Doc: A Novel (7 page)

You needed money to make money, that was the trouble. You had to get a leg up, somehow.

There was no hurry about getting back to Dodge. When he heard Fort Worth was hiring a deputy, Wyatt turned Dick in that direction. He started to think that if he got year-round work in Texas, he would wire Johnnie Sanders, tell him to pay James off, and forget the whole thing about Roxana. It was a half-baked notion from the start, Wyatt decided. He never should have involved the boy.

Along the way to Fort Worth, he got into the habit of stopping in towns and settlements to ask about local races. It was curiosity, really. He just wanted to give Dick a chance to test his speed. The stakes weren’t real high, but it was easy to get a few riders together, and the results were encouraging. Even when they lost, the finishes were close. Short races seemed to suit Dick best. Anything over half a mile just gave him time to get into trouble. If another animal drew even, Dick would pin his ears and bare his teeth and snap. He lost a couple of contests that way and was more bad-tempered than usual afterward.

Wyatt applied for the Fort Worth job, but—no surprise—it went to somebody local. By that time, though, he knew what a bargain he got with a pocketful of loose change the summer before. A season of conditioning and experience was all Dick Naylor had needed. The bony ewe neck had muscled up into a stallion’s crest tied to a good sloping shoulder. After months of patient stretching and frequent reshoeing, the club-foot didn’t seem to hold him back a bit. By spring, Dick Naylor had developed into a stocky little sprinter with a wide, deep chest and powerful hindquarters, all drive and push.

If he was just a hand taller. Maybe shorter in the back, and less inclined to bite …

Once again, Roxana filled Wyatt’s thoughts. She was leggier than Dick, delicate-looking but larger, all elegance and speed. Breed his scrappy little quarter-miler to a fine long-distance mare … Why, you could just see the colts! They’d have Roxana’s endurance and her lovely gait. They’d have Dick’s heart and desire to win, but without his stubborn malice.

Nights, by the campfire, Wyatt would scratch out calculations with a stick in the dirt. He was as good as anyone with numbers and odds, though reading gave him headaches and made him feel resentful. Morgan was the reader in the family, but Wyatt could do sums in his head, easy as Morg could read.

No matter how he figured it, $2,000 was a lot of money. Even when Wyatt was working regular, he got a dollar and a quarter a day. You couldn’t get ahead on that. At some point, he told himself, you have to take a chance. You have to make your move.

So, as much as he hated debt, and hated the way his brother James made his living running girls, and hated asking Johnnie Sanders to work for him that way … Well, every time Dick Naylor won a race, Wyatt’s conscience got a little quieter.

Whenever he found a town with a telegraph office, Wyatt let Morgan know where he was. All the brothers did that—wire Morg and wait around for a reply, to be sure the rest of the family was all right. In early May, a return telegram arrived within the hour, and this one was a shock.

ED MASTERSON KILLED STOP DODGE
HIRING REPLACEMENT STOP COME
BACK STOP MORG STOP

Wyatt certainly hadn’t wished Ed ill and was sorry to hear of his death and disliked to profit by it. Even so, this was a stroke of luck, and Wyatt headed back to Dodge feeling pretty good about his prospects.

This time, he’d get the chief deputy job Ed had vacated. That would mean a lot more money. He’d held on to every dollar Dick had won and counted it out often. Add that to his salary and … Well, it still wasn’t enough, but with Johnnie’s help, it wouldn’t be long before he could buy Roxana. If the timing was right and she wasn’t already in foal this year, Dick might sire a colt that could begin to race by ’81. In a few years’ time, Wyatt would have a string of horses that would run the legs off anything west of St. Louis.

And then, by golly, he could quit the law and finally get somewheres in life.

There were no towns, the last long stretch of the ride. No houses, no fences, no sign of human life, let alone a place to send or receive telegrams. Until you got to Dodge, there was just grass and sand hills and silence, day after day.

That was why he didn’t get the news. See, Dick’s right foreleg felt a little hot and Wyatt decided to give him a couple days’ rest and grazing on good grass before they started the final push into the city. But the leg wasn’t that bad. If he’d known, Wyatt could have reached Dodge in time for Johnnie Sanders’ funeral.

A day late, he would think when he finally stood staring at the boy’s grave.

Just like always: a day late and a dollar short.

Down Cards

T
he body was charred. It could have been anyone, in Morgan Earp’s opinion. On any given night during the cattle season, as many as fifty drunken cowhands might bed down in the loft of Hamilton Bell’s Famous Elephant Barn. Could have been one of them.

Morg kicked at a chunk of smoking wood. “You sure, Doc? It’s Johnnie Sanders?”

It was an innocent question, and Morgan didn’t mean anything by it. Doc Holliday was, however, a man of ardor and conviction as regards matters of personal dignity, and the dentist was already at a social disadvantage, kneeling next to the corpse as he was, peering into its gaping jaw and studying its teeth.

Doc looked up over his shoulder at Morgan. “Which is in doubt?” he asked. “My competence or my veracity?”

“I was just hoping maybe you was wrong, is all.”

“Help me up,” Doc muttered.

Morgan offered an arm.

When he was on his feet, Doc brushed the ash off his trousers, wiped his hands on one of those white cotton handkerchiefs he always carried. “There is a diastema between the upper central incisors, and I can palpate a raised lingual margin on those teeth as well. The left eyetooth is slightly twisted. I filled the lower right six-year molar myself, two weeks ago.”

Morgan didn’t know what any of that meant, except: Yeah, Doc was sure.

“Hell,” Morg said. “Wyatt’s gonna take this hard.”

“When’s he due back?” Bat Masterson asked.

“I thought he’d be here by now.”

Legally, Bat had no standing in this matter. The fire was inside Dodge City limits, so it wasn’t in Bat’s jurisdiction. On the other hand, Morgan Earp had never dealt with a death like this one. This would be his third season as a deputy, but he was used to working with his brothers. Without Wyatt or Virgil around, Morg didn’t mind having Bat there to back him up.

“Poor soul,” Doc murmured, looking at the corpse. “Seventeen years old …” He straightened and declared by way of eulogy, “John Horse Sanders was the second best faro dealer I ever met.”

“Who’s the best?” Bat asked him. “You, I guess.”

There was fame to be had and money to be made writing dime novels about the Wild West. Bat Masterson hadn’t published anything yet, but he was on the lookout for salable material. He already had a good title for his first story:
Doc Holliday, the Killer Dentist
. Or maybe
The Deadly Dentist
. He hadn’t decided which was better.

Morgan had heard the rumors about Holliday, but he already suspected Bat was making some of Doc’s exploits up. Bat didn’t lie, exactly, but he never told a story that didn’t improve some, over time. Far as Morg knew, the dentist’s only crime was rivaling Bat Masterson as the best-dressed man in Dodge.

“No, sir,” Doc was telling Bat, “best I ever saw was a little bitty gal name of Sophie Walton. My Aunt Permelia took Sophie and me in, after the war. Sophie taught all us cousins to play cards, but she didn’t teach us everything. She’d clean up four times out of five. Young Mr. Sanders was near as good.”

“Johnnie don’t belong on Boot Hill,” Morgan said. “We should take up a collection. Bury him right.”

Bat shrugged. With his brother Ed barely cool in the grave, it was probably hard for him to summon the feelings he’d need to give a damn about this death. Mostly Bat seemed angry with the barn’s owner, Hamilton Bell. Ham was friendly to a fault—same as Ed, who got himself killed by being nice to a drunk.

“I knew something like this was going to happen,” Bat muttered. “It was only a matter of time ’til this place burned down.”

Morgan nodded to the mortician’s boys, who were waiting at the edge of the smoking timbers. It was gingerish work, moving a burned body. They had just tipped it onto a stretcher so they could carry it to the coffin shop when Doc Holliday stopped them.

“You see something?” Morg asked.

Leaning on his cane, the dentist took a closer look, coughing again when the smoke and smell got to him. The back of the corpse was unburned, and he felt through the dark hair, moving his fingers systematically over the skull, stopping behind one ear. His hand came away sticky, and he held it out to the lawmen before wiping the mess off on his handkerchief.

“Blow to the head,” he said. “
Ante-mortem
, in my judgment.”

Morg was going to ask Doc what he meant by that part about his auntie, but Sheriff Masterson wasn’t willing to look ignorant.

“Probably got hit by a barrel,” Bat said.

Somebody’d had the idea of hoisting empty whiskey casks onto Dodge’s rooftops. The notion was that the rain-filled barrels would tumble over as a burning building caved in, thus extinguishing the flames. From the looks of the Elephant Barn, the heavy casks had simply compounded the generalized destruction.

“No barrels near the body,” Doc noted.

“Might’ve rolled,” Bat said.

“Can we take him now?” one of the mortician’s boys asked.

“Sure,” Morg said. “I guess.”

A crowd had formed just beyond the smoldering ruins of the barn. Standing a little apart from the others, Edwin Fitzgerald hugged himself morosely. The black-haired Irishman had a body blessed by the gods—lithe and superbly coordinated, capable of acrobatics and grace—but it was topped with a rubbery, comical face and a head full of sarcasm and mockery. The combination would make his fortune, for young Mr. Fitzgerald had recently taken the stage name Eddie Foy, and he had a stellar future in vaudeville ahead of him. One day there would be a movie and books about his life, as there would be about so many men who lived in Dodge that year: Bat Masterson, and the Earp brothers, and Doc Holliday, to name a few. For a good long while, Eddie’s fame would shine most brightly, though it would fade the soonest.

That afternoon, he stood by himself and waited for Doc Holliday to make his slow and careful way out of what remained of the barn.

“Johnnie Sanders,” Doc told him quietly.

The mobile face crumpled. “No!” Eddie cried. “Ah, Christ … Now, that’s a pity.”

Hats off, they watched silently as the crisped and blackened body was carried past. A few yards away, Bat Masterson had returned to his earlier theme for the edification of the assembled citizens.

“I told Ham Bell this would happen! I said, One of these days, Ham, some drover’s going to pass out with a cigarette in his hand and set the whole damn barn alight. You just wait and see, I told him. Only a matter of time ’til that barn goes up in smoke!”

“Lucky it didn’t take the whole town with it,” Eddie muttered.

He had survived the Great Chicago Fire as a boy. Now twenty-two, Eddie Foy retained a morbid anxiety about such things. It was a concern John Henry Holliday shared, as would anyone who’d seen what Sherman did to Georgia. Like old Chicago and antebellum Atlanta, Dodge City was all wood. Wooden walls, shingle roofs, wooden floors. Plank sidewalks and galleries. Everywhere you looked: wood, waiting to burn.

“This burg could use a fire brigade,” said Eddie.

“Could’ve used one last night,” Doc agreed.

Morgan went back to the jail to make his report to Fat Larry. Bat headed for the newspaper offices to be sure his name got into the stories. Eddie stuck with Doc, though he had to slow down considerably to match the gimpy Georgian’s pace. Usually Doc contrived to give the impression that he was a gentleman in no particular hurry who enjoyed a leisurely stroll through town. Today he was winded and limping before they’d got to the corner of Bridge and Front.

Eddie had more sense than to rag the man about that. If you were going to be friends with Doc Holliday, there were things you did well not to notice. That raw Christ-awful cough. His weight, what there was of it. The lameness. Doc had accumulated a fair number of infirmities for a man so young, but insisted he was in better health than he’d enjoyed in some time. That told you a lot, right there.

The two of them were recent arrivals in Dodge. Eddie had just landed a good gig headlining a song-and-dance show at the Comique Theater, twice nightly during the cattle season. Doc Holliday sometimes ran a faro game there; it was a temporary arrangement—just something to tide him and his lady friend over until he could get a dental practice going. Doc enjoyed Eddie’s act. Eddie liked that Doc got all the jokes.

“Look at them, now, will you,” Eddie said, stopping so Doc could rest. “Shameless, I call it.”

Driven out of the barn by the fire, Hamilton Bell’s little rat terriers were roaming the town. One of them had taken a shine to Dog Kelley’s brindle greyhound bitch, who was standing in the middle of Front Street, bemused by the attention. The terrier tried several approaches without achieving much in the way of satisfaction.

“It would appear that his reach has exceeded his grasp,” Doc observed, keeping his breath shallow.

“Ah,” said Eddie, “but you have to admire the ambition, now, don’t you.”

The greyhound got bored and wandered away, leaving a deeply disappointed terrier to reconsider his aspirations.

“Don’t wait on me,” Doc told Eddie. “I’ve got errands.”

“See you tonight, will we?”

“Depends. I’ll have to see what Miss Kate has planned.”

Eddie grinned. “Give my love to herself, then, won’t you!” he called, and did a little jig step before he set off briskly, grateful as a child let out of school early.

To anyone watching for the next few moments, the town’s new dentist would have appeared to be enjoying the spectacle of Eddie Foy’s sprightly progress down Front Street. In point of fact, John Henry Holliday was absorbed by a kind of calculus that had become second nature to him: plotting the shortest route from where he stood to China Joe’s Laundry and Baths, the post office in Bob Wright’s store, and on to his hotel room at Dodge House.

The wind shifted, adding dust, blown ash, and lingering smoke to the equation. Laundry first, he decided.

It wasn’t far, objectively. Nothing was. Front Street was just a dirt road three blocks long, with a row of buildings on each side of the railroad tracks. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe ran straight west through the center of a town that consisted primarily of saloons, saloons with gambling, saloons with dance halls, and saloons with brothels. The saloons were mostly south of the rails, a district they shared with China Joe’s Laundry, the remains of the Famous Elephant Barn, and the lower class of girls who worked in the cribs out back. More respectable commerce took place on the other side of the tracks. Bob Wright’s General Outfitting Store. The barbershop and a pool hall. The hardware and gun shop. A few of the fancier bars and bordellos. George Hoover’s Cigar Shop and Wholesale Liquor Store. The Dodge House Hotel and the Delmonico Restaurant.

That was the sum total of the town. Naming this place Dodge City was pure bluff. It barely amounted to a village.

Back in April, there were more stray dogs than people on the street. In early May, the herds had begun arriving from Texas. Now Ford County’s nine hundred permanent residents were outnumbered three to one by the drovers who came into Dodge to enjoy themselves while their cattle fattened on the grassland south of the Arkansas River.

By midnight tonight, Front Street would teem with carousing cowboys but at the moment, the town was relatively quiet and small as Dodge was, everybody had seen the fire last night. The big news was that Morgan Earp had found a body in the ruins and the dentist said it was Johnnie Sanders. Word of that spread faster than Doc Holliday could walk.

Even Jau Dong-Sing had heard.

Most people thought Jau was Dong-Sing’s personal name. China Joe, they called him. Doc addressed him as Mr. Jau, and he had even tried to reproduce the rising tone in Sing correctly. “F to F-sharp,” Doc said, listening hard when Dong-Sing taught him how to say it. Dong-Sing had no idea what that meant, but the dentist came close to getting it right. Dong-Sing appreciated the courtesy. He always made a special effort for Doc, a good customer who had three baths a week and who liked his pastel shirts boiled, starched, and ironed after a single wearing. Dong-Sing had done some alterations for Kate. Taking up hems, adjusting darts. He did tailoring for Doc as well. It was a pleasure to work on the dentist’s suits. They were beautifully constructed of fine English broadcloth.

In Jau Dong-Sing’s opinion, Doc’s
chi
was seriously unbalanced. That was making him sickly. “Doc! You too damn skinny!” Dong-Sing always told him.

“A man has no secrets from his tailor,” Doc would reply.

“You come by, I cook you noodles,” Dong-Sing always offered. “Make you fatter! Give you long life.”

“Mr. Jau, that is a handsome offer,” Doc always said. “I believe I’ll take you up on it one day.”

Today when Doc came in to pick up his shirts, Dong-Sing leaned over the counter to confide, “I know why that nigger boy dead.”

“Do you, now?” Doc said.

“Kill chicken. Scare wolf.”

“Well, now, Mr. Jau, that is an interestin’ theory,” Doc said, “though I shall have to think it over before I can subscribe to it. When do you suppose that pair of trousers might be ready?”

“Two day more. Very busy. Hotel trade pickin’ up.”

As always, Doc asked about Dong-Sing’s family back in Kwantung and about the business prospects of Dong-Sing’s nephew, who had recently opened a laundry in Wichita with Dong-Sing’s backing. Nobody else took the time to help Dong-Sing with his English, and he enjoyed these conversations.