Doc

by Mary Doria Russell

Hope—cruelest of the evils that escaped Pandora’s box—smiled on him gently all that summer.

“South Carolina is too damn small to be a country and too damn big to be an insane asylum.”

“Wyatt,” the man told him, “the entire criminal code of the State of Kansas boils down to four words. Don’t kill the customers.”

The facts were these. Dodge City did not invent or manufacture goods. Dodge did not raise or educate children. It did not nurture or appreciate the arts. Dodge City had a single purpose: to extract wealth from Texas. Drovers brought cattle north and got paid in cash; Dodge sent them home in possession of neither.

Dead men don’t pay for baths, haircuts, meals, or beds. Dead men don’t buy new clothes, or ammunition, or saddles. Dead men don’t desire fancy Coffeyville boots with Texas stars laid into the shank. They don’t gamble, and they don’t spend money on liquor or whores. And that was why, when the Texans got to Dodge, there was really only one rule to remember. Don’t kill the customers. All other ordinances were, customarily, negotiable.

“I can always tell Southerners,” he told Doc at the barbershop. “Northerners’ll tell you where they’re goin’, not where they’re from. Southerners’re like Indians. They’ll ask who your relatives are until they find out, oh, my mother’s sister married your father’s uncle, so we’re cousins!”

“Seminole ain’t a tribe. It’s a word. It means ‘runaway’ in Indian. Seminoles was rebel Creeks, and Muskogee and Yuchi, and some was fugitive slaves. None of them would bow down.

Tout casse, tout passe, tout lasse. That was the lesson Kate learned in childhood. Everything breaks, everything passes, nothing lasts. Revolution was the way of the world, the only constant in life. The question was how to survive it, how to make it pay.

Freighters, hunters, railroad crews. Soldiers, miners, cowboys. Homesteaders, merchants, traders. Con men and thieves. Lawyers, physicians. Judges and journalists. White and black and brown. Male and female. Children and gray-haired elders. Hookers and farmwives. Everyone gambled. Everyone. They bet on cockfights, prizefights, dogfights. They bet on horse races, dog races, foot races. They shot craps and played euchre, seven-up, pitch, brag, and all fours. Monte, both three-card and Spanish. Roulette, vingt-et-un, faro, keno, crown and anchor, rouge et noir, and whist. Many of the games were blindingly fast. You’d have thought the money must be burning the hands that held it, so quickly was it thrown down and lost.

one redhead to a whorehouse.

“It is wrong to have a ruthless, iron heart,” Doc recited, squinting through smoke at his cards. “Even the gods can bend and change …

The hotel seemed hushed, Front Street’s cacophony effectively damped by heavy window curtains in sun-faded maroon velvet. The wooden floor was carpeted in mud-stained bilious green, the lobby furnished with a suite of dusty furniture upholstered in blue plush with yellow floral figuring. Several vivid chromolithographs decorated walls papered in a red-flocked geometric pattern. Morgan whispered, “Doc says temperance ladies decorated the place to punish hungover guests.”

Placing his palms together just like his dear old mother taught him, James H. Kelley aimed his eyes heavenward. “May the saints preserve us, the Blessed Mother protect us, and the Lord Jesus Christ save us from honest men and Methodists.”

Morgan shook his head. In his experience, killings were the result of momentary fury, or drunken foolishness, or plain clumsiness even.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

By all accounts, Wyatt Earp was as honest a lawman as you could find in Kansas—admittedly, not a high bar to clear.

“Nec spe, nec metu,” she said. Without hope, without fear.

Whatever you worship will consume you, Dong-Sing wrote one week. Bob Wright worships money. Wyatt Earp worships justice. Eddie Foy worships applause. Doc worships home and family, as I do. How will this consume us?

“They break my heart, these girls. They are so brave. Wyatt, you have to admire their nerve, at least! They go off alone into alleys and small rooms with violent, dangerous, lustful men twice their own size … Shall I confess my crime, Marshal?” Wyatt looked up. “City ordinances be damned,” Doc told him. “I am never entirely disarmed. And I just play cards with the bastards.”

Handing over two bits, the dentist looked out across the river and said in a singing kind of way, “Boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.” Then, in a regular voice, he said, “I’ll be followin’ the cattle trail south for a couple of hours, Mr. Riney.

“Dick, if you want a hill in Kansas, you have to by-God build it yourself,” he remarked.

The voice of Hope is soft but impossible to ignore.

there she was, little old Isabelle Wright, surrounded by shirts, hats, boots, canned goods, flour barrels, hair tonic, and neckerchiefs, saying howdy-do to an international conspirator wearing a dress! And

“I will pray for you,” he promised softly, cupping her chin in his hand. Hope smiled. The Fates laughed. Belle frowned.

and jailed. Freelance scolds seized on boxing as a new source of indignation to fuel America’s rancorous political debates.

the west Kansas sky is black velvet on clear, cool December nights, and the Milky Way is strung across it like the diamond necklace of a crooked banker’s mistress.