Doc - Mary Doria Russell [173]
It was a cool evening, but Doc was sweating.
“Doc, are you all right?” Morg asked. “You don’t look so good.” He meant it kindly, but the moment he said it, he knew Doc was going to take it wrong.
“Why, thank you, sir,” Doc said, cold-eyed. “How charmin’ of you to point that out. You, of course, are the very picture of rude health, which evidently entitles you to interfere with the livelihood of others, you arrogant, meddlin’ sonofabitch.”
Morg had heard plenty of that kind of thing come out of Doc’s mouth, but this was the first time he’d been the target himself, and it was a shock to be spoken to like that. Virgil took no guff and would have cracked Doc for it. Wyatt was tolerant of back talk as long as it stayed talk; he’d have shrugged it off and walked away.
Morg sat down and glanced at the bottle on the table. It was three-quarters empty. “Hitting it pretty hard tonight,” he observed.
“And precisely how is that any business of yours? Was there an election I missed?” Doc asked. “Has temperance come to west Kansas? I have not created a disturbance. Am I in violation of some new city ordinance?”
“No, Doc, but we’re friends—”
“Well, get off me, then!”
Doc reached for the bottle. Morg got to it first. That alone was a sign of how much Doc had put away. Morg meant to move the bottle just out of reach, but a hand clamped over his wrist.
“Leave it,” Doc warned.
Morg let loose, a little startled by how strong Doc’s grip was.
Doc refilled his water glass and damn near drained it.
“Damn,” Morg whispered. “Jesus … What’s wrong, Doc?”
Certain that if he were to move at all—even slightly, even to speak—everything human in him would be lost to blind, bestial, ungovernable rage, John Henry Holliday sat silently while in the coldest, most analytical part of him, he thought, If I go mad one day, it will be at a moment like this. I will put a bullet through the lung of some healthy young idiot just to watch him suffocate. There you are, I’ll tell him. That’s what it’s like to know your last deep breath is in your past. You won’t ever get enough air again. From this moment until you die, it will only get worse and worse. Bet you could use a good stiff drink now, eh, jackass?
So he let Morgan Earp wait for his answer, just as he himself waited—patiently, helplessly—until he could be sure that the liquor had taken hold, and he could feel himself inch back from the edge of the abyss. And when at last he spoke, his voice was soft and musical. “Flaubert tells us that three things are required for happiness: stupidity, selfishness, and good health. I am,” he told Morgan, “an unhappy man—”
The coughing hit again, and though he was shamed by the whine that escaped him, he kept his eyes on Morg’s until the fit passed. “Tuberculosis toys with its victims. It hides, and it waits, and just when we are sufficiently deluded to believe in a cure—”
“But I—I thought … It’s just that cold, Doc. And the laudanum’s helping—”
“Oh, Christ, Morg! This is not a cold! As for laudanum—God knows how Mattie can stand that poison! Usin’ it is like bein’ dead already.”
“But you were better this summer,” Morg insisted. “I thought—”
“Well, you were wrong! We both were …”
He had spent his entire adult life dying, trying all the while to make sense of a dozen contradictory theories about what caused his disease and how to treat it, when his own continued existence could be used to support any of them. Or all of them, or none. Because of what he’d done, or not done, or for no reason at all, the disease sometimes went into retreat, but only as a tide retreats—
He tried to think of a way to explain all that—maybe telling Morg to think of the difference between a pardon and a reprieve—but the taste of iron and salt rose again in his pharynx, and