A Bullet for Billy

by Bill Brooks

  “Me and some of my pals went down there that first time to see could we steal some Mexican mustangs off a big ranch down there. Ah, hell, we were only half-baked boys without no mothers and fathers. Most of us jumped off the orphan trains rather than be put to work as slaves for some farmer or rancher. We had to grow up hard and do what we could to survive. But it ain’t no sort of way to live, boys. That’s why I want to be a pa to you—to show you there is a better way. And I love hell out of your ma, too.”

  Jardine always had good stories to tell, and Billy and Sam would listen raptly as Jardine told them. He always wore a workshirt buttoned to the top button winter and summer and was fastidious about having clean hands, would wash them ten, twelve times a day and clean under his fingernails.

  “So we get on down there,” Jardine said of that particular time, “and first thing we did was come into this little town where all the women were as pretty as young colts and batting their eyes at us, me and Clarence Harper and Gil Westmore, and not a one of us over the age of seventeen, eighteen years old, and still green peckerwoods as you’d ever find.

  “We practically fell out of our saddles from looking at them and having them look at us. Then some big-bellied man standing out front of a cantina waved us over and we stopped to see what he wanted and the son of a gun, and I swear this is the God’s honest truth, had nothing but gold teeth in his mouth.” Billy remembered how Jardine would shake his head over something he found hard to believe even when he was the one saying it was true. Jardine showed them his own teeth for emphasis.

  “This fellow owned the cantina and a cathouse as it proved out. You boys know what a cathouse is?”

  Billy and Sam shook their heads, and Jardine grinned and looked round to make sure their ma wasn’t anywhere within earshot.

  “It’s a place where a man can buy himself a whore,” Jardine said and waited for the effect to take hold of them, and when they both grinned he continued, “Anyways he says to us, ‘Hey, gringos, you want some tequila. Real cheap, ten cents a glass, and I got some nice women, real cheap too.’ And he called some of them outside there on the veranda of his cantina and we liked to have fallen over because she wasn’t nowhere near the beauty of the ones we’d been seeing till then. She was real skinny for one thing, and not very good-looking unless you squinted. She was wearing nothing but these little cotton shifts you could see the dark of her tits through. Had this straight chopped-off hair and stuttered when she talked.”

  Billy and Sam tried hard to see it in their minds: the ugly woman standing on the Mexican’s veranda in a cotton gown so thin her dark tits showed through.

  “Well, I won’t go into any of the dirty details,” Jardine said. “Let’s just say me and Clarence and Gil had us one heck of a time for a couple of days there even if we had to stay drunk as sailors. We went in that place with about forty dollars in money in our pockets and come out picked clean as chickens, with hangovers the size of Montana. We ended up crossing back north of the river with nary a stolen horse or a centavo to our names. But we was burning up with desire to go back again soon as we could put a little stake together. But then Clarence got hitched to a gal he got in the family way, and Gil got drowned in the Canadian River trying to cross where the ice was thin that winter. He was trying to save a yearling that had fallen in.”

  “What about the other time you went to Old Mexico?” Billy asked that time.

  Jardine simply shook his head and said, “Boys, you don’t even want to know about that time. Let’s just leave it at it wasn’t nothing like the first time. And you’ll learn soon enough, nothing ever is.” Then he showed them a puckered scar just below his shoulder. “That’s all that needs to be said about the second time I went into Old Mexico.” They knew it was a bullet wound that had left the scar.

  “Remember some of those stories Jardine told us about?” Billy said as they rode along a white dust road with the sun straight over their heads.

  Sam smiled and said, “I sure do. Wouldn’t it be something if we could find that Mexican with the gold teeth that ran that cathouse and give that same skinny gal a go like he did?”

  “It sure enough would,” Billy said. “We’d have to get drunk like he did, but we’d get her done, wouldn’t we!”

  They both laughed. But neither could remember where or if Jardine had said the name of the town, and all they could do was hope that each town they came to might be that town. Some of the smaller villages didn’t even have a cantina.

  Soon enough they ran low on their luck, their pockets nearly empty and sitting in the shade of a ramada, sharing some tamales they’d bought from a local woman.

  Sam said, “What’s our next play?”

  Billy shrugged. A grungy hound had come sniffing around, its coat dirty and rough. Billy broke off a piece of the tamale and fed it to the dog.

  “Now git,” Billy said and the dog slunk off.

  “I guess we need to rob something,” Billy said.

  Sam looked around at the small, dusty village.

  “Rob what?” Sam said. “There ain’t nothing here.”

  “Not here, but maybe the next place we come to. A store or a bank. Might even rob a railroad train if we come up on one going slow enough.”

  “Railroad train,” said Sam incredulously.

  “Well, something. I don’t know what yet till we get to it.”

  Their boots were dusty with the white dust and so were their jeans.

  “It’s pleasant country, ain’t it?” Billy said.

  “I reckon. You miss Ma?”

  “Some,” Billy said.

  “I do.”

  Billy ate the last of his tamale and wiped his hands on his jeans. “Eat up,” he said. “We still got some daylight to burn.”

  “How you think Jardine got shot that time he was down here?” Sam said, still chewing his tamale.

  “Hell if I know. Probably did something with a married woman and her husband shot him over it.” Billy grinned at the thought. “Knowing Jardine, how wild he said he used to be in his youth, it wouldn’t surprise me now, would it you?”

  Sam shook his head. “I miss him too,” Sam said, swallowing the last little piece of his meal.

  “Yeah, well, we pretty well took care of that son of a bitch who killed him, didn’t we?”

  Sam didn’t say anything but instead stood up from the shade and went over and tightened the cinch on his horse.

  The sun burned through his shirt, drying the sweat stains, and he told himself as he fixed the saddle that he sure didn’t feel fourteen anymore, but felt more like a grown man, him and Billy running all over the country taking what they needed and living free like they were, probably wanted outlaws north of the river so’s they could never go back. It left a bad taste in his mouth thinking about it, and in some ways he regretted ever having taken off with Billy in the first place.

  Finally he put a foot in his stirrup, realizing he didn’t have a say in things now, things had gone too far for either of them to have a say in it. They could quit and turn themselves in to the law back north of the river and get locked up in a jail, or they could just keep going and see what happened.

  The other thing troubling him was it seemed to hurt when he pissed.

  “I think I caught the pox from that fat whore,” he said as they turned their horses out to the road again heading south. He mentioned how it hurt when he went.

  “I’d say it’s a sure sign,” Billy said. “I think I got it too. Started out tickling a little and now it feels like I’m trying to piss razor blades. We’ll look for a doctor the next town we come to.”

  “Can you die from it, the pox?”

  Billy shrugged.

  “I never heard of nobody dying from it. But I did hear it can drive a man insane, he carries it in his blood long enough.”

  “It’s like our own sins are eating us up,” Sam said.

  Billy looked over at him.

  “Shut up,” he said.

  “Hell,” Sam said.
“I don’t guess I have to if I don’t want to.”

  Chapter Eleven

  The wind-waggled sign read: CIUDAD DE TONTOS. A sagebrush tumbled wildly across the road.

  “What’s it mean?” Sam asked.

  “I look Mescan to you?” Billy said.

  “Hell, I figured when you were running with that Mescan gal back home you knew some of the lingo.”

  “I knew enough to say let me kiss your lips and feel your titties,” Billy said with a grin.

  They spurred their mounts forward. It was a good-size town set between twin mountains whose slopes were prickled with hundreds of saguaro cactus.

  Most of the buildings were adobe, low slung and whitewashed so it hurt the eyes to look at them under the blazing sun. Judging by where it stood, it was sometime late afternoon, four or five o’clock.

  “You think maybe there’s a doctor here we can get ourselves checked out and fixed up?” Sam said.

  “I reckon, if we had something to pay him with.”

  “I’d trade my pistol for some relief.”

  “You’d be a damn fool then. In this country.”

  “I can’t hardly stand to sit my saddle.”

  They reined in at a merchant store.

  “What we aim to do here?” Sam said. “We got no money.”

  “We’ll figure it out,” Billy said and dismounted.

  Sam followed suit and followed Billy inside. It was quiet and cool inside the store, with the scent of dry wood and blankets, coffee and tea.

  Nobody was in sight.

  “We could just grab some things and go,” Sam said.

  “That’s what I was thinking. See can you find a gunny and then put some of them canned goods on that shelf yonder in it.”

  “What you gone do?”

  Billy was eyeing a big brass cash register.

  “What you think I’m gone do?”

  Billy went around the other side of the counter, keeping an eye peeled for whoever owned the place while Sam poked around for a gunny till he came up with one.

  “Eureka!” he said.

  “Keep quiet,” Billy said as he punched the buttons on the cash register in an effort to get the drawer to pop open. Finally it did with a ring and the drawer popped out. But the money was Mexican money, paper and copper and silver pesos.

  “Shit,” muttered Billy, but scooped them out and stuffed what was there in his pockets while Sam hustled cans of peaches and pears, beans and potted meats into the gunny.

  Billy saw a rack of rifles across the way and went over but the rifles were chained to the rack and held with a padlock and he wondered where the key was.

  “I can’t believe this, can you?” Sam was saying when they heard something from behind a door that stood to the rear of the store. They froze listening.

  “What was that?”

  “I don’t know but we best get in the wind,” Billy said.

  Then they heard something else, a sharp cry of pain sounded like a woman crying out.

  “Something’s wrong,” Sam said.

  “Don’t worry about it, let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “No, somebody’s hurt back yonder.”

  “It’s not our problem unless we make it our problem,” Billy said, tugging at the gunny Sam was holding, trying to pull him toward the door.

  “No, it wouldn’t be right to let a woman lay back there hurt.” Sam started for the door, then they heard the sound of breaking glass and a loud crash and Sam pulled the pistol from his belt and cocked it and Billy said, “You’re a crazy son of a bitch you go through that door.”

  But Sam went through it anyway and Billy yanked his piece and followed his kid brother, figuring he couldn’t just leave Sam hanging like that.

  What they saw on the floor stopped them dead in their tracks: a woman lying in a pool of blood, gasping, her dress torn away, everything exposed, and several bloody stab wounds in her chest.

  “Jesus God!” Sam said.

  Billy saw the torn dress lying to the side and grabbed it and knelt by the woman, pressing the folded cloth to the woman’s torso to try and stanch the flow of blood. She looked at him wild-eyed and gasped, only the gasp was more a rattling gurgle than anything.

  Sam stood frozen, gun in his hand as Billy struggled to stop the blood. The woman squirmed and Sam shouted, “She’s dying, Billy!”

  “Goddamn, help me with this. Do something.”

  But neither of them knew what to do, and Billy looked into the frightened eyes of the woman that stared at him with so much fear, it went straight into him. His hands were soaked in blood up to his wrists now, the dress soaked too so that you could wring the blood out of it, and Billy thought, How much blood can a body have?

  Sam ran out into the store and grabbed a striped blanket from a shelf and came back and pressed it to the woman’s nakedness even as she thrashed about in her agony.

  “Please, lady,” Billy was saying. “Please…” Then he looked at Sam and said, “Run get somebody, see can you find a doctor, anybody.”

  But when Sam turned there stood a man in a tan soldier’s uniform with a tan cap, clearly a uniform, and the man was nearly as tall as the doorjamb. He had dark fierce eyes and long black mustaches and wore a pistol in a black holster with a flap over it he’d already unbuttoned and was pulling the pistol from.

  He spoke to them harshly in Spanish and aimed his pistol at them, waving them away from the body. Then he came and knelt next to the woman and spoke her name, “Maria…” They saw her eyes roll toward the man as if she was trying to speak to him with her eyes.

  More Mexican soldiers poured into the room, their guns drawn.

  “Shit,” Billy said.

  Then the woman shuddered and the man cried out to some of the other soldiers in Spanish and they came and lifted her and carried her out of the room in a hurry.

  “You killed my child,” the man said to Billy and Sam in English while the remaining soldiers kept their guns leveled at the boys.

  “No sir!” Billy said. “We didn’t have nothing to do with this.”

  “You little shits!”

  The tall man stood, stepped forward, and slapped Sam with an open hand hard enough across the face to stagger him. Then he cocked the pistol and put it against Billy’s head.

  “Maybe I blow out your brains, eh.”

  Billy closed his eyes expecting the bullet. But then the man finally growled something to the others, and before Billy or Sam knew what was happening, they were dragged from the store and up the street to a large adobe building with bars on some of the windows. Even then the streets had suddenly filled with people, the word having gone out that Señorita Toro, the General’s youngest daughter, had been murdered, her throat slit, that she had been “violado,” they whispered. The rumors were rampant. Of course they were wrong on some of the facts, but what were facts when such a thing happened?

  The General had been at home eating a meal when his brother-in-law, his wife’s brother, came rushing in breathlessly to tell him there had been trouble at the store.

  “What sort of trouble?” the General said. He’d been eating a chicken.

  “Very bad trouble,” the brother-in-law said.

  “Maria, is she all right?”

  “I don’t know,” the brother-in-law said. “You know I just left for a little while to go get lunch and when I returned I saw two hombres there in the back room with her on the floor. They both had pistols, and, well…I came right away for you.”

  The General stood with such a burst of energy he knocked over the table and the platter of chicken and everything else and grabbed his cap, hurrying after his brother-in-law toward the store, telling him as they went to go and round up some of his men and have them hurry to the store.

  What he saw broke his heart when he entered.

  His lovely and beloved Maria, her bare legs sticking out from under a blanket, the pool of blood flowing outward across the wood planks of the floor. He bent and took the blanket a
way from her and saw the numerous stab wounds, the two boys with blood on their hands. He’d pulled his pistol and ordered them to stand away from her, then knelt next to his daughter.

  “Oh, dios querido!”

  Then he’d wanted to know why these gringos did this thing but they denied having anything to do with it, and he became instantly angry and slapped the one boy hard across the face and nearly shot them. But instead his logic took over and he ordered some of his men to take the girl to the infirmary and the others to place the boys in jail until he could learn the truth of what had happened.

  He told himself that if his child died, he would immediately execute the two boys without benefit of a trial. He would have them shot by firing squad; he himself would take up a rifle and make sure they paid for their crime.

  He was at once angry and aggrieved, and the two emotions struggled within him to find some balance.

  For now, he must go to the infirmary and await the outcome.

  At his advanced age, he had learned it is always best to keep your anger at bay until all the facts were known and then proceed with due speed to bring about justice where wrongs were committed.

  But it was hard not to want to kill those two muchachos then and there.

  Very damn hard.

  Chapter Twelve

  Of course the General had them beaten to get them to confess to their crime, to say why they did it. The men who did the beating tied Billy and Sam to chairs and hit repeatedly with a leather strap that cut and stung until their heads rang. At one point the General himself did it.

  “What I want to know is, why did you come here and do this thing?” he said to them in between the beatings, between the buckets of water poured into their bloody mouths until they choked and almost drowned.