APRIL 20, 1874     4:08 PM     MONDAY 

 They were dancing.  They were laughing, twirling around the table in their log cabin, a small, knobby-jointed, adolescent boy with honey blond hair flying, and a thin woman of forty-five. She was breathless but laughing, saying, “Billy. Oh, Billy. Faster. Come now. Faster.” The red clay of their New Mexico Territory floor could not hold them; high stepping, they were airborne dancers.

Suddenly coughing, the handsome woman halted. Dance gesturing, from her sleeve she flourished a handkerchief and coughed again. On its white was a clot: a shocking ruby set in blood. Defiantly, eyes glittering with fever, she said, “Sing, Billy. Sing ‘Turkey in the Straw.’ ”

His lovely voice whirled them with frothing petticoats of her girlish tartan dress and flickering shoes. He sang, “I came to the river and I couldn’t get across / So I paid five dollars for an old blind horse. / Well he wouldn’t go ahead, and he wouldn’t stand still / So he went up and down like an old saw mill. / Turkey in the straw, haw, haw, haw. / Turkey in the hay, hay, hay, hay, / Roll ‘em up and twist ‘em up/ a high tuck-e-haw, / And hit ‘em up a tune called / Turkey in the Straw.”

 Finally, she sank into the wingback chair at the fireplace while he still danced, shouting, “Silver City!” in ecstasy of motion.

In vague delirium, she saw him at five, in their Indianapolis cottage, sitting crosswise on her lap. “Precious,” she was saying, “sun’s in yer hair; sky’s in yer eyes, all fer luv o’ you.” He snuggled into her nightgowned chest, saying the sun loved her too; her hair was gold. Laughing, tickling in attack, she slipped him to the floor, helpless against her knowing fingers, until, scrambling up all narrow-bodied, he kissed her kissing lips.

Forced back to Silver City by Billy’s asking if she was sick, her trilling brogue lied, “Only tirrred. But a glass o’ water twould be nice. Josie didn’t fill the keg. Almost seventeen, but he’s morrre a child than you.” Billy left to do it, relishing triumph over his only sibling.

Her daydreaming resumed. November 23, 1859. It was Billy’s birth. All she remembered was the bliss. In a New York tenement, a woman splayed wide her legs into a weightless crouch as, abandoned to passion, her perspiration-wet hair snaked out on the bed and her eyes rolled up in ecstasy. “Is there no shame in this woman?” the midwife thought. Distractedly, she was kneading milk-distended breasts, frustrated by their covering smock, as  sliding boy parts and stiff cord pressed her, and brilliant light glory filled her skull. Away he slipped into stranger’s hands. Behind spasmed orgasmic thighs.

“Tis a Devil’s birth,” thought the midwife.  “Of pleasure, not pain as the Lord ordained.” But she said, “Catherine Bonney, yuv a fine son. What will ye call him?”

From rapture came “William Henry … McCarty. McCarty is his father’s name.”

The midwife thought, “Tis a lie of a name without God’s union,” brushing back dull hair with her forearm, hands damp from washing the baby, now back with his mother. “Damnation from birth,” she thought, but said, “He knows what t’ do, that’s sure, dearie.”

Thick pleasure gushed from his sucking. “Billy,” Catherine whispered. He looked up with large staring eyes. “Oh, my Billy,”  she said, drenched with insatiable passion for the beloved.

At the same time, eight hundred ninety-nine miles southwest of that tenement neighborhood, in Claiborne Parish, Louisiana, a nine and a half year old, long-legged boy with slick black hair, had loped in his family’s cotton plantation, calling imperiously to his playmate while swinging a rifle. The other shouted, “I can’t hear you, Pat Garrett.” 

He had yelled back, “Let’s shoot squirrels!” gray eyes bright with predatory zeal.