“Has its advantages, I guess.”
“Are you staying in Sumner?”
“Ofttimes.”
“With?”
The Kid just said, “With friends.”
But she’d heard the rumors of his queridas. With sadness, Paulita said, “Oh.”
Billy realized he’d let them take another wrong turning, so he grinned and changed the subject. “I got your letter to me in the Mesilla jail! Read it over and over again. Even showed it to Sheriff Southwick there. You know what he said? Said, ‘That girl is sure stuck on you.’?”
She seemed to consider his oddness before saying, “Then. I have outgrown that girl now. She believed you were being unfairly hounded due to misunderstandings and lies and exaggerations.” She seemed to want to go on, but simmered. “And you didn’t answer that letter.”
“My mind was on my hanging.”
She tilted her head for a different perspective. “Are you even aware of how hot and cold you are? How you seduce and then withdraw, tantalize and then retreat? Even with men you’re like that. You’re a mystery to people, you keep us off-balance and guessing. We have to presume what you’re thinking or feeling. And instead of being frustrated we find ourselves fascinated,
and we make things up about you out of our own hopes and needs and all the dangerous things we’re afraid to do.”
The Kid felt the outrage that so often sent his hand to his gun. But he governed himself and said, “You seem to have given this a lot of thought.”
“What else was there to do before I cried myself to sleep?”
He felt a farewell coming and he hastened it. “So where are we, you and me?”
She hesitated before saying, “José wants to marry me.”
The Kid flatly echoed, “José wants to marry you.”
“Yes.”
“I was hoping . . .”
“I suspected.”
“And I don’t have a chance?”
Enough of an answer that her coffee-colored eyes glistened with tears.
“Well, it may be July for you but it’s near winter for me. All the leaves are falling off the trees.” Heartsick, he stood. “I’ll be going now.”
She was forlorn as she faced the floor.
The Kid paused in the hallway. “I still love you, Paulita.”
“And I you,” she whispered.
* * *
Within a hasty few months Paulita Beaubien Maxwell would marry José Florentino Jaramillo at San José Catholic Church in Anton Chico. She was wealthy and eighteen, the Jaramillos were prosperous, and Pete Maxwell hoped she would no longer be sullied by her relationship with the Kid.
She would give birth to three children: Adelina, Luz, and a son, Telesfor. But in the 1890s the often drunk Jaramillo abandoned her for another woman and she raised the children alone.
In 1884 the New England Cattle Company purchased what remained of Lucien Maxwell’s real estate, and then Old Fort Sumner was reclaimed by flooding, its deteriorating buildings were torn apart for scrap lumber, and all its majestic cottonwood trees were felled. Mrs. Jaramillo was forced to spend her last years in a mail-order cottage only four miles north, on the outskirts of a dreary, sun-drenched village that still called itself Fort Sumner. And it was there as she was crocheting a mantilla on the front porch that the journalist Walter Noble Burns interviewed “A Belle of Old Fort Sumner” about the Kid, and Paulita took in the fall’s first riotous colors of dying as she denied ever being the Kid’s sweetheart. “I liked him very, very much—oh, yes—but I did not love him.”
When she was sent The Saga of Billy the Kid in 1926, she found she could not finish reading it. Even though avid Kid tourists later found her home and sought to extract intimacies from her, Paulita stayed put in new Fort Sumner and skimped by on an ever-shrinking inheritance until she died of nephritis in 1929, aged sixty-five.