Photograph: Courtesy Palace of the Governors (MNM/DCA)

That’s him. They say that’s his picture. The cocky little cowboy strikes a tintype pose, probably assisted by a hidden stand whose metal collar restrains him for the long exposure; you can just see its leg behind one foot. Still, he looks draggle-tailed. This may be more attitude than posture. I picture his mother propping him up with a death grip on the back of his neck, though his hips nonetheless appear to sling forward, his arms to bow apart, his insolent mouth to slackly unhinge, as though most of him were an irrelevant sack hanging from her clenched hand. But Catherine died in 1874, six years before this picture was taken, and a species of coat stand with one projecting pincer arm had to substitute for her.

She never saw him as we do, when we gaze at this picture, with his front teeth so prominent he could eat pumpkins through a fence, as a wag once said—or with arching black eyebrows, sticking-out ears, scraps of black hair hanging down his neck. He surely didn’t own that weaponry when she was living—the holstered pistol, the cartridge belt, the Winchester rifle on which his hand rests—because when she died he was only 13 and he hadn’t yet become Billy the Kid. The side-creased hat looks as though he’s been clubbed on the head by a washboard. The sweater, two sizes too large, could be a hand-me-down—he did have an older brother—and the shirt. The shirt! On its placket just visible through his buckskin vest is what appears to be an anchor with a rope loosely coiled around its shaft, and does that not make it one of those ubiquitous sailor shirts that doting mothers used to buy for their sons?

The Anthony four-tube camera had a six-second exposure and produced four images, for which the Kid paid 25 cents. Two survived. One of these disappeared years ago. The other was given to the Lincoln County Heritage Trust in 1986 by the descendants of Sam Dedrick, a horse trader at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, where the picture was taken. But the trust displayed it under bright lights, a serious blunder, and the tintype darkened, and all we have now are reproductions of a vanished original. Even the scratched and spotted surface is a copy of a scratched and spotted surface, as are the marks of the tacks on the four corners and, at the bottom, the photographer’s corrosive thumbprints. The only known image of Billy the Kid, then, the one you are looking at, is a shadow of a ghost, a photograph of a perished tintype of a young man who perhaps had it taken in the first place to prove that he wasn’t a figment of his own imagination. His head tilted like that, his jaw pooched out, he certainly is no figment of ours. He looks nothing like Hollywood’s Billies, Robert Taylor, Buster Crabbe, Paul Newman, Kris Kristofferson, Emilio Estevez.

Nothing like Billy Conlon, either, the boy who stole my three-speed Schwinn bike when I was 10 years old, then had the chutzpah to offer to search for it with me and our playmates. As our posse scoured the backyards and alleys of north Cambridge, he looked up at my face—like his namesake, he was short—and framed his desire to “find” what he’d taken as a thrilling adventure; this was the Wild West and we’d string up the horse thieves. For a moment, his eyes were convincingly plaintive but, slipping to the side, they lapsed into cunning. Billy Conlon, too, had an exigent mother (and a missing father), a tall, indolent syrup of womanhood who wore shoulder pads, hairnets, and high heels, and who often poured herself across her shabby couch and asked her son to scratch her back in his friends’ presence. When I’d all but despaired of reclaiming my bike and lay on my bed sulking one day, he brought it to my door, having found it, he said, in the marshes beside the Dewey and Almy Chemical factory where Route 2 made its swing into Boston, the same industrial wasteland at the edge of our neighborhood where he’d once tortured bullfrogs and turtles. His mother had made him return it, I guessed. And, talk about brass, he expected a reward, despite having gouged his initials on the fender.

He was always Billy the Kid in our games, for unlike the tintype Billy he looked the part: gash of black hair across his freckled forehead, fetching grin, not too big a nose, no buck teeth, close dark Irish eyes. The odd cast of skin at his temples and brow made his face appear shrink-wrapped on the skull. Above all, he looked innocent. His face was a cherub’s. Yet, he’d set his room on fire; he’d forced his sister Nancy to drink range oil and eat an entire package of Ex-lax; he would fight anyone at the drop of a dime. And later, when I’d finished college and had begun writing novels, I heard that he’d stabbed a man on the street, viciously killing him, exactly as the first Billy was said by his nemesis and friend Pat Garrett to have done (because the man verbally abused his mother).

And that’s when I learned to look back on my childhood as though it had become an abandoned film set, a back lot obliging my fond inclination to sentimentalize bad behavior. Or a discarded comic book, or a Big Little storybook, for I read everything then, I even read torn newspapers on the street and labels of cans of peaches in the store, and pictured myself as an extra in the story that the Billies of the world acted out in books and movies.

Most longings fizzle. The point about Billy was he always died young. He did not have to make emotional adjustments, watch his language, rearrange his priorities, wonder what was stirring inside him, be punctual or dignified, harbor guarded intentions, or care what people thought of him. Those of us who color inside the lines and wash our hands before eating and finish our vegetables and floss and remain faithful to our spouses—we nice, regular people who shrink existence to the size of a nutshell and live out our biblical three score and 10 with diminishing zeal—where would we be without him?

John Vernon is a Distinguished Professor of English at Binghamton University (SUNY). His essay here is the prologue to his recent historical novel, Lucky Billy, copyright © 2008, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co.