The Kid: A Novel (34 page)

Was it fear that made Garrett reluctant to go there? In late May the sheriff called off his methodical manhunt for William H. Bonney after he or his deputies had interrogated the Kid’s enemies and visited all his old haunts—Los Portales, San Patricio, Puerto de Luna, Anton Chico—but found no sign of him. Garrett later claimed he’d failed to investigate Fort Sumner because it seemed like madness for the Kid to go where he was so well known. The sheriff was operating on the presumption of what he himself would do if on the run, which was that the Kid had wisely crossed the Rio Grande into the freedom of Old Mexico.

As May became June, Garrett surprisingly still avoided Fort Sumner, in spite of multiple reports of the Kid’s presence there. The sheriff said he just didn’t buy it, for there’d been fabrications that the Kid had been killed in El Paso or murdered a trio of Chisum’s cowboys outside Roswell or he was in Seven Rivers, Tularosa, Las Vegas, Albuquerque, Denver. Writing Lionel Sheldon, the new territorial governor, the sheriff noted, “I have never taken Bonney for a fool, but have credited him with the possession of extraordinary forethought and cool judgment.” So to him none of those rumored locales seemed right. And there was the awkwardness of the Kid’s connection to Celsa, his wife’s sister, and to the Maxwells, his old friends. He’d rather find Billy far from there, and in Lincoln County. So he handled chores on his ranch outside Roswell, cared for his and Apolonaria’s newborn, Ida, and busied himself with official tasks as he became patient as a spider where the Kid was concerned, waiting out a desperado who was too outgoing and free-spirited to stay hidden for long.

And it was true that with heedlessness, overconfidence, and pluck, the Kid larked in and out of Fort Sumner as if he weren’t wanted for murder with a reward offer available to anyone doughty enough to lift a gun against him.

The
Santa Fe New Mexican
for June 16 noted, “A man who came to Santa Fe from Lincoln County says that Billy the Kid gets all the money he wants, steals horses when he needs them, and makes no bones of going into and out of various towns. The people regard the sneaks-by with a feeling half of fear and half of admiration, they meekly submit to his depredations, and some of them go so far as to aid him in avoiding capture.”

*  *  *

The Maxwell house faced eastward and overlooked the old parade grounds and, farther off, the enlisted men’s barracks. South of the house was a garden of wildflowers such as poppies, mariposa lilies, hoary aster, and amaranth. And then there was a dance hall with
bailes
on the weekends where the Kid would carry on in his fine clothes like his old self, flouncing Celsa around in a schottische, formally waltzing with Manuela, and generally agreeing to join on the floor any of the fanning coquettes in mantillas who yearned for him.

Charlie Siringo would later become a Pinkerton detective and gain fame with his cowboy memoirs, but in 1881 he was a Texas rangehand in his late twenties who now and then helped out Pat Garrett in hunting the Kid and his gang. In that way he became familiar with the famous dances at Fort Sumner, and Siringo fell hard for the dark, alluring, high-spirited widow of Charlie Bowdre. Walking Manuela back to the old Indian hospital one night, Siringo confessed that he was smitten and they became affectionate at the hospital door. But though he begged to be invited inside where they could go a little further, she wouldn’t let him. She was being virtuous, he thought. And only weeks later, when it no longer mattered, did she tell Siringo that Billy the Kid had been hiding there.

The Kid heard Siringo gallop off that night and he told Manuela on heading out that he needed to find Paulita. She seemed to be avoiding him and he was going to the Maxwell house to see why.

She was not there, but the Navajo maid was. The thirty-five-year-old Deluvina focused on the Kid’s holstered Colt .41 Thunderer and feigned ignorance of the youngest Maxwell’s whereabouts. But Deluvina had been purchased as a child for fifty dollars by Lucien Maxwell and she felt kin to Billy as a fellow orphan, so she was fond enough to let the murderer wait in the lilac parlor for the girl. She even brought him fresh sun tea and a saucer of apple cobbler as he stewed on the love seat, worriedly thinking of Paulita.
She won’t want a wanted man
.

At last he heard the girl on the porch, confiding to someone in Spanish, “
Lo pasé muy bien
.” I had a very nice time. There was a male response the Kid couldn’t catch, and he was too cautious to go to the front door. He heard it open and shut, and he stood as he heard her soft footsteps on the floral carpet of the hallway. She may have been heading back to the kitchen, but then she halted in shock at seeing the Kid in the parlor, his face full of tragedy.

“Who let you in?” she asked.

He felt it was the wrong first question. “Deluvina,” he said. And he ticked his head toward the front porch. “Who was that?”

“José,” she said. She seemed irresolute, even fearful, and she lurked in the hallway as if he were dangerous.

Billy fell back onto the love seat and smiled as in a strained counterfeit of ease he patted a spot next to him. “Enter, my angel! Sit!”

She walked in but took the violet wing chair five feet away from him. She was wearing knee-high boots and the culottes that preceded jodhpurs.

“Moonlight ride?” he asked.

Even in a forced smile her cute dimples showed. “You know how I have always plumed myself on my horsemanship.”

“Riding with?”

“My brother’s roan mare.”

“I meant ‘Who’s this José?’ ”

“José Jaramillo. Lorenzo Jaramillo’s son.” Even in the heat of July her forearms were crossed over her breasts and she seemed to be trembling. She earnestly asked, “You’re not going to hurt him, are you?”

“Why would I?”

“Because you
do
that. You do
worse
.”

The Kid felt a hot burn of irritation flush his cheeks. “I’m not a ruthless murderer. My hand was forced each time.”

She ever so gently said, “Hah.” Like she found him delusional.

The night was getting pear-shaped. “And how is St. Mary’s Convent School?”

“I graduated.”

“Congratulations!”

“Lots of people do it,” she said.

“And now what?”

She sighed. “Doubts. Disappointment.”

And then Pete Maxwell was at the parlor doorway in a striped nightshirt and slippers. With false bonhomie, he said, “I thought I detected Billy’s voice. What a treat to see you again!”

“Hola, Pedro.”

With a catch of nervousness in his voice he said, “I hear no officers of the law can find you, yet here you are in plain sight!”

“I hither and yon a bit.”

“Well,” Pete Maxwell said, and then he seemed at a loss for words. His hands palsied as he stared at the Kid’s six-shooter. Then he flung a scowl to his sister as he said, “Don’t forget the lamps like you do, Paulita.”

She shooed him off with the flick of a hand. When he was gone, she whispered, “Pete disapproves of our . . . friendship. But he won’t do anything about it. You fill him with terror.”

“Has its advantages, I guess.”

“Are you staying in Sumner?”

“Ofttimes.”

“With?”

The Kid just said, “With friends.”

But she’d heard the rumors of his
queridas
. With sadness, Paulita said, “Oh.”

Billy realized he’d let them take another wrong turning, so he grinned and changed the subject. “I got your letter to me in the Mesilla jail! Read it over and over again. Even showed it to Sheriff Southwick there. You know what he said? Said, ‘That girl is sure stuck on you.’ ”

She seemed to consider his oddness before saying, “
Then
. I have outgrown that girl now. She believed you were being unfairly hounded due to misunderstandings and lies and exaggerations.” She seemed to want to go on, but simmered. “And you didn’t answer that letter.”

“My mind was on my hanging.”

She tilted her head for a different perspective. “Are you even aware of how hot and cold you are? How you seduce and then withdraw, tantalize and then retreat? Even with men you’re like that. You’re a mystery to people, you keep us off-balance and guessing. We have to presume what you’re thinking or feeling. And instead of being frustrated we find ourselves fascinated, and we make things up about you out of our own hopes and needs and all the dangerous things we’re afraid to do.”

The Kid felt the outrage that so often sent his hand to his gun. But he governed himself and said, “You seem to have given this a lot of thought.”

“What else was there to do before I cried myself to sleep?”

He felt a farewell coming and he hastened it. “So where are we, you and me?”

She hesitated before saying, “José wants to marry me.”

The Kid flatly echoed, “José wants to marry you.”

“Yes.”

“I was hoping . . .”

“I suspected.”

“And I don’t have a chance?”

Enough of an answer that her coffee-colored eyes glistened with tears.

“Well, it may be July for you but it’s near winter for me. All the leaves are falling off the trees.” Heartsick, he stood. “I’ll be going now.”

She was forlorn as she faced the floor.

The Kid paused in the hallway. “I still love you, Paulita.”

“And I you,” she whispered.

*  *  *

Within a hasty few months Paulita Beaubien Maxwell would marry José Florentino Jaramillo at San José Catholic Church in Anton Chico. She was wealthy and eighteen, the Jaramillos were prosperous, and Pete Maxwell hoped she would no longer be sullied by her relationship with the Kid.

She would give birth to three children: Adelina, Luz, and a son, Telesfor. But in the 1890s the often drunk Jaramillo abandoned her for another woman and she raised the children alone.

In 1884 the New England Cattle Company purchased what remained of Lucien Maxwell’s real estate, and then Old Fort Sumner was reclaimed by flooding, its deteriorating buildings were torn apart for scrap lumber, and all its majestic cottonwood trees were felled. Mrs. Jaramillo was forced to spend her last years in a mail-order cottage only four miles north, on the outskirts of a dreary, sun-drenched village that still called itself Fort Sumner. And it was there as she was crocheting a mantilla on the front porch that the journalist Walter Noble Burns interviewed “A Belle of Old Fort Sumner” about the Kid, and Paulita took in the fall’s first riotous colors of dying as she denied ever being the Kid’s sweetheart. “I liked him very, very much—oh, yes—but I did not love him.”

When she was sent
The Saga of Billy the Kid
in 1926, she found she could not finish reading it. Even though avid Kid tourists later found her home and sought to extract intimacies from her, Paulita stayed put in new Fort Sumner and skimped by on an ever-shrinking inheritance until she died of nephritis in 1929, aged sixty-five.

*  *  *

John William Poe was a cattle detective for the Canadian River Stock Association in Tascosa, and because so much rustling seemed to have its origin in Lincoln County, he went there and established headquarters in White Oaks in March 1881. Chancing upon Sheriff Pat Garrett in a saloon, Poe chatted about his job scouring the rangeland for stolen livestock, and Garrett finished a jar of whiskey and asked, “Why don’t you become my deputy, haul in evildoers, and get paid twice over?”

Poe did that, and it was he who rode the forty miles from White Oaks to Lincoln to find his boss in the Wortley Hotel, telling him that a White Oaks drunk was sleeping off his hard night in a haymow at West & Dedrick Livery & Sales when he overheard Sam and Dan Dedrick talking about the Kid hiding in and around Fort Sumner.

“Was your informer still squiffed?” Garrett asked.

Poe said, “I just know the Dedricks are old friends of Bonney.”

In June the sheriff had written a letter of inquiry to Emanuel Brazil, but it was not until July 11 that he’d gotten a reply, with Brazil admitting, “The Kid’s so much in the proximity that I am afraid to go outside.” And now this. John Poe was looking at him with the furrowed brow of
Why not?
Garrett felt forced to act and finally decided, “We’ll go get Kip McKinney.”

Thomas C. McKinney was a deputy US marshal with his office in the still-small town of Roswell. Garrett scared him up there on July 12 and took McKinney and Poe out to his homestead ranch to have Apolonaria’s menudo soup and tamales. Garrett had warned his deputies to make no mention of the Kid, but Kip McKinney thanked Garrett’s wife for the scrumptious food and just to make conversation said, “Heard you once lived where we’re heading!”

With a fierce stare Garrett hushed him, then he turned to his wife. She had a stricken look. “Celsa will be fine,” he said.

At sundown on the twelfth, the Lincoln County lawmen headed north for Fort Sumner, achieving about thirty miles of the eighty before finally picketing their horses in the wee hours and sleeping just off the Rio Pecos in their fewest clothes for the cool.

Waking at sunup to the noise of critters thrashing in the weeds in one of nature’s kill-or-be-killed dramas, the sheriff found Poe and Kinney awake, too, fully dressed and squatting by the river as they smoked in silence. Lying back with his hands behind his head he told them, “The Kid is a likable fellow. Often quiet. There’s no fuss or bluster in him. Wasn’t ever quarrelsome, never hunted trouble. But there’s something about him even when he’s friendliest that makes you feel he could be dangerous to take liberties with. I never saw him mad in my life. Can’t remember when he wasn’t smiling. But he’s the most murderous youth that ever stood in shoe leather, and he’s game all the way through.”

*  *  *

July 13 the
Nugget
newspaper in Tombstone, Arizona, reported, “Parties now in Las Vegas bring the information that Billy the Kid is on the Red River, near the Texas line, at the head of twenty men.” And on that Wednesday, the sheriff and his deputies instead journeyed another fifty miles on the Goodnight-Loving cattle trail in a hundred-degree oven, hearing the sizzling noise of locusts in the sagebrush and snakeweed, feeling their sweat soak their shirts and vests and scallop their hatbands, riding in silence into each heat shimmer ahead before finally halting to camp in sandhills near Taiban Creek. Emanuel Brazil was to meet them there, but fear of the Kid’s vengeance made him a no-show.