The World in Pancho's Eye - J P S Brown

by J P S Brown

  Baxter sat up on his haunches again and Popie ran backward as though he had been nipped on the nose. A car came by and braked and honked to keep from hitting Popie and that was enough to make him scurry home.

  Mikey wondered why the only two cowards he knew in the world had come to hate him and Baxter. He, didn't know anybody else who was hated at all. He didn't know any cowards except Panfilo and Popie, either. He guessed it was just his bad luck that the two nuts who had been born with the worst dispositions in Arizona happened to have their eyes on his and Baxter's territory.

  SEVEN

  THE DARING

  YOUNG MEN

  The headlong stunts cowboys pull off during their day's work opens their graves. They take mortal risks to make a wage and keep their charges prosperous. They don't risk the trust that has been put in them. They are trusted to take risks with their carcasses. The daring that goes with being a cowboy has to be born in a boy or a girl and exhibited early, and they have to like it. Later, after a boy starts to shave his whiskers and a girl has to put on her face to go out the door, it's too late to learn it.

  An earache began to plague Mikey as he started the second grade at Lincoln School. At first, Granny was able to alleviate it with treatments of warm olive oil, but the pain always came back. Maggie and Granny did not give him anything else to stop it from hurting, so Mikey could only hope that he would wake up some morning and be well. He could have endured the ache better if his imagination had not made him believe that something evil grew inside his ear. He did not want it to take him over, so when Granny's remedy did not work, he stopped complaining.

  Every day after school he climbed into his alamo tree to watch for Paul. In earache time it was not hard for him to sit still. His alamo was immense and a main branch stretched over the highway. If he climbed out on the end of that branch into its leafiest part, he could sit over the center of the highway with an unobstructed view of the road all the way up to the Nogales curve. After these vigils began, Mikey never saw anything but empty hours in his tree. He was able to endure empty hours when he waited for his dad. He was good at standing vigil because waiting and watching was a duty that he had learned to perform as soon as he learned to ride.

  Now that he was seven and had been given additional catechism instruction and had received the Sacrament of Confirmation, he believed in purgatory. After he thought about what purgatory would mean for him, he figured it was a place where God punished cowboys so they could atone for the sins that did not warrant eternal damnation but still carried an unpaid debt. When he decided on the worst punishment God could give a cowboy without killing him off and handing him over to the devil, he was sure it would be "holding herd." In Mikey's experience, cowboys were usually good enough persons to eventually be forgiven their sins, but Mikey believed that all of them, after facing God's judgment at their time of death, would be sent to purgatory and given one minute to saddle a horse and then minimum sentences of 25o years to maximum sentences of 16 trillion years holding herd.

  They would not be able to graduate to heaven until their sentences had been served. They would not be allowed a change of horses for their entire sentences. Every cowboy would be sentenced to hold herd in purgatory on one tired horse that nobody had ever loved. And to that, in Mikey's case, God probably would add an earache.

  To Mikey, holding herd was the purest form of punishment for any cowboy. A cowboy's job holding herd was to turn back the cattle on his side when they tried to leave the herd. He stopped them and turned them back into the herd when they tried to leave. This was done best when it was done slowly, easily, and without fuss. A cowboy could not hold herd on a fresh horse, either, because a horse tired of it even faster than a cowboy did. For hours a cowboy did this slowly and carefully and made it look so easy that the cattle were bluffed into thinking that they could not all jump and run and leave together in different directions any time they wanted. Even the first minute on a fresh horse was not easy. After a very short while a cowboy began to wish for a cow to make a wild dash for the wide open spaces so he could swing out ahead of her at a dead run, risk his neck to beat her to a thicket or some other kind of cover, then run her straight back into the herd and a standstill. But no, a cowboy spent days and days, hours and hours, step by slow step, sitting his horse and only moving three or four slow steps at a time to turn thousands and thousands of cattle back one at a time over and over and over again until a herd was finally worked and turned loose. In purgatory that herd might not be turned loose for 16 trillion years. One hour excruciated a body.

  What sins could a cowboy commit to have to hold herd for 25o years? Everything that was fun, short of willful blasphemy; anything to keep from working; being unfaithful to his family and friends so that he might indulge himself with cowboy work; and working himself and his friends and family until everybody died unhappy and broke were a few such sins. Another sin that might warrant only 25o years would be waking up too late to feed the horses, then hurrying back to the comforts of camp and forgetting to close the gate so the horses strayed out onto the highway.

  A sin a cowboy might commit that would deserve 16 trillion years might be to stay away from his wife and children so he could run and play with a neighbor's sister, then not go home until all his wages were spent, then confess the sin to his wife for everybody's own good and to show his extreme honesty, then to beat his wife to within an inch of her life when she became righteously angry, then to forget to feed the horses, then to bawl great tears because he was sorry about the mess he had caused.

  Holding herd is a cowboy stationed at a dam to plug a hole with his finger. The hole is of a size, location, and height that preclude him from lying down, sitting still, or standing up straight to rest. He can't go to sleep, but his body stops functioning, as his blood stops flowing because he and his horse are forced to remain at a standstill and once in a while are allowed only a walkstill three yards long.

  An ordinary cowboy holding herd does not get to ride into the herd and do what the bosses do. The bosses and top hands get to work inside the herd in cowboy glory. They rope calves and drag them out to the branding fire. They cut the bulls away from the heifers, or the heifers from the steers, or the culls from the keepers. Their horses perform at their peaks. The bosses get to show verve and style and expertise, The waddy, the cowboy who stops a hole on the edge of a herd, gets to watch and wait and hope that just before he falls off his tired horse from paralysis of the joints, some boss will agitate a steer so much that he will try to get away from the herd. A cowboy who has been paying for his sins would not be able to do anything but ache and watch the work until his eyes burned and would have to go on holding herd while other cowboys with lesser sins got to run after that steer and bring him back.

  Because Mikey had held herd a lot, he knew the travail of sitting still for long hours. It was something he could do with a throbbing earache in an alamo tree because of the hunger and thirst and aching bones he knew from holding herd.

  That earache was so bad at times that Granny put Mikey in Uncle Joe's bed in her house and Dr. Gonzales came out from Nogales to see what he could do. He always only instructed Granny to pour more warm olive oil into Mikey's ear.

  While he was in bed, his Nina came to see him every day. Art Robinson, his Nina's younger brother, also came by to see him. He was a cowboy too and he told Mikey he knew how much an earache hurt. He had gone through it once after a tick crawled in and camped on his eardrum. After the tick was discovered and plucked out, his earache got worse and he had to go back to Dr. Gonzales to find out that the tick had left its head imbedded in his eardrum. That story made Mikey feel a little better. At least he could be pretty sure that he did not have a tick in his ear. Mikey's uncles and his dad's cowboy partners, whom he also called his uncles, heard that he was sick in bed and came by to sit with him and tell stories. He guessed they were afraid he was going to die and needed to check on him for his dad, because his dad was never able to come. The uncles made Mike
y realize that it was good for a man to be tough when something hurt a lot. He suffered a lot when he thought about his dad not coming to see how tough he was. He suffered when he heard the bootsteps and low voices of cowboys coming through his Granny's house and then his dad was not with them. His uncles did not bring him candy or play pretties. They did not expect that he needed presents for being a man. They came to make sure he was man enough to get well as all men were required to do. They showed that they approved of him and that came close to making Mikey feel good until they were gone again, but he still did not seem to get well.

  He felt good enough to go back to school some days, but he missed a lot and his teachers told Maggie that he would not pass second grade. Dr. Gonzales told her she ought to keep Mikey out until he got well. His ear would swell up and get real hot, then go down for a short while, but it always throbbed and rang. He imagined that he might have a colony of ants in there, or a den of poisonous worms with fangs, or a hairy tarantula's lair. He would climb into his tree and press his ear into his hand on the limb and watch the road for Paul. He did not have to go to school, but he was getting desperate to be useful again and would have done anything to stop his ear from aching.

  Then Uncle Bill Shane gave Billy a red and white Schwinn bicycle. That machine made Billy proud and Mikey proud of Billy. Uncle Bill was a stern, hardworking man who came home every single day of his life to be with his family. Through the years he rose from the lowest position of customs inspector, who worked all day afoot on the line, to chief inspector with authority over the whole port of entry.

  Billy's little sister Bea had been born six months before Mikey's little sister Maudy, so both boys now had sisters. A baby daughter the Shanes called The Flapper had been born before Billy. The Flapper and Bea were both pretty little blondes, but Mikey never knew anything but a picture of The Flapper. She had died of pneumonia when she was only two.

  Uncle Bill liked to grow vegetables and every minute he was awake he worked, either at his duties in the customs service, or in an acre of truck garden on his property. That's how Billy got his bicycle. Uncle Bill bought it brand new for twenty-five dollars that he made on his vegetables.

  For a time after Billy got his bicycle, Mikey did not have to walk to Billy's house. Instead of stepping out onto the highway and hollering and then reaching for the sky with a broad wave for Mikey to come on over, he would come get him and transport him back to his house on the handlebars of his bike.

  Billy always went as fast as he could pump the pedals at first, then he and Mikey coasted in their own wind while he rested. The dashes that the two made on the highway with humming tires and flashing spokes on the bright, new, solid, shiny, red and white bike made Mikey love bicycles forever and made him realize again how much his Uncle Bill loved him.

  Uncle Bill was absolutely a real man. Mikey believed that anybody who thought he wanted to be a father and husband ought not to even try unless he could be like Uncle Bill. Of course, the bike was Billy's, but it brought great joy into Mikey's life with its rubber-scented tread and winking spokes, its own headlight that was shaped like a comet for the dark, the way it smoothly chained he and Billy on their way in time with the pumping of Billy's legs, the engine of Billy's breath, and the grip of Billy's freckled hands. All Mikey could do while he took all this in was sit still, watch, listen, and ride.

  Billy led Mikey into some precarious situations, but he was never overbearing and he never used force against Mikey, even in fun. He was not one ounce a bully, but he was tough and brave and to Mikey he was 1oo percent hero. Other kids lived on the Tucson highway and all of them except Skippy Swikert were closer to Billy's age, but Mikey was Billy Shane's best friend and he was Mikey's and everybody else was a sissy.

  Maggie loved Billy too and usually gave her son over freely into his charge, but she gave him hell and Nina gave him absolute hell when something went wrong with his and Mikey's ventures and they became casualties.

  Once the boys found an old rope and Billy knew immediately what to do with it. They hiked up to the Devil's Cliff above Indian Springs and Billy climbed out onto a black oak limb and tied the rope to it so it hung out over the cliff. The boys took turns swinging out over the cliff. That was daredevil stuff. The cliff was forty feet of sheer rock above a solid mesquite thicket, which allowed the boys to swing out a long way over the canopy of the trees. In the summer, when the mesquites were in full leaf, those treetops looked like a soft green carpet far below and the boys could not see the hard, old ground beneath them.

  Each time Mikey and Billy arrived at the Devil's Cliff swing they warmed to the thrill of it little by little. To build their nerve, because the cliff was so high, the boys first swung only five or six feet out into space without looking down. Then they swung out and made themselves look down. Then they backed off to the end of the rope and took a run at it, sprang off the edge of the cliff, swung out, turned, and looked down all the way back. They usually did not go home until darkness made it hard for them to see the cow trail that led them off the hill.

  Mikey always followed Billy's lead. Billy thought up the variations of stunts they dared to do and was first to perform them. Mikey did them the way Billy did. The drill made Mikey as fearless as the second lamb who follows the first to slaughter. Sometimes Billy's feats caused Mikey to think and look before he leaped, but not often and not for long. New feats waited to be performed and Billy did not like for Mikey to stall.

  Neither of the boys ever worried about the wear they put on the rope over the Devil's Cliff. Billy always leaned back and put all his weight on it before they started swinging. Mikey thought he was thirty or forty pounds lighter than anything, so after Billy swung on the rope, he knew it would hold him. Then after a summer or two that their rope had hung over the Devil's Cliff, they went back one dry, windy, spring day to swing again.

  They tried the rope and their courage with short swings, then with wider, longer ones, then after a running start. Then they returned one-handed. They swung out holding on with both hands, turned when they reached the outer limit of the swing, let one hand go, and returned one-handed. They could just barely hold on that way long enough to get their feet back on the ground.

  They tired of that and Billy decided there was one thing they had not tried and that was to both swing at once. They tied a foot loop in the bottom end for safety. Swinging with one foot in the loop was not their idea of a stylish way to do it, but it was the only way they figured Billy could hold on safely with Mikey on his back. Mikey got on Billy piggyback and they swung.

  They were clumsy the first time, but they kept trying until they warmed to it and by the fifth try Mikey was less a part of Billy's performance and more on his own. Instead of being like a monkey on Billy's back, Mikey was more like a flag or a scarf waving from his neck. They suspended use of the foot loop and made a run for the edge of the cliff with Mikey running behind Billy. At the edge, Mikey sprang onto Billy's back and wrapped his arms around his neck and his momentum shoved Billy out over the chasm. They often slipped down the rope before they made it back, but they always made it because Billy was too tough and brave to let go. The rope creaked on the limb and stretched. They finally stopped when they suspected that the rope or the limb was about to come apart. Besides that, Billy's neck felt like it had already come apart.

  Before they left the place, while Billy rested, Mikey decided that one more stunt on his own would be safe. He climbed with the end of the rope to a place on top of a rock that was level with the limb on which the rope was tied, dropped into space off the rock, hit the end of the rope, swung away from the edge of the cliff, and returned to the ground on Billy's side of the tree.

  Billy's eyes got big and he forgot how much Mikey had tired him by hanging on his neck. He grabbed the rope, ran to the top of the rock, and sailed out over the void with such wild banshee verve that he scared Mikey.

  To get even, Mikey took the rope and ran back to the top of the rock, grabbed the bottom loop in bot
h hands, kept the rope taut as he ran across the rock, and leaped out into space. Gravity took over that time. The rope broke just below the knot on the limb as though it had been chopped with an ax. Mikey watched himself plummet all the way down into the top of the mesquites.

  Billy later said that Mikey disappeared at the point where the rope should have stopped his fall and the rope trailed away after him and not even the sound of him remained. Mikey was light as an ant and did not feel that he was in danger, though a free fall forty feet to the ground through a big tree was not his usual way of getting off a swing. He had always trusted that the canopy of the mesquite thicket below the Devil's Cliff would be a safe cushion. He was surprised when it did not gently stop him, but he was taken into one tree's embrace, grabbed from all sides all the way down, and caught short of the ground in a bottom fork.

  The tree only scratched Mikey in the places it grabbed him on the way down. He owned one little gash at the base of his skull, a badge wound that bled enough to give evidence of derring-do, but not enough to hurt and not deep enough for stitches.

  Billy risked more in his hurry to get down off the cliff to Mikey's side with no tree to take him into its embrace. Mikey was already safe on the ground when Billy reached him. When he heard the exciting story of what Billy had seen, and saw Billy's concern for the bloody gash, Mikey thought it best to at least give out a sob, because that was what a little kid was supposed to do. He was only able to summon it up from his heart and get a real tear for it because of the awful worry on Billy's face. Not only was he unhurt, but he was happily satisfied and thrilled by what he considered to be a great achievement.