Lucky Billy (20 page)

They must stone a Chinaman and of course that eats up time. He wishes he could steal the costume jewelry from Derbyshire's window and bring it home to his mother, and he lingers there staring. He lingers and lingers, Silver City invites it. He must race the street Arabs. He must visit his stepfather at the mine where he works a few miles above Silver. Antrim stands in a smashscape outside the shaft house holding his wheelbarrow filled with gray gangue as his stepson approaches. I low is she? he asks. Tired most always, Henry informs him, when will you come home? She's as thin as a straw, she coughs all the time.

I wouldn't like to see that, Bill Antrim says. He doesn't set down the wheelbarrow.

Henry stares at the man who, a year or so ago, married his mother and loaned him his surname. He knows what Antrim thinks: some things have to be just because they have to be; there's nothing I can do about it. He remembers firing a shotgun in the hills near this mine under Antrim's supervision, he and his brother, Josie, when they moved to Silver City. They were shooting at pumpkins placed on a stump in a pinscape of stumps, for all the spruces and firs around Silver City had been cut down for timbering the mines. A slight boy, only twelve, when Henry's turn came he thought for a moment that the burro he and Josie had ridden to this place had kicked him in the chest. He'd fallen—been walloped—on his skinny ass upon pulling the trigger, and lay there as though just having woken up from a Rip Van Winkle sleep. It wasn't only the shock of being knocked over; it was the deafening sound inches from his ear that left a ringing blank and cracked the world in two. Did I die? he asked, and Antrim and Josie laughed, looking down.

Consider that a rehearsal, said Bill Antrim. Everyone dies. Everyone's bullet has been assigned. You might as well get up. This ain't your time yet.

When is my time?

Nobody knows. It was writ down somewheres a long time ago. It's your destiny, said Antrim. You can't do much about it.

Poor shaken Henry climbed to his feet and brushed off his pants. The shotgun lay there on the ground.

Both of you boys ought to know right now the way the world runs. Some things happen because they have to happen. You can't change them or stop them. No use of crying about what never was or could of been. Never say
if only
or
would of
or
could of.
There's no going back. Your votes were cast a long time ago and they weren't cast by you.

Henry asked, Who were they cast by?

By the armies that foughten the war when you were born. Oh yes, there was a war. A war in the heavens.

Who won?

Henry's stepfather laughed. I suppose you'll find out when you die, you little shit.

You'd think that Antrim was a hard man for saying such things, the Kid thought years later—for telling young Henry his bullet was fired the moment he was born and would follow him all his life, taking every turn he took. But he wasn't, he was soft, as soft as cream pie. He was helpless—that was Antrim's dirty secret. His nose and chin appeared to pinch together, buffered by his mustache, and his voice went so low his stepson could barely hear it. The same tiling happens when Henry finds him at the mine and tells him about Catherine and asks when he's coming home. After a pause and gentle frown accompanied by a downward cast of eyes, in a voice less voice than a rustle of leaves and a scraping of twigs, William Antrim, wheelbarrow still hanging from his arms, says of his wife lying on her deathbed, I wouldn't like to see that. That's not the Catherine I remember.

Mother has friends who look in, Henry knows, and Josie still lives there, she doesn't need Bill Antrim. Or himself, for that matter. He takes to sleeping in the warm ashes outside the ovens at the brickyards—to stealing pig's feet at the Blue Goose and boiled eggs at the Orleans Club, and to doing chores for Mary Richards, the teacher, who can write equally well with either hand and whose cheeks are not cadaverous. It is Mary who insists that he sit with his mother. Mary who threatens to take him by the hand all the way to the cabin at the end of the bridge across the big ditch, which would kill him with shame. I'll go myself, he says. Bring me a lock of her hair, says Miss Richards. Mary says she remembers just a year ago Catherine singing and dancing the Highland fling. She baked bread, she cooked for the children at school, she took in laundry, she laughed like a schoolgirl. Goodness, her voice would charm hardened criminals! Well, he'd figured on moving back anyway, is why he pulls the latchstring on the cabin, pads into the room, stumbles on a boot, eye-strings on the strain. Windows all shawled, unlit candle by the bed.
Henry,
she whispers.
Is that you, Henry?

Where's Josie? he asks.

He moved in at the butcher's.

How come?

He couldn't stomach the smell.

He feeds her the chicken broth she instructs him on making. He helps her to the jakes. He holds one of her hands in both of his and squeezes it repeatedly and, in pain from the consumption, she squeezes back. Then one day she yanks out her hand, points at the ceiling, and sputtering the sharp tool that once had been her voice, exclaims,
He's smiling!
She looks frightened, excited, amazed, a little puzzled, and sinks back on her pillow. Then shoots up and desperately blares,
She's
smiling!
She's smiling!

Henry peers up at the cracked beams and water-stained boards. Who, Ma?

Her lungs fill with fluid. A young priest arrives, summoned by their neighbor Mrs. Conner, and mumbles some prayers, and Catherine's breathing grows more rattled and hoarse. She hyperventilates, her keyhole-shaped mouth voraciously open, can't get enough air. Then she falls into a sleep and will not be woken up. Henry holds her limp hand. She breathes slow and even, fizzing her lips upon the exhale like an infant making bubbles. This lasts all day until late afternoon when, as though stung, she suddenly winces. Henry thinks the pain has returned and squeezes her hand; no response. He's seen that wince a thousand times before, when she pricked her finger sewing or touched her wrist to a stove. Usually she'd say,
Cripes
or
Oh shoot.
Her hand begins to cool.

Outside, he spots two dogs going at it and ferociously, blindly, pelts them with stones.

And this is the way he sees her even now in a sanctum of his mind: behind a splintered door in darkness, pinched dirt Hindering down from the ceiling. Clothes piled on the bed. Her ashen face. Always a membrane of moisture on her skin, even now, in death. Hair matted and wet. Head slumped forward, eyes softly closed, though the white of one eye bulges like an egg forcing open the parted lids just a sliver. She summons him there, to her side, once again. Sometimes he locks her up in that room in his mind or finds himself playing jackstraws with Josie when she calls them out the window, not in Silver City now, now it's the tenement in New York, and he and his brother squatting in the dirt outside the school sinks.
Don't look me in,
she says.
Remember I said don't let anyone cheat you and if you do, settle it yourself?

I don't hold with any other way.

The dead had left her alone, she always said. It wasn't the living who'd abandoned poor Catherine, it was the dead, and she vowed not to do the same. In her opinion, the dead ought to stick around. Stay with you. Be dead. But
be
there, alongside.
When I stepped off the ship I had no idea who I was or where I'd come from. I wasn't even sure what the buttons of my shoes were supposed to do. When I first saw that place, the ant hill in the sky, I promised myself never to die there. It was no kind of place for any man or woman and one thing I noticed they didn't say potato, no, they said podado. I remember holding you in the palm of my hand, no larger than a squash, little Henry McCarty.

Henry Antrim.

Antrim came later. If you suffered from something, from a toothache or the flux, why, I would come down with the same blessed thing just by feeling bad about it, by imagining how you felt in my mind, so best keep away. It works both ways. What a small nut we lived in on Cherry Street, Henry. What a hot place in summer and the North Pole in winter.

He still holds her hand. Still feels it growing colder. Ma, can I have a lock of your hair?

To remember me by? It's just a mess of dry grass.

He has his own penknife. He reaches out and saws, pulling on a tress, appalled as the skin lifts from her smooth scalp and stretches to a point, and frightened by the eye-white bulging through its lids, a big dry eye as round as a cow's, though just a paring of it shows. How did he get here, what should he do, who crammed so much grief and confoundment in his heart?
He's after going out west,
he remembers she told him and Josie one day coming home from the market.

Who, Ma?

Mr. Antrim.

That had to be before they moved to Wichita. By the time she married Antrim in the church in Santa Fe, Henry could sign his name with either hand, the first thing his teacher Mary Richards noticed when they arrived in Silver City. He and his brother signed the marriage book as witnesses: Henry McCarty, Josie McCarty. But who the dickens was McCarty?

Never you mind. Old carrion, so.

Billy looks around. He's done it again. He's decided what to do without deciding what to do. He's rounded the Capitans toward Agua Azul, heading south, not north.
Good for you, boy.
And he continues. Why not? Neither way makes more sense than the other. Besides, goers-backward never come out ahead. And anyway he's tired. The insupportable vexation of always being on the move only gets balmed by not thinking about it. There's a hard glassy edge to everything he sees, a brittle sense of melancholic dislocation, though he knows this land well. The blur to the east could be sandstorms or haze, hard to tell which. Between here and there: sharp outline of hill, south-facing slopes beginning to green, two or three wind-battered trees in a hollow alone with their buds. A pungency in the air. Crushed cinchweed on this little-used trail. So he's going to Mexico. He concludes it must be that. Even though it feels like a version of himself tied to an ankle and stuffed with sawdust that has made this decision. There's no forward spill. It impedes his sense of urgency. How mortifyingly slow everything happens, how sluggishly his carcass gets dragged by events. Just one damn thing after another, and who gives a shit?

A bright cube of rolling thread tumbles in air, catches the light, elongates, contracts, like some caught thing underwater. Then another. Another. The air's crazy with them, slowly trembling and spinning. Now and then Billy glimpses inside the gauzy cages a squirt of black spider. Spiders swim past piloting their aircraft and there's not a breath of wind. Their tumbling outlines and boxes of light shift in the air in diminishing stairways from here to the horizon.

He spots on the ground, in the lengthening shadow of his horse, four red blossoms arranged in a wheel just opening as the shadow falls across them, or maybe one blossom, four petals. Each is almond-shaped. Then, bending from the horse, he sees it is not a flower at all. It's four bird-chicks opening their mouths, thinking the shadow is their ma's, come to feed them. Here, the land gently troughs and cottonwoods appear and half a dozen cattle erratically maunder through a basin below. One walks into a tree trunk, veers, makes a circle, walks into another. Another lows as the Kid approaches, and swings his head around, and Billy's gullet clenches. The steer's eyes are sewn shut; pus leaks through the stitches. He's heard about this but hasn't seen it till now. It makes wandering cattle stay closer to home.

A faint wagon road runs through this valley, and more trees appear, Gambel oaks and willows, grass and hard mud cracked into octagons. A fence. A stone hut, long ago abandoned. The valley widens, loses definition, a
bosque
rises out of the dancing heat lines. An adobe, corrals, broken gates, a fallow garden.
Carretas,
forked plows abandoned on their sides. The house a burnt shell. Adobe walls broken, timbers caved in, mud roof cracked apart and sitting on the floor, cold smell of scorched wood. Another casualty of the Lincoln County War. Sprawled in the yard beside the
homo
in back is the corpse of a man, his features burned off. His splayed arms and legs are charred stumps: a black star. The headless skeleton of a boy reclines against a tree, strips of clothing and flesh still hanging from his bones. His head has rolled off and is arranged in the dirt with a cigar in its mouth.

An hour or so later, Billy's horse bogs down, his hooves suck mud. Then he notices the willows and recognizes where he is and it comes with a shock: Blackwater Holes. This is where he shot Morton and Baker, where McCloskey got killed, where it all became unstoppable. Coming on it now from the opposite direction, his mind must adjust its panels and mirrors. Yellow cliffs of that
cuesta
ahead where the draw swings south. Bare cottonwoods below. New grass, willows blowing over into yellow, tule shooting up.

Eyes moving everywhere, nowhere, stuck. His horse stops. There's something wrong with my mind. Who was it called me malignant and cruel, a minion of the devil? He leaves the trail, skirts La Junta, decides to miss the canyon where Mr. Tunstall was murdered and pulls for a shortcut to the Ham Mills Trail. This unexpected tour of old abominations is taking its toll. Where Tunstall was murdered in cold blood.
Is there any other way except cold, young man?

Down and bloody, Ma. Hot. Drunk on killing.

Suddenly he remembers he doesn't have a weapon. The whole day must be revised. Caution flows back like an acid to burn the complacency off his journey from Las Tablas. He feels a goneness on his hip. He stops, looks behind, listens for a while. Same old vigilance. Yet now he feels naked.

Sun to the southwest long in the sky so hot on his face it burns like ice. The cattle in the new grass in Pajarito Flats are undoubtedly the same as three years ago but no longer belong to Dick Brewer, of course. Nothing belongs to Dick Brewer anymore; and he belongs to nothing, he's just a troubled thought. The long day gives the Kid a second helping of time and this horse, at least, humps it. By sundown he's crossing the trickling Feliz below Mr. Tunstall's ranch; it now belongs to James Dolan. It's still faintly light when he ties to the snubbing pole at John Meadows's log cabin on the Peñasco. He can't hallo the house. Must he careful. Tries peeking in a window but it's so filthy all he sees is scrabbled murk and yellow light inside obscured by many gouges. He approaches the door, knocks meekly, backs off, then steps behind a Cottonwood. Behind the door, Meadows closes his twelve-gauge with a
shlang,
which Billy hears clearly. Exactly the point. "
Who?
" he growls.