Lucky Billy

by John Vernon

  "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."

  Francisco yawned. "Me, I'm soft."

  "In Silver City," said the Kid, "I was just a boy, and one time I picked up a scorpion. My mother had married a man named Bill Antrim, and at the time he was still living with us. Don't move, he says. Hold out your hand, keep it out from your body, don't drop it, now. Give it to me, he says, be careful, go slow, don't get scared, don't drop it. Drop it in my h
and, he says. No, he says, don't. I just stood there like a statue. Finally I saw a pair of scissors on the table and snipped off its tail. My stepfather says to my mother, 'He's hard. Some folks are just meant to be hard.'"

  "Don't sound like he was one of them."

  "She didn't want to hear it. She takes me by the ear and pulls my face against her breasts."

  "Mothers," said Francisco.

  They stared at the fire. Its smoke rose into the sky, underlit by the flames, and would never stop rising, like a heaven-bound soul, Billy thought. "What kind of fire is this, Francisco?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "A redskin fire?"

  "It's better than that, it's a Mexican fire. White man makes a bonfire and burns up everything at once. You can't even get close enough to warm yourself good. Indian puts the ends of the logs together in the flames and pushes them in so they gradually burn. Mexican fire's in between—it's the best."

  Billy stirred the fire with a stick. "What did you mean about Juan Roibal?"

  "What about Juan?"

  "You said he's no friend of mine."

  "You said yourself he's in touch with Garrett."

  "Have you heard that too?"

  "Out here in the desert?"

  "So what did you mean?"

  "I didn't mean nothing."

  "Was it him that betrayed me?"

  Francisco looked away. Burst of sparks from a log. "Juan would never do that."

  Billy looked at Francisco. "At least it wasn't you."

  ***

  SEVERAL WEEKS LATER back at Fort Sumner, the Kid was on a bench outside Beaver Smith's saloon when he spotted Francisco across the parade grounds walking into Hargrove's. So he'd brought in his sheep. But had he seen Billy? He wasn't alone, either, someone was with him: short and squat Juan Roibal, who also disappeared inside.

  It was five o'clock, the hottest part of the day, and well into July, and Billy felt strange. A gluey taste filled his mouth. I've changed, he thought. I'm not seeing red. Everything is different now, nothing's the same. He'd been talking with his friend Jesús Silva, recounting the story of his escape for the hundredth time, and he felt like a pest. Was it true, as someone had complained, that he'd tell it at the drop of a hat to anyone who'd listen? Had he become one of those? You're just a swell-head, Kid. He cut the story short. He wasn't sure that was Juan entering Hargrove's, Juan lived in Puerto de Luna, he knew. A huge wing of fear all at once brushed his heart, it came out of nowhere. To resist dark suspicions had never been that difficult, though sometimes it was like nailing rats in a box. It took willful indifference, the stiff-necked conviction that what other folks intended was no concern of his and all he had to do was hold up his end. But this time around he couldn't stop it, he felt it—the wing of a bird as large as a dragon. The creature sank inside his body, picked the marrow from his bones. His heart flew around and he felt for the butt of his pistol like a boy feeling for his pud, to make sure it was there. Then the fear took off like a raven from a corpse and once again he was fine. But he still felt suspicious. Jesús beside him, anyone on the parade grounds, the men at Hargrove's, he mistrusted them all. He didn't care; let them plot. He'd always been able to look himself in the mirror without turning away. I can sleep at night, can't I? It's no concern of mine if Juan and Francisco go places together, they've always been friends. The world can go to hell. I'm not what I am. Sometimes you might as well just ditch your own past. What people like about me is my lack of hesitation—he's quick, that boy. If he feels like shooting something that's what lie does, no questions asked. Laws don't apply to him, trying to catch Billy would be like trying to hold water in your fingers. How easy it would be to kill everyone he meets!

  Then he sees, outside Hargrove's, across the parade ground, the man he thought was Juan walking toward the post office, and wonders how he ever made that mistake. He's not even a Mex; it's Barney Mason's cousin.

  Jesús had to go now, he stood up and paused. "What you doing tonight, Kid?"

  "Why do you ask?"

  "You could throw in with me."

  He searched his eyes. "That's all right. I'm meeting a friend. I do have a few left."

  "Friends, you mean? Everyone here's your friend, Bilito."

  But as Jesús walked off, Billy raised his voice. "This place ain't what it used to be, Jesús."

  Later that night he whispered to Celsa, "Let's do it again."

  "Don't you have to wait?"

  "Does it look like I have to wait?"

  "You going to have me crying out for help, Bilicito."

  "It's me that cries out. That's the way I am."

  In the orchard their proceedings disturbed an errant stinkbug caught beneath the blanket. The bug scuttled out with his ass in the air and headed for the brush at the base of a peach tree. Behind him, the blanket smelled of kerosene, but neither Billy nor Celsa, yoked together, noticed. Near the edge of the orchard, sphinx moths gathered nectar from the lemony flowers, larger than bugles, of the sacred datura. A datura beetle poisoned himself by gorging on the plant's delicious stems and leaves. A three-quarter moon bathed the branches of the peach trees, splashed the earth, flecked their blanket. They heard horses on the road. "Who's that?" whispered Celsa.

  "Someone headed for the baile."

  "There's no baile tonight."

  "Someone going home, then." Talking, he knew, was a living demonstration of their separate existence, but that only sharpened the sensation of being joined, one flesh.

  "El Chivato!"

  Celsa reached down and tried to tug up their blanket.

  "Who is it?"

  "That redhead."

  "Bang! Bang!"

  "Bang yourself, pardie. Vamoose. ¡Fuera!" Billy shifted his weight to his left arm, found a rock in the dark, and threw it at the shadow over near the fence. It didn't move. He grabbed a fistful of rocks and threw them hard, but it was Celsa who yelped when the thrust drove him in. At last the shadow vanished.

  They picked up the pace. Celsa hummed with each stroke. She whispered in his ear, "Everyone wants to be El Chivato."

  "Not me."

  Later, on his back, with Celsa's damp length buttered against him, Billy asked Celsa, "Has Apolinaria said anything about Garrett?"

  "I don't know."

  "Maybe you could find out."

  "She's in Roswell, not here. I never see her."

  "You could write. Don't you sisters write all the time?"

  She shrugged. "You shouldn't ask me such things."

  "Why not?" He grabbed her arm, tried looking in her eyes—she kept turning away.

  "You're hurting me," she said.

  He felt badly used but what could he do? His heart wasn't in it, he regretted even asking. He said, "I'm starved," and jumped to his feet but his knees buckled. He stamped the sleeping leg to shake out the needles.

  "I got some boiled eggs back at my place. Nobody's there."

  "I'll go get them."

  "Take my knife in the drawer. There's a quarter section on Pete's porch."

  "I'll get some of that, too."

  18. July 1881

  Garrett

  THE PAPERS MAY CALL me an atheist, John, but my thoughts on the matter are more of a whipsaw. You can be sure that if we kill or capture the Kid I won't be an atheist, I'll be a hero. And so will you." We were north of Roswell on the Sumner Road at dusk, myself and my deputies, John Poe and Kip McKinney. Those in the know claimed the Kid was back at Sumner. He'd haunted Fort Sumner for the better part of June, or so said my informant, staying with Celsa Gutiérrez when her husband, Saval, was out herding sheep, and racking out when Saval returned. Now he was there even with Saval around, for they were old friends and had learned to share; or so claimed the informant. It seemed incredible to me that Billy Bonney should linger in the territory. There was a great deal of talk about the Kid that didn't go, and folks gave statements without vouching for them, and I scarcely wished for the public to have a laugh on me if I showed up at Sumner and he
wasn't there. People saw him everywhere. He was the theme of every tongue. The fact of men answering to his description, with carabinas strapped on their backs, and on horses like his, riding into town and acting suspicious and talking to persons known as partisans of the Kid, only multiplied his feats, for the bed is longer than the man that stretches on it. I've fellowshipped several Billy the Kids and observed that Kid Antrim was the one that prevailed. He's the one we were after.

  Dust from the horses. New Mexico dust, I believe, keeps me healthy, they ought to bag it for lungers. In several directions, saddle-shaped thunderheads in the twilight's white sky shook off black curtains, but all was dry around us.

  On my right, John Foe was a monster. A barrel of beef. He could spear you with those minatory eyes under beetling brows set atop a nose as wide and thick as my hand. To my left, McKinney was more rabbity, lean. He was either sneaky or callow, I couldn't tell. Of all things, he wore a New York bowler hat and his bushy eyes beneath it caught every grain of dust. "What do you mean, whipsaw?" asked Poe.

  "I mean it goes back and forth. I'm not a decider. I believe in God sometimes but I also believe he's a horse's ass. Consider this man, Billy the Kid. He's been known to kill persons just to keep his hand in. What kind of god would make something like that?"

  "I thought you used to be friends."

  "We knew each other briefly."

  "I heard you once rode to the door of a church and made your horse kneel just to rile up the flock."

  "To amuse the children, John. I wanted to see if a horse could pray, too."

  McKinney asked, "How long do you intend to ride tonight?"

  "Long enough not to be seen. We can bed down across the river at dawn. Away from the road."

  "Tell me again how much we get for this."

  "The reward is five hundred dollars," I said.

  "He's lost value," said Kip. "It was a thousand the first time."

  "It was never a thousand."

  "I'm a washed-in-the-blood-of-the-lamber myself," John Poe announced. "I shouldn't be partnering with the likes of you."