The Shootist

by Glendon Swarthout

"You don't? Well, if not, what are you?"

  "I have earned a living several ways. I speculated in cotton, down in Louisiana. I bought and sold cattle once, at the railhead in Kansas. I struck a little gold. I have made a good deal at cards over the years, and lost a good deal, too. In general, I have had a damned good time. Till lately."

  "Lately, yes. Have you relatives?"

  "I used to have, over in San Saba County. I don't know where they are."

  "What about friends?"

  "No."

  "None at all?"

  "I have always herded by myself."

  "Do you mean no one will come to see you? Or people you'll want to send word to, that you are—"

  "Going to perdition? No."

  "I'm shocked. I pity you, truly. To have no one now—that is indeed a tragedy."

  "Here comes Gillom."

  He dawdled toward them, pitching stones into the ditch.

  "What does 'J.B.' stand for?" she asked quickly.

  "John Bernard. What is yours?"

  "Bond."

  "Pleased to make your acquaintance, Bond."

  "How do you do."

  He moved away from the tree to meet Gillom. To her surprise she noted, when they met, that her son was taller than Books. She had never looked at the man-killer that way. She had equated notoriety with height. Suddenly she saw a pistol in his hand.

  "Ever fired one of these?" Books asked Gillom.

  "A couple times. A guy I know, name of Cobb, let me fire his Colt's. He's got two beauties."

  "Want to try this one?"

  "Gee, do I!"

  "All right." Books pointed. "See the knot in that trunk yonder? It's about sixty feet away. Stand, aim, and fire five rounds. Easy when you pull. It's a hair trigger."

  "Why not six?"

  "You keep the hammer chamber empty. An extra safety. Never load six unless you're sure you will be using the weapon."

  "Oh. Why such a short barrel?"

  "Speed."

  "Oh. O.K. Ma'll have a conniption, though." Gillom took the Remington, faced the cottonwood, raised his right arm, aimed. "There's no sight!"

  "Close in, you don't need one. Steady now. Take your time. Pull easy."

  Gillom fired five times, slowly, re-aiming after each round. The shots were muffled by leaves and the lowering sky, and fell like a single syllable upon the ear despite the intervals between rounds, for the echo of one explosion was fused with the explosion of the next round. Through a haze of powder smoke the youth turned, his expression one of such wonder, such ecstasy, that it was almost grotesque, to find Books with a second pistol in hand, a few feet away, aiming at a knot in the tree adjacent to his own target.

  The man fired five times, even more deliberately, and lowered his arm.

  Gillom jumped to him, returned his weapon, then dashed to examine the two knots while Books reloaded immediately from a box of bullets.

  "My spread's no bigger'n yours! Hey, damn if I didn't tie you! Hey, look, Ma!" Gillom whooped. "I tied 'im! Look!"

  She had not moved, did not move.

  Books put the guns away inside his coat. He appeared disinterested in his marksmanship. Together they walked back to Bond Rogers. Gillom strutted.

  When they approached, her lips were a thin, stern line. "Why did you do it?" she accused the man.

  "A weapon wants firing regularly. Otherwise it fouls when you need it."

  "You mean, the main purpose of this drive was to shoot those guns?"

  "That was one. I had others."

  "I want to go home," she said. "Now."

  "If you wish. Here."

  He gave Gillom the pint bottle. Gillom winked at him, grinned at his mother, and shoved it in his jacket.

  Bond Rogers' fingers worked the wool of her shawl in frustration. Striding to the phaeton, she opened the rear door herself, seated herself. Books joined her. Gillom untied the team and climbed aboard. Instead of taking the reins, however, he stepped up and sat facing his passengers on the top of the front seat. Just then the gray sky above them was slit by a knife of blue, and such was the position of the sun behind the ceiling of cloud that the vehicle and its occupants were encompassed by light. It was a phenomenon.

  Gillom gazed at the gun man as does a pup its master. "Mr. Books, how many men have you killed?"

  "Gillom, you have no right to ask that," his mother rebuked.

  Books considered his questioner. "I disremember," he said.

  "How could you kill so many?"

  "Gillom!"

  "Everybody has laws he lives by, I expect. I have mine as well."

  "What laws?"

  Bond Rogers was dismayed. Yet she waited, evidently as curious as her son.

  "I will not be laid a hand on. I will not be wronged. I will not stand for an insult. I don't do these things to others. I require the same from them."

  To untangle his tongue, Gillom made a face. "What I meant was, how could you get into so many fights and always come out on top? I tied you."

  "I had to," said Books. "It isn't being fast, it is whether or not you're willing. The difference is, when it comes down to it, most men are not willing. I found that out early. They will blink an eye, or take a breath, before they pull a trigger. I won't."

  As miraculously as the sky had opened, it was sealed, and the three sat once more in chill and shade. A wind mourned through the dry leaves of the cottonwoods. The team stomped, restive.

  "Do you regret the life you've lived, Mr. Books?" the woman asked.

  He looked a hole through Gillom. "I regret I quit school too soon. And frittered away my young years in bad company. At that age, I was too big for my britches."

  "I was thinking of your victims."

  "Mrs. Rogers, I have never killed a good man."

  "How do you know? It's the Lord who should judge, surely, not weak, mortal creatures like us."

  Books lay back against the leather. He seemed weary. "From my observation, ma'am, the Lord has not made a very damned good job of it. Let me put an individual at the business end of a gun and I will judge as well as He can."

  That evening he perused his newspaper. He noted two items in particular, the first in the humor column:

  "Last night, when I accepted Harry" said Miss Stockson Bonds, who was suspicious as well as homely, "he kissed me on the forehead."

  "The idea!" exclaimed Miss Pepprey.

  "I wonder why he didn't kiss me on the lips," said Miss Stockson Bonds. "Oh, horrors! Probably he had been drinking!"

  "Very likely," said Miss Pepprey. "That is, if he proposed to you."

  The drive into the valley and the tensions between mother, son, and himself, strung as taut between the three as telephone wires, had worn him to the bone. Pain made the paper rustle in his fingers. He had had to take two doses of laudanum since their return, and he could wait no longer for another. He took a spoonful.

  The second item was an advertisement:

  Yes, August Flower has the largest sale of any medicine in the civilized world. Your mothers and grandmothers never thought of using anything else for Indigestion or Biliousness, Doctors were scarce, and they seldom heard of Appendicitis, Nervous Prostration or Heart Failure. They used August Flower to clean out the system and stop fermentation of undigested food, regulate the action of the liver, and stimulate the nerves, and that is all they took when feeling dull and bad with headaches and other aches. You only need a few doses of Green's August Flower, in liquid form, to make you satisfied that there is nothing seriously the matter with you!

  He stripped to his longjohns, used the slop-jar, opened the windows, pulled out the lamp, and got into bed, pearl-handled Remington under the covers, black under his pillow.

  Pain woke him at one o'clock. The analgesic effect of the laudanum was of shorter duration now. He had another spoonful, and slept again.

  He woke again just after four in the morning. This was a new agony. It was as though two iron screws were being rotated inch by inch into his pelvic region,
laterally, from hip to hip, and upward, from genitals to navel. In too much haste for the spoon, he tilted the bottle. Pressure on his bladder would have roused him in any event. Taking the slop-jar from under the bed, he squatted over it and waited for relief. Frequently, such was the state of his plumbing, he had to wait three or four minutes to achieve flow.

  He closed his eyes, conjecturing drowsily whether or not he had made a mistake after all, allowing Gillom Rogers to target-practice with one of the guns the day before. At a certain age, boys fell in love with firearms more readily than with girls. Some of them never recovered.

  He opened his eyes. They sent to his brain the impression of a shadow upon the lace curtain of the window at the south. His brain resisted the impression. It was four in the morning. The moon would have declined. He squinted.

  The shadow moved.

  Books did likewise.

  Deliberately, without waste motion, and soundlessly, he lifted the slop-jar to a place between the library table and the armchair, out of the way.

  Kneeling by the bed, he bunched the sheet and blankets lengthwise and eased the black-handled pistol from beneath the pillow.

  As he let himself down by the bed onto his back, one hand on the frame under the mattress, gun in the other, he became conscious of a second shadow, this one in the curtain folds of the western window. So there were two of them.

  He crabbed himself under the bed—not at the center, under the bunched covers, but at the side. The fingers of his left hand clenched the frame.

  The curtains at the south window were parted by the head and shoulders of a man. He hesitated, adjusting his vision.

  Extending his arm, the intruder fired four rounds into what resembled a sleeping figure in the center of the bed. After the last he climbed rapidly over the sill into the room.

  Simultaneously, there was a gunflash through the west window and, having fired, the second assailant propelled himself through it with such awkward force that he tore the curtain from the wall.

  Standing over the bed, the first man let go a fifth, an insurance, round into the bunched covers.

  In close confines, the reports were like detonations. The floor of the room seemed to heave. The walls of the room hurled thunder at each other. Six rounds had been fired within twenty seconds, five by the man who had entered through the south window, one by the man through the west. Books had counted.

  Using his left arm, levering his upper body into the open like a reptile striking from a crevice, he fired twice at the man to his left, the west, heard the smack of lead into flesh, then recoiled below.

  The man grunted, fell backward, shrouded in lace, crashing against the washbowl to the floor.

  Still crouched over the bed, the first intruder fired at Books's gunflash, and the bullet splintered a corner of the library table.

  Instantly, levering himself even with the upper edge of the mattress, Books fired once at him. He staggered backward to the wall, dropped his empty weapon.

  "Don't kill me, Books, oh Christ don't kill me!" he screamed. "I'm shot out!"

  Books came cautiously to his knees.

  There was ample light now. The bunched bedcovers were on fire.

  Through the flames, Books watched the wounded man crawl toward the south window, flop himself on his elbows over the sill in the crazed hope he could fall out of the house to safety.

  "I'm gutshot, Books!" he yelled. "Jesus Christ, don't murder me!"

  Raising the Remington over the blazing bedclothes, Books sighted on his enemy's rectum.

  "You tried to kill me," he said hoarsely. "So long, you murdering son of a bitch."

  He fired. Ranging half the length of the spine, shattering vertebrae and destroying the central nervous system, the .44 slug drove the body halfway through the window.

  Books placed his weapon on the carpet.

  Twisting then, he reached, got a grip on the rim of the slop-jar, lifted it high, swung, and doused the flaming bed with urine.

  The door of the room burst open.

  A stench sickened them. Black powder smoke blinded them.

  One of the railroad men, a gnome in a nightshirt, balding and elderly, with watering eyes and hairy ankles, edged tentatively into the room and turned on the ceiling fixture.

  At the door, the other railroad man, the middle-aged schoolteacher, Bond Rogers, and her son Gillom drew incredulous breath.

  J. B. Books sat beside the bed in his underwear. He stared vacantly, not at them but at a wall patterned with sprays of blue and golden lilies.

  Below the mirror and washbowl, both of which were blood-spattered, a dead man lay on his back, a revolver in his hand, his mouth open, his winding sheet a web of torn curtains.

  A foul steam rose from the blackened stew of the bed.

  Another man seemed to be attempting to climb out of the south window, out of the house. But he was still, his legs spraddled wide. And from between his buttocks, through the denim of his pants, a dark stream welled as though he were excreting blood.

  To wake from a sleep of peace, to look into that infernal room, to outrage the nostrils with the odors of terror and death and madness therein, was to have a presentiment of Hell itself. Those witness at the door stood as though nailed to the floor. The railroad men turned heads. The schoolteacher tried to shriek and, unable, commenced to wail.

  "Telephone the marshal, Mrs. Rogers," ordered Books. "The rest of you, get the hell out of here."

  In flannel dressing gown she waited in the parlor for the marshal. Gillom could not sit. She had even had to remind him to put on his trousers. Barefoot, he paced up and down before her.

  "God," he said.

  He ran a hand through his rat's-nest hair.

  "God!"

  He swept a toe along the fringe at the base of the sofa.

  "God, Ma, did you see that? That's the way it happens, Ma—the real thing! My God, he got both of 'em! They must've come through the windows, guns going, and he's so fast, he killed 'em both! You wait—half this town'll be coming by our house every day for a week, gawping and pointing! Will we ever be in the papers, too! J. B. Books in a shoot-out right in our house—we can brag on this the rest of our lives!"

  She had never seen him so excited. His face, his eyes, were feverish. And suddenly she hated her son. Her home, the home she and Ray had dreamed of and saved for, had been desecrated. If her departed husband knew, and she had no doubt he did, he could not in an eternity forgive her. And she hated Books. She had let a killer into her house, let him buy her forbearance and charity and the adoration of her boy for the pottage of four dollars a day. She remembered them together yesterday, Gillom as tall as the gun man, shooting at tree trunks, competing yet sharing in a false and deadly virility. She shuddered again to explosions and yells. A viper of revenge entered her bosom.

  "You respect him, don't you, Gillom?"

  "Wouldn't you?"

  "You worship the ground he walks on, don't you?"

  "Damn right I do!"

  "You think as much of him as you did of your father, don't you?"

  That brought him up short.

  "Don't you?"

  "I told you, Ma. Don't talk—"

  "He's dying," said Bond Rogers.

  "Who?"

  "J. B. Books."

  "Hah."

  "Of natural causes. He told me the other day. That's why Doctor Hostetler has been here twice. He has a cancer."

  "I don't believe it."

  "It's only a matter of time—several weeks perhaps. That's why he wanted to go for a drive yesterday. He said it would be his last opportunity to see the world."

  "You're lying."

  "Have I ever?"

  "He'd have told me. He likes me a lot."

  "He's dying, Gillom."

  He understood at last. He believed at last. She could have cut out her tongue. For his reaction was as startling, and as frightening, as a shot in the dark of night.

  Gillom turned his back on her. A string of reserve was
pulled in him. He sank awkwardly to his knees and buried his face in the seat of a chair. He sobbed. He stained with his tears the velours of the chair, an overstuffed of which she was particularly choice. His hands tore the antimacassars from the arms. He cried as desperately as he had at another bereavement.

  She had wanted to hurt him, her own flesh, and hence to do herself injury—but not to this terrible extent. She had hated him momentarily, and hated Books. Gillom would hate her now, and Books, too, and have in time his own vengeance. If the man in the corner room had taken life tonight, she was guilty of a sin almost as grave. Given the secret of death to keep, she had used it instead as a weapon, and by means of it, on impulse she had robbed a seventeen-year-old of hope. On the slate of his future, she knew now, Gillom had begun to chalk a new image, and with one cruel stroke she had wiped the slate blank.

  In a cold dawn, in a cold house, Bond Rogers sat, watching through her own tears her son grieve the loss, in less than two years, of two fathers.

  "Who were they?"

  "Ben Shoup, the one you shot in the ass."

  "Shoup."

  "The other name of Norton. Two no-goods, not from around here. Know them?"

  "I recollect the name Shoup back in San Saba County when I was a kid. I had family there."

  "Well, they knew you. And I knew sure as death and taxes we were due for something like this." Thibido sipped from his coffee cup. "Came in the windows, did they? How'd you manage?"

  "I was up taking a leak. I stayed under the bed till I placed them, then came out shooting."

  "Just like that, two more notches." The marshal glanced at the blood-blotched mirror and washbowl, and at the dried rivulet in the carpet under the south window. He shook his head in disgust. "Place looks like a damned slaughterhouse. Smells like it, too."

  "They must have heard I was hanging up my irons for good. Figured I couldn't defend myself."

  "They found out."

  Books considered him. "Only three people knew—Doc Hostetler, the landlady, and you. How would you guess the word got around?"

  "Not from me," lied Thibido quickly. "My profession, you learn to keep your eyes skinned and your mouth shut."