Epitaph (42 page)

“My cousins Robert and George send me photographs of their children now and then.”

“No, I mean having kids. Of your own.”

Arched brows rose high over slate-blue eyes. “Well, now. Is Miss Louisa . . . ? ”

“No. She'd like that. We're not doing anything to prevent it, but . . .”

They were taking a break, sitting amid the beer kegs and crates behind the Alhambra. Now that Morgan had quit Wells Fargo, Doc was training him on the faro table. Wyatt was going to bank Morg when he got good enough to deal on his own, but that seemed a long way off. Doc said faro was a stupid game, but it was fast. Morg found the bets hard to follow and hated being indoors so much.

“It's kinda strange,” Morg said. “Six of us brothers, and Newton's the only one with kids.”

Doc took out one of those thin, black cigars he favored now because they were easier on his lungs than cigarettes. “Newton's children were born before the war, were they? Before he enlisted?”

“Now that you mention it. Why?”

“‘A night with Eros, a lifetime with Mercury . . . '”

Doc stopped, choking on the first draw, as usual. What happened next was so much a part of him that you hardly noticed. The cough. The handkerchief. The flask uncapped. A sip or two of bourbon to dull the pain in his chest. Everything back into his pockets. Then he'd pick up with whatever he was saying as if nothing had interrupted the thought.

“Folks had bigger families before the war, in my observation. If men were lucky enough to survive the fightin', they were usually unlucky enough to bring a souvenir home to their wives and sweethearts. Venereal disease has run rampant ever since. The damage is internal, but it can interfere with what Mr. Darwin calls reproductive
success. Children may not be in the cards for any of us whose lives have not been pure.”

“Oh,” Morgan said. “Damn.”

“Yes, indeed,” Doc said softly. He looked at Morgan sideways. “Thinkin' about ghost lives, are we?”

“Yeah,” Morgan said. “Maybe.”

Not his own so much but Lou's, for she was not the wife of a clean-living, hardworking, sweet-faced farmer with a big spread and a good future ahead of him. No, Lou was shacked up with a man who meant well. A man who was good-natured, if not ambitious. A man who had just realized that Higgs might be the closest thing to a baby they'd ever have.

Doc was leaning back in his chair, eyes narrowed in speculation. “You know what you need, son?”

“What?”

“A decent suit of clothes. Marine-blue gabardine, I should think. With a chalk stripe perhaps. That, and a justice of the peace.”

“Doc, what in hell are you talking about?”

“You. Marryin' Lou.”

“Lou doesn't want to get married,” Morg said, a little too quickly. “She said a wedding might make Allie feel bad because Virg can't marry her.”

“Very thoughtful. Very considerate. I would expect nothin' less of Miss Louisa, but two witnesses are all you need. Nobody else has to know.” He looked away. “Make her your wife, even if you can't give her children.”

Morgan chewed on that awhile before he asked, “What about you, Doc? You ever think about being married?”

“All the time,” Doc said, “but she's in a convent now.”

Morgan just about fell off his barrel. “Kate's in a convent?”

Doc's wheezy laugh lurched into a serious coughing fit, but his eyes were merry over the handkerchief. “God a'mighty, Morgan! If you
could see your face! No, not Kate. There was a girl back in Georgia I might have married if I hadn't come out here for my health. Martha Anne will always be dear to me, but she is a bride of Christ now. At my best, I could not have rivaled Lord Jesus, and I am a long way from my best.”

Doc ground the stub of his little black cigar into the dust. Morgan stood and offered the dentist an arm for leverage.

“As for Miss Kate,” Doc concluded wryly, “she is a foul-mouthed, pigheaded Hungarian harridan who has made it amply clear that she would not have me on a silver platter.” He looked northward, toward Globe, Arizona. “Even so . . . I miss her.”

T
HERE ARE WOMEN WHO DO NOT WISH TO BE PURSUED.
During a dozen years of active frontier prostitution, Mária Katarina Harony had often declared, “I pick and I choose!” That was no idle boast. In the grim world of two-dollar house girls, Kate Harony had always named her price, getting what she demanded and doubling the fee if a john dared to argue.

“I know what I'm worth,” she'd declare. “If that's more than a cheap bastard like you can afford, be damned to you.”

Men had lined up, year after year, hoping to be accepted. How many of them? Four thousand? Five? Maybe more. Too many, that's for sure. She was thoroughly tired of men and their lust. Tired of the whole damn business.

It's a rare whore who anticipates that the market for her wares will turn. Rarer still: a whore who saves her cash and makes plans for what comes next. Kate Harony was a realist who'd always kept an eye out for the next opportunity and in the beginning, that's all Doc Holliday was. A way out. A way up.

Of all the men who'd had her, Doc alone asked the right questions and showed an interest in the answers. He alone knew her for what she was: the pampered, well-educated daughter of a Budapest physician. Fluent in four modern languages, familiar with the Greek and Latin classics. Exiled by war, impoverished, orphaned, fostered out. Ruined
by the guardian who should have protected her, she'd run away, and it was in a string of frontier brothels that she learned her seventh language: a vulgar and ungrammatical English. Doc, too, had lived with luxury in childhood, with poverty in adolescence, and with hardship in adulthood. He admired the nerve and self-possession she brought to the only work a girl could get paid for on the frontier. His respect meant a great deal to her. So did his cash. So, eventually, did he.

She never meant to love him.

He didn't make it easy, for if Doc deplored the way Kate made her money, she was infuriated by how he spent his. They had traveled together off and on since 1878, a pair of souls chained together in the fourth ring of the Inferno—the miser pushing a boulder up a hill while the spendthrift shoved it down. Doc could win in an hour what Kate earned in six months, but he'd spend it just as quickly. He insisted that they live in a town's best hotel, that they eat in the finest restaurants. It was French frocks for her, English suits for him, lavish parties for his friends. And then there was the stupid way he'd slip a few bucks to anyone he felt sorry for! She understood that he was trying to recapture childhood's careless abundance, but they weren't aristocratic children anymore, and the way he squandered money drove her crazy. The very fact that he had walked away from their saloon in Las Vegas—just
gave
her his interest in it—proved what an idiot he was about finances. And how could he possibly believe it was wrong to kill a dangerous, crazy, drunk bastard like Mike Gordon? Doc did the world a favor when he shot that mad dog down, but she couldn't make him see that.

She had no reason to stay near the sanatorium after he left, so she sold out and cleared enough to buy a six-bedroom boardinghouse in a silver camp in northern Arizona. She'd gone from silk to calico before, but this time she wasn't drudging for an Iowa bastard who called himself a foster father but worked her all day and rode her all night. This time, by God, she was on her own and liked it that way.

She divided the six rentals into two twelve-hour shifts. “You don't
need no bed when you're working,” she told each miner. “I'll give you a discount to share.” That was a lie but one they fell for, each of them hoping that she was part of the deal. She hired a cook, learned to make plain, cheap meals in quantity, fired the woman, and did the work herself to reduce expenses. “The goddess of parsimony,” Doc called her once, and he hadn't meant it as a compliment.

Then, he started sending all these telegrams, each one more provoking than the last. Why did he waste money on Western Union when a penny stamp would have sent a whole letter? Was he afraid she would see from his handwriting that he was sick again? Was he trying to trick her into coming to Tombstone so she would nurse him like she did in Dodge? “George Sand was an imbecile,” she'd mutter at night, rereading the stack of messages before she turned down the lamp and went to sleep.

The telegrams finally stopped coming at the end of April. In what appeared to be a final contact, Doc had sent a pair of earrings. Indian turquoise set in Mexican silver. “I thought of your eyes when I saw these,” he wrote, his beautiful copperplate handwriting firm and controlled. “Perhaps you will think of me when you wear them. In the meantime,
dum spiro, spero.
” That seemed to be the end of it. Which was a relief at first. But as the weeks passed, she began to wonder if he really was sick.
Dum spiro, spero:
While I breathe, I hope. Was that some veiled reference to his disease?

She was too damn busy to sit and read a newspaper these days. They were just advertisements and bullshit anyway. Still, when a month had passed with nothing further from him, she asked Florence at the grocery store if there'd been anything in the news lately about Doc Holliday.

Learning that Doc was a suspect in a stage robbery back in March confirmed her opinion of journalism. Doc hated dealing faro because it made him feel like a thief to take money from men who didn't stand a chance of winning a game they didn't understand. Kate was about to tell Florence, “I know Doc—he'd starve before he'd steal!” But before she could, the man behind her in line piped up.

“Yeah, ole Doc, he'll shoot you just to see if his gun works. He's wanted in Las Vegas, too. Killed his wife. Took her up into the mountains and—
bang!
Shot her right in the head.”

Kate choked a little on this “news” but played along. “That poor woman!” she cried, making her eyes round and serious. “Except . . . I heard Doc Holliday, he always uses a knife when he kills women. How do you know he shot her?”

“I helped bury her,” the man said, proud of this swift invention.

Kate lowered her voice. “I wouldn't noise that around, mister. They'll call you accessory to murder and string you up!”

Doc would have thought that was a wonderful story.

IN MAY,
she began to think that it would be nice to get away from Globe for a while. She'd certainly earned a rest. Twelve men meant twelve breakfasts, twelve lunch pails packed, and then twelve dinners. Fifteen thousand meals, with all the shopping, cooking, serving, and cleaning that entailed. And then there was the laundry, and all the beds, and making sure the miners settled up with her before they gambled and whored and drank their pay away.

A little trip to Tombstone might be nice. Everybody said it was a real city, not a shit hole like Globe. She could stay with Bessie and James Earp—she'd known them for years professionally and counted them as friends. Florence was tired of working for the son of a bitch who owned the grocery store, and she'd been asking about Kate and her going partners on the boardinghouse. This would be a good time to see how that might work out; Flo could look after the business while Kate was gone.

A few days later, when she'd made all the arrangements, Kate went to Western Union and used one of Doc's paid-reply forms to send a telegram to Bessie Earp.

               
ARRIVING BY EVENING STAGE MAY 25 STOP DONT TELL DOC STOP

She knew Bessie would ignore the second part of the message. She knew Doc would be waiting for her at the depot and that he'd treat her like a princess—he always did. She would be haughty, perhaps a little scornful at first. Then she'd relent, and they'd have a few drinks, and the fun would begin. She'd take some cash down with her, too, and let Doc parlay it into something more. Maybe even set up a few poker games for him. It'll be just like old times, she thought.

And to everyone's misfortune, she was right.

THERE WAS A LONG LIST OF PEOPLE
who'd died abruptly in and around Tombstone during its first three years of existence. When Mária Katarina Harony awoke on May 27, 1881, she did so with an absolute certainty that she would soon be counted among them. This conviction did not come to her from the abstract philosophical assurance of the famous syllogism arising from the premise “All men are mortal.” It arose instead from two objective facts: Someone angry was banging on a door, and the noise was going to kill her.

The need to rid herself of that last shot of whiskey battled with dread of the spasmodic violence that would precede relief, but the mere thought of vomiting was now enough to trigger the act. Rolling onto the side of the bed, she threw up over the edge.

This would be the high point of her day.