Lucky Billy

by John Vernon

  Yet even this will not impeach his credit with the people of Las Tablas. Un hombre muy generoso, Billy the Kid. He give money, horses, drinks. We always glad to see his innocent face. Su vista penetraba al corazón de toda la gente.

  A thunderous noise comes from the south, from up Las Tablas canyon. Bent over, Billy humps it to the privy behind his friend's house and pulls the door shut as a dust cloud descends and horses approach, whinnying and blowing, and soldiers fill the space between Yginio and the villagers.

  Billy left the gun behind. He feels gut-shot, lightheaded. He twists the wooden turnbuckle and contemplates the privy hole. He could hide in the pit if he had to, he knows. Jack Long and the Dummy had done exactly that during the five-day battle behind McSween's house. But upon cool reflection he realizes these soldiers aren't searching for him—they were likely out patrolling even when the Kid escaped and just now heard the shooting and have come to have a look-see. Buffalo soldiers from Fort Stanton. Billy spies them through a knothole. The white lieutenant leans down from his saddle in Yginio's face, who's picked up the gun—dear, loyal Henio!—while his soldiers' black faces impassively survey the brown ones of the townspeople.

  And inside the jakes, everything comes out, coils and coils, he just barely got his pants down. He is not the sort of person who goes to the privy because he has to shit. No, he shits because he finds himself in the outhouse, because he couldn't sleep last night, because he can't shoot to save his ass all the sudden. At least he didn't come here to hide like a coward.

  "What's going on here? What's all the firing?" To Billy inside the privy, the voices ring clear.

  "Target practice," says Yginio.

  "Why are they here? What are you people up to?" Billy peers through the knothole and sees the lieutenant gesturing toward the crowd with his glove in his hand. This lieutenant is one he's never seen before; young, buttoned tight, round dumpling cheeks, straight as an Indian on his bay mare. He doesn't speak, he shouts.

  "I was practicing my shooting."

  "Speak up!"

  Yginio repeats himself at exactly the same volume.

  "Where's your target?"

  "That cholla."

  "It looks remarkably unscathed."

  "I'm a lousy shot. That's why I need to practice."

  "With the whole town watching? These people dropped their chores to watch you shoot at a cholla? See my men? These soldiers? They're doing a job. Long days in the saddle, long nights without sleep. No wonder they resent people like you who sit around dreaming up ways to waste your time. I suppose your fields just plow themselves without you. The sawmill cuts its own boards. I don't buy it for a minute. Why are you here?" He waits. No one speaks. He turns back to Yginio. "What's your name?"

  "Yginio."

  "Full name."

  "Yginio Salazar."

  "I've been given a list and I believe your name is on it. It sounds suspiciously familiar. Let me see that gun." Holding the barrel and trigger-guard, Yginio reaches him the gun. The lieutenant is short and Yginio tall but the former being mounted reverses this advantage.

  "I've heard all about your vigilance committees, your public executions. Is that why you're here?" He surveys the congregation, mostly women and children and a few ancient men.

  "They're here because they want to find out if I've improved my shooting."

  "Don't make me laugh. I can see what you're up to. You're trying to make me think you're an object of ridicule. Are you baiting me, mister?"

  Yginio says nothing.

  "Where do you live?"

  "In that house over there."

  "Who lives there with you?"

  "My stepfather and his niece."

  The lieutenant's horse swings around. The gun's on the other side. "It's clear you're a menace to this community."

  And Billy watching it all through the knothole, his arms and legs sliced by paper-thin sunbeams shining through the walls like light in a pisspot. The lieutenant doesn't look suspicious or upset or even concerned, he looks pleased with himself and disgusted with the world. "I'm keeping this weapon. It's sequestered. You people go on about your business." He waves the arm with the weapon, finger on the trigger. No one moves. "I often patrol this area," he announces. "I don't intend to hear gunshots again."

  ***

  HEADING EAST ON a new horse the following morning—again for a second night not having slept—the Kid completes the full circle from jubilant transport for his perilous escape to sheer whipped-dog glumness and meanness and despair. When he couldn't sleep he rose at four A.M. and went out in the dark and two hours later came back with a horse, not from Las Tablas, from a neighboring ranch, out of respect for Yginio. Like a mother, Yginio packed him food. Tins of sardines, empanaditas, marquezotes. They embraced, Yginio whispering, "Go to Mexico, Bilito. Go south." From their windows and doorways, people watched him ride out.

  Now it all comes crashing down, all the mayhem and loss of the past three years. Tunstall executed, McSween gunned down, Dick Brewer's head blown off, Tom O'Folliard shot in the heart—"Don't shoot, Garrett. I'm already killed"—Charlie Bowdre leg- and gut-shot, mouth filling with blood—"I wish ... I wish..."—and the Regulators broke up, Frank and George Coe pulled out for Colorado, Fred Waite lit off, Hank Brown in Kansas. Chisum still owes me five hundred dollars.

  How much?

  Five hundred, Ma.

  Shoot him.

  Sure. The most popular millionaire in Lincoln County.

  You're popular, too.

  Is that so.

  You're famous. You need to take advantage of your good odor.

  I already have. The Mexes all like me.

  I don't mean that. Write some letters to the papers. Stand up for your rights! Governor Wallace promised you a pardon. You could go to Santa Fe.

  I could go south, too. I could go to Mexico. There's advantages in both. Or I could go north to Fort Sumner, Ma.

  None of that! I'm wise to you, mister. He wants to see the tart that's carrying his child! For all I give a damn. Go ahead, he my guest. You could shoot her, too. Shoot her in the belly for all I give a damn. Everything I said you always did the opposite. You never did mind well, Henry McCarty. It comes of growing up without a father around. Is that why you shoot people? Headstrong child. Go ahead and eat beans—I'll stick to potatoes. You ever were a bother and how could I help it I loved you so much? I'd say now at least you got plenty of love. That wasn't the problem. Faith, hope, and love. Well, you never had faith. But the greatest is love. The greatest of these.

  You loved me so much you got everything I did. I got a toothache, you got a toothache. Remember, Ma? Same tooth, even.

  Chilblains, the mumps.

  I took to my bed, you took to your bed.

  For all you cared. You had your own little world.

  I cared. I still do.

  Grand way to show it.

  Fireweed along the Roswell trail. The sun in his face. Torrey yucca, new evening primrose, cholla everywhere, the resurrection of the grama grass. The earth to his right breaks in successive waves against the north-facing slopes of the Capitans. Green-gray clearings in trees near the summits. He'll be past the mountains soon. Then where to go. Olive-green, mouse-green, yellow-green plains rolling ahead from behind him, around him. Mother dead, too.

  7. 1878

  Tunstall

  MIDDLETON AND BILLY, leading their horses, scrambled up the slope to join Widenmann and Brewer, who'd taken cover in an outcrop of boulders. Below, the shooting had stopped; the posse, Billy told them, had been firing in the air. Then they heard a single shot and John Middleton calmly observed, "They've killed Mr. Tunstall." It can't be, thought Billy. Then two more, then the sound of Tunstall's horses bolting every which way in a panic of darkness. The Kid, jumping up, could not contain his urine and before he had the chance to thumb his pecker out he felt a warm thread run down his leg. By the time he had it aimed, though, nothing emerged. As he stood there trying to go, from his heart to his toes,
everything sank and a strange calm took over. The ongoing seconds coolly slipped past the stoppage of time created by the gunshots. It couldn't be true...

  Another avalanche of horses: the posse storming off. Maybe they just arrested Mr. Tunstall, maybe they're taking him with them. The worm of fear that gnawed Billy's heart refused to abate.

  He and the others led their horses down and searched in the darkness, listening for moans. The inky dark swelled in exactly the pockets they thought they'd find a body. At last they rode on, following the steep trail down to the Ruidoso, but Billy and Middleton insisted on stopping at John Newcomb's ranch and sending a search party out the next morning. Pooh, blustered Widenmann; Harry's in jail in Lincoln by now.

  But Widenmann was wrong. In the corpse-light of dawn, Ramón Baragón found John Tunstall's body dragged into a thicket beside his dead horse. It was carefully arranged: one blanket underneath him, another on top, his folded overcoat placed under head and neck. His hat had been wedged beneath Mormon Pussy's ear. Tunstall, Billy learned when Baragón returned with the body tied across the back of a mule, had been shot in the breast then shot again in the back of the head and after that his skull bashed, no doubt with a rifle stock. At John Newcomb's ranch they placed him in a cart and freighted him to Lincoln.

  The Kid and the others helped Alexander McSween lay out the body on a table in his parlor. Blood pooled in Tunstall's ear had run down his neck, and Billy spit on his bandanna and tried to wipe it off. The skin was cold and hard. Mr. Tunstall's face was misshapen and grayed and the Kid turned his head. Then he turned back and stared at the spectacle. Somehow, on one side, the lower lip had pulled clown, the mouth wouldn't close. Billy pinched it together but still it twisted open. He wiped his fingers on his pants.

  Soon the word spread, mobs gathered outside. Down the road, someone shot out Dolan's front window. Those who didn't care if they'd be seen by the Dolanites knocked on McSween's door to pay their last respects. One by one they filed past, some averting their eyes from the gray face and crushed head, each greeted by McSween with the same grim words: "Justice will be clone." Squire Wilson brought news of the Dolanites' claim that Tunstall'd fired first while running off with horses that had been legally attached. Mac shook his head sadly. "What won't those Irish thugs say?" he asked. "They lie in their teeth, they're cowards and jacklegs, every last one. They can't hold a candle to John! He was a man of his word! Why, John had once—"

  Billy Bonney couldn't listen. Next to Fred against the wall inside McSween's parlor, he swore to himself to revenge Tunstall's murder, committed, he knew, by men he'd once run with—most particularly Buck Morton, Jesse Evans, and Tom Hill. That became his litany, chanted in his head as a single word, Morton-Evans'n-Hill, for they'd split off from the posse, he'd seen them do that, and rode up to Tunstall and shot him cold. But his purpose embraced their bosses, too, the ones who pulled the strings, men like Dolan, George Hindman, Billy Matthews, Sheriff Brady.

  He gave himself the whip over Mr. Tunstall's death. He'd acted like a coward and first-water idiot, thinking the posse was after the horses and maybe at most they might arrest Tunstall, but he should have known better. He should have stayed with the Englishman instead of racing past him, should have fired back. He'd learned his lesson. The world had split in half into those who'd murdered John Henry Tunstall and those with blood in their eyes for revenge, and you couldn't be neither, you had to take sides. Yes, the Englishman had his faults, who didn't, but for the life of him Billy couldn't think of one now. They'd dissolved into the stew of rage and regret boiling in his soul, the coil of wanting and loss, while Mr. Tunstall himself, who'd been good to the Kid, who would always be good, was fixed for the ages, having hardened into marble. And Morton-Evans'n-Hill were buckets of slime each hanging by a string just waiting to be slashed.

  He kicked at a chair and it flew across the room and landed on its side. Everyone looked at him. McSween inspected the chair and held up a leg that was knocked clean off. Billy approached and relieved him of the chair and, without a word, carried it through the dining room door to the kitchen and outside. On the hard bare earth at the yard's edge he smashed it into bits and tossed the pieces in the brush leading down to the river.

  Back inside, he listened to McSween eulogizing Tunstall. In his lawyer's suit and tie, tall and broad, with hands as large as shovels, and rolling his shoulders as he walked, yet at the same time looking glassy and vague—with his wiry black hair piled on his head and his wishbone mustache lengthening his chin and despite, lamentably, breaking off in mid-sentence as though ambushed by grief, Macky showered accolades on John, praised his generosity, his natural nobility, and his openhearted manner. He was made of bell metal, his heart was pure sterling, he looked down upon us now and approved of our—If anything, he was too soft on the Dolanites. Now they'll see—now they'll see—

  "Now they'll see what?" the Kid asked Fred. The growing crowd before them consisted mostly of Mexicans.

  "Now they'll see what we do."

  "What will we do?"

  Fred glanced over at John Tunstall's body. "I imagine we'll have to kill the whole pack of them."

  The Reverend Taylor Ealy, sent for by McSween several months ago, offered prayers beside the body. He and his wife, Mary, and their two children had arrived that very morning all the way from Pennsylvania, and planned to board temporarily with the McSweens in their sprawling house before they found their own place. Mary played Sue McSween's parlor organ—Mac's wife was visiting friends in St. Louis—and Squire Wilson translated for the Mexicans such hymns and prayers as they'd never heard before. McSween had told Tunstall's men about Ealy when they carried in the body; he'd been summoned to counter the Catholic influence in Lincoln. And wouldn't you know it?—his five-day journey from the end of the train-line in a wagon and horse had culminated that morning with a welcome from the Dolanites when he and his family rattled into town. Gathered on the porch of James Dolan's store, they'd asked Ealy, driving past, who the hell he was, and when he guilelessly answered they surrounded his wagon and said they'd as soon see a whore come to Lincoln as a Protestant minister. They had no need of his Bible-thumping, they said, drawing their weapons. Reeking of liquor, Jack Long had leaned into Reverend Ealy's face and informed him that he'd once helped hang a Methodist preacher in Arizona but never tried a Presbyterian, are their necks any tougher?

  Now McSween fumed. As the mourners filed past, he declared that the Murphy-Dolan gang was like the Spanish Inquisition, whereas McSween himself and the martyred John Tunstall were like the Covenanters killed in the seventeenth century for defending the Scottish Presbyterian Church.

  That night, the Kid, Fred Waite, and Dick Brewer slept on the floor in McSween's dining room, and heard sporadic gunshots outside and hoarse prayers from the parlor, where McSween and Reverend Ealy sat up with the body.

  At breakfast, McSween outlined his plans, which became, the more he talked, the more irritatingly legal to the spunked-up Kid. They met in the dining room. Tunstall was still unburied, and at the table Billy just could make out his stocking feet through the open door. Before his sideboard, as he talked, Macky had a habit of making a fist and slamming it into his other palm as though ready to run out and conquer the world, then hesitating and gazing at his hands. He assigned the Kid and Dick to swear affidavits before Squire Wilson, justice of the peace, who would surely issue warrants for the murderers of Tunstall. Wilson, he reminded them, like all the town authorities, was of their own faction, whereas the Dolanites controlled the county government, of which Lincoln was the seat, including Sheriff Brady, District Attorney Rynerson in Las Cruces, and Judge Bristol in Mesilla, who'd issued the unjust writ of attachment that had started this whole mess in the first place. To get justice, said Mac, we'll have to bypass the county, but all the Kid could think was, justice—what is justice? He knew that Mac went unarmed because the gospel said to turn the other cheek, but he was human, wasn't he? By now, wouldn't scenes of bloody revenge have passed th
rough his mind? They'd taken over Billy's: James Dolan clasping Billy's knees begging not to be shot; Sheriff William Brady's lip and large mustache sliced off his ugly face; Billy Matthews dragged through town on a rope behind a manure cart. As he watched the lawyer ramble, though, Billy understood that others did that sort of thing, not McSween.

  Others did that sort of thing for McSween.

  Yet here he was admonishing his men to not allow their grief to fester into brutality. What kind of man was he? Billy brooded over Macky. John's loss meant a loss of income for the lawyer. Was he just a poor actor or, in his own way, oafishly angered? He seemed just as inconsolable over Tunstall's death as over the inevitable stoppage of funds from London, and announced to them now with a sympathetic frown, "I can't pay you boys yet." He looked them each in the eye. "But I will. I will. You'll have to trust me on this one."

  No one responded.

  One problem, Mac went on, was that Lincoln's town constable, Atanacio Martínez, was just a part-timer, he didn't even wear a badge. "You might have to persuade him to exercise his authority." McSween's eyes grew brighter. "He could deputize you boys."

  "I'll persuade him," said the Kid.

  Rob Widenmann walked in with a letter in his hand—he'd been writing to Tunstall's family in London in the room he'd shared with "Harry"—and the men filled him in then realized they'd better dissuade him from helping. "You're a hothead, Rob," Dick Brewer said.

  "That is not true!" Rob looked down at the ammunition belts draped across his shoulder.

  "So what?" Billy said. "We could use a few hotheads."

  In the end, it was just Dick Brewer and the Kid who swore the affidavits, and only Fred and Billy who roused Martínez from his bed to deputize them so they could help serve the warrants. Martínez demurred. They'll kill me, he said. Billy in turn told Martínez that he'd better take that chance because if he didn't he would kill him himself. So the next day they set out for Dolan's store: Billy, Fred Waite, and the reluctant Martínez.