The Pot Thief Who Studied Billy the Kid (37 page)

From his scuffed riding boots to his sweat-stained cowboy hat, he looked like a character from a spaghetti western. His frame was scrawny and twisted, his face lean and angular. Scars, bumps and missing teeth indicated a life of rough ridesf rough over rocky trails.

“How did you get the nickname ‘Cactus’?”

“
S
pent most of my life
prospecting in the Mogollon
s
. Folks started calling me cactus cause they knowed I had to be tough as a cactus to survive up there.”

“Where did you live?”

“Mostly in the mines I was workin’. A man’s got to dig into the side of the mountain to find ore up
t
here. There ain’t much flat ground. After you done all t
hat digging, you got a place
out of the weather even if you don’t strike nuthin.”

“
S
ounds li
k
e a tough life.”

He shook his head and took a long drag from his smoke. “Best life
t
here is. My daddy worked all his life in the
Little Fannie Mine.
They let him go be
cause of the panic of 1930
. His first wife was w
ashed away in the flood
of ‘23
. He married my mother a few years later, so he h
ad a young wife and a new young’
un to support but
didn’t have two dimes to rub together. He took the family back to Silver
City
where h
e
’d
growed up
. I didn’t take to city life
. S
o w
hen I hit sixteen,
I
bought
a burro and headed into the mountains.
But I never worked for no mining company
cause
I saw how the
y
treated my daddy
.
”

Cactus struck another match and li
t the kindling in the fire pit.

“Gets chilly when the sun goes down,” he said.
“You got any whiskey?”

He must have
been watching all along
.

I handed him a glass and poured us each some rye.

After our first sips – his was actually more of a guzzle
–
I asked him when he had s
top
ped prospecting.

“It was near ten years ago. I’d just sold some silver and was fixin
’
to buy supplies when a
fella
in
the feed store overheard the
clerk call my name. He asked
if I was kin to the Jack Truesdell went to school with Bill
y
the Kid, and I told him that was my daddy.”

“Your father went to school with Bill
y
the Kid?”

“
Yep
. That’s what got me this here job. That fella was from
these parts. H
e told me I could have a job at the museum
in Lincoln
tellin’ folks about
Billy
the Kid. I was nearin’ seventy, and getting up and down that mountain weren’t getting’ no easier, so I th
rowed
my knapsack in h
i
s truck and moved to Li
n
coln.
>
”

He held out his glass, and I gave him a refill. I gave myself one to
o
so as not to lose ground. After all, it was my bottle.

He laughed. “I didn’t last long. You can tell I’m a fell
a
likes to talk. But they wanted me to stick to stuff they wrote down. I told ‘em I don’t read too good, and they said I could just mem
orize it
. But
my
memory
was worse
than
my
readin’, so I quit before they could fire me and took a job here mowin’ the fields, pickin’ up the tras
h
the tourists throw out
and keepin’ the tack room nice and tidy.”

“How could your father have gone to school with Billy the Kid? That was ages ago.”

“Daddy was born
a year
or two
after
Billy. When
he was twelve
, Silver City got its first school, and the two of them started together. I growed up on the stories daddy told me
about him and Billy. They was best friends. Seven years later, Billy was dead. Daddy lived to be
over
eighty
just like me. Us Truesdells are a hardy bunch
.
He always wondered how things might
’a
worked out if Billy hadn’t been double-crossed by
General Wallace.”

I remembered
the publisher’s introduction
to
Ben-Hur
claimed Wallace wrote the final
scenes after returning from a clandestine meeting with
Billy the Kid.

So I asked
Cactus
about the double cross. He told me what his father had told him and recommended I drop by the museum to learn more.
By the time he had complete
d
the story, the bottle was half empty.

He tossed
another
dry log on the fire. “I can’t take the cold like I used to. My hands is cold. My ears is cold. Even this here scar is cold,” he said, pointing to a disfigured patch on his right cheek. ”I guess no blood can get there.”

“How’
d
that happen?”

He laughed. “Done it to myself. I was working a
claim
on the east side of B
ear
wallow Mountain when one
of
my back tooths started hurting something fierce. I
tried to pri
z
e it out with my jackknife, but it wouldn’t budge. The pain got so bad, I tried to knock it out with my little rock hammer, but I could
n’t
get a good swing at it. I decided to just wait it out. But after two days, I couldn’
t take
no more. I carried a little .22 pistol in those day to fight off varmints and claim jumpers. So I decided to blow the tooth out.”

“You shot your tooth!”

He gave a quick nod.
“First I
priz
ed
off
a
slug and dumped out half the powder from the casing. I carved the slug down so it was smaller and more pointy. Then I put it back on the casing. I put the muzzle at the bottom of the tooth and aimed up a bit.
I guess it
hurt, but the toothache was so bad, I hardly
noticed
it. I took a swig of whiskey and rolled it around. I hated to waste the whisky, but I figured I didn’t need blood and tooth pieces in my gut, so I spit it out. Cout it outrse I’d had a few swallers before shooting the
tooth just to steady my aim. A flap of meat and skin was hanging off the hole in my cheek. I swabbed it with bacon grease and pushed it back in place. Then I tied my bandanna around my head and went to sleep.”

“How could you sleep after that?”

“I hadn’t slept for two nights. Once that tooth stopped throbbing like a bull’s heart, I dropped right off. The next morning my mouth tasted like I’d ate a coyote, but the hole was already beginning to scab.
A week later it was right as rain.
”

It was dark now and the fire cast shifting shadows on his face.
“That
’s
an awfully big scar for just a .22.”
I said.

“It might have been infested,” he said. “It
bled off and on for days.”

“You said it scabbed over and healed in a week.”

He remo
v
ed his ha
t
and
scratched his head.
There were a few patches o
f grey stubble, a dent the size of a tablespoon and a long jagged scar.

He put the hat back on. “Guess my memory ain’t so good these days.” H
e
held his glass between the fire and his eyes. “This shore is good whiskey. Lot bet
t
er’n that stuff I had up on the mountain.”

38

Truesdell
left around
eleven
. I walked back
to the
Apple House
and found
Susannah had left the door unlocked
f
or me
.

People who live in big cities may find that scary, but it didn’t strike me as strange. I live in a big city, part of
which is dangerous
,
I’m sorry to say. But even in Albuquerque there’s an un
derstanding of what the rest of the state is like. Villages where people go out at three in the morning to open and close gates in
acequias
.
Places where
there are no bad neighborhoods because there are no neighborhood
s
at all. There is only the village.

The people are not better or worse than city people. There are just too few of them
for things to go
too far wrong
. They
live in a different setting. If
El Bastardo
lived in certain neighborhoods in Albuquerque, there would be others like him. If he was bested in a bar fight, they would urge him to get even.
Offer to help.
Th
at
’
s how gangs start.

But in La Reina, he extends his hand and says
“no hard feelings.” People in v
illages may not always like each other, but they almost always coexist peaceably.