Doc - Mary Doria Russell [30]
“It’s a game for imbeciles! They all play until they lose,” she’d said back in Dallas. “Take their money and be done with it. Why do you warn them?”
Doc sat up, and coughed, and moved to the edge of the bed, where he reached out for the makings and rolled himself a cigarette. He was quiet for a while, smoking and watching the dawn through the window of her room above the bar. She could have counted the bones of his spine, prominent beneath the light linen shirt.
“Because,” he said finally, “they break my heart.”
Startled, she barked a laugh. “They don’t break mine! I like to watch the fuckers get fucked.”
He turned to stare at her, appalled by her coarse language and her callousness. “What an ugly thing to say.”
She was ashamed and so she was belligerent; their first night together ended with their first fight. She threw the skinny, smug, high-hat bastard out of her room. But when the hangover wore off, she found herself remembering his hands. And how clean he was. And how gentle. The next night, she sat down near his table again to watch him deal.
Like Kate, Doc had made a study of gamblers and had theories about the breed. “A game like faro gives men the power to stop time,” he told her when they’d been together for a week. “That is the appeal, in my observation.”
He was lying on his back with his hands behind his head. She thought he was staring at the ceiling, the way some men will when they’ve rolled off. Later she learned that lifting his arms that way helped him breathe.
“When the bet is placed,” he said, “a moment is carved away from the past and the future. In that enchanted moment, anything is possible. A man’s debts and regrets and limitations disappear. He is buyin’ the chance to imagine—for one moment at a time—that the next card I deal will make him rich.”
Speaking, Doc had begun to shiver. Falling silent, he rolled away from her in bed. He’s cold, she thought. A Southerner with no meat on his bones. She came up close behind him, putting an arm over his shoulder, warming his bony back with her own small, soft body. She tried to remember the last time she had listened to such a thoughtful man. Not since her father died, most likely.
“I hate it,” Doc muttered. “Makes me feel like a thief.”
Faro was the means to an end for Doc, something to which he resorted when he needed to accumulate cash to play poker. Kate found that mystifying. Why give up a sure thing for a game you could lose? If it had been up to her, Doc would do nothing but deal faro night after night, raking in money from one idiot after another. Drovers, farmers, soldiers … Every damn one of them would bet his eyeballs out if you gave him odds.
“Who cares how hard they work?” she cried. “Nobody puts a gun to their heads!”
They argued their way through Texas. Nothing she said about faro made any difference to Doc, but she’d won the battle over moving to Dodge. Now that they were here, she would make it her business to find him high-stakes games.
After years of watching gamblers, she was a good judge of poker players. Doc himself could be astonishing. He didn’t cheat, as far as she could see, but he was impossible to predict, and that could be just as effective. He’d play tight and slow all evening and then destroy an opponent in twenty minutes. Raising and reraising, jacking the game up, betting like a tyrant until his baffled competitor folded or lost. Once she saw him win nearly $3,500 with a pair of nines that way and the biggest loser hardly knew what had happened to him. Two hands later, sure that Doc was bluffing, the table lost another grand to him because that time Doc had the goods. Then he played small for the balance of the night, driving the others crazy.
This evening, she had the perfect mark: a South Carolinian named Estes Turner, a consistent, aggressive player who expected the same from others. Last night in a private game at Bessie Earp’s bordello, Turner tossed a grand into a $315