A man for all seasons
Authors return to Billy the Kid with fresh looks at the legendary outlaw
If you’re chatting with friends about Western gunfighters, what’s the first name that jumps out? Probably Billy the Kid.
Billy the Kid has been the subject of a number of biographies and novels. But there probably haven’t been works of fiction quite like these two recently published books — Rudolfo Anaya’s “Chupacabra Meets Billy the Kid” and Frederick Turner’s “The Kid and Me.”
Anaya’s novel is a strange mash-up of historical fiction and the supernatural. It opens in the present in the east-central New Mexico village of Puerto de Luna, where Rosa Medina, a Los Angeles social worker, comes to write a novel about Billy the Kid, or El Bilito. Rosa insists on learning the truth behind his legend.
She agrees to travel back in time to hang out with the Kid in 1878 until his death three years later. Before that happens, Billy does his own time traveling, but from past to present, to meet Rosa and take her back with him. A temporary obstacle to their time traveling is Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett. Or maybe he’s really a himit, a new type of morphing chupacabra named Saytir.
Chupacabra is a beast in Hispanic mythology that drinks the blood of goats.
Rosa is eager to head back in time but is hiding a flash drive, which leads to a strange sidebar. The flash drive may contain the genomes of chupacabra and a space alien. The alien had supposedly been recovered from the Roswell UFO crash site by scientists of a secret government agency. The scientists decoded the DNA of the chupacabra and the alien.
Combining the DNAs would allow the agency to create a world-dominating army.
Rosa’s time with Billy the Kid encompasses the Lincoln County War. But the book has a kind of afterword: 10 pages of Rosa’s notes and observations about Billy and other major figures in the war.
This is Anaya’s third chupacabra novel with Rosa. The previous two were 2008’s “Chupacabra and the Roswell UFO” and 2013’s “Curse of the Chupacabra.”
Turner’s take on the Kid is presented through the voice of George Coe, a fictional cowboy based on a real pal of the Kid’s with the same name.
Coe recalls gunfights, herd driving and conversations, and he describes people he rode with, ate with and killed.
What’s engaging about the novel is Turner’s informal, smooth writing style. “The book, to me, succeeds or fails to the extent that you buy the dialect. If you do, it keeps your interest. If you don’t, it’s a bust,” Turner said in a phone interview.
Here are a few samples of the author’s descriptions and use of dialect.
“I may as well cut here to say I shot a man in the war. He lived, but he didn’t live on. Some while after, he died, just of what I don’t know, and I never tried to find out, on account of I wanted to believe it wasn’t me that took him off but something else I had nothing to do with …”
Here’s another sample, this one about Billy the Kid: “One thing we found out quick was that he could speak Mexican like he was one. … He was just naturally at home around them folks, talked their lingo, sang their songs, danced with their gals, loved their chow. … When Garrett and his possemen was chasing him all over the territory after the big shootout, we said the kid was probably having a far rougher time dodging jealous girlfriends than lawmen.”
Turner and Anaya, both born in 1937, have reputations as prolific writers.
Anaya, a New Mexico native, lives in Albuquerque and is considered the dean of Chicano writers. He is also a poet, a playwright, an essayist and an author of children’s books.
Turner, a Chicago native, has lived in Santa Fe for many years. He wrote a novel based on Jazz Age cornetist Bix Beiderbecke. Among Turner’s nonfiction books is the 1985 biography “Rediscovering America: John Muir in His Time and Ours.” Turner is also a veteran magazine journalist.