The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (9 page)

“It was the Kid who came in there on to me,” Garrett told Poe, “and I think I got him.”

“Pat,” replied Poe, “I believe you have killed the wrong man.”

“I’m sure it was the Kid,” responded Garrett, “for I knew his voice and could not have been mistaken.”

*

Poor young William’s dead
with a fish stare, with a giggle
with blood planets in his head.

The blood came down like river ride
long as Texas down his side.
We cleaned him up when blood was drier
his eyes looked up like turf on fire.

We got the eight foot garden hose
turned it on, leaned him down flat.
What fell away
we threw away his head was smaller than a rat.

I got the bullets, cleaned him up
sold them to the Texas Star.
They weighed them, put them in a pile
took pictures with a camera.

Poor young William’s dead
with blood planets in his head
with a fish stare, with a giggle
like he said.

*

It is now early morning, was a bad night. The hotel room seems large. The morning sun has concentrated all the cigarette smoke so one can see it hanging in pillars or sliding along the roof like amoeba. In the bathroom, I wash the loose nicotine out of my mouth. I smell the smoke still in my shirt.

This was the first book I wrote where I swam into the deep end. It began as a small flurry of poems supposedly by the outlaw Billy the Kid. I’d had an obsession with westerns since I was eight or nine—for even in Sri Lanka the myth of the American West had filtered down furtively among children in Colombo. I had a cowboy suit, with blatantly cheap-looking glass “jewels” on my cowboy belt as well as little leather holders for one’s bullets, which always seemed to me to be a fey and fussy method of transporting bullets that would later be used to kill a mule or a woman or a sheriff. So, when our house in Boralesgamuwa was robbed, I was glad to see that the jewelled cowboy belt was also stolen, only to be returned by the police several months later.

By the time I was in my teens I was going to school in England and had seen many more westerns, but somehow the movies all seemed too
safe.
The plots followed the well-rutted paths to obvious conclusions: the villains fell
regularly to their deaths off mesas, the lovers left town in a stagecoach for a better life, and the old sidekick cackled into the fade-out. There was never an Act Two or a Malvolio to confuse us or temper the moral note. There were few surprises. Save for Nicholas Ray’s
Johnny Guitar
where one of the villains on lookout duty is seen reading a book and is obviously so transported by it that hero and posse are able to burst into the outlaws’ camp and overcome them. (Books were not a regular prop in westerns, except maybe under the arm of a school teacher, or glimpsed out of focus on the library shelves of a too powerful and corrupt land baron (the complete works of Thomas Carlyle, no doubt). And yet Lew Wallace, the governor of New Mexico in Billy the Kid’s time, wrote
Ben-Hur.
One wonders what the ranch hands and neighbours thought about that.)

At nineteen I moved to Canada, no longer obsessed with westerns. Or so I thought. I was reading and writing avidly, and within a few years I was also teaching to make a living. By
1968
I had written two books of poetry, and I was surrounded by the possibilities of all the literary forms. There were books such as Gary Snyder’s
Earth House Hold,
which brought his work journals and his poems naturally together because they hailed from the same place and time in the Pacific Northwest; and Kenneth Patchen’s
The Journal of Albion Moonlight,
full of drawings alongside the text. Most of the time I was reading literary journals, where the new writing was, and in these I discovered a stunning range of voices and emotional angles. What if I tried to write a book that allowed all these angles and subjects and emotions, but they all came from one person? As far as I could see, one voice never really spoke only in one way: it contained multitudes.

This was just a shadowy concept. I have never begun books with a careful plan or sure intent. But this idea propelled me into deep water. I had only a skeletal page of information
about Billy. I had read one book called
The Saga of Billy the Kid
that began, I still remember, with the great line, “John Chisum knew cows.” I had read articles in Western magazines about Colts and Remingtons (one text was called
Triggernometry),
about safe and unsafe spurs, about desert wells, and the general consensus pertaining to lady gamblers and new sheriffs from the East. I pored over topographical maps of Western deserts. But in truth by now I had already written a third of the book, was on an unstoppable horse, just grabbing these details as I passed them, sticking them into my pannier. In this way the book turned into an improvisation on a historical figure who had by the
1960
s turned into a cartoon. I had to invent Billy from the ground up because really there was now nothing left of him. No blood or sinew or clue of character behind the known facts.

I did have some sort of Aristotelian unity. Twenty-one killed. Dead at twenty-one. Otherwise merely a hint of a love affair and some vague friends who were known only by their names. It was perfect. I was given free rein. I invented every gesture and the choreography of every gunfight. I stole jokes from my friends and woes from people I knew less well. I was on a bus in London, Ontario, when two people behind me started chatting about Robert Browning’s son who while at university had tried to breed a mad dog, but they got off before the story was over, leaving me with the germ of an eventual tall story. (I couldn’t afford to go south, so it was an eventual delight when a review of the book in a Texas newspaper a few years later complained that a Canadian had been allowed to edit the journals of Billy the Kid.) In the summers I wrote in an abandoned barn, so the locale of that barn, the dry smell of past animals, the cobwebs on my pencils and table if I stayed away too long, became important. There were rats in the next set of stalls and so one afternoon rats entered the story. The mad dogs had already come and gone.

I was not at all sure if any of this was good or bad. If I thought about what I had written, it was crazy content and a possibly crazy form. These Western women were dangerous, and the boys in the gang untrustworthy to the core. But Billy somehow, in all his wildness, stayed balanced, the sane assassin. I wrote. And as I finished each poem I put it away in a drawer after the first draft and never looked at it again until I had finished the whole book. So while I knew tentatively where I was going, I was not always sure where I had been. It gave me the freedom to swerve away into a new voice or character trait. Halfway through the manuscript I realised I needed to break free of the lyric voice. I needed more space for my characters to ride across the border or to stroll into town on Christmas night after being away for a while. So I suddenly began writing prose. This was the first “fiction” I had written but it did not feel like fiction to me. By now the forty or fifty poems I had in the desk drawer had created enough of a basic landscape for the language of prose, and all the unspoken possibilities poured out in a gush. Suddenly other characters spoke and thought—the enigmatic Garrett, the hesitant Sallie, the painfully shy Tom O’Folliard—and they had a specific nature in their voices that was not there until they started to speak.

What I discovered I had at the end of two years of writing poems and prose and imaginary interviews and songs and fragments was a manuscript somewhat like a valise containing the collected raw material for a collage. And so there followed another year of rewriting, refocusing, restructuring, and compressing all that material into some newly invented organic form that would contain the story. During the editing process scenes blended together, hooked together—just as much by juxtaposition of moods as by new, surprising narrative lines. One could leap from terror to a close-up of a
moth in a bowl, but there had to be some unspoken or hidden link between the two moments—to do with language perhaps or some small spark in a lyric that would lead to conflagration in the prose sequence that followed. I learned everything about editing a haphazard structure in the time I spent choreographing and rebuilding
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.

I attempted everything. I took a stanza and wrote it backwards and in one case I kept the result; I tried beginning the poem halfway through; I tested and rewrote the poems again and again until they felt indelible to me. Oddly enough, the prose I left almost as it came out in the first draft. The lines in the poems were gnarled, with each line reflecting up to the line above as much as to the line that followed, but the prose wandered as if unaware into strange rooms and imaginary landscapes and old memories, and I realised without quite knowing why that I wanted to keep that informality. Even now I am not sure if it is the poems that anchor the book in a mental reality or the prose that does so with its physical actuality.

It was a strange time for me certainly, feeling partially blindfolded about what I was doing. After the strict editing of the individual pieces I became obsessed with the arcing of the story, its larger architecture, as opposed to the clash of juxtapositions or plot development. Dennis Lee was my editor at House of Anansi, and he would visit me in London, Ontario, where I had all the scenes on the floor so I could look down at the movement of it and alter it by simplifying or complicating the storyline. Dennis was crucial in shaping this mongrel work, especially by accepting the fact that it
was
a mongrel work and that we had to live with it and, more importantly, make it airtight. Later, when I brought forward the visuals I had always planned on using— “fictional” portraits, documentary photographs, as well as the
needed “white spaces” for the pauses in the story—it was the poet bpNichol who helped me pace the book with its silences and what was unsaid. “I send you a picture of Billy…”, which begins the book, in fact had an image of The Kid within the rectangle above the text until Barrie suggested I simply (or perversely) remove the image within it, and suddenly the footholds of the story became mysterious. It was the reader who would now need to provide the picture of Billy. Dennis Lee and Barrie Nichol, and Stan Bevington, who designed the book at Coach House Press, were my cohorts in the making of the book.

It came out at first to a thundering silence. Then one day I walked into Coach House Press and found some of the printers and designers there listening to a tape that the Vancouver artist Roy Kiyooka had made of himself reading one of the prose sections in the book. As I listened I was for the first time shocked at the violence of it, almost scared of it. My God, was that written by me? It was in any case the first time I was objectively aware of what I had done. And I was also aware that those gnarled private meditations of Billy could make terrible sense when heard out loud, so that the emotions could be recognised by any stranger, not just by the author who had written them.

Michael Ondaatje, 2008

Some sections of
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
have appeared in magazines so I would like to thank the magazines and their editors:
Blew Ointment, Is, 20 Cents Magazine, Quarry.
And the following books:
The Cosmic Chef
and
The Story So Far.

The death of Tunstall, the reminiscences by Paulita Maxwell and Sallie Chisum on Billy, are essentially made up of statements made to Walter Noble Burns in his book
The Saga of Billy the Kid,
published in
1926.
The comment about taking photographs around
1870–80
is by the great Western photographer L.A. Huffman and appears in his book
Huffman, Frontier Photographer.
(Some of the photographs in this book are his.) The last piece of dialogue between Garrett and Poe is taken from an account written by Deputy John W. Poe in
1919
when he was the President of the National Bank of Roswell, New Mexico. The comic book legend,
Billy the Kid and the Princess,
is
©1969
Carlton Press, Inc., by permission.

With these basic sources I have edited, rephrased, and slightly reworked the original statements. But the emotions belong to their authors.

MO 1970

MICHAEL ONDAATJE
is the author of five novels, a memoir, a nonfiction book on film, and eleven books of poetry.
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
won the Governor General’s Literary Award;
The English Patient
won the Booker Prize;
Anil’s Ghost
won the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Giller Prize, and the Prix Médicis. His most recent novel is
Divisadero.