A Bullet for Billy

by Bill Brooks

  He wished he had a dime for a cold beer and a sandwich, but he’d spent his last dollar for the telegraph. Well, that was where he was smart, to carry that empty shotgun, he told himself. It was all about taking risks now; he told himself he had nothing left to lose.

  But goddamn, he was weary of running, of being chased, of all the bad stuff and none of the good. And the pox he’d caught from the whore didn’t help his disposition any either.

  He cracked the scattergun open again, hoping somehow, magically, two shells would appear. But the chambers were still empty. He snapped it shut again and stood there on the sidewalk in front of a closed millinery shop, trying to decide his next play.

  A bank stood across the street, but it was closed as well, the last of the dying sun reflected in its plate glass windows. ARIZONA BANK & TRUST was lettered in gold leaf. He thought of all that money that must be in that bank, and he thought of his empty pockets and nothing standing between him and riches except twelve inches of brick wall and probably that much of steel where the money was no doubt kept in a vault.

  Well shit, he told himself.

  He figured to rob someone since there was no store or bank open to rob. First man who came up the walk looked like he had a few bucks was who he’d rob. The problem was, it was the supper hour and most folks were either home eating supper with their families or in the saloons drinking their supper. He was glad he wouldn’t have to kill anybody, and in that way the empty shotgun was a blessing.

  It was a wild-assed idea, but he even thought if he could steal enough money, he could hire some gunslingers to ride with him back down across the border and break Sam out of jail and thus save face all around.

  But shit, that was like asking for the moon.

  He leaned against the wall of the millinery and waited as the shadows closed in around him. Now he held the shotgun down along the side of his leg so it wouldn’t be so obvious. Somebody come up, he’d just raise it and point it and ask for their wallet. He had his eye on a little paint tied up down the street in front of one of the saloons. Mustang, it looked like. Nice little horse.

  How long he stood there waiting he couldn’t say, but the lights began to come on in the saloons up and down both sides of the street, and somewhere far off he could hear the rumble of thunder. It was almost as if he could taste the air, the way it tastes when it has rain in it, or about to come.

  A stiff wind blew along the street kicking up dust, and some cowboys rode in off to the right of where he was standing, four or five of them in a bunch, and tied off up the street and went into that particular saloon, laughing and talking loud.

  He realized it was Friday. First time he’d thought about the day because ever since him and Sam had left home, time didn’t mean nothing to them. They didn’t have to be anywhere at any particular time and had no use for watches or calendars. Time simply became lost to them.

  But if he remembered correctly, it had to be Friday. Or maybe it was Saturday. He closed his eyes and saw the General bringing down the strap, felt the sting, the way it stung like when you got cut by a knife.

  The anger and hatred welled in him suddenly and he didn’t give a shit what he had to do, he was going to rob somebody, and if they put up a fight, well, too bad for them.

  Then he heard the clomp of boots on the boardwalk coming from his left. A tall man wearing a frock coat with his trouser legs tucked down inside the tops of his boots, whistling softly to himself. Billy gripped the shotgun tight, hoped his ruse would work.

  And when he stepped from the shadows, shotgun coming up in both hands, he faced the barrel of a pistol inches from his nose.

  “I don’t know what you’re intending, son. But you look way too young to die like this,” the man said. Then showed Billy his city marshal badge pinned to the backside of his lapel when he flipped it over.

  “Now set that shotgun down easy or this could be the last thing you’re going to see—the dark hole of my pistol barrel.”

  Billy swallowed hard and let the shotgun slip from his grip till it clattered to the boardwalk.

  “Now put your hands where I can see them plain,” the man said. “I’d not want to get caught by surprise at some little gun you might have hidden up your sleeve.”

  Billy raised his hands, and the lawman told him to turn and face the wall and not move because “I’ve got a slight case of the palsy, and this Colt has a hair trigger, and I’d sure hate to blow your brains out if I didn’t have to.”

  Billy felt the lawman patting down his pockets and down the inside of his legs and into his boots looking for a gun or a knife. And when he was satisfied, the lawman said, “Now just march down the street ahead of me till I tell you to stop.”

  Billy did as directed, and soon enough he was sitting in another jail cell, this one only slightly better than the one in Mexico.

  The lawman, once he’d turned the lock, stepped back and said, “You ain’t a local, so what I need to know is where’d you come from and what are you doing here?”

  Billy told him what had happened.

  “So you killed this daughter of a Ruales general, is that what you’re telling me?” the man said.

  “No sir, we didn’t, but I said I did so I could hopefully save my kid brother from getting shot, figuring if they thought it was just me who did it, they wouldn’t hurt Sam. But we didn’t do nothing but try and save her life, and that’s what thanks we got for it.”

  And when Billy told him the rest, how he’d wired his ma to try and get his granddaddy to come down with a company of Texas Rangers and said who his granddaddy was, the man offered a crooked smile and said, “Jesus, boy, I know your old granddaddy. You are one lucky peckerwood to be landed in my jail, and luckier still I didn’t leave your brain matter splattered all over Mrs. Thurgood’s hat shop. She’d hated like hell to have to wash up such a mess and who can blame her. Where’s old Gus living these days?”

  “Eagle Pass, the last I heard.”

  “You hungry, kid?”

  “Enough to eat a damn dog.”

  “Well, we got plenty running around here.”

  “I know it.”

  “I’ll be back in a little while.”

  Billy watched the lawman go out. He was an old bastard for doing law-dog, Billy thought. Old but way out in front of trouble, it sure seemed like. He had pulled his pistol without Billy even seeing it, and in a heartbeat too.

  Then the fellow returned in a little while with a plate of food and slid it in under the door of the cell, and went and got Billy’s stolen shotgun and broke it open and saw it wasn’t even loaded.

  He came carrying it to the cell door and held it up and said, “Jesus, boy, you must have yourself a real death wish.”

  “I reckon I must,” Billy said, eating hungrily.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Billy was lying there on the cot, his arm flung over his eyes, his body aching like a fever from the whipping he’d taken at the hands of the General. What right did that son of a bitchin’ Mescan have to whip us? He lay there seething, which did not help his physical condition any. He thought about Sam, wondered if maybe they’d taken him out and shot him by now, figuring that they’d not risk letting another escape their puny jail. He fretted over Sam terribly. His own guilt was like a sharp rock in his belly. He slept that night with a head-ful of bad dreams, of seeing Sam hanging from a tree, of the stabbed girl laughing at them, of his flesh being chewed by dogs.

  He awoke to a stream of morning light angling in through the barred window above his head. Then heard the door to the jail open and the clomp of boots. It was the old lawman bringing him another tray of food, covered with a cheesecloth to keep the flies off. Ira slid the tray under the door and stood back and watched Billy eat.

  Goddamn but it tasted good, a thick slice of fried ham, fried potatoes, two corn dodgers, and a scoop of applesauce.

  “My missus fixed it,” the lawman said, retrieving a chair from the outer room and bringing it back to sit outside Billy’s
cell. He took out his makings and rolled him a handmade, and struck a match head off his belt buckle and held it to the tip of his shuck, then snapped it out. The smoke smelled good and reminded Billy of better times, like when Jardine would smoke in the evening on the porch of his mama’s house, and him and Sam would sit at Jardine’s feet there on the steps and listen to Jardine tell stories about all what he did in his life.

  “Thank your missus for me, would you?” Billy said when he finished the plate.

  “I’ll do it,” the lawman said. “I wired your granddaddy, told him I had you in the jail down here. I reckon I’ll get an answer back from him pretty quick if he’s still alive. You know if he’s still alive?”

  Billy shrugged. In truth, he did not know if Gus was still alive. He could only hope that he was.

  “From what I know about him, I’d say he’s too tough to be dead. Hell’s bells, I figure he cares anything about us he’s already on his way with a passel of Rangers,” Billy said bravely.

  The lawman looked at him askance through a veil of his cigarette smoke.

  “I know those Rangers is some bad sons a bitches,” Ira said, “but even they wouldn’t cross that river and go into Mexico. It’d start another damn war if they did.”

  Billy suddenly felt glum.

  “You don’t know him then,” he said defiantly. “I mean he whipped the Comanches all up and down Texas every which away. He sure as hell can whip a few of them damn Mescans.”

  “Hell, I know old Gus Rogers is bad on miscreants and such,” Ira said. “He arrested me once and put me in prison. Hadn’t been for his hard ways, I’d probably be dead my own self right now. He prayed with me to turn my life around before they took me off to the jail and I’ll never forget him for that.”

  It was something Billy didn’t know about his granddaddy, that he was a praying man. But then there were a lot of things he didn’t know about his granddaddy because his mama had moved them away every time she got up with some man or another, and only occasionally did the Cap’n drive to wherever it was they were living at the time and see them. One Christmas he brought presents, and another time he stayed a week and took Billy and Sam fishing and they caught a catfish the size of a man’s leg out of a muddy river. But that was about all he knew about Cap’n Rogers directly; the rest of his granddaddy’s history was learned from Billy’s mother whenever she felt in the mood to talk about him. Now Billy wished he’d learned him better.

  “He might just do that very thing,” Billy said, trying hard to raise his own hope. “Come all the way down here and bust Sam out of the jail.”

  “Might grow wings and fly with the angels too, boy,” the lawman said. “You play checkers?”

  Billy thought of it more as an opportunity than simply passing time. Figured he might find a chance to distract the lawman and get hold of his gun or some such.

  “Like a son of a bitch,” Billy said.

  “All right then, I’ll go get the set.”

  Billy and Ira played nine games straight and Ira whipped him like a rented mule and said, “It’s a good thing we’re not playing for money or you’d be broke as old Aunt Hattie.”

  “I am broke as old Aunt Hattie,” Billy said.

  “They skinned you in every way a man could get skinned down there, didn’t they?”

  “Worse than you can know.”

  “I’ll have the doctor come and look at you soon as he gets back from the Johnson place. Mrs. Johnson’s about to have her eighth child and Doc’s been out there all night waiting on it.”

  “I appreciate it if he was to come and give me something for these whip marks.”

  “You want to go again?”

  Billy saw there was no opportunity to reach through the bars and grab the lawman’s gun since Ira wasn’t wearing one. He’d obviously left his pistol in the outer room.

  “No, I guess not,” Billy said. “You’ve already whipped me so bad, I don’t see as how there’d ever be any pleasure in it for either one of us.”

  “It’s the only game I know,” Ira said. Then he stood and folded the checkerboard after putting the checkers in a wood box with a sliding lid. He carried them out and returned with a wool blanket and handed it to Billy through the bars.

  “’Case you get cold during the night, otherwise you can fold it and use it for a pillow,” he said and went out again, and Billy could hear him locking the front door after he went out. Then it was just silence.

  He lay upon the cot and stared at nothing, trying hard to think how he was going to break jail again. It was break jail or face the consequences once old Gus Rogers showed up—if he showed up. He was sure if Gus thought he’d killed and raped that General’s daughter, his granddaddy wouldn’t take any mercy on him. From what little he recalled of Gus’s nature, he was a stern man when it came to serving the law. Well, maybe I could convince him the truth of it, he thought, lying there in the growing heat.

  He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again the lawman was standing there with another man wearing pince-nez glasses pinched on the bridge of his nose. A sleepy-looking little man with a bald head holding a black leather bag in one hand.

  “This your victim?” the man said to the lawman.

  “It is. Boy says they whipped him with a razor strap—some Ruales down in Old Mexico.”

  “Razor strap? That right, boy, they whip you with a razor strap?”

  Billy nodded.

  “Like I was a goddamn dog that ate off their plates,” he said.

  “Well let’s have a look,” the man said. “I’m Doctor Bunyon, and all you’re about to find in this town that passes for a medico. I also cut hair and embalm if you ever find yourself in need of such services.”

  He nodded to the lawman, who unlocked the cell door and let him stroll in like he was visiting a sick aunt in an infirmary.

  “Take off your shirt,” the doctor said.

  Billy did as ordered, feeling ashamed to have to let people know he’d been whipped like that. Told himself a real man wouldn’t have allowed it.

  The doctor touched the welts with delicate fingers, but it still hurt like the blazes while he was probing and prodding. He reached into his bag and took out a jar of something and unscrewed the lid.

  “This is some healing ointment,” he said. “Dab some on you every little while like this,” and showed Billy how much to slather on. “Don’t get it into your eyes,” he said. The ointment had a distinct smell to it and even caused Billy’s eyes to water a little bit.

  The doctor looked at the lawman and said, “I don’t find no broken ribs or nothing. He’ll heal but he’ll have some scars to show the ladies.”

  Then he stepped out of the cell, and Ira closed it again and locked it and thanked the doctor, saying how he’d walk with him up the street to the café where they could get some coffee. “’Cause what I cook ain’t worth drinking,” Ira said.

  Billy put the ointment on his cuts and welts, and it cooled the places it touched. He was grateful for any little relief.

  Later the lawman came back with yet another plate of food, announcing, “Lunch,” and set it under the jail cell door where Billy could get it.

  “I’ll go over to the telegrapher’s and check and see if your granddaddy sent a wire back yet,” Ira said. “You drink coffee?”

  “Yes sir, I do.”

  “I’ll bring you back a cup.”

  “Thank you.”

  The lawman reminded Billy of Jardine a little with his easy manner. I’m sure going to hate it if I have to shoot him, Billy thought as he sat on the side of the cot and ate his lunch, a liverwurst sandwich with a slice of onion. But I got to do what I got to do.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Jim & the Cap’n

  We made Finger Bone midmorning. The dead men, the fire, the near to coming to being assassinated in the middle of the night was still playing in the back of my mind. How many others did those two murder and bury somewhere was the question the Cap’n asked and the one I asked
myself as well. It was a question I came to conclude that would never find an answer. But I told the Cap’n we ought to mention the attack to his friend Ira Hayes, the lawman in Finger Bone, just in case he knew of anyone missing lately—it might give a clue as to what had happened to them.

  “You’re right, Jim. Could be all sorts of folks them two killed and buried somewhere.”

  His voice was near a rasp by now, and I could tell his flame was burning out sure as anything. I pretty well figured too that once he killed his own grandson, that would just about finish him, that he’d never make the trip back to Texas, much less on down to Old Mexico to retrieve his other grandson from the General. I doubted that boy was even alive.

  Finger Bone would prove to be a typical little desert town: dusty and not much to it, but the sort of place that attracted bad men on the dodge from the law from either side of the border that lay just south toward the river. It was a place where the saloons outnumbered the churches ten to one and where the indecent women ruled the roost, because not many decent women would so much as hit the town limits before turning round and heading back to wherever it was they’d come from. It was also a town of men, mostly, and a handful of whores who kept them from going completely crazy. I’d ridden into a dozen such towns before, back when I was a Ranger and otherwise. They were towns that often would spring up because of a silver or gold strike or a railroad spur. And for a while, the town would beat like a young heart for a few years until the gold or silver played out, or the railroad stopped coming.

  Then such towns would die a slow hard death, like a man gut shot, and be forgotten except by those who’d once been there and raised a little hell.

  It was the bottom of the barrel for a lawman, the last stop before the grave, or worse, clerking in a store. I’d never met Ira Hayes, but I felt as though I already knew him because of what all the Cap’n had told me about him. My gut started to tighten the minute we entered onto the main drag because I knew that probably within the hour, I’d have to witness a killing that, no matter how you sliced it, didn’t have any good to it. Killing never does, but this was going to turn out awful.