Doc: A Novel (19 page)

Wyatt was born after his father got back from the Mexican war and had never known him to be any different. Of all the boys, Wyatt was always the most conscientious. From the time he was small, he made it his business to stay ahead of his father’s orders. Asked about his chores, he’d look Nicholas in the eye and say, “Done it, sir.” Quizzed about the details of the job, Wyatt answered briefly. He was always polite enough, as far as Virginia could see, and he never shirked, but that just seemed to make Nicholas hot up more. All of the boys took their beatings, but Wyatt always caught it worst.

When Morg was little and things got tense, he would climb up into Virginia’s lap, too young yet to be directly involved in these hushed skirmishes but braced, like his mother, for the moment when his father would explode because Wyatt didn’t say “sir,” or because Wyatt hadn’t answered quick enough, so Nicholas could accuse him of thinking up a lie to tell.

“Say sorry!” Morgan would plead, speaking Virginia’s mind. “Say sorry and he’ll stop!” But Wyatt was pure Earp. Even when he was a boy, there was something stern and resolute about him, something that could absorb his father’s anger and draw strength from it, something that would not bend and could not be broken.

Wyatt wasn’t more than seven when he first took on the full fury of his father’s rage, and he did so not on his own behalf but on Morgan’s. Morg was only four, but he’d snuck off to the barn to look at a picture book instead of going out to pick berries like he’d been told. When Nicholas went out looking for him, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind. That child was about to be thrashed.

Wyatt was on his father’s heels. Without thought or hesitation, he darted between his father and his little brother, and gave Nicholas back the language Wyatt himself had heard from earliest childhood.

“Leave him be, you worthless goddam pile of shit!”

It took Virginia and three of the boys to drag Nicholas off Wyatt. When they did, the child was bleeding from the mouth and almost senseless, but that afternoon Wyatt won for life what Nicholas had lost forever: the respect and ferocious loyalty of James, Virgil, and Morgan Earp.

It wasn’t the last time Nicholas beat the daylights out of one of the boys, but it was the first time he felt ashamed. He never admitted it was wrong for a grown man to do that to a little kid, but a couple of days later he came home with a book for Morgan.

For the next few weeks, all Nicholas got from any of the children was “Yes, sir” and “No, sir.” He didn’t even get that much from Wyatt, whose battered, swollen, unmoving little face was a wordless rebuke.

Go ahead
, those calm, steady, ancient young eyes said.
Go ahead, old man. I can take your worst
.

Dodge didn’t have a city hall. Generally, the saloon owned by whoever was mayor served that purpose, which made the Alhambra the seat of government for now. The Alhambra wasn’t as big as the Long Branch and the bar didn’t offer as many drinks as the Saratoga, which served everything from straight whiskey to milk punches, but Dog Kelley’s bartender was said to be the best damn billiard player in the by-God world, and a lot of men came there to test Jake Schaeffer’s claim to the title or to bet on the outcome of such competitions.

“Raise your right hand,” Dog told Wyatt. Frowning at the piece of paper on which the oath was printed, Dog said, “Repeat after me: I, Wyatt Earp, do solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Kansas …” Dog waited.

“Go on,” Wyatt said.

Dog shrugged, finishing, “And that I will faithfully and honestly discharge the duties of deputy marshal of the City of Dodge durin’ my term of office, so help me God.” The crack and roll of ivory balls stopped, as did the conversations at the gambling tables. Dog looked up from the paper. Wyatt was just standing there with his brother Morgan and the rest of the police force. Waiting. Sometimes Dog thought Wyatt might be a little slow. “You want me to read it again?”

“I got it the first time. I want to get something straight,” Wyatt said. “Somebody breaks the law, I don’t care whose friend he is, I’m taking him in.”

“Sure, Wyatt. That’s fair,” Dog said.

“That goes for everybody,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at the other men. “Not just me and Morg.”

“You bet.”

“I want Bat and Charlie sworn in as city, too.”

“I’m not sure that’s necessary,” Bat told Dog. “Dodge is inside Ford County, so I’m thinking maybe we have jurisdiction in town, too.”

Wyatt shook his head. “City police have jurisdiction inside town limits. Sheriff’s department covers unincorporated territory in the county. I don’t want somebody getting off because Bat or Charlie made the arrest.”

“I’ll swear them in as city,” Dog said, “just in case. Anything else?”

“Shotguns. One for each man. An extra, loaded, in every saloon, behind the bar.”

“Bird or buck?” Dog asked.

“Bird. I want a bang, not bodies.”

Dog nodded.

“It’s two dollars for every arrest, right?”

“That’s right, Wyatt. I tried to get you three, but—”

Wyatt turned to the other men on the force. “We work in pairs. Point and backup. Morg and Stauber, Bat and Charlie, Jack and Chuck. I’ll circle. We pool the fines. No money for dead men. End of the month, we split the cash up even.”

Nobody objected.

“All right, then.” Wyatt picked up the Bible with his left hand and raised his right. “I, Wyatt Earp, do solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Kansas, and that I will faithfully and honestly discharge the duties of deputy marshal of the City of Dodge during my term of office, so help me God.”

He got it word perfect, too, Morgan noticed, which was better than either Bat or Charlie did when Dog swore them in. By that time, everybody in the saloon was watching as Wyatt pinned the badge on his shirt and drew a map in the beer slops on a table.

“The river,” he said, making a wavy line. “The bridge.” A straight line over the wavy one. “Tollbooth.” A dot, and then a T-shape. “Bridge Street. Front.”

He looked up. The deputies nodded.

“Morg and Stauber: north end of the bridge, here and here. Bat and Charlie, south end. Jack and Chuck, down at the corner, second-floor windows of the Green Front and the Lady Gay. Street’s mine.”

Wyatt looked at each one of his men in turn, for that was what they were. His, and no argument about it.

“Everyone carries a shotgun, every night. You need help, fire it. Rest of us’ll come on. You see any weapon at all, bash whoever’s carrying it. Don’t argue. Don’t explain. Don’t wait.”

He looked away and then at each of them. Bat. Charlie Bassett. Chuck and Jack. John Stauber. Morgan.

“Last time I saw a lawman gunned down, the drunk who did it walked away for a twelve-dollar fine.” Wyatt fell silent. No one moved. When he spoke again, he seemed to be talking to himself. “Nobody dies tonight,” he said. “We all go home in the morning.”

In the back of the Alhambra, at a table as far from the noise and dust of the street as possible, John Henry Holliday shuffled and reshuffled a deck with absentminded precision, watching as the policemen left the saloon—all except for Morgan, who had noticed Doc and Kate there and stopped by their table briefly.

“Hey, Kate. What’re you reading?” Morg asked.

“
Crime and Punishment
. Translated from the Russian.”

“Sounds interesting. Can I borrow it when you’re done?”

She shrugged.

“Twenty bucks says Wyatt don’t even raise his voice,” Morg offered, “and the Texans do as they’re told.”

Doc reached over to lift Kate’s hand to his lips. “You’re on your own with this one, darlin’. I wouldn’t take that bet.”

“Make it ten,” Kate told Morgan. “We’re short.”

The River

W
inters in Kansas could fool you, John Riney always warned newcomers.

A man would come west in the springtime, and it would be just like the newspaper said. Homesteads weren’t free anymore, but they were sure enough dirt cheap. There were no trees to clear nor swamps to drain. No rocks to dig out before you could break ground. First day you got up and ran your eyes over your land at sunrise, you’d be so glad you came to Kansas, you’d think, Damn, how’m I gonna know when I’m in heaven after living someplace this good?

Couple months later, you knew just how tough that grassland was, and how hard you and your wife and kids and the mule had to work to bust through it—and not a particle of shade for five hundred miles, sun beating on you like a hammer. Still, you’d get your crop in, and when that first summer passed, you’d have a pretty good harvest, even after the cyclone that one time and a long stretch of dry in August.

And anyways, you could get bad weather back East, too. Farming’s the biggest gamble there is. Ask the man who’s tried it.

With no trees, you wouldn’t even notice so much that it was getting to be autumn, but then nights would cool off a lot. You’d tell your wife, “Well, it’s hot as hell, summer, but when the heat breaks, the weather’s real pleasant.” There’d be cold snaps and frost in October and you’d think, Oh, Lord. Here comes the snow! But that was squaw winter, and November would surprise you. The air would turn mild and sweet, and the light was soft and golden, slanting in low as the days shortened.

The first sign of what you were in for? Just a shift in the wind. Right before Christmas, usually. Huge clouds the color of spent charcoal would pile up on the far horizon. Suddenly the temperature would drop like a rock, and the first blizzard of the season would roar across the plains and hit you like a damn train. Men would get caught outdoors—fixing a fence, maybe—no coat, just wearing what seemed sensible that morning when the sun was shining and it looked to be another pretty day. Happened so fast, you didn’t hardly know what to think.

That’s how it was the year John Riney took over a farm from a Dutch fella, out north of Dodge. The Dutchie had a run of bad luck and went bust, what with the drought and the hoppers and the depression, but John reckoned him and Mabel and the boys could make a go of it, and by December he could see his way clear to proving up on the land.

Then one day—mid-December—John was out in the shed working on a broken harness when the breeze came up. Before he even thought twice, the wind was so strong, the whole little building started to shake and the snow was coming down like nothing he ever seen in north Arkansas. Can’t last, he told himself and went back to the harness, figuring he’d wait it out, but the storm just got worse and worse, and next time he peered through a gap in the siding, he couldn’t see the house anymore, nor hear his own voice above the wind when he hollered.

Before long, it got so bad, he said to himself, “Damn if this shed ain’t gonna come down around me.” So he crawled in between a couple of bales of hay he’d used to prop up a workbench, hoping they’d break the fall of the roof.

He never knew until that day how cold a man could get. He was shaking like anything, but all he could do was wrap his arms around himself, curl up like a babe and wait for the storm to blow itself out, except it didn’t. It just went on and on like that, and then the air started crackling, and there was lightning and thunder—in a snowstorm!—which seemed against nature.

“By God, it’s the End,” John cried, and gave himself up to Jesus and prayed for salvation. Sure enough, he felt strangely warm after a while and finally stopped shivering. In the peacefulness that followed, he believed he was dying, and though he regretted leaving his family, he was happy that the Lord was coming for him.

Later, the
Ford County Globe
reported that the temperature hit sixteen below, and that the plains surrounding Dodge were littered with the carcasses of antelope and deer and livestock and coyotes and birds. Several farmhands froze to death, but John Riney had always been a lucky man, and the proof of it was that Mabel and the boys got to him before he died, digging through the snow with their hands and an iron fry pan. They slid him out of the shed and drug him back into the house, where the door faced southeast and could still be opened, even though the snow on the northwest side reached the roofline.

It was the Lord’s mercy that John only lost parts of his feet and most of his fingers instead of his life, but there he was: a cripple, and no farmer anymore. And you’d have to call that bad luck, except that very year, Dodge City got itself a committee and built a bridge over the Arkansas.

In those days, the river was swimming-deep and too fast to cross without danger most of the time. Freighters needed to double up their ox teams to pull the wagons through it, and that meant a lot of extra work, unyoking and yoking and what all, and then their merchandise got wet because the wagon beds weren’t high enough to stay above the waterline. Or let’s say you were trying to take a herd through the river. Some of the cattle you drove all the way up from Texas would get pulled downstream and be lost, just before you got them to market. Now and then, somebody on your crew’d drown, too. That was a hell of a thing.

So it was pretty bad until Bob Wright figured out that a bridge would make Dodge more attractive as a railhead for the cattle trade. Bob’s old partner Charlie Rath knew how to build bridges, from during the war, so they got together with a finance man from Leavenworth and ordered in a lot of wood, special, and construction began.

Then Bob had the notion that folks would be willing to pay to drive across the only bridge between Hutchinson and the Colorado line just to avoid the trouble of crossing that damn river for free. Which they were. And
that
meant there had to be a tollbooth, and someone to be there all day and all night to collect the tolls, and you didn’t hardly need more than four fingers, total, to do a job like that.

See? That’s how lucky John Riney was, and he defied anyone to tell him different.

There was a nice tollhouse for him and Mabel and the kids to live in, fairly large and built real tight against the storms, and the boys swam all summer in the river, and John himself could just sit there and let the world come to him. He collected $1.50 for a two-horse team and wagon, $2 for a four- or six-horse hitch, and two bits a man, mounted. Pedestrians were 25 cents, too, but since 1874, John Riney had never once seen anybody walk across the bridge, until this very day.

“Official business,” Bat Masterson told him, ducking under the gate.

“Me, too,” said Charlie Bassett.

They were both carrying shotguns and wearing two pistols apiece. So were Morgan Earp and John Stauber, but those two didn’t cross the bridge. They just waited on either side of the end nearest the tollbooth.

Morgan said, “John, you might want to send Mabel and the kids down to Jake Collar’s for an ice cream or something.”

“Why?” John asked. “What’s going on?”

“Probably nothing, but it might get kinda noisy around here. Better safe than sorry.”

Morg’s brother Wyatt was down at the corner, talking to Jack Brown and Chuck Trask, who were sitting in the upstairs windows down at the Green Front and the Lady Gay, one leg in, one leg out, shotgun stocks resting against their thighs on the outside.

Charlie Bassett let loose a shrill whistle. John Riney swiveled in his chair and saw the dust rise from a crew coming in from the pastureland south of the river.

“Mabel!” he yelled. “Git the boys and git into town!”

“Why?” she yelled back from the kitchen.

“Do as you’re told, woman!”

A crowd was forming on either side of Bridge Street. Whores and gamblers, and Bob Wright, and Dog and Chalkie, and Deacon Cox, and some kids galloping theirselves around on stick horses, hollering and waving their hats like drovers, and Hamilton Bell and Big George Hoover, and a big bunch of off-duty soldiers from the fort, and gamblers making book on what would happen next. Pretty much everybody in town was standing around like they were waiting for a parade to pass by, but it was only Morg’s brother Wyatt, walking toward the bridge down the center of the street.

Mabel came out, drying her hands on her apron. “What’s going on?” she asked. “Wyatt, nice to see you again.”

“Afternoon, Mrs. Riney,” he said, touching the brim of his hat when he drew even. Wyatt leaned his shotgun up against the north wall of the tollhouse, where it was handy but out of sight. “You best go back inside, ma’am. John, keep the gate down ’til I tell you different.”

With Dodge getting closer, the drovers got noisier, and you could hear them whooping now and shooting off their guns. Wyatt waited until the first bunch of them banged onto the bridge. Then he stepped out to stand just behind the center of the tollgate.

A moment later, eight barrels of four shotguns went off like cannon at the corners of the bridge. The next instant, forty-some horses were rearing and squealing, with their riders yelling and trying to check up those ponies.

Wyatt stood quietly during the general uproar and confusion, paying no mind to the curses and demands, just waiting until the cowboys shut up and started to get scared. Which didn’t take long because the bridge was pretty beat up after being crossed by ten million longhorns and Lord knows how many thousands of freight wagons loaded high with buffalo hides before that. When they finally stopped hollering, those Texas boys could hear the groan and creak of a wooden trestle that was none too sturdy anymore, and the roar of the river beneath it. They could see how the roadbed planks were kind of rotten, and they could smell the gun smoke that came drifting out of those street howitzers when Bat and Charlie and Morg and Stauber broke, and tossed shell casings aside, and reloaded.

An older fella pushed his mount through the crowd that was bunched near the tollgate. He pulled up when he saw Wyatt and looked at him, hard.

“Afternoon, Mr. Rasch,” Wyatt said, polite as you please. “I don’t know if you remember me from Ellsworth, sir.”

“I remember you, Wyatt,” Rasch said.

John Riney heard Morg mutter, “Probably still has the headache.”

“I wonder if you’d mind having a word with me before your crew goes into town,” Wyatt said. “John, let Mr. Rasch through.”

John hauled on the counterweight from where he sat, then let the gate drop down again before anyone else could pass. Rasch rode through but didn’t dismount, and Wyatt didn’t ask him to.

“I expect you heard about Ed Masterson,” Wyatt said.

Rasch nodded. “Good man, but out of his latitude.”

“Yes, sir, I agree,” Wyatt said. “Dodge is open for business, Mr. Rasch, but you and your men should know we’ll be enforcing the laws. They can wear their guns into town, but they don’t ride in shooting. First place they go into—livery, bar, store, hotel—they rack their hardware and leave it. They can call for the weapons on their way out of town, but they don’t ride out shooting, either. Anything gets out of hand, we’re busting heads and jailing ’em. Fair warning, sir. It’s twenty dollars apiece to get them out in the morning—”

“Twenty dollars!”

“Yes, sir, and I know you don’t want that expense. This’ll carry more weight if they hear it from you. I’m giving you a chance to talk to them.”

Richard Rasch sat a bit, chewing it over. Then he nodded to John, who lifted the gate for him again. Rasch’s crew formed up around him, listening to what he had to say. When he got to the part about their pistols, there were a few protests and a lot of unchristian remarks. Rasch cut off the backtalk with a look, and waited for shrugs and nods and Yessirs before returning to John to pay the toll.

The crew rode over the bridge and Rasch steered them toward Ham Bell’s corral, where they could leave their horses and their guns.

Down at the south end of the bridge, Charlie Bassett looked at Bat, who shook his head in dumb amazement. They walked across the bridge, joining Morg and Stauber.

“That was the easy part,” Wyatt told them. “Watch for trouble with the troopers.”

Mabel Riney retrieved Wyatt’s shotgun from next to her kitchen door and handed it to him. “Take care, now,” she told him.

“Yes, ma’am,” Wyatt said. “We will.”

“Damn if that don’t beat all,” John Riney said, watching him go.

Mabel said, “Don’t curse, John,” and went back inside to finish making supper.

A few yards down Bridge Street, Doc and Kate waited for Morgan to pass by. Doc took off his hat and bowed. “Achilles and his Myrmidons!” he declared in his soft-voiced way. “If your brother is wise, he will keep his heel well-armored, sir.”

Morg had no idea what that meant, but he could tell it was a compliment somehow. “I told you he was something.”

“It was neatly done,” Doc agreed.

Like everyone else in Dodge City, John Henry Holliday was still working out what he had just witnessed. There was an admirable element of
sangfroid
, but something else as well, visible but unspoken. A deferential civility, he decided, combined with … a physical insolence that subtly welcomed a challenge. It was an interesting approach.