by J P S Brown
The tourist had been jabbering and now Kane listened to him.
"Boy, what a wild one, what a wild one," the tourist was ,J shouting. "He sure bounced you off beautifully, cowboy. I'd give anything to have a picture of that."
Kane pulled himself up on the fence. He was dizzy and he had to hold on to the fence with all his might to keep from passing out. He stuck his head through the boards in the fence and pressed his chest down on the board under him. He began to feel very warm and cozy in the head and he was sure he was passing out and all his weight went down on the board and he rode the board far away. He found a good place and when he started coming back he saw his hands in the sun on the white board below him and he started feeling better. He kept hanging there loving that board under him and caressing the other board under that one as though the boards were making the pain go away. Then he started to sweat nicely.
The tourist had come over and was standing near him. Kane didn't want to move even though he knew the tourist was laughing at the position he was in.
"Boy, that was funny. The funniest, most ludicrous thing I've ever seen. You with your hiney in the air like that. If I only had a movie camera for that sequence I could make a million dollars."
He came closer, laughing, enjoying life out West. When he was in front of Kane, Kane reached up and got him by the lapels of his orange suede coat and jerked him down and butted him under the chin with the top of his head. This is one time I'm glad I lost my hat when I got bucked off, he thought. The tourist collapsed under the fence and Kane hung there groping for him but he couldn't reach him and the tourist flopped out from under him and crawled away. Kane hung there a while longer. He heard a car drive away.
When he tried to walk again he found he still could put no weight on the leg. He crawled across the corral to the edge of the saddle house and found a pickax for a crutch to help him to his car. He had to clutch, brake, and accelerate with his good foot. He could not move his bad leg. The gate at the highway looked like the Rocky Mountains to him when he drove up to it. He had to unload the leg, open the gate, load the leg and drive through, stop, unload again and close the gate. He loaded again and drove to Frog's Frontier Bar. He borrowed some ice to put on the knee before it swelled. He had a shot of Old Crow for the pain. He asked Frog to go and unsaddle Whiskey Talk and turn him out to pasture.
9
The Sale
The day the Mexican mares crossed the border they were shipped to an auction at Clovis, New Mexico. Very few people came to the sale. The bad luck, the plight of the mares was such that a hurricane of wind and rain was blowing the day the mares were sold.
Jim Kane, standing in a wind that took his breath away, ` before he led the first mare into the sales ring to start the auction, laughed because he was relieved the time of bad luck was probably finished for the mares and he could start on something new himself. Something new might offer him good luck, produce for him a living. After all, win or lose, he was turning his mares over to people that might not have bad luck with them. This sale would put the cost of the mares for the new owner down where the owner could see the real value of the mares. Kane knew that no one who braved a hurricane to bid at this sale was going to give one penny more than the stock was worth to him.
Jim Kane led each mare into the sale barn and paraded her before three men who stood in the ring while the wind through the overhead rafters in the high barn lifted and slammed at the loose tin roof and drowned the auctioneer's voice.
As the little mares, the calicos, the sorrels with gold flecks on them, the whites with black spots, the blues with polka dots on their round and plump and white-blanketed rumps, went through the ring, Kane's stake in the little ranch he wanted with the nopal in the clearing went with them. The three buyers, bidding in accord and keeping the price down by solemn agreement among themselves, had no way of knowing that Jim Kane had lost his stake to them in bringing the mares from Jalisco to Clovis, new Mexico. They only knew they were making sure they'd get their dollar's worth and that was the only way they liked to do business. They were kind to each other and each other's dollar and were keeping all other considerations out of the deal. They didn't let selfishness make them crazy bidders. One puffed a pipe, one a cigar, one cigarettes, and all three calmly and evenly divided the mares by quality and color. The man with the pipe took fourteen head, the man with the cigar took fifteen, and the man on cigarettes took fifteen. And Jim Kane took himself back to Frontera without enough money to pay Eligio Gavilan the feed bill for the more than three months the mares had been in his corrals.
Eligio was at his stool in the Montezuma Bar when Kane found him.
"¿Qué hubo, Jim?" Eligio said. "How did you do at the sale?" He didn't give Kane time to answer. "Did you bring my little check?"
"I brought a check. I don't have enough to pay everybody, Eligio."
"Ah, you make like the tontito, the little dumb one, eh?"
"No, this time my calculations are correct. I have enough to pay you or Will Ore or each of you half of what I owe you and enough to pay the bank. But not enough to pay everyone all the money I owe."
"Why you want to pay Will Ore? Will Ore is your friend. He can wait. Pay the bank and if you have any money left, pay me.
"Will Ore has been very good to you and me both, Eligio."
"Ah yes, Will Ore is a very good man, a very good man. He will be glad to wait for his money for a friend."
"Where is he, Eligio? His office phone doesn't answer. His home phone doesn't answer."
"He went to Magdalena. But he'll be back. Pay me if you want to and I'll tell him when he comes back. He'll understand."
"Come on, Eligio. One roll of the dice to see who I pay. I can't pay you both."
"No, no, no, no. I don't like the dice. I always lose at the dice and I don't like to lose. I am very unlucky. It's a sin to gamble, you know that? A sin to gamble. No, no, no, no, no, I won't gamble, it's a sin."
"Only one roll," Kane said.
"I am tempted but I'm not going to do it. Don't tempt me anymore," Eligio said.
"What shall I do then, Eligio?"
"Don't ask me. I am merciless," Eligio said, hissing his merciless.
"Don't give me mercy, Eligio. Tell me what to do."
"Pay the gringos. I am a merciless man. I'll get you when you come through my corrals. If you don't pay the gringos they will stop you from doing business. I want you to stay in business. When you come through my corrals with cattle I will cobrar, demand payment. If you bring two steers I will cobrar one steer and an ear and the tail of the other. I am a merciless man, a demon to cobrar."
"Thank you, Eligio."
"You have style, Kane. I'll get the money. Only promise me one thing. Please don't bring me any more diseased horses. Stay out of the diseased horse business. The American veterinarians are killing me with sanitation?
"I promise, Eligio."
"Good. I invite you to a brandy."
Kane drank the brandy with Eligio and paid for it.
10
The Commission
The Cave across the border in Frontera, Sonora, was a bar and restaurant which had once been a dungeon. The Cave had been carved deep in the rock of a hill that dominated Frontera. The owner of the Cave, an Italian immigrant, had bought it from the town of Frontera, Sonora, soon after the First World War when that town had moved its prisoners out of the Cave to a jail it had prepared for them of brick and mortar. For many years the iron shackles and chains on the walls of the Cave had served the Italians patrons as conversation pieces. Now they were gone and the walls were painted gold, its highest ceilings were painted the color of the sky and electric stars blinked from them. A string orchestra played in the dining room from noon until the Cave closed in the early morning and diners had their choices of "The most extensive varieties of foods and wines in r northern Mexico or the southwestern United States." The food was very good and the Cave dining room was the place where the people who made the two border towns th
eir headquarters went when they wanted elegance. The Italian, however, had never effectively been able to control the black scorpions that once in a while fell from the high ceiling of the Cave into the soup of old ladies who came to Frontera on bus tours.
Jim Kane walked across the line to the Cave to have a drink. The bar was crowded. A band of mariachis were standing in a semicircle playing for a crowd of Americans in a booth. The bar's row of booths was packed. Tourists high on margaritas, businessmen and their wives from Arizona, uniformly undressed college children from Tucson in Robinson Crusoe hats, danced in the space between the bar and the booths with the loud trumpets of the mariachis in their ears.
Terry Garrett and Ira March, two cattlemen Kane knew, were at the bar with two girls. They were having a nice time. Terry Garrett's blond hair was hanging in his eyes from under his hat. Ira March's hat was cocked on the side of his head. Garrett grinned out of the side of his mouth at the girl by his side. The grin came out of only one side of his face because a scar stiffened his face on the other side. Ira March's grin, which showed no teeth and had always reminded Kane of the rattlesnakes grin, if a rattlesnake could grin, split his face like a scar. The two cowpunchers and the two girls were hunched closely together over their drinks on the bar, intently enjoying their conversation and their becoming intoxicated. One girl looked as feral as an Aztec with her big, slanted eyes and short,thin, hooked nose, and lips that were too full to be civilized. The other girl sat up straight and handsome at the bar, her head haughty and erect. The bare neckline of her black dress plunged out of sight under the edge of the bar. A gold religious medal on a gold chain adorned this naked area that she knew men liked to look at the most. Kane stopped at the bar and Garrett saw him. Garrett squalled as if the owls had hold of him. ‘
"There he is, I see him. I knew if we talked about him it would be our bad luck for him to show up here among us," Garrett shouted.
"Who is it?" the Aztec asked.
"Jim Kane," Ira March said.
"Is he the one you've been talking about all afternoon?"
"That is him," Ira March said.
"Mr. Kane, come over and join us," the other girl said. They turned on their stools to greet Kane. Ira March had his arm in a cast. Kane tapped the cast instead of shaking hands.
"What did it to you?" Kane asked.
"Saddle bronc," Ira said.
"Bucked you off?"
"I've got to admit it."
"Don't feel bad. I fell off one on New Year's Day."
"I never fall off because I don't ever get on one," Terry Garrett said. "Give Kane whiskey," he told the bartender. "I'm a lover, " he mumbled, squeezing the Aztec.
Kane stayed with Terry Garrett and Ira March through the evening. Much later they went to the Toreo Bar which specialized in strip shows and girls from the streets. The Toreo was the place border traders went when they wanted to play dirty. They arrived in time for the midnight floorshow. Ladies of the evening had already taken their stations at the tables where men drank. The place was dark. The heads of many brave bulls killed in the Frontera bullring stared glassily from their places on the walls. The bar was owned by the Count, a friend of Kane's, who for many years had been the empresario of the bullring. The Count seldom attended the functions held in his Toreo Bar.
Ai spotlight fell on a girl as she dodged and stumbled through the crowded tables from her dressing room. She arrived at the edge of the dance floor, composed herself, raised her arms, and tried gracefully to flex her uneducated wrists. Instead of the flowing movement of hands and arms she had seen somewhere and was trying to remember and reinterpret, she succeeded only in causing her many gold bracelets to slide down to her elbows. She stepped out in long-legged paces at the end of which she unemphatically placed painted toes upon the floor. She felt her way around the floor, her waving arms halted by the jerk of each overextended step. Periodically she sought to recover her balance and dance by violently nodding her head so that her long, black hair waved furiously like the wringing tail of a nervous horse. Meanwhile the band, a nonsyncopated group of union members, independently of each other blared leering sounds.
When the floorshow was over the ladies of the evening each ordered another drink and stared stonily past the drinking men proximate to them at their own reflections in the glass eyes in the heads of the bulls on the walls. This was a sign that they were giving the drinking men exactly one drink's time in which to make their propositions. If, by the end of that drink no formal commitments had been made to the ladies, the ladies would gather themselves, their cigarette lighters, and their jeweled purses, and leave the table, not looking back, to choose another drinker who had been similarly recently abandoned.
Jim Kane's friends were now in the clearest state of complete drunkenness. They were ignoring their girl friends and talking business. They discussed cattle and how much money they were sure was to be made on the border. Kane listened indifferently. He had no present business other than enjoying his drink and looking at the people. Terry Garrett was giving Ira March a lesson in Mexican border cattle trading. "Ira, if I had been around this border as long as Jim Kane has and could speak the language as well as he can, I could be making at least fifty thousand dollars a year. "
"Is that right?" Ira asked, looking at Kane with new respect.
"Hight. Kane and I were raised on this border. I learned to speak Spanish when I was a kid but I've forgotten it. How come I forgot Spanish and you didn't forget Spanish, Kane?"
"I just didn't forget. I have always spoken it. I stayed here when you left."
"Well, I used to speak it well but I don't now. I've been too busy making money all my life. That is one thing I've got on you, Jim Kane, you don't know how to make money. "
"That don't make a bad feller out of him," Ira March said.
"I mean it. Jim Kane has had more chances to make real money than anyone I ever knew. He has all the ability in the world. His deals always go sour because he don't know how to make money."
"Well, so what?" Kane said.
"Well, you sonofabitch, you don't know how to make money, that's what."
"I may not know how to make money but I know how to knock the head rolling off anyone that calls me a sonofabitch."
"You big sonofa . . ."
Kane stood up.
"I was just going to say, " Garrett said, "you big sonofagun, I don't need my head knocked off."
Kane sat down. "Well, I don't need to knock your head off," he said.
"I was going to say that Ira and I want you to buy some rodeo cattle for us and you can make some money."
"I could go for that."
"How well do you know the Rio Alamos area?" Ira March asked Kane.
"I've never been there but I have a friend down there."
"We need good-horned steers for rodeo. We believe you can get the best kind around Rio Alamos," Garrett said. Rio Alamos is in the dirty zone," Kane said,
"Yes. The tick zone. Anything that comes out of there for export has to be quarantined sixty days in the clean zone north of Hermosillo."
''Gawd, don't talk to me about quarantines," Kane groaned.
"The quarantine won't be your concern. You just buy the cattle and ship them to us. We'll find pasture for their quarantine."
"How long do you want me to buy for you down there?"
"For as long as we can make money at it." '
"What's in it for me?"
"We'll give you two dollars a head and expenses on all the cattle you buy for us."
"You'll put up all the money, all the cost of the cattle?"
"Of course. We'll count your expenses in the cost. You draft on us when you get a load together. Include all your expenses on the draft with the cost of the cattle plus any freight."
"How soon do you need the cattle?"
"Yesterday."
The three men firmed the agreement between them by shaking hands.
11
Rio Alamos
Arriba ya del caba
llo, hay que aguantar los reparos. This means that once you've chosen to mount a horse you have to, as a man, take any pitching and bucking he might decide to hand you.
In February a dust haze hung over the coastal desert of Sonora. The Alamos Valley was a green slash in the desert. The highway led down off a gentle rise, around a curve, through irrigated fields, through a long line of giant poplar trees, to Rio Alamos. The big poplars, the álamos of Rio Alamos, were sixty to one hundred feet tall, and were growing so close together that from a distance their tops could not be distinguished one from another.
Kane drove across a long bridge spanning the Rio Alamos. The river flowed widely, sparely, and shallowly to the west and the Sea of Cortez. Alamo trees lined the road into town. At the edge of town the highway gave out. It broke into stubborn slabs of asphalt between which deep potholes grew. Then, at the beginning of the main street, the front of Kane's car plunged into a dust fine as flour that boiled inside the car and sloshed like mud from under the tires onto the sidewalk. The dust, when disturbed, kept its substance in flight and settled quickly and densely on store fronts and pedestrians.