“I believe I’d rather be harelipped,” Bryant said. “Came about when I planted a woman with child in San Antonio. She hunted me out when she got ripe and found me in a flophouse with a six-fingered whore. Tried to shoot me in the ear with a cap-and-ball pistol and burst the pillow I had my head on. Powder burnt my face like hot tar. The woman that deformed me lost every one of her teeth to the butt end of her pistol. I was careful not to miss one.”

Bryant didn’t move for a minute or two, then stood and brushed off his pants. “You have a sister or something?”

The Mexican showed Bryant to a one-room shanty with a blanket for a door. Inside there were two black girls and a Mexican woman of forty, smoking from a pipe. The black girls sat on their beds and watched him as the woman leaned back against a pillow and lifted the front of her dress.

Then Bryant walked to a Chinese laundry where he bought opium and a small metal pipe, and an ancient woman scraped at his cheek with a bone knife and pressed herb leaves to his face as he slept. Then he returned to the hotel room where each member of the gang discussed his own entertainments.

Bitter Creek Newcomb was calling himself “The Slaughter Kid” in Silver City so everyone would think him a Texan. He spent his afternoon whittling a reed flute and picked up body lice in his evenings with an obese Missouri farm girl. He treated himself with a hot bath and kerosene and from then on indulged in gambling at the green felt tables where a boy from Alabama called him a carping cheat and Newcomb thunked him in the Adam’s apple with a quart bottle of Kentucky whiskey. The boy sat down hard on the floor and would have swallowed his tongue like a fresh trout had the bartender not gripped hold of it with a pliers.

Newcomb thought that was the end of the altercation and two hours later he was raking in a pot of fourteen dollars when the boy walked up behind him and knocked Newcomb to the floor with one of the tavern’s beer pulls. Newcomb went for his gun but the boy stomped on his hand, splitting the thumbnail with his boot heel.

Newcomb sucked on it and asked, “Are you through now?”

“Yes,” said the boy, “I believe I am.” His mouth quivered and tears slid out of his eyes.

Newcomb just slumped there on the floor for a bit, staring at the bloody tail of the shirt he’d wrapped around his hand.