“But teacher, Johnny One-Arm is the best around,” said Roy Thatcher, a red-headed, fiesty kid my own age. “Why, I betcha he could take on John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, any of them guys, and whip ’em with his one arm tied behind him!”
“Now that’s just what I mean!” Billie Bob said. “Dillinger, Floyd, they’re all outlaws, vicious killers, not somebody kids your age, or any age, should be looking up to.”
Billie Bob boarded at Sheriff Jason’s, in the spare room in back. The past term had been his first at our school. Sheriff Jason was a member of the school board and had a hand in hiring him. Always before we’d had women teachers, and we were a little in awe of Billie Bob.
He was a good teacher, quiet, soft-spoken, but he would take no sass. He wasn’t a great deal older than some of his pupils. He was slender, not very tall. Some of the older boys were bigger and easily outweighed him. But he was quick and strong, as a couple of the older boys found out when they defied him. After that, Billie Bob had little trouble keeping order.
Naturally rumors followed him into our town. He had been a big football star with the Horned Frogs of Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, and it was said that he had been a high school teacher afterward for a couple of years. Nobody seemed to know why he took a job teaching at a little school like ours.
I asked Sheriff Jason once about that, and he said, “It’s the depression, Kyle. Jobs of any kind are hard to find. He’s a good teacher, ain’t he?”
I agreed that he was.
“Then be grateful he’s here instead of somewhere else.”
I liked Billie Bob. For one thing, he treated me like a grownup, didn’t talk down to me. And he did talk to me.
Of course, after school was out for summer, he didn’t have much else to do. Like Sheriff Jason said, there were no jobs to be had, much less summer jobs, so Billie Bob stayed pretty much to his room. He ate with us, and most of those hot summer nights, he’d sit on the front porch with Sheriff Jason and me, talking football, politics and the hard times, while Aunt Beth cleaned the kitchen. She was Sheriff Jason’s sister and kept house for us. She wasn’t really my aunt. Sheriff Jason had taken me in to raise following my mother’s death.
After sitting for an hour or so, Billie Bob would go round the house to his room and read awhile. Many nights, when I got up long after midnight to stumble put to the outhouse in back, I’d see his light still off.
That evening after he’d given us the dickens on the playground, Billie Bob picked a time when Sheriff Jason had stepped, inside to say to me, “About this afternoon, Kyle. We live in hard times, dreary times. I know, it’s something to do, brag on our local badmen. So long as it doesn’t go beyond that, I guess it can’t do much harm. But people like John Dilligner, Johnny One-Arm — they’re not people to be admired. They’re killers, thieves, lawbreakers. Just because we hate and blame banks for the Depression, we shouldn’t admire people because they rob banks. And just because we don’t agree with liquor laws, we shouldn’t brag on men who break those laws, who operate honky tonks where men fight over women.”
The first honky tonk killing didn’t take place at Johnny One-Arm’s. It happened at the other one on the highway east of town and on a Saturday night. The girl’s first name was Betty Sue — we never knew her last name. She was found early Sunday morning on the creek bottom two hundred yards behind the honky tonk, strangled, tongue protruding hideously, eyes starting for her head.
The details, of course, I got secondhand, mostly from other kids passing on what their parents had told them. Sheriff Jason was kept on the run all week, with so many people over from the Sheriff’s office at the county seat. There had been killings in our little town before, and Sheriff Jason had handled them. This time, the county seat people buzzed about like nesting hornets. Not that it did them much good. At the end of the week, they hadn’t the least idea who the killer was.
And by that time interest in town had died down somewhat. Who cared all that much about the death of a honky tonk girl? Nobody had even stepped forward to claim the body.
Then the second one was killed, on the very next Saturday night.
Sheriff Jason had one of the few telephones in our town. It rang shortly before eleven. By the time I got awake enough to go out into the hall, Sheriff Jason’s Model A was already driving off, and Aunt Beth was back in bed.
I went out toward the outhouse. A light was on in Billie Bob’s room.
Halfway to the privy, a voice spoke behind me. “That’s a terrible thing, this second killing, isn’t it, Kyle?”
I jumped about a foot, wheeling around. It was Billie Bob.
He nodded. “That’s what the phone call was all about. I couldn’t sleep and was sitting on the porch. I caught the drift of the call to Sheriff Jason.” He looked tired and very, very sad. “I know folks are always saying this, but I don’t know what the world is coming to. Lechery, dishonesty, thievery, murder, all everyday occurrences. Awful, Kyle, just awful. I hope you’ll help make a better world when you grow up. It’s too late for my generation.”
The reaction of the townspeople this time was shock, outrage and undertones of fear. Two violent deaths within seven days. A honky tonk girl, sure, but who could be certain it would remain that way? It could be some maniac loose. Who could sleep easy in their bed?
People began locking their doors for the first time within memory.
In addition, the second girl was known, a member of family right there in town. Ethel Thompson. True, Ethel had the name of a tramp long before she went to work at Johnny One-Arm’s place. But she was one of our own.
Ethel was found in one of the cabins out back, strangled just like the first one. She lived there, getting free rent as part of her wages. There was some evidence that a man had been in the cabin, but nothing to point to what man. Somebody passing the cabin saw the door open, peeked in and saw Ethel. She had only been dead a short while. That was how Sheriff Jason got called in so quickly on the case.
Newspapers in Dallas and Fort Worth picked up the story. It was a natural for headlines: HONKY TONK. KILLER STRIKES AGAIN
Talk in town became ugly. Folks began sniping at Sheriff Jason, demanding he find the killer.
“They’re getting mean,” he said one night on the front porch. He wiped sweat from his brow. “And this heat and the dry spell ain’t helping.”
“Any idea at all as to the killer?” Billie Bob asked.
“Plenty of ideas, but they go off in all directions, like chickens caught out in the rain.”
“If you ask me, it’s that Johnny One-Arm,” Aunt Beth said from the doorway.
“Now Beth,” Sheriff Jason said uncomfortably, “nobody’s asked you.”
“Maybe somebody should,” she said defiantly, hands folded over her stomach. “That man should have been run out of the county long since.”
“But just because a man has a bad reputation doesn’t mean he’s a murderer,” Billie Bob said.
“It’s the best reason I know,” Aunt Beth said, plump face obstinate. “Can you think of anyone else around who’d kill them poor girls?”
There was a brief silence which Sheriff Jason broke with a sigh. “That’s just it, sis. We can’t. Still, that doesn’t mean it has to be Johnny One-Arm.”
“You just wait, you’ll see.” With a loud sniff she went back inside.
“Awhile ago it was honky tonk tramps,” Sheriff Jason said dryly. “Now it’s them poor girls.”
Aunt Beth wasn’t the only one who thought that about Johnny One-Arm, I soon found. Yet there were some folks who refused to believe he was the Honky Tonk Killer. How could a man with only one arm have strangled those two girls?