The Kid: A Novel Read Online Free

gardener with a hoe saw the Kid’s soot-blackened hands and face and asked, “You playing in a minstrel show?”
    “You won’t tell on me, will you?”
    “Oh, I’ll tell. The fix you’re in don’t mean nothing to me.”
    Hearing of the escape and getting on his knees to peer up the tight fit of the chimney, Sheriff Whitehill was impressed, telling the jailer, “Henry has an ingenuity with which I have heretofore not been acquainted.”
    “You could tell he’s a hard case,” the jailer said. “He’s got them dancing eyes.”
    Meanwhile Henry hightailed it to the kitchen of Clara Truesdell’s hotel. She got him cleaned up and harbored him in the pantry for a spell, then put the orphan and his box lunch on a dusty, jouncing stagecoach through hostile Apache territory to Chloride Flat in the Arizona Territory, where his stepfather was.
    The Kid formulated some high hopes for his meeting with Antrim, whom he had not seen for half a year, but then he found the former Hoosier fruitlessly panning for gold upstream on a trickling creek that ran into the San Francisco River.
    Billy Antrim knelt back on his haunches as he stared up at Henry, who detected a distinct lack of welcome. “Weren’t you farmed out?”
    The Kid lied, “I was lonesome for you.”
    “Oh, me too. I been pining.” Antrim looked around for a horse. “How’d you get out here?”
    “Walked. Took me an hour. You get anything?”
    “Tracings this week. Hauled in a nugget a month ago. Where’s Josie?”
    “Running errands at the Orleans Club.”
    “Well, he’ll never amount to much anyways.” Antrim stood. “Copper mine won’t be hiring none more if that’s what you’re thinking.”
    “I’m just footloose and fancy-free.”
    Antrim squinted his distrust. “I got just the one upstairs room and no provisions, but I guess you can stay overnight.”
    Antrim’s upstairs room was over the Two Galoots Saloon, where he seemed customary. A couple of soiled doves in their next-to-nothings were acting flirtatious, but Antrim wouldn’t acknowledge them, only excusing himself by saying, “I have needs like everbody.” He ordered two shot glasses and a full bottle of Old Overholt Straight Rye Whiskey and filled the jiggers for himself and Henry, but the boy was preoccupied by a large hanging picture of a naked female slave in a harem. Antrim noticed and said, “They tell me that’s an odalisque. Don’t ask me how to spell it.”
    “She’s pretty,” Henry said.
    “Ainunt no she . It’s a picture .” Antrim lifted his shot glass. “Down the hatch,” he said and swilled the whiskey.
    Henry found the consequence of imitating his stepfather unpleasant. Coughing, he said, “Harsh as hellfire and never-ending, all the way down.”
    “You get used to it.” Antrim poured himself another shot glass and tilted his head back for it. “Ah,” he said; then, “This Old Overholt whiskey was Abraham Lincoln’s favorite. That ought to tell you something.”
    “And Abraham Lincoln’s dead, isn’t he?”
    “But not from the whiskey. A bullet. Lead poisoning.”
    “Are you going to stay here for a spell?”
    “Oh, me, I’ll prolly get restless I expect.”
    “Want me here?”
    Antrim frowned into his whiskey, then drank it. “Not really,” he said.
    Silence took up residence for a while. Antrim doffed his dirty felt hat. He wasn’t clean and he’d lost still more hair and the sun had wrinkled his face so that he looked far older than his thirty-two.
    The Kid flashed him the insincerest of smiles. “You haven’t asked about the funeral.”
    “Whose?” he asked, then said, “Oh.”
    “Entire city turned out,” the Kid lied. “There was an uplifting sermon and stirring hymns about the attributes of paradise, but folks kept pestering me about ‘Where’s Cate’s husband?’ Told em you were too stricken with grief, that you thought you might could kill yourself over it.”
    “Oh, that would surely gladden you, wouldn’t it,