A Bullet for Billy (8 page)

H
e waited till the old man had placed himself in a vulnerable position, then brought his manacled hands down hard, using the heavy cuffs to knock the guard senseless. The old man let out a hard groan after the first blow but did not make a sound when Billy struck him a second time, splitting open his head.

“You dirty son of a bitch!” Billy muttered, then took from around the man's neck the key that he'd used to unlock Billy's cell and rushed back inside. But the key would not fit or would not work the lock on Sam's cell. It was either the wrong key or the lock was jammed.

“Hurry up,” Sam pleaded.

“I'm trying, goddamn it.”

Sam was so frightened, his hands shook and
his body trembled as Billy fumbled with the lock.

“It don't want to work,” Billy said. “Goddamn it.”

“Maybe there's another key somewhere.”

Billy ran out into the jailer's room and searched through the drawers of the desk but could find no other keys. There was a shotgun sitting in the corner of the room and this he grabbed up, broke it open, saw that it was unloaded but held on to it anyway. He ran back into the cell area and tried the same key again, only in forcing it to try and open the lock he broke it off.

“Son of a bitch!” he yelped.

Sam looked at him through the bars with the saddest eyes Billy had ever seen on anyone.

They could hear approaching voices through a small open window there in the back.

“I'll have to come back for you,” Billy said.

“No use to it,” Sam said. “They'll kill me sure.”

“No they won't. I won't let them.” Billy touched Sam's hands that gripped the bars of his cage. “I'll come back.”

Billy burned with guilt at having to leave Sam. He wanted to stay and fight but he had nothing to fight with. Two Ruales entered the jail through the front door. Both had been drinking heavily,
and Billy could hear them talking loudly to each other. Billy fled out the back door, stepping over the prone body of the old guard, and ran down the darkened alley into the night.

Stealing a horse should be easy enough, he told himself as he ran away and came out at the far end, where he rounded a corner and stood in the shadows of the main street again. He could not tarry, he told himself. The Ruales would discover soon enough he'd escaped and sound the alarm. There were several saddle horses tied up on the street in front of a cantina. Billy was already formulating a plan in his head. The river was a good fifty miles north, but if he chose a good sound horse and rode like hell, he could make the river by daybreak, cross it, find the nearest town, and sent a wire to his granddaddy.

He chose a big roan mare and knocked his heels into its flanks and rode it fast out of town and all night northward, resting only long enough for the horse to catch a blow and drink a little and eat a little. He'd read dime novels about the Pony Express riders and thought if they could ride at such a pace, so could he. He didn't care if he rode the horse to death as long as he could reach the river and cross over.

By dawn the next day that's exactly what he did, splashed across the river and into the States.
He passed the dugout that had a sign crudely hand-painted that read:
WHISKEY & ICE BEER
and kept on riding. He needed to find a town that had a telegraph and remembered a town not many miles yet north of the river. And less than five miles more he came to a town with the funny name: Finger Bone. He learned from asking strangers where the telegraph was. He used his last dollar, that he'd stuck down inside his right boot for safekeeping, to send a telegram to his mother. Its contents explained in brief that Sam was in a Mexican jail in a place called Ciudad de Tontos—and that she should wire her daddy, Cap'n Rogers, and have him come quick with a company of Texas Rangers.

The last line of the telegram stated: “
I took blame to save Sam.
” The telegrapher looked at him when he read it and said, “This true?”

“Just send it,” Billy said.

Exhausted, he found a place to lie down in an alley to try and sleep and woke with a mangy dog licking his face. A dog with worse than dog's breath, and he sat up swatting at the creature. It yelped and growled once, then trotted off looking back over its shoulder at him.

“Boy, I'm piss poor and run down at the heels,” he muttered to himself. The light in the alleyway was dim, indicating the sun was close to setting, he figured. He had no watch to tell time by. His
welts and bruises felt like fishhooks in his flesh every time he moved. He stood with great effort. He'd been wise enough to have tied the reins of the stolen horse around his wrist before lying down. The horse stood with its head drooping, and he knew he'd pretty well worn it out on the hard ride.

He took pity on it knowing it wouldn't carry him another five miles. He turned it loose and walked out of the alley carrying the shotgun over his shoulder, on the scout for another horse to steal. Whoever he pointed the scattergun at wouldn't know it wasn't loaded and would be a fool to take the chance it wasn't, the way he figured.

He wished he had a dime for a cold beer and a sandwich, but he'd spent his last dollar for the telegraph. Well, that was where he was smart, to carry that empty shotgun, he told himself. It was all about taking risks now; he told himself he had nothing left to lose.

But goddamn, he was weary of running, of being chased, of all the bad stuff and none of the good. And the pox he'd caught from the whore didn't help his disposition any either.

He cracked the scattergun open again, hoping somehow, magically, two shells would appear. But the chambers were still empty. He snapped it shut again and stood there on the sidewalk in
front of a closed millinery shop, trying to decide his next play.

A bank stood across the street, but it was closed as well, the last of the dying sun reflected in its plate glass windows.
ARIZONA BANK & TRUST
was lettered in gold leaf. He thought of all that money that must be in that bank, and he thought of his empty pockets and nothing standing between him and riches except twelve inches of brick wall and probably that much of steel where the money was no doubt kept in a vault.

Well shit, he told himself.

He figured to rob someone since there was no store or bank open to rob. First man who came up the walk looked like he had a few bucks was who he'd rob. The problem was, it was the supper hour and most folks were either home eating supper with their families or in the saloons drinking their supper. He was glad he wouldn't have to kill anybody, and in that way the empty shotgun was a blessing.

It was a wild-assed idea, but he even thought if he could steal enough money, he could hire some gunslingers to ride with him back down across the border and break Sam out of jail and thus save face all around.

But shit, that was like asking for the moon.

He leaned against the wall of the millinery and
waited as the shadows closed in around him. Now he held the shotgun down along the side of his leg so it wouldn't be so obvious. Somebody come up, he'd just raise it and point it and ask for their wallet. He had his eye on a little paint tied up down the street in front of one of the saloons. Mustang, it looked like. Nice little horse.

How long he stood there waiting he couldn't say, but the lights began to come on in the saloons up and down both sides of the street, and somewhere far off he could hear the rumble of thunder. It was almost as if he could taste the air, the way it tastes when it has rain in it, or about to come.

A stiff wind blew along the street kicking up dust, and some cowboys rode in off to the right of where he was standing, four or five of them in a bunch, and tied off up the street and went into that particular saloon, laughing and talking loud.

He realized it was Friday. First time he'd thought about the day because ever since him and Sam had left home, time didn't mean nothing to them. They didn't have to be anywhere at any particular time and had no use for watches or calendars. Time simply became lost to them.

But if he remembered correctly, it had to be
Friday. Or maybe it was Saturday. He closed his eyes and saw the General bringing down the strap, felt the sting, the way it stung like when you got cut by a knife.

The anger and hatred welled in him suddenly and he didn't give a shit what he had to do, he was going to rob somebody, and if they put up a fight, well, too bad for them.

Then he heard the clomp of boots on the boardwalk coming from his left. A tall man wearing a frock coat with his trouser legs tucked down inside the tops of his boots, whistling softly to himself. Billy gripped the shotgun tight, hoped his ruse would work.

And when he stepped from the shadows, shotgun coming up in both hands, he faced the barrel of a pistol inches from his nose.

“I don't know what you're intending, son. But you look way too young to die like this,” the man said. Then showed Billy his city marshal badge pinned to the backside of his lapel when he flipped it over.

“Now set that shotgun down easy or this could be the last thing you're going to see—the dark hole of my pistol barrel.”

Billy swallowed hard and let the shotgun slip from his grip till it clattered to the boardwalk.

“Now put your hands where I can see them
plain,” the man said. “I'd not want to get caught by surprise at some little gun you might have hidden up your sleeve.”

Billy raised his hands, and the lawman told him to turn and face the wall and not move because “I've got a slight case of the palsy, and this Colt has a hair trigger, and I'd sure hate to blow your brains out if I didn't have to.”

Billy felt the lawman patting down his pockets and down the inside of his legs and into his boots looking for a gun or a knife. And when he was satisfied, the lawman said, “Now just march down the street ahead of me till I tell you to stop.”

Billy did as directed, and soon enough he was sitting in another jail cell, this one only slightly better than the one in Mexico.

The lawman, once he'd turned the lock, stepped back and said, “You ain't a local, so what I need to know is where'd you come from and what are you doing here?”

Billy told him what had happened.

“So you killed this daughter of a Ruales general, is that what you're telling me?” the man said.

“No sir, we didn't, but I said I did so I could hopefully save my kid brother from getting shot, figuring if they thought it was just me who did it,
they wouldn't hurt Sam. But we didn't do nothing but try and save her life, and that's what thanks we got for it.”

And when Billy told him the rest, how he'd wired his ma to try and get his granddaddy to come down with a company of Texas Rangers and said who his granddaddy was, the man offered a crooked smile and said, “Jesus, boy, I know your old granddaddy. You are one lucky peckerwood to be landed in my jail, and luckier still I didn't leave your brain matter splattered all over Mrs. Thurgood's hat shop. She'd hated like hell to have to wash up such a mess and who can blame her. Where's old Gus living these days?”

“Eagle Pass, the last I heard.”

“You hungry, kid?”

“Enough to eat a damn dog.”

“Well, we got plenty running around here.”

“I know it.”

“I'll be back in a little while.”

Billy watched the lawman go out. He was an old bastard for doing law-dog, Billy thought. Old but way out in front of trouble, it sure seemed like. He had pulled his pistol without Billy even seeing it, and in a heartbeat too.

Then the fellow returned in a little while with a plate of food and slid it in under the door of the cell, and went and got Billy's stolen shot
gun and broke it open and saw it wasn't even loaded.

He came carrying it to the cell door and held it up and said, “Jesus, boy, you must have yourself a real death wish.”

“I reckon I must,” Billy said, eating hungrily.

B
illy was lying there on the cot, his arm flung over his eyes, his body aching like a fever from the whipping he'd taken at the hands of the General.
What right did that son of a bitchin' Mescan have to whip us?
He lay there seething, which did not help his physical condition any. He thought about Sam, wondered if maybe they'd taken him out and shot him by now, figuring that they'd not risk letting another escape their puny jail. He fretted over Sam terribly. His own guilt was like a sharp rock in his belly. He slept that night with a head-ful of bad dreams, of seeing Sam hanging from a tree, of the stabbed girl laughing at them, of his flesh being chewed by dogs.

He awoke to a stream of morning light angling in through the barred window above his head. Then heard the door to the jail open and the
clomp of boots. It was the old lawman bringing him another tray of food, covered with a cheesecloth to keep the flies off. Ira slid the tray under the door and stood back and watched Billy eat.

Goddamn but it tasted good, a thick slice of fried ham, fried potatoes, two corn dodgers, and a scoop of applesauce.

“My missus fixed it,” the lawman said, retrieving a chair from the outer room and bringing it back to sit outside Billy's cell. He took out his makings and rolled him a handmade, and struck a match head off his belt buckle and held it to the tip of his shuck, then snapped it out. The smoke smelled good and reminded Billy of better times, like when Jardine would smoke in the evening on the porch of his mama's house, and him and Sam would sit at Jardine's feet there on the steps and listen to Jardine tell stories about all what he did in his life.

“Thank your missus for me, would you?” Billy said when he finished the plate.

“I'll do it,” the lawman said. “I wired your granddaddy, told him I had you in the jail down here. I reckon I'll get an answer back from him pretty quick if he's still alive. You know if he's still alive?”

Billy shrugged. In truth, he did not know if Gus was still alive. He could only hope that he was.

“From what I know about him, I'd say he's too
tough to be dead. Hell's bells, I figure he cares anything about us he's already on his way with a passel of Rangers,” Billy said bravely.

The lawman looked at him askance through a veil of his cigarette smoke.

“I know those Rangers is some bad sons a bitches,” Ira said, “but even they wouldn't cross that river and go into Mexico. It'd start another damn war if they did.”

Billy suddenly felt glum.

“You don't know him then,” he said defiantly. “I mean he whipped the Comanches all up and down Texas every which away. He sure as hell can whip a few of them damn Mescans.”

“Hell, I know old Gus Rogers is bad on miscreants and such,” Ira said. “He arrested me once and put me in prison. Hadn't been for his hard ways, I'd probably be dead my own self right now. He prayed with me to turn my life around before they took me off to the jail and I'll never forget him for that.”

It was something Billy didn't know about his granddaddy, that he was a praying man. But then there were a lot of things he didn't know about his granddaddy because his mama had moved them away every time she got up with some man or another, and only occasionally did the Cap'n drive to wherever it was they were living at the time and see them. One Christmas he brought pres
ents, and another time he stayed a week and took Billy and Sam fishing and they caught a catfish the size of a man's leg out of a muddy river. But that was about all he knew about Cap'n Rogers directly; the rest of his granddaddy's history was learned from Billy's mother whenever she felt in the mood to talk about him. Now Billy wished he'd learned him better.

“He might just do that very thing,” Billy said, trying hard to raise his own hope. “Come all the way down here and bust Sam out of the jail.”

“Might grow wings and fly with the angels too, boy,” the lawman said. “You play checkers?”

Billy thought of it more as an opportunity than simply passing time. Figured he might find a chance to distract the lawman and get hold of his gun or some such.

“Like a son of a bitch,” Billy said.

“All right then, I'll go get the set.”

Billy and Ira played nine games straight and Ira whipped him like a rented mule and said, “It's a good thing we're not playing for money or you'd be broke as old Aunt Hattie.”

“I
am
broke as old Aunt Hattie,” Billy said.

“They skinned you in every way a man could get skinned down there, didn't they?”

“Worse than you can know.”

“I'll have the doctor come and look at you soon as he gets back from the Johnson place. Mrs.
Johnson's about to have her eighth child and Doc's been out there all night waiting on it.”

“I appreciate it if he was to come and give me something for these whip marks.”

“You want to go again?”

Billy saw there was no opportunity to reach through the bars and grab the lawman's gun since Ira wasn't wearing one. He'd obviously left his pistol in the outer room.

“No, I guess not,” Billy said. “You've already whipped me so bad, I don't see as how there'd ever be any pleasure in it for either one of us.”

“It's the only game I know,” Ira said. Then he stood and folded the checkerboard after putting the checkers in a wood box with a sliding lid. He carried them out and returned with a wool blanket and handed it to Billy through the bars.

“'Case you get cold during the night, otherwise you can fold it and use it for a pillow,” he said and went out again, and Billy could hear him locking the front door after he went out. Then it was just silence.

He lay upon the cot and stared at nothing, trying hard to think how he was going to break jail again. It was break jail or face the consequences once old Gus Rogers showed up—if he showed up. He was sure if Gus thought he'd killed and raped that General's daughter, his granddaddy wouldn't take any mercy on him. From what lit
tle he recalled of Gus's nature, he was a stern man when it came to serving the law.
Well, maybe I could convince him the truth of it
, he thought, lying there in the growing heat.

He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again the lawman was standing there with another man wearing pince-nez glasses pinched on the bridge of his nose. A sleepy-looking little man with a bald head holding a black leather bag in one hand.

“This your victim?” the man said to the lawman.

“It is. Boy says they whipped him with a razor strap—some Ruales down in Old Mexico.”

“Razor strap? That right, boy, they whip you with a razor strap?”

Billy nodded.

“Like I was a goddamn dog that ate off their plates,” he said.

“Well let's have a look,” the man said. “I'm Doctor Bunyon, and all you're about to find in this town that passes for a medico. I also cut hair and embalm if you ever find yourself in need of such services.”

He nodded to the lawman, who unlocked the cell door and let him stroll in like he was visiting a sick aunt in an infirmary.

“Take off your shirt,” the doctor said.

Billy did as ordered, feeling ashamed to have
to let people know he'd been whipped like that. Told himself a real man wouldn't have allowed it.

The doctor touched the welts with delicate fingers, but it still hurt like the blazes while he was probing and prodding. He reached into his bag and took out a jar of something and unscrewed the lid.

“This is some healing ointment,” he said. “Dab some on you every little while like this,” and showed Billy how much to slather on. “Don't get it into your eyes,” he said. The ointment had a distinct smell to it and even caused Billy's eyes to water a little bit.

The doctor looked at the lawman and said, “I don't find no broken ribs or nothing. He'll heal but he'll have some scars to show the ladies.”

Then he stepped out of the cell, and Ira closed it again and locked it and thanked the doctor, saying how he'd walk with him up the street to the café where they could get some coffee. “'Cause what I cook ain't worth drinking,” Ira said.

Billy put the ointment on his cuts and welts, and it cooled the places it touched. He was grateful for any little relief.

Later the lawman came back with yet another plate of food, announcing, “Lunch,” and set it under the jail cell door where Billy could get it.

“I'll go over to the telegrapher's and check and
see if your granddaddy sent a wire back yet,” Ira said. “You drink coffee?”

“Yes sir, I do.”

“I'll bring you back a cup.”

“Thank you.”

The lawman reminded Billy of Jardine a little with his easy manner.
I'm sure going to hate it if I have to shoot him
, Billy thought as he sat on the side of the cot and ate his lunch, a liverwurst sandwich with a slice of onion.
But I got to do what I got to do
.