Every homemaker in horn-rimmed spectacles and every Jim Dandy in a wrinkled suit paid the nickel when a headline promised a new tale of our escape.
Sightings were reported the globe over. Our pictures were sent broadcast daily, worming in code through telegraph wires from one outpost to the next, placarded on street poles and diner windows and train station bulletins. One day I was spotted in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and the very next day seen in Florida on Buzzard Island. Other reports had Billy on a steamship headed for Honduras and, six hours later, claimed his likeness to be holed up at Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in North Dakota.
That entire summer, we rode south through intense heat wearing wide-brimmed hats to block out the sun and kept dry in yellow slickers during heavy downpours. For six straight months, we committed more bank and train robberies than the Jesse James and Cole Younger gangs combined. Flash floods stranded us on high chunks of rocks twice in three weeks and nearly broke the leg of my blue roan during a close escape. Coursing through southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, the temperature would drop fifty or sixty degrees at nighttime. We’d shiver ourselves to sleep outside desert mining towns that, come midday, would be glimpsed from afar through sheets of heat haze as if we were looking at a mirage.
We slept on horse blankets in stinking pup tents. We slept under desert willows that dropped newly hatched tree spiders on our snoozing faces. When we could find them, we slept in caves notched into the base of sky islands that rose up from the Chihuahua desert floor so high the peaks were covered with snow.
When it rained, we dug square moats in the ground around our camp to keep our bedrolls dry. At certain intervals we stopped to rest and water our horses in the shade. I considered my compass and gauged the land and sky in every direction, as if all the world and the universe above was something containable inside my head.
Every new moment was so temporary, so ethereal, like the existence of a mayfly.
Now it was Nogales.
For three weeks we lived in the belfry of an abandoned adobe church, hotter than the furnace of a dying star, guano baking on the roof tiles. Middle August and the mercury eased past triple digits sometimes before breakfast and stayed perched until the sun was rising somewhere over Greece. We scrubbed our clothes on a washboard in the river with a cake of lye and stole roosters at night to stew them in a crock of scald. Soon the whole bell tower floor was covered with enough chicken feathers to start a mattress factory. We’d converted some of the Cudahy gold to greenbacks as we traveled south through Utah and kept the bills stuffed in the bottom of our horse grain sacks for safe keeping.
We found little pleasure and didn’t assume to find much more of it for some time yet.
Nogales gave us hope.
Three weeks without incident, and we began to relax for the first time in over half a year. How many horses had we been through? Four? Five? At every friendly juncture, we sold and bought new ponies to change our look: Appaloosas as heavily spotted as dalmatians, sorrels without markings, even once a pair of mustangs that were nearly as big as moose. I adopted a new costume in Santa Fe: a flat straw hat and a spade beard on my chin like that of a goat, thirty pounds heavier in the gut. Billy stained his hair with boot polish, learned a touch of Spanish, wore a velvet cape and gloves, and started calling himself Jimendo the Magician.
So came the last Thursday of the month.
We felt safe enough to eat in public, no more boiled rooster in the abandoned church, and found a little cantina with faded orange walls and clay floors. We pushed open the batwing doors and surveyed the establishment with the apprehension of ghosts suddenly made visible by knocking over the flour jar. Ten tiny tables, only three of which were occupied, were lit by individual candle lamps. Moths the size of small birds thumped against the shades.
I nodded. As good a place as any.
We took up a table by the back wall, spied the pair of old caballeros playing dominoes along the windowsill, and noted the gigantic revolvers in the beaded holsters at their hips.
A lumpy waitress brought us a gourd of pulque with two cups. We toasted our glasses and drank fast, the pulque as thick as treacle and white as milk, with the flavor of spoiled milk that had been yellowing on a hot porch stoop. Next came plates of tortillas with wooden bowls of rice and pork and poblanos.
We ate and drank until we were plump drunk. Outside a hard blue sky past dusk, the last ten minutes of deep blue before full nightfall. The cantina was as quiet and hot as our hideout in the church belfry but much more pleasant. I sweated through the seat of my pants so fully the bottom of my wicker chair sagged with wetness. The shoe polish in Billy’s hair ran down his cheekbone in rivulets.
“I feel pretty good,” I said.
Billy agreed. “This isn’t such a bad place to wind up.”
I held up my glass of pulque. “This stuff ain’t much of a substitute for brandy.”
“We can’t live in that church for much longer.”
“What do you propose?”
“We got more money than we’ve ever had, and we haven’t spent hardly a dime of it. Would it be so bad to get a hotel for a while?”
“Lot of risk in that. Hell, we shouldn’t even be in here. You see them old beaners over there with the dominoes?”
Billy spied the pair of hombres with the big pistols as he poured more pulque.
“Those are thirty-eights they’re carrying,” I said.
“So what?”
“Not exactly dude ranch pistols. Those fellas are hired guns.”
“Old Mexican army more likely. Hell, they’re both north of sixty.”
“We ought to slip out the back, quietly,” I said.
“You’re paranoid. We’ve been here a good hour and those old boys would’ve moved on us by now if they were going to move on us at all.”
“Not if they’re professionals. They seen us drinking. Wouldn’t it be easier for them if we were both drunk? The bigger one there in the white hat? He’s a sicario for sure.”
Billy finished off the last of his pulque in a giant swallow, spilled some down the side of his mouth, and wiped it from his chin with his sleeve. “You’re going to spook yourself silly if you keep thinking that way. I’m telling you, I won’t sleep one more night in that church or eat any more goddamn rooster. Not one more.”
“We ought to skedaddle. Get us some tequila bagged up,” I said.
“You can go if you want, but I’m staying here.”
“We need to leave now.”
“No sir, no way. I’ll be sleeping in a real bed tonight, and I’ll be having a nice puta in there with me. I ain’t using my hand again so long as I can afford not to. It’s shameful. Facing the wall while you’re snoring and with the goddamn owls watching all the time. Tell you what, if some fat old caballero wants to try at my bounty, he can get a bellyful of buckshot doing it,” Billy said with a belch. He patted his scattergun that he’d leaned against the table like a cane and went up to the bar counter for another gourd of pulque.
I groaned and kept my eyes trained on the two Mexican gunmen.
The big one in the white ten-gallon hat had a walrus mustache and deep-set eyes that seemed to hold attention on the entire room like the stare of an enigmatic portrait: everywhere you went no matter the angle, they followed you. I didn’t know just how large he was until he stood to use the outhouse. Nearly six and a half feet tall in a pair of hobnail boots. Every footfall a stomp. His pearl-handled revolvers were custom engraved.
If he was old Mexican army, he’d given up war long ago.
Billy returned to the table while the big man was outside relieving himself. I said it was time to go, no arguments. Midnight drew near and with it came the howling of lobos out on the grasslands. The cantina, nearly empty just ten minutes ago, was now at full capacity. We gathered our shotgun and rifle and exited the back of the cantina in an alle
yway overgrown with grapevine between the hovels of rabbit warrens. We paused at the end of the egress where it opened into a stone courtyard strung with paper lanterns.
I studied the empty gravel avenida in both directions, cast in pale pitch from a gorged moon. An ash can burned waste next to an old hunk of furniture scorched past recognition. Perhaps once a couch or a bedstead that smoldered like an animal carcass rotting under a pounding sun. There wasn’t a sound to be heard except for faint barroom music.
Billy lurked behind me with his coach gun lazy in his hands. A ragpicker appeared in shadow across the street as he crossed a tavern window and disappeared again. A handcart of muskmelon abandoned in front of a mud house. I nodded, and we set forth down the side of the street, nearly hugging the building fronts.
We weren’t more than a few paces down the sidewalk when the giant Mexican in the white hat appeared in the middle of the street like an apparition rendered visible out of thin air. I braced Billy with my free hand, the other hovering over the revolver at my hip. The sicario stood there calmly as if he’d been waiting for us the whole while and knew we’d show at this very juncture. His face was darkness. His eyes reflected light. Billy and I waited, unable to move. The big man made a soft sound like a grunt and walked off the street behind a building.
I gasped relief.
We watched the man until he was gone, and behind us there was a loud flap like that of the wing of some prehistoric creature taking flight. I turned. Across the avenida a dusty tarp flung off a mobile Gatling gun on a two-wheeled frame and three men behind it, one wrestling the tarp into a ball, the other two squatting behind the cannon. In the last hiccup of silence before its six-barreled cylinder began to spin, I grabbed Billy by his shirtsleeve but could not move his legs.
“Oh, my God,” I said.
A fusillade of grapeshot broke open the silent street in a whirl as I hustled Billy behind a parapet in the courtyard, hunkering down over him like a mother would a child while a cyclone chewed up their house. The barrage of bullets streamed scattershot, bursting stone flowerpots into smithereens and mowing down whole walls into rubble over our heads. Adobe brick exploded in chunks, and terra-cotta burst apart into pink dust from the shelling as the field cannon continued to spray the courtyard.
We crawled deeper into the courtyard, squirming like crabs until we reached a thick barrier and sat up against its hold. The Gatling whirred ceaselessly. I could hear nothing but the stunned humming of my own shot eardrums. Billy was shot through the chest as adobe dust settled all around us. His shirt filled with blood, and his eyelids drooped as he floated in and out of consciousness. I slapped his face like trying to wake a deep sleeper. His stomach gushed and his chest heaved and there was nothing to be done for him.
“Jesus Christ! You’re full of holes!” I screamed and my scream was barely audible.
Billy heaved up blood like slow vomit.
I wiped my friend’s forehead.
“It’s—it’s just—a knick,” Billy managed.
“Goddamn, Bill, you’re dying.”
“I got five minutes left. Help me outta here.”
I held him and knew that he didn’t have the better half of a minute left let alone five, and I stroked him as his blood covered my clothes. There was nothing else said between us as the salvo screamed banshee over our heads crosswise. Brick dust turned our faces pale as silver miners. One more day in that old church, one less hour in that cantina, one more of anything in our favor, I thought. The Gatling rang so loud it was almost quiet, the noise a kind of silence of its own creation. Bullets oscillated across the building fronts without much care for aim but only for volume, and suddenly the sonorous flow of machine-gun fire whistled to a halt.
Only the cranking of the empty breech could be heard.
I waited for another barrage, but it never came. The Gatling was spent of ammunition. It sighed down slowly like a beast stricken with sleep, its empty cylinders spinning to a stop. I listened for screams but heard only silence. Cannon smoke dissipated. Cordite burned the air. Billy was dead in my arms and not a goodbye word shared between us.
All those years and nothing for a farewell but the cradling of his body.
A portion of adobe wall collapsed nearby. Bullet holes everywhere, the courtyard riddled and steaming still. I held Billy’s head in my lap and pushed him gently to the ground so I could get at the pistols on his hip. I coughed powder. A chunk of daub on my hat brim. My clothes ghostly, scoured. Our scattergun and rifle had been dropped somewhere in the street when we ducked for cover.
I wiped the white dust from my eyes and listened hard. The entire world hushed as if abandoned all at once. Then the crunch of approaching footsteps. Two different beats, two different men. The big Mexican was coming from the left. I could tell the difference in his heavy footfalls. Maybe twenty yards away. Then fifteen. Cautious but not overly so. I cocked both of Billy’s pistols as I hunkered down against the collapsing parapet.
A voice called, softly, “¿Puede ver algo?”
“No. Cállate,” replied another.
A moment passed. The big Mexican’s footsteps stopped. I breathed deep, knew deep down that the breath was likely my last, and snapped up from my sitting position against the wall firing both of my pistols in the direction I’d last heard the men talking—until my chambers clicked empty.
Two bodies collapsed, ten feet apart.
I couldn’t believe my luck. I’d gunned down both men with blind fire. The big sicario in the white hat hadn’t been more than three paces away from discovering my hiding place behind the parapet. His head was sprayed off from the eyebrows up. The other was wounded but still alive. He moaned prone on the ground.
I dropped the empty pistols and made for the dead sicario’s pearl-handled revolvers. A streak of brain slashed the ground next to his big white hat. So much for him. I picked up the revolvers and fired three shots into the wounded man’s back.
“So much for you, too, compañero.”
There were still two others out there somewhere in the smoky street. I stepped into plain sight past the wreckage of the courtyard and called, “Any man who doesn’t want to get killed better not show face or I’ll gun you down and then I’ll burn this whole fucking town to the ground.”
“¿Cabrón?” A voice called after a moment.
I scanned my pistols about the street. “Who’s there and where are you?”
The remaining pair of men who’d helped operate the Gatling stepped out from a pile of stacked stone with their hands raised.
“No estados armados,” one of them said.
“You speak English?” I asked.
“No. No inglés.”
“Salir,” I said, only knowing a few words of broken Spanish. “Salir or I’ll kill you. Salir or muerte, pendejos!”
The two men looked at each other and took off at a dead sprint down the street where it emptied toward the grasslands. I trained my new revolvers upon them and slapped off six shots, hitting both men in the back as they fled. A woman cried from a window somewhere in the distance. I looked about the street, flashing my revolvers in every direction. Oil lamps burned in the windows of the jacales lining the avenue. A group of terrified onlookers stood in a huddle outside the cantina, which was partially collapsed from stray cannon fire.
I yelled at them to scat.
“Vámonos,” I demanded and waved my revolvers, but it did no good. I snuffled and coughed more powder as I walked over to the bodies of the men I just killed and searched their pockets. They had no guns. They’d told the truth. No armados. Probably poor chicken farmers hired out locally by the man in the white hat. Too bad, I thought and clicked my tongue pitifully. I plugged each man twice more to make sure he stayed dead.
I considered how I might get Billy’s corpse out of town. No time to dig a grave. I stood thinking in the street where anyone might take a shot at
gunning me down. A small lizard scampered over my boot. Poor goddamn Billy, full of grapeshot. His last laborious breaths pulling more tin into his lungs. Goddamn if that was quick but painful. Our horses were a mile away, hitched back at the abandoned church. Hardly another pony in that town. Nearly every hombre a chicken farmer and too poor to afford a mule.
There was only the orange river.
The shallow, wide Santa Cruz.
I picked Billy up under his armpits and drug him out of the rubble. Nearly the whole town had come outside to witness the aftermath. I screamed at them to move along. I cried and screamed and threatened their lives, and they didn’t budge. A man and his son stepped forward with a wheelbarrow to offer their assistance.
“You take him to the river, no?” the man asked and nodded at his cart.
I nodded. “Yes. To the river.”
Together we lifted Billy’s body into the wheelbarrow, his arms and legs akimbo over the sides. The Santa Cruz ran parallel to the outskirts of Nogales where a mill sat abandoned after the ruptured iron mine polluted the water. When I got to the riverbank, I looked behind me and expected the townsfolk to be following, but no one was there. They’d let me be. Only the howl of distant wolves and the long grasses stirred by the nighttime desert winds and the fat moon as big as Jupiter, the silence astounding.
“Goddamn, Billy,” I said. “Goddamn.”
I lifted his body out of the wheelbarrow and pulled him into the water until I was chest deep. There were no words. Taking one last long look at his face, I let him go.
V
IN THE SOUTH courtroom on the top floor of the Douglas County Federal Building, I sat alone at the defense table, dressed in a loud tangerine suit. At ten minutes before nine, my attorney Samuel Ritchie entered in a fuss and dumped his leather suitcase and stack of books on the tabletop. “This is how you dress for your first day in court?”
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