Lucky Billy (25 page)

What to do now? Blow up the world? He felt helpless, confused. The perception of impotence compelled him to check his weapon again, to break it open, rotate the cylinder, feel each round with the pads of his fingers. Shouts and laughter came from below. Glancing down, in the light of the red oily smoke pouring from the house, he saw shadows of men burdened with goods passing between Tunstall's store and the road. They were looting the store. It looked like someone'd found Yginio's fiddle and begun a reel because peanut-size phantoms danced in the lurid light, yellow devils from hell. Another fire in a barrel further down the road where Dudley's soldiers huddled lit up their button-faces. And Billy climbing higher. Where had the others gone? Did Macky make it out alive, where were Tom, Yginio, Charlie Bowdre, Jim French? The higher he climbed the darker it became and he soon began to feel the warm moisture of the clouds. Now he angled east. He wasn't lost but he felt it. He stumbled, tripped, lurched up against a cliff but it seemed to give way. He tried to step back but couldn't stop from spilling forward and tumbling down with groping hands through a needling softness and the oily smell again and, sinking gently, grabbing for branches, foundering, gliding, he lowered himself, floating, it seemed, then found he was blundering down a declivity, found his legs dancing rock to rock, the rocks moving, too, rolling beneath him, with him, around him, then grinding to a stop.

He sat. Ankles sore. Covered with dirt, some sliding down his neck. Stayed there a blessed while. The while stretched to hours; he'd curled on the ground. What happened down there, he wondered, sitting up, what had they done? Had Tunstall's avengers lost everything now? He couldn't see the fire. Bosky here, he sensed. Smell of piñón. He might be in a draw. Fie jumped up, continued, then felt his heart snap when, stopping at a sound, he heard footsteps in the dark, stumble-prone thumps. They were searching for him. He drew the Thunderer and padded softly forward expecting dogs to bark, torches to appear. "Who's there?" No answer. The heavy footsteps continued. There was nowhere to go. He didn't move. He absorbed more than saw a large hulking shadow approaching through the darkness, and cocked the Colt's. "Is that you, Tom?"

"It's me."

"Christ's sake, O'Folliard, how come you didn't answer?"

"I wasn't sure who it was."

"You almost got yourself shot."

"That would have been unfortunate. Jim found the horses."

"Our horses? Wiere?"

"Downstream. Almost to the Hondo."

"Where is he now?"

"Waiting over to Tinnie. It ain't all the horses. Only six."

"Only six? Who else is with him?"

"José and Charlie."

"So everyone made it?"

"Saw Harvey Morris fall."

"What about McSween?"

"I think he surrendered."

***

FOUR WERE KILLED
escaping the house, he later learned, most notably Macky. Two more dead inside from the fighting. Lallycooler Crawford took another week to die. Total, six Regulators, two Dolanites, and now Dolan and his men with a headlock on the town. Now the brush-poppers from Seven Rivers, emboldened by their triumph, began to terrorize the countryside. They'd been deputized by Sheriff Peppin and assisted by Colonel Dudley and the army but with the Regulators routed they were no longer needed and, the Kid suspected, they felt the lack of all the fun. They'd become a band of brothers. To them, normal life was dull by comparison to pillage and mayhem, so they stuck together and went on the warpath, and Billy couldn't get the Regulators to stop them. The Regulators could not even bury McSween, Lincoln was closed to them, townsfolk had to do it. Billy later learned he was laid beside Tunstall behind the latter's store—
grassed down,
folk said on their native island. But here no grass grew to cover the dirt.

The store itself had been plundered by the Dolanites. Fearing for her life, Sue McSween had fled to Las Vegas.

The crew from Seven Rivers decided to call themselves Wrestlers, or Rustlers, identical words if your mouth was full of chew, and they no longer merely robbed old ladies, tore the roofs off of stores, or shot Regulators' horses. Instead, under the leadership of a man named John Collins, they wrecked Will Hudgen's saloon in White Oaks, abused Hudgen's wife and sister, then ransacked Lincoln looking for Sue McSween. Billy insisted to the Coes and Fred Waite that they regroup and fight this scourge. This was no time to quit. Those hatchet men and murderers, those weasels, those—

"What about them?" said Fred. "They won, didn't they?"

"It ain't over yet."

The Wrestlers broke into houses, stole horses, burned ranches, trashed stores, shot to cripple. They looted and burned the Coe ranch on the Hondo, and rode up to three adolescent boys cutting hay in the fields on José Chavez's ranch and murdered all three and ran off with their horses. At Martin Sanchez's farm, they wounded a farmhand and shot Martin's fourteen-year-old son, Gregorio, through the heart. Two days later, under a black moon on the Bonito, they dragged the wives of two employees at Bartlett's gristmill into the bushes, held knives to their throats, and took turns raping them.

Then like scorpions in a jar they turned on each other. As Billy heard it, John Collins was poisoned by God knows who, and John Selman and Ed Hart aspired for his position. While Hart's wife cooked dinner, the victorious Selman shot her husband through the brow, splattering his brains into the skillet that held their sizzling steaks.

As at Macky's house, Billy found himself rousting up sponges when he rallied the Regulators. It was like trying to throw snakes into a gunny sack. Then, exactly like the Wrestlers, or Rustlers, all they could really do was pillage, for when rage overflows and thins as it spreads it finds expression in happenstance. The Regulators accosted a traveler on the Roswell road and took his horse and money. They raided the Casey ranch and stole more stock and at Charles Fritz's ranch they stampeded a hundred and fifty head of cattle and rounded up fifteen horses. They placed pistols to the heads of Fritz's two sons, and Fred Waite asked Billy, "Are you sure you want to do this?"

"Any excuse for a party," he said.

"You mean these are the fellows who killed Mr. Tunstall?"

They weren't, of course. The Kid ordered them released. He wasn't sure what to do and sometimes he didn't care. The war wasn't over, he blared to the others, but even he saw it had become a war by proxy, for when you can't kill the principals then you terrorize their sympathizers. Or just lash out at anyone. They stole every horse at the Mescalero Apache Reservation Agency and killed the agency clerk, Morris Bernstein. Or Bernstein rode into the crossfire between the Regulators and a band of Indians, and wound up dead. But who turned out his pockets? Who took his rifle, pistol, and cartridge belts? Events were in the saddle, you hung on for the ride, and often Billy thought that the wood tick in his ear that always told him what to do had died and tumbled out like a piece of cold wax. Then he thought, no he hadn't. If he died I wouldn't know it. The fact that I'm thinking about him in this manner means he's still there.

I never listened to him anyway.

The more gadfly he grew the more he hated himself. Reasoning creatures began to vacate the county. The Beckwiths fled. Buck Powell and Lewis Paxton pulled up stakes and decamped. In Roswell and Seven Rivers, the post offices were closed. A contingent of Mormons who'd immigrated to Lincoln County sold their ranches and left; this was no place for a Stake of Zion, they said. Much to Billy's dismay, John Middleton racked out for Kansas and Henry Brown for Texas. In Washington, President Rutherford Hayes removed Governor Axtell from office and appointed the Civil War general and novelist Lew Wallace as the new governor of New Mexico Territory.

Even Frank and George Coe, two of the Kid's oldest friends, announced they'd sold their ranch and would pull for Colorado. They'd had enough of the outlaw life and urged Billy to join them. All still had warrants against them and now a new governor would make sure they were enforced.

"You can't go," Billy said. "I'm the decider. I'm still after the mob that murdered Mr. Tunstall."

"It's a clone deal," said George, holding up his hand. He wiggled the stump of the finger shot off by Buckshot Roberts at Blazer's Mill. "We sold out. We're gone. Come with us, Kid."

The taste in Billy's mouth was wormwood and gall. "I'm no quitter."

In late September, the Kid, Fred Waite, and Tom O'Folliard rode east from San Pat with a stolen remuda. Outside La Junta, they passed señoritas with
ollas
balanced on their heads. The walnuts, box elders, and cottonwoods overhead on the Lincoln-Roswell road were heavy with leaves, which cooled the hot clay. Mexicans at one farm had begun their threshing: on a circle of ground outside their adobe, they'd leveled the earth and spread it with straw and splashed on water and allowed the mud to harden. Now goats and mules, driven in circles, trampled the sheaves in the afternoon sun. Behind them, Billy saw, boys with pitchforks made from forked branches threw up the crushed wheat to catch in the wind, and gradually the chaff idled toward the edges in circular windrows like ripples in water. He knew the grain left behind would be tossed in the air with long-handled shovels to free it from goat dung then washed and spread on a canvas to dry before being carted in sacks to the gristmill.

Further clown the road, outside a barn, women beat corn in wooden
cemidors
to separate the kernels, which fell on lengths of canvas. Men cut needle grass with short-handled sickles on the banks of the river and sang as they cut. The Kid had cut grass in exactly this manner, helping out his friends Yginio and José. As the men below him sprang up and bent down, sprang up and bent clown, he felt his body absorbing their rhythms, his own back and arms going through the same motions. The grass lay in long rows. The wind whipped through this valley. A mule pulled a
carreta
driven by a young boy—he looked all of seven—toward the rows of cut grass. And on a fence, magpies laughed; why hadn't this behavior, their mocking seemed to say, been blown to smithereens like every other thing of duty and custom inside Lincoln County? Why hadn't it, too, become ashes and debris?

Billy and his friends could have been riding through the Bible.

Now and then beyond the farmers he glimpsed a river, the Hondo, that had grown too shy on water to flow; instead, it pooled between rocks.

They would take their stolen horses to west Texas by way of Los Portales and sell them there; then steal more horses on the Llano and bring them east to White Oaks and sell them to the miners. East and west, back and forth: a Sisyphean life. The Kid thought, I'm just a horse thief again. As they emerged from the foothills it was cock-shut time on the flatlands below: beginning twilight. The prairie flared up like an all-body rash which the shadow of the Capitans, creeping east, slowly balmed. Billy led them north skirting Blackwater Draw and continuing northeast across darkening plains. When it was dark enough they camped underneath the stars, burning sage and old booshwa in this seldom-crossed land. Tom brewed some coffee and brought Billy a cup. After a while, the fire declined to ashes and short-lived coals, the day's surviving heat cooled. "Has anyone ever counted those stars?" the Kid asked Fred.

"I did once."

"How many did you get?"

"One thousand eight hundred and thirty-two. But by the time you get a count there's new ones come up. The sky continues turning. You must keep on adding stars. I've never had the patience to keep it up for very long. I've tried different ways. Divide the sky in quadrants, count the stars in a quadrant, multiply by four. The trouble with that is they aren't spread out even. Look at your Milky Way—one long string of clusters. Anyways, a Frenchman thought he figured it out. He did a scientific count, got forty-seven thousand, three hundred ninety."

"That many?"

"That many. But then an Englishman got over ninety thousand. And a German after that come up with three hundred twenty-four thousand. It just keeps on growing. Like frog eggs in a pond. And there's plenty we don't see. They're too far away. Counting's important but what you see now—we're just scratching the surface."

They watched the sky in silence.

The next morning, removing the hobbles from the horses, Billy said, "Where's that Appaloosa?"

Fred and Tom looked around at the emptiness. Flattened out by hidden powers, by a cosmic rolling pin, the desert's false limits suggested immensities. Only to the west, where the mountains got pushed, did distance seem real.

"And the croppy? I only count twelve. We began with fourteen. You hobbled every one, Tom?"

Tom nodded and shrugged.

"I see tracks going west."

"You want to follow them?" asked Fred.

Billy couldn't decide. "That won't bring us to our milk."

The following morning they struck the wagon road leading to Fort Sumner
and held it for a while. But it made the Kid nervous; there could be other traffic. They strayed north toward evening, the sun at their backs growing weaker as it set. Already, its strength was in the other direction. It was circling the world to come all the way around and summon their shadows strung out before them. A cloudbank to the east looked so low in the sky it coidd have been a dust storm, though the air hardly stirred. The sun against this cloudbank gave it knobby contours, it shifted erratically, drifting in all directions. They heard a crepitating rumble. As wide as the desert, behind a sudden wall of wind, the cloud overtook them and they were plunged into a furnace whose whining roar and screech of dry wings sounded uncannily like actual fire. Fred waved his hat, Tom pulled his jacket over his head, his mount spinning around, but Billy just sat there unmoving on his horse laved by the grasshoppers brushing his eyebrows, catching in his shirt, trying to squeeze into his mouth. The air had gone black with them. They crawled through his mare's mane, devoured mites in her ears, and would not be shaken out. In a gesture as ancient as petitioning redress or expressing ecstasy, Billy flung his arms out to the sky and one landed on his hand and he brought it to his face: bucket-headed, pop-eyed, caparisoned, strapped, with muscular, buttressed, piston-femur legs, fully charged in its stillness, slime-green and black. Hello. He'd seen them like this in huge swarms before but mostly through windows. He'd watched them cover the roofs, doors, and shutters of stables and barns, and strip a field within minutes of everything but stalks. He'd even seen them peel fences and boards. They stripped objects so bare they no longer had names. The grasshopper snapped from his hand into shrapnel and the air ripped around him. These were angry beasts; there was nothing here for them. In the absence of crops, they'd become a din of beggars sounding clack dishes. He detected a tremble. The earth or his horse? A worm of fear began to spiral. It could be they'd lost their compass, they'd be stuck here for hours. You want to keep going west to the Rio Grande valley where green things still grow, he urged them. And as he thought it, they rivered. The shattered pieces scrolled and light leapt from earth and the blind cloud flooded the sky and was gone, its roar shrunk to nothing.