A Bullet for Billy (4 page)

W
e stepped off the train in Tucson at around noon the following day. It looked ramshackle, like a bandito hideout. Up the street a group of men were gathered watching a cockfight. Two oily red roosters with steel spurs were tearing into each other, and I don't know who was squawking more, those chickens or the men betting on them.

Cap'n shook his head and said, “What men won't bet on.”

He spat in the dust.

“What's our next move?” I said.

“We go and rent me a hack and drive to Finger Bone.”

“You know how to get there?”

“No, but I can ask.”

I unloaded my stud and saddled him, and tied
on my rifle in its scabbard and bedroll behind the cantle. Cap'n carried his Winchester in one hand and his valise in the other. The sun scorched the dusty street so that when we walked our footsteps raised little puffs of brown dust that settled over the toes of our boots, and we got as far as a saloon that simply had the word
SALOON
painted in black on the adobe facing over the wood door.

“Maybe we ought to stop and get us a cold beer and something to eat,” he said. “I'll bet you're hungry.” We hadn't eaten anything since yesterday. We went inside and found a table, and the waiter came over and we ordered a couple of ice beers, and the Cap'n said, “Can you read that menu?” It was a chalkboard above the bar and featured beef stew and sausages and cabbage. I read it aloud and he said he'd try his hand at the sausages and cabbage. I ordered the stew. The Cap'n only nibbled at his food.

“It ain't setting too well with me, Jim. Not much is these days.” Then he motioned the waiter over and asked if he had any bread and milk, and the waiter said he thought he had but he'd have to check the ice house. Then soon enough he came back with a saucer of milk and a loaf of crusty bread, and this the Cap'n tore off in small chunks and dipped into the milk and ate fairly well for a man in his condition. I could only imagine what that was like—to have cancer in your stomach.

We mostly ate in silence. Finally the Cap'n had enough and ordered us each a glass of whiskey.

“Finger Bone's where you said they got Billy locked up?” I commented as I washed down the last of the food with what was left in my beer glass before tossing back the shot of rye.

“Yes sir.” Then he proceeded to tell me about Ira Hayes, the local lawman in Finger Bone, how Ira used to be a cattle and horse rustler and real hard drinker till the Cap'n caught up with him in a whorehouse after dogging him for the better part of a month.

“Ira at that time was living with a three-hundred-pound whore and selling snakehead whiskey to the savages down in the Oklahoma panhandle. The marshals were after him as well, but I caught him first. I come up on him taking a siesta, his big feet sticking off the end of the bed. The son of a buck was well over six and a half feet tall. His big gal jumped on me like I was a pony at the fair and tried to bash my head in with her fists. I had to lay her out, Jim. I swear I'm not about hitting women, but this one was about to ride me under. Then I called for him to surrender. Which he did quite well. He asked me right off as I was putting the manacles on him if I was a God-fearing man, was I in the Good Book regular, and I said I was, and even if I hadn't been, just looking around that den of iniquity of a town, where the
saloons maintained a noticeable predominance over every other sort of dwelling, I'd sure enough become a righteous man from thinking I'd just landed in hell itself…Then I asked him why he wanted to know and he said because he'd been having thoughts lately about turning his life around…”

The Cap'n again displayed a rare smile in the telling of how he first met Ira Hayes.

“He wore two guns, real rare,” the Cap'n said. “But one had a busted hammer and the other had busted grips, and when I relieved him of them and made commentary on his poor firearms, he laughed and said, ‘Hell, I ain't a killing man nohow. Onliest way I'd kill a feller with my guns was if one went off accidental, or I was to throw one at him and it somehow knocked his brains out.' I said, ‘Well, you are under arrest for horse thieving and cattle rustling and that's that.' He asked me would I pray with him and help show him the way to the Lord. I said, ‘Right here, you mean?' His whore was laid out like a Belgium carpet there on the floor where I knocked her, and it was such a bad place you could taste the sin in the air. ‘Yes sir,' says he, ‘right here and right now, for I am sick to death of my criminal ways and want the good Lord to take mercy on me like he did them sinners on the hill.' So we prayed and I felt a change in him and promised
if he ever needed anything when he got out of the jailhouse to let me know. Didn't hear from him for several years, then one day I got a letter from him telling me he was doing all right for himself, going to church regular, and wanted to know if I'd write a letter of recommendation for this lawman's job in Finger Bone—said he had a wife and a new child on the way and could use regular work. I wrote the letter and sent it to him and he wired me back later and said he'd got the job. That was three years ago.”

It was the most I'd ever heard the Cap'n say at one time. I wondered if he'd gotten windy knowing his time was short, and everything he needed to get said, he needed to get said before it got too late. He swallowed down the whiskey the Mexican brought to the table, and it allowed some color back in his sallow cheeks.

“So the second stroke of luck, if you can call it that, was it was Ira who arrested Billy for trying to steal a horse, and Billy ended up confessing to him the whole sad story about what happened down in Old Mexico and that he'd wired his ma to try and get me to come down with my Rangers, and that's how it come out about who Billy was to me. Ira right quick sent me a telegram. I wired him back and said, ‘Hold him till I get there.'”

“You tell Ira what's going to happen once you get Billy?”

“No sir. That's between us.”

I saw how the thought of it drew down the corners of Cap'n's eyes and mouth into something grim and weary. He swiped whiskey dew off his mustaches with a forefinger and stood and took a moment to straighten himself, leaning his weight on the back of his chair but acting like it was a natural act and not something born of his pain.

“We best go rent that hack,” he said. On the way out he asked the waiter where there was a stable, and the man told him and we went up the street past the cockfight where the dead roosters lay in a pile of bloody feathers, their owners having twisted off their heads and fed them to several stray cats lurking about.

Cap'n said, “I guess a man takes his pleasure where he can find it,” as we walked past the knot of shouting men. “I personally don't see no sport in killing chickens.”

A caballero sitting under a big straw hat with some of the crown eat out probably by rats was dozing on a three-legged stool in front of the barn. You could smell the sweet scent of hay and horseshit lingering in the heat.

The man's arms hung straight down from his sides like he'd been shot dead, only hadn't yet fallen over. Cap'n kicked him lightly on the sole of his huaraches, and he woke with a start, pushing back the flop brim of his sombrero.

“Sí!”

Cap'n told him in Spanish he'd come to rent a hack, and they haggled the price because it was a common thing to do, haggling. Most of these birds felt slighted if you didn't haggle with them. They came to terms in short order because the Cap'n was by nature an impatient man. The caballero went and hitched a horse to a hack, and the Cap'n paid him in silver. Then the Cap'n pointed and said, “That the road to Finger Bone?” The caballero nodded.

“Sí.”

“You're a fellow of few words, ain't you?” Cap'n said.

The caballero shrugged, not understanding the joke.

I mounted my horse and rode alongside the hack at an easy pace.

“We should get there by nightfall,” he said.

And I couldn't help but think that by morning, Billy would be dead and the old man would feel worse than he ever felt in his entire life, and I probably would as well, just having to witness it.

I
n the dying heat you could smell the greasewood. The horses stepped along, raising dust to their fetlocks, their tongues fighting the bit.

“You doing okay?” I said.

The Cap'n kept a steady eye on the road in front of him. Off to the north a distant ridge of gray mountains seemed to shimmer in the haze.

Suddenly his horse shied in its traces and he fought it down while I shot the rattler that had crawled out onto the road, the Cap'n saying, “Snakes and horses just don't mix and never will.” He skirted his rig around the carcass because the horse wouldn't have none of it. The damn thing was long as a man's leg and thick through the body as your wrist.

“Everything bites, stings, or sticks you in this country,” he said. “They even got what they call
jumping cactus out here—cholla, they call it.” Then he grimaced in pain from something obviously troubling him on the inside, and his face was bathed in sweat, his color ashen.

I spotted a lone cabin off the road to our right, up a trace that cut through the desert.

“Why don't we pull off and see can we water the horses at that house yonder,” I said.

“Lead the way,” he said without debating me on it.

The house set back about a quarter of a mile and the trace was rutted with deep wheel tracks that had cut through the earth when it was wet from the rainy season and baked hard again with the sun, and each time the Cap'n's wheels caught and jiggled the hack, his face took on the look of a man being punched in the gut.

We got within calling distance of the house—a combination of mud and wood with a tin roof run through with rust streaks, a small stone chimney at one end and a by-God gazebo in the yard. Off to the right was a couple of lean-tos, a wagon with the tongue laid on the ground. Farther on was a privy. Off to the left rear stood a pile of rusting cans.

I called the house.

Old man stepped out with a big bore in his hands down below his waist, not aiming but ready to use it if he had to.

“What you fellers want?” he said cautiously.

“Wanted to know if we could water our horses,” I said.

He looked from me to the Cap'n.

“Don't figger you're trouble,” he said. “Never known killers and troublemakers to go around in a hack. Water trough is out back.”

“You mind I step down and stretch my legs and maybe use that privy of yours?” the Cap'n said.

The old man nodded.

“Hep yourself,” he said.

I led the horses around back to the water trough and let them drink while the Cap'n trudged off to the outhouse, then pretty soon trudged back again. I heard him in there retching. Then I walked the horse back round to the front where the Cap'n now sat making palaver with the old man there in the shade of a partial roof of what could be considered the start of a porch, but I'd never bet it was going to get finished anytime soon, if ever.

“How you making it way out here?” Cap'n was asking the old man. Well, I say old, but truth be told, the old man was probably the same age as the Cap'n, just more gnarled, like a wind-twisted tree trunk.

“Making do as best I can,” the old man replied. “I come out here in '50, back when it was still wild and overrun with Chirichua and Lipan
Apaches. Met old Geronimo and Natchez and their bands right here, near my well yonder. We palavered some and I think they would have cut my head off and put it on a pike, except I was married to an Apache woman at the time and she spoke up for me, saying how I was a good man and friend to the Induns, and they said long as I was married to her I didn't have nothing to worry about from them. That son of a bitch Geronimo had eyes like candle flames.”

“That so,” the Cap'n said. The old man nodded.

“You want a drink? I got some peddler's whiskey in the house I could abuse you boys with.”

“Yes sir, we sure could use a drink of something stronger than well water,” the Cap'n said.

“You look as if you could. Wait here, I'll go in and get the jug.”

Cap'n looked at me and nodded.

“You learn to talk to folks right, you can get along pretty well in this old life,” he said.

I looked off to where the sun was edging down behind some low brown hills, the rays of its light glancing upward and outward like the earth was catching fire.

“I bet that old boy has seen some things in his times,” the Cap'n said. “I heard Geronimo was a real bad actor. Heard they put him in a jail down in Florida, Natchez too and their whole band.”

“I bet he knows he's a lucky man to still be living,” I said.

The old man came out, said, “My name's Torvor, Waylon Torvor, 'case you was interested,” and handed Cap'n a brown glazed crock jug. The Cap'n took it up by the handle and hitched its bulk over his shoulder and tipped the neck to his mouth for a good long pull, then swung it over to the old man, who held it out to me. I stepped forward, and he grinned a dark brown–toothed grin through the grizzle of his maw and said, “You ain't Mormons, are you?”

“No sir, we ain't. What makes you think we are?”

“Nothing,” the old man said.

I took a pull and was surprised how top-notch the liquor was. I handed it back and he took a pull and said, “Goddamn,” and did a hitch step.

“You want another?” he said to the Cap'n.

“No sir, we got several miles yet to go and I'd not want to fall out of that hack and break my neck along that there lonely road and have to be buried so far from my home.”

“Where you hail from?”

“Texas,” is all the Cap'n would say.

“Texas,” the old man said, like he was tasting the word. “Now that's a goddamn place and a half, it sure is. I once got married in Texas to a six-foot-tall whore—this was before I married
the Apache woman, of course—who outweighed me by thirty pounds. This was in my wild youth. They grow everything big in Texas including their women.” He cackled and snapped the jug up to his mouth again, happy for a reason to drink and palaver. And when he finished, he wiped off his mouth with the frayed cuff of his shirt sleeve.

“I buy my liquor off a whiskey drummer comes through here in the spring and fall. Says he has it shipped in from Kentucky. It fortifies me against all illnesses and dark times.”

“Yes sir,” the Cap'n said, trying to be polite. He wasn't a man to carry on an overlengthy conversation, nor listen to one either. He edged away from under the overhang and stepped toward his hack, and I could see it took every ounce of his strength to make it that far.

The old man called, “You boys is welcome to stay the night. Can camp out there in that shed if you like. Don't make nothing to me if you do. Got water and feed for your hosses. Just charge you a dollar for the feed. Good straw in that shed to make you a bed.”

Cap'n looked at me.

“What do you think?” he said. The sky overhead had turned the color of sheet iron now that the sun had nearly gone out of it.

“How far is it to Finger Bone?” I asked the old man.

“Oh, I'd say another twelve, fifteen miles, but you daren't get caught out on that road after dark—too many highwaymen. They catch you out on that road, just the two of you, they'll set on you like chickens on a june bug. Real bad fellers patrol that road at night.”

“I'm about tuckered out, Jim,” the Cap'n said.

“You want us to bed down here for the night, that's okay with me,” I said.

He looked off toward the dimming sky.

“It'll be dark before we got another two miles,” he said. “I don't guess it'd make no difference if we get there late tonight or first thing in the morning.”

I couldn't tell if his reluctance to push on was due to his feeling poorly or just that he knew what lay ahead of him, what he had to do once he got there.

“Maybe we ought to give it a rest then,” I said.

He nodded.

The old man said, “I got a pot of beans with some fatback cooking in the firebox. We can all sit down to eat whenever you're ready.”

I walked over and paid him the money for the horses' feed and then turned both animals out into the small corral he had there with his bunch of nags. I grained them down, then went and washed my hands and face at the pump and wiped off with my bandana.

The Cap'n was seated on one of the chairs the old man carried out from inside and set in the front of the house. The last of the sun was just then winking out beyond the smoke gray mountains off to the west. A soft dying wind ruffled the Cap'n's striped shirt. I sat on the edge of the porch.

“You thinking about tomorrow, when we get to Finger Bone and get your grandson?” I said.

“I am, can't help but to think about it.”

“I'll do it for you if you want,” I said. “I'll take care of that business for you.”

He looked at me with troubled eyes.

“I couldn't ask that of you.”

“You don't have to ask it.”

“Shit,” he said. It was one of the few times I'd ever heard him swear.

“You think about it,” I said. “It's no skin off my neck you want me to do it.”

“You think you could, just shoot a man like that?” he said. “A kid who never did a thing to you and wasn't trying to kill you back?”

“Put a gun in his hand if it will make you feel better.”

He grunted.

“Ain't me that would need feeling better if
you
was to do it.”

“It wouldn't make me feel better either way.”

“I keep wondering what would get into him so
bad, make him do something like what he done to that woman.”

I shrugged and took out my makings and rolled myself a shuck, and it made me think of being out in the evening after supper with Luz, the two of us smoking and sipping liquor and talking.

“I sure wish I had a cold pear,” the Cap'n said suddenly, sipping another bit of the peddler whiskey. “I do admire cold pears. Ever since I got told what I had by the physician, I'll get a craving for something now and then. The sweet kind you get in a can with the syrup in it.”

I knew he wanted to change the subject, and I did too. I'd kill the kid if he wanted me to. I'd do to save him the grief, but I sure as hell wouldn't feel good about it and knew it was something I'd have to live with forever.

The old man came out with his kettle of beans and salt pork and set it on the ground and then went back in and came out with three tin plates and some spoons and another jug of whiskey.

“Dig in,” he said. “Ain't nothing formal round here.”

So we ate till our bellies felt like they were full of buckshot, except the Cap'n didn't eat but a spoonful or two.

“Ain't it to your liking?” the old man asked.

“It is, I'm just not feeling up to snuff is all,” the Cap'n replied.

To be honest, I wanted to say it was about the worst meal I ever ate, but I held my tongue in order to be polite.

Afterward we smoked and the old man said, “What you all going to Finger Bone for?”

It wasn't common for one man to ask another his business, but there wasn't anything overly common about this old buzzard. I just supposed he was lonely for talk.

The Cap'n said, “Buy some horses.”

“Horses, huh?”

The Cap'n nodded as if to say,
What part of that don't you understand, old-timer?

The old man pushed the jug toward the Cap'n and he tipped it up, and I could see the liquor was beginning to take its effect on him from eating so little and drinking that hard whiskey.

“We best turn in,” I suggested. It was nigh on full dark now, stars beginning to sprinkle the sky and a half moon rising over the rimrock.

“Go on, make yourselves to home,” the old man said, standing away and stretching. Then he hooked a forefinger through the jug's ear and took it up and swallowed what little was yet still in it and said, “You boys sleep well.” Then he trudged off inside his door and closed it.

“I'm about all in, Jim,” Cap'n said.

“Let's go saw some wood then,” I replied, and we stood up and walked to the shed and pitched
down some saddle blankets hanging from a nail hook onto the thicket of straw there.

“Boy, it feels like I've swallowed a belly full of bent nails,” Cap'n said as he lay down. “It's pretty bad how life treats you when you get old…”

In a few minutes I could hear him breathing like a man will when he's first asleep. I was myself tired but not so much, and I lay there in the darkness with only a little of the moon's light coming in over the partial shed wall above my head.

I kept thinking about Luz, and how it would feel to be lying with her tonight in a regular bed and when was I ever going to get too old or tired of sleeping on the ground or some old man's shed floor and finally settle down permanent? I vowed once I got back home again, that was it for me; it would take hell and high water to ever get me to do anything like this again. Jesus himself could ride up to my place and say he needed help with the Philistines and I wouldn't go with him.

I was thinking all this when I must have drifted off to sleep, for I suddenly started awake when I heard the crunch of boot just outside the shed.