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

by J P S Brown

  Mikey was never one to move fast, but on the morning that everybody left headquarters, he got himself ready and mounted so quickly that he had to wait for Grover. Grover was methodical and did everything with grace and economy. He did not make a kid's mistakes. He knew his profession, was a natural at it, and did not ever intend to do anything else. That day he did not have to wait one minute for Mikey.

  Every camp on the ranch was the same: one hogan, one windmill, one reservoir tank, one pump house beside the windmill, a set of corrals, a saddle house, and a hay barn. A new chuck box was installed in each hogan. The cowboys slept on cots with springs and kept their belongings in their warbags and bedrolls. A counter and cabinet for utensils and canned goods were set up near the cook stove. A washstand with an enamel basin and two water buckets stood inside the door. A #1o washtub hung on the wall. Jim Porter had built a brand-new two-hole outhouse fifty yards away, downwind from each camp hogan. All the hogans were built the Navajo way with their doors facing east.

  The sun did not ever catch Grover and Mikey in bed. They were long gone by the time the sun shone on their door. Mikey did not know what it was to be tired, but when he stretched out in his bedroll at night, he was asleep in an instant.

  The routine was the same every day. Grover made biscuits after he washed his hands and shaved in the morning while Mikey wrangled and fed the horses and carried water to the hogan. When he returned to the hogan with the full buckets, Grover's biscuits were in the oven and bacon, eggs, and potatoes fried on the stove. After breakfast Mikey swept the floor. A sprinkle of water settled the dust as he swept. The dirt floor was smooth. The sprinkling made it smoother and harder every day because the dirt was barrial, lake-bottom soil, which could be used to make adobe.

  After breakfast the cowboys rode circle on the cattle. Viv did not want his cowboys to leave camp in separate directions because someone might get hurt and be hard to find. Work usually kept cowboys busy until sunset, so a man would not know if his partner had been hurt until nightfall. Mikey and Grover stayed together all day at the risk of being accused of riding one horse, or doing the work of one horse on two horses. They separated often, covered a wide swath, but tried to keep each other in sight.

  Their job was to watch for screwworms and shipping fever in the cattle. They ran Mexican corriente cattle that were most resistant to disease, so they did not have shipping fever that year. Flies laid eggs in the bloody places of the brands when they began to peel. The eggs hatched into screwworms that burrowed into the healthy flesh of the steers. A steer with worms showed great anxiety. He danced and wringed his tail, tossed his head, and licked slobbers on the brand. Adams, Cunningham, and O'Brien branded their cattle on the left shoulder. A steer could reach the brand with his slobbers, but he could not keep the flies off.

  Three or four infected cattle would bunch together to fight flies. They trotted a while to see if they could outdistance them, then stopped and milled together to see if they could rub them off. If they rubbed against a tree or a post, they aggravated the wound and gave the flies new places to lay eggs. When the cattle became most aggravated by the worms, they separated from their fellows and holed up in dense brush. They were hardest to find when they were so ill that they went off alone in a state of lunacy to fight the worms. Mikey and Grover often tracked them into the cedars but could not find where they came out or find them inside the thickets.

  A carrion smell characterized the ailment. The cowboys could always smell it when they were close, but sometimes they caught the stench on the wind and had to find the sufferers with their noses. Cattle that hid alone stuck their heads deep into the brush and did not move even an ear when a cowboy rode nearby. The cowboys often rode within a few feet of them without seeing them, but the stench was always there to help discover them.

  The sick cattle that Grover and Mikey missed out on the range were caught when they came in to drink in the fenced waterlot at their camp and at the waterlots that held rainwater in the pasture. Some of the wormy cattle became so wild that they only watered at night. When the ailment was at its worst, Grover closed the gates to the waterlots at sunset. Often the wildest, sickest cattle were waiting at the gates when the cowboys looked out of their hogan the next morning.

  The cowboys stayed in camp on Sundays, heated water on the stove, and bathed and washed their clothes with Ivory soap in the #1o washtub. Grover taught Mikey everything the boy could absorb. He was a lifelong friend of Paul Summers, Maggie, and her brothers, and he looked after Mikey as though he were his own brother. Mikey could not have invented a better partner.

  Mikey and Grover rode circle every day in the forty section G-Lake pasture and only rested in their own camp. They often rode over to help with the work at headquarters but seldom had time to get off their horses and go to the house. Viv visited the G-Lake camp in the pickup once a week, but if he did not show, the cowboys did not worry. He offered to take Grover to town once a month, but Grover said he did not need to go. He was paid forty dollars a month and everything he needed, even cigarettes, was provided. He saved his money.

  Walter and Darrel Lee rode to G-Lake one day on the tracks of a stray bull. Grover and Mikey had penned the bull the night before and were planning to return him that day. The Lees owned the Hardscrabble Ranch at Witch Wells, seven miles away. Mikey and Grover could do without visitors, but they loved it when they saw them coming.

  Walter was Darrel's father and Darrel was Mikey's age. The Lees were redheaded. Darrel was as fair as Mikey was dark and the sun was a hardship to him. Nothing small like chronic sunburn could have kept Darrel from cowboying. He rode a sturdy saddle with a brass horn and a brown horse named Star that was much taller and sleeker than Mikey's Negro. The Lees sat their horses like centaurs and were solemn, almost grim in visage. They were serious people, but gentlemanly, soft spoken, and later quick to smile. Mikey and Darrel immediately became friends.

  Maggie came out to camp once to see how Grover and Mikey were doing, but she came during daylight hours and did not catch them in camp. The plaintive note she left said that she would like to see her son once in a while.

  On a Saturday a month before he was to go back to school, Mikey and Grover roped and doctored three head in the open. The last one was a stag that Mikey had castrated. Mikey roped the stag's horns and Grover caught the heels and they stretched him out on the ground. Mikey got down to doctor him with Peerless worm medicine and pine tar. He poured the red Peerless into the wormholes in the brand and scrotum and watched the worms unscrew and boil out. When he believed they were all out, he covered the wound with pine tar, mounted Negro, and rode him up to slacken the rope. He dismounted again to take the slack rope off the stag's horns; He mounted his horse before Grover gave the animal's heels slack so he could get up. Once in a while a steer came to his feet on the fight and charged the first man or horse in sight. Mikey could protect himself and his horse better if he was on him. The steer usually stood up as soon as the heeler's rope went slack.

  This time, the stag lay still and rolled his eye as though he had been killed. Mikey dismounted and stomped him on the neck so he would wake up and get up. He lay moribund. Mikey twisted a half hitch in his tail, usually a sure cure for any stag who thought he was dead, but he did not even grunt. Grover dallied his rope up short and hauled the stag's hind feet up under his belly, then gave the legs slack so he would remember to use them and get up. The legs flopped back to the ground and lay still. Mikey found two cedar sticks, put one on each side of the stag's tail, stood on the end of the tail, held the ends of the sticks in both hands, squeezed them against the tail, and rubbed them up and down. Wisps of tail hair rose in the breeze. The hot bones in the tail sent up a fire alarm. The stag bawled and jumped up, whirled, and stepped out of Grover's loop, picked Mikey up on his horns, and tossed him onto his back. Mikey landed on the stinking brand and dragged the front of his shirt across it as he fell to the ground. The stag tossed him ahead and rolled him along on the points of his horns,
scrambled over the top of him, stomped his head with all four feet, and headed for a high cedar ridge without looking back.

  Mikey was suddenly back in the boxing ring with Joe McGrath again. Joe had just landed the punch that rang Mikey's ears and made him wonder if his eyes were open or closed.

  Grover held Mikey's head off the ground so he would not inhale dirt. He brushed dirt out of Mikey's mouth and nose when Mikey sat up on his own. Mikey's hat was covered with tar, Peerless, blood, and stench. He mounted Negro by himself, but as he rode, the closer to camp he got, the more vague he got. His head grew larger and his ears rang louder with every step of his horse. Then the worm stink made him vomit. He vomited until his stomach was empty and he kept on vomiting. He did not get off his horse because each new urge to vomit came suddenly and unexpectedly and kept him too busy to dismount.

  At camp Grover walked Mikey into the hogan and helped him undress. He carried Mikey's stinky clothes outside and laid them by the door. He heated water and helped Mikey bathe and take stock of his injuries.

  Mikey had been punctured eight times by the horns, but the wounds were not deep and were mostly only bruises. Grover figured that he was so light that the steer had lifted him and tossed him before the horns could go deep. Mikey could move all limbs, but he could not talk because he had bitten his tongue.

  Mikey bawled when Grover went out to unsaddle their horses, mostly to rid himself of outrage. He was not afraid or sorry for himself, only sore of head and body, so he did not cry for long. After Grover doused his wounds with Mercurochrome, he told Mikey he thought he'd better ride to headquarters to get Viv and Maggie. Mikey was about to tell him that he was all right, but he threw up again. Grover cleaned it up and brought him an outdoor bucket in case it happened again and hit for headquarters on Mae West.

  Mae West was a spayed mare that Roy Adams had raised. She was the daughter of a stud named Ben Hur and granddaughter of Man O'War. Mikey's grandfather Bert Sorrells had brought Ben Hur to Arizona. Mae West covered the seven miles to headquarters like tapping for a dance and Viv and Maggie quickly went to get Mikey in the car. They loaded him up and took him eighty miles over dirt roads to the Presbyterian mission hospital on the Navajo reservation at Ganado.

  The doctor opened and disinfected each of Mikey's horn punctures and put him to bed. He said that Mikey had suffered a severe concussion. He gave him a tetanus vaccination but said he was afraid that Mikey might get blood poisoning. Septicemia on the horns of bulls was known to kill bulIfighters.

  Before sunup, Mikey lapsed into unconsciousness. Inside his delirium he knew again and missed all the sweetness of his fathers, mothers, horses, dirt, dogs, cows, and trees. On the fifth day he embraced them and went away in peace with them.

  Maggie was singing "Panchita" in Spanish at the top of her voice while she hung a fresh wash out on the line to dry by Pancho's pen in Nogales. The wind whipped her short skirt so it showed the backs of her legs above the roll of her stockings. Mikey knew again how good she was at fixing her face and then stepping out to show the world how a pretty woman walked down the street. She did a good deed every time she sallied forth that way because people liked it when they saw her coming and that helped her make up to God for her vanity. She was good at smiling and laughing, and Mikey was sure she could wither a pine tree with her frown. All- pine trees should be grateful that she did not have anything against them and they did not have to grow up near her house. Oh, when she decided it was time to show her stuff, whether it be fussing or loving, everybody had better be ready to see a lot of style. She could show more style in the way she laid her hand along the back of a chair than most people could show with a gesture they taught themselves with six weeks of rehearsal. The best part of Maggie's style was that it made ordinary sons of guns wish and dream they had it, and it made them despair of ever having it even on the best day of their lives. And, boy, could she sing. And boy, did she sing in Mikey's dream. She sang better than Jeanette MacDonald because of the way she breathed her words. In his dream, Mikey loved her voice again, a voice that was prettier than any other he had ever heard, the voice with which she had breathed in his ear when she taught him to read.

  He had been unconscious six days when he heard Maggie's real voice close in his ear again and he left his dream behind. "Mikey," she said. "Mikey. Mikey." He revived and improved each day after that. Maggie took him home a week later.

  On the day Mikey had been hurt, his uncles Herb, Roy, and Buster had arrived at the High Lonesome with more saddle horses from the Baca Float. They had driven to the railroad phone at Sanders every evening to call the hospital and find out how Mikey was doing. When Mikey returned to the ranch from the hospital, Viv led Pancho up to the hogan and asked him to come out and see if he could tell him who the horse was. After Mikey identified him, Viv said, "Here, take him, son. Your mom bought him back."