by John Shirley
My wife ran off to Las Vegas with a broken-down stuntman, about a year before, took my savings with her. I’m forty-five years old and working on Poverty Row junk like this. My daughter hasn’t spoken to me in almost a year, and I got fired off the last shoot for drinking.
Tequila. Maybe that’s why Henry picked me. Or maybe he saw the stamp of destiny.
So I’m sitting in front of my Airstream, nursing my Cuervo, when I hear a clopping and catch this funny smell—not so funny, more like strange and sick. I look up from the recorder set up on the card table, and there’s this leathery snaggletoothed rider squinting down at me from his horse. He’s skinny, got jug ears and long gray hair. The sunset is in his eyes—blue eyes under heavy dark eyebrows. On his worn-out old saddle is a rifle holster, with what I assume is a prop Winchester in it.
I glance past him, see a trail of dust still hanging in the crotch between the scrubby hills. I figure this is the rider Harry spotted, the one watching us this afternoon. He’s ridden down out of the eastern Santa Susana foothills around Corriganville. Old Crash Corrigan bought the ranch land back in the '30s and turned it into a low-budget movie set, mostly for Westerns and serials, but they made all kinds of pictures here, and parts of pictures. Even some Tarzan, and television, later.
But this rider, he’s coming from the mountains—and on the other side of those mountains is the Mojave Desert. I figure he can’t have come that far. Must be an extra fooling about with one of our rented horses, all afternoon. “If Mr. Beaudine sees you took one of our horses out for a joy ride,” I advise him, “he’s liable to fire your ass off the shoot.”
“Don’t know a Mr. Beaudine,” he says to me. He had a voice that went from squeaky to gravelly in a few syllables. “Anyway, this here is my own damn horse. Pedro’s his name.”
“Beaudine’s his name—the director of the goddamn movie,” I say. I remember trying to figure out how old the rider was—couldn’t guess. Might be old or just weather-beaten, premature gray. I’ve never seen such leathery skin. Like it was stripped off, run through a tannery, and put back on. His hodgepodge outfit doesn’t look like it belongs to the standard western costuming they put the cast in. He’s wearing an antique military jacket—khaki, a few brass buttons left, yellow collar—like something one of the Rough Riders would have worn going up San Juan Hill. He has big dusty clodhopper boots on, dungarees, and a stained, dust-coated sombrero. There is a red bandana around his neck, though. That’s the only bit of costumery on him that seems to go with the production.
He sits there, on one of those black-and-white Indian ponies, a grimy Pinto stallion who snorts and lowers his head to the ground, looking for something to crop up, but there’s nothing but sage.
Music plays from one of the other trailers, a song by the Beatles. “Drive My Car.” The rider looks toward the sound. “Now that’s a queer song,” he says. “ ‘Beep beep beep,’ they say.” He sticks the tip of his tongue out to catch it between crooked buck teeth, as if to keep from laughing.
“That’s the Beatles,” I say.
“Sounds more like birds peepin’ away,” he says. “Say there, bub …” And he leans over pommel of the most worn-out old saddle I’ve ever seen, to look real hard at the bottle of Cuervo sitting on the table. “That ta-keeler there?”
It takes me a moment to figure out he meant tequila. “Sure. Climb down and have a slug, bro.” Anything to take my mind off my life….
He steps down off the horse, doesn’t bother to tie it up. The Indian pony wanders off, and the rider doesn’t seem worried about it. He limps energetically toward the other camp chair, sits with a grunt, slapping the dust off his dungarees. He accepts the bottle from me. “You ain’t got a glass? I’m not barrel boarder. I’ll have a glass if they is one.”
“Sure….” I go into the trailer, find a second glass, and when I come out I see him poking at my tape recorder.
“Now don’t touch that!” I tell him, sharply. “Not cool, man!”
He draws his hand back, sits up straight, shrugging, adjusting his bandana. “You use that machine to make a movie picture?”
“Just for certain kinds of sound effects. Here …” I pour him the tequila.
He takes the tumbler and raises it to me. “Here’s how!” He knocks back half a glass like nothing. He’s real quiet for a minute, his face shaded by that dirty sombrero. “That’s good ta-keeler,” he says, at last. “Didn’t drink much till … after. What’s your name, bub?”
“Jack,” I tell him. “You?”
“Gone back to my own given name. Henry. Well, it was William Henry McCarty but I liked Henry.”
I sit next to him. “You changed your name at some point, huh? Police trouble?”
“You could say. Started out, I went by Antrim, after my stepfather. He was a right son of a bitch. Never knew my real Pap. Later, when I got in some trouble for shooting that pig-snout Cahill, I went by Bonney. William H. Bonney.” He smiles ruefully. “Alias Billy the Kid.”
When he says that, I’m thinking, Oh Jesus, we got a live one here. A grade-A liar or a grade-B lunatic.
It’s cooling off now, and he pushes his sombrero back so it hangs off his neck by the chin string. His hair’s all tangled together. He goes on, “Got a cabin in southeast California, by the border now—and about twelve mile from my cabin, they got one of those places with the movie screens up so high. Folks drive their jalopies up to them, watch ’em outside. I can’t get me a jalopy because I got no identity papers. So I take Pedro out and they let me sit on the ground by my horse and watch the pictures. They give me a little work, now and then. Pedro, I had him five years … where’s he gone to?” He looks around for the horse. “There he is. Don’t wander off too far, Pedro…. What was we talking about?”
I’m guessing this is his idea of an audition. All “method” like, living the part. I pour myself a drink. “So you want to play Billy the Kid in this picture? They’ve cast that part already, Henry.”
“Me? No, I’m too old to play … the Kid.” He grins, showing his crooked buckteeth. I’m thinking I’ve seen that face before, in a photo. He goes on, “But I expect I can be a help. Heard that Wyatt Earp got paid for talking about things.” He spits in the dirt. “He advised on some Tom Mix movie picture. If that head-busting Kansas cow-fucker could get the do-re-mi, why not me? I need some money for Doc Vic. Got to have some chemistry supplies.”
“You want to be a consultant, you mean? Oh that’s right … you used to be William Bonney, alias Billy the Kid.” I smirk and pour him another. Then it occurs to me that even though he left the Winchester on his horse, I ought to glance at him to see if he has a gun or knife or something, seeing as he’s either half or whole cracked. I don’t see a weapon, but one could be tucked under that old military coat. “Were you in the military?”
“No, I took this coat off a fella. He didn’t need it no more. I just like the buttons.”
He takes the refill in as dirty a hand as I’ve ever been around. And while I’m noticing this, I see a pale zigzag of scars all around his right wrist. Sewing marks, sutures, all laced up. There’s something else odd about his hands but it takes me a bit to work it out. Then I get it: his right hand is larger and a bit darker than his left. His left is small as a boy’s of maybe fourteen.
“You are looking at my sewin’ scars,” he says, frowning at me.
“Um—car accident?”
“Nope. Now, I heard that this here movie picture—” He pointed toward the production set, just visible between the old-timey false-front buildings of Main Street. “—is about Frankenstein and Jesse James. Now I didn’t know Jessie but I know all about that German doctor. Much as a man can know about that one—he was not a man who showed his insides … oh, here’s how.” He drains the rest of the tequila in his glass, boom, just like that.
“Wrong show,” I tell him. “We’ll be shooting Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter pretty soon, but this is Billy the Kid Versus Dracula.”
“It’s what? Guess I heard wrong then. I come too soon. This here’s Corrigan Ranch?”
“This is it. And the picture we’re doing now is you … versus Dracula.”
“Dracula, you say. I saw an old movie about him, back before pictures could talk. But he ain’t real. Frankenstein, now, he was real—only that doctor’s name’s not Frankenstein. Howsomeever, I read that Miss Shelley’s book. There’s people say I cain’t read. It ain’t—it’s not true. My Ma taught me, before the consumption took her. I read that Ivanhoe once. Most of it, anyway.”
Henry seemed to be talking more to the setting sun than to me. He was staring unblinking right into it, over the top of the fake saloons on the dusty street Corrigan Ranch used for its cheap oaters.
“So Frankenstein was real, huh?” I said, sipping tequila, wanting to hear more of this fantasy. “That’s far out.” It’d make a great story to tell around the set, anyhow.
“That name Frankenstein was a lie Miss Shelley made up. A book alias, you might say. His name was Doctor Victor Von Gluckheim. Doc Vic, that’s how I think of him—he knew that Miss Shelley and her friends, had ’em out to his castle in Austria. She was young, real young, then, no more'n eighteen. He showed her some things he was working on. Made a dead frog and a rabbit come alive, right in front of her. Showed her a dead man he bought, fella died in a lunatic house. Working on sewing that onto another fella, trying to revive 'em. He was in a struggle with death, don’t you see. Was Doctor Vic told me this. Now, Doctor Vic was pretty old when I met him. 1881—more'n ninety years old. But he looked maybe sixty. He come over to this country back in 1816, running from trouble back home. Graverobbing charges, as you might expect. So he come out to hide in the territory where he could do his work in peace. I met him two days before Pat Garrett shot me.”
I’m listening to him and sometimes I’m trying not to laugh and other times I stare at those mismatched hands and I wonder. My nephew George, in those days, worked for Confidential magazine. It occurs to me then that maybe there’s some way I can get a story to sell him for Confidential. Something like, “‘Billy the Krazed' Raids Movie Set.” I’m testing the recorder anyway, so why not? "Billy the Kid—In His Own Words.” Hell, I’d read it.
“Tell you what,” I say. “You tell me how you met Frankenstein, or whatever he called himself, and I’ll try to get you the consulting job. If you do get it, it won’t pay much. Maybe we can do something with your story, anyhow. I could record it on this machine….”
Damn if his story couldn’t be a movie itself. I think so now and I thought so even then.
Henry thinks about it and then he says real slow, “Maybe you’re the one I saw in the dream.”
“Which dream is that?”
“I had a dream that a fella would tell my story, my true story, but I had to ride the mountains to find him. Since my time with the doctor I’ve learned to take advice from dreams.” He looks at me and says, real slow, “My story’s been percolatin’ in me many a year and it could be the time has come. I’ll do 'er. One thing though—you got anything to eat, maybe some pork and beans? I like those canned pork and beans….”
“Got some canned chili. I’ll get you some, but don’t touch that machine.”
So he eats some chili out of the can with a spoon, cold, really relishing it, his yellow teeth chewing with his mouth open. He seems to have some trouble swallowing, and drinks a lot of my jugged water to get it down. When he’s done he asks, “You got a truck I see to tote this here modern trailer. I expect there’s a battery in that truck? One of those big car batteries?”
“Sure. Why?” Is he thinking of stealing my truck battery? Maybe he’s got a broken-down truck in the hills somewhere.
“I’ll show you, by and by. Got a smoke, there, bub?”
Does he mean grass? “Lucky Strikes, if that’s what you mean….”
“Now that’s a name I like. Did some prospecting. Never had a lucky strike that wasn’t a smoke.”
I give him the pack and matches. He puffs the cigarette and drinks tequila and I switch on the tape recorder. What’s coming up now is his voice, spliced in after my voice: Mr. William Henry McCarty aka Henry Antrim aka William H. Bonney—alias Billy the Kid.
There is a lot of lies told about me. One is that I’m left-handed. You can see I am no lefty. Another is that I was some kind of full-time cow thief. I threw a wide loop in my time but I’m no cow thief, or hardly ever. I was a good hand for Mr. Tunstall. It’s true I did start out as a horse thief with ol’ Johnny Mackie. Another lie is that I killed a man for each year of my life. Here’s the truth on the Holy Book: I killed but nine fellas, before Pat shot me. After that, well….
See, bub, I was in Fort Sumner, in New Mexico Territory, visiting my girl Paulita. Her brother Pete was keeping a close watch on her. He didn’t like a wanted man dating his sister.
We was to meet up in the cantina. I was playing cards that warm night, my back to the wall, watching the door for her, and for law dogs. I was a dozen hands into a game with a couple of vaqueros up from Old Mexico. I pretended to drink more ta-keeler than I was, letting them get good and drunk so they make all the wrong calls. Then into the cantina came this nervous, quick-walking old man with a big bush of white hair 'round his head and a beak of a nose. He wore a funny old gray suit and knickerbockers and he chewed a crooked cheroot. He spoke the Español to the bartender. Spoke it with a funny accent. “What the hell kinda Spanish that old duffer’s talkin'?” I said it out loud in English, not thinking he’d understand me.
But he did. He turned, with his Spanish wine in his hand, and looked at me real close, raising one of those old spectacles on a stick to do it with; and he said in English, “I have learned my Spanish in Spain, young man. But me, I hail from Germany.” He said it like, Chermany. "But I know many languages,” says he. “Even some Comanche, I know.” He looked me up and down and says, “I have not seen you here before….”
“You want to play some cards, old horse?” I ask him. “I’ll take German gold same as any other.”
When he smiled, there were only a few teeth in there. “No, I think not. You are an interesting young man. You have the stamp of destiny on you. Such I have learned to see.”
That’s how he talked. “Such I have learned to see.” Struck me as real entertaining. A man sure gets tired of vaqueros and blacksmiths and cowpunchers for company. Here was a man who’d traveled to Europe. My Ma, she was born in Ireland, and I was born in New York, and I hankered to see more of the world. Especially when my neck was like to be fitted for a rope halter in New Mexico.
“The stamp of destiny,” I repeated. “I like that.”
He nodded and drank his wine, staring at me the whole time, then he gave me a little bow, from the waist, and walked out of the cantina.
“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” I said, and the bartender laughed.
“The doctor, Señor Victor, he has a silver mine,” said the bartender. “But with no silver in it.”
He told me the doctor had a cabin at an old silver mine that was all played out, some miles from town. He had some way to make ice down in that mine, where it was cool, and sometimes he sold it to the town. He did some doctoring on ’em too but most were scared of him.
“But he always smiles, and speaks softly to me.” There was a priest, there, in the cantina, as drunk as any one of us, hearing me and the bartender talking, and he spoke up. He said, in Español, “The devil always wears a smile, and speaks with a soft voice.”
I put it out of my mind and set to playing stud. That ricket-legged little Mexican dealing had given me three aces down. He was grinning, thinking he had me with his two pair, and his tall, drunken partner with the pitted face was trying to look all cucumber-cool so I knew he had a hand too. So I said, “Boys, let’s bet it all out there, and see what happens.”
They went for it and when the next cards were dealt I had me a full house, aces full of tens. When we turned those cards over I never saw two sicker-looking vaqueros.
I scooped up the double eagles, except for one to buy ’em enough a drink or two, gave ’em a wink to go with it, and walked out. I was tired of waiting for Paulita—I was going to take the bull by the horns and find her.
I went out to my mare and was leading her out through another alley to the street, thinking about where I’d look for Paulita, when I heard a scuffling behind me. I knew right away what it was—the drunk vaqueros wanting their money back. I jerked my single-action and turned. Sure enough, they were coming out into the moonlight, side by side, the tall one unlimbering an embossed-silver shotgun while Mr. Rickety-legs was aiming his pistol. The pock-faced bastard fired and missed so wide I never even heard the bullet pass. Hell, he didn’t even hit my horse. I couldn’t hardly miss him from eight paces, and my first round caught him right in the middle of the chest, knocked him back off his feet. The other vaquero would have done for me with that shotgun but the damn fool hadn’t cocked it. He was working on that, cussin’ to himself as he realized it wasn’t set, when I shot him through the throat, just above the collarbone—that’d be right there on you, bub. And over he goes, crying out "Madre Mia" and then spitting blood. He rolled over, tried to crawl away. I spent two more bullets making sure of them—and then I knew someone was watching. I could feel it.
I looked around to see a shadow shaped like a man out on the street, standing by a buckboard. There was a big halo, like, of white around its head. Then I worked out it was that German doctor with the light from the whorehouse behind him. He said to me, “Ach, hold your fire! The law will be here, chure—but if you help me load these men on my wagon, I’ll tell them you were not here. And I will pay you for your help. You have already helped me much tonight.”