Chapter Eleven

“Bilito was one of the kindest and best boys I ever knew. He was not bloodthirsty. He was forced into killing in defense of his own life. In all his career he never killed a native citizen of New Mexico, which was one of the reasons we were so fond of him.”69

I sit in the living room surrounded by countless years of newspapers. Once organized into chronological towers, they have fallen over like a house of cards in slow motion or time-lapse photography in reverse. I have trouble reading them now. The words grow fuzzy in front of unfocused eyes. The palms slip over pages that fingers barely have the strength to turn. I toss current issues, unfinished, into the fray.

The newspapers have spread across the floor like lost days—the headlines, the top stories, the photos with grinning heads of state—all swim in a darkening pool of faded ink and withered paper. Each day, another house burned; another government toppled; another pocket picked by politicians, preachers, hookers, and other petty thieves. The whole world, captured within these folded pages, delivered daily to my door, picked up by these hands, deposited here in this living room. All these sentences of history, these millions of words, rise like the flood waters of memory before overflowing into consciousness. How long can the leaky dam hold?

I have a chair, a throne of sorts, set up at one end of the room to look out over a raging sea of words. I sit watch, like an old man on the dock by the bay, accompanied by my last box of Deep Night Double Fudge Sandwich Cookies and a gallon of powdered milk, freshly mixed. For desert, I have four CO2-powered canisters of Super Creamy Reddi-Wip Deluxe Sweetened Instant Grade A Real Whipped Heavy Cream, Ultra Pasteurized. I can suckle them for hours. Four should be enough.

Beyond is a long window, twenty-feet wide, running the full length of the living room. A low window sill—two feet high—serves as a less than reassuring border between myself and the outdoors. If I happened to casually stumble over it, I’d go reeling through the glass, plunge head over heels, and crash through the roof of the garage below into the back seat of some Mercedes or BMW owned by a luckless neighbor. “Hello, Apartment 14D? I believe there’s a problem with your car. It may not be ready in time for tomorrow’s commute.”

“On his way to Señor McSween’s house, just a day before the five-day siege, Bilito and his friend, Tom O’Folliard, rode up while I was trying to plow my fields with a riding horse. He asked why I would do this and I had to tell him that all my other horses had been rustled by Jesse Evans and his gang. While they switched all their gear from the pack horse to the ones they were riding, I told them I could not accept such a gift. They rode off and left the horse anyway.”

- Martin Chávez70

As the sun recedes behind the building beyond, her red fingernails claw the floor unable to find a handhold on the yellowed pages of time. Each newspaper lies perfectly still, unruffled by her scratchy grip. Darkness settles in over the clumped landscape of folded paper and ink welcoming the cool embrace of night.

So many stories, every day, how can we feel for them beyond the catharsis they minister? How can we experience them with any more simpático than a passive audience in the theater? Like the definition of drama that Aristotle outlined in his Poetics, drama and comedy purge the self of pent-up emotions. Left to fester inside, such passions would foul the body and spirit to the point of corruption, poisoning the mind and body with bile, or worse, exploding like an appendicitis or a deranged sniper picking off innocents from a tower. Feel for the characters on stage, cry for their pain, help us forget our own.

Bertold Brecht redefined this concept. In experiencing theater, we are merely displacing our emotions onto others, so we don’t have to face them ourselves. The anger, frustration, the love needed to inspire us to personal change is magically purged and transferred to distant characters whose lives play out our emotional dilemmas to a conclusion at a safe distance. Rather than transforming ourselves, we feel temporarily relieved until the problems, purged but unsolved, eventually return. Thus, like a narcotic, the audience needs another cathartic fix to hold them until the next crisis. Many who live off such fixes often seek melodrama in their own lives: a silly romance, a one-night stand, a heated debate, hand to hand combat—constant turmoil to mask unresolved issues. High drama keeps things simple.

I notice only two cookies left and save them, a pleasant reminder of the box just finished. I take a last swig of milk, one glassful left, another sweet memory to share with the last pair of Double Fudges. Hunger abated, I switch to the first canister of Reddi-Wip and refocus on the ocean before me, the air taking on the sound of surf breaking upon the shore at my feet.

But what of those people who live out their dramas in the black and white world of the daily news—are their souls not lost between the lines? What screams are sealed in that silent space between splashes of ink? As I look out over the graveyard of their suffering, the skeletal remains of once teeming lives, I can make out distant whispers rising on the soft magnetic waves of emptiness.

Straining, I detect the ruffles of brushing dust like the sound of blank audio tape hissing through speakers that modulate with anticipation. Slowly, the whispers rise in a strange mumbled harmony, struggling to be heard above the cacaphonic concent, ascending into the last streams of sunlight as if they could ride light waves to my ears. Like choppy radio transmissons, broken language and dust particles mingle in a sand storm of reflected light. Voices surge momentarily above the din as I struggle to pick individual words out of the light, focusing on swirling dust particles before losing them in the shadows. What can they be saying to me: a message, random complaints, instructions?

I suck the last drops of cream from the first canister until the CO2 dribbles like the air let out of a balloon. I switch to the second canister.

Twilight vacuums the dust from sight. Voices abate like an audience as the curtain rises. An orange dusk frames the dark blue building beyond. The looming structure spreads tall and wide obscuring any other view out of the window spacious as it is. As evening fades to night, it’s like an empty movie screen filled with rows and rows of darkened windows. As apartment lights pop on, it draws all your attention. If the curtains are opened, you search for the instigator. Someone undressing? No, it’s too early for that, maybe later. Just people coming home from work: a coat draped over a chair, a briefcase dropped to the floor—gnored in the next room by a shadowy figure lit dimly by the flickering light of a T.V. “What’s for dinner, honey?” “Fix it yourself, I’m pooped—I work too, you know!”

With each light switched on, each apartment reveals a different life of waking, working, eating, defecating, arguing, demanding, not getting, accusing, sleeping, and waking once more to start the process of dying all over again—the only benefit being that, as you get older, the days go quicker and the sensations of the mind and body mercifully dull.

Third canister.

More doors opening and slamming shut, more lights snapping on, more tired bodies slumping down in seats, more beams of infected light streaming into my living room over the folded pages of this world like stars illuminating the skyscraper husks tumbled over in the slow earthquake of time’s passing. As I sit in the darkening gloom surveying my domain, the lights begin to irradiate my skin. Each apartment across the way casts its accusatory beam like search lights locating an escaped criminal and adds its voice to the muffled murmur rising once again from the floor.

I pop the top of the fourth and last can.

Can I pick out words or would the voices find me if I only could relax long enough? Can I will myself into the deep meditative state required to hear the unsaid. Can I calm my nervous heart—give into fear like diving into the wreck? I concentrate on the beating of my heart, absorb its rapid rhythm, each pump, each squirt of blood seeking the farthest reaches of my body—shoulders unhitching, stomach untightening over my belt, head pleasantly dropping forward naturally askew giving in to gravity. I’m finally sinking into weightlessness. I feel myself evaporate into the air like rubbing alcohol.

A voice distinguishes itself from the din.

Do it.

Do what? I gaze out fuzzily over the rumbled swell and beyond into the chasm between this building and the next in whose pit the garage roof beckons. Glaring lights stab my eyes like a prisoner during interrogation. I lose focus as the room turns into a blinding white light. Like a pressure chamber, the air grows heavy, too thick to breathe, compressing me into a tight throb.

Define yourself!

How?

“Yes, the Kid and I did paint the town red a time or two, although I must say that I never did see him imbibe any bug juice. He told me that as a boy it had caused him to insult his mother, so he never had a drop since. Now of the ladies, he did indeed have his fill. It was said of the Kid that he had ‘a querida in every plaza.’ I personally heard tell of Lily Huntress in Roswell, Emily Schulander in Las Vegas, Fredericke Deolavera in Anton Chico, and in Fort Sumner, Abrana Garcia, Nasaria Yerbe, and Celsa Guitierrez, just to name a few. There was a rumor that he was with Celsa’s sister Apolinaria, Pat Garrett’s wife, just before Garrett shot him. Since the Kid went to Maxwell’s bedroom to ask if he could cut a piece of the calf hanging in the courtyard, that would make it Garrett’s wife that gave Billy the appetite.”71

Get a job …

What can I do?

a wife …

How can I support another when I can’t support myself?

a few kids maybe …

How can I look into trusting eyes when I can’t trust myself?

a house in the country …

How can I be a professional, a husband, a father—I can’t even be me?

a dog, a cat, a two-car garage …

“But many close to the Kid said that he went to Fort Sumner to marry Paulita Maxwell. If that is the truth, I am not surprised that Garrett was talking to her father secretly in the old man’s bedroom with the lights out. What father wants his daughter to marry an outlaw?

Pat had two deputies posted outside, but they did not recognize the Kid as he passed by. They figured Billy was Mexicano. By then he looked it. So when the Kid stumbled into the secret meeting, the old man must have been scared half to death. When the Kid asked Pete in Spanish about the strange gringos, the old man knew Garrett did not understand. Instead of answering the Kid, Maxwell said to Garrett, ‘That’s him!,’ so Pat plugged the Kid on Pete’s word.”

- Add Casey72

I open my eyes and make out the phantom grey ceiling above. The wooden floor pounds my head. I must have slipped off the chair. How long was I out? The apartment building across the way is completely dark. A purplish glow emanates from the sky above. The newspaper sea squirms ever so slightly. I close my eyes and put my head in my hands. A metallic voice rises over the din as the echo of typewriter keys slap crisp paper.

“Last night’s rainstorm claimed at least two lives when a car traveling northbound on the West Side Highway spun out of control and crashed through the guardrail in upper Manhattan shortly before midnight.”⁷³

Tears warm my palms.

“The car tumbled down a densely wooded embankment into southbound traffic lanes before finally coming to a stop. Fortunately, no other vehicles were involved, but both the driver and passenger, husband and wife, were pronounced dead at the scene. The two victims’ names are being withheld until surviving family members can be located.”⁷⁴

I wipe them over my face in an ecstasy of righteous remorse.

“They are survived by a five-year-old son.”⁷⁵

The phone rings.