King of The Road

by Alex Deborgorski

  My Short Career as a Cattle Rustler

  Farmers generally do a good job of looking after their livestock and keeping the weeds down on their land. Every once in a while, there will be one or two who for a number of reasons don’t. There was an elderly farmer named Jake who had acquired a lot of land during the Depression years and had cattle and pigs. He had gotten older and had trouble looking after it all, but he did not want to give up farming.

  He wore railroad coveralls, the striped ones with many pockets. When he died, they said they found receipts in his pockets that were almost fifty years old. He was cheap but needed help on his farm. Few would help him for the ten dollars he would pay for the day’s work. Dad would help Jake, herding animals, castrating, or hauling livestock to the Fairview Auctionmart. He would use his own vehicle and his own gas, and sometimes Jake wouldn’t even pay him for that.

  One night Dad came home at about nine o’clock. It was in the wintertime, maybe 20 below, and a moonlit night, full moon. I was about thirteen years old. In the Wild West that’s when the Indians used to steal horses. They’d call it the “horse thief moon.”

  Dad came into the house and said, “Come with me.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Never mind, come with me.”

  We got in the truck, and off we went. I said, “You forgot to turn on the headlights.”

  “We’re going to leave the lights off.”

  “Why?”

  “Never mind.”

  My dad’s driving always made me nervous. He was an even worse driver than my mother. Neither one of them knew how to steer a vehicle on ice or wet mud, and we were forever going in the ditch. So we’re driving down the bush road with no lights and I’ve got my hand braced on the door frame because I’m fully expecting the truck to spin out on the next curve and maybe roll over in the ditch. I’m all tensed up, thinking, What the heck is he doing driving with no headlights?

  We drive for a few miles. Park the truck on the road and proceed to walk off into this field. Deep snow, bitter cold. In the bright moonlight I can see that the field is trampled down with cattle tracks. And we walk into this bluff of trees, and my dad says, “Grab that rope.”

  “What rope?”

  “Right in front of you there’s a rope.”

  I look, and sure enough there’s a good-size rope tied to a tree. “Grab that rope and hold on tight,” he says. “There’s a cow on the other end.”

  I untie this rope and hang on. Dad is hanging on, too. There’s a good-size Charolais cow on the end of this rope, and as soon as we untie it from the tree that cow takes off.

  Charolais cows are big and tall, like an elk. When the crops were nice and green, Jake’s cattle would jump over his fences and make a loop through all the farms in the area, eating everything in sight. His pigs, too. I’d see a sow come out of the bush with a litter of pigs walking behind her, and I would say to my dad, “Where the heck did the sow come from?”

  “Oh, that’s just Jake’s sow. She came five miles to eat our crops.”

  His livestock was famous for doing that, so people would occasionally steal one of his animals because he never paid crop damage. It was like collecting a debt.

  As soon as we touched that rope it took off. It sprinted away and hit the open ground running full out, and when it hit the end of the rope, whang, I got jerked off my feet.

  Of course Dad is hanging on, too, but right away he slips on the frozen cow shit and falls down in the willow bushes and lets go of the rope. This is his bright idea, but I’m the only one holding on to the rope. I’m falling down and getting up and he’s yelling in Polish and giving me shit. “Hang on to that cow! You hear me? You’re gonna get a licking if you let go of that cow!”

  So I’m bouncing along behind that cow as it gallops across the field. I’m only thirteen years old, but I’m a big kid of about 170 pounds, and I’m pretty strong. Still, it’s like being towed by a Jeep in third gear. I’m whacking against trees and bouncing off frozen cow pies and getting snow inside my pants and I’ve got the rope wrapped around my wrists so that I can’t let go even if I want to. This cow is beating the hell out of me, but I know this is minor abuse compared to the beating the old man is going to give me if I let the cow get away.

  At the far side of the field the cow comes to the ditch. It’s a deep ditch, full of snow right to the top, but the cow plunges in and forges through that snow even though it comes up to her shoulders. Then she runs across the road right behind the pickup and into the next ditch, and bogs down again in that deep snow. I’m basically skidding and tumbling behind her, but as soon as she hits the second ditch and starts struggling through that deep snow it gives me enough time to cinch that rope through the ring in the box of the pickup.

  Now, try and pull a pickup truck, you crazy cow!

  By the time my dad shows up, the cow is fastened securely to the truck and I’ve earned my passing grade as a wrangler.

  So we’ve caught her, now what are we going to do?

  My dad explains that we need to get her into the truck. That’s not going to be easy because we’ve got fencing around the bed of the pickup and the tailgate is thirty inches off the ground. What are we going to do, lift the cow into the truck? I’m hoping that he’s not expecting me to do it, because that cow is still fighting and thrashing like a crazy varmint at the end of the rope. I guess we got lucky, because my dad just touched it on the ass and it went sky-high. It jumped like a moose and went right over the tailgate and landed in the back of the truck.

  So then we take this cow home.

  Dad says to me, “Listen to me, boy, I didn’t steal the cow. You understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you know why we brought it home?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I found a rope and it happened to have a cow on the end of it. That’s my rope, so that’s my cow. Earlier today, I was herding cows through the bush for Jake. I found a rope laying on the ground and I tied it to a tree so I could find it later. After I finished herding, I realized there was a cow tied to the end of it.”

  That was my dad’s story.

  So we hide that big rangy Charolais in the barn, and Dad goes and gets a pair of scissors, I think they’re called pinking scissors. Those ones with little teeth going all over the place. And he goes up to this cow and takes the tags out off her ears and he starts slicing up her ears with the scissors, hacking them this way and that until they end up hanging in shreds.

  For the next month or so he kept the cow hidden inside the barn. He fed it, fattened it up, tamed it down, and eventually took it to the auction sale. I went to that auction sale with him, and of course before the auction starts, everybody displays their livestock. Then they go into the auction and bid on them.

  Well, in this case, the auction started and nobody was there. The auctioneer was asking, “Where the heck is everybody?”

  It turned out they were all looking at Dad’s crazy-looking cow. Everyone was asking my dad, “What the heck happened to the cow’s ears?”

  Dad said, “Well, you know what my dogs are like.”

  They all laughed because my dad’s cow dogs had a reputation for being the meanest dogs in the country.

  I don’t think Dad ever stole a cow again. I guess he realized that he couldn’t keep showing up with cows that had no ear tags and had ears like a Jamaican musician’s hairdo. So that was the end of my short career as a cattle rustler.

  My Short Career as a Professional Hunter

  When I was young, about twelve, I did a lot of hunting. My dad would give me a quota of .22 shells and I had to be careful with them. We needed wild meat for food, and I would bring home rabbits and partridges. I also hunted muskrats and beavers for fur. I couldn’t swim but I would wade out into the freezing water anyway, right up to my nose, to get the dead ones.

  One time I shot a muskrat and I went in the water naked to recover it. There was still ice in the middle of the lake. I got halfway to th
e rat and my balls started to hurt so bad I had to go back to shore. I just put my underpants back on, then I waded out again and got the son of a gun. I was a long way from home on foot and needed to keep my clothes dry, so I wouldn’t get hyperthermia.

  Hunting got to be a little more challenging after my dad modified my .22 rifle by driving over it with his tractor.

  It still worked just fine, but the barrel was bent and the bullets went way off to one side. If it had been a little more bent I could have shot around a corner with it! But I practiced with it and got a feeling for where the bullets would go. The further away the target, the more the bullets would veer off to one side. You had to have all these angles figured out in your head, so it was definitely sporting.

  I finally spotted a deer one day and crawled up within range. That was a real trophy, a lot of meat for the family, and I was pretty excited. I aimed about two feet high and about two feet off to one side and fired. The deer ran off and I thought, Darn it!

  I walked after it a little ways, just in case, and suddenly there it was, lying on the ground, shot right through the heart. Man, I was proud of that deer. The average person couldn’t hit a barn with this gun.

  One day in June, I came home from school and my dad said, “You know, the milk cow wandered off today. I think I’ll go down to George Walter’s place and look for it.”

  Dad made himself a walking stick and went down looking for the cow. George Walter’s place was down in a valley, in a creek bottom, and there was nice grass there in the springtime. Dad went down along the creek and saw the cow standing in some willows. He came up behind it and whacked it on the rump with the stick and said, “Come on, let’s get along home now.”

  Well, the cow turned around and it was a big brown bear! Dad was startled, of course, but the bear just looked at him and walked away. He came home and told me about it. I was excited about it. A bear!

  Well, I considered myself to be a pretty good hunter by now, and decided I should go and shoot that bear!

  A .22 rifle with a bent barrel was not going to be sufficient, so after dinner I cleaned the dishes and went into the barn and got my dad’s rifle. I didn’t ask him about the rifle because I didn’t believe in asking any questions that could be answered with a “no.”

  His rifle was an old Lee Enfield, and it used .303 British ammunition. I put a couple of Savage .303 shells in my pocket, and any fool knows that the Lee Enfield takes .303 British cartridges, and you can’t use that Savage ammunition or you’re liable to blow the gun up. But I never worried about little details like that.

  I was a bit of a romantic, or at least I considered myself one. It was my mum’s influence on me, so I got my camera, a sketch pad, and a notebook. I intended to take a picture of the beast, sketch him, and write a poem about him. So I tucked everything under my arm and went off in search of Mr. Bear.

  My plan was to do my photographing and sketching and poem-writing while he was still alive, preferably from close up, then proceed to kill him. That would satisfy both sides of me—the caveman and the poet. But when I found the bear, he was a lot bigger and scarier-looking than I’d expected, so I stopped about a hundred yards away, and decided to forgo all that sketching and poem-writing until after he was dead.

  I lay down on this grassy knoll, lined him up in my sights, pulled the trigger, and ka-boom, that old rifle went off like a cannon.

  I didn’t realize it, but I’d shot that poor old bear right through the back leg and balls. He squatted down and shivered. You could see the heat pouring off him like asphalt in the summertime. Then he took off into some heavy bush. I knew this wasn’t good, following a wounded bear into deep woods. But I had no choice. So I put another shell into the gun. It fit so badly that I bent it, jamming it in, but eventually I managed to force it all the way into the chamber. I closed the bolt, turned off the safety, and went stalking into that deep dark bush after that wounded bear.

  Finally I saw the bear in this little clearing. He was sitting down, looking at me, and kind of groaning. The poor thing must have been in a lot of pain. I decided I would just walk up to him and shoot him in the head. Then I recalled that someone told me you should never shoot a bear in the head because they have such a thick skull that the bullet will glance off. I lined the gun up on his chest and pulled the trigger, but the bullet hit a little sapling between me and the bear and the slug ricocheted off and the bear wasn’t hit. Now I was out of bullets.

  The bear got up and started coming toward me. Oh boy, I thought. Now I’m in trouble. I dropped my camera and my sketch pad and my pencils and pens scrambled up a dead poplar tree and sat on a branch about ten feet off the ground. This was a black bear, and black bears can climb trees a heck of a lot better than any kid can, but I didn’t know that then.

  I guess the bear was too sick to climb the tree, because he just sat on the ground looking up at me. Shooting a creature in the balls is about the worst thing you can do. I wouldn’t have blamed him for climbing that tree and ripping me to pieces, but he just sat there staring at me. After about three hours on that narrow, uncomfortable branch, getting bitten by every mosquito in the Peace River country, I decided I couldn’t take it anymore, and jumped down and ran like the devil to Fat Newton’s cabin. As I might have mentioned, Fat Newton loved bear meat, and I knew he’d be excited about getting a nice big bear.

  I told Fat what had happened, and sure enough he was as keen as mustard. He got his tractor and his .30–30 and we went over to my place, where we took my dad’s pickup. I wasn’t allowed to take the pickup, but what my dad didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. We filched the truck and went off and found the bear. Fat finished it off with his .30–30, then we skinned it, quartered it up, and hauled it back home, where we cut and wrapped the meat and put it on the deep freeze.

  As it turned out, Dad gave me a licking for taking the truck but it wasn’t such a bad deal because Fat gave me thirty-five dollars for the bear! And in 1966 that was probably about the equivalent of two hundred bucks today. A licking wears off, but money is still with you the next day.

  After I sold that one bear I started hunting bears for Fat Newton on a regular basis. He would eat them up as fast as I could deliver them. There were so many bears in our neighborhood that I could always rely on Fat to keep me in pocket money.

  Even though he was like an uncle to me, I was a little leery of him. Many times on the way back from hunting, I would stop at his door as it was turning dark. As I would go to knock, Francis would suddenly bellow, “Bullshit!” at a hundred and twenty decibels. It would scare me half to death and I would turn around and walk away. Turns out he had only been yelling at some comment on his transistor radio.

  Often when I would visit, he would complain about all the baloney on the radio. When I would offer to get rid of the radio for him, he would give me a threatening look.

  Old Fat always told me he wanted one favor in return. “When I die, stick me up in a poplar tree like the Indians used to do. But put a bucket over my head so the magpies can’t peck my eyes out.”

  When he died they buried him and I always felt bad about that. I don’t know how many times he asked me for that favor. More than a few times I considered going to the graveyard and digging him up and hanging him in the tree, but I never actually did it because I was too young. I didn’t have the confidence back then. Today I’d do it for him.

  2

  THE OPEN ROAD BECKONS

  “You’ve got only one life to live. Get it over with or make something out of it.”

  My dad came over from Britain, where all he ever learned to drive were tanks and armored vehicles. He was right at home with horses, too, but he never really got the hang of civilian cars and trucks.

  I was born to drive. As soon as I climbed behind the wheel of a car and fired it up, I knew that life would never be the same. I was like one of those caterpillars that suddenly sprouts wings and takes off. I never really cared where I was going just as long as the engine was humming and
the wheels were turning under me.

  Lloyd Paul

  My name is Lloyd Paul and I went to school with Alex.

  We went through all the stages of boyhood together—from wearing short pants to riding bikes in grade five to chasing girls and driving hopped-up cars in high school.

  I remember playing sports in the gymnasium with Alex running around crashing into everybody and knocking them into next week. He grew like crazy when he was still young, and most of the time we were in school he weighed about a hundred pounds more than everybody else. He wasn’t a bully, though. He got good marks and read a lot of books, but you know what it’s like when you’re big and a little bit uncoordinated—some of the kids thought he was a dumb Polack, and we teamed up together for mutual protection. I was the skinny, mouthy one and he was my big buddy. If I started a fight, it was good to have Alex around to finish it.

  As you get older, you start getting into trouble more often, and I don’t know how many hours we spent in detention together. Even with that we were always working hard after school. If we weren’t serving time in detention we were out hustling for a buck, doing odd jobs and saving up for cars. We really started letting her rip once we got our driver’s licenses. By the time we were in grade ten we both had our own cars. We were pretty good drivers, but our cars couldn’t manage to stay on the road. Alex’s cars in particular would just as soon turn upside-down as stay right side up.