by John Shirley
He held up a little leather sack and jingled it. What did he mean, I’d helped him? Then I remembered that doctors liked to cut open dead folks to see what made ’em tick—and what made ’em stop ticking. And this man, something about him seemed like a kindly old uncle. Never had me a kindly old nobody. So I said, “You can keep your gold, I’m flush now. Come ahead.”
We dragged the bodies to the buckboard, heaved them on. I heard some shouting, someone asking for the constabulary, the voices of the whores talking in Spanish nearby, so as soon as he got up on the buckboard I slapped his horse’s rump and it pulled him off into the night.
Pretty sharp after that I rode off to Paulita’s cabin, out on the edge of Pete Maxwell’s ranchland. We were shacked up for true, hardly going out, for two days.
Well sir, we were drinking and lovin’ up in that shack on a hot July night, not so different from this one, bub. But hotter, it was, hotter'n a whorehouse on nickel night. We got hungry, as you do. I thought I’d go to her brother Pete’s house, cut some beef from his stores like he’d offered, maybe have a drink and talk to him about Paulita. Clear the air. We used to be friends.
I had no shirt on that night, just some jeans. No gun, because I didn’t want to spook Pete. Just a knife in my hand for cutting some steak for me and Paulita. I rode over, barefoot and bare-chested, singing to myself. I was a pretty good tenor, you know. Hard to believe, hearing me now.
I was drunk but able to sit a horse, still remember that the air felt good on my skin as I rode. I reined in when I saw some strangers on the porch of Pete’s place. I was wanted for shotgunning Bob Olinger and shooting one or two others, so I was nervous. I skirted around to the back, dismounted, and went in the back way, carrying that knife. Went to Pete’s room to ask him who those fellas were on the front porch—couple of deputies, is who they were, I found out later—and then I see someone in there, just the shape of him in the dark. Doesn’t look like Pete to me. So I say, “Quien es?” and boom, the fella shoots me. When his six gun goes off, that flash showed his face. Pat Garrett. I’ll never forget it. Fella I’d ridden with, turned sheriff. He looked scared as a deer in a ring of wolves, even though he was facing a man without a gun.
He fired twice. One round went through my right hand, changed direction when it smashed a bone, passed through and smacked into my left leg right above the kneecap. Second shot cut into my chest. I guess it nicked an artery, and spilled a mess of blood into my lungs. Getting shot like that felt like being kicked by the meanest mule ever was.
Then I was flat on my back, trying to breathe, and Pat was yelling to his men, “I shot Billy, by God!” And there were a lot of voices, including Pete’s. Then I thought: I expect I’m dying. Everything went black.
Next thing I remember is a stroke of lightning against the blackness. The blaze of the thunderbolt seemed to linger there, not going away like lightning usually does.
Second thing I remember is a voice speaking in foreign, like a man muttering to himself. I tried to open my eyes but they were too heavy. “Mr. Bonney, you are stirring, I see,” he said to me. “Das ist gut. But now, sleep….”
After that, I remember the pain of sitting up. It never hurt so much to sit up, bub. The light hurt my eyes at first, too. Even though it was just a railroad lantern, down in a dark hole in the ground. Doc Vic had him a little operating room way down in that played-out silver mine of his. There was what looked like telegraph wires on the ceiling, nailed to the rafters, and there was a machine, big as a pedal sewing machine, 'cept it had a crank on it. Doctor Vic was turning the crank, faster and faster, and I felt right then like someone poured pure grain alcohol in my veins and lit it on fire. Soon after I went under again.
Next time I woke I felt some better. Just kind of funny. Like part of my body was missing, or half missing.
Something else was missing. I couldn’t remember my name. Or who I was. Took me a long time to get that back. Years. It was in there somewhere, but locked away. Doc Vic said it was something to do with my poor brain losing breathing-air when Pat killed me.
Pat Garrett did kill me, too. The doc told me he bribed the Mexican fellas watching my body, replaced it in the coffin with one of the vaqueros I shot, or part of him. The doc drug my body back to his mine, covered in sawdust and laying on blocks of ice. He took it down deep underground, patched it up and he put the life back in it. He says my spirit was hanging around my body, like they do for a time after dying. When he called down the lightning for me it’s like my spirit rode that lightning down—like a bronc-buster riding a thunderbolt. Rode it right back into … up here. My brain.
I realized, when I woke up, that I was nekkid as a jaybird. This did not sit well with me. I was cold, and felt like a man with his back to the door on a night when his enemy is looking for him. But what bothered me more was all that sewing. My right wrist was sewed up. And my hand looked all wrong. That’s because it wasn’t my hand—Pat Garrett fair destroyed that hand—and this one belonged to that pock-marked vaquero I killed. You can see it’s too big for me. My left leg from the thigh down belonged to that other hombre. It’s crooked and fat, but I make do with it. Now, some of my inner parts is theirs too. I got my own heart, thank God, but my lungs belongs to the tall vaquero. Later I got me a new liver—a young priest died from falling off a horse, and the doc sent me to dig up the body. Hadn’t been embalmed—liver was still good, he said. It was in winter, too, that helped keep it fresh.
Doctor wouldn’t take body parts from people who died of disease on account of they was tainted. He liked to get the bodies of folks been killed from falls or hangings—or from being murdered, long as it wasn’t poison. That’s why he kept watch on me that night. Said he knew I was a killer the minute he laid eyes on me. Knew I’d tangle with those Mexicans. He saw the stamp of destiny on me, and he saw their destinies too—short.
How’d he do that? He spoke of the power of lightning and "animal magnetism.” That thunderbolt power he put in me—he put it in himself. Not quite the same. He takes his different, in something he calls a charged tonic. He says that’s because he never died. But me, I got to have it right in the old nerves. Now I got what he calls a feeder, right here in the back of my neck, just under my collar.
Me and him, though, we had one thing in common. The thunderbolt, it changed us both somehow. It makes a man live longer. Real long. And it makes him sense things, like a rattler sensing your footstep a ways off with his tongue on the rock.
When I woke up in that mine, he called me Billy and that sounded right. I had a few memories of my mother coughing her life away in a bed; of pulling handcuffs off my hands, seeing as the cuffs was too big for them; of seeing a pal gunned down. But I couldn’t connect none of it. Seemed like it all happened to someone else. And when Doc Vic saw I couldn’t remember much, he said he’d take care of me. “In essence,” said he, “I am your father.”
Now that made me feel good. I couldn’t remember much of my past but there was something in me longing for a father. I guess it had always been there. So I went right along with that.
And I served that man for more than twenty-five years. That’s right. For twenty-five years I never ventured far in daytime. Only at night.
One hot day, a diamondback twice as long as your arm came into the mine and reared up, hissing and rattling. That thunderbolt the doc put in me came flashing up so I was faster than the rattlesnake. It struck at me but I caught it right under its jaws—caught him a whisper away from my neck. I could feel his tongue tasting the skin on my throat. I held him out at arm’s length and sent that lightning through my hands to him and that ol’ snake just went rigid as a pine branch and started smoking. I burned his golden eyes right out of his head. We ate cooked rattler that night—cooked then and there.
Most of the time we stayed up north, out east of Fort Sumner, at the mine where Doc Vic poked and prodded me and made notes. He had a feud with Old Mister Death himself, so he kept on with his work to build other fellas up out of not
hing but spare parts, like in that Mary Shelley book. He got one of them up and moving too, but that patchwork fella was an imbecile and mostly drooled and played with his private parts. One day he just keeled over dead.
I did errands and I dug in the mine and gave the silver to Doc Vic. It was mostly played out but there was a little silver to be found. And we still sold ice to the town, now and then. Time passed full queer for me in those days, and years went by like weeks.
One time an outsider came snooping around, knowing the old doctor had gold. This poor excuse for a road agent was a red-headed son of a whore with a scraggly beard and an eye-patch. I smelled him before I saw him—my senses was that acute, and Lord knows he smelled high. I came out of the mine, sniffing the air, that evening and then seen him ride up on a bent-backed hammerhead roan, and I said, “Smelled you coming, bub. What you want here?”
Gingerhead cleared his throat and he said back, “Your money or your life.” He waved a rusty old pistol I doubt would have fired anyhow. “Bring that old fool out and I better see his gold. I’ve got a short-fused stick of dynamite in my saddlebag and I’ll set it burnin’ an’ chuck 'er in the mine unless I see gold fair quick. Silver’ll do, too.”
“Sure, bub!” I said, grinning like I was simpleminded. “I’ll do that!” And as I said it I walked up to his horse. “Let me just help you down, there, you can come and get the gold.”
I knew he wouldn’t go for that but it confused him a moment or two, and that gave me time to step close. I grabbed his belt and dragged him down off his horse, and threw him on the ground. To me he was light as a half-empty feed sack. I stepped on his gun hand, and while he was blinkin’ his good eye and cursing, I took the gun and tossed it in the brush. Then I knelt down, put my hand on his neck and let go some of the thunderbolt, sent it burning into him, just like that rattler. Boom, he went stiff, his remaining eye popping halfway out. I started in to choking him and he couldn’t fight, being all stiff with the electricity.
I killed him quick and good, drug him off to the mine, where the doctor praised me, and chopped him up for parts.
Now, you notice I don’t carry a gun. That vaquero couldn’t shoot straight and I got his hand. I can manage a Winchester if I have time to aim, is all. And anyway I don’t need a gun so much now, with the thunderbolt in me.
Now at that time, more than twenty years after Pat shot me, my brain was finally mending. Killing this gingerheaded fella seemed to wake something up in me. Made me want to go sniffing around the world.
So the next night, when the doc was resting, I came out of the mine—and I smelled something in the air. It was perfume, wafting from the town though it was some miles off. It seemed to call to me. So I lit out, not even understanding what I was doing, headed into Fort Sumner. It was a full moon, like the night I met the doc, and I heard the sound of a piano from the cantina. I was starting to remember cantinas, and a few other things, like the women you find in them. I had my charge that morning, and still felt strong from it. If a man doesn’t exert himself too much, why, a charge’ll last a good three days—but it’s when you first get it that you feel like you could take on an Army and laugh.
When I got near the cantina out comes a young fella dressed like a Spanish rancher, and walking like he’s had too much ta-keeler. I stared and stared at him. I thought for a moment that it was me.
He looked a hell of a lot like I did when I was young. The young fella took no notice, just kind of weaving off down the street.
In a doorway next to the cantina there was an old barefoot peon in a sombrero, a gent we sometimes bought grub from. I asked him in Español, “Who’s that fella?”
Said he, “That’s Señor Telesfor Jaramillo.” I asked him who this Telesfor’s mama was. I didn’t know why I asked—but somewhere in me, I was starting to remember things.
He tells me, “His mother was Paulita Jaramillo. She married Señor Jaramillo and this child came soon after.” He grinned in a way that told me it was too soon after. Then he came over all solemn. “But she has died now….”
I felt struck by lightning of a different kind then. Paulita dead, and a child born to her—a grown child who looked like me. All of a sudden I had a fierce headache, and I had to sit down, right there on the road, because of what was coming back to me. I was hammered down by a hailstorm of pictures in my mind.
Telesfor Jaramillo. He had to be my son with Paulita. And then I remembered who Telesfor’s father truly was—remembered all about myself. William Henry McCarty. Alias William Bonney. Alias Billy the Kid.
Now, I had no real fear anyone in town would recognize me. It was more than twenty years, and I looked a helluva lot different anyhow. My skin—well you can see for yourself. The doc had dipped me in some kind of preserving tonic when he first brought me to the mine, and it still shows.
I thought of going after that young man, telling him who I was—but I could not tell him what I was.
He believed he was the son of this Señor Jaramillo. It was better he went on believing that. Because I was a kind of half man, and half corpse. I could not bear for him to know what I was—and I could not lie to him.
Bub, I felt like my heart had been dropped down a deep cold well.
I determined to leave Fort Sumner. I could not be so close to my son and never speak to him.
I am ashamed to say I scarcely gave a thought to old Doc Victor. He had plenty of his charged tonic to hand—but I should have stayed with him, for he’d been poorly. I just stood up, there in the street, and walked to the livery stable. I had some gold on me, which the doctor give me for emergencies. I would make my way. I would be weaker without the thunderbolt cranker—but surely I could live without it….
I found an old man working at the livery and bought him tequila to get some questions answered. I found out there was no use going after Pete Maxwell, who betrayed me to the law—he died in 1898, and was beyond my reach.
But I could get to Pat Garrett, for he was known to be alive and well.
I bought a horse and saddle and I rode out to find Pat.
Everyone knew about Sheriff Garrett; they all knew he had killed Billy the Kid and was damned proud of it. Crowed about it in a book.
Ol’ Pat was still in New Mexico—had him a ranch in the San Andres Mountains. I set to finding his place, asked around in those hills, saying I wanted work with him. Couple of cowpunchers pointed me to his place.
When I got close, I climbed a bluff that looked down on Pat’s layout, spying it out. I was laying there, flattened down and admiring his herd of quarterhorses, trying to decide how I’d kill him—when I started to feel real weak. I ate some jerky and the food helped, but not enough.
Then I knew—it was the thunderbolt. It seemed I needed it to live on, after all. Maybe it was a kind of addiction. I’d never been so long away from the cranker, and hadn’t counted on the exertion. Seemed three days was all a charge was good for.
I had to ride hard to get back home. Killed my horse just getting there. I made it into the mine, staggering by the time I got to the cranker and got my thunderbolt into me.
I reckon I had come back looking sickly, but Doc Vic didn’t look much better than me. He was laid out flat on his back in the lowest chamber of the mine. He had been slowing down some—age finally catching up. He didn’t say so, but I worked out that my being gone for three days had kind of knocked his pins out from under him. Doc was powerful attached to me. The son he never had, is what I was. I knew just how he felt, for I had to let go of my own son.
Laying there on his cot, he took my hand, smiling real sad, and said that he needed to go to sleep and kind of die, for a while—but he wouldn’t be thoroughgoing dead. He would build himself up, from inside, only it would take time, a long time.
He closed his eyes, and asked me to lay him out on the ice we kept in the mine. He’d go into the long sleep there, and it’d take care of him.
I will tell you straight, bub, it made me weep like a woman when he said that. He
was the only father I’d ever known. I was to be alone in the world again. And I’d run out and left him to fend for himself when he was feeling low.
So I gave him the tonic he kept ready for this long sleep, and he drank it right down—and went stiff as a board. But I could feel through the "animal magnetism" and all—he was still there. Every so often, his heart beat, just one little thump … and a little while later, another.
I wrapped him up good, like he told me, in some medicine-soaked bandages. Then I went about my business. I had some of Doc’s gold and silver—and I had the buckboard and a couple of horses. I put the cranking thunderbolt machine in the buckboard, then I rode out.
I thought about shooting down old Pat on my own, face to face. Wouldn’t that have given him a turn, seeing me a short breath before he died? But there was a long memory in New Mexico about Billy the Kid. It concerned me. I had a horror of having people look at me and laugh at the patchwork Billy I was now. Then too, the habits of staying hid had gotten strong with me. I was Billy, but I was also a man who’d spent most of twenty-five years in an old silver mine. No, I had to do for Pat Garrett from a good distance. Keep Billy the Kid out of it.
So I played the harmless old saddletramp, and asked around about Pat’s doings. I found that folks around about there had no great affection for him and his bad temper, especially a onetime cowboy turned goat rancher, a hardbitten red-faced young fella name of Jesse Wayne Brazel. Pat was always shouting at Brazel to keep his goddamn goats off his land.
I went to Brazel, and played some cards with him—and made sure I lost. This will sometimes make a foolish man trust you. Then we talked about his troubles with the old sheriff—and I allowed as how I had a reason to hate Garrett too. I told him real quiet that if he’d kill Pat, I’d pay him for it—and I’d pay some "witnesses" to lie and say it was self-defense.