The Hi-Lo Country

by Max Evans

  We both took a big drink. Maybe it helped me shut my mind to what she’d said. I don’t know. I saw the car lights up ahead. Big Boy and Mona were already at Meesa’s place.

  I began to get the idea that Josepha felt the witch would reveal something about Mona that would back up her accusations. I said, “What tricks does this woman pull?”

  “She can tell you just about anything you want to know. About anyone.”

  “What else?”

  “Well, I’ve seen her ease childbirth with a mixture of raw eggs and onions. It soothes the pain and draws out the baby.”

  “I’m not pregnant,” I said. “How does she cure hangovers?”

  “Oh, that’s easy for Meesa. It’s eggs again. You just rub a hen egg on your stomach, then break the egg, pour it in a dish and place it behind your head.”

  “I’ll try that first thing in the morning,” I said.

  “She can hex people, too. I think I’ll have her make one for me.” She smiled sweetly at me. I couldn’t tell if she meant it or not.

  “It’s a good thing I don’t believe in this stuff or I’d be scared to death of you,” I said.

  “The way to protect yourself from a hex is to hang a pair of open scissors over an open window. That cuts the tails off the evil spirits as they enter. An evil spirit without a tail is helpless.”

  “That’s a good thing to know,” I said, and took another drink. We pulled up in front of the adobe house of Meesa the witch. It sat alone—no other home was within an eighth of a mile.

  Josepha said: “I’ll go in and tell her what we want. We’ll have to enter one at a time. I’ll be last. You’ll have to decide which of you will be first.”

  “We’ll roll high dice for it,” Big Boy said.

  While Josepha made the arrangements, we hunkered down in front of the car lights and rolled the dice. Naturally, Big Boy won. I was next.

  In a few moments Josepha came back out and said, “She’s waiting.”

  Big Boy went in, and we all huddled behind the car, trying to get out of the wind that was growing stronger all the time. Mona and I took another drink. Josepha refused. She was standing very close to the left of me. Mona stood on my right, her arm just barely touching mine.

  After a while Big Boy came back. He was very white.

  “Give me the whisky,” he said, and took about five swallows.

  “Lord A’mighty, I’m sure glad I don’t believe what that woman said.”

  I could hear Mona begging him to tell her as I left to take my turn.

  The old woman sat at a tiny table with nothing but a black cloth on it. There was a strange acrid smell in the room, mixed in with the scent of burning cedar. I could see a cracked mud pot oozing a little smoke under a window.

  “Enter, my son,” she said, rising and to my surprise giving me a good solid handshake.

  I had heard of her for many years. Everyone in our country had, of course. But this was the first time I’d seen her up close. In the dim lamplight she appeared much younger than I had expected. There were no wrinkles in her face. Her age showed only in the tight skin across the jutting cheekbones and around the large sunken eyes. Even the skin of her hands was smooth, but thin as onionskin.

  “The cards or the crystal?” she asked.

  “Crystal?”

  She removed the black cloth from around the top of a small crystal ball.

  “That’ll be fine,” I said. The smell came stronger from the pot and seemed to permeate my whole being. I was sure that even the high wind of Hi Lo could not blow that scent away.

  “What do you wish to know most of all?” she asked.

  I thought of Mona. Then a cold prickling went up the back of my neck. What if Josepha had planned this whole act and made a deal with the old woman? It was possible.

  I said, “I’d like to know if all of us here tonight will live and be prosperous through the next year.”

  The old woman looked at me, and I was sure she could read my every thought. Then she put her hands around the ball a moment, warming it, and when she pulled them away her huge black eyes burned into the glass.

  I waited.

  Silence.

  The wind talked to us, and the smell of cedar grew even stronger. Finally, just as I thought I was going to pass out, her voice came to me.

  “Ah, yes, here it is. It comes now. Clearer. Clearer.”

  I wanted to scream, What! What! but kept my mouth shut.

  “Yes, young man, yes. It is large and clear. It is the sign of death. Death will come.”

  “Death? Whose?” I croaked. “Who?”

  “Quiet,” she said. “Now you have destroyed the vision. It is gone. It is done.”

  I lighted a cigarette with a shaky hand.

  “Put it out!” she screamed. “Put it out immediately. Something else comes in the glass. It is something you must do in the next hour of our universe. Something you must know.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Ah, it must be your decision,” she said. And so saying, she folded the cloth back around the glass. “That is all. Go.”

  Brother, I went. For the first time in my life I wanted out in that wind. I wanted to tear this smell away from me and cleanse my lungs. But it was still now. Very still.

  I met Mona walking up the path toward me. “I saw you come out,” she said, and brushed lightly against me as she passed.

  My head was whirling dizzily; otherwise I would have run to the car.

  “Where’s Big Boy?” I asked Josepha.

  “Passed out in the back seat,” she said. “He’s dead drunk.”

  “Don’t use that word,” I said.

  “Drunk?”

  “Never mind. Give me a drink.”

  She handed me a bottle from the front seat of Mona’s car. It was two-thirds gone. After I drank I could still smell the cedar. It was so still. ... I stood breathing in the unusually sluggish night air and looked up at the moon smiling down at us. Or was it scowling? I squinted and decided it was neither.

  “Josepha, the moon is laughing at us.”

  “It has its own way,” she said, and leaned full length against me. I almost went to sleep holding her. Then I saw the door open and the light jump out of the house for a moment and jump back in.

  “Go on, Josepha,” I said. “It’s your turn.”

  She went.

  Mona came toward me with her sinuous walk and her tight blue dress. She was as pale as Big Boy had been, but the moon gave her face a blue glow several shades lighter than the dress. That goddam dress! Why did she have to wear it? The memory of her thighs and the movement of her hips penetrated through the alcohol, and I wished again for the wind to come and fill my lungs with fresh air. It was hard to breathe.

  She said in a whisper, “What did she tell you, Pete?”

  I took her by the arm. “Let’s walk a minute and I’ll tell you.”

  We came to a little sandstone gully. I set the bottle down and turned to her.

  “What did she say, Pete?”

  “This,” I said, and pulled her to me. It was as before. No giving, no refusing.

  Suddenly I threw her to the ground and fell on top of her. She rolled away, and I thought crazily, Good! Resist me. I’ll rape you anyway, but please, resist me! But it was only the slope of the ground. She rolled into a gully and I scrambled madly after her. Then my arms were around her and I pulled her down against the flat stone. My mouth found hers, and my breath rasped in my throat. I ripped the buttons from the front of her dress and tore the brassiere from one breast.

  It was over very quickly.

  She lay as still as the stone beneath her. I raised my head and looked into her face. Her eyes met mine . . . saying nothing, just looking. I felt numb.

  And then things became extremely lucid. She had not even given me the satisfaction of destroying her resistance. For a moment my hand tightened around a rock and I fought the urge to bash her head into the ground with it. Then the hand loosened. I got up a
nd walked a step or two away.

  I looked down at her. Only her eyes moved. They stared up at me—through me. The laughing moon gleamed along her thighs; the naked breast, with my teeth marks on it, gleamed like another little moon. I had not had the pleasure of raping her— hurting her. She had denied me that. Everything that had gushed from me—everything—had simply been absorbed. Not a shred of it had been returned. She lay there as if she waited for the next in line.

  The only thing that had been violated was the honor and trust of two friends. I reached for the bottle, but I didn’t drink. Instead I hurled it away from me, and it smashed against a rock, the liquid dulling its crash as it shattered to pieces.

  I bent and picked her up and struggled back to level ground. I had to get her to the car before Josepha came back or Big Boy woke up. I had to. She rested her head against my shoulder, and I thought I felt her sigh.

  There before us stood Josepha. I couldn’t speak. I put Mona on her feet and her eyes opened. She swayed a moment, then righted herself.

  Josepha said dully: “Come with me. Meesa will give you a shawl to cover yourself.”

  Twenty

  The death of Big Boy Matson had been delayed these last few weeks by Providence, Levi Gomez, and the silence of Mona Birk. It would be delayed still further by man’s struggle with the elements. Man had no time or strength left to fight his fellow man. I knew the battle I was waging on my own ranch was being fought all over the Hi Lo country.

  The winter snow had been light and the spring rains had been few and far between. I rode across the pastures searching for green. It was almost nonexistent except along the draw leading to the water hole. No question about it, the drought had its teeth in our throats. The grass had dried, twisted, and shrunk by the hour.

  My face felt eroded, wind-ripped, wrinkled. It was a hot dry wind now as spring spilled into summer. It rapidly gathered in strength and whipped the fast-drying grass back and forth, shriveling it further, taking the green life from its thin tips where they broke away—shortening the stems and shortening the life of the valley. Around the roots of the grass the earth was torn loose, gradually exposing the tender shoots to the ceaseless inferno of the burning wind. The air filled with millions of minute particles of dust and vegetation. The intense blue of the sky gradually changed to a dull yellow. The water hole became coated with filthy scum.

  Each day I rode out into the pastures. I tied my hat down with a red bandana and wrapped another about my face to filter the dust from my nostrils. The horse pasture was scoured clean and barren. Perpetual clouds of red-brown earth swirled upward. The horses had long ago been turned into the main stock pasture. It wouldn’t last long, but as yet they were in fair shape.

  The cattle foraged in the foothills where the wind had done the least damage, but in the late afternoon they stood abjectly in the poor shelter of the scrubby pinon. Some of the mother cows, whose weakened calves had been eaten by coyotes, bawled forlornly. Their bones showed more prominently every day.

  Mid-August, and things got neither better nor worse. But now the very thought of winter was a threat. God, how many winters we’d endured with the one idea: Hold out till spring, just a little while now till spring. And then at last the spring greenness, the lush summer, and the early fall when the hay was stacked in the lot next to the barn. Let the snow fall then. But now . . .

  My saddle horses fared a little better than the cows. Their longer, sharper teeth enabled them to eat the grass much closer to the ground than the cows could. Even so, they showed the wear. Their ribs were beginning to look like barrel staves along their sides. I could feel the spring missing from Old Baldy’s fast running-walk. I rode him, though, with a feeling of confidence born of our many hard-working years together.

  Then hope returned on one of those few days when the wind let up a little. The stock moved about, foraging harder than ever for survival. The sky retained its dirty hue, but the dust settled and the wind sank to a barely audible whisper.

  I rode down to check the water hole. I had been aware for a few moments of the slow monotonous bawling of a white-faced bull moving closer and closer. The bull came up the draw toward the spring, plodding straight ahead. His mouth was open and his nostrils were scenting the air. A two-year-old unbred heifer grazed near the water hole where there were still a few sprigs of grass. Her tail arched slightly from her hips. She was in heat. The bull had, caught the scent, and he moved forward telling the world of his intentions.

  He stopped where the heifer had urinated, and smelled the froth-covered spot. His upper lip curled and his eyes rolled back as his head went up. He pawed at the ground, first one forefoot then the other. The earth sent up a puff of dust at each stroke, and a deep, throbbing sound burst from his lungs. Then he moved to her, smelling her hips, snuffing, tasting. He pawed again, his bawling rising in pitch until it was almost a shriek. The great knotted muscles in his shoulders rippled. The massive red shaft came out from his underbelly. He raised up, his forelegs split across her back. There was life yet.

  If the rains would just come.

  I rode back to the house, hitched up a work team, and made for the hills. I might as well haul some wood, I thought. It would sure as hell be dry enough to burn.

  I swung the ax with automatic precision. It ate through the gray outerstains of the dry dead pinon and exposed the fresh, cream-colored inner wood. Each downward flash of the blade widened the V of the cut and a smooth chip flew into the air. I made a last swing, then broke the log in two with the butt of the ax. Each piece was short and light enough so that I could load it onto the wagon by myself. Later I would shorten it further for use in the cookstove and fireplace.

  I undid the lines from the wagon wheel where they had been tied so as to pull back on the horses’ mouths if they tried to move forward while I was away from the wagon and crawled up on the load.

  I yelled, “Giddup, Bob. Giddup, Bill.” The two horses strained against the traces and put the wheels in motion. I held the reins not quite tight, not quite loose, for best control.

  I looked out across the pastures beyond the valley above my home. A few weeks more and the stock, the feed, the whole valley would be destroyed. I gritted my teeth and swore softly.

  The wind had blown so hard and so long it was impossible to remember a time without wind. It slacked slightly now and then, but these periods of quiet were of little comfort. All the growing things in the meadows and hills had already given themselves to the eternally sucking, consuming wind.

  In a way the wind itself had kept me from breaking. The necessity for physical action had given me no time to think. Day after day I rode out into the dust-choked valley. I rode with my head down, raising it only when I was in the foothills. I found one old cow down and on the lift. I got off and took hold of her tail.

  "Come on up, baby,” I said, straining with all my strength. The old whiteface cow turned her dirt brown face to me but she couldn’t get up. I had to leave her.

  A little farther on I found another, and this one I managed to tail up. She breathed hard and went lumbering off, wobbling from side to side. I knew she wouldn’t last another day.

  The next three I found were dead. Their stiff legs stuck out straight. The dust was piled up against them in delicate, shifting little dunes.

  Dust pneumonia was killing them. They were so weak they couldn’t get up, and with every breath they breathed dust into their lungs.

  The herd bull stood with his huge head bent low. His once thick neck was thin and weak. He no longer went about his breeding duties, but stood motionless, his strength draining away, and bawled low and coarse into the wind.

  Then I found a mother cow with her calf half born. She had been too weak to shed it. Along with its mother it had died, never having seen the new world it sought.

  I rode up into the jumbled boulders beneath the rimrock hunting grass I knew I wouldn’t find. Old Baldy labored, but he had some strength left. The white slobbers ran down the long shanked
steel bits and turned to mud in the boiling dust. His thick dark mane showed a line of dirt where it parted along the top of his neck. I stared from bloodshot eyes out over hollow cheeks, searching the crevices for patches of grass or dead cattle. It was hopeless, but I knew I had to try to keep trying.

  Old Baldy worked his ears back and forth when I talked to myself, as if he understood every word. We threaded our way through the boulders, through the gullies and oak brush, and finished working the canyons, but it was no use. We headed back each day a little before dark.

  There was home—the house and the water hole. All of our fives depended on the water hole, the womb of the valley, the wet, life-giving mother of us all. But now it was dirt-covered, and twigs and bits of grass and dry manure fouled its once clear blue surface. Its water was muddy and had to have the vileness strained out before it could be used. There had been life at its sides in the past. The birds, the cattle, even the coyote sometimes crept cautiously up and drank from its depths. Life had been started there and life would finish there. Now the water hole seemed to me like the festering womb of a diseased prostitute. I thought of another spring, when my love for Josepha O’Neill had been a wondrous, flourishing thing. I wondered if that spring was dying too. Or had I killed all the love in me that night with Mona?

  The dark was neither restful nor soothing. It was like the spreading shadow of a giant, evil vulture. And the wind howled louder at night.

  I decided then to make my move. I opened the gate into the haystack pen. There was only a little of Big Boy’s hay left now, six or seven days’ supply, but I was glad I had made up my mind.