The Kid: A Novel (8 page)

It seemed more accusation than compliment.

The Kid hung his head a little.

Bowdre spoke so slowly it was like each word was his unique invention. “He’s a ladies’ man,” he said. “I could tell that from the first instance.”

“Innocence, flair, and helplessness conjoined,” Scurlock said.

To change the subject or give an excuse for the girls’ overfondness, the Kid said, “This being November twenty-third, it’s my eighteenth birthday.”

“
Qué dijo?
” Antonia asked. What’d he say?

Scurlock told his wife, “
Que hoy tiene dieciocho años.
” He has today eighteen years.

Manuela told Charlie, “
Entonces necesitamos una fiesta
.” Then we need a party.

And so Scurlock went off for his fiddle and Bowdre got his squeeze-box and changed into a fresh white shirt and red brocaded vest and the gold-striped trousers that he tucked into his boots. Scurlock and he weren’t dancers, so they played the music and filled their whiskey glasses between songs and drunkenly watched as Manuela and Antonia taught the Kid an old Spanish dance, clicking castanets and clapping their palms and flouncing their skirts in a kind of disdainful, fierce, taunting quarrel whose final goal was seduction.

Scurlock fell asleep around ten, so his wife took him home, but Bowdre just kept tilting his whiskey bottle into his mouth until his hand no longer worked and he fell into a stunned insensibility, finally closing his eyes and snoring.

His wife said she was too excited by the company to sleep, so she stayed up and told Billito about the region. She said the Anglos called them Mexicans, but the people called themselves Spanish, for many still considered themselves citizens of the Imperial Spanish Viceroyalty of the sixteenth century, and even spoke in the formal, older ways of the explorer Coronado or like the characters created by Miguel de Cervantes. Had Billito read
Don Quixote de la Mancha
?

He hadn’t yet but he’d get right to it.

She smiled and said in English, “But you can still call us Mexicans. All the Anglos do.” She flushed a little as she added, “You berry nice to talk with. All days it is only my sister.”

“Well, you got Charlie now,” the Kid said.

Manuela looked across at the whiskeyed, snoring jigger boss. “Oh, heem,” she said. “For heem I am only his servant. We no even married.” She seemed to be sorting out thoughts, and then she turned to the Kid. “I have for you a . . .
regalo de cumpleaños
?”

“Birthday present.”

“Jes.” She then unbuttoned the bodice of her dark woolen dress to expose the full breasts of a girl of eighteen.

Smiling, he said, “
Precioso!
” Beautiful!

She whispered, “You may touch, too.”

The Kid glanced at Charlie.

“He don care.”

The Kid held them in his hands for half a minute, taking uneasy pleasure in it as he wondered what he would be doing next. He withdrew his hands. “They’re exceptional.”

She smiled shyly as she buttoned up her dress. “
Entonces, te gustó tu regalo?
” So, did you like your present?

“Oh yes,” he said. “I’m very, very grateful.” Yet he stood, hiding his erection, and went for his overcoat and hat.

Manuela was surprised and disappointed. “
No te vas a quedar?
” You’re not staying?

“It’s the wanting you,” he said. “I don’t have the discipline to handle it. And my only claim to virtue is my loyalty to my friends.”

*  *  *

The Kid ended up sharing Dick Brewer’s hundred-foot-long adobe ranch house and, with weaponry close at hand, cowboyed the cattle herd with Brewer and the mostly silent Chickasaw, Fred Waite. Waite and the Kid fantasized about owning a ranch together on the Rio Peñasco, but neither was good at husbandry so they were just spinning wool. Waite asked him once, “What do you really want, Kid?
Wanting
comes first, then the getting.”

The Kid gave it so much thought Waite wondered if he’d heard. And then the Kid said, “To belong. To be liked. To be famous. To be feared.”

Wordless, Waite just nodded.

*  *  *

The hands hunted snow geese for a Boxing Day dinner with John Tunstall, who sought to preserve his English customs even in the “Wild West.” Watching from afar, Harry saw Waite and Widenmann fire into an overhead flock with shotguns and fail to bring anything down while the Kid lifted revolvers in his right and left hands and nailed geese with one shot from each gun. The felled birds flumped to the ground near the Englishman, and as Harry ran to get them he yelled, “How absolutely marvelous, Kid! That’s really so cracking well done!”

George Coe was visiting that December 26 and later recalled that as the Kid painted butter over a crackling cooked goose the Englishman confided, “Billy’s the finest young chap I’ve ever met. Each day he’s a new and welcome revelation. I suspect there’s nothing he won’t do to please me, and in requital I shall yet make a proper gentleman of him.”

Before dinner the Englishman heaved in a heavy box and handed out to each of his gunslingers there the mutually advantageous gift of fifty rounds of .44-40 cartridges. “I do hope you shan’t need to use them in anger,” Harry said, and then he entertained them by singing the British anthem “God Save the Queen,” giving emphasis to the stanza:

O Lord our God arise,

Scatter her enemies,

And make them fall.

Confound their politics.

Frustrate their knavish tricks.

On Thee our hopes we fix.

God save us all.

*  *  *

Evenings in January were spent by the hearth fire with the cowhands slouching in chairs or on the floor as they read books on loan from Alex McSween’s hundred-volume home library. Because of the author’s surname, Dick chose Reverend Ebenezer Brewer’s popular
Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
. And Billy became absorbed in
Oliver Twist
, seeing his impoverished childhood self in the orphan Oliver, recognizing in his own Wichita and Silver City experiences many bullying oafs like Bill Sikes and juvenile pickpockets like the Artful Dodger. And he found himself pining for a sweet and nurturing Miss Rose Maylie, who so reminded him of his mother.

The Kid asked Dick, “Have you read
Oliver Twist
?”

Brewer turned a page of the Brewer book. “Yes.”

“Me too,” said Waite.

The Kid was not yet fully acquainted with the locale, so he asked, “Who’s the Fagin of Lincoln County?”

Without looking up, they both replied, “Major Murphy.”

- 7 -

THE RIVALS

L
awrence Gustave Murphy was born in County Wexford, Ireland, in 1831, or so he said. Hoping to be ordained a Catholic priest, he graduated from St. Patrick’s College at Maynooth. But then he was expelled from the seminary for some infraction, and in disgust or shame he fled the potato famine by emigrating to Buffalo, New York. Enlisting at twenty-one in the US Army’s 5th Infantry and serving in Texas, Murphy rose to the rank of hard-bitten sergeant before he was commissioned a first lieutenant in the New Mexico Volunteers in 1861. Became Kit Carson’s regimental adjutant and quartermaster. When the Confederate Army retreated from the Southwest, the Volunteers found field exercise in slaughtering the ever-vexing Navajos and Apaches. All the killing gave Murphy a certain outlook.

Thin, five feet nine, mustached and goateed, with ever-squinting green eyes and a leonine head of Irish red hair, Murphy could be suave and gregarious in good company, but a childhood in the Great Famine and a hard, violent life in the Army had given him the fierce, canny, adamant disposition of a hungry dog. He made it to the rank of captain at Fort Sumner, then was a brevet major and commanding officer at Fort Stanton before mustering out in 1866 to form L. G. Murphy & Co. with another former officer, Lieutenant Colonel Emil Fritz, who handled the finances loaned to them by a wealthy entrepreneur. At first they operated a civilian brewery, saloon, and store for provisions at Fort Stanton, but a fracas with an Army captain got them evicted from government property and they shifted their operation nine miles northeast to the village of Lincoln.

Emil Fritz, the cofounder of the House, was not yet forty-two but sick unto death with heart and kidney diseases. An osteopath falsified the German’s medical exam so he could sign up for a ten-thousand-dollar policy from the Merchants Life Assurance Co. of New York in order to give his sister in America a nest egg. Emil named Alexander McSween the executor of his estate and then voyaged back to Stuttgart for an
auf Wiedersehen
with his family. In June 1874 he finally passed away. Would have left a gaping hole in the establishment were it not for James Joseph Dolan stepping up like he was Murphy’s favored son and the store was his entitlement.

Jimmy, as he was called, was born in County Galway, Ireland in 1848, the son of a tallow chandler. Came over as a boy and attended a Christian Brothers grammar school while inhabiting the Five Points slum of New York City, but he got fed up with education and took a full-time job at twelve in a lingerie store. Enlisted as a drummer boy with the New York Zouaves in 1863, reenlisted to massacre Indians in Kansas, mustered out of the Army at Fort Stanton in 1869, and hired on as a clerk with Fritz and Murphy, having soldiered for the officers and seen they were kindred spirits. A few years later, when the L. G. Murphy & Co. provisions store and brewery was at the fringe of Fort Stanton and the village of Lincoln was still called San Placito, the fiery Dolan had been prosecuted for murder but was acquitted for Wild West reasons.

Oh, but he was a hotheaded pipsqueak, just a weedy five feet two, and as sourly pretty as a petulant damsel with his wavy, brown, ambrosial locks and ever-pouting disposition. Still, L. G. Murphy was so fond of him that most mistook them as doting father and son, and there was unseemly gossip about them sharing a bed.

In the fall of 1874 Murphy held the grand opening of the House and permitted himself to be captured by a wet-plate collodion camera for a formal carte de visite, with a glowering, wool-suited Dolan standing beside his seated boss, a hand affectionately atop Murphy’s right shoulder as the brevet major, probate judge, and wealthy entrepreneur seemed to gaze off at his fabulous future.

The House was the third largest privately owned building in all of the New Mexico Territory and the first with a pitched roof. Within was a jammed store, a saloon, post office, savings and loan, a second-floor Masonic hall, and a lavish, high-ceilinged residence tidied by the housekeeper, Mrs. Lloyd. All of it made possible by overcharging for necessaries, practicing usury through their bank, selling deeds to properties the company didn’t own and then foreclosing, and by finagling to win lucrative government contracts to be the sole suppliers of meat, produce, hay, charcoal, sugar, whiskey, and other commodities—much of it acquired illegally—to the region’s Indian reservations and Army posts.

And some tricky accounting was afoot, with L. G. Murphy & Co. getting paid by the federal government for fictitious sales of hundreds of cattle from L. G.’s thirty-thousand-acre Carrizozo Springs ranch, for which of course he had no clear title. With Sheriff William J. Brady his employee and the highest government authority in Lincoln County, there was little Murphy did that was judged illegal by civic authorities.

Yet, in spite of all that financial heft and those seemingly favorable circumstances, by 1877 the overextended House had fallen on hard times and Lawrence Gustave Murphy and his partners were scrounging for money. Alexander McSween knew far too much about the operations of the House, so when he demanded payment of his immense legal bills, Murphy could do nothing more than transfer ownership to him of six acres on the plaza and his former adobe house next to the Wortley Hotel for “$1.00 and other good and sufficient considerations.” Soon after that Murphy found out he had ravaging intestinal cancer, for which he claimed his doctor recommended he drink as much whiskey as he could handle to dull the pain. Warned that he had less than a year of his crooked life left, worn down with illness and misfortune, and in a perpetual state of inebriation, Murphy was convinced to withdraw from running the House, deeding it over to Jimmy Dolan, whom he also designated heir of his estate. The firm became Jas. J. Dolan & Co., and under that scheming management could have achieved prosperity again but for the undercutting competition of J. H. Tunstall & Co. General Merchandise.

*  *  *

Kid Bonney heard much of that from Waite and Brewer at nights and on the jouncing ride up to Lincoln from the Ruidoso ranch along the Ham Mills trail. Hitching his horse in front of Tunstall’s store, he looked kitty-corner to the wide, handsome, two-storied House, with its second-floor veranda, which in the future would have dual wings of stair steps. And below in the shade of the veranda was L. G. Murphy aslant in a ladder-back chair, a quart of hooch cozied by his gloved hands and his overcoat collar up in defense against the cold air. Seeing something that troubled him, Murphy hurtfully stood up and tottered to the House’s entrance, jarring open the front door to shout inside.

The Kid heard a man say, “They have a hankering for my hide,” and he turned to see Alexander A. McSween walking eastward from his home next door to the Tunstall store, where he leased his law office. Waite, Brewer, and the Kid followed him inside.

McSween was a haughty, defiant Canadian in his thirties with a horseshoe mustache, a ribbony bow tie, and a Prince Albert suit underneath an Inverness topcoat. Educated for the Presbyterian ministry, Alex left it to enroll in law school at Washington University in St. Louis, staying with that program for just the first year of the usual two before hanging out his shingle in Eureka, Kansas. In 1873 he married Susan Hummer, and because of his financial malfeasance—but lying that it was due to his asthma—the couple fled to anything-goes New Mexico Territory and found out by chance there was no attorney in all of Lincoln County. At once it seemed to him there was a lucrative vacuum he could fill.