by Ron Hansen
“Seen you talking to Celsa,” he said. “Don’t blame you a-tall. She’s got them kitchen eyes.”
“Kitchen eyes?”
Charlie smiled. “Saying, ‘Come and get it.’ ”
Soon it was Celsa who came to the Kid in her husband’s overcoat and insisted in English, “For favor, you take Celsa home.” The Kid asked about Saval, and she said, “Like alway, he too borracho.” Drunk.
She hugged herself and leaned into the Kid as they walked to the old quartermaster store and the apartment next to Beaver Smith’s saloon. Celsa lit a hurricane lamp, and the Kid was startled to see that a tiny, dark-haired boy, maybe a toddler of three, was sleeping on a couch. Celsa let Saval’s overcoat fall to the floor in a heap as the child whimpered and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. She petted his hair and in Spanish said she missed him, and then she carried him over to an Azteca armchair. His face nuzzled into the front of her dress as he whined, “Leche.” Milk. She then unbuttoned her dress and lifted out a round left breast with a violet areola and nipple, which the toddler hungrily sucked on.
Celsa smiled as she saw Billy flushing in an interested stare. She asked in English, “You like?”
“Oh my yes. I’m very thirsty.”
She laughed. “I mean Candido. You like heem?”
“Oh, the tyke. Of course.”
In a flirting way she said, “Tell Candido he is beautiful and that you love him.”
And Billy said, “You’re beautiful and I love you.”
* * *
The Kid stayed for the next few weeks with Doc, Charlie, and their women in the Indian hospital. And it was there that one of Maxwell’s vaqueros handed him an envelope addressed to “Wm. H. ‘Kid’ Bonney.” Inside was a formal invitation from “The Maxwells” requesting the pleasure of the Kid’s presence at a six o’clock Christmas dinner. Seemed they’d heard of his exploits.
His friends jeered to hide their envy and joked about the faux pas he’d commit. “They’s richer than clabbered cream!” Charlie said. “They’s etiquette. Whereas you eat your food like a bachelor, right from the fryin pan!”
Doc counseled, “The Maxwells are highfalutin. You’d best spiff up in your fancy duds.”
So the Kid opened the trunk of his finer things that Doc had hauled to Fort Sumner and he dressed in a white collared shirt and wide, planetary tie, a formal suit coat of blue velvet, gray slacks with cuffs he jerked down over his shined Wellington boots to make them look like shoes, and a charcoal gray derby hat cocked rakishly on hair dressed with Rowlands’ macassar oil.
The Kid felt like a fish out of water as he walked through the gate of the white picket fence and onto the wide porch that shaded the first floor on three sides of the house. Chatter and laughter eddied through the front door, and he wanted to flee, but he rapped the brass knocker and soon a rail-thin man six and a half feet tall was there in a footman’s formal livery. “William Bonney,” the Kid said.
“Uh-huh,” said the footman. Walking down the hallway, he said, “In the parlor.”
The Kid saw on his left an ornate bedroom that seemed all leather and sienna brown, and across from it was a far more feminine bedroom, in which everything from the sculpted headboard to the chiffonier to the frilly pillows was white. And then there was the lilac wallpaper of a parlor overfurnished with Victorian love seats and armchairs and ten elegantly dressed people holding flutes of champagne. A stocky man who seemed about thirty was in a Prince of Wales tailcoat and was losing his hair but for an upswept central tuft. Seeing past his interlocutor, he noticed the Kid and with excitement announced, “There he is, our wild card, Billy Bonney!”
The guests turned to the Kid, and his hand was shaken by Pedro Menard Maxwell, who said, “Call me Pete,” and tugged him through introductions to Ana Maria de la Luz Beaubien Maxwell, his fifty-year-old mother, his sister Emilia and her husband, Manuel Abreu, who oversaw the sheep operation, and Emilia’s little sister Odila. Captain Alexander Chase of the Army was in his formal dress blues with full regalia and tilted down to introduce his sitting wife, Virginia, who seemed afraid of Billy and slanted into the officer’s hip like a child seeking an apron. Also shy was Sofia Maxwell, now married to a disdainful Telesfor Jaramillo, who lifted his nose at the Kid and whose slicked, oiled, ebony hair shone in the candlelight. And lastly their “wild card” made the acquaintance of the fourteen-year-old, Paulita, a gorgeous girl half French and one-quarter each Spanish and Irish. She had freshly shampooed raven black hair piled in a fashionable pompadour and the deep-roasted, coffee brown eyes that Mexicans called cafés. Candlelight glittered in them. “So pleased to meet you, Mr. Bonney,” she said. Her cheeks dimpled cutely when she smiled.
“We all are!” Pete Maxwell exclaimed and faked a shiver of horror as he said, “The fiend who revels in bloodshed! The child suckled on vice!”
“Pedro!” his mother said.
“Oh, he knows I’m joshing him. It’s all direct from those idiotic newspaper stories.”
The Kid tried the knife of a smile and then was nudged, finding Saval also in a footman’s livery and holding out a flute of champagne. “No thank you,” the Kid said.
“No quiere nada?” You want nothing?
“Water.”
Saval sighed and headed to the kitchen.
Paulita seemed aflutter and was warily smiling at the Kid. He returned the flattery.
The very tall and dour footman announced that dinner was served, and they all crossed into a grand dining room of Sheraton furniture, an ironed lace tablecloth, and dishware and cutlery of pure silver along with chalices of fourteen-carat gold for the wine, the great wealth of it gleaming under a huge French chandelier.
Don Manuel Abreu whispered, “Remove your pistol.”
“I’m not carrying.”
Don Manuel gave him a tickled look like he’d just made a pretty good joke, Ho ho. And then it was he who gave the holiday toast, “Feliz Navidad!”
A Navajo cook named Deluvina delivered a lamb shank, a large turkey, and a goose on silver platters, and Pete nodded to the tall liveryman as he said, “We have Pat to thank for the fowl. Went hunting for me this morning.” He asked his mother to “return thanks,” and when she’d blessed the food and cooks in Spanish, he called out, “Like Lucien would say, ‘Y’all be careful now or you’re gonna fleshen up.’ ”
Saval the footman poured water into the Kid’s chalice with a hint of rebuke, and furtive conversations about some of the clan Billy couldn’t have met flittered in shorthand among the dinner guests. The Kid realized he was invited just to entertain the revelers with wild tales of derring-do, but doing that would make his life seem unserious, so he chose silence and avoidance. But Paulita kept shyly focused on him and asked, “Are you still in school?”
He shook his head. “I just look young for my age. Are you?”
“Uh-huh. In Trinidad, Colorado. St. Mary’s Convent School.”
“What’s your favorite class?”
She thought for a few seconds and answered, “English or history. I like to read.”
She had a squinty right eye that he found fetching. “Me too,” he said.
“Have you read Little Women?”
“Afraid not.”
“I like it ever so much.”
They fell silent and just ate for a while, overhearing the other diners trading local gossip in Spanish. Whenever she glanced up from her food she’d smirk as if she found her secret thoughts devilishly funny. Paulita finally asked what she’d been wanting to. “So, do you have a girlfriend?”
“I have lotsa friends.”
“And the girls—do you kiss?”
The Kid looked up and down the table, but no one else seemed to be listening.
She changed the subject. “Have you seen the actress Sarah Bernhardt?”
“Heard of her.”
“What about Fanny Davenport?”
“No.”
She passed a requested gravy boat to Sofia and said, “Some women ar
e so ravishingly beautiful.”
“I guess that’s true.”
She forked a cooked carrot but held it poised near her kissable lips. “Why, do you think? What is it about them?”
“Well, they have to have those gorgeous coffee brown eyes to begin with.”
She was figuring him out, and then giggled.
And her brother, Pete, called from the far end, “We’ve been leaving you out, Kid. You been to Lincoln of late?”
“No, sir. Texas Panhandle.”
“So you don’t know Tomcat Catron shut down and sold the House for a mere three thousand dollars. And Jimmy Dolan’s buying the Tunstall store instead.”
The names nettled him, but the Kid just said, “Nope, that escaped me.”
“And Susan McSween is there in Lincoln again. She booted Saturnino Baca and his passel of children out of that house they rented from her so she could selfishly have it.” Pete slumped back so Saval could pour more wine into his golden chalice. And then he said as if someone had inquired What’s she like? “Lewd, profane, vulgar woman. Wholly without principle.”
His mother chastised him with “Pedro!”
“Well, it’s a fact she’s from a house of ill fame in Kansas. And Sheriff Dad Peppin saw her in actual lascivious contact with John Chisum.”
Some of the women inhaled in shock.
“I find that hard to believe,” the Kid said.
“And frequent occurrences where she forced herself on a Mexican boy on the grassy banks of the Rio Bonito.”
Billy was fuming. “Where you getting all this?”
“Army scuttlebutt based on Nathan Dudley’s investigations,” Maxwell said, and he falsely smiled. “You won’t shoot the messenger, will you?”
Captain Alexander Chase said, “Such comments seem indelicate, Pete. Especially among ladies and on the birthday of Our Lord.”
Pete Maxwell held up both hands as if he’d desist, but then he turned the screw a jot more, asking, “You still horse-thieving, Kid? Or are you just gunning folks helter-skelter?”
Paulita yelled to him, “Have some more wine, Pedro!”
Pete flopped backward as if he’d been punched. “Oh my gosh, my dear little sister’s sweet on you, Kid!”
She faced her food. “Am not.”
“She finds the bad boy fetching!”
“Quit it,” she said, her face flushing.
All the dinner guests were fondly looking at the two. The Kid stood up from the table. “This has been lovely,” he said. “Scrumptious dinner and there was such”—he sought a high-flown word and found it—“conviviality.”
Pete lifted his golden chalice in a false farewell toast and then finished it.
Paulita got up, too, saying, “I’ll walk you out.” And she touched the Kid’s forearm with a soft, consoling hand in their walk as she said, “I’m so sorry for my stupid brother’s rudeness. And none of the others sticking up for you. It’s indecent.”
The Kid smiled and said, “I was about to lose my cherubic demeanor.” He put on his gentleman’s derby hat and gallantly offered, “But I guess I gave Pete ammunition with all my disorderly doings.”
She seemed serious and old beyond her years as she asked, “So, are you changing your ways?”
“If they let me.”
“They,” she repeated. She seemed to find some wifely satisfaction over his tardy improvement, and then was all formal politeness. “I do hope we’ll see you again in spite of this evening’s unpleasantness.”
“I’d take kindly to that.” Then he remembered his gift and reached into a velvet side pocket as he said, “Oh here, for you. I didn’t have a bow or paper or anything to wrap it.” And he drizzled into her waiting hands the gold lady’s watch that Henry Hoyt had given him in exchange for Sheriff Brady’s horse.
She held it up to candlelight. “But it’s dazzling, Billy! You take my breath away! Oh, I’m so happy! I love it!”
“Well, good.”
She hesitated and in a sudden flash kissed his cheek. Embarrassed by that forwardness, she withdrew into the frilly white feminine bedroom as he let himself out, snugging the front door quietly closed.
And then he found himself at the old quartermaster store. “Saval’s still butlering,” he said. Celsa smiled as she let him in and she invited his carnal enjoyment.
* * *
Hard winds and slanting snowdrifts as deep as his horse’s stifle slowed his uphill journey from Fort Sumner to a full six days, but the Kid managed to get to Lincoln on the afternoon of February 18, exactly one year since John H. Tunstall was assassinated. He’d heard that Jesse Evans, his former captain with the Boys and in the sheriff’s posse that killed Harry, was using Fort Stanton like a free hotel, going and coming as he pleased, so the Kid had written him there, saying,
I have been shifting from can to can’t and am wanting to shuck our fractiousness. Won’t you and Jimmy meet me in Lincoln on Tuesday, the 18th instant?
The Kid first went to Juan Patrón’s house and store, where Tom Folliard was holing up. Juan’s wife, Beatriz, served them Arbuckles’ Ariosa coffee and told them Jimmy Dolan had effected a truce with Susan McSween so he could buy the Tunstall store. Susan would be holding a piano recital that evening in the home Juan still referred to as Saturnino Baca’s. Half the town would be there.
Around five Tom and Billy sloshed through wet snow and mud on Lincoln’s only street until they got to Frank McCullum’s Oyster House, which overlooked the charred joists and rot of the late Alexander McSween’s home. They ate hearty as Tom chattered boastfully about having defiled “a pretty doxy from Socorro just behind the Torreón. Locals got a name for the area but I forget.”
“El Chorro,” the Kid said.
“Yes! Exactly! What’s that mean?”
“The squirt.”
Tom Folliard guffawed in a way that caused him to lose some food.
Just before seven they got to Baca’s, where children were scrunched up on the floor, genial women were laying their overcoats on a bed, Jimmy Dolan was lurking near the Steinway piano with Jacob B. Mathews, Sheriff Brady’s deputy on the morning BB was killed. Jesse Evans was seemingly on parole, for he was sitting there with a ferocious Texas cowhand named Billy Campbell and they looked like they hadn’t heard a good joke in years. Jesse noticed the Kid but did nothing since he was dealing with the sour wreckage of drunkenness.
Susan McSween seemed none the worse for wear in a fine gown and an excess of jewelry, and she delightedly greeted the fine-looking “Red Tom” Folliard with a lingering hug and, as an afterthought, Billy—whom she still condemned as “one of those foolhardy boys.” She said, “There’s someone very important to me that I should like you to meet.”
So they were introduced to Huston Ingraham Chapman, a heavy attorney and railroad engineer whom she’d met in Las Vegas and with whom she was cohabiting. Chapman had lost his left arm to a hunting accident in Oregon at the age of thirteen and overcompensated with high dudgeon and irascibility in his practice of law—he was a rule-or-ruin sort that few people liked. And now his right hand kept tenderly petting his red, windburnt face, for he was, he explained, “suffering from neuralgia.” Seeing Tom Folliard’s frown, he defined it as “sudden intensity of pain in a nerve.” Still, he was feisty, and as he talked there seemed to be no lack in him of affidavits, motions, stipulations, and outrage. Enemies aplenty he had, some identical to the Kid’s—Judge Warren Bristol, District Attorney Rynerson, and in particular Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Dudley, whom Susan McSween intended to have prosecuted for murder and arson. Huston Chapman’s hazel eyes never strayed from the Kid’s face as he talked about the miscreants, until he finally asked, as if he’d found a new client, “Aren’t there civil warrants out for your arrest?”
But then Susan McSween was sitting at the pianoforte and announcing, “I shall be performing Chopin’s Études this evening. Opus ten. Composed in eighteen thirty-three. The first is called ‘Waterfall.’ ” When that was over she announced
in sequence “Chromatique,” “Tristesse,” “Torrent,” “Black Keys,” “Lament,” and “Toccata.” Each was mercifully short, but little Jimmy Dolan would not leave the Kid alone with his restless eyes, and Chopin’s music seemed to hath not the charm to soothe the savage Evans and Campbell. When the opus was finished with “Revolutionary” and Susan McSween stood to more fully absorb the adulation and applause, Evans and Campbell were impatiently standing, too, and giving Jimmy and J. B. Mathews the high sign.
The Kid and Tom shouted some praise to Susan, and she offered a queenly wave as they went outside, following the Dolan faction. Yginio Salazar was healed up from the gun wounds of the Big Killing, and he scrambled up from Susan’s fainting couch to follow his cousin.
Hostilities started with Evans urging Dolan to just get rid of Billy, and the Kid saying, “I don’t care to open our parley with a gunfight, but even if you jump me four at a time you’ll all soon find yourselves toes up.”
Tom confided to Yginio, “Billy reads shoot-em-ups.”
There seemed to be some silent calculations by the Kid’s foes, a few wary looks, and then a pacification of the mood. Jimmy Dolan asked, “So ye be wanting a peace treaty, Billy? What are ye thinking, lad?”
The Kid had in fact given it a good deal of thought and listed some imperatives. “Either side agrees not to kill anyone on the opposing. Anyone we ever called a friend is hereby included.”
Jimmy Dolan’s deepest friendships were now at Fort Stanton, so he added, “And no soldiers or officers are to be punished for any ting up to this date. We wants to keep the Army outta this.”
The Kid shrugged his agreement and continued, “We promise not to give evidence against each other in court. We guarantee to help each other avoid arrests on civil warrants, and if a fellow is jailed we’ll try to get him out.”