Lucky Billy

by John Vernon

  I shut the door, barred it, exhaled, shook my head, and returned to the corpse. I thought about praying and how I might go about it. Ways to circumcise the foreskin of my heart. Where is the Lord that led us through the wilderness, through a land of drought and the shadow of death? When I took this job, I thought, I had no religious sentiment. Now, however—

  A shot concussed the air, ripped its fabric apart, and I instinctively ducked, felt for my weapon, smelled the hot stink of powder—all the while wondering if I'd been killed. I hadn't. At the edge of the light cast by the oil lamp, Beatriz's boy held the Kid's pistol with his two hands. He lifted it heavily. "My God," I whispered. The boy with red hair and dark rings around his eyes from behind a dense cloud raised the smoking barrel. "Boy," I said. "Son. You don't want to do this. Lower the pistol."

  He pointed it at me.

  "Point that thing away! Put it down, son!"

  His face creased in half. He began to cry but all there was for him to cling to was the Thunderer. Its foreign weight at the end of his arms, large and alive, looked fused to his hands.

  I found a calmer voice. "Put it down, son." As anyone could imagine, I felt nervous as a hen, but I managed to produce a tone of composure, even balmed it for the child. "Lay it there on the floor."

  The boy cried harder, sat on the floor, and the heavy pistol wavered. I took a step closer. "Did I shot him?" he asked.

  "That's fine. Yes, you did. Don't worry about it. I won't tell your mother."

  "Is he in heaven?"

  "Put the gun down, son. Yes, he's in heaven. Just put the gun down and I'll say that I did it. No one will ever know."

  "Mamá don't know?" Sobbing, the boy laid the weapon on the floor. I stepped forward and retrieved it and weighed it in my hand. A few threads of smoke still lingered at the barrel. Outside came the sound of footsteps and shouts; someone banged on the door.

  "Sure thing, she won't know. I'll say that I did it."

  "El Chivato?"

  "That's right. El Chivato's in heaven."

  "I shot him," said the boy.

  "No, you did not. I'm the sheriff here. I'm the one that shot him."

  "The sheriff?"

  "That's right. See?" I thumbed out my star and, pulling up my pant legs, squatted before him, while the door rattled on its hinges; behind it came a torrent of Spanish. "Everything's fine now. The sheriff's here. You want to stand up now? Come with me?" The boy reached up and took my hand and climbed to his feet and we walked to the door. I put the gun on the packing crate. "What's your name, son?"

  "Billy."

  * * *

  SANTA FE WEEKLY DEMOCRAT

  JULY 21, 1881

  Billy Bonney, alias Antrim, alias Billy the Kid, a 21 year old desperado, who is known to have killed sixteen men, and who boasted that he had killed a man for every year of his life, will no more take deliberate aim at his fellow man and kill him, just to keep himself in practice. He is dead: and he died so suddenly that he did not have time to be interviewed by a preacher, or to sing hymns, or pray, before that vital spark had flown, so we cannot say positively that he has clum the shining ladder and entered the pearly gates.

  The bullet that struck him left a pistol in the hands of Pat Garrett, at Fort Sumner, last Saturday morning, about half-past 12 A.M. in the room of Pete Maxwell. Governor Lew Wallace will now breathe easier, as well as many others whom he has threatened to shoot on sight.

  No sooner had the floor caught the descending form, which had a pistol in one hand and a knife in the other, than there was a strong odor of brimstone in the air, and a dark figure, with the wings of a dragon, claws like a tiger, eyes like balls of fire, and horns like a bison, hovered over the corpse for a moment, and with a fiendish laugh, said, "Ha, Ha! This is my meat!" and then sailed off through the window. He did not leave his card, but he is a gentleman well known to us by reputation, and thereby hangs a "tail."

  * * *

  AFTERWORD

  The two exclusively fictional characters in this novel are William Bonné and the red-haired boy. All the others are based on historical figures, "based" meaning I learned what I could about them from the historical record and extrapolated—but also invented—starting with that foundation. The details of the Lincoln County War, and of William Bonney's participation in it, are as accurate as I could make them. Readers should understand that many aspects of that war and of Bonney's career are in dispute. For those interested, the best historical overview I've consulted is Frederick Nolan's The West of Billy the Kid. A recent biography by Michael Wallis, Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride, was published too late for my research.

  The source of my information about the famous tintype of Billy is Bob Boze Bell's excellent The Illustrated Life and Times of Billy the Kid. Several sentences and phrases from my two Garrett chapters are borrowed from the historical Pat Garrett's The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid, a book at least partially ghostwritten by the Roswell, New Mexico, postmaster Ash Upson. In chapter 3, the letters of John Tunstall to his family in London are based upon the actual letters of the historical John Tunstall to his family in London, as published in Frederick Nolan's The Life & Death of John Henry Tunstall and The Lincoln County War: A Documentary History, I have combined some letters, altered dates, and provided fictional bridges (including Tunstall's explicit reference to William Bonney on [>]), all for the purpose of using these remarkable documents to help tell my story. Portions of Tunstall's interior monologue and dialogue with Billy in chapter 5 are also based on these letters. Finally, some of the language in Sue McSween's private journal (chapter 11) is taken from a passage in John Cleland's Fanny Hill.

  The proclamations of President Hayes and Governor Wallace, the letters of Billy Morton, Alexander McSween, Millard Goodwin, J. B. Wilson, Huston Chapman, William Bonney, and Lew Wallace, and all the newspaper articles quoted in the novel, are taken from the historical record.

  Whether the historical Billy the Kid was born in New York City and lived there as a child has recently been questioned by historians. But the historical and the legendary Billy the Kid are joined at the hip; and my fictional Billy, being rooted in both, is unequivocally a native of Manhattan.

  I would like to thank the English department at Binghamton University for awarding me a Newman Travel Grant for my research. Thanks are also due to the people of Lincoln, New Mexico, for their help with this project, particularly Dee Kessler and Tim Hagaman, former proprietor of the still-thriving Wortley Hotel. Special thanks to Anthony G. Lozano for helping me with the novel's Spanish. And my deepest thanks to Frank Bergon, Bob Mooney, and Anton Mueller for their comments on successive drafts of this novel.