The Kid: A Novel (11 page)

Martínez shrank down a little, but Waite just flatly stared at the guns as if indifferent to their shenanigans.

Sheriff Brady asked if the Kid’s was a Winchester ’73, heard nothing, and with a drill sergeant’s experience of handling tyros he loomed over Billy and demanded, “Hand me that rifle, you son of a bitch.” And when the Kid didn’t do that at once, Brady wrenched it away and admired the Winchester’s blued-steel breechblock and oiled walnut stock before socking the Kid’s jaw with its butt plate.

The Kid yelled, “Ow!” and held his jaw. He could taste blood, and his face was blotched red with fury over the injury and with the shame of a helplessness he hadn’t felt since adolescence.

The sheriff confiscated the rifle Harry had given the Kid for his birthday and announced to Waite and Martínez, “It’s
you
three that are under arrest!”

Jimmy laughed and said, “Oh, ain’t it grand!”

“Tis indeed,” L. G. Murphy said. “Good on ye, Bill. And good riddance, laddies.”

Waite seemed unsurprised, but Martínez protested, “
Pero por qué
?”

The sheriff answered, “Well, for disturbing the peace. And impersonating an officer of the law. And things I haven’t thought of yet.”

Eventually the lieutenant got the three arrestees in a tight formation with his Fort Stanton detachment around them, humiliatingly marching them to the jail like they were oafish new recruits.

Atanacio Martínez was let out of
la cárcel
before nightfall, but Waite and the Kid were held in the cold, fetid underground dungeon, and they were still there when the funeral for John Henry “Harry” Tunstall took place on Friday and he was buried in the horse corral behind his looted store.

The Kid said, “You and me, we could take over Harry’s ranch and run his cattle for him.”

Waite said, “You’re no rancher, Kid. Hell, you don’t even garden.”

“So what am I s’posed to do?”

“Well, you’re an able gunman.”

Mrs. Susan McSween’s foot-pumped reed organ had been carried into the corral, and the Kid could faintly hear the village congregation singing the hymns “Jesu, Lover of My Soul” and “My Faith Looks Up to Thee.”

Handsome Fred Waite leaned against an earthen wall with his flat-brimmed hat tilted far back on his head. His black mustache was wide as a comb. Hearing the hymns, he stared across the darkened room to where the Kid was listening, too, as he squatted down, his arms hugging his knees.

Waite asked, “You know about the lawyers Thomas Catron and Stephen Elkins? Of the Santa Fe Ring?”

“A smidge.”

“They were friends and classmates at the University of Missouri. But Smooth Steve served with the Union Army and Tomcat with the Confederacy. Enemies. Yet they’re partners in their Santa Fe law firm now, letting bygones be bygones. Water under the bridge. And that’s how it’s gonna be with us. Civil war, with friends and neighbors against friends and neighbors. Afterwards it may be different, but for now it’s unto death that we’re parted. Lincoln County is a house divided.”

The Kid was rocking back and forth on his boots, saying nothing.

Waite asked, “What’s hamstering in your head, Kid?”

“Working up a good hate.”

Within thirty hours Waite and the Kid were released from jail, in a rage over the injustices of the legal system, the factious stance of the Army, and the refusal of Sheriff Brady to go after murderers still very plainly at large.

Seeing their side of things, Lincoln’s justice of the peace made twenty-eight-year-old Dick Brewer, whose record was clean, an official constable, and all of John H. Tunstall’s former employees joined him as deputies when he formed a vigilante group he called the Regulators. Their stated purpose was to restore law and order in the enormous county, but each Regulator had his own fealty and resentments, his own scheme to make a dollar, his own childhood education in the uses of violence, and a wild craving for vengeance.

The Kid went to the grocery and tavern of Juan Patrón in Lincoln and took pleasure in telling the tequila drinkers there in Spanish that he was Brewer’s deputy now and finally on the right side of the law and he intended to stay there. Could maybe run for sheriff next election.

*  *  *

The first arrests of the Regulators came on March 6, when Brewer, Middleton, Bowdre, Scurlock, and Kid Bonney found Frank Baker and William “Buck” Morton watering their horses on the far side of the Rio Peñasco. Baker was raised in an educated and cultured family in Syracuse, New York, but took a wrong turning, joined the Boys, and found sick pleasure in several homicides even before he signed on with Sheriff Brady’s posse to hunt down John Tunstall. Twenty-one-year-old Buck Morton grew up on a tobacco plantation in Virginia, clerked in a hotel in Denver, slit the throat of his gold-mining partner in Arizona, and was a sixty-dollar-a-month foreman on Jimmy Dolan’s cattle ranch on Black River when he joined the sheriff’s posse and shot Tunstall in cold blood. They both still rode with the Boys at times and were hightailing it to Texas when their means of locomotion got thirsty.

Wide-eyed at seeing the Regulators, the culprits fired at the five from a crouch, and in a wild panic hopped on their horses and spurred them southward. The Regulators crashed their own horses across a pretty fly-fishing river and gave chase through open but jagged country, the pursued in a hot gallop and twisting in their jolting saddles to shoot backward, hitting nothing but earth and sky, then having to frantically reload on the run. The Regulators sent a fusillade of gunfire at them, too, but the leaps and lunges of their horses also jostled their aims into ever-miss. Yet their five animals were fresher and Morton’s and Baker’s were hard-used and playing out, heaving for air and lathering up and stumbling with weakness until one just halted in a head-shaking statement of
I shall go no farther
and then the other horse joined him in sharing their exhaustion.

There was nothing for the murderers to do but jump down and hide in some tall, crackling tules in cold marsh water. Reeds nodded whenever they shifted position and guns could find their sloshing noise even when they couldn’t be seen.

“Fish in a farrow,” Bowdre said.

The Kid corrected him: “Barrel.”

Constable Brewer shouted, “We could set fire to these weeds and burn you out! So surrender and we won’t harm you!”

The Regulators could hear the hissing of whispered discussion and then, “Okay, we give up. Don’t shoot.”

One fell in the high reeds, making a commotion, and his partner criticized him, and then both sodden men showed themselves with their hands held high overhead but seeming skeptical about their futures.

Brewer said, “We’d rather have shot you both and had it done with, but as it is I guess you’re under arrest.”

Wet Buck Morton said, “We never did anything wrong. It was all justifiable.”

And the Kid told Brewer, “Let’s kill em now.”

“We can’t. We caught em.”

The Kid protested, “We take them back to Sheriff Brady or Judge Bristol, and they’ll just set them loose.”

Brewer ignored him and got off his horse to take their guns and tie their hands behind their backs. And then the seven of them rode to John Chisum’s fine hacienda on his South Spring River ranch, headquarters of the Jinglebob Land & Livestock Company.

Cottonwood trees shaded a quarter-mile avenue from the main road to the residence. Eight hundred acres of alfalfa provided forage for Chisum’s cattle. Orchards of apple, pear, peach, and plum trees had been imported from Arkansas. The hacienda was hedged with roses he got in Texas, and even the bobwhite quail and scarlet tanagers were foreign birds hauled all the way from Tennessee. In a region of rolling grasslands and a far-off emptiness, the Kid thought of the South Spring River ranch as a gorgeous, watered oasis, and he was so full of need and aspiration that he told Doc Scurlock, “I’ll own this someday.”

Doc flatly said, “Sure you will, Kid.”

Sallie Chisum, the old man’s niece, walked onto the front veranda in a high-collared teal dress to greet them. She said she was alone there with the Mexican cook and a Navajo servant and it was nice to have men around. She was a half year older than Billy and pretty and blond and welcoming enough that she at once made any men she encountered lovesick and overeager. Even the prisoners Baker and Morton, whom she’d note in her diary were “nice looking chaps with unmistakable marks of culture,” forgot the jail they were headed for and gave her a spark, as was said then. Billy Bonney she thought of as an affable, funny, and very occasional friend but nothing more, so he was vying for Sallie while the sole object of her own flirtatious attentions, the strong, august, and dashing Dick Brewer—she alone called him Richard—avoided the contest for Sallie but still seemed to be winning it.

She relished having the crowded surround of seven sentimental, admiring men at the candlelit dinner table, Baker and Morton joining the Regulators for porterhouse steaks and roasted red potatoes but without utensils and with their gun hands tied to the stiles of their chairs so that they were forced to gnash the meat off the bone like dogs.

Still, Buck Morton fought for Sallie’s notice against John Middleton and Billy Bonney. Sweet glances and winking, tee-heeing, and tickling only soured the meal for the married men Scurlock and Bowdre, and Doc chose to darken the mood by reciting to the accused, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, old time is still a-flying; and this same flower that smiles today tomorrow will be dying.”

“Heck, that could be a poem,” Middleton said.

And Scurlock said, “Is.”

The Kid sneered at their captives and drew a finger from ear to ear in a cut-throat warning.

Buck Morton could not hide his horror over Scurlock’s threat and the Kid’s gesture, and after hurrying his dinner he requested stationery to write a letter to his cousin, an attorney in Richmond, Virginia, lying about his innocence and noting: “Constable Brewer himself said he was sorry we gave up as he had not wished to take us alive. I presently am not at all afraid of their killing me, but if they should do so I wish that the matter should be investigated and the parties dealt with according to law. If you do not hear from me in four days after receipt of this I would like you to make inquiries about the affair.”

Sallie stamped the envelope, and Brewer promised they’d stop at the post office in Roswell on their way to Lincoln. Then the Kid heard knocking at the front door, opened it, and was grieved to see William McCloskey there. He was a scoundrel when drinking and a wheedler when not, and he’d fashioned a shoddy career of hiring on at Jinglebob roundups and branding times and otherwise handling janitorial work for the likes of Jimmy Dolan. “Saw the lights from the trail,” McCloskey said. “Sallie here?”

“Yes.”

“Wondered if the Chisums would let me stable Old Paint and rest my weary bones.”

With dismay Sallie allowed it, and soon McCloskey was hunkering in the dining room with Brewer and hot coffee, flattering him and trafficking in gossip as he sought to join the Regulators, whom he’d heard were getting handsomely paid.

Sallie allowed the murderers to stay under guard in her frilly pink bedroom that night, chosen by Brewer because it lacked windows. And when she saw the Regulators had laid out their bedrolls on the floor of the dining room and parlor, Sallie said she was too excited by the company to sleep, seeming to hope that Brewer would invite her on a moonlight stroll. Instead it was the Kid who escorted Sallie outside into the darkness, where she said with fresh wonderment, “There are so many thousands and thousands of stars here. Ever so much more than in Texas. They’re like a spill of sugar.”

“Supposed to snow,” Billy said, and then chided himself,
Weather, when she was being romantic
.

Uncle John Chisum grazed upward of eighty thousand cattle on rangeland that extended north one hundred miles, but only fifty or so were close enough to see beyond the fences, all watching Sallie with their sad and beautiful faces as she showed Billy the starry W of the constellation Cassiopeia.

Words were lost for the Kid. He tried to fetch a joke now and then but was so tardy in doing so that she just looked at him quizzically with no idea of his references. She stood still, hugging her overcoat, and just stared silently into the night, as though waiting for a train.
She wants me to kiss her
, he thought, but he hesitated and failed to touch her and finally Sallie said, “Brrr. That cold old wind cuts right through you, doesn’t it?”

“The hawk is talking,” he said.

She squinched her face at the boy oddity beside her.

“Old expression,” he said. “Because a hawk’s beak is sharp. Like a cold wind.” Each further explanation made him feel stupider.

She considered him for a while and then she quoted, “ ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.’ ”

“So you’re going to bed now?”

“That’s what I was implying, yes.”

Billy just watched Sallie walk back to the house alone, thinking,
Could’ve said you love her, Kid
.

*  *  *

An hour before sunup he tramped through fresh-fallen snow with his tack and petted the left side of a fourteen-hand roan called Tabasco that Alex McSween had loaned to him. He swatted the black saddle pad to free it a little of reddish hair and flew it up over the horse’s withers, then hooked the stirrups over the horn and flipped up the cinch before hefting the saddle onto the horse’s back.

Dick Brewer was drinking coffee from a tin cup as he humped his own tack to his stallion. “Up and at em early, Kid.”

“I figure I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” He inserted and inserted again the leather latigo through the D ring at the end of the cinch and then necktied it.

Brewer put his tin cup on a fence post, and steam twisted from it. Catching up with his saddling, he said, “McCloskey tells me Jimmy Dolan already heard we caught Buck and Frank. Some pards of theirs saw the chase. Jimmy’ll have lookouts posted east of Lincoln, so I figure we’ll go north and around the Capitán Mountains and ride in from the west at night.”