The dying cowboy.
I crave an audacious music yet easy comfortable native.
Aaron Copland comes to mind, and I put on Billy the Kid long
a favorite of mine and among the most American of American
ballets.
Good.
A frontier town looms up in the mind's eye,
there is brawling and gunplay.
A woman is cut down in the crossfire, and it remains,
alas, for her son.
A mere lad of 12 to avenge her death and to flee.
In that awful moment of pain and rage,
his whole destiny is determined.
The music swells upon me and I'm carried along
in a swift current of his legend.
Night on the prairie, a card game, a gunfight, capture
and escape, and at last death in the desert.
The avocation is all but irresistible.
And an epic notion of heroism lies at the center of it.
We, Americans, have always cherished the institution
of the dying cowboy.
From the dime novel to the silver screen,
it has been one of our most enduring sentiments
and authentic national treasure.
We beat the drum slowly and played
the fife lowly and we bitterly wept as we bore him along.
For we all loved our comrades so brave young and handsome.
We all loved our comrade although he'd done wrong.
But if this is not precisely a false view of Billy the Kid,
it is decidedly a narrow one.
The irony is that the other side of this particular coin
is just as ambiguously true and false.
To wit the famous photograph, the only one known to exist,
if I am not mistaken.
In which Billy appears to be a mindless pear-shaped boy,
essentially innocuous in spite of the arsenal at his hips,
who stands in peculiar and pathetic relation
to man and to God.
The truth is not necessarily to be
found in either of these directions,
nor is it necessarily to be found at all.
One day, Billy and I were riding down from the high country,
South of the Hondo Valley.
It was getting on towards evening,
and the light was failing fast.
Far below, we could see the pale geometry of a village, Arroyo
Corvo, as I recall.
And we made straight for the cantina there.
Night came on as we stood without talking at the bar.
An hour passed, and another.
And then, move over, friend.
A thick bearded man stepped between us, facing Billy.
Quite apart from the fact that he was obviously drunk,
there was something repulsive in his manner.
You could see it once that there was no steel in him.
And not a glimmer of the doom that was about to fall on him.
I caught my breath.
Over the intruder's shoulder, I saw
Billy raise his eyes slowly.
He said nothing, nor did he give so much as an inch.
But for a moment, his eyes lay upon the man like a shroud.
And he returned to his drink.
The man withered away.
I had never seen Billy fix a man in his gaze before.
For years now, I have tried to understand
what it was that I saw in his eyes at that moment.
There are times when it seems surely
to have been something like sorrow.
Faintest sadness but at other times,
I realized that there was nothing.
Nothing at all.
That Billy was the only man I have ever known in whose eyes,
there was no expression, whatever.
But I digress.
There is the matter of Billy the Kid's demise.
He was shot to death as everyone knows in Pete Maxwell's house,
near Fort Sumner, on or about midnight, 13, 14 July 1881.
And he was shot by Pat Garrett, Sheriff of Lincoln County.
There was one witness, Pete Maxwell.
Immediately after the shooting, two other men
came into the room and saw Billy the Kid's body face down
on the floor.
They were John Poe and Kip McKinney.
It is generally believed, if I'm not mistaken,
that Garrett fired twice, one of the shots going wild.
But Poe and McKinney both thought
that they had heard three shots, two of which
were extremely close together in time.
Now, these are the important questions as I see it.
Was Billy the Kid armed?
Did the four men who stood over his body really
see, in addition to the butcher knife,
a pistol in Billy's right hand?
A pistol of a rare type?
A Colt double action 41 caliber with a small handle shaped
like that of a Derringer?
What did they only imagine that they saw such a thing?
Finally, did the four men really see Billy
the Kid there on the floor at their feet?
Or were they possibly dreaming?
Could it be that they and some extraordinary concert
of the mind imagined him there dead?
Or indeed, could it be that these men in their very souls,
in their most intricate mentality and absolute faith
in what they saw and what they were, for more or less equal
figments of Billy the Kid's imagination?