Lifting his face from a puddle of dark red blood and black mud, the old man rose to his feet, his back drenched through his shirt as rainwater spilled over him. Shielding his eyes from the downpour, he looked to the sky. He used his sleeve to wipe away the blood trickling from his nose, leaving a trail of dirt in its place, and he turned to face the younger man who was waiting to hit him again.
Inside the saloon, a crowd of at least 50 men and women gathered around a shaky table. Under their cheering and shouting, Richard Taylor could barely hear the rattling of the snake’s tail. He stood outside the circle, peering over the shoulders of men who were waving dollar bills in the air. On the table, the rattlesnake was coiled tight in its cage. A thin man in a black coat took notes in a small ledger, looking up every few seconds to see whose wager he was writing down.
In the alley, the young man swung his right fist forward, but the older man dodged. He raised his knee into the younger man’s chest, then jabbed at the back of his head with his elbow. The young man stumbled but managed to regain his balance. The older man ran at him, driving them both down, mud splashing as they landed.
Richard watched the snake in its cage. A man in a tall hat stood over the table, his arms outstretched, a small red bird cupped in his hands. Another man lifted the top of the cage and the bird was slipped in. The man with the ledger counted the seconds to himself on his wristwatch. The snake eyed the bird as it fluttered above, trying to escape.
The older man hit the young man in the face several times. He then slammed his head into the wet ground. The younger man pushed him off and he reeled back, leaning against a wall. The older man coughed blood.
The bird slipped to the bottom of the cage and the snake lunged at it, barely missing as it hopped out of the way. The crowd was cheering louder and applauding now. Richard watched the people more than the cage, disgusted that they would waste their money on a meaningless game.
The younger man pulled a knife from his pocket and the older man shuffled backwards. When the young man attempted to slash him, he arched back, the tip of the knife inches from his chest. He reached out and grabbed the young man’s wrist. He twisted it and the knife dropped into a puddle between them.
The snake missed again. The bird scurried away as the snake whipped across the cage after it. Richard shook his head, thinking half of these people probably didn’t even know how much they bet or how long they bet it would take the snake to catch the bird.
The older man pushed the young man into the wall. He hit him repeatedly in the chest and took a hard swing across his chin. He stepped back, reaching down to grip the wet, muddy knife. He rushed forward, stabbing the younger man in his gut. The young man slid down slowly, blood spilling out as he reached the ground. The older man kicked his head hard against the wall. He looked over his own clothes, his white shirt stained crimson. He stood in the rain a moment, then walked back into the saloon.
The snake finally got the bird into its mouth and most of the crowd stopped cheering and returned to their tables. The rest either won or thought they did. Richard figured they wouldn’t know for sure until someone handed them money or took it away.
Richard sat on a stool at the bar and sipped his beer from a green bottle with a thick neck and a fading star on the label, looking up at the top shelf filled with liquor he couldn’t afford. He noticed the old man entering from the back of the saloon, soaked and bloody. Richard recognized him. He didn’t know his name and had never spoken to him but he saw him there every night.
The man was a cold, black spirit haunting the room. Silent, his eyes hidden in the shadow of his hat, he had at least two guns that Richard could see. The rifle leaning against his chair and the Colt on the table always primed and loaded only inches from his small, weathered hands. In a packed bar at midnight, full of commotion, music and thick clouds of cigar smoke, he would sit there like he didn’t notice the world moving around him. A girl would come by every half hour or so to bring a fresh glass of whiskey and take away an empty one. He always sat with his back to the wall at the corner table under the stairs, the farthest from the creaking doors to the outside.
That night, Richard watched him return to his table, dripping water onto the wood floor, pick up the vest that was hanging over his chair and put it on over his bloody shirt. He took his seat and dispassionately put his hat on, finishing off the near-full whiskey glass he had left behind when he stepped out. As a barmaid picked up another drink to take to the table, Richard turned to the bartender, a large man with a scar across his neck.
“Who is that?” Richard asked, jerking his thumb toward the man in the corner.
“You don’t want to know.” the bartender said, wiping a dirty glass with a stained towel. He was silent for a moment. Then he looked around and signaled Richard to lean closer to him. He whispered, “The man claims he’s Billy the Kid.”
“Is that so?” Richard stood.
“I don’t know if it is or not.” The bartender poured bourbon in the glass and slid it down the bar to a waiting customer. “But, way I see it, he’s either crazy or he’s telling the truth, and either way he’s liable to kill you if you cross him, so I don’t ask questions.”
Richard tossed some coins onto the bar to pay his bill for the night, then walked over to the man’s table. When he got there, before he could think of something to say, the man asked, “You looking to get shot?”
“Not in particular,” Richard said, talking a small step back.
“Might want to keep walking then.” He looked up at Richard now. There was an anger burning in his eyes and his face appeared to have been chiseled in granite long ago. His left hand gripped the handle of his gun. Richard stood over him for a moment, his attention darting back and forth between the gun and the man’s eyes.
“You have a good night now,” Richard said. He turned and left the table. The man watched as he walked out of the saloon and into the darkness. Sitting alone, he smiled.
*****
Richard sat in his tent on the hill and looked out over the town of Beaumont. Starlit outlines of rooftops, the faint glow of candles in windows, billows of smoke wafting to the sky in the distance. Behind him, oil pumps rumbled in motion. The night shift at work in the fields. Money churning up from the ground beneath. A constant echo keeping him awake until dawn, reminding him of the mistakes he made.
Eighteen months ago, in early 1902, when word of oil and wealth gushing in Texas reached New York, Richard and his wife Anne made a decision. Neither of them was happy where they were, him scrubbing ash and soot in chimneys, always relying on her rich parents to help them stay above water. They heard stories of regular people getting flush on their own in Beaumont, making thousands of dollars just selling the land they lived on to people who wanted to dig holes in it. They talked about it on and off for a couple of weeks, and they ultimately decided there was a real opportunity here, a chance to make their own fortune. It was going to be an adventure, a foray into independence that Richard savored. Her parents disapproved, of course, calling the idea reckless and irresponsible, but Richard didn’t think they ever liked him anyway or thought anything he could do was good enough for their girl to begin with.
Despite that, they packed up everything they had, including their 6-year-old daughter Elizabeth, and began the long journey south. Once they got to Texas, Richard learned how difficult it was just to get a job, let alone his own plot of land, even with the money his wife’s father had quietly slipped to her before they left. He would manage to work a few days at a time in the bigger oil fields when the companies needed an extra hand. Most of the time, though, they sat in their tent on the hill surrounded by thousands of strangers and thieves, breathing in dark air tainted by black fumes from the nearby wells. He wasn’t surprised when Anne left with Elizabeth five months later—and he appreciated that she left most of their money behind—but he was still angry.
Now, over a year after they disappeared in the night, Richard sat in his tent and watched the seconds tick past on his pocket watch. It had been a wedding gift from Anne’s parents, gold with Richard and Anne’s names and the date of the ceremony engraved on the casing. Tonight, like most nights, he would just lie down and stare at the face of it, hypnotized by the movement of its hands, until he drifted off to sleep.
*****
A few nights later, Richard sat at the bar, again watching the man. Occasionally, he would look up and Richard would turn away the instant they made eye contact.
A woman walked into Richard’s line of sight and he could have sworn she looked just like Anne. His eyes followed her across the room and up onto the stage. He heard a piano begin to play but he couldn’t see it through the crowd. The music was fast-paced, complicated and irrelevant. Three other dancers joined the woman on stage but Richard’s focus remained on her as their performance started. He didn’t notice any of their carefully choreographed movements. He just studied her features. Her eyes, her smile, the sensitive spot on the back of her neck, that part of her lower leg she’d giggle when he touched. She looked perfect. For a brief moment, he smiled. Then he reminded himself that she wasn’t his wife, just a stranger. He turned back to the bar to drink whatever was left in his bottle.
When he did, he was shocked to see the man standing right next to him.
“Why you keep staring at me like that?” the man asked.
“Staring at you like how?” Richard said.
“Like you’re fixing to fuck my sister.” The bartender placed a full glass of whiskey on the bar in front of him, then backed off, never saying a word.
“I don’t know what that means,” Richard responded. He watched the bartender walk away, wondering if he was getting another drink for him too.
“It means you’re going to start looking elsewhere if you value your eyes being attached to your head, son,” the man said. He sipped from his glass and reached into his vest pocket. Richard tensed up, fearing he was going for a knife or a gun. Instead, he pulled out a cigar and rested it between his lips while he searched his other pockets for a match. The bartender reappeared, slipping a matchbook in front of him. The man lit a match and, through clenched teeth, said to Richard, “You’re here every night.”
“As are you,” Richard replied.
“Here every morning and afternoon, too,” the man said. He turned and looked out across the room. “What I’m asking is, what the hell are you doing here?”
“Mostly wishing I wasn’t.” Richard gazed absently into the mirror behind the bar.
“You ain’t alone in that, kid. Lot of folks around here trying to find a way out.”
“You one of them?” Richard watched the reflection of smoke rise up over the man’s head and dissipate in the air.
“I’m just trying to get through the day without killing anyone.” The man looked down at his wrist, though he wasn’t wearing a watch. “It’s early yet.”
“You find yourself having to kill people a lot, huh?” Richard asked, nervous but polite–and more intrigued than he wanted to be.
“Only as often as they try to kill me,” the man said. He reached behind himself for his whiskey, swallowed it all in one gulp, slammed the glass down on the bar and began to walk back toward his table. He added, “So yes, a lot.”
“You ever wonder why it is so many people are out to get you?”
“No, sir,” the man said, not looking back. “I know exactly why.”
*****
It was late fall, but it was still hot in the sun.
Richard had found a job for the rest of the week. One of the men, not a friend—Richard didn’t have friends here—but an acquaintance working for the Gulf Oil Corporation had to head back east for a few days for his mother’s funeral and somebody needed to fill in. He recommended Richard. The work consisted mostly of moving heavy pieces of equipment from one part of Gulf’s oil field to another up on Spindletop. It was exhausting, but it paid a decent wage, which was more than he could say for a lot of the other short-term jobs he’d taken lately.
Sweat dripped from his shirt to the soil. He stood with his cart full of steel bars, catching his breath while basking in the shadow of one of the derricks, a skeleton that spired up from the land. He felt the ground shake and heard pieces of metal screeching against each other somewhere. He still didn’t understand how all this equipment worked, but he knew what it sounded like when it broke. The earth cracked and oil suddenly gushed up, a steady vertical stream flowing through the top of the derrick. Before he had time to move, Richard found himself in the midst of a black storm pouring from the sky. He closed his eyes as oil ran down his face, gagging when a few drops slipped between his lips. He stumbled away, eventually getting clear and rolling into the dry dirt.
He looked himself over, painted black, and grudgingly accepted there was no way to avoid waiting in the long line to pay for a brief soak in a rusty tub in town later.
*****
Hooves dug into the mud. Lightning streaked across the sky miles away.
Richard stood outside, protected from the rain by the balcony hanging over the entrance to the saloon. He watched as the two horses pulled, straining against harnesses that were tied tight to the front side of a dirt-covered automobile. The vehicle’s wheels spun furiously, slipping deeper into the puddles around them, spraying muck and water across the front windows of the town bank. Two men in fancy suits shouted at the horses, their voices drowned out by the thunder and the revving engine.
“In 25 years,” a voice came from behind him, “everything’s going to be done by these infernal machines.”
The old man stepped out from inside the bar and joined Richard.
“Machines,” he continued, “these giant metal monstrosities lurching through the streets. They’ll have to build smaller machines to operate the big ones cause people won’t know how. Railroad tracks’ll run through the middle of every town. Machines everywhere. A world like you ain’t imagined in all your born days. They’ll cover the landscape, trees in a big clanking forest, waves in a metal sea. They’ll spread like syphilis in a whorehouse. It’s already started. Ain’t nothing a man like me can do to stop it now.”
The horses continued to pull. The men out in the rain were behind the vehicle, pushing against it with their backs, trying to maintain their steadiness as their boots constantly slipped on the wet road. The mud kicked up by the wheels splashed their clothes. Every time they raised a hand to protect their faces from the spatter, they would lose their grip with the other hand and nearly fall over.
“Should we be helping them?” Richard asked as they watched. The man said nothing. He just watched the two of them and their automobile, smiling and occasionally chuckling. Richard shook his head and looked down at the rainwater creeping toward them, beginning to gather around their feet.
“I have to—I’ve been wondering—”Richard paused, as if debating whether to continue his question. “What I’m trying to—I can’t figure why a man’d go around playing at being Billy the Kid.”
“Go ask a man who’s playing at it then,” the man said.
There was a moment of awkward silence between them before one of the men they were watching lost his footing and fell.
The man laughed. “Like watching a pack of dogs barking at a knot,” he said.
“People round here think you’re crazy,” Richard said.
“I reckon that’s cause I want them to think I am.” The man turned to him and grinned. “Also, because I am.”
The wheels had stopped turning and a third man got out of the vehicle. The one who had slipped was standing now, trying to wipe himself clean but only managing to rub the dirt deeper into the fabric of his shirt. The horses weren’t pulling anymore.
Richard looked over at the automobile, grime dotted across its sides, showered by falling rain. Despite all the effort, its back wheels had only sunken further.
“This fella was telling me a story,” Richard said. The man turned to listen. “I was out in the oil fields the other day talking to this guy come from up around Buffalo. He was saying, he was at the exposition where the president was killed, or so he says. Could have been lying. Don’t matter. He was telling me–You ever hear why McKinley died?”
“Because he got shot twice, I’d think,” the man said.
“That’s not the—What he was telling me, when the docs tried to operate on him, cut him open and get the bullets out, there wasn’t enough light to see. This big old exposition to celebrate our country’s industrial progress and they ain’t got enough electricity to light the table where the president was bleeding to death.”
“Progress, huh?” the man said as he turned back toward the door. Richard looked out and saw that the engine had started again and the horses were pulling, the vehicle still failing to break loose from the growing muck that ensnared it.
“Machines,” Richard heard the man say, the saloon doors swinging closed behind him. “As far as the eye can see.”
*****
Richard sat at the bar, a half-empty beer bottle in front of him. In the mirror, he saw the reflection of the man walking calmly into the bar. The man stopped in front of him, facing forward, looking past Richard to the rifle sitting at his table in the back. Richard noticed the man’s left hand move toward the Colt in his holster. The man was almost frozen, with an intense look on his face that Richard first mistook for fear.
“Take out your watch and show it to me,” he said. Richard stared at him. “Pretend like I’m asking you the time. Just do it.”
Richard pulled his watch from his pocket and held it out to him.
“Nice watch,” the man said. “You can put it away now.”
“It was a wedding gift from my wife’s—” Richard realized he wasn’t listening.
“Act natural,” the man said. “Like there ain’t two guys here aiming to kill me.”
“What are you going on about?” Richard asked.
“By the door.” He tried to nod subtly in that direction. “Bulldozer with the mustache on the right, short fella with a bit of a limp on the left. Both got their hands at their sides, close to their guns. So damn hell-fired not to be noticed that you can’t help noticing them? Looking at me without looking, same way I’m looking at them. You see?”
Richard whipped his head unsubtly to the entrance and saw the doors wavering behind two men who had just walked in. One was taller and had a mustache. The shorter one wasn’t moving so Richard couldn’t be sure about the limp. They wore long coats, but he could see two pistols around both their waists underneath.
“I said, act natural,” the man repeated. “I reckon this mess is about to get bloody. You best get out of here. Go someplace there’s not so much dying going on.”
Richard thought of his cold, empty tent up on the hill and didn’t move.
The taller man by the door took a few steps forward. That’s when the old man quietly said “Fuck it,” grabbed his gun, spun around and started firing. One shot hit the shorter man directly in the middle of his forehead and he dropped to the ground. Bullets missed the tall man and lodged in the wall behind him as he pulled out his two guns and dove to the left, rolling behind the far end of the bar. Customers ran in all directions screaming. The old man pushed Richard aside and sprinted to the nearest table, kicking it over on its side to shield him just as the tall man rose and fired. Wood splinters blew off the table with every impact. He stood up and fired back, grazing the tall man’s neck and hitting him in the stomach. The tall man fell to the ground and dropped both of his guns. Richard peeked out from behind the side of the bar just in time to see the old man walk across the room, stand over the tall man’s bleeding, barely-conscious body and shoot him in the head. Then he walked past the bar and reached for Richard’s beer. He drank what was left in one long sip as he walked back to his table, then tossed the empty bottle over his shoulder, sitting as glass scattered in shards on the floor.
Richard looked at the bodies and then over at the old man. He looked around the room, reconstructing what happened as other customers returned to their seats.
“You really are him, huh?” Richard said. “You’re Billy the Kid.”
“Don’t look so surprised,” he said, his gun still in his hand on the table.
*****
The next night, Richard approached the table and stood over it until the old man noticed him. After about a minute, the man lifted his head.
“Just so as we’re clear,” he said, sitting up, “you wouldn’t be the first mail-order cowboy I cashed in for no better reason than he was pissing me off.”
“I always wanted to know what the old west was like,” Richard said, either ignoring the threat or not entirely understanding it.
“Like this,” the man said, “but older.”
Richard remained standing for a moment, then grabbed a chair from a nearby table, slid it over and sat down. The old man stared at him in silence.
“I don’t know why you’re yammering at me here, son,” the man said.
“You’re Billy the Kid,” Richard said. “You’re a legend.”
“I’m a fucking horse thief,” the man said. “The legend is just something Garrett created to sell books. Half of what he says about me ain’t even close to true.”
“Then what is true? How’d you end up here?”
“I died 22 years ago,” the man said, a barmaid placing a glass of whiskey in front of him. “That complicates life a bit. All the shit I done to get by. Living on the dodge, always ready to pull foot without warning. Making sure all the right folk know who I am and the wrong folk never do. Trying to stop the world leaving me behind. It used to be, stealing horses was all I needed to know. Now, you take a look outside. I tell you, it is a bad time to be a horse thief in America and I reckon I’m too old to learn to steal anything else. How about you? What’s your sad story?”
Richard didn’t speak at first. He hesitated, considering how much he should say.
Then he reached into the pocket of his pants and pulled out a small, 3-inch square photograph. An attractive young woman holding a little girl, the angle slightly tilted.
“My wife Anne, my daughter Elizabeth,” Richard said. “Took that picture myself almost two years ago with one of those one dollar Brownie cameras. Hell of a thing to try to hold steady, that box. But that’s them and I don’t know where they are. They came down here with me—we were going to get rich and I was going to get to be a cowboy. It’s dumb. We were going to—I don’t even know how we expected to do it. But it was what people were doing and we wanted to do it too. Then I wake up one morning and they ain’t there. We been through the mill together, me and her, and after all that, she just leaves me drifting at sea. Been here most nights since, drinking away what little money I been able to make on my own.”
“I take it you’re not liking our town much, then?” the man asked, raising his glass to his lips. Richard was surprised to see he was still listening.
“I reckon it’s what hell’d look like if hell was in Texas. And it might be.”
“This isn’t nothing like hell,” the man said. He signaled to the bartender to pour him another drink. “Hell’s likely much nicer than this. Probably nicer than heaven, even. You think about it, that’s the only way it makes sense. Devil wants you to do something bad, why would he want to punish you for it eternally after? Where’s the incentive? Just be bad business on his part. No, seems to me, hell’s a candy land. Suppose we’ll all find out eventually, right?”
Richard considered the idea for a moment. He opened his mouth to respond, but the man raised his finger to him to be quiet.
“This music,” the man said. Richard could hear some ragtime tune coming from the piano up by the stage. The man listened for a minute or so, humming along softly. “I love this music. That’s why I keep coming here. Best piano in town. Nothing else in these parts holds a candle to it. Last couple of months, I got my own melody in my head, you know. I been wanting to write it down but I’m all balled up. Don’t have a damn clue how. This right here, though, there’s a magic to it.”
They listened to the rest of the song. Thinking about Beaumont, Richard added, “I miss baseball. Had a pretty good team up in Brooklyn. You all got nothing down here.”
“Never did understand that game,” the man said. He put down his drink. “Look, you don’t like it here? Leave. Your woman’s gone? Find another. Ain’t no one any less annoying than the rest. So you got the muddy end of the stick. So what? Quit pining for what used to be and do something about what ought to. Get your sorry ass a train ticket and go. Right here, right now. Time to fish or cut bait, boy.”
“I got no place else to go,” Richard said.
“There’s always someplace else to go. You just ain’t looking hard enough.”
“If that’s a fact, why are you always sitting here?”
“Nobody given me no reason to leave,” the man said, leaning back in his chair. “And I’ll stay here, at this table in this corner against this wall, until somebody gives me cause to do otherwise. From here, I’ll be able to see ‘em coming. And ain’t nobody ever going to shoot me in the back when I ain’t looking.”
*****
The first thing Richard noticed walking to the saloon the following night was that the man was gone and so was his rifle. Richard looked around the room, scanned the crowd for any sign of him. When he sat down at the bar, the bartender walked over.
“Where’s your crazy friend tonight?” he asked.
“Nothing crazy about him,” Richard said. “And I don’t got a clue where he is.”
“Billy the Kid or not,” the bartender said, placing a beer bottle in front of Richard, “the man needs his head examined.”
“That may be so,” Richard said, beer in hand.
Seconds later, the man entered. He approached Richard and called to the bartender to give him a full bottle of whiskey.
“I’ll handle my own refills tonight.” Then he turned to Richard. “Come with me.”
The man grabbed the bottle with one hand and Richard’s arm with the other.
“The hell’s going on, Billy?” Richard asked, following him out the back door.
When they stepped out into the alley, the man popped the top off the whiskey bottle and drank straight from it. He offered it to Richard, who took a small sip. It was only now that Richard noticed he had a rather large bag slung over his shoulder.
“You going somewhere?” Richard asked, nodding toward the bag.
“I’ve gotten sloppy here,” the man said. “Too many people know who I really am. That reason to leave I spoke of yesterday, I got one now. A bounty hunter out of Appalachia. Big and tough. People too scared to even tell me his name. And he’s getting close. I don’t want to be here when he catches up.”
“You could stay and fight,” Richard said. “You got your guns. Won’t be the first time somebody come to town with a mind to clean your plow.”
“I got nothing to fight for here,” the man said. “Anyways, I doubt there’s much left for me in Beaumont. Fact is, there never was. Just, well, any port in a storm and all.”
“So what do you do now?” Richard leaned against the wall.
“Run three ways from Sunday.” He put the bag on the ground. “Run like the dickens and hope I can run faster than he can.”
“Where will you go?”
“West,” the man said. He looked to the train station down the street. “As far west as the money in my pocket’ll take me. I hear it’s cold in Denver. Might not be so bad.”
“You taking the train in the morning then?”
“That’s the plan,” the man said. Richard saw his hand reach for his holster.
The man raised his gun and fired before Richard had time to move. He shot Richard twice in the head and then several times in the chest as he slumped over.
He walked over to the body and rummaged through the pockets. He took out the picture of Richard’s family. My name is Richard Taylor, he thought. My wife is Anne. My daughter is Elizabeth. We’re from New York City. He repeated the names to himself a few times. He looked at the engraved side of Richard’s watch, noted the wedding date and then put it in the pocket of his own pants. He counted Richard’s money and took that too. The plan wasn’t perfect, but time was running short and Taylor was an easy target. He’d have to change some details of the backstory when he told it in Denver, account for the obvious age difference from the new wife and daughter he missed so dearly. But he knew how to improvise and he could be very convincing. After all, he sold half of Beaumont on the tale that he was Billy the Kid.
My name is Richard Taylor. He dragged the body through the alley to the side of the building. He noticed the trail of blood in the darkness, but it didn’t concern him. He looked around for any witnesses, then poured the remaining whiskey over the body. He took a matchbook out of his pocket, lit a match and dropped it. He stepped back and watched the body burn.
Anne. Elizabeth. After a few minutes, he walked back through the alley, careful not to step in the dead man’s blood. He looked up at the wide river of tents spread across the hill and the men above them in distance, scurrying around in a maze of oil derricks. He looked at the schedule posted out in front of the train station. He took out Richard’s watch and checked the time. In just a few hours, the first train of the morning would arrive, heading west.
My name is Richard Taylor. He sat on a bench outside the station and closed his eyes, waiting for the ticket office to open.
Steve Loiaconi is a journalist in Washington, DC, a father, and a graduate of George Mason University’s MFA program.