The Brave Cowboy Read online

  He shrugged his shoulders wearily and walked to-ward her, eating the apple as he went. He saved the core and when he had advanced to within a few yards of the horse tried again to tempt her. “Whisky,” he called gently, proffering the apple core, “here girl. Come here, girl.” This time she responded, lurching toward him awkwardly with her hobbled forelegs.

  The man smiled and stepped to meet her and fed her the apple core from his palm, holding her head against his chest and whispering into the tense ears. “That’s a girl, now you’re gettin the idea.” He rubbed her face and forehead and patted the strong nervous neck. “You’re a good girl, Whisky. You’re not so dumb, little girl. No sirree, you’re all right.” While he was murmuring into her ears he started slowly and stealthily to slip the bridle on; but she resisted, jerked her head up and tried to back away. Quickly he jammed his thumb inside her cheek, forced her mouth open and inserted the bit, pushed the headstall over her ears and fastened the throatlatch. “Easy, girl, easy,” he said as the mare laid back her ears again. He caressed her neck and thumped his fist on her powerful shoulder. After a moment he half-knelt to unbuckle the Mormon hobble around her shanks. The mare trembled when the strap slipped off but made no trouble. “That’s a girl,” he whispered. He straightened up, holding the hobble in one hand, passed the reins over her neck and quickly smoothly pulled himself up and astride her bare back.

  For a second the mare stood rigid, frozen in outrage; then before he could put a spur to her she leaped forward as if stung, stopped suddenly, arching her back with convulsive violence, and left the earth in another mighty leap, came back down and hit with braced legs, a sickening bone-jarring shock. The man on her back gasped through his grin, shook his head and leaned forward and clutched at the mane with one hand, twisting the strong hairs around his fingers and wrist. “Come on, you bitch!” he shouted, and whipped the mare across the flank with the leather hobble.

  She sprang forward again, bucked once, twice, then broke and ran; laughing and cursing, the man turned her with a touch of leather on the neck, kept her turning round and round in a tight circle until she began to tire a little, then brought her at an easy canter back to the campsite, stopped her short and slid off. He cradled the mare’s head in his arms and talked low-toned soothing nonsense into her quivering ears, while the dust they had raised went drifting by to settle again on different ground.

  When she seemed quiet enough he spread a pad on her back and threw on his saddle, an old worn all-purpose outfit with a double rig and rolled cantle. He caught the cinch ring swinging underneath on the other side and pulled it up and passed the latigo through it a half dozen times and jerked it tight. The mare was holding her breath: he deflated her with a pair of good driving punches to the belly, drew the latigo tighter and secured it on the tongue of the ring. After this he hung on the saddlebags and fastened them, tied the bedroll on behind the cantle, and looped his almost-empty government canteen close to the saddlehorn. He had still more gear to attend to, a guitar and a rifle laying on the ground in the shade of the juniper. The rifle, a thirty-two caliber lever-action carbine, went in the scabbard slung under the fender on the right side of the saddle; the guitar he slung across his back by its braided rawhide cord.

  All was ready now; the mare waited impatiently under her firm burden of metal and leather, waited for the man’s approach and the springy pressure of his long weight on her back. She had to wait; he seemed in no hurry now after completing his preparations. Instead of mounting he stood facing the east and the city, slouching comfortably over his backbone and pelvis, thumbs hooked in the pockets of his jeans, the black hat tilted forward over his eyes.

  The sun was now an hour higher in the sky, a good ten feet above the violet crest of the mountains. The shadows contracted, creeping back, and the first miasmic shimmer of heat waves began to obscure the detail of rocks and brush. Between the man and the river a spinning dervish of air and sand, like a translucent tornado, danced across the plain with the weightless buoyant grace of a moving spotlight; at its base the tumbleweeds bounced around and around like figures in a square dance.

  The mare pawed at the sand, jerking her head nervously, and the leather gear on her back creaked and rustled—the most reassuring and satisfying of sounds, that agitation of used, worn, familiar leather. The man heard it, turned, caught up the dragging reins, put a hand on the pommel, his foot in the stirrup and swung up into the saddle. The mare was already facing the east, the river; he touched her with his spurs and she started off, breaking almost at once into a trot. He pulled back a little and kept her at a brisk walking gait, beading not for the center of the city but toward the northern tip of its elongated trunk.

  Mounted and armed, he rode for the city, the slanting blaze of the sun twinkling on the buttplate of the rifle, the silver buckle, the spurs, touching with fire the brief puffs of dust rising up from each step of the horse, glistening on the smooth hide of the mare’s shoulders, thighs, operating muscles. The man himself, in his worn dusty clothing, did not reflect much light; in the full glare of the morning sun there was something shadowy and smoke-like about him, something faded, blurred, remembered.

  He gazed straight forward as he rode, apparently indifferent to the vast sweep of desert around him, the sky singing overhead. The five volcanoes to the south, lined up like old ruined tombs, swung slowly around on his wheeling horizon. Riding into the brush of grease-wood, live oak, mesquite, he flushed a covey of quail; they rose in unison from the desert floor, shrilling and fluttering, flew ahead for a distance and dropped in unison to the ground again. When he rode up to them they rose into the air again, flew ahead and dropped into the brush, still in front of him. He ignored them, thinking of something else, his eyes under the shadow of the hat fixed intently on the vague complex of the city.

  His course brought him to an arroyo, whose sandy bed he followed for a mile or more until it veered too much to the south. Under the arroyo’s banks, on the fine drifted sand, he noted the delicate hieroglyphics of field mice, lizards, gophers, jackrabbits, quail and buzzards, but in the light of day only a few lizards appeared, swift and rubbery and insignificant, to watch the passage of man and horse.

  When the arroyo turned he rode up out of it and across the lava rock again, through scattered patches of rabbitbrush and tumbleweed, until he came eventually to a barbed-wire fence, gleaming new wire stretched with vibrant tautness between steel stakes driven into the sand and rock, reinforced between stakes with wire staves. The man looked for a gate but could see only the fence itself extended north and south to a pair of vanishing points, an unbroken thin stiff line of geometric exactitude scored with a bizarre, mechanical precision over the face of the rolling earth. He dismounted, taking a pair of fencing pliers from one of the saddlebags, and pushed his way through banked-up tumble-weeds to the fence. He cut the wire—the twisted steel resisting the bite of his pliers for a moment, then yielding with a soft sudden grunt to spring apart in coiled tension, touching the ground only lightly with its barbed points—and returned to the mare, remounted, and rode through the opening, followed by a few stirring tumbleweeds.

  He rode on, approaching the rim of the ancient lava flow and the glint of the river beyond it, the willows, the soft yellow-leaved cottonwoods on the banks of the river. The rider relaxed in the saddle, turning in the seat, and lifted one leg and rested it on the mare’s neck. After a while he pushed back his hat and unslung the guitar from his back and struck off a few running chords. The mare answered with a twitch of her ears and stepped forward quickly. He strummed a few more chords, tightened one of the strings, and then began to sing, very softly, addressing no one but himself and the mare.

  I made up my mind… to change my way,

  And leave my crowd… that was so gay…

  His hard, wind-honed, sun-dried face softened a little under the influence of the music, became human, almost gentle.

  To leave my love, who’d promised me her hand,

  And head down sout
h… of the Rio Grande…

  The mare’s iron-shod hooves clinked on the black rock; a whisper of wind drifted through the brittle clicking leaves of the greasewood. Beyond the river and ten miles east of the city the Sangre Mountains began to reveal themselves in more detail as the sun rose higher, the rampart of blue shadow dissolving in the light, exposing the fissured red cliffs, the canyons and gorges a thousand feet deep, the towers leaning out from the main wall, the foothills dry and barren as old bones, and above and behind these tumbled ruins the final barrier of granite, the great horizontal crest tilted up a mile high into the frosty blue sky, sparkling with a new fall of snow. The mountains loomed over the valley like a psychical presence, a source and mirror of nervous influences, emotions, subtle and unlabeled aspirations; no man could ignore that presence; in an underground poker game, in the vaults of the First National Bank, in the secret chambers of The Factory, in the backroom of the realtor’s office during the composition of an intricate swindle, in the heart of a sexual embrace, the emanations of mountain and sky imprinted some analogue of their nature on the evolution and shape of every soul.

  It was in the year… of eighty-three,

  That A. J. Stinson… hired me…

  The young man rode on, loafing in the saddle and singing to himself and the mare, but with his eyes still sighted on the northern fringe of the city where the houses turned to mud and dried out among cotton-woods and irrigation ditches on the edge of the all-surrounding desert.

  He passed within a half mile of a sheep camp: black tarpaper shack, a cardboard housetrailer resting on two flat tires, a brush corral, a flatbed truck with dismantled engine, a watertank and its windmill with motionless vanes, a great glittering heap of tincans; no men or sheep visible. Creeping toward this establishment from the north along the vague scratch of a road was a cloud of dust, moving with what at that distance seemed like agonizing deliberation; at the point of the dustcloud was a minute black object, tremulous in the shimmering light, apparently in motion, disappearing now and then, reappearing, silent and busy and persevering: a truck or car bouncing along at forty miles an hour over a washboard road. The distance and the silence, the grotesque disproportion between the small dark agitated object and its enveloping continuum of space and silence, gave its activity an absurd, pathetic air.

  Horse and rider came to another obstacle and a second halt—the black drop-off, the congealed rim of the lava flow, a jumbled mass of rock falling steeply to the plain ninety feet below. The man turned the mare to the north and followed the edge of the cliff until he came to a place where descent was possible. He dismounted then and led the mare down slowly and cautiously, squeezing between the black boulders, switching back and forth across the face of the slope.

  Above him, flowing over the dark burnt-out iron of the mesa, the sky turned deep liquid blue, vivid, burning, profound, the bottomless sea of the atmosphere. The young man stopped once and stared up at it, rubbing his jaw, and then went on. The mare followed him reluctantly, eyes rolling and knees trembling, before plunging and sliding down from one ledge to the next. The black rock was sharp-edged, hot, and hard as corundum; it seemed not merely alien but impervious to life. Yet on the southern face of almost every rock the lichens grew, yellow, rusty-brown, yellow-green, like patches of dirty paint daubed on the stone. Horse and man passed other signs and stigmata of life: the petroglyph of a wild turkey chiseled in the stone, a pair of tincans riddled with bullet holes of various caliber, brass cartridge shells, an empty sardine can dissolving in rust They were nearing civilization.

  It took about ten minutes to make the descent. At the bottom, among the scattered slabs of lava, the man swung back in the saddle and went on over the last mile or so of sand and rabbitbrush to the river. He traversed the trails of jeeps and motorcycles, picked his way through a litter of tincans, broken bottles and windblown kleenex, and came presently to the high western bank of the river. Here he stopped again and rolled another cigarette.

  In front of him the sand sloped down an easy fifty feet to the slow brown silt-fat water of the Rio Bravo. At this point the riverbed was about a hundred yards wide, with a fourth of that distance under flowing water and the rest consisting of mud, sand and quicksand drying out under the sun. Twenty-five yards wide, two or three feet deep, except where the heart of the current had gouged out a little more, the greatest river in New Mexico rolled sluggishly south, rippling and gurgling past the willows, the cottonwoods, the wild cane and cattails, toward the desolation of Texas and the consummation of the open sea eight hundred miles away.

  He puffed on his cigarette and spurred Whisky down the bank. “Hup,” he said, as she tried to resist, “come on, little puta.” She yielded, crouched down on her hind legs and half-slid, half-fell down and across the deep soft sand to the water, trailing dust and the transparent but powerful flak from a series of startled farts. She splashed for a moment in the swirling water, then jerked violently at the reins, plunging her head to drink. The rider let her have her way, while the water roiled around his boots. He touched the hot canvas cover of his canteen, lifted it from the saddlehorn and dipped it in the water and let it cool for a while.

  Blowing smoke, he watched the blue fumes twist in the downdraft over the water, diffuse and vanish in the cooler air. From where he waited he could see nothing of the city; the heart of it was two or three miles to the south, beyond the trees, fields, ditches and suburbs. On the opposite bank was a solid growth of willows and beyond that a grove of cottonwoods with golden leaves; nothing more was visible. But he had left the zone of silence; though he could not see the city he could hear it; a continuous droning roar, the commingled vibrations of ten thousand automobiles, trucks, tractors, airplanes, locomotives, the hum and whine of fifty thousand radios, telephones, television receivers, the vast murmur of a hundred thousand human voices, the great massive muttering of friction and busyness and mechanical agitation. The rider puffed calmly on his cigarette, waiting for the mare to cool her belly.

  When she was satisfied he tossed the butt of his smoke into the river and they started across. The current was stronger than it looked; near the center the mare lost her footing and floundered around, while the man hastily pulled his rifle from its sheath and held it above the water. The mare started to swim back to the west bank and he swore at her, turned her around and kept her going in the right direction until she was wading again, splashing across a submerged sandbar and up onto an island of mud and twelve-foot willows.

  They stopped here, while he poured the water out of his boots and out of the saddlebags and out of the soundbox of the guitar. The mare waited for him impatiently, swishing her soggy tail at the flies that swarmed through the bars of light and shade. He finished in a hurry, slapped at a mosquito settling down on his neck, and remounted and rode out of the willows.

  Mud lay ahead of them, liquescent oozy mud with the consistency of warm gruel, an unplumbed deposit of fine slit that had once been part of the tilth and topsoil of Colorado and would eventually become the property of the Gulf of Mexico. There was no way around, unless they retreated to the west bank and went five miles south to the highway bridge. Aside from that there was nothing to do but go over or through the mud.

  They went through it, the mare sinking in well over her fetlocks, lunging and staggering ahead, every lurching step accompanied by the suction of gasping slime and exploding pockets of air. The rider urged her on with his spurs, soothed her with soft words and caresses, forestalling panic, at the same time scrutinizing the creamy surface that lay ahead for a sign of quicksand.

  But there was none; they reached the east bank at last, wet and splattered with mud. The man dismounted, kicked some of the mud from his boots and urinated there on the grass and mushrooms under the cool shelter of the cottonwoods. He remounted after a minute and rode on straight east through the trees until he came to an irrigation ditch. He stopped again here and washed some of the sweat and dust from his face and wet his hair and slicked it back with
his hands. He could hear a meadowlark whistling in the alfalfa field beyond the ditch, and the steady rasping of cicada. The sun was high now, approaching noon and very hot.

  Without remounting he led the mare on a narrow wooden bridge across the ditch and through a wire gate in the fence on the other side. After he had closed and fastened the gate he climbed into the saddle and rode up the quiet dusty lane under a nave of cottonwoods squatting fowlwise along the road, their leaves burning, dying slowly, golden and heavy with dust. On each side of the road were fences enclosing pasture and alfalfa, and corn already cut and shocked. The fencerows were almost hidden by jungles of wild sunflowers standing ten feet tall, the rusty brown heads drooping with the weight of their seed. He could smell tamarisk and plowed earth and the smoke of burning cedar. As he rode on a flock of crows took alarm and flapped out of a cottonwood ahead of him, squawking anxiously, and a fine haze of dust filtered down from the trembling leaves.

  He passed a man in rubber boots and big straw hat, with a spade in his hands, contemplating the trickle of water that ran through the little ditch beside the road. The rider nodded his head gravely and the man with the spade returned his salute with a cautious handwave.

  Dogs began to appear, and children, as he rode past old adobe houses with heavy corroded walls and secret windows. The skinny yapping dogs thronged around the mare, nipping at her heels, and she lashed out at them with her iron hooves and broke into a trot. The rider hauled back on the reins, slowed her to a fast walk. “Easy, girl, easy,” he said quietly.