The Kid: A Novel (32 page)

Garrett gave it serious thought and offered, “Won’t be very special after six days dead in a railroad car.”

The Kid smiled. “I’ll have to avoid it then. Eating seafood that old could kill me.”

*  *  *

The Kid’s cell in the House was a high-ceilinged, oak-floored, twelve-by-twelve upstairs room with floral wallpaper on one end, iron jail bars bolted against the east wall, and unscreened, double-hung, north and east windows. Entry to L. G. Murphy’s former bedroom was only through his sitting room, now Sheriff Garrett’s office. Crucially, the fireplace and chimney were outside the jail bars, so there could be no shinnying to freedom. The hallway above the staircase crossed to a room formerly occupied by Mrs. Lloyd, Murphy’s housekeeper, but now was a jail for some petty thieves and public brawlers. A locked storeroom next to that was the armory.

Recognizing that Billy the Kid was ever a flight risk and that it was only a sixteen-foot jump from window to ground, Garrett chained the Kid’s ankle irons to the floor with just four feet of leeway and assigned deputies Jim Bell and Bob Olinger to share his watching.

Within the Kid’s earshot, the sheriff told his deputies, “You know the desperate character of this culprit. He is daring and unscrupulous and he will sacrifice the lives of any man who stands between him and liberty.”

Crossing his eyes and dangling his tongue, the Kid devil-horned his head with his fingers from behind the jail bars. Deputy Jim Bell smiled.

James W. Bell was a kind and likable man of twenty-seven who was raised in Georgia, failed at gold mining in White Oaks, and joined the posse that mistakenly killed Jimmy Carlyle. He took the ever-risky government job just to have a regular income and was one of the deputy marshals who escorted Bonney, Rudabaugh, and Wilson to Las Vegas. Whenever he forced the Kid to do anything, he first apologized by saying, “I’m just doin whatsoever’s required.” And once Bell said, “Cain’t never could work it out in my mind why a fella like you, sharp as a tack, would break bad like you done.” Always considerate, he even asked permission of the convict to continue his slow and preoccupied reading of
Ben-Hur
, fearing the governor’s name on the novel would be offensive to the Kid. It wasn’t.

Whereas Olinger continued his arrogant, sneering, bullying ways. The Kid would be on his cot, peaceably reading Ned Buntline’s
The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main
, and Olinger would rock back in his Victorian dining chair and admire his cocked Whitney shotgun as he irritated the Kid with taunts.

Olinger said, “Oh, but I would love it if you tried to escape. I got fat ten-gauge shells with eighteen buckshot waiting in both barrels. Would blow your pretty face to smithereens. You’d look like a spill of spaghetti and sauce on the floor.”

Another time he said, “Sometimes when they hang a man, things get catawampus and he strangles for a long, long time, gargling, glugging, his legs dancing an Irish jig. And sometimes, maybe in your case, his neck is so puny his head snaps right off with the weight of the drop. You hear a
punk
like the pop of a champagne cork. A fountain of blood wetting all the gawkers. Wouldn’t I love to see that!”

And he loved talking about the murder of John Tunstall on the Ham Mills trail. Hated it that he was in the larger group that failed to give chase, but his brother Wallace was with the posse that ran down the flummoxed Englishman. “Said after your Harry was hit he wet his trousers like a diapered child. Be sure to empty yourself beforehand so you don’t piss yourself on the gallows.”

Olinger once took his time loading his Smith & Wesson Schofield .44 pistol, then softly laid it on the floor and kicked it between the iron bars near the Kid’s stocking feet. With his shotgun in the crook of his left arm, Olinger grinned and gently said, “Reach for it, Billy.”

“I’d still be jailed.”

“Well then,” Olinger said, and he got up with his big ring of keys and unlocked the jail door, then the Baldur padlock that chained the Kid to the floor. “This is your chance, sweetie pie. Folks say you’re so quick you could dive and fan four shots into me before I even got this Whitney cocked.”

The Kid looked and looked at the pistol, then sneered at the deputy and kicked the Schofield back to him.

Olinger smirked. “Scared, huh?”

The Kid confided to Sheriff Garrett that “Olinger’s needling gets me so hot I can hardly contain myself.”

Garrett shrugged. “Well, good thing you’re contained, then.”

*  *  *

Gottfried Gauss had shifted occupations yet again: from chuck wagon cook for John Tunstall on his Los Feliz ranch to a general handyman in Lincoln and then to a job as a half-blind factotum for the courthouse and jail. His quarters were in the old bunkhouse and shared with Sam Wortley when Wortley felt the need to get away from his hotel. It was Gauss who brought the Kid his three meals a day from Wortley’s or Frank McCullum’s eatery, and as he sat and watched Billy eat he’d smile as if each scrumptious dish were his own creation. His English was fair, but he’d found less ridicule in silence, so he generally walked around unnoticed, humming Brahms’s Lullaby when sweeping up or hoeing his garden patch.

Looking out the north window, the Kid could see the newly leafing branches of a Rocky Mountain maple tree and beyond it the few adobe remains of Alex and Susan McSween’s house, now being overgrown with Russian thistle and foxtail grass. He avoided the northern window.

The east window he liked. Underneath it and the Kid’s cell was a first-floor post office run by Ben Ellis, Isaac’s son, who often slept there. After getting their mail, various Lincoln residents would pause below the east window so the Kid could lean out on the sash and chat. Each afternoon, Juan Patrón pitched him an apple and even once tossed up a small box of Hasheesh Candy, which called itself “enchantment confectionized” and was said to cure “nervousness, weakness, and melancholy.”

Saturnino Baca’s little girls visited frequently but usually only blushed and giggled.

Isaac Ellis was cradling mail-order packages under each arm when he whistled and the Kid poked his head out. “Don’t know if apologies are in order. I was just abiding the law, but that I did you no good is a fact. I’m real sorry you have to get hanged. Course you brung it on your own self, but that don’t give me no sort of satisfaction.” And then Ellis walked east to his store.

Even the young schoolteacher Susan Gates strolled over to gaze upward and softly talk with him, saying, “I heard folks saying you’d become a nuisance, but I never believed all the evil they associated you with. Excuse my ending with a preposition. Seems to me you’re unfairly maligned and misunderstood.”

“My, how very sweet and pretty you are, Miss Gates!”

She shyly looked to the ground and may have whispered, “Thank you.”

“Why is it I never courted you?”

She seemed to find fascination in her shoes. “I would have liked that,” she admitted. Then in embarrassment she hurried off.

Sheriff Pat Garrett shared lunches with the Kid a few afternoons and in an offhand way hoped he could get Billy to admit to his misdeeds, make, as they say, a clean breast of it. The sheriff could have been a reverend as he sat in Murphy’s old dining room chair and hunched forward over his lengthy legs and oh so earnestly investigated the Kid’s record.

Calmly relighting a churchwarden pipe, he said, “The county justice system needs to clear its books. I’d be grateful if you was to erase some felony cases for me, free me for other things.”

“Will that make your pony gallop?”

The sheriff twitched a smile. “Can’t hurt.”

Like a Roman emperor, the Kid languidly waved a hand. “Proceed.”

“Well now, it’s been said that you have killed a man for every year of your life.”

The Kid frowned and made a
pff
sound.

“How many, then?”

“Just two that I know of. Windy Cahill in Arizona. And Joe Grant at Fort Sumner. And those were both in self-defense.”

“Are you forgetting Sheriff Brady and George Hindman?”

The Kid grinned. “Objection: asked and answered.”

“All right, what about Buckshot Roberts?”

“My holster was hanging on a peg and I was still a hop-along inside the restaurant on account a my hurting leg. Heard the loudness and saw a glide of smoke under the porch roof and to my startlement Charlie and George and John was lying down in gunshot misery underneath it. Roberts was already lurching off.”

Sheriff Garrett rocked back in the walnut chair and sucked on his pipe as he looked down his tilted-up nose in a scornful, assessing way. “You appear to have a plausible excuse for each and every crime charged against you.”

“Well, I can’t alter what’s true. Wouldn’t that be so-called perjury?”

“And how about Jimmy Carlyle? Murdering a innocent hostage may have been your most detestable crime.”

“Had no hand in it.”

“Rudabaugh said you did.”

“And liars lie.” The Kid lifted his tray of lunch from his thighs and got up from his stool. “I’m tired of this,” he said. “I have to go lie down now.”

“Are you feeling the prickings of conscience?”

The Kid wrenched off his boots and said, “An old vaquero saying has it that there’s a thin line between catching an outlaw and becoming one.”

Later, Pat Garrett told Ash Upson, “In our conversations, he would sometimes seem on the point of opening his heart, either in confession or justification. But it always ended in an unspoken intimation that it would all be to no avail, as no one would give him credence, and he scorned begging for sympathy.”

*  *  *

The Kid had been incarcerated in the Lincoln jail for just a week when, on April 28, he decided.

Sheriff Garrett was collecting county taxes in White Oaks and the Kid heard Olinger unlock the far jail to walk four Tularosa no-goods down the stairs and across to the Wortley Hotel for their evening dinner. Ben Ellis would have joined them for the free eats and to help with policing. And Gottfried Gauss was generally in his bunkhouse by six. So the Kid was alone with Jim Bell. He went to the jail bars and called downstairs, “Jim? I need to go outside.”

Jim called back. “You mean to the latrine?”

“Uh-huh.”

The Kid heard the high-pitched scrape of a kitchen chair on the plank floor and then heavy bootfalls as Deputy Sheriff Bell walked to the bottom of the staircase and called up, “But it’s not full night yet!”

“Still, I’m feeling an urgency.”

The deputy seemed confused in his movements as he called, “I’m fixin to be there directly. I just gotta find that dang ring of keys.” A cabinet door was opened and closed, a few drawers were pulled. “Well, finally,” Bell shouted upstairs. “Cain’t never can figure out Olinger’s mentality.” His boots rasped on the stairs as he climbed. “Whatsoever oughta be out in plain sight, he hides it.”

The Kid was standing meekly in the middle of his cell, his manacled hands held low, a smear of a smile welcoming the hatless jailer, who smiled involuntarily because that was his way, and then Bell hunted the big ring for the jail door key and rattled open the lock. The hinges were freshly oiled but still sang with his shove, and then Bell was gingerly and ever watchfully genuflecting to unfasten the padlock at the floor hitch, freeing the Kid’s shackles from their four-foot limitation.

“Like we do,” Bell said, nodding sideways. “Me behind you.”

The Kid shuffled forward and downstairs. April was chilly at that high elevation. The air was scented with juniper fireplace smoke, and he could almost see his breath. Walking into the jail latrine, he heard Bell complaining, “Look at those saddles and bridles hung up on the fence rail where any passerby could steal em. That just dills my pickle!”

The Kid shook to finish his relieving, buttoned up his trousers, and went out into sweeter air.

Bell trustingly asked, “You want some of my coffee inside? It’s already been saucered and blowed.”

“I’ll pass, thanks. It’s late.” The Kid walked back to the jail with a quicker pace as Bell again looked to the corral, worrying about the horse tack out for all to see.

And then Bell called, “Why you hurryin, Billy?”

With a two-foot chain between the shackles on his ankles the Kid could still take the sixteen stairs two at a time, and he was fast enough that the deputy was a full flight behind him. The Kid’s iron manacles were one-size-fits-all, and he hadn’t let on that his often-mocked hands were too peewee for them. He twisted his left hand out, then his right, and dangled the iron cuffs from their chain as he hid upstairs, hugging the hallway wall and hearing Bell pounding upward.

“This ain’t funny, Billy!” Bell called out, and then the Kid was in front of him on the landing and he swung his iron manacles hard into the deputy’s head, the force of the double blows gashing his scalp and fracturing his skull. “Ow!” he cried, and his hands flew up to his injury. “Why d’ja do that?” The first spurt of blood became red seaweed over his forehead and face until there was nothing but blood. Bell dizzily bent over and braced himself with his hands on his knees. “Oh my!” he said. “I’m beside myself.”

“I didn’t want to hurt you, Jim. I’m only trying to save my life.”

Even watching his lifeblood flood the floor, Bell still upheld that “I’m just doin my duty, Billy.” And then he looked up at the Kid, his doleful, frustrated, hazel eyes seeming puzzled by the Kid’s wrath and unfairness until he found the fierceness to lunge forward to tackle the Kid, who swiftly fended off the ever-weakening man. The deputy then went to his holster, but the Kid laid his left hand on Bell’s feeble right and with just an effortless twist yanked the .44 free.

“Hold up your hands and surrender,” the Kid said.

“Won’t do that, Billy.”

Without lifting the pistol from his hip, the Kid shot him as he turned away.

The bullet pierced under his right arm and skewered his torso. Bell glanced down at his chest and hugged its new pain with his arms as he said in astonishment at the Kid’s treachery, “You took my
life
!” And then he fell backward down the staircase until he could right himself and flounder to the first floor.