Doc - Mary Doria Russell [57]
The very word made him feel calm. Piano practice. Dental practice. Pistol practice, poker practice. Practice was power. Practice was authority over his own destiny.
Luck? That was what fools called ignorance and laziness and despair when they gave themselves up to the turn of a card, and lost, and lost, and lost …
An hour later, he woke to Kate’s fingers on his buttons, to her lips, to her voice, to her breath, whiskey sweet, smoke sour.
“Viens au lit,” she was saying. “Viens t’allonger près de moi, mon amour.”
“Darlin’, please,” he mumbled. “I am beat flat. I can’t—”
“You don’t have to do nothing, Doc. I’ll do it all,” she said. “You’ll sleep good.”
“I was sleepin’.” His voice sounded fretful and peevish, even to himself, and he tried to spunk up. “You have to let me rest, Kate.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Doc. I was drunk last night, that’s all. I’ll make it up to you. I’ll make it right.”
The vulgarity. The exaggerated, theatrical, lascivious carnality. All that was gone. In its place was this fearful, earnest, pathetic need to please. He fought to open his eyes, too tired to lift a hand and stroke her hair.
“Let me make it up to you,” she said. “You’ll get some rest, you’ll feel better.”
He was consumptive and exhausted; he was male and twenty-six. And Kate, too, was practiced in her trade.
“See how good that is?” she whispered, lifting her skirts now, straddling him, lowering herself. “That’s good, isn’t it, Doc?”
She watched his face as she worked, saw the growing tension, the rigidity. She slowed her rhythm, deepening her hold, smiling when she saw release, triumphant when his breathing caught, and stopped, and then went on, without any coughing at all.
“That’s my man,” she said softly. “That’s my loving man …”
The doctors said this was bad for him, but she knew that they were wrong. They all said something different. He should rest. He should exercise. He should go to the mountains. He should stay on the plains. Get plenty of fresh air. No, stay inside. They said the smoking was bad for him, the drinking, the all-night games, but he could make so much money at the tables, and it was so easy for him! It was this day work that was killing him, anybody could see that. And it didn’t pay!
Doctors don’t know nothing, she told herself. They said he’d be dead by now, but I’m good for him. He don’t cough with me.
She waited until he slipped from her, then lifted herself and backed away. Leaving him asleep in the chair, she lay down on their bed and watched his thin chest rise and fall, rise and fall, regular and even.
Well, a little shallow, a little labored …
Don’t mean nothing, she told herself, but he looked so pale in the sunlight, his skin as colorless as his ash-blond hair.
“Ne meurs pas, mon amour. Non morais,” she whispered in the language of love, and the language of prayer. “Don’t die on me, Doc,” she whispered, over and over, watching him until her own eyelids drooped and closed. “Don’t die on me. Don’t die …”
When Wyatt Earp rode across the Arkansas River toll bridge into Dodge the morning after Johnnie’s funeral, it was not quite noon and the city was still pretty much asleep. Apart from a few hungover cowpunchers who’d drawn the short straw and had to work the stockyards, the only things moving were cottonwood fluff, dust, and Dog Kelley, who was crossing Front Street with half a dozen skinny greyhounds.
Dog knew what was coming, and waited. “Wyatt,” he said. “Welcome back.”
“You still mayor?” Wyatt asked.
“Reelected in April,” Dog confirmed.
“Still looking for a chief deputy?”
“Job’s open yet.”
“If you’d hired me in the first place,” Wyatt said, “Ed Masterson would still be alive.”
Dog squinted up toward a clouding sky, scratching at the three-day beard on