The Kid: A Novel (7 page)

“Are you a gunslinger?”

Tunstall seemed to be hoping for a yes, so the Kid said, “I’ll admit I have been a shootist on occasion. I’m not a flagrant criminal, though. Each time my hand has been forced.”

Seconds passed. Tunstall seemed to be examining him. “Are you given to strong drink?”

“Whiskey? I haven’t never acquired a taste for it.”

“And if you don’t mind my prying:
señoritas
?”

The Kid shied from answering that and inquired as to why he was being so closely questioned.

“I have a need,” Tunstall said. He was blind in his dullish, hazel-brown right eye, but his left was sympathetic and he sat snug enough that the Kid could smell a breath pepperminted with the Altoids that he ordered from Callard & Bowser in England. “It can be dull, venal work. You may feel like a hireling at times. But I daresay the tedium may be punctuated by sudden moments of danger. John Chisum pays his cattle protectors four dollars a day, or so it’s rumored, but I can afford just one dollar per diem, plus room and board. Would you settle for that?”

“I got nothing but these old clothes and some high ambitions. Seems like wealth to me.”

“Your name’s Billy?”

“Yep. William H. Bonney, sir.”

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen this November twenty-third.”

“Are you Protestant?”

“Probably.”

“Yes, but are your origins in the north of Ireland? Are your forefathers Anglicized and of the Orange Order?”

Because it seemed to matter so to him, the Kid nodded.

“Excuse me if I inquire again: In a pinch you’d be handy with a pistol?”

“Have had multiple trials and I passed em all.”

“And have you a firm purpose of amendment?”

“Absolutely.”

Smiling as he clapped a hand on the Kid’s knee, Tunstall said, “Well, William H. Bonney, you’re hired. Let us rise and go about changing your prospects.”

*  *  *

The horse-stealing charges against the Kid were withdrawn by John Henry Tunstall through his lawyer, Alexander A. McSween, and Tunstall linked his arm inside the Kid’s as he strolled him into the new J. H. Tunstall & Co. General Merchandise store, which was wide as eleven spaced porch posts and smelled of fresh pinewood flooring and the cedar fire in a hissing cast-iron stove. Employees were emptying boxes or working the till and coffee grinder, and the floor was crammed with crates and barrels and shelves overstocked with just-arrived groceries, dry goods, hardware, tools, guns, and even an apothecary of patent medicines and elixirs. Tunstall claimed with a grand gesture that his store offered more luxuries and necessities than did the so-called House kitty-corner from them, and he said he hoped to undercut that scoundrel Murphy until he captured even his Army contracts for groceries and meat. And he would be adding a bank, too, with the cattle baron John Chisum as its president and financial source. With some grandiosity he said, “I intend to get half of every dollar that is made in Lincoln County by anyone. And I will
deal
with those who oppose me. I do not suffer fools gladly.”

Then, as gifts for the Kid’s forthcoming birthday, the owner went about happily equipping charming Billy with batwing chaps, a holster and six-shooter, a Winchester rifle, .44-40 cartridges, whatever food he fancied, and, “not stinting anything,” outfitted him with the rigging of a Colorado saddle with doghouse stirrups and took the Kid to the corral behind the store and let him select a fine white Army horse that Tunstall said he’d purchased for twenty-five dollars from the post trader at Fort Stanton. “And I would not take seventy-five for her now.”

The Kid was overwhelmed with glee. Wanted to stop grinning but couldn’t. He told Tunstall, “Went through a dozen Christmases with no gifts at all, and you just made up for all a child’s wanting in one afternoon.”

Tunstall bowed humbly to the Kid as he acknowledged, “Gratitude is the sign of a noble soul.”

*  *  *

The Kid then rode beside Tunstall’s buggy and the dapple-gray team he’d stolen earlier as they traveled south thirty miles to the JHT Ranch of 3,840 acres in the Rio Feliz valley, and while they traveled John Henry Tunstall revealed himself.

Hinting at inherited wealth, he said he grew up in the fashionable London borough of Hampstead, where his father, “the Governor,” was “a financial success in the merchandise and shipping business.” Tunstall had three sisters, whom he adored, and he’d attended the Royal Polytechnic Institution with the intention of becoming an accountant in his father’s multiple firms. Since his father was also a John, all his friends and associates called him Harry, “And you may, too.” He said he was fluent in French and adequate in German and was pleased to hear that Billy spoke Spanish “to help us find common ground with the locals.” After graduation from the Polytechnic, Tunstall took a gentleman’s grand tour of Europe, then boarded the Cunard liner
Calabria
for America and finally arrived by railway in Victoria, British Columbia. There he worked for three years in his father’s mercantile firm of Turner, Beeton & Tunstall, but he left for California with the goal of investing some of his father’s fortune in sheep and a fleece- and wool-making business. Hearing in Santa Barbara of the practically free, semiarid land in the New Mexico Territory, he instead went east and found himself in Santa Fe in 1876. There in Herlow’s Hotel he met a Scottish Canadian, “a very shrewd fellow and a lawyer by profession, Alexander A. McSween,” who persuaded the Englishman to go into stock raising in Lincoln. Tunstall hired as his foreman the “wonderful physical and moral specimen” of Richard M. Brewer, and because Tunstall was a foreigner, McSween and Brewer had to file the papers for him to acquire the Rio Feliz ranch on which he hoped to graze ten thousand cattle. “With overhead and losses you can’t accumulate real wealth with less.” Working for him as well were Robert Adolph Widenmann, who grew up over a hardware store in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but attended an excellent high school in Stuttgart, Germany; and Frederick Tecumseh Waite, a handsome half Chickasaw Indian who’d graduated from Mound City Commercial College in St. Louis. “So you’ll be fraternizing with educated men.”

“I like learning things, sir,” said Kid Bonney. And he amended that: “Harry.”

Tunstall admired him for a moment. “I could see that. The flames of intelligence gleam in your eyes.”

*  *  *

The Kid was imagining an English manse or at least a handsome Mexican hacienda, but John Henry Tunstall’s home in the high desert foothills east of the Sacramento Mountains was just a fourteen-by-fourteen hovel of a cabin constructed with adobe blocks and piñon logs. But Tunstall was delighted at seeing his property again and, as if they were objects of beauty, called Billy’s attention to a heavy anvil and sledgehammer outside in the weather and a spade and a scoop shovel atilt against a lone mesquite. “I have tools!” he exclaimed. “I have forsaken the fancy drawing rooms and am
downstairs
, dining with staff!”

Hearing his voice, an English bulldog happily ran over a hill to his owner and wiggled and shrimped around in delight as Harry knelt to greet his Punch with high-pitched baby talk. Worry about the Englishman’s sanity caused the Kid to examine the manic zeal in his face.

Tunstall interpreted his concern. “Don’t be distressed, Billy. It shan’t always be such a humble abode. I fully expect betimes a stately house with rooms upon rooms and pretty maidens to do our bidding.”

*  *  *

White-bearded Gottfried Gauss, an ex-clergyman from Württemberg, Germany, and for thirteen years an Army hospital steward, worked as the ranchers’ chuck wagon cook and that night served them grilled pork chops with a green chilli glaze as Harry talked passionately about the fortunes to be made. Without a table or chairs, they sat on the cold earthen floor, and Harry hunched over his food as he confided, “John Chisum was given a contract to supply eleven hundred steers for the soldiers at Fort Stanton. The Army agreed to pay him thirty-five dollars a head for the full-grown livestock, but Chisum only paid eighteen dollars a head in Trickham, Texas! The cattle drive took two weeks so there were considerable expenses, but the scalawag still netted over eighteen thousand dollars!”

“A lot of money,” the Kid said.

Tunstall agreed and took that as encouragement to say more, going on and on about his wild ambitions until it was twelve, his “witching hour.”

The Kid slept in the hovel only one night and then was relieved to be sent farther north to the winter-dead grasslands fed by the Rio Ruidoso. There the jigger boss, or second in command, was Charlie Bowdre, a twenty-nine-year-old from Mississippi who’d gone flat broke on a cheese factory in Arizona before finding work with L. G. Murphy’s House as a gunman with Jesse Evans and the Boys. But in 1876 Bowdre had taken the teenage Manuela Herrera as his wifely servant and become domesticated, signing on to fork a saddle for the gentleman from London instead of being, as he put it, “ever on the skeedaddle and in a state of frantic.”

The Kid recalled a lithograph of the author Edgar Allan Poe that he’d seen in Wichita. Charlie Bowdre, he thought, took a likeness to Poe with his sad, dour, seen-too-much eyes and his trying to balance his ever-gaining baldness with a walrus mustache and a wealth of dark brown hair behind his ears.

When the Kid rode up and introduced himself, Bowdre scowled, and in the snail’s pace of Southern speech he asked, “William H. Bonney. Is that a consumed name?”

“Consumed?”

“Was you born with it or just take it on by your ownself?”

“Sort of.”

Bowdre nodded. “Well, your secret’s safe with me.” His flat-topped hat was rakishly cocked rightward on his head like the straw boater of a city boulevardier, but he otherwise looked like a far older man who’d been in the hot or cold outdoors for too long. He spurred his gray ahead to swerve a maverick far from an arroyo, and the Kid trotted his white horse to catch up.

Bowdre asked him, “You ever buckaroo aforehand?”

“In Arizona.”

“Which ranch?”

“The Sierra Bonita.”

Bowdre took his measure. “With the vaqueros? You look too littlish for that.”

“Well, mostly I helped around the chuck wagon.”

Bowdre smiled. “Oh, you was the
hoodlum
!”

“They called it by another name.”

“Was it the Little Mary?”

The Kid said nothing.

And Bowdre said, “Mr. Tunstall, he don’t tolerate disrespect amongst our ownen.”

The Kid was sent eastward as a flank rider, his sole job to bunch the cattle in their move-along and scare them with shrill whistles if they strayed wider. Though Bowdre was a hundred yards off, his voice carried, and the Kid could hear him sing, “It rained all night the day I left, the weather it was dry. The sun so hot I froze to death. Susanna, don’t you cry.”

At sundown Widenmann and three other hands in the nighthawk shift rode up to assume the overseeing, and with no more work for the weekend, Bowdre said Friday was his night to howl, and asked if the Kid had a place “to lay your wary head.” Billy hadn’t thought far enough into the future for that, a common problem with him, so Bowdre invited him to join him and his wife in his flat-roofed, two-room adobe house on the Rio Ruidoso. He’d purchased it from Lincoln’s L. G. Murphy for fifteen hundred dollars, but with just three years to pay off the mortgage, foreclosure was inevitable, so Charlie and the woman he called his wife were just camping there and expecting to head for the horizon soon like most vagrant cowboys. Bowdre called it “searching for the elephant.”

Manuela Herrera was a glamorous, exotic, high-spirited girl the Kid’s age who seemed ill-suited to be heavily bundled up and frying tortillas in a skillet over a crackling fire in their front yard. The Kid hopped down from his horse and introduced himself in the formal Spanish way, kissing the sides of her cheeks as he said, “
Buenas tardes. Me llamo Guillermo Bonney
.” Good evening. I call myself William Bonney.

She blushed as she said, “
Con mucho gusto, Señor Bonney
.” With much pleasure, Mr. Bonney.

“
El gusto es mío
.” The pleasure is mine. The Kid felt sure she’d batted those gorgeous brown eyes.

Charlie Bowdre was watching them with jealousy. “You speak Mexican
excelente
, Kid. I’m unpressed.”

“Well, I just get by, really.”

“I ain’t got the stick-with-it for learnin’.”

Cold was nipping at whatever was exposed outside as Josiah Gordon Scurlock strolled over from the adobe house a little farther on with a girl of no more than sixteen. Scurlock was co-owner of Bowdre’s ranch and the wrangler who handled the half a hundred horses needed on Tunstall’s ranch, the cowhands often running through at least two per shift. The girl turned out to be his wife, Antonia Herrera, the younger sister of Manuela.

Doc Scurlock was twenty-eight, as blond as the Kid and an inch taller. He’d studied medicine in New Orleans and in the twentieth century would become a schoolteacher, but earlier in Louisiana he’d argued over a faro game and ended up killing his accuser with his gun, so he quit his physiology studies and fled to Arizona, where he partnered with Bowdre in a failed enterprise of making cheese. Wandering into the village of Lincoln, the pair found work as cattle rustlers for L. G. Murphy before preferring the more legitimate employment of the Englishman.

The five went inside to get out of the stiff wind and cold, and the Herrera sisters served hot-peppered steak fajitas. Just for conversation the Kid asked Scurlock, “Are you a doctor still?”

“Of horses,” he admitted.

“Why’d you give up being a physician?”

Scurlock answered, “I guess I don’t much like hospitals. I associate them with sick people.”

He offered little else, but for the first time Doc smiled, revealing the quarter-size hole in his shattered front teeth that a gunshot took out in his struggle with the Louisiana gambler. The hole of the exit wound behind his throat had healed up like a button.

The Herrera girls were glancing shyly at Billy and giggling with each other as Bowdre and Scurlock talked about horse breeding. The Kid heard the sisters calling him Billito, and then Scurlock heard them saying the Kid was “
muy guapo
,” very handsome, and he said, “They seem to like the cut of your jib, Kid.”