The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje

Garrett's voice near me on the skin whats wrong billy whats wrong, couldnt see him but I turned to where I knew he was. I yelled so he could hear me through the skin. Ive been fucked. Ive been fucked Ive been fucked by Christ almighty god Ive been good and fucked by Christ. And I rolled off the horse's back like a soft shell-less egg wrapped in thin white silk and I splashed onto the dust blind and white but the chain held my legs to the horse and I was dragged picking up dust on my wet skin as I travelled in between his four trotting legs at last thank the fuckin christ, in the shade of his stomach.

I picked this book up years ago at a shop in Tucson, and I didn't think of it again until I was in Mesilla, New Mexico, the town where Billy the Kid was tried, sentenced to death and later escaped. Tucson, too, is a place that Billy fled, and in that part of the world you can follow Billy's footsteps across the desert: the Billy the Kid Scenic Byway, the Billy the Kid Gift Shop, the Billy the Kid Casino. Fleeing is part of Billy's legend, the thief and murderer, barely more than a child, who eluded the officials of the Old West until a single man, an obsessive sheriff and former friend of Billy's name Pat Garrett, finally brought him down. As is sometimes but not always the case with the figures of the old west, it's the outlaw who ends up myth, and the lawman ends up fairly suspect. That's certainly the case with Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, a pastiche of prose and poetry that captures Billy's flight and his last days.

Ondaatje's Billy is a charmer, well-dressed and well-liked, in opposition to the famous photograph of Billy looking rather ragged and buck-toothed. You can't say he's a reluctant criminal, but he's certainly an uncertain one; in one of my favorite prose passages Ondaatje imagines Billy hiding in an abandoned barn at peace with the animals there: "There were animals who did not move out and accepted me as a larger breed. I ate the old grain with them, drank from a constant puddle about twenty yards away from the barn. I saw no human and heard no human voice, learned to squat the best way when shitting, never ate flesh or touched another animal's flesh, never entered his boundary." But Billy's peaceable kingdom collapses when a group of flesh-hungry rats gets drunk on fermented grain and he's forced to take his shotgun to them. Billy's life is like that; he is compelled to the violence he commits. It is inevitable.

Pat Garrett, on the other hand, is depicted as a strange and untrustworthy figure who can "kill someone on the street and walk back and finish a joke." He keeps exotic birds but he is "frightened of flowers because they grew so slowly he couldnt tell what they planned to do." He is "[o]ne who had decided what was right and forgot all morals." His pursuit of Billy is not only a betrayal of an easy companionship they once shared at the home of a cattle rancher, but something strange and monomaniacal. Ondaatje's no McCarthy, but Garrett shares a little bit of DNA with the Judge from Blood Meridian, only this time under the self-righteous patina of law.

The poetry is... fine. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. None of it, I'd say, rises to the level of the prose pieces, which are richly evocative and sometimes even a little grotesque. They are as poetic, perhaps, as the poetry, not least because they're not interesting in giving any real historical account of Billy the Kid's life as much as a series of impressions from it. The book works best if you know a little about Billy already, I think, or if you, as I did, pause in the middle of it and go read through the guy's Wikipedia page. There you might learn that Billy's life, like Ondaatje's book, was fairly short and full of troubles, but it produced a legend that lives on.