believed that trigger guards slowed up draws. So Charlie has followed his mentor's mandates and had the front two-thirds of the trigger guard removed so that, under duress, he may seize the gun and his finger will fly directly to its trigger without having to curve, then straighten, to engage that part's sweep. Of course, if you don't know what you're doing with this outfit, you'll blow off your foot.
Charlie knows what he's doing.
Charlie also has a couple of Colt Detective specials which he'll wear, one in a boot holster, the other in an underarm job. All of his guns shoot the.38–44 that Earl has provided, and Charlie knows that it'll take the fight out of a white man just as quickly as it'll do the same to a Mexican.
But Charlie's real killing instrument isn't his handgun at all, though he's done in a few possibly bad individuals that way. No, Charlie is a shot gunner and for this job he's brought along the instrument that got him through many a tough night on the border. It's a Browning Auto-5, with an extended magazine, so that now it holds eight 12gauge double-ought shells instead of five, and he refers to the shells as Blue Whistlers, for he's convinced that he can see them whistling through the air in fleets as he fires. But the best is that he's cut down the barrel to eighteen inches, and there, at the end of the new muzzle, screwed on what he calls his duck bill. It's a spreader. It's as if you squashed the bell of a horn till it was flat and its effect is to cause the shot cluster to sail down the barrel of the gun to spread horizontally rather than circularly, so that it exits the muzzle like a deadly spray of paint flung from a quickly flicked brush. It does the job very well on Mexicans, and a part of Charlie genuinely wants to know how it'll work on big of white boys.
Out on the prairie, alone, is the most haunted of them. This is the young Audie Ryan. Audie has two Colts, but they're single-action revolvers, six-guns of the Old Western school, which he'll carry in custom-made black leather double buscadero holsters made for him by John Bohlin of Hollywood. You would think from this Audie is a cowboy; in the pictures, he's a cowboy.
Like so much of what's in the pictures, it's another lie. Audie wasn't raised on a ranch, though he's from Texas. His life had nothing of the West, or the range, or cattle or honor or horses or sidekicks to it. It was more out of Walker Evans's photography, those horrific images of the dispossessed, the thin-faced, the desperate hard scrabble Southern poor.
Those are Audie's memories, sharecropping near Greenville in northwest Texas, after his no ' old man lit out on them, and he and the boys had to rent themselves out early as sharecroppers, at twelve, just to keep a little food on the table and the sense of family, so instinctive, somehow alive. It was then that he began his hunting, and only alone in the hills with a beat-up old Winchester.22 single-shot-if he missed he went hungry?that he began to feel any sense of selfhood. A gun was at the center of it. Without the gun, he was a Texas redneck pretty boy with freckles and a girly name, who had to fight his way to and from school when he went. With the gun he felt the admiration of the family when he returned with rabbit or squirrel or pheasant or dove, each shot beautifully. He felt the most primitive thing a hunter feels: I have fed my family; I am a man.
So for him the war wasn't what it was to so many, a crushing obstacle erected across a promising life. It was an expression of all the lonely lessons he'd learned in the scruffy woods of northwest Texas, where the gun was the only means to manhood.
The two Colts are emblems of just how successful he had been. In the war he had been a terror, a little, bitty speck of kid, almost without fear, who brought his talents for shooting and his instinct about the lay of the land to the fields of Europe, where, after the first day or two, everything just seemed to make sense, to fit together. His instincts were always right. He wasn't really frightened in the way a lot of the others were. He didn't really care if he got back or not; he had gotten off the goddamned farm where his goddamned father had left him; he had gotten off it, and how. When he fired, men dropped.
When he shouted, men listened. Where he went, men followed, him hardly more than a child, with a soft, baby face, almost like a little girl, with small hands, but he was grit tough from the way he was raised, and even the Army food felt like a feast compared to the thin vittles of the rabbit split six ways he'd grown up on.
The two six-guns were presented to him by a very important man, Mr.
Graham H. Anthony himself, the president of the Colt's Company, on the occasion of his tour of the plant in 1947. The folks there were all very nice to Audie, who didn't say much, and whose childish looks somewhat nonplussed them. Like so many others, they couldn't see in this polite, nearly mute young man of surpassing beauty the great hero who had killed close to three hundred of his country's enemies.
Audie loved the guns. Aware that if he were to prosper in Hollywood as a Western hero, he'd have to learn to shoot them and handle them, that's exactly what he did, even when he was living in Jimmy Cagney's pool house his first few years out there. He'd rise early and head out to the hills over the city and just practice, slowly at first. When the world didn't make a lot of sense, the guns always did. He drew fast, with both hands. He learned to slip fire, to Curly Bill spin, to fan, to hit aerial targets, to load and unload fast. It was amazing how much you could learn if you put your mind to it, particularly when it was men's work, with machines and techniques, not like this acting business, which was mainly about getting yourself seen, and 'pretending' a certain thing, even if it wasn't true, and there were no rules at all.
So Audie, alone in the field, practiced a kind of warfare he had never fought, except in front of a camera: the Old West style, where the gun flew from his holster, clicked four times?C-O-L-T, the legend phad it, as the hammer peened against Sam Colt's genius system of pins and screws and levers?and then fired with the satisfying detonation of a big.44.
With a gun in his hand, he knew he could do anything. alone in his room, by design, Earl works the map again. He knows you can study a thing too hard, until you are so up close to it it makes no sense whatsoever. That is what he does not want to do.
His plan, he knows, is sound, if all the surprises work as they are set, and if the guards react as he expects they will react when confronted with strong, willful, armed men of extremely refined shooting ability and no mercy whatsoever. But he knows too that anything can go wrong at any time, and without radio communications, backup, a quick exit strategy, the whole thing can turn to catastrophe faster than a cat can blink.
But he can't do any more. A sergeant, in this instance, should be out and around, cajoling his boys, feeling their fears, trying to calm them.
These old goats are too old and too salty for much in the way of sergeanting. So Earl leaves them alone to do as they may, for they will do as they may when the day arrives, ever so shortly.
Earl, like the rest of them, works on his guns.
Earl has two revolvers. He would have preferred a.45 Government Model automatic, for he carried one as a Marine for fifteen years and again in the fracas in Hot Springs. He knows the Government Model well, and can shoot fine with it. It's powerful, it reloads fast, it's reliable, just what the doctor ordered. But his whole sense of this thing is that it can't be a military operation. It's not commandos, raiders, a secret, private army. It's a posse of citizens who have taken it upon themselves to face what no one in authority has the courage to face. He thinks it's all right like that, if it can be all right at all, but now it's gone so far, it don't matter much whether it's all right or not. He's going to do it, goddamn, and live with it forever after.
Earl doesn't take a stand on American gun-making. He has a Colt and a Smith. His Smith is the Heavy Duty, on the.44 frame, to shoot the.34–44 high velocity, with the same stubby 4-inch barrel. The Colt is the Trooper, a beefed-up Official Police to shoot that same hard recoiling.38–44. He's good and fast with both.
Now he, too, can do nothing but clean the guns, smoke his Lucky Strikes and watch the moon disappear. the phone call awoke the warden. He wasn't used to being alerted this early in the morning, and he had a moment of panic. Was the pale horse here?
But no. It was his bedroom. It was his Big House. It was the cool of the morning, but already the place outside had come alive. His servant was close at hand. He felt no disturbance in the ecosystem of his great place, for he was exquisitely attuned to such small disturbances.
The warden blinked, felt his breath return to normal. He glanced around, took a drink of water from the pitcher next to his bed, then picked up the phone. Since there was only one other working telephone in all of Thebes County, he had no doubts as to who it was.
'Warden here.'
'Sir.'
Of course: the sheriff, Leon Gattis.
'Sheriff Leon, what is this about?' 'Mr. Warden, thought you should know. They've arrived.'
'And, Sheriff, what would they be?'
