The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (2 page)

When I had arrived I opened two windows and a door and the sun poured blocks and angles in, lighting up the floor’s skin of feathers and dust and old grain. The windows looked out onto fields and plants grew at the door, me killing them gradually with my urine. Wind came in wet and brought in birds who flew to the other end of the room to get their aim to fly out again. An old tap hung from the roof, the same colour as the walls, so once I knocked myself out on it.

For that week then I made a bed of the table there and lay out my fever, whatever it was. I began to block my mind of
all thought. Just sensed the room and learnt what my body could do, what it could survive, what colours it liked best, what songs I sang best. There were animals who did not move out and accepted me as a larger breed. I ate the old grain with them, drank from a constant puddle about twenty yards away from the barn. I saw no human and heard no human voice, learned to squat the best way when shitting, used leaves for wiping, never ate flesh or touched another animal’s flesh, never entered his boundary. We were all aware and allowed each other. The fly who sat on my arm, after his inquiry, just went away, ate his disease and kept it in him. When I walked I avoided the cobwebs who had places to grow to, who had stories to finish. The flies caught in those acrobat nets were the only murder I saw.

And in the barn next to us there was another granary, separated by just a thick wood door. In it a hundred or so rats, thick rats, eating and eating the foot deep pile of grain abandoned now and fermenting so that at the end of my week, after a heavy rain storm burst the power in those seeds and brought drunkenness into the minds of those rats, they abandoned the sanity of eating the food before them and turned on each other and grotesque and awkwardly because of their size they went for each other’s eyes and ribs so the yellow stomachs slid out and they came through that door and killed a chipmunk—about ten of them onto that one striped thing and the ten eating each other before they realised the chipmunk was long gone so that I, sitting on the open window with its thick sill where they couldnt reach me, filled my gun and fired again and again into their slow wheel across the room at each boommm, and reloaded and fired again and again till I went through the whole bag of bullet supplies—the noise breaking out the seal of silence in my ears, the smoke sucked out of the window as it emerged
from my fist and the long twenty yard space between me and them empty but for the floating bullet lonely as an emissary across and between the wooden posts that never returned, so the rats continued to wheel and stop in the silences and eat each other, some even the bullet. Till my hand was black and the gun was hot and no other animal of any kind remained in that room but for the boy in the blue shirt sitting there coughing at the dust, rubbing the sweat of his upper lip with his left forearm.

In 1880 a travelling photographer came through Fort Sumner. Billy posed standing in the street near old Beaver Smith’s saloon. The picture makes him rough and uncouth.

The expression of his face was really boyish and pleasant. He may have worn such clothes as appear in the picture out on the range, but in Sumner he was careful of his personal appearance and dressed neatly and in good taste. I never liked the picture. I don’t think it does Billy justice.

*

Not a story about me through their eyes then. Find the beginning, the slight silver key to unlock it, to dig it out. Here then is a maze to begin, be in.

Two years ago Charlie Bowdre and I criss-crossed the Canadian border. Ten miles north of it ten miles south. Our horses stepped from country to country, across low rivers, through different colours of tree green. The two of us, our criss-cross like a whip in slow motion, the ridge of action rising and falling, getting narrower in radius till it ended and we drifted down to Mexico and old heat. That there is nothing of depth, of significant accuracy, of wealth in the image, I know. It is there for a beginning.

*

She leans against the door, holds
her left hand at the elbow
with her right, looks at the bed

on my sheets— orangespeeled half peeledbright as hidden coins against the pillowv

she walks slow to the window
lifts the sackcloth
and jams it horizontal on a nail
so the bent oblong of sun
hoists itself across the room
framing the bed the white flesh
of my arm

she is crossing the sun
sits on her leg here
sweeping off the peels

traces the thin bones on me
turns toppling slow back to the pillow
Bonney Bonney

I am very still
I take in all the angles of the room

*

January at Tivan Arroyo, called Stinking Springs more often. With me, Charlie, Wilson, Dave Rudabaugh. Snow. Charlie took my hat and went out to get wood and feed the horses. The shot burnt the clothes on his stomach off and lifted him right back into the room. Snow on Charlie’s left boot. He had taken one step out. In one hand had been an axe, in the other a pail. No guns.

Get up Charlie, get up, go and get one. No Billy. I’m tired, please. Jesus watch your hands Billy. Get up Charlie. I prop him to the door, put his gun in his hand. Take off, good luck Charlie.

He stood there weaving, not moving. Then began to walk in a perfect, incredible straight line out of the door towards Pat and the others at the ridge of the arroyo about twenty yards away. He couldnt even lift his gun. Moving sideways at times but always always in a straight line. Dead on Garrett. Shoot him Charlie. They were watching him only, not moving. Over his shoulder I aimed at Pat, fired, and hit his shoulder braid. Hadnt touched him. Charlie hunched. Get up Charlie kill him kill him. Charlie got up poking the gun barrel in snow. Went straight towards Garrett.

The others had ducked down, but not Garrett who just stood there and I didnt shoot again. Charlie he knew was already dead now, had to go somewhere, do something, to get his mind off the pain. Charlie went straight, now closer to them his hands covered the mess in his trousers. Shoot him Charlie shoot him. The blood trail he left straight as a
knife cut. Getting there getting there. Charlie getting to the arroyo, pitching into Garrett’s arms, slobbering his stomach on Garrett’s gun belt. Hello Charlie, said Pat quietly.

Snow outside. Wilson, Dave Rudabaugh and me. No windows, the door open so we could see. Four horses outside.

*

Jim Payne’s grandfather told him that he met Frank James of the James Brothers once.

It was in a Los Angeles movie theatre. After the amnesty he was given, Frank had many jobs. When Jim’s grandfather met him, he was the doorman at the Fresco Theatre.
GET YOUR TICKET TORN UP BY FRANK JAMES
the poster said, and people came for that rather than the film. Frank would say, ‘Thanks for coming, go on in’.

Jim’s grandfather asked him if he would like to come over and have a beer after the film, but Frank James said ‘No, but thank you’ and tore up the next ticket. He was by then an alcoholic.

*

Miss Angela Dickinson of Tucson
tall legs like a dancer
set the
80
s style
by shaving them hairless
keeps saying
I’m too tall for you Billy
but we walk around a bit
buy a bottle and she stands
showing me her thighs
look Billy look at this
she folded on the sheet
tapping away at her knees
leans back waving feet at me
catching me like a butterfly
in the shaved legs in her Tucson room

*

A river you could get lost in
and the sun a flashy hawk
on the edge of it

a mile away you see the white path
of an animal moving through water

you can turn a hundred yard circle
and the horse bends dribbles his face
you step off and lie in it propping your head

till dusk and cold and the horse shift you
and you look up and moon a frozen bird’s eye

*

His stomach was warm
remembered this when I put my hand into
a pot of luke warm tea to wash it out
dragging out the stomach to get the bullet
he wanted to see when taking tea with Sallie Chisum in Paris Texas

With Sallie Chisum in Paris Texas
he wanted to see when taking tea
dragging out the stomach to get the bullet
a pot of luke warm tea to wash it out
remembered this when I put my hand into
his stomach was warm

*

Pat Garrett, ideal assassin. Public figure, the mind of a doctor, his hands hairy, scarred, burned by rope, on his wrist there was a purple stain there all his life. Ideal assassin for his mind was unwarped. Had the ability to kill someone on the street walk back and finish a joke. One who had decided what was right and forgot all morals. He was genial to everyone even his enemies. He genuinely enjoyed people, some who were odd, the dopes, the thieves. Most dangerous for them, he understood them, what motivated their laughter and anger, what they liked to think about, how he had to act for them to like him. An academic murderer—only his vivacious humour and diverse interests made him the best kind of company. He would listen to people like Rudabaugh and giggle at their escapades. His language was atrocious in public, yet when alone he never swore.

At the age of
15
he taught himself French and never told anyone about it and never spoke to anyone in French for the next
40
years. He didnt even read French books.

Between the ages of
15
and
18
little was heard of Garrett. In Juan Para he bought himself a hotel room for two years with money he had saved, and organised a schedule to learn how to drink. In the first three months he forced himself to disintegrate his mind. He would vomit everywhere. In a year he could drink two bottles a day and not vomit. He began to dream for the first time in his life. He would wake up in the mornings, his sheets soaked in urine
40%
alcohol. He became frightened of flowers because they grew so slowly that he couldnt tell what they planned to do. His mind
learned to be superior because of the excessive mistakes of those around him. Flowers watched him.

After two years he could drink anything, mix anything together and stay awake and react just as effectively as when sober. But he was now addicted, locked in his own game. His money was running out. He had planned the drunk to last only two years, now it continued into new months over which he had no control. He stole and sold himself to survive. One day he was robbing the house of Juanita Martinez, was discovered by her, and collapsed in her living room. In about six months she had un-iced his addiction. They married and two weeks later she died of a consumption she had hidden from him.

What happened in Garrett’s mind no one knows. He did not drink, was never seen. A month after Juanita Garrett’s death he arrived in Sumner.

PAULITA MAXWELL:

His mind was clear, his body able to drink, his feelings, unlike those who usually work their own way out of hell,
not cynical about another’s incapacity to get out of problems and difficulties. He did ten years of ranching, cow punching, being a buffalo hunter. He married Apolinaria Gutierrez and had five sons. He had come to Sumner then, mind full of French he never used, everything equipped to be that rare thing—a sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane

(Miss Sallie Chisum, later Mrs. Roberts, was living in Roswell in 1924, a sweet faced, kindly old lady of a thousand memories of frontier days.)

ON HER HOUSE

The house was full of people all the time
the ranch was a little world in itself
I couldn’t have been lonesome if I had tried

Every man worth knowing in the Southwest,
and many not worth knowing, were guests
one time or another.
What they were made no difference in their welcome
Sometimes a man would ride up in a hurry
eat a meal in a hurry and depart in a hurry

Billy the Kid would come in often
and sometimes stayed for a week or two.
I remember how frightened I was the first time he came.