by J P S Brown
"Come on," the Lion said. "No need for us to wait here and freeze in this wind." He winked at Kane. "We'll wait for Arce at my father-in-law's house."
They climbed over the rock wall and stumbled down the steep, frost-hard, rocky hill toward the little town. They stopped at a white adobe house. The pine shingles on the roof
of the house were hand-hewn. The Lion knocked on the door and roared.
A small, whiskered old man, his face dry and darkened by sun, mountain cold, and woodsmoke, answered the door and quietly welcomed the Lion. Inside, the earthen floor was packed hard and clean. The white plastered walls were washed. A fire in an adobe oven warmed the room. Kane and the Lion sat on rawhide-covered chairs at a scrubbed, slatboarded table. A large woman in a shapeless cotton dress, an immaculate floursack bandana tied around her hair, her face clean and shiny and smiling, served them hot, black, syrupy coffee and white cheese.
The Lion lost his roar in that home. His speech became quiet, controlled. He and the old couple discussed the Lion's errand in the Sierra. A young man entered and respectfully, wordlessly, shook hands with the Lion. The old man sent the young man to the plaza of the little community to watch for Arce. Later the boy came back and told them Arce had arrived.
The town lay in a hollow. Houses had been built on the edge of a small, open plaza. The boy led Kane and the Lion across the plaza to a large store. The proprietor of the store told them Arce was on his veranda. Kane and the Lion passed through the store, up a short flight of steps, and out onto a long, open veranda that overlooked a deep canyon behind the house.
Arce was drinking coffee at a small table. When he turned in his chair Kane noticed he wore big serrano spurs on his black dress shoes. He had turned the spurs around so that they rested on his instep, allowing him the freedom of walking Without dragging the spurs on the ground. He was glad to see the buyers. He stood and smiled and the thick coffee filmed his teeth a tawny yellow.
Arce was very gracious and introduced Kane and the Lion to the proprietor and asked them if they needed anything from the store before they left for Arce's ranch. They said they did not.
"¿Bueno?" Arce said apologetically, as though he regretted they had to leave so soon after so long a journey as the one from Rio Alamos to the Sierra. "¿Nos vámos? Shall we go?"
"We're ready," the Lion said.
"Only I don't know if the Senor Kane is going to like the beast I brought for him to ride. Is he de a caballo, a horseman?"
"Don't worry about him. If he falls off we don't need him anyway," the Lion said.
Three mules were saddled and waiting outside. All of them were small, weighing six or seven hundred pounds at the most. Spurs hung on the saddlehorns of two of the mules. Kane put on a pair of the spurs and mounted a brown mule. The tree of the vaquero saddle was narrow and the stirrups were too short. Kane's knees were doubled up uncomfortably. The stirrups were so small and the noses of their tapaderas so short that Kane's feet would not slide all the way into them. He had to ride on the toes of his feet.
The Lion was in a worse predicament. He was a much bigger man than Kane; His legs were so doubled up under him that his Levis crawled up and showed hairy legs over the tops of his boots. Only the very tip of his boot fitted into the stirrup and the long spurs hung straight down.
A group of serranitos had gathered in the plaza to watch the departure of Arce and his buyers. They had been amused at the picture Kane made on his mule but when the Lion mounted they laughed quietly.
"¡Vale nada!" the Lion said. "It makes no difference!" He spurred the little mule into a lunge and warped the bridle reins over the mule's rear end. The mule paced down the street looking back at the Lion alternately out of the corners of his eyes as though he thought he really had a lion on his back. The three men rode out of` town and across a high, open plateau. The grass covering the ground was flaxen with winter. The cold wind was blowing. The little mules kept up a fast running-walk on the plateau. They slowed when the trail dropped into a deep, wide canyon. The canyon could have been a mile wide. Houses of a ranch at the bottom looked tiny, animals diminutive.
They rode four hours down the canyon. They passed through cornfields that had been grown on the almost vertical sides of the canyon. The tiers of dry cornstalks stood above the trail over the riders, heads and below their feet fell straight down into the canyon. On the trail they encountered cattle that unhurriedly took high ground above them at the sight of the riders and in a moment disappeared in oak brush.
From the plateau, the trail passed down through thick, tall oak; tall, fernlike higuera; and dense scrub oak. Overhead, the tops of mountains were crowned with forests of pine. Above these, so high their colors only occasionally glinted in the sun, flocks of squabbling parrots passed on their seemingly urgent business, quarreling about it as they went.
The men left the big canyon through a gap and rode down over a dim, brushy trail into another narrow, deep canyon. The floor of this canyon leveled off and widened and came to a dead end.
Arce stopped his mount at a place by a stream where a half acre of ground had been carefully cleared of brush, stumps, and rocks. A thick rock wall had been built around this clearing.
This was no stock pen. It had no gate. Arce dismounted and Kane and the Lion awkwardly got down and stretched their legs.
"We can rest here," Arce said smiling. My ranch is only a few hundred meters from here. I want to show you this place and ask our American friend his advice about business I may undertake inside this trinchera, rock wall.
"You see how steep the walls of the canyon are here? How good the earth is? How plentiful the water? This stream never dries. I have often wondered about the possibilities of success of a certain crop in this place. What do you think of the possibility of raising amapola in this place?" he asked Kane. ‘
"Poppies?" Kane asked. "I'll be honest with you. I know nothing about raising flowers."
"Maybe you can tell me something else? What is the American price for goma?"
"Gum? What kind of gum?"
Arce smiled at the Lion to see if his suspicions were true, that the American was only acting ignorant. The Lion showed him no expression.
"Gum of opium," Arce said.
"Ah," said Kane. "I know even less about that."
"I know it is good. The Sierra is ideal for the growing of amapola. This place is perfect. It is hidden. Disgracefully, it is against the law to raise opium poppies but a government airplane would have to pass directly overhead and would have only a very few seconds in which to see this spot from the air. Gum is grown in small patches all over the Sierra but, alas, the crops are often spotted from the air."
"You would be lucky if you were not spotted," the Lion said.
"Yes, I would plant on the chance that during the time my plants were in flower a plane would not pass close enough for the three or four seconds necessary to see my poppies."
"A slim chance. But what if someone informed on you?" Kane asked.
"The people of the Sierra are good. But there would always be that chance," Arce said, smiling.
"This place is on a trail to your ranch? Anyone who was looking for opium poppy growers might accidentally ride by here and see it and catch you," the Lion said.
"I would deny the crop was mine."
"Yes, but could you deny you knew about it? It is also a crime not to report such a crop, is it not?" asked Kane.
"Yes, but if I planted it I would make sure no strangers rode down to my ranch without my knowledge or without a guide, a guide I would assign to wait in the town in case any strangers wished to come into this area. Also, I am the comisario, the only law in this area. I would be warned if any lawman was coming to see me, in which case he would be taken to my ranch over the main trail."
"This is all very interesting to me," Kane said.
"Is it not?" Arce said, smiling. "That is why I brought you here. I knew it would be interesting to you."
"You might say this is a touris
t attraction of the region," Kane said.
"Exactly," Arce said, smiling. "But only at certain times of the year and only now when the trinchera is barren of any crop. Right now you, the Lion, and I are the only tourists. I often come here and look at this place and dream of how one crop would affect my life. I am really the only constant tourist who comes to this place."
"How long have you been coming here?" Kane asked.
"Three years now, " Salvador Arce said.
The three men mounted and rode out of the box canyon, over a piney ridge, and into a steep valley. The small settlement of the Arce ranch headquarters lay in the bottom of this valley.
Arce's house was a large, two-story adobe. The edge of a cliff fell off steeply on three sides of the house. The men dismounted in a small patio enclosed by a rock wall that rimmed the edge of the cliff. One of Arce's mozos unsaddled the mules and fed them dry corn leaves in the patio.
One side of the house was a storeroom for the ranch commissary. Arce unlocked the storeroom, went inside, and opened the top half of the storeroom door. He distributed canned goods and flour to four men who had been waiting at the house when he arrived. He also filled the pint bottles of the men with lechuguilla from a bluish, five-gallon jug. He poured some more into an enamel cup and handed it to Kane.
"Here is something for us to drink that will help us to remember the long trail more kindly," Arce said. "Bring it with you and we'll go to the field for the shoot." He led them down off the hill and around to a large field behind the big house. There, a large gathering of people had formed so quietly that Kane and the Lion were surprised to see them. Schoolchildren in their best clothes were being herded by a tall young man. Several men were waiting at the edge of the field where their mules and horses were tied under some trees. The hard, flat field was about one hundred yards long. The men carried old, single-shot .22 rifles.
The children were shepherded to one side of the field and made to sit in ranks. A young goat, bleating and dragging his feet, was led to a board fence on one end of the field. The goat's horns were fastened to the limb of a tree over his head and his legs were tied to the bottom of the fence. Only the agate-eyed face of the goat and about six inches of the neck could be seen above the fence.
Each of the men took a shot at the goat's face with his rifle from the other end of the field. The goat danced a quick little jig each time a bullet passed by or struck near him. The last man fired and a piece of one of the goat's horns disappeared. The Lion showed a long-barreled .22 pistol that he had been carrying in his belt under his shirt. "Heh, heh, heh," he growled, smelling innocent blood. "We will see." The meat was seventy-five yards away and its warm and appetizing bleat was stirring the Lion. He pointed the pistol and knocked the tip of the other horn off the goat. He handed the pistol to Kane. "Here. I spared him for you," he said. .
Kane aimed high and squeezed off the round. The goat dropped and hung from the tree by his horns. Everyone on the field ran to see where the bullet had struck. The goat was dead. The bullet had gone in the throat and hit the spine. Kane was not proud of the shot. He had hoped to hit the spot between the eyes or shoot over the goat's head and miss him completely.
"You hit him in the pure life, en la pura vida," Arce said. A mozo stabbed the goat's throat with a wide, sharp knife and sliced the throat open. The jugular emptied the goat's blood in a gush into a bucket a child was holding under the wound. The mozo carried the goat back to the patio of Arce's house and skinned it and jointed the meat. The shooting went on and three more goats were killed.
Women came to Arce's house and cleaned the paunches of the goats and filled them with diced little squashes, potatoes and onions, and sewed the paunches up with needle and thread. The joints of meat were placed in clay pots, the paunches on top. The lids of the pots were sealed with moist cornmeal. The pots were buried in pits on beds of live coals. Arce's young wife came over to greet Kane and the Lion. The girl was heavy-boned, with the plain, light, healthy features of the white woman of the Sierra. She wore dark clothing, black stockings, and chaste black oxfords. She invited the men into her kitchen and served them coffee. Aroe showed his guests "el alto," the upper story where they would sleep. They climbed up the notched log through a trapdoor to the room. Two heavily blanketed cots had been prepared for them. They washed in an enamel pan with water from a china pitcher and threw the water out the window to the field behind the house. A two-way radio in the corner of the room was Arce's communication with Rio Alamos and Chihuahua City.
When Kane and the Lion had washed they climbed back down to the kitchen where the lamps had been lit and the table set for supper. They ate small portions of fried potatoes, fried jerky, and fried beans with black coffee. They filled up on a pile of corn tortillas kept hot in floursack napkins on the table.
"Do you wish to attend the program honoring Benito Juarez?" Arce asked Kane and the Lion when they had finished supper.
"Of course," Kane said.
"After the ceremonies a dance will be held," Arce said. He led Kane and the Lion out of the house. The night was cold and the wind had not diminished. They walked across a wide stream to a small plaza. It was surrounded by small homes on three sides and a mountain several thousand feet high on the other. The people of the village were still inside their houses.
A stone bust of Benito Juarez in the center of the plaza decorated with homemade crepe flowers stared with stoic Indian pride into the wind. Benches were set on the ground around Benito Juarez. A small board stage was set up behind him.
Salvador Arce started a gasoline generator behind the stage. Lightbulbs strung around the plaza went on. He tried the speaker system. It worked falteringly. He found a phonograph and put on a record. He turned up the volume.
Accordion music of the Sonora-Chihuahua ranchers blared out over the Sierra Madre, riding the wind to the west across the black peaks in the cold dark.
People came out of their homes and began forming in the plaza. The profesór marched his half-dozen students to the stage. The tallest students stood on the ground in front of the platform. The small ones stood on the stage. The strident music of the phonograph was shut off. The children chanted student songs. Then each had a solo turn on the stage reciting singsong poems of praise to "El Benemérito de las Americas," Benito Juarez.
When these annual praises had been dutifully sung by the children and dutifully concurred to by the listening parents and grandparents, the barbecued goat was brought to the plaza. The meat was so well cooked that it slipped from the bones leaving them slick, clean, and shining. The meat was served on tortillas. After the last polished bones had been thrown to the town dogs, the benches were carried back and set under the strings of lights. The phonograph tuned up again and the dance began.
The old people who did not dance wrapped themselves in blankets and sat by fires laid around the dance ground. The fires threw quick, indistinct shadows on the sides of the big mountain. The girls, showing off their best dresses in the cold, hugged the young men who courted them to the tune of music on the dance ground.
The dance was still going strong after midnight. By then the cold had long since climbed into Kane's bones from the ground through his feet. Kane and Arce and the Lion started up the hill toward their beds. They crossed the stream and came upon an old man sleeping on the rocks in the path with his wine bottle lying on his hand. Arce awakened him.
"Prisciliano, you will freeze here," Arce said, lifting him by the arms to a sitting position. The old man gathered himself and sat up by himself, his old, cracked feet in their huaraches coming to life under him.
"Go to the fire, old man. Don't be dumb," the Lion scolded in the tone he reserved for old men, ignorant foreigners, and dumb Indians. The old man turned a clear, cold eye on the Lion."
"I am not dumb, young man," he said, "Háblame recio pero no golpeado. Speak to me loudly if you will but don't buffet me with your tone."
"Pardon me," the Lion said, mocking him. "I thought you were ju
st another little drunk bent on freezing yourself to death."
"I am eighty-eight years old, young man, and I have never been drunk."
"Don't sleep here, Prisciliano," Salvador Arce said. "Go to the fire. Drink some coffee. Take care of yourself."
"Thank you, Salva, I will," the old man said, patting Arce on the leg and dismissing him.
Arce led his guests on up the hill and into the warm kitchen of his home. He stoked the fire in the stove to heat the coffee.
"Do you know who that old man is?" Arce asked the Lion, smiling.
"I don't think so," the Lion `answered.
"That is Prisciliano Guevara. The father of Saturnino Guevara."
The Lion looked blank for a moment, then comprehended.
"Ah, sí, sí," he said. "The father of the assassin?"
"Precisely." Arce smiled, satisfied the Lion knew who the old man was.
"What happened to the son, the tigre? Tell Kane about him," the Lion said.
Arce poured three cups of coffee. He addressed the story to Kane.
"This old Prisciliano is a very intelligent man. He came to the Sierra fifty years ago. The way you saw him there on the path is the way he arrived in the Sierra, with nothing. He had been a priest. He left his parish somewhere in the south of Mexico. I believe he came here in search of the treasures of the Spanish Jesuits. I think he thought he knew the whereabouts of such treasures from old maps he had seen. He never acquired any treasure, though. He worked in the mines as a laborer and spent his earnings on wine. He worked as a vaquero. He cut lumber. He helped build houses here. All his work has only been for wine.