Billy took off his trench coat and draped it around Thalia’s shoulders. Sheila was holding the scared white girl by then.
There was no need for words. Billy and Nacogdoches squared off with about ten paces between them.
“Thalia?” Billy called.
“Yeah?” she said.
“You strong enough to count to three, honey?”
Thalia walked to the river side of the present-day cowboys. The rest of us, white and black, moved out of the line of fire.
“One,” Thalia said, and I was reminded of the sense of fate I’d experienced at Lazarus House.
“Two,” she announced, and I wanted to scream.
Before she was able to utter the last number, Nacogdoches reached for his pistol. He pulled out the gun and fired. But before that, with snake-like fluidity, Billy drew and shot. Nacogdoches’s bullet went wild, landing, I believe, somewhere out on the Hudson. The young white man was dead before he hit the concrete. I remember that he fell on a chalk-drawn hopscotch design.
There was another shot, and I looked to see Braughm, the other white southerner, aiming a pistol at Billy — who was now down on one knee. Billy shot one time, hitting his assailant in the upper thigh. Two others of Nacogdoches’s posse had guns, but Billy shot both of them before they could fire — one in the shins and the other in the shoulder.
After that we all ran.
At a coffee shop on 125th Street, Billy was once again wearing his trench coat, and he was drinking from a bowl of chicken noodle soup. Sheila and Thalia were there with us.
“You think he’s dead?” Billy asked me.
“You hit him in the head,” I said.
Billy nodded and grimaced.
“It ain’t no fun when somebody dies,” he said.
After a few minutes of silence I noticed a red spot at the right shoulder of his off-white coat.
“You’re bleeding.”
“I think I need to get out of town,” he said.
“I’ll go with you,” Thalia offered.
“That’d be nice,” Billy said kindly, “but with all them bruises we’d be stopped before the train made it out from Penn Station.”
Sheila’s aunt and uncle were out of town, and so we cleaned and dressed Billy’s wound there. The bullet had come in through the front and gone out the back of Billy’s shoulder.
“Lucky that Braughm had steel-jacketed slugs,” Billy said. “A soft bullet woulda tore me up.”
I went with my friend to Penn Station and waited with him for a train headed to Atlanta. I was worried that there was some kind of internal bleeding, but Billy said that he felt good and strong.
“I never wanted to live up here anyway,” he said.
“What do you want me to tell your mom?”
“I’ll write her, don’t you worry about that. If she calls, tell her I left your place sometime after two and you don’t know where I went.”
He boarded the 5:11 morning train, and that was the last I ever saw of him.
The police found Nacogdoches Early and followed the bloody trail back to his friends. All they knew was that there was some black kid named Billy who killed Nacogdoches in a gunfight. They got to my brother, but he said that he’d made the deal with some kid named Billy and he never knew where he’d come from.
Thalia told about the beating, but she’d tossed her phone, and the cops were never able to follow the electronic trail.
The three major newspapers loved the romance of a shootout on the Hudson.
In the weeks that followed there were seventeen Western-style gunfights all over the city. Black, white, and brown would-be gunslingers had duels. No one was killed, but the mayor and chief of police ratcheted up the stop-and-frisk program until even rich people started to complain.
Six months later it had all died down. Billy’s mother left Harlem, and I graduated a year ahead of time. I was in my fourth year at Harvard, majoring in English literature with an emphasis on Yeats, when I received an unopened letter forwarded to me by my sister, Latrice.
Dear Felix,
Over the past four years I have meant to write to you but I was always on the move and even when I started to write the words didn’t add up to much. I am very sorry for what I did when you knew me back then. There was no excuse for what Nacogdoches Early did to Thalia but that didn’t give me the right to take his life. Maybe if it had been a fair fight, maybe if I didn’t know I could beat him, it would have been all right. But I knew I was the better gunman and so what I did was murder.
I have spent my time since then in the country from Montana to Northern California riding horses and taking work as I find it. I see my mother from time to time. She moved back to Texas because Henry Ryder died and she didn’t have to be afraid of him anymore.
You were a good friend, Felix, and I appreciate you sticking by me even though you could have got in trouble too.
Maybe you should burn this letter after you read it. Whatever you do I’ll be writing again. Maybe one day we’ll even see each other in Times Square or maybe on the Hudson.
I haven’t burned Billy’s confession — not yet. I keep meaning to.
Over the years I have received eleven letters from the Harlem Cowboy. In the last few he’s written some very nice poetry about nature and manhood. His words mean a lot to me. His convictions about right and wrong give me the strength not to see myself as a victim.
I got my PhD from Harvard and now teach American literature at the University of Texas in Houston. In Billy’s most recent letter, he said that a girlfriend googled me online and found out that I was there. In that letter he wrote,
...Don’t be too surprised if I drop by your classroom one day, professor. In a long life you only got a few friends, that’s a fact...
Breath
Iremember waking up, trying to catch my breath. If someone had asked my name or address, or even what room I was sleeping in, I wouldn’t have been able to say. All I had on my mind was that elusive inhalation, that solitary lungful of air that had to be somewhere; it had to be or I was going to die.
The apartment was empty — stripped down to the dust-swirled wood floors. The air conditioner was on, and I wasted precious seconds looking around for my pants. I found the phone, but it was dead. Somebody was crying somewhere nearby, but I couldn’t call to them. As I went through the door to the hallway, it came to me that the sobbing was actually the whine of my lungs trying to throw off the congestion.
“Can’t bre—,” I wheezed.
I must have walked out of my building and across the private road to the unit concierge across the way. I never knew his name, even though he’d been working as a nighttime guard in that complex of university housing longer than I had been a professor at New York College.
He was younger than I by fifteen years at least — not a day over sixty. His eyes were both frightened and suspicious. Maybe I had been shot or stabbed. Maybe the assailant was still lurking somewhere in the dark hours of an early Manhattan morning.
As he helped me into a seat, a flood of thoughts entered my mind, each fighting for the place of my last mortal thought. There was my son, Eric, who had changed his name to Simba, calling on the phone. Simba never called, and even though I could hear him, I still couldn’t speak or breathe.
“Dad? Dad, are you there?”
Sarah, my wife, who had passed away in ’96, was talking to somebody other than me.