The Last Shootist Read online

  Mr. Skelly positioned his equipment, angling the maple Conley eight-by-ten camera on its tripod down on Books before ducking under green baize cloth to adjust the focus on its twelve-inch rectilinear lens.

  Pushing his opening, the lanky reporter began to drill. “So, Marshal, what have you concluded from this gory mess?”

  Thibido surveyed the big saloon. “Well, all of El Paso’s hard cases seem to have convened to gun each other down. I’ll propose to the city council we pay for these burials, since they’ve done us a civic favor. No innocents lost in here today.”

  “Any idea who shot first, or why?”

  “Nope. Except to burnish their bad reputations? Pulford and Serrano were mankillers. Jay Cobb was just a pimple-faced punk, a sharpshooter only with his mouth. Jerk didn’t stand a Chinaman’s chance against these gunslingers. And J. B. Books, well, his reputation rode into town before he did.” The marshal sighed, exhausted at just the thought of how much legal trouble cleaning up this big mess was going to be.

  “I’ll tell you straight, Dobkins. We’ve had bloody hell here these past ten years, since John Selman blew Wes Hardin’s brains out in the Acme in ’95. Then Scarborough killed Selman. Then some tough killed Selman. Before that marshal Stoudenmire shot Hale Manning and his brother Frank retaliated, killing the marshal.” The short, well-dressed lawman gestured around the barroom with vigor.

  “Now I’m standing at six-shooter junction. If these shootists don’t stop invading our fair city to assassinate each other, there’s going to be nothing left of El Paso but burnt dirt!”

  Both men were distracted by the sight of two young boys playing with Jack Pulford. The cardsharp was slumped against the back wall of the Constantinople. J. B. Books had killed him from sixteen feet, both men standing and firing at each other. One shot, right in the heart. But the bullet, stopped by fibrous heart muscle, hadn’t exited, and now the two boys, who must have snuck in the back door, were bent over Pulford’s corpse, playfully lifting his slack left arm up and down. With each lever action of his pump handle arm, blood swelled from the wound in the deceased’s chest. The mischievous boys were pumping a dead man dry.

  Appalled, the city marshal yelled to another deputy. “Jackson! Get those damned kids outta here! Playin’ with the corpses. Christ!”

  “So Marshal, you have no idea how five noted gunslingers managed to show up in the same saloon at the same time in broad daylight for the shoot-out of the century, right under your nose?”

  Walter Thibido had had enough.

  “No, by ginger, I don’t! And I’ve had quite enough of you today, too.” His face flushed red, one neck vein began to pulse as he shouted. “I want everyone not involved in this police investigation out of this saloon right now!” The marshal pulled his own pistol to wave above his head. “That includes children, dogs, and journalists!”

  At that moment, Skelly puffed hard into the brass pipe in his mouth, squeezed the bulb, and his exhalation blew the alcohol flame through the rear of the tin trough he was holding and ignited the magnesium powder in the trough. For a second the barroom lit up like the Fourth of July.

  Everyone—children, dog, deputies, the marshal, frightened bystanders—jumped. They might have all been standing in Hades’ waiting room. The photographer quickly extinguished the flame, put down his flashpan, and began fanning away the cloud of smoke. Five corpses never moved a muscle.

  Three

  Gillom avoided details over his mother’s supper that night, saying only that people had been shot in the Constantinople that afternoon, probably Books, too. Bond Rogers had decided to move her son out of his smaller upstairs bedroom and open that one up to another boarder, if any roomers ever showed up on her doorstep again after all this bloody mayhem. She wanted Gillom staying in J. B. Books’s larger downstairs room. The shootist had left nothing behind but his notorious reputation and the fact he’d shot two country cousins who’d tried to kill him in that very corner room only a week ago. No respectable person would rent a room housing those murderous ghosts till long forgot. She also thought it would be easier to keep track of her delinquent son in a main-floor room, right below hers.

  Gillom was happy to help his mother move his clothes downstairs to Books’s suddenly vacant quarters. His nostrils still caught scent of the faint mix of flaming gunpowder and urine from when Books had doused the burning bedsheets with the contents of his piss pot after those two jaspers had tried to murder him right there. His mother had bought new bedding and a mattress, to which he quickly gave a bounce test. Gillom rose from the refurbished bed and went to the west and then the south windows, sliding their wooden sashes higher to let in more cool night air. These glassed downstairs windows will make my comings and goings easier, he realized.

  Gillom returned to bed, pulled his bedspread up higher against the spring chill. But he was restless, squirming under stiff, new sheets, nerves still taut from the events of his momentous day. The seventeen-year-old jerked again from bed, padded in nightshirt and bare feet to the curtained closet. He groped the top shelf inside where he had dumped his cowboy hat and leather baseball glove and pulled Books’s whiskey bottle from a cubbyhole his mother had missed. A corner of redeye remained.

  Hurling himself back into bed, Gillom made the wooden frame sway and creak. Nestling with his prize, he pulled the cork with his teeth, grimaced as the whiskey seared his palate. He mused: Men drank whiskey, tough men like J. B. Books. I’ll have to get used to this harsh taste. My sarsaparilla days are over.

  Burning alcohol slid down his teenaged gullet and mixed with the warm beer he’d gulped six hours earlier. Gillom Rogers relaxed, remembering the first time he’d encountered the famous gunman, just a week ago. Books had spotted him spying, grabbed him by the throat and yanked him right up to this very room’s window. Nearly choked him out before the sick old man had collapsed on the windowsill, exhausted. Gillom dozed.

  He awoke to whispers on the wind. Curtains in the west window to the side of his headboard moved in the morning breeze. Bright sunlight. A giggle and a loud sssshh. I’m not dreaming, somebody is spying on me! Eyes wide, Gillom leapt out of bed, jumped to the open window, thrust his head outside.

  “Hey!” The gigglers jerked back in fear, surprised by the teenager’s suddenness. “Don’t you spy on me! I’ll whup your setters so hard, you’ll stand for a week!”

  Then he launched right through the open window to do it. Frightened by this angry young man right in their small faces, the two peepers turned tail and skedaddled across the grassy yard. A skinny tyke with black hair and big ears and a taller towhead.

  Both boys flew over his mother’s picket fence on the bounce.

  Must have talked to someone, heard what I did, Gillom thought. Gol-lee! I’m notorious before breakfast!

  * * *

  His mother sat at the head of the long dining table, Daily Herald in hand. Her right hand quivered as she turned the front page to continue reading about El Paso’s killings yesterday. Her intake of breath startled the silence. She’d read her son’s name again in the newspaper.

  Gillom slunk into the dining room. He’d heard her crank telephone in the front parlor ring several times, but had dozed until little boys whispering outside his window had pulled him from conflicted sleep. He could see from the Herald’s headline how deep he was in.…

  INVITATION TO A GUNFIGHT! J. B. BOOKS KILLED IN EL PASO BLOODBATH!

  His mother lowered the paper to search him with haunted eyes. She shoved her untouched plate of eggs and biscuit and unsipped cup of coffee along the tabletop.

  “You eat my breakfast. I have no appetite.”

  “Ma, please.”

  “Please. That’s a funny word, isn’t it? How one can twist its meaning into something completely different. You displease me greatly. My son, the only child I have born, is now a killer.”

  “Did him a favor, mother. Mister Books asked me to. It was … merciful.”

  Her face was drawn, but her voice remarkably
level.

  “It was a bloody slaughter. Which you evidently helped arrange. For some kind of payoff. Oh yes, I read you took his guns.”

  “It was our deal. His pistols for my service. Mister Books didn’t wish to die in bed, so he committed suicide.”

  “In public. And by assisting him in this public slaughter, you’ve brought shame upon us. Disgraced our family’s proud name … around all of Texas. Forever.”

  Her son waved his hands to stop. “Mother! People are saying Mister Books did El Paso a public service. Rid this town of all its hard cases. And I helped him do it.”

  Her eyes flared. “I didn’t read that in here.” She tapped the inky newsprint with a sharp fingernail. “You are named the assassin’s assistant.… Where are they?”

  “What?”

  “His guns.”

  “Oh. They’re well hid.”

  “We’ll have to turn them in. To the marshal. I’m sure they’ll be wanted.”

  “Be damned if I will.”

  “Gillom!”

  “Look, I’m not breaking any law. Thibido will just sell ’em, after the court work is done. He’s a shyster, a peacock. His deputies do all his dirty work.”

  “Well you’re already infamous, taking his guns and using them on poor Mister Books. If you’re seen on the street with those pistols, somebody will try to shoot you, too, to steal them. Until we’re rid of those bad luck weapons, wash our hands thoroughly of this shameful business, more trouble will follow us. I feel pain in my bones already.”

  Gillom rose from the table, his loaned breakfast untouched.. “Be goddamned if I give up those guns. To anybody. I earned ’em.”

  His threat hanging heavy, the young man stomped back down the hall to his room. His disobedience, again, finally cracked his mother. Bond burst into tears, slamming both palms onto the hard wooden table.

  “Damn you, John Bernard Books!”

  If anybody but the Lord had been listening, they’d have been shocked. It was the first time Bond Rogers had ever sworn.

  Four

  Gillom left by a side window in his back bedroom, a new convenience keeping his mother from interrogating him coming and going from their house. He stopped to pull his new guns from their hiding hole in the woodpile next to the storage shed. He fondled his prizes. These were 1890 Remingtons, basically the 1875 model with the webbed underbarrel assembly cut away. They were chambered for centerfire .44-.40 brass cartridges blasted through 5½" barrels. A hot lead load of 40 grains of black powder, the bullets of which could be used interchangeably in the famous Winchester ’73 rifle. He stuck them inside his leather belt, butts forward, out of sight under his blue wool sack coat. Gillom stepped over the yard’s white picket fence and hurried downtown.

  He headed up Overland, turned one block north onto noisy San Antonio Street, one of the main merchant byways of booming El Paso at its hard turn into a new century. He strode past the Liberty Bakery, Gamozzi’s Ice Cream Parlor, C. S. Pickerell’s Confectionary, any of which might have tempted his sweet tooth. He headed toward the meat markets farther down the chuck-holed, sand-and-gravel street. Two gigantic Percheron draft horses pulled a long wagon loaded with barrels of beer fresh from the brewery bound for one of the ninety-six saloons crowded all over this border town.

  On the northeast corner of Mesa and San Antonio streets stood his favorite, the old Acme Saloon, where he normally would have snuck in the back to check the day drinkers and drunks dozing off a long night before. It was in the Acme’s front barroom where the West’s most notorious shootist, John Wesley Hardin, was rolling dice for drinks on a hot August night in 1895. John Selman stepped inside the batwing front door and dropped his prey like a stone with one lucky shot right in the back of Wes Hardin’s head. Selman got off on that murder charge even though Hardin never had a gunfighting chance. For even as an older man, Hardin was still quite dangerous and generally disliked around El Paso.

  The Acme Saloon was thus consecrated ground to Gillom. But this crisp spring day he bypassed his shrine. Jim Dandy’s Leather Goods was near some of the meat markets on San Antonio Street, close to the source of the cowhides they worked into their leather products. And the stench from Jim’s tanning vats blended in with the smell of butchered beeves aging on big iron hooks in the meat markets, so those butchers didn’t complain. To them that stench smelled like money.

  Gillom found the proprietor behind a wooden counter in back and told him what he wanted: a double-holster rig in good condition. Mr. Dandy, or whatever his real name was, peered over bifocals.

  “New or used?”

  “Uh, new.”

  The proprietor pulled off a peg a brown leather holster and cartridge belt with a bronze buckle in front and cartridge loops around the back. Two more leather strips were spaced apart and stitched across the gun pockets to strengthen them and support each pistol. Gillom took the double-loop rig and strapped it on.

  “Stiff.”

  Jim nodded. “It’s new. Leather loosens as it’s broken in, gets comfortable around your waist.”

  “How much?”

  “Forty dollars. We’ll embross that leather for you, your name, any design you want, for an extra ten.”

  Gillom frowned. “Got anything cheaper?”

  Mr. Dandy sucked his teeth, moved to a darkened corner and pulled open a bottom drawer of an old desk. He returned blowing dust off another double rig, this one naturally brown.

  “This is a money belt. Cowhide’s doubled over and stitched together on top. See this slit inside here you can slip coins in to hide safely? You slide the belt’s billet into this slit, so your coins won’t fall out. Your silver dollars will add weight to this double rig, but no one’s the wiser when you’re travelin’.”

  The single-loop holster had several dull-colored silver conchos attached around the belt and on each gun sheath. Its worn leather was very flexible when the young man strapped it on.

  “Conchos are a little scratched, but they’ll shine up again, that buckle, too,” Mr. Dandy added.

  This time Gillom drew the six-guns from beneath his belt and slid them into the holsters, then raised and lowered the revolvers several times with his palms on each grip, testing for a smooth pull.

  He smiled, liking the feel. “How much?”

  Mr. Dandy eyed the teenager, calculating. “Twenty-five dollars, for those fancy conchos.”

  “Throw in some silver polish?”

  “Dollar extra.”

  Gillom tried a quick draw with his stronger hand, his right, but caught the revolver’s barrel on the sheath’s lip. There was no front sight on either pistol’s barrel to cause this, so he adjusted the height of the rig on his slim hips. He tried again, cleared leather easily.

  “Be faster, you soap that leather good, then oil it,” said Jim.

  He tried another draw with his off hand, his left, and was successful. Gillom grinned. He drew both guns. The three-pound revolvers seemed made to fill his strong hands and slid out of their protective pockets slicker than greased piglets. Cocky, pleased with his first attempts, Gillom spun the .44 by its trigger guard, like any teenager trying to show off a flashy spin before jamming his gun back into the leather. His index finger tapped the Remington’s trigger, however, and that was all it took. A bullet banged into the store’s upper wall, ricocheted off the arched wooden ceiling, and zinged harmlessly into the wooden wall directly behind him. A three-bank shot! Jim Dandy disappeared.

  Two Mexican leatherworkers piled out of the rear workroom, one of them pointing a revolver! Mr. Dandy rose from behind the counter red-faced.

  “Jesus, kid! Put that pistol away until you learn how to use it!”

  “Sorry.” Gillom unbuckled quickly and folded holster and guns to lay on the counter. “Trigger’s a little touchy.”

  “Are they even yours?” The shop owner was angry at how scared he’d shown.

  “Yes! J. B. Books himself willed ’em to me … after he died. They’re special Remingtons, custom-made.”r />
  “Books, huh? You’re the kid mentioned in the paper today.”

  Gillom nodded. Jim Dandy eyed him with new appreciation.

  “Books prob’ly had ’em sweetened. Gunfighters like to file down the notch on the hammer, loosen the spring on the trigger so it’ll pull sweet. Damn trick guns’ll go off if you breathe on ’em. Oughta get those fixed, before you blow your toes off.”

  “I’m sorry.…” Gillom paid with clean bills folded in his pocket—Books’s money left for his mother, which he’d stolen. He didn’t dare complain when Mr. Dandy charged him another dollar each for the saddle soap, bottle of gun oil, and tin of silver polish.

  Gillom left the leather shop in a hurry, his ill-gotten goods wrapped in burlap. His mother was right. He couldn’t be seen wearing these famous guns around El Paso, at least until some of the trouble stirred up by Books’s fatal gunfight had died down. Gillom had only John Bernard’s word he could have these weapons, regardless of the outcome of the bloodletting. Books’s letter to his mother that Gillom had found in his room, leaving her a sum of money, $532, he’d destroyed, so that the secondhand man who quickly showed up that night to take possession of Books’s few personals hadn’t been able to snatch his famous guns in the bargain. Gillom professed ignorance of their whereabouts, though Mr. Steinmetz hadn’t believed him. But his bill of sale from Books said nothing about the Remingtons.

  “Too bad for that old peddler!” he laughed later.

  Gillom would turn eighteen this summer, a grown man. He couldn’t hide something as exciting as these big pistols forever, especially from his pals. As spring weather began to warm the Pass of the North, his restless thoughts turned from readin’, writin’, and ’rithmetic, to gamblin’, guns, and gunmen in pretty quick order. Girls, too, figured somewhere in his brain-scrambled equation, but an amateur gunslinger needed time and money for courting, two commodities that had only just fallen his way.

  Gillom knew where his pals might be. They often liked to wander down to the muddy Rio Grande after school, to skip stones across the slow-moving water, or watch an occasional train chug across the Mexican Central Railroad trestle heading south into Juarez. Maybe they’d sip a little cheap whiskey or smoke hand-rolled cigarettes if they could steal any liquor or tobacco, or bribe some cowhand to buy these prohibited goods for them.