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

by J P S Brown

  Mikey had pulled off the last stunt that had been offered to him by the black oak tree, the cliff, and the old rope. He had performed the ultimate stunt that Billy and he had risked death time after time to achieve, and he had been the first to do it, and the last. This ultimate stunt would never have been accomplished if he had swung back safely to the ground. Billy Shane, the inventor and leader in their partnership, had not been the first to perform that stunt. Mikey had done it first. If anybody wanted to achieve what Mikey had accomplished, he would have to find another old rope that only had one stunt left in it.

  That was not the only stunt Mikey pulled that made him proud, but, not counting his cowboying, it was the best that he had achieved up until that day because everything had come apart and sure death had opened its mouth to receive him. That was what he and Billy always looked for and hoped to accomplish. They pushed a stunt to its limits to see if anything would come apart, waited without hoping for that to happen, and trusted that their guardian angels would keep them from being killed. When the stunt came apart, they wanted to ride the torn and broken remnants of it all the way to a standstill and then enjoy the thrill itself as it subsided and their lives lapsed into peace again. After that, they would have the delicious memory of it.

  Of course, Mikey did not analyze his reasons for doing stunts. People who like that sort of adventure only begin to analyze why they pull stunts after about the five-thousandth one and they find themselves in their sixties still pulling stunts. Mikey knew the satisfaction of achievement only after everything came apart. The victory was no good unless he had tried the limits of his luck. He took the risks necessary to make things happen that he had not known would happen, and then he realized the victory of standing unbroken among the broken fragments of everything that had gone through the disaster with him.

  Mikey knew well what the residuals of the Devil's Cliff venture would be: the soreness of body and head, a disgusted examination of the gash on his head by his Nina on the way home, banished by his Nina while his bosom pal got a whipping, met and scolded in his backyard by Maggie, examined under Maggie's hard touch, bawled out for getting bloody and tearing his clothes, and then finally not whipped so that all would not be forgotten quickly. Granny's love touch was as hard as Maggie's. These two women of Mikey's had in common a disapproval of all his stunts, anger when they had to nurse him, and hard handling of his wounds. They never kissed anything to make it better in their entire lives.

  Granny was only different in that she soon completely forgot his stunts. She examined the gash on Mikey's head and treated it once and Mikey never heard anything more about the Devil's Cliff from her. Maggie took a look at it while Granny doctored it and never said a word, but she got after him so much about the clothes that had been torn and bloodied that he learned to hate the sight of them. If he complained about having to wear them when it was their turn to be worn again, she made him put them on anyway. Billy's little sister Bea and Mikey's little sister Maudy were helpless and could not be counted on for anything. Maggie and Nina made darned sure the little sisters did not share in any of Billy and Mikey's adventures that took them out of the yard, or up a tree, or on a horse.

  Bica watched Maudy so well that she could not be lured into any kind of trouble, even if Mikey had been the kind who would try to enlist her cooperation in trouble. Maudy became stubborn about staying out of danger just so she could stay on the good side of Maggie, Granny, Nina, and Bica. All she had to do was curl an eyebrow and say, "No, I have to stay here because you go too far," and Mikey knew that she would squeal on him for what he was about to do and he would get the same spanking he would have been given if he had succeeded in taking her along.

  Mikey had kidnapped Bea when he was five and she was an infant. Paul had been off cavorting with a bunch of charros down in Mexico and he brought Mikey back a charro suit. The suit was black, so Mikey figured he would be a bandit when he wore it. He might grow up to be a bandit, a fact that was often pointed out to him. Bea was tiny and helpless, so one day he put on the charro suit and stole her out of her crib and took her back to his house. He barely got past Popie's house with her when he heard his Nina howl. Nina loved Mikey completely, so he figured she would be greatly amused and relieved when she found out Bea was with him. His poor Granny was so innocent of the caper, and she thought they looked so cute together, she sat them on her back steps and took a picture of Mikey with Bea on his lap.

  The kidnapping of Bea was a mistake. Bica understood what Mikey had done and let him know that Nina was suffering, so he got a little worried and headed back with Bea. He figured he could get her back inside the house without being discovered because he could tell where Nina was as she yelled for Uncle Bill and Billy from one side of the house to the other. All Mikey had to do was get across Nina's backyard and through the back door to redeposit Bea in her crib without being seen.

  He paused at Uncle Bill's pump house to listen to his Nina, heard the front door slam, and hurried across the backyard with Bea cooing in his arms. She loved Mikey and he loved her, so she was no trouble to carry. As he reached the back door, Nina came around the corner of the house like a mother cow on the fight with her head up and a mean, hot wind smoking out her nostrils.

  "¡Tú, muchucho!" she yelled. "You, boy give me that child." As she came on stepping real high, Mikey realized it might be that she thought he was somebody else. He sure did want to be recognized before he was killed. She was angrier than he had ever seen anybody in his life. When she was excited like that, with the prospect of having to kill a kid, or rescue one, or run off a mean dog or a bandit, her clothes would slide away and reveal large expanses of clean, bare leg or bosom or shoulder, as though she were coming right out of them and would leave them behind if they got in her way. Now the perspiration stood out on her upper lip and her eyes were hot and a wet, steamy mist seemed to envelop her as she set upon the one who had taken her baby.

  Just before she laid hands on Mikey, he saw that her eye was so hot that she did not recognize him at all. She did not know he was Mikey, the boy she bragged would someday marry that same little daughter.

  Nina swept Bea up high in her arms and slapped at Mikey with the back of her hand and knocked off his charro hat. "Mikey!" she yelled, and in her thick Mexican accent she said, "what are you doing? How long have I been calling? Do you realize what you have done? You have finally driven me insane."

  Well, Mikey really bawled after that banishment. He would have tried to kill anyone who scared his Nina like that. He felt worse when he remembered how she had looked at him before she recognized him. He would never have believed the time would come when his Nina did not know him. Maggie would have known him in a bearskin, in knickers, with a bowtie, and a Frankenstein mask. He never wore the charro suit again. Mikey stayed home the next day until Nina called up and said it was all right for him to come over and play with Billy. She said for him not to think she was mad anymore. When he was back in her house again, she even joked that he should have kept Bea at his house because her temper had been bad ever since he brought her back. Then, to make him smile and feel better, she asked him when he thought he could kidnap her again.

  Mikey's Nina did not mention the kidnapping again except jokingly Mikey believed she only joked about it to make up to him for that instant of rage when she did not know him. He had lived every day of his life convinced that she knew and loved him as well as her own kids. Later, after Billy's little brother Spike was born, Billy once seriously accused her of loving Mikey more than either of her own sons. She was capable of a most extreme kind of rage, and many times Mikey had seen her look straight at Billy as though he were a bank robber and not her son. She only looked at Mikey that way once, and that was enough. When Spike grew up big enough to get into mischief, he never made her as angry as Billy and Mikey had, but he was a much nicer, gentler kid than those two.

  Billy had a lot of style and never got mad at Mikey for any reason. He was serious about staying outdoors whe
re he could best enjoy every minute that he walked the earth. He was another one like Lorraine whose enjoyment kept him serious most of the time. Not Mikey. Mikey was a giggler and Billy's seriousness made him giggle a lot.

  Billy's bicycle made him more mobile on the highway, but he was not a boy to confine himself only to a road and a machine. He found much more wonder in the arroyo and the three rows of trees one hundred feet tall along the front of his and Mikey's houses and the steep hills behind them. The boys hung Granny's lariat rope in an alamo that spanned the arroyo and they could swing all the way from the railroad tracks on one side to a pasture fence on j the opposite bank. They swooped down from a height of about twenty feet on the banks to within three feet of the arroyo bed. They enjoyed knowing that if anything went wrong they would fall into deep sand, unless the arroyo was in flood. Granny made them bring her lariat back every evening because it had belonged to Mikey's Grandaddy Bert.

  The boys were not brave enough to use the swing when the arroyo was in flood. Heavy rains south of Nogales, Sonora, made floodwater roar down from Mexico. The boys could hear it coming, often before a drop of rain had fallen on their neighborhood, often in full sunshine with no sign of a cloud. They could even smell the brown wall of the flood as they ran to watch it come crashing down the wash around the Nogales curve.

  The arroyo in flood became a place for violent, sure death. If the boys heard the torrent coming in time they would lie in the middle of the warm sand bed and watch the head of the flood get fooled at the bend in the arroyo beside the Nogales curve. At the curve, it would stride on and reach blindly straight ahead toward the Baffert cow pasture because the wash curved out from under its momentum. Then it would be rudely shouldered away from the pasture by the bank and back into the channel toward the boys. The head of water would roil and scoop up sand and dislodge and roll new boulders and trees to make itself huskier while it spewed geysers of chocolate colored water into the air. It careened from bank to bank for fifty yards after it left the curve, and then it settled down to a straight dash for the last one hundred yards before it reached the boys. It came on faster and faster and its roar drowned all other sound in that stretch where nothing turned it or stood in its way.

  The sight of the head of a flood from ground level was a look at a running catastrophe that was as real as a tornado or a tidal wave that had been forced into a channel only thirty yards wide. The flood was of a lot more than water. Rocks and sand and tree trunks and dead carcasses came with it. It resembled the headlong stampede of a herd of tusky wild boars in a panic that trampled and leveled everything in the way, rabid boars that came on shoulder to shoulder through a narrow alley faster than any boy could imagine, tearing chunks out of each other as they came.

  Just before the front wall of the flood reached the boys, they jumped up and ran up the bank to the railroad tracks. They always lay side by side and faced the flood and waited to run until they could barely make it out of danger. Billy could run only as fast as Mikey could. Mikey was faster than boys his own age and Billy was short-legged. Mikey was able to outrun him by the time he was seven.

  The boys liked to climb in an old three-story iron mill above the Nogales curve that had been gutted by fire. They could climb the scorched beams to a platform under the roof, then jump out over space about two feet to catch the edge of a hatch and pull themselves onto the roof. The perch on top the burnt roof was rickety, high, and spooky, but the boys could be on top of their world and see a long way. That jump to the hatch meant sure death if they missed, but any kid could do it a hundred times out of a hundred and to be on top of the roof was worth the risk. The cement floor three stories down awaited the kid who could not jump out and up two feet and catch the sill of the hatch with both hands, swing with the momentum, hang, then pull himself onto the roof. Billy and Mikey were the only kids they knew who ever did it. To get back they grabbed the sill on the edge of the hatch that was closest to their platform, swung back over the platform, and dropped.

  Mikey and Billy never told their folks about that stunt in the mill. They kept a vow of silence about stunts they pulled that were done out of sight of their mothers. They got in enough trouble without bragging about what they did when they were out of their mothers' sight. Their mothers' punishments were stunts in themselves, for the boys were never sure that they would come out of them alive.

  Mikey and Billy could not stand anybody who bragged. They believed that anybody who bragged about doing things that nobody saw them perform were liars. Mikey and Billy believed that they performed the very most dangerous stunts anybody, kid or grown-up, ever performed without an audience. That was the cowboy way, too. Cowboys pulled off risky stunts horseback way out where no one could see them.

  Billy's bike was too tall for Mikey to ride by himself, so he could not learn on it, but Nita Wingo had a girl's bike that was easy for Mikey to handle. He could straddle it in the girl's well, get it rolling, then stand up on the pedals and pump. Nita was the same age as Billy and a good friend to Mikey, but she never left her yard to go with the boys and never felt she had to make excuses for it. She watched Mikey trail along on foot after Billy a few times when Billy forgot to load him on the handlebars, and she decided to take a risk and teach him how to ride her bike. After he learned to ride in her yard, she let him borrow the bike from time to time so he could keep up with Billy.

  The kids in that neighborhood were taught to be careful about the traffic, but the only locals who raced their motors up and down that part of the highway were would-be swains who drove out to look at Maggie. They liked to come swerving around the Nogales curve, spin their tires, race their motors, honk their horns, and scowl at Mikey from behind their windshields when he was standing out in front of the house instead of Maggie. Families still drove wagons and teams on that highway. Men and women still rode to town horseback. Automobile traffic was light.

  Billy and Mikey would pump the bikes up the hill of the Nogales curve, rest a minute, then pump back down the hill and around the curve as fast as they could on the outside lane, gain speed as they freewheeled down the hill, veer to the safe left lane, then coast down past Billy's house with their tires humming.

  Mikey would take the lead in front of his house so he could show off in case Bica, Maudy, Maggie, or Granny were looking. Then Billy would take the lead when they zipped by his house. One June evening when Billy was ten and Mikey was seven, Billy came by on his bike, so Mikey went over and asked Nita for her bike. The boys raced out of the Wingos' yard side by side. Mikey looked left and shouted, "Clear," and Billy looked right and shouted, "Clear!" They swerved onto the highway and headed toward Nogales on the left side, single file, with Billy in front. The passenger train from Tucson came up behind them as they pumped hard to make the hill on the curve. The engineer waved at them and blew his whistle to warn traffic that was out of sight at the mill crossing around the curve. The boys pumped hard to see if they could stay ahead of the train, but eased off when the

  train passed them and Billy waved to the engineer.

  Billy's hearing was sensitive and both boys hated noise. Mikey's hearing had not been as sensitive as Billy's since the earaches started. The train with its charged-up steam engine ran by them only thirty yards away and absolutely deafened the whole world. Mikey did not know what possessed Billy to cross the highway right then, unless it was the noise of the train, but he veered to cross to the other side. Mikey took his right hand off the handlebar to wave at the passengers and his bike swerved left and caught the dirt shoulder of the road. At that moment, he felt a heavy rush of hot wind as a black car passed him on the wrong side of the road. The car hurtled by so close that it ticked the fingernail of the little finger on Mikey's right hand as he reached for the handlebar. He realized later that if he had not waved at the train, he would not have veered off the pavement and the car would have hit him.

  The blare of the car's horn was muted by the rattle and whistle of the train. The car headed for the right side of t
he road but did not slow down. Billy never saw it coming. Mikey screamed to warn him, but his voice was nothing in the din of the train. Billy and his bike separated and blew up into the air above the hood of the car. His face was turned away from Mikey. His limbs remained stunned and stiff with the shock of impact and the momentum of his flight. His hair stood on end. He and his bike tumbled over the car, skipped off the roof, bounced onto the highway, and lay still.

  The black car sped around the curve and was gone.

  Mikey looked back and saw that the people on the train had seen the car hit Billy. Their faces were as still as snapshots as they went out of sight around the curve. Then the train and all the noise were gone. Mikey abandoned Nita's bike and ran to Billy. Mr. Wingo ran across his lawn toward him with his pipe clenched in his mouth. A heavy shock of his gray hair tumbled down over his forehead. The doors of his house burst open with frantic limbs and flying red hair and wan white faces as his daughters and Mrs. Wingo yelled and ran to find each other.

  Billy lay flat and still. The bike was rumpled and broken, ruined and still. Both were ugly and wasted. Mikey's life was over. An instant ago, he and Billy had leaned with verve as they turned onto the highway in a concert of pounding hearts, their hair full of the wind they made, their lungs full of sweetness. In the next, their lives stopped. Mikey became a small wad of broken bone, bleeding flesh, and hair that stuck out everywhere, like Billy.

  A hairy bloody patch of hide lay on the pavement apart from Billy. In his confusion, grief, and shock, Mikey could not imagine that it was a piece of Billy's scalp. Mr. Wingo knelt beside Billy with his teeth making snipping sounds on the pipe. Mikey watched his face because he needed the man to look at him so he could know what had become of Billy. Mr. Wingo looked toward his house to compose himself. Then he brushed his hair off his forehead and turned to Mikey. "Go home, Mikey," he said softly. Then he picked up the scrap of scalp and tried to put it back where