A Bullet for Billy

by Bill Brooks

  It was while I was there in the barber’s chair with a hot towel on my face I felt something small and hard suddenly pressed against my temple and the stink of bad breath. I heard the hammer of a pistol being thumbed back, accompanied by a rough Spanish voice saying, “Señor, usted mata a algunos de nosotros, nosotros mata a alga de usted, eh?”

  I’d learned enough Spanish to understand he was telling me it was my turn to die, to more or less even the score for the ones we’d killed of his. I peeked up through the towel and saw it was old Vaca Juarez—a half Apache, half Mexican—himself standing there, short and heavyset like a man who ate too much beans and fried bread. With him was a rough-looking character of about the same stumpy stature, holding a Walker Colt the size of a small cannon. Cross-eyed little bastard with a wispy mustache and whiskers looked like they were made out of black silk threads sewn into his upper lip and chin.

  I eased the towel from my face and saw the barber standing there holding his straight razor down along his leg, looking about as fearful as I was beginning to feel. You always think you’re ready to die when the time comes. But the simple truth is, you never are when it actually comes. You could be eighty years old and bullet shot and still not ready. I was still relatively young at forty-five and in pretty good health, and sure as hell not ready to cash in my hand.

  I saw the bottles of shave lotion and talc sitting on the shelf in front of the mirror, saw my reflection and that of the three men standing—the barber and the two bandits holding their pistols on me and every right to be pissed off, because we’d flat laid out their companions in the earlier fight like planks, side by side, so the local newspaperman could take photographs of them before we buried them in a hasty common grave.

  The sour smell of the bandits mixed with the talcum powder and shave lotions on the barber’s shelf. I saw patches of hair that had been cut from my head lying there on the floor, and thought that dying in a barber’s chair was about the last place I’d have guessed I was going to fold my hand if somebody had asked me. But it sure as hell looked that way, and I just hoped old Vaca had a good aim and generous heart and finished me with one bullet and not two or three. Sometimes a man wanted to make you suffer before he finished you off; he shot you in the knees or through the hands, just to make you suffer awhile.

  I waited for the bullet that would kill me, knowing I’d never even hear the shot. I closed my eyes because I didn’t want to see it. But then I did hear a shot that caused me to flinch. And when I opened my eyes, the man holding the pistol to my head fell like a stone dropped down a well at the same instant his blood and brains splattered across my unshaven face. The Mexican with him yelled something I couldn’t make out, a bastardized cussword. But before he could get the word all the way out of his mouth the Cap’n shot him too, dead center of his forehead. The bullet bucked him back and he crashed to the floor and lay there next to old Vaca, who had a ribbon of blood coming from underneath his head.

  I swiped the bloody offal from my face as I saw the Cap’n standing there, his gun still held straight out, smoke curling from the muzzle before he slowly lowered it and slipped it into his holster.

  “You okay?” he said that day.

  “I’m not sure, but I don’t hurt nowhere.”

  He took his bandana from round his neck and dipped it a pan of water the barber used to wash off his razor off, and handed it to me, saying, “Warsh your face, Jim. Get that stinking bandit’s blood off you.”

  He never once mentioned how I should have been more careful, or lectured me about making the mistake of letting the bandits get the cold drop on me. He just shot those two like they were quail, then put his gun away, waiting for me to wash my face. I’d always wanted to talk to him about it, about what it felt like to be so near being murdered, because a thing like that sticks with you worse than your worst dreams. I wanted to just talk about it after I’d had time to get my wits about me, but I knew he wasn’t the type to discuss such matters—that life was just what it was; you either lived or you died and that was the end of it. Didn’t matter how close you might have come to dying. Life for him at least was like a game of horseshoes—close didn’t count. And if it didn’t count, then why talk about it?

  But I figured I owed him my life even if he didn’t.

  I saw a sign the following day out the window that read: NOW ENTERING ARIZONA TERRITORY. And when the Cap’n woke up from napping, I told him we’d crossed the border and he nodded and said, “Well, it don’t look no different, does it?”

  “No sir, it don’t.” Then he closed his eyes again and I walked out to the platform of the caboose.

  A black porter was standing there smoking. He started to strip away his shuck but I waved him not to.

  “Don’t need to put it out on my account,” I said.

  “Yas suh.”

  The clatter of the train’s steel wheels against the track rose and fell with an easy steady rhythm. The porter said, “Nothing like train music.”

  “You like working on the railroad,” I said.

  “Beats lots of other things,” he said. He was middle-aged with very black skin, and wore a black jacket and wrinkled trousers that were a few inches too short and a pair of rough brown brogans.

  He reached in his pocket and took out his makings and extended them to me, and I thanked him and rolled myself a shuck, then handed his makings back. He handed me a match, and I struck it off the side of the car and cupped the flame in my hands to light my smoke, then snapped out the match and flipped it away. I never smoked before I met Luz. She’s the one got me into the habit, just watching her smoke there in the evenings out on the porch of my place after supper. I liked the smell of it and I had her roll me a shuck, and after the first few draws I got used to it. She’s the only woman I ever knew who smoked cigarettes and looked good doing it.

  The porter and me stood there smoking with the rocking of the car beneath our feet, not saying anything because we were of two different worlds, the porter and I, but maybe not so different than a lot of people might think. I’m sure, like me, the man had seen his share of troubles and heartache. And I’m sure, like me, all he mostly wanted was a decent life, a steady job, and to live in peace.

  “You like horses?” I said.

  He smiled broadly.

  “I used to ride ’em in the army,” he said. “I was a buffalo soldier with the Ninth. Fought the Comanche, the Apache and Kiowa too. All over Texas mostly.” He had a wistfulness about it when he spoke of it. He took off his cap and rubbed his shaved head.

  “The Indians gave us the name because they said our hair reminded them of the buffaloes. I always kept mine shaved because I figured if they ever killed me I didn’t want them to hang my scalp from their belts.” The corners of his eyes crinkled when he smiled.

  “We got that in common,” I said, thinking aloud about how in my early years as a Ranger we fought some of those same peoples at places like Adobe Walls and Palo Duro Canyon.

  “Huh?” he said.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just talking to myself.”

  “It ain’t no problem,” he said. “I best get back on inside.”

  I nodded and watched him take one last precious draw from his shuck, then grind it down under his shoe heel.

  Light lay along the twin ribbons of steel tracks that ran like two thin rivers behind the train. The smell of hot cinder rose from the track bed as a black erratic cloud of engine smoke floated lazily overhead. I thought of the thousands of Chinese that laid these tracks in their cotton pajamas and coolie hats, their backs bent to the task, how they must have squatted in the shade of their own making for lunch and the few daily breaks from the onerous work and chatted in their own language about their faraway homeland, wondering no doubt if they’d made a mistake coming here to this wild and endless frontier. I guess in some ways they were like that black porter; designated to their lot in life by the color of their skin and nothing else. Just men trying to make it from one day to the next while waiting fo
r something impossible to happen that would change their circumstances, like a man who waits for love or money or God.

  I went back in and sat across from the Cap’n. A woman in a dark blue gingham dress sat across the aisle from us reading a small book with red leather covers, her feathered hat resting on the empty seat beside her. She glanced up when I came and took my seat, and our eyes met, and she smiled and I returned the smile, then she returned to reading.

  We rode on through the day and into evening, into the darkening land that lay ahead of us and descended behind us. We rode on like two errant knights off to slay the dragon—only the dragon was a kid named Billy, son of the Cap’n’s daughter who always made poor choices when it came to men.

  Chapter Six

  We stepped off the train in Tucson at around noon the following day. It looked ramshackle, like a bandito hideout. Up the street a group of men were gathered watching a cockfight. Two oily red roosters with steel spurs were tearing into each other, and I don’t know who was squawking more, those chickens or the men betting on them.

  Cap’n shook his head and said, “What men won’t bet on.”

  He spat in the dust.

  “What’s our next move?” I said.

  “We go and rent me a hack and drive to Finger Bone.”

  “You know how to get there?”

  “No, but I can ask.”

  I unloaded my stud and saddled him, and tied on my rifle in its scabbard and bedroll behind the cantle. Cap’n carried his Winchester in one hand and his valise in the other. The sun scorched the dusty street so that when we walked our footsteps raised little puffs of brown dust that settled over the toes of our boots, and we got as far as a saloon that simply had the word SALOON painted in black on the adobe facing over the wood door.

  “Maybe we ought to stop and get us a cold beer and something to eat,” he said. “I’ll bet you’re hungry.” We hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday. We went inside and found a table, and the waiter came over and we ordered a couple of ice beers, and the Cap’n said, “Can you read that menu?” It was a chalkboard above the bar and featured beef stew and sausages and cabbage. I read it aloud and he said he’d try his hand at the sausages and cabbage. I ordered the stew. The Cap’n only nibbled at his food.

  “It ain’t setting too well with me, Jim. Not much is these days.” Then he motioned the waiter over and asked if he had any bread and milk, and the waiter said he thought he had but he’d have to check the ice house. Then soon enough he came back with a saucer of milk and a loaf of crusty bread, and this the Cap’n tore off in small chunks and dipped into the milk and ate fairly well for a man in his condition. I could only imagine what that was like—to have cancer in your stomach.

  We mostly ate in silence. Finally the Cap’n had enough and ordered us each a glass of whiskey.

  “Finger Bone’s where you said they got Billy locked up?” I commented as I washed down the last of the food with what was left in my beer glass before tossing back the shot of rye.

  “Yes sir.” Then he proceeded to tell me about Ira Hayes, the local lawman in Finger Bone, how Ira used to be a cattle and horse rustler and real hard drinker till the Cap’n caught up with him in a whorehouse after dogging him for the better part of a month.

  “Ira at that time was living with a three-hundred-pound whore and selling snakehead whiskey to the savages down in the Oklahoma panhandle. The marshals were after him as well, but I caught him first. I come up on him taking a siesta, his big feet sticking off the end of the bed. The son of a buck was well over six and a half feet tall. His big gal jumped on me like I was a pony at the fair and tried to bash my head in with her fists. I had to lay her out, Jim. I swear I’m not about hitting women, but this one was about to ride me under. Then I called for him to surrender. Which he did quite well. He asked me right off as I was putting the manacles on him if I was a God-fearing man, was I in the Good Book regular, and I said I was, and even if I hadn’t been, just looking around that den of iniquity of a town, where the saloons maintained a noticeable predominance over every other sort of dwelling, I’d sure enough become a righteous man from thinking I’d just landed in hell itself…Then I asked him why he wanted to know and he said because he’d been having thoughts lately about turning his life around…”

  The Cap’n again displayed a rare smile in the telling of how he first met Ira Hayes.

  “He wore two guns, real rare,” the Cap’n said. “But one had a busted hammer and the other had busted grips, and when I relieved him of them and made commentary on his poor firearms, he laughed and said, ‘Hell, I ain’t a killing man nohow. Onliest way I’d kill a feller with my guns was if one went off accidental, or I was to throw one at him and it somehow knocked his brains out.’ I said, ‘Well, you are under arrest for horse thieving and cattle rustling and that’s that.’ He asked me would I pray with him and help show him the way to the Lord. I said, ‘Right here, you mean?’ His whore was laid out like a Belgium carpet there on the floor where I knocked her, and it was such a bad place you could taste the sin in the air. ‘Yes sir,’ says he, ‘right here and right now, for I am sick to death of my criminal ways and want the good Lord to take mercy on me like he did them sinners on the hill.’ So we prayed and I felt a change in him and promised if he ever needed anything when he got out of the jailhouse to let me know. Didn’t hear from him for several years, then one day I got a letter from him telling me he was doing all right for himself, going to church regular, and wanted to know if I’d write a letter of recommendation for this lawman’s job in Finger Bone—said he had a wife and a new child on the way and could use regular work. I wrote the letter and sent it to him and he wired me back later and said he’d got the job. That was three years ago.”

  It was the most I’d ever heard the Cap’n say at one time. I wondered if he’d gotten windy knowing his time was short, and everything he needed to get said, he needed to get said before it got too late. He swallowed down the whiskey the Mexican brought to the table, and it allowed some color back in his sallow cheeks.

  “So the second stroke of luck, if you can call it that, was it was Ira who arrested Billy for trying to steal a horse, and Billy ended up confessing to him the whole sad story about what happened down in Old Mexico and that he’d wired his ma to try and get me to come down with my Rangers, and that’s how it come out about who Billy was to me. Ira right quick sent me a telegram. I wired him back and said, ‘Hold him till I get there.’”

  “You tell Ira what’s going to happen once you get Billy?”

  “No sir. That’s between us.”

  I saw how the thought of it drew down the corners of Cap’n’s eyes and mouth into something grim and weary. He swiped whiskey dew off his mustaches with a forefinger and stood and took a moment to straighten himself, leaning his weight on the back of his chair but acting like it was a natural act and not something born of his pain.

  “We best go rent that hack,” he said. On the way out he asked the waiter where there was a stable, and the man told him and we went up the street past the cockfight where the dead roosters lay in a pile of bloody feathers, their owners having twisted off their heads and fed them to several stray cats lurking about.

  Cap’n said, “I guess a man takes his pleasure where he can find it,” as we walked past the knot of shouting men. “I personally don’t see no sport in killing chickens.”

  A caballero sitting under a big straw hat with some of the crown eat out probably by rats was dozing on a three-legged stool in front of the barn. You could smell the sweet scent of hay and horseshit lingering in the heat.

  The man’s arms hung straight down from his sides like he’d been shot dead, only hadn’t yet fallen over. Cap’n kicked him lightly on the sole of his huaraches, and he woke with a start, pushing back the flop brim of his sombrero.

  “Sí!”

  Cap’n told him in Spanish he’d come to rent a hack, and they haggled the price because it was a common thing to do, haggling. Most of these bird
s felt slighted if you didn’t haggle with them. They came to terms in short order because the Cap’n was by nature an impatient man. The caballero went and hitched a horse to a hack, and the Cap’n paid him in silver. Then the Cap’n pointed and said, “That the road to Finger Bone?” The caballero nodded.

  “Sí.”

  “You’re a fellow of few words, ain’t you?” Cap’n said.

  The caballero shrugged, not understanding the joke.

  I mounted my horse and rode alongside the hack at an easy pace.

  “We should get there by nightfall,” he said.

  And I couldn’t help but think that by morning, Billy would be dead and the old man would feel worse than he ever felt in his entire life, and I probably would as well, just having to witness it.

  Chapter Seven

  In the dying heat you could smell the greasewood. The horses stepped along, raising dust to their fetlocks, their tongues fighting the bit.

  “You doing okay?” I said.

  The Cap’n kept a steady eye on the road in front of him. Off to the north a distant ridge of gray mountains seemed to shimmer in the haze.

  Suddenly his horse shied in its traces and he fought it down while I shot the rattler that had crawled out onto the road, the Cap’n saying, “Snakes and horses just don’t mix and never will.” He skirted his rig around the carcass because the horse wouldn’t have none of it. The damn thing was long as a man’s leg and thick through the body as your wrist.

  “Everything bites, stings, or sticks you in this country,” he said. “They even got what they call jumping cactus out here—cholla, they call it.” Then he grimaced in pain from something obviously troubling him on the inside, and his face was bathed in sweat, his color ashen.