The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje Read Free Book Online Page A

sweep of a
bird that’s grown too hot
and moves into the cool for an hour
    If I hold up my finger
I blot out the horizon
if I hold up my thumb
I’d ignore a man who comes
on a 3 mile trip to here
The dog near me breathes out
his lungs make a pattern of sound
when he shakes
his ears go off like whips
he is outside the door, his mind
clean, the heat
floating his brain in fantasy
    I am here on the edge of sun
that would ignite me
looking out into pitch white
sky and grass overdeveloped to meaninglessness
waiting for enemies’ friends or mine
    There is nothing in my hands
though every move I would make
getting up slowly walking
on the periphery of
black to where weapons are
is planned by my eye
    A boy blocks out the light
in blue shirt and jeans
his long hair over his ears
face young like some pharoah
    I am unable to move
with nothing in my hands

*
    We moved in a batch now. Not just Dave Rudabaugh, Wilson and me, but also Garrett, deputies Emory and East, seven others I’d never seen and Charlie lying dead on the horse’s back, his arms and legs dangling over the side, tied, so he wouldnt fall off. A sheet covered him to stop him drying too much in the sun. That was a bad week after that. Charlie having taken my hat had got it busted to pieces, so no hat for me as we moved back and forward, side to side over the county, avoiding people and law. Lynchers were out now and, bless him, Garrett didnt want that. So we moved along the Carrizozo plains to the slopes of Oscuros, stayed one night by Chupadero mesa, back to the Carrizozo, passed the Evan tribe, followed now the telegraph to Punta de la Glorietta but over 40 lynchers there. So we moved, no hat for me, uncomfortable times for all of us.
    Horses and trains horses and trains. Dave, Wilson and me, our legs handcuffed with long 24" chains under the horse, our hands bound to the bridle. Five days like that. We had to pee as we sat, into our trousers and down the horse’s side. We slept lying forward on the horse’s neck. All they did to stop us going mad from saddle pain was alternate saddles, or let us ride bareback one day and a saddle the next. All going grey in the eyes. My horse hating me, the chain under his belly, as much as I hated him.
    On the fifth day the sun turned into a pair of hands and began to pull out the hairs in my head. Twist pluck twist pluck. In two hours I was bald, my head like a lemon. It used a fingernail and scratched a knife line from front to back on the skin. A hairline of blood bubbled up and dried. Eleven in the morning then. The sun took a towel andwiped the dried dribble off, like red powder on the towel now. Then with very thin careful fingers it began to unfold my head drawing back each layer of skin and letting it flap over my ears.
    The brain juice began to swell up. You could see the bones and grey now. The sun sat back and watched while the juice evaporated. By now the bone was dull white, all dry. When he touched the bone with his fingers it was like brushing raw nerves. He took a thin cold hand and sank it into my head down past the roof of my mouth and washed his fingers in my tongue. Down the long cool hand went scratching the freckles and warts in my throat breaking through veins like pieces of long glass tubing, touched my heart with his wrist, down he went the liquid yellow from my busted brain finally vanishing as it passed through soft warm stomach like a luscious blood wet oasis, weaving in and out of the red yellow blue green nerves moving uncertainly through wrong fissures ending pausing at cul de sacs of bone then retreating slow leaving the pain of suction then down the proper path through pyramids of bone that were there when I was born, through grooves the fingers spanning the merging paths of medians of blue matter, the long cool hand going down brushing cobwebs of nerves the horizontal pain pits, lobules gyres notches arcs tracts fissures roots’ white insulation of dead seven year cells clinging things rubbing