A Bullet for Billy (3 page)

H
e was sitting there in front of the station, in the shade of the eaves on a wood bench smoking a cigarette. He was leaned forward with his forearms resting on the thighs of his faded jeans, his mackinaw unbuttoned and hanging loose. The sun had come up and melted most of the snow that had fallen through the night, and now the streets and roads were just a reddish mud the horses and wagons slopped through as they passed up and down. Women held their skirts up above the tops of their shoes as they walked wherever there weren't boards to walk on, and dogs stood grizzled with muddied legs, looking forlorn.

I rode up and stopped in front of the station, and he looked up and I could see just the merest recognition on his face and a sign of relief that I'd
come. He looked at the stud and said, “I see you got him broke.”

“Not without some disagreement,” I said.

“You going to haul him along?”

“That's the plan. What about you?” I said. “What you going to do for a horse once we get down to Tucson?”

He drew on his cigarette and exhaled a cloud of smoke, his fingers stained yellow from years of tobacco use.

“I'm going to rent a hack,” he said. “Can't sit a horse no more. This burg they got Billy in is about fifty or so miles southwest of there, a place called Finger Bone. Train don't go there.”

Stacked there beside him next to the bench was a small trunk and a Winchester rifle. He saw me glance at it.

“How'd you learn of him being in jail down there, Cap'n?”

Cap'n leaned his head forward and spit between his boots.

“Like I said, I got friends all over the Southwest.”

I dismounted and went in and bought myself a ticket and stuck it in my shirt pocket, then came out and unsaddled the stud, and set the saddle along with my bedroll and kit there next to his things, and my rifle still in its scabbard next to his, and he looked at it and said, “I see you still favor the Henry rifle.”

“It was good enough for me in Texas,” I said. “I guess it's good enough for me here in New Mexico.”

He drew on the smoke and shucked the nub into the muddy street, where it fizzled, and said, “I reckon so.”

I glanced at my pocket watch, and there was still half an hour before the train was set to come in.

“I need to go do something,” I said.

“Go ahead,” he said. “I'll watch over your gear.”

I went up the street toward Luz's place—a small adobe at the edge of town that had an ocotillo fence around it. She was there in the side yard hanging clothes from a wire line, white blouses and black and red skirts.

She turned when she heard me open the gate.

“Didn't think I'd see you again so soon,” she said.

“I've come to tell you I'll be gone for a little while,” I said.

The smile faded from her face as she brushed some loose strands of hair away from her forehead with the back of her wrist, a wet piece of clothing clutched in her hands.

“I thought you liked it here,” she said. “Did you just say the other night how you didn't think you were ever going to leave here again?”

“Like it here more than anyplace else I've ever been.”

“Then why go?”

“No choice.”

She looked beyond me as if someone was standing behind me.

“We can choose to stay or we can choose to go,” she said. “If you're going, it's because you choose to go, because you want to go, not because you have no choice.”

I came up close to her. She was wearing a long-sleeved blouse and I could see the heaviness of her breasts loose inside, and I wanted to take them in my hands through the cloth and hold them and feel their firm softness once more. Something dark and troubling had been working at me ever since I first saw the Cap'n's buggy black against the snow.

“It's because of that man that came to your house, isn't it?” she said.

“Yes.”

She crossed herself as if she'd just stepped into the little church at the other end of the street—the one by the plaza where bailes were held every Saturday night if the weather was decent—and had a bell in the tower that would ring in the believers. An old padre with one good eye preached there, and some claimed he could perform miracles.

“I knew it,” she whispered.

“He needs my help,” I said. “I owe him from the past.”

“What do you owe him?”

“My life.”

“And now he wants it back.”

“No. Not if I can help it.”

She shrugged in resignation, shook loose a wet skirt she'd been holding, and hung it on the line.

“It's none of my business what you do,” she said. “When and where you go and come. I'm just the woman who cleans your house.”

“And sleeps in my bed,” I said.

“Yes, and sleeps in your bed.”

“I just wanted you to know,” I said. “I figured I owed it to you to tell you.”

“And now you have told me.”

“Yes.”

I turned to leave. She called my name.

“Jim.”

I turned back, and she came close to me and pressed the palms of her hands against my chest.

“I'm afraid for you,” she said. “I'm afraid you will go away and I will never see you again.”

“You don't have to worry; there's nothing to this. I'm just going to ride along with the Cap'n while he does some business. You were right about him looking sick. He is. He's dying and is worried he won't get his business done before he
passes on.”

“What sort of business needs you wearing this?” she said, patting the bulge under my left armpit.

“You know how it is out here in this country,” I said.

“Yes, I know how it is.”

“I best get on,” I said.

“I'll wait for you until the spring,” she said. “After that I'll stop waiting for you.” I wanted to laugh at her foolishness.

“I shouldn't be more than a couple of weeks at the outside.”

“Do you want me to go and feed and water your horses?”

“No, I've asked Gin to do it.”

“What about the chickens, should I go collect the eggs?”

“They're scattered all over hell,” I said. “I broke the stud earlier and he kicked down the coop and fence and everything. I reckon those chickens could be in Colorado by now.”

She smiled. I kissed her, then walked back up the street to the station.

Cap'n looked up when I approached like he knew something.

“You let her know you're going off?”

“Yes.”

“You think you might end up marrying her?”

“It's possible.”

“She strikes me as a good woman besides being real easy on a man's eyes. Women like that are hard to come by way out here in this frontier. Even no-account ugly women are hard to come by, but especially the real good-looking ones.”

“There's more women than you might imagine if you like the Mexican kind,” I said.

“I got nothing at all against Mexican women,” he said. “They work hard and laugh a lot from what I know of them. I imagine yours does too.”

I reached inside my coat pocket and took out the pint bottle of forty rod and handed it to him because he looked like he could stand a drink, and I sure as hell knew I could.

He looked at it before taking hold of it and pulling the cork, then he put it to his mouth and swallowed. Then he looked at it again and handed it back to me, and I took a pull and plugged it and put it back inside my coat pocket.

“Sun's pretty on the snow on them mountains yonder,” he said.

“It is, ain't it.”

Way off in the distance we heard the train whistle blowing.

“She's coming,” he said.

I pulled my watch and checked the time.

“Way early,” I said.

“Lucky we're here then or we'd of missed it,” he said.

“Ain't we though.”

He stood slowly as though he had to fit everything into place, all his bones, before he could move properly.

“You don't owe me nothing,” he said. “I don't want you to go on you thinking you owe me because of what happened that time in Caddo.”

“I'm not thinking nothing like that.”

He stared hard at me then.

“'Cause if that's the case, I don't want you helping me. I don't operate like that, figuring a man owes me anything because of the past.”

“Look, maybe it is some of that, but so what? You saved my skin in Caddo and if it wasn't for you killing those two bandits, I'd have been planted and no chance to help nobody or eat a nice breakfast this morning or spend my nights with a good woman. So maybe it is a little of my thinking I owe you for something. But it's not just that.”

“What is it then?”

The whistle grew louder, and you could see the black smoke of its engine chuffing into the air off in the distance like a small dark cloud.

“I guess you already know.”

He nodded.

“I always just did my job, Jim, keeping you boys alive, you and the others. I didn't always, that's a natural fact, but I did the best I could
because it was my job, that's all.”

I couldn't say I thought of him like he was my own daddy, which he'd just about had been when I first joined the Rangers. I couldn't tell him that, nor would he have wanted me to. Men like him and me don't talk about such intimate things, but it didn't mean we didn't feel them.

“You did more than your job, Cap'n, a lot more.”

He looked off again up the tracks.

“Here she comes,” he said.

I held the reins to the stud. He was jumpy at the sight and noise his iron brother was making. I stroked his muzzle and spoke to him gentle. “Don't raise no fuss and make us have to go through what we did earlier all over again,” I said. The stud tossed his head and whinnied.

“Maybe we ought to have another sip of old Mr. Fortifier,” Cap'n said. “Before we get on that train. Maybe you ought to give that half-broke horse a swally too so he won't kick out the sides of his car when they put him aboard.”

I took out the bottle and handed it to the Cap'n, and he bit off a piece and handed it back.

“I used to be a teetotaler when I was married up with JoAnn. She was a righteous woman and wouldn't let me keep none in the house, and so I just gave it up along with every other wickedness when I got with her. She got me to being bap
tized standing waist deep in the Canadian River by a tongue-speaking preacher. She cleaned me up pretty good from what I had been. But I never claimed not to miss a good glass of whiskey or a good smoke, and now I just look at it as the best medicine a man can get himself.”

“You don't need to explain nothing to me,” I said.

“I know I don't.”

Then we stood there waiting for the train to shudder to a stop.

T
he Cap'n slept on and off as the train rolled through countryside that was mostly tan hills shaped like the crowns of sombreros, and laced with ocotillo that glittered in the sun like the white of an old man's hair. The red country turned to brown and the creek beds and washes we crossed were mostly dry, strewn with rocks and boulders—here and there thin streams of water laced down through the sandy draws.

Once I saw a herd of antelope way off in the distance grazing contently, their tails swishing the flies.

The Cap'n would wake every now and then and say, “Where are we, Jim?” And I would guess and he'd nod and then close his eyes again, and I thought,
You must be plum wore out, Gus, go ahead and sleep in peace while you can
.

His coat was parted open and I saw the familiar pearl grips of his Smith & Wesson Russian model—something he'd always carried ever since I've known him. It was a .44 caliber that had seen its fair share of work. I knew because I'd seen it in action up close and personal on more than one occasion. The Cap'n was a dead shot even under fire. I asked him about that, how he never missed.

He said, “You just can't think about it, you just aim and shoot what you're aiming at. You start thinking, you're probably going to hesitate, and that can be a fatal mistake in a gunfight.” He proved his point that time in Caddo when we ran this half-breed gang to ground. We'd been dogging their trail for weeks over some robberies and killings they had committed in the Panhandle. Our party of Rangers took them on in a last stand they'd made there in that little town, and we killed five of them and they two of us.

We thought we'd killed them all, and while the Cap'n went to send a wire to our headquarters in Fort Griffen that the Juarez Gang was no longer, the rest of our party licked its wounds and set about burying our dead. Then when that was complete, we allowed as to how we needed to rest our horses a day or so before starting home. I took the opportunity to go into the town and get myself a haircut and shave.

It was while I was there in the barber's chair with a hot towel on my face I felt something small and hard suddenly pressed against my temple and the stink of bad breath. I heard the hammer of a pistol being thumbed back, accompanied by a rough Spanish voice saying, “
Señor
,
usted mata a algunos de nosotros, nosotros mata a alga de usted
,
eh?
”

I'd learned enough Spanish to understand he was telling me it was my turn to die, to more or less even the score for the ones we'd killed of his. I peeked up through the towel and saw it was old Vaca Juarez—a half Apache, half Mexican—himself standing there, short and heavyset like a man who ate too much beans and fried bread. With him was a rough-looking character of about the same stumpy stature, holding a Walker Colt the size of a small cannon. Cross-eyed little bastard with a wispy mustache and whiskers looked like they were made out of black silk threads sewn into his upper lip and chin.

I eased the towel from my face and saw the barber standing there holding his straight razor down along his leg, looking about as fearful as I was beginning to feel. You always think you're ready to die when the time comes. But the simple truth is, you never are when it actually comes. You could be eighty years old and bullet shot and still not ready. I was still relatively young at forty-
five and in pretty good health, and sure as hell not ready to cash in my hand.

I saw the bottles of shave lotion and talc sitting on the shelf in front of the mirror, saw my reflection and that of the three men standing—the barber and the two bandits holding their pistols on me and every right to be pissed off, because we'd flat laid out their companions in the earlier fight like planks, side by side, so the local newspaperman could take photographs of them before we buried them in a hasty common grave.

The sour smell of the bandits mixed with the talcum powder and shave lotions on the barber's shelf. I saw patches of hair that had been cut from my head lying there on the floor, and thought that dying in a barber's chair was about the last place I'd have guessed I was going to fold my hand if somebody had asked me. But it sure as hell looked that way, and I just hoped old Vaca had a good aim and generous heart and finished me with one bullet and not two or three. Sometimes a man wanted to make you suffer before he finished you off; he shot you in the knees or through the hands, just to make you suffer awhile.

I waited for the bullet that would kill me, knowing I'd never even hear the shot. I closed my eyes because I didn't want to see it. But then I did hear a shot that caused me to flinch. And when I opened my eyes, the man holding the pis
tol to my head fell like a stone dropped down a well at the same instant his blood and brains splattered across my unshaven face. The Mexican with him yelled something I couldn't make out, a bastardized cussword. But before he could get the word all the way out of his mouth the Cap'n shot him too, dead center of his forehead. The bullet bucked him back and he crashed to the floor and lay there next to old Vaca, who had a ribbon of blood coming from underneath his head.

I swiped the bloody offal from my face as I saw the Cap'n standing there, his gun still held straight out, smoke curling from the muzzle before he slowly lowered it and slipped it into his holster.

“You okay?” he said that day.

“I'm not sure, but I don't hurt nowhere.”

He took his bandana from round his neck and dipped it a pan of water the barber used to wash off his razor off, and handed it to me, saying, “Warsh your face, Jim. Get that stinking bandit's blood off you.”

He never once mentioned how I should have been more careful, or lectured me about making the mistake of letting the bandits get the cold drop on me. He just shot those two like they were quail, then put his gun away, waiting for me to wash my face. I'd always wanted to talk to him about it, about what it felt like to be so near being
murdered, because a thing like that sticks with you worse than your worst dreams. I wanted to just talk about it after I'd had time to get my wits about me, but I knew he wasn't the type to discuss such matters—that life was just what it was; you either lived or you died and that was the end of it. Didn't matter how close you might
have
come to dying. Life for him at least was like a game of horseshoes—
close didn't count.
And if it didn't count, then why talk about it?

But I figured I owed him my life even if he didn't.

 

I saw a sign the following day out the window that read:
NOW ENTERING ARIZONA TERRITORY
. And when the Cap'n woke up from napping, I told him we'd crossed the border and he nodded and said, “Well, it don't look no different, does it?”

“No sir, it don't.” Then he closed his eyes again and I walked out to the platform of the caboose.

A black porter was standing there smoking. He started to strip away his shuck but I waved him not to.

“Don't need to put it out on my account,” I said.

“Yas suh.”

The clatter of the train's steel wheels against the
track rose and fell with an easy steady rhythm. The porter said, “Nothing like train music.”

“You like working on the railroad,” I said.

“Beats lots of other things,” he said. He was middle-aged with very black skin, and wore a black jacket and wrinkled trousers that were a few inches too short and a pair of rough brown brogans.

He reached in his pocket and took out his makings and extended them to me, and I thanked him and rolled myself a shuck, then handed his makings back. He handed me a match, and I struck it off the side of the car and cupped the flame in my hands to light my smoke, then snapped out the match and flipped it away. I never smoked before I met Luz. She's the one got me into the habit, just watching her smoke there in the evenings out on the porch of my place after supper. I liked the smell of it and I had her roll me a shuck, and after the first few draws I got used to it. She's the only woman I ever knew who smoked cigarettes and looked good doing it.

The porter and me stood there smoking with the rocking of the car beneath our feet, not saying anything because we were of two different worlds, the porter and I, but maybe not so different than a lot of people might think. I'm sure, like me, the man had seen his share of troubles and
heartache. And I'm sure, like me, all he mostly wanted was a decent life, a steady job, and to live in peace.

“You like horses?” I said.

He smiled broadly.

“I used to ride 'em in the army,” he said. “I was a buffalo soldier with the Ninth. Fought the Comanche, the Apache and Kiowa too. All over Texas mostly.” He had a wistfulness about it when he spoke of it. He took off his cap and rubbed his shaved head.

“The Indians gave us the name because they said our hair reminded them of the buffaloes. I always kept mine shaved because I figured if they ever killed me I didn't want them to hang my scalp from their belts.” The corners of his eyes crinkled when he smiled.

“We got that in common,” I said, thinking aloud about how in my early years as a Ranger we fought some of those same peoples at places like Adobe Walls and Palo Duro Canyon.

“Huh?” he said.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just talking to myself.”

“It ain't no problem,” he said. “I best get back on inside.”

I nodded and watched him take one last precious draw from his shuck, then grind it down under his shoe heel.

Light lay along the twin ribbons of steel tracks
that ran like two thin rivers behind the train. The smell of hot cinder rose from the track bed as a black erratic cloud of engine smoke floated lazily overhead. I thought of the thousands of Chinese that laid these tracks in their cotton pajamas and coolie hats, their backs bent to the task, how they must have squatted in the shade of their own making for lunch and the few daily breaks from the onerous work and chatted in their own language about their faraway homeland, wondering no doubt if they'd made a mistake coming here to this wild and endless frontier. I guess in some ways they were like that black porter; designated to their lot in life by the color of their skin and nothing else. Just men trying to make it from one day to the next while waiting for something impossible to happen that would change their circumstances, like a man who waits for love or money or God.

I went back in and sat across from the Cap'n. A woman in a dark blue gingham dress sat across the aisle from us reading a small book with red leather covers, her feathered hat resting on the empty seat beside her. She glanced up when I came and took my seat, and our eyes met, and she smiled and I returned the smile, then she returned to reading.

We rode on through the day and into evening, into the darkening land that lay ahead of us and
descended behind us. We rode on like two errant knights off to slay the dragon—only the dragon was a kid named Billy, son of the Cap'n's daughter who always made poor choices when it came to men.