The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (6 page)

So, bed, says John and we say yes and sit for a bit longer, then Sallie wakes Garrett and we all get up and go to our rooms. And Angie I find is high as hell and stumbling hanging onto my shoulder. In the room we have been given the same bed I was given when alone. Angie says she’ll have to sleep on top of me or me on top of her. And I say I’m too drunk for a balancing act Angie. O fooo she says and buttons open my shirt and her hands are like warm gloves on my back, soft till she uses her nails to scratch me towards
her and I come and start giggling, wait the bathroom hold it. Yes, she says laughing. Quiet Sallie’s in the next room, got ears like anything.

On the can I have to sit cos I know I cant pee straight. Before I finish she comes in and straddles me and drops her long hair into my open shirt as we slip our tongues into each others mouths. Her skirt over both of us and the can. Billy come on. Mmm I say yes, get up first. No. Dammit Angie. No. And slowly and carefully she lifts her legs higher and hangs them on tight to my shoulders like clothespins. Come on Angie I’m drunk ’m not a trapeze artist. Yes you are. No. And slowly I lift her up pressing her to me. The smell of her sex strong now daubing my chest and shirt where she rubs it. Youre too heavy for this I think, and we move careful to the floor, she leaning back like timber, lifts her legs to take clothes off and I grab the skirt and pull it over her head. Let me out Billy. Out Billy. Quiet she’s next door. No! I know you Billy you! Youre fucking her. No Angie, no, I say, honest Angie you got too much, and enter her like a whale with a hat on, my drowning woman my lady who drowns, and take my hat off.

*

Waking in the white rooms of Texas after a bad night must be like heaven I think now. About 9 o clock and the room looks huge like the sun came in and pushed out the walls, the sun—as if reflected off the bushes outside—swirling on the white walls and the white sheets on the bed as I can see when I put my head up.

I’m sure everyone in the house threw up last night. All except Garrett anyway. The whisky and coffee and whisky again did in our communal stomach and the bathroom last night was like a confession box. At one point Angela was in the can and Sallie and I stood in the hall, leaning against the wall, eyes half closed, she in her nightgown of white with
a bow of grey trailing down to her stomach. The hall also grey as nobody wants the light on for our eyes are shifting like old half dried blood under their lids and Sallie’s even put her hair over her face for more shade. And in my blur she looks lovely there, her body against the cold stone wall, leaning there, her arms folded, the wrists snuggled into her elbows and her gown down to her white feet scratching at each other. Me in a towel, having now to sit cos I keep slipping down the wall.

Hurry up Angela, Sallie hits the door. More noises in there like an engine starting up. I cant wait, I said, I’ll go outside. No reply. And I move through the dark house hitting stools with my feet and hanging onto chairs on my way, cant see a goddam. Realise walls are there just before I hit them and the dog comes out of a corner and along with me licking my bare feet.

Outside with only a towel on and the wind is lifting the sand and lashing me around. I select a spot and start throwing up, the wind carrying it like a yellow ribbon a good foot to my right. The acid burning my gums and tongue on the way out. Stop. Put my fingers into the mushrooms of my throat and up it comes again and flies out like a pack of miniature canaries. A flock. A covey of them, like I’m some magician or something. This is doing nothing for my image is it. Here I am ¾s naked in a towel vomiting
10
yards from the house, to my left a fucking big desert where nothing is except wind picking up sand and dust and the smell off dead animals a hundred miles away and aiming it at me and my body.

And this bloody dog goes over and sniffs it and then methodically begins to eat, preparing no doubt his appetite
for tomorrow morning, while now, it puts the machinery in me that organises my throwing up to sleep, as if I hadnt drunk a thing in a year. I kick the dog away but it comes back to the meal. I cant yell cos my mouth is dry. I try and then the muscles heave deep down and up it comes like a daisy chain whipping out as it gets free into the slipstream of the wind and collapses on the ground right in front of the dog who is having the time of his life. The end. I leave the dog and move back into the now warm house, sand on my feet and collapse into my bed. And Angela’s there and Sallie wasnt in the hall so I guess she’s in there or back in bed. And just as I drop off I hear John getting up and staggering in the dark.

So it was a bad night. But this morning the room is white and silvery shadows roll across the ceiling. All is clean except our mouths and I move to the basin and rinse out last night’s throat and pee down the drain and struggle back to bed, and Angela D is golden and cool beside me the sheet over her stomach like a skirt and her arm out straight over the edge of the bed like a peninsula rich with veins and cooler than the rest of her for it has been in the path of the window’s wind all night.

She is so brown and lovely, the sun rim blending into lighter colours at her neck and wrists. The edge of the pillow in her mouth, her hip a mountain further down the bed. Beautiful ladies in white rooms in the morning. How do I wake her? All the awkwardness of last night with the Chisums gone. My body open to every new wind direction, every nerve new move and smell. I look up. On the nail above the bed the black holster and gun is coiled like a snake, glinting also in the early morning white.

*

The street of the slow moving animals
while the sun drops in perfect verticals
no wider than boots
The dogs sleep their dreams
off they are everywhere
so that horses on the crowded weekend
will step back and snap a leg

/ while I’ve been going on
the blood from my wrist
has travelled to my heart
and my fingers touch
this soft blue paper notebook
control a pencil that shifts up and sideways
mapping my thinking going its own way
like light wet glasses drifting on polished wood.

The acute nerves spark
on the periphery of our bodies
while the block trunk of us
blunders as if we were
those sun drugged horses

I am here with the range for everything
corpuscle muscle hair
hands that need the rub of metal
those senses that
that want to crash things with an axe
that listen to deep buried veins in our palms
those who move in dreams over your women night
near you, every paw, the invisible hooves
the mind’s invisible blackout the intricate never
the body’s waiting rut.

*

           (watch)   bullet claws coming

*

This nightmare by this
7
foot high doorway
waiting for friends to come
mine or theirs
I am
4
feet inside the room
in the brown cold dark
the doorway’s slide of sun three inches from my shoes I am on the edge of the cold dark watching the white landscape in its frame
a world that’s so precise
every nail and cobweb
has magnified itself to my presence

Waiting
nothing breaks my vision
but flies in their black path
like inverted stars,
or the shock sweep of a
bird that’s grown too hot
and moves into the cool for an hour

If I hold up my finger
I blot out the horizon
if I hold up my thumb
I’d ignore a man who comes
on a
3
mile trip to here
The dog near me breathes out
his lungs make a pattern of sound
when he shakes
his ears go off like whips
he is outside the door, his mind
clean, the heat
floating his brain in fantasy

I am here on the edge of sun
that would ignite me
looking out into pitch white
sky and grass overdeveloped to meaninglessness
waiting for enemies’ friends or mine

There is nothing in my hands
though every move I would make
getting up slowly walking
on the periphery of
black to where weapons are
is planned by my eye

A boy blocks out the light
in blue shirt and jeans
his long hair over his ears
face young like some pharoah

I am unable to move
with nothing in my hands

*

We moved in a batch now. Not just Dave Rudabaugh, Wilson and me, but also Garrett, deputies Emory and East, seven others I’d never seen and Charlie lying dead on the horse’s back, his arms and legs dangling over the side, tied, so he wouldnt fall off. A sheet covered him to stop him drying too much in the sun. That was a bad week after that. Charlie having taken my hat had got it busted to pieces, so no hat for me as we moved back and forward, side to side over the county, avoiding people and law. Lynchers were out now and, bless him, Garrett didnt want that. So we moved along the Carrizozo plains to the slopes of Oscuros, stayed one night by Chupadero mesa, back to the Carrizozo, passed the Evan tribe, followed now the telegraph to Punta de la Glorietta but over
40
lynchers there. So we moved, no hat for me, uncomfortable times for all of us.

Horses and trains horses and trains. Dave, Wilson and me, our legs handcuffed with long
24"
chains under the horse, our hands bound to the bridle. Five days like that. We had to pee as we sat, into our trousers and down the horse’s side. We slept lying forward on the horse’s neck. All they did to stop us going mad from saddle pain was alternate saddles, or let us ride bareback one day and a saddle the next. All going grey in the eyes. My horse hating me, the chain under his belly, as much as I hated him.

On the fifth day the sun turned into a pair of hands and began to pull out the hairs in my head. Twist pluck twist pluck. In two hours I was bald, my head like a lemon. It used a fingernail and scratched a knife line from front to back on the skin. A hairline of blood bubbled up and dried. Eleven in the morning then. The sun took a towel and
wiped the dried dribble off, like red powder on the towel now. Then with very thin careful fingers it began to unfold my head drawing back each layer of skin and letting it flap over my ears.

The brain juice began to swell up. You could see the bones and grey now. The sun sat back and watched while the juice evaporated. By now the bone was dull white, all dry. When he touched the bone with his fingers it was like brushing raw nerves. He took a thin cold hand and sank it into my head down past the roof of my mouth and washed his fingers in my tongue. Down the long cool hand went scratching the freckles and warts in my throat breaking through veins like pieces of long glass tubing, touched my heart with his wrist, down he went the liquid yellow from my busted brain finally vanishing as it passed through soft warm stomach like a luscious blood wet oasis, weaving in and out of the red yellow blue green nerves moving uncertainly through wrong fissures ending pausing at cul de sacs of bone then retreating slow leaving the pain of suction then down the proper path through pyramids of bone that were there when I was born, through grooves the fingers spanning the merging paths of medians of blue matter, the long cool hand going down brushing cobwebs of nerves the horizontal pain pits, lobules gyres notches arcs tracts fissures roots’ white insulation of dead seven year cells clinging things rubbing them off on the tracts of spine down the cool precise fingers went into the cistern of bladder down the last hundred miles in a jerk breaking through my sacs of sperm got my cock in the cool fingers pulled it back up and carried it pulling pulling flabby as smoke up the path his arm had rested in and widened. He brought it up fast half tearing the roots off up the coloured bridges of fibres again, charting the slimy arm back through the pyramids up
locked in his fingers up the now bleeding throat up squeezed it through the skull bones, so there I was, my cock standing out of my head. Then he brought his other hand into play I could feel the cool shadow now as he bent over me both his hands tapering into beautiful cool fingers, one hand white as new smelling paper the other
40
colours ochres blues silver from my lung gold and tangerine from the burst ear canals all that clung to him as he went in and came out.

The hands were cold as porcelain, one was silver old bone stripped oak white eastern cigarettes white sky the eye core of sun. Two hands, one dead, one born from me, one like crystal, one like shell of snake found in spring. Burning me like dry ice.

They picked up the fold of foreskin one hand on each side and began the slow pull back back back back
down
like a cap with ear winter muffs like a pair of trousers down boots and then he let go. The wind picked up, I was drowned, locked inside my skin sensitive as an hour old animal, could feel everything, I could hear everything on my skin, as I sat, like a great opaque ostrich egg on the barebacked horse. In my skin hearing Garrett’s voice near me on the skin whats wrong billy whats wrong, couldnt see him but I turned to where I knew he was. I yelled so he could hear me through the skin. Ive been fucked. Ive been fuckd Ive been fucked by Christ almighty god Ive been good and fucked by Christ. And I rolled off the horse’s back like a soft shell-less egg wrapped in thin white silk and I splashed onto the dust blind and white but the chain held my legs to the horse and I was dragged picking up dust on my wet skin as I travelled in between his four trotting legs at last thank the fucking christ, in the shade of his stomach.