Loop Group
Folly and Glory
By Sorrow’s River
The Wandering Hill
Sin Killer
Paradise
Boone’s Lick
Roads: Driving America’s Greatest Highways
Still Wild: Short Fiction of the American West 1950 to the Present
Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond
Duane’s Depressed
Crazy Horse
Comanche Moon
Dead Man’s Walk
The Late Child
Streets of Laredo
The Evening Star
Buffalo Girls
Some Can Whistle
Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood
Texasville
Lonesome Dove
The Desert Rose
Cadillac Jack
Somebody’s Darling
Terms of Endearment
All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers
Moving On
The Last Picture Show
In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas
Leaving Cheyenne
Horseman, Pass By

BY LARRY MCMURTRY AND DIANA OSSANA

Pretty Boy Floyd
Zeke and Ned

LARRY
MCMURTRY

ANYTHING
FOR BILLY

Dedication

For Margaret Ellen Slack
and in memory of
Dorothea Oppenheimer

The flower of friendship never faded.

ANYTHING
FOR BILLY

PART I

The Butler’s Sorrow

1.

The first time I saw Billy he came walking out of a cloud. He had a pistol in each hand and a scared look on his rough young face. The cloud drifted in from the plains earlier in the morning and stopped over the Hidden Mountains, in the country of the Messy Apaches—that was what buffalo hunters called the Mescalero.

It was a thick cloud, which made downhill travel a little chancy. I had found myself a seat on a rock and was waiting for the cloud to go somewhere else. Probably I looked as scared to Billy as he looked to me—my mule was winded, my gun was empty, my ears were popping, and I was nervous about the prospect of running into some Messy Apaches. One minute I wanted the cloud to leave; the next minute I was glad it was there.

Billy looked relieved when he saw me. I think his first notion was to steal my mule—it would only have been common sense.

“This mule won’t make it far,” I informed him, hoping to scotch that notion—though if he had pointed one of the pistols at me I would have handed him the reins on the spot.

Billy gave me a chip-toothed grin. I would have guessed him to be no more than seventeen at the time, and short for his age at that. In fact, he was almost a runt, and ugly as Sunday. His dirty black coat was about three sizes too big for him.

He glanced at Rosy, the mule. She didn’t like heights, or clouds either, and was in a foul mood.

“An Apache could take that mule and ride her fifty miles,” he pointed out. “It’s lucky for you I’m not an Apache.”

“If you were I’d offer you the mule and hope for the best,” I said.

He stuck one of the pistols into an old holster he wore and shoved the other one into the pocket of his black coat.

“Joe Lovelady’s around here somewhere,” he said. “It would be just like him to show up with my horse.”