“Maybe so,” he said, “but we will be there.”
All the youngsters in our neighborhood knew about the showdown, as Billy called it, scheduled for Wednesday night. They gossiped about it and bragged on their black cowboy hero.
In the interim, I saw Billy every day because I was his assigned tutor.
“Hello, Felix,” Mrs. Consigas greeted me on that Wednesday afternoon. She was a dark-skinned black woman with a young face. “You’re a little early, aren’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What’s that you’re carryin’?”
“My uncle’s video camera.”
“What for?”
“My sister’s in a dance recital after, and I’m going to video it for my mother. She works nights.” It was all lies, but Marion Consigas didn’t know my mother or my sister.
“You’re a good boy, Felix Grimes.”
I spent the next two hours trying to teach Billy about variables in algebra. I was a good student, and as far as school went, Billy was dumb as a post; he said so himself.
“It takes me a long time to get the idea,” he said to me at our first tutoring session, “but once I got it, it’s there forever.”
He didn’t talk about the showdown at all. I told six friends where it was happening: five guys and Sheila Grant, a girl I wanted but who only had eyes for the Harlem Cowboy, Billy Consigas.
Billy struggled through the workbook lesson, and somewhere around seven o’clock he said, “Time to go.”
We all — Billy, me, Sheila Grant, and five others — arrived early. My brother Terrence, who worked at Lazarus House as a nighttime security guard, was waiting at the side entrance. He told us that Nacogdoches was already inside with his posse.
My brother was nineteen, three years older than I. He was nervous, but Billy ponied up twenty dollars for the use of the gym, and Terrence was always looking for more money.
Nacogdoches was there with the same group of friends. This detail said something about the ugly southerner that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
While I set up the tripod and videocam, Billy and Nacogdoches decided on the rules.
“Best out of three,” the white cowboy said.
“And we check to make sure that each other’s gun is empty before each duel,” added Billy.
“Duel?” Nacogdoches sneered. “What are you some kinda English faggot?”
“I am what I am,” Billy said, “and that’s more than enough for you.”
Nacogdoches frowned and balled his fists. Billy wasn’t school-trained, but he once told me that all true cowboys could sing and were poets. The white gunslinger couldn’t match him with words, and so he said, “Thalia will count. On three we draw.”
Billy nodded, no longer smiling.
The duelists checked each other’s guns and then took their places six steps apart. The white guy had a mean look on his face. Billy was as peaceful as moonlight on the Hudson. He wasn’t actually a handsome youth, but Billy had a look that made you feel like there was something good somewhere, something you could depend on.
Thalia, that was Nacogdoches’s girl, counted out loud. When she got to three, Nacogdoches slapped his brown leather holster, coming up with his black iron gun at incredible speed. But when we looked at the replay it was obvious, even to Nacogdoches’s friends, that easygoing Billy had his piece out first. The black cowboy’s movements were fluid, seamless.
Nacogdoches was slower on the second draw. We didn’t even have to look at the replay.
After that Billy started undoing the leather string that laced the bottom of the black and silver holster to his right thigh.
“What you doin’?” the white cowboy complained.
“Two outta three,” Billy said.
“I want the last draw.”
“Why?”
“You scared?” Nacogdoches asked in a taunting tone.
Billy smiled and shook his head. He tied the lace again, and I turned on the camera.
“One,” Thalia said, and a sense of doom descended upon me.
“Two,” she pronounced. It struck me that this last contest meant far more than two young men proving themselves.
“Three.”
Nacogdoches was faster this time. He grabbed his piece and had it out like a real gunslinger in a fight for his life.
But Billy was faster still. On the video replay he had the silver gun out and had played like he was fanning the hammer with his left hand before Nacogdoches had his barrel level.
“We could have hot dogs on that corner where I said I’d shine your boyfriend’s shoes,” Billy suggested to Thalia.
“No, you won’t,” Nacogdoches said.
“That was the bet,” Billy countered, the ass-kicking smile back on his lips.
“You didn’t pull the trigger,” his rival argued.
“Why I wanna pull on a trigger when I know the gun is empty?”
“You could draw faster if you didn’t move your finger. Any fool could pull a gun out by its butt.”
Billy squinted as if he was on his beloved prairie trying to make out a shadow on the horizon. He shook his head ever so slightly and then shrugged, moving his shoulders no more than an inch.
“Thank you, Terrence,” Billy said, waving to my brother, who was standing next to the exit door. “We finished here.”
“You didn’t pull the trigger,” Nacogdoches said again.
“I won,” Billy replied.
Terrence herded us out the door and onto Sixty-Third.
Thalia, who was wearing black jeans and a calico blouse, walked up to Billy and shook his hand. He gave her a quizzical stare, but she lowered her head and turned away.
“I won!” Nacogdoches said, as he and his friends walked toward Central Park.
When we were walking to the train, Billy asked me to come with him while Sheila and the rest took a more direct route to the subway. He said that he wanted to talk about something as we strolled north on Broadway.
But before he had the chance someone said, “Stop right there.”
I was already nervous. Most of my life I had spent at my home, at church, or in school, where I had been an honor student every year, every semester. I wasn’t used to running the street with armed friends and watching duels.
Two uniformed policemen were getting out of their black and white cruiser. Billy had his six-shooter in a battered brown leather satchel, and the police had the right of stop-and-frisk.
Once again I had the urge to run, but I knew that wouldn’t end well.
One cop was pink colored and the other dark brown.
“What are you doing here so late at night, boys?” the black cop asked.
“Good evening, Officer O’Brien,” Billy said to the white policeman.
“Consigas?” he replied.
“You get that parade trot down yet?”
“This is the kid I was telling you about, Frank,” the white cop said to his partner. “He can do anything on a horse. Honest-to-God cowboy from Texas.”
“I was just playin’ basketball with my friend Felix here down at Lazarus House,” Billy said.
O’Brien asked Billy a few things about riding and then shook my friend’s hand.
“I thought the Cowboy Code said you shouldn’t lie,” I said when we were installed on the train.
“She gave me her phone number,” Billy replied.
“What?”
“That Thalia gave me her phone number on a little piece of paper when she shook my hand.”
“Damn.”
“What do you think I should do?”
I am, as I said, a good student and the kind of citizen that stays out of trouble. I prefer reading to TV and ideas in opposition to actions, sweat, or violence. I was always considered by my parents, teachers, and, later on, by my employers, a good person. My only serious fault, as my father was always happy to say, was that I often spoke without considering what it was that I said. This was most often a minor flaw, but in certain cases it could be a fatal one.