The Boy Bandit King

Let’s see if I can do it from memory: Snake Eagle Cove to Spillman Ranch Loop to FM 620 to 183 to 67 to 84 which becomes 20 for a while before turning off and heading back onto 84 and past Anton and Muleshoe, near Earth but not quite through it, zoom past Farwell and the border and slow down past all the stragglers in red sweatsuits and the huge retired fighter plane in Clovis and by this time it’s 60 or 84, your pick really, cause it says both for a long long time, until finally you see some signs for Fort Sumner. This is the exciting part because it’s getting dark and there have been thunderclouds on and off and it’s only the Michelin brand windshield wiper purchased way back in Sweetwater that is responsible for sporadically saving your ass – and, by the way, they sell you one blade at a time, dumbshit…next time try buying TWO – and since the sun is beginning to head over the edge of the earth, which makes all the night eyes of deer and armadillos and other potential car-wreckers, it’s time to either concede defeat and shlepp over to the very next motel you come across OR continue until…

Billy The Kid’s grave! There it is! Fort Sumner arrived just as I was trying to scheme and plot my journey through the evils of America’s vast and very-underestimated rural outback. The one-lane highways of the United States Roadway System are some of the most glorious roads to travel upon, but only during the day. Come nightfall, critters come out. Critters mean more of the Route 290 bullshit from Texas, and that shit just isn’t allowed anymore. I’ve now repeatedly learned that knuckles do, in fact, turn white in certain high-stress situations. Pupils dilate. I know what high-beams are for. At various moments tonight, though, they weren’t enough and I wanted heat-sensing infrared goggles so that I could at least see the size and shape of the buck I was about to hit before he was mangled and plastered to my windshield. I seriously hate night driving now.

Anyway, I’m not explaining this linearly and that’s probably annoying. Point is: I left Austin at about 11 a.m. and headed out with the goal of getting to Billy The Kid’s grave in Fort Sumner, New Mexico.



Mapquest said it was a ten-hour drive which, at this point in my motoring career, is like a warm-up lap. The roads were beautiful and clouds were all over the place so it stayed cool and the windows were down, this time blowing tepid air instead of hairdryer air. About Sweetwater, I realized that my five-year-old windshield wipers weren’t going to cut it if I was going to be heading anywhere near the billion-acre storm that was on the horizon, so I stopped off, filled up, and headed into the mecca of all small-town killers, WalMart. God, what a horrible place. Henry Rollins’ latest stand-up thing on IFC had a hefty portion devoted to this monstrosity of a corporation, and he was dead-on. The fluorescent lights are so bright that they reset your internal clock over and over again so you forget what time it is, how long you’ve been in the place, and start looking for provisions that will allow your body the proper nourishment to stay-on in the store. This particular WalMart even had a full-scale grocery store and pharmacy under its roof. It took me a good fifteen minutes to find the wipers and then I picked out some fuses just in case it gets hot again and then some gum and by the time I got back out the storm had moved off.

I spent a good portion of the next few hours listening to Patsy Cline and Neko Case in an attempt to rid my brains of the refrain of some adolescent kid in the WalMart, his hands full of candy bars, flat-tiring his younger brother with a gleeful call of, “You're such a faggot, faggot. You are a faggot! You are a faggot! Ha ha ha.” It’s now thirteen hours later and the words are still bouncing happily about my head. Hooray for the southwest backwoods!

Anyway, I did the drive and it was getting late at a certain point and I was on one of those one-lane highways (as I said, either 84 or 60, you take your pick) and I was nervous and then Billy The Kid sprouted up out of nowhere. There’s a little brown sign off to the side of the road and it points south and out into the fields you go.



It said two miles, but it was definitely more, and I got a little turned around because the signage dropped off and I figured maybe I had missed the grave on the side of the road or something, so I turned around next to some horses, and then got dirty looks from a kid about my age with a whispy attempt at a moustache and an Oldsmobile with the back window shot out and scenes from Deliverance shot through my head, even though I’ve never seen that movie and I can’t stand John Voigt, and I turned around a few more times, saw a large dirty lake with picnic tables, felt scared, and finally stumbled upon the grave. It’s located in the back of a museum/shop thing that was long-since closed by the time I got there (about 8 p.m.) in the center of a courtyard with a few other graves scattered about. But it’s easy to tell which grave belongs to The Boy Bandit King because it’s enclosed in a large metal cage.



Kind of tacky, but necessary: the tombstone has been stolen twice in the past hundred years and, truthfully, without it, the city of Fort Sumner will quickly disappear off the face of the planet like so many other cities I hurried past earlier in the day. The southwest has a way of eating off its vestigial cities rather quickly, and the wonderful crew at the aforementioned WalMart corporation have become superb catalysts. So, the cage is understandable and easy to deal with and porous enough to allow for ample spookiness and authentic I-just-saw-Billy-The-Kid’s-grave vibes. It was awesome.



No one else was around cause it was so late, so I did some touristy photo-op stuff without feeling the pinch of embarrassment. Proof:



And then I was on my way, racing the fading sun, trying to find I-40 so that I could have some lights and company out there in the dark, but I somehow missed the point where 84 and 60 split and became their own entities, and I stayed on 60. This was cool because I saw the Pecos River up close, but not cool because it meant 70 miles to Vaughn and then asking the nice woman at the gas station how to get to I-40 and being told 45 more miles to Clines and then follow the signs. Nighttime, deer, no other cars, chitter-chatter teeth. But no accidents. And a sense of great accomplishment when I-40 finally popped up, and an even greater sense of accomplishment when Albuquerque was only 70 more miles away. 845 miles after getting started, I opted for the EconoLodge because there was high-speed internet and it was $40 and in I went, Carl’s Jr. and all, and now get ready to face the Painted Desert of Arizona upon the morrow.



Al