A Bullet for Billy

by Bill Brooks

  “You think he knows what you did to my daughter and that he will forgive you for it?”

  Sam looked up, his eyes full of grief.

  “He didn’t see me do nothing like it. I may have done some bad things but I never did what you said.”

  The General slapped him across the face with an open hand so hard, the sound was like a pistol shot. It knocked Sam senseless for a moment.

  “You will own to it before it is over,” the General said.

  “That what you want? Me to own to something I didn’t do?”

  The General slapped him again, just as hard, and Sam tasted the salt of his own blood as it leaked from his lips and his nose.

  The General smelled of cloves, his eyes black as the beads on a woman’s necklace. He just needed hooves and horns and he’d be the damn devil.

  The General walked out of the cell and the Ruales guard with him locked the door.

  Left alone finally, Sam felt himself shrinking inside. He tried hard not to think about what it would be like in those final minutes when they came and dragged him from the jail—for he would not go willingly—and stood him in front of a wall (wasn’t that the way they did it?) and tied his hands behind his back. He tried not to think what it would be like looking down the barrels of their aimed guns and waiting for that instant when they pulled their triggers and how the bullets would feel punching into him, and if when you died did you float off this earth into heaven or was it more like just a forever blackness where you didn’t think or feel anything.

  Forever blackness. It broke his heart to think there might be a forever blackness.

  He thought of Rebecca, their neighbor girl back home who lived in the house next to Jardine’s place where his mama had moved him and Billy to be with Jardine. Rebecca had strawberry-colored hair and budding bosoms and a sweet way about her. She was a year older, and seemed several years wiser. And when she kissed him that one evening underneath the tree with the sound of cicadas buzzing all around, he thought he had never felt anything as good or would again, until she reached for his hand and put it inside the top of her dress and he felt the small, firm, rounded bosoms and the rapid beating of her heart.

  Something happened to him that evening. Something in him broke like a wall pushed by too much water behind it, and he felt a warmness issuing from him and wondered if he’d wet his pants. But it was worse than that. Much worse. And it scared and embarrassed him even as the pleasurable sensation washed over him.

  “Oh my,” she said when she noticed as he twisted away. Then giggled into her hand saying, “No, Sam. I’m not laughing at you.”

  He ran off leaving her there under the tree, too embarrassed to speak, and for a week or more hid out, Billy and his ma saying, “You sick or something?”

  The last time he saw her, she wanted to talk to him about it, but he begged her not to and they kissed and sat sweetly holding hands, Sam pining away for her, to touch her again like he did when he had his accident, but afraid he’d have another.

  Then Jardine suddenly got himself killed and it was a mournful time till Billy said they ought to leave off out of there and strike out on their own.

  Now as he sat caged and bleeding, his whole face hurting like the blazes, he pined for her, for home, for his ma, even for Jardine. And it all got worse when he thought that maybe Billy was even dead, his body lying out there somewhere, the buzzards and wolves eating it.

  I come into this world with nothing, he finally told himself. And I guess I’ll go out of it with nothing.

  He could not see them because there were no windows in the jail to see them with. But he thought the stars might be falling.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Jim & Billy

  It went on like that for a while, me waiting outside the dugout for Billy to make his play—to go out in a blaze of glory as he said it, or to throw down his weapon and come out peaceful. The air buzzed with flies.

  “You liking it in there with those dead people,” I called at one point. “You’re going to join them, you don’t get your ass out here.”

  “I need your assurance you won’t shoot me if I come out,” he said.

  “I already told you, kid, I’m not here to kill you. I just come to get you to your granddaddy.”

  Another thirty minutes ticked off, then he said, “I’m coming out!”

  “Toss your piece out first,” I said.

  His pistol came out through the busted window and landed in the dirt. Then he appeared in the open door frame holding his shoulder, his fingers painted with blood.

  “You busted my damn shoulder with one of your shots,” he said, grimacing.

  I told him to sit on the ground while I went inside to check on the scene. And it was as one of the patrons who’d run out earlier said it was—two dead, one a woman. I mean both god-awful dead with the flies eating their blood. There wasn’t any time to bury them. I figured somebody would surely find them quick enough and do the job for me, or burn the place down around them. There just wasn’t any time to waste.

  I helped the kid struggle into the saddle of his horse that had run off a little ways but then stood cropping the local vegetation of grass there by the river’s edge where I caught it up easy enough.

  We rode north again with the rising sun off to our right painting the desert red, then golden. You could feel the heat already rising from the desert floor. A Harris hawk sat perched atop a saguaro and watched us with an alert eye as we passed down the road.

  Then it suddenly took flight, went into a low glide, and snatched a packrat with its talons and lifted high into the air again, working its wings mightily, breakfast caught.

  “I feel like that packrat,” Billy said. “Just like it.” He rode slumped to his offside where his shoulder was broke from my bullet.

  “Don’t die on me, kid,” I said.

  “Hell, why not?”

  I didn’t have an answer for him. And to tell the truth, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if he had died. It would save the Cap’n the trouble of doing the deed. But still, something in me didn’t want the kid to die.

  We had to ride slow because of the kid’s busted shoulder. But before we ever reached Finger Bone, I saw the Cap’n’s hack sitting off to one side of the road, the horse still in its traces its head down, the Cap’n slumped over in the seat.

  I figured the Cap’n was dead. That he’d got up his grit to follow us and just died, and the harnessed horse finally just stopped pulling without anyone to guide it.

  I reined the stud in thinking the whole journey had been a failure, remembering what I’d promised the Cap’n if he died—that I’d go down and try and save the other boy and kill the General if I had to. I sure did not want to.

  The Cap’n lay on his side across the seat with his eyes closed, his hat fallen off his head.

  “That him?” Billy said.

  “It is.”

  I dismounted and told the kid to get down and he nearly fell getting off the horse because of his bad shoulder.

  “Sit on that rock yonder,” I said, and he went over and sat on it because he looked like he was close to fainting.

  I went over and shook the Cap’n, and at first he didn’t move. I shook him again and he roused, but slowly, never even reaching for his pistol, which told me he was in bad shape. I’ve never seen him come awake without reaching for his pistol.

  “Huh…what is it?” he muttered.

  “You okay?” I said.

  He looked around till he saw Billy sitting there on the rock. His eyes narrowed. I saw the lines around his mouth tighten. The boy looked up.

  “You my granddad?” he said.

  Cap’n nodded.

  “Come here, boy,” he said.

  “I can’t.”

  Cap’n looked at me.

  “What’s wrong with him,” he said. Then he saw the blood on the side of my shirt, dried now to a reddish brown.

  “We had a problem,” I said. “He didn’t want to come along. His shoul
der’s broke from a bullet.”

  The Cap’n looked aggrieved.

  “You been taking your medicine?” I said.

  “Too much of it, it seems. I thought I had it in me to catch up with you. Didn’t want to lay this whole thing on your back, Jim. Last I knew I was just driving along, and gawd almighty, I wake up and you’re standing here. My head feels like it’s stuffed full of cotton.”

  “You don’t look too well.”

  “I don’t feel too well, to be truthful with you. Had some real bad dreams.”

  “What do you want to do here?” I said.

  “You know what I’ve got to do,” he said.

  The kid sat listening. You could tell he suspected something bad was about to happen, like a dog you’re about to put down, or a horse when you approach it with your gun behind your back—they just know. The kid just knew.

  “Listen,” I said. “I’m going to walk off up that road just a little and leave you to your business. Then I’ll come back. That okay with you?”

  He nodded.

  I glanced at the kid one last time, then led my horse up the road where there was a bend in it that would take me out of sight of the Cap’n and his grandson. I didn’t want to see it. I knew it would be a scene that would live with me all the rest of my days if I saw it.

  I walked with an ache behind my eyes and wished I had a whole bottle of whiskey to drink myself into a stupor. Maybe it would help, maybe it wouldn’t. I got around the bend and stood there in the road waiting for the pistol shot that would kill the kid. I wish I didn’t have ears to hear with, either.

  Time seemed to stand still like the whole world was frozen in a moment. Then: BANG! A single shot. The sound quickly got swallowed by the vast desert as though it never happened. I turned around and walked back, expecting to see the last thing I wanted to see.

  Only what I saw wasn’t at all what I expected.

  The Cap’n lay dead on the ground, his gun still in his hand, one side of his head blown out, his boots pointed skyward, the dust soaking up his blood. Billy sat there on the rock staring at him.

  “What the hell happened?” I said.

  Billy shook his head.

  “He shot himself,” he said.

  “Goddamn, I can see that, boy!”

  “I thought he was going to shoot me,” Billy said, his whole body trembling now. “He said he was bound to kill me in order to save Sam. He said, ‘I hate to do this worse than anything, son…’ Then he cocked his gun and I said, ‘Yes sir, I understand. You got to do what you got to do. Go on and do it.’ He told me to look away, that he didn’t want me to look at him. I told him I wasn’t going to look away. Told him that I wasn’t afraid of dying as much as I was to keep living. Told him that I’d messed up my life pretty good, but if he by God was going to kill me, I wanted him to look me in the eyes when he done it.

  “He said, ‘Yes sir, you surely have ruined your life. I just don’t know why it was you went so bad so young. I guess if I’d been there for you, you would have turned out different than you have.’ I told him it wouldn’t have made no difference—that I’d probably have gone bad either way, that I thought I just had bad blood in me. He said, ‘Is that why you killed that woman and my friend Ira Hayes?’ I told him I killed that lawman because he was going to kill me for trying to escape—that it wasn’t something I wanted to do, that it was an accident.

  “He said, ‘What about that woman, that just an accident too?’ I said, ‘No sir. I never did kill no woman,’ and explained it all to him. You know what he said when I told him that?”

  I shook my head.

  “He said, ‘I believe you, boy. I been around liars and cheaters and badmen all my born life and I know one when I see one. You might be a lot of things, but I don’t think you’re a liar.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s it then, go ahead and pull your trigger and get this over with.’”

  I waited as the kid hesitated, blinking back whatever was in his eyes.

  “Then he just said, ‘I’m all in, boy. I’m finished as finished can be, and I’ll be damned if I’m going out with such sin on my head. So long, boy,’ and turned the gun on himself before I could try and stop him…”

  Tears began to stain the kid’s dirty cheeks, his resolve to be hard-bitten was broken at last, broken in a way no bullet or threat of death could break him.

  “Thing is,” I said, kneeling by the Cap’n and taking the gun out of his hand, then gently closing his half-open eyelids. “He wouldn’t have lasted another week. He was eat up with cancer. I guess he just couldn’t do what he’d always done in the past.”

  The kid rubbed the tears from his eyes with the heel of his hand.

  “What’s that?” he said.

  “His job,” I said.

  “Where does it stand now,” he said, “between you and me?”

  “If your granddaddy didn’t kill you and bring your head in a basket to him, the General was going to shoot Sam, that was the deal,” I said.

  “Then you best go on and do it. Sam’s a good boy and never done nothing truly wrong other than what I talked him into doing. He don’t know much better—he’s just a kid. Hell, what difference does it make to me if I’m alive or if I’m dead.” He looked at his bum shoulder. “I’ll never be able to use this no more and I’d as soon be dead as be a cripple anyways.”

  I stood away from the Cap’n’s body. My old friend. I looked at the kid. I told myself I should just ride away from this, that maybe the younger boy was already dead, and even if I killed this boy and did what the General wanted, I’d just be wasting my time doing a dirty business I wouldn’t ever be able to wash from my hands.

  There was already too much good blood spilled as it was.

  Chapter Twenty

  I bent and picked up the Cap’n’s body and got it into the hack.

  “You think you can drive this with one arm?” I said to Billy.

  He nodded.

  “Then get in and take the reins.”

  “Where we going?”

  “To Old Mexico,” I said.

  For the first time I saw something akin to fear in his eyes.

  “They’ll kill us both we go down there with no army of guns to back us,” he said.

  “I’m going to see if I can trade you for that kid brother of yours. That’s the plan, kid.”

  He stiffened.

  “I wish you’d just do it instead,” he said. “Pull the trigger on me rather than let those dirty Mescans have at me.”

  “You don’t always get what you want in this life,” I said.

  “I don’t want that dirty Mescan killing me!”

  “What difference does it make who does it?”

  “Makes a lot to me. He whipped me like I was a damn dog. Whipped Sam too. He had no right.”

  “He thought you killed his daughter; you’re lucky he didn’t shoot you on the spot.”

  “I wished to hell he had.”

  “Wishing don’t make it so, kid.”

  I told him to lead out and he took up the reins in his good hand and snapped them over the rump of the horse, and we splashed across the river, and I thought, There is no turning back. By midday we made the village of Arroyo according to the sign on a side of a livery; a sleepy little burg that stood baking under the noon sun. A collection of clapboards and adobes without a single thing I could see to recommend the place. But I was hoping we could find a doctor, though, to look at the kid’s shoulder. It was one thing to take him down to Old Mexico to be murdered, another thing to let him suffer on the way. I am not by nature a cruel man, or at least I’d like to believe that I am not. And I needed to find an undertaker for the Cap’n. I wanted him to have a decent burial.

  I stopped the first person I saw, a woman sweeping the front of her adobe stoop. She was fat and brown with raven black hair twisted into a cone atop her head. She wore a red blouse and dark blue skirt and sandals on her feet that were dusty. She paused when I rode up and spoke to her and asked her if the village ha
d a doctor.

  “Qué?”

  “Medico,” I said. She looked from me to the boy, then to the tilted form of the Cap’n, and crossed herself and pointed up the street. We rode on. I saw a man, a white man, washing the windows of a cantina and asked him where the doctor was, and he turned to look at me and the kid and the body of the Cap’n.

  “Across the street upstairs over the jeweler’s,” he said. He was wearing a big Walker Colt on his hip. I thought it must be a pretty bad town if a man had to wear a sidearm just to wash his store window.

  “Who does the burying in your town?” I asked.

  “The German, Hass. Digs the graves, no undertaker; he just puts them in quick, if you know what I mean, it being hot as hell down this way.” Then he paused and chuckled and said, “I guess it’s hot as hell in hell too, if that’s where you’re headed.”

  “Where might I find this Hass?”

  “Keeps a place out at the cemetery, lives there, can’t miss it. Just go on up this road to about half a mile out of town. You’ll see it on your right.”

  I thanked him and we went across the street and I tied up the horses and helped the kid out of the wagon.

  “What about him?” he said, looking at his granddaddy.

  “He’s not going anywhere.”

  I guess he saw the wisdom in that and climbed the stairs ahead of me, and we knocked on the door and it was soon opened by a thin man with dark skin and a widow’s peak of silver-streaked hair and spectacles.

  “Got a patient for you,” I said in Spanish. “You speak gringo?” He nodded, said, “Sí. Poquito, a little.”

  “This boy’s got a bullet-busted shoulder, do what you can for him, I’ve got money.”

  He had the kid remove his shirt, then examined his busted shoulder, shaking his head. “How did this happen?” the medico asked.

  “That sum bitch standing yonder,” Billy said, pointing at me with his nose.

  I ignored the remark and rolled myself a shuck and smoked it while the doctor cleaned out the wound and wrapped it and set a sling for the boy’s arm.

  “I can’t do much for you,” he said. “I’ve not too much to work with here in this place. Do you use this hand or the other one?”