Joe Lansdale - The Magic Wagon

We'd gone a mile or so when the storm got so bad every little bit of the sky lit up with forks of blue-white lightning and the thunder roared like there was a cannon war going on.

About the time all this storm business got built up, Checkers made his play. Maybe he and the Indian had planned such a thing all along and it hadn't gone good. I don't know. Maybe Checkers planned to rob us after we had the body and the Indian's money, that way he could make double. And maybe he hadn't planned nothing at all and was just mad because he hadn't made his share like he thought he should.

Doesn't matter now. With Billy Bob in front of him, he had the perfect chance to do to him what Jack McCall had done to Hickok.

I seen him go for his gun, and I tried to yell, but with the thunder and lightning like it was, I didn't know if Billy Bob could hear me. But he did, or maybe he'd just been waiting for Checkers to make his play all along. Billy Bob swiveled on his critter, and as he did, I seen there was a smile on his face, like he was about to get a present he'd been waiting a long time for.

The way Billy Bob's hand moved was too fast to be real. I figured it was a trick of the lightning or something. One second his hand was on his knee and the next it was full of pistol and the pistol was cocked.

Only he didn't get to kill Checkers. The lightning did it. It was faster even than Billy Bob, and it reached down out of the sky and hit Checkers' little pistol and there was the sound like a giant whip cracking, then Checkers and his horse exploded and I was wearing some of him and some of his suit and some of his horse.

Billy Bob, with a wail, threw himself off his horse onto the ground and started pounding his hand against the ground, screaming. "I had him beat. My first white man. I had him beat," then he began to cry.

I just sort of sat there, dumbfounded, wearing Checkers, his suit, and his horse. Finally I got down off my horse, led him over a piece, got down on my knees, and threw up.

When I was able to get up, I looked over and seen Albert was helping Billy Bob to his feet. Billy Bob was saying over and over, "I had him beat. My first white man."

Albert helped Billy Bob over to his horse and put him in the saddle. He patted him on the knee. "There's just a whole bunch of white men, Mister Billy Bob. Don't you fret. There'll be others."

"I had him, Albert. I had him whipped fair and square, didn't I?"

"Couldn't have been no fairer or squarer," Albert said, like he was talking to a little kid.

"It ain't right. I had him beat."

"Plumb beat," Albert said.

"By the time Wild Bill was my age he'd done a lot of his killing already," Billy Bob said.

"Things were different then," Albert said. "Folks was more for killing in them times. Got up with it on their minds. They had more niggers to do their work, and there was lots of free time for shooting folks."

"I had him," Billy Bob said, shaking his head. "I had him."

Actually, I had a lot of him. I got a handkerchief and cleaned off what I could and got sick some more.

When I was feeling some better, I went over and stood with Albert and he put his arm around my shoulder. We looked at what was left of Nose Picker Chauncey and his horse. It wasn't much. Just a heap of bones, smoking meat, some saddle leather, and a hunk of checkered suit.

Maybe I should have felt some worse about old Checkers, but to tell it true, I couldn't work up a lot of enthusiasm for feeling bad. I figured after he killed Billy Bob he planned to finish off me and Albert, not knowing we had guns on us and seeing us as easy pickings, which I reckon I would have been. And besides, I just couldn't warm myself to a man that spent the largest part of his life with a finger up his nose, even if he did end up sadlike, being cooked with a horse and a checkered suit.

It seemed like it took forever to get out of the hills, what with the storm being like it was and Billy Bob sort of pouting along, stopping now and then to shake his fists at the heavens and to cuss God and the lightning, calling them some of the meanest, foulest names I've ever heard a mouth utter. The way that thunder rumbled and that lightning sizzled blue-white around Billy Bob, framing him now and then like a bright-colored picture, I half felt it was cussing and threatening him back.

By the middle of next morning we got down out of the hills and back to Deadwood. The sun still hadn't come out.

We collected the wagon, the mules, and Rot Toe, who smelled mighty sweet from all them women petting on him, and we got out of town lickety-split, started heading South-West, which was a direction that suited me fine.

We hadn't gone a day out of that storm when, Billy Bob decided to fix up some cracked sideboards in the wagon. He'd been putting it off for a month and there didn't seem any sense in it right then, but I think he did it to make light of what that medicine man had told him about them boards in Wild Bill's box being made out of sacred trees. He knew I'd told Albert the story, and he knew that Albert believed it, and I about half believed it, so he wanted to show us what fools we were.

Like I said, we'd gotten ahead of the rain for a while, and had all been sitting on top of the wagon, trying to get us some sun, and suddenly Billy Bob had us pull over.

Usually, any work to be done, me and Albert did it, but this time Billy Bob took it on himself. He dragged the box with Wild Bill outside the wagon, propped the body against it, knocked out those old sideboards he wanted to replace, and put in some boards from Wild Bills box.

It took about half a day for him to get that done, as Billy Bob wasn't no joiner to speak of, and by the time he was finished and we were on our way, thunder was right behind us, rumbling loud, and when I turned to look back I got the willies, cause them dark storm clouds that were following us looked to have come together in the shape of Elijah's stovepipe hat.

That was the day that storm started pushing for us, and it stayed after us from then on.

A week or so later, we stopped in a little town to do our act, and Billy Bob had a joiner make a new box for Wild Bill. When that was done, he took the guns that were in Wild Bill's rotting sash out, cleaned them up, and put them in the corpses bony hands, rigged up those hinges in the elbows and those wires that cocked the guns.

And that's the true story of how we came by that body in the box, not the one Billy Bob was telling the crowd about a noble red man giving it to him because he was Hickok's son. I mean, his tale was a good story, all right, but it was nothing more than a damned lie.

To get back to this time in Mud Creek. Billy Bob told his story, then he went out to the clearing with everyone tagging along behind, and he did some shooting.

And I mean shooting. I want to witness that I hadn't never seen him as good as he was that day. He split playing cards edgewise, like always, but now he was doing it from farther away. The same for when he held the mirror with one hand and shot over his shoulder with the other. And he hit nickles tossed in the air with either hand. Before he'd only done that kind of shooting with his right hand.

To put it simply, the man could not miss.

He even went as far as to strike a match with a shot, and I'd heard that was just an old wives' tale and couldn't be done. But he done it, and neatly.

When next I looked out at the crowd, I seen Skinny had joined us. He still had on his apron. He was eating from a bag of peppermints, drooling it down his chin. His eyes looked like a couple of dark holes. It was kind of good to see the old boy.

Then I seen something that made me considerably less happy.

Blue Hat and Texas Jack.