The Brave Cowboy

by Edward Abbey

“Jesus…!” the operator said, his eyes bulging.

  Johnson shouted at the six men by the cars. “Get on up there! Hurry up!” He reached inside the jeep and wrenched a big First Aid kit free of its bracket; he lobbed the heavy metal box at the little man with the .45. “Take that along.” The little man caught it and they all started up the canyon at a slow trot, carrying their rifles. “I’ll catch up to you in a minute,” Johnson shouted after them. He turned back to the operator. “Try to call them.”

  The operator was already trying: “Ground to helicopter. Hello, helicopter, anybody there? Can you hear me? Come in, helicopter. Over.” He flicked a switch and the loudspeaker buzzed and crackled. They waited. He tried again: “This is Sheriff’s party calling helicopter. Hello, helicopter, can you hear me? Come in, helicopter. Over.” Again they waited, but there was no answer. “Radio’s busted,” he operator said.

  “All right,” Johnson said; he scratched his lip briefly. “Call the Air Base, tell em to rush an ambulance out here or another helicopter if they can—that would be better. With a doctor. After that call our boys and give them the location of the shooting. If they haven’t seen it already. If the State Police ever get their plane out here give them the dope too, of course.” Unexpectedly, Johnson belched. “Where’s those binoculars?” He found them in the back of the jeep, took them out of the case, and looked toward the helicopter. Adjusting the focus, he was able to see two men standing outside the helicopter, apparently admiring the wreckage. He saw a third man crawl on hands and knees out an open hatch on the side of the fuselage, stand up and hobble forward a few steps, then sit down abruptly. There’s one casualty, Johnson thought. He continued to watch, saw one man re-enter the fuselage, come out with a rifle in his hands and start up the mountainside. The other two men, after several minutes of discussion, began a slow descent toward the floor of the canyon, the hale-bodied one assisting the other. Johnson lowered the binoculars. “Doesn’t seem to be any serious damage,” he said, mostly to himself; the operator, busy, did not hear him.

  Johnson hesitated, uncertain now whether to go up the canyon to meet the fliers or to stay where he was. He was already beginning to regret having loosed those six vigilantes into the hills; when and if they found the helicopter crew without need of assistance, they would undoubtedly go on after the fugitive: six more nervous, itchy trigger fingers at large. Things were getting out of control; even the wind was beginning to stir and whistle and kick up dust: it looked as if this was going to be a long, busy day.

  From somewhere in the yellow sky to the south came the harsh, strained persistent noise of a small airplane. Johnson saw it after a while, a Taylor Cub. The State Police. He glanced toward the radio operator and saw his jaw working industriously under the red nose and the small blue eyes.

  I’ll wait here, he decided, at least for a while. If the wind gets very bad we might all have to go home anyway.

  The operator was in communication with the State Police airplane, directing the crew’s attention to the stricken helicopter high on the mountain; the plane banked to the right and climbed through the air, side-slipping a little in a sudden gust of wind, flying toward the helicopter, the granite cliffs, the pine and aspen and vast disorder that sheltered the outlaw and his horse and concealed somewhere in its chaotic depths the dozen or more armed men pursuing him.

  The operator pushed up his earphones and lit a cigarette, cupping the match in his hand and turning his back to the wind. “This is a mess,” he said. “Huh, Morey?”

  “Sure is,” Johnson said. Something in his eye—a particle of dust. He pulled at his upper eyelid and tried to blink the eye dean. The irritant, whatever it was, settled firmly in a corner of the eyesocket. “Did you contact the Air Base?”

  “They’re sendin an ambulance.” The operator looked at Johnson. “How about some lunch? I’m starved.”

  Johnson scratched and rubbed at his eye until he had succeeded in spreading and intensifying the irritation, “There’s something in my eye,” he said. “See if you can find it.” He sat down beside the radio operator in the jeep; the man lifted a grimy thumb and forefinger toward his eye. “I think it’s in this corner,” Johnson said, pointing. “Under the lower eyelid.” The operator’s face loomed large before his; he looked serious and concerned and simple and infinitely kind. He spread Johnson’s eyelids with his rough scarified fingers; through a film of automatic tears Johnson watched the eye of the operator scanning the surface of his own.

  “Look up,” the operator said. Johnson looked up. “Look down.” Johnson looked down. “Can’t see anything… Look to the right,” the operator said. Johnson looked to the right. “Look to the left.” He looked to the left. “I can’t see a thing, Morey,” the operator said; “I can’t see anything in there.”

  “All right,” the sheriff said. “Thanks for trying. Maybe I blinked it out.”

  “That’s prob’ly what happened. Sometimes when you get rid of a thing it still feels it’s in there. For a while.”

  “Did we bring a lunch?” Johnson said.

  “Sure we did. I remember packin it in.”

  They searched in the back of the jeep for the lunch-bag, found it and the quart thermos bottle full of coffee. They ate cheese and bologna sandwiches and drank hot tan coffee while the wind rolled in from the north and stirred the sand in the arroyo and filled the air with a suspension of fine dust. —The dry almost weightless hulk of a tumbleweed bounced over the sand and rocks, coming toward them.

  “They won’t find him now,” the operator said.

  Johnson drank the hot coffee, looking up through the haze toward the mountain. Above the foothills the air seemed still clear; the sky beyond the mountain’s crest was a sharp electric blue. He tried to imagine the activity and the sensations of the solitary man in whose honor he—Johnson—and the others were now waiting in the dust or blundering heavily around in the absurd labyrinth of boulders and canyons and thorny chaparral. Scared as a rabbit, he thought; that’s the way he must feel. That’s the way I’d feel, stumbling through that rocky jungle.

  He stared up at the mountain, forgetting Burns again, conscious of a vague annoyance, sharing for a few moments in the general undifferentiated social resentment of this mountain, an impatience with its irrational bulk and complexity, its absurd, exasperating lack of purpose or utility. To the east were the plains, flat and reasonable and cooperative, limited, amenable to man; on this side were similar areas, suitable at least for airstrips, housing projects, graveyards and fraternity picnics; by contrast the mountain appeared as a great ugly eruption of granite, not only meaningless but malignant, and worse than malignant—a piece of sheer insolence.

  Thinking about it, Johnson began to smile; he scratched his neck and chuckled aloud. The radio operator looked at him closely.

  The tumbleweed had crossed the wash; it bounded lightly before the wind on its tense stems, coming straight at the jeep. It hit a rock and bouncing up was caught fully by the wind and lifted over the hood of the jeep, rustling and cackling aridly, while Johnson and the radio operator shielded their faces. The tumble-weed dropped in the sand again and rolled and bounced toward the opening of the canyon, toward the valley. A dead mechanism bearing seeds, with a ludicrous semblance of purpose in its hustling, restless movements.

  Johnson shined an apple on the sleeve of his jacket. “I’m going up the canyon,” he said. He climbed out of the jeep. “I’m going up to meet those two aviators. I’ll be back in half an hour, I reckon.”

  “Okay, Morey.” The operator had dribbled a little coffee on his khaki shirt; he rubbed at the stain with a blue bandana. “Any message?”

  “Message? Message for who?”

  “Suppose the General wants to know what happened to his helicopter?”

  “Tell him.” The sheriff started off, following the trail in the sand. This canyon was much like the other one, narrow and twisting and steeply ascending, with a cactus slope on the north and a piñon-juniper slope to the south. Ag
ain he had to climb barricades of jammed-up boulders and smooth eroded outcroppings of the underlying granite; between these barriers were the usual long stretches of sand with their patches of bunch grass, withered scrub oak, jackpine and cane cactus.

  Johnson walked with his eyes down, breathing heavily and sweating—he removed his jacket, draped it over his forearm—and watched the procession of tracks in the sand and gravel before him. Among the footprints, scuffed and overlapping as if a multitude had passed this way, he was able to recognize the stamp of a Size 13 boot: Deputy Gutierrez. The bloodhound, he thought, the murderous bloodhound. He wondered where, in that hanging wilderness several thousand feet above, the big man was now, and where the other one—the criminal—was, and how close they might be to each other, and if either knew. Especially, if the cowboy knew. The cowboy! Johnson spat; his instinctive sympathy for the hunted man was darkened by a scornful pity closer to disgust than compassion. The emotion faded as he climbed on; all emotions and thoughts retreated before the insistent pressure of fatigue and breathing and heat and the problems forced on him by the successive dams and poised cascades of stone.

  He was sheltered from the wind now and the air was cleaner. When he stopped to rest and looked back he could see the jeep and the four automobiles at the mouth of the canyon below, and the pattern of erosion spreading over the mesa toward the city. The city, however, had disappeared; where it should have been or had been there was now a boiling shroud of yellow dust. The dust diagrammed the currents and whorls of the winds, smothered and obliterated the ragged crucifix of the city, whirled over river and city and valley to the north and south for as far as Johnson could see. It made an impressive spectacle; Johnson, a man of limited prophetic powers, was faintly troubled by old, obscure, unacknowledged premonitions of suffocation and disaster.

  He shrugged his shoulders, glad now to be far above the scene, and turned his back on it and trudged ahead, upward. The holstered pistol weighed uncomfortably against his thigh; he pulled the belt around, shifting the weight to his hip, and tightened the belt by a notch.

  A voice hailed him. He looked up and saw the two helicopter crewmen, one supporting the other, limping slowly down the canyon floor. The men were dirty, their green coveralls were torn and dusty, and they both seemed unhappy, sullen, irritable. “Hey!” one of them cried again; “how do we get out of this jungle?”

  The sheriff did not reply but sat down on a rock and waited for them to approach. He wiped his brow with his handkerchief and put his jacket back on. The two men came close to him; they looked young, less than twenty; the uninjured one wore sergeant’s stripes. The sergeant did not offer to introduce himself or shake hands, but began complaining immediately. “How much farther we gotta go?” he asked. A smudge of grease was spread across his nose and cheek; droplets of sweat glistened under his eyes, on his upper lip. “Hey, man? How do we get outa this goddamned place?”

  “You’re doing all right,” Johnson said, not looking at him. He spoke to the second man, whose face was pale and tense. “What’s the matter, son? Sprained ankle?” The young man nodded, standing on one foot, an arm around the sergeant’s shoulder. “Sit down and rest yourselves a spell,” Johnson said. The young man looked toward the rock on which Johnson had been sitting. “Here,” Johnson said, stepping toward him; “let me help you.”

  “We’re in a hurry,” the sergeant said.

  “That’s all right,” Johnson said. “You can wait for a few minutes; this fella looks like he could use some rest.” He helped the injured man to sit down, while the sergeant stood by frowning and glancing nervously around. “Let me see that ankle,” Johnson said, as the young man leaned back, shutting his eyes.

  “It’s all right,” the sergeant said; “I put an elastic bandage on it.”

  “That’s good,” Johnson said; he lifted the pantleg of the man’s coveralls and began unwrapping the bandage, while the sergeant stood nearby and complained: he was bitter; the affair was supposed to have been a game, good sport, a real man-hunt. No one had suggested the possibility of their being shot down—and in what a jungle! Nothing but rock and cactus; the sergeant was disgusted. And then, worst of all, the goddamned pilot taking off after the guy with his rifle, leaving him to carry a man with a game leg down several miles of cliffs and rock slides; —Christ! Johnson inquired after the men he had dispatched to the scene of the wreck. “Never saw em!” the sergeant said. “Never saw em…”

  Johnson made a mental note, unwrapping the last of the bandage. He looked at the injury. The ankle was blue and swollen, hot to the touch. “Oughta have splints on this,” Johnson said; “it might be broken.”

  The injured man opened his eyes and smiled weakly at the sergeant, “Didn’t I tell ya?” he said; “goddamnit, didn’t I tell ya?”

  “Bullshit,” the sergeant growled; “I know a broken leg when I see one.” He scuffed around in the sand, staring down the canyon. “Jesus, what a place…” he muttered.

  Johnson carried a notebook in his jacket; he pulled it out and broke off the stiff cardboard covers and folded them double. “This’ll have to do,” he said to the young man; he placed the improvised splints on the sides of the swollen ankle and started to rewrap the bandage.

  “And why couldn’t they send a “copter out to pick us up?” the sergeant said. “How can they expect human beings to climb around over this stuff?” He waved a hand at the mountain now surrounding and supporting them. “Why couldn’t they send a ’copter?”

  “I don’t know,” the sheriff said. “We asked for one.” This here’s a cranky case, he was thinking. Parlous upset. I should’ve known better than to let the Air Corps get into this.

  “You’re Johnson, aren’t you?” the sergeant said; he stared at the sheriff with narrowed, cynical eyes, licking the sweat from his upper lip.

  “Sheriff Johnson to you.” Johnson made the final turn in the bandage and fastened it with the two little metal clips. “That feel all right, son?” The young man nodded.

  “You sort of made a mess of things today,” the sergeant said, after a short pause. “Isn’t that right, Sheriff Johnson?”

  Johnson slapped on his hat. “Mind your manners,” he said, standing up. “And your own business.” He put a hand under the armpit of the injured man, Who was smiling slyly. “Come on,” Johnson said, “let’s get this fella down outa here.”

  “Okay, okay,” the sergeant said; “sure. Okay. Yes sir, Mister Sheriff.”

  Far above them, across the canyon walls, the wind roared through the fiery blue ether of the sky.

  When they returned to the foot of the canyon, some three-quarters of an hour later, they found waiting for them—considerably modified by a driving storm of sand and dust and whirling tumbleweeds—an Air Force ambulance with two young Medics huddled in its lee, smoking cigarettes; also, the radio operator, looking flustered and anxious. “The General wants to talk to you,” he shouted at Johnson through the yellow current of the wind.

  Johnson turned the damaged airman over to the Medics, then struggled through the dust toward the jeep. “What general?” he growled. Sand pattered the metal surfaces of the machine, against the radio, against his leather jacket. “You mean that Air Force fella— what’s his name?”

  “Yes,” the operator said; “him.” He pointed to the microphone. “All set. They’re waitin for you to call right now.”

  “All right,” Johnson took up the microphone. “This is Sheriff Johnson calling Kirk Field. Come in, Kirk Field. Over.” The operator flipped the toggle switches and the loudspeaker crackled and hummed; the operator turned up the volume against the whine of the wind. Suddenly the great voice of General Desalius boomed at them, thundering over the wind and the flapping canvas of the jeep:

  “Sheriff, this is General Desalius. Sheriff, what have you done with my helicopter?” Without waiting for an answer the voice roared on, making the speaker screen rattle like a piece of loose tin. “Is this nonsense true that that jailbreaker, that scum, that
common vagrant, shot down my helicopter? Eh, Sheriff?” There was a pause; a different voice, startlingly mild and meek, said: “Over.”

  Johnson replied: “That’s right, General. The helicopter was damaged by small-arms fire and forced down. A crash landing. Nobody seriously hurt. Over.”

  The sergeant and one of the Medics approached, listening.

  The rich powerful bellow of General Desalius burst from the speaker again, while the radio operator, with a grimace of pain, removed his earphones and held them on his lap: “Sheriff, don’t kid me! That’s ridiculous! Impossible! This bandit—why I’ll blast him off the face of the earth! Where is the rascal? Why I’ll burn him out with napalm, I’ll cook him with phosphorus! Where is that vermin? He can’t—where is he? By god, I’ll drop an atomic bomb on the bastard!”

  The two Air Force men were grinning openly, nudging each other. Johnson turned down the volume. The General stormed on:

  “Do you know how much my helicopters cost, Sheriff? Do you? Do you have any notion at all?” Another pause; again the anonymous, meditating voice said: “Over.”

  Johnson tried to restrain his mounting anger and disgust. “No I don’t, General,” he said. “Over.”

  “One hundred and twenty thousand dollars!” the General howled. “Apiece! You hear that, Sheriff? One hundred and twenty thousand dollars, that’s what my “copters cost! One hundred and twenty—”

  Johnson switched off the speaker, frowning bitterly. In the comparative silence that followed they could all hear the rasp and rattle of the earphones on the operator’s lap, still vibrating with the thunder of the General’s anger. But a mechanically reduced thunder, a strange and artificial diminution of what had been so overpowering a moment before. The effect was curious and contradictory—a bellowing in miniature, like the roar of an outraged insect.

  Johnson felt a peculiar shame, not for himself but for his kind. The wind and dust assailed him, the sun pale beyond the yellow sky, but he stood motionless, his hand on the radio, his eyes fixed on the ground. He became aware, after a few minutes, of the two Air Force men still watching him. He looked at them and they grinned in a furtive, malicious way. The sergeant said: “The General’s real wigged out, huh man? Really flippin his lid, huh?”