THE SHOOTIST
by Glendon Swarthout
Doubleday & Company, Inc. 1975
He thought: When I get there nobody will believe I could have managed a ride like this and neither by God will I.
It was noon of a bodeful day. The sun was an eye bloodshot by dust. His horse was fistulowed. Some friction between saddle and hide, of thorn or stone or knot of thread, had created an abscess on the withers, deep and festering, the cure for which he knew was to cauterize and let the air heal by staying off the animal, but he could not stop. If the horse had suffered, he had suffered more. This was the ninth day of his ride, and the last.
He wore a gray Stetson, a black Prince Albert coat, gray vest and trousers, white shirt, gray bow tie, and boots of black lizard.
Between his backside and the saddle throat was stuffed a soft pillow of crimson velvet trimmed with golden tassels. He could not have endured the journey without the pillow. He had stolen it in Creede, Colorado, from a whorehouse.
He rode below the Organs, a bleak range trending south and east, over sand flats wrinkled with dry washes. Tied on behind his saddle were a black valise and a porcelain coffeepot. The lid of the pot had clanked monotonously all morning. He stopped and, turning slowly, untied the coffeepot, turned again, and hurled it as high into the air as he was able. He meant to draw and fire and riddle it before it hit the ground, but the effort of hurling roused such pain in his groins that he could not draw. He slumped, gripping the pommel, as the pot hit the ground and tumbled down the side of a dry wash, clanking, clanking.
There were many bosques, or thickets, now and he detoured them. But the trail required him to pass between two, and as he did, a man jumped from the brush and leveled an antiquated cap-and-ball pistol and croaked at him to throw down his wallet. The man was thin and elderly and reminded the horseman of his grandfather, who had been driven occasionally to desperate undertakings. He had a claw hand for a left hand, cocked perpetually at the wrist, the fingers stiff and splayed. Reining up, the rider reached inside his coat. Claw Hand waggled his gun in warning. "I am not armed," the rider assured him. "You be careful of that cannon." Slipping the wallet from inside his coat, he tossed it. The old man let his eyes follow and therefore did not see the weapon which appeared in the rider's hand as suddenly as blown sand, nor did he hear the explosion because the bullet exploded in his abdomen, crazed through the vitals, was deflected by the spine, and lodged, spent, in the socket of his left hip. He dropped his gun and fell to his knees and squealed like a stuck pig.
"Gawdamighty, you've murdered me!"
"Bring me the wallet."
"I cain't! Gawdamighty!"
"Bring it, you old bastard, or I will put another one through the same hole."
The man's claw pecked at it, his good hand stopped his stomach as though it were a barrel with the bung out, and blubbering, staggering to the horseman, he handed up the wallet.
"Thanks," said the rider, putting away wallet and weapon and taking reins.
"You ain't a-going to leave me here!"
"I am." The rider considered him. "I will do you a favor, though. You have got a bellyache you are not going to get over. You can die slow or now. If you like, I will kill you."
"Kill me!"
"If I was in your fix, I would be obliged. I am a fair shot, and you are old enough, and you don't look as if life has treated you very sporting."
Claw Hand backed off and sank to his knees again and began to wail like a child. His mouth hung open in shock. Saliva dripped from his chin.
"Suit yourself," said the man on the crimson pillow, turning as he rode on. "Don't try to hold up anybody else before you die, Granddad. You are not worth a damn at it."
In another hour under the sun obscured and irritated by dust he reached a ridge which overlooked the pass, and there before him were the town and the Rio Grande and, on the far side, Ciudad Juárez and more mountains and Old Mexico. A chill wind urged him down the ridge into the pass. He had not been in El Paso for years, and they had developed it considerably since then, he'd heard, along the lines of sin and salvation. They had churches and a Republican or two and a smart of banks and a symphony orchestra and five railroads and a lumberyard and the makings of a library. So much for sin. On the side of salvation they had ninety-some saloons, just shy of one for every hundred citizens, although municipal goodyism had moved the gambling rooms out back or upstairs. They had a "Line" on Utah Street with some of the fanciest parlor houses and flossiest girls in Christendom. Champagne went for five dollars a bottle and the girls went for drives in carriages on Sunday. In El Paso, they said, it was "day all day in the daytime and daytime all night, too."
He thought: If Hostetler is here, and he says I am O.K., and he had better after I have come three hundred miles to see him, I will be thirty years old again in thirty seconds. I will take the best room in the Grand Central or the Orndorff Hotel. I will dine on oysters and palomitas and wash them down with white wine. Then I will go to the Acme or Keating's or the Big Gold Bar and sit down and draw my cards and fill an inside straight and win myself a thousand dollars. Then I will go to the Red Light or the Monte Carlo and dance the floor afire. Then I will go to a parlor house and have them top up a bathtub with French champagne and I will strip and dive into it with a bare-assed blonde and a redhead and an octoroon and the four of us will get completely presoginated and laugh and let long bubbly farts at hell and baptize each other in the name of the Trick, the Prick, and the Piper-Heidsick.
On that prospect he clucked the roan into a trot, sharpening the anguish in his groins, and cursed himself for thinking thirty and putting the cart before the horse.
He entered El Paso sideways, from the west, avoiding Santa Fe Street and the plaza like the plague. It would not do to be recognized yet, not until Hostetler gave him the good news. He turned south on Chihuahua Street and was beset by wagons, gigs, and buckboards. He could scarcely identify the town. Most of the hospitable old adobes had been replaced by two-story buildings with brick fronts and false cornices. At intervals were tall poles strung with lines which he gradually understood to be poles and lines for telephones and electric lights. The next thing, he expected, would be herds of horseless carriages. At this rate El Paso would soon be as citified as Denver, far too highfalutin for a man who liked to let the badger loose now and then. The streets, however, were still the same chuckhole sand and gravel.
At the corner of Chihuahua and Overland a newsboy yawped. He reined up and flipped a nickel and glanced at the front page to find out what was going on in the world. It was the El Paso Daily Herald for Tuesday, January 22, 1901. There were two enormous headlines: Queen Victoria Is Dead and Long Live the King. He read the lead item:
London, Jan. 22—Queen Victoria has just died. Her last moments were free from pain. She had been in a comatose condition for some time. Her deathbed was surrounded by members of the royal family, who stood silently as the most famous monarch of the century passed into the great beyond. Preparations began at once to convey the news officially to the Prince of Wales and crown him Edward VII.
Folding the paper, he pushed it into a pocket and turned east onto Overland Street, looking left and right. Several houses had "Board and Room" signs, but one, a new two-story brick with a front porch, a wooden sidewalk, and a picket fence, displayed a smaller sign which said "Lodging." The simplicity appealed to him. It had class. He reined up and wondered if now, after nine days, he could get off the train by himself.