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

by J P S Brown

  He dreamed that he was a silver-mounted cowboy on his top horse Pancho with big silver buckles and conchos on his belts and spur straps. Even the bridle and reins on his horse were silver mounted. The silver on his trappings made a rich buffing sound that silver only makes on silver when he buckled it on—a sound that only he knew. When he ran the silver tip of his belt through the buckle and then through the twin silver keepers, it released a spray of rich, sparky dust that only he could hear and see. His father and mother turned him loose but longed for his return. He was covered with dust from the work he did with large herds of cattle and horses. Baxter backed him up and licked his wounds when some cutthroat shot or stabbed him. In his favorite daydream, he watched himself brush and groom Pancho to a shiny blue, then he saddled him with a silver-mounted saddle and rode into the brush by the arroyo. He waited patiently in ambush for the school bus. When it came, Mr. Clark saw that Mikey was not at his place beside the road, so he drove on. Mikey spurred Pancho into a run out of the brush, fell in behind the bus, and boarded through the back door. He was so tall that he ducked his head inside to keep from denting the crown of his hat. Lorraine gave him the old I'm-your-only-woman look, so he leaned over and kissed Enriqueta on the mouth. That was so Lorraine would know he did not need her darned I'm-your-only-woman looks anymore. Well, he could still daydream sweethearts, but he was now only a make-believe cowboy with only Tom Mix, Hopalong Cassidy, Buck Jones, Ken Maynard, Johnny Mack Brown, and Roy Rogers to admire. Except for George Kimbrough, those were the only kind he ever saw anymore. Then Viv O'Brien came to call on Maggie.

  NINE

  ONE GILLETTE

  A cowboy's job is to see that his charges "do good." He wants to see herds of "good doers." When an animal has been left to rest and I recuperate on his own all night after a day of being driven or ridden hard and a cowboy finds him full bellied, rested, and ready to go to work the next morning, he is a good doer. When a cowboy can work all day on one can of tomatoes and no water and no salt, he is known as a good doer. In praise of a cowboy who is a good doer, it will also be said that

  he can go all day on one Gillette.

  Viv O'Brien was taken with Mikey's little sister Maudy Marie. He liked to stop by on his way to someplace else to see his "Curly Girl." Maggie did not like for him to come to her house with no warning, so he was told that he had better call so she and Maudy could make themselves presentable before he arrived. After that he came regularly. He was plainly lonesome, infatuated with Maudy Marie, and seemed to enjoy visiting with Maggie and Mikey.

  Mikey and Viv got along well after Viv reminded him that he was raised with Paul Summers in Pecos, Texas, and considered Paul to be the best cowboy who ever buckled on a pair of chaps. He also said that his partners Roy Adams and Herb Cunningham bragged all the time that Mikey was as good a cowboy as any grown man they ever hired. He began to stop by the Lincoln School from time to time to eat lunch with Mikey and he sometimes picked him up after school and took him home. He said he would soon have a bunch of cowboying for Mikey to do. As an advance against his wages, one afternoon he took Mikey to Brackers Department Store and outfitted him with a new hat, boots, Levi's, and a blue shirt. He wanted to be sure he could depend on Mikey's help. He intended to cross several thousand steers out of Mexico, and he wanted Mikey to help drive them from Nogales, Sonora, to the Baca Float Ranch outside Nogales, Arizona.

  One Saturday, Granny and Mikey came home from a double feature and found Pancho back in his pasture. He had grown into much of a horse while he made a hand for Paul in the Sierra de San Juan. To Mikey, this meant that Paul would come for him any day. Viv O'Brien would have to wait. Mikey had not worn the outfit Viv bought him since he tried it on in the store. He fed and exercised Pancho to keep him in condition for the day that Paul would come for him with work to do. Pancho needed to be calmed down. His new way was to show the whites of his eyes when he looked at people, as though he were anxious about the burden someone might load on him.

  One day, as Mikey filled Pancho's tub with water from the hose, he looked up and saw the faces and horns of a big herd come around the Nogales curve. Boy, he could not let anything like that go by. He bridled Pancho, jumped barefoot on his back, and rode him out to the front of Granny's house to protect her lawn and flowers.

  Roy Adams and Viv O'Brien came along in a pickup behind the drags. Felix Johnson, Manuel Valenzuela, Uncle Buster Sorrells, Grover Kane, Bud Parker, and George Kimbrough were horseback with a herd of eighteen hundred Mexican steers that belonged to Adams, Cunningham, and O'Brien.

  As the herd passed, Mikey fell in behind it to help in the drags and look for Paul. When he did not see him, he asked Roy where he was, but Roy said Paul had stayed in Mexico with Cabezon Woodell and Del Mercer. Roy and Viv had bought the herd from Cabezon. Mikey did not know it, but the Adams, Cunningham, and O'Brien Cattle Company owned Pancho. Paul had been with Cabezon's crew at the stockyards in Magdalena when the cattle were delivered and had sold Pancho and Cognac to Roy, and then went straight to the cantina with the money. Uncle Buster had met the herd in Nogales and hauled Pancho with a supply of hay and grain for his keep to Maggie's. Pancho was at Maggie's for Mikey to ride, but he was not Mikey's anymore.

  Viv and Roy stopped the pickup in the shade of a big tree and began to call the cowboys for lunch. Mikey saw that the pickup was the old one that belonged to Paul, the one he had driven for years, the same pickup Mikey had hoped to see when he waited at the arroyo bridge all day, the truck Paul owned when he worked as a jailer in the courthouse.

  Roy called Mikey for lunch.

  "Where's Paul?" Viv asked and feigned an abrupt and unsmiling way. Mikey knew this was a sham. Viv knew where Paul could be found a whole lot better than Mikey. He asked for Paul in that way because he knew Mikey liked to have his father's name brought up.

  "l don't know/' Mikey said. "When I saw you in his pickup, I thought you would know where he was."

  "Paul brought this herd down out of the Sierra and delivered it to Roy, but he sold his truck to me and went back." Viv said. "We need him here, don't you think?"

  Mikey sat his horse and nodded. Viv pointed to a pile of bread, jam, cheese, open cans of sardines and Vienna sausages and said, "What do you crave, boy? Eat your lunch/'

  Mikey jumped down and took an open can of tomatoes, a spoon, and some crackers and squatted underneath Pancho to eat. Canned tomatoes could be both meat and drink to a cowboy when nothing else was handy. Pancho stood over him and dozed. His whiskers poked Mikey on the back of the neck. One hour with Mikey on a herd and he was gentle as a kid horse again.

  Mikey figured Paul was probably down in Mexico craving a drink, now that he'd sold his pickup. Later, he found out that every cowboy on the drive had seen Paul when he delivered the herd at Magdalena.

  Mikey remembered when he learned what "crave" meant. He had asked Paul why he drank so much even though he knew it caused so much hurt. Paul looked him in the eye and said, "I crave it, son. It's a craving I have." Mikey understood the word without explanation because he recognized the famished edge in his father's look.

  Mikey knew a craving or two himself. He already knew how much a person could crave a drink of mezcal for his tired body and mind as he rode the trail home in the evening. He craved the risk of his life when he launched himself into space on a swing. He craved to be close inside his father's reach, close enough to smell his whiskey breath. That sure would be sweet to know again.

  Mikey loved canned tomatoes but did not crave them. He loved pan de huevo with café con leche with his Nina after Sunday Mass, but they did not stretch the cords of his being to satisfy a craving. He loved his Granny's bland mashed potatoes and gravy and bland boiled carrots served on her blue china with Chinese birds above Chinese trees; albondiga soup; fried steak; potatoes and gravy and sweet peas; horseshoe-sized pancakes with molasses and bacon; a glass of cold, raw milk; eggnog; and peanut butter sandwiches with jam or honey or mayonnaise, but he craved to ride Pancho and
cowboy with Paul Summers and did not think of meat or drink when he could do it.

  Mikey was given plenty to eat because Maggie was a good provider. Last Thanksgiving she was broke but able to provide a fat hen for their dinner. Granny would have provided a turkey, but she went off to California to be with her brother Fred and his family. Maggie headed home Wednesday night after work without a bird for Thanksgiving. She always drove too fast. As she passed the Morales's Mariposa Dairy a rooster chased a plump little hen up out of the bushes by the side of the road. The hen came out looking back at the rooster, and when she saw the car she did not change course, but widened her eyes at Maggie and flew up as high as she could. Maggie said that she could tell by the look in the hen's eyes that she would rather take her chances at overflying Maggie's hurtling car than turn back and be caught by the rooster.

  Maggie did not have time to stop or swerve. The hen whacked against the top of the car's grill, stretched her wings straight out in front of her to break her fall like a diver who at the top of her dive discovered no water in the pool, folded into a bunched mass as she struck the windshield, and rolled over the top of the car. Maggie stopped to pick her off the highway and to see if she was still alive. Maggie saw that she was cow-killed and felt the warm, clean tallow of the leg under her thumb, got in her car quickly, dropped the hen on the floorboard, looked straight ahead, and drove home. She got out of the car with the hen at the woodpile, saw her blink an eye, chopped off her head, was glad to see she bled well, then held her away so she would not bleed on her new high-heeled pumps and silk stockings.

  Maggie's story of the Mariposa Dairy hen that she stole for Thanksgiving dinner got funnier every time she told it, and she could always bring it up as a remedy for desperation in the family. Everybody had been feeling desperate lately except Maudy Marie. Maudy was like Granny; she figured life could only stay good as long as she did not have to work desperately to make it so.

  After lunch Viv and Roy drove up close behind the herd and Roy told Mikey to give him his horse and board the truck with Viv. Roy then swung up on Pancho's bare back and rode into the drags. His legs were so long, his feet almost dragged the ground. Mikey climbed in beside Viv and smelled his father's sweat again. He watched Roy laugh and joke with Felix Johnson as though he enjoyed being down close to a herd in the dust again.

  "Now, highpockets, do you want to work for me?" Viv asked.

  "Yes, I do," Mikey said.

  "What kind of wages do you get?"

  "I don't often get paid wages."

  "No? Wouldn't you rather be paid? You're too good a hand to work for nothing. You work for me, I want to pay you. How would that be?"

  "All right."

  "Oh, that'd be all right. Well, I'm glad that'd be all right. What kind of money are we talking about?"

  "I don't know."

  "How old are you, Mikey, eight? How come you don't know how much you're worth?"

  "I just don't."

  "And what? Don't care?"

  "I care, but I haven't thought about it."

  "Well, think about it. What are you worth?"

  Mikey wanted to cowboy but he would not argue about pay.

  "You don't have to pay me," he said. "I'll work as a favor to you. I've always done it that way."

  "Well, son, I admit you're awful young to hold down a paying job and somebody else might not want to pay you because you're little, but not me, You're as good a hand horseback as any man who works for me, even better than some, so I'm going to pay you ten dollars a drive. You can help drive the saddlehorses from the Baca Float to the pens across the line the day before every drive, then make each cattle drive back to the Baca Float. How does that sound?"

  "Fine."

  "Okay, and as a bonus, you'll own Pancho after ten drives."

  Money talk perplexed Mikey and ownership did not concern him because he owned so little, but he knew he already owned Pancho and Baxter. He did not imagine how anyone could be so mistaken as to try to lay claim to Pancho.

  Viv must have read the look on his face because he said, "What are you thinking, that Pancho is already yours?"

  "No, you just probably didn't know that he's always been my horse," Mikey said.

  "You're wrong, Black Man. Pancho belongs to Adams, Cunningham, and O'Brien. Roy bought Pancho from Paul at the same time that I bought the truck in Magdalena."

  Mikey was silent for a long time. Viv did not press the subject or say anything against Paul. Mikey was to learn that Viv always handled a situation that involved the boy's hurt feelings by giving a practical solution to it, or he would bring up another problem that needed to be solved. He liked to bring a problem out in the open, solve it quickly and frankly, write it off, and go on to new business. He did not consider feelings to be an obstacle that should slow a man from doing his day's work.

  "Now," Viv said, "we need to get a few things straight before you come to work for this outfit, is that all right?"

  "Sure," Mikey said.

  "Let me ask you this. How do you recognize someone who might be a cowboy when you first lay eyes on him?"

  "I guess, by his hat and boots."

  "Would you know a cowboy just by the way he wears his hat?"

  "I think I would."

  "How about the way you're dressed? If boots and a hat made a cowboy you'd sure come up short today. Where's the outfit I bought so you'd be ready to go to work when the outfit needed you?"

  "I didn't even know the herd was on the way until it came around the Nogales curve. Nobody told me anything. I couldn't have made you a hand if I'd waited to saddle my horse and put on my cowboy outfit."

  "What were you doing bareheaded and barefooted? Were you playing in the trees again like a monkey?"

  "No, when the herd came around the curve, I was watering my horse."

  "Well, doesn't this help you understand something about people?"

  "Yes."

  "I don't think you do, so, to be sure, let me tell you what I think. Not everybody who dresses like a cowboy is one. Not everybody who doesn't dress like a cowboy isn't one. Not everything a man says he owns is always his.

  "Be that as it may, if you want to be a cowboy and do the work, you better wear the outfit. If you're going to do a man's work, you have to wear the boots so you can at least get down off your horse and open a wire gate in a hurry if you have to. You have to wear a man's hat so the sun won't cook your brain before the day's work is done. You need to wear a long-sleeved shirt so all the hide won't sunburn off your arms. You understand what I'm telling you? If you got sunstroke or the hide sunburned off your arms and face, I'd have to leave the job and take you home to your mama. Our crew would lose its two best men because you didn't wear your long-sleeved shirt and hat and boots. Understand?"

  "Yes," Mikey said. He figured Viv must not know about all the cowboy work he had already done on Pancho in Santa Cruz County and the Sierra de San Juan. All Viv could see was a bare-headed kid who liked to play. Mikey had thought he would only take a few minutes to help with the herd. He only considered himself provisional help for an hour or two that day. By trying to make a hand and plugging a hole when he saw he was needed, he had only made himself look bad.

  "Good. I'll say one thing," Viv went on. "You're damned tough to ride all day barefooted and bareheaded on one can of tomatoes and six saltine crackers. When you grow up you'll be one of those guys they say can go all day on one Gillette," meaning he'd been given about as much as one razor blade's shave to sustain him, yet he'd been called upon for a month's energy. One Gillette blade was only good for so long, then it was only good to throw away.

  Mikey smiled and Viv patted him roughly on the shoulder. The boy liked Viv O'Brien a whole lot better now that he could be certain the hats and boots that Viv had bought him were not a bribe so the man could get close to Maggie. Every cattle human in Santa Cruz County knew that Mikey wanted to cowboy, so people were always telling him they would come and get him and give him a job with their cattle for one
reason or another. Mikey would never in a hundred years have believed that Viv would keep his promise and give him all this good work.

  Now Mikey believed he was finally on his own with the right outfit. Roy Adams and his Uncle Buster had probably promised Paul they would put Mikey to work to keep him busy in the family where he could be watched and trained. Uncle Buster was up ahead pointing the herd away from the houses and yards. He was sober that day and not clowning as he did when he worked with Paul. He seemed to be there for the pure joy of doing his job. He was a good clown but a better cowboy any day.

  Mikey appreciated all the good people on the drive. Manuel Valenzuela was on point across the herd from Uncle Buster. Everything from the spurs on his heels to the jacket on his shoulders was scuffed, fit him as well as his old hat, and it all fit well on his horse. Manuel was always glad to see Mikey and Pancho, but the containment of eighteen hundred cattle as they tromped past houses and lawns and barking dogs did not give him much time to grin and say hello. Only the cowboys in the drags were able to visit with each other.

  Grover Kane, Jim Kane's son, was there. Mikey hung close to Grover any time he could be with him. He was fifteen and already made a living as a cowboy. He would go to Wyoming to work on a wagon for a big outfit that summer. He would leave home with his bed and saddle and live outside until the outfit's cattle were branded, weaned, and shipped in the fall.

  George Kimbrough was there and when he rode up and fell in step beside Uncle Buster, Mikey could not tell them apart. Bud and Dink Parker were two more of Paul's best friends that Mikey called "Uncle."

  Viv O'Brien was the only one on the drive who was not an absolute bosom pal of Paul's. He liked to talk about how he knew Paul when they were kids in Pecos, but he did not love Paul the way the other cowboys in the crew did. Paul's buddies told stories about Paul Summers all the time and when it was Viv's turn he could only say that Paul was a year older, had been in a lot of mischief as a child in Texas, and had boarded a trainload of cattle for Arizona when he was twelve.