Doc: A Novel (17 page)

“It was a real good funeral, Wyatt,” Morgan told him. “Almost as handsome as the one for Ed Masterson. That priest—Alex? He came in from Wichita. The service was real pretty.” Wyatt was staring at the plank with Johnnie’s name and dates. “Wasn’t sure about his birthday … Did I get it right?”

“Near enough, I guess.”

“Alex said you took Johnnie in. After his parents.”

“Owed him that much. Ramsey got off clean.” Wyatt ran a hand over his face. “I shoulda known better’n to let him stay in Dodge. He was doing good in school. I shoulda taken him straight back to St. Francis.”

“Wyatt, I been wondering … Why’d you pick a Catholic school for Johnnie?”

“White school wouldn’t have him.” Wyatt frowned and looked away. “I don’t guess there was any money in his room.”

“Nope. Just his clothes and some books.”

A wilted bouquet was lying on the mound. Wildflowers, purple and yellow and pink, but tied with a thin black ribbon. “Who left those flowers?” Wyatt asked.

Morgan shrugged. “Hell if I know.”

Wyatt bent over and picked up a playing card half-shoved into the dirt near the bouquet. Ace of hearts. There were some words written on it. “
Mix forever with the … elements, brother to
—What’s that word?”

“Insensible.”

“
Brother to insensible rock
. Make any sense to you?”

“Sounds like some kinda poetry,” Morgan said. “Must have been Doc left that. He couldn’t come to the funeral, but he threw a hell of a wake for Johnnie.”

Wyatt looked surprised. “Why would McCarty do that?”

“Not Doc McCarty. Town’s got a dentist now. John Holliday. He says he met you down by Fort Griffin.”

“Skinny? From Georgia?”

“Yeah, that’s him. Bat says Doc’s real dangerous, but—”

“Bat’s full of it. Always has been. But there’s talk about Holliday.”

“No trouble here. Couple of fights with his woman. Kate’s registered as his wife at Dodge House, but about half the time she’s over at James and Bessie’s.”

“Working?”

Morgan smirked. “I don’t think she’s there for the uplifting conversation.”

“His idea?”

“Doc puts up with it. More like Kate pimps him, the way she finds poker games for him.”

Wyatt looked at the card in his hand once more before pushing it back into the dirt where he’d found it.

With anyone else, Morgan would have known what to do next. Take him to a bar or a brothel, or both. Get him drunk, get him laid. Wyatt might have been a happier man, and better liked, if he developed a taste for the commoner vices, but he didn’t drink and he didn’t fornicate. Didn’t even curse. Worst word he ever used was
hell
.

“Jake Collar opened up a soda fountain in his place this spring,” Morgan told him. “How ’bout I buy you an ice cream?”

They walked back into town. It was getting hot. A gang of drovers came rumbling over the bridge, hollering and waving their hats and shooting into the air. One of them rode up onto the boardwalk and straight into the Long Branch.

Wyatt watched, indifferent. Wasn’t his job to deal with them, not yet.

He looked down the street toward where the old Elephant Barn had stood. The debris had been shoved off to one side. New walls were already framed up. A crew boss was yelling orders as two dozen men hoisted a truss into place. Wyatt would pasture Dick out by Anderson’s for now, but he could move the horse back into Ham’s by next week, looked like.

For a long time, he said nothing at all but he was thinking hard, grateful that Morgan left him alone as he worked out what was bothering him.

What business did Johnnie have in the barn that night? he wondered. Why would he go there at all? Johnnie Sanders didn’t have a horse.

Stacking the Deck

O
ne by one, the Dodge City fathers assembled around the poker table on the second floor of Wright’s General Outfitting. Cigar smoke climbed the walls, pooling in the ceiling, filling the room like a fog.

“Anybody know where Dog’s at?” Bob Wright asked, half an hour into the game. “I’ll raise, I guess.”

“Start without him,” Deacon Cox suggested. “Call.”

“Can’t do that, Deacon. Dog’s the mayor.”

Chalkie Beeson folded. “Why ain’t you mayor, Bob?”

“I’m awful busy these days, what with being representative and going to Topeka all the time. Anyways, it was Dog’s turn. Deacon?”

“Pair of jacks.”

“Well, all I got’s a pair, too, but they’re ladies,” Bob said, sounding apologetic.

“Damn,” said Deacon. “Your deal, Chalk.”

Several hundred dollars circulated. A great deal of detail about Chalkie Beeson’s new brass band was conveyed and ignored. A bottle’s contents disappeared. Finally the click of nails and the ropy thump of a long, nearly hairless tail announced the arrival of a bony harlequin hound hauling its narrow carcass up the stairs, a few steps ahead of Dog Kelley.

“ ’Bout time, Dog,” Bob said quietly.

“That is the ugliest animal I ever seen,” Chalkie said, just like he did every damn time the council met. “He ain’t got enough room in that skull for a prairie dog’s brains.”

“Don’t have to be smart to be fast,” Dog said, sitting. “Told you not to bet against him Sunday. What’s the ante?”

“Sawbuck,” Deacon told him. “Bob? Let’s get started.”

“Well, all right, then,” Bob said. “I call to order the Dodge City Council meeting of June fourth, 1878, at”—Bob pulled out his pocket watch—“at nine forty-five
P.M
. Let’s begin with a prayer. Mayor Kelley?”

Placing his palms together just like his dear old mother taught him, James H. Kelley aimed his eyes heavenward. “May the saints preserve us, the Blessed Mother protect us, and the Lord Jesus Christ save us from honest men and Methodists.”

“Amen to that,” said Chalkie. “You don’t drink? Fine, but don’t tell the rest of us to go dry. Deacon! Ante up.”

Deacon Cox tossed ten dollars into the pot.

“And may God damn George Hoover to eternal hellfire while he’s at it,” Chalkie added. “Tell me that jackass ain’t putting together a Reform ticket to run against us again.”

“The man is an opportunist,” Deacon said.

“Know what an opportunist tells you?” Dog asked, looking straight at Bob. “Tells you who’s winnin’.”

Takes one to know one, Bob thought.

“Raise you twenty,” Dog said.

Bob folded. “You fellas see who’s back in town?” he asked. “Wyatt.”

There were groans around the table.

“He wants chief deputy,” Dog told them, and the groans got louder.

“Newspaper’s on his side, too.” Bob reached down for a copy of the
Dodge City Times
lying on the floor by his chair. “Says here,
Mr. Wyatt Earp, who served with credit on the police force last summer, arrived in this city from Texas on Saturday last. We hope he will accept a position on the force once more
.”

“That teetotaling killjoy,” Chalkie muttered, tossing twenty into the pot. “Jesus. Business fell off something terrible when he was cracking heads last year. Call.”

“That was mostly his brother Virgil,” Dog pointed out.

“James and Morg’re good people, though,” said Deacon, folding.

Chalkie had two pair, kings and tens. “What’ve you got, Dog?”

“Deuces,” Dog said, but there were three of them.

“Damn,” Chalk said. “Deuces! Is that all?”

“Good enough to beat you,” Dog told him.

“I’ll give odds George Hoover gets Wyatt to run against Bat Masterson on the Reform slate,” Chalkie said. “Any takers?”

“No percentage in a sure thing,” Dog said, scooping up the pot.

Bob Wright could have argued that point with Dog, for he had grown wealthy dealing in a sure thing. The men at this table represented half a million dollars in gambling, prostitution, and liquor, but Bob could match them—on groceries alone. It was only a month into the season and Bob had already cleared more than $12,000. Drovers ate on their way north. They ate while their herds grazed and fattened on the grassland south of Dodge. They continued to eat until the cattle were sold and loaded onto the trains to be shipped east. Occasionally, they even made time to eat while they were in the midst of drinking, whoring, and playing cards. There was money to be made, as well, supplying groceries to townspeople and to restaurants like the Iowa House and Delmonico’s, where cattle buyers and railroad officials dined. And then there was the Fort Dodge trade, and the railroad crews. Even lawmen and prostitutes had to eat. Nobody seemed inclined to legislate against the selling of canned goods, coffee beans, and soda crackers, so Bob Wright didn’t stand to get hurt all that much if the Prohibitionists took hold in west Kansas, the way they had in the eastern part of the state.

It was that steady stream of morally unobjectionable cash that allowed Bob to admire the iron self-control George Hoover needed to keep a straight face while he talked about putting brothels and gambling dens and bars out of business.

Big George aimed to be on the right side of Front Street when civilization arrived, and that was smart. Any day now, the politics and the economy of Dodge City were going to shift from one side of the tracks to the other. And when they did, there’d be no going back. Saloon owners like Chalkie and Dog considered it the cost of doing business when they replaced window glass shot out by drunken cowboys, but there were families moving into town now and random gunfire scared them. Local grangers feared the Texas longhorns would infect their own stock with tick fever, and local farmers complained that the drovers cut their fences and let the herds trample cropland. Soon, settlers like that would hold more votes than those who served the cattle interests. When they did, old-timers like the men at this table—who’d built towns up from the bare ground—they’d be on the outs. It had happened in Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Caldwell. It was going to happen in Dodge, too, and soon.

Chalkie Beeson was right about half of it. George Hoover intended to run for mayor on a Reform ticket again, and this time he’d have the railroad men behind him. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe had a lot invested in the roaring hell that was Dodge, but its owners had begun to back Reform demands to close the saloons and dance halls on Sundays at least. Eastern visitors were disturbed by the open drunkenness that offended George Hoover’s birdy little wife, Maggie, and by the same brazen prostitutes who annoyed Bob’s own wife, Alice.

Even Bob was starting to be concerned. He tried to keep his daughter inside when the drovers were in town, but Belle had a mind of her own. He couldn’t watch her round the clock or keep her locked up half the year. Short of posting an armed and gelded guard in the hallway, there wasn’t much more Bob could do, apart from getting her married off before she got out of hand.

Ignore it, deny it, or fight it, change was inevitable. “The smart man doesn’t just wait for the future,” Bob often told his children. “The smart man shapes it.” His whole life was proof of that.

He had come west alone in 1856, a boy possessed of nothing but a fierce desire to better his condition. He was still driving freight for the Mexico trade when he saw the commercial potential of a site where the Santa Fe Trail crossed the Arkansas River just west of Fort Dodge. It was spang in the middle of the buffalo range, but it could have been a fine homestead, with a trading post, maybe. There was a spring-fed creek nearby. Geese and duck, three seasons out of four. Fish year round. Otter, beaver, and muskrat for the fur trade.

Bob kept his eye on that piece of land, especially after he got himself appointed sutler to Fort Dodge after the war. In those days, the fort was just about the only thing on the prairie between Kansas City and Denver. Soldiers had no recreational alternative to standing at the bar in Bob’s store, spending all $13 of their monthly pay on drink. Given the fort’s atmosphere of general boredom, simmering rancor, and the assiduous cultivation of grudges, manly moments of indignation or disagreement were liable to get physical. Bob insisted it was no extra trouble to deliver whiskey to combatants who’d been hurt badly enough to require a stay in the post hospital. Didn’t even charge extra for the service!

When the medical officer complained about drunken brawls breaking out among convalescents, the fort commandant prohibited liquor on the post. Bob considered this an infringement on his constitutional right to sell whatever he wanted, wherever he wanted, to whoever had the cash to buy it, but there was no sense paying a lawyer to argue the point. The solution was to ride five miles west, stake out that creekside site on the bluffs above the Arkansas River, and invent Dodge City.

Bob knew what men saw when they looked at him. They saw a scrawny fella with a weak chin—the kind that was supposed to be a sure sign of mental inferiority and a feeble character. He hated mirrors, but Bob made himself study his reflection every morning when he shaved: to see what others saw and daily renew his determination to turn that disadvantage to his benefit. Let ’em believe what they like, he’d tell himself as he trimmed the luxuriant mustache that overhung his little jaw like a mountain crag.

All his life he’d made men pay for their slights and disregard. In Topeka, the legislative big bugs in the Kansas House of Representatives had taken one look at the storekeeper from Dodge and dismissed him as a good-natured, slightly simpleminded rube. And yet after two years in office, the Honorable Robert C. Wright had deftly blocked a boneheaded farmers’ relief bill, and then cornered the southern cattle trade for Dodge by getting the Texas tick quarantine line moved to the eastern boundary of Ford County.

Let ’em sneer, that was his motto. Stupid sonsabitches.

He was only thirty-eight, but he had already exceeded his boyhood dreams of wealth and power. In the six years since he drove his first stake into the ground, while the rest of the whole damn country was going bust, he had made himself quietly, securely rich, and groceries were the least of it.

Millions of dollars changed hands in Dodge each season and every penny of it passed through the massive safe Bob Wright had in his back room. Cattlemen, shippers, meat processors, the army, freight companies, the railway. They all had payrolls. They all needed transfers, checks, credit. They all paid fees and interest. No matter what it was or who was involved, Bob got a slice of every transaction. It all added up, and every single dollar was revenge for the snickers and jests of lesser men.

Of all the men Bob hated, and that was just about every man he knew, only Big George Hoover had ever taken Bob’s true measure. In a few months’ time, George might well take the mayoralty. Worse yet, he had applied for a license to open a real bank. There was only one conclusion: George Hoover was aiming to beat Bob Wright at his own game. And Bob would sooner sell his daughter to white slavers than let that happen.

So when the time was right, Bob brought the poker conversation back around to politics, and when it was his turn to deal again, he laid the cards aside. “Seems to me, Chalk, what you’re asking is, how do we cut the legs out from under Reform and make a buck doing it?” He looked around the table and saw no bright ideas waiting to be expressed. “How about if we don’t wait for the reformers to outlaw vice altogether? How about if we regulate it some, and tax it?” he suggested, like he was offering an idea that just occurred to him.

“No taxes!” Deacon cried.

“Well … All right, then, we could
fine
it.”

“Same thing,” Dog said, shrugging.

“But it’s not a tax,” Bob said innocently. “And then, see, we could use the fines to pay the men we hire to enforce the regulations. Wyatt Earp, for instance.”

“Oh, hell!” Chalkie cried. “Not that prig!”

“Well, see, I’ve been thinking—”

Deacon snorted. “Don’t hurt yourself, now, Bob.”

Bob joined in the laughter at his expense, but it was right then and there that he decided to open a hotel and put the Dodge House out of business.

“Well, see, Deacon, when I heard the
Times
might back Wyatt for Ford County sheriff, I thought, How about if the city appoints him chief deputy? It would make reformers who read the
Times
happy, and it would make Wyatt beholden to us, not George Hoover. What do you fellas think?”

“If Wyatt’s enforcing the laws,” Deacon admitted, “he’ll think he’s on the side of the Lord.”

“And he’ll be makin’ money off the fines,” Dog observed. “Which means you don’t have to pay him much.”

You
, Bob thought. Interesting choice of words … It was time to shorten up on Dog Kelley’s leash.

Chalkie grinned. “The bastard’s bought—and he’s bought on the cheap. I like it!”

By the end of the poker game, the new ordinances had been discussed and written up. Public drunkenness was prohibited. Why allow cowboys to wander the street when they could be corralled inside, drinking and gambling and whoring? Disorderly conduct—understood to mean prostitutes soliciting during daylight hours—was also banned. Everybody knew where to find the girls anyway.
No riding on the sidewalks
passed without quibble.
No horses above the ground floor of any building
took longer.