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two bandits holding their pistols on me and every right to be pissed off, because we’d flat laid out their companions in the earlier fight like planks, side by side, so the local newspaperman could take photographs of them before we buried them in a hasty common grave.
    The sour smell of the bandits mixed with the talcum powder and shave lotions on the barber’s shelf. I saw patches of hair that had been cut from my head lying there on the floor, and thought that dying in a barber’s chair was about the last place I’d have guessed I was going to fold my hand if somebody had asked me. But it sure as hell looked that way, and I just hoped old Vaca had a good aim and generous heart and finished me with one bullet and not two or three. Sometimes a man wanted to make you suffer before he finished you off; he shot you in the knees or through the hands, just to make you suffer awhile.
    I waited for the bullet that would kill me, knowing I’d never even hear the shot. I closed my eyes because I didn’t want to see it. But then I did hear a shot that caused me to flinch. And when I opened my eyes, the man holding the pistol to my head fell like a stone dropped down a well at the same instant his blood and brains splattered across my unshaven face. The Mexican with him yelled something I couldn’t make out, a bastardized cussword. But before he could get the word all the way out of his mouth the Cap’n shot him too, dead center of his forehead. The bullet bucked him back and he crashed to the floor and lay there next to old Vaca, who had a ribbon of blood coming from underneath his head.
    I swiped the bloody offal from my face as I saw the Cap’n standing there, his gun still held straight out, smoke curling from the muzzle before he slowly lowered it and slipped it into his holster.
    â€œYou okay?” he said that day.
    â€œI’m not sure, but I don’t hurt nowhere.”
    He took his bandana from round his neck and dipped it a pan of water the barber used to wash off his razor off, and handed it to me, saying, “Warsh your face, Jim. Get that stinking bandit’s blood off you.”
    He never once mentioned how I should have been more careful, or lectured me about making the mistake of letting the bandits get the cold drop on me. He just shot those two like they were quail, then put his gun away, waiting for me to wash my face. I’d always wanted to talk to him about it, about what it felt like to be so near beingmurdered, because a thing like that sticks with you worse than your worst dreams. I wanted to just talk about it after I’d had time to get my wits about me, but I knew he wasn’t the type to discuss such matters—that life was just what it was; you either lived or you died and that was the end of it. Didn’t matter how close you might have come to dying. Life for him at least was like a game of horseshoes— close didn’t count. And if it didn’t count, then why talk about it?
    But I figured I owed him my life even if he didn’t.
    Â 
    I saw a sign the following day out the window that read: NOW ENTERING ARIZONA TERRITORY . And when the Cap’n woke up from napping, I told him we’d crossed the border and he nodded and said, “Well, it don’t look no different, does it?”
    â€œNo sir, it don’t.” Then he closed his eyes again and I walked out to the platform of the caboose.
    A black porter was standing there smoking. He started to strip away his shuck but I waved him not to.
    â€œDon’t need to put it out on my account,” I said.
    â€œYas suh.”
    The clatter of the train’s steel wheels against thetrack rose and fell with an easy steady rhythm. The porter said, “Nothing like train music.”
    â€œYou like working on the railroad,” I said.
    â€œBeats lots of other things,” he said. He was middle-aged with very black skin, and wore a black jacket and wrinkled