Lucky Billy (19 page)

Lincoln woke up. Lying at his porthole, Billy watched the town stir, smelled the charcoal, heard roosters. A wagon chirped and rattied up the road, hissing through puddles left from last evening's sleet. Odors hung in the air. Sweet piñón smoke, smell of coffee. Sheep and goats bleated. From the west end of town, a commotion of legs and barking dogs and good mornings moved in their direction but the store blocked his view. Widenmann, at the far wall of the corral, kept watch standing on a barrel. "They're coming," he announced.

Billy levered his rifle. Five echoes followed. To those behind the wall it was a bone-crushing sound but on the street no one turned, not Billy Matthews nor George Peppin, carbines cradled in their arms. "Hold your water," said the Kid. Then came George Hindman and Sheriff Brady twenty feet behind, Brady's red face beaming like a lantern as he marched through his town. Reaching to his chin, entirely embracing the bottom half of his face, his mustache resembled a well-fed rodent. A familiar Winchester lay across his arms, and Billy flushed—it was his, the one the sheriff had sequestered when he threw him in jail. He dug his boot-toes in the dirt. Brady's little procession, he knew, was headed for the courthouse to post a notice for the April term of court, and the first-water fools weaved around puddles trying not to muddy their freshly shined boots. A waste of polish if you're dead. The sun found a notch in the hills to the south and raised the soggy road just as Brady's coat jumped like a sack of frogs, his arm flipping funny, and the Kid realized they'd already fired. And who gave the order? Apparently no intentionality was involved. All of them had fired and from their portholes it was easy: Brady and his men were half-pint figurines, gewgaws on a shelf, and they shattered into bits. They fired again, and this time the noise and smoke slammed against the wall, obscuring Billy's porthole. People were shouting. Brady, he saw through drifting dust, sat in the road. Someone had rushed out and lifted George Hindman and held a cup to his mouth. "Oh, Lord," Brady groaned, trying to rise, then all fired a third time and Hindman was ripped from his ministrant's arms while closer to their wall Brady fell back. Close or far, it didn't matter. Hindman lay still. Later, Billy learned that a stray bullet had crossed the road, sped over a field, found Squire Wilson hoeing his onion patch, and passed through his buttocks.

Brady half sat, half lay there kicking. Dark bloody flowers aghast in earth around him. On an impulse, the Kid hurdled the wall and ran into the road to recover his rifle, the Winchester Mr. Tunstall had made him a gift of. And as he ran out and as Jim French followed, as they beelined for the street, William Brady, who'd ridden in from his ranch that morning; who was born in County Cavan the eldest of eight and took communion habitually from the age of seven and crossed the ocean from Ireland, joined the Union army, served in Texas as a sergeant for a five-year hitch, then reenlisted for another five years, only to be discharged when the Civil War started; who joined the Second New Mexico Volunteer Infantry as first lieutenant, rising to command of Fort Stanton by war's end; who was mustered out as a captain with a brevet of major; who married Maria Bonifacio Chaves Montoya and fathered nine children, the ninth still in her belly on this April morning; who served as sheriff, U.S. commissioner, and Lincoln's first elected representative in the territorial legislature; who was forty-eight years old; died.

A shot grazed Billy's leg and passed through French's thigh and the two raced back to Tunstall's corral, Billy with his Winchester, French lunge-trotting behind. The Regulators mounted and rode out of town but French fell off his horse; he couldn't grip it with his knees. The Kid helped him hide inside an opening in the floor of a room in the back of J. H. Tunstall & Co., General Merchandise, where he lay face-up in the two-foot-high space, a gun in each hand, beneath the reinserted boards and the repositioned bed, then snuck out that night under cover of darkness.

Later, Billy learned that Macky Sween arrived when the corpses still lay there draining in the street, blood unspooling into mud. The new sheriff, George Peppin, wished to arrest
both
Mr. and Mrs. McSween but could not. Mac refused to recognize Peppin's authority—the governor hadn't confirmed his appointment—and refused to be taken to Lincoln's deathtrap jail, surrendering instead to the buffalo soldiers, who brought him and Sue back to Fort Stanton where they'd be safe in its jail until the spring court convened. Rob Widenmann joined them there; he'd been arrested, too.

***

AFTER THAT
, it was a cavalcade of killings. With Macky in custody and the town torn apart—the meek and the crafty getting out while they could—Billy and the others headed south to the Apache reservation hunting for those remaining Dolanites who'd taken to the hills. They'd swelled to fifteen and Dick Brewer once again was head of the crew but Brewer hadn't been at the Brady kill-feast, he'd fallen a notch in the others' esteem; and Billy Bonney had risen.

They put up at Blazer's Mill in a pocket of the foothills to the Sacramento Mountains. The two-story adobe was no longer a mill, more like a village in a box: store, post office, Indian agency, boarding house, eatery, and meeting place. Here, they ordered a meal. With their horses corralled behind high plank walls and the men inside eating, anyone entering the valley just then might have sworn the place was empty.

And here comes Buckshot Roberts riding a mule, his legs nearly scraping the ground on either side. He's bullish and short and carries in his right shoulder a painful load of buckshot that impedes his range of motion; he can't raise that arm. Still, he's learned to fire from the hip, or prone behind a rifle, and he's a crack shot, having once been a hunter for Buffalo Bill. He was Frank Baker's friend before Billy shot Baker, and a member of the posse that had pursued and killed Tunstall. But he'd just sold his farm outside of Lincoln and planned to fog out of the county for good now that it had become a battlefield, after first checking at the Blazer's Mill P.O. to see if his money from the sale had arrived. As he snubbed his mule and drew his Winchester out of its scabbard, the mill's door opened and Roberts found himself before Frank Coe, a Regulator and friend of the Kid. "We have a warrant for your arrest," said Coe.

"The hell you have."

"I'm glad you showed up. We don't have to hunt you down. You best come inside and see Brewer and surrender."

"Me? Surrender?" Roberts laughed, winced.

"What choice do you have? We're fifteen to one."

"We'll see about that."

"Ain't there been enough bloodshed? Do you want to get yourself killed? Come inside and surrender."

"I'll be killed if I surrender."

"What makes you think that?"

"I know damn well who's inside there. I know what they done."

"If you give me your gun, I'll stand by you. I'll make sure you're not hurt."

"Don't make me laugh. Laughing hurts my shoulder."

"This is no joke. Surrender while you can."

"Not by a long jump. You must think I'm pathetic or a gullible fool. Well, Frank Coe, it's been a grand talk. Now I'll be on my way."

Billy spilled out the door sparring with his friends like a boy at a
baile.
Then they saw Roberts. "You son of a bitch, throw up your hands!" Charlie Bowdre yelled.

"Not much, Maryann." Roberts swung his Winchester up from his hip and fired at Bowdre, who shot simultaneously ten feet away. Roberts's ball traveled eight hundred miles an hour straight for Charlie's belt buckle and merely knocked him on his ass. Bowdre's shot, however, skewered Roberts's viscera, the Kid spotted it flying out his backside.

The shot to Bowdre's buckle ricocheted and shattered Geoige Coe's right hand, removed his trigger finger.

Roberts shot again and hit John Middleton square in the chest, shredding his lung, just missing his heart.

He shot a third time and struck Doc Scurlock's pistol, still in its holster, for all of this happened in supercooled time. The ball burrowed down Scurlock's leg.

He shot once more and skinned Billy's arm and now the smoke was everywhere, it had absorbed the space between them. Gut-shot, Roberts backed across the road and stumbled into Dr. Blazer's private house. His rifle was empty. He found, on the far wall of Blazer's office, a single-shot Springfield, officer's model, .45-70 caliber, and a box of ammunition on the desk beneath it. In a corner of the room stood a three-quarter bed. He dragged the mattress off the bed, belly-humped it to the door, all the time leaking blood and fecal matter, and settled in for the long haul. But the effort cost him; his eyeballs swung back, a hurlwind in his head seemed to spiral down his spine. The mattress lay against the bottom half of the door. Sprawling behind it, Roberts rallied himself. His large and windy belly had spare capacity, that's what he figured, it would keep him alive, dispensing fat into his system long enough to have a game, and what else could matter now?

Across the road, outside the mill, Dick Brewer ordered Dr. Blazer's foreman to go pull that wounded bastard out of the house but he refused. Shots came from the doorway; everyone took cover. Brewer ordered Blazer to do it himself and Blazer said, You. "I'll burn the fucking place down," the sterling Brewer declared, but he didn't; he forted up instead in a pile of firewood beside the two-story mill building and he, too, hackles raised, trying nonetheless to keep sane and steady, and clinging all the while to the logic of amends that had brought them to this impasse, settled in for a siege.

Middleton was down. He coughed up blood. George Coe had wrapped his shattered hand in a shirt, Charlie Bowdre had had the wind knocked out of him and was crawling toward the mill gasping all the way. At a window in the mill, Billy passed his rifle to Fred to reload and while waiting fired with his pistol six shots so rapid, whomping Roberts's mattress, that his gun burned his hand and he had to throw it down. "He's licking us," he said.

"Yes, he is," said Fred.

"He's just a sneaks-by, no?"

"Hardly. I suppose he's hopping mad."

In his pile of logs, Brewer fired his carbine and saw the doorjamb splinter next to Roberts's face. Roberts meanwhile spotted Brewer's puff of smoke and drew a careful bead and squeezed just as Dick raised his handsome head. As it entered his blue eye, the ball snagged a patch of Dick's fine brown eyebrow and, lifting him bodily, drove him back across the firewood. The part of his brain still thinking "lucky shot" went flying behind him, the rest stayed in his skull. And, tall as a maypole, true as steel, the soul of honor, plucky and reliable, of irreproachable character, the man whose good looks were the fame of the county no longer had a head, its top was blown off, including the bulk of his black curly hair that plenty of painted fingernails had plowed.

That did it. Roberts resumed dying—it took another day—and Billy and the Regulators, pragmatists all, left him in his hidey-hole, left Dick Brewer's body where it was, too, sprawled across a pile of wood—unburied—and John Middleton in agony writhing on the ground. The bullet in his lung took eight more years to kill him. They just up and rode off while they still could, having had it up to here. No one said a word. A single, collective, head-foremost sensation somewhat akin to disgrace kept butting them along, and their bluster was depleted but only for the interregnum, which didn't last long. They already had a new leader—William Bonney—who understood that disgrace was like everything else, something you waited out. Brewer'd cashed in and Billy had survived and the killing was inescapable now.

W
HICH WAY, WHICH WAY
? It all looks the same. Fireweed along the Roswell trail, the sun in his face. Torrey yucca, new evening primrose, cholla everywhere, the resurrection of the grama grass. The earth to his right breaks in successive waves against the north-facing slopes of the Capitans. Green-gray clearings in trees near the summits. He'll be past the mountains soon. Then where to go. North to Fort Sumner. South to Mexico.

Go
to Mexico, Henry, you'll have your fill of chicas there.

Or they'll have their fill of me, he wants to answer, but it never will do to potty-mouth his mother. I'm Billy now, Ma.

To
me, you'll always be Henry.

Fans of erosion up there in the mountains. Pale yellow dust. It's as dry as sin here. He wishes Yginio had come with him a ways just for the companionship. Alone, his mind flounders. To keep going east is to avoid studying the matter, is to dilly-dally shamelessly. He can't listen to his mother. Her disgust unmans him. She scraps them right back, Ma always did, she's a proudy, that one. I say one thing, she says the other, then I drop down a hole. I lick the dust, cowed. It happens every time.
Sleep in your own piss and shit, Henry Antrim, for all I give a damn.
His table manners at home were never as good as they were out in company, once she took to bed. She lay on her deathbed for three long months in the house in Silver City, turning more and more gray, spitting up gouts ot blood, while thirteen-year-old Henry found a hundred occasions, a constant press of business, distractions galore, which happened to prevent him from going home and opening the gate and knocking on that awful door and softly entering that terrible room, as was his duty, and sitting there with her.
Look at you, you're a mess. How often do you change your underwear, Henry?

Underwear?

Blankets of bluebottle flies ripple from the stinking hides when Henry passes the butcher's. A man sorting through the stacks is pulling some out to freight to his tanning pits and needs the boy's help. Two bits. The tanning pits are south of town in what they call Chihuahua, Silver City's Mex hill—how can Henry go home? The school ceiling collapses in the heavy rains and the older children have to help with repairs. I lenry must rehearse for the minstrel show, in which he'll dress as a girl and dance in the chorus of Buffalo Gals, to raise money for the school, which regrettably chops his time at home short. Henry and Tony Conner smell joss sticks on Hudson Street passing a building that Henry calls a boarding house. Tony demurs. That ain't no boarding house. It's what my mother called it, says Henry, indignant, she had a friend there she much liked to visit. Some friend, says Tony. Your mother's friend was the opium pipe.