Billy Old, Arizona Ranger

by Geff Moyer

  After the feast they were entertained by a Squaw Dance then given their own tepee furnished with enough buffalo hides and various animal skins to put Jim Bridger to shame. As both men plopped down on the comfortable and soft hides a flute began playing somewhere in the distance.

  “What the hell’s that?” asked Jeff.

  “Kokopelli,” responded Billy, sitting up.

  Before he could explain the meaning of the word two young squaws crept into the tepee, giggling.

  Jeff’s hand instinctively reached toward the holster lying next to him.

  “What the hell?”

  “Relax,” stated Billy. “I kinda expected this.”

  “Expected what? What do they want, our hair?”

  “Think lower! After one a them Squaw Dances the women folk can choose any partner they want. Looks like we done been chosed.”

  Jeff was shocked, mortified, and curious.

  “You mean they want to...to fuck us?” he managed to stammer with both concern and arousal.

  “Yep,” Billy answered with a big grin. “Which one ya want? That one’s got bigger tits, but the other’s got a more toler’ble face.”

  “But they’re...they’re savages,” he whispered.

  “No need to whisper. They don’t know what we’re sayin’.”

  One of the squaws giggled and said something to the other.

  “What’d she say?” Jeff asked.

  “Don’t know fer sure, but I think she said she ain’t ne’er had a white man afore.”

  “That makes two of us,” responded Jeff. “Uh, what if we catch some ungodly disease?”

  “Hell, Jeff,” Billy chuckled, “em two are prob’bly cleaner than any Nogales whore. Besides, turnin’ them down would be an insult—might have to fight our way out of here.”

  That was bullshit and Billy knew it. He figured these two squaws were just out to satisfy their own curiosity and have a little fun. But he also figured sex with an Indian may be something Jeff Kidder should experience.

  Jeff grimaced and whispered, “What if she smells? I know male Injuns smell somethin’ fierce.”

  “Oh, she will! She’ll smell like a woman, ‘stead of a whore.”

  Billy knew the fellow from Dakota frequented the whorehouses and had had his share of baggage handlers, but when he glanced over and saw the squaw gumming Jeff’s johnson while tickling his ball sack with a quail feather, he figured his new friend was in a place he had never been before. The kokopelli played on somewhere outside the tepee.

  The next morning Billy sketched out a crude map to where he had dug the two small holes. He gave it to the Chief so the children’s families could retrieve the bodies for their ritual ceremonies. As the two Rangers saddled their mounts, Jeff was noticeably quiet.

  As they rode back to Yuma to catch another slow, hot, filthy train to Nogales, Billy finally asked, “Okay, what’s buggin’ ya? Spit it out!”

  “I want you to know that if my dick falls off I’m gonna have to shoot you.”

  They both laughed long and hard. For the rest of ride Jeff couldn’t stop talking about the the squaws, the piles of animal skins in their private tepee, the tasty tarantulas, even the way the Quechan elders winked and grinned at him as they ate the delicious meal. Billy just smiled and let him ramble.

  They never learned if the young Quechan girl survived.

  July 10, 1910

  Diaz Pasco woke in a haze and with one dandy headache. From the first lifting of his eyelids to the time the haze cleared enough to appreciate his situation had to have been a long minute.

  “Qué es esto?” he managed to choke out, “Qué es esto?” He couldn’t move his arms or legs. “Qué es esto?” He couldn’t even wiggle. He felt as if his body was wrapped in a very tight blanket. And it was: a blanket of earth. “Qué es esto?”

  He had half of the same sentence out of his mouth when a rattle cut off his words. To his front, slightly to the right, and about ten feet away he saw a stake in the ground. Attached to the stake was a five foot long leather strap. Tied by its tail to the end of the strap, barely a foot from his face was a very angry four-foot Diamondback.

  “Qué es esto?” he screamed again and again and again.

  The Diamondback hissed and twisted and jerked and struck at the man’s head, but couldn’t empty his dripping fangs, which seemed to get the serpent even angrier. As Pasco’s eyes began to bring more of the world around him into focus, he realized they were level with the hooves of a black horse standing about twenty feet away. With the back of his neck scraping against hot sand, he strained to tilt his head upward until his limited view ran up the horse’s legs to the saddle. Silhouetted in the dawn sun, seated on the horse, holding a long rifle with a scope pointed in the air and its crescent-shaped butt plate resting against his hip, was the gringo.

  “¿Quien chingados es? ¿Quien chingados es?”

  “Told ya I was gonna plant ya.” He gave Pasco a face full of Orion’s ass and the two began a slow walk from the buried man.

  “Fuckin’ gringo, fuckin’ gringo,” the man shrieked in a dry, raspy voice as the snake tried like hell to break free of the leather strap and quiet this screaming nuisance. “¿Quien chingados es?”

  At close to seventy-five yards Billy pulled Orion to a halt. A second after he did, Pasco stopped screaming, wondering what the gringo was doing. Billy slid off Orion and dropped to one knee. Resting his left elbow on his left knee, he steadied the Winchester 1895 Second Model Sporting Rifle and lowered his eye to the Malcolm Model #3 hunting scope to take careful aim at the stake holding the leather strap.

  “Just like splitting a pea pod,” he whispered to himself.

  Pasco screamed.

  As Billy’s finger began to tighten around the trigger it suddenly felt like he was shaking. He couldn’t seem to steady the Malcolm Model #3 hunting scope. He wondered if his brain was trying to stop his heart from finishing the job. He wouldn’t let it. Again lowering his eye to the scope he tried to focus in on his target. But the target wouldn’t hold still. It kept quivering. Then he realized it wasn’t the target that was quivering and it wasn’t him that was shaking. It was the ground. A tingling sensation shot through the knee resting in the dirt and up his leg until his whole body seemed to tremble. The earth under him was coming alive, churning and crawling in circles like it was stirring from a deep sleep. Bushes shook, rocks moved, and cactus twitched. A hard gust of hot wind and sand stung his face and jarred his body. Looking to the west he saw a huge sandstorm explode from behind the small mesas and swallow them up as it rumbled towards him at lightning speed. Orion reared and whinnied. Billy could see brush and cactus and sand and small stones twisting and swirling in the raging brown and black mass. The dawn sunlight made it all sparkle and blink, reminding him of the Christmas lights back in El Papalote. For a long moment the sight of the roaring beast had him frozen solid. But this was death blowing its hot, foul breath at him. Breath filled with sand that had turned itself into millions of razors that would rip and shred the skin of anything in its path.

  He hopped on Orion and cried, “Fog it, Big O!”

  The duo sped off for the shelter of Naco, leaving the screaming pleas of Diaz Pasco swallowed up in the throat of the storm.

  June, 1904

  A band of normally friendly Papago Indians were hot on their asses. Billy and Jeff were high-tailing it east towards Fresnal Canyon with hopes of losing them in the twisting rocks. But just beyond the canyon and heading straight for them was a sandstorm. A big one. They jerked the reins of Swiss and Vermillion, causing the animals to skid to a halt and kick up dust and pebbles. Both whinnied angrily at the sudden pain from their bits. The two Rangers had only minutes to pick their poison: pissed off Papagos or a pissed off Mother Nature.

  Having never seen a true southwest sandstorm Jeff was almost hypnotized by the sight. He thought it looked like a spinning, pulsating mass of dirty cotton candy. It was his disdain for Indians that had caused their plight. They
were tracking some stolen cattle and found a dozen head on the Papago Gila Bend reservation. That was evidence enough for Jeff to pull his fancy Colt on the tribe’s Medicine Man while Billy took a closer look at the moss backs. The Medicine Man, fed up with this stupid white man, turned to walk away. Jeff yelled at him to stop but the man kept walking. Not allowing a snub like that to stand, especially from an Indian, he sent a round into the dirt between the man’s legs. The Medicine Man stopped.

  “Ya hearin’ me now, asshole?” shouted Jeff.

  The Indian turned and glared at the Ranger with hate in his eyes. Then he suddenly looked to a hillside beyond and his face formed into a devious smile.

  Hearing the shot and expecting the worse, Billy galloped back yelling, “These ain’t the cows! They ain’t jingle bobbed.”

  It was too late. A returning hunting party of peaceful Papago Indians on the crest of the hill had just seen a white man take a shot at their Medicine Man. They poured down the hill, firing wildly.

  “Do we go through it?” Jeff shouted over the roar of the approaching storm.

  “Hell no! Blind our horses. Keep for the canyon!”

  They spurred their mounts and rode like hell. Seconds before the storm would whip them both out of their saddles Billy spotted the cave. Big enough to ride into, they bolted into the natural shelter. The grotto was only about thirty feet deep, but enough to escape Nature’s blast furnace. Luckily the storm drained the anger from the Indians and they hurried back to their village for shelter. The two men hopped off their mounts, held the reins tightly, and watched the storm howl and churn and shriek by the cave.

  “Why the hell’d ya shoot at that Med’cine Man?” Billy shouted over the noise.

  “I shot ‘tween his legs,” snapped Jeff, as if that made it okay.

  “That’s still shootin’ at him, goddamn it!”

  “The sumbitch turned his back to me.”

  “So?”

  “He was ignoring me, goddamn it!”

  “So?”

  “We’re the goddamn law, Billy!”

  “He’s an injun, for crissake! He don’t un’erstand our laws. Pro’bly didn’t even un’erstand a fuckin’ word we was sayin’!”

  “Then it’s time he learned!’ declared Jeff, leaning into Billy’s face and still having to shout above the passing storm outside their small refuge. “This is our country, Billy, not some giant godless happy hunting ground anymore. There are laws, there are rules! There’s baths for crissake, and that includes a bunch of fuckin’ dirt worshippers!”

  “Still ain’t no call to shoot at his feet like that! All ya did was pepper up them other Injuns. Ain’t ya e’er heard the old sayin’ ‘Ya git more bees with honey then vinegar’?”

  “It’s flies!” Jeff corrected Billy in a condescending tone.

  “Ya still ain’t always gotta pull that fancy ass Colt a yers, and ya sure as hell ain’t gonna ‘git famous’ fer shootin’ some old medicine man!”

  “They’re a goddamned conquered people, Billy! Don’t you think I know we’re killin’ off a way of life? But it’s happened for thousands of years to millions of defeated peoples. They had to bend to it or die. It’s in the history books, Billy! It’s life, Billy! It ain’t always fair, but it’s life, ya stupid shit!”

  As soon as his tongue pushed those last three words from his mouth Jeff wished he could suck them right back down his throat and choke on them. Hating something or someone so hard can eat up a man’s insides and turn his heart black. It can make him say things that shouldn’t even be in his mind, much less coming out of his mouth. For thirty minutes they sat in silence, watching the storm inch by. It was the longest thirty minutes of Jeff’s life.

  “I’m a shit, Billy,” Jeff finally said as the world outside calmed. Too ashamed to even make eye contact with his friend, he continued, “Nuthun but a shit! Hit me, ya hear! Bust me in the rotten mouth that deserves what it spewed.”

  “I ain’t gonna hit ya, Jeff,” replied Billy, tightening his saddle cinch.

  “Callin’ ya that was the lowest thing I could do, Billy. I didn’t mean it. I was pissed and I ain’t worth a bucket of pox puss. I’m ashamed, Billy.”

  Inside, Billy smiled at his friend saying “ain’t.” Outside, he stood motionless for a few more seconds then turned and extended his hand.

  Jeff looked at him, shocked that the man could be so forgiving. Embarrassed and humbled, he finally managed to stammer, “Ya sure ‘bout this?”

  “Hell, ya think yer the only knothead that ever said somethun that he later regretted? If I had a nickel fer ev’ry dumbass thing I said I’d own the biggest whorehouse in New Orleans.” Jeff grinned and tightly grasped his friend’s hand with both of his.

  Then Billy added, “But don’t ‘spect us to kiss and make up.”

  The two men laughed, looked at each other for a short moment then hugged. It was a quick embrace, like two brothers who had just been in a fist fight with each other, both knowing it was wrong and they had to make it right.

  “Glad no one was here to see that,” laughed Jeff after they broke the embrace.

  “Me, too,” laughed Billy. “But our horses did!”

  Jeff drew his Colt and said, “Guess we’ll have to shoot ‘em!”

  “How’ll we get back?”

  “Good thinkin’!”

  July 10, 1910

  Feeling frisky, Mother Nature blew the storm to the north towards Bisbee, but much to her dismay it petered out a few miles from the town. Billy returned the Clover to the dentist’s office, knowing no one would be there on Sunday morning. Exhausted from the previous evening’s work, he slept most of the day away in his plump bed. It was close to supper when some knuckles pounded on his door, startling him into consciousness.

  “Billy it’s me, John, lemme in!”

  Hearing the urgency in Foster’s voice, Billy unlocked the door and opened it. Foster thrust a piece of paper at him.

  “Some Mexican kid ran in the office, tossed this to me and ran out. What the hell’s goin’ on, Billy?”

  Billy read aloud, “Pasco for whore. Lucheia’s.” Just four words, but they stung like a nest of yellow jackets.

  “Did ya kill him, Billy?”

  “No,” A half truth as he quickly slipped on his pants and shirt.

  “What’d ya do? Did ya take him? Why do they have this whore? What whore? Abbie? Where the hell is Pasco, Billy?”

  “He’s dead, John!” Billy replied as he whipped his gun belt around his waist.

  “You just said....”

  “He’s dead. That’s all there is to it,” Billy answered as he slipped on his shoulder holster. “Now I gotta get Abbie outta there.”

  “Why did they take Abbie?”

  “Ain’t got time now, John.” He started for the door. Foster stepped in his path. “I gotta cross that bridge, John!”

  John saw the determination on his friend’s face and stepped aside. “I can’t go with ya, Billy.”

  “I know.” He left his friend alone in the room.

  He rode Orion as far as the bridge than tied him to a post. No sense getting his horse all shot up, too, when he could easily walk the distance across the bridge to the Mexican side. It was late Sunday afternoon and the sun was setting, so he figured there wouldn’t be any bystanders.

  “Wait here, Big O, and don’t do nothun stupid like come after me.”

  Sensing the danger Orion snorted and lowered his head to feel Billy’s palm on it at least one more time, which he did.

  “Now don’t go gettin’ morbid on me either, shithead!”

  He stared at the wooden structure for a long moment thinking of Jeff, Freddie, Henry, and his ma. He prayed Abbie was still alive.

  “No more,” he thought. “This time I’m gonna be there.”

  He began the walk across the weathered bridge. About halfway Captain Wheeler’s words bounced around his head again, “Only a fool walks into a hostile environment alone.” Then he heard Jeff’s voice, �
�You’re not stupid, Billy!” It stopped him dead in his tracks. He thought, “Why go into Lucheia’s at all?” He knew Abbie would be in there with them, but they didn’t know where Pasco was. If he could get them out in the open...maybe...just maybe...a slight advantage.

  “Them?”

  How many of “them?” He continued walking and just as his first boot left the bridge and touched Mexican soil, he stepped to the right. The main street of the Mexican side of Naco ran east and west. The cantina sat to the south. Billy was crossing the bridge from the north. By stepping to the right, or the West, he had put the setting sun at his back and in the faces of anyone leaving Lucheia’s. Advantage! He pulled his Smith and Wesson. There were five beans in the wheel so he slid a sixth one into the empty cylinder under the firing pin. He checked the clip of his .45. Full! He touched the small of his back and realized he had left his knife at the boarding house. He took a deep breath and walked out to the middle of the dusty street. It was still empty. That probably meant they were all inside waiting for him to step through that door like Jeff did. That’s fine! They can wait until hell freezes over.

  “Hey assholes!” he shouted. “I’m here! Bring out the whore!”

  There was a long silence before a voice finally responded from somewhere inside the dark cantina.

  “Come in for drink, amigo,” it taunted. “We talk!”

  “Not a chance in hell, amigo!” Billy shouted back. “Ya want Pasco, bring out the whore!”

  Another long silence was finally broken when four Mexican policemen clamored out of the cantina’s door, but none were Victoriano. Four! Billy wondered if this was what Feather Yank had seen when he said “Goodbye, Billy Old.” From the stagger in the policemen’s walk he knew they had been doing some heavy Sunday drinking. Advantage! The same tall, ugly one with the crooked eye was dragging Abbie. He had one arm tight around her waist to keep her standing. His other hand held a knife to her throat. Her face was swollen and bloody. Her nose had a slight crook to it. Her arms and legs were covered in bruises. She wore the same corset from last night, but it was streaked with blood and tattered, ripped, and allowed her left breast to hang free, on which Billy could see red threads of blood coming from nicks and slices. Four! God only knows what else they did to her.