The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday

by David Corbett

  Although the more salient question at this juncture is this: Why did you not see fit to inform me of these matters yourself?

  You can imagine the devastating effect of the news, not simply because I am, at last, rejected for another. The fact that you could write to me and speak at length with such an air of contentment about friends and settling down, while saying nothing whatsoever about this change of affection, made me feel more than shunned. I felt as though I no longer truly understood who you are, who I am. It seemed we both had ceased to exist.

  Have you so little regard for me, or your own dignity, as to act with such cavalier dishonesty?

  Have you lost any sense of the man you are, the man I know you to be?

  I do not begrudge your choice of happiness, but I also cannot resist the suspicion that the other half of that happiness, the dark half, is that you have come to believe I am nothing more than a pitiless moral scold, a sanctimonious shrew.

  How unfair. And yet if our roles are chosen, let us play them in full measure. For my part I will do so with utter candor, the virtue you elected to withhold from me.

  Do not think me possessed of that peculiar blindness that renders one incapable of reading between the lines. I commend your embrace of human fellowship, but it also remains clear that the devil on your shoulder has lost no command of his voice, regardless how subtle his whisperings. And there is the tragedy.

  Of all the men in the world, you remain the dearest in my heart, but you also are the one most suited to greatness. You possess a keenness of mind, a delicacy of feeling, a fineness of spirit that I cannot help but believe you yourself neglect.

  Don’t misunderstand. I am happy that you have put aside the restlessness that characterized your prior life. A man wanders because he is lost.

  If your newfound circle of friends and this woman with whom you have joined your life permit you at long last to claim a sense of home, I am happy for you. But do not deceive yourself into thinking it all is as simple as that.

  There is also a weakness in your nature, a powerful doubt in your own worth, that continues to put your very soul at risk.

  Perhaps the blame is mine, in that I should have loved you more wisely, with much less thought of myself.

  In my own defense, I have tried to counsel you as best I know how, reminding you as often and in as many ways as I can that you possess a singular dignity, and are worthy of love. Perhaps, in the end, I should take comfort that you have, at least to some degree, heeded my words, and now feel at home in your new environs. If so, I am glad.

  Regardless, I cannot nurse my wrath against you, despite the pain you have caused.

  True, the swains do not beat a path to my door. Despite the innumerable consolations of family, loneliness has become my most faithful companion.

  However, as Uncle John often remarks in his kind attempts to console his spinster niece, husbands are like painted fruit, and marriage nothing more than a cage for many women.

  I turn to Our Lord for guidance, and He offers what solace I deserve. May He do so also for you. Do not neglect Him, even in your current state of contentment. Were you to allow that to happen, it would truly and forever break my heart.

  With fond concern, always:

  Mattie

  CHAPTER 34

  Reaching the courthouse well before eight, Lisa turned into the bunker-like garage, lowered her window as she reached the ticket booth, and handed her money to the small Navajo woman in her fringed serape. With a business-day queue of cars stretched out behind her, Lisa dropped her ticket and change into her lap and promptly pulled ahead, while the tiny woman, rather than returning to her knitting and nest of magazines as she had the day before, remained at her post, waiting for the next exchange.

  Pulling into a slot on the second tier, Lisa held up her hand against a spear of light flaring through one of the tall narrow openings in the wall. As she killed the ignition, her cell started humming inside her purse. Popping the snap, she dug the phone from her clutter of stuff, thumbed in her code, and opened her TM app. A message from Nico.

  Wish I was with you. There in spirit. Remember: shoot to kill.

  She pictured him again in sweatpants and T-shirt, hair disheveled, waiting for the coffeemaker’s felicitous beep as he thumbed those words into his phone. The image left a vapor trail of loneliness across the empty sky of her mind.

  She wondered if he’d slept with one of his beautiful enigmas the night before—a Slovenian poet, perhaps, or some other variety of slutty artiste. Maybe she was standing there beside him right now, twirling his hair in her fingers, wearing one of his shirts, the classic feminine move, a claim of morning-after possession. Maybe she wasn’t even wearing that much.

  Indulging a moment of resentful envy, she wondered: Why are all the good men gay, taken, or playing hard-to-get?

  Checking for other messages, she found nothing more from Tuck, nothing from Rayella. No surprise in that, she supposed, given the text from last night. Still, it would have been nice, something, anything.

  She shooed off the self-pity, grabbed her briefcase, and left the car.

  ***

  “I think I see them,” Tuck said, squinting into his field glasses. “Along the ridge line.”

  He passed the binoculars to Rayella who lifted them to her eyes. “Where?”

  He popped several mints into his mouth, kill the morning breath. They’d spent the night in the car, him the front seat, her the back, blankets bought from a trading post outside Benson. She’d looked almost angelic in her sleep, eyes closed, hands open.

  “All the way at the top,” he said, nodding to suggest the direction. “Little to the right.”

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “They may have already dropped onto the trail heading down toward the airstrip. It’s pretty overgrown.” He passed her the tin of mints, shook them for emphasis when she didn’t take them right away. “And a pretty fair distance.”

  They’d parked as close to the Bristlecone as they dared, just off the Tombstone road, half a mile from the gate. The sun had yet to crest the mountain range, so the whole valley floor remained carpeted in shadow, fragrant with pine and sage.

  Rayella finally lowered the field glasses and took the mints, slipped several one-by-one between her lips, staring through the windshield. “So what now?”

  “We wait.”

  “For what?”

  “Give them time to get down off the mountain, reach the house.”

  “And then?”

  Tuck smiled thoughtfully. “That depends.”

  “I’m gonna try calling.”

  Tuck stretched out a hand, stopped her. “Not just yet.”

  Her eyes flared. “Why?”

  “You don’t know what kind of equipment they have at that ranch. Some kind of interceptor or monitoring device, pluck your signal right out of the air.”

  It was largely bullshit, but not so entirely out of the question he couldn’t sell it. He’d spent a good portion of his life spinning nonsense far more bizarre.

  Her gaze tracked back and forth, trying to read whatever she could from his eyes.

  “Besides,” he said, drawing back his hand, “it’s no picnic coming down off that mountain. Trail’s steep and wicked with switchbacks, and you’ve got cactus and thorn bushes all the way down. Then they’ve gotta scramble across the pediment at the bottom, which’ll be tricky with the downslope and the rocks, then hack their way through scrub till they hit the ranch. Let’s not distract them.”

  “So we drove all this way and slept in this car just to sit here?”

  “Only till they’ve had time to reach the bottom, maybe an hour or so. Be patient, okay? Besides, there’s something I need to walk you through.”

  He told her to open the glovebox, and when she did, discovering the two pistols he’d hidden there—both Smith & Wesson, a .45 for him, a smaller snub nose for her—he said, “You ever used one before?”

  She didn’t reach for either weap
on, just stared. “Some. Not much.”

  “Well, here’s hoping it’s not an issue today. But if it comes to that, you’re gonna need to feel comfortable with it. The smaller one’s got a nice long trigger pull so it won’t go off unless you mean it to.”

  She nodded, more to acknowledge than agree. “Where did you get these?”

  “Private dealer. No names, no record, strictly cash exchange.”

  “When?”

  “That’s not the issue.” He waited for her to look up, meet his eyes. “Look, I heard you. I get it. You didn’t come out here to sit. You want to chip in, take part. Do your share.” He reached over for the larger of the two guns. “Good for you. So do I.”

  ***

  Even before she turned the corner, Lisa heard the thrum of the generators for the TV satellite vans. A throng of cameramen and reporters stood before a sprawling crowd, circled around a quartet of clean-cut men perched atop the courthouse steps. Behind them, the building’s giant glass entrance flared from the morning sun, its reflection like a blinding white god.

  Edging closer until she found a spot of shadow, she saw that it was Gideon Littmann at center stage, his voice amplified for the sake of the crowd. The lawyer, Rankin, stood two steps behind, flanked by two well-groomed bodyguards. Like they expect to get mugged, she thought. By me.

  Giordano and Phin? Nowhere to be seen.

  She felt her heart crawl into her throat, followed by an almost volcanic fury surging up from somewhere. You miserable gas bag, she thought. You insufferable coward.

  Seemingly carried away by the swells of his own oration, Littmann did not seem to notice her as she melted farther into the crowd from the back.

  “…simple fraud, nothing more, nothing less, masterminded by a convicted felon named Tuck Mercer—a forger. He has the unmitigated gall to give a declaration under penalty of perjury that’s nothing but lies beginning to end—that’s the level of farce we’re talking about here. Behold the man behind the scheme, if you will. A man who spent a decade in prison after cheating hundreds of people out of millions of dollars, ruining lives, bankrupting innocent gallery owners.”

  That’s not entirely true, Lisa thought. Even unspoken, the defense felt meager.

  “And let’s not forget the other notorious fraud at the center of this, because it all comes together in one neat picture.” He folded his hands to demonstrate the image materializing, taking shape before their eyes. “Who’s the star in all this? Doc Holliday, the most notorious cheat, drunk, bunko man, and back-shooter in the history of the West. Sure, some say different, put him on a pedestal, but folks down our way know better.”

  Little knots of nervous laughter. Heads nodded. Knowing smiles.

  “The scheme would be scandalous if it weren’t so transparent. Well, we refused to fall for it. And we refused to let them scurry away so they could dupe some other unsuspecting party. We felt that was our duty. What law-abiding person wouldn’t?”

  Lisa scanned the crowd again, studying them a bit more closely. Plain Janes, Ordinary Joes. Mortimers and Whitneys, America’s backbone—plus some lawyers with time to kill in the mix. Appraising the span of expressions, she couldn’t determine just how many were buying in, as opposed to simply passing the time.

  None of which would matter inside, before the judge. But that, of course, was the point.

  When you don’t stand much chance before the law, rally the pikes and torches. They’ll be your defense when you defy the court’s order, refuse to perform. Because that’s what this is about—isn’t it, Mr. Littman? You’re going to hang on to those letters until someone puts a gun to your head.

  What in the name of God have I gotten myself into?

  “And of course the nasty little lawyer behind the whole scam takes her phony case to the feds. She knows the locals would laugh her out of court.”

  Despite herself, Lisa felt the heat rising in her cheeks. Had he spotted her out here? How soon until he pointed her out?

  “Ever since the territory’s first days, we’ve been fending off the arrogant stupidity and conniving greed of Washington and its shills and sympathizers. Looking down their snooty little noses, telling us how to live and who’s boss, telling us how to deal with the Indians, the unions, the borders, not a clue as to what’s right or wise or even common sense. They just sit there on high, loaded with lofty nonsense, because they know best.”

  This seemed to gain some traction with the crowd, men especially.

  “This here is beautiful country, filled with honest people. And yet listen how beauty and honesty gets shouted down—by vulgar resentment, laziness, envy. By arrogant spite. Listen to the smug comedians on late-night TV, mocking decent people. Watch the coastal elites turn their backs on anybody who believes in work and responsibility and a fair shake. Well, guess what? We’re tired of it. This is the West, not Washington, and thank God for that. We know who we are, and we won’t let outsiders, no matter where they come from or what they think they know, play us for fools.”

  This garnered real applause, with calls of “Damn right!” and “Lock ’em up!”

  Lisa began edging away when she backed into something solid. A man. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry…”

  It took a second for the face to register, not merely because of the cryptic warmth of its smile. Elan Wingfield, wearing a fresh shirt but the same jeans and boots and tweed jacket as the day before, greeted her with a curt nod, then returned his gaze to the courthouse steps.

  “Enjoying the show?” He reached inside his jacket, withdrew the inevitable pack of cigarettes. “To every tribe its truth. And its trouble.”

  Lisa checked the time. “I should probably head in.”

  With his usual command of the enigmatic, he said, “How well do you know your bible, Ms. Balamaro?”

  He worried a single smoke from the pack, snagged his lighter from its pocket.

  “As well as any other recovering Catholic, I guess.”

  “Do you remember the story of the Manasseh?”

  Just what I need right now, she thought. A pop quiz. “Off the top of my head?”

  “They’re one of the tribes of Judah. They come into the central highlands of Canaan where they encounter, you know, the indigenous people.” He lit his cigarette, then tucked his lighter back in its pocket. “In particular, a group called the Midianites. This is all in Judges, by the way, you want to look it up. A group of a mere three hundred from the tribe of Manasseh, hand-picked by Yahweh from over thirty thousand warriors, take on the Midianite ‘raiders,’ as they get called—you know, same word they used to describe the Apache—and drive them off. Care to guess the name of the Manasseh leader?”

  Lisa obligingly racked her memory: Joshua, Aaron, Samuel, Saul… Finally, the name drifted up, and not from an expected place.

  “Gideon,” she said.

  He exhaled a sideways plume of smoke. “The Catholic has apparently recovered.”

  “You are a veritable font of fascinating minutiae, Mr. Wingfield.”

  “There’s some dispute as to what Littmann means. Most experts agree the name traces back through Germanized Slavic, but it’s unclear whether the name’s origin lies in the word for ‘grim, fierce, ferocious, wild,’ or the word for ‘dear, beloved.’” He tapped ash onto the pavement. “Turns out the two words are quite similar, despite meaning nearly opposite things.”

  In such paradoxes, Lisa thought, lies the heart of the human story. “You’ve really made a point of studying this man.”

  He shrugged. “Like I said yesterday, we’ve seen his breed before. And we’ll see them again. But yeah, you’re right. I’ve taken a special interest in the judge.”

  Finally, she understood what he’d been getting at, not just today but yesterday, and felt ashamed for having misjudged him. They were all fighting for the same thing. A packet of letters, a way of life. The Promised Land.

  “Thank you,” she said, extending her hand to say goodbye. “For everything.”

  Hi
s grip felt warm and strong. “I wish I could join you, lend some moral support, but there’s a situation at the county jail that apparently needs my…attention.”

  I can only imagine, she thought. “Good luck.”

  “To you as well.” He glanced toward the courthouse steps. Littmann had begun his grand peroration. “He’s an impressive talker. And he fights dirty. But he’s not invincible. No one is.”

  With that and a smile, he walked off. As he wove a path through the crowd, she found herself sensing once again that lonesome trail of vapor.

  CHAPTER 35

  Whiptail lizards scurried across the dusty rocks in the deep morning shade as Rags and the others made way down the steep, narrow trail toward the landing strip at the mountain’s base.

  Trying their best not to lose traction as the jagged gravel and powdery dust gave way underfoot, they also had to dodge a variety of cacti, only to have snarling branches of thorny ironwood and desert hackberry snag at their trousers and shirtsleeves. The brush provided cover, though, especially in the spare light, making them all but invisible as they made their descent.

  Halfway down, they spotted a circle of dark-skinned women in ponchos, black hair braided in long pigtails, digging up mescal plants in a sheltered gully about fifty yards off the trail. The women did not look up from their task, and the four men silently, respectfully continued down.

  Once they reached the valley floor, they passed from the stony hardpack of the seldom-used airstrip onto the sprawling bajada carpeted in red chuparosa and yellow brittlebush. Here and there, Mexican buckeye with its desiccated seedpods rattled in the morning wind.

  They advanced to within a hundred yards of the nearest corral and took cover in the scrub, watching as the Bristlecone’s wranglers, waving their hats as they whooped their commands, ran a herd of ponies from their stable stalls to a pasture somewhere to the south. As the thunder of hooves grew faint and the dust began to settle, the ranch hands climbed into their Jeeps and pickups, cranked the engines, and followed the horses out.