Doc: A Novel (9 page)

“Always tri-
un
-fant,” Doc finished with him, smiling.

The Scouts patrolled the Rio Grande borderlands, and they took on all comers. Comanche, Apache, Kiowa. Confederate renegades. Cattle rustlers—Mexican and Texan, both. The Scouts wore uniforms, like white soldiers, but they didn’t much care for their West Point officers, who wanted them to line up straight and do as they were told.

Johnnie was of the opinion that the Scouts had more in common with the cagey desert Indians they fought. His daddy would always wink when he said, “Sometimes we’d get together with them Indians. Your mamma’s people was crazy gamblers—all them Indians was. They’d bet what buzzard’ll fly off first! Stake their horses and wives and tents on any kinda race. I won your mamma that way. Her Indian husband was a damn fool to gamble her.”

Which is how Johnnie came to be.

“See? I am a mixed multitude all by myself,” he told Doc. “African, and white, and Indian, and maybe Arab, too.”

“That is a wondrous story,” Doc said. “Somebody should write it all down. I could help you with that, if you like.”

“Oh, I can write,” Johnnie assured him. “I can read and write better than most white folks. I learned myself before I got to St. Francis, but Father von Angensperg made me better at it.”

Doc asked how the Sanders family wound up in Kansas after being down in Texas, and that was when Johnnie realized he didn’t know. And he had his own questions, too. Like: How did his daddy get the name Sanders? And was there some special reason Johnnie himself was named after John Horse?

“You could ask next time you visit,” Doc suggested.

“Too late now,” Johnnie said. “My folks was killed when I was twelve.”

He went quiet for a while.

“All them ancestors,” he said thoughtfully. “And I’m the only one left to remember.”

Show Cards

T
hat evening Doc tried to put the boy’s dead, burnt body out of his mind, but circumstance conspired against him. Kate had found him a moderately interesting poker game and he sat in, but all anybody talked about was the fire. Much of the commentary centered on how capacious the Famous Elephant Barn had been. Word was, Hamilton Bell had already ordered lumber and a crew of carpenters, and he intended to rebuild, bigger than ever. There was a good deal of speculation as to what Ham might name the new stable. What was bigger than an elephant?

Nobody seemed inclined to inquire into Johnnie’s death. It wasn’t that folks didn’t care. Everybody seemed to have liked him, but Johnnie was just a colored kid, after all, and kin to no one. Bat Masterson was telling everyone that it was an unfortunate accident. That quickly became the common wisdom.

There was no mention of how much money the boy had taken at his faro table in the past few weeks. Apparently no one else had noticed how steadily those winnings had accumulated. Even Doc tried to forget his suspicions that first night. None of my affair, he thought. Why borrow trouble?

Two hours into the game, Kate leaned over to whisper
sotto voce
into his ear, “
Viens coucher avec moi, mon amour
.”

Her arms were wrapped around his shoulders. Her voice was throaty. Her French required no translation. The other players nudged each other, looking down her dress. This was the desired effect, for she was giving Doc an excuse to cut his losses. He knew she was right. His concentration was shot and he was playing poorly, but he waved her off.

She straightened. “You don’t want me? You want that girl back home? I ain’t good enough?”

When he failed to rise to that well-chewed bait, Kate cursed him roundly and declared, “All right, then. One of us has to make some money tonight! I’m going to Bessie’s.”

“Suit yourself,” he said.

He played three more hands, lost two, and quit the game. Back at the hotel, he tried to read, but
The Aeneid
was no better than the poker game as a distraction.

Beloved Troy is in flames … The roar of the fire grows louder, the seething flood of flame rolls closer …

He skipped ahead to Carthage. That was more successful.

Here Aeneas dares to hope he has found some haven and, after all his hard straits, to trust again in better times …

On John Henry Holliday’s best days—when he’d slept well; when a freshening breeze from the northwest cleared the air; when his cough was just a nuisance he could almost ignore—on those days, his mood lifted and soared. On one such day, he had written to Martha Anne,
Western Kansas appears to have a good climate for me. Tell Cousin George that I feel quite well most of the time and take regular meals in a restaurant with a good Austrian cook
. To Robert, he reported,
Dodge isn’t much yet, but the town looks to grow. There are no dentists closer than Wichita, so the work will not be split among competitors, as it was in Dallas
.

He needed capital to set up an office. For that, he could rely on a summer’s worth of cowboys who thought faro was easy and cattlemen who believed they knew how to play poker. It would take time to develop his practice, but he was already getting referrals from Tom McCarty, a decently educated physician who’d read up on consumption, now that John Holliday was his patient.

“No crackle in the lungs,” Tom had told him last week, “but you’ve got a thirty percent loss, is my guess.”

That was just an estimate, of course, but if it was accurate, John Henry still had 70 percent of his lungs left, and that was better than he had imagined. If he could hold that line, he’d manage just fine. Maybe next spring, he’d be healthy enough for a visit home. In the meantime, he was starting to make some friends here in Dodge. Morgan Earp was a cheerful young man who liked books and would sometimes talk about them. And Eddie Foy was always good for a laugh. All told, things were looking up.

Except for what happened to Johnnie.

Drunk and defiant, Kate waltzed in just past dawn, fully intending to pack her bags and tell Doc to go to hell. Instead, when she saw him, she closed the door quietly behind her.

He was sitting in the upholstered chair next to the window. Kate waited while he wiped his face, and blew his nose, and coughed, and got a grip.

“That boy was clubbed from behind,” he said, rough-voiced. “Some coldhearted sonofabitch rolled him over to go through his pockets. John Horse Sanders was robbed, and he was killed, and nobody gives a damn.”

Sometimes Doc seemed so young to her. So innocent. “Take it from me,” she said wearily, sitting on their bed. “Nobody gives a damn about anybody.”

Hoping to cheer him, she changed the subject. “There’s a high-stakes game tonight. Turner’s your man. He won last night and thinks it was skill. Time to put on a show,
mon amour
.”

He turned his face from her, the muscles in his jaw hardening. She had learned by then that it was better not to push, so she let the idea drop for now. Leaning over, she took
The Aeneid
from his lap, riffled the pages, and set it aside.

“That girl,” Kate said with something like pity, but her hands were moving now, around his neck, down his chest. “She don’t know you. Not like I know you, Doc. Vergil is all wrong. She should have sent you Homer.”

They rang the bell for room service when they awoke, dressed at leisure, and left Dodge House at about eleven-thirty that night, in no great hurry to arrive at the Green Front Saloon. Bets, Doc had observed, become increasingly ill-considered as games progress, when losers try to win everything back in one hand. That’s when patience paid.

A cool spring shower was just tapering off. The stockyard dust had settled out of the air. The temperature had dropped as well. Kate could feel a slight tremor when she took Doc’s arm.

“You want to stop for a drink?” she asked. “Warm up a little?”

“I’m not cold.”

Stage fright, she thought, but he had agreed with her strategy. Drive the stake into Cyclops’ eye early. Word would get around. Her Greek was better than Doc’s, but she knew he’d recognize the quote. “
Enter fearlessly
,” she recited. “
However foreign a man may be, in every crisis it is the high face that will carry him through
.”

“Brazen it out,” he translated.

“Words to live by,” she told him.

“Easy for Athena to say.”

Front Street was alive with young men. Sauntering, staggering. Laughing, puking. Shouting in fierce strife or striking lewd whispered bargains with girls in bright dresses. They were giddy with liberty, these boys, free to do anything they could think of and pay for, unwatched by stern elders, unseen by sweethearts back home, unjudged by God, who had surely forsaken this small, bright hellhole in the immense, inhuman darkness that was west Kansas.

“You see, Doc? Dodge is where the money is,” Kate reminded him as they passed saloon after saloon, each filled with tables where months of wages and a year of profits were at hazard. And the season had barely started! “Stick with me,” she told him, squeezing his arm and dancing a little with her own excitement. “I’ll make us rich.”

Johnnie Sanders’ daddy had told no lies. The Indians were crazy gamblers. For numberless centuries and uncounted generations, the Choctaw, the Zuni, the Crow, the Arapaho, the Navajo, the Dakota, the Mandan, the Kiowa, and a hundred other tribes had whiled away countless days and nights playing a thousand games, betting on anything with an outcome that was not assured. Blame boredom. Blame the timeless, unrelieved monotony of land so devoid of trees that owls burrow in the ground for want of better accommodation. Blame vast herds of ceaselessly chewing ruminants who walked with the unsyncopated beat of a Lakota chant. However you explained it, never and nowhere else on earth had gambling occupied the attention of so many for so long as in this flat and featureless land.

Then in a geological instant—just five years’ time—the American bison had been replaced on the prairies by European domestic cattle. Dead red Indians made way for live white bankrupts lured west by the promise of a fresh start on land free for the grabbing. Kate had watched it happen and felt no pity. The Indians all but wiped out? Good riddance. A danger eliminated, nothing more. Millions of buffalo rotting on the plains. Who cares? They were filthy brutes, huge and stupid.

Tout casse, tout passe, tout lasse
. That was the lesson Kate learned in childhood. Everything breaks, everything passes, nothing lasts. Revolution was the way of the world, the only constant in life. The question was how to survive it, how to make it pay. Now Kate had her answer: she had Doc. Because, from the Mississippi to the Rockies and beyond, everything had changed, except gambling.

Freighters, hunters, railroad crews. Soldiers, miners, cowboys. Homesteaders, merchants, traders. Con men and thieves. Lawyers, physicians. Judges and journalists. White and black and brown. Male and female. Children and gray-haired elders. Hookers and farmwives.

Everyone gambled. Everyone.

They bet on cockfights, prizefights, dogfights. They bet on horse races, dog races, foot races. They shot craps and played euchre, seven-up, pitch, brag, and all fours. Monte, both three-card and Spanish. Roulette,
vingt-et-un
, faro, keno, crown and anchor,
rouge et noir
, and whist. Many of the games were blindingly fast. You’d have thought the money must be burning the hands that held it, so quickly was it thrown down and lost.

In every boomtown and mining camp she’d worked, Kate had watched the gamblers. She was fascinated by the way they tossed the meager return from backbreaking, soul-killing work onto the tables. Their stoic, unmoving faces were a marvel, for she could smell the frantic, feral fear hidden behind those masks. Often such men would turn to her next, hoping to bury their despair in a woman’s body. There was a special satisfaction in telling them, “Go to hell, and don’t come back ’til you got ten dollars.”

She had noticed Doc before he noticed her, back in Texas. Kate still didn’t know quite what to make of him. “Short-term loan,” he’d warn punters who won their first few bets at his faro table. “Quit while you’re ahead,” he always advised. Of course, no one ever listened. Two minutes later, the fools would be broke flat.

If you could find an honest faro game, and if you bucked it sober, and if you could concentrate on the cards, Doc claimed, the odds of beating the dealer were just about even. In practice, the house always won, for faro had no logic discernible by a drunken miner or an ignorant dirt farmer or a witless young cowboy.

“It’s a game for imbeciles! They all play until they lose,” she’d said back in Dallas. “Take their money and be done with it. Why do you warn them?”

Doc sat up, and coughed, and moved to the edge of the bed, where he reached out for the makings and rolled himself a cigarette. He was quiet for a while, smoking and watching the dawn through the window of her room above the bar. She could have counted the bones of his spine, prominent beneath the light linen shirt.

“Because,” he said finally, “they break my heart.”

Startled, she barked a laugh. “They don’t break mine! I like to watch the fuckers get fucked.”

He turned to stare at her, appalled by her coarse language and her callousness. “What an
ugly
thing to say.”

She was ashamed and so she was belligerent; their first night together ended with their first fight. She threw the skinny, smug, high-hat bastard out of her room. But when the hangover wore off, she found herself remembering his hands. And how clean he was. And how gentle. The next night, she sat down near his table again to watch him deal.

Like Kate, Doc had made a study of gamblers and had theories about the breed. “A game like faro gives men the power to stop time,” he told her when they’d been together for a week. “That is the appeal, in my observation.”

He was lying on his back with his hands behind his head. She thought he was staring at the ceiling, the way some men will when they’ve rolled off. Later she learned that lifting his arms that way helped him breathe.

“When the bet is placed,” he said, “a moment is carved away from the past and the future. In that enchanted moment, anything is possible. A man’s debts and regrets and limitations disappear. He is buyin’ the chance to imagine—for one moment at a time—that the next card I deal will make him rich.”

Speaking, Doc had begun to shiver. Falling silent, he rolled away from her in bed. He’s cold, she thought. A Southerner with no meat on his bones. She came up close behind him, putting an arm over his shoulder, warming his bony back with her own small, soft body. She tried to remember the last time she had listened to such a thoughtful man. Not since her father died, most likely.

“I hate it,” Doc muttered. “Makes me feel like a thief.”

Faro was the means to an end for Doc, something to which he resorted when he needed to accumulate cash to play poker. Kate found that mystifying. Why give up a sure thing for a game you could lose? If it had been up to her, Doc would do nothing but deal faro night after night, raking in money from one idiot after another. Drovers, farmers, soldiers … Every damn one of them would bet his eyeballs out if you gave him odds.