by John Vernon
Further clown the road, outside a barn, women beat corn in wooden cemidors to separate the kernels, which fell on lengths of canvas. Men cut needle grass with short-handled sickles on the banks of the river and sang as they cut. The Kid had cut grass in exactly this manner, helping out his friends Yginio and José. As the men below him sprang up and bent down, sprang up and bent clown, he felt his body absorbing their rhythms, his own back and arms going through the same motions. The grass lay in long rows. The wind whipped through this valley. A mule pulled a carreta driven by a young boy—he looked all of seven—toward the rows of cut grass. And on a fence, magpies laughed; why hadn't this behavior, their mocking seemed to say, been blown to smithereens like every other thing of duty and custom inside Lincoln County? Why hadn't it, too, become ashes and debris?
Billy and his friends could have been riding through the Bible.
Now and then beyond the farmers he glimpsed a river, the Hondo, that had grown too shy on water to flow; instead, it pooled between rocks.
They would take their stolen horses to west Texas by way of Los Portales and sell them there; then steal more horses on the Llano and bring them east to White Oaks and sell them to the miners. East and west, back and forth: a Sisyphean life. The Kid thought, I'm just a horse thief again. As they emerged from the foothills it was cock-shut time on the flatlands below: beginning twilight. The prairie flared up like an all-body rash which the shadow of the Capitans, creeping east, slowly balmed. Billy led them north skirting Blackwater Draw and continuing northeast across darkening plains. When it was dark enough they camped underneath the stars, burning sage and old booshwa in this seldom-crossed land. Tom brewed some coffee and brought Billy a cup. After a while, the fire declined to ashes and short-lived coals, the day's surviving heat cooled. "Has anyone ever counted those stars?" the Kid asked Fred.
"I did once."
"How many did you get?"
"One thousand eight hundred and thirty-two. But by the time you get a count there's new ones come up. The sky continues turning. You must keep on adding stars. I've never had the patience to keep it up for very long. I've tried different ways. Divide the sky in quadrants, count the stars in a quadrant, multiply by four. The trouble with that is they aren't spread out even. Look at your Milky Way—one long string of clusters. Anyways, a Frenchman thought he figured it out. He did a scientific count, got forty-seven thousand, three hundred ninety."
"That many?"
"That many. But then an Englishman got over ninety thousand. And a German after that come up with three hundred twenty-four thousand. It just keeps on growing. Like frog eggs in a pond. And there's plenty we don't see. They're too far away. Counting's important but what you see now—we're just scratching the surface."
They watched the sky in silence.
The next morning, removing the hobbles from the horses, Billy said, "Where's that Appaloosa?"
Fred and Tom looked around at the emptiness. Flattened out by hidden powers, by a cosmic rolling pin, the desert's false limits suggested immensities. Only to the west, where the mountains got pushed, did distance seem real.
"And the croppy? I only count twelve. We began with fourteen. You hobbled every one, Tom?"
Tom nodded and shrugged.
"I see tracks going west."
"You want to follow them?" asked Fred.
Billy couldn't decide. "That won't bring us to our milk."
The following morning they struck the wagon road leading to Fort Sumner and held it for a while. But it made the Kid nervous; there could be other traffic. They strayed north toward evening, the sun at their backs growing weaker as it set. Already, its strength was in the other direction. It was circling the world to come all the way around and summon their shadows strung out before them. A cloudbank to the east looked so low in the sky it coidd have been a dust storm, though the air hardly stirred. The sun against this cloudbank gave it knobby contours, it shifted erratically, drifting in all directions. They heard a crepitating rumble. As wide as the desert, behind a sudden wall of wind, the cloud overtook them and they were plunged into a furnace whose whining roar and screech of dry wings sounded uncannily like actual fire. Fred waved his hat, Tom pulled his jacket over his head, his mount spinning around, but Billy just sat there unmoving on his horse laved by the grasshoppers brushing his eyebrows, catching in his shirt, trying to squeeze into his mouth. The air had gone black with them. They crawled through his mare's mane, devoured mites in her ears, and would not be shaken out. In a gesture as ancient as petitioning redress or expressing ecstasy, Billy flung his arms out to the sky and one landed on his hand and he brought it to his face: bucket-headed, pop-eyed, caparisoned, strapped, with muscular, buttressed, piston-femur legs, fully charged in its stillness, slime-green and black. Hello. He'd seen them like this in huge swarms before but mostly through windows. He'd watched them cover the roofs, doors, and shutters of stables and barns, and strip a field within minutes of everything but stalks. He'd even seen them peel fences and boards. They stripped objects so bare they no longer had names. The grasshopper snapped from his hand into shrapnel and the air ripped around him. These were angry beasts; there was nothing here for them. In the absence of crops, they'd become a din of beggars sounding clack dishes. He detected a tremble. The earth or his horse? A worm of fear began to spiral. It could be they'd lost their compass, they'd be stuck here for hours. You want to keep going west to the Rio Grande valley where green things still grow, he urged them. And as he thought it, they rivered. The shattered pieces scrolled and light leapt from earth and the blind cloud flooded the sky and was gone, its roar shrunk to nothing.
The three men were left speechless. Oddly enough, the world at their feet still swarmed with nameless spirits and imps, though the plague had now passed. The world's secret architecture had burst—its lost prayer etched on a speck of dust. Billy pictured apes, rats, and frogs boiling from the desert, teeming around him. It had something to do with his destiny, he felt, that destiny written before he was born. Composed in code, its detail was exhausting, and the president of heaven had cached it away in an underground cave and conveniently forgotten it. Each clattering hopper, born in the earth, had whispered a piece of that incomplete story but in their rush to proclaim it they'd drowned each other out. They'd produced only babble. Their dream of chaos, then, was not the world's dawn come to haunt its settled ways. It was just more noise.
The face of the world has changed since that time. It was older then; wrinkles and cracks spidered every landform; the earth carried hidden scrolls. Since then we've learned the use of machines to seal it up safely as smooth as an egg.
The boys looked around and spotted something strange: a herd of pronghorns grazing on the prairie as though not even interrupted. They were faster than the hoppers, they could have outrun them, instead they'd just ignored them—they didn't exist. The Kid began to wonder whether anything had happened.
Meanwhile, their remuda had scattered, mostly west. They could see the plumes of dust. But when they'd succeeded in rounding them up, three more were missing: a zebra dun and two sorrels. And the sun had set; it was growing dark already. Either these were especially far-ranging horses or someone'd been picking them off, Billy thought. How dare some rustler steal horses that had been already stolen fair and square by himself? This time they picketed instead of hobbling the horses, in a wide grassy swale breaking to the west, guarded on the north by a bottlecap bluff. Three or four cottonwoods, their leaves turning yellow, grew in this valley. The ground was broken here; they could camp at a distance and make a big fire so he'd think it was safe—but split a night watch from the top of the bluff.
Billy took the last watch. At dawn—pale sky, dark earth, purple ribbon where sky and earth met—he spotted a shadow approaching the horses, whose tails had started jumping. The thief was tugging at a picket when Billy scurried down, drawing his pistol. "You son of a bitch, raise up your arms. Where's the rest of my herd?"
The man backed up against t
he trunk of a Cottonwood, leering at the Kid. In the uncertain light, this cocky little cowboy struck a sassy pose broadcasting dissipation. Hips slung forward, arms bowed apart, one hand resting on his Winchester's barrel. He tilted his head, his mouth hung loose. The slouchy wool sweater bagged at the wrists was two sizes too large, and the buckskin vest filthy. The worst thing about him was his slack-jawed arrogance. The way his wet mouth, stained with tobacco, loosely cracked open. The fuck-you smirk. "Who the hell are you?" asked the Kid.
"A man. Who are you?"
"You can be damn well sure I am not a woman."
"I am not a woman, either. I am a man and I like bad men."
"Is that so? Then you ought to like me. I'll kill any cocksucker that dares steal my horses."
"I take what I want. I aim to steal myself a living."
"Not from me, you don't."
"I'll show you!" the man yelled. "Look at me! Look!" He began to raise his rifle.
"Lower that weapon," Billy calmly said. But he didn't feel calm. His Thunderer locked on the man's chest. The sweet feathered flags of the grama grass around them took on a red tinge as the sun broke the sky, as did the tansy asters on their dead stalks. Only ten feet away from this smirking horse thief, Billy's gun began to shake. The world had slightly turned, that's all it takes, and now someone else tastes with my tongue. The impudent shit. His arms were still spread but the Winchester's barrel now inched upward, seeking a level. "Goddamnit, what's your name?"
The man at the tree said, "I am Billy the Kid."
The Colt's Thunderer fired in rapid succession, six clustered shots in 2.8 seconds, and dust flew from the holes as though from a rug thrown over a fence. Wisps of smoke rose from the splintery hull of the man's chest. Look. He's still smirking. He's still propped against the tree. Somebody woke up the wrong man this morning. His rifle fell clatterwhack while he himself leaned against the cottonwood tree, more insolent than ever, head lolled back. Billy reloaded and gingerly approached and kicked out his ankles. He dropped straight down. The Kid leaned over and stared long and hard into his eyes, which hadn't snapped shut.
Then he fingered his sweater, thick as bear fur. I could use a good sweater what with these cool nights. He surveyed the corpse, admired the new boots. They were V cuts, sharp...
***
FRED WAITE ANNOUNCED he'd decided to leave. He said he'd go back to Indian Territory, he was fed up with running from the law. He wanted to see his family, wanted to own his own farm. "You want, you want," said the Kid. "Why don't you just take what you want like everyone else? We've got everything here."
"Well, I'm shut of that now."
"Don't you want to get the Englishman's killers?"
"That makes me no nevermind. It's over. How come it's so important to you? He's not the only one that died."
"Mr. Tunstall was good to me. He gave me a horse, a saddle—"
"I know, a gun."
"I liked him. The man had a heart."
"You hardly even knew him."
"I knew him good enough. He had polish. He was different."
"He wasn't that different to you and me, Kid. He was after the same things. So was James Dolan. Stick it to the Mexes. Make yourself all the dinero you can. Get rich and get out."
"That's not true. He was good to the Mexes. He let them buy things on tick."
"So did Dolan. The difference was Mr. Tunstall never lived long enough to take it out on their hides like Dolan did."
"How can you say that? Goddamnit, Fred, to hear you talk, you'd think there's nothing good in the world."
"There's good in the world and there's bad in the world and they're wound up together. You know the buffalo bird? The one that lays an egg in some other bird's nest? The other eggs in the nest are half the size of this monster but their mother's got to feed it once the scummy thing hatches. All it does is squawk and eat all the food and starve out her own chicks. The good feeds the bad and the bad grows fat. But it's part of the family. Inseparable."
"You say the damnedest things."
"Do I, now? You're the one that switched sides."
"Suck my dick, Fred! I thought you were my friend."
"I'm sorry, Kid. I was just saying."
"What the hell does switching sides have to do with anything?"
"Well, you wouldn't have done it without you divided the world in equal parts. Good and bad, white and black. That's not a regular world."
Fred and Billy's horses rubber-nosed each other, facing at an angle. Their riders fell silent. They were just a few miles from the Fort Sumner road where the shortcut to Los Portales forked east. Tom O'Folliard climbed off his horse and walked him a ways, making a circle. Clouds had blown in, threatening rain. A chill was in the air, they'd pulled on their gloves. Under a wide and endless gray sky, the yellow earth rippled and spread to the horizon, barren and flat. More rocks here than dirt, more dirt than vegetation. Fred swiveled his head, took in the wasted plains. "Well, Kid. I'm sorry. You know how it goes. I'm out to find some good, too. I just haven't found it here."
"Forget good. I'm after justice."
"Good luck on that."
"Alls I ever did was shoot a few people."
"I know, I know. You never wanted to hurt them."
"I've learned a lot, Fred."
"I have, too. The main thing I've learned is how to live with myself."
"Yes." Billy coughed; sighed. He turned away. "Well." He sighed again—blew out a tub of air. "It was a time, wasn't it?" He turned back and watched Fred, whose eyebrows had furrowed. With his mustache, they made a big X across his face. His startled scowl hadn't changed since they'd met—he always looked mad yet never got mad. "You have to say that, Fred. Good or bad, it was a time. Don't you think it was a time?"
"I suppose."
"It was. You gotta say it."
"Was what?"
"Quite the time."
"You make it sound like it's over."
"Go on. It was a time."
Fred paused. "'It was a time.'"
"Sometimes don't it all seem like a dream?"
"You want me to say that, too?"
The Kid couldn't help it, he felt his eyes widen like a little boy's, looking at Fred.
"Okay, okay. It feels like a dream. Where'd you get that sweater?"
"I've always had it."
Fred swung his horse around and made toward Los Portales leaving Billy feeling irked, uncompleted. When he was fifty feet away he turned and waved his hat without stopping. "Adios, boys!"
"Hey, Fred, hold up! I was wondering something."
"What?"
The Kid had to holler. "Was that you with Sue McSween the night before Macky died?"
Fred was still trotting off. A wind had come up. "What did you say?" he shouted as he diminished.
"You and Sue McSween!"
He scowled and repeated, "Me and Sue?" and stopped and said something but the wind intercepted and blew it away. Then he turned and Billy watched him grow smaller out there below the world's turning rim. He thought about how Fred often went missing when the shooting began. He'd taken the wagon road, splitting from the group, when Tunstall was shot. He did put a bullet into Morton and Baker at Blackwater Draw after they were dead—or did he? He could have shot into the ground. He could have missed Brady. And he'd slipped out of Macky's house after boarding Sue—if that was him in Sue's room. He grew smaller and smaller, small as a chigger out there on the desert, and finally vanished. The Kid turned his horse and made for Fort Sumner and never thought of him again.
13. 1879
Peace
* * *
Whereas it has been made to appear to me, that by reason of unlawful combinations and assemblages of persons to arms, it has become impracticable to enforce by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings the laws of the United States within the Territory of New Mexico, and especially within Lincoln County thereof, and that the laws of the United States have been therein forcibly opposed, and the execution thereof
forcibly resisted;
and Whereas, the laws of the United States require that whenever it may be necessary, in the judgment of the President, to use the military force for the purpose of enforcing the faithful execution of the laws of the United States, he shall forthwith, by proclamation, command such insurgents to disperse and retire peaceably to their respective abodes within a limited time;
Now, therefore, I, RUTHERFORD B. HAYES, President of the United States, do hereby admonish all good citizens against aiding, countenancing, abetting, or taking part in any such unlawful proceedings; and I do hereby warn all persons engaged in or connected with said obstruction of the laws to disperse and retire peaceably to their respective homes on or before noon of the 13th day of October instant.
A PROCLAMATION
For the information of the people of the United States, and of the citizens of the Territory of New Mexico in especial, the undersigned announces that the disorders lately prevalent in Lincoln County in said Territory, have been happily brought to an end. Persons having business and property interests therein and who are themselves peaceably disposed, may go to and from the County without hindrance or molestation. Individuals resident there but who have been driven away, or who from choice sought safety elsewhere, are invited to return, under assurance that ample measures have been taken and are now and will be continued in force, to make them secure in person and property. And that the people of Lincoln County may be helped more speedily to the management of their civil affairs, as contemplated by law, and to induce them to lay aside forever the divisions and feuds which, by national notoriety, have been so prejudicial to their locality and the whole Territory, the undersigned, by virtue of authority in him vested, further proclaims a general pardon for misdemeanors and offenses committed in the said County of Lincoln against the laws of said Territory in connection with the aforesaid disorders, between the first day of February, 1878, and the date of this proclamation.
And it is expressly understood that the foregoing pardon is upon the conditions and limitations following: