September 11, 2007 Bonus Blog
Got a weird call from my artist compadre Buckeye Blake. He told me he was working in his remote Texas art studio this morning when he heard a distant cry. "Sounded like a Siamese cat," he told me. An hour later, he heard it again, and went out to investigate.

Buckeye is the artist who created the sculpture "The Wake of Billy the Kid." You know, the one that shows the Kid stretched out in his funeral clothes, on a bench, after Pat Garrett sent him to hell. And this is the one he was supposed to install at the Kid gravesite in Fort Sumner, until the Kid Krazy Krowd over there went, well, Krazy, and threatened to destroy it if he even attempted to install it. The sculpture now resides in a horse trailer at the edge of Buckeye's property.

When Buckey couldn't find anything, he checked inside the trailer, where he found a jet black goat, stone dead, curled up underneath the sculpture. How it got there, he has no idea. When I asked him if someone might have placed it there, he scoffed, saying, "No, I live way out in the middle of nowhere."

Buckeye told me the hairs on his neck were standing straight out and he had goosebumps from the weirdness of it all. As some of you might know, I used the symbol of skeleton goats throughout my illustrated bio of the Kid, to mark when participants in the Lincoln County War were murdered. This symbol of death (poached from the Mexican Day of The Dead skeletons) is a powerful sign, and the fact that it was found under a sculpture of El Cabrito (The Kid, or, The Goat) is mighty spooky.

Buckeye then asked me what I thought of 3:10 To Yuma and we chatted about the flick and then he told me he had heard a rumor that the movie producers had called me before they started but I told them I was too busy.

I told him that is ridiculous. We laughed. Buckeye ventured this is how the crazy stories get started and become legends. I asked him if he wanted to trade legends. I'll take the black goat story and he can have the 3:10 to Stiffing The Studio story. He declined. He said when he told artist Thom Ross the goat story, Thom said, "I wish that had happened to me." Proving once again, that we are all Kid Krazy. And beyond all hope.

"The nice thing about being senile is you can hide your own Easter eggs."
-Old Vaquero Saying