The Story Is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories

11. Silver Bullets

11 Silver Bullets Billy’s Gun In late August 1972, my son Michael, then ten years old, and I were in a junk store near Fort Sumner, New Mexico. The owner pointed to an old pistol in a locked glass case. He said it had once belonged to Billy the Kid, whose grave was nearby. I said that if Billy had owned half the guns people said he owned, he couldn’t have climbed onto a horse. ‘‘Don’t know about that,’’ the man said, ‘‘but I do know that Billy owned that gun.’’ Michael stared at the pistol. Clearly, he believed it was Billy’s, and he was seriously disappointed. ‘‘It doesn’t have a front sight, and it’s rusty, and it looks like a cap gun,’’ he said. The man told Michael that hardly anybody in those days owned the kind of fancy pistols you saw on television; Michael looked at the man as if he were deranged. Back in the car and once again heading east along US 60 toward Clovis, he was silent a long time. Then he told me that if the pistol in the glass case was the real thing he preferred what he saw on television. 151 151 I started to explain what was wrong with his attitude. I said that he couldn’t ignore facts just because he liked fictions better. Then I stopped talking because we both knew I agreed with him: it wasn’t for reality that Michael or I or anyone else watched western films, or most other films either. It was the stories that hooked us; facts were incidental. Facts were outside, something else entirely. Billy Say ‘‘Billy the Kid’’ and everybody knows whom you’re talking about, or believes he knows. The most common line on him is that his real name was William Bonney, that he died at twenty-one, a notch on his pistol grip for every man he’d killed. But some people insist his name was really Henry Antrim, that he didn’t mutilate his pistol grip because he could remember the body count. It wasn’t twenty-one anyway, and neither was he. Who cares what they know or say? The notched gun is easy to visualize, twenty-one dead men coupled with twenty-one years of life has a nice symmetry, and William Bonney works better than Henry Antrim. With Billy the Kid, as with most heroes of folklore and legend, we prefer the better, not the more factual, story. Billy figures as the central character in scores of films and novels . The films include The Outlaw, Howard Hughes’s 1943 homage to Jane Russell’s breasts (starring Jack Beutel as Billy, Thomas Mitchell as Pat Garrett, Walter Huston as Doc Holliday, and Jane Russell’s breasts as themselves); Arthur Penn’s 1958 The LeftHanded Gun (starring Paul Newman as a moody and introspective Actor’s Studio Billy who, out of guilt and depression, tricks Garrett into killing him when he pretends to draw a pistol from a holster everyone but Garrett knows is empty), Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (starring James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson as the cynical and doomed eponymous heroes, with a song track by Bob Dylan), and William Beaudine’s 1966 Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (1966, with Chuck Courtney as Billy and John Carradine as the vampire). 152 Public Stories One of the best known books about Billy the Kid is by the man who shot him down, Pat F. Garrett’s The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid, the Noted Desperado of the Southwest, Whose Deeds of Daring and Blood Made Him a Terror in New Mexico, Arizona and Northern Mexico (1882). Two novels are N. Scott Momaday’s The Ancient Child (1989) and Larry McMurtry’s Anything for Billy (1988). Michael Ondaatje’s Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1974) is a book that defies category. It is polyphonic and transgeneric: there are poems, ostensible newspaper stories, and interior monologues by Billy, Sallie Chisum, Garrett, and the author. Ondaatje’s book also includes photographs, sort of. The top two-thirds of the first page is an empty frame. The text below it begins, ‘‘I send you a picture of Billy made with the Perry shutter as quick as it can be worked. . . .’’ The text continues in specific detail about the sender’s photographic experiments and darkroom...