The Pistoleer: A Novel of John Wesley Hardin

by James Carlos Blake

  During his first few weeks in the Austin jail he somehow managed to shape a couple of pieces of tin into keys—one for his cell and one to the lock on the runaround, the big barred cage around the cells. Somebody—we always suspected Manning Clements—had slipped him a six-inch piece of hacksaw blade, and every night, after letting himself out of the runaround, he’d go to work cutting on the bars of the jail’s back window. The other prisoners knew what he was doing, of course, since you can’t keep such a thing a secret in a jail, and one of them sold him out to the jailers for an extra ration of supper. When we examined the bars of the back window, we saw that two of them were nearly cut through. Another night of hard sawing with the little bitty blade—we found it hid in his mattress lining—and he’d of been out. After that, we kept a guard posted at the runaround door day and night, and another posted directly under the back window. “I don’t hardly blame you for trying to escape, Wes,” Reynolds told him, “but if you’d got out that window, the jail-yard guards would of shot you down like a dog in the street.” Hardin answered, “That’d be better than dying like a rat in a cage.” He had a point, you ask me.

  I was on guard in the visiting room one time when his wife and children came to visit. His face was bright as a harvest moon, he was so happy to see them. But she looked tired. There were lines in her cheeks and dark circles under her eyes, like she hadn’t slept good in a long time. The children were respectful but standoffish. Hardin tried hard to sound encouraging. He told her to be brave and strong and so forth. She mostly whispered, and it was hard to tell from her face what she might of been saying. I did hear her say, “Of course not—there’s nothing to give up to!” Said it sharp, and for a second he looked at her like she’d cussed him. When they left, he stared at the door like he was looking at something long ago and far away. I know for a fact he wrote her just about every day he was waiting to hear from the appeals court. I guess she probably had a lot of good reasons for not writing him back near as often.

  I never did understand the workings of the appeals court—why it could be so fast to rule in some cases and took so damn long in others. Like the difference between the time it took them to decide Hardin’s case and how fast they decided Brown Bowen’s.

  Hardin had been in jail for months already when his brother-in-law was finally extradited from Alabama on a warrant for murder in Texas. He was put in a cell not too far from Hardin’s, and it was real clear there was no love lost between them. Whenever they saw each other in the runaround, Wes would damn near snarl at him, and Bowen was always bad-mouthing Hardin to the other prisoners. The way I heard it, they held each other to blame for getting caught by the law.

  Bowen was a cocky sonbitch who figured there wasn’t a way in the world he would be convicted. “Ain’t no witnesses,” he said. “It’s my word against a dead man’s.” A few weeks later he got taken to Gonzales for trial, and as it turned out, there had been a witness. A young fella named Mac Billings had seen Bowen commit the murder—he’d shot a passed-out drunk for some reason nobody knew. The jury stepped out of the room for a few minutes and came back with a hanging verdict.

  When Bowen was returned to Austin while his case was appealed, he wasn’t near so brash as before. He licked his lips a lot and looked to be in a constant sweat. He spent a whole day talking to his lawyer—and then the two of them announced to reporters that the man who’d really committed the murder Bowen was convicted of was John Wesley Hardin. Bowen claimed he hadn’t said so before because he wanted to protect his sister’s husband—and he hadn’t expected to be found guilty. He said Mac Billings had lied to cover for Hardin.

  Neal Bowen, Brown’s father, came to Austin to beg Hardin to confess to the killing and save his son’s neck. Hardin told him he wouldn’t make a false statement—and that a true one wouldn’t help Brown in the least. Bowen stomped out of the jail with a face like a storm cloud. I heard they never talked to each other again.

  In early May Brown Bowen’s appeal was denied, and we took him to Gonzales to be hanged. Over three thousand spectators turned out on the appointed day. He once again declared that Hardin was the guilty party, not himself. Then he was hooded and his legs bound together and the trap was triggered. The hangman wasn’t too good at his work, though, because I counted to thirteen-Mississippi before Bowen finally stopped twitching.

  I never felt a bit sorry for Brown Bowen, but I couldn’t help thinking how hard things must have been for Jane. Her whole family had come to hate her husband, and they cut all ties with her when she refused to turn her back on him. She went to live with Hardin’s mother.

  Four months after Bowen’s hanging, the court denied Hardin’s appeal. In its written opinion, it made reference to “the enormity of the crimes of John Wesley Hardin,” which sounded to me like they’d denied the appeal as much because of who he was as for what he’d done. Reynolds thought the same thing. “The court ain’t sure if he killed Charlie Webb in self-defense or not,” the lieutenant said, “but they know damn well he’s Wes Hardin and has killed plenty others, and that’s enough for them to shut the iron doors on him.”

  We took him back to Comanche for formal sentencing, then set out with him and three other prisoners in a wagon once again flanked front and rear with a heavy guard detail. At Fort Worth we put them aboard a train—a prison car with barred windows and double-thick, double-locked doors—and headed for Huntsville. Every station on our route was jammed with gawkers, with people praying for him and people cursing his damned soul. The depot at Palestine was so crowded, people were jostling and shoving each other off the platform. We later heard a young boy lost his foot when he fell on the tracks as we went rumbling by.

  He got to Huntsville early one morning in October. There were a lot of eyeballs on him when the prison wagon came into the main yard and the guards took out him and three others, including a bank robber and a boy who’d killed a fella in a fight over a girl at a church picnic. Wes was shackled to a blacksmith who’d got two years for trying to kill a storekeeper who kicked his dog, and the smitty looked about to piss his pants, he was so scared to be in prison with the likes of us. Two years!—hell, that’s nothing. A man ought be able to do two years on his goddamn toes. I’d already been inside for seven years and had thirteen to go. A lot of the cons were doing thirty, forty, fifty years. An old boy named Weeks was pulling ninety-nine years and a day. He’d got the sentence from a smart-ass judge in Houston. “Could of been worse,” Weeks liked to say. “Shitfire, it could of been life.” That smitty, though, he couldn’t bear up: before he’d been in the walls two months he dove off the second tier and smashed his head like a melon on the stone floor.

  Wes was the big attraction, of course, and he damn well knew it. Even with the shackles on him he walked like a man used to getting attention. Most new fish would turn away real quick when you looked them in the eye as they crossed the main yard on the way over to Processing, but not him. He wasn’t about to be rattled by a bunch of yardbirds. Some of the hardrocks hollered to him that they aimed to find out just how tough he was. He just looked at them and spit between his teeth.

  A con who clerked in Processing said they had to use nearly two full pages to record all the scars he had on him. After he was washed down, he was given his skunk suit and his mustache was shaved off and his hair was cut down to the scalp like the rest of us. He was brought into the row just before lockdown that evening and put in a cell with Snake Miller. Snake was the only con on the row who usually celled alone. The rest of us kept our distance from him. He was crazy as a moonstruck dog and liked to kill things with his hands.

  Right after lights out, we heard the scuffle in their cell. Didn’t neither one let a holler through the whole thing, but we could hear them thumping and cussing and grunting hard. The row guards heard it as clear as we did, but they weren’t about to put a stop to it. Hell, that’s why they’d put Wes in there in the first place. Snake Miller was their favorite way to soften up any new fish who came on the row thinki
ng too much of hisself. The loudest sound of the fight was the last one—there was a kind of wet crunch and everything got quiet. Next morning when they took the padlocks off the doors and opened the cells, they found Snake on the floor with his busted head still leaking blood on the stones. Pieces of hairy scalp were stuck to the door bars. Wes had some lumps and scratches but looked spruce compared to Snake. Smiley and Groot were the row guards—real sons of bitches—but they laughed when Wes said Miller must of been trying to break out by using his head. They had Snake carried over to the hospital. A couple of days later the morning orderly found him with his throat cut.

  Wes got assigned to the wheelwright shop, which is where I worked, and where we got to know each other. I was from Liberty County, and it turned out we had some common acquaintances in East Texas.

  He hadn’t been there two months before he had a plan for breaking out. It was a good plan except for one thing—he had to bring ten other cons in On it. That was a mistake and I tried to tell him so. “The place is crawling with rats who’ll sell you out for a tiny piece of cheese,” I told him. But he wouldn’t believe cons wouldn’t stick together in trying to escape. “In or out, Red?” he said. I knew better, I truly did, but of course I was in.

  What we did was dig a tunnel from under the wheelwright shop to the prison armory, about seventy yards away. Every evening, the guards—including the saddle bosses, the horseback guards who took convict work gangs to the fields every day—stored their weapons in the armory before going to supper. We figured to cut our way through the armory floor, arm ourselfs, get the drop on all the guards, shoot anybody who resisted, and set loose every con in the place—all except for the rape fiends, of course.

  The shop had all the tools we needed. Working in three shifts of four men each, we broke through the floor in the rear room of the shop, dug down about seven feet, and tunneled straight at the armory. The tunnel was just big enough for one man at a time, and each man in a shift would work for an hour before being spelled by somebody else. The man in the tunnel always took a handful of empty flour sacks and payed out a strong cord behind him. Whenever he’d fill a sack, he’d tug on the cord and the men keeping watch up in the shop would pull the sack out and dump the dirt in one of the privies behind the building.

  It was pitch-dark down there, so we had to work by feel. Some of the boys were scared shitless of working so confined under the ground—but they forced theirselfs to do their share. They’d come out breathless and white-eyed, hands shaking, and make jokes about learning the mole’s trade. I admit I was one of them. Every time a clod of dirt fell on me I’d think the tunnel was giving way and I’d have to lock my jaws to keep from screaming with the fear of being buried alive. There ain’t been much in my life to spook me like being in that damn tunnel. But hell, it ain’t nothing a man won’t do to try to set hisself free.

  The wheelwright was in on the plot. He was a Swede named Johansen and he’d admired Wes since long before meeting him. He took Wes at his word that five hundred dollars would be coming to him once we’d made our escape. “All you got to do or say or know,” Wes told him, “is nothing.”

  We were all of us strong as oxen and the work went fairly fast. It was fall and the weather had turned cool, so the digging was easier than it would have been in summer. Every night I went to sleep with the smell of dirt in every one of my pores. It smelled like freedom. And our reckoning turned out to be perfect. In three weeks we reached a point directly under the armory. Then we dug up to its pine floor and by God we were there.

  On the evening of the break I could feel my heart punching in my throat while we watched the armory from the wheelwright shop, waiting for the guards and saddle bosses to put up their guns and go eat. Wes had wanted to be the one to do the cutting through the armory floor and the first to arm hisself, but so did I and a couple of the others, so we drew straws to decide it. Weeks got the shorty and gave us a shit-eating grin.

  As soon as the guards and bosses put up their guns, Weeks dropped into the tunnel and started crawling for the armory. I was right behind him, then Wes, then the others. When the tunnel turned upright again, Weeks stood up and slipped a sawblade between a couple of the floor planks over his head and started cutting. The chinks in the pine boards let just enough light into the well of the tunnel for me to make out the dark shapes of Weeks’s boots right in front of me. I could smell the sawdust drifting down and feel it on my hands.

  “What’s taking that sawyer so damn long?” Wes said behind me. “Hold your horses, boy,” I said. “I reckon you’ll be free soon enough.” I heard him chuckle, and I had a powerful urge to laugh out loud. “You about there?” I whispered up to Weeks. “Just about,” he said.

  He stopped sawing and gave a grunt, and I heard wood cracking and then break free. “Got it!” he said. One of his feet raised up to get a foothold on the side of the tunnel. I heard him grunt again and his other foot disappeared as he pulled hisself up.

  I squirmed forward into the well on my belly and sat up. But before I could get my feet under me and stand up, there was a hell of a blast up above and Weeks came tumbling down on top of me. I knew he was dead by the weight of him. I felt his strong-smelling blood running hot and thick over my face. I kept wondering how he could be hollering so loud if he was dead, and then finally figured out that it was me doing the hollering.

  Of the ten cons we’d brought into the plan, seven had ratted it away to the guards. One got hisself a full pardon, two were made trusties in another building, and the others got reassigned to farms outside the walls.

  When they found out what we were up to, the guard captain—a hardass named Brockman—and some of his men had stashed extra shotguns in the shed behind the armory. On the day of the break, they’d gone through their usual routine of putting up their guns, then they went around to the shed and got the shotguns and sneaked back in the armory through the side door and waited real quiet for us to come up through the floor. When Weeks poked his head up, Brockman blew it off with both barrels.

  They give me and Wes both fifteen days in the hole on bread and water, him in one building, me in another. I heard they give him a whipping too that damn near killed him. I never did see him again. When they took me out, they put me to work in the tannery, the most miserable, most stinking work there ever was. And I had to do it with a ball and chain they clamped on my leg, which they said I’d keep until I’d proved I could be trusted without it. It didn’t come off for another eight years. To this day I walk kinda funny because of having it on for all that time.

  The hole was a lightless cell about five feet high and four feet square. Its door was solid steel except for a small hinged slot at the bottom for pushing through the prisoner’s ration of bread and water once a day. The usual stay was three to seven days, depending, but if an inmate had been particularly troublesome—and Hardin surely was during his first six or seven years behind the walls—he could get up to fifteen days. What’s more, we were under full authority to add to a con’s discomfort in a variety of ways during his stay in the hole. His bread would certainly be moldy, and on occasion might even be soaked with “yellow gravy” dispensed from a guard’s bladder. His drinking water would likely be dipped from the privy.

  But nothing we did to their food and water was as punishing to most inmates in the hole as the cramped darkness itself. Some men adjusted to it, but many could not. Isolation in total and prolonged darkness will unleash the demons in a man’s mind like nothing else can. Prisoners of weak will would start to scream within hours of the door closing on them. Others lasted a day or two before they began to howl. And once a man started screaming in the hole, he’d still be screaming when we came to take him out, even if his vocal cords had quit on him. They’d come out with eyes like loco horses and blood in their mouths and wouldn’t be able to talk for days. The whole time they were in there, they were obliged to relieve themselves on the floor and wallow in their own waste. They’d come out smelling worse than you could believe p
ossible of a human being. They’d be purblind in the sudden light. After fifteen days in the hole, some never recovered their proper vision. Some couldn’t stand up straight or walk steadily for days afterward. A prisoner once described the hole as being as dark and foul as the devil’s asshole. It was a crude but apt description.

  Hardin always got through his stays in the hole a whole lot better than most. When we opened the door at the end of his first time in there, he was on his back and had his legs straight up against the wall—a position the smart ones figured out as a way to keep their knees and back muscles from knotting up on them and losing their stretch. He seemed indifferent to the cockroaches crawling over his filthy nakedness. He squinted hard against the light and said, “Already?” He was a genuine hard case, all right, and I was certain he would never leave Huntsville alive.

  After his first escape attempt, we riveted a ball-and-chain to his ankle—a punishment usually reserved for the worst of the repeat offenders—and put him in a cell with a lifer named John Williams, a big mule-faced con who was the row turnkey. He was also the best snitch we had on the row. He could convince the hardest cons of his loyalty to them. And because they believed he had the trust of the authorities—his position as turnkey was proof of that—they considered him a valuable confidant. We would have been at a grave disadvantage against the cons if it weren’t for snitches like Williams—but most of us saw them the same way the cons did: as worthless, dishonorable trash who would betray anybody for cheap gain. It is satisfying to know that a snitch’s luck will sooner or later run out. Williams’s ran out two years later when somebody overpowered him in his cell, sliced his tongue off at the root, and held his head back until he drowned in his own blood. Rumor had it that a row guard had tipped the cons about Williams. Perhaps so.