The Kid: A Novel (37 page)

Authors: Ron Hansen

BOOK: The Kid: A Novel

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Garrett’s financial problems continued as he moved Apolonaria and his eight children back to New Mexico, saw his clothing and possessions auctioned to pay off liens, signed a five-year lease on his land in Bear Canyon, and was distressed to see his cattle ranch taken over by a renter with a drove of twelve hundred goats. Garrett became increasingly aware that he’d squandered all his opportunities, and that they’d been available to him only because of his fame as the killer of Billy the Kid. In his fifties he said, “I sometimes wish that I had misfired and that the Kid had done his work of iniquity on me. He was the end of an age and I belong there, too.”

His final end came on an afternoon when Garrett was haggling with his business partners on a road outside Las Cruces. He sought to prevail by telling the thirty-year-old hothead riding a bay horse alongside his buggy, “You forget I’ve dealt with your kind before. I’m the man who killed Billy the Kid.” Seeking an intermission from the arguments, he got his Burgess folding shotgun for defense and climbed down from the buggy to urinate. And he was just unbuttoning his trousers when Jesse Wayne Brazel fired a bullet into the former sheriff’s skull, killing him instantly. It was February 29 in the leap year of 1908. He was fifty-seven years old.

Because Garrett was a nonbeliever, he’d wanted no religious rites at his funeral, so the owner of his favorite El Paso saloon read aloud a graveside eulogy by the English atheist Robert G. Ingersoll: “Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud and the only answer is the echo of our wailing cry. From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead there comes no word; but in the night of death hope sees a star and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing.”

Even as his celebrity continued, there would be no monuments honoring Pat Garrett, no museums dedicated to his life’s work, no highways named after him. Yet, like so many others, he stayed heard-about and famous because of books and movies that featured a Kid who’d become, to a great degree, each person’s wild invention.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T
his is a work of fiction based on fact. I have streamlined the history and eliminated some characters to spare the reader, but as often as possible I have stayed faithful to the Kid’s biography and the period. To get it right I mainly relied on the following books:

Bob Boze Bell,
The Illustrated Life and Times of Billy the Kid

Walter Noble Burns,
The Saga of Billy the Kid

Mark Lee Gardner,
To Hell on a Fast Horse

Pat F. Garrett,
The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid, the Noted Desperado

Joel Jacobsen,
Such Men as Billy the Kid

Leon C. Metz,
Pat Garrett: The Story of a Western Lawman

Frederick Nolan,
The Life and Death of John Henry Tunstall

———,
The Lincoln County War

———,
The Billy the Kid Reader

Miguel Antonio Otero, Jr.,
The Real Billy the Kid: With New Light on the Lincoln County War

Stephen Tatum,
Inventing Billy the Kid: Visions of the Outlaw in America, 1881–1981

Robert M. Utley,
Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life

Michael Wallis,
Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride

My thanks to my editor, Colin Harrison, for his discerning suggestions about the manuscript; to my agent, Peter Matson, for his advocacy and care; to Juan Velasco, for help with the Spanish; to Drew Gomber, for an informative private tour of Lincoln; and to my sister Gini, who accompanied me on visits to all the Billy the Kid sites. I’m particularly indebted to my helpful correspondence with the ever-responsive historians Frederick Nolan and Mark Lee Gardner.

The first readers of these pages were my friend Jim Shepard and my lovely wife, Bo Caldwell—their insights and enthusiasm were invaluable to the making of this book and I owe them.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

R
on Hansen is the author of nine novels, two collections of stories, and a book of essays. He graduated from Creighton University in Omaha and went on to the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Stanford University. His novel
Atticus
was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. His novel
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
was also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and was made into a movie starring Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck. Hansen’s writing has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is currently the Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., Professor in the Arts and the Humanities at Santa Clara University in Northern California. He is married to the novelist Bo Caldwell.

MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT

SimonandSchuster.com

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Also by Ron Hansen

Fiction

She Loves Me Not

A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion

Exiles

Isn’t It Romantic?

Hitler’s Niece

Atticus

Mariette in Ecstasy

Nebraska

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Desperadoes

Essays

A Stay Against Confusion

For Children

The Shadowmaker

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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First Scribner hardcover edition October 2016

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Interior design by Jill Putorti

Jacket design by Scott Biel

Jacket photographs: man © Cameron Whitman/Shutterstock, frame © Hulton Archive/Stringer/Archive Photos/Getty Images

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hansen, Ron, 1947– , author.

Title: The Kid : a novel / Ron Hansen.

Description: New York : Scribner, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016011975 | ISBN 9781501129759 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501133336 (ebook)

Classification: LCC PS3558.A5133 K53 2016 | DDC 813/.54—dc23 LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2016011975

ISBN 978-1-5011-2975-9

ISBN 978-1-5011-3333-6 (ebook)

Chapters 1, 2, and 3 of this novel first appeared in
Epoch
, and chapter 4 in
Narrative
.