The Kid

by Ron Hansen

  Rattling with adrenaline, the Kid told Salazar about his jail escape and his killings, and Yginio took it all in with the solace of approval, telling the Kid that Olinger, for sure, needed killing and with Bell he was given no option. It was kill or be killed in a war that seemed to be never-ending. “Your Spanish friends love you and we’ll all hide you,” Yginio said. “But wouldn’t Old Mexico be safest?”

  “There’s no job for me there. I need to get some loot first,” said the Kid.

  Exactly as he’d promised he’d do, the Kid slapped the hindquarters of the Indian pony he’d stolen, and it trotted back to its owner in Lincoln. Then he stole a prized roan stallion and headed south past Agua Azul, weaving through shady forests of ponderosa pine and spruce to overnight at the farm of a John Tunstall ally. There he traded for a fresh horse and headed farther south to the Rio Peñasco, riding in melancholy over the sunny Los Feliz rangelands where he used to cowboy in order to get to the neighboring ranch and choza of Harry’s friend John Meadows. The Kid told his tales of woe, and then Meadows, too, urged him to continue down to Old Mexico for a fresh start. Ciudad Juárez was on the Rio Grande a little over one hundred miles southwest, and in the opposite direction was Fort Sumner, half again as far. The Kid failed to mention Paulita as he said his old friends there were enough of a draw that he felt the fort ought to be his destination, telling Meadows that he’d just hole up with shepherd pals for the summer or until he’d earned enough cash to head south.

  John Meadows scolded the twenty-one-year-old that Pat Garrett had relatives in Sumner. The sheriff would hear he was there and find him and kill him, or the Kid would have to kill Garrett.

  But the Kid would not be dissuaded, and rode northeast through sun-bleached grasses as high as his horse’s hocks, zephyrs dipping and lifting great swaths of fresh wild barley that seemed to rise and roll like the swells of a storm green ocean he’d never see.

  * * *

  On May 3, 1881, Lew Wallace again published the government’s offer of a five-hundred-dollar reward for William H. Bonney. Announced via the newspapers, it did not mention “dead or alive,” but those conditions were presumed.

  The Kid understood that, yet he still went northeast 150 miles to the locale of his familiars, walking the final 20 miles from Conejo Springs because his stolen bay stallion got spooked one night and galloped away. He was footsore, parched, and exhausted when he got to Fort Sumner and the Indian hospital on May 7. “I feel like I been rode hard and put away wet,” he said, and Manuela Herrera, whose new baby boy was sleeping, prepared the Kid a bath.

  Watching him lather his hair with soap as she poured in more hot water, the young widow asked in Spanish how long it had been since he’d been with a woman, and he admitted that with jail and being on the run it was too long ago to remember. She said she’d been without for six months, since before Charlie died, and as she toweled him off she saw his interest and they quietly took comfort in each other’s bodies.

  His hands were still desiring her afterward, but she was nettled with concern as she asked in Spanish, “Why are you here?”

  He answered in Spanish, “Here’s where my friends are.”

  “Celsa? Paulita?”

  “And you. And others.”

  “I’m not jealous. We can share. But don’t you see you’ll be found out? Even getting here you were noticed. Many love you and will keep the secret. Some won’t.”

  He laid his cheek against the scented crook of her neck as his free hand idly floated over her seascape of rise and fall. “I have no roots anywhere else. I have no ‘at home’ but here. And I feel doomed. Like I’m riding to Hell on a fast horse. I’m not afraid of dying, but I don’t want to die alone. I don’t want some no one finding me finished off and asking a sheriff, ‘Who’s that?’ ”

  The baby woke and cooed to himself, but then hunger changed his mind and he cried until his mother got to him.

  The Kid found fresh clothes for himself in the trunk he’d left behind, and after a skillet of fajitas, there was nothing for him to do on a Saturday night but steal a fine horse hitched in front of Beaver Smith’s saloon and ride it fifteen miles along the Rio Pecos to a Mexican shepherd’s camp.

  The horse’s owner hammered a barracks door to wake up Deputy Sheriff Barney Mason, and he promised the rancher he’d launch an investigation. Because of the Kid’s fame, he was no problem to track, just a “Donde está el Chivato?” was enough to get children to give Mason a heading, and he and a friend, an oddly unarmed cattleman, got to the shepherd’s camp near Buffalo Arroyo that Sunday evening.

  The man hunters were still a quarter mile off when the Kid spied them on the open range of sideoats grama grass, and, embittered by Mason’s abandonment of their former friendship, he enlisted four Mexican friends to back him up with rifles as the agents of justice ever more gradually rode in.

  Some years later, Paulita Maxwell recalled that whenever Billy rode into Fort Sumner, the fearful Deputy Mason would find a reason to ride out, and he lost courage again when from a hundred yards he saw the Kid rise up and shoulder his Winchester. The deputy felt it unlikely he could be hit from that distance, but he wasn’t in fact certain, so he wheeled his horse fully around and raced off. And he would soon hurriedly collect his wife and child, head to Roswell, and have no other part in this drama.

  But the cattleman found the wherewithal to hold up his hands as he ambled his own horse forward, and he was surprised at the Kid’s affability as the cattleman told him how much the owner wanted his stolen horse back. It was a gift from his late wife.

  With a smile the Kid said, “I’m real upset that I inconvenienced anyone, but you see I’m without transportation otherwise. When circumstances are better with me, I’ll either return his horse or give him good money for it.”

  And with relief the cattleman said, “Well, my business here is done,” and he cantered off.

  The Kid did return the widower’s horse the next noon, doffing his hat to the man in a much-obliged gesture, and then he stole another.

  * * *

  Although the Kid was still on the loose, on May 13, Governor Lew Wallace signed a pro forma warrant of execution as if the hanging were going to happen in Lincoln that day as planned. And then he returned to packing for his long journey east on a Pullman sleeper to Indiana in order to finally join his wife, Susan, and then go onward to the Port of New York and, a few weeks later, to his ministry to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. He served four years there, but with Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, taking the presidential oath of office in 1885, Lew Wallace retired from diplomacy and politics in general to focus on his writing, publishing a biography of Benjamin Harrison, the novel The Prince of India, and the narrative poem The Wooing of Malkatoon. Surpassing even Harriet Beecher Stowe in book sales, he became a hugely wealthy man, and at age seventy-seven he died of gastritis while in the midst of writing a two-volume autobiography in which Billy the Kid was hardly mentioned.

  * * *

  On May 19, the Las Vegas Gazette either found out or inferred, “Billy keeps well-posted on matters in the outside world as he is well thought of by many of the Mexicans who take him all the newspapers they can get hold of. He is not far from Fort Sumner and has not left that neighborhood since he rode over from Lincoln after making his break.”

  Like the town of Lincoln after its civil war, Fort Sumner and its outlying placitas were losing hundreds of residents because of the wildness and continuing violence, and that left as its majority Mexicans who were generally sympathetic to the Kid, as well as some hard and dangerous characters who shrugged at the Kid’s outlawry, and no more than a dozen Anglos who followed all the potboiled accounts of his wickedness and were terrified of him.

  Was it fear that made Garrett reluctant to go there? In late May the sheriff called off his methodical manhunt for William H. Bonney after he or his deputies had interrogated the Kid’s enemies and visited all his old haunts—Los Portales, San Patricio, Puerto de Luna, Anton Chico—but fou
nd no sign of him. Garrett later claimed he’d failed to investigate Fort Sumner because it seemed like madness for the Kid to go where he was so well known. The sheriff was operating on the presumption of what he himself would do if on the run, which was that the Kid had wisely crossed the Rio Grande into the freedom of Old Mexico.

  As May became June, Garrett surprisingly still avoided Fort Sumner, in spite of multiple reports of the Kid’s presence there. The sheriff said he just didn’t buy it, for there’d been fabrications that the Kid had been killed in El Paso or murdered a trio of Chisum’s cowboys outside Roswell or he was in Seven Rivers, Tularosa, Las Vegas, Albuquerque, Denver. Writing Lionel Sheldon, the new territorial governor, the sheriff noted, “I have never taken Bonney for a fool, but have credited him with the possession of extraordinary forethought and cool judgment.” So to him none of those rumored locales seemed right. And there was the awkwardness of the Kid’s connection to Celsa, his wife’s sister, and to the Maxwells, his old friends. He’d rather find Billy far from there, and in Lincoln County. So he handled chores on his ranch outside Roswell, cared for his and Apolonaria’s newborn, Ida, and busied himself with official tasks as he became patient as a spider where the Kid was concerned, waiting out a desperado who was too outgoing and free-spirited to stay hidden for long.

  And it was true that with heedlessness, overconfidence, and pluck, the Kid larked in and out of Fort Sumner as if he weren’t wanted for murder with a reward offer available to anyone doughty enough to lift a gun against him.

  The Santa Fe New Mexican for June 16 noted, “A man who came to Santa Fe from Lincoln County says that Billy the Kid gets all the money he wants, steals horses when he needs them, and makes no bones of going into and out of various towns. The people regard the sneaks-by with a feeling half of fear and half of admiration, they meekly submit to his depredations, and some of them go so far as to aid him in avoiding capture.”

  * * *

  The Maxwell house faced eastward and overlooked the old parade grounds and, farther off, the enlisted men’s barracks. South of the house was a garden of wildflowers such as poppies, mariposa lilies, hoary aster, and amaranth. And then there was a dance hall with bailes on the weekends where the Kid would carry on in his fine clothes like his old self, flouncing Celsa around in a schottische, formally waltzing with Manuela, and generally agreeing to join on the floor any of the fanning coquettes in mantillas who yearned for him.

  Charlie Siringo would later become a Pinkerton detective and gain fame with his cowboy memoirs, but in 1881 he was a Texas rangehand in his late twenties who now and then helped out Pat Garrett in hunting the Kid and his gang. In that way he became familiar with the famous dances at Fort Sumner, and Siringo fell hard for the dark, alluring, high-spirited widow of Charlie Bowdre. Walking Manuela back to the old Indian hospital one night, Siringo confessed that he was smitten and they became affectionate at the hospital door. But though he begged to be invited inside where they could go a little further, she wouldn’t let him. She was being virtuous, he thought. And only weeks later, when it no longer mattered, did she tell Siringo that Billy the Kid had been hiding there.

  The Kid heard Siringo gallop off that night and he told Manuela on heading out that he needed to find Paulita. She seemed to be avoiding him and he was going to the Maxwell house to see why.

  She was not there, but the Navajo maid was. The thirty-five-year-old Deluvina focused on the Kid’s holstered Colt .41 Thunderer and feigned ignorance of the youngest Maxwell’s whereabouts. But Deluvina had been purchased as a child for fifty dollars by Lucien Maxwell and she felt kin to Billy as a fellow orphan, so she was fond enough to let the murderer wait in the lilac parlor for the girl. She even brought him fresh sun tea and a saucer of apple cobbler as he stewed on the love seat, worriedly thinking of Paulita. She won’t want a wanted man.

  At last he heard the girl on the porch, confiding to someone in Spanish, “Lo pasé muy bien.” I had a very nice time. There was a male response the Kid couldn’t catch, and he was too cautious to go to the front door. He heard it open and shut, and he stood as he heard her soft footsteps on the floral carpet of the hallway. She may have been heading back to the kitchen, but then she halted in shock at seeing the Kid in the parlor, his face full of tragedy.

  “Who let you in?” she asked.

  He felt it was the wrong first question. “Deluvina,” he said. And he ticked his head toward the front porch. “Who was that?”

  “José,” she said. She seemed irresolute, even fearful, and she lurked in the hallway as if he were dangerous.

  Billy fell back onto the love seat and smiled as in a strained counterfeit of ease he patted a spot next to him. “Enter, my angel! Sit!”

  She walked in but took the violet wing chair five feet away from him. She was wearing knee-high boots and the culottes that preceded jodhpurs.

  “Moonlight ride?” he asked.

  Even in a forced smile her cute dimples showed. “You know how I have always plumed myself on my horsemanship.”

  “Riding with?”

  “My brother’s roan mare.”

  “I meant ‘Who’s this José?’ ”

  “José Jaramillo. Lorenzo Jaramillo’s son.” Even in the heat of July her forearms were crossed over her breasts and she seemed to be trembling. She earnestly asked, “You’re not going to hurt him, are you?”

  “Why would I?”

  “Because you do that. You do worse.”

  The Kid felt a hot burn of irritation flush his cheeks. “I’m not a ruthless murderer. My hand was forced each time.”

  She ever so gently said, “Hah.” Like she found him delusional.

  The night was getting pear-shaped. “And how is St. Mary’s Convent School?”

  “I graduated.”

  “Congratulations!”

  “Lots of people do it,” she said.

  “And now what?”

  She sighed. “Doubts. Disappointment.”

  And then Pete Maxwell was at the parlor doorway in a striped nightshirt and slippers. With false bonhomie, he said, “I thought I detected Billy’s voice. What a treat to see you again!”

  “Hola, Pedro.”

  With a catch of nervousness in his voice he said, “I hear no officers of the law can find you, yet here you are in plain sight!”

  “I hither and yon a bit.”

  “Well,” Pete Maxwell said, and then he seemed at a loss for words. His hands palsied as he stared at the Kid’s six-shooter. Then he flung a scowl to his sister as he said, “Don’t forget the lamps like you do, Paulita.”

  She shooed him off with the flick of a hand. When he was gone, she whispered, “Pete disapproves of our . . . friendship. But he won’t do anything about it. You fill him with terror.”

  “Has its advantages, I guess.”

  “Are you staying in Sumner?”

  “Ofttimes.”

  “With?”

  The Kid just said, “With friends.”

  But she’d heard the rumors of his queridas. With sadness, Paulita said, “Oh.”

  Billy realized he’d let them take another wrong turning, so he grinned and changed the subject. “I got your letter to me in the Mesilla jail! Read it over and over again. Even showed it to Sheriff Southwick there. You know what he said? Said, ‘That girl is sure stuck on you.’ ”

  She seemed to consider his oddness before saying, “Then. I have outgrown that girl now. She believed you were being unfairly hounded due to misunderstandings and lies and exaggerations.” She seemed to want to go on, but simmered. “And you didn’t answer that letter.”

  “My mind was on my hanging.”

  She tilted her head for a different perspective. “Are you even aware of how hot and cold you are? How you seduce and then withdraw, tantalize and then retreat? Even with men you’re like that. You’re a mystery to people, you keep us off-balance and guessing. We have to presume what you’re thinking or feeling. And instead of being frustrated we find ourselves fascinated,
and we make things up about you out of our own hopes and needs and all the dangerous things we’re afraid to do.”

  The Kid felt the outrage that so often sent his hand to his gun. But he governed himself and said, “You seem to have given this a lot of thought.”

  “What else was there to do before I cried myself to sleep?”

  He felt a farewell coming and he hastened it. “So where are we, you and me?”

  She hesitated before saying, “José wants to marry me.”

  The Kid flatly echoed, “José wants to marry you.”

  “Yes.”

  “I was hoping . . .”

  “I suspected.”

  “And I don’t have a chance?”

  Enough of an answer that her coffee-colored eyes glistened with tears.

  “Well, it may be July for you but it’s near winter for me. All the leaves are falling off the trees.” Heartsick, he stood. “I’ll be going now.”

  She was forlorn as she faced the floor.

  The Kid paused in the hallway. “I still love you, Paulita.”

  “And I you,” she whispered.

  * * *

  Within a hasty few months Paulita Beaubien Maxwell would marry José Florentino Jaramillo at San José Catholic Church in Anton Chico. She was wealthy and eighteen, the Jaramillos were prosperous, and Pete Maxwell hoped she would no longer be sullied by her relationship with the Kid.

  She would give birth to three children: Adelina, Luz, and a son, Telesfor. But in the 1890s the often drunk Jaramillo abandoned her for another woman and she raised the children alone.

  In 1884 the New England Cattle Company purchased what remained of Lucien Maxwell’s real estate, and then Old Fort Sumner was reclaimed by flooding, its deteriorating buildings were torn apart for scrap lumber, and all its majestic cottonwood trees were felled. Mrs. Jaramillo was forced to spend her last years in a mail-order cottage only four miles north, on the outskirts of a dreary, sun-drenched village that still called itself Fort Sumner. And it was there as she was crocheting a mantilla on the front porch that the journalist Walter Noble Burns interviewed “A Belle of Old Fort Sumner” about the Kid, and Paulita took in the fall’s first riotous colors of dying as she denied ever being the Kid’s sweetheart. “I liked him very, very much—oh, yes—but I did not love him.”