I walked a while up a creek bed—arroyo, they used to call them in the westerns—but pretty soon I had to go back to riding. We gained a little elevation and the vegetation shrank to reasonable proportions. I couldn’t say the same for the ticks. I wondered if any of the shots I’d had were good for spotted fever.
Señor Ojara was waiting for me on the veranda of what looked like a Mexican house turned inside out. You know how they build right out to the property line, nothing but bars on the outside. Handy if you have teenage daughters but . . .
It had a thatched roof like every other building in town. Ojara was wearing a pith helmet. I almost expected him to give the regimental cheer and order me a chota peg. When he spoke, though it was in Spanish. The illusion of Kipling’s India dissolved completely when he offered me tequila con limón.
After four tequilas con limón I had learned that Miguel Ojara’s English was about as good as my Spanish and that the resemblance between Ojara and O’Hara was more than coincidence. Seems there were two Irishmen.
Next morning he explained the setup. We had to pay the local ranchers and either witness the shooting or get tangible proof that it had been done.
“What do you mean by tangible proof?” I asked Mike.
“It’ll have to be pretty good,” he said. “I remember the last aftosa epidemic.” By aftosa he meant hoof and mouth disease. “We made them bring in the ears.”
“Something go wrong?” I asked.
“Things were fine for several months.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Six months after the campaign was over earless cattle started showing up.”
I digested this for a while as we rode out toward the nearest rancho. People automatically visualize thousands of acres and the big house and all the little houses around it where the peones live and all that hogwash. It’s nice background for movies. This rancho was forty acres and had forty-eight head ranging in the hills. I wondered if the cattle needed oxygen in the upper pastures.
Don Nepomuceno Uchuturría was a wiry little man of fifty, I thought. Actually, he was seventy-two. He couldn’t read but nobody could slip him a one peso bill and call it a ten. He lived in a jacal like the famous grass shacks of Hawaii but the women were on their knees in the back yard playing the stone piano—grinding masa for tortillas. No poi.
“Buenos días, don Nepomuceno,” Mike said.
He greeted us with suspicion but got a lot more friendly when he saw the bills in Mike’s saddlebags. Some Indians were piling mezquite brush. Nepomuceno’s son was driving the herd down from the upper pastures.
Shooting thirty cows isn’t my idea of sport. We got most of them to drop in the piled mezquite and the boy got a rope on the rest. It was amazing, the weight his little horse could drag with that highhorned old saddle.
If you’ve ever stepped out for a minute and left the steak on the fire you may have a faint idea of what it smelled like when we set fire to the mezquite. Even so, it didn’t finish the job. The zopilotes would be too heavy to fly for several days.
They were circling overhead before the second shot was fired.
The womenfolk turned out a meal for us. For one horrible moment I thought we’d get beefsteak. No matter how horrible it sounds in translation, cracklings cooked in green pepper tastes good. After dinner Mike got the old man off in a corner and started arguing. I sat at the table, enjoying an extra cup of coffee. They char sugar in the roast to give it that asphalt color. The girls cleared the table, shying away from me as if I had the aftosa. I put it down to my being a foreigner and a government man at that.
Mike beckoned. “He says that’s all”
“All what?” I asked.
“Last week he had forty-eight head of cattle.”
“But we only shot thirty today.”
“That’s what I mean,” Mike said.
“Where are the other eighteen?”
Mike pointed toward the hills. “You don’t think he’s going to give up the good ones without a fight, do you?”
“If we don’t kill everything for two hundred miles the disease will spread again.”
“Tell him that,” Mike said.
I went into my spiel about how we had to kill all the cattle from ocean to ocean and make sure the disease was stamped out, that there was no cure, that we were paying for the cattle, and all that. He nodded and agreed and assured me that he understood and that surely, the government was looking out for the welfare of the rancheros and so on. He agreed that it was a shame that all the fine cattle had to be killed off but it was unavoidable and in the long run the rancheros would benefit by it when all cattle in the district were healthy, new thoroughbred stock brought in, and so on for twenty flowery minutes.
I was out of breath but I congratulated myself on getting the idea across. It tickled me that I could make myself understood by this simple son of the soil when Mike who had been born and raised in the same country couldn’t do it. Some of my smugness must have been visible. Mike gave a little sideways grin and turned to don Nepomuceno. “Now will you tell us where the other eighteen head are?”
“But don Miguel,” Nepomuceno protested in round-eyed innocence, “I had but thirty head.”
Mike shrugged and we left.
That night I asked him what he intended to do about it.
“What would you do?” he asked.
“Go out and find them.”
He laughed and poured another tequila con limón.
“I really prefer cold beer,” he said. “But considering the lack of ice and other niceties of civilization, I think we’re fortunate that the art of distilling has penetrated these fastnesses.”
I poured an ounce o£ tequila, put salt on the flat spot made by clenching thumb and finger together, and picked up a slice of lemon. The trick is to lick the salt, gulp the tequila, and bite the lemon. Carried off in one fluid motion, it tastes no worse than paint remover.
“To get back to your idea,” Mike said, “have you any ideas of how big the range is up in that sierra?”
I looked at him and said nothing.
“A general once took his division up there. He was chasing bandits.”
“And?”
“Search me. Nobody ever came out.”
“You kidding?”
“I swear it by my mother,” Mike said so I knew he wasn’t. No Mexican ever kids about his mother.
The next day we took another trail and saw another rancher. Same story all over again. I could swear they were telling the truth. So eager to please, such simple, good-hearted folk. I kept thinking about how we ornery whites had done the Indians out of everything and all the time I was paying out Uncle’s money for their cull cattle, the ones they’d have killed anyway if I hadn’t come along to pay for the privilege.
Mike just laughed. He didn’t take the campaign seriously. One day I went up in the hills to find some of the hidden cattle. After seven or eight hours I had to give it up as a bad job. It gets cold in the tropics at night, sitting around a fire with only a serape for warmth. I felt kind of foolish next morning when I stumbled on Mike and a search party.
After that I began taking it easy. Once in a while we’d go out to shoot a few cattle and hand out some money. The rancheros began to thaw. I started getting invitations. It’s amazing what a high old time you can have with a guitar, a fiddle, and the neighborhood girls all turned out in their Sunday best. Even so, a dance was all I ever got.
Mike had his eye on one of don Nepomuceno’s daughters but I knew he didn’t have any serious intentions. A man of Mike’s standing just doesn’t marry an Indian ranchero’s daughter. Since I was a foreigner, I didn’t have any exact position on the social scale. I could overlap and if I did something wrong there was always the excuse that I didn’t know any better.
With weather that never changed and the tequila con limón I started losing track of time. Mike didn’t. One day I noticed it enough to ask what was eating him.
“Mail,” he said.
>
“What’s wrong?”
“There hasn’t been any since before you came. I’m expecting batteries.”
He had a portable radio but the batteries had fizzled out in the middle of a Russian ultimatum two days after I arrived. At first I’d missed it. Now I was in the habit of listening to the local boys play their guitars. They weren’t crowding Segovia but they did their best. That’s more than I could say for some musicians I knew back home.
These boys couldn’t read. They didn’t know Hemingway from hemorrhoid but they played and they sang. Nobody ever gave them lessons but they expressed their immortal souls. I guess that’s Art.
Mike worried about the mail. He didn’t just want batteries. We were starting to run out of money. I wondered what would happen to our social standing when Uncle and the República Mexicana failed their joint representatives on the aftosa commission. Mike was wondering too. Although he was Mexican, Mike was as much of a foreigner to these people as I was.
“What are we going to do?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Mike answered worriedly. “Mail isn’t exactly regular but this is the longest I’ve ever seen it miss.”
“I don’t like to repeat myself but what are we going to do?”
“Somebody on my side must have pulled a bubu,” Mike said.
“So?”
“It’s a sad truth that a prophet is without honor in his own land. You’re a gringo. If you go down to the railroad and send some telegrams you’ll get results. If I went I’d accomplish nothing.”
I thought he was trying to push off a dirty job on me but after I thought it over I knew he was right. In the morning I packed a saddlebag. Going down wasn’t as bad as the trip up. I’d been riding Balaam for several months and my tail bone had a few calluses.
After an hour in the little depot, waiting for the train, it finally percolated through my head that something was wrong. I began to notice the dust. It lay in thick layers over everything. I looked outside and the rails were rusty. It wasn’t the thin bright rust that forms in a few hours with the tropical rain. These rails were caked like steel that has been rained on for months without a wheel to shine it. I climbed aboard Balaam and we started down the tracks toward the city. When I found a gasoline speeder a few miles down I hobbled Balaam. The battery was pretty weak but there was a crank.
There were wrecked locomotives every forty or fifty kilometers. I had to abandon one speeder and handcar after another as I detoured around the wrecks. In Guadalajara the stores were open but nobody was tending to business. The groceries had been pretty well picked over; rats always survive. I lived on what canned goods hadn’t rusted through yet. After scrounging about a bit I found four cases of blasting gelatin and opened the vaults of the Banco del Occidente.
You read stories about the end of the world and everybody knows money’s no good. Everyone wants weapons or food or some such thing. I was crazy. I got thirty million pesos. You’d have thought I was crazy if you’d seen the Thank God look on Mike’s face. He’d been spinning a pretty thin line of bull while I was gone.
I told him how things were. He didn’t believe me. When he came back a month later he seemed to be bleeding internally. Not literally, understand, just sort of stunned. I poured some tequila and handed him the salt and lemon. After ten rounds he could talk.
“I went home,” he said heavily. “My mother, my father, my sisters . . .”
“I know. I had some too.”
“What happened?” he asked.
“It wasn’t your country pulled the bubu; it was mine.”
For an instant I thought he was going to kill me then he sat down again and we poured ourselves a couple more tequilas con limón.
The next day we went out to see don Nepomuceno. He gave us the fisheye but when I opened the saddlebags he thawed out in a hurry.
Swindlers, you say? Didn’t we pay for everything? Just because Mike bought a ranch and took a wife—
So what if I did the same. Between Mike and me we own this town. When we walk down the street people take off their hats and smile and say, “Good morning, don Jaime, good morning, don Miguel.”
Benefits of civilization my bleeding fistula! Make up your own mind. If you want to stay we’ll give you a million pesos and a land grant. If you can’t keep quiet then go back down where money’s no good. Take your rifle and steal another jeep and take your chances with the wild men down below. Up in this town God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world. We intend to keep it that way.
The Demancipator
Memo from Associate Editor: This story is downright reactionary! Memo from Editor to Associate: Yes, isn’t it?
THE LITTLE man I smiled like a mail-order Mephistopheles and crossed his legs, giving careful attention to the creases. He tossed another pinch of chickenfeed to the pigeons before answering. “Hardly a year goes by that somebody doesn’t dig it up and do a rehash. I’m used to it by now.” He shrugged. “It’s a living.”
“A living!” the young man gushed. “A living, you call it! Sir, you are a living legend! Others have conquered empires; others have invented—but who among living men can say he has created an era?”
“I suppose I can,” the other said. Again the smile flitted over his lined face like summer lightning. “I think it’s time to puncture a few myths, though,” he added, quietly.
“You mean there’s an inside story?” The young man’s nostrils began quivering.
The older man uncrossed his legs and tossed the rest of the grain to pigeons which fluttered at his feet. “Why not?”
FOR ONE not born in the first half of our century, a description of it is as meaningless as color to the congenitally blind. The rise of technology, the gradual disappearance of privacy the hot, cold, and lukewarm wars—all these contributed, but the hallmark of the age was a general tendency to
Blow the whistle.
Ring the bell!
Run in circles.
Scream and yell.
Now, of course, the problem has been solved. In those days we didn’t even know what the problem was.
One of the unhappier men of that era was Carson Jones, last year’s model of the young-man-to-be-watched. In the two years since he had joined the Klein-Schmidt agency, he had watched with a detached and sardonic amusement as one bad guess after another created lumber for the skids which Sid Vorshak was busily building under him.
“Morning, Jones,” Vorshak said with an effusive bonhomie.
“Morning, Vorshak,” Jones replied with even greater unctuousness. Vorshak’s voice annoyed him. It was an ordinary enough midwestern voice, but somewhere along the line it had been channeled through Harvard and toward a spurious gentility. They sat facing each other across the mahogany table. Vorshak whipped a notebook from his pocket and began a furious scribbling as he hummed to himself.
CROMLEIGH came in. He reminded Jones of an old school-tie, knotted and pulled tight several times too many. They exchanged banalities while Vorshak hummed and scribbled. For the barest fraction of a second Jones glanced at the scribbler and back to Cromleigh. Cromleigh’s face took the cast of one who has unwittingly swallowed emetic instead of orange juice, and for a moment communion flowed between them.
The Old Man entered. They rose and chorused, “Good Morning. Mr. Klein-Schmidt.” The Old Man harrumphed and the conference got under way.
It was soon obvious that the session wasn’t going to get very far away. The scribbler flipped pages and quoted statistics, but his Harvard slurred into South Chicagoese when he saw that the Old Man knew he didn’t have a fresh idea this morning, either. A secretary entered and silently poured four cups of coffee.
The Old Man took a sip with a loud slurping noise. “What we need is something new,” he said. He stood with one foot on his chair in what Jones secretly called Stance No. 3 and went into Speech No. 4 which began, “When I started this business, thirty years ago, all I had was eighty dollars and an idea.”
The money had rep
roduced but the idea remained sterile. Jones daydreamed, nodding and yessing at automatic intervals. Cromleigh was also nodding. Vorshak gave periodic “yes, Chief” while he scribbled.
THE OLD MAN got to where he had made a fortune on the cake mix account, and Jones began losing touch. He wished he’d gotten a little more sleep last night. Five hours just wasn’t enough. He came to with a start. The room was filled with silence; all eyes were on him.
“Five hours,” Jones said automatically.
“Not feeling well?” Vorshak asked solicitously.
“Cake mix,” Jones said, playing by ear and hoping frantically for a clue.
“Are you sleepy, Jones?” the Old Man asked.
“No, sir!” Jones said positively. “I was thinking.” He looked at Cromleigh, but Cromleigh could only radiate sympathy; he’d been dozing, too. “Five hour cake mix,” Jones said with a sureness he didn’t feel.
“Drunk,” Vorshak muttered.
“Like hell I am,” Jones said angrily. He blustered a moment, trying to think something up. The Old Man glared, and Jones felt the skids slowly starting to move. Vorshak smiled maliciously, and prepared a parting shot. Jones glared back at him—then suddenly relaxed as Vorshak’s face dissolved into a view of six months on Long Island, interrupted only by weekly visits to the unemployment office.
“I SAID FIVE hour cake mix,”he repealed, with the airiness of one who no longer cores. “If you had a brain in your head, you’d see it’s the biggest idea since the Schweppesman.”
“Explain yourself,” the Old Man said.
“It’s simple. American women are surrounded by automatic machinery; they have nothing to do all day but push buttons and watch TV. When suppertime comes, it’s minute this and instant that. In five minutes, supper’s ready and then they settle down to an evening of boredom.”
“So?” the Old Man said non-committally.
“So we change all that. We sell a packaged cake mix that takes five hours of hard work to prepare. Absolutely guaranteed to shoot the hell out of a dull afternoon.”
Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 5