The Kid

by Ron Hansen

  “Well, yes. I’ll concede that I’m tall.” His speech had the slow cadence and syrupy accent of the Deep South.

  “We met at the Maxwell house.”

  The bartender seemed embarrassed—probably because of his butlering getup then. “That was just for the extra money,” he said.

  The Kid offered his hand, and the bartender stopped drying a shot glass to shake it.

  “William H. Bonney. Kid, my pals call me.”

  Even in later photographs the future sheriff seemed to have an alien and unsettling habit of widening his eyes as if in shock or as if he were dredging his faulty memory for further information. Whenever captured in a group portrait, he was the lone man who did not fit in. And now his stare seemed to loiter over the Kid’s face until his dark thoughts finally became “I heard stories about you, Mr. Bonney. Some of them true most likely.”

  “Hardly any. And your name?”

  “Pat Garrett.”

  * * *

  Patrick Floyd Jarvis Garrett was born on June 5, 1850, in Chambers County, Alabama, and grew up on an eighteen-hundred-acre Louisiana plantation in Claiborne Parish. Even as a high-strung little boy he imitated the foreman by dragging a bullwhip through the cotton fields while yelling and glaring at the slaves. Although he became expert at hunting, fishing, and horseback riding—really, anything done outdoors—Garrett received little formal schooling, and he followed his father in having no truck with organized religion.

  He was fifteen when the Confederacy lost the War of Rebellion and Yankees seized much of the estate. His father drank himself to death within three years, and financial hardship so poisoned family life that at nineteen Garrett left home, condemning his sisters to sudden marriages and his brothers Alfred and Hillary to hardscrabble farming. Garrett was hired as a cattle gunman to fend off rustlers from the huge LS Ranch in West Texas and, after a squabble over a card game, was indicted for “intent to murder” a freed slave in Bowie County. But he managed to shake the sheriff’s deputies who were tailing him and they lost interest in the chase.

  Rumor later had it that Garrett had married in Sweetwater, Texas, and fathered a child, forsaking both the mother and the baby girl when he walked outside, as he’d told his wife, to smoke his pipe. And then with some partners he became a buffalo hunter in the flat grasslands of northwest Texas on what was called the Staked Plains, slaughtering from fifty to one hundred placid animals per day and collecting twenty-five cents for each three-dollar hide.

  Essentially he and a hundred others like him were shooting themselves out of their livelihoods, and soon, with scarce animals to skin, the hunters went sullen and pouty. An Irish kid named Joe Briscoe was one of the skinners and was vexed that he couldn’t get the stink of blood and intestines out of his clothes. Watching Briscoe squat by a brook and dunk his shirts in its ice water, Garrett said, “I reckon you have to be as ignorant as an Irishman to think you can wash your camisoles in that mud.” The Briscoe kid took it hurtfully and there were oaths and haranguing until he peevishly swung at Garrett with an ax. Without anticipating the certain outcome, Garrett fired his Winchester and killed the kid, watching him topple into the campfire and just lie there feeding the flames until Garrett yanked the body out. After a full day of repentance and self-loathing, Garrett finally turned himself in to officials at Fort Griffin, suicidally wishing to be hanged. But without even an investigation, the officials decided his sounded like an act of self-defense, and so he was off the hook.

  Soon he quit his unprofitable hunting job, and, fed up with the emptiness of the Panhandle, he wandered west, drunkenly frittering away his savings with gambling and whoring until he finally found himself, penniless, outside Fort Sumner. Seeing cattle being moved upstream alongside the salty Rio Pecos, he rode his horse up to an overseer in a buckboard and told him he dearly needed work.

  Pete Maxwell looked over a dour, wide-mustached, rail-thin man in his late twenties, six and a half feet tall and half of that seeming to be his stovepipe legs. He later recalled that Garrett’s nag was so swaybacked his boots nearly dragged on the ground. Maxwell asked, “What can you do for me, Lengthy?”

  “Ride anything with a hide and rope better than any cowpoke you got.”

  Maxwell had faith in the solemn man’s integrity and told him to hop aboard.

  Garrett’s extreme height and Southern formality were fascinating to the far shorter Mexican folks at Fort Sumner, and though he failed in his miserable tries at Spanish, there was a good deal of envy among the señoritas when it was Juanita Gutiérrez who became his wife in 1877. She was pregnant at the time and just a few weeks later died of a miscarriage.

  His grief became rage, and when he heard that Comanches had stolen a herd of twenty-seven horses from a Roswell ranch, Garrett crazily took it personally and organized a vigilante group to go after the horse thieves. Relentless in his pursuit and not seeming to need food, water, or rest, he outstripped his pluckless companions, who one by one peeled off for home until it was just Garrett alone heading over a hill at sundown. Six days passed with no word of him, and then he achingly rode into Roswell with half the stolen horses and hefting a gunnysack that he finally spilled out onto the wooden porch of the general store. Ash Upson, who would become his closest friend and ghostwriter, collected the murderous proof that was six pairs of worn moccasins, a few of them still spotted with blood.

  Hearing the tale from Upson, John Chisum went up to Fort Sumner to interview Garrett about running for sheriff when George Kimbrell’s term was up, and then he sent a letter rife with misspellings “To his Exelency Gov Lue Wallis.” Uncle John advised the governor on where to station men to “prevent Robers from coming in off the plains on to the Pecos and give protection to this place and the Citizens below.” And he noted that “Pat Garrett who resides hear would be a very suitable man to take charge of the squad East of this place if authorized to do so.”

  Although he stayed on even terms with Pete Maxwell, Garrett sought indoor work with the hard winter coming on, and he found a job in Beaver Smith’s saloon. When off his saloonkeeper duties, Garrett persistently lost at five-card draw with the Kid, who generally only played hands that seemed likely to win while Garrett would play even a deuce-seven off-suit, hopefulness his reigning emotion.

  Elderly Beaver Smith called them Big Casino and Little Casino. They weren’t close friends, they just knew each other, and that was enough for Pat Garrett to fill the silence one rainy afternoon in November by confessing that he intended to marry Apolonaria in January.

  “Apolonaria Gutiérrez? Your wife’s sister? Celsa’s sister-in-law?”

  “You drafting a family tree?”

  “I’m just happy for you and hope I’ll be invited to the wedding.”

  Garrett tilted forward with a hollowed, nothing-thereness in his eyes, eyes as dead as the buttons on a doll. “I heard all about you and Celsa,” he said. “Don’t make you a relative.”

  * * *

  On November 23, 1879, the Kid celebrated his twentieth birthday by doing the idle things he generally did, but a sidewalk photographer showed up in front of Beaver Smith’s saloon with his camera, props, tented booth, and boy assistant, and the Kid decided to indulge himself with a ferrotype portrait that was then called a carte de visite. The cost was twenty-five cents.

  With a full measure of snootiness, the photographer considered Billy’s rather slovenly, not-put-together look and asked, “Are you wearing that?”

  “Yep, I am.”

  “You have nothing more formal?”

  “All the ordinaries dress up for picture making. I want to be different.”

  The Kid’s hat that Sunday was a dark fedora, cocked to the right, with a crown that seemed crushed by a whack. A yellow bandanna was loosely knotted at his neck, and under that was a childish blue sailor shirt with an anchor design and a tan unbuttoned vest with lapels overlaid by an overlarge, acorn brown cardigan with a hem that hung as low as his thighs. His trousers were navy blue and tucked inside di
rty midcalf cavalry boots constructed with leather so thin the boots rumpled at the ankles. In accordance with the manly style then, Billy posed with his Winchester rifle in his pale left hand, his bulky cartridge belt and Colt revolver slung to the right. His gambler’s ring on his left little finger sparked in the sunlight.

  Billy said with nervousness, “Some Indians think getting captured by a camera steals your soul.”

  The photographer was mixing chemicals. “Well, there might be something to that. Look at celebrated, much-pictured people. Such odd behaviors!”

  The Anthony four-tube camera was already positioned, so as the photographer painted a collodion emulsion on a lacquered rectangle of thin iron, his assistant guided Billy to his mark, adjusting the U of a vertical brace behind his neck to hold his head stable for the six-second exposure. And then it was done. The wet plate ended up with four fractionally different halftone images, each flipped so that Billy’s right hand seemed his left.

  The practiced assistant used tin snips to perfectly divide the plate into four separate picture cards, and the Kid carried one to fifteen-year-old Paulita as a gift.

  She sank onto her plush white bed to examine his portrait, and she seemed at a loss for words.

  “You don’t like it.”

  “I’m just disappointed that you can’t tell the color of your eyes. They’re such a lovely powder blue. And your hair needs cutting, and it looks dark, not your honey blond. Plus your ears stick out like bat wings.”

  She kindly did not note what he could see now, that he seemed girlish, with wide hips and narrow shoulders and those ever-unmanly hands. And his squirrely front teeth looked even bigger, like he could eat fruit through a picket fence.

  “Oh, please don’t misunderstand, Billy. I’m really grateful for this and I’ll cherish it forever, but it doesn’t do you justice.”

  “You’re saying I look like a slack-jawed oaf.”

  “So you see it, too? You’re a handsome man! You’re the kind of cavalier who makes wives fall out of love with their husbands.”

  The Kid wondered if she knew about Celsa.

  “So this is your birthday?” she asked.

  “Yep.”

  “How old?”

  “Twenty.”

  She was chagrined. She scanned her very feminine bedroom and concluded, “But I have nothing to give you.”

  “A kiss?”

  She smiled and softly complied.

  “Don’t quit,” the Kid said. “Kiss me till I’m drunk with you.”

  She did.

  * * *

  On January 10, 1880, faithful Tom Folliard visited from wherever, and since he’d been alone for weeks he was in the mood for a rollick and soon grew tired of the smallness and innkeeper calm at Beaver Smith’s, harassing the Kid to find him some action and sporting ladies in Bob Hargrove’s saloon.

  Walking across the parade grounds in front of the Maxwell house and in a hunker from the sleeting cold, the Kid was called to by Jim Chisum, Uncle John’s younger brother, who’d been in conversation with Pete Maxwell on the front porch. Pete offered a friendly wave and went back inside the former officers’ quarters as Jim and one of his hands, a Jack Finan, hurried through the gate of the picket fence to interrogate them.

  Jim told the Kid and Tom that he’d been retrieving stolen cattle in Canyon Cueva near the village of Juan de Dios. Would the Kid know anything about that? The Kid said he didn’t. Jim and Jack squinnied their eyes at him.

  “I’ll grant you I have rustled from time to time, but not in this particular instance.”

  Jack Finan said, “Pete says you prolly did.”

  “Pete says a lot of things, and he lies like a no-legged dog.”

  Tom was hugging himself as he asked, “How long we gonna stand out here? I’m frozen!”

  The Kid asked, “Would you galoots like to join us in Hargrove’s? Just to let bygones be bygones? I’m buying.”

  Jim Chisum dithered a little, but Jack Finan scoured the Kid with his glower. The Kid chose to take note of Jack’s gun, an ivory-handled Colt single-action Army revolver that shone like new chrome. “You got a handsome hog leg in that scabbard.”

  “Cost me plenty,” Jack said, his face hinting at a readiness to smile.

  “Could I heft it?”

  Jack was tentative as he handed it to him. The Kid felt its weight, tested its balance, spun it on his trigger finger, and looked down the barrel at the front sight as he aimed at a sheet of newspaper flying on the wind.

  “Go ahead and try it,” Jack said.

  The Kid shot, and the sheet of newspaper swatted. “Wow!” he said, just to be charming. He fired again with his left hand, and the first bullet hole got larger. His third shot from hip-high was elsewhere on the page. “Enviable piece,” the Kid said. And because they were heading into a public place, he half-turned the cylinder so that the hammer was on the first spent shell and couldn’t misfire. Jack took the pistol back with satisfied pride.

  Even in midafternoon, there was the noise of someone cranking organ music from a hurdy-gurdy, the hee-haws of drunken laughter at the long bar, and four flirting daughters of joy in frilly, full-length white dresses inveigling fallen men. Red-haired Tom went to one who was no prettier than the others and confided a few sentences. She tugged him by the hand into the stalls in back.

  The Kid bought pints of Anheuser-Busch for Chisum and Finan and got a porcelain cup of coffee for himself. And then he heard a drunk yell, “Are you Bunny? I’s here alookin for Kid Bunny!”

  The Kid leaned toward the mixologist. “You know who that is?”

  “Says he’s Joe Grant. Says they call him Texas Red.”

  “Stewed?”

  “Half a quart of our rotgut so far.”

  The Kid waved his hand and called, “Kid Bonney, over here!”

  Jim Chisum whispered, “You need help, just say so.”

  Widening his winter coat to give freedom to his six-shooter, the Kid said, “I’ll deal with it.”

  Joe Grant was zigzagging over to him, skidding off the backs of drinkers and swinging his forearm at the vexation or bumping chairs into screeching changes of position. His hand gripped the bar to hold himself upright. He was fat and hatless, and the fringe of auburn beard at his jaw so matched the fringe on his skull that the Kid thought his chapped, round face would look pretty much the same upside-down.

  “So, you Bunny?”

  “William H. Bonney.”

  “We gots a score to shettle.”

  “Why don’t I buy you a shot or two of fire starter and you can tell me all about it?”

  “Had enough for now.” Weaving and seeming about to fall, Joe Grant’s unfocused glances around himself fell on Jack Finan’s fancy .45. “Lemme see that gun.”

  The Kid nodded permission, and Jack handed it over.

  Grant admired it for a second, then asked, “Wa was I sayin?”

  “Shettling something,” the Kid said.

  “Here. Here,” Grant said to Finan. “My gun while I’m lookin.” Exchanging weapons, he shoved his own pistol into Jack’s holster, then he lewdly licked the shining barrel and ivory handle of the Colt with his own pitiful impression of rapier wit. “She so perty!”

  “So,” the Kid patiently said. “What’s your plan?”

  His face hardened. “Ah’m gonna kill you afore you do.”

  A reverent, churchlike silence took over as hard-bitten cowhands and gunmen in the saloon edged away from the forecast confrontation, not wanting to get anything on them.

  The Kid chose to be pacifying. “Oh, wha’d’ya want to kill anybody for, Joe? Give Jack his pistol and let’s solve the world’s problems with whiskey.”

  Joe Grant was shaking his head from side to side. “Nope, mind’s made up.” But then he tilted a little as he uncertainly focused on Jim Chisum. “You Uncle John? Hafta kill Chisum firs.”

  His halitosis could frazzle houseplants.

  Jim’s and Jack’s hands were easing down to their holst
ers as the Kid lifted his hand in the halt sign. “Hold on, Joe. You got the wrong sow by the ear. This is Jim Chisum, Uncle John’s brother. And he done nothing to you.”

  “Well, I gots this shiny gun and she’s all go!”

  “Shall I show you to the door? Walk with me outside.” The Kid strolled from Joe Grant’s fuddled menace toward the saloon doors, the ever-so-quiet crowd dividing for him as he heard Jim Chisum call out, “Kid!” and then heard the click as the hammer cocked and snapped onto an empty chamber. The Kid hesitated and heard another snap as in frustration Joe Grant tried to kill him again. And then the Kid ducked and twisted around in a crouch and in sudden rage and viciousness fired his own Colt three times, bang, bang, bang, each shot hitting Joe Grant in the chin in a gruesome destruction that was the size of a fist. Grant was dead so quick there was no chance for reaction or even for pain. He fell against the foot rail of the bar, and his body sagged gradually to the floor, blood eddying from him.

  The Kid considered his victim and said, “Sorry, Joe, but I’ve been there too often.” Recalling Windy Cahill and Arizona, he looked around through the acrid gray haze of gun smoke. The saloon customers were still holding their ears from the noise and cautiously inching away, like this was finally the frightening Kid they’d heard so much about. “You saw what happened, right? It was self-defense.”

  “He was spoilin for it!” a far-off man yelled out.

  Another man agreed, “You had yourself no option in the matter.”

  Jack Finan bent down to extract his ivory-handled .45 from the corpse’s surprisingly firm grip.

  “We’ll clean all this up,” the bartender said. “But you better go, Kid.”

  Tom Folliard had heard the shots and was running into the main room, his face full of horror as he buttoned up his trousers. “What’d I miss?”

  With the jazzy exhilaration he always felt when he found himself still alive, the Kid told him, “Oh nothing. It was a game of two and I got there first.”

  * * *