A Bullet for Billy (12 page)

I
bent and picked up the Cap'n's body and got it into the hack.

“You think you can drive this with one arm?” I said to Billy.

He nodded.

“Then get in and take the reins.”

“Where we going?”

“To Old Mexico,” I said.

For the first time I saw something akin to fear in his eyes.

“They'll kill us both we go down there with no army of guns to back us,” he said.

“I'm going to see if I can trade you for that kid brother of yours. That's the plan, kid.”

He stiffened.

“I wish you'd just do it instead,” he said. “Pull
the trigger on me rather than let those dirty Mescans have at me.”

“You don't always get what you want in this life,” I said.

“I don't want that dirty Mescan killing me!”

“What difference does it make who does it?”

“Makes a lot to me. He whipped me like I was a damn dog. Whipped Sam too. He had no right.”

“He thought you killed his daughter; you're lucky he didn't shoot you on the spot.”

“I wished to hell he had.”

“Wishing don't make it so, kid.”

I told him to lead out and he took up the reins in his good hand and snapped them over the rump of the horse, and we splashed across the river, and I thought,
There is no turning back
. By midday we made the village of Arroyo according to the sign on a side of a livery; a sleepy little burg that stood baking under the noon sun. A collection of clapboards and adobes without a single thing I could see to recommend the place. But I was hoping we could find a doctor, though, to look at the kid's shoulder. It was one thing to take him down to Old Mexico to be murdered, another thing to let him suffer on the way. I am not by nature a cruel man, or at least I'd like to believe that I am not. And I needed to find an undertaker for the Cap'n. I wanted him to have a decent burial.

I stopped the first person I saw, a woman sweep
ing the front of her adobe stoop. She was fat and brown with raven black hair twisted into a cone atop her head. She wore a red blouse and dark blue skirt and sandals on her feet that were dusty. She paused when I rode up and spoke to her and asked her if the village had a doctor.

“
Qué?
”

“Medico,” I said. She looked from me to the boy, then to the tilted form of the Cap'n, and crossed herself and pointed up the street. We rode on. I saw a man, a white man, washing the windows of a cantina and asked him where the doctor was, and he turned to look at me and the kid and the body of the Cap'n.

“Across the street upstairs over the jeweler's,” he said. He was wearing a big Walker Colt on his hip. I thought it must be a pretty bad town if a man had to wear a sidearm just to wash his store window.

“Who does the burying in your town?” I asked.

“The German, Hass. Digs the graves, no undertaker; he just puts them in quick, if you know what I mean, it being hot as hell down this way.” Then he paused and chuckled and said, “I guess it's hot as hell in hell too, if that's where you're headed.”

“Where might I find this Hass?”

“Keeps a place out at the cemetery, lives there,
can't miss it. Just go on up this road to about half a mile out of town. You'll see it on your right.”

I thanked him and we went across the street and I tied up the horses and helped the kid out of the wagon.

“What about him?” he said, looking at his granddaddy.

“He's not going anywhere.”

I guess he saw the wisdom in that and climbed the stairs ahead of me, and we knocked on the door and it was soon opened by a thin man with dark skin and a widow's peak of silver-streaked hair and spectacles.

“Got a patient for you,” I said in Spanish. “You speak gringo?” He nodded, said, “Sí.
Poquito
, a little.”

“This boy's got a bullet-busted shoulder, do what you can for him, I've got money.”

He had the kid remove his shirt, then examined his busted shoulder, shaking his head. “How did this happen?” the medico asked.

“That sum bitch standing yonder,” Billy said, pointing at me with his nose.

I ignored the remark and rolled myself a shuck and smoked it while the doctor cleaned out the wound and wrapped it and set a sling for the boy's arm.

“I can't do much for you,” he said. “I've not
too much to work with here in this place. Do you use this hand or the other one?”

“This,” Billy said, looking down at the hand of his wounded shoulder.

“Then you will need to learn to use the other one,” the doctor said.

“How much for the services?” I said as the doctor shook some pills from a bottle into a small envelope and handed them to Billy, telling him to take them as he needed them for the pain. “Take one or two now, if you wish?” Then he said to me, “Five American dollars.”

I dug around in my wallet for five dollars in paper money and handed it to him.

“We've got to go, kid,” I said.

Billy stood unsteadily and we went down the stairs again, and we drove out to the cemetery, where we saw two men digging a fresh grave. We rolled up to the iron fence and I dismounted. They stopped digging as I approached.

“I got a man needs burying,” I said. “A friend.”

One was a large man with a barrel chest wearing a thin, sweat-soaked shirt with the sleeves rolled up past his elbows, and a beard that looked like a hawk's nest. The other man was short and dark-skinned, wiry as a terrier. His work clothes were dirty, ragged at the knees. His straw hat was busted out in the crown.

“Yah, I bury yer friend,” the big man said with a German accent. “Where you have him, eh?”

“Over in that rig,” I said, pointing to the hack.

“We get him for you, then,” the German said, and both men laid their shovels aside and went and carried Cap'n out of the hack and laid him there on the ground near the grave they were digging.

“Head shot, eh?” the German said, looking at the Cap'n's bloody head wound.

“Yes,” I said.

“Pretty bad deal for him.”

“You going to bury him in that grave you're digging now?”

“Yah. Why not?”

I shrugged and nodded with approval. There was no reason not to bury the Cap'n as quickly as possible. No need for a funeral and no mourners except Billy and me to attend it.

“You think you can get a priest to come and say a prayer for him?” I said. The German nodded and looked at his smaller companion, who hurried off toward town.

“We dig all the time, eh. Always somebody needs buried, yah. We finish this, we start and dig two more right away. Always the same, three graves a day, more if we need to. That way we stay ahead of the work, yah.”

“How much for the burial?”

“Ten dollars if you don't want no coffin, fifteen if you do.”

I took out the last of my money, then realized I probably should empty the Cap'n's pockets of his possessions. I knelt and took out his effects: a wallet with close to a hundred dollars still in it, a tintype of a young woman holding an infant with a towheaded boy clinging to her skirts—Sam, I figured, was the baby and Billy the boy—a heavy pocket watch, the contents of his valise, and his fancy Russian model Smith & Wesson pistol. I stood and said, “Okay, make sure he gets the coffin and the priest prays over him.”

“Yah, sure, sure. I make sure, for his soul.”

Then I started to walk away. Billy was still sitting in the hack looking stunned, and I saw he had the Cap'n's bottle of laudanum with the cap screwed off in his hand.

“Hey,” the German yelled. I turned around.

“What about the ring on his finger, your friend?”

He pointed. It was the Cap'n's wedding ring. I never saw him without it.

“You leave it on him,” I said.

“Yah, yah, okay then.”

I tied my horse on back of the hack and climbed in and took the reins from the kid and turned the hack back toward the town because we needed to eat something. My belly was rubbing my back
bone and I was tired from not having slept all night. We needed to eat and rest a little while, then hit it hard on down to the border and across.

“We turning back?” Billy said.

“Just going to town and get some grub and a day's rest. We can't go on like this, neither of us, and our horses need rest as well.”

We found a livery and I paid the liveryman there to feed and water our horses while Billy and I walked up to a restaurant and bought a meal: bowls of chili with chunks of beef that made your eyes water. Coffee for me. Billy asked if they had any cold buttermilk. The waiter said no. He had big black handlebar mustaches and acted as though this was the worst work in the world for a man to be doing. Maybe it was. Billy said, “I'll have a glass of beer then if you don't mind.”

When we finished we walked up the street to the one and only hotel according to the waiter. It stood on the corner across from a bank. On the opposite corners were also a hardware store and a saddle maker shop.

The clerk behind the desk at the hotel had long sideburns that came down to his jawbone and shifty eyes.

“Two rooms next to each other with locks,” I said.

He asked me in Spanish how long we'd need the rooms.

“
Una noche
,” I said. Just one night.

The room charge was ten dollars.

We climbed the stairs to the upper level and walked down the hall till we found room numbers nine and ten. I unlocked nine and we went in. It was just a room with a single bed, no chair, a small table with a lamp on it. Bare floor, window that looked down into the alley that ran behind it.

I opened the window to let in some air. The room was hot and dry, the wallpaper that had once been a pattern of roses and stripes was faded and here and there peeling.

“Why it's just like the queen's palace,” Billy said, looking around.

“What would you know about the queen's palace?” I said.

“Shit if I know anything about it.”

“You stayed in school long enough to learn to read and write?” I said.

“Some. I read about her once—Queen Victoria. Said she lived in a palace and had servants for her wolfhounds. You believe that?”

“I wouldn't know. You go ahead and get some rest,” I said and went out locking the door from the outside with the key, then opening the door to my own room, which was nothing different from the kid's.

I took off my shoulder gun rig and laid it on the
table, but put the pistol under my pillow, then I sat down on the edge and removed my boots and lay back. The weight of exhaustion pressed down on me like a slab of granite. The room was hot and still, but I didn't even care.

I closed my eyes, and when I did I fell into a sweet dream about Luz.

We were swimming naked in a pool of cool water and she was laughing and we wrapped our arms and legs around each other and became like one person and made love that way, standing in the water, wrapped round each other.

I awoke sometime later in the darkness, got out of bed, and looked in on the kid, half expecting him not to be there. But he was. Sleeping in the bed just like he was a normal boy. And I wondered what he was dreaming about.

It sure couldn't be anything as pleasant as making love to a woman in water.

S
am heard the mournful music outside his cell, from beyond the adobe walls. Strained and halting, it seemed like at first. Then it became less strident and uneven and more like the sad weeping of women, and he realized that it was the funeral cortege for the General's daughter. He could hear the ringing of church bells, dull and heavy with a reverberation that he could almost feel against his skin.

A
Ruale
stood guard outside the cell—ever since Billy had escaped. He was armed with a rifle and he did not smile or speak, for he'd been ordered not to.

“They burying the General's daughter, ain't they?” Sam said.

The
Ruale
's eyes flicked his way.

“Boy, that's sure enough a sad thing to hear—that dirge. She was a pretty woman,” Sam said. The
Ruale
looked away.

The day before, they had they had come and taken Sam from his cell, and he thought it was to shoot him. They marched him down the street to a vacant lot that had an adobe wall and three wood posts set into the ground. A crowd of people had gathered and there was a line of Ruales standing there in the hot sun with their rifles. And then the old guard that had allowed Billy to escape had been brought in a wagon. He was sitting atop a coffin of white pine, it looked like. The wagon stopped and the prisoner was dragged down, his wrists and ankles in shackles. His head was cut from the beating Billy had given him, and he stood trembling as the coffin was lifted out of the wagon and carried over to the middle post. Then he was marched over to the wall where the posts were and a rope was tied around his chest to secure him to the middle post.

The General came then, riding a large black horse whose tail nearly brushed the ground. The General sat there among the gathered crowd as though allowing everyone a chance to take no
tice of him before dismounting. Then he went and stood among his soldiers who were lined up twenty or so paces from the prisoner. Another officer who walked along with the General handed him a cigarette already made and lighted it for him with a match.

The General smoked casually while all around him everyone stood silent, waiting. The prisoner wept openly, his whole obese body trembling. He blubbered in Spanish. Sam reckoned he was pleading for his life. Sam felt sorry for him.

Then the General motioned for the Ruales holding Sam under the arms to bring him forth and Sam thought,
Well, this is it then
. It pleased him that he had no fear of what was about to happen to him. He'd been working it through his mind for days now. Sure it was going to hurt a little, but the pain would be so quick and done with he'd only have to stand it for a mere moment. It took him longer to work through the after-dying part. He wasn't raised under the Holy Book like some. He knew a little about it, knew there was such things as heaven and hell according to the preachers. But then he thought,
I didn't know nothing before I was born so why should I know anything after I'm dead?
And he'd prayed to himself consistently ever since the Ruales had grabbed them up. But no answers or no relief
came as answers to his prayers. He finally just figured either God wasn't there, or he wasn't listening if he was there.

Once he got himself settled on that point, his fear subsided.

The Ruales stood him before the General, who looked down at him with the same dead eyes he'd seen in the fish he and Billy had caught out of the river.

“You shall see now your fate,” the General said. “Look at him. Like a woman he has become. Weeping and begging me for his life. You see, this is what the fear of death does to a man. It reduces him to being a baby, but only if he has enough time to think about it.”

“I ain't afraid,” Sam said.

The General drew deeply on his cigarette, then exhaled.

“Oh, but you will be when it comes your turn. I've seen men much braver than that one break down and weep like babies when their time has come. You don't think so now, but you'll see. To stare down the barrel of a rifle and know there is no escaping. Well, that's quite different than to just think about it. You will be like him, like a woman.”

Sam figured they were going to drag him to one of those other posts and tie him up but instead they turned him around to face the pris
oner, whose pleas now were more like screams.

The General nodded to his man, who gave a sharp command to the Ruales, and they brought their rifles up to their shoulders—Sam counted twelve of them. The prisoner wiggled and fought to free himself as if he were a hooked fish.

The General's man barked a second order, and the guns clattered, and Sam could see the bullets striking the prisoner, punching holes in him from which blood leaked as he sank to his knees, his head slumped, and like that he was dead.

Some of the Ruales came forward and untied the rope and then lifted him into the coffin, then another hammered shut the lid before the coffin was carried to the wagon again and carted off. Sam could see the dark stains in the dirt; they were the only evidence the guard had ever lived. Then Sam was dragged back to his cell. The whole while he repeated to himself,
I'm not afraid. I'm not afraid.

And so now in his cell he heard the dirge of funeral music, the blare of horns, the ringing of the heavy church bells and thought,
So much death for a place so middling.

“That's her being taken to the cemetery, ain't it?” he said to the guard.

Sam could not know that on this same day his own grandfather was being buried by a fat German less than fifty miles north.

“We didn't kill her,” Sam said suddenly, more as if to convince himself than the guard. As if hearing himself say it was important to him.

The guard said nothing.

“I just want you to know that, we didn't kill her. And if you kill me, you'll be killing somebody innocent.”

The guard simply blinked.

Sam sat on the side of his cot, his face in his hands.

“I ain't afraid,” he muttered.

The funeral dirge went on a long time, fading slowly until there was a longing silence again.

Later that day, the General came in still in his funeral finery; a young woman in mourning dress stood next to him. The General said, “This is one of them,” to the woman, who pulled the veil away from her face. Sam could see she was much younger than the General and very beautiful as well.

She looked at him intently for a moment.

“Yes, you see how young these gringos are who come down here and commit murder on our children,” the General said to her.

She came close to the bars where Sam stood and spat in his face, then turned and stalked out.

The General came very close then, his breath smelling of liquor, and Sam could tell, because
he'd seen it on Jardine's face lots of times, that the General was drunk.

“You see, you have made her a mother without a child,” he said. “You have just two days to live. How does it feel now? Are you still unafraid?”

“You see me crying like that fat friend of yours?”

The General offered him a sullen smirk.

“He's in heaven with his Jesus,” he said. “You'll join him soon. Your grandfather, Gus, he's a man of his word. He told me he will find your brother and kill him and bring his head to me. I think he will do this. And when he does, I will kill you. Then there will be justice.”

“He won't kill Billy.”

“To save you? I think so that he will.”

“If anybody, it will be you he'll kill.”

The General reached into his fancy black coat and took out a silver flask and drank from it.

“No,” he said, wiping his mouth with the edge of his hand. “He will not kill me. I will kill him if he tries. I will wipe out his bloodline. Bang, bang, bang. And bury you all three in unmarked graves.”

The General used his finger as if it were the barrel of a pistol.

Sam could see that the black dye the General used on his hair and mustaches had sweated down
his neck and his chin. He was an old man trying to look young, no doubt for his young wife. Sam wiped the spittle from his face. Old men and young women. Sam couldn't understand it; why a man would make such a fool of himself for a woman, why a young woman would marry an old man.

“That stuff you put in your hair,” Sam said. “It's leaked all over your shirt collar.”

The General motioned for the guard to unlock the cell door, then struck Sam with a winging backhand that made Sam's world go suddenly dark.

Sam's dark dreams were of fish and murder.