by John Vernon
Henry Antrim.
Antrim came later. If you suffered from something, from a toothache or the flux, why, I would come down with the same blessed thing just by feeling bad about it, by imagining how you felt in my mind, so best keep away. It works both ways. What a small nut we lived in on Cherry Street, Henry. What a hot place in summer and the North Pole in winter.
He still holds her hand. Still feels it growing colder. Ma, can I have a lock of your hair?
To remember me by? It's just a mess of dry grass.
He has his own penknife. He reaches out and saws, pulling on a tress, appalled as the skin lifts from her smooth scalp and stretches to a point, and frightened by the eye-white bulging through its lids, a big dry eye as round as a cow's, though just a paring of it shows. How did he get here, what should he do, who crammed so much grief and confoundment in his heart? He's after going out west, he remembers she told him and Josie one day coming home from the market.
Who, Ma?
Mr. Antrim.
That had to be before they moved to Wichita. By the time she married Antrim in the church in Santa Fe, Henry could sign his name with either hand, the first thing his teacher Mary Richards noticed when they arrived in Silver City. He and his brother signed the marriage book as witnesses: Henry McCarty, Josie McCarty. But who the dickens was McCarty?
Never you mind. Old carrion, so.
Billy looks around. He's done it again. He's decided what to do without deciding what to do. He's rounded the Capitans toward Agua Azul, heading south, not north. Good for you, boy. And he continues. Why not? Neither way makes more sense than the other. Besides, goers-backward never come out ahead. And anyway he's tired. The insupportable vexation of always being on the move only gets balmed by not thinking about it. There's a hard glassy edge to everything he sees, a brittle sense of melancholic dislocation, though he knows this land well. The blur to the east could be sandstorms or haze, hard to tell which. Between here and there: sharp outline of hill, south-facing slopes beginning to green, two or three wind-battered trees in a hollow alone with their buds. A pungency in the air. Crushed cinchweed on this little-used trail. So he's going to Mexico. He concludes it must be that. Even though it feels like a version of himself tied to an ankle and stuffed with sawdust that has made this decision. There's no forward spill. It impedes his sense of urgency. How mortifyingly slow everything happens, how sluggishly his carcass gets dragged by events. Just one damn thing after another, and who gives a shit?
A bright cube of rolling thread tumbles in air, catches the light, elongates, contracts, like some caught thing underwater. Then another. Another. The air's crazy with them, slowly trembling and spinning. Now and then Billy glimpses inside the gauzy cages a squirt of black spider. Spiders swim past piloting their aircraft and there's not a breath of wind. Their tumbling outlines and boxes of light shift in the air in diminishing stairways from here to the horizon.
He spots on the ground, in the lengthening shadow of his horse, four red blossoms arranged in a wheel just opening as the shadow falls across them, or maybe one blossom, four petals. Each is almond-shaped. Then, bending from the horse, he sees it is not a flower at all. It's four bird-chicks opening their mouths, thinking the shadow is their ma's, come to feed them. Here, the land gently troughs and cottonwoods appear and half a dozen cattle erratically maunder through a basin below. One walks into a tree trunk, veers, makes a circle, walks into another. Another lows as the Kid approaches, and swings his head around, and Billy's gullet clenches. The steer's eyes are sewn shut; pus leaks through the stitches. He's heard about this but hasn't seen it till now. It makes wandering cattle stay closer to home.
A faint wagon road runs through this valley, and more trees appear, Gambel oaks and willows, grass and hard mud cracked into octagons. A fence. A stone hut, long ago abandoned. The valley widens, loses definition, a bosque rises out of the dancing heat lines. An adobe, corrals, broken gates, a fallow garden. Carretas, forked plows abandoned on their sides. The house a burnt shell. Adobe walls broken, timbers caved in, mud roof cracked apart and sitting on the floor, cold smell of scorched wood. Another casualty of the Lincoln County War. Sprawled in the yard beside the homo in back is the corpse of a man, his features burned off. His splayed arms and legs are charred stumps: a black star. The headless skeleton of a boy reclines against a tree, strips of clothing and flesh still hanging from his bones. His head has rolled off and is arranged in the dirt with a cigar in its mouth.
An hour or so later, Billy's horse bogs down, his hooves suck mud. Then he notices the willows and recognizes where he is and it comes with a shock: Blackwater Holes. This is where he shot Morton and Baker, where McCloskey got killed, where it all became unstoppable. Coming on it now from the opposite direction, his mind must adjust its panels and mirrors. Yellow cliffs of that cuesta ahead where the draw swings south. Bare cottonwoods below. New grass, willows blowing over into yellow, tule shooting up.
Eyes moving everywhere, nowhere, stuck. His horse stops. There's something wrong with my mind. Who was it called me malignant and cruel, a minion of the devil? He leaves the trail, skirts La Junta, decides to miss the canyon where Mr. Tunstall was murdered and pulls for a shortcut to the Ham Mills Trail. This unexpected tour of old abominations is taking its toll. Where Tunstall was murdered in cold blood. Is there any other way except cold, young man?
Down and bloody, Ma. Hot. Drunk on killing.
Suddenly he remembers he doesn't have a weapon. The whole day must be revised. Caution flows back like an acid to burn the complacency off his journey from Las Tablas. He feels a goneness on his hip. He stops, looks behind, listens for a while. Same old vigilance. Yet now he feels naked.
Sun to the southwest long in the sky so hot on his face it burns like ice. The cattle in the new grass in Pajarito Flats are undoubtedly the same as three years ago but no longer belong to Dick Brewer, of course. Nothing belongs to Dick Brewer anymore; and he belongs to nothing, he's just a troubled thought. The long day gives the Kid a second helping of time and this horse, at least, humps it. By sundown he's crossing the trickling Feliz below Mr. Tunstall's ranch; it now belongs to James Dolan. It's still faintly light when he ties to the snubbing pole at John Meadows's log cabin on the Peñasco. He can't hallo the house. Must he careful. Tries peeking in a window but it's so filthy all he sees is scrabbled murk and yellow light inside obscured by many gouges. He approaches the door, knocks meekly, backs off, then steps behind a Cottonwood. Behind the door, Meadows closes his twelve-gauge with a shlang, which Billy hears clearly. Exactly the point. "Who?" he growls.
"The Kid," says the Kid.
Meadows lifts the bar and squints outside.
***
"FUCK. Missed again."
"Try the Le Mat."
"Christ, John, that cocksucker weighs three or four pounds."
"I'll take out the shot."
"It still weighs a shitload. It's not a practical weapon."
"At least you could try it."
Billy hands Meadows the odd-looking Trantor. Its butt is too narrow, it doesn't feel right. Why invent a chamber to hold five shots when it could just as easily hold six? Suppose you failed with the first five, what then? In fact, he has. At fifty feet, he's missed the empty whiskey bottle five times, the errant shots displaying no pattern.
Meadows puts the Trantor in his gunny sack and gives Billy the Le Mat. Always the clown, even vexed as he is, the Kid staggers forward, rescuing his right hand with the left, acting like the weapon's as heavy as an anvil. "Draw, you sucker." His arm lifts out of an imaginary holster with painful slowness, as though underwater. They're in a gravel hollow behind Meadows's cabin; the river once looped around a ridge here but sometime in the previous millennium it cut itself a shorter neck and isolated this gully. Presumably, the sound of the gunshots will rise instead of spreading horizontally and alerting the countryside. He fires and the shot is so wide of the mark he can't even detect the eruption of dust. It could have flown straight up, too. F
ive more miscarry. It's not him, it's the gun. 'You could reload the buckshot," says Meadows.
"It never seemed right to me. Pistols firing shot."
"Lawmen like it. You share out the shot with the underneath barrel if you're facing a crowd, then pick off the ones that are left with the upper."
"Well, you'd have to keep a hold of it every blessed minute. You'd be dead before you raised. Let me try that Smith and Wesson."
He tries the Smith and Wesson, Meadows standing beside him. John Meadows is slight, with big ears, a large mustache, and high, hairy eyebrows. Flow he's managed to keep himself out of the Lincoln County War is by mindful circumspection and hardly leaving his ranch. He's a rancher, sure, but a small one with no employees; he does everything himself. I've always wanted to ranch, Billy told him last night, it just never worked out. It's a good life, said John. Pick of horses to ride. Deer in the mountains, antelope on the prairie, ducks in the river, cattle on the range. Choice of weapons to fire—I've got weapons to spare. That was Billy's opening. I could use a pistol, John, but I can't pay you for it. That's all right, Kid. You can take it on tick.
Billy fires six rapid shots in succession; the bottle doesn't even tremble. And when he breaks it to reload the weapon seems to come apart, pieces flying in the air, and he drops the thing. It was just the shell-extractor, he belatedly recalls. Some smartass named King decided it would save you precious seconds to not have to dump expended loads via gravity.
Meadows picks up the gun. It isn't so much the gift of a weapon as the waste of cartridges that's beginning to grate him. "Your best bet's the Colt's Navy."
"Let me try it again."
He reaches in the gunny sack and hands out the pistol by its long barrel. The length of the barrel on a Colt's Navy has always bothered Billy. Being used to a Thunderer, he knows that in drawing this cannon of a weapon he'll catch it on the holster. But drawing's overrated, he also knows that. Accuracy beats a quick draw hands down.
He fires and misses.
This model's a conversion, firing .38-caliber metal cartridges, of which Meadows has a stock in his gunny sack that Billy seems bent on depleting. He fires again and misses. Rounds is expensive. Fires and misses. "Shit!" This weapon is beautifully balanced, the Kid knows. The butt feels lovely; obliging to the hand, graceful as a swan, smooth but not slippy. Then why can't I hit the bottle. He brings the weapon to his face, holds it with both hands, extends his arms slowly, sighting down the barrel, then lowers it. "Christ. I feel like a little boy." He raises it again, stiff-armed, and aims, and the bottle explodes when he fires.
"There you go."
"Light trigger."
"Reliable weapon."
"I guess I'll take this."
"You'll want to carry it in your waistband."
"I know."
"Keep one chamber empty."
"You mean the quick trigger? I'm not worried on that."
"You could lose your manhood."
"I think I lost it already."
"You're just tired."
"More tired than you know, John."
Later, they climb a grassy knoll and talk, the river spluttering below them. Some of Meadows's stock on the other bank low now and then. Sing to me, cowboys. "I bought the right dirt. I learned that when a boy. Buy sweet and buy low, my father taught me."
"I used to have my eye on some land upriver. Me and Fred Waite."
"I never saw land go back one cent in value all my life. I worked for years till I got a little money and slapped it into land quicker than lightning. Where is the war that can carry off land? Where's the thief who can steal it? No sir, land is land, and when you have that your money is safe."
"They stole Tunstall's land."
"I bought land and kept on buying. Now I have all I need."
"How much is all you need?"
"It just lacks a thousand acres."
"That's not an awful lot. Don't you have trouble with your neighbor's cattle?"
"It's plenty for me."
Sitting there beside Meadows, the Kid begins to feel like he's been left behind. You could spend all your life on a thousand acres and never know want. Never change your clothes. Eat brisket, drink buttermilk, sleep on a featherbed. Meadows does smell a little riper than most but where's the harm in that? He smells of wood smoke and layers of sweat, new on top of old, old soaked into wool shirts and leather vests and britches, new—Billy pictures it—a kind of softly crawling crust on his skin and in his hair. Well, better a close smell on your own land than no smell at all. Better to die in the same place you live instead of roaming the world becoming more and more a fanciful creature. Given time—given rootlessness—men pick up pieces of themselves from what's around them, from whatever's at hand. They become made up.
"Where's your next stop?" asks Meadows.
"Maybe John Chisum's."
"I thought you were going to Mexico, Kid."
"I don't know about that. I'm changing my mind."
"You'll have sheriffs and deputies up about your ears."
"What would I do in Mexico without any money? I'll have to get a little somewhere. Go back and see my friends."
"Where?"
"Fort Sumner."
"Sure as you go there, Garrett will get you."
"I don't believe he will. I can stay there awhile and get money enough and then go to Mexico."
"You'll get caught or be killed. He'll just kill you this time. You ought to go south while the going is good."
"You sound like Yginio. Go to Mexico, go to Mexico. I've given up that notion."
"You've departed from your faculties."
"Don't worry about it."
"I'm not the worrying type."
In the silence that follows, Billy pictures the bed behind the door in his mind. He removes his boots, pads backwards slowly, makes it to the porch, then lights out without a word. She must have died again, mothers always die. Then they stay with you. The next morning, once more not having slept at all—not having eaten much either, his stomach a permanent hollow mass thick as to lining, thin as to contents—he tucks his Colt's Navy into his shrinking waistband and shakes Meadows's hand and rides east toward the Pecos.
11. 1878
War
JULY 18. In Alexander McSween's besieged adobe house, Billy pulled on his blue anchor shirt, clawed his thicket of hair, and rose from the parlor floor. Yginio Salazar and Tom O'Folliard lay on their backs beside the tasseled couch but the couch itself was empty of Fred. He must have slipped past the many bodies on the floor without waking a soul. "Where's Fred?" the Kid asked McSween in the kitchen.
"The jakes."
"He'll get shot."
"It's too early. Coffee's on the stove."
As Billy poured a mug Fred walked in the door and barred it behind him. Others shuffled into the kitchen: Jim French and Tom. McSween wouldn't sit, he paced back and forth, and provided the men with news of the siege: Lallycooler Crawford, who'd been shot through both hips while trying to sneak down from the hills around Lincoln and get a bead on the privy that Fred had just visited, now lay dying at Fort Stanton.
"How many is that, then?" asked Billy.
"Two if you count Dan Huff."
"He was poisoned. He's not in this war."
"You heard all the shooting last night I assume?" Standing before them, McSween, in tie and collar, waistcoat, and worsteds, though this was high summer, crossed his legs awkwardly as though trying to relax then stumbled and uncrossed them. "Wilson and Reverend Ealy were carrying I luff past the Torreón and the brutes inside detected their footsteps and opened fire. There's no one in this town who is not in this war. There are no innocent bystanders."
Unless you counted Macky Sween, thought the Kid. At the table he pulled out a chair then stood there trying to decide what to do. Piss outside or here, in a jar? Fred was staring at his shirt, which he'd worn every day of the siege for good luck, and Billy mentally dared him to smile. A sailor shirt scarcely comported with his stature,
he knew, yet nothing comported, nothing answered the purpose or tallied or matched in this wreckage of circumstance. At least the shirt smelled of man-sweat. I bis made him feel less boyish. Everyone smelled pretty rank by now, since water for baths was scarce, as was privacy. The coffee had wrapped a steel band around his head, and he had to pee badly, and McSween in his duds with his fatuous airs annoyed him, as usual. On the kitchen wall a photo of John Tunstall, taken in San Francisco, appeared to mock them all. How many times had Billy tried to picture John Henry Tunstall since he'd been murdered? Whenever he did, the man's face broke up into granulated bulbs that drifted apart. Then he'd gaze at this photograph on McSween's wall of the perfect stranger who'd opened the flood gates, and now here they were caught in a current that no one could buck. They couldn't stop now, if you stopped you'd be dead. I've stepped outside myself, Billy thought, I'm in the wash. I'm up to my neck and cut off and exposed and I never could swim and it's all I can do to keep my head above water. I could climb out to shore but they'd shred me like lettuce.
Outside, he ducked and ran to the privy through the dry light of morning but no shots came. Isolated near the fence in back of the house, it made an especially risky destination. The day was hot already and dust from his tracks tunneled the sunlight. Beyond the privy's warped boards, gullied and gray, cedars and pinons descended to the river.
Back in the kitchen, Billy barred the door and sat at the oilclothed table next to Tom. He listened to McSween ramble on about everything and, equally, nothing—the decline of the world, the intentions of the Dolanites, the comfort of friends. "When do we get paid?" asked Fred. Tom blew on his coffee. Elizabeth Shield's ten-year-old, Minnie, came racing through the kitchen, chased by her older brother Davy, a pimpled adolescent, and she whomped right into Macky, who did not appear to notice. Davy swung a dead rat tied to a string into his sister's face until his uncle, as though through a fog, began to discover the disturbance below him and the sneaky boy hastily stuffed it in his britches. Elizabeth Shield was Sue McSween's sister. She'd come from Missouri with her family of six including Minnie and Davy to live with Mac and Sue. Two months ago Billy had helped the preacher Taylor Ealy and his brood move into Tunstall's store next door, making room in Macky's house for the Shields. Like McSween, Elizabeth's husband was a lawyer, and a Scotsman to boot, thus another irritant to the Church of Rome in Lincoln, and Mac's firm now had become McSween and Shield. David Shield was presently visiting Santa Fe—fortunate man, thought Billy. McSween heard a muffled scream at his feet and spotted a child-blur, and Billy witnessed on his boss's face the fraction of his brain allotted to the present moment putting two and two together. But what Mac said was addressed to his men. "Don't you worry about it. We've got more pressing matters. I'll pay you boys everything you're owed as soon as we're out of this."
