The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (5 page)

catching flies with my left hand
bringing the fist to my ear
hearing the scream grey buzz
as their legs cramp their
heads with no air
so eyes split and release

open fingers
the air and sun hit them like pollen
sun flood drying them red
catching flies
angry weather in my head, too

I remember this midnight at John Chisum’s. Sallie was telling me about Henry. They had had it imported from England by ship, then train, then Sallie had met the train and brought it the last seventy miles in a coach. Strangest looking thing she said. It could hardly walk up a stair at first because it was so heavy and long. Its tail, which was dark brown with an amber ridge all down the middle of its length, stood up like a plant, so when he moved up and down hills the first thing you saw was this tail. In the house, John’s clock banged away in the kitchen, the noise and whirr reeling out onto us on the porch. John and Sallie, the mutt Henry, and me. I had come in that morning.

They call it a bassett says Sallie, and they used to breed them in France for all those fat noblemen whose hounds were too fast for them when they went hunting. So they
got the worst and slowest of every batch and bred them with the worst and slowest of every other batch and kept doing this until they got the slowest kind of hound they could think of. Looks pretty messy to me, I said. John scratched his groin awkwardly but politely—I mean not many would have noticed if they hadnt been on the lookout, expecting it as it were. John began a story.

When I was in New Orleans during the war I met this character who had dogs. I met him because I was a singer then, and he liked to sing, so we used to sing together quite a lot. He seemed a pretty sane guy to me. I mean, he didnt twitch or nothing like that. Well, a month or two after I left New Orleans, I got a note from another friend who sang with us once in a while, and he said Livingstone, who was the first singer, had been eaten by his dogs. It was a postcard and it didnt say anymore. When I was in New Orleans again, two or three years later I found out.

Livingstone had been mad apparently. Had been for a couple of years, and, while he couldnt fight in the war—he had a limp from a carriage accident—he hung around the soldiers like me. There was a rumour though that the reason he was not accepted was because no one that knew him would trust him with a gun. He had almost killed his mother with a twelve bore, fortunately only shooting an ugly vase to pieces and also her foot. (Her surgeon’s bills were over
$40
for he took nearly three hours getting all the buckshot out of her thighs because she wouldnt let anyone go any further than her knees, not even a professional doctor.) After that, Livingstone stayed away from guns, was embarrassed by it all I suppose, and besides the episode was a joke all over town.

Some time later he bought a spaniel, one of the American kind. A month later he bought another. He said he was going to start breeding dogs, and his mother, pleased at even a quirk of an ambition, encouraged him. But she didnt realise what he had been really doing until after his death and even then the vet had to explain it to her once more. Livingstone, and this was at the same time as he sang with me in the evenings, had decided to breed a race of mad dogs. He did this by inbreeding. His mother gave him money to start the business and he bought this wooden walled farm, put a vast fence around an area of
50
square feet, and keeping only the two original dogs he had bought, literally copulated them into madness. At least not them but their pups, who were bred and re-bred with their brothers and sisters and mothers and uncles and nephews. Every combination until their bones grew arched and tangled, ears longer than their feet, their tempers became either slothful or venomous and their jaws were black rather than red. You realise no one knew about this. It went on for two or three years before the accident. When people asked him how the dogs were coming along, he said fine; it was all a secret system and he didnt want anyone looking in. He said he liked to get a piece of work finished before he showed it to people. Then it was a surprise and they would get the total effect. It was like breeding roses.

You are supposed to be able to tell how inbred a dog is by the width of their pupils and Livingstone knew this, for again he picked the two most far gone dogs and bred them one step further into madness. In three years he had over
40
dogs. The earlier ones he just let loose, they were too sane. The rest, when the vet found them, were grotesque things—who hardly moved except to eat or fornicate. They lay, the dogs, when they found his body, listless as sandbags
propped against the
14
foot fence Livingstone had built. Their eyes bulged like marbles; some were blind, their eyes had split. Livingstone had found that the less he fed them the more they fornicated, if only to keep their mind off the hunger. These originally beautiful dogs were gawky and terrifying to that New Orleans vet when he found them. He couldnt even recognise that they had been spaniels or were intended to be. They didnt snarl, just hissed through the teeth—gaps left in them for they were falling out. Livingstone had often given them just alcohol to drink.

His mother continued to give him money for his business, which still of course hadnt turned a penny. He had never sold a dog and lived alone. He came into town on Thursdays for food and on Thursday evenings when I was stationed in New Orleans he sang with me. We usually drank a lot after the bouts of singing. And again, even when drunk he never showed any sign of madness or quirkiness. As if he left all his madness, all his perverse logic, behind that fence on his farm and was washed pure by the time he came to town every Thursday. Many he had known when younger said how much more stable he had become, and that now they probably would accept him in the army. He told me he had a small farm he ran, never mentioning dogs. Then usually about three in the morning or around then he went back home to the house next to those
40
mad dogs, clinically and scientifically breeding the worst with the worst, those heaps of bone and hair and sexual organs and bulging eyes and minds which were chaotic half out of hunger out of liquor out of their minds being pressed out of shape by new freakish bones that grew into their skulls. These spaniels, if you could call them that now, were mostly brown.

When they found Livingstone there was almost nothing left of him. Even his watch had been eaten by one of the dogs who coughed it up in the presence of the vet. There were the bones of course, and his left wrist—the hand that held the whip when he was in the pen—was left untouched in the middle of the area. But there was not much else. The dust all over the yard was reddish and his clothes, not much left of those, scattered round.

The dogs too were blood hungry. Though this scene was discovered, they reckoned, two days after the event occurred, some of the dogs had been similarly eaten. The vet went into the house, got Livingstone’s shot gun, the same one that had spread bullets into his mother’s leg, couldnt find any bullets, went into town, bought bullets, didnt say a word in town except got the sheriff with him and rode back. And they shot all the dogs left, refusing to go into the pen, but poking the gun through the planks in the fence and blowing off the thirty heads that remained alive whenever they came into range or into the arc that the gun could turn to reach them. Then they went in, dug a pit with a couple of Livingstone’s shovels, and buried everything. Forty dogs and their disintegrated owner.

The clock inside whirred for a half second and then clunked
1
o clock. Sallie got up and walked down the steps of the porch. Henry could deal with the steps now, went down with her and they walked into the edge of the dark empty desert. John rocked on in his chair. I was watching Sallie. She bent down, put her hands under Henry’s ears and scratched his neck where she knew he liked it. She bent down further to his ear, the left one, the one away from us, and said, very quietly, I dont think John heard it it was so quiet, Aint that a nasty story Henry, aint it? Aint it nasty.

*

H’lo folks—’d liketa sing my song about the lady Miss AD you all know her—her mind the only one in town high on the pox

Miss Angela D has a mouth like a bee
she eats and off all your honey
her teeth leave a sting on your very best thing
and its best when she gets the best money

*

Angela—hand shot open
water blood on my shoulder
crying quiet
O Bonney you bastard Bonney
kill him Bonney kill him

this from Angela
she saying this when their bullet for me
split her wrist so flesh burst out

Watching me do it.
Took a knife and opened the skin
more, tugged it back
on the other side of her arm
to pick the bullets out
3
of them
like those rolled pellet tongues of pigeons

look at it, I’m looking into your arm
nothing confused in there
look how clear
Yes Billy, clear

*

So we are sitting slowly going drunk here on the porch. Usually it was three of us. Now five, our bodies on the chairs out here blocking out sections of the dark night. And the burn from the kerosene lamp throwing ochre across our clothes and faces. John in the silent rocking chair bending forward and back, one leg tucked under him, with each tilt his shirt smothering the light and spiralling shadows along the floor. The rest of us are quieter. Garrett sits on the sofa with Sallie the quietest of us all. He doesnt talk much I’ve noticed and mostly listens. Sallie her legs out resting on the chair at the ankles, the long skirt falling like a curtain off her legs and touching the floor. The cat shifts in her lap. And just to my left, her leg dangling off the rail she sits on, Angela D, the long leg about a foot to my left swaying, the heel tapping the wooden rail.

The thing here is to explain the difference of this evening. That in fact the Chisum verandah is crowded. It could of course hold a hundred more, but that John and Sallie and I have been used to other distances, that we have talked slowly through nights expecting the long silences and we have taken our time thinking the replies. That one was used to the space of black that hung like cotton just off the porch lights’ spill. At one or two then Sallie would get up and bring me the cat and leave to make coffee and get ready for bed. And come back with the three cups and changed into her nightgown, always yellow or white with fabulous bows at her shoulders and the front of her neck. And then hunch up the gown over her folded legs so we joked at her looking like a pelican or some fat bird with vast stomach and short legs. But she didnt move from that, said her legs against herself kept herself warm for the wind had begun
now, a slight flapping against the house. And it is now one and Sallie gets up and the cat stays on the sofa in the warm pool of material where she was. And Angela stretches and says bed I guess and I say no we are having coffee now and she leans back and later Sallie brings mugs in on a tray this time. And we all laugh a little cos Garrett has fallen asleep. Nobody noticed it in the semi dark. He hasnt moved an inch. Just the eyes closed. But the coffee tonight doesnt do much for the drink. That is, we are all pretty loaded here and in fact we go back to the whisky. And my throat now feels nothing as the drinks go down. I wonder how Angie can balance on the rail; as I do, she slips down near me and tho I cant see Sallie’s eyes I think she must be watching us.

We sit here drinking on, after the coffee. Garrett here but asleep, Sallie, John, and the two of us. My eyes are burning from the pain of change and the whisky and I cant see very well, John’s rocker is going slow but his checkered shirt leaves just a red arc daze like some blurred picture. I remember, when they took the picture of me there was a white block down the fountain road where somebody had come out of a building and got off the porch onto his horse and ridden away while I was waiting standing still for the acid in the camera to dry firm.