“Ha-haaa!”
It’s a laugh that possesses an integrity, a total absorption on the part of its source, that immediately, I both envy and fear the woman from which it springs. Behind the front desk (a raised fortress armed with computer terminals and medical forms) she goes about her business shuffling papers and filling out forms while talking on the phone, to a friend perhaps, apparently unaware of my (or anyone else’s) presence. Dressed in one of those generic nurse uniforms (soap opera surplus), her laugh seems in contempt of such trappings. Rather than being defiant, the laugh, spontaneous and without calculation, demonstrates that the role she plays as a health care provider in no way infringes upon her human right to be herself completely. Her job is just a function performed in order to pick up a paycheck and get on with her life. I must keep in mind, however, that just because I can neither laugh so freely nor wear a uniform without having my identity swallowed up by it, it matters not. I too have a job to do.
“Excuse me,” I say. She continues her phone conversation. “Excuse me, I would like to visit a Mr. Henry O’Brian.”
“Hol’ on, Dorothy.” She presses the receiver against her fleshy collarbone and acknowledges me with her eyebrows.
“A Mr. Henry O’Brian, I want to visit him.”
“Sit down over dere.” She points with her head and lifts the receiver back to her ear speaking into the mouthpiece. “So now wha’ jah sayin’ about Johnny-boy?”
“Aren’t visiting hours over by five?” I ask. “I need to visit him now.”
“Lawd, can’t jah see me busy?” she says glancing at the forms and back up again. “Now sit you down and wait jah turn.”
No one else is sitting in the lobby, so I sit in the far corner after bumping my shin on the glass coffee table. Nervously, I fidget through old magazines until one attracts me with the headline “Billy the Kid: Dead or Alive?” Magazine pages are so easy to turn while wearing surgical gloves. Maybe I should wear them around the house as well.
The article concerns a revision of an old theory concerning Billy: that the wrong man was shot by Pat Garrett and that the Kid escaped to live a long, though uneventful, life.
BUT THE GOAT, ON WHICH THE LOT FELL TO BE THE SCAPEGOAT, SHALL BE PRESENTED ALIVE BEFORE THE LORD, TO MAKE AN ATONEMENT WITH HIM, AND TO MAKE HIM GO FOR A SCAPEGOAT INTO THE WILDERNESS.133
A cloud came over his face when he made some allusion to his being made the hero of fabulous yarns, and something like indignation was expressed when he said that our paper misrepresented him in saying that he called his comrades cowards. “I never said any such thing,” he pouted, “I know they ain’t cowards.”134
Conspiracy/coverup theories concerning legendary figures claiming that they never died are popular in America from Jesse James and Butch Cassidy up through Elvis and JFK. Why can’t Billy the Kid, an essential figure in the American mythology of youthful innocence lost, be raised from the dead as well? It’s an old theory and the author debunks much of it. He even points to new evidence discrediting “Brushy” Bill Roberts of Hico, Texas, who had claimed to be Billy the Kid in the 1950s. Roberts convinced many and even earned an audience with the governor of New Mexico who subsequently denounced him in an unruly press conference which included many irate descendents of Pat Garrett. However, the author does concede a ten-point list of inconsistencies with the official story that raises unanswered questions concerning Billy’s death. He even goes on to trace possible descendants of the Kid who may not even be aware of their pioneer blood. I clip the article for my files.
I glance at the clock: a quarter to five! I jump up and bang my shin again in the same place.
“Excuse me,” I say as she looks up annoyed, “but isn’t it almost closing time?”
“We never close,” she says.
“I mean …”
“Ah know what jah mean, chile.” With exaggerated frustration, she takes out a dull green card and fills in the time and date. “Who jah wan’ to see?”
“Mr. Henry O’Brian.”
She looks up a computer printout and fills out the card again. “Room tree-tirteen.” She hands me the card, but pulls it back before I get my hands on it.
“Doncha come dis late again or me sen’ jah right back from where ya come. You undastan’ dat chile?”
I nod.
“It four forty-five. Ah get-toff at five. You got fifteen minute. Don make me commup and fetcha now!”
“There was a big crowd gazing at me, wasn’t there,” Bonney exclaimed, and then smilingly continued, “well, perhaps some of them will think me half a man now; everyone seems to think that I was some kind of animal.”
He did look human, indeed, but there was nothing very mannish about his appearance, for he looked and acted a mere boy. He is about five feet eight or nine inches tall, slightly built and lithe, weighing about 140; a frank and open countenance, looking like a schoolboy, with the traditional silky fuzz on his upper lip; clear blue eyes, with a roguish snap about them; light hair and complexion. He is, in all, quite a handsome looking fellow, the imperfection being two prominent front teeth, slightly protruding like squirrel’s teeth, and he has agreeable and winning ways.135
I make my way through the doors and into the main hall when a wave of foul humidity washes over me like dirty mop water. The smell of industrial strength cleaner intermingles with the sour smell of death. I paddle down the middle of the hall keeping my hands close to my sides. When I get to the elevator, I wait until someone else comes to push the greasy button. As the doors open, I’m shocked to see a living cadaver in a wheelchair connected to straps and bottles. I can’t tell if it’s a man or woman. Its head rests sideways on a shoulder with its mouth agape and eyes frozen open, as if paralyzed while staring into the face of death.
“Are you getting in or aren’t you,” a voice rudely booms behind me.
I take a deep breath. The doors close. We rise slowly. Forced to stand in front of the wheelchair, I feel its eyes fixed upon my back as if it can read my mind, fully aware of my disgust, my fear, and silently laughing at me, as if to say, “You think this is bad, wait until it happens to you!” I turn around to see its eyes staring right up at me. The nurse takes a rough hewn towel and harshly wipes the drool across its chin leaving a red path of irritated skin. Its face appears either clean-shaven or raw as if scrubbed with a wire brush. How the staff must hate their charges. As the elevator stops, the doors take an eternity to open and I stumble out, gasping for air.
The hallway seems more like a hospital than a nursing home. The top floor must be the ward for the oldest of the aged. Although no one ever knew the true age of Great-grandfather (he always claimed ignorance), it was always accepted that he was impossibly old, over a hundred years, even for as long as I could remember, defying even the most skeptical of doctors before they gave him a physical. Without a record of his birth or even his cooperation, no articles could be written on him by story-starved newspapers nor could his novelty-value be exploited. With all other family members dying off and lawyers taking over, he was finally housed here in a warehouse for the living dead, a curio for janitors and nurses, and a thorn for administrators waiting to insert a higher paying customer.
The smell of death is sweeter now, more ripe and sickening. As I walk past the semi-private rooms, a few scattered rolling beds line the walls like cars taxi-ing for parking spaces. Bottles hang with tubes trailing down into the living ghosts patiently waiting for an available space. The doors are left open in anticipation, revealing crowded rooms split into quarters with over-sized shower curtains, closed for what little privacy the patients had left. Behind them I can hear nurses grunting as they shift lifeless bodies around to make a bed or—if the family has any money left to grease palms—administer an alcohol bath. Now and then a patient with some life left in him cries out in pain at a needle or in rebellion at unwanted food, or simply howls into space as if his cries could be registered somewhere, anywhere, if only for the short moment that it echoes down the hall.
Passing limp, chair-ridden bodies, heads tipped back, to the side or forward, drooling through black gaps between brown-stained teeth, arms fallen over wheels, lifeless fingers resting precariously between spokes, the only movements are from countless pairs of yellow eyes transfixed upon the stranger in their mist. As I shudder past each, I feel as if, with the last of its strength, a hand will latch on to the scruff on my neck and shout, “O.K., that’s far enough, you fake, you phony, you false pretender. We know why you’re really here!”
Then, looking around the placita, Bonney asked “Is the jail in Sante Fe any better than this?”
This seemed to bother him considerably, for, as he explained, “this is a terrible place to put a fellow in.” He put the same question to everyone who came near him and when he learned that there was nothing better in store for him, he shrugged his shoulders and said something about putting up with what he had to.136
His door, like all the others, is propped open. I pause and take a deep breath, regretting it immediately as I fight back a dry heave. I take one latex glove off, reach into my pocket and clasp the battered old watch he gave me. Dear Gods, give me strength. Quickly, I squeeze back into the glove.
I peer into his room: white curtains, closed, let in a diffused pale light. A soiled disposable diaper, apparently rinsed out, dries on the heater. Peeking around the corner, I tip-toe in, hands holding my stomach, and see his feet first, knobby knees, sunken stomach, T-bone chest, blotchy beard, skeletal face, eyes half closed—and experience the shudder of recognition. This wrinkled mummy, could this really be Great-grandfather?
I’m suddenly overcome with the same dread as one, who upon seeing a dead body, is afraid to get too close for fear it could still reach out and grab him. Then I notice his left wrist. It’s strapped to the roll guard on the left side of his bed. The leather restraint has a lock. Half aghast at the human rights violation and half reassured for my safety, I walk around his bed. The aged oak dresser along the opposite wall is the only piece of real furniture, likely the last of its type in the building. It’s far too heavy to move until absolutely necessary and fully appropriate for the floor’s last private room, a testament for this final survivor from an age when the dying were still allowed a few tokens of humanity. A large white notecard is taped to the middle of the mirror, upon which is written in big neat block letters, my telephone number. Beneath the number in smaller letters is my name. However, my name is written clumsily in a different pen as if added hastily at a later date with a mixture of frustration and angry surrender to forgetfulness: evidence of a time when attempts were still being made to speak to the future, to the self soon to be a total stranger.
Photographic portraits, wedged tightly between the mirror and frame, surround my phone number. These ancestral faces must have watched him countless years as he shuffled within the small confines of his cell until finally one day he could no longer rise to meet them. Yellowed and curling, I can make out faded blue pen marks designating their identities, names I’ve either forgotten or refuse to remember, until I come to my father and mother staring at me accusingly. Even in their wedding clothes, they stare into the camera somberly. It’s as if they’re looking straight ahead into the future at me (the last active survivor of a broken family wheel) with utter disappointment.
“Ugh!”
The noise sends an electric shock through my back, heart and stomach. I weave around and see my great-grandfather in the same position. Shaken, yet strangely relieved to have the stillness broken, I pass over to a chair by his bedside. Above the phone, my home number is pasted again, this time nameless. The final link to his past left unmarked and forgotten, but not ignored. Tempted to rip it down, I resist, swallowing my shame.
I lean over and whisper, “Great-grandfather?”
A final stroke of the hammer cut the last rivet in the bracelets, and they clanked on the pavement as they fell.
Bonney straightened up and then rubbing his wrists where the sharp edged irons chaffed him, said: “I don’t suppose you fellows would believe it, but this is the first time I ever had bracelets on. But many another fellow had them on, too.” As they led Bonney back down into the cold darkness of his basement cell, he turned and looked back and explained: “They say a fool for luck and a poor man for children. Garrett takes them all in.”137
“Great-grandfather … hello … can you hear me?”
His head turns slightly, eyes half open. “¿Chávez?”
“I’m not the attendant. It’s me, Walter, your great-grandson.”
“Great-grandson? Nah, not a chance. I’m only sixty-seven.”
“No Great-grandfather, you’re over a hundred.”
“A hundred? Son, don’t stretch an old man’s blanket. Nobody lives that long, not even Mexicans and Indians. What did you say your name was?”
“Walter, the son of the son of …”
“Well, grandson, whoever you are, corral that talking wire.” He shakes a bony finger at the phone, then points to my number pinned above. “Dial that number.” I hesitate. “You hog-tied? Go on, dial it.”
“But Great-grandfather, why?”
“Because … because, I say so.”
I dial. My answering machine kicks in. “Nobody’s home, Great-grandfather.”
“Oh yes they are. Was it picked up?”
“Well, yeah, sort of, but …”
“Good lord, son, then say hello!”
“Hello? Nobody answers.”
“Maybe they have sand in their ears. Say it again.”
“Hello …?”
“Keep saying it until they hear you.”
I obey.
“Hello … Hello … Hello …?”
We saw them again at the depot when the crowd presented a really war-like appearance. Leaning out of one of the windows of the train car, he talked casually with us as the rumblings of the crowd grew spirited.
“I don’t blame you for writing of me as you have. You had to believe others’ stories, but I don’t know as anyone would believe anything good of me, anyway,” he said. “I wasn’t the leader of any gang. I was for Billy all the time. I made my living gambling but that was the only way I could live. They wouldn’t let me settle down; if they had I wouldn’t be here today,” he held up his right arm on which was the bracelet. “Chisum got me into all this trouble and wouldn’t help me out. We used to do business together, but I guess I remind him of a time he’d rather forget.”138
I look over. He’s fallen back asleep. Eyes sunken in, hollow cheeks, skin wrinkled like a closed accordion, he could die before me and I couldn’t tell the difference.
“Great-grandfather?”
“Huh …”
“There’s still no answer, Great-grandfather.”
“¿Quien es?”
“What?”
“¿Quien es, Chávez? ¿Has venido a liberar tu amigo?”
“I’m not Chávez, Great-grandfather. I’m …”
“What did you call me? Are you family?”
“Yes.”
“Then please, I appeal for succor.”
“Anything, Great-grandfather.”
“Is my dresser still there?”
“Yes.”
“Go over there. Open the bottom drawer.”
I open a drawer full of yellowed boxer shorts.
“Do you not see it?”
“See what?”
“What’s hidden there?”
“But Great-grandfather, there’s nothing here but dirty old underwear.”
“That’s it!”
“That’s what?”
“That is the hidden treasure.”
“What treasure?”
“See, I fooled you too. I fooled them all!” he exclaims with a toothless smile. “That’s not just underwear, son,” he winks. “That’s $100,000 underwear—worth its weight in gold!”
The prospects of a fight at the train station exhilarated him, and he bitterly bemoaned being chained. “If I only had my Winchest
er, I’d lick the whole crowd,” was his confident comment on the strength of the attack party. He sighed and sighed again for a chance to take a hand in the fight, and the burden of his desire was to be set free to fight on the side of his captors as soon as he should smell powder.
As the authorities calmed the anxious crowd, the Kid fashioned his fingers into a make-believe pistol and peppered away at a group of small boys hiding behind the legs of their elders. The young innocents returned fire, one scoring a hit on the Kid’s shoulder. As the train rolled out, he lifted his hat and invited us to call and see him in Sante Fe, calling out “Adios!”139
Grasping to my breast the heart-shaped box of chocolate truffles I intended to give Great-grandfather, I step out of the entrance of the nursing home, shocked at the deepening gloom of evening. The sun has set and instead of being warmly wrapped beneath my bed covers, pleasantly diving in and out of the last sleep, I’m hurling into the second day without proper rest, hopelessly vulnerable to all kinds of foulness in the night air. Still, I take a deep breath of the cold, the first full swallow I’ve taken in an hour. A hint of foulness from the nursing home kitchen gives me a slight shiver, yet the outside air, after being in the depths of Hades for so long, has a dizzying, yet euphoric effect on me. In a moment of absolute clarity, I make the most important decision of my life. There is no alternative and the time to act is now. I know I must put Great-grandfather out of his misery.
Billy’s Blues Page 13