The Kid

And then they heard a voice outside asking, “Quién es?” Who is it?

* * *

The Kid was about ten feet away and fastening his trousers when he attracted John Poe’s attention. The deputy thought it could have been Maxwell himself or a houseguest walking back from the privy, so he just watched. There was no sign of a gun.

Because Poe was partially hidden on the stoop, the Kid failed to see him until he could have reached out and felt the figure’s rifle. Electrified as always by danger, the Kid hopped up the steps, whispering, “Quién es?”

McKinney and Poe did not understand Spanish.

The Kid was backing away from the deputy as he headed toward Pete Maxwell’s bedroom and said again, “Quién es?”

John Poe still presumed the Kid was a houseguest, and he stood up with a calming hand and said in reassurance, “Don’t be afraid of us. We’re visiting just like you.”

The Kid recalled Paulita saying, You’re not going to hurt him, are you? And he felt off-kilter.

John Poe was just a few feet from him when the Kid ducked into Maxwell’s room, calling out, “Pedro, quiénes son esos hombres afuera?” Pete, who are those men outside?

* * *

Sheriff Garrett heard the voice outside but failed to recognize it at first as he worried that it could be Maxwell’s brother-in-law and frequent houseguest, Manuel Abreu. But the form of the man was like that of the Kid, and as he asked Pete his frantic question, he was walking close enough to reach a hand out to the foot of the bed.

Garrett yanked out the newish Colt .44 he’d taken from Billie Wilson, and the Kid heard the scratch of leather and the four clicks of a hammer getting to full cock in the hand of a just-recognized upright shape on the bed, and, in his precaution to not injure a friend, he left his Colt in his trouser pocket but held out the butcher knife in his left hand as he skewed farther away, asking again, “Quién es? Quién es?”

Without warning, Garrett fired at the Kid, and the flash of the gun faintly illumined him as a .44 caliber bullet hit the Kid’s chest and the left atrium of the heart so hard it turned him around and he fell face-forward onto the floorboards. And Garrett did nearly the same as he fell to all fours from the bed and fired again with a wild aim that drilled through a wooden washstand and hit the headboard next to Pete in a loud ricochet so that outside John Poe thought he heard three shots. The room was filled with the haze and pungent smell of gunpowder, and the sheriff and Maxwell were so deafened by the noise that neither one heard the Kid’s few gasps and then a final groan.

They fled the room, Maxwell falling to his knees on the south porch as he yelled to the deputies, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

Sheriff Garrett told Deputy Poe, “That was the Kid, and I think I got him.”

John Poe said, “Are you sure? You may have shot the wrong man.”

Kip McKinney joined them on the east porch, and with caution the three lawmen stooped to peer through the open windows to see if the Kid was dead or just waiting for retribution. But with the roof shading them, it was too dark to have any certainty, so Pete went to the far end of the house for a candle as alone Garrett cautiously walked back inside the room with Billie Wilson’s Colt in both trembling hands.

The Kid’s blood was a widening pond on the floor, and Garrett worried as he saw that the Kid had no gun, just the butcher knife. There would be scandal. Garrett looked out to the front porch and saw that McKinney and Poe were facing east in caution as native people ran to find out what the gunshots were about. Ever so quietly Garrett squatted to frisk the Kid and felt relieved when he found the smallish Colt .41 in his trousers. Garrett gently laid it beside the Kid just as Pete arrived on the front porch with a lighted tallow candle and stood it in its own wax on a windowsill.

With the help of the fluttering flame, Maxwell was pretty sure it was the Kid, and he said he seemed dead as a doornail, and by then Deluvina and Jesús Silva were running in. She and Jesús rolled the Kid over onto his back. His face was white as paper, his mouth was loose, and his flashing eyes were finally dulled. With two fingers Deluvina tenderly closed his eyelids, and when she noticed the tall sheriff lingering beside her in silence she hurled a full load of curses at him. “You pisspot!” she screamed. “You traitor! You snake in the grass! You have murdered our little boy!”

Pete Maxwell walked back into his room, and he and the sheriff exchanged glances. He who’d been afraid of the Kid was now afraid of Garrett. And then Paulita was there in a nightgown. With a face that lacked emotion, she looked at a nothing-there Kid and flatly said, “And now he’ll never be old.”

* * *

The gun was raised and then it flashed. The shock of it was like a punch that spun the Kid and swatted him to the floor. Then there was a fiery, searing pain that overcame all other feeling, but it waned as the Kid’s body acquired its education in dying. The Kid felt himself floating upward, felt a surprising happiness. With each quitting of an organ or process there came a greater liberation, an aliveness, an awareness of never having been so real. Seeing himself on the floor and the chaotic concern around him, he felt affection for all of them, felt pity for who he used to be, but he was overwhelmed by his new fluidity and increase, his ever-greater sense of wonderful love and limitlessness, of having now what he’d always wanted but couldn’t ever name.

* * *

There was a ruckus outside as the Kid’s Mexican friends crowded around the Maxwell house, seething. Had there been anyone to urge them on, they would have rioted against the Kid’s murderer, but the one who could have induced them to do that was now dead. Still, the sheriff and his deputies stayed wakeful inside Pete’s bedroom that night, barricading themselves to forbid access, their guns ever in their hands in case the locals sought retaliation. Garrett looked at the dead body still on the floor and told his deputies, “Kid Bonney was as cool under trying circumstances as any man I ever saw. I guess he was so surprised for an instant he could not collect himself.”

At one in the morning of Friday the fifteenth, Celsa and Saval, Deluvina and Jesús, and a boy named Paco Anaya carried the Kid eastward across the old parade grounds to a carpenter’s shop on the southern limits of the fort, where they laid him on a workbench. With lumber scarce, some of Maxwell’s shepherds tore apart the roof of the falling-down stable next to the Indian commissary and used its ceiling planks for the Kid’s interment. Jesús Silva then sawed and nailed the boards to construct a basic coffin as Manuela and Celsa and other weeping señoras washed the Kid’s nakedness, brushed his hair, dammed the Colt .44’s large exit wound with a rag, and dressed him in a fine linen shirt and trousers donated by Pete Maxwell. They left the Kid’s white feet bare and arrayed yellow beeswax candles all around him, and off and on his friends visited him for a night wake of rosaries and Spanish funeral hymns.

Sheriff Garrett and his deputies left the fort around noon that Friday, and soon after that his friends tenderly laid the Kid’s corpse into the coffin and shoved it onto Vicente Otero’s hauling wagon. Then the entire population of Fort Sumner, even saloonkeepers who never closed up, followed the funeral cortege to the old soldiers’ cemetery. Young Paco Anaya had worked all morning with Vicente digging out a grave next to tho

se of the Kid’s pals Tom Folliard and Charlie Bowdre.

There was no priest or minister to handle the rites, so Hugh Leeper, a Christian nicknamed the Sanctified Texan, read from the fourteenth chapter of the Book of Job: “?‘Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down; he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.’?” And: “?‘Thou shalt call, and I will answer thee; thou wilt have a desire to the work of thine hands. For now thou numberest my steps; dost thou not watch over my sin? My transgression is sealed up in a bag, and thou sewest up my iniquity.’?”

In Leeper’s funeral sermon he continually referred to the Kid as “our beloved young lad” and closed by telling the congregation, “Billy cannot come back to us, but we can go to him and will see him again up yonder. Amen.”

Then Paco hammered into the ground a simple cross made from a stave from the Maxwells’ picket fence. Crudely painted on it was BILLY THE KID, but nothing more.