A Bullet for Billy

by Bill Brooks

  We were just coming up the drag when we heard the blare of trumpets.

  “Sounds like a welcoming committee,” Cap’n said.

  “No, Cap’n, that sounds like funeral music to me,” I said.

  Then we looked on ahead and saw a black hearse pulled by a pair of Percherons followed by a bunch of people walking or riding horses or in gigs: men in bowlers and a few women in black dresses carrying umbrellas to shield against the sun. Behind the mourners was a brass band, their instruments catching the sun’s glare, and a fellow beating a big bass drum slow and steady.

  “Somebody sure enough is dead and getting buried this fine day,” Cap’n said. The sky was as blue as a painting I once saw of the Pacific Ocean hanging in a whorehouse in Northfield, Minnesota.

  “There shouldn’t never be no funeral without rain,” Cap’n said. “God’s tears is what rain is.”

  I couldn’t disagree. We were at a slow walk ourselves with the funeral procession a hundred or so yards ahead of us. The Cap’n took off his hat and held it to his chest, and I could see him mumbling what I supposed was a prayer and wished I was somehow better at it myself, but just dropped my eyes away out of respect.

  We reined in at the saloon next to the building marked JAIL. There was black bunting in many of the storefront windows, including both the saloon and the jail.

  “Must have been somebody important,” I said.

  “Must have been,” the Cap’n said and climbed down out of his buggy with a grimace. He stood for a second getting himself back in order and I pretended not to notice. I knew his blood must be ticking in his wrist like a cheap railroad watch winding down, close as we were now to taking charge of his grandson Billy.

  He turned the handle on the jail door’s office but it was locked. Cap’n offered me a troubled look.

  “Let’s go next door,” he said, “and get us something to swallow down this road dust and find out where old Ira Hayes is.”

  We entered the saloon through the batwing doors, and the place was virtually empty, except for one man behind the bar reading a newspaper held up to the dim light falling through a window there at the back wall.

  He looked up when we entered and folded his paper and set it atop the bar before coming down to wait on us.

  “Gents,” he said. He was a smallish man with handlebar mustaches and garters on the sleeves of his red shirt. “What’ll it be?”

  “Whiskey with a beer back,” Cap’n said. “And could you kindly tell us where I might find city marshal Ira Hayes? I’ve come to see him on some important business.”

  The man paused in his reaching for a bottle on the shelf behind him, all three of us framed like a photograph in the back bar mirror.

  “I’m afraid you’re a little too late if you’re here to conduct business with Marshal Hayes,” he said, turning slow and pouring the shot glasses he’d set on the bar full to the brim with whiskey, so full you’d have to lift it gentle not to spill any.

  “How’s so?” Cap’n said.

  “Marshal’s been kilt. They’re hauling him up to the boneyard now. Surprised you didn’t hear what passes for a town’s band playing his dirge. They just went by here couple of minutes ago. Would have gone myself, but he was no friend of mine.”

  “Who kilt him,” Cap’n said. His voice was low now, tired as I’d ever heard it. I knew what he was thinking and wishing against—that it wasn’t Billy that killed Ira.

  “Kid he had locked up in his jail is who kilt him,” the barkeep said, pulling the porcelain tap handle to fill our beer glasses, then slicing off the heads with a wood paddle before setting them before us.

  Cap’n took off his Stetson and set it on the bar and rubbed his scalp, then tossed back his whiskey before setting his hat back down on his head again.

  “How and when did this happen?”

  “Yesterday evening,” the man said, pouring himself a shot of the forty rod and tossing it back. “It’s kinda early for me to be drinking but what the hell.”

  “You didn’t say how it happened and I’ll ask you again,” Cap’n said.

  The barkeep looked from him to me, then back at him. There was an element of danger in the Cap’n’s voice when he grew irritated with someone, and the way the barkeep was casually talking about the death of Ira Hayes, I’m sure was irritating him more than just a little.

  “Shit, nobody knows,” the barkeep said, shrugging his shoulders. “Somehow the kid got hold of a gun and shot him, right there inside the jail. Then he run out and stole the first horse he come to—Charlie Kilabrew’s fine gray racer it was—and rode out of here like his heels was on fire.”

  “Which direction?”

  “South,” the man said.

  The Cap’n stood there, tired eyes ablaze with disappointment and maybe a mixture of relief that he didn’t have to kill his grandson this hour. I was still wondering how he was going to do it when the time came.

  “What lays south?” the Cap’n said. “Between here and the border as far as towns go?”

  The barman thought for a moment.

  “Just some little crap heap don’t have nothing there except for a dugout run by Terrible Donny Dixon, who sells whiskey he pisses in and unbranded horses that are to say the least suspect as to their prior ownership. He also rents cots to men equally suspect, bordermen and others whose faces adorn wanted posters; they take quite well to Terrible Donny’s place. Plus he keeps a couple of fevered whores whenever he can get them. Heard you can buy you a piece of beaver for little as fifty cents, you get there on the right day.”

  “That’s it?” Cap’n said, “the only thing between here and the river, this man’s dugout?”

  The man nodded. “Far as I know, unless someone’s come and built a metropolis since I was last there.”

  “What you want to do?” I said.

  The Cap’n coughed and said, “What the hell do you think I want to do?”

  He put a dollar on the bar for the refreshments, then said, “You got a telegraph in this burg?”

  “Out the door and up the street, three doors down on your left.”

  We walked out into the sunlight again, the glare of it causing us to squint.

  “I’m a son of a buck,” Cap’n said, shaking his head. “That grandson of mine has turned feral…”

  “I guess if he thought he was going to hang,” I said, “it made him a desperate man, like it would any of us, you and me included.”

  “That boy would have had a father, or if I’d taken over that role, none of this would have ever happened.”

  “You can’t blame yourself. You can’t say one hundred percent certain either it wouldn’t have happened. You remember that Forbes boy who killed his whole family? He was, what, all of fifteen? His daddy was a banker, his mama a school-teacher. They were as good a folks as you’re likely to find, living in that nice house in Houston, money in the bank. Well, he had a daddy and a mama too and everything a kid could want, and he still murdered them in their beds. And you remember how when we caught him in Ulvalde, he wasn’t sorry one bit for it. Went to his hanging with a smile on his face. Some are just born with bad blood in ’em, Cap’n. Maybe that’s the way Billy is.”

  He turned to me then and said, “That’s the longest damn speech I ever heard you give, Jim.”

  “I know it.”

  We found the telegrapher’s and went in, and Cap’n had him send a telegraph to his daughter, reassuring her everything was going well.

  “I hate having to lie to her,” he said when we walked out again. “But I don’t want her worrying herself sick over this business.”

  “What about afterward?” I said. “If you get Sam back. She’ll have to learn about Billy then, what happened down here.”

  He leveled his gaze at me and said, “I don’t think I’m ever going to make it back to Texas, leastways not alive, so I’ll not concern myself about the consequences…”

  “Why do you think he headed south and not north?” I said. “After what ha
ppened.”

  Cap’n shook his head.

  “There’s not a thing I know about that boy except that at one time he was sweet with blond hair and loved to fish.” Then he added, “We best get going, see if we can catch up to him before something else bad happens. This whole thing is turning into a nightmare, Jim. Just a damn nightmare.”

  “You don’t look fit to even ride,” I said.

  “I’m here to tell you, it’s not the easiest thing I ever done and it’s plumb wore me out to come this far, but unless I’m dead, I got to catch Billy and put him down and all the rest of what the General wants me to do to get Sam back.”

  I saw a sign across the street in a small plate glass window that read: DOC BUNYON, PHYSICIAN, UNDERTAKER, BARBER.

  “Let’s take a walk across the street if you’re up to it,” I said.

  Cap’n saw what I was looking at.

  “You think I’m that far gone, I need embalming?”

  “No sir, but you could stand you something a little more potent than that cheap whiskey you been guzzling.”

  We entered the door, and it set off a little tinkle bell. The place had a strange odor to it like nothing I ever smelled before, a combination of hair oil and camphor. A man came out from the back with his shirt sleeves rolled up. The room we stood in had a barber’s chair with a fancy steel footrest, leather seat, and porcelain arms. There was a small shelf of bottles and a mirror behind it. There were three chairs along the opposite wall with some old issues of the Police Gazette and a couple of DeWitt’s dime novels lying on one of the chairs. Sunlight streamed in through the plate glass and lay in a patch on the floor that had tufts of hair around the chair.

  “You boys need a haircut or a burying?” the man said with an affable smile that reminded me of a man whose daughter I had once courted in Amarillo. His eyes settled on the Cap’n.

  “You look ailing,” he said.

  “I am,” the Cap’n said. “Damn fine observation, but then that’s your job, ain’t it—to tell the sick from the dead?”

  “’Tis,” the man said without any indication of affront from the Cap’n’s reply. “And you are in need of something that will not cure you but make the unpleasantness go away slightly, am I correct?”

  “You are.”

  “I’d need to know what ails you in order to prescribe?”

  “Cancer, if you must know,” the Cap’n said. “At least according to those Texas medicos I’ve seen. Got it of the stomach.”

  “Sorry to hear. What troubles you the most, the pain or nausea?”

  “Both, but mostly the pain. I got no appetite and can’t sleep but a little at a time. Just wore out is all.”

  The man nodded, and you couldn’t tell whether he was contemplating the Cap’n’s situation or measuring him for a coffin.

  “Just a moment,” he said and went into the backroom whence he’d come and returned again in a matter of moments with an amber bottle in his hand. He held it forth to the Cap’n.

  “What is it?”

  “Laudanum. The only thing I have to help you. It won’t cure anything, but it will help with the nausea and the pain. And if you take enough of it, it will put you out like a candle flame in the wind. It will make everything seem less important.”

  The Cap’n hesitated taking it.

  “I need to be in my right head. There’s something important I’ve yet to do.”

  The physician seemed resigned and lowered the bottle.

  “Well, your choice, sir.”

  “How much is it?” I said.

  “Three dollars.”

  “I’ll take it,” I said.

  “It will turn a healthy man into a dope fiend,” he said by way of warning.

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  I dug out the money and handed it to him and put the bottle into my back pocket.

  The Cap’n waited until we were outside before saying, “What the hell you going to do with that?”

  “Take it along with us just in case.”

  “Just in case what?”

  “You change your mind.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Well, we’ll have it along just in case.”

  He shook his head and we crossed the street again to where our animals were, and he climbed up into his hack with grit and took up the reins and snapped them. I put the bottle into my saddle pouch and climbed aboard the stud and followed along with him down the south road and the unknown, and all the while, I’m sure, even though neither of us talked about it, we were both thinking the same thing: how it was going to be once we caught Billy, and the Cap’n had to put a bullet in him.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Billy

  The gun had gone off as they struggled for it. Billy said how he had to use the privy; it had worked before. Ira Hayes knew his own boy would have been about Billy’s age had he lived from childbirth. But he hadn’t. The doctor came out wiping his hands on a towel, his face hangdog, that blustery night so many years before with the wind slashing across the Kansas prairies like sharpened knives that wanted to cut everything in their path, a hard snow ahead of it that rattled the windows till they came near to breaking.

  “I did what I could, Ira, but your baby boy came out of the womb lifeless. Tried to breathe air into its nostrils, but to no avail. Stillborn is the medical term, but tragedy is the human one.”

  Ira and his wife were always careful after that not to try and make another one. His wife was fragile as a wildflower.

  “You think we should?” she said that first night months afterward, knowing he was lonely and she was too; the two of them lying there in the dark listening to the last of the winter winds crying as if the winter was trying to stop the land from being born again.

  But already fresh grass stems were struggling from the rich earth. Nature, an unstoppable force.

  He’d shrugged, full of doubt whether he was too old to make a child with her, whether she was too old. The doctor had said one more miscarriage could take her too. Ira didn’t want to run the risk of losing the only woman he’d ever come to love. They had named their unborn William.

  “I reckon we should wait,” he said. And so they had waited all through the spring and into the middle of summer. Then one day they were out cutting sod together to repair that same west wall the winter had nearly battered down, and it came a sudden rainstorm. The sky darkened the color of ripe plums and the air seemed to shimmer with something uncertain and became very still for a time. Blackbirds hurried away from the storm’s approach, winging their way across the sky. They could see lightning like twisted wire dancing in the distance. Ira remembered an abandoned bachelor’s one-room soddy within a mile of where they were and rushed her into the wagon and whipped the team of horses with a fury. They arrived just as the first raindrops the size of liberty dollars began hammering down.

  They huddled inside under a smidgen of roof rafters that still had some sod on them, and the storm quickly surrounded them with a roar and a fury that wasn’t uncommon on the plains. At times the ground shook from the thunder and she clung to him, afraid, and he held her, unafraid, even though he’d seen what a storm like that could do to beasts and humans. He’d once been a drover on the long trails out of Texas when he was just a kid and had seen men and cattle killed dead by lightning. He had seen dry washes and gullies suddenly roaring with a wall of water that would and could drown a cowboy looking for strays. But he was unafraid, because he was a man who believed firmly in the fates—that if it was your time to go, you were going to go, and not heaven nor hell nor all the gods, Christian or otherwise, could prevent your going. He believed, and he told her this one time while they were courting, that a man’s days are numbered in the book of life, and when your number comes up, that’s it.

  She’d said to him at that time, “Are you a Christian, Ira?”

  “No ma’am, I don’t reckon so (this before he met Cap’n Rogers, who’d arrested him and prayed with him till he felt born again).

&
nbsp; “That’s too bad,” she’d said. “I was raised to believe in Jesus and the Holy Bible.”

  “I hope it don’t change things with us,” he said.

  “No, I don’t suspect it will. You can’t always help who it is you fall in love with, can you?”

  “No ma’am.”

  So there they were now cleaved to one another with the rain coming in and her trembling in his arms and as sudden as a lightning bolt his desire for her flashed within him. The next they knew they were being intimate there on the ground of that old bachelor’s hut, the rain falling in around them, the mighty sky dark and brooding, the ground trembling, and she kept saying, “We must be careful, Ira. We must.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said. And he tried his best to be careful, but neither of them was sure afterward if he had been careful enough. Then the late fall arrived and trouble arose within her pert body. The baby she carried because he was not careful with her wanted to come early. He remembered blood and water on the floor. He remembered her cries of agony as they waited for a doctor who never arrived. He remembered burying her in the same ground they’d used for a garden when it was planting time. He remembered how alone he felt and all the rest till he went way wrong in life and became what he became—an outlaw of sorts. Then fate brought him Cap’n Rogers, and it all got better after he stepped out of the prison gates.

  He was thinking about all these things that evening as he sat playing checkers with Billy, how he’d have liked a son with her, and mourning the loss of his wife and the two babies she nearly had, both boys as it turned out. Then Billy suddenly said, “I sure got to use that privy, Mr. Hayes.”

  Ira didn’t see much caution in it. The boy was soft-spoken and respectful enough, and besides, he’d go and get his pistol and strap it on, and nobody but a crazy person who was unarmed would try a man wearing a gun.

  Ira walked him out back and waited outside the shithouse door studying the night sky laced with stars like the sequins on a gown of a song-stress he’d seen one time at the Birdcage Saloon in Tucson. And as much as he reflected on the sorrows of his life, he was grateful for what he presently had, a good new wife and a baby on the way, a decent job, and a little money in the bank. He thought himself a lucky fellow.