Lucky Billy (21 page)

"The Kid," says the Kid.

Meadows lifts the bar and squints outside.

***

"
FUCK
. Missed again."

"Try the Le Mat."

"Christ, John, that cocksucker weighs three or four pounds."

"I'll take out the shot."

"It still weighs a shitload. It's not a practical weapon."

"At least you could try it."

Billy hands Meadows the odd-looking Trantor. Its butt is too narrow, it doesn't feel right. Why invent a chamber to hold five shots when it could just as easily hold six? Suppose you failed with the first five, what then? In fact, he has. At fifty feet, he's missed the empty whiskey bottle five times, the errant shots displaying no pattern.

Meadows puts the Trantor in his gunny sack and gives Billy the Le Mat. Always the clown, even vexed as he is, the Kid staggers forward, rescuing his right hand with the left, acting like the weapon's as heavy as an anvil. "Draw, you sucker." His arm lifts out of an imaginary holster with painful slowness, as though underwater. They're in a gravel hollow behind Meadows's cabin; the river once looped around a ridge here but sometime in the previous millennium it cut itself a shorter neck and isolated this gully. Presumably, the sound of the gunshots will rise instead of spreading horizontally and alerting the countryside. He fires and the shot is so wide of the mark he can't even detect the eruption of dust. It could have flown straight up, too. Five more miscarry. It's not him, it's the gun. 'You could reload the buckshot," says Meadows.

"It never seemed right to me. Pistols firing shot."

"Lawmen like it. You share out the shot with the underneath barrel if you're facing a crowd, then pick off the ones that are left with the upper."

"Well, you'd have to keep a hold of it every blessed minute. You'd be dead before you raised. Let me try that Smith and Wesson."

He tries the Smith and Wesson, Meadows standing beside him. John Meadows is slight, with big ears, a large mustache, and high, hairy eyebrows. Flow he's managed to keep himself out of the Lincoln County War is by mindful circumspection and hardly leaving his ranch. He's a rancher, sure, but a small one with no employees; he does everything himself. I've always wanted to ranch, Billy told him last night, it just never worked out. It's a good life, said John. Pick of horses to ride. Deer in the mountains, antelope on the prairie, ducks in the river, cattle on the range. Choice of weapons to fire—I've got weapons to spare. That was Billy's opening. I could use a pistol, John, but I can't pay you for it. That's all right, Kid. You can take it on tick.

Billy fires six rapid shots in succession; the bottle doesn't even tremble. And when he breaks it to reload the weapon seems to come apart, pieces flying in the air, and he drops the thing. It was just the shell-extractor, he belatedly recalls. Some smartass named King decided it would save you precious seconds to not have to dump expended loads via gravity.

Meadows picks up the gun. It isn't so much the gift of a weapon as the waste of cartridges that's beginning to grate him. "Your best bet's the Colt's Navy."

"Let me try it again."

He reaches in the gunny sack and hands out the pistol by its long barrel. The length of the barrel on a Colt's Navy has always bothered Billy. Being used to a Thunderer, he knows that in drawing this cannon of a weapon he'll catch it on the holster. But drawing's overrated, he also knows that. Accuracy beats a quick draw hands down.

He fires and misses.

This model's a conversion, firing .38-caliber metal cartridges, of which Meadows has a stock in his gunny sack that Billy seems bent on depleting. He fires again and misses. Rounds
is
expensive. Fires and misses. "Shit!" This weapon is beautifully balanced, the Kid knows. The butt feels lovely; obliging to the hand, graceful as a swan, smooth but not slippy. Then why can't I hit the bottle. He brings the weapon to his face, holds it with both hands, extends his arms slowly, sighting down the barrel, then lowers it. "Christ. I feel like a little boy." He raises it again, stiff-armed, and aims, and the bottle explodes when he fires.

"There you go."

"Light trigger."

"Reliable weapon."

"I guess I'll take this."

"You'll want to carry it in your waistband."

"I know."

"Keep one chamber empty."

"You mean the quick trigger? I'm not worried on that."

"You could lose your manhood."

"I think I lost it already."

"You're just tired."

"More tired than you know, John."

Later, they climb a grassy knoll and talk, the river spluttering below them. Some of Meadows's stock on the other bank low now and then. Sing to me, cowboys. "I bought the right dirt. I learned
that
when a boy. Buy sweet and buy low, my father taught me."

"I used to have my eye on some land upriver. Me and Fred Waite."

"I never saw land go back one cent in value all my life. I worked for years till I got a little money and slapped it into land quicker than lightning. Where is the war that can carry off land? Where's the thief who can steal it? No sir, land is land, and when you have that your money is safe."

"They stole Tunstall's land."

"I bought land and kept on buying. Now I have all I need."

"How much is all you need?"

"It just lacks a thousand acres."

"That's not an awful lot. Don't you have trouble with your neighbor's cattle?"

"It's plenty for me."

Sitting there beside Meadows, the Kid begins to feel like he's been left behind. You could spend all your life on a thousand acres and never know want. Never change your clothes. Eat brisket, drink buttermilk, sleep on a featherbed. Meadows does smell a little riper than most but where's the harm in that? He smells of wood smoke and layers of sweat, new on top of old, old soaked into wool shirts and leather vests and britches, new—Billy pictures it—a kind of softly crawling crust on his skin and in his hair. Well, better a close smell on your own land than no smell at all. Better to die in the same place you live instead of roaming the world becoming more and more a fanciful creature. Given time—given rootlessness—men pick up pieces of themselves from what's around them, from whatever's at hand. They become made up.

"Where's your next stop?" asks Meadows.

"Maybe John Chisum's."

"I thought you were going to Mexico, Kid."

"I don't know about that. I'm changing my mind."

"You'll have sheriffs and deputies up about your ears."

"What would I do in Mexico without any money? I'll have to get a little somewhere. Go back and see my friends."

"Where?"

"Fort Sumner."

"Sure as you go there, Garrett will get you."

"I don't believe he will. I can stay there awhile and get money enough and then go to Mexico."

"You'll get caught or be killed. He'll just kill you this time. You ought to go south while the going is good."

"You sound like Yginio. Go to Mexico, go to Mexico. I've given up that notion."

"You've departed from your faculties."

"Don't worry about it."

"I'm not the worrying type."

In the silence that follows, Billy pictures the bed behind the door in his mind. He removes his boots, pads backwards slowly, makes it to the porch, then lights out without a word. She must have died again, mothers always die. Then they stay with you. The next morning, once more not having slept at all—not having eaten much either, his stomach a permanent hollow mass thick as to lining, thin as to contents—he tucks his Colt's Navy into his shrinking waistband and shakes Meadows's hand and rides east toward the Pecos.

J
ULY
18. In Alexander McSween's besieged adobe house, Billy pulled on his blue anchor shirt, clawed his thicket of hair, and rose from the parlor floor. Yginio Salazar and Tom O'Folliard lay on their backs beside the tasseled couch but the couch itself was empty of Fred. He must have slipped past the many bodies on the floor without waking a soul. "Where's Fred?" the Kid asked McSween in the kitchen.

"The jakes."

"He'll get shot."

"It's too early. Coffee's on the stove."

As Billy poured a mug Fred walked in the door and barred it behind him. Others shuffled into the kitchen: Jim French and Tom. McSween wouldn't sit, he paced back and forth, and provided the men with news of the siege: Lallycooler Crawford, who'd been shot through both hips while trying to sneak down from the hills around Lincoln and get a bead on the privy that Fred had just visited, now lay dying at Fort Stanton.

"How many is that, then?" asked Billy.

"Two if you count Dan Huff."

"He was poisoned. He's not in this war."

"You heard all the shooting last night I assume?" Standing before them, McSween, in tie and collar, waistcoat, and worsteds, though this was high summer, crossed his legs awkwardly as though trying to relax then stumbled and uncrossed them. "Wilson and Reverend Ealy were carrying I luff past the Torreón and the brutes inside detected their footsteps and opened fire. There's no one in this town who is not in this war. There are no innocent bystanders."

Unless you counted Macky Sween, thought the Kid. At the table he pulled out a chair then stood there trying to decide what to do. Piss outside or here, in a jar? Fred was staring at his shirt, which he'd worn every day of the siege for good luck, and Billy mentally dared him to smile. A sailor shirt scarcely comported with his stature, he knew, yet nothing comported, nothing answered the purpose or tallied or matched in this wreckage of circumstance. At least the shirt smelled of man-sweat. I bis made him feel less boyish. Everyone smelled pretty rank by now, since water for baths was scarce, as was privacy. The coffee had wrapped a steel band around his head, and he had to pee badly, and McSween in his duds with his fatuous airs annoyed him, as usual. On the kitchen wall a photo of John Tunstall, taken in San Francisco, appeared to mock them all. How many times had Billy tried to picture John Henry Tunstall since he'd been murdered? Whenever he did, the man's face broke up into granulated bulbs that drifted apart. Then he'd gaze at this photograph on McSween's wall of the perfect stranger who'd opened the flood gates, and now here they were caught in a current that no one could buck. They couldn't stop now, if you stopped you'd be dead. I've stepped outside myself, Billy thought, I'm in the wash. I'm up to my neck and cut off and exposed and I never could swim and it's all I can do to keep my head above water. I could climb out to shore but they'd shred me like lettuce.

Outside, he ducked and ran to the privy through the dry light of morning but no shots came. Isolated near the fence in back of the house, it made an especially risky destination. The day was hot already and dust from his tracks tunneled the sunlight. Beyond the privy's warped boards, gullied and gray, cedars and pinons descended to the river.

Back in the kitchen, Billy barred the door and sat at the oilclothed table next to Tom. He listened to McSween ramble on about everything and, equally, nothing—the decline of the world, the intentions of the Dolanites, the comfort of friends. "When do we get paid?" asked Fred. Tom blew on his coffee. Elizabeth Shield's ten-year-old, Minnie, came racing through the kitchen, chased by her older brother Davy, a pimpled adolescent, and she whomped right into Macky, who did not appear to notice. Davy swung a dead rat tied to a string into his sister's face until his uncle, as though through a fog, began to discover the disturbance below him and the sneaky boy hastily stuffed it in his britches. Elizabeth Shield was Sue McSween's sister. She'd come from Missouri with her family of six including Minnie and Davy to live with Mac and Sue. Two months ago Billy had helped the preacher Taylor Ealy and his brood move into Tunstall's store next door, making room in Macky's house for the Shields. Like McSween, Elizabeth's husband was a lawyer, and a Scotsman to boot, thus another irritant to the Church of Rome in Lincoln, and Mac's firm now had become McSween and Shield. David Shield was presently visiting Santa Fe—fortunate man, thought Billy. McSween heard a muffled scream at his feet and spotted a child-blur, and Billy witnessed on his boss's face the fraction of his brain allotted to the present moment putting two and two together. But what Mac said was addressed to his men. "Don't you worry about it. We've got more pressing matters. I'll pay you boys everything you're owed as soon as we're out of this."

Fred asked, "Flow much is that, then?"

"Foot it up yourselves. I trust all you boys. Put it in writing and show me your figures. Not today—do it when we're out of this."

The children ran off. The Kid thought of Macky's
this—
the thing they weren't out of—the final, decisive, stick-to-one's-guns, never-say-die, holdout for ascendancy, once and for all between Dolan's boys and Tunstall's avengers. You'd think clearing Macky's name would have made a difference. Two weeks after Dick Brewer's death the grand jury in Lincoln had found Mac and Rob Widenmann innocent of all charges, including embezzlement. And public opinion had swung to Macky's side! Widenmann, just the same, had fogged out to Mesilla, in fear of his life, for the war still continued as though nothing had changed, and now Billy thought maybe Rob had been wise. On Dolan's side, ruddy George Peppin, confirmed as sheriff by the governor, had augmented the Boys with men from Seven Rivers, a town south of Lincoln near the Texas border. These desperadoes and hoodlums had been cowing the populace even before Sheriff Peppin had them deputized, and those of them who were vets of the Modoc War in California had scornfully applied a new name to the Regulators: the Modocs. Billy swore it wouldn't stick. The Modocs were a tribe of bloodthirsty Indians and the Regulators were righters of wrongs. The red devils in this business weren't the Tunstall loyalists but these new Irish savages from Texas, who had robbed old ladies, ripped the roofs off of stores, thrown the goods into the streets, and shot the horses outside. They'd ambushed Frank McNab at the Fritz ranch and chased him up a gully and shot him in the back. No wonder people were fleeing the territory. Squire Wilson, after offering the courthouse and its land for sale to Taylor Ealy for two thousand dollars, and after Ealy demurred, had lowered the price to seven hundred dollars and a span of mules but still hadn't made a sale. Meanwhile, McSween had mortgaged his wife's brand-new nine-hundred-dollar piano, and where
had
he found the money to buy it in the first place? He'd mortgaged it to pay his loyal men, and still they hadn't seen a cent. "Kid, when this is over, I'll set you up pretty. You, Jim, and Fred. You'll get that ranch Mr. Tunstall promised."