Doc - Mary Doria Russell [28]
On John Henry Holliday’s best days—when he’d slept well; when a freshening breeze from the northwest cleared the air; when his cough was just a nuisance he could almost ignore—on those days, his mood lifted and soared. On one such day, he had written to Martha Anne, Western Kansas appears to have a good climate for me. Tell Cousin George that I feel quite well most of the time and take regular meals in a restaurant with a good Austrian cook. To Robert, he reported, Dodge isn’t much yet, but the town looks to grow. There are no dentists closer than Wichita, so the work will not be split among competitors, as it was in Dallas.
He needed capital to set up an office. For that, he could rely on a summer’s worth of cowboys who thought faro was easy and cattlemen who believed they knew how to play poker. It would take time to develop his practice, but he was already getting referrals from Tom McCarty, a decently educated physician who’d read up on consumption, now that John Holliday was his patient.
“No crackle in the lungs,” Tom had told him last week, “but you’ve got a thirty percent loss, is my guess.”
That was just an estimate, of course, but if it was accurate, John Henry still had 70 percent of his lungs left, and that was better than he had imagined. If he could hold that line, he’d manage just fine. Maybe next spring, he’d be healthy enough for a visit home. In the meantime, he was starting to make some friends here in Dodge. Morgan Earp was a cheerful young man who liked books and would sometimes talk about them. And Eddie Foy was always good for a laugh. All told, things were looking up.
Except for what happened to Johnnie.
Drunk and defiant, Kate waltzed in just past dawn, fully intending to pack her bags and tell Doc to go to hell. Instead, when she saw him, she closed the door quietly behind her.
He was sitting in the upholstered chair next to the window. Kate waited while he wiped his face, and blew his nose, and coughed, and got a grip.
“That boy was clubbed from behind,” he said, rough-voiced. “Some coldhearted sonofabitch rolled him over to go through his pockets. John Horse Sanders was robbed, and he was killed, and nobody gives a damn.”
Sometimes Doc seemed so young to her. So innocent. “Take it from me,” she said wearily, sitting on their bed. “Nobody gives a damn about anybody.”
Hoping to cheer him, she changed the subject. “There’s a high-stakes game tonight. Turner’s your man. He won last night and thinks it was skill. Time to put on a show, mon amour.”
He turned his face from her, the muscles in his jaw hardening. She had learned by then that it was better not to push, so she let the idea drop for now. Leaning over, she took The Aeneid from his lap, riffled the pages, and set it aside.
“That girl,” Kate said with something like pity, but her hands were moving now, around his neck, down his chest. “She don’t know you. Not like I know you, Doc. Vergil is all wrong. She should have sent you Homer.”
They rang the bell for room service when they awoke, dressed at leisure, and left Dodge House at about eleven-thirty that night, in no great hurry to arrive at the Green Front Saloon. Bets, Doc had observed, become increasingly ill-considered as games progress, when losers try to win everything back in one hand. That’s when patience paid.
A cool spring shower was just tapering off. The stockyard dust had settled out of the air. The temperature had dropped as well. Kate could feel a slight tremor when she took Doc’s arm.
“You want to stop for a drink?” she asked. “Warm up a little?”
“I’m not cold.”
Stage fright, she thought, but he had agreed with her strategy. Drive the stake into Cyclops’ eye early. Word would get around. Her Greek was better than Doc’s, but she knew he’d recognize the quote. “Enter fearlessly,” she recited. “However foreign a man may be, in every crisis it is the high face that will carry him through.”
“Brazen it out,” he translated.
“Words to live by,” she told him.
“Easy for Athena to say.”
Front Street was alive with young men. Sauntering, staggering. Laughing, puking.