Doc: A Novel (20 page)

“Lord,” he cried suddenly, “but I do enjoy a display of professional proficiency! You owe the gentleman money, Miss Kate. Pay up.”

Kate counted out ten dollars and handed them to Morg, who was grinning ear to ear. Kate made a mouth at him and looked away.

“Don’t sulk, darlin’,” Doc said, offering his arm. “Make him buy that Dostoevsky.”

“I can make the money back in five minutes,” she said. “Let’s go milk these Texas cows.”

Rasch’s crew left the New Famous Elephant Barn’s corral and headed for Front Street on foot. Gamblers and whores laughed and waved and dispersed to the saloons, ready to start the night shift.

As Wyatt approached Wright’s General Outfitting, Bob called, “Nice work!” Wyatt acknowledged his praise with nothing more than a slight lift of his chin, which was strong and square and chiseled, and which silently proclaimed his strength of character and moral rectitude to anyone who looked at the bastard, which was everybody in town at the moment.

How in hell does he do it? Bob wondered.

Wyatt’s brother Morgan was well liked and respected, but didn’t draw the eye the way his older brother did, even though they looked so much alike. Wyatt didn’t holler or throw his weight around like Fat Larry used to, back when he was still able to get out of the marshal’s office. Bat Masterson’s clothing account was damn near enough to keep Wright’s General Outfitting in the black all on its own, and the sheriff cut an impressive figure for a man so short he wore lifts in those high-heeled boots of his, but Wyatt dressed simply. A cheap, collarless shirt. Dark trousers. Scuffed shoes. Bob wasn’t even sure that Wyatt owned a sidearm; if he did, he rarely wore it. And yet six deputies—each of them Wyatt’s equal or better in experience—simply accepted that he was running things. And forty Texas cowboys rode into town like they were on their way to church.

As though reading Bob’s mind, Chalkie Beeson said, “Jesus, I hate that sonofabitch. Goddam. I thought they’d plug him where he stood, just for asking.”

Dog laughed. “Chalk, you’re gonna owe me fifty bucks on the Fourth.”

Bob Wright waited to comment until Wyatt was well out of earshot.

“Naw …” he said then, like he was talking himself out of thinking something. “Probably just a coincidence …”

“What?” Dog Kelley asked.

“How he got them to leave their guns at Ham’s.”

“Kickback,” Chalkie said darkly, wishing he’d thought of it before Ham.

“Well,” said Deacon Cox, always reasonable, “makes a certain amount of sense to corral the horses first thing and leave the guns at Ham’s instead of letting them come through town heeled. We should’ve written the ordinance that way in the first place.”

“Golly, Deacon,” Bob said, “you must be rolling in money. Me, I could have used the extra business when they came back to the store.”

“C’mon, Bob,” Dog groaned. “You’re pullin’ in boxcars of cash, and everybody knows it.”

“I got expenses, too,” Bob pointed out. “Why, shipping costs alone can kill a merchant out here! Anyways, I better get back to the store.”

By then the saloons were getting noisy. Bridge Street was almost clear, except for Nick Klaine, who was leaning against a hitching rail, still scribbling notes for the
Dodge City Times
. Bringing up the rear, Bat Masterson came even with the newspaperman and told Charlie Bassett to go on ahead and start the patrol without him. It wasn’t much of a chance to take. Rasch’s boys wouldn’t be drunk for at least twenty minutes yet, and Bat wanted to make sure Nick got the facts right—especially the part about how he and Charlie were deputized to work within city limits, but the sheriff’s office still had jurisdiction in the county. So this was not a demotion but an expansion of responsibility.

Nick listened, and nodded, and wrote a few words. When he looked up from his notes, Wyatt was already dragging a dazed and weakly protesting young Texan to the jail. “Doesn’t waste time, does he.”

“Nope,” Bat said. “He was like that even back when me and Ed and him was hunting buffalo. Size up a herd. Move downwind of the animal most likely to be a troublemaker. Drop that one first. See, now, here’s the difference between me and Wyatt and these cowboys,” Bat continued, warming up. “Drovers are tough, but if you’re with a cattle crew—why, there’s always thirty, forty other men nearby. You got a trail boss. You got Cookie driving a chuck wagon, making meals for you like he was your mamma. Each man’s got eight or ten horses at least in the remuda. Something goes wrong—say, your horse breaks a leg or you do? Why, there’s always help near. Now, buffalo hunters? That’s a different story. You hunt buffalo, you’re the only thing on two legs for four thousand square miles. Jesus! Wet, sick, thirsty, starved, trampled—you’d just handle it or die trying.”

Nick Klaine nodded, gazing at Wyatt.

“Yep. Do or die!” Bat said. “Most I ever had was a three-man crew. Just me and Ed and Wyatt—”

“Bat!” Wyatt yelled.

“Doesn’t waste words, either,” Nick observed. “Guess you better get to work.”

All that night, when Bat and Charlie weren’t settling things down before an argument turned into a fight, or backing up a faro dealer whose customers suspected fraud, or making sure a whore got paid, Bat was going over and over in his head how he’d have written the confrontation at the tollbooth if he were working for the newspaper.
RASCH ACTIONS
, he’d have headlined it, and he thought that was pretty clever. Or maybe
NO RASCH ACTIONS
. He couldn’t decide which was better. He was particularly pleased with his analysis of why cowboys weren’t near as tough as the self-reliant ex–buffalo hunters who wore the badge. That was what you called “a good angle,” and as the night went on, Bat regretted more and more that he hadn’t saved it up for D. M. Frost instead of giving it away to Nick Klaine, because the
Ford County Globe
reached more constituents than the
Dodge City Times
.

The next morning, same as always, Bat bought both papers and read them before he went to bed. Being an elected official and not an appointee like a city marshal, he believed it was important to keep up with local politics, and he was eager to see how the toll bridge story had been told.

The
Globe
didn’t cover it at all, which was dismaying. The
Times
concluded its brief account with Nick’s laconic observation:
Our new deputy, Wyatt Earp, has a quiet way of taking matters in hand. He gives the impression that the city will be able to enforce her mandates and preserve her dignity this summer
.

Hell, Bat thought, climbing into bed. If you want something written right, I guess you just have to do the job yourself.

Still, even he had to admit that the story lacked a dramatic climax. Maybe that was why it didn’t get much ink …

Unless his brother Morgan pointed out something of interest to him, Wyatt Earp never read the papers and, unlike Bat, he finished the night with a sense of satisfaction. He’d jailed five of Rasch’s men before the trail boss made it clear to the rest that he was taking the fines for drunk and disorderly out of their own pay. The Texans still got loaded, and they still gambled, and they still whored, and they still spent their last dime in Dodge before they were done, but nobody got killed. And all the deputies went home in the morning—excepting Wyatt himself, who ate a couple of boiled eggs at the Green Front and then shuffled over to Ham’s.

The new barn smelled good. Fresh wood, fresh straw, fresh manure. Down in the last stall, Dick Naylor snorted, and nickered, and looked at Wyatt as if to say, “About time. Where you been?”

“Busy,” Wyatt told him, offering a couple of carrots from a bucket Ham had hung on a spike in the wall. “I been busy.”

He gripped Dick’s halter and made a move into the aisle. Being Dick, the horse gave him an argument about it. Wyatt got a brush out of the tack room, which changed Dick’s mind about the desirability of staying put.

“Getting fat,” Wyatt noted, sweeping dust and bits of straw off Dick’s back with long, firm strokes. “You’re done with oats. Cost too much anyways.”

When he got a rhythm going and Dick relaxed, Wyatt started working out the numbers. Five arrests a night, $2 apiece, pooled, made $10 divided by seven deputies. A little over $1.40 a night, on top of his salary, which was barely enough to live on. At that rate, it would take months to pay off the loan from James, especially if Larry Deger demanded a cut of the fines because he was the city marshal, even though all he did was sit in the office eating and doing paperwork.

Course, it was pretty quiet last night, with just Rasch’s gang new in town. There’d be more arrests when they had two or three fresh crews coming in all at once. For the next few weeks, every outfit approaching Dodge would be laboring under the impression that Ed Masterson’s laxity still obtained. The new ordinances and enforcement standards would have to be explained repeatedly, and every crew would have a few idiots who needed to be knocked cold to get their attention. Eventually, as the cattle outfits returned to Texas, word would filter back along the trails that Dodge was no longer tolerating any nonsense.

Which meant there’d be fewer arrests as the season went on.

The better Wyatt did his job, the less money he’d make, and the sooner the town would let him go, come cool weather. “Dick,” he said, bending over the horse’s near front foot to clean out around the frog, “I can’t win for losing.”

Another man might have considered bashing a few extra cowboys a night, just to run the fines up. In the past, Wyatt himself had indulged in the practice, along with a few other habits involving more enterprise than integrity. That was exactly why he didn’t anymore: he knew from experience that his conscience bothered him a whole lot longer than the time it would take to pay James back legitimately.

He finished with Dick’s hooves and got him saddled.

“All right,” he said, swinging up. “Let’s see what you can do.”

With the sun low behind them, he struck west and took Dick out to the county racetrack, half a mile beyond the city limits. This time of day, the place was deserted, so Wyatt let the horse get used to the surface, alternating easy with quick laps. The track was harder than Dick was accustomed to, but he did fine.

“Best win on the Fourth,” Wyatt told him, slowing to a walk. “If I have to sell you back to some cowboy, you’ll have to work for a living.”

When he spoke to Dick now, it was just to amuse himself. Most of the time, Wyatt didn’t so much as
think
what he wanted. Dick would know his intentions from a little shift in weight or a slight tightening in the reins, even before Wyatt himself noticed what he was doing. This morning, for instance, Dick left the track and started off north toward the farms, like he knew they were due for some real exercise for the first time since getting back to Dodge.

It struck Wyatt as interesting how close you could get to an animal and how much you could have in common with a dumb brute. He recalled Morg reading somewheres that when the Indians first saw a Spaniard on horseback, they thought they were looking at one animal with two heads. Wyatt found that easy to understand. Watch a stockman on a cutting horse, say, and you’d come to the notion yourself. A cow would get ready to turn tail and change direction or bolt for the herd. The horse would see what she had in mind, slide to a chest-deep stop, pivot, and beat that beeve every time. A good rider just slacked the reins and kept out of his horse’s way, but he had to anticipate the action and adjust his own balance or be thrown for his inattention.

There was beauty in that wordless partnership, and Wyatt could never watch such a marvel without feeling moved. He came closest to it himself when he was on Dick at the line, waiting for the start. Dick didn’t need spurs or a quirt any more than Wyatt himself. They felt the same tension, reacted at the same instant, working the field together, driving for the inside or spotting a break and muscling through to a lead. Man and beast were one thing during a race.

In Wyatt’s opinion, Dick would have the advantage on the Fourth of July. Dog Kelley’s gelding, Michigan Jim, was the favorite in local races, but Dick would get long odds, for he would take the bookmakers by surprise. Until they’d seen him run a few times, nobody would expect “that two-dollar horse” to be anything much.

“They’re underestimating your cash value by a good fifteen cents,” Wyatt told Dick, who flicked an ear at him but otherwise minded his own business.

The sun was well up when they turned back toward Dodge. Wyatt was occupied with calculating how much he should hold back from James in order to put together a bet on Dick in the race, and what the payoff would be at thirty to one, when he saw another rider to the east, about five miles out.

Didn’t take but a glance at the lovely, floating gait to know who it was. That army captain—Grier, his name was—riding Roxana.

It was his father’s voice that Wyatt heard then. As always, an indictment.

It’s your own damn fault, you stupid worthless goddam pile of shit
.

All them dreams …

Trying to get about yourself, dragging an innocent boy down instead
.

Shoulda been you dead, not Johnnie
.

Dick snorted and jogged sideways a few steps, and tossed his head. Distracted, Wyatt needed a few moments to work out why the horse had lost his stride.

“Hell,” he said, disgusted, when he realized that he was crying.

“Easy, now,” he told Dick. “Easy. Settle down.”

In all his life, he had wept only twice before that he could recall. Once was back when he was ten and his sister Martha passed. The second time, he was twenty-two, and his wife had just died of typhus.

He was visiting his grandparents in Lamar, Missouri, when he first saw Urilla Sutherland. She was on her way to church, dressed up real pretty but still modest and sweet-looking. In that very first moment—before Wyatt drew his next breath—he decided that it was time to quit drinking and quit drifting and settle down so he could be near Urilla and see her twice a week at church.