The Kid: A Novel (19 page)

And that’s where the Kid, now age nineteen, sought out Scurlock and Bowdre in December 1878, trotting his horse southwest from the Staked Plains of Texas along the Portales–Stinking Springs Road and entering the fort near the parade grounds where Pete Maxwell’s sheep were gardening the wintry grama grass. The Kid saw Beaver Smith’s saloon to his right and the great barn of a dance hall to his left, then rode the wide avenue between the Maxwell house and the former enlisted men’s barracks to an orchard at the north end and Bob Hargrove’s saloon. A hundred yards east were the old Indian corrals and then the former Indian hospital, where Doc Scurlock, Charlie Bowdre, and the sisters Herrera were housed.

Doc and Charlie had been hired as wranglers on Pete Maxwell’s horse-overrun ranch and told Billy they’d found Fort Sumner congenial, with good hunting on the treeless plains, a peach orchard on the property, weekly frolics and dances, and fame among the Mexicans for the Regulators’ stance against the House and the Santa Fe Ring in the Lincoln County War.

The Kid was mystified. “But we
lost
.”

“We won their hearts and minds,” said Doc.

“So we’re fixin to settle right chere,” Charlie said. “With the outlyings we got near three hunderd peoples so our women got company now, and speakin for Manuela, she’s sore put out with me forever wanderin hither and john.”

The Herrera sisters nodded their agreement.

The Kid smiled and said, “Wow, if times get any better you’ll have to hire me to help you enjoy em.”

“Well, we’re tired of falling on stony ground,” said Doc.

With a tad too much interest, Manuela inquired, “And what are jour plan?”

“It is my firm intention to put the dastardly gunplay behind me.”

Doc frowned and asked, “You get that out of some damn dime novel?”

The Kid winked. “
Whip Penn and the Scoundrels of Whiskey Flats
.”

*  *  *

With no job or responsibilities, the Kid frittered away his time practicing his shooting, knocking a tin can into a twirl down the road, trimming the skeletal branches off trees, inventing situations and reeling around to slap leather and nail the evildoer, or galloping a horse and tilting off until he could snatch his rifle from the ground.

And he gambled at faro at Beaver Smith’s or Bob Hargrove’s saloon, generally favoring placing his bets on the lacquered face cards on the green felt and mentally counting and recalling what had already been dealt from the shoe so he could predict what would next fall. Like all gamblers, he said he won more than he lost, but in his case it was true.

His first Saturday in Fort Sumner there was a
baile
, a dance, with Doc and Charlie adding a fiddle and guitar to the trumpets and violins of a six-piece band. It wasn’t only songs from Old Mexico like “
El Tecolotito
” but a mix of tunes such as “Rose of Killarney” and “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.” Doc invited the Kid onstage to sing the 7th Infantry’s regimental march, “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” and the Kid grinned widely with the lyrics as he sang,

Such lonely thoughts my heart

Do fill since parting with my Sallie.

I seek for one as fair and gay

But find none to remind me.

How sweet the hours I passed away

With the girl I left behind me.

Women were so scarce that Pete Maxwell’s hundred cowhands and sheepherders took numbers and waited to be yelled for, were forced to dance with the oldest ladies first, and then again stirred in the hall with that form of despair that is patience.

The high stepping included a four-couple square dance called a
cuadrilla
, a side-by-side waltz called a
varsoviana
that was accompanied by the song “Put Your Little Foot Right There,” and the excitement and shrieks of the schottische, a slow polka in Europe but faster in America, with wild pivots and twirls.

With an attractive señora named Celsa Gutiérrez, the Kid flirted with a
jarabe tapatío
, otherwise known as a hat dance, while her liquor-addled husband dully watched from an old Victorian office chair. Then she yanked the Kid over to happily introduce him to Saval, who seemed interested only in swallowing more mescal.

Celsa was very pretty, with a pouting, pillowy mouth, copper-colored eyes, and hair more brunette than black. She told the Kid in Spanish that she and Saval had found housing in the old quartermaster store. Would he like to sleep there? They had room. The Kid said he’d give it prayerful consideration. She asked his age and confessed she was three years older. She said her maiden name was also Gutiérrez, that she and Saval were cousins. Even though her husband was within earshot, she confessed she was not in love with Saval, the marriage had been arranged, and she’d fought the family over it until she’d finally just grown tired of Saval’s ridiculous begging. Hearing that, her husband gave the Kid that woebegone, baleful look that no one wants to see, and the Kid excused himself to sit again with Manuela and Charlie, who was slumped in a chair with a fifth of Old Grand-Dad, his fiddle biding its time on his knee.

“Seen you talking to Celsa,” he said. “Don’t blame you a-tall. She’s got them kitchen eyes.”

“Kitchen eyes?”

Charlie smiled. “Saying, ‘Come and get it.’ ”

Soon it was Celsa who came to the Kid in her husband’s overcoat and insisted in English, “For favor, you take Celsa home.” The Kid asked about Saval, and she said, “Like alway, he too
borracho
.” Drunk.

She hugged herself and leaned into the Kid as they walked to the old quartermaster store and the apartment next to Beaver Smith’s saloon. Celsa lit a hurricane lamp, and the Kid was startled to see that a tiny, dark-haired boy, maybe a toddler of three, was sleeping on a couch. Celsa let Saval’s overcoat fall to the floor in a heap as the child whimpered and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. She petted his hair and in Spanish said she missed him, and then she carried him over to an Azteca armchair. His face nuzzled into the front of her dress as he whined, “
Leche
.” Milk. She then unbuttoned her dress and lifted out a round left breast with a violet areola and nipple, which the toddler hungrily sucked on.

Celsa smiled as she saw Billy flushing in an interested stare. She asked in English, “You like?”

“Oh my yes. I’m very thirsty.”

She laughed. “I mean Candido. You like heem?”

“Oh, the tyke. Of course.”

In a flirting way she said, “Tell Candido he is beautiful and that you love him.”

And Billy said, “You’re beautiful and I love you.”

*  *  *

The Kid stayed for the next few weeks with Doc, Charlie, and their women in the Indian hospital. And it was there that one of Maxwell’s vaqueros handed him an envelope addressed to “Wm. H. ‘Kid’ Bonney.” Inside was a formal invitation from “The Maxwells” requesting the pleasure of the Kid’s presence at a six o’clock Christmas dinner. Seemed they’d heard of his exploits.

His friends jeered to hide their envy and joked about the faux pas he’d commit. “They’s richer than clabbered cream!” Charlie said. “They’s etiquette. Whereas you eat your food like a bachelor, right from the fryin pan!”

Doc counseled, “The Maxwells are highfalutin. You’d best spiff up in your fancy duds.”

So the Kid opened the trunk of his finer things that Doc had hauled to Fort Sumner and he dressed in a white collared shirt and wide, planetary tie, a formal suit coat of blue velvet, gray slacks with cuffs he jerked down over his shined Wellington boots to make them look like shoes, and a charcoal gray derby hat cocked rakishly on hair dressed with Rowlands’ macassar oil.

The Kid felt like a fish out of water as he walked through the gate of the white picket fence and onto the wide porch that shaded the first floor on three sides of the house. Chatter and laughter eddied through the front door, and he wanted to flee, but he rapped the brass knocker and soon a rail-thin man six and a half feet tall was there in a footman’s formal livery. “William Bonney,” the Kid said.

“Uh-huh,” said the footman. Walking down the hallway, he said, “In the parlor.”

The Kid saw on his left an ornate bedroom that seemed all leather and sienna brown, and across from it was a far more feminine bedroom, in which everything from the sculpted headboard to the chiffonier to the frilly pillows was white. And then there was the lilac wallpaper of a parlor overfurnished with Victorian love seats and armchairs and ten elegantly dressed people holding flutes of champagne. A stocky man who seemed about thirty was in a Prince of Wales tailcoat and was losing his hair but for an upswept central tuft. Seeing past his interlocutor, he noticed the Kid and with excitement announced, “There he is, our wild card, Billy Bonney!”

The guests turned to the Kid, and his hand was shaken by Pedro Menard Maxwell, who said, “Call me Pete,” and tugged him through introductions to Ana Maria de la Luz Beaubien Maxwell, his fifty-year-old mother, his sister Emilia and her husband, Manuel Abreu, who oversaw the sheep operation, and Emilia’s little sister Odila. Captain Alexander Chase of the Army was in his formal dress blues with full regalia and tilted down to introduce his sitting wife, Virginia, who seemed afraid of Billy and slanted into the officer’s hip like a child seeking an apron. Also shy was Sofia Maxwell, now married to a disdainful Telesfor Jaramillo, who lifted his nose at the Kid and whose slicked, oiled, ebony hair shone in the candlelight. And lastly their “wild card” made the acquaintance of the fourteen-year-old, Paulita, a gorgeous girl half French and one-quarter each Spanish and Irish. She had freshly shampooed raven black hair piled in a fashionable pompadour and the deep-roasted, coffee brown eyes that Mexicans called
cafés
. Candlelight glittered in them. “So pleased to meet you, Mr. Bonney,” she said. Her cheeks dimpled cutely when she smiled.

“We all are!” Pete Maxwell exclaimed and faked a shiver of horror as he said, “The fiend who revels in bloodshed! The child suckled on vice!”

“Pedro!” his mother said.

“Oh, he knows I’m joshing him. It’s all direct from those idiotic newspaper stories.”

The Kid tried the knife of a smile and then was nudged, finding Saval also in a footman’s livery and holding out a flute of champagne. “No thank you,” the Kid said.

“
No quiere nada
?” You want nothing?

“Water.”

Saval sighed and headed to the kitchen.

Paulita seemed aflutter and was warily smiling at the Kid. He returned the flattery.

The very tall and dour footman announced that dinner was served, and they all crossed into a grand dining room of Sheraton furniture, an ironed lace tablecloth, and dishware and cutlery of pure silver along with chalices of fourteen-carat gold for the wine, the great wealth of it gleaming under a huge French chandelier.

Don Manuel Abreu whispered, “Remove your pistol.”

“I’m not carrying.”

Don Manuel gave him a tickled look like he’d just made a pretty good joke,
Ho ho
. And then it was he who gave the holiday toast, “
Feliz Navidad
!”

A Navajo cook named Deluvina delivered a lamb shank, a large turkey, and a goose on silver platters, and Pete nodded to the tall liveryman as he said, “We have Pat to thank for the fowl. Went hunting for me this morning.” He asked his mother to “return thanks,” and when she’d blessed the food and cooks in Spanish, he called out, “Like Lucien would say, ‘Y’all be careful now or you’re gonna fleshen up.’ ”

Saval the footman poured water into the Kid’s chalice with a hint of rebuke, and furtive conversations about some of the clan Billy couldn’t have met flittered in shorthand among the dinner guests. The Kid realized he was invited just to entertain the revelers with wild tales of derring-do, but doing that would make his life seem unserious, so he chose silence and avoidance. But Paulita kept shyly focused on him and asked, “Are you still in school?”

He shook his head. “I just look young for my age. Are you?”

“Uh-huh. In Trinidad, Colorado. St. Mary’s Convent School.”

“What’s your favorite class?”

She thought for a few seconds and answered, “English or history. I like to read.”

She had a squinty right eye that he found fetching. “Me too,” he said.

“Have you read
Little Women
?”

“Afraid not.”

“I like it ever so much.”

They fell silent and just ate for a while, overhearing the other diners trading local gossip in Spanish. Whenever she glanced up from her food she’d smirk as if she found her secret thoughts devilishly funny. Paulita finally asked what she’d been wanting to. “So, do you have a girlfriend?”

“I have lotsa
friends
.”

“And the girls—do you kiss?”

The Kid looked up and down the table, but no one else seemed to be listening.

She changed the subject. “Have you seen the actress Sarah Bernhardt?”

“Heard of her.”

“What about Fanny Davenport?”

“No.”

She passed a requested gravy boat to Sofia and said, “Some women are so ravishingly beautiful.”

“I guess that’s true.”

She forked a cooked carrot but held it poised near her kissable lips. “Why, do you think? What
is
it about them?”

“Well, they have to have those gorgeous coffee brown eyes to begin with.”

She was figuring him out, and then giggled.

And her brother, Pete, called from the far end, “We’ve been leaving you out, Kid. You been to Lincoln of late?”

“No, sir. Texas Panhandle.”

“So you don’t know Tomcat Catron shut down and sold the House for a mere three thousand dollars. And Jimmy Dolan’s buying the Tunstall store instead.”

The names nettled him, but the Kid just said, “Nope, that escaped me.”

“And Susan McSween is there in Lincoln again. She booted Saturnino Baca and his passel of children out of that house they rented from her so she could selfishly have it.” Pete slumped back so Saval could pour more wine into his golden chalice. And then he said as if someone had inquired
What’s she like?
“Lewd, profane, vulgar woman. Wholly without principle.”