Lucky Billy (3 page)

Mrs. Lesnett just stares.

"Then they say I killed Brady. Well, it wasn't me. It was somebody else named Billy the Kid about the same size as me. Why am I the only one that stood trial for Brady? I'm for myself now. The hell with them all. I'm on my own hook. Hold on. Don't move." Wrists still manacled, he waves his gun at the crowd, at the sky, across the street, then twists his body and holsters the gun and grabs the pick and exits the balcony. He races clown the stairs and through the old store and out the front door, eyes searching the world when he's out on the street. "Help me with these bracelets, Dad." With the pick, Gauss and Billy break the chain on his manacles. Gauss holds the pony but when he tries to mount, his hanging chains spook the animal, who bolts up the road. "You. Alex." Billy points the gun across the road at Alex Nunnelly, one of the trustees. "Catch that horse and bring him back."

"Hell, no. That would make me an accomplice."

"Well, you can just tell them I forced you to do it." Alex reluctantly starts up the street. "Move!" Alex runs.

As Alex shacks the horse Billy scans the crowd and spots José Sanchez and walks up and shakes his hand. "José." He hugs Godfrey Gauss, pecks Annie Lesnett on die cheek, and now a queue has formed: all die Mexes in Lincoln line up to shake his hand and nobody smiles. "Hey. Buck up. Go ahead, dance for joy." Even Bob Brookshire joins the line and manfully, somberly grasps the Kid's still-manacled hand. "Don't beat the drums or nothing." Then, festooned with chains but liberated—free!—Billy mounts the skittish horse and canters out of town. "Tell Billy Burt I'll send his pony back!"

They mill in the street and watch him trot off. And is that singing they hear? Yes, the Kid is strangling "Silver Threads Among the Gold" and Annie Lesnett tenuously joins in with a muffled quaver. At last they come to life, they're beginning to talk. A few even laugh. They glance around, shake their heads. There ought to be a band. Look, he's waving his hat. "Adios, boys!"

Then he's gone.

Five miles west of Lincoln he turns up into the Capitans, hardly conscious of direction. It's the trail to Las Tablas. Spring snow along the horse path, a soft hum in the air. The hum, he discovers, comes from his own throat. Must be the jitters. The hums are indulgences, little throaty grunts that rise through his spine with each thud of the horse and pleasantly vibrate inside his glutchpipe, and they work to calm him down. This is how famous outlaws mosey out of danger. Hum, sing, leap.
Whoop 'em up, Liza ]ane!

He clams up and looks back. Keeps on looking back, eyes forever searching tree trunks, brush, boulders.

He feels his tongue sticking out. Sees his stepfather, Antrim, coming at him with a shovel, then his mother's lips trembling—out of nowhere, these memories. Ma has that look, the one preceding tears, the expansion of face as before a pot boils. I must obey my mother.

Won't Garrett be floored! And Lincoln without authority of law, having lost its two deputies, so there's no one to chase him. Just the same, to be safe, Billy moves off the trail and rides inside the maze of tall ponderosas, thick enough to stop the undeviating bullet. The comfort of these trees, the firs and ponderosas, cannot be overstated. Real trunks for a change, the sort that reach for the sky, instead of the empty grasslands and desert whose rare stunted pinons in folds and arroyos hardly reach a man's shoulders.

He usually sees these mountains from below. Sees them pull their green fabric tight to their bulk like disgruntled sleepers, shorting the foothills, completely baring the llano.

The chains spook his mount but what can he do? The climb into the Capitans now begins to taper off but the Kid's horse won't give up limping, bad actors can't stop. Then comes the ridgeline folding into the canyon down the other side and the pony opens up. And the Kid, the young hotblood brimming with funk, the hard case, the desperado, the tough little pine knot, the canny
pistolero
of the sure aim and sixth sense, finds his mind racing as he descends, as it looks like he really and truly has escaped, racing and skidding and hopping around like spit on a hot stove.
Que hombre,
what a man!
Muy seiõor
—very much the gentleman. God knows he didn't
want
to kill Bell, who treated him fairly, but he had no choice. Oh, my goodness. The Kid has killed Bell.

Yes, he killed me, too.

What the Faber-pushers won't say. What the rag sheets won't print! Well, I'm short, they can't figure me out. My lack of facial hair is a deficiency that nature is still laboring to correct. Don't laugh. Let's slay that little shit, he looks like a nancy, wait till I give the signal. But fate decreed otherwise as the saloon lights blazed brilliantly in the pitchy inky darkness and the stranger fogged out. Last night you boys had "Billy the Kid" creeping around here, did you know that?

He knew the shooting would disturb the poor children in the orphanage. He'd once rescued a prayer book that a little girl had dropped—there you go, sweetie.

That frank, open countenance.
Look at me, Ma!
Note the roguish snap about the blue eyes, the brown curly hair, the slight but wiry frame clad in common garments. Hell, I'm just a person. A boy. I'm sort of normal for my age. I like to go to
bailes
and other such affairs where there is lots of noisy fun. At times I feel like smashing things. Everything tastes the same. Quite a handsome-looking lad and with an eye for the ladies, relaxed, light-hearted, playful with children, gallant to the
viejos,
attentive to his ma. You'd of been proud to know him. The tender heart of the coolest young outlaw who ever trod the trackless west—this Claude Duval of the wilderness—this good-natured Knight of the Road, always cheerful and smiling—

William H. Bonney, Billy Bonney, Billy the Kid, Kid Antrim, the Kid, El Chivato, William Antrim, Henry Antrim, Henry McCarty, Henry McCarthy, Patrick Henry McCarthy, what a prodigy of cognomens! And with each new name a piece of past washed away, with each one his selfhood loosened its grip. My goodness, there were days I never even existed.

How do you like it, Bilicito?

Don't move. Just like that.

Oh, Chivato, it's so
beeg.

You think this one's big, you ought to see the '73. Single action, sure, but good Christ—it's got a .45-caliber center-fire cartridge and the goddamn barrel's near eight inches long!

What will Garrett do when he finds out? He will sit down and smile and be perfectly collected and eat himself inside. I'd like to see his face. Or Governor Wallace, I could pull for Santa Fe and lay for him there before the news arrives. He's the big toad in a small puddle, or so he thinks, but he is about as estimable as a heap of shit. The man is swelled up over his position and needs to be taken down a buttonhole. All of them do. To see their tongues hanging out, their petrified jaws—

They'll be on me like a stink. Let them come. Let them come. Who was it betrayed me to Garrett in the first place? Who told him where to look?

Once approaching Las Tablas, Billy calms down and his palms begin to dry. The trees thin out, trail grows sandier. A cottontail at the base of a ponderosa is perfectly still, thinks no one can see him. Now it's evening, almost dusk. As the trees give out he can spot with greater keenness the brown-green plains below and the volcanic cones and blisters and domes, the ridges stacking up against the gray distance and the gray raised rim of the faraway horizon streaked with long shadows from the setting sun. The smells have changed, too. No more pine needle compost, moist pits of ghost rain. Now, rising with the heat against his descent comes the coal-oil cinnamon throat-scrape odor of the dry plains below. He rides down past needle rocks and flatiron crags with tall fins and flukes, as though, two thousand miles from the nearest ocean, without consideration of nature's proper arrangements, gray whales here had swum into the mountain and found themselves stuck.

The brownish plains turn red. Like a grassfire: hot, quick, finished. On a crumbling shelf in the many folds of hills, the Kid spots the first cholla. Now it's junipers and pinons comfortably arranged with scalds of free dirt between isolated trees. Around a quick bend, the scratch-ankle town of Las Tablas emerges.

H
UDGEN'S WAS A LONG-BAR
brass-rail place. I've a sensitive nose and could detect each distinctive component of its smell: beer, sawdust, sweat, old leather, pipe tobacco, coal smoke, and gamey foodstuffs. On a table near the bar were stacks of sliced meat, piles of bread, pickled beets, boiled eggs, warm biscuits, a hog's head, and canned tomatoes sprinkled with vinegar and sugar. The beer came in washtubs in back of the bar, into which the underskinker dipped the frosted mugs, and towels hung from nails pounded into the tables to wipe the thick foam off your beard when you drank it. Sand and sawdust on the floor, cattle brands burned into the paneled walls, a painting of a thinly veiled odalisque, yellowed by smoke, on the wall behind the bar. I couldn't bring Apolinaria into this place. It wasn't just the painting; bean-eaters weren't welcome, especially women. Too many encounters with out-of-town miners. White Oaks was a mining community, they had the quality miners, the scabby gap-toothed ones. The ones that swung shovels at each other from underneath the earth and considered every Mexican to be fair game. Among the acts of aggression these gentlemen committed, one asked a man to pass the butter at this very saloon and, not being heard, he immediately drew his pistol and presented it to the man's head, saying, "Pass the butter,
please.
" They thought I was to thank for this new civility. The marshal, Pinto Tom, when arresting malefactors took special care now not to hurt their feelings any more than was necessary.

If asked, the men at my table would probably have called me the apotheosis of the changes that were sweeping the territory. The railroad, which ran all the way to Las Cruces. The Apaches, which gave up their war against the world. The bad men, who I supposedly broke of miswending and taught how to sing patriotic songs. Thanks to Pat Garrett, the Lincoln County War was over. Somehow I'd been credited not only with catching Billy the Kid but with wiping out smallpox, whorehouse manners, decayed people, and unbridled fornication. Folks paid their taxes now; I was in White Oaks to collect them. Also, to obtain the wood for his gallows. They'd offered to contribute all the lumber I needed and a wagon to carry it. This was what they called community spirit. The pillars were there, Pinto Tom, Joe Tomlinson, Fred Kuch, even Israel Jones, the parson who once accused me of being an atheist. A nullifidian is more like it. Also at the table was a drummer from St. Louis who wrote for the dailies as well as sold stoves, and he hadn't heard the story of the Kid's capture yet, so all of them would get it one more time tonight. Being seated at table leveled our disparities. You'd never have known the drummer was five-foot-one or I was six-six or Jones had a wooden leg. My legs being half of me, my fingers and arms came from the same tree and they were lengthy, too; that's what they called me, "Lengthy." The Mexicans made this into Juan Largo. At Port Sumner in the old days, I'd already told them, I was called Big Casino, the Kid Little Casino. We sometimes partnered up at the faro tables. At that time I'd just arrived, I was years from being sheriff. Likewise he wasn't yet Billy the Kid, he was Antrim, Kid Antrim. It was a newspaper man that gave him the sobriquet Billy the Kid. And that was only last year—not long before I collared him at Stinking Springs.

"Weren't you a bardog at Sumner?" asked Jones.

"Yes, Reverend Jones, in the old days." He inspected me with an eyelid that drooped at half mast, having been ripped off in the same altercation in which he lost his leg, then sewn on with fish line. His puttylike face had not one scrap of facial hair, thus stringing out the mouth. "Do they still call you Reverend?"

"Israel will do."

"Fort Sumner?" said the drummer. "They had a saloon there?"

"It hasn't been a fort in ten years," I said. "More like a starve-acre town. I used to live there. What happened to me was a thousand-pound porker ran me down on the parade grounds, damn near killed me, but instead of dying I married the woman who nursed me back to health, Apolinaria Gutiérrez. She and her family moved to the fort when Lucien Maxwell bought it. You've heard of him, I suppose? Lucien Maxwell of the Maxwell Land Grant? He's dead now but his son Pete still brags up his daddy's two million acres, enough land to contain a fat curve of the planet. Had to sell it all to pay off his debts and with the leftover he bought the old fort, which was decommissioned in '71. Converted the officers' quarters into a home, elegant by the usual standards. By the time he died and his son Pete took over, the family empire was sadly diminished. Pete still manages the place, the sheep herds and stables. He's a well-known friend of the Kid, or a foe, depending on the hopes of his sister, Paulita. She was the Kid's sweetheart. She now carries his child. Pete rents the old hospital and barracks and storehouse which his father chopped into lodgings for his Mexican clients and friends from Cimarron. He runs the weekly dances and leases the shops and stables and saloons, Bob Hargrove's saloon and Beaver Smith's saloon, where I first met Kid Antrim. Beaver Smith is the one you should ask about Billy. His ears are jingle-bobbed. You're a drummer, you must get around, have you ever heard of that? For twenty-five cents Beaver will show you the long rail on his hams from where Chisum's men branded him. Get him drunk first."

"From bardog to sheriff," the drummer observed, looking at me. I gave him my bullet-hole-eyes look of being startled, fooling him by seeming somewhat up a tree. That's what I always do for strangers. You never know who they are. The effect of the mustache covering my mouth, I knew, was to lessen my jaw, and with my reedy twangy voice, mine was the most Texas drawl he would hear in White Oaks. "The secret to being a bardog, I learned, is to keep your mouth shut."

"You must be catching up," said Jones.