The Pot Thief Who Studied Billy the Kid Read online

  “How so?”

  “Because Christina Olson refused to use a wheelchair. She said she didn’t want to be beholden to anyone. As a result, she lived in squalor.”

  “No wonder people don’t understand modern art,” I said, and she laughed even harder.

  We passed through Capitan and Lincoln before backtracking on U.S. 70 for three miles to San Patricio. We had traveled two hundred miles through eleven villages with a combined population smaller than a freshman history course at the University of New Mexico.

  The La Rinconada Gallery is part of the Sentinel Ranch which has a scattering of private residences and a few guest cottages. It struck me as a perfect combination of urban sophistication and pastoral relaxation, Virginia Wolfe meets Dale Evans.

  The ranch is cradled in quiet rolling hills along the Rio Ruidoso, ‘noisy river’ in Spanish. But think of noisy as water flowing over rocks in a Japanese garden, not noisy as in Niagara Falls.

  We checked into the Apple House, a modest pink adobe with a tin roof. The cottonwood, aspens and Lombardy poplars had just begun to turn. The yellows and golds were magnificent against the pink walls.

  We had just enough time to change, refresh and head for the reception.

  We were greeted at the entrance by an elderly Hispanic gentleman holding a tray of champagne flutes. Bubbles rose from a strawberry at the bottom of each glass. I was reaching for a glass to determine if it might be Gruet when a man with an in-charge countenance took the tray from the older gentleman.

  “I’ll greet the guests,” he said. “Go fill some glasses. And put on a tie.”

  The older gentleman nodded, said, “Yes, sir,” and left.

  The man now holding the tray moved it out of my reach and said, “I’m sorry sir, but we cannot allow you to enter with a foot cast. Our cherry cherront>wood floors are quite delicate. They were milled from local trees and we are fastidious about them because… well, we can hardly go to Home Depot and buy a replacement piece if one is damaged, can we?” He laughed his authoritative laugh.”We can, however, offer you the use of one of our wheelchairs with soft rubber tires.”

  “That’s very kind,” I said, “but out of respect for Christina Olson, I never use a wheelchair.”

  He took a step back and gave me an uncertain smile.

  I gestured to Susannah and said, “Ms. Inchaustigui is an art historian. I am simply her driver. I would enjoy a stroll around the trees.”

  There was visible relief on his face. The sunburned guy with the skinned nose and cast was not going to embarrass the other guests with their spa-smooth faces and their hedge-fund plump wallets.

  “Please do not hesitate to let me know if you change your mind,” he said with a smile. You could have lubricated an eighteen-wheeler with the oil in his voice.

  I started down to the river using my crutches.

  I was just to the back of the main building when I heard someone call, Señor.

  I turned to see the gentleman who had initially been serving the champagne.

  “I am sorry you were not allowed to enter. I am in the kitchen filling glasses. Can I bring you something? We have the champagne you saw. We also have many kinds of fine liquors.”

  “What would you have if you were going to relax over by those trees?” I asked him.

  There was a mixture of merriment and mischief in his eyes. “There is some expensive whiskey.”

  “I’ll go in with you and fix myself a glass of it.”

  He smiled. “No, Señor. I do not wish to have the marks from your cast on the fine linoleum in the kitchen. I will bring it to you.”

  He returned moments later with a quart of High West Rocky Mountain Rye 21 Year Old Whiskey.

  “I brought two glasses in case your patrona decides to join you,” he said and winked.

  I thanked him profusely even though I had never heard of the brand, and rye sounded like a close cousin of pumpernickel, the taste of which had clung to my taste buds like hot on a jalapeño.

  There were a few outbuildings and a barn closer to the river. I sat down on a weathered wood bench in front of a fire pitit.

  I was content to listen to the rippling water and breathe in the fresh air. After a while, I heard footsteps and turned.

  He seemed to materialize out of the glooming, a figure backlit by the sun dropping below the Sacramento Mountains. He stepped to me and offered his hand.

  “Howdy. Jack Truesdell,” he said, “but folks call me Cactus.”

  His hand was one continuous callus and felt way too tough to drive a rebar through.

  “Pleased to meet you. I’m Hubert Schuze.”

  “I was just stepping out for a smoke. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “No,” I lied.

  He popped the snap on his shirt pocket, pulled out a bag of tobacco and did something I’d never seen before except in old movies. He rolled a cigarette. After he stuck it in his mouth, I half expected him to produce a wooden match and ignite it with a flick of his thumbnail.

  He did use a match, but he ignited it by drawing it across his right boot. The hand-rolled paper flared, casting a brief light on a face with a thousand stories etched upon it.

  From his scuffed riding boots to his sweat-stained cowboy hat, he looked like a character from a spaghetti western. His frame was scrawny and twisted, his face lean and angular. Scars, bumps and missing teeth indicated a life of rough ridesf rough over rocky trails.

  “How did you get the nickname ‘Cactus’?”

  “Spent most of my life prospecting in the Mogollons. Folks started calling me cactus cause they knowed I had to be tough as a cactus to survive up there.”

  “Where did you live?”

  “Mostly in the mines I was workin’. A man’s got to dig into the side of the mountain to find ore up there. There ain’t much flat ground. After you done all that digging, you got a place out of the weather even if you don’t strike nuthin.”

  “Sounds like a tough life.”

  He shook his head and took a long drag from his smoke. “Best life there is. My daddy worked all his life in the Little Fannie Mine. They let him go because of the panic of 1930. His first wife was washed away in the flood of ‘23. He married my mother a few years later, so he had a young wife and a new young’un to support but didn’t have two dimes to rub together. He took the family back to Silver City where he’d growed up. I didn’t take to city life. So when I hit sixteen, I bought a burro and headed into the mountains. But I never worked for no mining company cause I saw how they treated my daddy.”

  Cactus struck another match and lit the kindling in the fire pit.

  “Gets chilly when the sun goes down,” he said. “You got any whiskey?”

  He must have been watching all along.

  I handed him a glass and poured us each some rye.

  After our first sips – his was actually more of a guzzle – I asked him when he had stopped prospecting.

  “It was near ten years ago. I’d just sold some silver and was fixin’ to buy supplies when a fella in the feed store overheard the clerk call my name. He asked if I was kin to the Jack Truesdell went to school with Billy the Kid, and I told him that was my daddy.”

  “Your father went to school with Billy the Kid?”

  “Yep. That’s what got me this here job. That fella was from these parts. He told me I could have a job at the museum in Lincoln tellin’ folks about Billy the Kid. I was nearin’ seventy, and getting up and down that mountain weren’t getting’ no easier, so I throwed my knapsack in his truck and moved to Lincoln.>”

  He held out his glass, and I gave him a refill. I gave myself one too so as not to lose ground. After all, it was my bottle.

  He laughed. “I didn’t last long. You can tell I’m a fella likes to talk. But they wanted me to stick to stuff they wrote down. I told ‘em I don’t read too good, and they said I could just memorize it. But my memory was worse than my readin’, so I quit before they could fire me and took a job here mowin’ the fiel
ds, pickin’ up the trash the tourists throw out and keepin’ the tack room nice and tidy.”

  “How could your father have gone to school with Billy the Kid? That was ages ago.”

  “Daddy was born a year or two after Billy. When he was twelve, Silver City got its first school, and the two of them started together. I growed up on the stories daddy told me about him and Billy. They was best friends. Seven years later, Billy was dead. Daddy lived to be over eighty just like me. Us Truesdells are a hardy bunch. He always wondered how things might’a worked out if Billy hadn’t been double-crossed by General Wallace.”

  I remembered the publisher’s introduction to Ben-Hur claimed Wallace wrote the final scenes after returning from a clandestine meeting with Billy the Kid.

  So I asked Cactus about the double cross. He told me what his father had told him and recommended I drop by the museum to learn more. By the time he had completed the story, the bottle was half empty.

  He tossed another dry log on the fire. “I can’t take the cold like I used to. My hands is cold. My ears is cold. Even this here scar is cold,” he said, pointing to a disfigured patch on his right cheek. ”I guess no blood can get there.”

  “How’d that happen?”

  He laughed. “Done it to myself. I was working a claim on the east side of Bearwallow Mountain when one of my back tooths started hurting something fierce. I tried to prize it out with my jackknife, but it wouldn’t budge. The pain got so bad, I tried to knock it out with my little rock hammer, but I couldn’t get a good swing at it. I decided to just wait it out. But after two days, I couldn’t take no more. I carried a little .22 pistol in those day to fight off varmints and claim jumpers. So I decided to blow the tooth out.”

  “You shot your tooth!”

  He gave a quick nod. “First I prized off a slug and dumped out half the powder from the casing. I carved the slug down so it was smaller and more pointy. Then I put it back on the casing. I put the muzzle at the bottom of the tooth and aimed up a bit. I guess it hurt, but the toothache was so bad, I hardly noticed it. I took a swig of whiskey and rolled it around. I hated to waste the whisky, but I figured I didn’t need blood and tooth pieces in my gut, so I spit it out. Cout it outrse I’d had a few swallers before shooting the tooth just to steady my aim. A flap of meat and skin was hanging off the hole in my cheek. I swabbed it with bacon grease and pushed it back in place. Then I tied my bandanna around my head and went to sleep.”

  “How could you sleep after that?”

  “I hadn’t slept for two nights. Once that tooth stopped throbbing like a bull’s heart, I dropped right off. The next morning my mouth tasted like I’d ate a coyote, but the hole was already beginning to scab. A week later it was right as rain.”

  It was dark now and the fire cast shifting shadows on his face. “That’s an awfully big scar for just a .22.” I said.

  “It might have been infested,” he said. “It bled off and on for days.”

  “You said it scabbed over and healed in a week.”

  He removed his hat and scratched his head. There were a few patches of grey stubble, a dent the size of a tablespoon and a long jagged scar.

  He put the hat back on. “Guess my memory ain’t so good these days.” He held his glass between the fire and his eyes. “This shore is good whiskey. Lot better’n that stuff I had up on the mountain.”

  38

  Truesdell left around eleven. I walked back to the Apple House and found Susannah had left the door unlocked for me.

  People who live in big cities may find that scary, but it didn’t strike me as strange. I live in a big city, part of which is dangerous, I’m sorry to say. But even in Albuquerque there’s an understanding of what the rest of the state is like. Villages where people go out at three in the morning to open and close gates in acequias. Places where there are no bad neighborhoods because there are no neighborhoods at all. There is only the village.

  The people are not better or worse than city people. There are just too few of them for things to go too far wrong. They live in a different setting. If El Bastardo lived in certain neighborhoods in Albuquerque, there would be others like him. If he was bested in a bar fight, they would urge him to get even. Offer to help. That’s how gangs start.

  But in La Reina, he extends his hand and says “no hard feelings.” People in villages may not always like each other, but they almost always coexist peaceably.

  Thanks to the best whiskey I ever drank, I slept soundly on the couch. Okay, it may have been the quantity of whiskey rather than the quality that aided my sleep, but I felt refreshed in the morning.

  We drove to Lincoln and had breakfast at the The Wortley Hotel, actual motto: No Guests Gunned Down in Over 100 Years.ÀYears.

  Lincoln was the county seat of the largest county in the United States until other counties were carved out of it. The town faded into obscurity and was replaced as county seat by Carrizozo. The historical buildings were eventually taken over by the state as a museum. Because Lincoln had the courthouse, jail, sheriff’s office and saloons in its heyday, it was also the place where many episodes of the Lincoln County War played out, including Billy the Kid’s most famous jail break.

  I asked our waiter about it, and he was happy to oblige. Because Lincoln is now more a museum than a town, everyone there is a tourist guide either formally or informally.

  He pointed across the street.

  “Billy was over there wearing shackles and waiting to be hanged. Marshall Bob Olinger was sitting at this very table. Billy was being guarded by Deputy James Bell. Billy asked Bell to take him to the outhouse behind the courthouse. When they got back inside the courthouse, a pistol shot was heard. Bell ran out of the courthouse and fell dead from a bullet wound.”

  Susannah said, “I’ll bet someone hid a pistol in the outhouse so Billy could get it.”

  “Yep, that’s what most people figure. Billy then gets Olinger's shotgun from the armory and positions himself by that window,” he says, again pointing across the street.

  “Olinger jumped up from this table when he heard the shot and charged outside. ‘Did Bell kill the Kid?’ he yelled out. A man named Godfrey Gauss replied, ‘No, The Kid has killed Bell.’ Billy called out from the window, ‘Hello Bob’. Olinger sees the shotgun and replies to Gauss, ‘Yes, and he's killed me too’. Which Billy does by blasting him with both barrels.”

  Susannah shuddered.

  “How could he do all that in shackles?À” I asked.

  “He was famous for having thin wrists. He slipped the shackles off with ease.”

  “Olinger and Bell must not have known that,” said Susannah. “It was smart of Billy to leave the shackles on until he was ready to make his move. Gave them a false sense of security.”

  Our waiter told us Billy threw the shotgun through the window onto Olingers body then went back to the armory for a Winchester rifle, two pistols and two cartridge belts loaded with ammunition.

  “Quite a crowd had gathered by that point. Billy talked to them from the balcony, telling them he hadn’t planned to kill Bell. He was just going to lock him in the cell. But Bell ran, so Billy said he was left with no choice. He also told them he didn’t want to kill anyone else, but he would if anyone tried to interfere with his escape. The manager of this hotel grabbed a gun to stop the escape but was restrained by two friends with cooler heads. If our manager tried to do that today, no one on the staff would lift a finger,” he said with a scowl.

  “That’s awful,” Susannah said.

  He gave us a big smile. “Just kidding. We all love Vic and Cathy.”

  “So he got away?” I asked.

  “Yeah, he took a horse belonging to Billy Burt, the county clerk. He said to the crowd, ‘Tell Billy Burt I'll send his pony back, and don't look for me this side of Ireland. Adios, boys’. And he rode out of town singing.”

  We walked across to the courthouse museum and paid the five dollar admission fee. Susannah studied the various old artifacts while I read the le
tters exchanged between Lew Wallace and Billy the Kid.

  One from Billy dated March 4, 1881 read as follows:

  To Gov. Lew Wallace

  Dear Sir

  I wrote you a little note the day before yesterday but have received no answer. I expect you have forgotten what you promised me, this month two years ago, but I have not and I think you had ought to have come and seen me as I requested you to. I have done everything that I promised you I would and you have done nothing that you promised me.

  I think when you think the matter over, you will come down and see me, and I can then explain everything to you.

  Judge Leonard passed through here on his way east in January and promised to come and see me on his way back, but he did not fulfill his promise. It looks to me like I am getting left in the cold. I am not treated right by Sherman. He lets Every Stranger that comes to see me through Curiosity in to see me, but will not let a Single one of my friends in, not even an Attorney.

  I guess they mean to send me up without giving me any Show but they will have a nice time doing it. I am not entirely without friends.

  I shall expect to see you some time today.

  Patiently Waiting, I am truly Yours Respectfully.

  Wm. H. Bonney

  Another one started:

  Sir, I will keep the appointment I made but be sure and have men come that you can depend on. I am not afraid to die like a man fighting but I would not like to be killed like a dog unarmed.

  I was struck by the simple prose of this young man who had only two years of formal schooling. In my opinion, both his writing and his behavior were more forthright than Lew Wallace.

  39

  We left Lincoln and headed west on U.S 70. About halfway through the Mescalero Apache Reservation we turned left on NM 244 up to Cloudcroft. My parents used to rent a cabin there in the summer when it was too hot in Albuquerque. At almost 9,000 feet, it’s never hot in Cloudcroft.