The Kid: A Novel (36 page)

*  *  *

Waiting in the hallway for a moment, Garrett listened for sounds of wakefulness in the house and heard nothing but the song of insects outside. The shade of the front porch roof made the interior moonless. Walking inside the twenty-by-twenty south bedroom, he could make out Pete Maxwell sleeping flat on his back in a nightshirt, his white top sheet flung off in the heat. Garrett went to the head of the double bed, felt the sag of the mattress as he gently eased down onto it, and sitting there he softly laid a hand on Maxwell’s forearm as he whispered, “Pete.”

Maxwell inhaled in a shocked “Huh?”

“It’s Pat,” he whispered. “We’re looking for the Kid. Seen him here?”

Maxwell was still waking and wiped his left eye as he said, “Week ago.”

And then they heard a voice outside asking, “
Quién es
?” Who is it?

*  *  *

The Kid was about ten feet away and fastening his trousers when he attracted John Poe’s attention. The deputy thought it could have been Maxwell himself or a houseguest walking back from the privy, so he just watched. There was no sign of a gun.

Because Poe was partially hidden on the stoop, the Kid failed to see him until he could have reached out and felt the figure’s rifle. Electrified as always by danger, the Kid hopped up the steps, whispering, “
Quién es
?”

McKinney and Poe did not understand Spanish.

The Kid was backing away from the deputy as he headed toward Pete Maxwell’s bedroom and said again, “
Quién es
?”

John Poe still presumed the Kid was a houseguest, and he stood up with a calming hand and said in reassurance, “Don’t be afraid of us. We’re visiting just like you.”

The Kid recalled Paulita saying,
You’re not going to hurt him, are you?
And he felt off-kilter.

John Poe was just a few feet from him when the Kid ducked into Maxwell’s room, calling out, “
Pedro, quiénes son esos hombres afuera
?” Pete, who are those men outside?

*  *  *

Sheriff Garrett heard the voice outside but failed to recognize it at first as he worried that it could be Maxwell’s brother-in-law and frequent houseguest, Manuel Abreu. But the form of the man was like that of the Kid, and as he asked Pete his frantic question, he was walking close enough to reach a hand out to the foot of the bed.

Garrett yanked out the newish Colt .44 he’d taken from Billie Wilson, and the Kid heard the scratch of leather and the four clicks of a hammer getting to full cock in the hand of a just-recognized upright shape on the bed, and, in his precaution to not injure a friend, he left his Colt in his trouser pocket but held out the butcher knife in his left hand as he skewed farther away, asking again, “
Quién es
?
Quién es
?”

Without warning, Garrett fired at the Kid, and the flash of the gun faintly illumined him as a .44 caliber bullet hit the Kid’s chest and the left atrium of the heart so hard it turned him around and he fell face-forward onto the floorboards. And Garrett did nearly the same as he fell to all fours from the bed and fired again with a wild aim that drilled through a wooden washstand and hit the headboard next to Pete in a loud ricochet so that outside John Poe thought he heard three shots. The room was filled with the haze and pungent smell of gunpowder, and the sheriff and Maxwell were so deafened by the noise that neither one heard the Kid’s few gasps and then a final groan.

They fled the room, Maxwell falling to his knees on the south porch as he yelled to the deputies, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

Sheriff Garrett told Deputy Poe, “That was the Kid, and I think I got him.”

John Poe said, “Are you sure? You may have shot the wrong man.”

Kip McKinney joined them on the east porch, and with caution the three lawmen stooped to peer through the open windows to see if the Kid was dead or just waiting for retribution. But with the roof shading them, it was too dark to have any certainty, so Pete went to the far end of the house for a candle as alone Garrett cautiously walked back inside the room with Billie Wilson’s Colt in both trembling hands.

The Kid’s blood was a widening pond on the floor, and Garrett worried as he saw that the Kid had no gun, just the butcher knife. There would be scandal. Garrett looked out to the front porch and saw that McKinney and Poe were facing east in caution as native people ran to find out what the gunshots were about. Ever so quietly Garrett squatted to frisk the Kid and felt relieved when he found the smallish Colt .41 in his trousers. Garrett gently laid it beside the Kid just as Pete arrived on the front porch with a lighted tallow candle and stood it in its own wax on a windowsill.

With the help of the fluttering flame, Maxwell was pretty sure it was the Kid, and he said he seemed dead as a doornail, and by then Deluvina and Jesús Silva were running in. She and Jesús rolled the Kid over onto his back. His face was white as paper, his mouth was loose, and his flashing eyes were finally dulled. With two fingers Deluvina tenderly closed his eyelids, and when she noticed the tall sheriff lingering beside her in silence she hurled a full load of curses at him. “You pisspot!” she screamed. “You traitor! You snake in the grass! You have murdered our little boy!”

Pete Maxwell walked back into his room, and he and the sheriff exchanged glances. He who’d been afraid of the Kid was now afraid of Garrett. And then Paulita was there in a nightgown. With a face that lacked emotion, she looked at a nothing-there Kid and flatly said, “And now he’ll never be old.”

*  *  *

The gun was raised and then it flashed. The shock of it was like a punch that spun the Kid and swatted him to the floor. Then there was a fiery, searing pain that overcame all other feeling, but it waned as the Kid’s body acquired its education in dying. The Kid felt himself floating upward, felt a surprising happiness. With each quitting of an organ or process there came a greater liberation, an aliveness, an awareness of never having been so real. Seeing himself on the floor and the chaotic concern around him, he felt affection for all of them, felt pity for who he used to be, but he was overwhelmed by his new fluidity and increase, his ever-greater sense of wonderful love and limitlessness, of having now what he’d always wanted but couldn’t ever name.

*  *  *

There was a ruckus outside as the Kid’s Mexican friends crowded around the Maxwell house, seething. Had there been anyone to urge them on, they would have rioted against the Kid’s murderer, but the one who could have induced them to do that was now dead. Still, the sheriff and his deputies stayed wakeful inside Pete’s bedroom that night, barricading themselves to forbid access, their guns ever in their hands in case the locals sought retaliation. Garrett looked at the dead body still on the floor and told his deputies, “Kid Bonney was as cool under trying circumstances as any man I ever saw. I guess he was so surprised for an instant he could not collect himself.”

At one in the morning of Friday the fifteenth, Celsa and Saval, Deluvina and Jesús, and a boy named Paco Anaya carried the Kid eastward across the old parade grounds to a carpenter’s shop on the southern limits of the fort, where they laid him on a workbench. With lumber scarce, some of Maxwell’s shepherds tore apart the roof of the falling-down stable next to the Indian commissary and used its ceiling planks for the Kid’s interment. Jesús Silva then sawed and nailed the boards to construct a basic coffin as Manuela and Celsa and other weeping señoras washed the Kid’s nakedness, brushed his hair, dammed the Colt .44’s large exit wound with a rag, and dressed him in a fine linen shirt and trousers donated by Pete Maxwell. They left the Kid’s white feet bare and arrayed yellow beeswax candles all around him, and off and on his friends visited him for a night wake of rosaries and Spanish funeral hymns.

Sheriff Garrett and his deputies left the fort around noon that Friday, and soon after that his friends tenderly laid the Kid’s corpse into the coffin and shoved it onto Vicente Otero’s hauling wagon. Then the entire population of Fort Sumner, even saloonkeepers who never closed up, followed the funeral cortege to the old soldiers’ cemetery. Young Paco Anaya had worked all morning with Vicente digging out a grave next to those of the Kid’s pals Tom Folliard and Charlie Bowdre.

There was no priest or minister to handle the rites, so Hugh Leeper, a Christian nicknamed the Sanctified Texan, read from the fourteenth chapter of the Book of Job: “ ‘Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down; he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.’ ” And: “ ‘Thou shalt call, and I will answer thee; thou wilt have a desire to the work of thine hands. For now thou numberest my steps; dost thou not watch over my sin? My transgression is sealed up in a bag, and thou sewest up my iniquity.’ ”

In Leeper’s funeral sermon he continually referred to the Kid as “our beloved young lad” and closed by telling the congregation, “Billy cannot come back to us, but we can go to him and will see him again up yonder. Amen.”

Then Paco hammered into the ground a simple cross made from a stave from the Maxwells’ picket fence. Crudely painted on it was
BILLY THE KID
, but nothing more.

*  *  *

With a sheriff’s annual salary of only two hundred dollars, Garrett had campaigned hard to finally collect the five hundred dollars from the government for the Kid’s capture at Stinking Springs, the reward getting to him only some months later after much public pressure. So in Fort Sumner he left nothing to chance and invited Alejandro Segura, the justice of the peace, to form a jury of six, including Saval Gutiérrez and José Jaramillo’s father, Lorenzo, with Garrett’s friend Milnor Rudulph acting as foreman of the inquest. It was the jury’s judgment that William H. Bonney died due to a fatal wound inflicted by a gun in the hand of Pat F. Garrett, but in an odd conclusion to such a report, Rudulph wrote in his friendship to the sheriff, “Our decision is that the action of said Garrett was justifiable homicide; and we are united in the opinion that the gratitude of all the community is owed to said Garrett for his deed, and that he deserves to be rewarded.”

*  *  *

In July 1881 no fewer than eight New York City newspapers hurrahed the killing of “the scourge of the Southwest,” and there were notices about it in all the major cities in the United States and Great Britain. In the Kid’s former hometown of Silver City, an editorial noted: “The vulgar murderer and desperado known as ‘Billy the Kid’ has met his just desserts at last.”

The
New York Daily Graphic
looked backward to the December 1880 capture of the Kid, when “with fangs snarling and firing a revolver like a maniac, W. H. Bonney fought his way out of his ambushed robber castle at Stinking Springs where he lived in luxury on his ill-gotten gains with his Mexican beauties.” And it vouchsafed that the Kid “had built up a criminal organization worthy of the underworld of any of the European capitals. He defied the law to stop him and he stole, robbed, raped, and pillaged the countryside until his name became synonymous with that of the grim reaper himself. A Robin Hood with no mercy, a Richard the Lion-Hearted who feasted on blood, he became, in the short span of his twenty-one years, the master criminal of the American southwest. His passing marks the end of wild west lawlessness.”

And the
Santa Fe Weekly Democrat
took on a scoffing tone as it jested: “No sooner had the floor caught his descending form which had a pistol in one hand and a knife in the other, than there was a strong odor of brimstone in the air, and a dark figure with wings of a dragon, claws like a tiger, eyes like balls of fire, and horns like a bison, hovered over the corpse for a moment and with a fiendish laugh said, ‘Ha, ha! This is my meat!’ and then sailed off through the window.”

With the passing years the Kid’s life became just a collection of fabrications that lost American interest to such an extent that in 1925 a journalist opened an article with the question “Who remembers Billy the Kid?” But by then the Chicago journalist Walter Noble Burns was in New Mexico interviewing hundreds of those still alive who were friends of the Kid. Published in 1926,
The Saga of Billy the Kid
became a huge bestseller that got many things wrong and fictionally duplicated some hoary legends, but depicted a jaunty yet tragic Kid defying death to carry out his oath of vengeance against those who murdered John Tunstall and a majority of the Regulators. “The boy who never grew old,” Burns wrote, “has become a sort of symbol of frontier knight-errantry, a figure of eternal youth riding forever through a purple glamour of romance.”

*  *  *

Pat Garrett did get his five hundred dollars for the Kid’s homicide, but half a year later he declined to run for reelection as sheriff of Lincoln County—John Poe won that job—and instead, with his Roswell postmaster friend Ash Upson, Garrett wrote
The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid, the Noted Desperado of the Southwest, Whose Deeds of Daring and Blood Made His Name a Terror in New Mexico, Arizona & Northern Mexico
.

The first fictionalized version of the Kid’s life had been published within weeks of his fatality by the Five Cent Wide Awake Library, which the Kid himself used to dwell on as a boy, and there were four other so-called biographies in 1881, including
Billy the “Kid” and His Girl
, which appeared in Morrison’s Sensational Series and sold 100,000 copies. The Kid’s assassin was not often extolled, as there was a whiff of cowardice in his actions. Although Garrett’s own book contained some wild inventions up front, its latter half was far more factual: a frank, methodical, self-vindicating account of how the Kid was hunted down. Yet it did not sell well, and it was only because Jimmy Dolan, John Chisum, and generous readers of the
Las Vegas Daily Optic
donated a fortune to him for slaying the Kid that Garrett could retire to his ranch outside Roswell and found the Pecos Valley Irrigation and Investment Company.

It was just one of many commercial partnerships that failed for him as he shiftlessly moved his family from place to place in pursuit of other luckless schemes. In 1896 he became sheriff of Doña Ana County and lasted five successful but miserable years before President Theodore Roosevelt rescued the famous Pat Garrett by naming him collector of customs in El Paso. Hundreds of written complaints about his incompetence were sent to Washington, however, and he so overspent his time in the Coney Island Saloon downtown that after five years an insulted Roosevelt replaced him.