A Bullet for Billy (5 page)

B
illy said after the funeral of their stepdad, Jardine Frost, when he and Sam went off behind the saloon in town after asking the drunk, Thompson, to buy them a bottle and giving him a dollar to do it: “We ought to skin out of this town.”

Sam, barely fourteen, was still weighing the loss of the only daddy he knew with an ounce of kindness in him. Jardine never beat them, never laid into them, real soft-spoken sort and good to their ma as well. Would come riding home some days after his job as a horse trader with bouquets of wildflowers he'd stop and pick and sometimes bags of rock candy for the boys. One time he
came home with a baseball for them. It was a treat to wait for Jardine to come home from his work.

But then one day he didn't come home till some men brought him home in the back of a wagon wrapped in a tarp, saying how he'd gotten into an argument with a fellow over a horse the fellow claimed Jardine sold him that had the bloat and how Jardine refused to refund the fellow's money and how the fellow went up the street and got drunk and came back with a long barrel pistol and shot Jardine through his rib meat, the first round, and the second through the back of his “goddamn skull” to quote the fellow who shot him. The fellow was arrested and a quick trial was held and the fellow was found innocent of murder in the first degree and every other degree because nobody could prove one way or the other whether it was a justified shooting or not, seeing as how the horse in question actually had the bloat and in fact died only one hour before Jardine was himself shot.

So there he now lay in a cold dark grave with nothing but Billy and Sam's memory of him photographed in their minds, this mild-mannered fellow with eyes blue as ice water, closed forever against the stain of the world wherein men could
shoot you over practically nothing at all and get away with it.

“Where would we go?” Sam asked when Billy suggested they leave Tascosa. “And what about Ma?”

“Ma can make out a lot easier she don't have our hungry mouths to feed. We'd be doing her a favor.”

“How'd we make a living and feed our own hungry mouths?” Sam asked.

“Hell if I know, but we'll make out one way or the other.”

Billy was nineteen, and growing up as he had, with a mother who couldn't pick the right man till she picked Jardine, or rather, Jardine picked her, had made him grow up fast.

He passed the whiskey bottle to Sam, and Sam took a hit off it while Billy rolled them a shuck and smoked it first, then handed it to Sam when Sam handed him back the bottle.

“You know that son of a bitch Longly that killed Jardine and got away with it ought to pay something for his sin,” Billy said.

“How you mean?”

“I mean he ought to pay something.”

“Like what?”

“I don't know, but we ought to ride over there and make him pay something to Ma, and to us.”

“How we gone do that? We ain't even got no horse to ride over there with.”

“We got the keys to the padlock that holds the gate to those horses Jardine was trading for that man in Uvalde.”

“You mean steal us some?”

“You think that fellow from Uvalde when he gets here is just gone give us two horses for showing up and asking him?”

“No, I don't reckon he would.”

“We got Jardine's pistols,” Billy said. “We'll need 'em.”

Sam remembered the Remingtons Jardine kept in a red velvet–lined case made of mahogany he'd shown them once from his old days of being a town marshal in Dallas. The citizens there had given him the set for his faithful duty of keeping law and order. They were even inscribed on the backstraps with
J. R. Frost.

“His prize pistols?” Sam said.

“You think he's gone need them anymore?”

“No, I reckon not.”

“Time we went out on our own, became men,” Billy said. “Pass me that shuck.”

They drank half the whiskey before Sam puked up his portion and slumped down green. Billy, nearly fallen-down drunk, laughed at his little half brother.

That night after they'd all gone to bed, Billy
woke Sam and told him to pack some things and off they snuck out the back door with Jardine's prize pistols stuck inside their belts and walked clear to town where Jardine kept the man from Uvalde's horses locked up in a corral with a big brass padlock.

Billy undid the lock with Jardine's key, and they slipped inside among the horses, some of whom slept standing, their heads down. Billy picked his way through the small herd to where some saddles and bridles were kept next to a big grain bin.

“Pick you out one,” Billy whispered.

The each took a bridle and saddle and picked them out a horse and slipped the headstall over their horses' heads and the bit between their teeth and saddled them up, then walked them out slow through the gate, with Billy dismounting and locking the gate again before remounting, telling Sam to take it slow, to walk up the back alley behind the town's buildings till they hit the road leading south.

It was half a moon that night, enough to see by but not easily be seen unless somebody was looking for them.

When they reached the south road Billy said, “Okay, let's ride these sons a bitches like they was horses we just stole.”

“We
did
just steal them,” Sam said.

“My goddamn point exactly,” Billy said with a grin.

The found Longly's place easy enough. Just a lone little shack looked like a shadow in the half light of night, sitting just off the road three miles outside of town.

“What if he keeps a dog?” Sam said. “And it sets to barking loud.”

“Then I feel sorry for that old dog,” Billy said and pulled the Remington out of his waistband, and holding it like that, knowing what he might end up doing with it, gave him a whole other feeling than he'd ever had before.

“You best pull your piece too.”

Sam followed suit and they rode up to the house slow, thinking any minute some hound would come out barking and snarling. And such would have been the case, but Longly's hound had been bitten a week earlier by a rattlesnake several times and died an anguished death. The man Longly had not yet replaced him, much to Billy and Sam's good fortune and not to Longly's.

They tied off their mounts out front, and Billy stepped up to the door with Sam across from him, both of them holding their pistols at the ready. Billy rapped hard at the door and kept rapping till a light came on inside.

“Who is it?” they could hear a man calling from within. “Who the hell is there and what do you want?”

Billy shouted, “It's the law, open this goddamn door!”

It opened slowly and Billy stuck the muzzle of his revolver in Longly's face and walked him back into the room with Sam following.

“You're the brats of that whore Frost was living with,” he said, and Billy struck him across the ear with the barrel of Jardine's pistol, and Longly yelped like someone had scalded him.

Sam was feeling nervous.

“Give me all your money, you son of a bitch,” Billy commanded. “What you owe my family for taking the life of a decent man.”

Longly held his bleeding ear, the blood dripping through his fingers and down his hand to his wrist.

“I'll give you shit and call it money, is what I'll do, you mealymouth little peckerwood.”

Billy struck him again, across the collarbone, and dropped the man to his knees. Billy thumbed back the hammer and put the muzzle to the man's head and said, “You think I won't, just go ahead and call me another name and find out.”

Longly relented, and Billy let him get a tin box
from under his bed and take out the money he had in it, then Billy ordered Sam to take a rope and tie Longly to the bed, and Sam did what Billy told him. And once he had Longly tied to the bed, Bill went into the small kitchen and broke off a table leg and come back in and set to whaling on the bound man till Longly stopped screaming, passed out from the blows.

“I reckon playing all that baseball come in handy, huh?” Billy said, standing there breathless.

“You killed him,” Sam muttered.

“Nah, I didn't. I just busted him up good. Look, he's still breathing fine. Let's get.”

So they left with Longly's money and the man from Uvalde's horses and Jardine's pistols and Longly's canned peaches and a slab of fatback bacon and coffee in a burlap poke tied to Sam's saddle horn, and Billy wanted to burn the place to the ground with Longly still in it, but Sam talked him out of it.

And they rode hard for a time but then Billy said, “We ain't safe nowhere this side of the border, we best go to Old Mexico, cross the river and get on down to where they don't care who we are or what we've done.”

And along the way they sustained themselves by holding up small stores to get supplies, and once a saloon for whiskey and a box of cigars. They even robbed a bank in Brazos but hardly got
more than pocket change because all the money was kept in a large steel vault the banker said couldn't be opened till the next morning.

They camped out in canyons so nobody looking could see their firelight. They drank the whiskey till they passed out from it and smoked the cigars till they got used to smoking them.

One night while thus camped, Sam said, “I miss Ma.”

“I miss her too,” Billy said. “And as soon as we get a little extra money, we'll send her some of it to help her along and let her know we're all right.”

Sam sometimes wept in his sleep.

And once they got down near the border, Billy said, “Time you and me became full-fledged desperadoes.”

“How do you mean?” Sam said. “I thought we already were with all the crimes we been committing.”

“We stole things, yeah—whiskey, horses, and even a box of cigars, and robbed that bank in Brazos.” They both laughed at the fiasco of it. Billy continued, “And we come close to killing a man—which is the truest mark of a true desperado,” Billy said. “But we ain't blooded yet.”

“How do we get blooded?”

They were sitting their horses atop a rocky ridge
looking down on a small village below. And perhaps a mile or two beyond, if their judgment was worth a spit, lay the river that once you crossed you were in Old Mexico. The river shone like a wire in the fading light.

“Come on, I'll show you,” Billy said and spurred his mount down the slope, and Sam followed him on down.

They rode into the village with their pistols plainly showing, and folks outside their haciendas stopped to look at them. It was just one dusty street leading up to small adobes on either side, ramadas with roofs made of ocotillo that threw down patches of striped shade. They came to a cantina halfway up the street, and Billy said, “Let's rein in here.”

They tied off their horses and went in without trying to hide the fact they were wearing pistols, and strode to the plank bar. A small, thin man with a horseshoe of gray hair stood behind the bar.

“We'd like some whiskey and a woman.”

The man looked from Billy to Sam.

“You boys got a red cent to pay for the booze and pussy?”

The man had a deep Southern drawl.

“I guess we wouldn't be standing here asking for it if we couldn't pay for it,” Billy said, and
slapped five silver dollars on the table. “What'll that get us?”

The man smiled enough to show he had buck teeth.

“Zee!” he called to a woman seated at a table by herself on the other side of the room. Near where she sat, a man sat with his head lying down on his table, snoring.

She was a lot bigger than anyone else in the room, and she lifted that bulk from her chair and came over. She was wearing a loose, thin cotton shift that showed the outline of her breasts and the patch of dark hair between her legs when she waddled over.

“These boys say they want a piece of beaver,” and he pointed at the money on the bar. “What do you think, Zee?”

She looked at each of them.

“You little peckers think you're up to handling Mama Zee?” she said.

“I reckon we're about up for anything,” Billy said.

“Shit then, follow me.”

“I'll wait here,” Sam said.

“Hell you will,” Billy said and tugged him by his collar to follow the woman out back to a small shack that was barely large enough for a bed and a basin, which was all there was in it.

“How you peckers want it, one at a time or both together?” she said.

“One at a time,” Billy said.

“Strip off your duds then, or if you'd rather, leave 'em on, but let's get started because it's tight in here and I don't mean this,” she said, lifting the shift above her fat thighs. “I'm not laying in this stifling room any longer than necessary.”

Sam cut his gaze away as Billy dropped his pants and climbed on top of the woman. Sam wished he could shut his ears as well—the ache of bedsprings and the woman grunting like a shoat hog. Then Billy climbed off and said, “Your turn.”

It was something awful and at the same time fixating, Sam thought as he tried not to think at all. And when it was finished he and Billy went back into the bar while the woman cleaned herself up standing over the washbasin and had themselves a shot of tequila each, then left and headed for the river.

And when they'd crossed the river and made camp for the night, Billy said, “How was that back there?”

“Plain ugly,” Sam said.

“Yeah, but you liked it too, didn't you?”

“I guess it's second best to using your hand.”

Billy laughed and said, “Well, we're both blooded now.”

“I feel like I ought to jump in that river and warsh.”

“Go ahead.”

“Think I will.”

“Hell, I'll join you.”

And for a time, as the sun sank beyond the brown hills, they frolicked in the cool waters of the river like fishes until they were exhausted and climbed out and lay on the grass naked and wet, semi happy knowing they'd probably never cross north of the river again—that what had been home was home no more.