A Bullet for Billy (7 page)

T
he wind-waggled sign read:
CIUDAD DE TONTOS
. A sagebrush tumbled wildly across the road.

“What's it mean?” Sam asked.

“I look Mescan to you?” Billy said.

“Hell, I figured when you were running with that Mescan gal back home you knew some of the lingo.”

“I knew enough to say let me kiss your lips and feel your titties,” Billy said with a grin.

They spurred their mounts forward. It was a good-size town set between twin mountains whose slopes were prickled with hundreds of saguaro cactus.

Most of the buildings were adobe, low slung and whitewashed so it hurt the eyes to look at them under the blazing sun. Judging by where it stood, it was sometime late afternoon, four or five o'clock.

“You think maybe there's a doctor here we can get ourselves checked out and fixed up?” Sam said.

“I reckon, if we had something to pay him with.”

“I'd trade my pistol for some relief.”

“You'd be a damn fool then. In this country.”

“I can't hardly stand to sit my saddle.”

They reined in at a merchant store.

“What we aim to do here?” Sam said. “We got no money.”

“We'll figure it out,” Billy said and dismounted.

Sam followed suit and followed Billy inside. It was quiet and cool inside the store, with the scent of dry wood and blankets, coffee and tea.

Nobody was in sight.

“We could just grab some things and go,” Sam said.

“That's what I was thinking. See can you find a gunny and then put some of them canned goods on that shelf yonder in it.”

“What you gone do?”

Billy was eyeing a big brass cash register.

“What you think I'm gone do?”

Billy went around the other side of the counter, keeping an eye peeled for whoever owned the place while Sam poked around for a gunny till he came up with one.

“Eureka!” he said.

“Keep quiet,” Billy said as he punched the buttons on the cash register in an effort to get the drawer to pop open. Finally it did with a ring and the drawer popped out. But the money was Mexican money, paper and copper and silver pesos.

“Shit,” muttered Billy, but scooped them out and stuffed what was there in his pockets while Sam hustled cans of peaches and pears, beans and potted meats into the gunny.

Billy saw a rack of rifles across the way and went over but the rifles were chained to the rack and held with a padlock and he wondered where the key was.

“I can't believe this, can you?” Sam was saying when they heard something from behind a door that stood to the rear of the store. They froze listening.

“What was that?”

“I don't know but we best get in the wind,” Billy said.

Then they heard something else, a sharp cry of pain sounded like a woman crying out.

“Something's wrong,” Sam said.

“Don't worry about it, let's get the hell out of here.”

“No, somebody's hurt back yonder.”

“It's not our problem unless we make it our
problem,” Billy said, tugging at the gunny Sam was holding, trying to pull him toward the door.

“No, it wouldn't be right to let a woman lay back there hurt.” Sam started for the door, then they heard the sound of breaking glass and a loud crash and Sam pulled the pistol from his belt and cocked it and Billy said, “You're a crazy son of a bitch you go through that door.”

But Sam went through it anyway and Billy yanked his piece and followed his kid brother, figuring he couldn't just leave Sam hanging like that.

What they saw on the floor stopped them dead in their tracks: a woman lying in a pool of blood, gasping, her dress torn away, everything exposed, and several bloody stab wounds in her chest.

“Jesus God!” Sam said.

Billy saw the torn dress lying to the side and grabbed it and knelt by the woman, pressing the folded cloth to the woman's torso to try and stanch the flow of blood. She looked at him wild-eyed and gasped, only the gasp was more a rattling gurgle than anything.

Sam stood frozen, gun in his hand as Billy struggled to stop the blood. The woman squirmed and Sam shouted, “She's dying, Billy!”

“Goddamn, help me with this. Do something.”

But neither of them knew what to do, and Billy
looked into the frightened eyes of the woman that stared at him with so much fear, it went straight into him. His hands were soaked in blood up to his wrists now, the dress soaked too so that you could wring the blood out of it, and Billy thought,
How much blood can a body have?

Sam ran out into the store and grabbed a striped blanket from a shelf and came back and pressed it to the woman's nakedness even as she thrashed about in her agony.

“Please, lady,” Billy was saying. “Please…” Then he looked at Sam and said, “Run get somebody, see can you find a doctor, anybody.”

But when Sam turned there stood a man in a tan soldier's uniform with a tan cap, clearly a uniform, and the man was nearly as tall as the doorjamb. He had dark fierce eyes and long black mustaches and wore a pistol in a black holster with a flap over it he'd already unbuttoned and was pulling the pistol from.

He spoke to them harshly in Spanish and aimed his pistol at them, waving them away from the body. Then he came and knelt next to the woman and spoke her name, “Maria…” They saw her eyes roll toward the man as if she was trying to speak to him with her eyes.

More Mexican soldiers poured into the room, their guns drawn.

“Shit,” Billy said.

Then the woman shuddered and the man cried out to some of the other soldiers in Spanish and they came and lifted her and carried her out of the room in a hurry.

“You killed my child,” the man said to Billy and Sam in English while the remaining soldiers kept their guns leveled at the boys.

“No sir!” Billy said. “We didn't have nothing to do with this.”

“You little shits!”

The tall man stood, stepped forward, and slapped Sam with an open hand hard enough across the face to stagger him. Then he cocked the pistol and put it against Billy's head.

“Maybe I blow out your brains, eh.”

Billy closed his eyes expecting the bullet. But then the man finally growled something to the others, and before Billy or Sam knew what was happening, they were dragged from the store and up the street to a large adobe building with bars on some of the windows. Even then the streets had suddenly filled with people, the word having gone out that Señorita Toro, the General's youngest daughter, had been murdered, her throat slit, that she had been “
violado
,” they whispered. The rumors were rampant. Of course they were wrong on some of the facts, but what were facts when such a thing happened?

The General had been at home eating a meal
when his brother-in-law, his wife's brother, came rushing in breathlessly to tell him there had been trouble at the store.

“What sort of trouble?” the General said. He'd been eating a chicken.

“Very bad trouble,” the brother-in-law said.

“Maria, is she all right?”

“I don't know,” the brother-in-law said. “You know I just left for a little while to go get lunch and when I returned I saw two hombres there in the back room with her on the floor. They both had pistols, and, well…I came right away for you.”

The General stood with such a burst of energy he knocked over the table and the platter of chicken and everything else and grabbed his cap, hurrying after his brother-in-law toward the store, telling him as they went to go and round up some of his men and have them hurry to the store.

What he saw broke his heart when he entered.

His lovely and beloved Maria, her bare legs sticking out from under a blanket, the pool of blood flowing outward across the wood planks of the floor. He bent and took the blanket away from her and saw the numerous stab wounds, the two boys with blood on their hands. He'd pulled his pistol and ordered them to stand away from her, then knelt next to his daughter.

“
Oh
,
dios querido!
”

Then he'd wanted to know why these gringos did this thing but they denied having anything to do with it, and he became instantly angry and slapped the one boy hard across the face and nearly shot them. But instead his logic took over and he ordered some of his men to take the girl to the infirmary and the others to place the boys in jail until he could learn the truth of what had happened.

He told himself that if his child died, he would immediately execute the two boys without benefit of a trial. He would have them shot by firing squad; he himself would take up a rifle and make sure they paid for their crime.

He was at once angry and aggrieved, and the two emotions struggled within him to find some balance.

For now, he must go to the infirmary and await the outcome.

At his advanced age, he had learned it is always best to keep your anger at bay until all the facts were known and then proceed with due speed to bring about justice where wrongs were committed.

But it was hard not to want to kill those two muchachos then and there.

Very damn hard.

O
f course the General had them beaten to get them to confess to their crime, to say why they did it. The men who did the beating tied Billy and Sam to chairs and hit repeatedly with a leather strap that cut and stung until their heads rang. At one point the General himself did it.

“What I want to know is, why did you come here and do this thing?” he said to them in between the beatings, between the buckets of water poured into their bloody mouths until they choked and almost drowned.

“We didn't!” Billy sputtered. “We found her like that.”

“Oh, is this why you had her blood all over your hands, eh?”

The General's English was quite good. He was
by far the most threatening of the many men who stood in the room along the walls looking on with passive faces.

Billy tried to explain it, so did Sam. Tried explaining it over and over again. But whenever they tried explaining it, the General or one of his men would hit them with the razor strap.

“Why don't you just kill us then, you believe we did it?” Billy screamed against the pain at one point.

The General shook his head, wiped the sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt, and drank from a bottle of tequila.

“If my
hija
dies, you can count on it, amigo.”

The boys continued to deny their involvement with the savagery.

“You just happened to be there by accident, is that it? You came in and found her like that, is that your story?”

More beating.

Finally Billy said something that gave the General real pause: “If we done it, where's the damn knife we done it with!”

The General stayed the hand of his man holding the strap now.

“Did you find the knife?” he asked his men. They looked at one another, shrugged, until an older man said, “No, General, but then we did not look or even think about it.”

“Go and see if you can find the knife,” the General ordered.

Several of them raced from the room and went to the store.

The strap stung like a razor being slashed across their skin. Sam couldn't help but cry. Billy bit the insides of his cheeks till they bled.

Then their mouths would be forced open and buckets of water would be poured down their throats until they thought they were drowning and would pass out, only to be awakened again, to be beaten again until they both thought they would go crazy.

“I did it!” Billy finally muttered. “I stabbed her for the money, but Sam didn't have nothing to do with it…” Billy couldn't take seeing Sam done that way; he knew if it kept up, Sam would probably die first. Sam didn't deserve any of what was happening to him, Billy told himself, and if he had to confess to try and save Sam's life, then that's what he would do. And did.

The General nodded his head slowly, looked round at his men with a sagging satisfaction that he had gotten the confession.

“Why did you do it?” the General asked. “Did you do it for the money or because she was just there and an easy target for you? I want to know why.”

“Yes…” Billy said, his will completely broken.
What difference would it make what he confessed to? The General was bound to kill him either way.

“What is your name and where do you come from?” the General said. “I want to put it on your death certificate and send it to your mother. I want her to feel what I am feeling.”

Billy told him the only true name he knew of, his mother's maiden name, because he didn't really know who his father was or even who Sam's father was—both men had fled before they were born. And it wasn't right in his book to use Jardine's name, because Jardine was no kin at all; he was just a dead man lying in a grave with all those stories left untold.

“Billy Rogers,” he said.

“And where do you come from Billy Rogers?”

“Tascosa, Texas.”

“Tejas, eh?

Billy nodded.

“Tell me your
madre
's name and I will write and send her your death certificate and tell her how you have died from your sins here in Mexico. I'm a fair man.”

“Don't have no living kin,” Billy said. He could only imagine how hard his mother would take hearing that he and Sam had gotten themselves killed down in Mexico, accused of rape and murder. He didn't want her to have to bear that.

“So you come from the North and yet you have no family. Were you born of chickens? Hatched from eggs?”

The General motioned toward one of his men and said, “Kill that one,” pointing at Sam. The soldier took out a black revolver and stepped forward.

“All right, damn it!” Billy said. “Her name's Laura Lee Rogers. And I'll tell you something else, you goddamn son of a bitch, you kill either of us, she send her daddy down here to wipe all you bastards out.”

The General snorted his derision.

“This is what you think, that some old man will come down here for the sake of you two and himself be killed in the trying?”

“Gus Rogers is one mean son of a bitch,” Billy declared. “And he'll bring every Ranger he knows down here and burn this town and hang you and all these others…”

Again, the General took pause. He knew a Gus Rogers from his youth who later joined the Texas Rangers and became well known on both sides of the border.

“So your
abuelo
is Gus Rogers, eh? You think he will come and save you two little shits? No, he won't save you. And if he tries I will have him buried in the same grave as you.”

The General motioned for the Ruales to lower
his weapon. Tears streamed down Sam's cheeks. It was so awful, the beating they'd given him, he'd just as soon be shot and put out of his misery.

“Put them in separate cells,” the General ordered. Then he went out, and some of his men shadowed him because he was
the
General. He went first to the store where his men were searching for the knife.

“Have you found anything?”

“No, General.”

“Keep looking.”

“Yes, General.”

“And wash that stain.”

“Yes, General.”

The General was full of sorrow for his young daughter, the issue of his third wife as it turned out. He'd been married before, and one wife had died in childbirth and the baby as well, and the other had gone off with a young vaquero and disappeared after giving birth to a daughter, Edwina, and left him to raise her alone, and she was nearly grown by the time he met his third wife, a young woman forty years his junior named Phillipina with whom he'd had, very late in his life, this child that now lay in the infirmary possibly dying.

He went home to tell his wife what had happened and she wept bitterly.

He said simply, “I'm sorry. I've caught those
who've done this thing and will see that they are punished severely.” It seemed to the General too little consolation.

It was this wife's brother, the one who had informed him of the tragic events, who owned the store originally. Maria had gone to work there at first to learn to become a business woman. She proved very good at it due to her education at a girls' academy while an adolescent. It was at the General's wife's insistence that he bought the store outright from the brother-in-law, who'd gotten himself into gambling debt. The General gave the girl the deed and said, “It is yours,” but again at his wife's insistence, the General let the brother-in-law stay on as an assistant to his daughter. And so it had been until this very day.

What of course the General could not have known was the effect that the lovely Maria would have on her uncle. How, having worked so closely with her day in and day out, Don Domingo had secretly observed the young woman's beauty, practically breathed it in and became intoxicated by it. How his passion for her was like a small flame that built into a raging fire. And how on that particular day the two young gringos had come into the store, he had already lured her into the storeroom and set upon her. And when she refused his advances, he put his knife to her breast
and cut away the dress and threatened that she would give herself to him one way or the other, so impassioned was he. And that as he was finishing with her and they heard someone enter the front of the store, the ringing of small bell above the door, this man, this Don Domingo, panicked when she cried out and plunged his knife into her several times. And then crashed through the tall window and ran down the alley.

No, the General would have never thought such a thing of his brother-in-law, the affable Don Domingo, who was by nature a quiet and unassuming man.

Absorbed as he was in his misery, the General waited with his wife at the infirmary; waiting, waiting, until she drew her final breath. Then the women who themselves were widows and prayed every day in the church came and said they would care for her. His wife, distraught beyond consolation, threw herself over the girl's body screaming, “No! No! No!”

The General could stand it no longer and wandered out into the night, then into the cantina, and proceeded to drink tequila while some of the men who always accompanied him stood by and watched somberly.

“What will you do, General?”

But he only wanted to erase the memory of seeing his daughter as he had—naked and terribly
wounded and now peacefully dead. How does one wash away such a memory?

He fought the impulse to go straight to the jail and kill them both. That would be too easy; they deserved greater punishment before he killed them. For what would they suffer in comparison to what Maria had suffered if he gave them each a quick bullet to the head? No, let them think about it, the hour of their death, in a way that his child had no time to think of her hour of death. Let them think about it and wonder when that hour would come to them. His military training had taught him much about how to punish the enemy. He would wait until after Maria's funeral.

He drank for a time, then said, “I want to go see the fortune-teller.” His head was abuzz as though full of bees, from the absinthe and the tequila.

And so his soldiers walked him up the street to the house where the fortune-teller lived. The windows were dark. He rapped hard until a light came on and the door opened and the woman recognized her visitor.

“Sí, General,” she said, and he removed his cap and heeled back the hair that had been sweated to his forehead and told her why he'd come. She invited him in, and he told his men to return and be with his grieving wife.

He stepped into the little house, and she led
him to a settee and then sat in a chair near him and said, “Give me your hands, General.” He extended them to her, and she turned them over and looked at his palms.

After a moment or two she released his hands.

“What do you think?” he said.

The fortune-teller said with all authority, “You have suffered greatly, but you will suffer even more…”

“Tell me how I could possibly suffer more than I am at this moment?”

She shook her head and said, “I don't know. It is not clear to me. But the lines in your palms tell of more trouble.”

He gave a sigh and paid her for the fortune, stood and said, “Pack your things and be gone from this place by the morning.”

His anger and pain were redoubled by the old woman's predictions. What did she know anyway? Everything around him seemed unpleasant; his life was ending in ruin.

And in those very hours while he was away from the jail, sitting at the infirmary and later in the saloon drinking, followed by his visit to the fortune-teller, the General could not have known that the old guard watching over the gringos was smitten with Billy. The old guard was of a secret nature, and his desire ran counter to most men. And when he first saw Billy, he began to speak
to him in soft tones while Sam slept on the floor in the adjoining cell with his hands clamped between his knees.

This old guard said to Billy, “You are a very handsome boy.” Billy had removed his shirt to inspect his welts and bruises. “Yes, very handsome. Would you like a cigarette?” At first Billy did not know what to make of this odd fellow who was old enough to be his grandfather, a man with small rat's eyes narrowly set into his thin face and greasy gray hair that lay plastered to his bulbous head when he removed his cap and combed it to one side with his dirty fingers. He had a sour smell to him.

But young Billy had good instincts for sin and so saw it as an opportunity even if he had to swallow down the bile created by his disgust of the old bastard's intentions.

And when the leering guard stood and went out into the outer office for something, Billy whispered to Sam, “I think I got a plan to get us out of here. You just be ready to go when it happens.”

Sam started to ask a question but Billy silenced him with a finger to the lips.

“Just be ready to run when I make my play.”

Sam nodded.

Then Billy kicked at the barred door till the old guard returned, his eyes bulging from his thick face.

Billy met his gaze as they stood separated by the bars.

“I need to use the privy,” Billy said.

“I get you a bucket, amigo.”

“No. I thought maybe we could go out back. You got a privy out back, don't you?” Then Billy glanced at Sam, who pretended to still be asleep.

“I don't want my brother to have to see anything,” Billy whispered.

The guard nodded.

“Sí,” he said. “We go out back, me and you.”

The guard went and got a pair of manacles and put them through the bars and told Billy he must wear them.

Then he winked and said, “It's okay, you won't need your hands, hombre.”

Sam watched through half-closed eyes the two of them going out the back door.