The Kid: A Novel (22 page)

Like his older brother, Josie, the Kid earned as a gambler, even affecting the flat-faced gold pinkie ring that card cheats used to mirror whatever they dealt, though such hints were useless in the games of faro and monte that he favored. The house, or bank, had an edge in those games, so he was ever the house, watching pixilated cowhands guess and guess again on cards until their wages were lost. And since he never drank, he never fell ill to a case of the stupids.

The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad was famously having its grand arrival at the Las Vegas depot on July 4, so the Kid headed there to join in the festivities and visit his medical student friend Henry Hoyt, who was then bartending at the Cherokee Hotel on Railroad Avenue. Invited by Henry to the hotel’s free lunch, the Kid took a seat in a booth and saw a finely dressed man in his thirties walk in and lean over the oaken bar to make a quiet inquiry of the mixologist. Henry seemed surprised as he answered and lifted his dishclothed hand to indicate the Kid there in the booth, sitting agreeably with a glass of lemonade. The man looked over his right shoulder at Billy and seemed to like what he saw, for he limped over on a bad ankle, a glass of Anheuser-Busch lager beer in his hand. “I hear you’re Billy Bonney,” he said.

With hesitation, he said he was.

“You been selected.”

“For what?”

“Would you be so kind as to let me sit?”

The Kid threw his hand at the bench across from him, and the stranger took off a gentleman’s hat. His blinking eyes were blue, his hair was chestnut brown, his beard was trimmed in the fashionable style of a physician. He looked like someone rich and leisured who had the common touch. Offering his hand, he said, “Thomas Howard. Nashville, Tennessee.” The Kid shook it. “I have been looking for William H. Bonney. The Kid? I been reading about you in the papers.”

“You a reporter or a cattle detective?”

“Well, neither. You might say I’m an entrepreneur.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

Thomas Howard sipped some beer like he didn’t want to and put the half-filled glass on the table. “I run a very profitable commercial enterprise that involves enormous initiative and risk.”

It felt like the prelude to some kind of sales pitch. “Would you be hankering for a ham sandwich?” the Kid asked. “They’re free.”

“Ain’t no such thing as free, Kid.”

“Still, I’m hungry,” Billy said, and he was getting up when Thomas Howard forcibly gripped his wrist with a serious, malevolent, thou-shalt-go-no-further stare.

“Siddown.”

“I’m carrying,” the Kid warned him.

With gloomy, frightening earnestness, the man gritted out, “Likewise.”

The Kid flopped back in the booth like a scolded teenager.

Having got his way, the rage gradually left him, and Mr. Howard seemed to ruminate some before saying, “We had a gang that held up banks and trains, but we had a reversal of fortune. Some pals died, some went to prison. And now we and my family are on the backside of hard times and I’m on a recruiting trip.”

The Kid had an inkling. “This reversal of fortune. Where?”

It seemed a sore point, but the man from Tennessee said, “Northfield, Minnesota.”

The Kid took it in and then tilted forward to whisper, “You’re Jesse James!”

“And like I say, I’m recruiting.”

“I hardly do nothing with people involved. Railroads and banks, that’s complexicated.”

“All’s I need is a wizard gunslinger with sand in him. And has to be smarter than the dirt-farmin Reubens I been with. They’d swat at a hornet’s nest with their hands.”

The Kid said, “I honestly feel flattered that you looked me up. I mean, it’s a privilege to meet such a famous person, but I’m riding opposite of the owl-hoot trail now and not interested in your livelihood.”

Jesse James seethed like he was chewing rocks, and the Kid’s hand inched toward his sidearm in case it came to that. But then Jesse looked around the restaurant and at all the reasonable people there and his hot temper went on ice. “Look at me getting wrathful with a boy just exercising his freedom. Which is all I’m trying to do. I do swear, I’ll be the death of myself someday.”

Henry Hoyt walked over just to chat, but Jesse was already standing. He shook Hoyt’s hand in a genial way but got close to his ear to whisper, “You have met Jesse James. Now you can go ahead and die.” And then he was gone outside.

The Kid watched him cross the street and vanish in an alley, and he thought,
If that is an outlaw, you are not an outlaw
.

*  *  *

On July 5, in a scathing, eight-hour peroration to the court of inquiry at Fort Stanton, Henry Waldo sought to exterminate all enemies of Nathan Dudley, calling them ignorant, lying, irresponsible, and shameless. “Especially does Ira E. Leonard loom up above the waste water of the dead sea of selfishness,” he said, but he had not yet gotten to the Kid. “Then was brought forward William Bonney, alias ‘Antrim,’ alias ‘the Kid,’ a known criminal of the worst type although hardly up to his majority, a murderer by profession, as records of this court connect him with two cowardly and atrocious assassinations. There were warrants enough for him on the nineteenth day of July last to have papered him from his head to his boots. Yet he was engaged to do service here as a witness and his testimony aptly illustrated that he would not hesitate to swear falsely about soldiers firing at him that night as he was escaping. ‘A liar once is a liar all the time.’ ”

Eight weeks after the court of inquiry commenced, the result was this:

In view of the evidence adduced, the Court is of the opinion that Lieut. Col. N. A. M. Dudley, Ninth US Cavalry, has not been guilty of any violation of law or of orders, that the act of proceeding to the town of Lincoln on the 19th day of July, 1878, was prompted by the most humane and worthy motives and of good military judgment under exceptional circumstances. None of the allegations made against him by His Excellency the Governor or by Ira E. Leonard have been sustained and that proceedings before a Court Martial are therefore unnecessary.

– PART THREE –

WHO IS IT?

(JULY 1879–JULY 1881)

- 15 -

SHERIFFS

T
hat summer a smart-aleck journalist asserted that hundreds were in pursuit of the Kid and dearly hoping
not
to find him. But word got to Sheriff George Kimbrell that Billy was hiding out in a shack alongside the Rio Bonito just six miles from Lincoln, and because his deputies were in his office and heard the rumor as well, the sheriff felt obliged to go after the Kid.

There was some dillydallying and a host of invented tasks that he said first needed tending to, so the sheriff and his posse didn’t get to the pinewood shack until sundown. They saw no sign of movement from afar, just a wisp of smoke from the chimney. But a forward scout did find a fettered horse near the river. Looked like a hard keeper of an animal indulging in green foliage and watching the timid scout with unblinking disrespect.

Sheriff Kimbrell thought someone ought to crawl up to the only window and have a look-see, but he got no volunteers.

“
You
could do it,” a deputy told him.

But a fluttery reluctance befell the sheriff and he confessed, “Nah, it’s not just that I like the Kid, it’s that I also like living.”

Kimbrell changed his strategy to cautious waiting throughout the night in a semicircle sixty yards distant. Soon enough the Kid would open the door and their guns would catch him in a crossfire.

Hunger was overtaking them and skeeters whined at the ears of the posse. They kept slapping themselves in the head and grousing.

Inside the shack, the Kid cooked frijoles in a saucepan, then roasted green coffee beans in the same pan and stirred in water with a fork until he got the coffee to a boil. He let the grounds settle, then filled his tin cup. Hearing an unfamiliar sound, he sidled to a knothole in a plank and peered out into the pitch-black. Humps of infrequent motion lay on the earth and whispering heaps leaned against fir trees.

Wasn’t but one way out for a normal person, but the Kid crouched under the window to get to the fireplace, where he doused the wood embers with his coffee and quietly shoveled them, still hissing, into a bucket. Wrapping his firearms, hat, and necessaries into a woolen poncho and tying it to his left ankle with twine, he stooped inside the fireplace and squeezed up inside the hot chimney just as he’d done at age fourteen in the Silver City jail. Alternately reaching up his arms and kicking his feet as in an Australian crawl, the hot bricks scalding and soot-blackening him, he did manage to get out and onto the shingled roof, squatting to haul up the jutting burdens in the poncho and assemble himself in full armory as he looked down at a semicircle of men in front who were either sleeping or swatting at insects. And then there was nothing left to do but jump and jar his legs with the hard hit to the ground and to roll in loam, where he halted on all fours, his finely tuned ears seeking the sounds of notice or stirring. But he heard nothing but an older man mumbling in dream, “Oh dear, oh dear.” The Kid stood up and walked toward his horse like just another deputy selecting a night pee in the river, and he left in an easterly direction.

Sheriff Kimbrell and his posse plodded into Lincoln the next morning, slumping with hangdog looks and scratching their itches. Inquiries were made about what had happened, but the sheriff only stated, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Confidence in him was forever lost, and some of the wealthier cattlemen in Lincoln County began seeking a finer and more stalwart candidate for the sheriff’s office when next election time came.

*  *  *

Early in July 1879, James Joseph Dolan was examined in a habeas corpus hearing concerning the homicide in the first degree of Huston Ingraham Chapman. Although he’d initially testified that he wasn’t there when the murder occurred, then that he was there but without a gun, he now claimed in his own defense that he’d seen nothing because he was so drunk and he
did
fire a shot but at the ground to call off his friends from their hazing of the lawyer. The contradictions and inconsistencies in Jimmy’s sworn testimony would have gotten him locked up for perjury anywhere else, but Judge Warren Bristol’s affection for him was such that he decided to release Jimmy on $3,000 bail until the next term of court in Socorro.

Upon his leaving the courtroom, a journalist asked him, “Will you be found guilty in Socorro, do you think?”

“Hardly dat.”

“So you’ll be getting off scot-free?”

Jimmy smirked. “Luck o’ the Irish, boyo.”

On Sunday, July 13, in a Roman Catholic ceremony held in a friend’s parlor, Jimmy married Caroline Franzis “Lina” Fritz, the German-American niece of Jimmy’s former business partner and commanding officer at Fort Stanton, the late Emil Fritz. Lina was eighteen and exceptionally pretty, so Jimmy, who was twelve years older, had been forced to overcome many other paramours in his wooing, and he never did earn the approval of Lina’s father, who failed to attend the wedding. There was a formal reception afterward, at which Jimmy was reminded that the civil insurrection in Lincoln had commenced exactly one year earlier. “Water under the bridge,” Jimmy said. And then the small group waved goodbye as the newlyweds left for a luxurious two-month honeymoon in Texas.

Jimmy could afford it, for he had invested in gold and silver mines in the Jicarilla Mountains northeast of White Oaks and culled enough of a fortune to get into the mercantile business again, the Jas. J. Dolan General Store finding location in John H. Tunstall’s building in Lincoln because Thomas Catron held the mortgage on the House. Jimmy even acquired the Englishman’s
choza
and ranch on the Rio Feliz, later constructing a solid, handsome home there and joining District Attorney William Rynerson in establishing the Feliz Land & Cattle Company on Harry’s former rangeland. Jimmy would be elected Lincoln county treasurer twice, and then, despite his arrogance and contentiousness, he would become a New Mexico state senator.

But Jimmy’s family life was filled with tragedy. His first child, a son, was two years old when he died; a daughter died at age five; and his wife, Lina, was just twenty-five when she died after giving birth to another girl. Jimmy soon married his children’s nanny, a fretful, unsmiling woman who screamed back at his screaming until she cowered beneath his slaps and Wellington boots. His drunkenness became as regular, reeling, and demented as that of his idol L. G. Murphy, and James Dolan finally died of delirium tremens in 1898, aged fifty. Which was just as well, since he didn’t have to deal with the indignity of realizing that his name would have been lost to history were it not for his association with that scoundrel Billy the Kid.

*  *  *

To keep lawmen and cavalry patrols akilter, the indicted Kid rotated among the gambling haunts of Las Vegas, Anton Chico, Puerto de Luna, and Fort Sumner, staying just a few days at each before skedaddling off, and since Manuela Herrera was now residing with Charlie Bowdre on Thomas J. Yerby’s ranch twenty miles north of the old fort, the Kid’s trunk of finer clothes was stored in the old adobe quartermaster’s store with Celsa Gutiérrez.

She’d become the Kid’s
querida
, his mistress, and her generally intoxicated husband, Saval, vaguely acknowledged the arrangement before riding to White Oaks to prospect for currency metals, telling the Kid in a glum so-long, “
Billito. Cuida bien de ella
.” Billy. Take good care of her.

But Billito lost too much at cards and he was running out of cash, so in October of 1879, the Kid, Folliard, Bowdre, and Scurlock sought to fortify their scant wages by heading to Uncle John Chisum’s rangeland some fifty miles south of Fort Sumner. The cattle there were now officially owned by the St. Louis firm of Hunter, Evans & Company, and the executives had given up the Jinglebob way of branding, in which a hot iron burned a long rail along the cow’s flank and an ear was notched so that a large lobe of it dangled like jewelry. The Hunter, Evans brand was far easier to change, enticing the former Regulators led by the Kid to steal a herd of 118 cattle and drive them north to Yerby’s ranch, rebrand them, and sell the lot to Colorado beef buyers for about $800.