With a pixie smile on his small and pretty face, America's most decorated hero slipped out of the tower. He had a town to tame. audie strolled the dark street. He was an apparition in gun-hawk black, from his black hat to his tight black neckerchief to his black shirt to his black pants to his black double gun belt. Only the two Colts, each tied with a thong to the leg, were not black; they were nickel-finished, polished up nice, not a night-fighter's guns at all.
But they had their advantages. The great Hollywood gun coach Arvo Ojala had honed and stoned their actions, so they were slick as hog guts. He'd rewelded the hammers on each, so they pronged upward another inch and were smooth there, the point being to draw the palm of the off hand along the top of the rising revolver while holding the trigger back so that no lockage was possible, and the hammer just reached apogee and fell of its own accord. Fanning, it was called, and it was much favored by movie gunfighters. You couldn't get work if you couldn't fan, and fanning took a year to master, for you had to build that callused toughness into the edge of the palm, and you had to build the muscles of the wrist and forearm. Most movie cowboys practiced with blanks, so accuracy wasn't an issue. Audie, Texas-born and war-hard, saw no point in blanks; conceptually the blank made no sense to him. So he shot to hit with live.45s, and by this time was among the two or three fastest gunmen in the world. He had made himself into a different kind of killer than the boy who had thrown grenades and shot men down with carbine, Thompson and Garand; he was the Kid now, not much older than the famous Kid of 1884, Johnson County, New Mexico.
In '-town, four men had gathered. They had enjoyed pleasures accessible to them by right of skin color and the guns they carried.
This was no mission of rape; it was simply the way it was at Thebes, and one reason why only the best guards of the Mississippi penal system came to Thebes; its '-town, and the relaxations available, were legendary.
These four were neither braver nor more cowardly than their brethren, most of whom were already dead, the rest of whom had crawled nekkid into the trees; they simply happened to be the ones who were there, and they had gathered at one end of the street in the lee of a shanty as the gunfire and flames had risen all around them. They essentially had no idea what to do: Should they go back or should they flee?
Having no ideas, they did what men in such circumstances will always do: nothing.
They sat and waited to see what would develop.
What developed was a cowboy in black strolling down the street.
'Will ya look at that?' said one. 'He stepped out of the picture show.'
'He's a little '.'
'Them guns he's carrying ain't so little.'
'If I had a rifle I'd shoot him and we'd ride on.'
'You don't have no rifle. You got yourself a revolver like him, and unless you can shoot it well a hundred yards in the dark, you are going to have to get through him to get your cracker ass out of this place.'
'I say we run out shootin', and sure enough one of our bullets will clip that feller.'
'Yes, sir, but suppose he don't panic, suppose he shoots as good as he looks, and suppose you're so nervous you can't hit nothing. Then what?'
'Let him pass, shoot him from behind.'
'That be a good idea.'
'It be, but can you absolutely still your breathing and the noise as he passes by? Suppose he hears you? He turns and comes. Then what?'
'What're you saying, Vonnie?'
'I am saying the onliest sure way is to get close up and face this bastard. He can't take all of us. He just can't. No, sir. We four, he one, that is what it be. We have our guns out. But we have to be so close it ain't about aiming, it's about speed. You got a better plan?'
Nobody did.
And so it came to happen that Audie saw them slough into the street.
They had guns in their hands, sleeves rolled up, hats pulled low. A director would have handled it differently, and better. For one thing, he'd have lit the scene more vividly, as the odd flicker of a lamp from the close-by shanties didn't bring enough texture out; and for another, he wouldn't have let them carry their guns, because that violated the code of the movie West. They wouldn't be clean-shaven, and their hats would have more character. He'd also have insisted on better dialogue, for even Audie sensed the banality of the exchange.
'You go on, git out of here, Mister. This ain't your place. You got no business here.'
Audie, a fighter not a writer, could do no better.
'This is my business. This is my best business.'
'You one. We four. You put them guns down, boy, or you will be dog dead in the dust in two seconds.'
'So will you.'
'You ain't got no cards to play.'
At that point, one of the men fell dead. He dropped like a stone, a small geyser of blood pulsing from the side of his head, which had been crushed by one of Jack O'Brian's.270's fired from almost a third of a mile away.
'Odds are a little better now,' said Audie, whose best thing as both actor and real-life gunfighter was that in moments of high stress a little smile played across his tight lips and his not terribly expressive eyes came abloom in twinkle. So this was the best line, and the best delivery, of his career.
From the three guards, the three guns came up, on the practical impulse that standing in the middle of the '- town street was no longer a risk-free opportunity, and the faster this was handled the better it would be for all of them.
They moved first, and it is practically true that in such encounters aggression pays dividends; nobody can catch up with a fired gun.
Audie, therefore, could not catch up; however, the shots that came at him missed, not by much, but by enough?a tenth of an inch being 'enough'?because the shooters were not practiced at the art of instinctive close- range shooting and didn't realize that unless you've disciplined your trigger finger to come straight back, as if on a pivot, its yank will invariably misdirect the first shot; it comes then to correcting quickly. That's the quickly they lacked.
Audie drew and fanned so fast his shots sounded like a burst from the German attack rifle. He scored three hits in less than a second, and two were fatals; two men went down, a.45 Colt not being something a man can argue with. The third was gut shot and the big slug hit no bones. He was dead but would not die for another ten or so minutes, and he got his gun on Audie and would have finished the trick but for Jack's finest shot of the night, which hit him in the neck, a split second before Audie recovered and fanned two more, heart and lung, into him, and knocked him askew for all time.
Then it was over.
Gun smoke hung in the air, and dust, too, from the fall of the four.
Again the movies: slowly doors opened and women and kids and old men came out. They'd all seen it, but they knew nothing about Jack. It was just that the stranger in black had gunned four of the hated guards down in the street in but a second, after a dramatic exchange of words.
'Who you be, sir?' an elder finally asked.
'We come in from the river, folks,' said Audie. 'We come in to serve this place some justice. You see the flames lighting the sky? We're burning it out. So y'all have to clear out and find other lives. In the morning all this is gonna be under water.'
'I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy.'
'I am, sir. Texas born and raised. Proud of it. Y'all take your belongings now. Have courage. Be bold. This part of your life is over.'
'Sir, they won't nevuh let us leave. We owes ' all money, so we have to stay. The Man work that way.'
'Ain't no more Man. Them debts, that's them burning. All your debts are burned to ash. You get what few get, and that is a new start in life.
I'd grab it hard, for there ain't nothing here for you or nobody tomorrow.'
And with that, the cowboy faded into the dark, a dream, a wish, a myth, but above all a man with a gun.
The world exploded on Jack O'Brian. It just lit up. Suddenly he seemed in a wooden coffin while men shot the
