A Bullet for Billy

by Bill Brooks

“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.

  A
bsorbed 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.

  Chapter Thirteen

  He waited till the old man had placed himself in a vulnerable position, then brought his manacled hands down hard, using the heavy cuffs to knock the guard senseless. The old man let out a hard groan after the first blow but did not make a sound when Billy struck him a second time, splitting open his head.

  “You dirty son of a bitch!” Billy muttered, then took from around the man’s neck the key that he’d used to unlock Billy’s cell and rushed back inside. But the key would not fit or would not work the lock on Sam’s cell. It was either the wrong key or the lock was jammed.

  “Hurry up,” Sam pleaded.

  “I’m trying, goddamn it.”

  Sam was so frightened, his hands shook and his body trembled as Billy fumbled with the lock.

  “It don’t want to work,” Billy said. “Goddamn it.”

  “Maybe there’s another key somewhere.”

  Billy ran out into the jailer’s room and searched through the drawers of the desk but could find no other keys. There was a shotgun sitting in the corner of the room and this he grabbed up, broke it open, saw that it was unloaded but held on to it anyway. He ran back into the cell area and tried the same key again, only in forcing it to try and open the lock he broke it off.

  “Son of a bitch!” he yelped.

  Sam looked at him through the bars with the saddest eyes Billy had ever seen on anyone.

  They could hear approaching voices through a small open window there in the back.

  “I’ll have to come back for you,” Billy said.

  “No use to it,” Sam said. “They’ll kill me sure.”

  “No they won’t. I won’t let them.” Billy touched Sam’s hands that gripped the bars of his cage. “I’ll come back.”

  Billy burned with guilt at having to leave Sam. He wanted to stay and fight but he had nothing to fight with. Two Ruales entered the jail through the front door. Both had been drinking heavily, and Billy could hear them talking loudly to each other. Billy fled out the back door, stepping over the prone body of the old guard, and ran down the darkened alley into the night.

  Stealing a horse should be easy enough, he told himself as he ran away and came out at the far end, where he rounded a corner and stood in the shadows of the main street again. He could not tarry, he told himself. The Ruales would discover soon enough he’d escaped and sound the alarm. There were several saddle horses tied up on the street in front of a cantina. Billy was already formulating a plan in his head. The river was a good fifty miles north, but if he chose a good sound horse and rode like hell, he could make the river by daybreak, cross it, find the nearest town, and sent a wire to his granddaddy.

  He chose a big roan mare and knocked his heels into its flanks and rode it fast out of town and all night northward, resting only long enough for the horse to catch a blow and drink a little and eat a little. He’d
read dime novels about the Pony Express riders and thought if they could ride at such a pace, so could he. He didn’t care if he rode the horse to death as long as he could reach the river and cross over.

  By dawn the next day that’s exactly what he did, splashed across the river and into the States. He passed the dugout that had a sign crudely hand-painted that read: WHISKEY & ICE BEER and kept on riding. He needed to find a town that had a telegraph and remembered a town not many miles yet north of the river. And less than five miles more he came to a town with the funny name: Finger Bone. He learned from asking strangers where the telegraph was. He used his last dollar, that he’d stuck down inside his right boot for safekeeping, to send a telegram to his mother. Its contents explained in brief that Sam was in a Mexican jail in a place called Ciudad de Tontos—and that she should wire her daddy, Cap’n Rogers, and have him come quick with a company of Texas Rangers.

  The last line of the telegram stated: “I took blame to save Sam.” The telegrapher looked at him when he read it and said, “This true?”

  “Just send it,” Billy said.

  Exhausted, he found a place to lie down in an alley to try and sleep and woke with a mangy dog licking his face. A dog with worse than dog’s breath, and he sat up swatting at the creature. It yelped and growled once, then trotted off looking back over its shoulder at him.

  “Boy, I’m piss poor and run down at the heels,” he muttered to himself. The light in the alleyway was dim, indicating the sun was close to setting, he figured. He had no watch to tell time by. His welts and bruises felt like fishhooks in his flesh every time he moved. He stood with great effort. He’d been wise enough to have tied the reins of the stolen horse around his wrist before lying down. The horse stood with its head drooping, and he knew he’d pretty well worn it out on the hard ride.

  He took pity on it knowing it wouldn’t carry him another five miles. He turned it loose and walked out of the alley carrying the shotgun over his shoulder, on the scout for another horse to steal. Whoever he pointed the scattergun at wouldn’t know it wasn’t loaded and would be a fool to take the chance it wasn’t, the way he figured.