A Bullet for Billy Read Free Page A

getting himself killed just about done it as far as those boys standing a chance of getting raised right. They just went wild after he passed. I’m sure she did her best to raise them right, but you know when boys don’t have no father to discipline them, they can get off the track real fast.
    â€œI didn’t learn about a lot of this till later on—till after it was too late for me to do anything about it. Not that there was much I might could have done living three hundred miles away at the time. But maybe if she’d come lived with me and brought those boys with her, I could have been some sort of father to them and taught them the right thing to do…”
    He looked pained and he drank down more of the whiskey-laced coffee, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear more of this story because it just felt like it wasn’t going to get any better the more of it he told.
    He looked up at me with those gray eyes, and I didn’t see in them what I once had: a man too tough to be whipped. What I saw now was a man who had five, six weeks at the outside to live and peck of personal problems.
    â€œThe way it turned out was Billy and Sam drifted off and started getting themselves to doing bad stunts.”
    â€œWhat sort of bad stunts?” I said.
    â€œMostly minor stuff at first—gambling, drinking, fighting, petty thievery. But like most wild boys who start out slow, they did not stay that way. Pretty darn soon they progressed up the ranks to become true outlaws—stealing cattle and horses and even got accused of robbing a bank in Las Vegas, New Mexico, though they didn’t get but pocket change according to the report I got. I heard all this secondhand from Laura Lee through letters had the ink stained with her tears. Broke my heart to hear about it. I went down there to visit with her and get the whole story just after I got word I was in a fix my own self. Cancer of the stomach,” he said with a finality that was like letting his breath out.
    â€œAnd that’s where the real tough news came, when I got down that way.”
    I thought about Luz, my life here, how I’d pulled away from the violent life I’d once lived. I looked up at the gravesites of my friend TomTwist, on the hill where I’d buried him, and the woman he’d loved and died over, both of them buried side by side now and forever together. I thought about the men I’d already killed and sometimes dreamed about—the dreams always bad, but what told me it was time to quit was when I stopped dreaming about them.
    Then for a time I took to drinking hard and fell pretty low on the ladder of humanity.
    I drifted for a year or so, mending fence and working for other men and getting into my own sorts of trouble with liquor and women. I got into fistfights because I was good with my fists and I liked how it felt to beat a man down who gave me trouble, like it wasn’t so much beating him down as it was the trouble that dogged me.
    Then I woke up one morning from a hard drunk, lying face up on the high desert with rain in my face and my horse and saddle stole along with my boots. And if whoever it was hadn’t also stole my guns, I do believe I would have killed myself then and there because I was a man past forty without a future and I knew I either had to lie there and die or get up and walk.
    I was cold and miserable and hung over, and out of nowhere a dog came up and started licking my face, and something made me hug it because it was love I was most in need of, and I guess that old dog was looking for the same thing.
    I asked the dog if it was Jesus come to save me and it barked and I said, “Well if you ain’t, you’re close enough.” And I got up and started walking and the dog followed me and stayed with me for a time, then went off on its own soon as I got to within sights of the next town.
    I hated to see that dog go, but I knew we all had to choose our own way and