Collected Fictions (5 page)

THE BATTLE OF RIVINGTON STREET

A hundred or more heroes, none quite resembling the mug shot probably fading at that very moment in the mug books; a hundred heroes reeking of cigar smoke and alcohol; a hundred heroes in straw boaters with bright-colored bands; a hundred heroes, all suffering to a greater or lesser degree from shameful diseases, tooth decay, respiratory ailments, or problems with their kidneys; a hundred heroes as insignificant or splendid as those of Troy or Junin*—those were the men that fought that black deed of arms in the shadow of the elevated train. The cause of it was a raid that Kelly's "enforcers" had made on a stuss game under Monk Eastman's protection. One of Kelly's men was killed, and the subsequent shoot-out grew into a battle of uncountable revolvers. From behind the tall pillars of the El, silent men with clean-shaven chins blazed away at one another; soon, they were the center of a horrified circle of hired hacks carrying impatient reinforcements clutching Colt artillery. What were the protagonists in the battle feeling? First, I believe, the brutal conviction that the senseless, deafening noise of a hundred revolvers was going to annihilate them instantly; second, I believe, the no less erroneous certainty that if the initial volley didn't get them, they were invulnerable. Speculation notwithstanding, behind their parapets of iron and the night, they battled furiously. Twice the police tried to intervene, and twice they were repelled. At the first light of dawn, the battle died away, as though it were spectral, or obscene. Under the tall arches raised by engineers, what remained were seven men gravely wounded, four men dead, and one lifeless pigeon.

THE CRACKLE OF GUNFIRE

The ward politicians for whom Monk Eastman worked had always publicly denied that such gangs existed, or had clarified that they were merely social clubs. The indiscreet battle on Rivington Street alarmed them. They called in Eastman and Kelly and impressed upon them the need to declare a truce. Kelly, who recognized that politicians were better than all the Colts ever made when it came to dissuading the police from their duty, immediately saw the light; Eastman, with the arrogance of his great stupid body, was spoiling for more grudge fights and more bullets. At first, he wouldn't hear of a truce, but the politicos threatened him with prison. Finally the two illustrious thugs were brought together in a downtown dive; each man had a cigar clenched in his teeth, his right hand on his gun, and his watchful swarm of armed bodyguards hovering nearby. They came to a very American sort of decision—they would let the dispute be settled by a boxing match. Kelly was a skilled boxer. The match took place in an old barn, and it was stranger than fiction. One hundred forty spectators watched—toughs in cocked derby hats and women in "Mikado tuck-ups," the high-piled, delicate hairdos of the day. The fight lasted two hours, and it ended in utter exhaustion. Within a week, gunshots were crackling again. Monk was arrested, for the umpteenth time. The police, relieved, derived great amusement from his arrest; the judge prophesied for him, quite correctly, ten years in prison.

EASTMAN VS. GERMANY

When the still-perplexed Monk Eastman got out of Sing Sing, the twelve hundred toughs in his gang had scattered. He couldn't manage to round them up again, so he resigned himself to working on his own. On the 8th of September, 1917, he was arrested for fighting and charged with disturbing the peace. On the 9th, he felt like he needed another sort of fight, and he enlisted in the Army.

We know several details of his service. We know that he was fervently opposed to the taking of prisoners, and that once (with just his rifle butt) he prevented that deplorable practice. We know that once he escaped from the hospital and made his way back to the trenches. We know that he distinguished himself in the conflicts near Montfaucon. We know that afterward he was heard to say that in his opinion there were lots of dance halls in the Bowery that were tougher than that so-called "Great War" of theirs.

THE MYSTERIOUS, LOGICAL END

On the 25th of December, 1920, Monk Eastman's body was found on one of New York's downtown streets. He had been shot five times. A common alley cat, blissfully ignorant of death, was pacing, a bit perplexedly, about the body.*

The image of the lands of Arizona, before any other image—Arizona and New Mexico. A landscape dazzlingly underlain with gold and silver, a wind-blown, dizzying landscape of monumental mesas and delicate colorations, with the white glare of a skeleton stripped bare by hawks and buzzards. Within this landscape, another image—the image of Billy the Kid, the rider sitting firm upon his horse, the young man of loud shots that stun the desert, the shooter of invisible bullets that kill at a distance, like a magic spell.

The arid, glaring desert veined with minerals. The almost-child who died at the age of twenty-one owing a debt to human justice for the deaths of twenty-one men—"not counting Mexicans."

THE LARVAL STATE

In 1859, the man who in terror and glory would be known as Billy the Kid was born in a basement lodging in New York City. They say it was a worn-out Irish womb that bore him, but that he was brought up among Negroes. In that chaos of kinky hair and rank sweat, he enjoyed the primacy lent by freckles and a shock of auburn hair. He practiced the arrogance of being white; he was also scrawny, quick-tempered, and foulmouthed. By the age of twelve he was one of the Swamp Angels, a gang of deities whose lair was the sewers of the city. On nights that smelled of burned fog they would swarm out of that fetid labyrinth, follow the trail of some German sailor, bring him down with a blow to his head, strip him of all he owned, even his underwear, and return once more to that other scum. They were under the command of a white-haired Negro named Jonas, a member of the Gas House gang and a man famed as a poisoner of horses.

Sometimes, from the garret window of some hunchbacked house near the water, a woman would dump a bucket of ashes onto the head of a passerby. As he gasped and choked, the Swamp Angels would descend upon him, drag him down the basement steps, and pillage him.

Such were the years of apprenticeship of Bill Harrigan, the future Billy the Kid. He felt no scorn for theatrical fictions: he liked to go to the theater (perhaps with no presentiment that they were the symbols and letters of his own destiny) to see the cowboy shows.

GO WEST!

If the packed theater houses of the Bowery (whose audiences would yell "H'ist dat rag!" when the curtain failed to rise promptly at the scheduled time) presented so many of those gallop-and-shoot "horse operas," the reason is that America was experiencing a fascination with the West. Beyond the setting sun lay the gold of Nevada and California. Beyond the setting sun lay the cedar-felling ax, the buffalo's huge Babylonian face, Brigham Young's top hat and populous marriage bed, the red man's ceremonies and his wrath, the clear desert air, the wild prairie, the elemental earth whose nearness made the heart beat faster, like the nearness of the sea. The West was beckoning. A constant, rhythmic murmur filled those years: the sound of thousands of Americans settling the West. That procession, in the year 1872, was joined by the always coiled and ready to strike* Bill Harrigan, fleeing a rectangular cell.

A MEXICAN FELLED

History (which, like a certain motion-picture director, tells its story in discontinuous images) now offers us the image of a hazardous bar set in the midst of the all-powerful desert as though in the midst of the sea. The time—one changeable night in the year 1873; the exact place—somewhere on the Llano Estacado, in New Mexico. The land is almost preternaturally flat, but the sky of banked clouds, with tatters of storm and moon, is covered with dry, cracked watering holes and mountains. On the ground, there are a cow skull, the howls and eyes of a coyote in the darkness, fine horses, and the long shaft of light from the bar. Inside, their elbows on the bar, tired, hard-muscled men drink a belligerent alcohol and flash stacks of silver coins marked with a serpent and an eagle. A drunk sings impassively.

Some of the men speak a language with many
s's
—it must be Spanish, since those who speak it are held in contempt by the others. Bill Harrigan, the red-haired tenement house rat, is among the drinkers. He has downed a couple of shots and is debating (perhaps because he's flat broke) whether to call for another. The men of this desert land baffle him. To him they look huge and terrifying, tempestuous, happy, hatefully knowledgeable in their handling of wild cattle and big horses. Suddenly there is absolute silence, ignored only by the tin-eared singing of the drunk. A brawny, powerful-looking giant of a Mexican with the face of an old Indian woman has come into the bar. His enormous sombrero and the two pistols on his belt make him seem even larger than he is. In a harsh English he wishes all the gringo sons of bitches drinking in the place a
buenas noches.
No one takes up the gauntlet. Bill asks who the Mexican is, and someone whispers fearfully that the dago (Diego) is Belisario Villagrán, from Chihuahua. Instantly, a shot rings out. Shielded by the ring of tall men around him, Bill has shot the intruder. The glass falls from Villagran's hand; then, the entire man follows. There is no need for a second shot. Without another look at the sumptuous dead man, Bill picks up the conversation where he left off.

"Is that so?" he drawled. "Well, I'm Bill Harrigan, from New York."

The drunk, insignificant, keeps singing.

The sequel is not hard to foresee. Bill shakes hands all around and accepts flattery, cheers, and whiskey. Someone notices that there are no notches on Billy's gun, and offers to cut one to mark the killing of Villagrán. Billy the Kid keeps that someone's knife, but mutters that "Mexicans ain't worth makin' notches for." But perhaps that is not enough. That night Billy lays his blanket out next to the dead man and sleeps—ostentatiously—until morning.

KILLING FOR THE HELL OF IT

Out of the happy report of that gunshot (at fourteen years of age) the hero Billy the Kid was born and the shifty Bill Harrigan buried. The scrawny kid of the sewers and skullcracking had risen to the rank of frontiersman. He became a horseman; he learned to sit a horse straight, the way they did in Texas or Wyoming, not leaning back like they did in Oregon and California. He never fully measured up to the legend of himself, but he came closer and closer as time went on. Something of the New York hoodlum lived on in the cowboy; he bestowed upon the Mexicans the hatred once inspired in him by Negroes, but the last words he spoke (a string of curses) were in Spanish. He learned the vagabond art of cattle driving and the other, more difficult art of driving men; both helped him be a good cattle rustler.

Sometimes, the guitars and brothels of Mexico reached out and pulled him in. With the dreadful lucidity of insomnia, he would organize orgies that went on for four days and four nights. Finally, in revulsion, he would pay the bill in bullets. So long as his trigger finger didn't fail him, he was the most feared (and perhaps most empty and most lonely) man on that frontier. Pat Garrett, his friend, the sheriff who finally killed him, once re-marked: "I've practiced my aim a good deal killing buffalo." "I've practiced mine more'n you have, killing men," Billy softly replied. The details are lost forever, but we know that he was responsible for as many as twenty-one killings—"not counting Mexicans." For seven daring and dangerous years he indulged himself in that luxury called anger.

On the night of July 25,1880, Billy the Kid came galloping down the main (or only) street of Fort Sumner on his pinto. The heat was oppressive, and the lamps were not yet lighted; Sheriff Garrett, sitting on the porch in a rocking chair, pulled out his gun and shot Billy in the stomach. The horse went on; the rider toppled into the dirt street. Garrett put a second bullet in him. The town (knowing the wounded man was Billy the Kid) closed and locked its windows. Billy's dying was long and blasphemous. When the sun was high, the townspeople began to approach, and someone took his gun; the man was dead. They noted in him that unimportant sort of look that dead men generally have.

He was shaved, sewn into tailor-made clothes, and exhibited to horror and mockery in the shop window of the town's best store.

Men on horses or in gigs came in from miles around. On the third day, they had to put makeup on him. On the fourth, to great jubilation, he was buried.

The iniquitous protagonist of this chapter is the uncivil courtier Kira Kôtsuké no Suké, the fateful personage who brought about the degradation and death of the lord of the castle of Ako yet refused to take his own life, honorably, when fitting vengeance so demanded. He was a man who merits the gratitude of all men, for he awakened priceless loyalties and provided the black yet necessary occasion for an immortal undertaking. A hundred or more novels, scholarly articles, doctoral theses, and operas—not to mention effusions in porcelain, veined lapis lazuli, and lacquer—commemorate the deed. Even that most versatile of media, celluloid, has served to preserve the exploit, for "Chushingura, or The Doctrinal History of the Forty-seven Loyal Retainers" (such is the title of the film) is the most oft-presented inspiration of Japanese filmmaking. The minutely detailed glory which those ardent tributes attest is more than justifiable—it is immediately just, in anyone's view.

I follow the story as told by A. B. Mitford, who omits those continual distractions lent by "local color," preferring instead to focus on the movement of the glorious episode. That admirable lack of "Orientalism" allows one to suspect that he has taken his version directly from the Japanese.

THE UNTIED RIBBON

In the now faded spring of 1702, Asano Takumino Kami, the illustrious lord of the castle of Ako, was obliged to receive an envoy from the emperor and offer the hospitality and entertainment of his home to him. Two thou-sand three hundred years of courtesy (some mythological) had brought the rituals of reception to a fine point of anguished complication. The ambassador represented the emperor, but did so by way of allusion, or symbolically—and this was a nuance which one emphasized too greatly or too little only at one's peril. In order to avoid errors which might all too easily prove fatal, an official of the court at Yedo was sent beforehand to teach the proper ceremonies to be observed. Far from the comforts of the court, and sentenced to this backwoods
villégiature
(which to him must have seemed more like a banishment than a holiday), Kira Kôtsuké no Suké imparted his instructions most ungraciously. At times the magisterial tone of his voice bordered on the insolent. His student, the lord of the castle of Ako, affected to ignore these affronts; he could find no suitable reply, and discipline forbade the slightest violence. One morning, however, the ribbon on the courtier's sock came untied, and he requested that the lord of the castle of Ako tie it up for him again. This gentleman did so, humbly yet with inward indignation. The uncivil teacher of court etiquette told him that he was truly incorrigible—only an ill-bred country bumpkin was capable of tying a knot as clumsily as that. At these words, the lord of the castle of Ako drew his sword and slashed at the uncivil courtier, who fled—the graceful flourish of a delicate thread of blood upon his forehead-----A few days later, the military court handed down its sentence against the attacker: the lord of the castle of Ako was to be allowed to commit
hará kiri.
In the central courtyard of the castle of Ako, a dais was erected and covered in red felt, and to it the condemned man was led; he was given a short knife of gold and gems, he confessed his crime publicly, he allowed his upper garments to slip down to his girdle so that he was naked to the waist, and he cut open his abdomen with the two ritual movements of the dirk. He died like a Samurai; the more distant spectators saw no blood, for the felt was red. A white-haired man of great attention to detail—the councillor Oishi Kuranosuké, his second—decapitated his lord with a saber.