The Kid: A Novel (24 page)

Jim Chisum dithered a little, but Jack Finan scoured the Kid with his glower. The Kid chose to take note of Jack’s gun, an ivory-handled Colt single-action Army revolver that shone like new chrome. “You got a handsome hog leg in that scabbard.”

“Cost me plenty,” Jack said, his face hinting at a readiness to smile.

“Could I heft it?”

Jack was tentative as he handed it to him. The Kid felt its weight, tested its balance, spun it on his trigger finger, and looked down the barrel at the front sight as he aimed at a sheet of newspaper flying on the wind.

“Go ahead and try it,” Jack said.

The Kid shot, and the sheet of newspaper swatted. “Wow!” he said, just to be charming. He fired again with his left hand, and the first bullet hole got larger. His third shot from hip-high was elsewhere on the page. “Enviable piece,” the Kid said. And because they were heading into a public place, he half-turned the cylinder so that the hammer was on the first spent shell and couldn’t misfire. Jack took the pistol back with satisfied pride.

Even in midafternoon, there was the noise of someone cranking organ music from a hurdy-gurdy, the hee-haws of drunken laughter at the long bar, and four flirting daughters of joy in frilly, full-length white dresses inveigling fallen men. Red-haired Tom went to one who was no prettier than the others and confided a few sentences. She tugged him by the hand into the stalls in back.

The Kid bought pints of Anheuser-Busch for Chisum and Finan and got a porcelain cup of coffee for himself. And then he heard a drunk yell, “Are you Bunny? I’s here alookin for Kid Bunny!”

The Kid leaned toward the mixologist. “You know who that is?”

“Says he’s Joe Grant. Says they call him Texas Red.”

“Stewed?”

“Half a quart of our rotgut so far.”

The Kid waved his hand and called, “Kid Bonney, over here!”

Jim Chisum whispered, “You need help, just say so.”

Widening his winter coat to give freedom to his six-shooter, the Kid said, “I’ll deal with it.”

Joe Grant was zigzagging over to him, skidding off the backs of drinkers and swinging his forearm at the vexation or bumping chairs into screeching changes of position. His hand gripped the bar to hold himself upright. He was fat and hatless, and the fringe of auburn beard at his jaw so matched the fringe on his skull that the Kid thought his chapped, round face would look pretty much the same upside-down.

“So, you Bunny?”

“William H. Bonney.”

“We gots a score to shettle.”

“Why don’t I buy you a shot or two of fire starter and you can tell me all about it?”

“Had enough for now.” Weaving and seeming about to fall, Joe Grant’s unfocused glances around himself fell on Jack Finan’s fancy .45. “Lemme see that gun.”

The Kid nodded permission, and Jack handed it over.

Grant admired it for a second, then asked, “Wa was I sayin?”

“Shettling something,” the Kid said.

“Here. Here,” Grant said to Finan. “My gun while I’m lookin.” Exchanging weapons, he shoved his own pistol into Jack’s holster, then he lewdly licked the shining barrel and ivory handle of the Colt with his own pitiful impression of rapier wit. “She so perty!”

“So,” the Kid patiently said. “What’s your plan?”

His face hardened. “Ah’m gonna kill you afore you do.”

A reverent, churchlike silence took over as hard-bitten cowhands and gunmen in the saloon edged away from the forecast confrontation, not wanting to get anything on them.

The Kid chose to be pacifying. “Oh, wha’d’ya want to kill anybody for, Joe? Give Jack his pistol and let’s solve the world’s problems with whiskey.”

Joe Grant was shaking his head from side to side. “Nope, mind’s made up.” But then he tilted a little as he uncertainly focused on Jim Chisum. “You Uncle John? Hafta kill Chisum firs.”

His halitosis could frazzle houseplants.

Jim’s and Jack’s hands were easing down to their holsters as the Kid lifted his hand in the halt sign. “Hold on, Joe. You got the wrong sow by the ear. This is Jim Chisum, Uncle John’s brother. And he done nothing to you.”

“Well, I gots this shiny gun and she’s all
go
!”

“Shall I show you to the door? Walk with me outside.” The Kid strolled from Joe Grant’s fuddled menace toward the saloon doors, the ever-so-quiet crowd dividing for him as he heard Jim Chisum call out, “Kid!” and then heard the click as the hammer cocked and snapped onto an empty chamber. The Kid hesitated and heard another snap as in frustration Joe Grant tried to kill him again. And then the Kid ducked and twisted around in a crouch and in sudden rage and viciousness fired his own Colt three times,
bang
,
bang
,
bang
, each shot hitting Joe Grant in the chin in a gruesome destruction that was the size of a fist. Grant was dead so quick there was no chance for reaction or even for pain. He fell against the foot rail of the bar, and his body sagged gradually to the floor, blood eddying from him.

The Kid considered his victim and said, “Sorry, Joe, but I’ve been there too often.” Recalling Windy Cahill and Arizona, he looked around through the acrid gray haze of gun smoke. The saloon customers were still holding their ears from the noise and cautiously inching away, like this was finally the frightening Kid they’d heard so much about. “You saw what happened, right? It was self-defense.”

“He was spoilin for it!” a far-off man yelled out.

Another man agreed, “You had yourself no option in the matter.”

Jack Finan bent down to extract his ivory-handled .45 from the corpse’s surprisingly firm grip.

“We’ll clean all this up,” the bartender said. “But you better go, Kid.”

Tom Folliard had heard the shots and was running into the main room, his face full of horror as he buttoned up his trousers. “What’d I miss?”

With the jazzy exhilaration he always felt when he found himself still alive, the Kid told him, “Oh nothing. It was a game of two and I got there first.”

*  *  *

Because Celsa wanted his company and because Saval was still prospecting northeast of White Oaks, hunting for fortunes that would never be found, she invited the Kid to Pat F. Garrett’s Wednesday marriage to her cousin Apolonaria in the white, twin-spired San Jose Catholic Church in Anton Chico. Garrett was nearing thirty, his wife was twenty-two. Joining them in the double wedding ceremony was a Virginian named Barney Mason, who still worked for Pete Maxwell, and Barney’s seventeen-year-old bride, Juanita Madril.

Apolonaria’s father, José, owned a successful freighting company, and he hosted a fiesta afterward in the Abercrombie general store, founded by a Scottish father and son who’d frequently been hospitable to the Kid. And though Garrett wouldn’t himself dance, he howled encouragement and fervently applauded the hilarity of friends making, he thought, fools of themselves. Celsa fed the Kid some wedding cake and got up to see if the quartet would play “Turkey in the Straw.” The Kid found the tune irresistible, and he was encircled and cheered as he sang, dancing an Irish jig his mother had taught him. And Celsa noticed that Garrett’s face was now solemn, for the Kid of course was famously indicted and Celsa knew that Patrick F. Garrett was considering a run for Sheriff of Lincoln County.

- 16 -

THE RUSTLERS

E
ver in motion, the Kid recruited into his gang his cousin Yginio Salazar and his pal Pascal Chaves, Garrett’s friend Barney Mason, and Billie Wilson, a headlong eighteen-year-old petty thief originally from Ohio with whom the Kid was often confused by the authorities. Wilson had owned a livery stable in the burgeoning tent city of White Oaks, which, since its founding in 1879, was filling up with optimistic miners. But Billie Wilson sold out his faltering business in exchange for a sack full of counterfeit hundred-dollar bills that looked pretty darn good to him. Also in White Oaks, at West & Dedrick Livery & Sales, the Kid recruited the worshipful Dedrick brothers and even thrilled them with the gift of one of his ferrotype portraits. Handed down for generations, it is still the only certifiable photograph of William H. Bonney, age twenty.

Calling themselves the Rustlers, the night-riding gallants reportedly stole forty-eight Indian ponies from the idly guarded Mescalero Apache reservation and roamed up and down the Rio Pecos in the hostile cold of February selling them off to horse traders who could not resist a bargain. In March, it was claimed that the gang went after the livestock of Uncle John’s kid brothers, Jim and Pitzer Chisum, riding off with ten steers, ten bullocks, and two pregnant cows. Charlie Bowdre joined them for an eastward foray into Los Portales in May, stealing fifty-four cattle from a Canadian River ranchers’ association, steering them cross-country all the way to White Oaks and selling them for ten dollars a head in a deal that the Dedrick brothers had arranged. They thieved from a cattleman at Agua Azul, from a cattleman named Ellis near Stinking Springs, and even supposedly stole seven thoroughbreds from Uncle John Chisum, daring him to try to retrieve them.

But much of that accounting was Ash Upson’s and written insincerely in 1882, when he thought exaggeration, outrage, and garish lies would help Pat Garrett’s book sales. And Upson could have claimed in 1880 that the Kid was the source of any crime perpetrated in Lincoln County, from burglary to hijacking a train, and a lot of the Anglo citizens would have believed it. The Kid was not yet twenty-one, he still didn’t need to shave, and even wary people on meeting him remembered his cordial smile and fun-loving nature. Yet he was increasingly considered a fiend with a lust for blood by those seeking commerce and prosperity for New Mexico, for whom he seemed the impediment, the hitch in the get-along, the enemy of progress. And the Kid was not yet aware that there was a faction that desperately needed to have him done away with.

*  *  *

Heading up the hunt for a new sheriff was Joseph C. Lea, a former Confederate Army officer who’d fought alongside Cole Younger. Lea would later be called the father of Roswell, but in 1880 he was just the owner of its few buildings and a homestead ranch. Hearing praise of Pat Garrett from an excited Uncle John, Lea invited the saloonkeeper to stay in his own Roswell home just long enough to establish residence in Lincoln County. And John Chisum joined them on the homestead one evening for dinner, skirting political topics until Mrs. Lea took the dinner plates and cutlery away and the three men lit Chisum’s gifts of La Flor de Sanchez y Haya cigars.

“I guess it’s up to me to broach the subject first,” Chisum said. “We want to get your mind right on what our intentions are for our new sheriff.”

Garrett grayed the air in front to him with smoke before he asked, “Which are?”

“Well, we frankly need you to kill the Kid dead.”

Captain Lea used the rim of a saucer to carve the ash from his cigar and took a more lawyerly, brick-by-brick approach. “Uncle John and I have ambitions for Roswell and in fact for all of New Mexico. We foresee a time when most every major town will have a railway depot, a schoolhouse, even a doctor’s office. We want land that is platted and fenced. We want roads instead of cattle trails. We want factories and merchants and all the niceties of civilization.”

“What we
got
is wildness and anarchy,” Chisum said. “We got Kid Bonney on the loose taking whatever he pleases, whenever it suits him. Carefree, headlong, guns in every hand.”

Lea said, “The Kid’s days are numbered, and I imagine he knows that. We think of him and the frontier he inhabits as doomed, for—”

Interrupting Lea, Chisum spoke around the cigar in his mouth as he said, “Your
job
will be to uproot the Kid and his lackeys like
chokeweeds
in the garden patch!”

Pat Garrett rocked back on his dining room chair and quietly considered his fine cigar. With his Southern formality he said, “Elect me sheriff and I’ll be a cold and impersonal legal machine. Without sentiment or malice or resentment, I’ll carry out the law to the last letter.”

“Exactly what we hoped to hear,” said J. C. Lea.

*  *  *

At the Democratic Party’s nominating convention, Garrett was vaunted as a strict disciplinarian of impeccable morals who would persevere in an endless manhunt for the Kid and his ilk. Joseph Lea shouted in his convention speech, “Whosoever has encountered Pat Garrett will have noted how coolness, courage, and determination are written on his face! He alone shall bring law and order to the Territory and spell doom to the villains wreaking havoc on our lands!”

Running against him was Sheriff George Kimbrell, a former government scout and justice of the peace and an easygoing Republican who was thought to be too friendly to Billy and too timid in his prosecution of criminals. Even though both he and Garrett had Mexican wives, Kimbrell was far more liked by a native community that despised the wealthy associates of the Santa Fe Ring because of the thefts of their lands.

Louisiana-born George Curry would become governor of New Mexico in 1907, but in 1880 he was just nineteen and working for the firm of Dowlin & DeLaney, when the Kid, whom he didn’t know from Adam, rode onto the ranch and was invited to join Curry for dinner. In his twentieth-century autobiography, Curry recalled, “He asked me how I thought the election for sheriff would go in Las Tablas, our voting precinct. I told him our votes would be for Pat Garrett. He asked, bluntly, why I thought Garrett would win, and I replied just as bluntly that Garrett was a brave man who would arrest Billy the Kid or any other outlaw for whom a warrant was outstanding.”

The Kid told him, “You’re a good cook and a good fellow, George, but if you think Pat Garrett is going to carry this precinct for sheriff, you are a darn poor politician.”

The Kid was right about Las Tablas; Garrett got only one vote out of forty. But in Lincoln County’s final tally of its 499 votes for sheriff, Pat F. Garrett of Roswell got 320 and was elected.

Paulita Maxwell later recalled, “Nothing ever gave Fort Sumner such a shock of surprise as Garrett’s selection by the cattle interests to be sheriff. He was just a saloonkeeper, with no experience as a detective and no reputation as a gunfighter.”