by Ron Hansen
When she was sent The Saga of Billy the Kid in 1926, she found she could not finish reading it. Even though avid Kid tourists later found her home and sought to extract intimacies from her, Paulita stayed put in new Fort Sumner and skimped by on an ever-shrinking inheritance until she died of nephritis in 1929, aged sixty-five.
* * *
John William Poe was a cattle detective for the Canadian River Stock Association in Tascosa, and because so much rustling seemed to have its origin in Lincoln County, he went there and established headquarters in White Oaks in March 1881. Chancing upon Sheriff Pat Garrett in a saloon, Poe chatted about his job scouring the rangeland for stolen livestock, and Garrett finished a jar of whiskey and asked, “Why don’t you become my deputy, haul in evildoers, and get paid twice over?”
Poe did that, and it was he who rode the forty miles from White Oaks to Lincoln to find his boss in the Wortley Hotel, telling him that a White Oaks drunk was sleeping off his hard night in a haymow at West & Dedrick Livery & Sales when he overheard Sam and Dan Dedrick talking about the Kid hiding in and around Fort Sumner.
“Was your informer still squiffed?” Garrett asked.
Poe said, “I just know the Dedricks are old friends of Bonney.”
In June the sheriff had written a letter of inquiry to Emanuel Brazil, but it was not until July 11 that he’d gotten a reply, with Brazil admitting, “The Kid’s so much in the proximity that I am afraid to go outside.” And now this. John Poe was looking at him with the furrowed brow of Why not? Garrett felt forced to act and finally decided, “We’ll go get Kip McKinney.”
Thomas C. McKinney was a deputy US marshal with his office in the still-small town of Roswell. Garrett scared him up there on July 12 and took McKinney and Poe out to his homestead ranch to have Apolonaria’s menudo soup and tamales. Garrett had warned his deputies to make no mention of the Kid, but Kip McKinney thanked Garrett’s wife for the scrumptious food and just to make conversation said, “Heard you once lived where we’re heading!”
With a fierce stare Garrett hushed him, then he turned to his wife. She had a stricken look. “Celsa will be fine,” he said.
At sundown on the twelfth, the Lincoln County lawmen headed north for Fort Sumner, achieving about thirty miles of the eighty before finally picketing their horses in the wee hours and sleeping just off the Rio Pecos in their fewest clothes for the cool.
Waking at sunup to the noise of critters thrashing in the weeds in one of nature’s kill-or-be-killed dramas, the sheriff found Poe and Kinney awake, too, fully dressed and squatting by the river as they smoked in silence. Lying back with his hands behind his head he told them, “The Kid is a likable fellow. Often quiet. There’s no fuss or bluster in him. Wasn’t ever quarrelsome, never hunted trouble. But there’s something about him even when he’s friendliest that makes you feel he could be dangerous to take liberties with. I never saw him mad in my life. Can’t remember when he wasn’t smiling. But he’s the most murderous youth that ever stood in shoe leather, and he’s game all the way through.”
* * *
July 13 the Nugget newspaper in Tombstone, Arizona, reported, “Parties now in Las Vegas bring the information that Billy the Kid is on the Red River, near the Texas line, at the head of twenty men.” And on that Wednesday, the sheriff and his deputies instead journeyed another fifty miles on the Goodnight-Loving cattle trail in a hundred-degree oven, hearing the sizzling noise of locusts in the sagebrush and snakeweed, feeling their sweat soak their shirts and vests and scallop their hatbands, riding in silence into each heat shimmer ahead before finally halting to camp in sandhills near Taiban Creek. Emanuel Brazil was to meet them there, but fear of the Kid’s vengeance made him a no-show.
Still fruitlessly waiting for him at midnight, Garrett finally ended his silence to confide to his men, “I know now that I will have to kill the Kid. We both know that it must be one or the other of us if we ever meet.”
- 21 -
“QUIéN ES?”
After a breakfast of hardtack and coffee on Thursday, July 14, Sheriff Garrett and his deputies walked up a high hill and Garrett used his field glasses to scan the prairie between them and the fort, finding nothing but far-off sheep and boy herders with sticks long as fishing poles. The sheriff determined that he and Deputy McKinney were too familiar in Sumner, and that Deputy Poe, who’d never been there, should ride in and reconnoiter.
Hitching his horse in front of Beaver Smith’s Saloon at ten, Poe saw the old owner tilting back in a front porch chair. Smith frankly asked, “Who are you and why are you here?”
John Poe offered his name, told him he’d scavenged too little ore from Lone Mountain near White Oaks, and now, “With my tail between my legs, I’m wandering back to my homestead on the Red River, in Mobeetie, Texas.”
“Hidetown?”
“Yep, we used to call it that. When there was still buffalo.”
Smith stood up. “Are you thirsty?”
Soon there were ill-humored and questioning men crowding around him in the saloon. Poe ponied up for house whiskeys and introduced various topics of conversation until he could innocently worm in a few tourist questions about this Billy the Kid. Wasn’t he a resident once? Any of you see him kill Joe Grant? Who’s this sweetheart I been hearing about?
Each time the Kid was mentioned, silence chilled the room and glances were exchanged so that he was forced to return to homely saloon talk, like him getting to watch the Albuquerque Browns play semiprofessional baseball on the fairgrounds. Couldn’t make head nor tail of the game.
At noon Poe lunched alone on tacos and then loitered in the shade, making affable comments about the hot weather to passersby and finding some willing to get into conversations. But whenever he would undertake even a casual inquiry about the Kid, his companions would just walk off. He later told Garrett, “The fort’s residents were secretive and suspicious of me, and it was plain that many of them were on the alert, expecting something to happen.”
* * *
With the heat again at a hundred degrees on July 14, Celsa Gutiérrez doubled up on the Kid’s stolen palomino and they rode out to the salty alkali lake of the failed Apache and Navajo reservation at Bosque Redondo. Billy took off Celsa’s clothes and she took off his. They admired each other’s bodies and kissed and fooled around, then they swam and floated and splashed like children. Then the couple lay naked on the salt-limed shore, letting the fury of the sun dry them and then induce crooked trickles of perspiration.
The Kid woke to find Celsa up on an elbow, a full breast pillowing against him as she softly glided a finger over the gunshot wound in his thigh. She said in Spanish, “I forget how you got this.”
“Jacob Mathews shot me in Lincoln.”
“But why?”
“Well, fair’s fair, I guess. I was trying to kill him.”
She smiled. “You have not been shot often, have you?”
“Just that once.”
“You’re like the cat with the nine lives.”
“I hope I haven’t used them all up.”
Celsa kissed him. “There. I am a fairy princess. And now you live forever.”
The Kid grinned. “And will you be with me all that time?”
Weeks later Celsa would be frustrated that she could not recall anything more of what they talked about. She was certain though that there were no confidences, no worries or guilt, no plans for the future except for the still-vague idea of finding a new life in Old Mexico. She told people, in Spanish, they frolicked, and that was all.
Because Saval was returning at six from his failures at silver mining in White Oaks, they hurriedly dressed and rode back to the fort in midafternoon, happening to pass Deputy John Poe as he exited Sumner. Each of them ignorant of the other.
Poe later recalled seeing a lithe, hatless man in his late teens riding a palomino with a beautiful Mexican woman hugging him, her face fondly nestled against his white, collarless, long-sleeved shirt as she rocked with the horse’s slow pace. P
oe was heading north seven miles to the post office in Sunnyside. Garrett had torn a page from his vest pocket notebook and written a note of introduction to the postmaster, Milnor Rudulph:
My dear friend. This is my deputy, John Poe. I hope you will welcome him with your usual hospitality. P. F. Garrett.
Rudulph was originally from Maryland and was fifty-six but looked far older—he would die within six years—a bald, officious man with a wide white sickle of a mustache and a hard-bitten schoolteacher’s glare of scrutiny. Upon reading Garrett’s note, he stuffily claimed, “I have a friendship of three years standing with Pat and have nothing but admiration for him. I would be very glad to accommodate any friend of his for the night.”
The formality made Poe suspicious.
Rudulph’s Mexican wife served them a dinner of red potatoes and fresh-caught cutthroat trout, and as she handled the dishwashing Deputy Poe invited conversations from her husband about general things like the mail service and gardening problems and his own viewing of the Albuquerque Browns, and once Rudulph had lit a clay pipe and seemed fully relaxed Poe asked, “You had a friendship with Billy the Kid when he was here?”
Rudulph’s wife turned from the sink in distress, but Rudulph himself just fidgeted as he said, “Well, he sent mail like people do.”
Deputy Poe introduced the topic of the Kid’s jailbreak and the report from Emanuel Brazil that the Kid was in their neighborhood.
“Excuse me,” Rudulph said as he got up from the dinner table and fiddled with things in the kitchen so his back would be shut to Poe. “I have heard that such a report was about,” Rudulph said. “But I do not believe it, as the Kid is, in my opinion, too shrewd to be caught lingering in this part of the country.”
John Poe could see the quaver in the postmaster’s hands as he put dried saucers away in the cupboard, and he told the postmaster he was convinced he was well intentioned but like so many others he was afraid of the Kid and would not hazard to say anything whatever about him. Rudulph’s wife seemed to give her husband a silencing look.
Deputy Poe continued, “I have come to you with the express purpose of learning where the Kid could be found. We believe he is hiding in Fort Sumner. Is that so?”
With a hint of embarrassment in his vehemence, Rudulph defended himself by saying, “My son Charlie, and just eighteen for gosh sakes, took it upon himself to serve on that posse that captured the Kid and his gang at Stinking Springs. We can be depended on to tell you if that murderer was around.”
John Poe stood and thanked the wife in English, saying the good feed was all he needed and instead of staying overnight he would ride back to his friends in the fresh cool of the evening.
Milnor Rudulph failed to hide his relief.
* * *
The deputy rejoined the sheriff and McKinney north of the fort at Punta de la Glorieta, where the irrigation ditch called Acequia Madre crossed the northwest road to Las Vegas and Fort Union. Poe recounted the secrecy and uneasiness in Fort Sumner and Milnor Rudulph’s odd agitation, which seemed to confirm the many reports of the Kid’s whereabouts. So they mounted up and the sheriff and his deputies rode south to Fort Sumner, with Garrett saying in his formal, Southern way, “I have but little confidence in accomplishing the object of our trip.” Without giving the name of Celsa Gutiérrez, he told them there was a rented apartment in the old quartermaster’s store that the Kid had formerly frequented. Maybe they’d see him going in or out that night. Garrett failed to acknowledge the gossip his wife had passed along, that Celsa was pregnant with Billy’s child. There were so many stories.
To avoid detection in Fort Sumner, the trio stayed on what was called the Texas Road behind the old Indian hospital, then went around Bob Hargrove’s saloon to the green and fragrant expanse of the peach orchard on the northern boundary of the fort. They staked their horses with their muzzles within reach of the fruit, but the horses lowered their heads to tear up the high grass between their hooves. Garrett left the 1873 model Winchester rifle he’d taken from Billie Wilson in his saddle scabbard, but he wore in his holster Wilson’s fine new Colt .44 pistol.
The sheriff and his deputies went forward on foot to wait near the fence around the orchard, hanging out in the night of the trees with views east to the front of the old Indian hospital in case the Kid visited Manuela, and south across the parade grounds to the old quartermaster’s store and the quarters of Saval and Celsa Gutiérrez, just left of Beaver Smith’s saloon. With the full moon overhead they could see from a hundred yards away a pretty woman in her twenties pass in front of Beaver Smith’s, hugging sheets she’d just pulled down from a clothesline. She walked farther east and inside the adobe building, disappearing.
John Poe asked, “Who was that?”
Garrett quietly said, “My sister-in-law.”
The deputies gave him a look. Kip McKinney asked, “Why not ask her if she seen the Kid?”
Wordlessly, Garrett pinched some Blackberry Long Cut tobacco from its pouch and tamped it into his calabash pipe with his thumb. His deputies waited for his rationale but finally realized he was going to say nothing more, so they went back to their lookout. Chirring insects and nickering horses were the only sounds. It was nine p.m.
* * *
The Kid intended to hide away that night in an old Navajo hogan with a Mexican sheepherder who worked for Pete Maxwell. But the sheepherder kept putting off their dinner with games of cards until he finally confessed around eight that he actually had no food. “Well, that’s no good,” the Kid said, and the shepherd told him he’d slaughtered a steer for Don Pedro that morning and hung it on the porch for aging.
The Kid was hungry enough to trot his horse back to the fort.
Jesús Silva said he found the Kid strolling in darkness behind Bob Hargrove’s saloon that night. The Kid told him he was hungry, but Silva said in Spanish, “Have a cold beer with me first.”
“Cold?”
“I hung the bottles in the Pecos with fishing lines.”
The Kid was coaxed, and Silva took him to the far end of the peach orchard, where there was a tin pail with green bottles in it from the Cervecería Toluca y México. They sat under the peach trees in high grass and talked very quietly with it so late. Jesús Silva later recalled that the Kid was in his usual high spirits, though he did allude to the trouble he was in and cautioned, “Holding on to hatred is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.”
* * *
Spanish was being spoken quietly and indistinctly far behind Garrett, but there’d been a fiesta and many Mexicans were still up. Hearing an “Adíos,” he turned in the peach orchard to see a lithe man in a slouch hat and waistcoat gracefully and easily jump the orchard fence and head east. Even with the full moon, Garrett couldn’t tell if he was Anglo or Mexican, couldn’t even make out where he ended up going. Watching like this seemed such a waste of time. He told his deputies, “We seem to be on a cold trail, fellows. We come to the end of the alley.”
* * *
Even much later in life, Candido Gutiérrez remembered being up late and shyly hiding behind his mother’s skirt as she handed the Kid a butcher knife at the back door and told him she would cook the steaks if he got one for Saval, too. Candido’s father drunkenly called out from the front room that he wanted one as big as a Bible.
And then Candido heard his mother confide that she’d been told a stranger was in the fort that afternoon questioning people about Billy the Kid.
In Spanish, the Kid said, “A lot of people do that. I’m a curiosity. I ought to be in the freak show with the Siamese twins.”
“Still, you’ll be careful?”
“I’ll be fine.” With it still so hot, he took off his hat and waistcoat, then his holster so he wouldn’t attract attention, and finally he wrenched off his boots. In English he said, “Hold these for me, will ya? I’ll be walking on cat’s paws.” And then he tucked his smallish Colt .41 Thunderer into his right trouser pocket.
* * *
“Ready to go?” a frustrated sheriff asked his men.
But John Poe insisted, “Don’t you think we ought to talk to Pedro Maxwell first? We haven’t questioned him yet.”
Kip McKinney said, “It’s after eleven. He’ll be sleeping.”
His wariness was overcome by his methodical nature, and Pat Garrett decided, “We’re old friends. Pete won’t mind me waking him.”
The sheriff and his deputies left the peach orchard for the former officers’ quarters but went there in a wandering, unpredictable way just in case a gun was trained on them, McKinney even backpedaling to watch the area to their rear.
Poe saw a very large house with porches on three sides and a picket fence that was flush against the street. At the front gate Garrett nodded toward the first-floor room to the left and told them in a hushed voice, “That’s Maxwell’s room in the southeast corner. You fellows wait here while I go in and talk to him.”
It was still so hot that Maxwell’s unscreened windows were fully raised and the front door was wide open for the sultry breeze. The sheriff walked up the porch steps, and Poe followed just far enough to sit on the stoop, while McKinney squatted outside the fence with his rifle in both hands.
* * *
The Kid lofted himself over the fence dividing officers from enlisted men and walked toward the Maxwell house, cockleburs catching his stocking feet. He saw there’d been a fiesta in the dance hall, and with the near-full moon he could see some people still strolling on the parade grounds though it was probably half past eleven. The Kid found more night so he could relieve himself in the high grass that Pete’s sheep hadn’t got to yet. He could see the curing carcass of the steer hanging under the eave of the north porch and could have butchered the porterhouse steaks from the short loin right then, but his loyalty to his old friends caused him to seek permission, so he shook himself and walked around to the front of the house, fastening his trousers.