by John Vernon
They were singing. While the howl goes round, while the howl goes round. Sue played the mortgaged keys, all sang the borrowed songs, and Yginio fiddled. Tunstall's favorite song was "The Tear," by Gumbert, Mac suddenly remembered. "Sing 'Factory Girl,'" someone said.
Pity me my darling
Pity me, I say:
Pity me my darling,
And carry me away.
How brave of Sue! She was playing the piano to keep their spirits up. The assembled sang the chorus, she warbled the verses, and fifteen-year-old Yginio sawed his violin. The children sang, too, save when distracted. And was that a real ax in little Davy's hand, who once more was chasing his sister? Sue's dresser rose, gems and money showered down, smoke filled the room; the sound of an explosion. Fire in the burst doorway. "Heave," someone said. A dozen men surrounded the Beatty grand piano and tipped it on its side and it floated through the door. Macky found himself collecting dollar bills, jewelry. Someone screamed in his face, "Is there any more powder kegs?"
"Powder kegs?"
Coughing and retching, they moved clothes, the prie-dieu, a chair, carved figurines into Sue's bedroom. Somebody took Macky's arm to guide him through the door and they found a black satchel for the treasure in his hands. Sue's lovely voice was at it again. Some folks do, they sang. The notes of the piano tumbled down an incline as though it hadn't been properly uprighted, or the house was on its side, or gravity had been suspended—tumbled clown, burst away, became smoke and air. The grace of God, David Shield once had said, won't carry a man through such troubles as these, it takes powder and ball. Then he went to Santa Fe. The only palliation those Irish admit of is bullets, I'm afraid, he'd told Mac on another occasion. Their pernicious stimulants give them a wild purpose which prayer cannot defeat, my friend. Do not wonder at the fact that once having tasted the evil sweets of sin and unrestrained behavior, on returning to the haunts of law-abiding folk they languish and pine for the irresponsible solitudes where neither laws nor restrictions imposed by morality have the least effect on their—
At one juncture, Mac found himself lifted up bodily as they moved from room to room, down the west wing, across the front portion, up the east wing to the kitchen, taking Sue's piano with them as they went, also her bedding, clothes, items of furniture, and, in Macky's satchel, her jewelry and cash. The house methodically devoured itself behind them. Sue played a new song in each new room - "Old Memories," "The Mill," "Ellen Bayne," "Wilt Thou Be True?"—but soon the chorus lost interest. Children screamed, smoke billowed, more windows burst, and Mac vaguely recalled, just after it happened, watching through the parlor window his wife and her sister and Lizzy's five children racing for a wagon outside on the street. In the wagon were Taylor Ealy and his family, fleeing Tunstall's store. Soldiers surrounded it. Twilight in Lincoln. Dark hills, white sky. The fire sent its heat ahead of itself, through the walls, beneath the floors, as though scouting fuel. The air grew heavier, smoke clung to their clothing, coughing and retching they slatter-pouched themselves.
All at once William Bonney yanked Macky's head from his hands by the hair and slapped his greasy face. They were in the kitchen now—the last room left. "Pull yourself together, man!" But all Mac could do was stare at a blue shirt with an anchor and a rope and, hand across his month, suppress a giggle. He raised his eyes to Billy's. The boy's expression had struck a fleeting mean between panic and rage, and his hat was on his head, his black hair licked and curled around his ears, he'd tied a bandanna around his skinny neck. "Jesus Christ, Macky!" He grabbed Mac's arms and shook them. Then, clapping his hands, he raced through the kitchen kicking soppy butts, shouting, "Get a leg on! Stir your sticks, turkeys!"
"I've lost my mind, boys," Mac heard himself say. Bonney, Tom, José, Harvey Morris, and Jim French raced out the door to a rip-tide of bullets parting the air. Dark figures in the yard, light cast by the fire, an outer darkness beyond. Francisco Zamora and Vicente Romero went next. Then Yginio Salazar and Florencio Chavez, one on either side, took McSween's arms and passed through the door and were in the hellish light. Mac recognized Harvey Morris on the ground draining into earth. Why weren't they moving? Across the yard, the Kid shoved the barrel of his Colt's into Robert Beckwith's mouth while Bob Ollinger behind them, the mountain gorilla, reloaded his Whitney. Yginio went down. "Surrender, McSween!" someone shouted from the fence.
"I surrender!" he boomed, but ahead of him Vicente and Florencio were dashing for the chicken house, firing at whatever moved. No one held his arms. Obscure figures all around, running shadows, smoke, repeated flash of muzzles, zipsting of bullets. The chicken house jumped, its planks splintering and shredding. "I shall never surrender!" Mac heard himself recant while entering the hailstorm, and he found that he was spared. The bullets must have missed. Warm spit filled his mouth. I le ran like hell until nothing was before him, he tumbled through darkness, and happened to fall on top of Robert Beckwith, rolling over on his legs, stars and smoke above his face. Now it was Macky's turn to stop existing. The stars and the smoke were inside a vacancy. He owed David Shield a saddle, he recalled, and posted the note in his mental files. The following morning, chickens could be seen pecking out Alexander McSween's eyes.
When the surviving Dolanites examined the bodies they laughed at the bullet holes. The dead were not outraged. Their bones would become New Mexico dust breathed by future tourists. They flipped Yginio over. "I'd like to plant one more bullet right between this greaser's eyes," John Kinney said.
"No," said Milo Pierce. "He's dead but his face looks pretty good. Let's leave him alone. His mother might want to remember what he looked like."
"Fuck-all," said Kinney, walking away. He picked up a loose adobe brick, turned around, and heaved it at Yginio, striking his hip. "Dead as a herring."
Later, Yginio crawled through the gate, scrabbled through brush and yucca to the river, dragged himself along the riverbank. He reached the house of his sister-in-law a half-mile away with a bullet in his back and another in his shoulder and managed to live another fifty-eight years.
12. 1878
War
THE KID RAN bent over crashing through brush down toward the Bonito below the burning house. Once beyond the circle of light he was forced to go blind and trip and grope. Branches of Gambel oaks whipped his ear. Trunks of cottonwoods loomed sufficiently dark inside the greater darkness to caution him to slow. His boots caught on sage, yucca stalks grazed his neck and snapped through his legs. Turpentine smell of the needling junipers he was forced to blunder through to gain the river, and the wafting acrid odor of Macky's burning timbers underlying that. Then the soft sand. Mud-suck. Trickle of water. And Billy mucking through to reach the other bank and traverse the open fields and begin the slow climb toward a faint illumination on the northern slopes cast by the fire. The shooting hadn't stopped. Who was there left to shoot? Crossing open ground, he knew that the danger now was stray bullets whizzing past and thumping into earth, or worse, striking rocks. Zig and zag; they follow you, regardless. Rocks and boidders in the way, more sage, bladed yucca. Once in the hills, with hoarse burning throat he jog-stumbled up. His Colt's 'Thunderer, he noticed, was still in his hand. Best to keep it there. Then he tripped on a rock and, sputtering forward, changed his mind and holstered the pistol so as not to shoot his foot off. Tie vaguely made out a bank of low clouds the higher he climbed; they obscured the stars. And he perceived, looking up, the wounded reflection of McSween's burning house swirling in the sky.
What to do now? Blow up the world? He felt helpless, confused. The perception of impotence compelled him to check his weapon again, to break it open, rotate the cylinder, feel each round with the pads of his fingers. Shouts and laughter came from below. Glancing down, in the light of the red oily smoke pouring from the house, he saw shadows of men burdened with goods passing between Tunstall's store and the road. They were looting the store. It looked like someone'd found Yginio's fiddle and begun a reel because peanut-size phantoms danced in the lurid light,
yellow devils from hell. Another fire in a barrel further down the road where Dudley's soldiers huddled lit up their button-faces. And Billy climbing higher. Where had the others gone? Did Macky make it out alive, where were Tom, Yginio, Charlie Bowdre, Jim French? The higher he climbed the darker it became and he soon began to feel the warm moisture of the clouds. Now he angled east. He wasn't lost but he felt it. He stumbled, tripped, lurched up against a cliff but it seemed to give way. He tried to step back but couldn't stop from spilling forward and tumbling down with groping hands through a needling softness and the oily smell again and, sinking gently, grabbing for branches, foundering, gliding, he lowered himself, floating, it seemed, then found he was blundering down a declivity, found his legs dancing rock to rock, the rocks moving, too, rolling beneath him, with him, around him, then grinding to a stop.
He sat. Ankles sore. Covered with dirt, some sliding down his neck. Stayed there a blessed while. The while stretched to hours; he'd curled on the ground. What happened down there, he wondered, sitting up, what had they done? Had Tunstall's avengers lost everything now? He couldn't see the fire. Bosky here, he sensed. Smell of piñón. He might be in a draw. Fie jumped up, continued, then felt his heart snap when, stopping at a sound, he heard footsteps in the dark, stumble-prone thumps. They were searching for him. He drew the Thunderer and padded softly forward expecting dogs to bark, torches to appear. "Who's there?" No answer. The heavy footsteps continued. There was nowhere to go. He didn't move. He absorbed more than saw a large hulking shadow approaching through the darkness, and cocked the Colt's. "Is that you, Tom?"
"It's me."
"Christ's sake, O'Folliard, how come you didn't answer?"
"I wasn't sure who it was."
"You almost got yourself shot."
"That would have been unfortunate. Jim found the horses."
"Our horses? Wiere?"
"Downstream. Almost to the Hondo."
"Where is he now?"
"Waiting over to Tinnie. It ain't all the horses. Only six."
"Only six? Who else is with him?"
"José and Charlie."
"So everyone made it?"
"Saw Harvey Morris fall."
"What about McSween?"
"I think he surrendered."
***
FOUR WERE KILLED escaping the house, he later learned, most notably Macky. Two more dead inside from the fighting. Lallycooler Crawford took another week to die. Total, six Regulators, two Dolanites, and now Dolan and his men with a headlock on the town. Now the brush-poppers from Seven Rivers, emboldened by their triumph, began to terrorize the countryside. They'd been deputized by Sheriff Peppin and assisted by Colonel Dudley and the army but with the Regulators routed they were no longer needed and, the Kid suspected, they felt the lack of all the fun. They'd become a band of brothers. To them, normal life was dull by comparison to pillage and mayhem, so they stuck together and went on the warpath, and Billy couldn't get the Regulators to stop them. The Regulators could not even bury McSween, Lincoln was closed to them, townsfolk had to do it. Billy later learned he was laid beside Tunstall behind the latter's store—grassed down, folk said on their native island. But here no grass grew to cover the dirt.
The store itself had been plundered by the Dolanites. Fearing for her life, Sue McSween had fled to Las Vegas.
The crew from Seven Rivers decided to call themselves Wrestlers, or Rustlers, identical words if your mouth was full of chew, and they no longer merely robbed old ladies, tore the roofs off of stores, or shot Regulators' horses. Instead, under the leadership of a man named John Collins, they wrecked Will Hudgen's saloon in White Oaks, abused Hudgen's wife and sister, then ransacked Lincoln looking for Sue McSween. Billy insisted to the Coes and Fred Waite that they regroup and fight this scourge. This was no time to quit. Those hatchet men and murderers, those weasels, those—
"What about them?" said Fred. "They won, didn't they?"
"It ain't over yet."
The Wrestlers broke into houses, stole horses, burned ranches, trashed stores, shot to cripple. They looted and burned the Coe ranch on the Hondo, and rode up to three adolescent boys cutting hay in the fields on José Chavez's ranch and murdered all three and ran off with their horses. At Martin Sanchez's farm, they wounded a farmhand and shot Martin's fourteen-year-old son, Gregorio, through the heart. Two days later, under a black moon on the Bonito, they dragged the wives of two employees at Bartlett's gristmill into the bushes, held knives to their throats, and took turns raping them.
Then like scorpions in a jar they turned on each other. As Billy heard it, John Collins was poisoned by God knows who, and John Selman and Ed Hart aspired for his position. While Hart's wife cooked dinner, the victorious Selman shot her husband through the brow, splattering his brains into the skillet that held their sizzling steaks.
As at Macky's house, Billy found himself rousting up sponges when he rallied the Regulators. It was like trying to throw snakes into a gunny sack. Then, exactly like the Wrestlers, or Rustlers, all they could really do was pillage, for when rage overflows and thins as it spreads it finds expression in happenstance. The Regulators accosted a traveler on the Roswell road and took his horse and money. They raided the Casey ranch and stole more stock and at Charles Fritz's ranch they stampeded a hundred and fifty head of cattle and rounded up fifteen horses. They placed pistols to the heads of Fritz's two sons, and Fred Waite asked Billy, "Are you sure you want to do this?"
"Any excuse for a party," he said.
"You mean these are the fellows who killed Mr. Tunstall?"
They weren't, of course. The Kid ordered them released. He wasn't sure what to do and sometimes he didn't care. The war wasn't over, he blared to the others, but even he saw it had become a war by proxy, for when you can't kill the principals then you terrorize their sympathizers. Or just lash out at anyone. They stole every horse at the Mescalero Apache Reservation Agency and killed the agency clerk, Morris Bernstein. Or Bernstein rode into the crossfire between the Regulators and a band of Indians, and wound up dead. But who turned out his pockets? Who took his rifle, pistol, and cartridge belts? Events were in the saddle, you hung on for the ride, and often Billy thought that the wood tick in his ear that always told him what to do had died and tumbled out like a piece of cold wax. Then he thought, no he hadn't. If he died I wouldn't know it. The fact that I'm thinking about him in this manner means he's still there.
I never listened to him anyway.
The more gadfly he grew the more he hated himself. Reasoning creatures began to vacate the county. The Beckwiths fled. Buck Powell and Lewis Paxton pulled up stakes and decamped. In Roswell and Seven Rivers, the post offices were closed. A contingent of Mormons who'd immigrated to Lincoln County sold their ranches and left; this was no place for a Stake of Zion, they said. Much to Billy's dismay, John Middleton racked out for Kansas and Henry Brown for Texas. In Washington, President Rutherford Hayes removed Governor Axtell from office and appointed the Civil War general and novelist Lew Wallace as the new governor of New Mexico Territory.
Even Frank and George Coe, two of the Kid's oldest friends, announced they'd sold their ranch and would pull for Colorado. They'd had enough of the outlaw life and urged Billy to join them. All still had warrants against them and now a new governor would make sure they were enforced.
"You can't go," Billy said. "I'm the decider. I'm still after the mob that murdered Mr. Tunstall."
"It's a clone deal," said George, holding up his hand. He wiggled the stump of the finger shot off by Buckshot Roberts at Blazer's Mill. "We sold out. We're gone. Come with us, Kid."
The taste in Billy's mouth was wormwood and gall. "I'm no quitter."
In late September, the Kid, Fred Waite, and Tom O'Folliard rode east from San Pat with a stolen remuda. Outside La Junta, they passed señoritas with ollas balanced on their heads. The walnuts, box elders, and cottonwoods overhead on the Lincoln-Roswell road were heavy with leaves, which cooled the hot clay. Mexicans at one farm had begun
their threshing: on a circle of ground outside their adobe, they'd leveled the earth and spread it with straw and splashed on water and allowed the mud to harden. Now goats and mules, driven in circles, trampled the sheaves in the afternoon sun. Behind them, Billy saw, boys with pitchforks made from forked branches threw up the crushed wheat to catch in the wind, and gradually the chaff idled toward the edges in circular windrows like ripples in water. He knew the grain left behind would be tossed in the air with long-handled shovels to free it from goat dung then washed and spread on a canvas to dry before being carted in sacks to the gristmill.