The Collected Works of Billy the Kid Read Free

luke warm tea to wash it out
remembered this when I put my hand into
his stomach was warm

*
    Pat Garrett, ideal assassin. Public figure, the mind of a doctor, his hands hairy, scarred, burned by rope, on his wrist there was a purple stain there all his life. Ideal assassin for his mind was unwarped. Had the ability to kill someone on the street walk back and finish a joke. One who had decided what was right and forgot all morals. He was genial to everyone even his enemies. He genuinely enjoyed people, some who were odd, the dopes, the thieves. Most dangerous for them, he understood them, what motivated their laughter and anger, what they liked to think about, how he had to act for them to like him. An academic murderer—only his vivacious humour and diverse interests made him the best kind of company. He would listen to people like Rudabaugh and giggle at their escapades. His language was atrocious in public, yet when alone he never swore.
    At the age of 15 he taught himself French and never told anyone about it and never spoke to anyone in French for the next 40 years. He didnt even read French books.
    Between the ages of 15 and 18 little was heard of Garrett. In Juan Para he bought himself a hotel room for two years with money he had saved, and organised a schedule to learn how to drink. In the first three months he forced himself to disintegrate his mind. He would vomit everywhere. In a year he could drink two bottles a day and not vomit. He began to dream for the first time in his life. He would wake up in the mornings, his sheets soaked in urine 40% alcohol. He became frightened of flowers because they grew so slowly that he couldnt tell what they planned to do. His mindlearned to be superior because of the excessive mistakes of those around him. Flowers watched him.
    After two years he could drink anything, mix anything together and stay awake and react just as effectively as when sober. But he was now addicted, locked in his own game. His money was running out. He had planned the drunk to last only two years, now it continued into new months over which he had no control. He stole and sold himself to survive. One day he was robbing the house of Juanita Martinez, was discovered by her, and collapsed in her living room. In about six months she had un-iced his addiction. They married and two weeks later she died of a consumption she had hidden from him.
    What happened in Garrett’s mind no one knows. He did not drink, was never seen. A month after Juanita Garrett’s death he arrived in Sumner.
    PAULITA MAXWELL:
    I remember the first day Pat Garrett
ever set foot in Fort Sumner. I was a
small girl with dresses at my shoe-tops
and when he came to our house and
asked for a job, I stood behind my
brother Pete and stared at him in open
eyed wonder; he had the longest legs
I’d ever seen and he looked so comical
and had such a droll way of talking
that after he was gone, Pete and I had
a good laugh about him.
    His mind was clear, his body able to drink, his feelings, unlike those who usually work their own way out of hell,not cynical about another’s incapacity to get out of problems and difficulties. He did ten years of ranching, cow punching, being a buffalo hunter. He married Apolinaria Gutierrez and had five sons. He had come to Sumner then, mind full of French he never used, everything equipped to be that rare thing—a sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane
    (Miss Sallie Chisum, later Mrs. Roberts, was living in Roswell in 1924, a sweet faced, kindly old lady of a thousand memories of frontier days.)
    ON HER HOUSE
    The house was full of people all the time

the ranch was a little world in itself

I couldn’t have been lonesome if I had tried
    Every man worth knowing in the Southwest,

and many not worth knowing, were guests

one time or another.

What they were made no difference in their welcome

Sometimes a man would ride up in a hurry

eat a meal in a hurry and depart in a