by Ron Hansen
Rudabaugh removed from his saddlebags two round loaves of sourdough bread that he’d stolen from Wilcox and Brazil, and in a spasm of selflessness shared them with the gang while Charlie Bowdre uncorked an unlabeled bottle of homemade rotgut that seemed to have been flavored with molasses to brown it and had the head of a rattlesnake wobbling in the bottom. Bowdre warned them that he called it strychnine.
Even huddled together near the horse, no one could thaw in that doorless shelter.
“I have to apologize,” the Kid said. “I’m really sorry I got us into this fix. We could’ve fought it out.”
Each word fogged in the air.
“We’ll be outta here in the morning,” Charlie Bowdre said. “And after that I don’t wanna be cold anymore. Maybe I’ll traipse on back to Biloxi. Work on a shrimp boat or sumpin. Won’t ever have to hear Mexican again cept when Manuela damns my hide.”
The Kid said, “You could have learnt Spanish.”
“Why should I fool with another language? Ain’t hardly got English bucked out yet.”
Dirty Dave Rudabaugh was not watching or heeding the palaver; he was just sinking deeper into his odorous goat-hair coat and falling asleep. Billie Wilson had his gloves off and was breathing onto his fingers to get some feeling back.
The Kid’s racehorse nickered. And then there was quiet except for Rudabaugh’s snores, each one seeming louder and like the roar of a strangling lion.
The Kid found the humor to tell the others, “He’s doing that on purpose.”
* * *
The sheriff and his posse of thirteen got near the Kid’s hideout around two in the morning. Young Juan Roibal collected all the horse reins as the men dismounted and each took his rolled-up blanket and rain tarp with him as they trudged through deep snow until a hawkeye spotted the gang’s hitched-up horses. Half of the men then circled fifty yards behind the rock house as Garrett crept his half of the posse into kennels of snow in an arroyo that looked up a slope to the open doorway. They were no more than twenty yards off. The sheriff wanted to attack while the gang was sleeping, but he was overruled by Frank Stewart, who said his force in back were too cold and tired to shoot with accuracy, plus sunup was only a few hours off. Garrett made a harrumphing noise as he wallowed a sofa into the snow and covered himself with a woolen blanket. His shivering men were grousing in whispers about their frostbitten ears and noses, but he hushed them with a “Shh!”
The Kid woke at the sound and hunched to the doorway. He took off his white sugarloaf sombrero so he couldn’t be so easily construed as he looked out into the moonless night, seeing nothing, nothing, nothing. Like it was his future.
Bowdre got up just before dawn and was in his sergeant’s surtout and heading outside with a feeble amount of oats in the canvas nose bag that was called a morat. When he saw sleet flitting through the doorless entrance, he halted to hat himself with the Kid’s sombrero. And he was outside and facing his chestnut gelding as he apologized to him for the lack of feed when he heard Pat Garrett again shout out no warning, just the misidentification, “It’s the Kid, boys! Cut him down!”
Bowdre could just glance left with shock, seeing only a few dark, crouching shapes in the snow, and in that fraction of a second half the front posse’s rifles fired at him, hitting a kidney, his left thigh, his right scapula, and his liver. Bowdre slammed into the house wall and sagged as the firing stopped, then he gripped the feldspar rock with his hands to drag himself back inside.
The gang was awake with their handguns cocked, and the Kid was holding and soothing his frantic horse in there as Billie Wilson examined Charlie Bowdre’s wounds and shook his head no to the Kid, who took his sombrero back and yanked Bowdre’s holster to the front of his trousers so Bowdre could get at it. The Kid’s eyes were hectic and crazed with anger as he said, “They have murdered you, Charlie, but you go get yourself some revenge. Kill some of the sons of bitches before you die.”
Charlie looked down at the gun hanging below his trouser belt buckle as if working to recognize what it was.
Billie Wilson yelled outside, “You have killed Charlie Bowdre and he wants to come out!”
“Let him!” the sheriff yelled back. “But with his hands in the air!”
Bowdre floundered outside, giving vengeance no thought, his hands raised and his legs seeming soft as taffy as he woozily stumbled down to the arroyo, seeking a solemn and very tall Pat Garrett, whose Winchester rifle was held at ease in the crook of his left arm. Bowdre was gurgling and strangling on his own blood as he vaguely lifted his right arm toward the rock house and struggled to tell the sheriff, “I wish . . . I wish . . . I wish.” And then he fell forward into Lee Smith, dead. He was thirty-two years old.
With the distraction, Dave Rudabaugh untied his horse and tugged it toward the doorless entrance with the intent of saddling it and charging out of the rock house, his guns full of venom. A few of the posse had read the Police Gazette and were on to such criminal high jinks. About four of them lifted their rifles and killed Rudabaugh’s horse just as she entered the doorway. She weighed over a thousand pounds and was like a huge boulder of interference.
The Kid looked over the mare at Charlie lying facedown in reddening snow. He yelled, “Are you going to leave him there like that?”
“Cold won’t bother him now,” the sheriff told him.
“You plan to fight us?”
“We’ll just let you stew!”
The Kid slid down against a wall until he was sitting on the ground. With tears in his eyes, he sang for Charlie as he once did for his mother. “I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger. I’m traveling through this world of woe. Yet there’s no sickness, toil, nor danger in that bright land to which I go. I’m going home to see my father. I’m going there no more to roam. I’m just a-going over Jordan. I’m just a-going over home.”
His racehorse sniffed him, and he petted the soft, downy hair of her nose for a while. He noticed Billie and Dave inquisitively staring at him, and he said, “I have nothing to say.”
A half hour later, Garrett patiently called, “How are you fixed in there, Billy?”
The Kid slunk over to the entrance frame and called back, “Pretty well, but we have no wood for a fire! And no food neither!”
Garrett called, “Why not come out and get some from us? Be a little sociable!”
The Kid was hungry enough to give it some thought. “We can’t do that, Pat! We find commerce with you too predictable!”
Hours passed, with enough time for Cal Polk to go to and return from the Wilcox-Brazil ranch with firewood and a flank of pink, butchered beef in his Wisconsin wagon. A huge fire was started at sundown, and hacked meat was heaved onto the mesquite branches to roast.
Rudabaugh was near the doorway and asked, “Are you smelling that?”
Wilson said, “How we gonna get them to feed us? Right now I’d take right kindly to gettin greasy round the mouth.”
The Kid’s own mouth watered at the aroma and his stomach registered need.
“We could surrender,” Rudabaugh said.
“And then what?” Wilson asked.
Rudabaugh faced him and in a condescending way said, “You don’t always hafta go to prison. There’s this here deal called state’s evidence. You hand over other outlaws they happen to want more.”
“I could do that,” Wilson said. “I got lotsa people to get even with.”
The Kid noted, “But Billy the Kid is who they want most. And that’s dead instead of alive.”
Rudabaugh gave him a So what? look and said, “Well, I’m doin it,” and he found in his foul overcoat pocket a much-used, formerly white handkerchief that he flaunted at the rock house entrance before flinging his guns over his dead horse into the snow and crawling over the immovable mare toward the cookout, still waving his handkerchief in wild sweeps and yelling to Garrett, “Where you gonna carry us?”
“To Las Vegas!” he called back.
“If we hafta go to Las Vegas, we’d just as soon die
right here! The Mexicans there want my head on a platter!”
“We’ll take you on to Santa Fe, and I guarantee your protection from violence!”
Rudabaugh turned to the gang in the rock house for affirmation and saw the Kid’s fine bay thoroughbred hop over the other door-filling horse and run free until she was lassoed by Juan Roibal. Then Billie Wilson was scrambling over the animal and falling forward down the slope, his guns held wide and unshootable.
Garrett fancied the weapons and took them as his own before calling out, “How about you, Kid?”
“Just a sec!” The Kid’s rifle and handgun were on the ground inside the building, and he was urinating on them with wide arcs of his hose.
Wilson and Rudabaugh were handcuffed before the Kid got outside, his hands high over his head, his boots plunging so deep in the snow that he tottered, and yet grinning in a way that made Garrett skeptical. The Kid said, “Long time no see, Pat!”
“Been over a year. But not for want of trying.”
The Kid looked at each man in the posse, some with their rifles trained on him, some hungrily gnashing rib eye steaks that they held in their gloved fingers. He smiled as he said, “This is a historical occasion. I’d like to shake the hands of you heroes who accomplished it.”
With deputies holding guns on the Kid, and the sheriff-elect going up to the rock house to collect the possessions there, many in the posse took turns walking up to the Kid and jerking a firm handshake as they smiled and said their names. “Frank Stewart.” “Lon Chambers.” “Jim East.”
Barney Mason shook the Kid’s hand as he sheepishly said, “I changed sides.”
“I see that. Good wages?”
“Well, they’s regular at least.”
Others crowded forward. “Tom Emory.” “Lee Hall.” “Charlie Rudulph.” “Buenas tardes, me llamo Juan Roibal.”
“Hola, Juan,” the Kid said.
- 18 -
TRIALS
The possemen and their prisoners overnighted at the Wilcox-Brazil roadhouse, filling its rooms, and on Christmas Eve went west to Fort Sumner with Wilson, Rudabaugh, and the Kid shackled on the flat bed of the Wisconsin farm wagon, each of them skirting his legs away from Charlie Bowdre’s white, openmouthed corpse, each of them working hard at not noticing his rocking, his jouncing, his seeming to breathe as they hit frozen ruts in the road.
Manuela Herrera was hanging sheets on a clothesline by the Indian hospital when she saw the caravan approach, and when she glimpsed a deputy riding Charlie’s horse she ran out into the snow of the entrance road, heavy with child and screaming hatred of Garrett and the justice system in Spanish as she pounded fists against his long thigh.
“You have my sympathy in your loss,” he said in a practiced way. And thinking of his five-hundred-dollar reward, he felt some largesse. “Will you buy a suit for Charlie to be buried in and charge it to my account?”
The Kid translated into Spanish for him, and then he softly consoled Manuela as she hugged him and pressed her tear-wet cheek to his own, groaning over and over again the words for husband, “Mi marido. Mi esposo.”
Cal Polk got down from the wagon, and Barney Mason joined him in hefting Bowdre into the Indian hospital triage room and swinging him up onto a dinner table, knocking salt and pepper shakers onto the floor.
Polk said, “Quite the character, Charlie was.”
And Mason said, “ ‘Quite the character’ is what gets you kilt.”
The horse thief from Mississippi would be buried next to his pal Tom on Christmas morning.
* * *
The three prisoners first were escorted to the old enlisted men’s stockade, but when the Maxwells heard that the Kid had been captured, they sent their Navajo servant, Deluvina, with a handwritten note in English from Señora Luz Beaubien Maxwell.
I request that Kid Bonney be brought to our home in the former officers’ quarters so my daughter can say goodbye.
Garrett consented and assigned Jim East and Lee Hall as the Kid’s police guards. They walked to the house in a narrow furrow that had been haphazardly shoveled between snowbanks.
Sixteen-year-old Paulita greeted the Kid on the front porch in an emerald green formal gown with crinoline petticoats that shaped a bustle. Tears glimmered in her café eyes.
The Kid said, “Don’t you cry, Sweetheart. I’ll be fine.”
She hurried a kiss of his cheek and lingered in a hug, her right ear to his hammering heart, and then looked beseechingly at East and Hall. “Would you let Billy join me in my room so we can have some privacy?”
East told the girl that the Kid was too slippery, with an earned reputation for escaping custody. They couldn’t risk it.
“Will you all join us then in the Yuletide room?”
The Kid was in leg irons, so she hung on to him with an entwined forearm and slowed her pace in adjustment to the clumsy noise of his shuffle.
A spruce tree flaring with lighted candles filled a corner of the lilac parlor, and Paulita’s mother was sitting on the love seat with her forearms crossed in a quarrelsome way as she scowled at the Kid’s police guards. Luz said in highly accented English, “You have caused what you are now arresting.”
“We’re just doing our duty, ma’am.”
She hmmphed.
Lee Hall took off the Kid’s sombrero for him, and his girlfriend groomed his tawny hair.
The Kid told Paulita, “Reach your hand into my overcoat pocket.”
She did and removed the green velvet pouch with “For My Angel” on the tag. She was wide-eyed.
“Open it.”
She poured out the fine gold necklace and kissed the crucifix in the Mexican way.
Smiling, Señora Maxwell said, “Please to let me see, Paulita.” And when she held it up, her mother said to the Kid, “So beautiful. So thoughtful, Chivato.”
“I saw it in Puerto de Luna and had to buy it. Seemed already hers.”
Paulita fastened it around her neck. “You’re always giving me such lovely jewelry.” She admired it in the reflection of a Victorian pier glass and with a formal pledge of her fidelity to him said, “I’ll always be wearing this, from now on.”
Smiling, Luz said, “And you have a Christmas gift for Billy, no?”
With a sunburst of happiness, Paulita hurried to kneel under the spruce tree and found a small, ribboned box that she opened for her handcuffed boyfriend. It was a tortoiseshell pocketknife and made by J. S. Holler & Co. cutlery store in New York City. She made a porcupine of it as she pinched out its twelve tools.
“Look at that!” the Kid exclaimed. “Six different blades, an awl, a corkscrew, tiny scissors . . . This will be so useful!”
And Jim East took it from the girl, saying, “Maybe too useful.”
With hopefulness she said, “Well, maybe later.”
“For sure later,” the Kid said.
Lee Hall intoned, “And now we’ll have to say our goodbyes.”
“Oh, but no!” Señora Maxwell said. “Won’t you have some eggnog at least? Some sugarplums?”
Hall said, “The Kid’s a prisoner, madam.” She seemed to need the reminder.
Paulita stamped a foot in frustration and pouted as she said, “Billito! You’re always just arriving or just about to leave!”
And then, Jim East later remembered, “The lovers embraced and she gave Billy one of those soulful kisses the novelists tell us about. We finally had to pull them apart, much against our wishes, for all the world loves a lover.”
Because of the observers, she kissed him with piety at first, but as she seemed to feel the foreignness of his hard-used form, there seemed to become a greater need of belonging, and she kissed him with a passionate yes that was as soft as something fluid, that spoke an Enter me until she finally pulled a little away and told his ear in a hushed voice, “We are so much in love, Billy. We have to be together. I have money. We can marry and I’ll ride with you to the ends of the earth in spite of anything you have ever done. I don’t care
what the world thinks of me.”
The Kid looked at his watchmen watching him, and excitement and embarrassment warred with each other. And then he kissed her softly and deeply one last time. “Vamos a ver,” he said. We’ll see.
* * *
Hiring only Jim East, Deputy Jim Bell, and his friend Barney Mason to accompany him on horseback, the sheriff-elect sent the other men home for Christmas, and Emanuel Brazil harnessed fresh mules to his farm wagon to haul the three prisoners to Las Vegas.
They got to Puerto de Luna around two o’clock in the afternoon of December 25 and walked into Grzelachowski’s store and restaurant to find a fabulous feast being served to some locals. A jolly Padre Polaco welcomed the Kid with an embrace as the Kid said, “Real sorry about your stolen horses.”
The ex-priest looked fiercely at Rudabaugh and Wilson as he said, “Oh, but it wasn’t you, Boleslaw. It was these fleas. But even them I forgive on this glorious holy day.”
After introductions to those he’d never met, Grzelachowski asked, “Would you like to take something on the teeth?”
The Kid told him, “I won’t turn anything down but my collar.”
Ever the figurer, Sheriff Garrett asked, “Would you have enough for all of us?”
“We have such plenty in the kitchen! Please to sit.” Then the ex-priest and his cook carried out heaping platters of hot wild turkey, pierogi, cabbage rolls, and the gingerbread called Old Polish piernik. Padre Polaco motheringly sliced the food for the handcuffed Kid and continued refilling his plate until he finally groaned over the excess.
Ever wanting, Rudabaugh viewed the end of their meal with distress.
Headline news of the Kid’s capture got to Las Vegas before the captives did on the twenty-sixth, and a huge crowd of rowdy gawkers with their own ideas of penal correction were waiting in the Old Town plaza. The Kid grinned as he shouted out the names of acquaintances he saw, seeking out Henry Hoyt but failing to find him, for he’d gone back to medical school in Chicago. By contrast, Billie Wilson was dour, humiliated, and penitent, his head down to avoid further intimacy with the citizens, and Dave Rudabaugh was in hiding and lying sideways on the flat bed of the wagon, for the hundreds of Mexicans in the plaza sought vengeance for his jailbreak murder of Deputy Lino Valdez. The horsemen rode protectively closer to the wagon and kicked citizens away until they could hustle their prisoners inside the stone jailhouse on Valencia Street.