Lucky Billy Read online

  "Weren't you a bardog at Sumner?" asked Jones.

  "Yes, Reverend Jones, in the old days." He inspected me with an eyelid that drooped at half mast, having been ripped off in the same altercation in which he lost his leg, then sewn on with fish line. His puttylike face had not one scrap of facial hair, thus stringing out the mouth. "Do they still call you Reverend?"

  "Israel will do."

  "Fort Sumner?" said the drummer. "They had a saloon there?"

  "It hasn't been a fort in ten years," I said. "More like a starve-acre town. I used to live there. What happened to me was a thousand-pound porker ran me down on the parade grounds, damn near killed me, but instead of dying I married the woman who nursed me back to health, Apolinaria Gutiérrez. She and her family moved to the fort when Lucien Maxwell bought it. You've heard of him, I suppose? Lucien Maxwell of the Maxwell Land Grant? He's dead now but his son Pete still brags up his daddy's two million acres, enough land to contain a fat curve of the planet. Had to sell it all to pay off his debts and with the leftover he bought the old fort, which was decommissioned in '71. Converted the officers' quarters into a home, elegant by the usual standards. By the time he died and his son Pete took over, the family empire was sadly diminished. Pete still manages the place, the sheep herds and stables. He's a well-known friend of the Kid, or a foe, depending on the hopes of his sister, Paulita. She was the Kid's sweetheart. She now carries his child. Pete rents the old hospital and barracks and storehouse which his father chopped into lodgings for his Mexican clients and friends from Cimarron. He runs the weekly dances and leases the shops and stables and saloons, Bob Hargrove's saloon and Beaver Smith's saloon, where I first met Kid Antrim. Beaver Smith is the one you should ask about Billy. His ears are jingle-bobbed. You're a drummer, you must get around, have you ever heard of that? For twenty-five cents Beaver will show you the long rail on his hams from where Chisum's men branded him. Get him drunk first."

  "From bardog to sheriff," the drummer observed, looking at me. I gave him my bullet-hole-eyes look of being startled, fooling him by seeming somewhat up a tree. That's what I always do for strangers. You never know who they are. The effect of the mustache covering my mouth, I knew, was to lessen my jaw, and with my reedy twangy voice, mine was the most Texas drawl he would hear in White Oaks. "The secret to being a bardog, I learned, is to keep your mouth shut."

  "You must be catching up," said Jones.

  "I do talk more now."

  "Why is that?"

  "Because I'm done with doing."

  "With the Kid in irons, you mean?"

  "With the Kid in irons, I mean."

  The drummer piped up. "What's he like?"

  I kept my voice lofty. It comported with a stiff-jointed sandy sheriff who wished the world to think he was slightly loco, or maybe nervous as a hen, when not coldly efficient. "A very pleasant, fun-loving gentleman, quick with the handshake or quip or laughter unless he thinks he ought to kill you. I believe his hands and feet, being delicate and small, are more like a woman's than a man's. He's fairly much a chameleon of a person. He's just a boy. He changes stripes often. He once gave me a horse when mine come uncorked and I did not ask its provenance. George Coe told me something once told to him by the Englishman Tunstall. It was John Tunstall's murder that began the war whose final chapter will be the Kid's hanging. Tunstall said to Coe, 'George, that's the finest lad I ever met.' We might have known what he meant if he'd lived. In my estimation, the Kid wants you to think he's a cocksure reprobate. That was his downfall. He swung a wide loop and that put him in chains. Be happy he's scheduled to die in two weeks. He overwent the norm when it came to taking risks, plus he always desired to put in a gay time. Then again, he strikes fear in the average person's heart, mouth-fighters especially, so I guess he has a reputation to live up to. You can thank those who wield their Faber's number two. Have another glass of meat." I reached for the drummer's tumbler with my whiskey. "I should mention as well he's a famous lady's man. It's not just Paulita Maxwell. That's what rouses Pete's ire. The Kid has planted babies all over the territory. Just like a squirrel—hide the seed in a hole. A year later you forget where-all you put it."

  So as not to scale down his heroic proportions, I didn't add what I could have about his behavior in those Fort Sumner days. Back before the Lincoln County War, before he stopped drinking and would get quite a jag on most every night at Beaver Smith's saloon. He'd sing his favorite song, "Silver Threads Among the Gold," and would not stop singing it despite all our efforts, which included throttling his neck, he still sang through squeezed pipes. One night, Pete Maxwell, whose hands are large as shovels, exclaiming, "Shut your damn pie hole," clamped his hand across the Kid's mouth for a full five minutes, and when he let go, the Kid, instead of continuing to sing, flipped his lips with a finger, making a sort of sputtery baby sound in one endless aggravating babbling scroll. Some fool then dared him to continue and to our dismay he did, even when every blessed person in that place screamed at him to stop. Beaver Smith then emptied a trunk in his room and carried it out and we loaded him in it and still we could hear him through the shut lid. And the next morning, when I arrived for the day's business and asked Beaver, "Is he still at it?" and he answered, "Look and see," I lifted the lid and there was the Kid folded up like a coffined grasshopper, his hard blue eyes round as buttons looking right at me, still flicking his bloody lips with his finger and making that sound. "Ain't he a piece of work?" asked Beaver. He's some for his inches, I acknowledged. If he caught himself a pig he knew damn well to hold him. The stubbornest jackass west of the Pecos.

  "You captured him last December, you say?" asked the drummer.

  "We set out in mid-December five months ago, yes. I knew his habits well. His haunts, his temptations. And my posse were reliable. We started from here, White Oaks, from this very saloon—Frank Stewart, Lon Chambers, Lee Hall, Poker Tom Emory, Louis Bous-man, the latter called 'The Animal.' Who else was it, Fred?"

  "Bob Williams."

  "Bob Williams. Barney Mason, of course. Jim East joined us later. It takes an army to catch a little fly. We took off across the prairie, cold-camped in a gulch, and made Puerto de Luna the following morning. We spent the clay putting up at Grzelachowski's store, warming our flesh at mesquite-root fires and eating dried apples and drawing corks. From that place we struck out for Fort Sumner in a terrible snowstorm. Arrived at Gayheart's ranch twenty miles above the fort and sent a Mexican fellow, Juan Roibal, to see whether Billy and his boys were at Sumner. He returned the news they were. Next morning, Barney Mason and me snuck into the fort but someone must have tipped them off. They'd racked out, we learned, to Wilcox's ranch, about twenty miles east. Tom Wilcox and his partner Manuel Brazil on the Texas Road. The same road I first traveled into this territory, being a brush-popper from the brasada by way of Louisiana."

  "Louisiana?" A burst of laughter came from a nearby table. Someone rolled a barrel in, wagons passed outside. Hudgen's was full of clinked glasses, loud shouts, low growls, sharp heel-thumps.

  "So I concluded on a subterfuge. You see, Billy had lots of Mexican friends who were carrying reports to him all the time. There was Ignacio Garcia, José Valdez—tools of the Kid. I traded Valdez out for his assistance, convincing him to show a note to the Kid, addressed to Manuel Brazil, stating that our plans had disarranged and that, as we'd thought better of the situation, we'd ridden on to Roswell. My intent was to suggest that we'd been scared up. Then we sequestered our horses in Pete Maxwell's stable. We forted up in the old Indian hospital on Sumner's east side, a few doors down from Charlie Bowdre's wife, whom we were forced to restrain. Poor Charlie! His heart was not set on riding with the Kid. He'd already written to Governor Wallace promising to change his evil ways and forsake his disreputable associates and requesting the governor to extend the pardon he'd granted for others to him, Charlie, and give him the opportunity to redeem himself. Charlie'd met me in secret to plead his case but he evidently thought I was playing a game to get him i
n my power. Quit those curs or surrender, I frankly told him, if not you will certainly be caught or killed, as we are after the Kid and the gang that runs with him and will sleep on the trail until we take them all in, dead or alive. Whether he remembered this conversation or not that night is beyond my surmise. If he had, would they not have been somewhat leery? I posted Chambers outside, to the east, on guard. The remainder spread a blanket on the icy floor and Mason had his cards and we sat to play poker. This room held old saddles, harnesses, traces, spurs, and ropes, mostly hung on the walls, and sacks of feed in the corners. Now and again I went to the door and cracked it an inch to peer out into the night. It was wintery and dark but not so dark as to be black. Warm air had blown in from the south and the snow gave off fog which obscured determined vision. The snow was a foot deep and the moon shone through the fog, mixing light and dark in swirly gusts of wind. About eleven o'clock, Chambers rushes in and announces a party is coming from the east. That can only be them, boys, I say, and we slip out, me, Chambers, and some others, and conceal ourselves amid a row of harnesses hanging on the porch. Mason and the rest go around the building in case they come that way. Soon, they heave into sight, emerging through the fog. The lead horse thrusts his head directly onto our porch. 'Halt!' I shout and up pops my Winchester and Chambers and I fire in concert. In the subsequent fusillade on either side, amid the swirl of black smoke and blue fog and moonlight, I heard cries of mortal agony. Their steeds pranced and curved and vanished in the fog, but one of them come back—made a circle and returned. 'Don't shoot, Garrett,' a voice I recognized says. 'Don't shoot. I am killed.'

  "It was Tom O'Folliard, Billy's joined-at-the-hip man. Stuck to him like glue. But if you want to find out what sort of person the Kid is, I later learned that as they were approaching Fort Sumner, the Kid and Tom cheek by jowl in the lead, Billy all to sudden has an infusion of caution. A strong suspicion arises in his mind that they are riding into unforeseen danger. I'll say this much, he's quick. He decides that what he wants is a chew of tobacco and knows that Billy Wilson has some that's good and Wilson's in the rear, so he swings his horse around at the very last moment after the tobacco."

  "Who told you that story?" asked the drummer.

  "The Kid himself, from his jail cell. Told it with a wink."

  "The coward."

  "One man's cowardice is another's wile." I widened my eyes and fixed them on a fly grating my nerves in a puddle of beer. When my hand walloped down, beer fountained the table, and Fred Kuch got it in the eye. I smeared the pastry of fly guts and beer to the fat of my thumb and flicked it on the floor. "O'Folliard's sagging in the saddle. Our rifles are upon him. Throw up your hands!' 'I can't, I'm too weak.' We approach him with caution. He begs to be assisted. The rest of his gang has disappeared in the night. Mason slips his carbine out of its spicier, we help O'Folliard from his horse and, to his cries of mortal agony, carry him inside. Not an easy task. He is a large mulish man with a flatiron face and porthole eyes. Been shot below the heart and creased across the chest and begs me now to finish him off. 'If you are a friend of mine you'll put me out of my misery.' 'I am no friend to men of your kind,' I tell him sternly. 'You sought to kill me because I tried to do my duty.'

  "We lay him on the floor, sparing our blanket, and resume our game of poker. The chicken pie's large—almost ten dollars. But our play is distracted by O'Folliard's groans and I for one grow peckish. 'Oh my God, is it possible I'll die?' We've had to move the blanket to avoid his track of blood. 'Goddamn you, Garrett!' he screams when I've just drawn to a flush. 'I hope to meet you in hell.' 'I wouldn't talk that way, Tom,' I very calmly tell him. 'You'll be dead pretty soon.' 'Aw, you long-legged son of a bitch,' he wails, 'suck my cock.' 'Take your medicine,' says Mason and shows three nines and reaches for the pot. The oil lamp broadcasts a broken wheel of light into which our arms dip. Tom's back there in the darkness. 'Your time is short, Tom,' I say without turning. At the same time, I lay my hand on Mason's wrist. Directly behind me, Tom by now is breathing shallow and changes his tune. 'The sooner the better. I will be out of pain.' He asks for a drink of water. Having already folded, Jim East sighs and stands up and gets him one. As the poor fellow drinks I show Mason my flush, much to his disgust, and rake in the pot. Tom gags on a bubble and when it pops he's gone. I gather up the cards and shuffle. My deal."

  The drummer asked, "Was this before or after Wallace posted his reward?"

  "Governor Wallace announced his five-hundred-dollar reward for the Kid's capture on December fifteenth. The day we struck out. Are you suggesting I was doing this for mercenary gain?" I stared the man down. His disconcerted smile showed one broken tooth beneath his mustachio. "Don't be such a squitter-ass. Is that what you're suggesting?"

  The poor fellow shrugged. "I suppose."

  "You suppose? You suppose?" I produced my snippy smile. "What the Christ else would my object be?" The rest at the table nervously tittered and the drummer looked around in baffled relief. He grabbed the Old Towse and poured a double shot and drank it down chewal-lop. "After Tom died and we put him in the ground we had another heavy snow. I was in no particular rush at this juncture. We lit a warm fire and played some more cards. I knew Billy and the others would go back to Wilcox's ranch. If they caught on they'd been betrayed they never told Brazil or Wilcox. In fact, the Kid sends Brazil to Fort Sumner to scout out the lay. This was his one lapse. It could be he was distraught over losing O'Folliard. The next day Brazil rides into Fort Sumner and comes straight to me without batting an eye. He describes the condition of the crestfallen band, now reduced to five: the Kid, Charlie Bowdre, Dave Rudabaugh, Tom Pickett, and Billy Wilson. Rudabaugh's horse had been wounded in the shootout and died underneath him on the way back but he got another from Brazil. So it's five men, five horses, Wilcox and Brazil pretending to be friendly, and I give Manuel some more good manure to spread when he gets back, that we're shaking in our boots and want no more violence, then send him on his way. I tell him if the gang's not there when he returns, to come back and inform me. If they're there, just stick around. I and the posse will start for the ranch at two in the morning and if we don't meet you on the road we'll know they're still there.

  "He went home and turned around and come back to Sumner, arriving at midnight. Snow on the ground, cold enough to piss icicles, frost in his beard. They taken supper, he said, then mounted and left. We climbed on our mounts and pulled out for the ranch. I send Brazil ahead to see if they're back and go around by Lake Ranch and come down from the north just past Wilcox's, where Brazil meets us. He shows me their trail in the snow, heading east. After following it a short distance I know their destination: a deserted forage station made out of stone hard by Stinking Springs. When we're half a mile away, I caution my companions to preserve silence, as we have them trapped. We leave Juan Roibal in charge of the horses, divide the party, and circle the house. I'm inside the dry edge of a snow-filled arroyo scarcely fifty, maybe forty, feet from the door. Three horses are tied to the projecting vigas, which means two are inside with the five men. Shivering with cold, we await the dawn.

  "I'd coached the posse regarding Billy's togs, in particular his hat: wide-brimmed, light-colored, a Mex sugarloaf with an artistic braided green band around the crown. Some señorita wove that band for him. If he makes his appearance, fire at once, I said, and the rest will surrender. Shoot the Kid down first, ask questions later. He'd sworn that he'd never yield himself a prisoner but would die fighting with a revolver at each ear, and I knew he'd keep his word. Being in position to command the doorway, I said, When I raise, you also raise and fire.

  "Faint light. Cold dawn. We're shivering with cold from lying on the earth and a man appears at the open doorway wearing a hat which corresponds to my description. A nosebag in his hand to hang upon a pony. The doorway, understand, has no material door. It is just an opening. And there are no other openings save the window that faces us. I raise my rifle, the others do too, and seven bullets speed on their errand of dea
th."

  "Did you give them fair warning?" The drummer again.

  "I take no risks. I'm fond of my hide. And the reason I'm sheriff and have not been killed is I never give the other fellow a chance—not if I can help it."

  "Admirable," muttered Israel Jones.

  I looked him up and down, amused. His face darkened; he lit a cheroot. I was a little hoarse by now so I nodded to the drummer, who passed the bottle, and I medicined my throat. "I see it's not the Kid when he reels back toward the door—it's poor Charlie Bowdre, who wanted out so bad, if you recall, that he'd written to the governor. My heart bled for Charlie. Cod bless him, poor man. His ready-made conscience just didn't fit. I suppose Mrs. Bowdre had insisted he wear it, maybe even 'took it in' so it wouldn't be baggy." I hung quotes on the words. "But it's hard for some men to unglue from dear companions if they come to your ranch and ask to be fed and taunt you for demurring when they ride to depredations. Let that be a lesson. As to why he was wearing Billy's hat, I presume he just grabbed it. Or is this another instance of that savvy or luck for which the Kid was justly famous? Did he throw the hat at Charlie just before he stepped out? Here, warm your head. If so, the bitter pill must be hard to swallow now. To save his own hide, he sent the two men who were closest to his heart to die in his place. When everyone around you lives outside the law, when 110 rules exist and mayhem is common and every sort of debauchery and cruelness is run-of-the-mill, then survival depends on forgotten skills like knowing who-all to sacrifice.

  "Wilson shouted out that Bowdre was killed and wished to surrender. We laughed in our boots at this appositive. The young wounded brigand staggered at the door, not quite dead yet. I shouted for him to come out with his hands up but from behind him the Kid caught Charlie's belt, drew his revolver, placed it in his hand, and said to his friend, 'They've murdered you, Charlie, but you can take a few with you.' Bowdre come out with both arms in the air, the gun dangling from a finger, and him walking tangle-leg, left and then right, his head rolling like a melon. He wobbles in my direction, motions toward the house, and with a mouth full of blood, purls, 'I wish ... I wish...' He'd been shot in the groin, the gut, the neck, shot up so bad it was a wonder he could move. Each of his prints in the snow was pooled with blood. He falls in my arms and I roll him to the side and after a while when I reach out to feel him I find him frozen already, solid as a block of ice.