wrong side of the tracks, Jau Dong-Sing had plenty of opportunity to observe the flesh trade, and it confused him. In China, good fathers had the right—the duty, even—to sell a daughter in order to feed the rest of the family. In America, daughters ran away from their fathers and whored to feed themselves alone. In China, when a wife grew old and unattractive, a rich man would take a concubine or two into his household. Here, rich men used the same girls as any lousy young cowherd who stank of dung and sweat. George Hoover had married a prostitute, and Doc was a gentleman but lived with Kate, even though she still sold herself.
The news about Wyatt and Mattie is all over town now. Everyone thinks this is a good joke, Dong-Sing wrote in his mind. Wyatt is embarrassed, but he has been a long time without a woman.
Wyatt didn’t even recognize Mattie Blaylock when he saw her a few days after dropping her off at Bessie’s that night. She was clean, and her hair looked nice, and her eyes were clear. She was wearing a different dress, too.
China Joe had traded it to her for a ride, but Wyatt didn’t know that. There was a lot Wyatt didn’t know, including why his sister-in-law wouldn’t give Mattie a job. He figured that out when he caught a dose off the girl, though it would remain a lifelong mystery to him why he never fathered a child except with Urilla. Mattie herself would never tell Wyatt how she got the idea of coming to him that first morning, either. (“Idiot. Just move in with him!” Big Nose Kate had said. “A man like that won’t throw you out.”) All Wyatt knew was Mattie showed up at the house one morning after he got off work.
“Bessie told me you paid for my whole night,” she said. “I’ll work it off.”
“You don’t have to do that,” he told her.
“Don’t take what I don’t earn,” she said, head up. “I’ll pay it off in cash if you give me some time, but I’d rather do it this way. James says you’re widowed. I reckon you loved a girl once, you won’t be mean to one now.”
There didn’t seem to be a good way to tell her no. It helped that she didn’t look anything like Urilla. Mattie was dark-haired, and sturdy, and didn’t seem likely to get sick, though later on he found out she had bad headaches with her monthlies.
After his first time with her, he couldn’t hardly think about anything else. With the long drought over, he welcomed her when she came back the next day. He got bullyragged about it a lot, but he got bullyragged about not doing it, too, so he ignored the laughing, and the jokes, and the snide remarks. A few extra cowboys got bashed for mouthing off. Otherwise, he kept his temper.
James was merciless. It was rich: Wyatt being with a whore after he was so uppity about Bessie, whose husband was, James pointed out with immense satisfaction, lawfully married to the woman he lived with, unlike some brothers he could name.
And Wyatt wasn’t the only Earp living in sin, James noted. Virgil had left his wife to fight in the war. Afterward, he let her think he was dead but hadn’t divorced her, which meant he couldn’t marry that little Allie he was with, down in Arizona. And now Morg and Lou were shacked up, too, because Lou was a Mormon and her parents refused to let her marry a Methodist.
Morg had started calling Lou his wife anyhow, and in his opinion, Wyatt ought to be satisfied with what passed for marriage in Kansas.
“Mattie’s not such a bad person,” Morg said one morning when he and Wyatt were over visiting Doc. “You know, if things had gone a little different, even Lou might have wound up a whole lot worse than a dance hall girl.”
“Say what you will about Mormons,” Doc murmured, lying in bed but paying attention. “They are very fine dancers.”
Doc had been up and around right after the fall on the Fourth, carrying things to the rented house and helping Kate fix the place up the way she wanted it. It was too much, too soon. Tom McCarty diagnosed overexcitement and ordered him back to bed for a few days. The rest was doing him good, but Doc enjoyed having visitors, no matter what Kate or Doc McCarty thought, so Morg and Wyatt stopped by a lot.
“How long ago did Urilla die, Wyatt?” Morgan pressed. “Is it nine years now?”
“Eight,” Wyatt said, halfway between stubborn and sad. “I promised to love her all my life, Morg. I meant to keep my word.”
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.