by J P S Brown
"Yes."
"You think that makes his dreams sweet?"
Mikey kept a straight face. "No, I think it's so he won't miss Mary too much."
Even the Apaches laughed.
On the first day of work in the meadows, Mikey went out to saddle his wrangling horse. At the corner of the saddle house he ran head-on into a stocky man. The man had a cold brown cigarette in the corner of his mouth and a dusty black hat set low over his brow. He stared into Mikey's eyes and did not smile.
"And who might you be, button?" he asked.
"Michae1 Paul Summers Sorrells."
"Well, I'm glad to meet you, Michael Paul. I'm Gunnar Thude."
"My dad said you'd meet us here."
"Let's go see your dad. Is the coffee ready? Who does the cooking in this lash-up?"
"The coffee's ready. Lyle's cooking and I've got to wrangle the horses."
"No, you don't. They're already in the corral."
Mikey looked around the corner of the saddle house and saw that the remuda had already been corralled.
"Now that you've seen them in the corral, you've done your duty. Let's get some coffee," Gunnar said.
Mikey fell in step with him. "Thanks," he said.
"Don't mention it," Gunnar said. "I bet you and me'll get along good."
"We will if you wrangle the horses before I get up every morning." Mikey kept a straight face.
"Naw, that's a button's job. Not a chore for a top hand like me."
"But you do it so well. I think whoever's best at it ought to do it."
"You can't get good at it unless you do it all the time as a button."
The crew was in the cabin drinking coffee when Gunnar and Mikey went in. Gunnar got his coffee, then shook hands all around.
"This button tells me I'd make a good horse wrangler," Gunnar said to Paul. "I think he'll do to take along. He's as good a confidence man as Buster Sorrells and he don't stutter like Buster."
"Well, Buster's his uncle. Do you think he looks like him?"
"He's as black, anyway. Is this the one they call Black Man?"
"This is the one."
"Well, put 'er there, Black Man." Gunnar shook Mikey's hand again. "Your Uncle Buster is probably the best friend I have in the whole world besides your dad. You think you'll be anything like them when you grow up?"
Mikey looked at his dad. "You never know," he said.
All the cowboys laughed at that. Mikey enjoyed another victory. His dad had been telling the cowboys stories about him and that was proof that his life had not been completely without accomplishment.
That day the crew spread out and gathered a forty-section pasture. Mikey paired off with Uncle Art. ·
After a while, Art asked, "Mikey, which way is camp?"
Mikey pointed back to camp.
"That's right. In this timber, you have to keep your own compass in your ears so you'll always know which side of your head our camp lies."
"I guess I do that without thinking about it, Uncle Art."
"You always have to remember to think about it when you're in the timber. You have to look for landmarks because you're not surrounded by close mountains. Cowboying is not the same in these big pines as it is down south where you have big mountains to watch and short brush to ride through. You can lose track of your landmarks, so watch out. Everything looks the same inside these pines. You know what I mean?"
"I think so, Uncle Art."
"I know you're a good cowboy, Mikey, but any of us can get lost in this country. If you stayed in the thick forest, you could probably ride all the way to the Grand Canyon and not see a landmark, so be careful. If you and I get separated for more than half an hour I want you to stop and get off old Eagle and let him rest until I find you. If something happens and I don't catch up to you in a couple of hours, you get on Eagle and give him his head. He'll take you back to camp, either to the Horseshoe or the Haystack."
Mikey thought, "God help me if I get lost like a greenhorn. Wouldn't that be something, to ride out of the trees at the Haystack and have to tell Madam Hitler I got lost? Then I'd have to ask her to take me back to the work. She can't even pass the bread without making a face."
The country Mikey had known in southern Arizona and Mexico was broken up with plenty of landmarks and trails that were always visible underfoot or over a cowboy's head. Inside that ponderosa forest, all a cowboy saw overhead were the tops of the pines and all he saw underfoot were trunks, deadfalls, and a carpet of pine needles. Every tree was a twin to millions more. Mikey stayed on course in the trees until he found his first cattle. He threw them in with cattle that Art found and stayed and held the bunch. Art used him to hold the bunch while he found more and brought them in. When the country was clean, they started the cattle back to camp. The cows were big Herefords who were easy to handle in the trees because Paul Summers had been in charge of them. Paul and his crew rode circle every day and made sure every cow saw cowboys every week. When Art was away looking for cattle on the flanks, Mikey was able to bluff the cattle and control them, even in the trees where they could have scattered in all directions and left the country. They had been made to believe that they could be held by one man. When cattle were that easy to handle horseback, a lot of country could be covered and a lot of cattle gathered in one day.
The miracle that happened in every one of Paul's roundups also happened that day. All the cowboys arrived at the Horseshoe pens with their cattle within an hour of each other. By noon everybody was in for dinner. Manuel Chavez, a good camp cook from Saint John's, had shown up to cook sourdough biscuits, steak and gravy, spuds, canned peas, and peach cobbler. The cattle were kept in a holding pasture and watered in the Horseshoe pens. The crew gathered the cattle in the mornings and branded calves in the afternoons. The cowboys took turns holding herd, flanking calves, branding, earmarking, castrating, and vaccinating.
The calves were roped and dragged to the fire. That was everybody's favorite part of the work, and Mikey was given a fair share of it. Paul gave him a short reata and he heeled all the calves that he could and roped the calves around the neck that were not easy to catch by the heels.
The work was hot, dry, and long, but Mikey found himself right in the middle of the best part of another great victory in his life and he did not ever want it to end. He looked up out of his blankets in the morning glad about the work at hand and he looked up at the sunset when the last calf had been branded, sorry that it was time to quit. He never felt tired and was not visited by petty thoughts.
Evenings in camp were spent washing clothes, repairing gear, and playing poker or checkers. An hour and a half of poker and checkers killed the cowboys dead. Every man was in his bedroll two hours after sunset because they would be up and out of their bedrolls two hours before sunup.
Paul was riding one bronc, a dun seven-year-old outlaw with a mean eye he called Pesa, short for Pesadilla, Nightmare. Pesa was a real haunt to look at, with a long, heavy head, shaggy fetlocks, and big feet. He owned an atrocity for an eye, for it was as yellow as a goat's and the hair did not grow around it. He only had about a sixteenth of an inch of eyelash, but the beard on his chin and muzzle was half a foot long. He did not look or act like a real horse—more like a nightmare of a horse.
Pesa was mean. He was liable to kick, bite, and strike. When he was mad he growled in a way that made Paul believe he was insane. He fought when Paul took hold of him and could be expected to hurt any person or horse who came in range of his teeth and feet at any time.
Paul caught Pesa to ride on the day the crew was to ship a herd of old culls from the Horseshoe. When the rope settled around neck, his eyes turned black and he ran at Paul to trample him. Paul snubbed Pesa to a post, bridled him, and blindfolded him with the tapojo on his bridle, saddled him, untied him from the post, stepped on him, and pulled the blindfold off one eye and then the other. Pesa untracked and trotted away stiff-legged with his ears laid flat. He turned his head for better looks out of one eye and then
the other. He made five circles of the corral and did not hump up to buck, so Gunnar opened the gate for him and Paul rode into another corral.
Pesa did not have the look of a normal warm-blooded mammal. His eye had a serpent's yellow glint. As the crew bunched around him to ride through another gate, Gunnar's horse jostled him from one side and he recoiled into Art's horse. He bolted and snapped at Gunnar's arm with his teeth and kicked Art and his horse with both hind feet. He kicked past Art's ears with both hind feet again, then snaked his head back and clamped his teeth on Gunnar's thumb when the man tried to slap him away.
Pesa growled and shook his head to clip off Gunnar's thumb. When a horse bites something he does not open his mouth to unbite it; he tears himself loose from it by sideways jerks of his head. For a mouthful of narrow blades of grass, the jerk is tiny. For a thumb with a 16o-pound man on the end of it riding a thirteen-hundred-pound horse, the jerk was violent. Pesa bellowed and whipped his head from side to side with all his might until Gunnar's thumb came off.
Paul's only remedy for the situation had been to spur the horse. Later the crew thought the spurring might have been a mistake, but nobody knew what to do while Pesa had the fit. Gunnar might have saved his thumb if he could have come unhorsed, but then Pesa would have had him in a lot better place to kill him while he took off his thumb.
Paul did not know that Pesa was growling over Gunnar's thumb. He only knew the outlaw was on the fight and his official business was to fight back. When Pesa had made his first jump, Paul's limber, old hat flopped down into his eyes and he did not see anything that happened afterward. Pesa tore free from Gunnar and bucked into the cattle and so surprised the cattle that they climbed over the top of one another to get out of his way. Then he broadsided an old shelly cow, cartwheeled over the top of her, and broke his own neck. Paul was catapulted thirty feet end over end into the cattle, but he stood right up to show he was not hurt.
Gunnar's wreck was an awful disaster to happen so far away from a hospital. Dr. Disterhafft ran a clinic for Southwest Lumber in McNary, but Gunnar had to ride the eight miles back to the Haystack so he could be driven to the clinic. Art and Lyle went with him to do the driving and to wait on him if he fainted.
Forever after that, Gunnar blamed the loss of his thumb on Paul's floppy hat. He said if Paul could have seen what was happening he would have reined Pesa into Gunnar's horse instead of spurring him. He also laughed about the way a foot-long piece of his tendon had been stretched out and laid bare to the weather when the thumb came off.
FOURTEEN
THE PLAYING FIELD
In our grandfathers' time, if a boss wanted to fire a man, he caught his top horse, led him out of the remuda, and handed him over to another cowboy.
Mikey was an old witness to the changing moods of women because of Maggie. Nevertheless, he could not figure why Mary Bell Summers had been so nice to him when she picked him up in McNary and so mean when his dad came around. At supper on the day the crew returned to the Haystack, she told Paul that she was sick and tired of spending days alone in the camp. She wondered why a ten-year-old kid could ride and she could not. She would not stay in camp alone anymore. She would ride Eagle and Mikey could ride some other horse. She would not have to ride every day, but she wanted Eagle to be her horse. When she rode, she did not want Mikey to ride. He could just stay in camp and see how he liked it. That was all there was to it.
The next morning, as the crew made ready to drive a bunch of cattle to McNary she declared that she would ride. Mikey could stay and look after the camp. She filled a canteen with water and hung it on a nail outside on the cabin wall where it would be in the sun most of the day. She did not want Mikey in the cabin while she was gone. She did not want him to water at the tank by the windmill because of germs. If he got thirsty, he could drink from the canteen. She did not explain why it had to hang where the sun would make the water hot. The whole crew, including Mary and Paul, drank nothing but the fresh water out of the well under the windmill.
Mary did not look Mikey in the eye while she gave him instructions. She stood before her mirror, arranged a white Stetson on the back of her head, and posed in her cream-colored elk hide chaps and matching gauntlets.
When she was ready to go, she ushered Mikey outside and locked the door. As she walked toward the corral, he saw that she wore a pair of spurs that had once belonged to him. He did not mind. They looked good on her, but he had thought he lost them. He knew he would never be able to claim them now.
With a good book to read, Mikey would have been just right for the day, but Granny's gift of a new Tarzan adventure was locked in the cabin. He had plenty to do outside, though. He would build muscle with the ax and split stove wood and kindling. When he wanted to rest, he would climb to the platform on top the windmill, or to the top of a pine tree. Mary forbade him to swim in the stock tank. She said he would drown. He did not want to bounce off the top of that water naked, anyway. At that altitude of seven thousand feet, it was too hard and cold.
He chopped wood until he wanted a drink and decided to tank up on the canteen water before it got hot. The Brothers at Saint Michael's taught that he should take nine swallows from the bubbler fountain several times a day. He swallowed the canteen water nine times before he took a breath and realized it had gasoline in it. A big belch of gasoline fumes issued from his gullet and his stomach swelled. Now he knew why Mary wanted him to drink only from that canteen. At midafternoon, Filomena, Nana, and Juan Bueno found Mikey lying in the shade of the cabin with a stomachache and took him back to their camp. They gave him a cup of coffee with canned milk and sugar in it, but he only swallowed one sip. They brought out a watermelon they had chilled in the horse trough, but he could not handle that, either.
Nana walked up to him with a glint in her eye. "My wrist hurts here, and my elbow hurts here, and my arm nerve hurts here," she said. "Put your hand on my wrist."
Nana's wrist glowed inside his hand.
"Now here," she said, and she put his hand on her elbow. The inside of the joint seemed hot, so he pressed his palm against it. He felt that his hand drew her pain because his own wrist, forearm, and elbow began to ache.
"There?" he asked. "Is that where it hurts?"
Nana looked way off over his head. "Now here." She put his hand on the back of her upper arm. Mikey took his hand back and shook it until the ache went out, then grasped the back of her arm and felt pain seep into his own arm again.
He held her arm tenderly at first. Filomena watched him closely but would not meet his gaze, and that made him feel that he was doing good. He tightened his hold.
After a while, Nana picked Mikey's hand off her arm and said to Filomena, "It's gone. I knew it." She turned away from him and went to the fire.
"Well?" Mikey asked. "Did I help it?"
"No! " Nana said sharply then she turned to Filomena and laughed.
Filomena smiled at him. "What made you think you could help anything?"
"Then why did Nana want me to hold her arm? It made mine ache."
"For nothing! Forget it."
"Okay." Mikey laughed. "Next time your arm is sore, ask Mrs. Pol Somairs to take away the pain, because a pine tree will do it before I ever will again."
Nana handed Mikey an eagle's wing feather on a leather thong. "Here," she said. "Hang this around you neck."
"What will it do?" Mikey asked.
"Make you pretty/' Nana said, and she and Filomena laughed.
"Does your arm still ache?"
"No," Mikey said. "Why would you think my arm still ached?"
"Nothing," Nana said sharply. "You and Juan Bueno go find some pine gum to chew for your stomach and I'll make mint tea."
The gum made Mikey belch big and the tea soothed his stomach. A strange car drove up to the cabin, dropped Mary off, and left. Mikey stayed with the Apaches until after dark.
When he went back to the cabin and knocked on the door, Mary opened it and said, "Where have you been?"
&n
bsp; "At the crew camp."
"What were you doing over there?"
"Waiting for everybody to come back."
"You might as well have stayed there. The crew's not coming back until tomorrow."
"My bed's here."
"I wouldn't have come back, either, except for you."
Mikey did not know what to say about that.
"You know what, kid? You might as well come in, but you're putting a cramp on my married life."
"I don't mean to."
"You don't mean to. You don't know you're doing it. Bullshit. You know. Maybe you ought to be the one to tell me. Just why do you need all this special care?"
"I don't know what you mean."
"Your dad made me come back to look after you. Why is that?"
"I don't know."
"Because he wants to go out tonight and get drunk with his other sonsabitches, that's why. So he uses you for an excuse to get rid of me. What do you think of that? Or didn't you already know he would do that?"
"No, I didn't."
"You mean this is the first time he left you at home so he could have an excuse to get rid of his wife and get drunk?"
"Mary you're the one who wanted me to stay here, not my dad."
"Oh, I'm the one, am I? I'm the one. You might as well go to bed, because I ain't hungry and I ain't cooking anything. Go to bed."
Mikey turned back the tarp on his cot and undressed with his back to her. He used the costumer between his bed and hers as a partial blind. He belched gasoline without meaning to.