Lucky Billy (2 page)

"I never had a weakness for it. It didn't take with me."

"Didn't take?" Billy said. "You make it sound like the cow pox."

"What is it then, sweetheart?"

"It's just pulling a trigger. You're the messenger, that's all. The bullet was assigned and fired long ago, before you ever come along."

Bell said, "That's a crazy idea."

"What about you?" Bob asked Billy. "Was your bullet assigned?"

"Everyone's was. You can't duck it, either."

"You've ducked plenty."

"They weren't mine."

"In other words, do I have this straight? The bullet you dodge isn't yours. But the one you don't is. That's—there's a name for that. It's un-American. No matter what you do, it just had to be. That's a piss-ant philosophy."

"I'll tell you why," said Billy. "My stepfather said it. Your bullet's coming after you all through your life. It follows you around, takes every turn you take. Spend too long in any one place, sleep too much, it's bound to catch up."

"I myself sleep a lot."

"It's best to keep moving.
Look out!
"

Olinger jumped up, knocking over his chair. He threw his cards on the table. "You little cunt-garbage," he hissed. "Back to your hole, maggot!"

"Shoot me, Bob, and get it over with."

"I'll get it over with! I'll get it over with!" With one arm, he grabbed Billy's chains and dragged him out the door to the head of the stairs. The other held his ten-gauge Whitneyville shotgun. "Go ahead. Run." He released his prisoner, opened the shotgun and looked inside the breech, then closed it with a
shlang.

"How can I run with these shackles?"

"You'll run if I tell you." He kicked him in the ass and Billy slid down the stairs, protecting his face by skidding on his elbows, and managed to break the fall halfway down. Then he turned and mounted the steep flight of stairs with baby steps enforced by the heavy shackles. "I was hoping you'd do it," said Bob. "If you'd of just reached the landing I would have blasted you to hell. I'd love to see you make a run for it. They would have to collect the little pieces in a jar."

"I wouldn't give you the satisfaction."

"In that case, my satisfaction shall be watching you hang. I'll be right in front with a smile on my face."

"That's a he and you know it. You never smiled in your life."

Mrs. Lesnett on her walks past the courthouse heard these daily altercations. She'd once hidden the Kid in a grain bin in her barn during the Lincoln County War. When she walked by that afternoon, Bob, to cool off, had wandered out onto the balcony and lit up a cheroot while Bell and the Kid, with Bob's half-empty bottle to pilfer, resumed playing cards inside. Bob shouted down, "Annie! Mrs. Lesnett! You ought to come to the hanging. Watch his neck stretch. You used to cook for him, ain't it?"

"He's a nice boy."

"And your husband didn't know. You hid him in a mash barrel, I heard, lest the Dolans burn you out."

"You should mind your own business."

"Well, come to the hanging. It will be fun."

And from inside the courthouse Billy's voice shouted: "If I'm not there they can't hang me!"

Playing poker with the deputies while wearing fifteen pounds of shackles was a cross to bear for Billy, a caution to Bell. Sheriff Pat Garrett had had the shackles special-ordered from a blacksmith in Santa Fe after capturing the Kid. No bolts or brads. Fused single-piece manacles connected by a short chain; leg irons also linked by a chain; and both manacles and shackles chained below and above to a permanent chain around his waist. Nights, the entire harness was padlocked to an iron ring anchored to the floor in his room. Days, he couldn't walk; he shuffled, he dragged, he heaved with both legs as though in a sack race. Eating, he had to lean into his plate, affording Olinger the chance to push his face into his eggs. He couldn't deal monte with his hands manacled, it impeached their smart pace, so he and the deputies stuck to poker. To show, he seized his cards in his teeth and spit them onto the table face-up. Bell's complaints about seepage on his cards were taken with a grain of salt. Better slobber than boredom.

Bell and the Kid were still playing cards when it came time for Olinger to walk the trustees across the street for their supper at the Wortley. When they were through Bob would saunter back first, carbine hanging from one hand, with the Kid's and Bell's meals in a box in the other. Neither Bell nor Billy talked. Poker could not dispel the tedium, just give it method. Everything about waiting to hang was tedious. With a finger, Bell rubbed his ear-to-mouth scar, the result of a dispute over cards in a mining camp, which had gentled his temperament—at least that's what Billy thought. Unlike Bob, who wouldn't hesitate to ear down their prisoner if he looked at him wrong, Bell never lorded it over Billy. When the Kid announced he had to use the jakes, Bell pulled out his Colt's Army and waved him to his feet and followed behind as Billy awkwardly bunny-hopped toward the stairs. The leg irons allowed just enough tormenting slack to take baby steps down; one foot found the tread then the other caught up. Halfway to the bottom, the Kid grasped the banister and gave it his weight and went two legs at a time, and this new protocol spiced his day, Bell couldn't help grinning. At the door, the Kid paused and Bell stepped out first and looked left and then right then led the Kid outside to the privy, Billy hopping with a festinating shuffle.

"Can you free my hands? I'll have to wipe myself." Bell unlocked the short chain that linked the manacles to his waist.

Hollow-eyed Godfrey Gauss, gray of face and beard, was hoeing his vegetable patch near the fence. He'd once been a coosie for Billy's boss, the late John Tunstall; now the county employed him to keep the courthouse floors swept and the windows clean and to lock up at night. He gestured Bell over, reached in his coat, and pulled out a slip of paper. "That order came in," he said.

"Which order?"

"The spit cups." He held it up. "'Three dozen spit cups which we hold subject to your order. Bill herewith enclosed.'"

"Does that mean they're here?"

"In Mesilla," said Gauss.

"Then it didn't come in."

"What do you want me to do?"

Bell glanced beyond Gauss's shoulder at the privy. "Wait till Garrett gets back." The door was hanging open. He looked over at the courthouse where Billy's after image vanished inside, spilling forward bent in half, humping it to beat the band. Halfway to the building, Bell heard his prisoner's chains thump and rattle up the steps. He ran for the stairway, which was already empty and eerily silent, and took the steps flying three at a time, his last lunge whipping him into the hallway where the world came crashing down. He was on his hands and knees. The
whang
in his ears had a logic, he felt: it pulsed with each blow, flashed orange and yellow. Each time he pushed up, a manacle hammered the back of his skull but couldn't crack the hard nut. Always the thickwit, as Pap used to say. But he had to push up, if he were closer to the source of the blows the force would lessen. This coolheaded observation gave him hope. He raised up again, something slipped through his hip, it felt like a hand sliding out of a glove, then he knew it was over, his gun had been taken—it all happened too fast—so he didn't resist the kick down the stairs, despite not much oomph, the Kid's legs were still hobbled. The first shot completely missed, and Bell was still rolling. The second missed, too, but shattered off the wall where the stairs made their turn and nearly sawed him in half, for at last poor Bell had managed to stand—nearly made him two people, a top one and a bottom one, weaving out the door while carrying himself like a vase on a pillar. He was
coming apart at the seams,
Jim Bell, and felt like the village sot with his mortifying groans.
My little body. These vasty wilds.
He spilled through the yard into Gauss's arms and died.

"Hello, Bob."

After that, the upshot merely took minutes. Billy hobbled to the armory, put his shoulder to it, softest thing he ever struck. Doors opened before him! He looked around at the Springfields, the Remingtons, an old Henry, a fine selection of holsters. He picked out a holster for Bell's Colt's and here was a Winchester and there the .50-caliber Sharps with the octagonal barrel that suffered from wind drift. But the thing that caught his eye was dinger's Whitneyville. Double-barreled, loaded, propped against the wall, ready to right all the wrongs of the universe. He grabbed it and bunny-hopped to his cell—Lawrence Murphy's old bedroom—and waited at the window.

"Hello, Bob." The voice smooth and playful. Below, the big ox freezes on the spot. Approaching the courthouse, he never thought to look up. What lovely revenge, what head-splitting joy! Billy has killed men before, he fully expects to kill them again, but it's never the same from one murder to the next. It's different each one. These two, ushered in by an internal free fall, by a rope snap signifying re-lease from control, are the product of seven long days of vigilance. Bob standing there below just ten feet away with a load in his pants, or so the Kid surmises. The carbine hanging from his fist; too late to raise it. Billy thrusts out his tongue and almost bites it in half, watching dinger squirm like a bug on a pin, though he doesn't move at all, he
internally
squirms. "The Kid has killed Bell!" somebody yells out back—maybe Gauss—and Bob's response comes just before or just after the blast from the Whitney strikes his chest, his right shoulder, his arm, his cheek and neck—rips off his ear, pulps an eye, cracks his jaw, unfingers his hand—turns his body flesh, his bones and mapped blood into a fountain of Olinger-slop, as though thrown from a pail. Both barrels, thirty-six buckshot, all that smoke, the Kid can hardly see. Then he hears it: "And he has killed me, too." As the smoke clears, he spots the shadow of blood and fat stretching more than twice Bob's length behind his sprawled body. The man was just hog fat.

Now what? He's not happy or content, if anything more livid. He smashes the shotgun on the windowsill, splintering the stock, and throws it down on dinger's corpse. "You son of a bitch, take that with you to hell." If he could kill him again he'd gladly do so. He stops, thinks. "And save me a place." He clanks back to the sheriff's room, steps out on the balcony, looks down at the crowd beginning to assemble. "Hold it right there," he shouts at Bob Brookshire, waving Bell's pistol hip-high. He never has liked Brookshire. "Cross the street and I'll kill you." So Brookshire wisely stays across the street with J. A. LaRue, Sam Wortley, and others, any one of whom could draw a bead on Billy but evidently cannot summon up the spunk. Below the balcony, it appears, ever)' Mexican in Lincoln has gathered to watch. Godfrey Gauss, too—he catches Billy's eye—and Mrs. Lesnett. The Kid finds himself speaking. He paces back and forth. Every movement he makes pounds and rattles his chains. "Olinger, I don't care. Nobody liked him. Was there a single one of you liked that gorilla?"

No reaction from the crowd. His voice feels funny. He has no control over how it sounds. Is it loud or soft, can they even hear him? They're all maddeningly quiet.

"I could never see where he was an asset to any community. But as far as Bell goes, I did not want to kill him. I told him to surrender—" Billy's little white lie. "—But he refused. It was him or me, and so it was him. And that's that. I done him up. I'm sorry he's dead but I couldn't help it. Anyway, he's famous now. His claim to fame is all wrapped up for being someone I shot."

No one says a word.

"Don't all speak at once. Whoa. Calm down."

They look perfectly calm watching him from below.

"Somebody here got an ax or something I can use? I can pry off these irons?" Gauss leaves the crowd and walks around the courthouse while Billy keeps on talking. "I'm worked up so watch out. If anyone tries to stop me I'll kill him. You know me. I shoot first and ask questions later. It feels like I weigh a ton, my mind's racing all over. I got to take a piss but I can't in front of people. I feel like ... I feel ... Do I look all right to you? A little pale around the gills? I'm not going back to that snake hole in there." He nods to the room on the corner of the courthouse. "Thank you, Dad." Gauss tosses him a pickax and Billy sits and puts clown his pistol and works on a leg iron. "These fucking things are strong." He inserts the pick into the first link, fused to the iron, and works it back and forth. "All right. Hold on. This goddamn head's loose." He holds the head of the pick, not the handle, but because of the manacles has to lean forward and twist to one side. "Dad, get me a horse. Maybe one of Judge Leonard's." Gauss walks off. He scurries up the road.

For a good fifteen minutes Billy works on his shackles and succeeds in snapping the short chain linking them—no more baby steps. The manacles are harder; he'll need Gauss's help. Gauss, below, now holds Billy Burt's pony, saddled and bridled. The Kid jumps to his feet and tucks the chain in his belt and leaps in the air and kicks and whirls around as though at a
baile,
and the skittish pony tries to pull away from Gauss. "He's on his way to hell," Billy announces, waving at Olinger, "and me, I'm free." He grips the balcony and leans out and shouts. "Freedom beats all! That's what makes this country great! I'm as good an American as anybody here. It's not many countries you can be free in anymore. I'm free and white and my blood's red and no one can stop me. Give me some room, for Christ's sake. Give me room, give me room!" His wild eyes dart everywhere searching the crowd, which backs off as though he might actually leap. "And this fucking country can easily spare men like Bob Olinger. My only show was to kill the stupid bastard. You ought to thank me for it. The town's a safer place. Alls I ever wanted was a fair shot at getting those bastards that murdered Mr. Tunstall. Mr. Tunstall was good to me. He gave me a horse, a saddle, a gun. He brought some class to this place and what did they do, they shot him in the back. Then I hired to Macky Sween who never paid me a penny and they killed him too and I hired to John Chisum and he still hasn't paid me. These jackleg lawyers and mealy-mouthed cattle barons do everything on tick, understand? If you owe them, why, it's everything you got. And if they owe you they punch a hole in a barrel of kill-me-quick red eye and offer you a swallow, thank you very much. Then it takes two days to straighten up again for business. They don't want you to be free. Isn't that right, Annie?"