The Last Shootist (38 page)

 

Forty-three

 

The three youths rode at a slow trot, drinking deeply of the cooler night air, trying to take their minds off the bloodbath they'd just suffered, the loss of their outlaw friend. Gillom was reloading his Remingtons, extricating the misfired cartridge from one cylinder. Anel Romero cleared her opium fog by pouring half a canteen of water over her head, rubbing the refreshing water around her face, and shaking her wet, black hair to dry off. The darkness was illuminated by a growing fire flaming up against north Clifton's night sky, but they didn't care what happened to that
pozo
and the pimp's employees.

“Can't believe I shot those jaspers without usin' many gun tricks. Moving so damned fast, I forgot to show off,” muttered Gillom.

“‘Fast is fine, accuracy is everything,' said Wyatt Earp.”

“Wyatt said that?” wondered Gillom.

“Yup, after that little fracus at the O.K. Corral. But you're the best shootist I've ever seen, Gillom, your speed, accuracy, and nerve, just sensational. Least as good as ol' Wyatt ever was,” admired Ease.

“Thank you.” Gillom Rogers sat straighter in his saddle, basking in the first compliment anyone had paid him in a very long while. “Like J. B. Books warned, gunfighting's a sorry way to make a living.”

*   *   *

The riders were now in Metz's Flat, a mile south on acreage which had been leased by the livery stable owner for the local Chinese's vegetable gardens. Additional acres Henry Hill had sold to the Shannon Copper Company, the third new mining conglomerate in the Clifton-Morenci area, which had just blown in its first smelter down here near the banks of the San Francisco River for the needed water to cool the furnaces refining their new copper ore.

Gillom slowed their fast walk to lead the horses off the stage road to Guthrie, then over railroad tracks from the mines in the north down to this new copper-processing facility.

“Where are we going?” inquired Ease.

“Need to bandage in some light. I'm still bleeding.”

They could see a fiery glow ahead from two blast furnaces. Noisy rock crushers weren't operating within the wood-framed, tin-roofed buildings, too dangerous work at night, but the young riders could see a few carbide safety lamps moving about as night workers smelted valuable ore around the clock.

The three reined their mounts outside a corner of the nearest open-sided building. The cooling water jackets to these two furnaces were thirteen feet high, and the glow reflected out of four charge spaces on the feed floor gave them enough light to doctor by, after the two wounded youths gingerly dismounted.

“Get whiskey from my saddlebag,” motioned Gillom to his girlfriend. He snapped open the Barlow knife he'd won from Johnny Kneebone, oh so long ago, to cut wider the stab hole above the left knee in his heavy denim jeans. Anel had the whiskey pint open and an unused bandanna to soak the alcohol in.

“Hold up. Will hurt,” she ordered.

He lifted his knee and braced himself against the horse's flank. She splashed liquor directly on his leg wound, then swiped the soaked cloth around its edges to clean it.

“Aaahhhh!” It hurt like blue blazes. His girlfriend reached inside his ripped pants to wrap the bandanna tightly around his thigh several times and tied the stab wound off with Gillom's belt for a pressure bandage to staunch further bleeding.

“Help Ease, wouldcha?” Anel began rifling saddlebags to find something else to use for a bandage.

Gillom tested his bandaged knee to see if he could walk. Ease slipped the torn wool coat off his holed upper left arm as gently as possible.

Gillom was drawn toward the heat from the furnace being stoked by several workers on the feed floor. He saw metal cooking through the
tuyère,
the indentation in the furnace's metal jacket through which a metal nozzle was inserted to blast air like a bellows to superheat the ore that then flowed into a metal crucible below it. The glowing red mix of lime and flux waste and molten copper was alluring, and the gunfighter was drawn closer. He halted, staring into the hellishly hot maw wrenched from the bowels of the earth. His heart was high in his gullet, and he chewed his lip as he squinted into the fiery glare.

Suddenly, in a split second, Gillom Rogers drew his Remington, spun it twice to flip forward in the air and catch by the butt on its rotation, then wound up and heaved the custom revolver straight in through the
tuyère,
the side opening in the blast furnace. Gillom could see the famous gun sink in the molten metal, heard three loud pops as cartridges in the cylinder ignited, quickly swallowed by the burning flux.

This rash act got several smelter workers' attention. “Hey, kid, what in hell do you think you're—”

But the man was too late. From his left-hand holster Gillom Rogers pulled the second Remington, the pearl-handled one, and flipped this nickel-plated .44 in the air with a backspin transfer, caught it by its barrel, and then threw this beautiful pistol, too, right into the furnace after the other weapon.

“Hey! Fella!
Stop
that!”

The trick shootist didn't linger to hear those bullets popping. He limped back to his friends, who were watching him, amazed.

“
Gillom!
Those were valuable guns!” Ease's upper left arm was bandaged in another bandanna, and Anel was tying his bloody coat to the back of his saddle.

“They were
cursed
. Those revolvers brought nothing but blood, death, and bad luck to me and Mister Books. Don't need 'em in my life anymore.” The young man seemed calm as he checked his horse's cinch, then remounted carefully from the right side again, forgiving his bandaged leg.

Ease was confused. “Can you risk going unarmed?”

“
Si!
No need
pistolas,
” Miss Romero agreed, remounting as several smelter workers carrying safety lamps high approached for a better look at these gunslinging intruders.

“J. B. Books said I was a sorrow to my mother. Well, I don't intend to be anymore. And I sure as hell don't wanna be ridin' the night train to the big
Adios
.” Gillom turned his buckskin gelding, pulling Sam's black race horse along behind by its reins.

Ease Bixler was having a little difficulty mounting with only one usable arm to clutch his saddlehorn. Gillom's girlfriend gigged her paint pony over to pull him up onto his saddle.

Gillom Rogers straightened in his saddle, feeling calmer, refreshed. It almost felt like being reborn.

“C'mon, Ease! El Paso
awaits!
”

With a clatter of hooves and whoops in the night, the three friends rode away fast, whipping their reins, galloping now, out from under a black cloud toward clearing southwestern skies and a pearly white gibbous moon.

 

Afterword

 

I knew the toughest thing to convince Western fans of would be the alligator pond shoot-out, so here's a 1954 photograph of the famous alligator pond in El Paso's downtown San Jacinto Plaza. Note the little boy on the left attempting to climb over the concete railing to get in and “play” with the alligators. Wonder if he's still got all his fingers and toes? That concrete railing was an improved barrier from the original low chain-link fence I've described, which was erected in 1883 when the plaza was relandscaped to contain this tourist attraction. The original gators had grown large and were still in the plaza in 1901. There was a wooden plank from the pond's concrete rim over the water so keepers could walk out to the fountain to do repairs or reach the animals for feeding. Yes, a group of dentists really
was
turned away by the police late one inebriated night way back when they tried to decide a bet about how many teeth an alligator actually had. El Paso history records that the alligators were eventually moved to quarters at their city zoo in 1965 after two were stoned to death and another had a spike driven through its left eye. Students also kept “borrowing” them to put in lucky professors' offices or the pool at Texas Western College (now the University of Texas at El Paso) before swimming meets.

*   *   *

My late father's, Glendon's, famous novel has had an impact on the Western genre since it was first published by Doubleday, winning a Spur Award as the Best Western Novel of 1975. The Western Writers of America ranked
The Shootist
no. 4 in their sixtieth anniversary member survey in 2013 of the ten greatest Western novels written in the twentieth century. This Western classic is now available in its fourth paperback edition (different covers, different publishers) from Bison Books, the University of Nebraska Press. It's available online from Bison's website (www.nebraskapress.unl.edu) and is an e-book on Amazon's Kindle.

Where this Western title has really become well known, though, is as John Wayne's final film. May 22, 2007, was John Wayne's centennial, one hundred years of the Duke! The bulk of Wayne's 176-odd films were Westerns, and all the studios and video distributors rushed out DVDs of most of his movies in a one-hundredth-birthday celebration, some in newly remastered special editions.
The Shootist
received a DVD edition from Paramount Home Video, in which I appear in their “Making Of” segment talking about this film. The film featured a sterling cast of famous actors who came together to support Wayne when word went round that his health wasn't good and this might be his last movie. Many of those stars worked for less than their normal salaries in this eight-million-dollar picture, which wasn't that large a budget even back in 1976.

By all accounts it was a tough shoot, with Wayne having difficulty breathing at Carson City's five-thousand-foot altitude. He had to be oxygen-assisted regularly and had a nurse with him round the clock. The Duke was cranky with his costars and demanding about script changes and the hiring of bit players. He'd never worked with action veteran Don Siegel before, and those two hard-headed guys soon had a showdown over who was actually going to direct the picture.

John Wayne calmed down and filming went a little easier when the company moved down to sea level on the back lot of the Burbank Studios for some of the interiors and the Carson City street scenes. The novel is set in El Paso in 1901, when it was the last of the roaring border towns, but the script changed the locale to Carson City to match the mountainous exteriors they had filmed in Washoe Lake State Park north of the Nevada state capital. Big John caught the flu during filming, and he was already down to one lung from an earlier operation for cancer due to his lifelong smoking. The producers had accident insurance to cover his two-week absence and filmed around Wayne using body doubles and every trick in the cinematographers' handbook. Finally Wayne returned to film the final saloon shoot-out on a very tense back-lot set.

Robert Boyle received a well-deserved Oscar nomination for his $400,000 set design for this film, and Wayne was reportedly in close competition for another Best Actor nomination; however, he'd already won for
True Grit
seven years earlier, and the Duke's conservative politics didn't mesh well with more liberal, younger Academy voters, so it wasn't to be. Released in September 1976, usually the slowest movie month of the year with students back in school and the beginning of football season,
The Shootist
didn't do that well at the box office, grossing thirteen million dollars in the United States. Producer Dino De Laurentiis kept the international box office for himself, and cofinancier Paramount Pictures only had North American distribution, so the studio didn't spend that much on advertising. Wayne found the energy to do twelve days of TV talk shows and press interviews around the country to promote the film as the mostly rave reviews came in.
Variety
called
The Shootist
“one of the great films of our time.” Another film critic called it “the finest valedictory performance by any major American actor in a role hand-tailored for him.”

And indeed,
The Shootist
became John Wayne's final film, outside of a few last TV commercials and antismoking ads. His last appearance was presenting the Best Picture Oscar in April 1979 at the Academy Awards. Duke looked like a walking cadaver then, after having most of his stomach removed earlier in the year because of his spreading cancer. John Wayne died on June 11, just a few months later, and the world mourned a film legend's passing.

Where
The Shootist
has really aged well has been in the aftermarket, on TV networks worldwide and in DVD and video sales. Film historians have widely praised this Western, deeming it a classic, and today it's considered one of John Wayne's ten best Western films.

Several times since my father died of smoking complications, too, in Scottsdale, Arizona, in September 1992, the Swarthout estate has been contacted by book packagers wanting to put out quickly written paperback series of Shootist novels or a compilation of short stories by well-known Western authors about the adventures of John Bernard Books as a younger gunfighter. We turned them down, not wishing to tarnish this famous title via hacked-out tomes. I wasn't ready to attempt a sequel until I won a Spur Award myself from the Western Writers of America for
The Sergeant's Lady
as the Best First Novel of 2004 (Forge Books). That frontier romance, set against the backdrop of the final months of Apache raids into Arizona Territory in 1886, was also based on one of Glendon's forgotten short stories, which ran in the old
Saturday Evening Post
in July 1959.