The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

by Michael Ondaatje

  Jim’s grandfather asked him if he would like to come over and have a beer after the film, but Frank James said ‘No, but thank you’ and tore up the next ticket. He was by then an alcoholic.

  *

  Miss Angela Dickinson of Tucson

  tall legs like a dancer

  set the 80s style

  by shaving them hairless

  keeps saying

  I’m too tall for you Billy

  but we walk around a bit

  buy a bottle and she stands

  showing me her thighs

  look Billy look at this

  she folded on the sheet

  tapping away at her knees

  leans back waving feet at me

  catching me like a butterfly

  in the shaved legs in her Tucson room

  *

  A river you could get lost in

  and the sun a flashy hawk

  on the edge of it

  a mile away you see the white path

  of an animal moving through water

  you can turn a hundred yard circle

  and the horse bends dribbles his face

  you step off and lie in it propping your head

  till dusk and cold and the horse shift you

  and you look up and moon a frozen bird’s eye

  *

  His stomach was warm

  remembered this when I put my hand into

  a pot of luke warm tea to wash it out

  dragging out the stomach to get the bullet

  he wanted to see when taking tea with Sallie Chisum in Paris Texas

  With Sallie Chisum in Paris Texas

  he wanted to see when taking tea

  dragging out the stomach to get the bullet

  a pot of luke warm tea to wash it out

  remembered this when I put my hand into

  his stomach was warm

  *

  Pat Garrett, ideal assassin. Public figure, the mind of a doctor, his hands hairy, scarred, burned by rope, on his wrist there was a purple stain there all his life. Ideal assassin for his mind was unwarped. Had the ability to kill someone on the street walk back and finish a joke. One who had decided what was right and forgot all morals. He was genial to everyone even his enemies. He genuinely enjoyed people, some who were odd, the dopes, the thieves. Most dangerous for them, he understood them, what motivated their laughter and anger, what they liked to think about, how he had to act for them to like him. An academic murderer—only his vivacious humour and diverse interests made him the best kind of company. He would listen to people like Rudabaugh and giggle at their escapades. His language was atrocious in public, yet when alone he never swore.

  At the age of 15 he taught himself French and never told anyone about it and never spoke to anyone in French for the next 40 years. He didnt even read French books.

  Between the ages of 15 and 18 little was heard of Garrett. In Juan Para he bought himself a hotel room for two years with money he had saved, and organised a schedule to learn how to drink. In the first three months he forced himself to disintegrate his mind. He would vomit everywhere. In a year he could drink two bottles a day and not vomit. He began to dream for the first time in his life. He would wake up in the mornings, his sheets soaked in urine 40% alcohol. He became frightened of flowers because they grew so slowly that he couldnt tell what they planned to do. His mind learned to be superior because of the excessive mistakes of those around him. Flowers watched him.

  After two years he could drink anything, mix anything together and stay awake and react just as effectively as when sober. But he was now addicted, locked in his own game. His money was running out. He had planned the drunk to last only two years, now it continued into new months over which he had no control. He stole and sold himself to survive. One day he was robbing the house of Juanita Martinez, was discovered by her, and collapsed in her living room. In about six months she had un-iced his addiction. They married and two weeks later she died of a consumption she had hidden from him.

  What happened in Garrett’s mind no one knows. He did not drink, was never seen. A month after Juanita Garrett’s death he arrived in Sumner.

  PAULITA MAXWELL:

  I remember the first day Pat Garrett

  ever set foot in Fort Sumner. I was a

  small girl with dresses at my shoe-tops

  and when he came to our house and

  asked for a job, I stood behind my

  brother Pete and stared at him in open

  eyed wonder; he had the longest legs

  I’d ever seen and he looked so comical

  and had such a droll way of talking

  that after he was gone, Pete and I had

  a good laugh about him.

  His mind was clear, his body able to drink, his feelings, unlike those who usually work their own way out of hell, not cynical about another’s incapacity to get out of problems and difficulties. He did ten years of ranching, cow punching, being a buffalo hunter. He married Apolinaria Gutierrez and had five sons. He had come to Sumner then, mind full of French he never used, everything equipped to be that rare thing—a sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane

  (Miss Sallie Chisum, later Mrs. Roberts, was living in Roswell in 1924, a sweet faced, kindly old lady of a thousand memories of frontier days.)

  ON HER HOUSE

  The house was full of people all the time

  the ranch was a little world in itself

  I couldn’t have been lonesome if I had tried

  Every man worth knowing in the Southwest,

  and many not worth knowing, were guests

  one time or another.

  What they were made no difference in their welcome

  Sometimes a man would ride up in a hurry

  eat a meal in a hurry and depart in a hurry

  Billy the Kid would come in often

  and sometimes stayed for a week or two.

  I remember how frightened I was the first time he came.

  *

  Forty miles ahead of us, in almost a straight line, is the house. Angela D and I on horses moving towards it, me bringing her there. Even now, this far away, I can imagine them moving among the rooms. It is nine in the morning. They are leaning back in their chairs after their slow late Saturday breakfast. John with the heels of his brown boots on the edge of the table in the space he cleared of his plate and cup and cutlery, the cup in his hands in his lap. The table with four plates—two large two small. The remnants of bacon fat and eggs on the larger ones, the black crumbs of toast butter and marmalade (Californian) on the others. One cup in a saucer, one saucer that belonged to the cup that is in John Chisum’s hands now. Across the table on the other side is Sallie, in probably her long brown and yellow dress, the ribbon down her front to the waist with pale blue buttons, a frill on either side of her neck along her shoulders. By now she would have moved the spare chair so she too could put her feet up, barefoot as always, her toes crinkling at the wind that comes from the verandah door. Her right arm would be leaning against the table and now and then she’ll scrape the bottom of her cup against the saucer and drink some of the coffee, put it down and return the fingers of her right hand to bury them in the warm of her hair. They do not talk much, Sallie and John Chisum, but from here I can imagine the dialogue of noise—the scraping cup, the tilting chair, the cough, the suction as an arm lifts off a table breaking the lock that was formed by air and the wet of the surface.

  On other days they would go their own ways. Chisum would be up earlier than dawn and gone before Sallie even woke and rolled over in bed, her face blind as a bird in the dark. It was only later, when the sun eventually reached the bed and slid over her eyes, that she slowly leaned up to find her body, clothesless, had got cold and pulling the sheet from the strong tuck fold at the foot of the bed brings it to her, wraps it around her while she sits in bed, the fists of her feet against her thighs trying to discover which was colder—the flesh at her fee
t or the flesh at her thighs, hugging the sheet to her tight until it would be a skin. Pretending to lock her arms over it as if a tight dress, warming her breasts with her hands through the material.

  Once last year seeing her wrapped I said, Sallie, know what a madman’s skin is? And I showed her, filling the automatic indoor bath with warm water and lifting her and dropping her slow into the bath with the sheet around her and then heaving her out and saying that’s what it is, that white thing round you. Try now to dig yourself out of it. Placed her in the bed and watched her try to escape it then.

  On weekdays anyway, she’d sit like that on the bed, the sheet tight around her top and brought down to her belly, her legs having to keep themselves warm. Listening for noises around the house, the silence really, knowing John had gone, just leaving a list of things he wanted her to do. She would get up and after a breakfast that she would eat wandering around the house slowly, she would begin the work. Keeping the books, dusting his reading books, filling the lamps in the afternoon—they being emptied in the early morning by John to avoid fire danger when the sun took over the house and scorched it at noon, or dropping sideways in the early afternoon sent rays horizontal through the doors and windows. No I forgot, she had stopped that now. She left the paraffin in the lamps; instead had had John build shutters for every door and window, every hole in the wall. So that at eleven in the morning all she did was close and lock them all until the house was silent and dark blue with sunless quiet. For four hours. Eleven till three. A time when, if inside, as I was often, your footsteps sounded like clangs over the floors, echoes shuddering across the rooms. And Sallie like a ghost across the room moving in white dresses, her hair knotted as always at the neck and continuing down until it splayed and withered like eternal smoke halfway between the shoulder blades and the base of cobble spine.

  Yes. In white long dresses in the dark house, the large bones somehow taking on the quietness of the house. Yes I remember. After burning my legs in the fire and I came to their house, it must have been my second visit and Sallie had begun using the shutters at eleven. And they brought the bed out of the extra bedroom and propped me up at one end of the vast living room of their bungalow. And I sat there for three days not moving an inch, like some dead tree witnessing the tides or the sun and the moon taking over from each other as the house in front of me changed colour—the night, the early morning yellow, the gradual move to dark blue at 11 o clock, the new white 4 o clock sun let in, later the gradual growing dark again.

  For three days, my head delirious so much I thought I was going blind twice a day, recognising no one, certainly not the Chisums, for I had been brought out cold and dropped on their porch by someone who had gone on without waiting even for water for himself. And Sallie I suppose taking the tent sheet off my legs each morning once the shutters closed. No. Again. Sallie approaching from the far end of the room like some ghost. I didn’t know who it was. A tray of things in her right hand, a lamp in the other.

  Me screaming stop stop STOP THERE you’re going to fall on me! My picture now sliding so she with her tray and her lamp jerked up to the ceiling and floated down calm again and jerked to the ceiling and floated down calm again and continued forward crushing me against the wall only I didnt feel anything yet. And Sallie I suppose taking the sheet off my legs and putting on the fan so they became cold and I started to feel them again. Then starting to rub and pour calamine like ice only it felt like the tongue of a very large animal my god I remember each swab felt like the skin and flesh had been moved off completely leaving only raw bone riddled with loose nerves being blown about and banging against each other from just her slow breath.

  In the long twenty-yard living-dining room I remember the closing of shutters, with each one the sudden blacking out of clarity in a section of the room, leaving fewer arcs of sun each time digging into the floor. Sallie starting from one end and disappearing down to the far end leaving black behind her as she walked into the remaining light, making it all a cold darkness. Then in other rooms not seen by me. Then appearing vast in the thick blue in her long white dress, her hands in the pockets strolling in the quiet, because of her tallness the hips moving first, me at the far end all in black.

  Her shoes off, so silent, she moves a hand straying over the covers of John’s books, till she comes and sits near me and puts her feet up shoeless and I reach to touch them and the base of them is hard like some semi-shelled animal but only at the base, the rest of her foot being soft, oiled almost so smooth, the thin blue veins wrapping themselves around the inside ankle bone and moving like paths into the toes, the brown tanned feet of Sallie Chisum resting on my chest, my hands rubbing them, pushing my hands against them like a carpenter shaving wood to find new clear pulp smelling wood beneath. My own legs black with scars. And down the room, the parrot begins to talk to itself in the dark, thinking it is night.

  *

  She had lived in that house fourteen years, and every year she demanded of John that she be given a pet of some strange exotic breed. Not that she did not have enough animals. She had collected several wild and broken animals that, in a way, had become exotic by their breaking. Their roof would have collapsed from the number of birds who might have lived there if the desert hadnt killed three quarters of those that tried to cross it. Still every animal that came within a certain radius of that house was given a welcome, the tame, the half born, the wild, the wounded.

  I remember the first night there. John took me to see the animals. About twenty yards away from the house, he had built vast cages, all in a row. They had a tough net roof over them for the day time when they were let out but tended to stay within the shade of their cages anyway. That night John took me along and we stepped off the porch, left the last pool of light, down the steps into the dark. We walked together smoking his long narrow cigars, with each suck the nose and his moustache lighting up. We came to the low brooding whirr of noise, night sleep of animals. They were stunning things in the dark. Just shapes that shifted. You could peer into a cage and see nothing till a rattle of claws hit the grid an inch from your face and their churning feathers seemed to hiss, and a yellow pearl of an eye cracked with veins glowed through the criss-crossed fence.

  One of the cages had a huge owl. It was vast. All I could see were its eyes—at least 8" apart. The next morning however, it turned out to be two owls, both blind in one eye. In those dark cages the birds, there must have been twenty of them, made a steady hum all through the night—a noise you heard only if you were within five yards of them. Walking back to the house it was again sheer silence from where we had come, only now we knew they were moving and sensing the air and our departure. We knew they continued like that all night while we slept.

  Halfway back to the house, the building we moved towards seemed to be stuffed with something yellow and wet. The night, the dark air, made it all mad. That fifteen yards away there were bright birds in cages and here John Chisum and I walked, strange bodies. Around us total blackness, nothing out there but a desert for seventy miles or more, and to the left, a few yards away, a house stuffed with wet light where within the frame of a window we saw a woman move carrying fire in a glass funnel and container towards the window, towards the edge of the dark where we stood.

  *

  (To come) to where eyes will

  move in head like a rat

  mad since locked in a biscuit tin all day

  stampeding mad as a mad rats legs

  bang it went was hot

  under my eye

  was hot small bang did it

  almost a pop

  I didnt hear till I was red

  had a rat fyt in my head

  sad billys body glancing out

  body going as sweating white horses go

  reeling off me wet

  scuffing down my arms

  wet horse white

  screaming wet sweat round the house

  sad billys out

  floating barracuda in the brain

/>   *

  With the Bowdres

  She is boiling us black coffee

  leaning her side against the warm stove

  taps her nails against the mug

  Charlie talking on about things

  and with a bit the edge of my eye

  I sense the thin white body of my friend’s wife

  Strange that how I feel people

  not close to me

  as if their dress were against my shoulder

  and as they bend down

  the strange smell of their breath

  moving across my face

  or my eyes

  magnifying the bones across a room

  shifting in a wrist

  *

  Getting more difficult

  things all over crawling

  in the way

  gotta think through

  the wave of ants on him

  millions a moving vest up his neck

  over his head down his back

  leaving a bright skull white smirking

  to drop to ankles

  ribs blossoming out like springs

  the meat from his eyes

  Last night was dreamed into a bartender

  with an axe I drove into glasses of gin lifted up to be tasted

  *

  I have seen pictures of great stars,

  drawings which show them straining to the centre

  that would explode their

  white if temperature and the speed they moved at