The Kid: A Novel (4 page)

“And they hang you.”

“But I chore from
soldjers
! Ye think they owns the animals? Naw. Airmy property. So ye and I would joost be takin from them who’s back east in Washington City. Why they ginna hang me, like? They woon’t even
know
.”

Walking up between them was Windy Cahill, an Irish former Army private in Camp Grant and now the owner of the local farrier’s shop. Windy was a wide, muscular, gorbellied hooligan much heavier than the Kid, and he had a history of finding humor in rankling the teenager with shoves and slaps and throw-downs. And now just for fun he intentionally collided with him, knocking Henry into a stumble that Windy thought was a hoot. “Oops,” he said. “Blundered you akilter.”

“What is it with blacksmiths?” the Kid grumbled as he found his pace again.

Windy turned to Mackie. “Hello, John.”

“Ahwrite,” Mackie said.

The farrier leaned toward him and hushed his voice. “I need two saddles and blankets for Old Man Clanton’s ranch.”

“What kine? Nae Mexican, I hope?”

“Nah. The thirty-dollar kind.”

Mackie nodded. “See ye eifter.”

Windy told him he’d be in George Atkins’s cantina for just a nip and strode ahead so he wouldn’t be associated with them. Mackie and the Kid headed onward to the east side of Grant Creek and George McKittrick’s bagnio, called by Mackie a “big-no” and called by soldiers the Hog Ranch. The front was a saloon and dance hall filled with havoc and music, but upstairs and also behind in a long adobe bunkhouse were rooms for cavorting, each small as a sty.

Mackie eased up to a buxom madam in a frilled, ankle-length white apron and softly spoke with her. She pointed upstairs, and he headed there, stopping after four steps to turn to the Kid. “Ye comin?” he asked, for the Scot earned a fee for whichever newcomer he lured into harlotry.

The sixteen-year-old followed him up, his stomach queasy with his daring.

The upstairs hallway was lined with parlor chairs on which shy cowhands and soldiers were sitting primly, like schoolboys soon to be punished.

“Ye feel no weel?” Mackie asked the Kid. “White as a ghoost ye are.”

“The blood’s all gone from my face to my nether region.”

The madam huffed up the stairs to the hallway with a brass school bell, which she rang so close to the Kid that he ducked.

Six Cyprians soon crowded into the hallway and smiled at the men and lifted their long draperies thigh-high to show their hosiery and wares. Selections were made and the couples went off. In his shyness, the Kid instead stayed seated. A leftover Anglo who was less than pretty walked over to him. She waited for him to look up or speak, but he was finding intrigue in the hallway’s Axminster rug. She said, “You’re quiet as a shadow.”

Without raising his eyes he said, “I’m unacquainted with the process.”

“You have two dollars in your pocket?”

“No.”

She sighed. “One?”

“Just that.”

“Hand it to me.”

After he’d done that, she tugged him up to standing and took his forearm to guide him sideways into a narrow room with a hodgepodge of furniture. She smoothed a fresh towel on the patchwork quilt of the bed and hiked up her dress as she laid herself down and widened her legs. She wore no underwear, just knee-high white stockings.

The Kid was overwhelmed with his seeing. “You’re so beautiful!”

“No I’m not. But you are.” She glanced at his bulging. “You can’t stick it in me,” she said. “I’ll get pregnant.”

“What then?”

“Stick it between my thighs. They tell me it feels kind of the same.”

The Kid unbuttoned his jeans, excitedly got on top of her, and found purchase as she clenched him. “This is amazing!”

Like a yawn, she said, “I’m so glad.”

“Could I touch your bosom?”

She nodded.

Henry used his left hand and felt a softness that was the size of an orange. Hurrying more, he asked, “What’s your name?”

She turned her head away as he shoved faster. “Mildred.”

“This is so nice of you. Letting me do this.”

She was surprised but found he was serious. She giggled in spite of his chafing, then heard him groaning. She noticed the wet. “Are you finished?”

With embarrassment he said, “Afraid so.”

She felt between her legs. “My goodness, you were so pent up!”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Was it good?”

He got up and adjusted himself. “Don’t have much to compare it to.”

She was using the towel. “So I’m your first?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that makes me feel real special,” she said, but he construed that was untrue.

The singing piano man at the upright Steinway downstairs completed “The Vacant Chair,” waited for applause that did not happen, and pursued a sketchy new tune that he wished to be “The Lost Lady Found.”

Mackie was leaning back against the bar, grinning at the Kid’s face. “Ye get yer pipes cleaned?”

“Yep. Had me a time of it.”

“We hae a job of work to do now, laddie.”

Which was just untying the reins on two brown, fifteen-hand US Army horses from the hitching post in front of McKittrick’s and riding them to Francis P. Cahill’s farrier shop. Windy was waiting there, and he smiled as he watched them uncinch both black McClellan cavalry saddles. The blacksmith folded the saddle blankets and handed each man a limp ten-dollar bill with a grim Daniel Webster on the left front and a vignette of Pocahontas on the right.

The Kid asked, “How much will the caboodle get you?”

“Oh, prolly fifty dollars.” He winked. “You’re wholesale, I’m retail.”

Without stirrups, the Kid and John Mackie stood up on a plank of the farrier’s fence to jump onto the horses, and they rode them bareback to a hiding place up Aravaipa Creek. “Ye’ll be needin ye ain horse, Kid. We’ll get one of these swapped out for ye.”

“I favor roan-colored.”

“Ach, roan it is.”

Walking back to their rooms in the Hotel de Luna, Mackie told the Kid horse stealing seemed to suit him, that they could continue it on a regular basis.

The Kid smiled. “And whoring?”

“With regularity.”

*  *  *

Success in thieving fetched the Kid his first horse, but he failed to name it, having none of the affection for the loyal animals that caused old hands to conjure poetry about Mackerel, Rusty, or Dan. A horse was just a ride to him, and he went through half a hundred in the next few years. Of greater importance to him was his purchase of a fine tooled, right-handed holster with a new 1873 Colt single-action Army revolver snug inside it, a Winchester Model 1873 rifle, which accepted the same .44-40 caliber cartridge as the six-shooter, and quite an assortment of fancy clothes—owning such being another one of the vices he was becoming accustomed to.

But he had his reverses, too. Such as when he stole a sergeant’s horse from the tie-up at Milton McDowell’s store in November 1876. The sergeant and four privates tracked the horse into Pinal County and overtook the Kid near the Stonewall Jackson mine, seemingly on his way to McMillen’s Camp, where his stepfather now labored and perhaps had a hankering for a 6th Cavalry mount. The Kid never got there, but he had such a way about him that the five soldiers let him go once they had collected the gelding. Still, to get home Kid Antrim would have had to walk a hundred miles in wild country filled with hostiles. Instead he went to the tiny village that called itself by the highfalutin name of Globe City, and there in its only saloon he was accidentally reunited with John Mackie.

Went on stealing Army horses, this time at Cottonwood Springs from soldiers posted to Camp Thomas on the Gila River. Hearing that an arrest warrant for horse theft had been filed against “Henry Antrim, alias Kid,” he and the Scot sought exoneration by giving up five stolen horses to the surprised quartermaster at the camp.

Incorrectly presuming legalities were now squared away, in February 1877 the horse thieves returned to Camp Grant and soon were served warrants for their arrest at their eggs-and-bacon breakfast in the Hotel de Luna, the officer of the court being Miles Wood, the hotel’s Canadian owner and the recently elected justice of the peace. The horse thieves were promptly locked up in the Camp Grant guardhouse, and none other than Windy Cahill was called in to rivet iron shackles and chains around their ankles.

In his dejection Mackie sank down to a hard sit on the dirt floor, but Kid Antrim clanked around in his shackles and chains, looking at the hasps and locks on the one door, the knit of the stone and mortar foundation, and the upright, overlapping planks that formed the twelve-foot-high walls. Seeing there was about a foot of space for ventilation between the ledge of the walls and the roof overhang, the Kid noted, “I hear the regimental band is playing in the officers’ quarters tonight.”

“So?” Mackie said.

Still looking up, the Kid smiled. “I love music.”

At eight o’clock the Army band commenced their concert with the Civil War song “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” then “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane” and “Silver Threads Among the Gold.”

Kid Antrim was standing on Mackie’s shoulders. “That song was my mother’s favorite,” he said.

With suffering Mackie said, “Joost reach the sill, will ye?”

The Kid got both hands on it and scraped his boots against the planks to get higher, finally achieving enough leverage with both elbows to heave his right leg up and over. Then it was just a matter of hanging on the outside and falling five feet to the ground as the band played “Beautiful Dreamer” and a female contralto sang the lyrics:

Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me,

Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee.

Sounds of the rude world, heard in the day,

Lulled by the moonlight have all passed away!

Cumbered by his shackles, the Kid found it slow going out of the fort, but as he’d predicted, the soldiers on duty were caught up in the music and failed to look in his direction. In fact, Kid Antrim was in the back room of George Atkins’s cantina, having a bartender use a crowbar to pry off Windy Cahill’s rivets, before the sergeant of the guard reported the escapee to Major Compton as he was dancing with his wife.

The Kid did not find a way to free John Mackie, but the Scot was let go when an Army adjutant determined there was insufficient evidence to convict him of horse stealing. Mackie even ended up reenlisting at Fort Walla Walla in Washington and did not retire from the Army until fifteen years later. And it was not until 1920 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that John Mackie died peacefully at the age of seventy-two.

- 4 -

THE KILLER

H
enry Antrim got hired again as a hay reaper, this time for an Army contractor named Sorghum Smith, whose ranch was near Camp Thomas. The Kid’s horse and tack and guns and such had been confiscated in his arrest. Easy enough, for
him
, to steal another horse, but he felt he needed weaponry and finally had to request an advance on his wages from Sorghum Smith. The rancher offered him ten dollars, but Henry said he needed forty. The Kid had a talent for wooing folks into obliging him, and it worked again on Smith, so that the boy came back from the post trader’s store with a six-shooter, a holster, and a fifty-cent box of cartridges.

And then in August of 1877, orphaned by his worthless stepfather, his mother nearly three years gone, his luck took a turn for the worse. Homesick for his friends in the saloons outside Camp Grant, he thought he could sneak back, have himself a time, and get out of the settlement again before Sixth Army officials found out he was there.

The Kid wasn’t yet eighteen but even looked shy of fourteen, being just five and a half feet tall and no more than a hundred fifteen pounds. Ever smiling. And now he was prinked up and citified, in a Sunday-go-to-meeting suit and foulard necktie, with laced black shoes instead of boots and with his felt hat cocked off his head like a pretty child about to be photographed.

Strolling into George Atkins’s Bonita Cantina, he saw some youngish ladies of the evening who were familiars, and he spoke a little with them in Spanish, letting one touch the six-gun stuffed in the front of his trousers as he confided a joke that made the girl giggle.

Kid Antrim, as they knew him, was hunting a card game and found an empty chair at a poker table, its only disadvantage being that Windy Cahill was there. As the Kid took a seat, the stout, thirty-two-year-old farrier was holding forth as was his habit, full of false information and lies. The subject now was Cahill’s free congress with a virgin from Tucson whose ignorance of manly things desperately excited her curiosity. To hear Windy tell it, as a Sixth Army cavalry private he was quite the paramour, and she was so pleased with the overwhelming pleasure of him that she turned to full-time prostitution.

The Kid seemed confused as he anted. “You mean she lived through it?”

Windy eyed him.

“I figured the story would end with you crushing her flat.”

“Are you saying I’m fat, Kid?”

“Oh no. You’re not overweight, Windy. You’re just underheight.”

There was general laughter, and that riled the smithy. Cards were dealt as he thought out an insult. The Kid folded his nothing hand, and Windy finally offered, “I guess you get to know lots about whores hanging out at the Hog Ranch like you do.”

“I
have
received a fine education.”

Windy pretended he was only joshing, grinning as he ruffled Henry’s hair, which Windy knew he hated. The Kid shrugged away from it. Windy said, “Hell, we’re pals, right? We let bygones be bygones.”

The dealer said, “Your bet, Windy.”

Cahill scrutinized his cards and tossed in a nickel on his pair of fours. The cowpoke next to him raised to a quarter, and Cahill folded out of turn so he could face Henry with a policeman’s concern as he solemnly asked, “Would you mind if I asked you about your philandering?”

It was a new word to him. “Philandering?”

Seeming to think the Kid had the same arrangement with the Hog Ranch that John Mackie did, Windy asked with gravity, “Was it your momma who taught you how to pimp?”