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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504033596 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The Permanent Press (ORD) |
| Publication date: | 04/26/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 202 |
| File size: | 847 KB |
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Billy's Blues
By C. Rips Meltzer
The Permanent Press
Copyright © 1998 C. Rips MeltzerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3359-6
CHAPTER 1
The evening begins like every other day. A setting sun filters softly between black curtains as I roll over, curl up, and pull covers warmly overhead. Surrounded by a bevy of plump pillows, I happily await the best sleep, the kind of sleep that can only be enjoyed after alarm clocks have long been silenced and forgotten. Ten minutes here. Five minutes there. Diving quickly into the most vivid of dreams, sinking slowly to the bottom, rushing the surface for air before submerging into another breathless vision — each complete conception may last but minutes or mere seconds, yet each details more than could ever be captured with language, paint or song. Such dreams were believed by the ancient Greeks to predict the future.
Each salubrious plunge is so consuming that even bodily pain withdraws, and I hate pain. Some men are built for speed, others brute force. I am built for comfort. Where others have muscle, I have cushioning. Some talk of scars earned on battlefields or in sports arenas, but the only injuries I seem to acquire occur in bed. I wake with pulled muscles, jammed fingers, and sprained ankles among an assortment of other ills.
But my sufferings begin long before the first battle with sleep. Early skirmishes involve just trying to get comfortable. Those whose bodies were built for comfort often have the most difficulty in finding it. Lying upon my belly, my prodigious girth forces the spine to curve outward. This results in searing back spasms. Belly up, my knees buckle under gravity's strain. On the side, my shoulders groan beneath the heavy load and the only way to keep these copious thighs from crushing my little he-biddies is to wedge a firm pillow forcibly between the knees. Not until sunrise, with curtains drawn and earplugs inserted, does the night's war of attrition leave me exhausted enough to trust the tremulous arms of Morpheus as he carries me away with noiseless wings to land of slumber.
For me, however, it's a flight filled with turbulence. After a day of fitful sleep, the sun finally sets and twilight tucks the earth to bed. Not until then can the final aphoristic magic begin. Freed from the prying eyes of Helios yet still safe from the danger of night, I'm granted a last episodic respite before the painful moment of resurrection.
Stuffing an extra pillow between the knees, I dream on ...
Floating beneath the stars on a cloudless night, my weightless spirit glides above a dark green forest touched lightly by the moon. A soft radiance flickers ahead, a campfire. I zero in to see a blanketed figure sleeping before the glow. Familiar in its curves, I realize that the slumbering body is mine, which I find peculiar, because I've never slept outside so exposed to the dangerous elements of the natural world. Stranger still is the camp: a rustic pot hung above the blaze from a triangle of sticks, two horses tied to a tree, and two unfurled bedrolls, one empty. Looking down upon the ugly lump that was once myself, I feel peaceful. The cares that once possessed me when embodied seem as trite as they were infinite: the need for rest, clean clothes, warmth, Hershey's chocolate. Satisfying the endless needs of the body, especially such a spacious one, was an undertaking of Sysiphian proportions. Now, outside the body, I feel unfettered by such corporeal torments.
Then I notice a tall shadow at the edge of woods on the other side of the fire. The dark figure stands perfectly still like a Cimmerian sorcerer. Finally, the shade steps into the circle of light. A wide-brimmed sombrero hides his face. Wearing cowboy boots and denim trousers over wiry bowlegs, he cradles something beneath a thick poncho. As he steps around the flames, a flash of light reveals the barrel of a rifle. He walks up to my sleeping figure and flips the left side of the poncho over his shoulder freeing the rifle butt. He lowers the barrel and points it toward my body.
From deep in the woods a sound is heard. Startled, he raises the gun.
"Hello?"
The voice sounds old and frail.
"Hello ... Hello ...?"
All space and time ceases. Everything becomes this voice from outside our circle of light. Its volume rises and like a blind man stumbling forward, it comes closer, aged, painful, a voice cracking with loneliness and confusion, seeking me, beckoning for me to answer:
"Hello ... Hello ... Hello ...?"
Icy fingers reach beneath moist sheets. Faraway sounds seep in through earplugs: a distant train, a car alarm. All aches awaken and pound for recognition: ankles, knees, back, neck, an overwhelming need to relieve myself. The voice repeats itself, closer, vivid, plaintive.
"Hello ... Hello ... Hello ...?"
Heartbeats stab my chest. My eyes open to darkness. Reaching for the answering machine, I turn the volume down and the voice trails off into peaceful emptiness. I slip off the slumber mask, remove earplugs, and check the clock.
It's 6:30 p.m. Night has settled upon the Northeast. I'm up. Now what?
CHAPTER 2After years of searching and months of waiting, I finally received today, via the mail, an ultra-rare, original copy of the most underrated book in the 20th century, The Saga of Billy the Kid. It was the first legitimate biography of the most famous outlaw in the late 19th century Southwest, yet, by the time Walter Noble Burns wrote The Saga of Billy the Kid in 1925, the career of America's first child criminal had been long forgotten by a country caught up in the turbulent twenties. By the depression thirties, however, the country was ready again for outlaw legends. That's when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures got hold of Burns' Saga and made the immensely popular film, Billy The Kid.
The Kid was never forgotten again.
He reached out his manacled hands to place his wager of ten matches when, seemingly by accident, he brushed the jack of hearts off on to the floor at Bell's left side. "Didn't mean to do that, Bell," the young boy apologized. "Hard to play with handcuffs on like this."
"That's all right, Kid," replied Assistant Deputy J.W. Bell. "I'll get it."
Bell bent over to pick up the card. Holding the deck in his left hand, he reached for the card with his right. To do so, he had to turn slightly away from the table. For a fraction of a second his head dipped below the level of the top, his eyes intent upon the card on the floor.
It was Billy the Kid's chance in a million for which he had been waiting weeks with the deadly patience of a panther.
Billy the Kid: notorious boy bandit of the wild and woolly West. It was said that he killed a man for every year of his life, "twenty-one," according to old-timers, "not including Mexicans and Indians." Billy the Kid: his bold escape from the Lincoln County Jail, just days before he was due to hang by the neck until dead, ranks as one of the most infamous escapes in America's history right up there with John Dillinger's gun carved out of wood and Ted Bundy's leap from a second floor court library window. Billy the Kid: hunted down and killed with a proverbial shot in the dark by Sheriff Pat F. Garrett, the man who once was his friend.
As Bell stooped, the butt of his six-shooter projected within reach of the Kid's hand. Leaning across the table, the Kid snatched the weapon. When Bell raised his head, he was looking into the muzzle of his own gun.
Billy the Kid: the tragic figure was born Henry Michael McCarty, November 20, 1859, fatherless, in the poverty-stricken, disease-infested Irish Fourth Ward of Lower Manhattan where the World Trade Center stands today. Billy the abandoned: his loving mother, Catherine, migrated west with little Henry and brother Joe to drier air in a vain attempt to cure the tuberculosis that racked her once hardy frame only to leave Billy an orphan at the tender age of fourteen. Little lost Billy: thousands of miles from familiar city streets, he was forced to live under a slave-driving stepfather who had gained rights to the child through an arranged marriage bartered by a desperate Catherine in Santa Fe shortly before her death. Ill-fated Billy: he was driven into a life of crime after being duped into hiding stolen laundry by Sombrero Jack, a local Fagin, in the dusty mining town of Silver City. Nobly refusing to snitch on his compadre (who had since skipped town leaving him to hold the bag, literally), Sheriff Harvey W. Whitehill jailed the young lad (his first trouble with the law), and promptly called a grand jury. The boy squeezed his wiry frame through the chimney of the city jail (his first of many escapes) and fled into the badlands of Arizona, a fugitive at the tender age of fifteen. Penniless and unarmed, bad luck Billy stumbled into Indian territory just south of the notorious Fort Apache.
"What the hell, Kid!"
"Do as I tell you, Bell, and be mighty quick about it," ordered the Kid in crisp, sharp tones. "Don't make a false move. You're a dead man if you do. I don't want to kill you. I'm not going to kill you. You've been good to me. Turn and walk out the door. I'm going to lock you in the armory."
I take a spoonful of Marshmallow Fluff, a knifeful of Skippy Roasted Honey Nut Peanut Butter, and smear it onto slabs of Hershey's Milk Chocolate. Only four more portions await me, so I chew slowly, one square at a time, a little extra peanut butter where I can tolerate it, because I need protein for this herculean task of piecing together the life of this badly misappropriated and misused legend of the old Southwest.
Bell faced about silently and marched out the door, the Kid, hampered by his leg irons, shuffling after him. As the deputy turned south in the hall, a sudden surge of anger, chagrin, hurt pride, swept through him. Why had he been such an easy dupe? Deaf to repeated warnings, he had been caught napping. He had fallen into a trap through which he should have seen with half an eye, a trap the Kid doubtless had been planning since their first card game together. This absurd situation was the upshot of his pity, his kindliness. He might have expected it. He had been a soft-hearted fool. What would Sheriff Pat Garrett think of him? What would that devil, Deputy Bob Olinger, say? Was there no way out of this? Desperate thoughts raced through his mind. Could he turn quickly and overpower the Kid? No. That seemed suicide. But if he could trick the Kid as the Kid had tricked him, he might yet save his reputation. Once out of the Kid's clutches, he would organize the citizens and recapture or kill him. He came to the head of the back stairs just beyond which was the armory door. He shot a furtive glance over his shoulder. The Kid had fallen perhaps six feet behind him, making awkward progress, his ankle chains clattering.
There were not more than a dozen steps from the upper floor to the point where the stairway turned. Once behind the angle of the wall, Bell would be safe. The stairs were his one forlorn hope. Swerving sharply, he plunged down. In one flying leap, he made the bend. His out-thrust hand struck the plastered wall; the heels of his cowboy boots cut splinters from the steps as he lunged for the shelter of the turn. One step more and the wall would shield him ...
A mere boy thrown into the world of men and what a world of men was life West of the Pecos. Angry Apaches violently defended the last of their homelands. Prowling gunfighters had free reign to act out an evil normally suppressed in civilized society. Roving bands of thieves plied their trade unhampered by law. But, far more dangerous, were the ruthless cattle barons who gobbled up the landscape before an encroaching civilization leaving many of the original settlers homeless, others dead. The resulting range wars forced the local citizenry to take sides or be cut down in the crossfire. It was a West filled with more perils and danger than any other epoch in American history. This notion of a mere child thrown into such a maelstrom, alone and without guidance, struggling to survive all while attempting to develop a code of conduct from which to behave — this was the essential conflict of the frontier. This manchild's gestalt symbolized the West's own struggle to merge into the modern, post-Civil War United States. Billy the Kid, coming of age in the very heart of the West at its wildest, was trying to manage a complex set of loose and ever-changing rules. Yet, a definitive code did exist. Arguments may have been settled with a gun, but they were settled mano a mano. Justice may have been at the end of a rope, but it was swift, final, and unobscured by a sprawling legal system which, in urbanized centers, seemed to breed more crime than it solved. Yes, the West had its own code, but in a sense it was purer, simpler, more innocent compared to the complex set of rules from the older, corrupted East. The code of the West, however, was one the "civilized world" could not tolerate. Those who could not adapt to modernization were doomed. A new West stumbled out of the gunsmoke of the old — a West which would no longer tolerate the likes of its own prodigy, Billy the Kid, infant rascal, boy bandit king.
The bullet struck Bell beneath the left shoulder blade, cut through his heart, and buried itself in the wall beyond.
One crucial task in any research concerning an historical figure whose deeds have sprouted into unruly legend is to separate fiction from fact, myth from reality, story from history. No one has ever reported the authentic story of Henry Michael McCarty (alias Billy the Kid, Kid Antrim, William H. Bonney, El Chivato, or simply, The Kid). I can, because unlike the others, I have no reason to sway from the path of truthfulness. So far I've completed a weighty amount of research: books, periodicals, videos, tapes.
But facts can only go so far. I need to get a feel for how things really happened. I must close my eyes, think deeply, and meditate. I must allow his spirit to enter my body, putting myself in his shoes, understanding how he thought, and then stick a needle in my vein and use that blood for ink — except now it's his blood, the long dead blood of Billy the Kid. I'm speaking figuratively of course. I detest violence.
Jamming Bell's six-shooter into his belt for emergencies, he stepped to the door of the armory, flung it open, and caught up Deputy Bob Olinger's double-barrel shotgun leaning against the wall.
Another chocolate fluffer-nutter sandwich, cold milk to smooth the palate, and I ponder the first enticing mystery concerning Billy: the time he spent south of Fort Apache, in the land of the Chiricahua Apache. Led by the infamous Geronimo, these last "hostile" American Indians refused to be settled on the reservation where the land wasn't fit for crops or hunting. There, they would be left dependent on corrupt Indian agents who skimmed so much off the already meager rations that children and the old suffered from malnutrition and descended into coma-like stupors. While the women gave still-births, once-proud warriors grew listless, aroused only by the firewater which seemed created just for the purpose of making the Indian forget who he was.
Geronimo and his followers would undergo no such indignities. They roamed free within the so-called "Apache Triangle" unimpressed by the soldiers who wore pants with a yellow stripe. In full view of the guards from Fort Apache and Camps Thomas, Bowie, or Grant, the Apache boldly killed any yellow legs who strayed beyond the front gates.
"Garrett went over to White Oaks to-day to order the gallows," said Olinger. "Kid's getting scared. Dropped some talk this mornin' about makin' some kind of break. Broke open my double-barrelled shotgun and said, 'Each one of them shells is loaded with eighteen buckshot. Try to escape, I wish you would. I'd like to see you kickin' at a rope's end, but, when I come to think about it, I believe I'd rather murder you myself. Go ahead and make your break and you'll get eighteen buckshot between the shoulder blades."
Olinger downed the red liquor and ordered another three fingers. "But I'll get my revenge when the trap falls. I want to see him kick. Little devil. Hope he strangles a good longtime."
"That's the stuff," echoed Jimmy Dolan and J.G. Murphy.
They raised their glasses.
"Here's to the rope that chokes the life out of the little devil," said Olinger. Then a sudden crashing noise over in the courthouse startled them.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Billy's Blues by C. Rips Meltzer. Copyright © 1998 C. Rips Meltzer. Excerpted by permission of The Permanent Press.
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