Free A Bullet for Billy by Bill Brooks Page B

of his boys comes home.”
    â€œThere won’t be,” Cap’n said. “I think we done all the killing tonight we’re meant to.”
    The Cap’n went inside and I took out my makings and rolled myself a shuck to ease off the things I was feeling. Then I took the dead men by their boots and dragged them both into the shed and laid them there, and went out again and sat down on one of the supper chairs that was still out front.
    I never have found out all the reasons that possess men to set upon one another, money, hatred, just pure meanness. Whatever it is gets in a fellow’s mind makes no sense if in the end the man you set upon puts a bullet through your brain.
    I smoked my shuck down, and then I guess I dozed fitfully in the chair until first dawn. The sky was as gray as a ghost with just a seam of silver light between it and the horizon. I went inside to wake the Cap’n, but he was already awake, but just lying there. He sat up and said, “Was it a dream I had about last night, me shooting a fellow in the brains?”
    â€œNo sir, it was real enough,” I said.
    He rubbed his eyes, then pulled on his boots, and we went outside again. We went out to the pump and washed our hands and faces and strung water through our hair, and then went back inside, where I fixed us some breakfast of fatback and beans from a can. We ate there at the table without speaking anymore about last night till we finished and stood away from the table and went outside again, leaving the dishes just setting there.
    I saddled my horse and then put the Cap’n’s in the traces of the hack, and he climbed aboard and looked off toward the road and said, “What’d you do with the bodies, Jim?”
    â€œI put them in the shed.”
    He nodded.
    â€œThe wolves and coyotes smell death, they’ll be round soon enough.”
    â€œI’m not that far gone as a human being yet to let them have at dead men,” I said. I went over to the shed and searched around till I found a can of coal oil, then shook out the contents all over the boards before striking a match and setting the whole place afire, the bodies still inside. The fire caught slowly at first, then built quickly enough, like a maw of flame swallowing everything.
    We rode off toward Finger Bone, the hungry flames behind us just as if we were riding out of Sodom and Gomorrah.
    â€œI wonder how many others them two has waylaid over the years?” the Cap’n said as we rode along.
    I said I didn’t know but I guessed we weren’t the first, that they just didn’t suddenly start with us, because of the way the old man had set it up.
    â€œI’m surprised he didn’t try and drug us with that whiskey first,” Cap’n said.
    â€œYou and me both know, criminals was smart, wouldn’t none of them get jailed or shot,” I said.
    â€œWell, their souls are with Jesus now,” he said.
    â€œI doubt Jesus will have any truck with them,” I said.
    â€œI doubt it too, Jim. I doubt it too.”
    We were leaving death to go and create more of it, and that was an unsettling thought if ever there was one.
    It was like death was dogging us just so it couldlearn how to do it proper. Last night, when I shot that man, I realized then and there, I didn’t flinch at the thought, my heart never quickened, my hand never wavered, and it made me realize that in whatever ways I thought I’d changed, I hadn’t changed all that much.
    The road lay long and straight ahead of us, the sun just now rising above the rimrock to our rear, and the world seemed no wiser or bereft because of what we’d left in our wake.

Chapter Ten
Billy & Sam
    T hey wandered from place to place, striking up friendships with the locals because they were in a strange country and Billy had heard some tales from Jardine back when Jardine was still alive and talking about the things that went on in Old Mexico. Said