Lucky Billy

by John Vernon

  A shot grazed Billy's leg and passed through French's thigh and the two raced back to Tunstall's corral, Billy with his Winchester, French lunge-trotting behind. The Regulators mounted and rode out of town but French fell off his horse; he couldn't grip it with his knees. The Kid helped him hide inside an opening in the floor of a room in the back of J. H. Tunstall & Co., General Merchandise, where he lay face-up in the two-foot-high space, a gun in each hand, beneath the reinserted boards and the repositioned bed, then snuck out that night under cover of darkness.

  Later, Billy learned that Macky Sween arrived when the corpses still lay there draining in the street, blood unspooling into mud. The new sheriff, George Peppin, wished to arrest both Mr. and Mrs. McSween but could not. Mac refused to recognize Peppin's authority—the governor hadn't confirmed his appointment—and refused to be taken to Lincoln's deathtrap jail, surrendering instead to the buffalo soldiers, who brought him and Sue back to Fort Stanton where they'd be safe in its jail until the spring court convened. Rob Widenmann joined them there; he'd been arrested, too.

  ***

  AFTER THAT, it was a cavalcade of killings. With Macky in custody and the town torn apart—the meek and the crafty getting out while they could—Billy and the others headed south to the Apache reservation hunting for those remaining Dolanites who'd taken to the hills. They'd swelled to fifteen and Dick Brewer once again was head of the crew but Brewer hadn't been at the Brady kill-feast, he'd fallen a notch in the others' esteem; and Billy Bonney had risen.

  They put up at Blazer's Mill in a pocket of the foothills to the Sacramento Mountains. The two-story adobe was no longer a mill, more like a village in a box: store, post office, Indian agency, boarding house, eatery, and meeting place. Here, they ordered a meal. With their horses corralled behind high plank walls and the men inside eating, anyone entering the valley just then might have sworn the place was empty.

  And here comes Buckshot Roberts riding a mule, his legs nearly scraping the ground on either side. He's bullish and short and carries in his right shoulder a painful load of buckshot that impedes his range of motion; he can't raise that arm. Still, he's learned to fire from the hip, or prone behind a rifle, and he's a crack shot, having once been a hunter for Buffalo Bill. He was Frank Baker's friend before Billy shot Baker, and a member of the posse that had pursued and killed Tunstall. But he'd just sold his farm outside of Lincoln and planned to fog out of the county for good now that it had become a battlefield, after first checking at the Blazer's Mill P.O. to see if his money from the sale had arrived. As he snubbed his mule and drew his Winchester out of its scabbard, the mill's door opened and Roberts found himself before Frank Coe, a Regulator and friend of the Kid. "We have a warrant for your arrest," said Coe.

  "The hell you have."

  "I'm glad you showed up. We don't have to hunt you down. You best come inside and see Brewer and surrender."

  "Me? Surrender?" Roberts laughed, winced.

  "What choice do you have? We're fifteen to one."

  "We'll see about that."

  "Ain't there been enough bloodshed? Do you want to get yourself killed? Come inside and surrender."

  "I'll be killed if I surrender."

  "What makes you think that?"

  "I know damn well who's inside there. I know what they done."

  "If you give me your gun, I'll stand by you. I'll make sure you're not hurt."

  "Don't make me laugh. Laughing hurts my shoulder."

  "This is no joke. Surrender while you can."

  "Not by a long jump. You must think I'm pathetic or a gullible fool. Well, Frank Coe, it's been a grand talk. Now I'll be on my way."

  Billy spilled out the door sparring with his friends like a boy at a baile. Then they saw Roberts. "You son of a bitch, throw up your hands!" Charlie Bowdre yelled.

  "Not much, Maryann." Roberts swung his Winchester up from his hip and fired at Bowdre, who shot simultaneously ten feet away. Roberts's ball traveled eight hundred miles an hour straight for Charlie's belt buckle and merely knocked him on his ass. Bowdre's shot, however, skewered Roberts's viscera, the Kid spotted it flying out his backside.

  The shot to Bowdre's buckle ricocheted and shattered Geoige Coe's right hand, removed his trigger finger.

  Roberts shot again and hit John Middleton square in the chest, shredding his lung, just missing his heart.

  He shot a third time and struck Doc Scurlock's pistol, still in its holster, for all of this happened in supercooled time. The ball burrowed down Scurlock's leg.

  He shot once more and skinned Billy's arm and now the smoke was everywhere, it had absorbed the space between them. Gut-shot, Roberts backed across the road and stumbled into Dr. Blazer's private house. His rifle was empty. He found, on the far wall of Blazer's office, a single-shot Springfield, officer's model, .45-70 caliber, and a box of ammunition on the desk beneath it. In a corner of the room stood a three-quarter bed. He dragged the mattress off the bed, belly-humped it to the door, all the time leaking blood and fecal matter, and settled in for the long haul. But the effort cost him; his eyeballs swung back, a hurlwind in his head seemed to spiral down his spine. The mattress lay against the bottom half of the door. Sprawling behind it, Roberts rallied himself. His large and windy belly had spare capacity, that's what he figured, it would keep him alive, dispensing fat into his system long enough to have a game, and what else could matter now?

  Across the road, outside the mill, Dick Brewer ordered Dr. Blazer's foreman to go pull that wounded bastard out of the house but he refused. Shots came from the doorway; everyone took cover. Brewer ordered Blazer to do it himself and Blazer said, You. "I'll burn the fucking place down," the sterling Brewer declared, but he didn't; he forted up instead in a pile of firewood beside the two-story mill building and he, too, hackles raised, trying nonetheless to keep sane and steady, and clinging all the while to the logic of amends that had brought them to this impasse, settled in for a siege.

  Middleton was down. He coughed up blood. George Coe had wrapped his shattered hand in a shirt, Charlie Bowdre had had the wind knocked out of him and was crawling toward the mill gasping all the way. At a window in the mill, Billy passed his rifle to Fred to reload and while waiting fired with his pistol six shots so rapid, whomping Roberts's mattress, that his gun burned his hand and he had to throw it down. "He's licking us," he said.

  "Yes, he is," said Fred.

  "He's just a sneaks-by, no?"

  "Hardly. I suppose he's hopping mad."

  In his pile of logs, Brewer fired his carbine and saw the doorjamb splinter next to Roberts's face. Roberts meanwhile spotted Brewer's puff of smoke and drew a careful bead and squeezed just as Dick raised his handsome head. As it entered his blue eye, the ball snagged a patch of Dick's fine brown eyebrow and, lifting him bodily, drove him back across the firewood. The part of his brain still thinking "lucky shot" went flying behind him, the rest stayed in his skull. And, tall as a maypole, true as steel, the soul of honor, plucky and reliable, of irreproachable character, the man whose good looks were the fame of the county no longer had a head, its top was blown off, including the bulk of his black curly hair that plenty of painted fingernails had plowed.

  That did it. Roberts resumed dying—it took another day—and Billy and the Regulators, pragmatists all, left him in his hidey-hole, left Dick Brewer's body where it was, too, sprawled across a pile of wood—unburied—and John Middleton in agony writhing on the ground. The bullet in his lung took eight more years to kill him. They just up and rode off while they still could, having had it up to here. No one said a word. A single, collective, head-foremost sensation somewhat akin to disgrace kept butting them along, and their bluster was depleted but only for the interregnum, which didn't last long. They already had a new leader—William Bonney—who understood that disgrace was like everything else, something you waited out. Brewer'd cashed in and Billy had survived and the killing was inescapable now.

  10. May 1881

  Escape

&nbs
p; WHICH WAY, WHICH WAY? It all looks the same. 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. North to Fort Sumner. South to Mexico.

  Go to Mexico, Henry, you'll have your fill of chicas there.

  Or they'll have their fill of me, he wants to answer, but it never will do to potty-mouth his mother. I'm Billy now, Ma.

  To me, you'll always be Henry.

  Fans of erosion up there in the mountains. Pale yellow dust. It's as dry as sin here. He wishes Yginio had come with him a ways just for the companionship. Alone, his mind flounders. To keep going east is to avoid studying the matter, is to dilly-dally shamelessly. He can't listen to his mother. Her disgust unmans him. She scraps them right back, Ma always did, she's a proudy, that one. I say one thing, she says the other, then I drop down a hole. I lick the dust, cowed. It happens every time. Sleep in your own piss and shit, Henry Antrim, for all I give a damn. His table manners at home were never as good as they were out in company, once she took to bed. She lay on her deathbed for three long months in the house in Silver City, turning more and more gray, spitting up gouts ot blood, while thirteen-year-old Henry found a hundred occasions, a constant press of business, distractions galore, which happened to prevent him from going home and opening the gate and knocking on that awful door and softly entering that terrible room, as was his duty, and sitting there with her. Look at you, you're a mess. How often do you change your underwear, Henry?

  Underwear?

  Blankets of bluebottle flies ripple from the stinking hides when Henry passes the butcher's. A man sorting through the stacks is pulling some out to freight to his tanning pits and needs the boy's help. Two bits. The tanning pits are south of town in what they call Chihuahua, Silver City's Mex hill—how can Henry go home? The school ceiling collapses in the heavy rains and the older children have to help with repairs. I lenry must rehearse for the minstrel show, in which he'll dress as a girl and dance in the chorus of Buffalo Gals, to raise money for the school, which regrettably chops his time at home short. Henry and Tony Conner smell joss sticks on Hudson Street passing a building that Henry calls a boarding house. Tony demurs. That ain't no boarding house. It's what my mother called it, says Henry, indignant, she had a friend there she much liked to visit. Some friend, says Tony. Your mother's friend was the opium pipe.

  They must stone a Chinaman and of course that eats up time. He wishes he could steal the costume jewelry from Derbyshire's window and bring it home to his mother, and he lingers there staring. He lingers and lingers, Silver City invites it. He must race the street Arabs. He must visit his stepfather at the mine where he works a few miles above Silver. Antrim stands in a smashscape outside the shaft house holding his wheelbarrow filled with gray gangue as his stepson approaches. I low is she? he asks. Tired most always, Henry informs him, when will you come home? She's as thin as a straw, she coughs all the time.

  I wouldn't like to see that, Bill Antrim says. He doesn't set down the wheelbarrow.

  Henry stares at the man who, a year or so ago, married his mother and loaned him his surname. He knows what Antrim thinks: some things have to be just because they have to be; there's nothing I can do about it. He remembers firing a shotgun in the hills near this mine under Antrim's supervision, he and his brother, Josie, when they moved to Silver City. They were shooting at pumpkins placed on a stump in a pinscape of stumps, for all the spruces and firs around Silver City had been cut down for timbering the mines. A slight boy, only twelve, when Henry's turn came he thought for a moment that the burro he and Josie had ridden to this place had kicked him in the chest. He'd fallen—been walloped—on his skinny ass upon pulling the trigger, and lay there as though just having woken up from a Rip Van Winkle sleep. It wasn't only the shock of being knocked over; it was the deafening sound inches from his ear that left a ringing blank and cracked the world in two. Did I die? he asked, and Antrim and Josie laughed, looking down.

  Consider that a rehearsal, said Bill Antrim. Everyone dies. Everyone's bullet has been assigned. You might as well get up. This ain't your time yet.

  When is my time?

  Nobody knows. It was writ down somewheres a long time ago. It's your destiny, said Antrim. You can't do much about it.

  Poor shaken Henry climbed to his feet and brushed off his pants. The shotgun lay there on the ground.

  Both of you boys ought to know right now the way the world runs. Some things happen because they have to happen. You can't change them or stop them. No use of crying about what never was or could of been. Never say if only or would of or could of. There's no going back. Your votes were cast a long time ago and they weren't cast by you.

  Henry asked, Who were they cast by?

  By the armies that foughten the war when you were born. Oh yes, there was a war. A war in the heavens.

  Who won?

  Henry's stepfather laughed. I suppose you'll find out when you die, you little shit.

  You'd think that Antrim was a hard man for saying such things, the Kid thought years later—for telling young Henry his bullet was fired the moment he was born and would follow him all his life, taking every turn he took. But he wasn't, he was soft, as soft as cream pie. He was helpless—that was Antrim's dirty secret. His nose and chin appeared to pinch together, buffered by his mustache, and his voice went so low his stepson could barely hear it. The same tiling happens when Henry finds him at the mine and tells him about Catherine and asks when he's coming home. After a pause and gentle frown accompanied by a downward cast of eyes, in a voice less voice than a rustle of leaves and a scraping of twigs, William Antrim, wheelbarrow still hanging from his arms, says of his wife lying on her deathbed, I wouldn't like to see that. That's not the Catherine I remember.

  Mother has friends who look in, Henry knows, and Josie still lives there, she doesn't need Bill Antrim. Or himself, for that matter. He takes to sleeping in the warm ashes outside the ovens at the brickyards—to stealing pig's feet at the Blue Goose and boiled eggs at the Orleans Club, and to doing chores for Mary Richards, the teacher, who can write equally well with either hand and whose cheeks are not cadaverous. It is Mary who insists that he sit with his mother. Mary who threatens to take him by the hand all the way to the cabin at the end of the bridge across the big ditch, which would kill him with shame. I'll go myself, he says. Bring me a lock of her hair, says Miss Richards. Mary says she remembers just a year ago Catherine singing and dancing the Highland fling. She baked bread, she cooked for the children at school, she took in laundry, she laughed like a schoolgirl. Goodness, her voice would charm hardened criminals! Well, he'd figured on moving back anyway, is why he pulls the latchstring on the cabin, pads into the room, stumbles on a boot, eye-strings on the strain. Windows all shawled, unlit candle by the bed. Henry, she whispers. Is that you, Henry?

  Where's Josie? he asks.

  He moved in at the butcher's.

  How come?

  He couldn't stomach the smell.

  He feeds her the chicken broth she instructs him on making. He helps her to the jakes. He holds one of her hands in both of his and squeezes it repeatedly and, in pain from the consumption, she squeezes back. Then one day she yanks out her hand, points at the ceiling, and sputtering the sharp tool that once had been her voice, exclaims, He's smiling! She looks frightened, excited, amazed, a little puzzled, and sinks back on her pillow. Then shoots up and desperately blares, She's smiling! She's smiling!

  Henry peers up at the cracked beams and water-stained boards. Who, Ma?

  Her lungs fill with fluid. A young priest arrives, summoned by their neighbor Mrs. Conner, and mumbles some prayers, and Catherine's breathing grows more rattled and hoarse. She hyperventilates, her keyhole-shaped mouth voraciously open, can't get enough air. Then she falls into a sl
eep and will not be woken up. Henry holds her limp hand. She breathes slow and even, fizzing her lips upon the exhale like an infant making bubbles. This lasts all day until late afternoon when, as though stung, she suddenly winces. Henry thinks the pain has returned and squeezes her hand; no response. He's seen that wince a thousand times before, when she pricked her finger sewing or touched her wrist to a stove. Usually she'd say, Cripes or Oh shoot. Her hand begins to cool.

  Outside, he spots two dogs going at it and ferociously, blindly, pelts them with stones.

  And this is the way he sees her even now in a sanctum of his mind: behind a splintered door in darkness, pinched dirt Hindering down from the ceiling. Clothes piled on the bed. Her ashen face. Always a membrane of moisture on her skin, even now, in death. Hair matted and wet. Head slumped forward, eyes softly closed, though the white of one eye bulges like an egg forcing open the parted lids just a sliver. She summons him there, to her side, once again. Sometimes he locks her up in that room in his mind or finds himself playing jackstraws with Josie when she calls them out the window, not in Silver City now, now it's the tenement in New York, and he and his brother squatting in the dirt outside the school sinks. Don't look me in, she says. Remember I said don't let anyone cheat you and if you do, settle it yourself?

  I don't hold with any other way.

  The dead had left her alone, she always said. It wasn't the living who'd abandoned poor Catherine, it was the dead, and she vowed not to do the same. In her opinion, the dead ought to stick around. Stay with you. Be dead. But be there, alongside. When I stepped off the ship I had no idea who I was or where I'd come from. I wasn't even sure what the buttons of my shoes were supposed to do. When I first saw that place, the ant hill in the sky, I promised myself never to die there. It was no kind of place for any man or woman and one thing I noticed they didn't say potato, no, they said podado. I remember holding you in the palm of my hand, no larger than a squash, little Henry McCarty.