The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (3 page)

*

Forty miles ahead of us, in almost a straight line, is the house. Angela D and I on horses moving towards it, me bringing her there. Even now, this far away, I can imagine them moving among the rooms. It is nine in the morning. They are leaning back in their chairs after their slow late Saturday breakfast. John with the heels of his brown boots on the edge of the table in the space he cleared of his plate and cup and cutlery, the cup in his hands in his lap. The table with four plates—two large two small. The remnants of bacon fat and eggs on the larger ones, the black crumbs of toast butter and marmalade (Californian) on the others. One cup in a saucer, one saucer that belonged to the cup that is in John Chisum’s hands now. Across the table on the other side is Sallie, in probably her long brown and yellow dress, the ribbon down her front to the waist with pale blue buttons, a frill on either side of her neck along her shoulders. By now she would have moved the spare chair so she too could put her feet up, barefoot as always, her toes crinkling at the wind that comes from the verandah door. Her right arm would be leaning against the table and now and then she’ll scrape the bottom of her cup against the saucer and drink some of the coffee, put it down and return the fingers of her right hand to bury them in the warm of her hair. They do not talk much, Sallie and John Chisum, but from here I can imagine the dialogue of noise—the scraping cup, the tilting chair, the cough, the suction as an arm lifts off a table breaking the lock that was formed by air and the wet of the surface.

On other days they would go their own ways. Chisum would be up earlier than dawn and gone before Sallie even woke and rolled over in bed, her face blind as a bird in the
dark. It was only later, when the sun eventually reached the bed and slid over her eyes, that she slowly leaned up to find her body, clothesless, had got cold and pulling the sheet from the strong tuck fold at the foot of the bed brings it to her, wraps it around her while she sits in bed, the fists of her feet against her thighs trying to discover which was colder—the flesh at her feet or the flesh at her thighs, hugging the sheet to her tight until it would be a skin. Pretending to lock her arms over it as if a tight dress, warming her breasts with her hands through the material.

Once last year seeing her wrapped I said, Sallie, know what a madman’s skin is? And I showed her, filling the automatic indoor bath with warm water and lifting her and dropping her slow into the bath with the sheet around her and then heaving her out and saying that’s what it is, that white thing round you. Try now to dig yourself out of it. Placed her in the bed and watched her try to escape it then.

On weekdays anyway, she’d sit like that on the bed, the sheet tight around her top and brought down to her belly, her legs having to keep themselves warm. Listening for noises around the house, the silence really, knowing John had gone, just leaving a list of things he wanted her to do. She would get up and after a breakfast that she would eat wandering around the house slowly, she would begin the work. Keeping the books, dusting his reading books, filling the lamps in the afternoon—they being emptied in the early morning by John to avoid fire danger when the sun took over the house and scorched it at noon, or dropping sideways in the early afternoon sent rays horizontal through the doors and windows. No I forgot, she had stopped that now. She left the paraffin in the lamps; instead had had John build shutters for every door and window, every hole
in the wall. So that at eleven in the morning all she did was close and lock them all until the house was silent and dark blue with sunless quiet. For four hours. Eleven till three. A time when, if inside, as I was often, your footsteps sounded like clangs over the floors, echoes shuddering across the rooms. And Sallie like a ghost across the room moving in white dresses, her hair knotted as always at the neck and continuing down until it splayed and withered like eternal smoke halfway between the shoulder blades and the base of cobble spine.

Yes. In white long dresses in the dark house, the large bones somehow taking on the quietness of the house. Yes I remember. After burning my legs in the fire and I came to their house, it must have been my second visit and Sallie had begun using the shutters at eleven. And they brought the bed out of the extra bedroom and propped me up at one end of the vast living room of their bungalow. And I sat there for three days not moving an inch, like some dead tree witnessing the tides or the sun and the moon taking over from each other as the house in front of me changed colour—the night, the early morning yellow, the gradual move to dark blue at
11
o clock, the new white
4
o clock sun let in, later the gradual growing dark again.

For three days, my head delirious so much I thought I was going blind twice a day, recognising no one, certainly not the Chisums, for I had been brought out cold and dropped on their porch by someone who had gone on without waiting even for water for himself. And Sallie I suppose taking the tent sheet off my legs each morning once the shutters closed. No. Again. Sallie approaching from the far end of the room like some ghost. I didn’t know who it was. A tray of things in her right hand, a lamp in the other.

Me screaming stop stop
STOP THERE
you’re going to
fall
on me! My picture now sliding so she with her tray and her lamp jerked up to the ceiling and floated down calm again and jerked to the ceiling and floated down calm again and continued forward crushing me against the wall only I didnt feel anything yet. And Sallie I suppose taking the sheet off my legs and putting on the fan so they became cold and I started to feel them again. Then starting to rub and pour calamine like ice only it felt like the tongue of a very large animal my god I remember each swab felt like the skin and flesh had been moved off completely leaving only raw bone riddled with loose nerves being blown about and banging against each other from just her slow breath.

In the long twenty-yard living-dining room I remember the closing of shutters, with each one the sudden blacking out of clarity in a section of the room, leaving fewer arcs of sun each time digging into the floor. Sallie starting from one end and disappearing down to the far end leaving black behind her as she walked into the remaining light, making it all a cold darkness. Then in other rooms not seen by me. Then appearing vast in the thick blue in her long white dress, her hands in the pockets strolling in the quiet, because of her tallness the hips moving first, me at the far end all in black.

Her shoes off, so silent, she moves a hand straying over the covers of John’s books, till she comes and sits near me and puts her feet up shoeless and I reach to touch them and the base of them is hard like some semi-shelled animal but only at the base, the rest of her foot being soft, oiled almost so smooth, the thin blue veins wrapping themselves around the inside ankle bone and moving like paths into the toes, the brown tanned feet of Sallie Chisum resting on my chest,
my hands rubbing them, pushing my hands against them like a carpenter shaving wood to find new clear pulp smelling wood beneath. My own legs black with scars. And down the room, the parrot begins to talk to itself in the dark, thinking it is night.

*

She had lived in that house fourteen years, and every year she demanded of John that she be given a pet of some strange exotic breed. Not that she did not have enough animals. She had collected several wild and broken animals that, in a way, had become exotic by their breaking. Their roof would have collapsed from the number of birds who might have lived there if the desert hadnt killed three quarters of those that tried to cross it. Still every animal that came within a certain radius of that house was given a welcome, the tame, the half born, the wild, the wounded.

I remember the first night there. John took me to see the animals. About twenty yards away from the house, he had built vast cages, all in a row. They had a tough net roof over them for the day time when they were let out but tended to stay within the shade of their cages anyway. That night John took me along and we stepped off the porch, left the last pool of light, down the steps into the dark. We walked together smoking his long narrow cigars, with each suck the nose and his moustache lighting up. We came to the low brooding whirr of noise, night sleep of animals. They were stunning things in the dark. Just shapes that shifted. You could peer into a cage and see nothing till a rattle of claws hit the grid an inch from your face and their churning feathers seemed to hiss, and a yellow pearl of an eye cracked with veins glowed through the criss-crossed fence.

One of the cages had a huge owl. It was vast. All I could see were its eyes—at least
8"
apart. The next morning however, it turned out to be two owls, both blind in one eye. In those dark cages the birds, there must have been twenty of them, made a steady hum all through the night—a noise you heard only if you were within five yards of them. Walking back to the house it was again sheer silence from where we had come, only now we knew they were moving and sensing the air and our departure. We knew they continued like that all night while we slept.

Halfway back to the house, the building we moved towards seemed to be stuffed with something yellow and wet. The night, the dark air, made it all mad. That fifteen yards away there were bright birds in cages and here John Chisum and I walked, strange bodies. Around us total blackness, nothing out there but a desert for seventy miles or more, and to the left, a few yards away, a house stuffed with wet light where within the frame of a window we saw a woman move carrying fire in a glass funnel and container towards the window, towards the edge of the dark where we stood.

*

(To come) to where eyes will
move in head like a rat
mad since locked in a biscuit tin all day
stampeding mad as a mad rats legs
bang it went was hot
under my eye
was hot small bang did it
almost a pop
I didnt hear till I was red
had a rat fyt in my head
sad billys body glancing out
body going as sweating white horses go
reeling off me wet
scuffing down my arms
wet horse white
screaming wet sweat round the house
sad billys out
floating barracuda in the brain

*

With the Bowdres

She is boiling us black coffee
leaning her side against the warm stove
taps her nails against the mug
Charlie talking on about things
and with a bit the edge of my eye
I sense the thin white body of my friend’s wife

Strange that how I feel people
not close to me
as if their dress were against my shoulder
and as they bend down
the strange smell of their breath
moving across my face
or my eyes
magnifying the bones across a room
shifting in a wrist

*

Getting more difficult
things all over crawling
in the way
gotta think through
the wave of ants on him
millions a moving vest up his neck
over his head down his back
leaving a bright skull white smirking
to drop to ankles
ribs blossoming out like springs
the meat from his eyes

Last night was dreamed into a bartender
with an axe I drove into glasses of gin lifted up to be tasted

*

I have seen pictures of great stars,
drawings which show them straining to the centre
that would explode their
white if temperature and the speed they moved at
shifted one degree.

Or in the East have seen
the dark grey yards where trains are fitted
and the clean speed of machines
that make machines, their
red golden pouring which when cooled
mists out to rust or grey.

The beautiful machines pivoting on themselves
sealing and fusing to others
and men throwing levers like coins at them.
And there is there the same stress as with stars,
the one altered move that will make them maniac.

*

MISTUH…PATRICK…GARRETT!!!

Mescalero territory is a flat region, no rivers, no trees, no grass. In August the winds begin and at that time everybody who can moves away. If you stayed, you couldnt see the sun for weeks because, if opened, your eyes would be speckled and frosted with sand. Dust and sand stick to anything wet as your eyeball, or a small dribble from your nostril, a flesh wound, even sweat on your shirt. A beard or moustache weighs three times as much after you are caught in the storms. Your ears are so blocked that you cannot hear for a good while afterwards, which is just as well for all there is is the long constant screech and scream of wind carrying anything it can lift.

I had been caught in the Mescalero that August for two days. Blindfolding the horse I veered it east when the storm let down, came to stony land and tumbleweed. Tumbleweed wont survive in the Mescalero for it is blasted to pieces in minutes. But here, tumbleweed moved like tires out of nowhere; you could be knocked off your horse by them. In another half day I got to the Chisum ranch. Had been there once a few years earlier and had liked them very much. It was, anyway, the only place you could have superb meals which became even better by your realisation that there was nothing near them for almost a hundred miles.

I arrived at their house mind blasted, and spent those strange three hours while the Chisums rushed around me, giving me drinks, gesturing towards the bath they had poured—all in total silence for I heard nothing, only the
wind I remembered from
24
hours back—before my ears had been gradually sprayed and locked. I put my head under water and weaved about, the hot water stinging even more my red face. Drunk on water, I staggered from the tub and passed out on the bed.

Sallie came in when I was waking and threw me a towel. Can you hear now? I nodded. Her voice like piercing explosions. Yes, but softly, I said. She nodded. We got visitors, she said. Do you know him? William Bonney? He’s brought his girlfriend that he plans to marry. My mind awake then. I’d of course heard of him. But leaning back to think of it, I fell asleep. Sallie must have covered me up properly with a sheet because I woke up a long while later and was warm. I could hear the boy Bonney arguing with John.