Trick Shooter by Marika Psalidas

"It’s us and the buzzards, Jack. Only creatures fool enough to go wheelin’ about in this infernal noonday.”

The boy made no contrary remark, instead continuing to count boundary stones in earnest silence, as was his manner. Bill MacNair shifted his reins to one hand, beat the sand from his hat, and carried on jawing undeterred, as was his.

“I’ll tell you, they’ve got the right idea down south with their siestas. Take the shade, pour a drink, and kick up your boots until the dust quits boiling. Damn heat’s fit for naught but gambling and gunplay. Say, I’ll bet you the first hundred dollars from my pocket you can’t shoot the tuna off that prickly pear yonder.”

Jack perked up at a chance for target practice but balked at the wager. “I don’t believe you’ve got a hundred dollars in the world, Mister MacNair, and if you did I wouldn’t take it.”

“Only joking, lad.”

Despite Bill’s long-standing efforts, the kid couldn’t tell a proper jest from a posthole. God only knew he’d dug enough of those in his thirteen years. And he’d roped colts, branded cattle, strung wire, split wood,  drawn water, pitched hay, and done whatever else his taskmaster father bid him. That was what trouble came of working a boy twice as hard as a man Bill thought—it weakened his natural knack for mischief.

“You ought to learn to have a lark once in a while. On a summer like this, at your age, I’d be dallying by the docks or burglarizing my ma’s flowerbed to go court some lass. My da hardly ever got a full day’s labor out of me.”

It was without intention, but he saw by a sudden tightness in the boy’s shoulders that he’d struck a glancing blow. Bill fixed his hat on his brow. “Come on, give ’er a try,” he said. “This morn’s shy of excitement.”

Jack drew his rifle from his saddle sling. It was a sixteen-shot Henry. The brass receiver was scuffed from second or third hand use but polished nearly back to glory. He took aim at the cactus from forty yards—steadied, squinted, fired. The pear fruit splattered into sweet scarlet pulp.

“Dead on,” Bill said approvingly.

Jack laid the gun across his lap. “Hey, ain’t nothing special.”

“I hope you’ll be sporting and wait until my next payday to collect. Now, what’s your count on those markers? Threescore and ten since the station?”

“Yessir.”

“Then our job is through and with time enough to beat the dinner bell. Boss’ll be glad to know he’s still richer than Solomon.”

Bill’s employer was a flint-fisted old stockman named Reuben Carrock, although few presumed to address him as anything other than Boss. Bill had cowboyed for him since before Jack was born and reckoned he’d stick with his outfit until age or affliction put one of them underground. Even though he signed his checks like every pen stroke slit his veins, Carrock paid steady wages for hard work—and hard work abounded in the company of a man who owned a hundred thousand acres of ranchland north of the Río Grande and enough cattle and horses to settle it snugly.

He also owned Jack. Bill recalled the evening over a decade ago when he’d been braiding rope by the main gate and witnessed the arrival of a young señorita, barefooted and careworn, carrying a child of three she claimed was Carrock’s son. At first, the boss refused to entertain such an idea, but after a heated discussion to which Bill was not privy there evidently arose some begrudging acknowledgement of the boy’s parentage, and Carrock turned the woman away with a few pesos for her pains and took the boy in. His mother had christened him Juan Jacinto, which wouldn’t do, so Jack he became.

Little Jack was a lively youngster with a norteño accent in his blossoming baby talk that Carrock thoroughly whupped out of him until even the Mexican hands said he sounded like a gringo, although the man begrudged him sufficient Spanish for horse-trading. Ten subsequent years of toil on the ranch served to produce a fine Western cowpoke but not much of a boy.

Bill shrugged off his reverie as he lingered at the top of the ridge watching a fever-shimmer rise from the ivory flatlands and blur into the unclouded blue above. The trail behind them was a vast range of cracked pale earth–the terrain broken only by tangled saltgrass and exclamations of white yucca. Below, the bluff wound around the Río far receding into summer shallows. Its banks were lined with a shock of vivid verdure where deep-rooted mesquite and tamarisk stretched their branches over the water.

Bill whistled. “Some sight, eh?”

Jack drew his pinto in a tidy turnabout alongside the older man and peered over the cliff. “It looks like a painting from up here.”

“Bet you could shoot a rattler’s eye on the far riverbank.”

“That’d be too easy.”

“Too easy, ha! I’ll be damned if I don’t make you prove up to that cockalorum. Show me a shot with mettle then.”

“What do I win?”

“Your honor as a man. I’d stake a dime, but lady luck didn’t fancy me in the deal Friday last.”

Jack surveyed the landscape before him. He was quiet for a long span, motionless and unblinking save for the slow swivel of his neck like a tawny owl. His hair fluttered in the wind-whirled dust. A sudden wildness seemed to overtake him, and he dismounted with his rifle in hand. “All right. X marks the spot.”

At first, Bill couldn’t read his meaning. He combed the endless expanse of earth searching for a trailhead or a broken tree limb. When his far-flung glance finally landed upon the small pueblo of La Junta de los Ríos beyond the water. In a flash, he spied Jack’s target—a wooden cross atop the whitewashed mission in the center of town.

Bill chuckled uneasily. It was an uncharacteristically impious act from the youth, who, despite his lack of spiritual upbringing—the boss didn’t believe in a day of rest on Sundays, and Mondays through Saturdays were out of the question—always seemed to have a sort of vague reverence about him. Still, he assured himself, nothing amiss would come of it. The distance was impossible.

“You’ll catch hell from the sisters if you interrupt midday Mass,” Bill said.

Jack carefully loaded another cartridge.

“Come now, that’s a mile if it’s an inch.”

The boy settled the stock against his shoulder.

“You won’t even make it past the arroyo.”

He aimed down the sights.

“Listen, son—”

Jack fired. The bullet soared skyward, a brilliant copper arc swiftly vanishing into azure. For nearly half a minute, he remained frozen in a steely stare as the report echoed across the plateau, and then without warning he lowered his weapon, chagrined.

Bill relaxed the unconscious tension in his reins. “What’s turned your head pulling such a stunt?”

“I just thought…” Jack absently ran a hand over the lever. “If I made a shot like that, I bet even Pa’d be proud.”

“If you made that shot, you’d be Doc Holliday, Bill Hickok, and Robin of Sherwood all rolled into one. Not a soul alive could do it. No use fretting. How about you saddle up and let’s head back?”

“But I didn’t see where it landed.”

“Hey?”

“I might’ve hit my mark. It’s downhill, a clear day, and with a leading wind… there’s a chance, isn’t there?”

Bill had seen the bullet fly, and he admitted the angle of it held some promise. Still, even if a Henry could shoot that far, the odds against the target were fantastical. It was a chance in ten thousand. Less than that.

“You’ve better sense than this, lad. Why not give it up?”

“It’s my honor as a man. You said so yourself.”

“Don’t heed me. You’re just a child yet.”

Jack looked stricken, but there was a flare of tenacity behind his dismay. “Please—I’ve got to know.”

Bill, for all his good humor, wasn’t much inclined to sentiment, but the boy’s grave countenance and the blaze of the open country stirred his ever-burning bigheartedness. He turned the matter over in his mind. It would take an hour or more to descend the steep ridge to La Junta—twice that to make the climb again. They could pass through town, swing ’round the mission, see that there was nothing to see, and head back. What was the harm? Anyway, he’d be a damned dissembler if he refused the kid now after all his talk of free and easy living.

Bill mopped the back of his neck with his kerchief. “I suppose I could visit old Manuelo about that saddle he’s fixing up. Maybe stop by the cantina for a spell—no better aguardiente south of the border. Mind you, if we go, you’ll have to help me spin some story to your da. There’s a roundup on the overland paddock this eve, and he won’t abide a couple of latecomers.”

With a grin, Bill clucked his grulla into a trot. Jack watched him depart then hurriedly mounted and rode up beside him in disbelief. “You mean it? We’re going?”

“Can’t have you getting too smug, can I? Got to set the facts straight.”

“Thank you! Thank you, Mister MacNair, I know it’s a long way. It’s real good of you—”

“A long way, aye, and even longer if you don’t hush that prattle. Just keep me company.”

The two of them drifted into idle discourse as they followed the ridgeline southwest. Bill was concluding a lengthy anecdote about a pay dispute with a shipyard foreman back in Edinburgh that turned into a punch-up—’twas masculine valor what carried the day, aided by no small dose of whiskey—when the ground before him struck a slight pitch and the cairn that marked the cliffside path rose into view. He faltered and swallowed hard at the sight of earth crumbling into air.

Bill was no friend to verticalities. Long gone were his boyhood days of awakening to the gold-dipped glory of a sunrise on the highland crags, and in their stead was a stretch of decades spent comfortably below sea level. As he and the boy slowed to meet the decline, Bill swayed toward the rockwall beginning to regret his reckless benevolence.

In an attempt to distract himself from his own labored breathing, Bill glanced over at Jack who had been sighing intermittently for the past quarter-hour.

“What’s got you so lonesome?”

“Nothing. Just thinking.”

“Thinking on what?”

Jack hesitated. “Marybeth Connor.”

“That little moppet from town?”

“We got to talking during the last cattle auction. About work and such. Mostly, she cooks and launders at the boardinghouse, but Sunday’s she plays piano for the church choir—wants to get good enough to go to the women’s conservatory up in Belton.”

“Her da’s on the railway gang, you know. Family hasn’t got a penny.”

“I don’t care about that.”

“Good lad.” Bill leaned back in the saddle. “Talking’s all you got to doing I take it.”

The boy turned half around, and Bill spied a flush in his face not from the heat. “Well, we don’t know each other much yet, but I asked if she’d like to go on a walk by the river sometime.”

“So the young gentleman’s got himself a sweetheart. I’ll give you a wise word on that score—sweetness is all well and good for sport, understand, but when you’re of a mind to wed, don’t settle down with some doe-eyed dove. Best thing to do is find yourself a quarrelsome woman.”

“Sir?”

“A man’s like a pocket watch. He’s got to be wound up to keep ticking. Take my dear departed Moira. Together thirty years and she gave me hell every day and night. God rest her soul. I’ll never love another so well.”

Bill smiled fondly, though the boy seemed unconvinced. “Ah, you’ll learn sure enough. And how’d your Marybeth answer?”

“She told me, if I took a bath and combed my hair next time I came around she’d be pleased to see me.”

“She’s got spirit then.”

After a while, they rounded the switchback. The sheer rock face angled inward, and the upper track that held two riders abreast swerved into a trail below that forced them into single file. Jack, on the nimbler steed, and by far the more eager party, led the way, and with the shift in position, their conversation languished before lapsing entirely. They rode along to the hollow howl of wind against limestone.

Jack seemed to slow his gait without intention and brushed a hand along the rippling layers of the cliffside—rose upon russet upon amber. “Pa wants a drift fence built across the pass to Coahuila,” he said at last. His voice sailed above the sound of the river, whose distant drone from the overlook had now livened into a rumble as they neared the shores. “He says we let the herd wander too far south last winter.”

“If that man could coop steers like hens, he’d do it.” Bill listened to the steady rhythm of hoofbeats on gravel. “You ever think to cut and run?”

“When I’m grown?”

“Anytime.”

“Sure. But it don’t matter. All I’ve got is here.”

“That’s folly if ever I’ve heard it. Come on, where would you go?”

“Maybe north, maybe west. Maybe east.”

“Devil take the east. Nothing there for a man but fishing and factory smoke. Whatever the papers say, there’s a frontier yet, and it’s the place for any such soul with grit.” He risked a glance to the horizon. “Don’t count yourself beholden, not to home, nor kin, nor anyone. Hundred thousand acres isn’t much at all. It’s a wide world.”

“Yessir,” Jack replied, but if he spoke with any faith, it was lost to the lonely breeze.

—

The path wound steadily down to the base of the bluff. When they finally reached level ground, it was all Bill could do not to fall to his knees and kiss it. He and Jack traversed the riverbank to wade through a waist-high crossing and water their animals on the other side, tarrying a moment by a cluster of coyote willow to brush the lather from their horses’ flanks. They mounted again refreshed. The road to town was broad and rambling, but beast and rider alike sensed it as the final stretch of their journey and kept a sprightly tempo. As they passed a worn signpost at the crest of the hill, the dizzying dread that had gripped Bill earlier dropped away acre by acre across the smooth swell of the sandy steppe. The view flowed into the distant surge of an indigo-heathered mesa where heaven met homeland in the faraway.

“What about you? Where would you go?”

The question caught Bill unawares, but Jack carried an alert and expectant air.

“Well,” Bill mused, recovering himself, “I’ve just about put all my goin’ behind me.”

“You talk all the time about everywhere you’ve been and seen.”

“That’s talk. I’ve played the wild rover long enough and lived to bear the tales and scars. Now, I’ve pitched camp. No shame in it. Ranching’s a steady trade, and I don’t mind the rough work. Not good for much else.”

“That ain’t so. I bet you could do whatever you like. You’ve taught me lots.”

“Nothing you wouldn’t have taught yourself by and by and with fewer mistakes to your name. But you don’t know yet how life wears on a body. Take your cheer in that. Being young’s a grand thing—all your best years, you can look ’em square in the face and knock ’em down, one by one.” Bill slowly stretched out the ache in his wrists. “You know, you’re getting of an age to make these rides on your own. Ought to hang around the other hands more, the vaqueros and those new boys from San Angelo. They’re plenty sharp. Better company than this old fool.”

Jack sat up straight in the saddle. In stillness and shadow, he had his father’s thin angles, his low-roving gaze, but when he rode beneath a fair sky, he showed the fullness of his mother in him. His sun-blooded face set with bright black eyes that could blaze a trail through the plains quicker than daylight. He now turned them upon Bill. His voice and gaze unwavering.

“There’s nobody I’d rather have along. Nobody in the world.”

Bill let his reins slacken. He pulled down his hat before the dust stung him blind. “Best you quit that talk, lad. You’ll make a bleeding heart of me.”

The village was in sight. Bill wanted to forge onward, to leave the moment behind, but instead he found himself silently chasing after his own nerve. The pursuit lasted half a minute, and when he finally caught his quarry he held it fast.

“Don’t believe I’ve ever told you,” he said. “Maybe it’s no place of mine, but I hope you know I’m proud.”

“You will be once we get to town. Just you wait.”

—

La Junta de los Ríos was tranquil when they rode in. It’s inhabitants stayed sensibly sheltered against the withering heat of the early afternoon. As Bill and Jack crossed the lane to the town center, all was still save for a sarape swaying on a second-story clothesline and a lone mongrel dog slumbering beneath a storefront porch dreamily wagging away flies.

The mission’s silhouette cast a spectral shimmer over the road. Jack tied his horse to the hitching-post, and Bill followed. Together they squinted up at the cross.

“Hard to tell with the glare,” the boy said.

“A bullet’s tough to miss.”

“See! Up in the crux.”

“That’s just a nail. It’s got to be.”

“Too big for a nail, ain’t it?”

“You’re daft.”

“There’s something stuck in the wood, but it’s too far to make out from down here. If we got a closer look….”

The boy and the man regarded one another.

“A closer look,” Bill sighed.

Jack started rolling up his sleeves. “I’ll go, sir. I know you’re sca—tired.”

Bill glowered at him. “Oh, no, you don’t. You’re just trying to save my pride. I set the wager, and I ought to be the judge of it. I’ll get up there and see with my own two eyes, or my name isn’t William MacNair.” He charged ahead to the lower wall and clambered atop the sloping cobblestones, a fury with conquering fervor. If the kid thought he was half mad, he was half right.

His valiant endeavor was going gloriously until the grade converged with the tall stucco slab of the mission’s front face. Twenty feet straight up. Hopeless. The nearer inlaid column beside the entry arch was his salvation if he could manage to scale it. Bill wiped his palms on his shirttail and sought a handhold along the pillar’s slender grooves, but by the time he found a chink he could use to haul himself partly up, they were slick with sweat again. He froze, clinging fiercely to the post.

“Please, you don’t have to,” he heard the boy call from beneath. “Let’s just go back.”

“Too late for that,” Bill panted. He’d given his word, and at least no one else was around to see him carry out the deed.

He groped about for the flatstone cap above his head. With a grunt, he hitched an arm over the platform feeling the weight and wear of his years all too keenly. He’d nearly dragged himself up to shoulder-height when his boot slipped on a loose corner of the column, and he dropped with a lurch, tensing to catch himself on a dip in the rock just in time. The jolt knocked off his hat and sent it pinwheeling onto the street below.

“Be careful!” urged Jack.

“Aye, lad, I’d forgotten.” He pushed against the foothold and struggled to hoist himself onto the narrow ledge where he swung a leg over the upper parapet and rested prone on the brickwork—desperate to settle the thunder in his blood. A few feet above him was a gap in the wall for the hanging church bell—just spacious enough to use as a final step to the eaves. Climbing it by inches was an agony he couldn’t endure, but with a burst of momentum, he could surmount it and end his torture in the span of a heartbeat.

Bill maneuvered into a crouch. Tension twitched through his muscles. Drawing a bated breath he leapt to his full height, and his spirit soared with triumph when he grabbed the edge of the roof and began to pull.

The tile snapped beneath his hold.

Panic drenched him as he lost his footing. He kicked helplessly and struck swinging iron, and the deafening clangor that resounded nearly rattled him out of his skin. Bill scrabbled for a firm grip, but he couldn’t find a purchase on the clay, slipping rapidly downward with each desperate spasm of motion.

He heard the boy cry out in panic, and Bill knew this was it, the end of him, and a sorry one at that, Try as he might to prepare himself, every prayer he’d ever known fled from his mind, but with one last frenzied grasp he shot up an arm and hooked his fingers around the keystone at the very pinnacle of the mission, and then, sweet mercy of Heaven, he found a final flare of strength to claw upward and hurtle over the ledge.

The terra cotta cracked beneath him as he landed. Bill lay flat on his back against the roof. His chest heaved like a storm-tossed ship. Wrenching away with a ragged breath, he rolled onto his hands and knees and crawled atop the pedestal of the cross, reaching up to inspect a dark dent in the middle of the planks. When his vision finally adjusted to the brightness, he stared in wonderment.

Surely it was sunstroke. Delusion.

A trick of the light.

Jack had done it.

There the shot was, dead in the crossbeam, a warped leaden lump splitting the sun-blistered paint and driving an inch deep into the piñon.

“God Almighty.”

With the bell still echoing through the streets, a throng of townsfolk had begun ambling out of shops and shacks and villas to investigate the commotion. They gathered around the mission. Their murmured attentions turned to the madman overhead.

“¿Está borracho?” one woman inquired of her neighbor supposing he was drunk.

“El pobre tonto se romperá el cuello.”

Jack smiled at the woman who worried the poor fool would break his neck.“Santa María, Madre de Dios….”

Whatever they’re saying, let them talk, Bill thought. They’d soon have plenty to discuss. He leaned over the edge of the rooftop and fixed his sights on Jack, who was waiting far below. “Jackie boy,” he declared, “you can tell ’em—tell all of ’em that they’re a witness to the greatest damned sharpshooting trick of the century!”

He expected jubilation at the news, but instead the youth was curiously composed. Jack glanced around at the inquisitive crowd. Stepping forward into the shade, he looked up at Bill once more, his manner light and easy.

“Come on down, Mister MacNair. I didn’t hit a thing. That bullet’s been there fifty years. Way back from when Mexico and the States were quarreling over who owned Texas. The padre showed me last time we rode through town. Thought I’d have a little fun keeping that fact to myself.”

He picked up Bill’s hat and slapped it across his knee. “I fooled you good!”

Bill had scarcely known the boy to so much as crack a smile, but now his eyes lit up with the spark of a roguish grin, and when laughter finally overtook him, it broke like the dawn.

Marika Psalidas spent most of her youth immersed in a book or a creek, a lifestyle she aims to continue throughout adulthood. She was born just shy of hurricane country in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and over the course of various moves came to appreciate the atmospheric variety of Kansas twisters, Iowa snowstorms, and Texas heatwaves, the latter of which sparked her deep and abiding love for Western literature, films, and music. Marika attended the University of Southern California and earned a degree in computer science, which she employs in her career as an audio engineer. Her current residence is in Sioux City, Iowa, where she is an active member of the Tri-State Writers group. In between working and writing a Western novel, she enjoys reading, campfire cooking, tending the garden, biking along riverside trails, and practicing harmonica. Although her home is in the heartlands, her heart belongs to the South.