The Hi-Lo Country

by Max Evans

  An eagle flying straight out above Hi Lo as high as his wings could carry him would see red and white cattle, heads down, grazing in every direction. To the south, on the edge of the desert, were innumerable sheep, with the herders alert for the wild marauding creatures lurking around the edges of the flock. Here the grass struggles to move out into the eroded desert, and the cactus and sagebrush thrust themselves back in pincered stabs at the grassland. It is a static battle, and has been so for thousands of years.

  To the east and the west, for thirty or more miles, the gramma and buffalo grass carpet the land except in those places where flint-hard malpais mesas ripple across the earth like huge, flattened snakes. The same grasses blanket the rolling hills for fifty miles to the north. Here the hills mesh with mountains, and the cedar and pinon change to pine and spruce. All the smaller animals of the open range live here—the coyote, the bobcat, the fox; here, too, are the bear, the deer, and the mountain lion.

  Although Hi Lo has tried hard to act civilized, it can never quite escape the wildness of these wild creatures. Often during Sunday-evening prayers at one of the churches the monotonous, mumbling tones of the congregation will be shattered by the yapping, unsynchronized howling of a pack of coyotes hunting right to the edge of town. And then on the opposite side of town another pack will answer, and yet another some distance beyond. On and on.

  So is it with the people of this land. They listen, and hear the call of the beast.

  Two

  The first time I saw Big Boy was at a country dance. I was giving it. It was a short while after the dust bowl of the early thirties had reduced almost everyone to the same low level. We were all broke and half starved. But now the grass was beginning to return, and a man could latch onto a dollar here and there. I’d hired a couple of Spanish musicians; one sawed on a fiddle and the other pounded a guitar. Everybody was dancing, stomping, yelling, drinking homemade whisky and raising general hell.

  Almost everyone had come in a wagon or on horseback. There were just a few old cars and a couple of pickups outside.

  Big Boy came up to me, introduced himself, and said, “If you ever need any help around here, just yell.”

  I didn’t talk to him again that night; but he lit in and had as fine a time as anyone. It did strike me as odd that a total stranger should make such an offer. Later I learned how much he meant just what he said.

  I had heard about the Matsons when I first came here, years back, but I’d never met any of them before. Big Boy had two younger brothers, his mother and an old grandmother on the Matson Outfit. When Big Boy was just a kid his father had died from a bullet in his lung. The bullet had been put there twenty years before by a rancher in a dispute over the exact location of a fence line. Just the same, it was the bullet that finally killed him. I heard that Big Boy’s grandfather had died the same way down in Texas for whipping a man with a loaded quirt. Instead of lasting twenty years, though, he’d died before his heavy frame hit the ground.

  Big Boy had grown up fast, taking over a man’s job at fourteen and learning to do it right. Being head of a family at that age was quite a calling, and I think that even then black things hovered around him like an invisible spray—felt but never quite seen.

  Time passed and things gradually got better. The price of cattle moved up; the rains came in grass-growing torrents; and a man could begin to plan once more. I hadn’t seen much of Big Boy for several months. We were all too busy trying to make a living. My next meeting with him was because of a horse.

  I had bought a four-year-old sorrel from the C-Bars. He had been broken by their foreman and had a good rein and stop on him. He traveled smooth, with a running walk, and was already developing good cow sense. It was about a month before I got to bring him home with me. I saddled him up and started for home. I noticed some healed-over spur marks on his shoulder that weren’t there before and I wondered about them. In a couple of days I stopped wondering.

  I rode the sorrel (and that’s what I called him, Old Sorrel) out after some springing heifers about two miles from the house. I took him to a shallow, muddy spring to let him water. I put one leg up over the swells of the saddle and lit a smoke. I was about half asleep. Old Sorrel finished drinking, raised his head, and when he pulled his foot up out of the mud the suction made a popping noise. That’s all the excuse he needed. Down between his front legs went his head, and a thousand pounds of horse flesh jumped right straight up in the air. I was caught completely off guard, and on the third jump I went down on my left shoulder into the mud.

  By the time I got up and scraped the mud out of my eyes, Old Sorrel had bucked to the top of the hill and was now in a dead run for the ranch house. I was afoot with a two-mile walk aheadof me. I may say that I was unhappy with that horse.

  Every time I rode him something drastic happened. The mere shadow of a fence post would start him bucking, and the son of a bitch always threw me. He bucked crooked, twisting, gut-wrenching jumps that I just couldn’t handle. He was more of a horse than I was a cowboy, and that’s all there was to it. I tried every trick I knew. It didn’t do any good.

  Now I understood about the spur marks. The foreman was mad because his boss had sold Old Sorrel, so, before I came after him, he deliberately spoiled the horse by spurring him viciously in the shoulders and making him buck. It was a shame, too, because he had the makings of a fine animal.

  I told Lollypop Adams, the bartender at the Double Duty Saloon in Hi Lo, about this and I guess he told Big Boy. Anyway, Big Boy and his brother Sykes, who was just a year or two younger than him, rode up one day. People called Sykes Little Boy. He was as tall as Big Boy but much lighter.

  “Pete,” he said, “I hear you got a spoiled horse on your hands.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. He’s out there in the corral now.”

  “Let’s go look at him,” he said. We all went out to the corral, and Big Boy walked around Old Sorrel twice.

  In a few minutes he asked, “How much you want for him?”

  “My money back,” I said.

  “How much is that?”

  “Seventy-five dollars.”

  “I’ll take him,” he said, and counted out the money.

  I was sure glad to make that sale. Big Boy proceeded to unsaddle the black he was riding.

  “You going to ride mine home?” I asked.

  “That’s what I bought him for,” he said.

  Little Boy hadn’t said anything but “howdy” since they got there. But he got down, tightened up his cinch, and made ready to haze Old Sorrel if need be.

  Big Boy caught the horse and tied him to the snubbing post in the center of the corral. Then he saddled him up, climbed aboard, and started off. I waited for the action to begin, but nothing happened. That horse just plain knew better. Between him and Big Boy it was “no contest.”

  He said quietly, “Let’s go, Little Boy.”

  His brother, leading the black, opened the gate and they rode off together. I stood watching them go, feeling kind of funny. The picture of him saddling that outlaw horse with such ease and total confidence was stamped on my mind.

  Though Big Boy was only about five foot eleven, he gave the impression of being taller, and he looked thirty pounds heavier than the two hundred he actually weighed. An impression of terrific reserve power just barely held in check at all times, was given by the way he talked and moved. I thought of him as being dark, but this wasn’t so: his hair was light brown, and he had a strange kind of skin, almost white but with just the faintest touch of olive, that never tans or burns but always stays the same, indoors or out. He had a long, broken nose, not flattened but twisted a little to the side by a horse’s hoof.

  I just couldn’t handle mean horses as casually as he did, and I had to admit I admired his talent. If only people were more like horses, Big Boy would have lived to a ripe old age.

  Three

  A couple of months later I spotted Big Boy in the Double Duty. We had a drink together and I asked about O
ld Sorrel.

  "He’s goin’ to make a horse yet,” he said and bolted a shot of bourbon. "So far,” he went on, “he’s behaved like an old-time cow pony. He’s reining good and works a rope like he invented it. But I still don’t entirely trust him. Ever since I bought him I’ve been too scared to talk and too ignorant to spell.”

  He said this with little change of expression, but you could sense the affection and respect he felt for the outlaw horse. He was that way about most wild things, but it was a long time before I knew it.

  Well, the war came. I hated it for more reasons than the wholesale killing. The land was making a slow but steady comeback from the plow, the drought, and the consequent depression. Everybody was gradually gaining. The price of cattle had eased upward year by year. Things were breaking just right for the land and its people. Then the cattle price went up overnight. The value of land and grass rose like dead weeds in a cyclone. The land was overstocked again. It would take a few years to show, but it was as inevitable as love and hate. Men that couldn’t operate a ten-furrow garden found out they were cattlemen. All they had to do was borrow from the bank to buy the cattle and get some grass. They couldn’t miss. The rise in prices took care of that.

  The old, the lazy, and the lame stayed behind and got rich. The rest of us went overseas to fight. I didn’t want to. I still can’t understand why I did, considering I was already running 150 head of good white-faced cows when it all started and could have gotten a waiver.

  I told Big Boy, "I wish I had a wife and eleven kids; then maybe I could stay here and feel right about it.”

  “No,” he said, "you wouldn’t.”

  We both went

  We were just average soldiers, maybe less. It was hard to adjust to all that army business, used as we were to living eighteen miles from the nearest village and never having anyone tell us what to do but the weather.

  We came back. That is, most of us came back. Big Boy returned to the ranch, but Little Boy had been in charge so long that he just left things as they were and went to work for Jim Ed Love, who owned the biggest ranch around.

  We didn’t talk about the war much. We knew that war was everybody’s war, but the one here around Hi Lo was ours, and it would be until we left or died, both of which we thought about from time to time.

  I suppose it was the spoiled sorrel I sold Big Boy that started our friendship. It gave us an excuse to talk and have a few drinks together. He liked to brag about how Old Sorrel was learning. And I liked to listen.

  "By the Lord A’mighty, Pete”—I don’t know where he got this expression; he claimed to be an agnostic—"that old pony hasn’t forgot a thing since we left.”

  Well, we got to talking horses, women, rodeo, and a lot of other things. He said: "There’s goin’ to be a two-day show over at Ragoon. Let’s try to make it.”

  "Suits me,” I said.

  The day of the rodeo we loaded my roping horse, a little bay weighing about nine hundred, and his dogging horse, a black about the same size, into the pickup and took off.

  I don’t know why I let Big Boy talk me into getting into the bareback-bronc riding because I am not by nature a bronc rider. Roping is my shot of whisky. I reckon I did it just to please him.

  He entered the bulldogging, bareback-bronc riding, and the bull riding, but not the roping. As good a roper as he was out on the flats and up in the brush, he was helpless in this event in a rodeo arena.

  There was a big crowd as usual, and what seemed like a million horses from all over the country. It was our first show after the war, and I was excited as a country boy the day of his wedding. When I eased down on the raw-boned back of that old bucking horse, I felt every nerve in my body stand at attention. I tried to swallow, and nearly strangled. The sweat ran down my arms and into my eyes.

  I nodded for them to turn him out, because there was no workable alternative. I rode three jumps with my left hand welded to the handle of that bareback rigging. It wasn’t any use at all. I flew off to the left and rolled over a couple of times, eating dirt. I got up and looked for my hat. The bronc was still slamming his hoofs into the ground at the other end of the arena.

  It was a good day for Big Boy. He splayed the steel in his bronc’s shoulders like a hammer after a nail, and took first money. In the bull riding he drew a whirling, spinning, hard-bucking animal and rode him to the whistle for second place. I hazed for him in the bulldogging. He was down, twisting his steer’s neck, before we’d hardly started. Eight seconds flat and first money again. For an amateur rodeo hand this was one hell of a day.

  I took third in calf roping. I made a bobble on my tie and missed first money by four seconds.

  That night we celebrated and got pretty drunk. About two o’clock they ran us out of the bars. We drove over to the all-night restaurant. It was full of cowboys and cowgirls and a lot of other kind of people. We ordered ham and eggs and were minding our own business when this Art Logan, from up in Colorado, walked over. He was running a close second behind Big Boy for the two-day average.

  "Hello, you hook-nosed son of a bitch,” he said.

  Now, in our country the word "son of a bitch” can be a friendly greeting, affectionate, really, or it can be a terrible insult. It’s all according to what’s in the voice. This time it was an insult. There was no mistake about Art Logan being jealous of Big Boy— probably had been for a long time. A lot of people were.

  Art wasn’t as tall as Big Boy, but he had a set of shoulders like a young buffalo and a neck thick as a gallon bucket. Now, when Big Boy Matson doesn’t like a man he gives him a damn good leaving alone. He tried this with Art. It didn’t work. Art kept on.

  “Hell, man, you must have your brother-in-law for a bronc-riding judge. You was marked at least twenty points too high.”

  And so it went. Big Boy put down his fork, pushed his chair back, pulled his hat down tight, and got up. He didn’t say a word. He just went out to the sidewalk, and waited. Everybody in the place started getting up, and a lot of Art’s buddies followed him out. The two of them walked side by side down the walk looking for some place besides the concrete street to fight.

  Suddenly Art whirled and smacked Big Boy in the side of the face, knocking him off the curb. Big Boy was up on his knees when Art hit him with both fists full in the face. Big Boy made it to his feet just the same.

  I ran over, yanked a shovel out of the pickup, and turned to Art’s friends. “Now, stand back and keep the hell out of this!” I yelled.

  Art was swinging so hard that when he missed he fell down. When he connected it sounded like a flat board swung up against a hindquarter of beef. Big Boy was bleeding badly. I’d heard a lot about Big Boy’s prowess as a fighter, but he sure was a slow starter. He kept measuring his man calmly and taking his beating.

  Art got a little desperate and began swinging more wildly. No doubt he was wondering why Big Boy didn’t go down—or when he intended to start swinging back.

  Well, it came, and it came so fast it took most of the suspense out of the thing. Big Boy caught Art with a big right fist as he went by. You could hear the ribs snap like breaking pencils. Big Boy reached down and pulled Art halfway off the street and flailed down into his face about six times. Then he dropped Art and turned around to look for his hat.

  Art stayed where he was a good spell.

  The next day he came to the rodeo as a spectator. He didn’t see much of the show because only one eye was operating, and you couldn’t tell that from over a yard away. Art Logan was supposed to be the roughest man on the amateur rodeo circuit, but that reputation was now badly dented. And when Big Boy went on to win the all-around championship the next day, he didn’t inspire any special love in the hearts of Art and his bunch. But he got from them the same thing he was accorded in Hi Lo —fear and respect.

  Four

  There isn’t too much social activity in our country. That’s one reason we usually drank enough whisky, played enough cards, chased enough women in one weekend to last
us six months. It might be that long before we’d get together again.

  Things happened pretty fast on this particular night: Big Boy and I fell in love with the same woman.

  We decided to go to a fiesta dance down south at the Mexican village of Sano. The road leading to Sano is not calculated to warm the heart of the AAA. It is neither paved nor maintained. Twice a year a delegation of politicos descends on the county seat of Ragoon and raises hell about the road. Since a small but important block of votes exists there, the road gets graded, with many promises of improvements, but these never come to pass.

  Cactus, chamisa, and reptiles inhabit the rolling hills. Here and there in a little valley a few sprigs of grass push their thin way out of the hard dry ground and afford some pasture for a limited number of sheep and goats.

  The village of Sano itself is made of mud from the very earth it rests on. It seems to have sprung up as haphazardly as the grass in the valleys instead of having been made by man.

  The people in Sano live off tiny patches of beans, corn, and squash irrigated from a lazily flowing desert creek that expends itself in the sand only two or three miles from the village. They sun-dry the squash and corn for winter use. The beans are dried and wind-threshed and are a stabilizing factor in an otherwise hopeless economy. Nearly all the food is stored in an airy room in gunny sacks for the long winter ahead.