The Kid: A Novel (13 page)

“Ike might could fix it for ya,” she said.

“I have tools meself,” he said and tipped his hat before heading onto the wooden porch of the Tunstall store, stooping and peering through its windows to see the pretty schoolteacher reading to children from a book.

Hindman called back, “Shall we wait for you, Bill?”

Sheriff Brady stepped off the porch, yelling, “I’ll be right there!” Then for some reason he glanced down the alley beside the store to a high gate of upright planks hiding a view into Tunstall’s corral. And suddenly the gate swung open and a gang of men stood up and raised their rifles or pistols and fired. Shots hit his gut and wrist and spun him into a fall on the street. Sitting there in a daze, he said, “Oh Lord,” and as if recognizing he was late for the train, he struggled to get up, only to be hit with another volley of gunfire, which hammered his left side and back and tore off a chunk of his skull.

Deputy Jacob Mathews ran into Lola Sisneros’s house, and Deputy George Hindman was floundering for the Torreón when he was shot in the back just below his gun belt and fell face forward into the puddled street. Rolling over, he held his innards inside the exit wound and gasped with pain. Soon he was calling for water.

Dick Brewer wasn’t among them, but William H. Bonney, John Middleton, Fred Waite, Rob Widenmann, and José Chávez y Chávez were seen walking to the street and standing over the very dead sheriff.

The Kid resisted kicking him but said, “Ooh, that feels good!”

“Don’t it?” said Middleton.

Billy hid the jitter of excitement in his hands and grinned with achievement. “We got
even
!” José took the credit for killing the Irishman, and the Kid said, “We
all
did,” as he retrieved his confiscated Winchester.

Seeing their slackened wariness, Deputy Mathews fired on them from the Sisneros house, his bullet whapping through Rob Widenmann’s trouser leg and scorching his skin before squarely ripping into the Kid’s left thigh. Even as he fell, the Kid fired back at Mathews, splintering a doorjamb and sending him into hiding. Then Fred Waite helped Billy up, and he hobbled back to their horses in the corral as the others retreated with them, their guns blazing at nothing much, a stray bullet skewering Juan Batista Wilson’s buttocks as he hoed his onion patch on a hillside.

John Middleton frowned at the Kid’s leg and said, “You’re bleedin.”

The Kid gave him a no-kidding look.

The lull was a minute old. Soon other guns would be gotten and there would be a fray in which they were outnumbered. Some Regulators got on their horses as Fred Waite deliberated. “You can’t ride like that,” he finally told the Kid.

And so Waite and Middleton carried the Kid into the eastern backroom of the Tunstall store, where Harry’s bachelor quarters had been. Taylor Ealy, the doctor of medicine whom Alex McSween had hired as a pastor of a still-unbuilt church, was now housed there with his wife, two small children, and Susan Gates, the teenage schoolteacher Dr. Ealy had recruited from Pennsylvania. The Ealy parents were elsewhere, and Susan Gates had been reading aloud
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
to the children until she heard the guns. Now she rushed to the Kid, for she’d developed a crush on the good-looking, good-natured rogue.

Waite got a hammer, said, “They’ll be scouring for him,” and efficiently clawed up two wide floorboards.

Hugging his Winchester, the Kid groaned with hurt as he squeezed between the floor joists but offered a false and uneasy smile of goodbye to the schoolteacher, whose hands went to her cheeks in horror as Waite hammered the floorboards over him like the lid of a coffin.

And then Waite and the three other Regulators were galloping out to the east and toward San Patricio, John Middleton halting near the eastern courthouse, the Convento, to fire back at the crowds running to rescue Sheriff Brady and the dying deputy. They scattered.

Deputy Mathews watched the four exit the town and noticed Kid Bonney wasn’t with them. Rushing to the Tunstall corral with a few men, he confirmed that the Kid’s horse was still hitched there.

In the tight, stifling darkness, the Kid heard the back door crash open as J. B. Mathews shouted, “Where is he?”

“Where’s who?” Susan Gates said. The quiet children must have been scared and clinging to her skirt.

Deputy Mathews ignored the schoolmarm, and the Kid heard a lot of boots overhead as the searchers undertook conjectures and interrogatories. He held his breath until in frustration and bewilderment they finally exited and there was silence. Then he heard the children being hustled to the front of the store to join their mother. Susan Gates seemed to be crouching close to him as she said, “Dr. Ealy is here now. He’ll get you out.”

The floorboards were lifted up again, and the Kid inhaled like he’d been underwater that whole time.

“Let me look at that leg,” Ealy said, and the Kid sat on a yellow Empire couch to have his trousers unbuttoned and yanked down to his knees. Susan Gates shyly looked away. “Kerosene,” the doctor said, and the schoolteacher carried over a crockery jug of it. The doctor dunked his handkerchief into the coal oil and told the Kid, “I have to hurt you.”

Billy nodded.

Dr. Ealy used a pencil to poke the wet handkerchief into the wound of the quadriceps muscle until a quarter inch of the blood-soaked cloth exited the other side. The Kid seized the couch cushions with the agony of it, which only increased when the doctor tugged the handkerchief completely through the injury.

The Kid sighed in the aftermath and said to the ashen Susan Gates, “That was excruciating. I don’t recommend it.”

“We have to worry about infection,” Ealy told him. “The hole won’t kill you, but sepsis will.” With a sewing needle and thread, he stitched the wound shut at entrance and exit, and the bleeding was stanched.

The Kid asked Susan Gates, “Was I wincing?” and she nodded. His left leg wrapped in a yard of gauze bandage, the Kid hoisted up his trousers and stood. “I have to go,” he said and limped outside.

He took a moment to stand over John H. Tunstall’s grave near the granary and pray a rest-in-peace and say aloud like an oath, “We’re gonna get the rest of em, too.” He managed to get onto his horse by boarding it on the right side, and he was the final Regulator to get away. He thought this would be his last visit to Lincoln, and so at the eastern extreme of town he forced himself to painfully stand on his saddle like this was a Wild West show, and he offered those lingerers who knew him a theatrical bow and a roundhouse wave of his sombrero to say goodbye forever.

But Lincoln would see him again.

- 10 -

VENDETTA

W
ith Dick Brewer as their captain, the Regulators were on the scout again as soon as April 2. Rumor had it that some of those who’d connived to kill John Henry Tunstall had found shelter for their cowardice on the Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation southwest of Lincoln. Still holding as sacred his “disreputable” warrants for arrest, Brewer collected his allies Charlie Bowdre, Fred Waite, Doc Scurlock, John Middleton, the cousins George and Franklin Coe, and William H. Bonney himself, his gunshot wound resenting each jounce of the saddle. Trotting his horse down the Tularosa Creek, the Kid stayed alongside Brewer like a sidekick, his orphan’s longing for a father or highly regarded older brother causing him to revere a hale, valiant twenty-eight-year-old he thought of as royalty.

Brewer spoke of the April Fools’ Day assassination just once, solemnly telling the Kid, “I just want it to be known that I would not have advised nor consented to that dastardly act.” And then the pair rode in silence for an hour.

On the Tularosa was an eentsy settlement containing a sawmill, a store, some adobe outbuildings, a hotel, and the office of the Mescalero Apache Indian agent. It was named Blazer’s Mill after its owner, Dr. Joseph Hoy Blazer, an Iowa dentist and widower who’d tired of the villainous smell of mouths full of decay and chose instead hard labor on the frontier.

It just so happened that Andrew L. “Buckshot” Roberts was in Blazer’s Mill and stewing because the mail was late. Off and on Roberts worked for the House, and he was part of the larger sheriff’s posse that had sought to chase down John Tunstall, and he was so fearful of being indicted for the crime that he sold his farm on the Rio Ruidoso in March, and on April 3 he rode to the Indian agency’s post office, hoping to collect the purchaser’s check before seeking anonymity elsewhere. Around eleven in the morning Dr. Blazer saw Roberts waiting in the hotel and warned him he had better hotfoot it because an Apache had told him he’d seen a gang of men sleeping under the juniper fir trees on Apache Summit. The dentist wondered if they mightn’t be Regulators.

Roberts gave Blazer a Colorado address where his letter could be forwarded and hurried up into the evergreens, but from a height he saw the mailman’s buckboard rolling toward the mill town, and he forced his mule into a sliding, worried jog down the steepness.

The Regulators had arrived while he was gone, but Roberts failed to notice their horses in the corral. Middleton was posted outside the hotel and watched a little man he didn’t know hitch his mule, hang his Colt Peacemaker and holster on his saddle horn, and clomp into the post office, a Winchester rifle aslant on his forearm. When Middleton overheard A. L. Roberts give his name to the postmaster, he recognized it as familiar and hurried to tell the Regulators, who were lunching on plates of tamales, frijoles, and mole poblano.

Hearing the offender’s name, Brewer immediately stood with concern and announced, “We have a warrant for Roberts.”

“I guessed that,” Middleton said.

Even an aching old man’s rise was impossible for the injured Kid, and when his right hand instinctively reached for his gun, he found air, the landlady having forbidden weapons indoors.

The gregarious Franklin Coe stood, too, and said, “My farm’s alongside Buckshot’s. Let me talk to him peaceably like a neighbor and get him to surrender.”

Brewer permitted it and just pushed his food around with his fork for a while, often turning to hear snatches of Franklin Coe’s affable persuasion and Roberts’s hot refusals.

George Coe leaned from his bench to listen and commented, “That feller ain’t tall but he sure is feisty.”

They heard Franklin Coe saying, “You give up and nobody will hurt you,” and Roberts saying, “That’s what your gang told Morton and Baker.”

Coe said more and Roberts said, “No, no, no,” and in the dining room Charlie Bowdre grew impatient, clambering up from his bench and hustling outside to grab his pistol, with George Coe, John Middleton, and Doc Scurlock right behind him.

Brewer frowned at the exodus and called, “Oh, go ahead and let him argue, fellas.” But the gang followed Bowdre, as did the Kid, who overcame his pain, grinned, and said, “I’d hate to miss this little frolic.”

Brewer counseled, “You best just watch, Hop-along.”

And then, before the Kid could limp to his friends outside, he heard Bowdre yell, “Roberts, throw up your hands!”

Roberts tilted around Franklin Coe to see Charlie and flatly said, “I don’t believe I will,” lifting his Winchester up and firing it from his hip just as Bowdre shot his pistol. Franklin Coe saw dust fly off the front and back of Roberts’s jacket as he was drilled through his upper intestines. Simultaneously, the Winchester found Bowdre’s cowboy belt buckle, the force of the blow knocking him off his boots as the bullet ricocheted into George Coe’s gun hand. Blood jetted from his instantly subtracted trigger finger. Roberts still was standing and got off a Winchester shot that caught John Middleton in his chest, just missing the heart, then another shot that blasted into Scurlock’s still-holstered pistol and deflected in a fiery scrape down his thigh, and a final shot that caught the Kid in his right sleeve, scarring him with a hot stripe of blood so that he backed up into the hotel, deaf from the noise of so much loud gunfire and watching the gray haze of gun smoke float over three downed Regulators.

Holding his gut, Roberts scuttled downhill to Dr. Blazer’s adobe house, far away from his holstered Peacemaker. His Winchester was now empty, but in the house he found an old single-shot infantry model Springfield carbine hanging on hooks over the bed. The front of the house was open country with the Scranton Road and then just sand and scraggle and the creek, so he felt he could fort himself there at the house entrance. With considerable pain and with blood puddling wherever he stopped, he pulled a chain-spring mattress off a four-poster bed, slid it over to the front doorway, and lifted it, propping the Springfield atop the mattress edge to shake out cartridges from a box and push one into the carbine’s loading gate.

Dick Brewer took care to see that the Kid was fine, ordered him to pull the injured men inside the hotel, then had to endure the government agent begging him to get his Regulators to just leave and end the donnybrook. Brewer looked at the agent with dismay and decided, “You, sir, are a blithering idiot.” He twice glanced down the hill to where Roberts was hidden and told the agent, “I’ll have that hombre out if I have to burn the house down.” And then he ran out to the footbridge over Tularosa Creek and ducked his way to the sawmill without Roberts firing a shot.

At the south end of the sawmill, Dick Brewer squatted behind some raw pine timber and peeked over to see Roberts hiding beside the framework of the doorway, a carbine laid across a chest-high striped mattress, ninety yards away. Brewer fired but just hit the wooden frame. It fanned out like so many pencils. After waiting a little behind the timber, he lifted up to fire again, but Roberts had seen where the first shot came from and was aimed, his .45 caliber carbine bullet striking off pine before hitting Dick Brewer in his blue left eye and detonating his handsome head.

*  *  *

Buckshot Roberts fell to his seat after killing Dick Brewer, “feeling very ill,” he later said, and he lost so much strength he was effortlessly arrested by the Kid and carried unconscious into a parlor in the hotel, where he howled with pain through the night, dying before noon on April 4, the check for his farm sale uncashed. Coughing blood from his damaged lung, fat John Middleton was hauled down to Tularosa Creek to lie in the cold water and drink it until he almost drowned, and George Coe held a cold washrag around his injury through the night, marveling aloud to those who’d listen that the phantom pain made him feel his missing finger was still there and being squeezed in a vise, its nail repeatedly hammered.