Doc - Mary Doria Russell [137]
For Wyatt, the reaction set in while he was sitting in the mud watching Hoyt ride off over the bridge, when he still believed he’d missed his target. Before Bat arrived at his side and started talking, Wyatt was all alone, and what came to his mind was that he’d missed his sister’s birthday. It was a strange thing to think, under the circumstances, but he kept coming back to it, over and over. If young George Hoyt had been a little steadier with his first shot, Adelia would always have remembered that her brother Wyatt forgot to send her a happy birthday, the year that he was killed.
Funny how much the thought bothered him.
As the night went on, Wyatt marveled that he’d been wearing a sidearm because it was so unusual for him. Ordinarily, he was just about the only sober man in town, and he counted on that for his edge. He could generally tame a troublesome drunk with a well-aimed bash across the side of the head. Carrying a weighted sap was easier than lugging a big old Colt around all night in the midsummer heat.
When he got home after his shift, he asked Mattie if she’d heard a rumor that something was going to happen. She denied it but claimed she had second sight, and said she’d had a funny feeling, so she’d handed Wyatt his gun belt before he left for work and asked him to be careful. Which was the only reason he went heeled that night: to make Mattie happy.
But if you have a gun, you’re inclined to use it. And now a kid was dying.
Wyatt didn’t go home right away when his shift was over. First he checked on Hoyt, who was still alive. Then he walked out toward the east end of town to watch the sun come up in a sky that had cleared overnight, and shone gold and pink this morning.
When he heard the familiar cough behind him, he did not turn. Doc Holliday’s steps slowed and stopped. For a while they stood together silently.
“Now I am farther from heaven than when I was a boy,” Doc said after a time. “Awful, isn’t it.”
To have someone look you right in the eye and to know that he intends to kill you. To hurt somebody so bad, he was going to die from what you did to him.
Wyatt asked, “Does it get easier?”
“No.”
That was Doc. He didn’t sugar things.
“The law can relieve a man of guilt,” Doc told him quietly, “but not of his remorse.”
The next day, before work, Wyatt went back to the jail to check on Hoyt again. By then the boy had been moved to the doctor’s clinic, so Wyatt walked over there and sat with him awhile. Most of the time Hoyt babbled, but once he seemed lucid. He looked at Wyatt—right at him, like before—and said, “You seem like a nice fella. I don’t know why they want you dead.”
“Who?” Wyatt asked. “Who wants me dead?”
“They was gonna pay me a thousand dollars, and get the charges dropped, after.”
“Who?” Wyatt asked. He never got an answer. The boy kept talking, but didn’t make any sense after that.
Wyatt went to work, like usual, but for the next two days he had a strange feeling of not hearing things quite right, like there was cotton in his ears, or water or something. And thoughts kept coming to him.
I could be dead instead of walking down this street.
Morg could be standing at my grave instead of joshing me about the hole in my hat.
I could be in the ground instead of drinking this coffee.
Somebody wants me dead, he’d think, and maybe that shouldn’t have been such a surprise, but it was, for he was just an ordinary man doing his job, and it struck him as unreasonable that anyone would pay so much to get him killed.
Hell, he thought. Give me the grand! I’ll leave.
Finally he realized he had to snap out of it before he made a mistake and let some other fool thing happen. Somebody else might get hurt.
The wire came back the day before George Hoyt died. He was wanted for cattle rustling, down near Amarillo.
Nobody in Dodge knew Hoyt personally, but the Texans in town that week clubbed together and gave the kid a big send-off. Wyatt watched the funeral procession from a small remove. A lot of the drovers looked at him like they might try something but nobody did, possibly because Morgan