The Kid: A Novel (27 page)

Koogler was the first journalist ever to call Bonney by his famous nickname as he wrote, “The gang is under the leadership of ‘Billy the Kid,’ a desperate cuss, who is eligible for the post of captain of any crowd, no matter how mean and lawless.” His gang of “forty to fifty men” was “harassing the stockmen of the Pecos and Panhandle country, and terrorizing the people of Fort Sumner and vicinity.

“Are the people of San Miguel County to stand this any longer? Shall we suffer this horde of outcasts and the scum of society to continue their way on the very border of our County?”

Writing Governor Wallace from Fort Sumner on December 12, the Kid sought to justify himself and his actions, maintaining that the Las Vegas journalist “must have drawn very heavily on his imagination.” Concerning a claim in the editorial that he was “the captain of a band of outlaws who hold forth in Los Portales” he maintained, “There is no such organization in existence.” Of the raid on the Greathouse & Kuch ranch and trading post, the Kid noted that Hudgens had no warrants to arrest or subpoena them, “so I concluded it amounted to nothing more than a mob.” After giving his own version of how Carlyle was mistakenly killed by his own vigilantes, “they thinking it was me trying to make my escape,” he said the illicit posse then withdrew. And then the Kid took on an aggrieved tone to say that in his absence, Deputy Sheriff Garrett, acting under John Chisum’s orders, went to the Kid’s cave in Los Portales “and found nothing. And he’d already gone by Mr. Yerby’s ranch and took a pair of honestly purchased mules of mine, which I had left with Mr. Bowdre. The sheriff claimed that they were stolen and even if they were not that he had a right to confiscate any outlaw’s property.” The Kid then petulantly claimed, “J. S. Chisum is the man who got me into trouble and was benefitted thousands by it and is now doing all he can against me. There is no doubt but what there is a great deal of stealing going on in the Territory and a great deal of the property is taken across the Staked Plains as it is a good outlet, but so far as my being at the head of a band of outlaws there is nothing in it. In fact, in several instances I have recovered stolen property when there was no chance to get an officer to do it.” He concluded, “If some impartial party were to investigate this matter, they would find it far different from the impression put out by Chisum and his tools. Yours respectfully, William Bonney.”

*  *  *

Because the Kid’s exculpatory letter needed to travel over a hundred miles by mail wagon from Fort Sumner to Las Vegas and then was sent in a railcar to the derelict Palacio del Gobernador in Santa Fe, Governor Lew Wallace did not receive it until six days later, on December 18. He’d just returned from his eastern book tour and found a canvas mailbag stuffed full with accolades and praise for
Ben-Hur
, but he also found the Kid’s letter, handwritten in red ink on ruled paper. Scorning it as he read along, he told his male secretary, “In penitentiaries it’s exactly the same. All the prisoners there are innocent, too.”

But whatever the Kid said would not have mattered, for five days earlier Wallace had coolly approved a notice sent to every post office and newspaper in the Territory:

BILLY THE KID

$500 REWARD

I will pay $500 reward to any person or persons who will capture William Bonny, alias The Kid, and deliver him to any sheriff of New Mexico. Satisfactory proofs of identity will be required.

LEW. WALLACE,

Governor of New Mexico.

*  *  *

On December 15, Joseph C. Lea in Roswell got a note in red ink signed by “Chas Bowdre,” but he was probably helped by the far more literate Billy the Kid. “I have broke up housekeeping,” Bowdre claimed,

& am camping around, first one place & then another on the range, so that no one can say that Yerby’s ranch is our stopping place. If I don’t get my name cleared I intend to leave hereabouts this winter, for I don’t intend to have any hand at fighting no more in the territory, for it is a different thing from what the Lincoln County War was, when I was justified. The only difference between my case & my enemies is that I had the misfortune to be indicted before the fighting was over & so did not get the liberty of a pardon. It seems to me that this would occur to the government once & awhile, so they would include us warriors in their clemency & stop their running around causing havoc. I have no more sentiments to urge in my favor, except that others were pardoned for like offenses. Respectfully, Chas Bowdre.

But on that December 15 the sheriff of Lincoln County and his handpicked posse of thirteen were seeking the five-hundred-dollar reward and were heading eastward from White Oaks to Fort Sumner, stopping at Grzelachowski’s store to stand in the heat of a mesquite fire, fill up on McIntosh apples, and uncork some Jim Beam bourbon whiskey.

They generally averaged a rigorous forty-five miles per day, but on December 17 a fierce blizzard forced them to seek haven at the Gerhardt ranch, twenty-five miles from the fort. Yet Garrett was too restless to overnight there, so he and his men rode out at midnight and just before sunrise finally got to Fort Sumner. There the former rustler Barney Mason heard from Garrett’s father-in-law that the fugitive gang had left yesterday, probably for the Wilcox-Brazil roadhouse, twelve miles east. And that was confirmed by Erastus Wilcox’s Mexican stepson, a sixteen-year-old named Juan Gallegos, who’d wandered into Sumner to reconnoiter for the Kid. The sheriff threatened jail time in order to convince José Valdéz, an outlaw friend of the Kid’s, to write a note in Spanish that claimed the posse had just left for Roswell and the fort would welcome them back. The sheriff then wrote a note to Wilcox and Brazil in English saying,

I am at Fort Sumner and on the trail of the Kid and his gang and I will never let up until I catch them or chase them into Mexico. I request your cooperation.

Barney Mason said, “The Spanish one’s for the Kid. The other is for your stepdad.”

“Am I stupid?” Juan Gallegos asked.

The Kid was hankering to get back to see Paulita, whom he’d missed the last go-round, so when a sheepish Juan gave him the note from José Valdéz, the Kid read it and told his gang, “The coast is clear. We’ll go back to the fort at nightfall on Sunday.”

Billie Wilson grinned as he said, “Those poodles heard where we was and trembled to meet up with us. Headed in the opposite direction.”

Charlie Bowdre was in the sitting room with Emanuel Brazil when he heard the news, and he wondered aloud if he could still be romantic with Manuela, she having reached the days of her confinement. Emanuel offered, “Well, there’s other things she could do for ya.”

Charlie cogitated for a moment and then got outraged. “What are you incinerating? Don’t you be dementing the mother of my child!”

A larger Tom Folliard got in the way of a fracas to say, “Y’all know where I’ll be in Sumner: visiting the scarlets at Hargrove’s saloon. I needs me some femaleness.”

Rudabaugh had just walked in, and Emanuel grinned as he said, “And you’ll be getting a bath, right, Dave?”

Rudabaugh socked him hard in the ear, and Emanuel Brazil fell off his upholstered chair. His hand came away from his ear with wet blood on it. “I’m bleeding! And you got me half deaf, you bastard!”

Bowdre happily clapped his hands. Rudabaugh just shrugged. “Ain’t got no sense of humor, me.”

Sunday morning the Kid scrubbed his overworn clothes with borax in a copper scullery and then used oven-heated flatirons to press out their wrinkles on a kitchen table.

Rudabaugh idly watched and said, “You’re gonna make some fella a nice wife.”

Without looking up from his ironing, the Kid said, “Don’t get any lewd ideas, Dave.”

He then spruced up with a chilly bath, and for the Christmas gift he got Paulita in Puerto de Luna, he found a tag and string fastener, writing on the tag “For My Angel” and bracketing that with hearts. And on the late afternoon of December 19 the Kid, Rudabaugh, Wilson, Bowdre, and Folliard took the twelve-mile ride to a fort that the Kid still thought of as home.

But he was expected, of course. After hiding their horses in a wing of the Indian hospital on the nineteenth, the sheriff’s men tied a wild and spitting Manuela to the iron hospital bed in the triage room, and around six went across the main access road to the old Indian commissary and killed time playing cards.

There was a foot of fresh snow on the ground, and the full moon shone off it so well that the Kid could see the fort entrance and the Indian hospital three hundred yards off. To guard against being overwhelmed in an ambush, the Kid was hanging back to ride drag just as he would when herding livestock. Bowdre and Rudabaugh were twenty yards ahead of him on the left and right wings; Wilson was the flanker, otherwise called the maverick catcher; and Folliard was far ahead, riding point on a cold night salted with stars. The horses’ hooves made squeaky, munching sounds in the snow. The Kid could hear Tom singing, “Oh my Sal she is a maiden fair. Sing Polly wolly doodle all the day. With curly eyes and laughing hair. Sing Polly wolly doodle all the day. Fare thee well, fare thee well, fare thee well, my fairy fey. For I’m going to Lou’siana for to see my Susyanna. Sing Polly wolly doodle all the day.”

Around eight p.m. in old Fort Sumner, the sticking Indian commissary door was jarred open by Lon Chambers, and Garrett looked up from a five-card-draw poker hand with an ace but junk otherwise. The nighthawk said, “I see five men with rifles coming.”

The sheriff and his posse hurried to collect their things, then edged out into a moonlit night of zero degrees, the sheriff hissing instructions that his thirteen men hold still inside the moonless shade of the commissary’s high adobe wall. Looking east they heard Folliard singing, “Oh a grasshopper sittin on a railroad track, sing Polly wolly doodle all the day. A-pickin his teeth with a carpet tack, sing Polly wolly doodle all the day.”

The Kid could see something far off slinking onto the access road, but it was like a tree walking, and then, when Tom’s racehorse was no more than ten yards from the figure, the Kid heard Pat Garrett yell, “It’s him!”

Shocked out of his song, Tom reached for his Remington sidearm but never got off a shot as thirteen men were suddenly alongside the deputy sheriff and firing a fusillade that turned the Rustlers into a gallop from whence they’d come. “A big shooting came off,” Cal Polk later wrote in a memoir. “They was about forty shots fired.”

Tom Folliard had felt the wallop of a slug in his chest but no immediate fierce pain, and he swung his filly thoroughbred around and jabbed at her flanks with his boot heels. And then the hurt was like something excruciating blooming inside him and he folded over to try to submerge it. The racehorse seemed to intuit doom, for she would not run forward but circled and fought Tom’s guidance in order to linger a little, as if in deep thought, and then disobediently walk back to the fort with her rider fallen forward across her withers, his hot blood trickling down her heart girth, forearm, and cannon.

Garrett yelled, “Throw up your hands!”

And Tom gasped in the theatrical way of the nickel books, “Don’t shoot me again, for I am killed.”

The turncoat Barney Mason called, “Well, it’s high time you took your medicine, son.”

“Is it Billy?” James East asked.

“Unfortunately no,” Garrett said. “Wild West tyro is all.”

Tom gasped, “Would you help me off my horse and let me die easy?”

The sheriff and his men gently took the six-foot man down from his horse and laid him on the floor of the Indian commissary and ruined a blanket as blood became a pond around him. Tom’s eyes were shut, but when Garrett thumbed one open to check his vitals, the outlaw surprised him by rasping out, “Would you have Kip McKinney write my gramma in Texas, informing her of my demise?”

“Will do.”

“Well,” he said of his dying, “the sooner the better. This is painful.” Then other sentences deserted him.

Waiting him out, they got back to their poker game and for about forty minutes were offended by his disgusting sucking and burbling noises as he coughed up blood. Waking from unconsciousness and craving water in “Help me” pleas, Tom swallowed from a tin cup that was held to his mouth, but that seemed too much exertion for Thomas O. Folliard, Jr.’s inner workings, and he wrenched up in agony and expired with a final sigh.

Ever efficient and unemotional, the former buffalo hunter told his men, “Carry him outside in the blanket. We’ll chip a hole for him when he’s stiff. And one of you clean up his mess. You’ll find me with my wife at Celsa’s.”

*  *  *

Rudabaugh’s horse was shot in the posse’s ambush and got only a few miles from the fort before it keeled over and just groaned in the snow as Rudabaugh got what weaponry and gear he needed and said, “You was a fine beast of burden and I hate like Hell havin to do this.” The horse craned its head up at his voice and he fired a .45 caliber bullet just below its forelock.

Billie Wilson rode back to fetch him and helped Rudabaugh straddle the saddlebags behind his saddle. Wilson looked back at him and asked, “Are you crying?”

The Kid decided there would be no pursuit that night, so he and Bowdre walked their horses back to the Wilcox-Brazil ranch in a slow mope, with Charlie vexed by the sheriff’s scurrilous ambush. “There weren’t no ‘Hands up!’ No warning a’tall. Ain’t it the rules that you get a chance to give up?” But the Kid was just recalling his good friend’s funny quirks and queernesses, his lard-on-toast breakfasts, his honking laugh, his registering of puzzlement with “Wait, what?” And Charlie went along with that, saying, “Always the same with Tom. He not only dint know nothin, he dint even
suspect
nothin, ever. Innocent as an angel.”

“Well, he was always fun to be with and ever straight as the string on a kite.”

“
Worshipped
you,” Charlie said.

Emanuel Brazil was standing outside his stone-walled house in his grizzly bear coat and turban, his left ear whitely bandaged, but smiling insincerely as he watched the outlaws ride up. “Well, Sumner mustn’t’a been hospitable to you boys! Whores all get religion there?”