Billy the Kid (2 page)

Art nodded thoughtfully. "You from around here?"

Billy shook his head and twisted the paper neatly. He lit up and dragged. "I worked on a ranch up in the Verdes. Near Polkton. But lately, I've been in Texas. Before that, Durango."

"Lost your job near Polkton, huh? By grannies, that happens a lot nowadays."

"I quit," Billy said, staring moodily out into the street, watching Joe as the boy watched the liveryman lead the horses into the stable.
I'll polish off my beer,
he thought,
and make an excuse.
There were better ways to spend the rest of this day than talking to the Smiths.

Art's voice went on softly. "Good feelin' not to be broke."

Billy turned his head. A brittle laugh came out. He blew smoke. "I assure you, if I wasn't broke, I wouldn't be bakin' here in McLean. I'm lookin' for work. Can't find that, I'll join the army. Maybe" There was no need to say he was down to eight dollars and some change That was the sorry fact.

Art smiled again. "I'm gittin' in a hirin' mood myself for somethin' else. It mighta been fortunate for us both to have crazy Joe stumble on you. Talk about luck, yours does look down indeed."

Billy eyed him tiredly. It didn't take much perception to gather that. There was usually a cast in a man's eye that told what he had in his pocket. Billy Bonney was pretty good at faking but had even grown weary of that lately. His pants, shirt, and boots were worn out.

Joe stomped up on the boards, ignoring Billy. He'd returned with a paper bag of multicolored gumdrops and was pouring them between the loose lips. Joe was almost laughable.
Almost
.

"Rest yourself, Joe," Art said amiably. "We're talkin'. Billy here knows the mountains near Polkton. How 'bout that?"

Billy hadn't thought very much about Polkton and cousin Willis Monroe in the last two years. Was Willie doing well at the Double W? How was his wife, Kate? Did they have any children by now? Billy had been best man at Willie's wedding.

Since he'd returned to Arizona via Texas a month before, he'd thought about visiting Willie and Kate, taking a look at the Double W to see what changes they'd made. But he didn't want to face them and have to lie about the last two years, didn't want them to see him scruffy and hurting, really didn't want to tell them some of the things that had happened in Durango and El Paso. Things that weren't very nice.

No, he'd wait until he turned himself around before visiting Willie and Kate. Then he could be his old self, laugh and joke with them. He loved big Willis like a brother.

***

AT EIGHT O'CLOCK
heat still hugged McLean even though a northerly breeze off the San Pedros was attacking it. Billy was on the porch of the Sulphur Springs Hotel, the only hotel in town, with Art Smith. Music and voices drifted out from Little Sally's and Alexander's Saloon. Now and then a coyote, in the barren hills, complained for lack of food.

Billy studied the early stars as Art talked about robbing a train. Cattle dealers? That was a predictable lie. Enough to make you laugh. A family of stickup artists.

Perry and Joe had long gone to Sally's. Probably chasing the bar girls, near naked because of the weather.
Joe will be manly after some whiskey and a couple of Sally's girls,
Billy thought. Maybe Joe would try his gun? You could almost forecast what might happen. Next time, though, he'd put a chunk of soft lead into Joe's wrist if he got reckless. That would tame him quite a spell. If he got real mean, Billy would kill him.

"I don't think you're listenin'," Art said.

"You talk to Joe?" Billy asked. Joe would probably stagger out of Sally's asking for trouble. Billy's rocking chair squeaked slowly.

"Forget Joe. He has a boy's mentality."

Billy nodded. His laugh was bone-dry. Boys like Joe often get into trouble quick.

"Let's get back to the train," Art said. "It'll work; I promise you. An' you're jus' the man I'm lookin' for."

"I don't know." Billy said restlessly, for the fourth time.
Train robbery?
That, he hadn't done. Robbery of any kind, he hadn't done.

"You do your part, an' lead us down out o' those hills..." Art smiled. "Then we'll forget we ever seen a hair o' each other."

Billy sighed, shaking his head. "They know me up there, Art."

"We'll be forty miles from Polkton. Shave that mustache off. Dress like a marshal. Not like a cowpoke. No one'll ever know you. Promise!"

Billy pulled himself up and grabbed his worn boots. His soiled shirt was off. "I'll let you know in the mornin'."
Dress up like a marshal? That's crazy,
Billy thought. On the other hand, he needed new duds and Art would pay.

"Fair enough," Art said.

At the door Billy turned. "You better keep Joe in line tonight. McLean's an awful place to be tombed."

Art laughed heartily. "He jokes a lot. You already know that."

Billy searched the block face in the shadows. "I am always careful who I joke with," he said, then padded across the dirty Spanish-tile lobby floor on his blistered feet.

In his room Billy lit the soot-encrusted glass lamp and then looked at himself in the cracked, faded mirror over the washstand. He didn't see the same old Billy Bonney, the laughing, happy fellow out of Polkton. This bleary-eyed drifter looking back at him seemed a stranger existing in the same body.

He turned away from the mirror and sat down despondently on the edge of the lumpy bed. He thought a while, wiping sweat from under his chin. It stung. Assessing what he had, his sole possessions in life came to a weary horse, the grungy clothes on his back, a pair of scarred leather chaps, a saddle, a saddlebag, two Colt .44s, two spare cotton shirts, an ocarina, a poncho, and one pair of wormy socks. Unless he got some kind of stake, that's about all he'd ever have.

Sorely tempted but leery of Art Smith and his two sons, Billy moved over to the window and sat on the ledge, letting the light evening breeze dry the sweat. Scanning around at the stars again, he thought about the cool Sierra Verdes—a robbery was almost worth the risk just to get out of McLean. Then he thought more about Polkton and cousin Willie. Any small luck at all, Willie would never know he'd ever been nearby participating in a robbery. And where Art wanted to stop the train was a long way from Willie, as Art had pointed out.

Shaking his head, he mumbled to himself, "Gotta do somethin', one way or other. Gotta do it." He sighed deeply, thinking again of Willie.

Someday Billy himself wanted to ranch, respectably, on his own spread. Or he thought he did. For months now he'd had an urge to see his own cattle stringing out down a trail toward water—September fat, ready for culling. The way it used to be at the Double W with Willie. Sleek whitefaces pawing dirt then picking up into trots; bulls rumbling behind. He wanted to stand up in the stirrups and see his own brand on grassy flats. This night, especially, the need for a new life was boring into him fiercely. He sat for almost an hour, just thinking.

***

THOUGH HE WAS AS FAST
as so-called greased lightnin', it hadn't occurred to Billy that he was a gunfighter until he went to work for the Cudahys. Oh, they'd told him that gunslingin' was why they'd hired him. The Mexican courts weren't too much interested in convicting cattle thieves, and the only way to stop them was to kill them.

Billy admitted that he loved guns. He cleaned them and oiled them and babied them. His two beloved .44s were exquisitely engraved, with relief-carved pearl grips and scrollwork even on the barrels. His .44s were works of art.

Until the Cudahys, though, he'd never killed anything but wild game. And he didn't use the .44s for that. For big game like deer and elk, he used a Model 1876 Winchester; for birds, an 1869 Smith & Wesson high-grade double-barrel shotgun inherited from his late papa. He'd sold the Winchester and the Smith & Wesson for eating money.

But the Cudahys had paid well, a hundred U.S. dollars a month plus keep. Yet popping those poor Mexes, four of them over a year—they just kept coming back to steal the longhorns—became tiresome and was certainly no fun. And the Cudahys' demand that the bodies be taken into Durango and set upright at the Posada Duran, the town's inn, with a cardboard sign strung around their necks—
LADRÓN DE LOS
GANADOS
(cattle thief)—wasn't Billy's idea of a nice way to spend a morning.

One time, in the darkness, he pumped two shots into a dark form, and at dawn, when he came back to check his work, he found a boy of no more than thirteen. That day Billy collected his pay for the week and headed north for Juárez and El Paso, by way of Preso el Palmito and Chihuahua, a long ride.

He probably would have left the Cudahys earlier than he did if it hadn't been for Helga, whose papa owned the Posada Duran. Helga was different from the other senoritas he'd met in Mexico. She spoke some English in addition to Spanish and her native German, and her honey-colored hair marked her out from the crowd. Billy came as close to being in love with Helga—true love—as he'd ever been with any girl except Kate Monroe. He promised himself he'd go back to Durango and get Helga once he got his life together again, buy some land below the border, and marry her.

After quitting the Cudahys, Billy had arrived in El Paso at the start of the boom, when pistoleros roamed San Antonio Street and the collection of brightly lit dance halls and gambling houses and drinking places had lined both sides of the street, among them the famous Acme. It was the time of lawmen like Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp and Pat Garrett and John Wesley Hardin. It was the time of Dallas Stoudenmire, a blond giant with a huge mustache. With .45s on his hips, the newly named black-frocked marshal cleaned up bad men with the Colts.

Marshal Stoudenmire had personally escorted Billy Bonney out of town after an afternoon killing behind the Acme. Over gambling, of course. Stoudenmire couldn't figure out which man had drawn first, Billy or the unlucky fellow from Juárez who was caught cheating. It had been Billy's first real gunfight. Stoudenmire, Billy remembered, seemed to be a pretty nice lawman and had wished him luck. But he did tell Billy to ride north and never come back.

Finally, Billy went over to the washstand and stropped his razor. He worked up a scant brown soap lather and began hacking at the brush mustache. Just shaving somehow made him feel better.

Then he stopped on a nagging thought.

Once, when he was about twelve, Billy had helped prop three dead men up against a shed for photographs after a Polkton posse shot them. He helped put boards under their armpits to keep them erect and then used twine to tie their heads back so everyone could see the blue puckered bullet holes. He hadn't forgotten how useless those men looked standing, dead, up against the shed. It reminded him of the Smith fellows.

He took a long breath and cut at the mustache again.

TWO LIGHTS BURNED
in the sheriff's office on the ground floor of Polkton Courthouse. Otherwise, the three-story brick building, save for a single glow in the jailer's office on the second floor, was dark and loomed ghostly. Its white wooden cupola, dormer windowed, looked like it was floating above the square stack of bricks. Polkton itself was quiet except for the usual rowdiness down on Saloon Row, near the rail tracks. Not a soul moved on Decatur, the wide main street that at noontime was a turmoil of buggies and wagons.

Sheriff Willis Monroe had his long legs propped on the counter of his rolltop desk, hanging by the heels. Countless boot scuffs and cigarette scars along the edge of the desk hinted at the long line of previous sheriffs. Monroe's head was twisted toward old Sam Pine, his deputy. "You keep tellin' me in bits and pieces, Sam, that I'm in political trouble. Three months, you been hintin'. Now, why can't you just get it all out. Nobody's here but us. You won't hurt my feelin's."

Balding, in galluses and a gray-striped shirt, elastic bands above his elbows, Sam was almost sixty and took care of paperwork and running the office. He'd been a hard-nosed peace officer until he got shot up when he was fifty-one. Now he was rather gentle with everyone and had turned chubby, an unfortunate circumstance due to his short stature.

Sam removed his steel-rimmed specs. "Willie, I'd think it was evident." He pulled the cloth cover over the new typing machine. Two months old, it was his office pride. He oiled it every morning.

"Maybe I'm not bright, Sam."

There was a drunk slumped on the stone floor of the holding cell, across the room. He was snoring loudly. A sour-bean vomit smell wafted from the cell. Monroe looked over in irritation, then looked back at Pine.

"All right," Sam said, nodding. "Big as you are, people thought you'd hammer some heads in. Now, my guess is that seventy percent of 'em are begin-nin' to wonder about you. Maybe you're too all-fired easygoing, Willie. Some think you're too young: boy sheriff."

"I'm the same fellow now as I was before I was elected," Monroe replied, frowning at the charge. "I'm not gonna change." Willie was twenty-two.

The deputy said flatly, "Well, then you shouldn't have run."

Willie snorted. "The only reason I did was because three or four hundred people kept proddin' my tail." He paused. "No, you know that's not the only reason. I didn't want Earl Cole to get it. He would have. That's the truth. No secret."

Sam shook his head. "Whichever, the people aren't happy now."

Willie's boot heels came off the desk counter, hitting the floor with an angry crunch. He swiveled around. "I want reasons, Sam."

The older man hesitated, then nodded. "You don't jail drunks 'less they start breakin' someone's place up."

Willie pointed a long finger. "What's that over in the cell?"

Sam ignored him. "You bend over backwards for the Chinamen. You seem to like Mexicans. Let 'em get in trouble, an' you act like a sufferin' priest instead of a sheriff. I tell you those Chinese are gobblin' up every business in the county."

"Laundries," Willie grunted.

"Damn Mexes are takin' jobs from Christian cowboys..." Sam had always hated Mexicans.