William McElhanie and I occupied ourselves at the bordellos, though it was only Bill who ever had his pants down. We crossed the arroyo to the cathouses after a twenty-five-cent breakfast of pancakes and four eggs and steak, and we hunched up on the stoops with weeds in our teeth, itchy and hot in our three-piece suits. We’d watch the chippies coming out of the four-holer in the back, or fetching water from the artesian well, or hanging their laundry out on the line. Those who were cursed in the month did the housework in the mornings. They did not dress to entice. Their hair was in strands and their long gray dresses were black about the armpits. They might’ve been farm wives coming back from the hen house with eggs. McElhanie would sit on the chintz parlor furniture at night and whisper to me whatever he’d heard about those available. “Word is, she’s dry as pumice,” he’d say. Or, “She stuffs sandwiches in her blouse.” William McElhanie was sixteen years old in Silver City. I’ve always wondered how he turned out.

My brother Bob spent most of his first week in the city carrying on like a politician. He listened to excess, shook many hands, introduced himself to men of substance as a retired deputy marshal, and he bought shot glasses of good whiskey for the permanent residents though he was stern as a woman from the temperance movement when it came to the subject of liquor.

But he gathered information, he did not dispense it, so there were considerable moments of awkward silence whenever he lunched with strangers. Here I was of some use, for I could extemporize like a bicycle salesman. If a banker was discussing the Chicago Grain Exchange and had his thoughts peter out and got to staring at his fork, I’d get a nod from Bob and proceed to rattle on about Billy the Kid, whose true name was not William H. Bonney but Henry McCarty, of Brooklyn, New York, who’d headed west in a Pullman car and lived in Coffeyville at the age of twelve and became a criminal after escaping through the chimney of a Silver City jail, held there for stealing laundry. “It isn’t gaudy,” I said, “but it’s fact.” The banker would be amazed and Bob would sit back in his chair and consider the banker’s face. I think my brother had a surprise in store for Silver City, but then he was introduced to Miss Eugenia Moore and got distracted from his plans.