The Pistoleer: A Novel of John Wesley Hardin

He got to Huntsville early one morning in October. There were a lot of eyeballs on him when the prison wagon came into the main yard and the guards took out him and three others, including a bank robber and a boy who’d killed a fella in a fight over a girl at a church picnic. Wes was shackled to a blacksmith who’d got two years for trying to kill a storekeeper who kicked his dog, and the smitty looked about to piss his pants, he was so scared to be in prison with the likes of us. Two years!—hell, that’s nothing. A man ought be able to do two years on his goddamn toes. I’d already been inside for seven years and had thirteen to go. A lot of the cons were doing thirty, forty, fifty years. An old boy named Weeks was pulling ninety-nine years and a day. He’d got the sentence from a smart-ass judge in Houston. “Could of been worse,” Weeks liked to say. “Shitfire, it could of been life.” That smitty, though, he couldn’t bear up: before he’d been in the walls two months he dove off the second tier and smashed his head like a melon on the stone floor.

Wes was the big attraction, of course, and he damn well knew it. Even with the shackles on him he walked like a man used to getting attention. Most new fish would turn away real quick when you looked them in the eye as they crossed the main yard on the way over to Processing, but not him. He wasn’t about to be rattled by a bunch of yardbirds. Some of the hardrocks hollered to him that they aimed to find out just how tough he was. He just looked at them and spit between his teeth.

A con who clerked in Processing said they had to use nearly two full pages to record all the scars he had on him. After he was washed down, he was given his skunk suit and his mustache was shaved off and his hair was cut down to the scalp like the rest of us. He was brought into the row just before lockdown that evening and put in a cell with Snake Miller. Snake was the only con on the row who usually celled alone. The rest of us kept our distance from him. He was crazy as a moonstruck dog and liked to kill things with his hands.

Right after lights out, we heard the scuffle in their cell. Didn’t neither one let a holler through the whole thing, but we could hear them thumping and cussing and grunting hard. The row guards heard it as clear as we did, but they weren’t about to put a stop to it. Hell, that’s why they’d put Wes in there in the first place. Snake Miller was their favorite way to soften up any new fish who came on the row thinking too much of hisself. The loudest sound of the fight was the last one—there was a kind of wet crunch and everything got quiet. Next morning when they took the padlocks off the doors and opened the cells, they found Snake on the floor with his busted head still leaking blood on the stones. Pieces of hairy scalp were stuck to the door bars. Wes had some lumps and scratches but looked spruce compared to Snake. Smiley and Groot were the row guards—real sons of bitches—but they laughed when Wes said Miller must of been trying to break out by using his head. They had Snake carried over to the hospital. A couple of days later the morning orderly found him with his throat cut.

Wes got assigned to the wheelwright shop, which is where I worked, and where we got to know each other. I was from Liberty County, and it turned out we had some common acquaintances in East Texas.

He hadn’t been there two months before he had a plan for breaking out. It was a good plan except for one thing—he had to bring ten other cons in On it. That was a mistake and I tried to tell him so. “The place is crawling with rats who’ll sell you out for a tiny piece of cheese,” I told him. But he wouldn’t believe cons wouldn’t stick together in trying to escape. “In or out, Red?” he said. I knew better, I truly did, but of course I was in.

What we did was dig a tunnel from under the wheelwright shop to the prison armory, about seventy yards away. Every evening, the guards—including the saddle bosses, the horseback guards who took convict work gangs to the fields every day—stored their weapons in the armory before going to supper. We figured to cut our way through the armory floor, arm ourselfs, get the drop on all the guards, shoot anybody who resisted, and set loose every con in the place—all except for the rape fiends, of course.

The shop had all the tools we needed. Working in three shifts of four men each, we broke through the floor in the rear room of the shop, dug down about seven feet, and tunneled straight at the armory. The tunnel was just big enough for one man at a time, and each man in a shift would work for an hour before being spelled by somebody else. The man in the tunnel always took a handful of empty flour sacks and payed out a strong cord behind him. Whenever he’d fill a sack, he’d tug on the cord and the men keeping watch up in the shop would pull the sack out and dump the dirt in one of the privies behind the building.

It was pitch-dark down there, so we had to work by feel. Some of the boys were scared shitless of working so confined under the ground—but they forced theirselfs to do their share. They’d come out breathless and white-eyed, hands shaking, and make jokes about learning the mole’s trade. I admit I was one of them. Every time a clod of dirt fell on me I’d think the tunnel was giving way and I’d have to lock my jaws to keep from screaming with the fear of being buried alive. There ain’t been much in my life to spook me like being in that damn tunnel. But hell, it ain’t nothing a man won’t do to try to set hisself free.

The wheelwright was in on the plot. He was a Swede named Johansen and he’d admired Wes since long before meeting him. He took Wes at his word that five hundred dollars would be coming to him once we’d made our escape. “All you got to do or say or know,” Wes told him, “is nothing.”

We were all of us strong as oxen and the work went fairly fast. It was fall and the weather had turned cool, so the digging was easier than it would have been in summer. Every night I went to sleep with the smell of dirt in every one of my pores. It smelled like freedom. And our reckoning turned out to be perfect. In three weeks we reached a point directly under the armory. Then we dug up to its pine floor and by God we were there.

On the evening of the break I could feel my heart punching in my throat while we watched the armory from the wheelwright shop, waiting for the guards and saddle bosses to put up their guns and go eat. Wes had wanted to be the one to do the cutting through the armory floor and the first to arm hisself, but so did I and a couple of the others, so we drew straws to decide it. Weeks got the shorty and gave us a shit-eating grin.

As soon as the guards and bosses put up their guns, Weeks dropped into the tunnel and started crawling for the armory. I was right behind him, then Wes, then the others. When the tunnel turned upright again, Weeks stood up and slipped a sawblade between a couple of the floor planks over his head and started cutting. The chinks in the pine boards let just enough light into the well of the tunnel for me to make out the dark shapes of Weeks’s boots right in front of me. I could smell the sawdust drifting down and feel it on my hands.

“What’s taking that sawyer so damn long?” Wes said behind me. “Hold your horses, boy,” I said. “I reckon you’ll be free soon enough.” I heard him chuckle, and I had a powerful urge to laugh out loud. “You about there?” I whispered up to Weeks. “Just about,” he said.

He stopped sawing and gave a grunt, and I heard wood cracking and then break free. “Got it!” he said. One of his feet raised up to get a foothold on the side of the tunnel. I heard him grunt again and his other foot disappeared as he pulled hisself up.

I squirmed forward into the well on my belly and sat up. But before I could get my feet under me and stand up, there was a hell of a blast up above and Weeks came tumbling down on top of me. I knew he was dead by the weight of him. I felt his strong-smelling blood running hot and thick over my face. I kept wondering how he could be hollering so loud if he was dead, and then finally figured out that it was me doing the hollering.

Of the ten cons we’d brought into the plan, seven had ratted it away to the guards. One got hisself a full pardon, two were made trusties in another building, and the others got reassigned to farms outside the walls.

When they found out what we were up to, the guard captain—a hardass named Brockman—and some of his men had stashed extra shotguns in the shed behind the armory. On the day of the break, they’d gone through their usual routine of putting up their guns, then they went around to the shed and got the shotguns and sneaked back in the armory through the side door and waited real quiet for us to come up through the floor. When Weeks poked his head up, Brockman blew it off with both barrels.

They give me and Wes both fifteen days in the hole on bread and water, him in one building, me in another. I heard they give him a whipping too that damn near killed him. I never did see him again. When they took me out, they put me to work in the tannery, the most miserable, most stinking work there ever was. And I had to do it with a ball and chain they clamped on my leg, which they said I’d keep until I’d proved I could be trusted without it. It didn’t come off for another eight years. To this day I walk kinda funny because of having it on for all that time.