The Kid: A Novel (20 page)

His mother chastised him with “Pedro!”

“Well, it’s a fact she’s from a house of ill fame in Kansas. And Sheriff Dad Peppin saw her in actual lascivious contact with John Chisum.”

Some of the women inhaled in shock.

“I find that hard to believe,” the Kid said.

“And
frequent
occurrences where she forced herself on a Mexican boy on the grassy banks of the Rio Bonito.”

Billy was fuming. “Where you getting all this?”

“Army scuttlebutt based on Nathan Dudley’s investigations,” Maxwell said, and he falsely smiled. “You won’t shoot the messenger, will you?”

Captain Alexander Chase said, “Such comments seem indelicate, Pete. Especially among ladies and on the birthday of Our Lord.”

Pete Maxwell held up both hands as if he’d desist, but then he turned the screw a jot more, asking, “You still horse-thieving, Kid? Or are you just gunning folks helter-skelter?”

Paulita yelled to him, “Have some more wine, Pedro!”

Pete flopped backward as if he’d been punched. “Oh my gosh, my dear little sister’s
sweet
on you, Kid!”

She faced her food. “Am not.”

“She finds the bad boy fetching!”

“Quit it,” she said, her face flushing.

All the dinner guests were fondly looking at the two. The Kid stood up from the table. “This has been lovely,” he said. “Scrumptious dinner and there was such”—he sought a high-flown word and found it—“conviviality.”

Pete lifted his golden chalice in a false farewell toast and then finished it.

Paulita got up, too, saying, “I’ll walk you out.” And she touched the Kid’s forearm with a soft, consoling hand in their walk as she said, “I’m so sorry for my stupid brother’s rudeness. And none of the others sticking up for you. It’s indecent.”

The Kid smiled and said, “I was about to lose my cherubic demeanor.” He put on his gentleman’s derby hat and gallantly offered, “But I guess I gave Pete ammunition with all my disorderly doings.”

She seemed serious and old beyond her years as she asked, “So, are you changing your ways?”

“If they let me.”

“They,” she repeated. She seemed to find some wifely satisfaction over his tardy improvement, and then was all formal politeness. “I do hope we’ll see you again in spite of this evening’s unpleasantness.”

“I’d take kindly to that.” Then he remembered his gift and reached into a velvet side pocket as he said, “Oh here, for you. I didn’t have a bow or paper or anything to wrap it.” And he drizzled into her waiting hands the gold lady’s watch that Henry Hoyt had given him in exchange for Sheriff Brady’s horse.

She held it up to candlelight. “But it’s dazzling, Billy! You take my breath away! Oh, I’m so happy! I love it!”

“Well, good.”

She hesitated and in a sudden flash kissed his cheek. Embarrassed by that forwardness, she withdrew into the frilly white feminine bedroom as he let himself out, snugging the front door quietly closed.

And then he found himself at the old quartermaster store. “Saval’s still butlering,” he said. Celsa smiled as she let him in and she invited his carnal enjoyment.

*  *  *

Hard winds and slanting snowdrifts as deep as his horse’s stifle slowed his uphill journey from Fort Sumner to a full six days, but the Kid managed to get to Lincoln on the afternoon of February 18, exactly one year since John H. Tunstall was assassinated. He’d heard that Jesse Evans, his former captain with the Boys and in the sheriff’s posse that killed Harry, was using Fort Stanton like a free hotel, going and coming as he pleased, so the Kid had written him there, saying,

I have been shifting from can to can’t and am wanting to shuck our fractiousness. Won’t you and Jimmy meet me in Lincoln on Tuesday, the 18th instant?

The Kid first went to Juan Patrón’s house and store, where Tom Folliard was holing up. Juan’s wife, Beatriz, served them Arbuckles’ Ariosa coffee and told them Jimmy Dolan had effected a truce with Susan McSween so he could buy the Tunstall store. Susan would be holding a piano recital that evening in the home Juan still referred to as Saturnino Baca’s. Half the town would be there.

Around five Tom and Billy sloshed through wet snow and mud on Lincoln’s only street until they got to Frank McCullum’s Oyster House, which overlooked the charred joists and rot of the late Alexander McSween’s home. They ate hearty as Tom chattered boastfully about having defiled “a pretty doxy from Socorro just behind the Torreón. Locals got a name for the area but I forget.”

“El Chorro,” the Kid said.

“Yes! Exactly! What’s that mean?”

“The squirt.”

Tom Folliard guffawed in a way that caused him to lose some food.

Just before seven they got to Baca’s, where children were scrunched up on the floor, genial women were laying their overcoats on a bed, Jimmy Dolan was lurking near the Steinway piano with Jacob B. Mathews, Sheriff Brady’s deputy on the morning BB was killed. Jesse Evans was seemingly on parole, for he was sitting there with a ferocious Texas cowhand named Billy Campbell and they looked like they hadn’t heard a good joke in years. Jesse noticed the Kid but did nothing since he was dealing with the sour wreckage of drunkenness.

Susan McSween seemed none the worse for wear in a fine gown and an excess of jewelry, and she delightedly greeted the fine-looking “Red Tom” Folliard with a lingering hug and, as an afterthought, Billy—whom she still condemned as “one of those foolhardy boys.” She said, “There’s someone very important to me that I should like you to meet.”

So they were introduced to Huston Ingraham Chapman, a heavy attorney and railroad engineer whom she’d met in Las Vegas and with whom she was cohabiting. Chapman had lost his left arm to a hunting accident in Oregon at the age of thirteen and overcompensated with high dudgeon and irascibility in his practice of law—he was a rule-or-ruin sort that few people liked. And now his right hand kept tenderly petting his red, windburnt face, for he was, he explained, “suffering from neuralgia.” Seeing Tom Folliard’s frown, he defined it as “sudden intensity of pain in a nerve.” Still, he was feisty, and as he talked there seemed to be no lack in him of affidavits, motions, stipulations, and outrage. Enemies aplenty he had, some identical to the Kid’s—Judge Warren Bristol, District Attorney Rynerson, and in particular Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Dudley, whom Susan McSween intended to have prosecuted for murder and arson. Huston Chapman’s hazel eyes never strayed from the Kid’s face as he talked about the miscreants, until he finally asked, as if he’d found a new client, “Aren’t there civil warrants out for your arrest?”

But then Susan McSween was sitting at the pianoforte and announcing, “I shall be performing Chopin’s
Études
this evening. Opus ten. Composed in eighteen thirty-three. The first is called ‘Waterfall.’ ” When that was over she announced in sequence “Chromatique,” “Tristesse,” “Torrent,” “Black Keys,” “Lament,” and “Toccata.” Each was mercifully short, but little Jimmy Dolan would not leave the Kid alone with his restless eyes, and Chopin’s music seemed to hath not the charm to soothe the savage Evans and Campbell. When the opus was finished with “Revolutionary” and Susan McSween stood to more fully absorb the adulation and applause, Evans and Campbell were impatiently standing, too, and giving Jimmy and J. B. Mathews the high sign.

The Kid and Tom shouted some praise to Susan, and she offered a queenly wave as they went outside, following the Dolan faction. Yginio Salazar was healed up from the gun wounds of the Big Killing, and he scrambled up from Susan’s fainting couch to follow his cousin.

Hostilities started with Evans urging Dolan to just get rid of Billy, and the Kid saying, “I don’t care to open our parley with a gunfight, but even if you jump me four at a time you’ll all soon find yourselves toes up.”

Tom confided to Yginio, “Billy reads shoot-em-ups.”

There seemed to be some silent calculations by the Kid’s foes, a few wary looks, and then a pacification of the mood. Jimmy Dolan asked, “So ye be wanting a peace treaty, Billy? What are ye thinking, lad?”

The Kid had in fact given it a good deal of thought and listed some imperatives. “Either side agrees not to kill anyone on the opposing. Anyone we ever called a friend is hereby included.”

Jimmy Dolan’s deepest friendships were now at Fort Stanton, so he added, “And no soldiers or officers are to be punished for any ting up to this date. We wants to keep the Army outta this.”

The Kid shrugged his agreement and continued, “We promise not to give evidence against each other in court. We guarantee to help each other avoid arrests on civil warrants, and if a fellow is jailed we’ll try to get him out.”

“The penalty for not upholding this treaty?” Jimmy asked.

“Well, it goes without saying,” said Jacob Mathews. “Killed on sight.”

There was some fretting and stewing, but first Jimmy Dolan shook the Kid’s hand and then all seven joined in liking the truce.

“I got no dog in this fight,” Billy Campbell said as though he regretted it.

Jimmy Dolan handed around a bottle of George Dickel Original Tennessee sour mash, and all but the Kid drank a jigger’s worth. “Quare chilly out here,” Jimmy said.

Jesse Evans was hugging himself as he agreed. “Colder than an old witch’s tit in a snowbank.”

Earlier, Huston Chapman had trudged to Isaac Ellis’s store at the east end of Lincoln and woke up Isaac to get a loaf of stale bread for a poultice he thought would act as a cathartic for his neuralgia. Walking back with his medicament after nine, his swollen face bandaged in gauze, he happened upon the seven in parley. J. B. Mathews just glowered, but Billy Campbell thought it hilarious to use his huge size to interfere with Chapman’s progress, swaying with intoxication as he demanded, “Who are you and where the hell you think you’re goin?”

“My name is Huston Chapman, and I am attending to my own personal affairs.”

Looking for any excuse, the infuriated Campbell yanked his gun and jabbed it into Huston Chapman’s significant belly. “You’ll have to dance for us first.”

“Oh, let him go,” sighed the Kid.

Huston Chapman took in the seven faces and said, “I do not propose to dance for a drunken, unruly mob.”

“Watch your fancy mouth,” Campbell said, “or you’ll find yourself—”

They all waited for him to finish his threat, but overindulgence in the red disturbance had stolen vocabulary from him.

Susan McSween had informed Chapman of Jimmy’s alcoholism, so he tugged his big gauze bandage aside to more clearly see his tormentor. “Am I speaking with Jimmy Dolan?”

Little Jimmy was in fact behind the lawyer, and he smirked. Evans said, “No. Just a darn good friend of his’n.”

And suddenly a swozzled Jimmy Dolan fired his pistol vaguely into the man’s overcoat. Reacting to the sudden noise, Billy Campbell fired, too, hitting the lawyer just above the navel.

The Kid glanced at Tom and Yginio in disbelief. J. B. Matthews, a half-time deputy, withdrew.

Realizing he was gutshot, Huston Chapman gazed in horror at his blackening waistcoat and exclaimed, “Oh my God, I am killed!” He fell to his knees in the frozen mud as the flash of gunpowder that singed his clothing fed into a flame. He toppled backward, and Jimmy Dolan pitilessly wasted the last of his George Dickel whiskey to fuel a full-blown fire that crept up the dying man.

Looking at Jesse Evans, Billy Campbell smiled and said, “There. We did it.”

“Good on ya,” Dolan said.

Billy Campbell faced the Kid to explain that he’d promised Lieutenant Colonel Dudley he’d kill that shyster Chapman and he’d gone and done it. His word was his bond.

With his gun still drawn, Jimmy Dolan told the Kid, Tom Folliard, and Yginio Salazar, “Join us in celebration.” There was nothing voluntary in the invitation. And the Kid, who forthrightly faced any skirmish and was affronted by every Oh-no-you-don’t, for some odd reason complied.

Huston Chapman was groaning in agony as the six went to Frank McCullum’s eatery and Jimmy ordered Olympia oysters and full glasses of rye all around. With the slightest of misgivings, he daintily lifted his own gun by the trigger guard and said, “We need someone to put this in Chapman’s hand. Like he shot first.”

Like you did with Harry
, the Kid thought. “I’ll do it,” he said and took the gun as he got up from oysters and drink he hadn’t touched. And Tom Folliard figured it was an excellent occasion to visit the backyard privy. When the Kid was outside in the elements, he ran east at full speed to Isaac Ellis’s, where his horse was stabled, and Tom Folliard and Yginio Salazar were right on his heels.

They galloped to Yginio’s house in a
placita
near the ranch of Patrick Coghlan, with whom the Kid had friendly acquaintance due to rustling transactions. Hence the Kid was long gone when Army Lieutenant Byron Dawson and twenty cavalrymen arrived in Lincoln at midnight, having heard on the afternoon of the eighteenth that William H. Bonney was afoot.

The soldiers banged on house doors in their search for him and in that way happened upon Huston Chapman’s stiff corpse, still on Main Street, his face eaten away by the fire. Worthless Sheriff George Kimbrell, who’d just taken the job, admitted he had seen the body lying there but couldn’t find a soul to help him carry it elsewhere.

With disdain, Lieutenant Dawson said
he’d
take care of it, and his cavalrymen deposited Huston Chapman on a courthouse plaintiff’s table.

There was no inquest and no meaningful pursuit of a murderer, for, because of his notoriety, the Kid became the only suspect. But the assassination did compel Governor Lew Wallace to write the United States secretary of the interior that “I have further information that certain notorious characters, who have long been under indictment, but by skillful dodging have managed to escape arrests, have formed an alliance which looks like preparation for raids when the spring opens. With that idea I propose a campaign against them.”

- 14 -

CLEMENCY

T
he governor would soon meet the Kid, for W. H. Bonney sent this letter to him at the Governor’s Palace in Santa Fe: