The Kid: A Novel (3 page)

T
he funeral service was on Thursday in the Antrim house, Clara Truesdell in attendance with her husband and joined by Lincoln County Coroner Harvey Whitehill and his wife. The sons were stoic; her husband, Billy Antrim, was, as ever, not present.

But Antrim had sent a telegram to arrange for the boys to reside in the home of Richard Knight, the butcher whose shop Antrim had once helped out in, and weeks later, when Antrim feared they’d exhausted the patience of the Knights, he shifted Henry to the former Star Hotel, which was now owned by the Truesdells, while Josie was sent into the home of Joe Dyer, the proprietor of the saloon called the Orleans Club, where he ran errands, served whiskey, swept up the peanut shells on the floor, and became addicted to the opium tar he would smoke through a dream stick in Chinatown.

The Kid’s grief over Catherine’s death first caused him to feel disoriented and in a trance, then fiery in his anger at Billy Antrim and, irrationally, the Silver City that had failed to heal her. There was a lot of
Why me?
in his ruminations. And it was his undoing that in his aloneness and loss he fell in with a wild and vice-laden crowd. Would have become an adored, happy, skylarking captain of all he surveyed had he not first linked up with miscreants like Sombrero Jack—so named because of the spangled Mexican hatwear he favored. Jack was ten years older, held a stonemasonry job, and just for company let a lonely fourteen-year-old orphan tag along like a tolerated little brother when Jack was pursuing thievery, an excess of whiskey, or the card games of monte and faro.

Was Jack who urged the Kid to leave his lodgings in the Star Hotel, where he was a waiter and dishwasher, and join him in Mrs. Brown’s rooming house. And it was Jack who goaded him into stealing three pounds of fresh-churned butter from a buckboard, selling it to a grocer on Texas Street for fifty cents. Coroner Harvey Whitehill had just been given the job of sheriff, after the former officer of the law ran off with some of Lincoln County’s funds. And the Kid was one of Whitehill’s first arrests. But the new sheriff just smacked the boy’s cringing head three, four times and wagged a finger as he lectured him, since he knew folks reacted hard to the loss of a mother.

Was Sombrero Jack, too, who one Saturday night smashed out a front window of the Chinese laundry owned by the Celestials Charley Sun and Sam Chung, Jack crawling through moon-glinting shards of glass in order to scavenge two Ruger Old Army cap-and-ball pistols, a stack of wool blankets, and the fineries floating and puffing on the backyard clotheslines in the soft October breeze. Skedaddling out of town and hiding his loot in Crawford’s Mill, Sombrero Jack later realized it was doing him no good there, so he retrieved it and returned to Mrs. Brown’s, telling the Kid he’d go halves with him if the worshipful boy would sell it.

A few days after that their landlady espied Henry Antrim, as he was still called, in an English gentleman’s shirt with a stiff, winged collar and in frock trousers so overlong he’d folded the cuffs up high as his calves.

Mrs. Brown said, “You got yourself some fancy clothes of a sudden!”

With no hesitation other than forcing a smile, he answered, “My uncle died and left em to me in his will.”

“Oh yes, passing on and passing the remnants along; that’s what we all bound to do,” she responded.

But she doubted him enough to investigate a steamer trunk in his closet when he was gone and found a soap-scented bundle of lady things and a Livingston suit he couldn’t afford, so she hustled out to the sheriff’s office to rain overdue judgment down upon Henry.

Sheriff Whitehill felt the late Mrs. Antrim would approve of him scaring her son into gallantry by locking him up in the county jail on the charge of larceny. Whitehill’s children, however, were friends of Henry, sharing a pretty Englishwoman’s classes in the one-room public school, and those seven children raised their voices against their father in high dudgeon that evening, and even the sheriff’s wife wanted him to at least escort the fourteen-year-old to their house for a nice breakfast in the morning.

Sombrero Jack, by then, had heard of the Kid’s arrest and skinned his way out of town and out of this narrative, but he would find Jesus and finally reform his life and wind up a justice of the peace in Colorado.

According to a jailer, the circuit court would meet in session in Silver City the third week of November, six weeks hence, so, forlorn with fear of a final conviction, the Kid conceived a plan to extricate himself from his dilemma. Working on the sheriff’s instinct for leniency, Henry conned him into a free half hour of exercise each morning in the corridor outside his cell, and then when a jailer for once wasn’t watching, the Kid ducked down into the fireplace and, skinny as he was, clawed and scraped and laddered his way up the narrow chimney flue until he could fall out onto the roof and then hurtfully to the ground.

A gardener with a hoe saw the Kid’s soot-blackened hands and face and asked, “You playing in a minstrel show?”

“You won’t tell on me, will you?”

“Oh, I’ll tell. The fix you’re in don’t mean nothing to me.”

Hearing of the escape and getting on his knees to peer up the tight fit of the chimney, Sheriff Whitehill was impressed, telling the jailer, “Henry has an ingenuity with which I have heretofore not been acquainted.”

“You could tell he’s a hard case,” the jailer said. “He’s got them dancing eyes.”

Meanwhile Henry hightailed it to the kitchen of Clara Truesdell’s hotel. She got him cleaned up and harbored him in the pantry for a spell, then put the orphan and his box lunch on a dusty, jouncing stagecoach through hostile Apache territory to Chloride Flat in the Arizona Territory, where his stepfather was.

The Kid formulated some high hopes for his meeting with Antrim, whom he had not seen for half a year, but then he found the former Hoosier fruitlessly panning for gold upstream on a trickling creek that ran into the San Francisco River.

Billy Antrim knelt back on his haunches as he stared up at Henry, who detected a distinct lack of welcome. “Weren’t you farmed out?”

The Kid lied, “I was lonesome for you.”

“Oh, me too. I been pining.” Antrim looked around for a horse. “How’d you get out here?”

“Walked. Took me an hour. You get anything?”

“Tracings this week. Hauled in a nugget a month ago. Where’s Josie?”

“Running errands at the Orleans Club.”

“Well, he’ll never amount to much anyways.” Antrim stood. “Copper mine won’t be hiring none more if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I’m just footloose and fancy-free.”

Antrim squinted his distrust. “I got just the one upstairs room and no provisions, but I guess you can stay overnight.”

Antrim’s upstairs room was over the Two Galoots Saloon, where he seemed customary. A couple of soiled doves in their next-to-nothings were acting flirtatious, but Antrim wouldn’t acknowledge them, only excusing himself by saying, “I have needs like everbody.” He ordered two shot glasses and a full bottle of Old Overholt Straight Rye Whiskey and filled the jiggers for himself and Henry, but the boy was preoccupied by a large hanging picture of a naked female slave in a harem. Antrim noticed and said, “They tell me that’s an odalisque. Don’t ask me how to spell it.”

“She’s pretty,” Henry said.

“Ainunt no
she
. It’s a
picture
.” Antrim lifted his shot glass. “Down the hatch,” he said and swilled the whiskey.

Henry found the consequence of imitating his stepfather unpleasant. Coughing, he said, “Harsh as hellfire and never-ending, all the way down.”

“You get used to it.” Antrim poured himself another shot glass and tilted his head back for it. “Ah,” he said; then, “This Old Overholt whiskey was Abraham Lincoln’s favorite. That ought to tell you something.”

“And Abraham Lincoln’s dead, isn’t he?”

“But not from the whiskey. A bullet. Lead poisoning.”

“Are you going to stay here for a spell?”

“Oh, me, I’ll prolly get restless I expect.”

“Want me here?”

Antrim frowned into his whiskey, then drank it. “Not really,” he said.

Silence took up residence for a while. Antrim doffed his dirty felt hat. He wasn’t clean and he’d lost still more hair and the sun had wrinkled his face so that he looked far older than his thirty-two.

The Kid flashed him the insincerest of smiles. “You haven’t asked about the funeral.”

“Whose?” he asked, then said, “Oh.”

“Entire city turned out,” the Kid lied. “There was an uplifting sermon and stirring hymns about the attributes of paradise, but folks kept pestering me about ‘Where’s Cate’s husband?’ Told em you were too stricken with grief, that you thought you might could kill yourself over it.”

“Oh, that would surely gladden you, wouldn’t it, Henry?”

“Was just what came out at the time.”

Antrim ordered them both porterhouse steaks and russet potatoes, wetting each chew with more whiskey. Which began to have an effect on him. He became fractious. “So what’s the real reason you’re here?” he finally asked. He pushed a jigger of truth serum toward the boy, and the Kid pushed it back.

“Wore out my welcome in Silver City.”

Antrim was as skeptical as an examiner. Were he wearing bifocals he’d have been watching the Kid through the bottom half-moons. “Why’s that, Henry?”

“I was selling used clothes.”

Antrim scowled. “Lot of people do that.”

“But they locked
me
in jail for it.”

With outrage, his stepfather said, “Ainunt fair at all!”

Henry agreed. “Exactly my thinking. So I escaped.”

Billy Antrim leaned over the jury box formed by his crossed forearms and told his stepson, “Don’t try to lie to a liar, liar! I believe the jail part. What about the clothes?”

“Stolen,” Henry confessed.

“Stolen!” Antrim fell back in his chair as though flummoxed. “Suspected as much from your scoundrel airs. Even knew it from your childhood. You was wrong, wrong, wrong from the very inception.” He got another shot glass of whiskey.

“Had enough?” the Kid finally asked.

Antrim finished it and said, “I’ll stop when I’m just beyond plenty.”

“I was here to forgive and forget how you ran out on your wife.”

His stepfather sneered. “Well, you can go to Hell with your forgiveness, Henry. Don’t want it and haven’t earned it.”

“I’m tired,” the Kid said. “Been a long day.”

Antrim hung his head as though himself seeking rest. “I have a judgment to render, which is if a thief is the sort of boy you’ve become, you got to get out. I got a hard-won reputation here.”

Henry thought he was kidding and laughed.

“You heard me! Get!”

The Kid stood up and saw Billy Antrim was incapable of standing. “I’ll just clear out my things,” he said.

Wearily, Antrim waved him off.

Upstairs, the Kid rooted around until he found two dollars and change and a loaded Colt 1849 Pocket revolver, and just for spite he stole some fresh clothes. Then he rumbled downstairs and out of the Two Galoots Saloon with nary an
adíos
for his stepfather. They’d never see each other again.

In 1922 at the age of eighty, William Henry Harrison Antrim would die in Adelaida, California, in the home of his niece. At his funeral service he was remembered as a pious and highly regarded gentleman.

- 3 -

STOLEN HORSES

H
ardly ever did hold a job for any length of time. There was some cowboying for the Kid at the Sierra Bonita Rancho, located in the Sonoran Desert east of Tucson and six miles southwest of Camp Grant. Hitched a ride to it on a freight wagon. The foreman liked the fifteen-year-old who called himself Kid Antrim, but he was the skinniest pickaninny he’d ever laid eyes on, and when he saw what a misfit the Kid was alongside his hardy and violent Mexican vaqueros, he shifted him to helping the chuck wagon cook. The job was snidely called the Little Mary and after a host of insults to his manliness, the Kid let himself be let go.

The Kid had taught himself to cook in the final months of Catherine’s life, when she couldn’t do for herself, so in April 1876 he hired on in the kitchen of the four-roomed Hotel de Luna, just down the road from the Army post named for Ulysses S. Grant.

Wasn’t long before he left the Hotel de Luna’s oven heat for a summer job as a hay reaper that paid just as poorly but at least was outdoors, and he liked looking beyond the yellowing hayfields to the far and wide flatlands of pinkish scrabble greened here and there with creosote bush, buckhorn cholla, prickly pear, and desert tea. Off in the distance were orange foothills as jagged as dragon tails but blued in their heights by the shade of foaming anvil clouds that looked tall as forever. And he found himself thinking,
I’m happy in Arizona. I could stay here.

And then he fell under the unfortunate influence of a Scottish former 6th Cavalry trumpeter named John Mackie, who rented the sleeping room next to him in the Hotel de Luna. Mackie was twenty-seven and had enlisted during the Civil War when he was just fourteen, but he’d never lost his Fife dialect and was still so hard to understand that some folks just shook their heads when he talked. The Kid, however, could decipher it, and John found him clever and amusing company on his sprees.

The Kid had felt fatherless since his vague early memories of New York City, and he forever found himself generating fierce loyalties for confident older men who paid him the least bit of attention. And that, for now, was a Scotsman whose current stint was horse thievery.

Strolling at eventide from the Hotel de Luna and heading down the lone street to the saloons, Mackie introduced the Kid to his nightly pursuits as if they were not only just but proper. “Sorry, laddie,” the Scotsman said, “but them loons what’s dinna tie up their mounts good, nae watch o’er em, are a-
beggin
for me to reive em. It’s the Code ay the West.”

“Seems to me the Code of the West means you have the right to hold your ground. The right to defend yourself.”

“Tis indeed! And also if ye hae a strong want for what belongs to wheelthy others, it’s in yer rights to make free with it.”