The Kid: A Novel (29 page)

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TRIALS

T
he possemen and their prisoners overnighted at the Wilcox-Brazil roadhouse, filling its rooms, and on Christmas Eve went west to Fort Sumner with Wilson, Rudabaugh, and the Kid shackled on the flat bed of the Wisconsin farm wagon, each of them skirting his legs away from Charlie Bowdre’s white, openmouthed corpse, each of them working hard at not noticing his rocking, his jouncing, his seeming to breathe as they hit frozen ruts in the road.

Manuela Herrera was hanging sheets on a clothesline by the Indian hospital when she saw the caravan approach, and when she glimpsed a deputy riding Charlie’s horse she ran out into the snow of the entrance road, heavy with child and screaming hatred of Garrett and the justice system in Spanish as she pounded fists against his long thigh.

“You have my sympathy in your loss,” he said in a practiced way. And thinking of his five-hundred-dollar reward, he felt some largesse. “Will you buy a suit for Charlie to be buried in and charge it to my account?”

The Kid translated into Spanish for him, and then he softly consoled Manuela as she hugged him and pressed her tear-wet cheek to his own, groaning over and over again the words for husband, “
Mi marido. Mi esposo
.”

Cal Polk got down from the wagon, and Barney Mason joined him in hefting Bowdre into the Indian hospital triage room and swinging him up onto a dinner table, knocking salt and pepper shakers onto the floor.

Polk said, “Quite the character, Charlie was.”

And Mason said, “ ‘Quite the character’ is what gets you kilt.”

The horse thief from Mississippi would be buried next to his pal Tom on Christmas morning.

*  *  *

The three prisoners first were escorted to the old enlisted men’s stockade, but when the Maxwells heard that the Kid had been captured, they sent their Navajo servant, Deluvina, with a handwritten note in English from Señora Luz Beaubien Maxwell.

I request that Kid Bonney be brought to our home in the former officers’ quarters so my daughter can say goodbye.

Garrett consented and assigned Jim East and Lee Hall as the Kid’s police guards. They walked to the house in a narrow furrow that had been haphazardly shoveled between snowbanks.

Sixteen-year-old Paulita greeted the Kid on the front porch in an emerald green formal gown with crinoline petticoats that shaped a bustle. Tears glimmered in her
café
eyes.

The Kid said, “Don’t you cry, Sweetheart. I’ll be fine.”

She hurried a kiss of his cheek and lingered in a hug, her right ear to his hammering heart, and then looked beseechingly at East and Hall. “Would you let Billy join me in my room so we can have some privacy?”

East told the girl that the Kid was too slippery, with an earned reputation for escaping custody. They couldn’t risk it.

“Will you all join us then in the Yuletide room?”

The Kid was in leg irons, so she hung on to him with an entwined forearm and slowed her pace in adjustment to the clumsy noise of his shuffle.

A spruce tree flaring with lighted candles filled a corner of the lilac parlor, and Paulita’s mother was sitting on the love seat with her forearms crossed in a quarrelsome way as she scowled at the Kid’s police guards. Luz said in highly accented English, “You have
caused
what you are now arresting.”

“We’re just doing our duty, ma’am.”

She hmmphed.

Lee Hall took off the Kid’s sombrero for him, and his girlfriend groomed his tawny hair.

The Kid told Paulita, “Reach your hand into my overcoat pocket.”

She did and removed the green velvet pouch with “For My Angel” on the tag. She was wide-eyed.

“Open it.”

She poured out the fine gold necklace and kissed the crucifix in the Mexican way.

Smiling, Señora Maxwell said, “Please to let me see, Paulita.” And when she held it up, her mother said to the Kid, “So beautiful. So thoughtful,
Chivato
.”

“I saw it in Puerto de Luna and had to buy it. Seemed already hers.”

Paulita fastened it around her neck. “You’re always giving me such lovely jewelry.” She admired it in the reflection of a Victorian pier glass and with a formal pledge of her fidelity to him said, “I’ll
always
be wearing this, from now on.”

Smiling, Luz said, “And you have a Christmas gift for Billy, no?”

With a sunburst of happiness, Paulita hurried to kneel under the spruce tree and found a small, ribboned box that she opened for her handcuffed boyfriend. It was a tortoiseshell pocketknife and made by J. S. Holler & Co. cutlery store in New York City. She made a porcupine of it as she pinched out its twelve tools.

“Look at that!” the Kid exclaimed. “Six different blades, an awl, a corkscrew, tiny scissors . . . This will be so
useful
!”

And Jim East took it from the girl, saying, “Maybe
too
useful.”

With hopefulness she said, “Well, maybe later.”

“For sure later,” the Kid said.

Lee Hall intoned, “And now we’ll have to say our goodbyes.”

“Oh, but no!” Señora Maxwell said. “Won’t you have some eggnog at least? Some sugarplums?”

Hall said, “The Kid’s a prisoner, madam.” She seemed to need the reminder.

Paulita stamped a foot in frustration and pouted as she said, “Billito! You’re always just arriving or just about to leave!”

And then, Jim East later remembered, “The lovers embraced and she gave Billy one of those soulful kisses the novelists tell us about. We finally had to pull them apart, much against our wishes, for all the world loves a lover.”

Because of the observers, she kissed him with piety at first, but as she seemed to feel the foreignness of his hard-used form, there seemed to become a greater need of belonging, and she kissed him with a passionate
yes
that was as soft as something fluid, that spoke an
Enter me
until she finally pulled a little away and told his ear in a hushed voice, “We are so much in love, Billy. We
have
to be together. I have money. We can marry and I’ll ride with you to the ends of the earth in spite of anything you have ever done. I don’t
care
what the world thinks of me.”

The Kid looked at his watchmen watching him, and excitement and embarrassment warred with each other. And then he kissed her softly and deeply one last time. “
Vamos a ver
,” he said. We’ll see.

*  *  *

Hiring only Jim East, Deputy Jim Bell, and his friend Barney Mason to accompany him on horseback, the sheriff-elect sent the other men home for Christmas, and Emanuel Brazil harnessed fresh mules to his farm wagon to haul the three prisoners to Las Vegas.

They got to Puerto de Luna around two o’clock in the afternoon of December 25 and walked into Grzelachowski’s store and restaurant to find a fabulous feast being served to some locals. A jolly Padre Polaco welcomed the Kid with an embrace as the Kid said, “Real sorry about your stolen horses.”

The ex-priest looked fiercely at Rudabaugh and Wilson as he said, “Oh, but it wasn’t you, Boleslaw. It was these fleas. But even them I forgive on this glorious holy day.”

After introductions to those he’d never met, Grzelachowski asked, “Would you like to take something on the teeth?”

The Kid told him, “I won’t turn anything down but my collar.”

Ever the figurer, Sheriff Garrett asked, “Would you have enough for all of us?”

“We have such
plenty
in the kitchen! Please to sit.” Then the ex-priest and his cook carried out heaping platters of hot wild turkey, pierogi, cabbage rolls, and the gingerbread called Old Polish piernik. Padre Polaco motheringly sliced the food for the handcuffed Kid and continued refilling his plate until he finally groaned over the excess.

Ever wanting, Rudabaugh viewed the end of their meal with distress.

Headline news of the Kid’s capture got to Las Vegas before the captives did on the twenty-sixth, and a huge crowd of rowdy gawkers with their own ideas of penal correction were waiting in the Old Town plaza. The Kid grinned as he shouted out the names of acquaintances he saw, seeking out Henry Hoyt but failing to find him, for he’d gone back to medical school in Chicago. By contrast, Billie Wilson was dour, humiliated, and penitent, his head down to avoid further intimacy with the citizens, and Dave Rudabaugh was in hiding and lying sideways on the flat bed of the wagon, for the hundreds of Mexicans in the plaza sought vengeance for his jailbreak murder of Deputy Lino Valdez. The horsemen rode protectively closer to the wagon and kicked citizens away until they could hustle their prisoners inside the stone jailhouse on Valencia Street.

An Irish mail contractor who was friendly with the Kid shoved his way into the jailhouse with packages of new gabardine suits and other attire for the prisoners because he thought it only right that the notorious ruffians face execution in high style. Their ankle shackles and handcuffs were chiseled off so they could change out of foul clothing that soon would be incinerated.

Because he was about the same age and seemed agreeable, Lute Wilcox, the city editor for the
Las Vegas Gazette
, was granted an interview by a chipper Kid, who found himself in his element as he joked and chatted with somewhat terrified bystanders.

“You appear to take it easy,” Wilcox said.

“Well, what’s the use of looking on the gloomy side of everything? But I guess you could say this laugh’s on me.” He glanced around at his surroundings and asked, “Is the jail in Santa Fe any better? This is a terrible place to hold a fellow in.”

Sheriff Romero told him in Spanish there was nothing better in store for him there.

And the Kid just shrugged. “I guess I’ll put up with what I have to for the time being.”

Wilcox wrote, “He was the main attraction of the show, and as he stood there, stamping his boots on the stone floor to keep his feet warm, he was the hero of the ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’ romance which this paper has been running in serial form for six weeks or more.”

With some surprise and pride, the Kid said, “There was a big crowd gazing at me in the plaza, wasn’t there? Well, perhaps some of them will think me half man now instead of some sort of wild animal.”

Wilcox wrote, “He did look human, indeed, but there was nothing very mannish about him in appearance, for he looked and acted a mere school boy, with a frank, open countenance and the traditional silky fuzz on his upper lip. Clear blue eyes, with a roguish snap about them; light hair and complexion. He is, in all, quite a handsome looking fellow, and he has agreeable and winning ways.”

Sheriff Garrett and his deputies shifted the prisoners to the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe railroad depot in East Las Vegas on Tuesday, December 28, and the Kid leaned out an open window of a yellow smoking car to affably continue his interview with Lute Wilcox, hints of self-pity coloring his tone as he said, “I don’t blame you for writing of me as your editors have. You had to believe others’ stories. But then I don’t know as anyone on the outside would ever believe anything good of me anyway.” Reckoning what he’d later claim in a courtroom, he lied in telling Wilcox, “I wasn’t ever the leader of any gang—I was for Billy all the time. About that Los Portales cave, it was the start of a property I owned with Charlie Bowdre. I heard a stage line would run by there and I wanted it to become a way station. But I have found to my sorrow there are certain men who won’t let me live in the Territory, and so I was going to leave for Old Mexico. I haven’t stolen any stock. I made my living by gambling. But some forces wouldn’t let me settle down. If they had, I wouldn’t be here today.” He held up his handcuffed wrists in illustration as he said, “Chisum got me into all this trouble and then wouldn’t help me out of it.”

The Kid seemed willing to go on with his complaints, but he was distracted by hundreds of seething Mexicans crowding around and rocking the railroad car as they shouted for Dirty Dave Rudabaugh to be handed over and hung strangling from the windmill in the plaza.

Rudabaugh sank down in his seat, like a knob of butter melting on a skillet.

Sheriff Garrett sidled down the aisle of the railcar and crouched next to the Kid. “We have a situation here. Could be I’ll have to give you a gun. Would you promise me you won’t try to escape?”

The Kid sighed, but said, “You have my word. Dang it.”

The sheriff then went out to the platform between the railway cars and shouted, “I have promised these men safe passage to Santa Fe! It is my duty as a federal marshal to preserve and protect them!”

Sheriff Romero was below near the knuckle coupler. Looking up at the tall man, he told Garrett, “We have chase the engineer off, so you not goin anywheres. We no care if you take the Billies. Rudabaugh only we wants.”

Garrett’s right hand rested on the hilt of his Colt .45 Peacemaker as he glared down and dared Sheriff Romero with “Then why don’t you try to take him?”

Romero considered both the offer and its consequences for half a minute, and then he and his frightened delegation slunk away. Garrett told Barney Mason, “They look like a covey of hard-backed turtles sliding off the banks of the Pecos.”

Seeing the still-furious ruckus outside, a railroad postal inspector hurried through a dining car to get to Garrett, telling him he’d earlier worked as a railroad engineer, “But my lungs couldn’t handle the soot and smoke.”

Garrett seemed to wonder about the relevance.

“What I’m saying is I could get you out of Las Vegas real fast.”

“Good. Go do it.”

The Kid watched as the postal inspector snaked his way through the mob to get to the locomotive. “This is exciting!” he told Lute Wilcox. “It’s my first train ride!”

And suddenly the locomotive’s iron driving wheels screeched as the throttle was pulled fully open, roughly jerking the passenger cars west. The Kid tilted out his window to grandly wave his hat to the
Gazette
reporter and shout back, “
Adíos
, Lute! Call on me in Santa Fe!” And then he held on to his passenger seat between his knees as the train got close to a thrilling fifty miles per hour.