Lucky Billy (34 page)

But he hadn't talked to her about her sister, not yet. That Celsa's older sister, Apolinaria, was Pat Garrett's wife had nothing to do with this. It was a dead heat for Billy: an angry Paulita could betray his whereabouts to Garrett just as easily as a love-struck Celsa could warn the Kid of his approach. They canceled out, he figured.

The music slowed and in sweaty elegance they danced a
vals re
dondo.
His ability to leap, she teased, probably reminded the elders and
abuelitas
of the late Kit Carson, also a
chopito.

"Don't call me a
chopito.
I'm taller than he was."

At a break in the music he left Celsa on the dance floor and walked toward Paulita. Heads turned; eyes followed. Against the walls, the crones all dressed in black were the very army of specters from the other shore described by the
Optic
that he'd read in Pete's room, and they gave him the willies; they were calling him to come. He reached in his pocket and pulled out his tinted specs while fixing on Paulita. He could make out her glare, the bullets in her eyes, and observed that the closer he approached the more livid she grew. Her face looked red. But the Kiel worked his magic. She glanced around, began to melt, he could tell from the way she raised her fan to hide her mouth, he could see it in her eyes. "Can I bring you anything?"

"No."

"It's hard to see you sitting here like this."

"I imagine it must be."

"Remember we came to these dances every week?"

"They still have them every week."

"Hey, look at that, Pauley. They just filled the bowl."

"Then you better go get some."

He stood beside her chair. She kept turning away. When the music came back they stared at the dancers, and Billy said, "Every once in a while I took a look-see at you and got a chill clown my spine."

"She's standing near the door."

"Who?"

"I don't want her coming over here, Billy."

They watched Celsa pretending not to look in their direction. Beside his sister, Pete asked the Kid, "What about Saval?"

Paulita said to no one, "He don't care."

"Guess who I saw? John Meadows," said Billy.

"He still alive?"

"He's got a new clock. What's he need a clock for? I suspect he never learned how to wind it."

Paulita fanned herself. "Wasn't it running?"

"Said eleven o'clock all the time I was there." He couldn't look at her belly. The last thing he wished to do was ask about the child and stir up more sass. He'd sometimes thought about the tadpole inside her, but as he stood there the tail ends of his vision told him it was hardly a tadpole, nor a bullfrog—more like a large bear cub, he thought. His mother used to say she'd wanted a girl. Then he was born and the doctor wrapped him up and said to Catherine, it's not what you think, and she forced back her tears. That's what she'd told him. What difference did it make anyway? he thought. Girl or boy, this is no place for either. It's a brutal, ruthless world, he somberly mused. "How have you been feeling?"

Pete said, "She can't keep anything down."

His heart began to melt. "We had some times, you and me."

"You can't just talk about days gone by and turn back the hands of time." Her nostrils flared, she pursed her lips.

"I was just saying."

"Things are different now."

"How are they different?"

"People can't always be shooting each other."

"Tell it to the gazetteers."

"I mean it, Billy. Someone's got to do it."

"Do what?"

"Stand up for civilization against savagery. Don't it make you feel rotten?"

Beside her chair he kept shifting his posture. Heat crept up his neck. "What is it that's supposed to make me feel rotten?"

"Shooting Bob Olinger."

"Olinger? Hell! I regret shooting Jim Bell but Olinger was a bucket of pus! Nobody liked him."

"Lily did. She's my friend."

"Lily who?"

"Lily Casey was engaged to Robert Olinger."

Olinger? Engaged? Will wonders never cease. The Kid experienced one of those revelations of another world embedded in this one that he'd been completely blind to. It was not unlike, while engaged in gunplay, hearing hoot owls call to each other. "Well, some women like dangerous men."

"And some women see through them."

"What's that supposed to mean? You mean to where they're cowards?"

"You don't have to stay with me,
Billy the Kid,
you must be tired of standing there. Maybe you've got some personal business to conduct?"

"That's all right."

"Suit yourself. You look tired."

"I am.

He found Celsa near the door. "Here's your
chopito.
" Outside, he took her hand and they crossed the parade grounds. Her profile in moonlight contracted to a cameo. Torches and
luminarias
bordered the parade grounds and Billy guided her toward a torch stuck in the earth, released her hand, rolled a cigarette without spilling a flake, and lit it. Some boys from families living at the fort, four- and five-year-olds who should have been in bed, came running toward them. "El Chivato," they shouted. "Bilicito!
Hola,
Billy!"

"Hey."

"Bang bang!" one yelled, and Billy spat out his cigarette.

"Whoa. That fellow there shot out my snipe."

The boy asked, "What will you do?"

"Roll another."

The stumpy little toddler gazed up at the Kid as though at the Virgin Mary. Billy recognized the yellow-black rings around his eyes, the crepe-paper nostrils, and semiformed chin, yellow and crimped like the edge of a lettuce leaf—the boy on the dance floor. He saw that his red hair matched the bandanna tied around his neck. "Who was that?" he asked when they'd left him behind.

"Beatriz Melendez's boy."

"He's got red hair, no?"

"So does Thomas Connelley."

"And what does Miguel say to that?"

"Miguel say he kill him. He shot at him once outside Hargrove's and missed. He's mostly gone now. Living with his sister in Belen."

"He's out late, that boy."

"She told me one time he never sleep, he's a devil. If Beatriz lock him inside when she go out he break everything around, then when she come back he cry for her to fix it."

"Must be the hair." The Kid pictured a door, a hand on the latch, a deathbed in the dark.
Who's this one, Henry?
He released Celsa's hand.

She looked at him, smirking. "And why is red hair so bad?"

"It's not bad, it's just red."
Who's that slut you're with now?
"See, my mother was a redhead. They scrap you right back."

They found the peach orchard and Celsa ran off in the warm night air and returned with a blanket. The papers said black malice burns in his heart but no, he thought, it's love. He cupped her chin, she put her hand to his mouth. He sucked her middle finger. Both were sweaty from the dance, and Celsa's
carmin
had smeared. She unbuttoned his pants, pulled off his boots, and he crawled on top of her. "What's this?" His fingers skimmed a scab on her thigh.

"Nothing."

Her shoulders were almost as loamy as his; they tasted like plows. Slow and easy, he thought—like climbing a wall. Sliding up her warm thigh and rooting inside her, he suffered himself to sob at the knowledge, deep in his mind, that he was back where he began, in a woman's flesh and blood, instead of hanging from a gallows. The space between her damp breasts smelled of copper. She wasn't like the others. She threw her head back, mouth wide open, and pulled him in as thirsty ground pulls in rain. After a while he whispered, "You first."

***

"
BOO
! I'm Billy the Kid."

"I know who you are."

"Your sheep look fat, Francisco."

"Good bunchgrass."

Billy dismounted at the edge of the herd. Hot as blazes out here, and Francisco Lobato had found the best shade, but that meant he had to share it with the sheep who'd pressed around him. The Kid wedged through the crowd. "They're all wet."

"From the river. This is why they look fat. Fat with wet wool."

Billy looked around. The color of the empty prairie and hills kept changing when the sun ducked behind clouds—green, yellow, gray. Overhead and to the west, the clouds resembled sheep. He laughed. But far to the east one long black cloud was swelling like a corpse. It could have been fifty miles long, he thought, and it lay stretched behind a low mesa on the horizon. The mesa was in sunlight and all behind it black.

The sun was hotter than shame. Surrounded by sheep, sitting underneath a half-dead cottonwood, Francisco didn't rise when Billy approached, let alone embrace him or shake his hand. Beyond the tree was the Pecos; the water was high yet hardly seemed to move in the absence of banks. Francisco's wagon and mule both stood beside the river, and across it, raked toward them, lay a long plain lonely with sage and meadowlarks—he knew, he'd ridden through it to get here.

"These sheep are full of ticks, Francisco."

"They're not the only ones." His friend reached behind and tugged the back of his collar down and, in front of Billy, leaned forward. "See?" Just below the hairline, running down his neck, were five or six ticks, swollen gray buttons. Their color belied the red blood inside them. The Kid had never seen them that large; would they suck until they burst?

"I can get those off for you."

"Why bother? As soon as you leave I'll just get more." He leaned back against the base of the tree, his round copper face looking up at the Kid without expression. "How come you came back?"

"How come I came back? How come everyone asks that? You'd think they were let down I didn't hang."

Francisco shrugged. The full face and lips, the ram's horn nose with the high curled wings, the wide stringy mustache and brown raisin eyes betrayed nothing. He could have been pissing in a river, Billy thought. Then again, herding sheep depleted your social skills. Yet it wasn't long ago that Francisco and the Kid had bucked endless monte, hunted for squirrels, altered brands, dressed hides, docked sheep, and shared whores. Francisco had taught Billy the fine art of gelding rams with his teeth.

"You heard I escaped?"

"Of course I heard you escaped. I heard you were at Sumner."

"I was there for a while. Then the rumors started. Like Garrett had sent some cattle inspectors to hang around the place and look out for me. And Manuel Brazil come to town to sell his wool and asked too many questions. Plus the
Optic
reported my presence at Sumner. They won't leave me alone. Someone told me Juan Roibal was in touch with Garrett. He's a friend of mine, Francisco."

"He ain't your friend."

Billy looked in Francisco's eyes and waited. Then he decided he didn't want to wait, bad news just put him out of humor, and he glanced away. "I found my old cave outside Los Portales. Spent some time at Saval's camp. Can I stay here a while?"

"I have to get these sheep shorn. I'm gonna bring them in soon."

"Maybe I'll go with you."

"Back to Sumner?"

"Why not?"

Francisco said nothing. Suddenly he stood and all the sheep stared. Those lying down climbed to their feet and faced in his direction. "C'mere, Kid." He walked around the tree, threading motionless sheep, and descended to the river. Beside it, Billy spotted a ewe on her back, hooves straight up in the air. She wasn't moving. "Dumb as shit, sheep. They run like hell into the river and don't know enough to come out. They race to new pasture and suddenly stop and do not move at all. A big storm make 'em panic. They mash together up against a fence and crush their insides. Just die pressed together."

"What happened to this one?"

"Found her like that this morning," he said. "She just get waterlogged, you know? Roll on her back and can't find her feet. Then she bloat up and die. Watch this." Next to them, the river hardly made a sound. They were on a sandy alluvial flat strewn with rocks and pebbles. Back by the tree, all the sheep were watching them, several hundred at least. Francisco, Billy saw, had an ice pick in his hand. An ice pick in the summer. Bending over the dead ewe, he fumbled in his pocket for a match, lit it on his pants, raised the pick high, and brought it straight down on the sheep's taut belly. It hardly moved; you could see it was swollen. As his friend removed the ice pick a faint hissing sound began, and he held the match to the bloodless hole. A blue flame popped and burned as they watched, rising in the air while the belly deflated. "You could probably cook an egg over that."

When the flame went out, Francisco pulled a knife from his belt and cut a line from the ewe's neck to her anus. Ribbons of blood oozed into her coat. Then he skinned the dead sheep, reaching inside up to his elbows and cutting holes around the legs.

When he'd first arrived at Sumner, before the Lincoln County War, the Kid had helped Francisco with his lambing one spring and seen him jacket lambs. A ewe's lamb dies and another one has twins and how to get the ewe to accept a new lamb? Francisco's solution, passed down from his father, was to skin the dead lamb, cut holes for the head and the four legs, and pull this bloody jacket over one of the twins and bring him to the baffled mother. For good measure, he cut out the dead lamb's liver and rubbed it on the pelt then stuffed it inside the jacket. The Kid observed the whole process. The suspicious ewe after sniffing this changeling and walking off—after being repeatedly presented with this sorry spectacle of lamb—at last grudgingly accepted it and gave it suck, and several days later, once the ruse gained a footing, Francisco cut the jacket off.

I could do that, thought the Kid. There's my solution. Shoot a drunk in the face, skin him, dress myself in his body-jacket. I could get Francisco to bury the corpse and say it was me, then light out for Texas and start a new life and find a new mother. "People are sheep," he observed.

"Not me. Don't call me a sheep."

"I mean people in general."

That night, Francisco shared his mutton
caldillo
with the Kid. Billy was explaining his philosophy of life. "You have to be hard."