New West Book Review

Billy the Kid Rides Again in John Vernon’s “Lucky Billy”

By Jenny Shank, 1-19-09

Lucky Billy
By John Vernon
Houghton Mifflin, 294 pages, $24

Who was Billy the Kid?  An outlaw with many names—Henry McCarty, Henry Antrim, and William H. Bonney, among others—he was dead before his 22nd birthday, and rumored to have killed 21 men.  Billy the Kid was something of a literary invention—little known during his own lifetime, his killer and former friend Sheriff Patrick Garrett published the biography The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid the year after Billy’s death, and from then on the tale sparked the imagination of countless writers, musicians, and filmmakers. 

The Colorado writer John Vernon is the latest to try his hand at capturing the quicksilver Billy in his new novel Lucky Billy, which displays the famous outlaw from a variety of angles, and creates a sympathetic though not simplistic portrait of a man who felt beset and compelled to fight back from his earliest days as a poor, small-for-his-age urchin on the streets of New York.

Vernon’s narrative cycles back and forth in time, beginning with Billy’s 1881 escape from the jail in Lincoln, New Mexico after he was sentenced to hang for the murder of a sheriff, and reaching back to the beginnings of what became known as the Lincoln County War in 1877, which in Vernon’s telling, sealed Billy in his role as an outlaw and murderer. 

Alternating chapters move backward in time, until we witness the affecting episode of Billy as the boy named Henry in New York, stealing oysters to fill his stomach.  This is juxtaposed against—in the forward-moving chapters—the days leading up to Billy’s killing.  The shifts in time are not difficult to follow, as Vernon has clearly marked the date and perspective from which he has written each chapter, but it can be hard to track the swirl of dozens of characters, however well each individual is described.

The allegiances behind the actions that occur in the Lincoln County war are also complicated.  In 1877, a British cattle rancher and merchant, John Tunstall, hired Billy as a cattle guard.  Tunstall comes to vivid life in Vernon’s telling as a newcomer to the area, a charming dreamer, who promises Billy a ranch of his own.  This notion captures Billy’s imagination, and he thinks if he had a ranch, “You could spend all your life on a thousand acres and never know want.  Never change your clothes.  Eat brisket, drink buttermilk, sleep on a featherbed.” In Vernon’s telling, Billy is a young man forever on the move with a fierce longing for a settled life.  “My own ranch and cattle, horses galore,” Billy thinks.  “Tunstall had opened a curtain in his mind and the spectacle on stage confused him with excitement.” Tunstall treats Billy well, and so when men working for the town’s rival merchant murder him, vengeance is stoked in Billy, which eventually leads to his downfall. 

Billy goes on a killing spree to avenge his friend, and Vernon deftly captures his shift toward cold-bloodedness after he kills one rival: “Then [Billy] slowly withdrew—retracted his soul—a process that entailed his eyes hooding over and narrowing to slits, his mind contracting to a hard little stone, his body feeling annoyed at every little fidget from his scared horse.  It would not be that awful to be the only person left alive in the universe.”

In Lucky Billy, frontier justice is a shifting concept, with equally lawless men pursued by sheriffs while others are let go free.  Billy the Kid ends up on the wrong side of that equation, in part because his side loses the power struggle in the Lincoln County War through attrition.  But before Garrett kills Billy, the outlaw has plenty of time to romance the Mexican women who celebrate him as “Billicito” and “El Chivato” in poems and songs, and plant a few babies to outlive him.  The scenes of Billy living and loving among his Mexican friends are some of the sharpest in the book, particularly an energetic portrayal of passion and jealousy at a dance.

Vernon is a skilled prose stylist; his word choices are distinctive and apt, such as his description of Billy the Kid in the one extant tintype of him (featured on the novel’s cover) as “draggle-tailed.” Vernon uses other words that have that authentic Old West-ring to them, such as “wappered,” “bullyragging,” and “miswending.” “Don’t be such a squitter-ass,” Patrick Garrett tells another character at one point, a command that I adore without entirely understanding.  The playful language leavens the somber subjects of Lucky Billy with a good deal of welcome humor.  Vivid images pepper the novel, such as one man “returning…like a dog to his vomit,” or just a background detail that somehow perfectly captures the setting and time period: “A toddler in a shift.”

The literature of Billy the Kid is extensive, but there will always be room for another book on the subject that is as finely written as is Lucky Billy.  Although it can be difficult for a reader to get a purchase on the book at first, as Vernon darts in and out of different characters’ consciousnesses, introduces dozens of characters, and skips around in time, Lucky Billy ultimately rewards a reader’s attention, and delivers a convincing, human portrait of the legendary outlaw.

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