A Bullet for Billy (6 page)

Billy lay on the grass thinking,
I guess what we have done can never be undone. I should have left Sam out of this
,
but too late
,
too late.

The stars looked like God's own eyes staring down at him.

Sam said, “I hope we didn't catch the pox from that fat whore.”

“What do you know about the pox?” Billy said.

“Nothing, except it's supposed to be something bad and something you get from whores. I heard it makes men go crazy and some blind. I heard old Wild Bill Hickok had it and he went near blind, and that's how come that fellow shot him
in Deadwood City because Bill couldn't even see the fellow pull his pistol.”

“I don't think we caught the pox, do you?” Billy said.

“I don't know.”

They closed their eyes and fell silent, each wrapped in his own thoughts. A coyote yipped from somewhere off in the dark hills. Another yipped back.

I
eased my Merwin Hulbert from my holster and brought it out and ready waiting for the next footstep to crunch into the caliche. The Cap'n lay asleep, his snores light, rhythmic. I leaned and touched his shoulder, and he awoke instantly, sitting up, his hand full of pistol. I touched the back of his wrist to keep him from firing at me.

“Someone's outside,” I whispered.

We didn't hear anything.

“Maybe nothing,” I said.

Then we heard it again, something, someone moving around outside. I rolled away from the Cap'n so that I was pressed up against the wall of the shed nearest the sound. There was a slight
crack between the weathered boards and I put my eye to it. The moon was bright enough to show a shadow of a man carrying an ax standing there several inches from the shed as though listening for us. I shifted back to the Cap'n and whispered, “Start snoring again,” then rolled back to the wall as soon as he did.

As I watched through the crack, the figure outside simply stood there holding the ax down alongside his leg, and the hair on the back of my neck rose. But it rose even more when a second figure appeared and stood next to the first. He was also carrying something in his hands—a shotgun it looked like, judging by the short length of it. I heard them whispering.

“You know what to do,” the one said to the other. It was the voice of the old man who a couple of hours earlier shared his grub and whiskey with us. I guess he was about to put an end to all that hospitality. They took a single step forward toward the shed and I shot the old man, the flash of light blinding my night vision for a moment.

I heard a yelp and the Cap'n crawled over quickly and said, “What's going on?”

But instead of answering him I kicked down the loose boards of the wall and fanned the hammer of my pistol into the body of the man with the ax who'd paused and bent to his fallen comrade. I was pretty sure I hit him four out of four because
every shot coming in rapid fire as it did caused his body to jump and jerk. He dropped the ax with the second round, spun completely around with the third, and went down with the fourth. The old man was on the ground moaning. The Cap'n was right there, his gun held straight out in front of him, cocked and ready.

“Get a lantern if you would, Cap'n,” I said. He crossed the yard to the house and took a bull's-eye that had been hanging next to the door on a nail and struck a match to the wick, then lowered the glass and brought it near the two shot men.

One, the one holding the ax, was a younger version of the old man. He was shot through the belly and writhing on the ground, groaning through clenched teeth.

“Bring your light over here to this other one,” I said, and the Cap'n walked it over and lowered it to the old man's face. His eyes were crossed in death as though he'd been trying to look down his nose at where my bullet struck him—top button of his shirt. Cap'n flashed the light around the ground till it fell on the double barrel. He bent and picked it up and looked at it close. Then he looked at the one moaning and groaning and said, “You chickenshit son of a bitch. How many others you done this way?”

He gasped and said, “I need a doctor, oh…oh…”

“You're gut shot, among your other wounds,” I said. “A doctor won't do you any good.”

It was a mean goddamn thing to say to someone dying, but I owed him no sympathy for trying to waylay me and the Cap'n.

“Oh…help me…”

“You bought the ticket, now do the dance,” I said and stood away.

Cap'n, still carrying the shotgun in his hand, his pistol now tucked down in his holster, said, “The old man must have thought we had money we were going to use to buy horses,” he said. “I wonder who this other'n is.”

“Looks enough like the old man I'd say he was kin, son or something.”

“I don't guess it really matters, does it?”

“No sir, I don't suppose at this point it really does.”

“What do you want to do about him?” Cap'n said, pointing the barrels of the shotgun at the dying man, whose boot heels kept digging for purchase into the ground.

“Leave him,” I said. “He'll not make it till daylight.”

“Can't just leave him like that, Jim. Wouldn't hardly be Christian.”

I looked at the Cap'n as he handed me the shotgun.

“No, I'm not going to kill him,” I said.

“I know,” the Cap'n said. “I know you ain't, Jim.” Then the Cap'n stood over the wounded man and drew his pistol quickly and shot him through the skull, and reholstered his revolver.

“I didn't see no other way, did you?” the Cap'n said.

“None at all.”

“What time you figure it is?”

“Two, three in the morning,” I reckon.

“Still can catch a few hours of rest and head out first light,” he said.

“All right, if you think you can after all this.”

“Might just as well make use of that bed inside,” he said. “Beats hell out of sleeping in the shed like a couple of dogs.”

“Be my guest. I'll wait out here 'case there's any more of his boys comes home.”

“There won't be,” Cap'n said. “I think we done all the killing tonight we're meant to.”

The Cap'n went inside and I took out my makings and rolled myself a shuck to ease off the things I was feeling. Then I took the dead men by their boots and dragged them both into the shed and laid them there, and went out again and sat down on one of the supper chairs that was still out front.

I never have found out all the reasons that possess men to set upon one another, money, hatred, just pure meanness. Whatever it is gets in a fel
low's mind makes no sense if in the end the man you set upon puts a bullet through your brain.

I smoked my shuck down, and then I guess I dozed fitfully in the chair until first dawn. The sky was as gray as a ghost with just a seam of silver light between it and the horizon. I went inside to wake the Cap'n, but he was already awake, but just lying there. He sat up and said, “Was it a dream I had about last night, me shooting a fellow in the brains?”

“No sir, it was real enough,” I said.

He rubbed his eyes, then pulled on his boots, and we went outside again. We went out to the pump and washed our hands and faces and strung water through our hair, and then went back inside, where I fixed us some breakfast of fatback and beans from a can. We ate there at the table without speaking anymore about last night till we finished and stood away from the table and went outside again, leaving the dishes just setting there.

I saddled my horse and then put the Cap'n's in the traces of the hack, and he climbed aboard and looked off toward the road and said, “What'd you do with the bodies, Jim?”

“I put them in the shed.”

He nodded.

“The wolves and coyotes smell death, they'll be round soon enough.”

“I'm not that far gone as a human being yet to let them have at dead men,” I said. I went over to the shed and searched around till I found a can of coal oil, then shook out the contents all over the boards before striking a match and setting the whole place afire, the bodies still inside. The fire caught slowly at first, then built quickly enough, like a maw of flame swallowing everything.

We rode off toward Finger Bone, the hungry flames behind us just as if we were riding out of Sodom and Gomorrah.

“I wonder how many others them two has waylaid over the years?” the Cap'n said as we rode along.

I said I didn't know but I guessed we weren't the first, that they just didn't suddenly start with us, because of the way the old man had set it up.

“I'm surprised he didn't try and drug us with that whiskey first,” Cap'n said.

“You and me both know, criminals was smart, wouldn't none of them get jailed or shot,” I said.

“Well, their souls are with Jesus now,” he said.

“I doubt Jesus will have any truck with them,” I said.

“I doubt it too, Jim. I doubt it too.”

We were leaving death to go and create more of it, and that was an unsettling thought if ever there was one.

It was like death was dogging us just so it could
learn how to do it proper. Last night, when I shot that man, I realized then and there, I didn't flinch at the thought, my heart never quickened, my hand never wavered, and it made me realize that in whatever ways I thought I'd changed, I hadn't changed all that much.

The road lay long and straight ahead of us, the sun just now rising above the rimrock to our rear, and the world seemed no wiser or bereft because of what we'd left in our wake.

T
hey wandered from place to place, striking up friendships with the locals because they were in a strange country and Billy had heard some tales from Jardine back when Jardine was still alive and talking about the things that went on in Old Mexico. Said he'd been there a time or two, back in his wild youth, Jardine called it. “It's easy country if you know how to get along with the natives,” he'd said. “Hard country if you don't.

“Me and some of my pals went down there that first time to see could we steal some Mexican mustangs off a big ranch down there. Ah, hell, we were only half-baked boys without no mothers and fathers. Most of us jumped off the orphan
trains rather than be put to work as slaves for some farmer or rancher. We had to grow up hard and do what we could to survive. But it ain't no sort of way to live, boys. That's why I want to be a pa to you—to show you there is a better way. And I love hell out of your ma, too.”

Jardine always had good stories to tell, and Billy and Sam would listen raptly as Jardine told them. He always wore a workshirt buttoned to the top button winter and summer and was fastidious about having clean hands, would wash them ten, twelve times a day and clean under his fingernails.

“So we get on down there,” Jardine said of that particular time, “and first thing we did was come into this little town where all the women were as pretty as young colts and batting their eyes at us, me and Clarence Harper and Gil Westmore, and not a one of us over the age of seventeen, eighteen years old, and still green peckerwoods as you'd ever find.

“We practically fell out of our saddles from looking at them and having them look at us. Then some big-bellied man standing out front of a cantina waved us over and we stopped to see what he wanted and the son of a gun, and I swear this is the God's honest truth, had nothing but gold teeth in his mouth.” Billy remembered how Jardine would shake his head over something he
found hard to believe even when he was the one saying it was true. Jardine showed them his own teeth for emphasis.

“This fellow owned the cantina and a cathouse as it proved out. You boys know what a cathouse is?”

Billy and Sam shook their heads, and Jardine grinned and looked round to make sure their ma wasn't anywhere within earshot.

“It's a place where a man can buy himself a whore,” Jardine said and waited for the effect to take hold of them, and when they both grinned he continued, “Anyways he says to us, ‘Hey, gringos, you want some tequila. Real cheap, ten cents a glass, and I got some nice women, real cheap too.' And he called some of them outside there on the veranda of his cantina and we liked to have fallen over because she wasn't nowhere near the beauty of the ones we'd been seeing till then. She was real skinny for one thing, and not very good-looking unless you squinted. She was wearing nothing but these little cotton shifts you could see the dark of her tits through. Had this straight chopped-off hair and stuttered when she talked.”

Billy and Sam tried hard to see it in their minds: the ugly woman standing on the Mexican's veranda in a cotton gown so thin her dark tits showed through.

“Well, I won't go into any of the dirty details,” Jardine said. “Let's just say me and Clarence and Gil had us one heck of a time for a couple of days there even if we had to stay drunk as sailors. We went in that place with about forty dollars in money in our pockets and come out picked clean as chickens, with hangovers the size of Montana. We ended up crossing back north of the river with nary a stolen horse or a centavo to our names. But we was burning up with desire to go back again soon as we could put a little stake together. But then Clarence got hitched to a gal he got in the family way, and Gil got drowned in the Canadian River trying to cross where the ice was thin that winter. He was trying to save a yearling that had fallen in.”

“What about the other time you went to Old Mexico?” Billy asked that time.

Jardine simply shook his head and said, “Boys, you don't even want to know about that time. Let's just leave it at it wasn't nothing like the first time. And you'll learn soon enough, nothing ever is.” Then he showed them a puckered scar just below his shoulder. “That's all that needs to be said about the second time I went into Old Mexico.” They knew it was a bullet wound that had left the scar.

“Remember some of those stories Jardine told us about?” Billy said as they rode along a white
dust road with the sun straight over their heads.

Sam smiled and said, “I sure do. Wouldn't it be something if we could find that Mexican with the gold teeth that ran that cathouse and give that same skinny gal a go like he did?”

“It sure enough would,” Billy said. “We'd have to get drunk like he did, but we'd get her done, wouldn't we!”

They both laughed. But neither could remember where or if Jardine had said the name of the town, and all they could do was hope that each town they came to might be
that
town. Some of the smaller villages didn't even have a cantina.

Soon enough they ran low on their luck, their pockets nearly empty and sitting in the shade of a ramada, sharing some tamales they'd bought from a local woman.

Sam said, “What's our next play?”

Billy shrugged. A grungy hound had come sniffing around, its coat dirty and rough. Billy broke off a piece of the tamale and fed it to the dog.

“Now git,” Billy said and the dog slunk off.

“I guess we need to rob something,” Billy said.

Sam looked around at the small, dusty village.

“Rob what?” Sam said. “There ain't nothing here.”

“Not here, but maybe the next place we come to. A store or a bank. Might even rob a railroad train if we come up on one going slow enough.”

“Railroad train,” said Sam incredulously.

“Well, something. I don't know what yet till we get to it.”

Their boots were dusty with the white dust and so were their jeans.

“It's pleasant country, ain't it?” Billy said.

“I reckon. You miss Ma?”

“Some,” Billy said.

“I do.”

Billy ate the last of his tamale and wiped his hands on his jeans. “Eat up,” he said. “We still got some daylight to burn.”

“How you think Jardine got shot that time he was down here?” Sam said, still chewing his tamale.

“Hell if I know. Probably did something with a married woman and her husband shot him over it.” Billy grinned at the thought. “Knowing Jardine, how wild he said he used to be in his youth, it wouldn't surprise me now, would it you?”

Sam shook his head. “I miss him too,” Sam said, swallowing the last little piece of his meal.

“Yeah, well, we pretty well took care of that son of a bitch who killed him, didn't we?”

Sam didn't say anything but instead stood up from the shade and went over and tightened the cinch on his horse.

The sun burned through his shirt, drying the
sweat stains, and he told himself as he fixed the saddle that he sure didn't feel fourteen anymore, but felt more like a grown man, him and Billy running all over the country taking what they needed and living free like they were, probably wanted outlaws north of the river so's they could never go back. It left a bad taste in his mouth thinking about it, and in some ways he regretted ever having taken off with Billy in the first place.

Finally he put a foot in his stirrup, realizing he didn't have a say in things now, things had gone too far for either of them to have a say in it. They could quit and turn themselves in to the law back north of the river and get locked up in a jail, or they could just keep going and see what happened.

The other thing troubling him was it seemed to hurt when he pissed.

“I think I caught the pox from that fat whore,” he said as they turned their horses out to the road again heading south. He mentioned how it hurt when he went.

“I'd say it's a sure sign,” Billy said. “I think I got it too. Started out tickling a little and now it feels like I'm trying to piss razor blades. We'll look for a doctor the next town we come to.”

“Can you die from it, the pox?”

Billy shrugged.

“I never heard of nobody dying from it. But I
did hear it can drive a man insane, he carries it in his blood long enough.”

“It's like our own sins are eating us up,” Sam said.

Billy looked over at him.

“Shut up,” he said.

“Hell,” Sam said. “I don't guess I have to if I don't want to.”