Doc: A Novel (39 page)

The priest’s voice was pretty quiet, but her father’s had a sort of carrying quality to it. Belle was familiar with some of what he was saying, so it was easy to figure out what she couldn’t hear. Bob didn’t know anything about any money, but allowed as how Johnnie might have booked his cash and put it in the safe without mentioning it. Bob himself used to keep all the transactions in his head, but he was out of town a lot, what with being a state representative and so on, lot of responsibilities, you see. He’d trusted Johnnie to do the books in his absence. Then the boy died in the fire just as the cattle season was picking up steam, and Father von Angensperg could see for himself how busy the store was. Bob had been more careful about accounts back when he had business partners in the old days, but since he bought out Charlie Rath and Henry Beverley, he’d gotten careless because there was nobody else to answer to, and that was why he’d hired Johnnie to take over the books in the first place.

Now, it was Belle’s observation that when people gave a whole
lot
of reasons for something, it was because they were trying hard to make sure you didn’t notice something else. And she was trying to figure out what her father was covering up when he said, “I haven’t really looked at the account books since Johnnie passed on. What kinda figure are we talking about here, do you know?”

The answer was so startling that her father repeated it, and Belle gasped, which set off one of those coughing spells that had been giving her trouble lately. It was probably just hay fever, which doctors said now wasn’t really a fever and didn’t have anything to do with hay, but Belle did feel awfully warm, at night especially, and she would be glad when the first frost hit because she expected she’d feel better after the goldenrod died back.

She was still coughing when her father opened the door and frowned at her like he knew she’d been eavesdropping and didn’t like it, but he couldn’t say anything about it because he was still talking to the priest.

“Well, I sure don’t know anything about a sum of money like that, but I’ll check into it for you, and I’ll let you know if I find anything out,” he said. Except he had a sort of stiff look on his face that meant,
Hell will freeze solid before I tell you anything about my books, you Catholic fiend. You probably want that money for the pope
.

Belle could tell that Father von Angensperg wasn’t a bit fooled either. He thanked her father for his time, though his eyes were on Belle as he spoke, and he had that look of compassionate concern again, which gave Belle the cold creeps because she didn’t know as there was anything to be concerned or compassionate
about
. Personally, she thought she was the last person in Kansas anybody should feel sorry for, given that she was tolerably pretty and her daddy was indecently rich and her whole life was laid out before her like a banquet on a fine lace tablecloth, and yet …

Wordlessly, Alexander von Angensperg reached toward the girl’s pale and pretty face. His fingers felt cool when he touched her cheek, flushed and pink.

Mary Clare’s age, he was thinking. Poor child. Poor child.

“I will pray for you,” he promised softly, cupping her chin in his hand.

Hope smiled.

The Fates laughed.

Belle frowned.

“Um. Thank you, sir,” she said.

Under the Table

A
t speed, steel wheels clicking over rail joins have a cradle’s rhythm. Lulled by the heat and the train’s sway, at least half the people in the second-class car were dozing. Wyatt was drowsy himself and Mattie Blaylock was sound asleep, her head drooping against his shoulder.

He was pretty sure Mattie had enjoyed going to Topeka. On balance, anyways. She liked looking in the shop windows and there were some good shows in the theaters, but she was kind of spooked by how the political people acted when Wyatt introduced her. Men would smile and tell Wyatt how he was a lucky fella to have such a lovely lady on his arm, and so on. Mattie’d just stand there without saying anything back, the suspicion plain in her face. The silence would go on until Wyatt said something like “Yes, sir. I guess I am.”

First time that happened, Mattie rounded on him when they got back to their hotel room, like it was his fault when other men paid her a compliment. “I ain’t lovely and I ain’t no lady, and you ain’t lucky to have me, and you know it!” she told him, and he couldn’t tell if she was going to cry or spit. “What am I supposed to do when people say shit like that?”

Wyatt blinked. “Well,” he said, trying to be helpful, “Lou says thank you.”

“A man talks
nice
, he wants something,” Mattie muttered.

She was pretty bitter about that. You could tell. And truth was, Wyatt did want something, but he was getting better at living with a woman again, and figured now wasn’t the time.

“Nice ain’t always a trick,” he said, watching her undress. “You’re prettier’n you think,” he added, realizing that it was true just as the words were coming out of his mouth. He didn’t say anything about the “lucky” part. Mattie might’ve noticed that, because she just looked at him hard and snorted before she turned her back to him.

Later that night, lying in bed, thinking, it struck him that Mattie’s story was like Dick Naylor’s. It was natural that she was nervy and suspicious. All men had ever done was ride her hard and hit her. But if a horse could change, so could a person, and Wyatt thought maybe Mattie would get used to being treated better, like Dick had. He hoped so, because Morg was right. Mattie wasn’t such a bad person. She’d just been ill-used in her youth.

Sure enough, a couple of mornings after that, when they were getting ready to go out for breakfast, he noticed Mattie gazing at her reflection in the mirror. She tried a little smile then, and he could see her lips shape the words “Thank you,” like she was practicing, the way he had practiced “Mississippi” and “fifty-five.” Before she could catch him looking, he turned away because he didn’t want to spoil it for her. He knew how different you could feel when you
saw
yourself different, and he liked that he was helping Mattie the way Doc had helped him.

That was when, without warning, a wave of feeling washed over him. It wasn’t love, like he had for Urilla. Even so, it felt pretty good.

As the convention went on, Mattie started saying “Thank you” out loud when somebody said something nice to her, and then she’d glance at Wyatt and he’d nod, sort of proud of her. She still looked embarrassed, and never said more than two words if she could help it, but she started standing up a little straighter, like maybe it wasn’t so bad to be noticed.

Course, nobody in Topeka knew what she used to be. As far as anyone at the convention knew, Mattie was Wyatt’s real wife. And without really wanting to, Wyatt began to wonder how it would be if he and Mattie didn’t go back to Dodge. Like: what if they just got on the train and stayed on it? What if they rode to the end of the rails, out in Colorado? They could get a clean start, both of them. Wyatt could quit busting heads and getting shot at. He wasn’t as good as Johnnie Sanders or Doc Holliday, but he guessed he could make a living dealing faro in Denver. And Mattie could be a new person. Happier, maybe. Less afraid.

Trouble was, a lot of men in Topeka had just spent two weeks telling Wyatt he should run against Bat Masterson for sheriff of Ford County, and how the party would back him if he did. And when Bob Wright came up for reelection, they said, Wyatt ought to challenge him for representative on the Republican ticket. That’s how Prohibition would get passed: one Dry representative elected at a time, until the legislature finally had enough anti-saloon men to do the right thing. But it would mean settling in Dodge for good. Which put Wyatt in mind of the train joke Eddie Foy told, where a conductor comes along the aisle and asks a drunk where he’s going. “To hell, I reckon,” the drunk says, and the conductor answers, “Ticket’s a dollar. Get off at Dodge.”

Halfway across Kansas now, listening to the chug and click of the train, Wyatt stared out the window, letting his thoughts settle some while he watched the land go by. Funny how you were traveling faster than a horse could run, and you knew you were moving, but there was no sense of the land under you. You lost the smell of grass crushed under your mount’s hooves and the sound of the leather creaking beneath your hips. You couldn’t really see anything small. The world was just two big slabs of color. Blue above, green below. Things got simpler.

It came down to this. If he was going to run against Bat, he needed more than suspicion. He needed a reason.

Put up or shut up, he thought.

It was early evening when the train pulled into Dodge. Lou and Morg were there to meet them but not Doc, who was laid up with a cold. Morgan wanted to go to Delmonico’s for a meal, so Wyatt could tell him and Lou about the convention, but Mattie had one of her headaches starting and couldn’t stand the thought of food. They stopped by Tom McCarty’s pharmacy to get her a dose of laudanum; that was the only thing that kept her from throwing up until she had dry heaves. Wyatt got her home and helped her into bed, but soon as she was asleep, he left to take a walk around town.

Morgan was back on duty by then, and he figured Wyatt would want to know what had gone on while he was in Topeka.

Wyatt brushed the report off and asked instead, “Where’s Bat?”

“He’s not at the Lone Star?” Morg asked after a moment.

Wyatt just looked at him, like he knew Morgan was stalling for time. Which he was.

“Well, it’s pretty quiet tonight,” Morg said then. “Maybe he’s over at the Iowa House?”

“Already checked.” Wyatt glanced away before giving Morgan that hard stare that could feel like a shove. “Where’s his money coming from, Morg?”

Morgan’s eyes dropped. “I ain’t gonna lie to you, Wyatt, but I’d rather you didn’t ask—”

“Morg, are you
covering
for him?”

“Well, see, we just figured what you didn’t know wouldn’t—”

“Where,” Wyatt said very quietly, “is he?”

Morg lasted about three seconds. “Out past Duck Creek,” he said. “A little north of Howells.”

In late November of 1853, when Catherine Masterson gave birth to her second son, nearly a dozen years had passed since the infamous Lilly-McCoy bare-knuckle boxing match in Hastings, New York. Even so, when her son Bat was a boy, men still spoke of that epic contest the way the Greeks and Trojans once spoke of mighty Achilles and brave Hector, in voices hushed by secondhand awe.

Homer sang of boxing matches. Vergil wrote of them. Pindar called down the blessings of Zeus upon them. In paint and in marble and in bronze, on vases and in murals and with heroic statuary, ancient artisans depicted the boxer’s manly beauty, with its cauliflower ears, its honorable scars and blunt, mashed nose.

For millennia, one man had squared off against another on a point of honor or simply to settle a question, here and now, once and for all. Which of us is stronger? Which more fearless and more fearsome? Which of us is the better man? In all that time, empires had risen and flourished and stumbled and failed. Maps of the world had been drawn and redrawn; globes had been invented. Wars and revolutions and science and industry had changed everything—but not boxing. It took the Lilly-McCoy fight to do that.

As a kid, Bat Masterson studied accounts of the match the way better-educated boys read
The Iliad
. In Bat’s opinion, the fight should have been stopped in the seventy-seventh round, and he was probably right. Even then, long before it was over, McCoy was in bad shape. All the newspapermen agreed about that, and they’d recorded his condition in lascivious detail. Lips grotesquely swollen. Blackened eyes puffed to slits. Broad chest red and slimy with the blood he vomited in quick, efficient gouts during the half-minute rest between the rounds. The darling of Irish immigrants, Tom McCoy would not concede, and swore he’d die before he’d let a fucking Englishman like Christopher Lilly best him. Cocky to the end, McCoy went 119 rounds, surviving a total of two hours and forty-one minutes until—choking on blood, blinded by it, speechless but head up and still defiant—he staggered into the ring from his corner, toed the scratch mark one last time, and fell down, stone-cold dead.

There were other fights that lasted as long or longer, fought by men as good or better, but the Lilly-McCoy event took on a larger meaning the moment Irish Tom died. Chris Lilly was forced to flee the country, skipping out ahead of a manslaughter charge. Eighteen others involved with the contest were arrested, tried, convicted, fined, and jailed.

Freelance scolds seized on boxing as a new source of indignation to fuel America’s rancorous political debates. People who’d never given boxing a thought—ladies and maiden aunties, for the love of Christ!—developed
opinions
about the sport. Rather than celebrate the victor’s unflagging sledgehammer power and the loser’s astonishing stamina, reformers attacked Lilly as a savage beast who had transformed McCoy’s face from the image of God into a loathsome ruin. The indomitable McCoy became a pitiable, doomed lamb led to the slaughter, and not the roaring, valorous, dying lion he was, refusing to be vanquished even as he was beaten.

Suddenly boxing was a thing to be loathed and done away with, like slavery and alcohol. Abolitionists rammed legislation through in state after state, until the fights were outlawed almost everywhere. “Goddam do-gooder busybodies,” Bat’s father always muttered whenever the subject came up, and it did so often.

Thomas Masterson was a hardworking, law-abiding man who’d never raised a hand in anger, not even against Bat, who might have benefited from a clout across the ear now and then. What Bat’s father couldn’t stand was reformers telling him what to do and think. Following the fights was a way to poke windbag meddlers in the eye. Tom Masterson did so with a boyish glee that he passed on to his sons, and he was not alone.

Across the country, boxing became more popular every year, for the new laws added the thrill of the illicit to the excitement of the sport. Arrangements were negotiated in secret, and word would go out: “A match tonight!” Sometimes the cops would catch wind and show up before the thing was settled, so fight promoters got craftier. Soon entire passenger trains called “Hell on Wheels” could be hired to transport the pugilists and the referees and spectators and bookies and bartenders and whores to a place nobody knew ahead of time. The train would stop in whatever isolated field took the brakeman’s fancy that evening. A ring would be scraped out into the dirt with a boot heel and boxers would put up and toe the line under the stars. Prize money and crowds soared into the thousands.

Then, in 1861, the whole damn country squared off to settle a point of honor, once and for all. It would be the Lilly-McCoy fight on a continental scale: a contest between inflexible, unyielding opponents—savage, bloody, majestic, and pathetic—but not even war could slake the American thirst for bare-knuckle boxing.

Amid the wholesale slaughter of civil convulsion, there was something almost quaint and strangely decent about retail violence. This was bloodletting and brutality with agreed-upon rules, fought by volunteers, not draftees. This was barbarity, but it was barbarity committed with stylish courage, appreciated by men who might be ordered to march anonymously into annihilating cannon fire the next morning. Soldiers expected to die and be buried in impersonal heaps of maimed and mangled meat, but a man could make a name for himself in a boxing match, and be remembered.

Too young for the war, boys like Bat grew up hearing about boxers as famous as any general. Yankee Sullivan, Tom Hyer, John Morrissey, Harry Paulson, “Bill the Butcher” Poole. Stoking interest and boosting sales by pretending to lament the outlawed sport, the popular press covered boxing as far away as Australia. When John Heenan sailed to England to battle Tom Sayers, the whole of red-blooded America cheered him on.

It was the most vicious congregation of roughs that was ever witnessed in a Christian city
, Bat read, wishing fervently that he could have been there, betting, snarling, cheering, grunting with every witnessed blow, his own stomach tight in mirrored defense, his fists knotted and jabbing the air. He could imagine it all as he studied the account.
What boiled-down savagery, concentrated in so small a space! What rowdyism! What villainy!

What fun!

Bat himself picked more than a few fights as a kid. “Bat’s like a chunk of steel,” his older brother, Ed, would tell folks. “Somebody’s always striking a spark off him.” Trouble was, Bat grew early but he stopped growing early, too. One by one, every boy he knew started to look down at him, and something about that made him even more eager to mix it up, readier than ever to teach larger, stronger, heavier kids a lesson.