Lucky Billy

by John Vernon

  "Well, I'm an anythingarian, you can partner with me."

  "Do you ever go to church?"

  "I have my own church. Church of the Disappointed."

  "Is that hard-shell or soft-shell?"

  "Hard as to creed, soft as to ways of the world. I live among people of unclean lips, so mine are unclean, too."

  "Are you referring to me?"

  "I'll tell you how I started up this church, John. My uncle came from Ohio. He told me a story about his church, which was the Millerites."

  "Ah," said Poe. "'Behold, the bridegroom cometh.'"

  "You know about the Millerites? Then you know that the bridegroom never cameth. My uncle was a child, ten years old. It was 1843, the last year of time. His mother was a follower of William Miller, who had studied the Bible and footed up the numbers based on all the prophecies, especial those in Daniel and Revelations. Father Miller concluded that on the twenty-third of April, 1843, Christ would come in the glory of the Lord, with clouds at his feet and surrounded by angels, and raise the body of his dead saints, and change the bodies of the living, and both would be caught up to meet him in the air. Meanwhile, down below, the works of man would be destroyed. Fire would consume the earth, the bodies of the wicked be burned to ashes, and Satan and his fallen angels be cast into a bottomless pit and shut up with a seal set upon it, that he should not deceive the nations until a thousand years had passed. And after that he'd be loosed a little season."

  "Quite a die-up," said Poe.

  "And as we plunged into eternity, we'd all laugh the holy laugh and dance the holy dance, said my uncle. He told me all this in Louisiana when he come to stay with us. At the time he was a child, his family lived in Indiana with a clutch of Millerites. He remembered the fervor of their preparation. To a boy of ten, who never knew better, all this was a certainty, he said, it was as normal as pie. Besides, preparation was more or less a vacation. Since the world was going to end, people sold their farms or just stopped working them. Laborers quit their jobs. Preachers told their flocks to sell all their property and scatter the proceeds. He heard tell of a grocer that burned all his goods, refusing to even save any for his family. No need for food. One task that made sense to my uncle, and to me when he told it, was to find a high hill so the Lord wouldn't miss you down there on the earth raising up your hands, crying, 'Me! Me next!' There was one a half-mile from their iron-dirt farm with a grassy slope on top. The thing of it was, when the day come, my uncle hadn't changed; he was still a child. He and the other children run around and played prisoner's base and pulled each other's hair and the boys spit at one another—the usual. Anyway, as you know, the world did not end—unless this life we live now is a dream. Night fell, it got cold, and they all drifted home a few folks at a time, all disappointed. But the preachers were not to be buffaloed that easy. They reformed their calculations. Uh-oh, they said, we forgot a few months, and when they toted it up a new date was announced: October twenty-first, 1844. By then, my uncle's family had moved to Ohio. One woman in Ohio murdered all five of her children to give them a head start and that did give my uncle's people pause, but most folks dismissed it and shook their smiling heads. My uncle said the believers were all drunk on hope. They couldn't see straight. He himself was a year older now and fed a little more off the grown people's range. This was to be the great year of jubilees, when all the bondsmen of the world shall be set free. October came. Same preparations, same search for a hill, same orgy of giveaways and quitting of jobs and mad frenzies of conviction. Wild-eyed men running around, acting like children themselves, said my uncle. Comes October twenty-first. Same climb up a hill, this time in the rain, but when the clouds part a great cry goes up. The sun emerges from the clouds! People laugh and cry, start to hugging each other! Children on their daddies' shoulders. But the shoulders get tired. Same long wait, same fatigue, same sinking of the heart when twilight is over and night has fallen. Same sagging walk home after midnight. Same scoffers taunting my uncle and his people, same gangs of toughs throwing eggs at their house.

  "Had the Bible proved a failure? Was there no God, no heaven, no golden home-city? No paradise? Was all they had believed but a cunning fable? The grownups tried to figure it out and come up with some answers. After the little book is eaten, and sweet in the mouth, there will be bitterness, they said, quoting Revelations, and they decided that that's what they had now. It was pride and overzealousness that did them in, they said. And, lo, a little light began to break through. They saw that there was to be a waiting time, a long midnight before the Lord would appear. Thus, they came into the tarrying time. We're in it now, he said. As for me, this story made me look at the world in a different light. Eventually, I made my way west, hunted buffalo in Texas, fought redskins, cowed. The way I see it now, the world did indeed come to an end, it's just that nothing changed. It still looks the same. The difference is the disappointment. This has certain rewards. In my church, we do without climbing hills and reaching for the Lord."

  "That's an awful story."

  "You're welcome to join."

  "Do you believe in justice?"

  It was dark by now. My tailbone monitored the gait of my mount. I suspect he'd caught a stone in the frog of his foot. In the darkness, the desert swallowed up sound, making heavy clops sound like snapping toothpicks, "justice, I believe, is for them of stiff backs not afraid to be disappointed. What is disappointment but a hungry calf sucking up his mother's grief? Even Christ was disappointed. 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' Me, I wake up disappointed, do my business disappointed, go to bed disappointed. If I start feeling good, all I need do is tell myself it won't last and right away I'm back where I started—disappointed. I'm disappointed when I'm happy, disappointed when I'm glum, disappointed when I'm disappointed. I don't know how I'd live without it."

  John Poe said, "I shouldn't have come. You're no kind of lawman. Do you expect to be disappointed on this business?"

  "Of course I do. Either way."

  "What do you mean, either way?"

  "We kill him or he kills us."

  I'D WRITTEN TO Manuel Brazil to meet us at the Tayban Arroyo on the night of the thirteenth but he was not there. When morning came, I asked John Poe if he'd ever been to Sumner; was he known around the place?

  "Hardly," be answered. "Liked even less."

  "People have to know a man before they can dislike him."

  "Not sheriff's deputies."

  I sent him ahead to the fort to scout the lay. He come back that night with uncertain information. He hadn't seen the Kid and did not want to appear overcurious about him, though from all indications he thought he might be about. Billy Bonney was not an unadulterated fool. It wasn't but last week the reports were given out that he was living with Celsa, but his ability to slip in and out of a place was known throughout the county. "Did anyone recognize you?" I asked.

  "They wouldn't know me from Adam's off ox."

  We pulled for the fort after dark and unhorsed at its edge. On foot, we lingered near Hargrove's saloon close by the orchard. From there we kept a sharp lookout on the door in the old quartermaster storehouse where Celsa lived. It was necessary to keep in mind he might have known we were there and was trying to work us. A man rose up from the orchard to our right, too obscure to identify, and jumped the fence and walked off. As our sequel will show, although I didn't know it then, this was the Kid himself. I realize now he was with Celsa in their love-bower, which they used when Saval was back from the sheep camps. I changed my notion and told Kip and John we ought to go clown to Pete Maxwell's house, but by circling the fort, not proceeding through it. It had occurred to me to question Pete on the Kid's whereabouts. John Poe by now was disgusted with my ways and thought our caution foolish and I was acting in a manner half froze, half scared to death. At Pete's, I left Poe and McKinney outside, the former by the gate, McKinney on the steps leading to the porch still in his bowler hat. A rattle of chilis shaped like a plumb bob hung on the porch and beside the
m a quarter section of beef. Pete's room was on the corner. I lis name is Pete but all call him Pedro. I softly knocked. "¿Quién es?" he said, and I identified myself and walked inside more by memory than sight, for all was perfect darkness in there, then found Pete's bed against the far wall and sat at the head of the bed beside him. "Is he here?" I asked. "Talk English."

  "Is that you, Garrett? Hold on a minute, let me wake up."

  There were footsteps on the porch. It could have been Kip or John. My hands shook, and I thought of the overlong barrel on my Peacemaker, its blued steel. It wasn't something a person could rush into play. The door flew open and a man barged inside, I could tell his back was toward us by the oddly distant voice. "¿Quién es?" he said to someone on the porch. He padded backwards in our general direction, a weapon in his right hand, a skinner in his left, his form barely visible in the lesser darkness outlined by the door. I didn't dare speak. I could see he was turning. "¿Pedro, quiénes son estos hombres afuera?"

  "That's him," whispered Pete into my ear, and when he said this I fumbled for my gun. I couldn't pull it from the holster. I suspected all at once, as he swung around, that he felt or saw the presence of another man at the head of Pete's bed. Within a foot of my breast he raised his pistol while concurrently edging back toward the door, and he appeared to hesitate. Somehow I fired, not having consciously retrieved my weapon. I threw myself aside and felt but didn't hear the concussion of the air as a ball passed my head. A .45 makes such a noise in a room that your ears keep on ringing, you can't hear a damn thing. I shot a second time even as his body fell. These events took a mere fraction of time. Later, Poe and McKinney told me three shots were heard, which confirmed that he'd fired between my two volleys, but we never could find a mark on the wall. And in the chamber of his Thunderer, when we examined it afterwards, though the hammer was resting on a shell, it was clearly an old one fired some time ago; and I knew for a certainty that the Kid, like many others, carried his weapon in this very manner, for reasons of safety. So where the third bullet came from, and whence it went, still remains for me a mystery.

  As we later learned, he'd ventured onto Pete's porch to cut a slice of meat from a quarter section hanging there; and spotting Poe and McKinney on the steps, he burst into Pete's room to ask who they were. The timing was propitious; a minute earlier or later and I'd not have been there.

  At my feet, he kicked. He lay on his face wheezing and coughing like a dog being strangled. His breath foamed then ceased. I didn't feel much at all. Yet, I shook like a pup. Christ, what a wide-eyed lamb, I thought, looking down at his body. He's just a lost child. But a cocky little shit. At last, I told myself, he's Billy the Kid. And I am Pat Garrett.

  Kicking off his blankets, Pete shot across his bed and ran for the door and I quickly followed. I hardly knew where I was. Pete kept on running at a lively gait all the way down the porch, and after that day the Mexes all called him (behind his back) "Don Chootme." At the door, Poe cried, What the hell's going on. Behind him, Kip was trying to peer into the room. "That was the Kid, and I think I have got him."

  "That's not possible," said John. "You've shot the wrong man."

  "It's him," I said. "I know his voice well."

  "Are you sure he's dead?"

  "I think so." I stepped onto the porch and as my shaking slowed gently shut the door behind me. Pete, who had made for his mother's room, soon returned with a candle, since the gunfire had stopped. He held it to the window. In the light it cast inside, we saw that the Kid lay on his face motionless. An edge of blood as thick as a pelt slid out from beneath him even as we watched. Behind us others came, having heard the shots. Deluvina Maxwell was first, the family's Navajo slave. She'd been captured as a child in the Canyon de Chelly by the Jicarilla Apaches and traded long ago for ten horses to Lucien, Pete's late father, and now bore the family surname. "You son of a bitch!" she screamed when I turned. She pounded my chest and I stood there and let her, my face hard as stone. I felt far away. "You pisspot!" she wailed. "Goddamn your soul! Why did you do it? He never hurt you, he was a better man than you!" Her high strong brow could split skulls, I knew, she'd eaten considerably larger men than me. Celsa Gutiérrez was wailing behind her and Deluvina turned to console both her and Paulita Maxwell, who'd thrown a blanket over her nightclothes before venturing out. The curses and wails these three women made were a chorus of misery; everyone around me was breaking down, it seemed. I thought of how oxen bellow over dead mates. But as the crowd grew there were some there who thanked me. "All mankind rejoices," said a white man. Most cursed and hurled insults at us, and it occurred to me that people wanting vermin wiped out often find they miss its company. I spotted someone crossing the parade grounds out there in the dark with a burning arm raised. Of course it was a torch.

  Dogs barked. The three-quarter moon hung just above the trees, and shouts came from various parts of the fort.

  "Pedro," I said. "Who's the coroner here?"

  "We got Alejandro Seguro and Milnor Rudulph."

  "Where are they?"

  "Sunnyside."

  "John, you go to Sunnyside and get those two men. Kip, we need a carpenter. Someone to make a coffin. I used to know Jesús Silva, Pedro."

  "He's still here. Over to the old hospital."

  "Go wake him up, Kip."

  ***

  WHEN THE CROWD broke up, though some snarling bandas of boys and young men followed our course with rocks in their hands, Saval Gutiérrez among them, Jesús Silva and I dragged the body to Pete's carpenter shop in the old quartermaster's buildings. Despite their shouts of vituperation, they never threw the rocks; they did not wish to damage the body, I imagine. I wondered about Saval. It could be he was swelled up a bit over the Kid's liaison with his wife. Could be a mark of foolish pride, despite all the Mexes' talk about honor. McKinney had vanished. I believe he thought we'd all be lynched. I felt anxious for the time when all of this would pass into well-merited oblivion.

  "It's hard to believe," said Jesús. He had one arm, me the other. "I was talking to him just a couple hours ago. He wasn't worry about nothing."

  "What was he doing?"

  "Sitting outside Beaver Smith's saloon." Jesús was crying; I heard his voice catch.

  "His time was up, that's all. What would he have done if I hadn't shot him? Change his name again? Move somewhere else, become a family man, live quiet and steady? That wasn't him."

  "It's a good life, Garrett."

  "Depends what you mean by good," I said.

  "I mean you do good. You don't do bad things."

  "He did bad things."

  "But he was wet behind the ears. He thought they were good. His heart was in the right place, that's what counts."

  "Sometimes it does," I said. "Sometimes it doesn't."

  We lay the body on a table in the carpenter's shop, and Jesús said he'd get his tools. I told him he might as well wait until morning. He left, and by the light of an oil lamp I proceeded to strip the clothes off his flesh. We'd reholstered his pistol before dragging him here and now I removed it and set it on a packing crate close by the door. He wore no shirt; the ball had entered his breast just above the heart, and his hairless chest was smeared with blood and dust. The hole was clean. His gabardine pants seemed a tad long, and the socks slipped off easy. He'd been in his stocking feet. Once fully naked, he appeared chopped short. I saw that his cock was not any special size. His pale skin stopped at the hands and neck, which were tawny as a greaser's. On top of each shoulder was a calcified knob about the size of a thimble. His body was as lean and tight as a mule deer's. I thought of those times we'd served up the drinks at Beaver Smith's saloon, of the two of us on our knees on the ground outside around a horse blanket bucking monte. I realized I'd averted my eyes from his face and looked at it now. It did not appear menacing. Still a smooth-faced boy. Jesus had closed the eyes before we took him. The high freckled forehead looked intelligent, I thought, as did the dark eyes, and the skin possessed a peculiar cast as of a
caul or web stretched across the skull; it looked burned and self-repaired. I placed my fingers on the eyelids. Then on an impulse I touched his limp cock, which to my alarm began to stir. The whole body gave a sigh. His lips were partly open, I saw, and in my shaken state I imagined his soul had been caught between his teeth but now was released and its runnel ran down and got pulled through the floorboards, dragged down to hell. Then I remembered there is no hell.

  Who told you I was here?

  A little dicky-bird.

  No, really.

  Do you think I would really tell you who it was? I don't hold anyone's life that cheap.

  You held mine cheap.

  I was doing a job.

  Through the wall I heard voices outside. Someone knocked and I slid die bar out and opened the door and thought, Oh shit. Two women stood there with towels and a pail, Deluvina Maxwell and Beatriz Melendez. A boy with red hair held Beatriz's hand. "We've come to wash the body," Deluvina said. She looked at me hard but didn't snap.

  "Give me a little more time," I said. And then with anxious grandeur: "I haven't prayed yet." Beatriz's boy stared at the table with the Kid upon it. A red bandanna around his neck matched the color of his hair. Something looked wrong with his face, I thought, though he was hardly more than five. "What's your name, son?" He seemed mesmerized; he wouldn't look at me. Deluvina also stared at the table and set down the pail and walked to the body and gazed long and hard at its face, then began once more to sob uncontrollably. I followed behind and stood beside her, looking down. Her whole body was shaking. She spread a towel across the face. Deluvina, too, had been one of Billy's sweethearts. It was not that long ago when the Kid favored women with powerful hams who would buck him all night. He'd told me all about it. I was a good listener. Once again Deluvina started beating my chest and I had to hold her wrists. "He never did nothing to you, you bastard!" she cried before, unaccountably, laying her trembling head on my breast. "You used to be friends," she sobbed. Taking her by the arm, I kindly escorted her back to the door but she shook me off. Beatriz had left; she was outside in the dark. Deluvina kicked the pail of water she'd brought and it sailed out the door and Beatriz shouted, "¡Mierda!" Deluvina stormed out.