Free The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje

eeii!!”
    “Duck, princess!”
    BANG! BANG!
    “Once more Chivoto, you have saved my life, this time from that cougar. You have won my love!”
    “Hold on, ma’am …”
    Before Billy the Kid can defend himself, La Princesa Marguerita has taken him in her arms and….

“It was the Kid who came in there on to me,” Garrett told Poe, “and I think I got him.”
    “Pat,” replied Poe, “I believe you have killed the wrong man.”
    “I’m sure it was the Kid,” responded Garrett, “for I knew his voice and could not have been mistaken.”

*
    Poor young William’s dead
with a fish stare, with a giggle
with blood planets in his head.
    The blood came down like river ride
long as Texas down his side.
We cleaned him up when blood was drier
his eyes looked up like turf on fire.
    We got the eight foot garden hose
turned it on, leaned him down flat.
What fell away
we threw away his head was smaller than a rat.
    I got the bullets, cleaned him up
sold them to the Texas Star.
They weighed them, put them in a pile
took pictures with a camera.
    Poor young William’s dead
with blood planets in his head
with a fish stare, with a giggle
like he said.

*
    It is now early morning, was a bad night. The hotel room seems large. The morning sun has concentrated all the cigarette smoke so one can see it hanging in pillars or sliding along the roof like amoeba. In the bathroom, I wash the loose nicotine out of my mouth. I smell the smoke still in my shirt.

AFTERWORD
    This was the first book I wrote where I swam into the deep end. It began as a small flurry of poems supposedly by the outlaw Billy the Kid. I’d had an obsession with westerns since I was eight or nine—for even in Sri Lanka the myth of the American West had filtered down furtively among children in Colombo. I had a cowboy suit, with blatantly cheap-looking glass “jewels” on my cowboy belt as well as little leather holders for one’s bullets, which always seemed to me to be a fey and fussy method of transporting bullets that would later be used to kill a mule or a woman or a sheriff. So, when our house in Boralesgamuwa was robbed, I was glad to see that the jewelled cowboy belt was also stolen, only to be returned by the police several months later.
    By the time I was in my teens I was going to school in England and had seen many more westerns, but somehow the movies all seemed too
safe.
The plots followed the well-rutted paths to obvious conclusions: the villains fellregularly to their deaths off mesas, the lovers left town in a stagecoach for a better life, and the old sidekick cackled into the fade-out. There was never an Act Two or a Malvolio to confuse us or temper the moral note. There were few surprises. Save for Nicholas Ray’s
Johnny Guitar
where one of the villains on lookout duty is seen reading a book and is obviously so transported by it that hero and posse are able to burst into the outlaws’ camp and overcome them. (Books were not a regular prop in westerns, except maybe under the arm of a school teacher, or glimpsed out of focus on the library shelves of a too powerful and corrupt land baron (the complete works of Thomas Carlyle, no doubt). And yet Lew Wallace, the governor of New Mexico in Billy the Kid’s time, wrote
Ben-Hur.
One wonders what the ranch hands and neighbours thought about that.)
    At nineteen I moved to Canada, no longer obsessed with westerns. Or so I thought. I was reading and writing avidly, and within a few years I was also teaching to make a living. By 1968 I had written two books of poetry, and I was surrounded by the possibilities of all the literary forms. There were books such as Gary Snyder’s
Earth House Hold,
which brought his work journals and his poems naturally together because they hailed from the same place and time in the Pacific Northwest; and Kenneth Patchen’s
The Journal of Albion Moonlight,
full of drawings alongside the text. Most of the time I was reading literary journals, where the new writing was, and