The Kid

* * *

The Kid intended to hide away that night in an old Navajo hogan with a Mexican sheepherder who worked for Pete Maxwell. But the sheepherder kept putting off their dinner with games of cards until he finally confessed around eight that he actually had no food. “Well, that’s no good,” the Kid said, and the shepherd told him he’d slaughtered a steer for Don Pedro that morning and hung it on the porch for aging.

The Kid was hungry enough to trot his horse back to the fort.

Jesús Silva said he found the Kid strolling in darkness behind Bob Hargrove’s saloon that night. The Kid told him he was hungry, but Silva said in Spanish, “Have a cold beer with me first.”

“Cold?”

“I hung the bottles in the Pecos with fishing lines.”

The Kid was coaxed, and Silva took him to the far end of the peach orchard, where there was a tin pail with green bottles in it from the Cervecería Toluca y México. They sat under the peach trees in high grass and talked very quietly with it so late. Jesús Silva later recalled that the Kid was in his usual high spirits, though he did allude to the trouble he was in and cautioned, “Holding on to hatred is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.”

* * *

Spanish was being spoken quietly and indistinctly far behind Garrett, but there’d been a fiesta and many Mexicans were still up. Hearing an “Adíos,” he turned in the peach orchard to see a lithe man in a slouch hat and waistcoat gracefully and easily jump the orchard fence and head east. Even with the full moon, Garrett couldn’t tell if he was Anglo or Mexican, couldn’t even make out where he ended up going. Watching like this seemed such a waste of time. He told his deputies, “We seem to be on a cold trail, fellows. We come to the end of the alley.”

* * *

Even much later in life, Candido Gutiérrez remembered being up late and shyly hiding behind his mother’s skirt as she handed the Kid a butcher knife at the back door and told him she would cook the steaks if he got one for Saval, too. Candido’s father drunkenly called out from the front room that he wanted one as big as a Bible.

And then Candido heard his mother confide that she’d been told a stranger was in the fort that afternoon questioning people about Billy the Kid.

In Spanish, the Kid said, “A lot of people do that. I’m a curiosity. I ought to be in the freak show with the Siamese twins.”

“Still, you’ll be careful?”

“I’ll be fine.” With it still so hot, he took off his hat and waistcoat, then his holster so he wouldn’t attract attention, and finally he wrenched off his boots. In English he said, “Hold these for me, will ya? I’ll be walking on cat’s paws.” And then he tucked his smallish Colt .41 Thunderer into his right trouser pocket.

* * *

“Ready to go?” a frustrated sheriff asked his men.

But John Poe insisted, “Don’t you think we ought to talk to Pedro Maxwell first? We haven’t questioned him yet.”

Kip McKinney said, “It’s after eleven. He’ll be sleeping.”

His wariness was overcome by his methodical nature, and Pat Garrett decided, “We’re old friends. Pete won’t mind me waking him.”

The sheriff and his deputies left the peach orchard for the former officers’ quarters but went there in a wandering, unpredictable way just in case a gun was trained on them, McKinney even backpedaling to watch the area to their rear.

Poe saw a very large house with porches on three sides and a picket fence that was flush against the street. At the front gate Garrett nodded toward the first-floor room to the left and told them in a hushed voice, “That’s Maxwell’s room in the southeast corner. You fellows wait here while I go in and talk to him.”

It was still so hot that Maxwell’s unscreened windows were fully raised and the front door was wide open for the sultry breeze. The sheriff walked up the porch steps, and Poe followed just far enough to sit on the stoop, while McKinney squatted outside the fence with his rifle in both hands.

* * *

The Kid lofted himself over the fence dividing officers from enlisted men and walked toward the Maxwell house, cockleburs catching his stocking feet. He saw there’d been a fiesta in the dance hall, and with the near-full moon he could see some people still strolling on the parade grounds though it was probably half past eleven. The Kid found more night so he could relieve himself in the high grass that Pete’s sheep hadn’t got to yet. He could see the curing carcass of the steer hanging under the eave of the north porch and could have butchered the porterhouse steaks from the short loin right then, but his loyalty to his old friends caused him to seek permission, so he shook himself and walked around to the front of the house, fastening his trousers.

* * *

Waiting in the hallway for a moment, Garrett listened for sounds of wakefulness in the house and heard nothing but the song of insects outside. The shade of the front porch roof made the interior moonless. Walking inside the twenty-by-twenty south bedroom, he could make out Pete Maxwell sleeping flat on his back in a nightshirt, his white top sheet flung off in the heat. Garrett went to the head of the double bed, felt the sag of the mattress as he gently eased down onto it, and sitting there he softly laid a hand on Maxwell’s forearm as he whispered, “Pete.”

Maxwell inhaled in a shocked “Huh?”

“It’s Pat,” he whispered. “We’re looking for the Kid. Seen him here?”

Maxwell was still waking and wiped his left eye as he said, “Week ago.”