The Kid: A Novel (28 page)

“Tom’s dead,” the Kid flatly said. “We got ambushed.”

“Oh.”

They shoved past him into the house.

*  *  *

Worried about his pregnant wife’s worry, a crestfallen Charlie Bowdre couldn’t sleep that night and stood guard instead, and he was making five o’clock coffee at the old Majestic stove when Emanuel Brazil innocently sashayed into the kitchen in his Navajo bathrobe.

There was an elephantine silence between them that Brazil interrupted with “We sorta got off on the wrong foot, you and me and Dirty Dave. I’d like to patch things by going into Sumner and finding out what the sheriff’s up to.”

Bowdre coldly stared at him and said, “Shove off then.”

Emanuel Brazil was dressed and on his horse before anyone else woke up.

Waking to the aroma of coffee, the Kid went into a kitchen full of the gang’s off-putting morning smells. “Where’s Emanuel?”

Bowdre tilted a kettle to refill his tin cup. “Off to Fort Sumner to see what’s up. Don’t matter; he’s tits on a bull here anyways.”

The Kid frowned at the oddity of the departure, judged it dangerous, and finally said, “
Vámonos
.” Let’s go.

And he was right about their jeopardy. Brazil rode into Fort Sumner the morning of the twentieth and sought out Pat Garrett in the old military cemetery as the sheriff watched his men swinging pickaxes into caliche earth that was hard as concrete. Tom Folliard was there beside them, as frozen and white as a marble pope on his royal sarcophagus. Garrett regarded the rancher’s bloodstained bandage. “What happened to your ear?”

Brazil said, as if that explained it, “They’re at our place.”

“First things first,” Garrett said.

Because he wasn’t a believer, he had Apolonaria in her high pile of hair read aloud in Spanish some verses from her Biblia Sacra as shovels of stony earthen clods were flopped onto a corpse now interred.

Wild snows ruled out a further pursuit of the gang until Wednesday the twenty-second, when the sheriff and his posse of thirteen provisioned themselves and took off for the eastern ranch. All were on horseback but for Cal Polk, who was hawing a horse team from the wooden seat of a Wisconsin farm wagon just in case there were bodies to haul back.

The sheriff, his posse, and Emanuel Brazil got to the Wilcox stone roadhouse in the late afternoon and crouched forward in fierce wind and snow, rifles aimed at all three windows, but inside found only Erastus Wilcox there in the kitchen, heating grits on the Majestic. He stirred them with a fork as he told Garrett, “Hightailed it, they did.”

Hoofprints heading northeast in the fresh snow simplified their tracking, but the thirteen in the posse were cattle detectives from West Texas or deputies from Lincoln and White Oaks and did not know the Kid’s haunts as well as the sheriff-elect, who was in front of them, silent and tireless and seemingly unfazed by a vicious cold that stiffened their leather gear, gnawed at some toes, and hung icicles from the muzzles of their hard-used, slogging horses.

Around midnight James East wearily called up ahead, “How far we going, Pat?”

Without turning the sheriff said, “Stinking Springs.”

*  *  *

The Kid and his gang had been there since nightfall, stacking their riding tackle inside a flat-roofed, windowless forage shelter fluffily fringed with snow, constructed with pinkish feldspar rock, and no larger than a jail cell. The Kid said, “Alejandro Perea built this.”

“Like that matters to us,” Rudabaugh said.

Just thinking out loud, the Kid nominated the cattle town of Tascosa as their next destination, and no one disputed the notion. Bowdre, Rudabaugh, and the Kid tore up a bale of hay and tossed the yellow feed to the famished animals as Billie Wilson found a cauldron inside the house and smashed his boot through the ice of a creek of stinking alkali water that the horses could drink but humans could not. The Kid’s stolen horse this time was a fine mare of the reddish brown color called bay, a thoroughbred like Folliard’s, and he thought her too high-strung and delicate to tolerate the winter elements, so the Kid pulled her inside the rock house. “She’ll be a heater for us,” he said as his gang tied their quarter horses to the pole rafters, called vigas, that extended outside.

Rudabaugh removed from his saddlebags two round loaves of sourdough bread that he’d stolen from Wilcox and Brazil, and in a spasm of selflessness shared them with the gang while Charlie Bowdre uncorked an unlabeled bottle of homemade rotgut that seemed to have been flavored with molasses to brown it and had the head of a rattlesnake wobbling in the bottom. Bowdre warned them that he called it strychnine.

Even huddled together near the horse, no one could thaw in that doorless shelter.

“I have to apologize,” the Kid said. “I’m really sorry I got us into this fix. We could’ve fought it out.”

Each word fogged in the air.

“We’ll be outta here in the morning,” Charlie Bowdre said. “And after that I don’t wanna be cold anymore. Maybe I’ll traipse on back to Biloxi. Work on a shrimp boat or sumpin. Won’t ever have to hear Mexican again cept when Manuela damns my hide.”

The Kid said, “You could have learnt Spanish.”

“Why should I fool with another language? Ain’t hardly got English bucked out yet.”

Dirty Dave Rudabaugh was not watching or heeding the palaver; he was just sinking deeper into his odorous goat-hair coat and falling asleep. Billie Wilson had his gloves off and was breathing onto his fingers to get some feeling back.

The Kid’s racehorse nickered. And then there was quiet except for Rudabaugh’s snores, each one seeming louder and like the roar of a strangling lion.

The Kid found the humor to tell the others, “He’s doing that on purpose.”

*  *  *

The sheriff and his posse of thirteen got near the Kid’s hideout around two in the morning. Young Juan Roibal collected all the horse reins as the men dismounted and each took his rolled-up blanket and rain tarp with him as they trudged through deep snow until a hawkeye spotted the gang’s hitched-up horses. Half of the men then circled fifty yards behind the rock house as Garrett crept his half of the posse into kennels of snow in an arroyo that looked up a slope to the open doorway. They were no more than twenty yards off. The sheriff wanted to attack while the gang was sleeping, but he was overruled by Frank Stewart, who said his force in back were too cold and tired to shoot with accuracy, plus sunup was only a few hours off. Garrett made a harrumphing noise as he wallowed a sofa into the snow and covered himself with a woolen blanket. His shivering men were grousing in whispers about their frostbitten ears and noses, but he hushed them with a “Shh!”

The Kid woke at the sound and hunched to the doorway. He took off his white sugarloaf sombrero so he couldn’t be so easily construed as he looked out into the moonless night, seeing nothing, nothing, nothing. Like it was his future.

Bowdre got up just before dawn and was in his sergeant’s surtout and heading outside with a feeble amount of oats in the canvas nose bag that was called a
morat
. When he saw sleet flitting through the doorless entrance, he halted to hat himself with the Kid’s sombrero. And he was outside and facing his chestnut gelding as he apologized to him for the lack of feed when he heard Pat Garrett again shout out no warning, just the misidentification, “It’s the Kid, boys! Cut him down!”

Bowdre could just glance left with shock, seeing only a few dark, crouching shapes in the snow, and in that fraction of a second half the front posse’s rifles fired at him, hitting a kidney, his left thigh, his right scapula, and his liver. Bowdre slammed into the house wall and sagged as the firing stopped, then he gripped the feldspar rock with his hands to drag himself back inside.

The gang was awake with their handguns cocked, and the Kid was holding and soothing his frantic horse in there as Billie Wilson examined Charlie Bowdre’s wounds and shook his head no to the Kid, who took his sombrero back and yanked Bowdre’s holster to the front of his trousers so Bowdre could get at it. The Kid’s eyes were hectic and crazed with anger as he said, “They have murdered you, Charlie, but you go get yourself some revenge. Kill some of the sons of bitches before you die.”

Charlie looked down at the gun hanging below his trouser belt buckle as if working to recognize what it was.

Billie Wilson yelled outside, “You have killed Charlie Bowdre and he wants to come out!”

“Let him!” the sheriff yelled back. “But with his hands in the air!”

Bowdre floundered outside, giving vengeance no thought, his hands raised and his legs seeming soft as taffy as he woozily stumbled down to the arroyo, seeking a solemn and very tall Pat Garrett, whose Winchester rifle was held at ease in the crook of his left arm. Bowdre was gurgling and strangling on his own blood as he vaguely lifted his right arm toward the rock house and struggled to tell the sheriff, “I wish . . . I wish . . . I wish.” And then he fell forward into Lee Smith, dead. He was thirty-two years old.

With the distraction, Dave Rudabaugh untied his horse and tugged it toward the doorless entrance with the intent of saddling it and charging out of the rock house, his guns full of venom. A few of the posse had read the
Police Gazette
and were on to such criminal high jinks. About four of them lifted their rifles and killed Rudabaugh’s horse just as she entered the doorway. She weighed over a thousand pounds and was like a huge boulder of interference.

The Kid looked over the mare at Charlie lying facedown in reddening snow. He yelled, “Are you going to leave him there like that?”

“Cold won’t bother him now,” the sheriff told him.

“You plan to fight us?”

“We’ll just let you stew!”

The Kid slid down against a wall until he was sitting on the ground. With tears in his eyes, he sang for Charlie as he once did for his mother. “I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger. I’m traveling through this world of woe. Yet there’s no sickness, toil, nor danger in that bright land to which I go. I’m going home to see my father. I’m going there no more to roam. I’m just a-going over Jordan. I’m just a-going over home.”

His racehorse sniffed him, and he petted the soft, downy hair of her nose for a while. He noticed Billie and Dave inquisitively staring at him, and he said, “I have nothing to say.”

A half hour later, Garrett patiently called, “How are you fixed in there, Billy?”

The Kid slunk over to the entrance frame and called back, “Pretty well, but we have no wood for a fire! And no food neither!”

Garrett called, “Why not come out and get some from us? Be a little sociable!”

The Kid was hungry enough to give it some thought. “We can’t do that, Pat! We find commerce with you too predictable!”

Hours passed, with enough time for Cal Polk to go to and return from the Wilcox-Brazil ranch with firewood and a flank of pink, butchered beef in his Wisconsin wagon. A huge fire was started at sundown, and hacked meat was heaved onto the mesquite branches to roast.

Rudabaugh was near the doorway and asked, “Are you smelling that?”

Wilson said, “How we gonna get them to feed us? Right now I’d take right kindly to gettin greasy round the mouth.”

The Kid’s own mouth watered at the aroma and his stomach registered need.

“We could surrender,” Rudabaugh said.

“And then what?” Wilson asked.

Rudabaugh faced him and in a condescending way said, “You don’t always hafta go to prison. There’s this here deal called state’s evidence. You hand over other outlaws they happen to want more.”

“I could do that,” Wilson said. “I got lotsa people to get even with.”

The Kid noted, “But Billy the Kid is who they want most. And that’s dead instead of alive.”

Rudabaugh gave him a
So what?
look and said, “Well, I’m doin it,” and he found in his foul overcoat pocket a much-used, formerly white handkerchief that he flaunted at the rock house entrance before flinging his guns over his dead horse into the snow and crawling over the immovable mare toward the cookout, still waving his handkerchief in wild sweeps and yelling to Garrett, “Where you gonna carry us?”

“To Las Vegas!” he called back.

“If we hafta go to Las Vegas, we’d just as soon die right here! The Mexicans there want my head on a platter!”

“We’ll take you on to Santa Fe, and I guarantee your protection from violence!”

Rudabaugh turned to the gang in the rock house for affirmation and saw the Kid’s fine bay thoroughbred hop over the other door-filling horse and run free until she was lassoed by Juan Roibal. Then Billie Wilson was scrambling over the animal and falling forward down the slope, his guns held wide and unshootable.

Garrett fancied the weapons and took them as his own before calling out, “How about you, Kid?”

“Just a sec!” The Kid’s rifle and handgun were on the ground inside the building, and he was urinating on them with wide arcs of his hose.

Wilson and Rudabaugh were handcuffed before the Kid got outside, his hands high over his head, his boots plunging so deep in the snow that he tottered, and yet grinning in a way that made Garrett skeptical. The Kid said, “Long time no see, Pat!”

“Been over a year. But not for want of trying.”

The Kid looked at each man in the posse, some with their rifles trained on him, some hungrily gnashing rib eye steaks that they held in their gloved fingers. He smiled as he said, “This is a historical occasion. I’d like to shake the hands of you heroes who accomplished it.”

With deputies holding guns on the Kid, and the sheriff-elect going up to the rock house to collect the possessions there, many in the posse took turns walking up to the Kid and jerking a firm handshake as they smiled and said their names. “Frank Stewart.” “Lon Chambers.” “Jim East.”

Barney Mason shook the Kid’s hand as he sheepishly said, “I changed sides.”

“I see that. Good wages?”

“Well, they’s regular at least.”

Others crowded forward. “Tom Emory.” “Lee Hall.” “Charlie Rudulph.” “
Buenas tardes, me llamo Juan Roibal
.”

“
Hola, Juan
,” the Kid said.