“You ought to make off with them, sell the outfit, and split the money. Teach them rich bastards a lesson.”
Jap Hardy shook his head. “You hear that kind of talk. That mining camp talk about stealing the prize. But who in hell would buy that many horses?”
“You chickenshit to try it?”
“Why don't you be our ringleader?” Tarz Witzell cut in, laughing at his joke.
“I'd do it,” the woman said, and she didn't smile at all. “Show them bastards a little justice.”
“Don't put no money on justice,” Tarz Witzell said, laughing again.
“You laugh at me one more time, and this beer drinking is over.”
“Aw, hell. We was just getting started.”
“Yeah. To hell with it.” She raised her bottle. “Here we are. I'll drink to you boys. You brought the horses.”
“You got any playing cards?” Jap Hardy asked.
“There,” she said. “That's a idea.”
So they sat playing hands of pinochle until the beer was gone. As they went out into the darkness to their horses, the woman stood on the lighted porch. “You boys,” she said, and closed the door.
By noon the next day they'd crossed a boggy narrows in the Donner und Blitzen Swamp, and beyond to the east side they approached a round barn with a conical roof that looked stranded like a ship left over from an old story, isolated as it was on a knoll among the sage hills. They herded the horses into a fence corner and held them quiet.
“You young fellows,” Jap Hardy said, “this you ought to see. There was corrals and a cookhouse. But they been torn down, so all we got left is this barn.” He sat on an orangey-red gelding, eyeing Rossie and Bill Sweet like one of them might have some dumb-shit thing to say. “Been here four times. This makes five.”
“You take them boys in there,” Tarz Witzell said. “Dickie and me will keep these horses herded.”
Double-wide doors in the board-and-batten wall creaked as they were pulled back to reveal a circular track and inside that a mortared stone wall eight or so feet high and, in the exact center of the interior corral, a juniper post, burnished by ropes—from years of men snubbing horses—supported a conical roof where the rafters came together at the apex like spokes in a wheel. Noontime light drifted in through a circle of ports in a high, octagonal cupola and lay over the reddish interior woods like dust.
“You think of Pete French building that stone wall as a fort against Indians, and those Mexican boys from California chewing their snoose and gentling horses all winter,” Jap Hardy said. “French took care that his hands was out of the winter. He was alone and afoot if they left him.”
Rossie ran his fingertips down the center post.
“If you wanted a church,” Jap Hardy said, “this would be it. French hated all them barbed-wire boys. Fucking settlers. One of them shot him. Ruined the country.”
All through the rest of his life Rossie would tell the story of Peter French and the Mexican vaqueros and their kingdom ranch in that faraway valley and the round barn French had built so his men could work with their horses in the wintertime, out of the weather.
Sweeping past high desert settlements like Princeton and Juntura and Vale, overnighting at willowy springs, the men caught their horses before sunup and were rolled in their blankets not long after darkness settled around the cook fire. Rossie listened to the others snoring and muttering in their sleep and thought about how it must have been for Indians through all the years outside in the dark and hearing others sleep hour after hour in the night.
They held up traffic at a long, sway-bellied suspension bridge over the Snake River into Idaho. As the horses clattered across the macadam a woman wearing a white straw boater came from a motor car, green dress flapping in the breeze, and set up a tripod for photography.
Jap Hardy spurred his black horse and trotted up, somehow amused. “Pilgrim,” he said. “You're going to cause me a stampede.”
The woman smiled, eyes vividly and handsomely alight. “Isn't that the idea? Aren't you cowboys? You sound like a cowboy right out of the movies. If you could move off a little ways and take off your hat, I'd photograph you.”
“One thing about cowboys.” Jap Hardy looked to be happy as he could be. “They don't take off their hats.”
“Fair enough,” she said.
Jap Hardy touched his spurs to his horse, rode off, and sat while the woman focused her camera.
“You ought to be famous,” she said, as she noted his name. “When this photograph is exhibited you might be famous in Berlin. Germans adore cowboys.”
“My pleasure,” Jap Hardy said, as the last of the herd moved off the highway bridge. Then he did take off his hat and tipped it to her. “My people are Portuguese. None of them had much use for Germans. But you could put a notice in the newspaper if I ever get famous in Portugal.”
“I will,” the woman said. “In the Boise newspaper.”
“The Reno paper would be a better idea.”
The woman nodded. “You're a sweet man.”
That evening they turned the pinto bell mare and the herd into another fenced pasture and camped under apple trees. The green knobs of fruit were just beginning to show.
“Berlin,” Jap Hardy said. “You think she knows anything about Berlin?”
“What's Berlin?” Tarz Witzell said.
“She said I was a sweetheart.”
“That's what they claim.” Tarz Witzell rolled his eyes like a comic. “She said you was a cowboy. We ain't no fucking cowboys. What we are is buckaroos. All we ever been.”
Off by the massive Snake River, as it flowed in a surging oxbow around a cottonwood grove, men in uniforms were playing baseball on a dusty field with automobiles parked around it. Other men leaned against fenders, spitting snoose and swigging at unlabeled bottles of homebrewed beer while women chopped kindling, built fires, and tucked their Dutch ovens among the coals. Raggedy children ran in routes, kicking cans and tagging one another and old motorcars kept rolling in through the twilight. “Fucking Okies,” Jap Hardy said.
“My people are Okies,” Bill Sweet said. “Along with Arkie in their blood.”
“Stands to reason. You act like a Okie Arkie cross.”
“Wonder if those people ever seen buckaroo dancing?”
Jap Hardy shook his head. “You got to try it, don't you?”
“Me and him,” Bill Sweet said. “Me and old Rossie. We're going down there and visit them girls.”
“You keep your dancing to yourself,” Jap Hardy said. “There's hay-hand boys down there who will kick your ass into the river. They won't let you out. You'll be swimming for it.”
“That mean we can go?”
“Shit, kid, you're five hundred miles from home, you can try anything you can think of. But don't get up sick and afraid to saddle your horse in the morning.”
So there they went, Bill Sweet leading the way and Rossie following behind and feeling chickenshit because he'd hesitated.
“Nobody knows it,” Bill Sweet said, “but I can swim like a duck.”
A man with a beard and gray-white braids was tuning a fiddle at fireside, and more people were coming in wagons and beat-up flatbed trucks. A heavy woman with long hair frothed around her head set up a circle of camp stools by a fire. Her features were painted red, her forehead dotted with blue. She dealt a deck of outsize playing cards onto a yellow blanket. “The fool,” she said, holding up a card. “He's here, so we're all right. There's no sweetness in things without the fool.”
“She sees you coming,” Rossie said to Bill Sweet.
“One other thing she'll see,” Bill Sweet said. “She'll see me going.” He wasn't smiling. “The Gypsies have took over around here. This is no place for us.”
“What the hell?”
“That's right.” Bill Sweet had a hand on Rossie's sleeve, pulling at him. “They's hell all right. Thieving and hellish.”
“Thought you was going to be dancing.”
“The
y'll be dancing on our ass.”
“What if you had a drink of whiskey?” Rossie dug into his front pocket for the coins and roll of dollars he carried. “What if I bought you one drink of whiskey?”
“Where from?”
“That greasy fellow.”
Buying whiskey was easy. Rossie passed a quarter to a tall bedraggled-looking man with taped-up boots who in turn produced a flat flask from his hip pocket. Rossie took a burning swallow and passed the flask.
“Wonder if we don't get disease,” Bill Sweet said as they walked away.
“Yeah. The dancing pussy disease.”
“You think that's going to happen? These is families. These little girls not going to be fucking with horseback boys.”
“Buckaroos,” Rossie corrected him. “You see that girl over there?” They edged up alongside one of the fires, where a cluster of people were watching a toothless man tune a banjo. Rossie nodded toward a black-haired, dish-faced girl on the far side of the fire, who was showing pregnant inside her lavender dress. “That girl has been fucking around. She's going to be a momma.”
“I think she's smiling at me,” Bill Sweet said. “She's already ruined herself and don't give a shit.”
“Thought you was worried about Gypsies.”
“I'm done with that. The whiskey helped.”
“You're going to be done with your ass if you think she's smiling at you. These people seen your kind before. They'll eat you for dinner.”
But Bill Sweet had turned away. Three boys had come up beside him, two of them stocky fellows of eleven or twelve and a third, bright-eyed and gawky, maybe fourteen or fifteen. They were wearing shit-crusted hand-me-down lace-up farmer boots and brownish home-sewn shirts with sleeves turned up at the cuffs. “You looking for something?” the tallest one asked.
“Girls,” Bill Sweet said.
The tall boy showed greenish teeth. “Sister Sue. You got any money?”
“You talking about charging?” Bill Sweet swallowed before plunging on. “You talking money for fucking your sister?”
“I don't talk about free. Neither does Sister Sue.”
“What kind of money?”
But the black-haired, pregnant girl had come around the fire, and she was smiling at Rossie, her eyes bright and clean as her teeth. “These asswipes bothering you?” she asked, without a glance at the boys.
“Five dollars,” the tall one said. “For the both of you.”
“Jamsie!” The girl spoke sharply in the direction of the toothless man, who had given up tuning his banjo to regard them with small eyes lost in wrinkles. The boys, when Rossie turned back, were gone, that fast. The girl was smiling again. “My momma should have drowned them dickheads at birth,” she said. It seemed an extreme thing for a pregnant girl to say, even when softened by her slow southern inflection.
“Do you down-home sweeties all talk that way?” Bill Sweet asked.
“First,” she said, “I'm not some slice of pie. I call myself a woman.”
“A woman and a growing half,” Rossie said.
She nodded seriously, like this idea pleased her. “That half is the baby boy. He's entirely sure a boy.”
“What's his name?”
“William. William Amos.”
“After Amos and Andy?”
“That's mean,” she said. “But I can take it. I like a little smart-ass in my men.”
“So I'm one of your men?”
“Could happen. Where you from? Can't be from Idaho. Nobody with enough brains to be smart-assed ever came from Idaho. We found that out.”
“Who's we?” Bill Sweet asked.
The girl nodded at the toothless man with his banjo. “Me andJamsie and them. We come all the way from Arkansas, but there's no work.”
“Where's your momma?”
“They're gone to Oregon. Momma and daddy are picking fruit out of trees around Corvallis. Jamsie is too old, and them boys are plain worthless, and I got knocked up. Now we're waiting for them to come back in the fall with money. I should have gone with them.”
“You think they'll come back? Sometimes people don't.”
“Yeah. Nobody knows about money, but they'll be back. My momma is a saint and my daddy is a good man.”
“What accounts for them boys?”
“They'll grow up.” She bit her upper lip and studied Rossie. “You can see there's no husband for this baby. And here you are, looking for girls. And here I am looking for a dollar.”
“We got about six dollars,” Bill Sweet said. “Between us.”
“Well, bullshit,” Rossie said. “I don't do bargaining for pussy.” He pulled out the two dollars he had folded into his hip pocket and held them to her. “For you,” he said. “For nothing but your sweetness.”
“There was never no hope of you getting any pregnant pussy, anyway.” She took the dollars, looking happy. “Those your horses that come through?”
“Not mine. We're running ‘em to Calgary.”
“Cowboys,” she said, her eyes on the ground, smiling something of a secret angry smile. “You fuckers. Let's dance. I like dancing. You got to dance with me. That'll show those assholes.” She flapped the dollars in her hand against her other palm and showed them to Jamsie, who lifted the banjo over his head in a gesture of thanks. “Slow,” the girl said. “One dance for the cowboy.”
For a long four or five minutes Jamsie picked out the chords of a song Rossie knew as “The Cowboy's Lament” while the girl got Rossie's arms around her and led him through a series of shuffling turns, kicking up puffs of dust as they went.
When the old man gave up his playing, she stepped out of Rossie's arms and curtsied. “Thank you, brave gentleman.” She smiled, then ran like he might be following.
“How come you give her that money?” Bill Sweet asked, eyeing Rossie like he'd gone borderline crazy.
Rossie smiled. “The goodness of my heart.”
“So you and me are pals. Since you gave away your money.” Bill Sweet bought another couple of swallows of whiskey and the darkness settled. Swimmers were splashing in the river, and the music was awake with strumming, fiddle picking, voices from around the various fires singing out and replying, and a man counting one and two, three, four, and quick-time music commencing.
“Sure makes you feel like fucking,” Bill Sweet said.
“What do you know about fucking? Nothing, is my guess.”
“You better get on with your dancing. She's waiting for you.”
“Dancing. We got horses in the morning. You could have danced. You was just chickenshit.”
“Yeah. Anyhow this place is running with Gypsies.”
“Where's the difference?”
“Them Gypsies is spooks.”
“They's not any such things as spooks. It's all in your head.”
Bill Sweet studied Rossie for a quiet moment. “There's plenty you don't know nothing about.”
That night Rossie wondered if an inclination toward just riding away was a sign of cowardice even if it was common sense. In the beginning of his dream Mattie was on the meadow, and though he wanted to keep his hands away from the secret silent jacking off, he couldn't.
Rossie called for a red-and-white, bald-faced pinto named Pinky. First there was Rock, the bay with a white star on his forehead. Next was Blackie, and third, asking for trouble, Rossie had picked a smooth-gaited traveling horse and named him Banjo. Now he was going to saddle this pinto, his Pinky horse. It had all come out perfect. He felt nothing of his old confusions about what to do. He was clear in his head and sure-handed and at ease. The sun rose and shadows from the cottonwoods by the river leaped off toward the west. So this is it, he thought. Here it is.
At sunup they were traveling between the fences along graded roads linking up white houses and row-crop fields and orchards. The horses were quick and nervous but followed their pinto bell mare.
“Tractor farmers,” Dickie Wilson said, gazing out over the fields. “If they're not a sorry breed
, what is?”
Jap Hardy rode off to Boise and came back with news. They had been planning on a night with the horse herd secured away in a fenced field and a trip to the bars, but it was not going to happen. “That town is in trouble,” he said. “Three or four hundred men on the streets, going through on the railroad and camping by the river, bumming, boozing, and stealing. No-account, out-of-work assholes from Portland and Seattle, coming home from Washington, D.C., and talking revolution. Useless bastards, looking for handouts. They say they would have burned down the Capitol building and the White House, but General MacArthur got the army out, and ready to shoot. They say the federal government is coming apart. I say let her go. Nobody would miss the son of a bitch.”
“Don't think they'd bother me while I was having a drink,” Tarz Witzell said. “They'd be bumming on you,” Jap Hardy said. “You'd run out of patience, I've seen it. Some of them are carrying pistols. Bad trouble. We are not going in there. We're running horses. They got troubles we don't need.”
Dickie Wilson set down his coffee. “Them boys spend all the day milling and stirring. What do you think? Do they like it?”
Over the next week they swung a long arc along the unfenced edges of the Idaho plains where the irrigated farmlands dried into pasturelands. To the north lay an impassable eighty-mile moonscape of lava flats and volcanic craters, beyond which they could see faint snowy mountains in long north-south reefs. After they crossed a low grassland pass, Jap Hardy told them they were in Montana. “Pretty country from here on,” he said. “She's grass all the way to Calgary.”
Upstream along the Dearborn River, the Rockies Front Range looming to the west, the herd flowed over a grassland bench and down to the Teton River. At the end of the long day, Jap Hardy counted the bell mare and the two hundred and fifty-seven Dufferena geldings and the private horses into a pasture and set of corrals called the French Field. They were upstream on the Teton from the settlers’ town of Choteau.
“How come it's called the French Field?” Bill Sweet asked. Jap Hardy studied him like a problem.
“It's owned by a fellow named French. What'd you think, there might be French girls around here? Hope you boys don't like milk shakes. They got a milk shake store, girls, and a movie house. But you're not going to see em.” He had counted seventeen head which had thrown at least one shoe. “We're not showing up in Calgary with lame horses. We'll stay here tomorrow to nail on shoes.”
The Willow Field Page 7