Books thought: No matter.
He thought: Both are friends of mine.
Jack Pulford ran the faro layout at Keating's, one of the ninety-six saloons in El Paso. He was noted for his toilet and his skill with a revolver. A singularly handsome blond man of forty or so, he was shaved by a barber, and since his hands, as he said, were the tools of his trade, and the dealing of faro required that they be on constant display, he also had the barber trim and buff his fingernails. He wore a low-cut linen vest and a clean white silk shirt every day. The shirt was set with diamond studs. He carried a small .36-caliber Smith & Wesson in an unobtrusive but businesslike holster high and handy on his right hip. Pulford was acknowledged the best pistol shot in west Texas. He could draw and fire with astonishing rapidity and accuracy, and practiced often with targets before an admiring audience on the town baseball field. It was gossiped that he had killed a man in Abilene, and a deputy sheriff in Lander, Wyoming, and although neither killing could be verified locally, they were fact.
One exploit, however, on a February night in 1899, had guilt-edged his status in El Paso. Dealing faro then at the Gem, handling both the case and cage himself, he had been accused of bracing the deck by a man named Cleo James. Pulford slapped James twice, returned his losses, and had him ejected. James took his grudge elsewhere, embellished it with liquor, obtained a gun, returned to the Gem, and began firing at Pulford as he entered the front door, much to the dismay of the clientele. It was an error of judgment compounded by the distance between him and his target. Pulford sat in the back room, the gambling room, of the saloon, framed by the doorway. James had fired four shots at him by the time the gambler rose, drew, aimed, and killed him with a single round through the heart. A bull's-eye at such long range, and under fire, was incredible. A tape measure was produced. Between the place where James fell and Pulford fired, the measure was eighty-four feet, three inches.
He was presiding at the table one night in late January, two years later, when one of the players remarked that J. B. Books was in town, holed up in a boardinghouse on Overland. But everyone knew. The game continued. And very bad off, the player added, very bad off. Dying of a cancer.
That stopped the game. The informant was closely questioned. He had it on the best authority. He'd heard it from a friend who'd heard it from Thibido himself, the marshal. Books was cashing in.
For some reason everyone glanced at Jack Pulford. "That's hard news," he said, studying the sheen of his fingernails. "There was a man I could've beat."
No one at the table doubted him out loud.
He had been taking laudanum only at night, two spoonfuls, one at bedtime, one four hours later. This afternoon the pain would not allow him to wait until bedtime. It was his first dose during the afternoon.
Relieved at once, he picked up his newspaper and began to read an article headed The Bloomerite of '01:
There is much discussion going on now in regard to woman's dress on the bicycle. A New York writer furnishes the following on the bloomer question. It's a hard question to answer. A year ago women who blushed at the mere mention of bloomers now wear them gladly, defiantly, and gracefully. True, the bloomers are almost as voluminous as skirts, but at any place frequented by women cyclists about the metropolitan district it is quite apparent that the bloomers are shrinking slowly but surely. Women talk now of the full bloomer, the three-quarter bloomer, and the half-bloomer. When the fractions get a trifle smaller, the bloomer will have shrunk into tight-fitting knickerbockers.
Black satin bloomers are a common sight on the great Brooklyn bicycle road running to Coney Island. As a matter of fact, the bloomer habit is much stronger in quiet Brooklyn than in dashing New York. Perhaps it is because…
"Come in."
Bond Rogers had knocked. "Mr. Books."
"Mrs. Rogers. What is your opinion of bloomers?"
"I beg your pardon!"
He rustled his newspaper. "I was reading about them. They have become the rage in New York City. It says that women who blushed at the mention of them a year ago now wear them 'gladly, defiantly, and gracefully.'"
She had gone as crimson as his pillow. "I came to see—" she began. "What was it? Oh yes, what you can eat. I mean, if you can have what I'm serving tonight."
"No, you didn't."
"I wish you would stop contradicting me."
"I wish you would say what you mean."
"Very well. I'm sorry about the other day, after Mr. Dobkins left. The reporter."
"After I kicked him out."
"I apologize for my lecture. It was probably unchristian of me. And also my breaking down when you told me of your—your affliction. I'm sorry. I realize no one else would take you in. So I wanted to say, I will do whatever I can for you."
"Thank you. I can eat anything. I am sorry myself that I struck your hand away. I guaranteed not to be a burden to you, and I have been too proud, most of my life, to take help from anybody. I will have to learn. Do sit down a minute."
"Well."
"Please do."
She took the straight chair. "Is the doctor sure? That you have cancer?"
"He is."
"Isn't there anything he can do?"
Books indicated the purple bottle. "He gave me that. It's a painkiller—laudanum."
"Laudanum? Isn't that habit-forming?"
"So?"
She realized. "Oh. Yes. How silly of me."
He considered her. "Mrs. Rogers, are you afraid of me?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Those guns in the closet. What you've done with them. The kind of man you are."
"Up to two months ago you'd have had every right to be. Afraid. A lot of people have been. But not now."
"I hope not."
"You may have been afraid of too much," he said. "Widows sometimes are, women alone. My being here will help you get over that. Maybe I will be good for you."
"Good for me?"
"Yes. I have never been afraid of anything. Cautious, yes, but that's different. Maybe I can bring out the spunk in you. I'm sure it is there."
The turn of the conversation disquieted her. She rose quickly. "I must get started with supper." She moved toward the door.
Since her back was turned, and she could not see the effort it required, he hauled himself upright. "Before you go, Mrs. Rogers, there's a favor I'd like to ask. I have been in this room too long. I wondered if you would go for a drive in the country with me tomorrow morning. I will hire a hack."
"Tomorrow? Oh, I couldn't, Mr. Books, thank you just the same. Don't you know about tomorrow?"
"No."
"President McKinley will be in El Paso. There's to be a parade, the McGinty Band will play, and all the school children are to march, carrying flags. He's expected to speak in the plaza. I couldn't miss that."
He leaned on the back of the armchair. "Are you sure that is your reason?"
"I certainly am."
"I wish you would reconsider. If there is a big shindig downtown, that's fine. We can skin out of town with no one the wiser. I do not care to be seen. Just for an hour or two?"
"Mr. Books, I appreciate—"
"You don't care to be alone with me. O.K., have your boy come along for a chaperon."
"It isn't that, I assure you. I've been widowed only a year. People would—"
"People." He scowled. "Ma'am, if I have to work on your sympathy, I will. This may be the last chance I will have. Doc Hostetler says there will come a day when I can't get out of bed. Before that day I want to see the world again—the skies and spaces—and I do not fancy seeing it alone. I have been full of alone lately. All we have done, you and I, since I moved in here, is scratch at each other, and then apologize. Well, if I am going to die in your house, I think we should try to be friends. So I wish like hell you would go with me. I apologize for the language."
Bond Rogers had not imagined he had that many words in him, or that much eloquence. It was true: under the menace, below the prof
anity, at the end of the fuse of violence which smoldered always, was the child with a stubbed toe who needed comforting. She had come upon that child in Ray, although the qualities which obscured it were kindly in his instance rather than reprehensible. Behind her husband's smiling face was a soul. Under this man's coat there were guns. She wished with all her heart that she had loved Ray more while she had him, and let him know it. For suddenly it was too late, he was gone forever. This man, awaiting grimly her response, would decline day by day, but die he would, just as surely as Ray, and much more terribly, and under her roof, too. It seemed to her that she must not make the same mistake twice. She feared what Books was, she despised what he had been, but she had taken him into her house and permitted him to remain when he had informed her almost casually that his case was hopeless; the least she could do in his last days, then, was to extend a kind though decorous hand. She searched for a text, and found it. "And the greatest of these," she sermonized herself, "is Charity."
"I will go with you," she said.
"Capital." It was the first genuine smile she had seen on his face. "Let's make it ten o'clock. Just for an hour or two. Invite your son along. And will you ask him to trot down to the livery in the morning and bring us a rig?"
"Yes," she said.
"I am very much obliged," he said.
She decided to test Gillom. She had not been invited anywhere by a man for a year. His reaction might reveal something she should know.
She told him, but he was inscrutable. He said that was swell. She learned nothing.
Then she added that he was invited too. His face lit up like a fiesta. He smacked a palm with a fist. "Hot damn!"
"You'll miss seeing the President."
"Who cares? How many men's McKinley killed?"
"I scarcely—"
"J. B. Books and us! Gosh, Ma, d'you think he'll bring his guns along?"
"I hope not."
"What if somebody sees him that hates him? What if there's a shoot-out and we're in on it?" Gillom crouched, drew, and fired his finger. "Bing! Bang! Bango!"
What his mother learned about her son was not what she had expected to.
At ten o'clock Books donned his vest and frock coat, which was tailor-made in the Prince Albert mode but single-breasted rather than double, so that he had quick entry to his vest, adjusted his Stetson, started, then returned for a spoonful of laudanum. He had determined to leave his pillow but, given the torment his rump would be sure to take in a gig or a buckboard, he did not believe he could do without the intercession of the drug. It was his first morning dose, though he relied on it afternoons now, as well as nights.
Mrs. Rogers waited for him on the porch. He took her arm. Gillom Rogers waited behind a team on the front seat of a phaeton—not a gig or a buckboard but a phaeton—a black four-wheeled, spring-seated, gilt-spoked, folding-top equipage fit for a king or a president or the madam of a high-priced parlor house.
"Mighty stylish," Books commented.
"I didn't think you ought to ride in any old hack, Mister Books. Mose Tarrant had to dust this one off. He says he don't rent it too often, except for funerals. Hop in, ladies and gents!"
"Keep to the back streets," said Books.
"Yes, sir."
Books opened the door, seated his landlady and himself in the rear. Gillom took the reins and clucked. The team stepped out smartly.
Their way was eastward. The streets were empty, for most of El Paso's populace and traffic had gravitated to the plaza for the McKinley parade and speechifying. Brass music drifted down the hollow thoroughfares. Between closed and shuttered stores the drumbeats loitered. Gillom chauffeured them north and, as the political discord faded, followed San Antonio Street out of town along the valley of the Rio Grande.
It was a drear day. Under a gray sky, under an impassive mountain, under a crow which accompanied it for a time, the phaeton rolled, the only sounds the inquiry of the crow, a grit of pebbles, a creak of harness, the snort and footfall of the team at a trot. Weather in west Texas this time of year depended on the whim of wind. When it came down the pass from the north as now, snow was not uncommon, though transient, but an immigrant wind from the south, from Old Mexico or the Gulf, turned the valley tropical overnight, drenching it often with rain and bloating the river into flood. When either of these winds desisted the hours were dry, the sun shone, the air glittered.
In the front seat, his jacket collar up against the chill, Gillom tended to his knitting. Books asked his guest if she wished the top raised. She did not, thank you. She was protected by an ankle-length coat, her head and shoulders by a shawl of black wool.
They dusted through Ysleta, a huddle of small adobe houses and a church with a broken cross. Children with brown and ancient eyes stared after them, and starving dogs gave chase. Then they were out under the gray sky again, into the silence and the long, long valley. They passed between vineyards, the vines sere and leafless, between barrens of stub corn and the winter tatter of squash and beans and melons. They saw a yoke of oxen in the distance, plodding toward the edges of the world.
Books leaned forward, pointed at a line of cottonwoods. His driver nodded, reined the team off the road and into a field and to a stop alongside an acequia, or irrigation ditch. He gangled down, tied the team, and opening the rear door, bowed low.
"Time to stretch your legs, folks."
His passengers alighted. From a pocket he slipped a pint bottle, offered it to Books. "Time to grease your tonsils, too."
"Gillom Rogers! Is that whiskey?" demanded his mother.
"Heck, no, Ma. Tiger milk."
Books accepted the bottle. "Do you want him to have this?" he asked her.
"I do not."
Books put it away in a pocket of his coat. "Take a walk, son."
Gillom chewed a lip. "Don't call me son, Mr. Books. I have a name."
"Take a walk, Gillom."
The youth looked at one, then the other, grinned as though he knew a secret, and left them, traipsing down the ditch.
Books took Bond Rogers' arm and walked with her along the acequia. The water was swift and clear, a gift from the Rio Grande and the law of gravity. The cottonwoods which lined it were immense, a hundred years old, and the leaves were winter gold.
"He needs a father, and a woodshed, and a strap," said Books. "Why don't you marry again?"
"Are you feeling all right?"
"As well as can be. Why don't you marry again?"
"That is none of your affair."
"I do not have time to be polite."
"Very well. I haven't been asked, for one thing. For another, I loved my husband and still do."
"Why?"
"I can't count the reasons. He was splendid with Gillom, for example. They went to ballgames, fishing, to bullfights over in Ciudad Juárez, everywhere together. Ray played cornet in the McGinty Band, and Gillom would sit through every concert."
"Ray. What did he die of?"
"A stroke, they think. He simply failed to come home for supper one evening. They found him slumped at his desk."
"He was lucky."
"No. He was forty-one."
Books strolled thoughtfully at her side, hands clasped behind his back. "Did he leave you much?"
"Just the house, which we built. By means of a large loan at the bank. And Gillom, of course."
"He worries you."
"You noticed. He certainly does. He refuses to attend school, preferring to hang around Utah Street. Today is the first time I've seen him with whiskey, but I'm sure he drinks when he can. He curses. He has stolen from my purse. He comes in at all hours and won't account to me. If his father were here it would be different, but he isn't."
"Why do you say that?"
"Woman's intuition. Male logic. He loved Ray deeply. Now he hates him for dying and hates me for living. He even hates himself, I suspect—I'm not clear why. Perhaps he thinks he must be the man of the family now, and fears he may not be man enough, and therefore must prove
it." She stopped. "How I grieve for him. He bears a grudge against God, I guess. I can't reason with him—all I can do is mother him, and he doesn't want that."
Books had halted. "You could give him another father."
"Who? One like you? So he could be taught how to handle a gun and murder and carouse? Oh, he respects you all right—he's in absolute awe of you. He'd shine your boots if you asked." Her tone grew harsh. "Oh no, thank you, J. B. Books! Don't you dare be his dime-novel hero! Don't you dare let him love you and respect you the way he did his father—ever! You're not worthy of it!"
She glared at him. Books scowled at her, then put hands behind back and resumed their promenade. "Can't you send him away?"
She caught up. "On the next train if I could. El Paso's no place to rear a boy, especially if one is alone. I have a cousin in Massachusetts, and near her there's a private school, the Milton Academy. I'd give anything to send him there for a year or two—but five hundred dollars might as well be the moon." She tightened her shawl about her. "Let's leave the subject. Please enjoy your outing. Why should you care about us anyway, Gillom and me? You have concerns enough of your own."
He turned to one of the cottonwoods and put his back to it comfortably, letting the trunk take his weight. He said, "I have no one else to care about."
The statement disarmed her. She joined him, leaning herself against the trunk, which was five feet in diameter. These trees had great gnarled roots twisting down into the acequia, stealing from it in all seasons their stature and endurance.
"Are you married?" she asked.
"No. I was once. I was eighteen. She died, trying to have a girl. So did the child."
"I'm sorry. You should have married again. The right woman might have changed the course of your life."
"I doubt it. I have a sudden nature."
"It's my turn to pry. How long have you been—been a gun man? Perhaps I should use the term the paper did the other morning—it has so much more dignity—a 'shootist'?"
"I don't think of myself as either."
The Shootist Page 5