There was ample light now. The bunched bedcovers were on fire.
Through the flames, Books watched the wounded man crawl toward the south window, flop himself on his elbows over the sill in the crazed hope he could fall out of the house to safety.
"I'm gutshot, Books!" he yelled. "Jesus Christ, don't murder me!"
Raising the Remington over the blazing bedclothes, Books sighted on his enemy's rectum.
"You tried to kill me," he said hoarsely. "So long, you murdering son of a bitch."
He fired. Ranging half the length of the spine, shattering vertebrae and destroying the central nervous system, the .44 slug drove the body halfway through the window.
Books placed his weapon on the carpet.
Twisting then, he reached, got a grip on the rim of the slop-jar, lifted it high, swung, and doused the flaming bed with urine.
The door of the room burst open.
A stench sickened them. Black powder smoke blinded them.
One of the railroad men, a gnome in a nightshirt, balding and elderly, with watering eyes and hairy ankles, edged tentatively into the room and turned on the ceiling fixture.
At the door, the other railroad man, the middle-aged schoolteacher, Bond Rogers, and her son Gillom drew incredulous breath.
J. B. Books sat beside the bed in his underwear. He stared vacantly, not at them but at a wall patterned with sprays of blue and golden lilies.
Below the mirror and washbowl, both of which were blood-spattered, a dead man lay on his back, a revolver in his hand, his mouth open, his winding sheet a web of torn curtains.
A foul steam rose from the blackened stew of the bed.
Another man seemed to be attempting to climb out of the south window, out of the house. But he was still, his legs spraddled wide. And from between his buttocks, through the denim of his pants, a dark stream welled as though he were excreting blood.
To wake from a sleep of peace, to look into that infernal room, to outrage the nostrils with the odors of terror and death and madness therein, was to have a presentiment of Hell itself. Those witness at the door stood as though nailed to the floor. The railroad men turned heads. The schoolteacher tried to shriek and, unable, commenced to wail.
"Telephone the marshal, Mrs. Rogers," ordered Books. "The rest of you, get the hell out of here."
In flannel dressing gown she waited in the parlor for the marshal. Gillom could not sit. She had even had to remind him to put on his trousers. Barefoot, he paced up and down before her.
"God," he said.
He ran a hand through his rat's-nest hair.
"God!"
He swept a toe along the fringe at the base of the sofa.
"God, Ma, did you see that? That's the way it happens, Ma—the real thing! My God, he got both of 'em! They must've come through the windows, guns going, and he's so fast, he killed 'em both! You wait—half this town'll be coming by our house every day for a week, gawping and pointing! Will we ever be in the papers, too! J. B. Books in a shoot-out right in our house—we can brag on this the rest of our lives!"
She had never seen him so excited. His face, his eyes, were feverish. And suddenly she hated her son. Her home, the home she and Ray had dreamed of and saved for, had been desecrated. If her departed husband knew, and she had no doubt he did, he could not in an eternity forgive her. And she hated Books. She had let a killer into her house, let him buy her forbearance and charity and the adoration of her boy for the pottage of four dollars a day. She remembered them together yesterday, Gillom as tall as the gun man, shooting at tree trunks, competing yet sharing in a false and deadly virility. She shuddered again to explosions and yells. A viper of revenge entered her bosom.
"You respect him, don't you, Gillom?"
"Wouldn't you?"
"You worship the ground he walks on, don't you?"
"Damn right I do!"
"You think as much of him as you did of your father, don't you?"
That brought him up short.
"Don't you?"
"I told you, Ma. Don't talk—"
"He's dying," said Bond Rogers.
"Who?"
"J. B. Books."
"Hah."
"Of natural causes. He told me the other day. That's why Doctor Hostetler has been here twice. He has a cancer."
"I don't believe it."
"It's only a matter of time—several weeks perhaps. That's why he wanted to go for a drive yesterday. He said it would be his last opportunity to see the world."
"You're lying."
"Have I ever?"
"He'd have told me. He likes me a lot."
"He's dying, Gillom."
He understood at last. He believed at last. She could have cut out her tongue. For his reaction was as startling, and as frightening, as a shot in the dark of night.
Gillom turned his back on her. A string of reserve was pulled in him. He sank awkwardly to his knees and buried his face in the seat of a chair. He sobbed. He stained with his tears the velours of the chair, an overstuffed of which she was particularly choice. His hands tore the antimacassars from the arms. He cried as desperately as he had at another bereavement.
She had wanted to hurt him, her own flesh, and hence to do herself injury—but not to this terrible extent. She had hated him momentarily, and hated Books. Gillom would hate her now, and Books, too, and have in time his own vengeance. If the man in the corner room had taken life tonight, she was guilty of a sin almost as grave. Given the secret of death to keep, she had used it instead as a weapon, and by means of it, on impulse she had robbed a seventeen-year-old of hope. On the slate of his future, she knew now, Gillom had begun to chalk a new image, and with one cruel stroke she had wiped the slate blank.
In a cold dawn, in a cold house, Bond Rogers sat, watching through her own tears her son grieve the loss, in less than two years, of two fathers.
"Who were they?"
"Ben Shoup, the one you shot in the ass."
"Shoup."
"The other name of Norton. Two no-goods, not from around here. Know them?"
"I recollect the name Shoup back in San Saba County when I was a kid. I had family there."
"Well, they knew you. And I knew sure as death and taxes we were due for something like this." Thibido sipped from his coffee cup. "Came in the windows, did they? How'd you manage?"
"I was up taking a leak. I stayed under the bed till I placed them, then came out shooting."
"Just like that, two more notches." The marshal glanced at the blood-blotched mirror and washbowl, and at the dried rivulet in the carpet under the south window. He shook his head in disgust. "Place looks like a damned slaughterhouse. Smells like it, too."
"They must have heard I was hanging up my irons for good. Figured I couldn't defend myself."
"They found out."
Books considered him. "Only three people knew—Doc Hostetler, the landlady, and you. How would you guess the word got around?"
"Not from me," lied Thibido quickly. "My profession, you learn to keep your eyes skinned and your mouth shut."
"Mine too," said Books.
They drank the coffee Mrs. Rogers had brought them. It was six o'clock in the morning. Several of Thibido's deputies had arrived with him and removed the bodies. The landlady had stripped the bed and, taking the sheets and blankets into the back yard, burned them, but the stink lingered in the room.
"Goddam fools," Thibido reflected.
"Who?"
"Shoup, Norton. All they had to do was hold their face and hands and you'd be in a wooden box and they'd of had the last laugh. How long now, Books?"
"I don't know."
"What's the doc say?"
"He doesn't."
Thibido smiled. "How you feeling? A little more poorly every day?"
"That's damned unkind of you."
"It was damned unkind of you to come to El Paso to kick the bucket." Walter Thibido tilted his chair and made himself comfortable. "I blame myself for this hash. I should of badged some good men and tied your legs under a burro and hurrahed you out of town the day you showed—but I didn't. I shed a tear, I sweet-talked Mrs. Rogers into letting you stay, I guaranteed her you wouldn't be here long. I'm sorry for her. Well, what I'll do, I'll post a man outside the house nights from now on. That'll cost the town three dollars a day. And ten dollars apiece to plant Shoup and Norton out of the taxpayers' pockets. Death and taxes, Books—what I just said. Keeping you alive long enough to die natural is costing us a pretty penny."