Maundy Thursday

We don't often think of the Three Graces as a Holy Week thing, and admittedly I've written the word Lent in the upper left corner. I have nothing today, but another transcript of something written earlier, years ago, in response to Billy the Kid's last words: "Pete, who are these people." The Kid had eluded his pursuers, Pat and Stacy Garrett of Elkhurst, IN, only to accidentally run into them at a tourist spa run by a friend in Fort Sumner, named Pete. The Kid had been taking a mud bath when he stumbled to the kitchen, caked with mud, and, noticing several strangers than mosts standing around, sought out his friend Pete. He went to Pete's room and stuck his head between the door edge and door jamb while asking his fateful question: "Pete, who are these people?" A question he never received an answer to, unless you count a load of lead heading toward your vitals as an answer. Pat and Stacy had stumbled onto the spa, having no idea that The Kid was there, and they were inquiring of Pete, in his darkened room, as lamps were scarce, whereabouts the Kid's whereabouts were. Imagine how surprised they were when a mud-caked Billy cracked open the door and asked his incurious untimely question. "Pete," he stammered, "Who" he questioned, "Are these people?" he queried? No sooner, no jayhawk, no aggie, had the words left his mouth than the clicker-clacking of liver loaders and spleen splicers snapped to and two and blasted towards his opened hands and mouth, coinciding finally with his chest, legs and adjacent bits of wood.
It's thought by the savants and cognoscenti that his last question- Are these people- foreshadowed the alien landings at Roswell 100 miles south and 67 years later. I speculate in Billy the Kid on Mars that Billy was spirited away by Martians to the Red planet just before the leaden bullets billeted their way into his luggage, and this is the beginning gist of my story of Billy finding the Femme Fatale and Lenny, the Russian bear, and the Buckarooskies attending his presence and strange teleportation.
I here as promised above supply the alternate version of Billy's final words that I had written under a different impetus:
[As guns blaze and Billy leaps for cover behind a flour barrel]
Billy: I find my life caught in a dialectic: past and future, sheep and cattle, farmer and railroad;
[switching guns]
Once freed of adolescent uncertainty, I embraced the ambiguity of adulthood -
YOU SONS OF BITCHES
an ambiguity wherein my very identity remained a question;
[leaping up he takes the schoolmarm by the neck as a shield]
I would wake up trembling and then I saw that only despair could drive me to accept the answer to this question- an answer of silence beyond past and future,
[he vaults onto a horse]
DAMN YOU LET ME DIE!
[his ear is shot off]
But an answer of transcendent position; I saw myself as ---
[has a sneezing fit]
--- Pete, WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?