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

by J P S Brown

  Mikey looked down at the airport pasture from the beacon on the bluff. He sat his horse on an escarpment a hundred feet above the flat floor of the pasture. He saw the emergency landing field that the government maintained in the center of the pasture. The herd raised dust in the flat a half mile below him.

  Mikey rode down to meet the herd. The drags were so obscured by dust that he could barely see the two riders in the herd's wake. The cowboy on point on Mikey's side grinned through sunburn and dust and a big mustache and said, "Quehubole, Miguelito."

  Mikey did not think he knew any long, skinny, fair-skinned vaqueros who wore handlebar mustaches, so he said, "Who are you behind that face?"

  "I'm Grover, Mikey. Your cousin Grover Kane."

  Mikey shook Grover's hand and then rode toward the rear. The cowboy on the flank was Viv O'Brien on his top horse, Sorrel Top. Viv was so fair-complexioned that the sun, wind, and dust had split both his upper and lower lips. He shook hands with Mikey, but when he tried to speak or smile he pursed his lips so his face would not come apart.

  Mikey went back to help in the drags. The cattle were hungry and he could see that they wanted to spread out and eat instead of slog through the dust of the drive. Maudy Marie rode in the drags on a palomino pony that Viv had brought out of Mexico for her. She wore a dilapidated Stetson hat that was so big and decrepit that it lopped her ears, and made her look like Paul Summers. She kept it on with a string under her chin.

  Maudy Marie's palomino was only ten hands tall and so skinny his ribs and hipbones stuck out. Mikey asked her when she intended to feed her horse.

  "He won't eat, Mikey. He's homesick."

  "How do you know he's homesick?" Mikey asked. "Nobody has to get gaunt like that when they're homesick."

  "He won't eat his grain or hay in the corral. When I turn him out to graze in the horse pasture, he runs to the south fence as fast as he can go, hangs his head over the wire, and nickers toward Mexico as though his heart will break."

  "Will he let you catch him?"

  "Yes, and he stands still to be saddled. He lets me ride him all day, but he heads for the other end of the pasture when I turn him out because he wants to go home. What am I going to do? Daddy says he'll die if he doesn't get over it. I don't want him to die. I love him."

  Mikey did not pretend to know what to do. One of the truths he had learned about horses was that a body should not pretend to know the answer to a horse's yearning when sometimes not even the horse knew.

  "He looks like he's pined all the meat right off his bones, sister," Mikey said.

  "Marna says he'll waste away until he dies. Why won't he eat?"

  "It's sure not right, because most gentle horses are gluttons. When we get back, we'll see if we can get him to swallow something to make him greedy again."

  Mikey wished he had some mezcal. If he could pour some mezcal down the paisano, he might like his new life better. That was the way Paul helped sick cattle and horses snap out of despair when they quit eating and tried to die.

  The little horse seemed to have plenty of energy and his eye was bright and full. Mikey would worry that he was in trouble when his eyes shrunk and the sockets turned hollow. He knew enough about dying horses and cattle to recognize a sick eye from a long way off.

  He settled down to enjoy his own horse, the dust, and the smell of the herd. He found himself in Mikey Summers's heaven. He would be happy if the drive never ended. This was the reason he was on the earth. Summer had only begun. Maybe he would make himself so indispensable that Viv would forget to send him back to Santa Fe.

  Another cowboy on the crew was Cap Maben. He had lived in cow camps all his life and was an artist as a camp cook. After the herd was penned at headquarters, and as the crew headed toward the hogan for dinner, Cap bragged about the tent camp he had set up for the crew. His chuck box, cook stove, table, and benches were installed in one big tent and the bedrolls in another. A tarp fly covered the entrances between the two tents and served as a shady breezeway between them.

  Cap said that he did not envy Maggie her cook stove because the oven in that stove could not cook two biscuits the same shade of brown in the same pan. He cackled as he laughed and said that, at best, Maggie's cooking was only ordinary, so maybe she wouldn't notice that her stove was no good. He glanced out of the corner of his eye to get Mikey's reaction to that.

  Mikey immediately felt sorry for Maggie. He had eaten two of Cap's sourdough biscuits that morning for breakfast. Any wife who called herself a cook but could not produce biscuits like Cap's ought to go into mourning for herself.

  Mikey had not even been introduced to Cap, but he believed his bragging as though it were catechism doctrine. Cap finally looked him in the eye and said, "Well, either you're Mikey, or old Viv used somebody else's name on you all morning."

  "I'm Michael Paul Summers," Mikey said, and shook Cap's hand.

  Cap laughed again. He had laughed all morning so that everybody on all sides of the herd could hear him. He laughed at least every five minutes. His laugh was the cross between a choked wheeze and the whistle in the song of a consumptive rooster. He wore a dusty black hat and was so thin the pockets sagged in wrinkles on his khaki-covered butt.

  Mikey walked into the cook tent with the crew. Everybody washed their hands at a washstand just inside the flap, so Mikey did too. The Navajos had already built a fire in the cook stove. The dirt floor had been sprinkled with water and swept. The smell of sourdough bread reminded Mikey of other camps he had known. He sat on the end of a bench and watched the crew help Cap make dinner quickly so it could go back to work. A barren cow, remnant of the former owner's herd, had been butchered the day before. The headquarters did not have enough refrigeration to keep the meat of an entire beef. The nights were cold, so the beef was hung naked inside the pump house at night and wrapped in a tarp and stowed on the ground in the tent under Cap's bedroll during the day.

  Grover sharpened a butcher knife and carved a pile of steaks off a quarter of the beef. Cap moved a two-gallon pot of beans over the hottest lids of the stove to warm. He opened the oven door to look at the three pans of biscuits that warmed there. He let down G the lid of the chuck box and propped it up with its hinged leg, sprinkled flour into a clean tin tray, and rolled the steaks in the flour. Grover greased a cast-iron skillet and Cap filled it with steaks to fry on the stove. Cap opened a quart-sized can of corn and put it in a pan to warm, then took a pile of spuds that Jim Porter had peeled and sliced them up and slid them into deep, hot lard to fry in another skillet. He poured himself a cup of coffee from a pot on the stove, tasted it, gave it a big spoonful of sugar, and poured a gurgle of canned milk into it. He sipped the coffee again and told everybody that dinner would be ready in fifteen minutes.

  Mikey's mouth watered, so he hit for his own dinner table. Cap gave him a pan of biscuits for Maggie "so her outfit wouldn't starve."

  Maggie fed her outfit the same chuck that Cap fed his. Maggie and Paul had always served small, salted and peppered cowboy steaks rolled in flour. Mikey figured he would not like Cap's steaks as much because Maggie and Paul added an extra sprinkle of black pepper on the steaks that Cap did not. Cap's steaks looked good, but to Mikey, the stove-hot, floured meat with extra pepper his parents prepared was the best-cooked beef anybody ever ate. Viv had imported a Flamo gas-powered refrigerator, so Maggie served iced tea and homemade vanilla ice cream, which were touches to her table that Cap did not have. Maggie would have given Cap's crew all the iced stuff they wanted if he had begged in a nice way, but he scorned sweets of any kind and considered any drink except hot coffee, water, and whiskey to be poison.

  Another advantage of Maggie's table was that everybody could eat as much as he wanted. After dinner, Mikey headed for the tent to join the crew again and met Charlie Redhouse and Willie Lynch as they came away from Cap's table. Both carried a handful of biscuits and an extra steak for dessert. When Mikey went into the tent he caught the tail end of a tirade that Cap gave against Indi
ans who ate everything in sight and did not stop grabbing unless he cleared the table. Cap begrudged every bite they ate even though Mikey was to find out that the young Indians ate only

  a little more than he did.

  After that first tirade, Mikey knew that he'd better restrict his intake at Cap's table the way Grover did if he was to get along with Cap. Grover filled the empty spaces in his growing belly with cigarettes and talk the way Jim and Cap did. Cap did not ever stop talking, except when Jim interspersed a grunt or a word that was little more than a grunt, or when it was time for Cap to croak out a laugh. Jim and Cap also kept their cigarettes lighted during meals, probably another reason they did not eat as much as everybody else.

  Mikey was ready to show he could make a hand with the High Lonesome grown-ups. A good horse was the great equalizer for any boy like Mikey, or any old man like Cap, as long as he was a hand and the horse knew how to carry him to the work. Mikey had been taught that anybody who called himself a cowboy ought to be able to make a hand on a burro with a gourd vine for a lariat if he had to, so he did not doubt that he would make it on the brown horse that everybody called Negro.

  The herd was penned in a large waterlot, a fire built on one end for the branding irons, and a bucket of clean water set outside the fence. Jim Porter, Viv, and the three Navajos did the work on the ground. Mikey, Grover, and Cap roped and stretched the cattle out on the ground by the fire. Maudy Marie was the tar baby in charge of a paint can full of a thick mixture of black pine tar and alcohol that she swabbed on the fresh brands and bleeding scrotums of castrated bulls. She carried the nuts to the bucket of water to be cleaned and dressed for supper. The ropers rotated at each job so their horses were given an equal share of the task. Fifty bulls were in that herd of 75o. All the rest were steers.

  Mikey had castrated bulls for Paul in the Sierra de San Juan and for Viv at the Baca Float, but he figured somebody on the ground would do it. However, when Grover and Cap stretched the first bull on the ground, Viv told Mikey to get off his horse, drop his reins, and come running. Mikey did as he was told. Viv opened a blade on a new stock knife for Mikey to examine.

  "What do you think of this knife?" Viv asked.

  "Looks like a good one," Mikey said.

  "How much do you think it's worth?"

  "A whole lot."

  "Guess."

  "A dollar?"

  "You got a nickel?"

  "I think so." Mikey dug six pennies out of his pocket. Viv picked five out of his hand one by one, and then handed the knife to Mikey.

  "Aw, Viv, you want me to cut the bull? You don't need to give me the knife."

  "No, I'm selling you the knife for five cents so I'll know you'll always keep it handy. Every cowboy needs a good knife. I'd give it to you, but some people believe it's bad luck to give away a knife. It might sever our friendship. I'm not saying I believe it, but I don't want to take the chance."

  Mikey fell on the flank of the bull, sliced off half the scrotum, held one nut in his palm, and sliced it carefully so that he only cut through the thin striffing of skin that surrounded the nut and drew no blood. He peeled that striffing off the nut and pushed it up to the base of the cord as far as it would go, sliced the vein off the base of the nut, sliced the cord way up where the thinnest strand of blood ran, and did the same with the other nut. Maudy Marie stepped up and tarred the steer's brand and empty scrotum, and the Navajos let him up. He had been emasculated in less than thirty seconds and did not realize his great good fortune.

  Viv went to Negro, took down Mikey's reata, coiled it, and laid it on a fence post. He picked a new manila lariat off another post and looped the running end hard and fast on Mikey's saddlehorn.

  "Michael Paul, every time you catch an animal and take those wild dallies around your horn with that snake of a reata, I almost have a heart attack," Viv said. "I want you to learn to rope tied hard and fast to your saddlehorn so your fingers won't get caught in the dallies. That way I'll be sure that you keep the surgeon's touch you'll need to doctor cattle on this outfit."

  Viv had become Mikey's new maestro. The boy did not consider this to be altogether good. All Mikey's cowboying had been learned from Paul Summers. Viv wanted everything done exactly his way, and he was a genius of a cattleman, but Mikey did not think he even sat a horse right.

  The crew branded and vaccinated one hundred cattle, quit at sunset, and turned the herd out in the shipping pasture. Then Viv and Mikey washed, changed shirts, and sat down at Maggie's table for a big roast of beef, beans in their soup, potatoes and gravy, Cap's sourdough bread, and tapioca pudding. After that, Viv stepped outside to smoke with the crew.

  Viv smoked one big cigar every evening after supper. After that he chewed PK gum. Grover, Cap, and Jim smoked Camel cigarettes and shared them with the Navajos. The Navajos could smoke or leave it alone, but Hoskie wordlessly held out a hand to Jim for a cigarette when the white men lit up. Willie and Charlie accepted cigarettes when they were offered.

  The Navajos smoked their cigarettes differently than the way the white men smoked. The white men held their cigarettes between thumb and forefinger with the lighted end toward the palm of their hand, or between the forefinger and middle finger with the hot end outside. The Navajos held the hot end away from their palm between thumb and forefinger or with the hot end against their palm with the cigarette held between their forefinger and middle finger. The habitual smokers inhaled the smoke deeply and held the cigarettes in the corners of their mouths a lot. The Navajos drew small drafts of smoke into their mouths and immediately blew it out through their nostrils or their pursed lips. The habitual smokers craved it in their lungs. The Indians tasted it on their tongues and inside their cheeks.

  Mikey could not wait to be allowed to smoke. The smell of the toasted, tailor-made Camel tobacco was more delicious even than Paul's roll-your-own Bull Durham. The crew did not smoke tailor-made all the time because they smoked more than a package a day and they would run out too soon. The ranch was twenty-two miles of dirt road away from the nearest supply. Jim and Cap smoked roll-your-own Prince Albert for their workaday smokes and Grover smoked Bull Durham. Roll-your-own smokes lasted four times longer than tailor-made. The smokers' hands were too busy during the day's work for them to stop and roll cigarettes very often, and the roll-your-own tobacco and papers cost a only third as much as the tailor-made.

  Maggie told Mikey to bring Viv inside and show him his boxing medals. He got them out of his suitcase and handed them to her. She handed the newest to Viv.

  "How many kids did you have to whip to win this medal?" Viv asked.

  "Four."

  "How many black eyes and bloody noses did you get?"

  Mikey laughed. "Two or three."

  "They didn't change your looks much, so you must have a good left jab."

  "I do."

  Maggie cupped Mikey's chin in her hand and rolled his head for a better look. "Nobody better change that face." She laughed.

  "What got you started boxing?" Viv asked.

  "I live with 26o other boys and most of them are bigger than me. I fight in the ring so nobody will pick on me on the playground."

  "Yes, but what if you lose, son?" Maggie asked. "What if you come home next summer with a broken nose? Can't you get hurt worse in the ring than on the playground?"

  "Mama, the other boys respect the boxers who lose as well as the ones who win. Nobody wants to fight me because everybody knows I can fight."

  "I can't understand how your letting other boxers hit you in the face will give you insurance against getting hit in the face by somebody else."

  "Nobody wins a fight on the playground, mama. Even if a boy wins, he still might get a bloody nose, torn clothes, or a black eye. Some boys are cowards and will hit you with a rock or bite your finger off on the playground. I'd look a whole lot worse after one of those fights."

  "Where are the Brothers while all this fighting goes on?"

  "The Brothers can't stop every fight and th
ey don't even try."

  "But aren't you afraid, son? How can you put yourself through something like that? It's not fun, is it?"

  "No, it's scary."

  "Well, see? How can you put yourself through that?"

  "I'm scared, but I'm not chicken. That's the message the bullies get. You know what scares me most? I'm scared to take off all my clothes and stand in the ring naked in front of a thousand people. That's the scariest part, getting up there naked. Then I worry I'll make a fool of myself and disappoint the ones who root for me. Most of all, I'm afraid I'll lose my courage and show everybody "I'm a chickenshit."

  "Michael Paul, is that a word you use often as a boxer?"

  "No, mama. I'm sorry."

  "Well, keep your mouth clean, or I myself will take a fist to it."

  "I'm sorry; it's a habit I picked up."

  "It's a darned bad one."

  "Well, Maggie, Mikey's good in other ways," Viv said. "It's no wonder to me that he's no chicken. He's little, but he's got the heart of a lion."

  Before he went to sleep, Mikey remembered a thought that had come to him when he explained his boxing to Maggie. For a moment he had quit being a cowboy and become a boxer again. xplanations about his reasons for boxing brought back his craving for it. For a few moments cowboying did not matter. Viv seemed to understand that.

  He guessed cowboys and boxers were obsessed. Boxing was not considered fun by everybody, so why else would anyone do it?

  Maybe he was a slave to it. Everybody was sure it was fun to be a cowboy until they got the chance to cowboy After they had done it a while, even some cowboys thought it was too much hard work and could not wait to stop. Not Mikey. All cowboying, except holding herd, was a pleasure. He would even take holding herd for the rest of eternity if it ever happened that holding herd was all that was left to do.

  A week later, when the herd of two thousand had been branded and turned out, Viv told Mikey that he and Grover would camp at G-Lake for the remainder of the summer. They would leave that day and be responsible for eighteen hundred cattle that had been located there earlier that month. Viv and Maggie were going down to Nogales to get the last of their furniture. Camping with Grover would not be any different than camping with Paul. Grover and Mikey were from the same bush, eran de la misma mata. Grover was seven years older than Mikey and had already spent two seasons on the wagon of a big outfit in Wyoming. Mikey and Grover spoke Spanish with the same accent. The quiet tone of their voices was the same. They spoke mostly Spanish to each other, unless somebody who did not understand was around.