So Brave, Young and Handsome

by Leif Enger

  “At first it comes down fast and steep and it’s a long way between pools,” said this conductor. “We thought we’d lost one of my uncles, Bret, in the rapids, but he was sitting underwater in one of the deep pools hanging onto a rock. Bret could hold his breath for two minutes—until we started to think, Where’s Bret? Then he’d bust up out of the water right behind you, frighten you into old age.”

  “Where do the orchards begin?”

  “The gradient lessens, the river levels out. It slows, gets wide, the hills are broad and tillable. That’s your citrus country. If this Soto is there, someone will know him.”

  I thanked the conductor and returned to my seat. On the way I picked up a recent Los Angeles newspaper that had a front-page picture of a marching army. Skipping the weighty headlines I meandered to the book section. There was a new Zane Grey, but then there is always a new Zane Grey; also a novel called Freckles about a disadvantaged boy who lives in the woods and falls in love with an angel. In the gossip corner was mention of Boyd Singleton Ample, who’d recently passed through Los Angeles. Boyd let drop he was working on a book about five brothers who go adventuring to sea and are all killed in a freak storm that then whips ashore and kills their parents too, so that no one is left of the family except the grandma who goes on lighting candles for twenty more years. Shutting my eyes I imagined Boyd: a destined figure in the grasp of his story, perfect strong sentences pouring out of his pen. I fell asleep that way. When I woke in the dark I was smiling—it’s a happy thing to brace for a visit from old friend Envy who then for some reason never shows up.

  2

  A boy in a Ford A gave me a ride far down the Rienda Valley. I had made inquiries after disembarking and the conductor was right: People knew Claudio Soto. As for the valley, it looked distressed. The boy informed me there had been frosts the previous two winters; many orchards had been abandoned or fallen into the hands of bankers. This youngster was roughly Hood Roberts’s age, yet he faced forward as Hood had never done, driving the Ford with an eyebrow raised as though on the lookout for better prospects. He expounded on the nature of citrus trees and how they grew, how they responded to cold weather. Himself the son of citrus growers, he couldn’t wait to get away from the business. He wanted to design buildings—he’d seen architecture in San Francisco that made him short of breath. It seemed to him a better life than orange trees could offer.

  “I read where an ice age is coming,” the boy remarked. “There is a glacier in Canada moving in our direction. It’s coming faster all the time! Dr. Horton of Los Angeles says in fifty years we’ll all be Eskimos. We’ll eat seals and live in buildings made out of ice.”

  “Do you believe Dr. Horton?”

  “I used to,” was his cheery reply.

  We drove on. Beside the road appeared a long low wall of native stone. The stones were placed without mortar and some had fallen and the wall wound to and fro like a dog on a walk.

  “We’re close,” I said, but the boy was talking about his plans and didn’t hear.

  The orchard behind the wall looked starved and skeletal. I sighted an ox harnessed to a flatbed wagon. A man on a ladder was trimming a tree and tossing the branches on the wagon. His movements were fluid and careful, his hair white as cotton.

  “Pull up,” I said.

  He steered the A to the side of the road. “See, I’ve got to make money for school. Otherwise it’s back to the orchard for me. I’ll end up like that hired hand there, on a ladder my whole life.”

  I opened the door and stepped out and leaned back in for my bag.

  “What—is this the place you’re looking for?”

  The ox regarded us and the man kept at his work. He worked easily, twisting carefully on his ladder. We could hear sharp cracks as the cut branches struck the flatbed. We were at a distance and I knew his eyes weren’t the best.

  I handed the boy some money.

  He said, “Hey, if that’s your friend—”

  “It’s all right.”

  He was a very decent youngster. I shook his hand and started to tell him good luck—my voice caught, though, so I just waved him down the road. Partly it was the boy and his easy talk and high hopes. Partly it was just that I hadn’t been around a friend in so long, and now Glendon was climbing down from his ladder, looking quizzically in my direction with his bad old eyes. For the first time in weeks I felt that lights were on somewhere for me.

  3

  Until he was within fifty feet he couldn’t tell it was me but angled up slowly as though I might be the tax man or maybe Siringo himself. When I said hello, his face changed to certainty and he dropped his pruning saw and charged, in his delight not even saying my name but laughing and getting me round the middle and lifting me straight off the earth, slight as he was. I laughed too—I couldn’t help it. He lifted me a foot in the air, set me down, then lifted me again. Whoop! Something was new about Glendon; it took me a little time to discern it.

  “Why ain’t you home with Susannah?” he said, poking my chest.

  “Where’s this Blue of yours?” I replied.

  “How’d you shake off old Siringo?”

  “What did she say when you showed up?”

  We tossed up questions like confetti, as long-parted friends do; but in fact we had not been parted long, it only seemed that way. Soon the weight of undelivered news bore in and I turned quiet. Glendon looked dismayed.

  “What news of our friend Hood?” he asked, in a reluctant tone.

  I looked at his eyes and he turned them from me.

  “Hood is dead, Glendon. I’m sorry to say it.”

  He nodded as though expecting these dread tidings. I waited for him to speak but he couldn’t and ran his rough fingers over his head.

  “Do you want to hear about it?”

  He nodded again. I kept it short but tried to give him some context with the Spigot fire and the empty farmhouse and the counterfeit bullets. Siringo’s stint as the toast of Columbus I left out, as well as Hood on display in the store window with his feet up.

  Glendon sat on the flatbed with his legs dangling. Though built small he’d always given an impression of nimble strength. Now he just looked small—meager, I want to say. He didn’t look at me but at the ground or the gray webwork of trees. A locust buzzed close by and the compliant ox shifted his feet. Glendon made no reply to Hood’s tragedy.

  Finally he got up and clucked to the ox, who moved forward at a walk as though a switch had been thrown. I rode on the flatbed with a pile of loose dead limbs while Glendon walked at the ox’s head. In a few minutes a pale pyramid rose out of the gloom and became a pile of branches. The ox stopped at its edge and Glendon and I unloaded the flatbed. The limbs were light but stiff and spiky—you didn’t want to get one in the eye.

  He said, “How did Hood seem to you—before Siringo shot him, I mean.”

  “We didn’t really get to visit, Glendon.”

  “But you saw him. You heard his voice.”

  I thought it over. “Well, he was courteous—he said Mr. Siringo. He sounded like Hood, you know.”

  “Good, that’s good. I’m glad to hear he was polite. That’s our boy.” Without another word he walked away into the trees. I didn’t follow him but stayed with the wagon. Night arrived and stars came out by their thousands every minute. After a little time I heard Glendon returning, walking slowly, picking his way. He put a hand on the ox and said, “All right then, it’s late in the day. Come on, Monte, you should meet Claudio.”

  4

  Glendon had reached the Rienda Valley two weeks earlier, riding a sand-colored cowhorse purchased from a shrewd Arizonan midget. He told me this while we moved through the orchard at the rate of a plodding ox. The midget was a hard negotiator with a voice like a kazoo but had the quality atypical in horse traders of stating a beast’s flaws alongside its heroic attributes. He knew horses like no one Glendon had ever met, especially their legs, where so many animals are prone to catastrophe. The mare he sold Glendon w
as named Sparrow and carried him without complaint clear down the Gila River to Yuma, where he stood on a hill overlooking the adobe ramparts of the famous territorial prison. Glendon’s voice hushed at the word Yuma, of whose ravages he had heard from experienced compadres: the sun beating through latticed ironwork, the brazed manacles set into the stone floor. Viewing the penitentiary from his far hilltop Glendon had no way of knowing it had been shut down years earlier and posed no threat. He crossed the Gila and a short while later the weedy Colorado before veering northwest toward a bank of dunes he knew from long ago. He was in familiar country and so was surprised when a lake appeared shining where there had been only dry and saline earth. The lake was too large to see across, too large to be misplaced. Riding Sparrow along the water’s edge he wondered at his memory until an Indian woman emerging from a tilted house informed him the Colorado had breached its banks a decade before and created this new ocean. At its bottom lay the bones of a town named Salton. Glendon had stopped in Salton twenty years before and done a little business in the saloon—he told the woman so, but she wasn’t interested. She hated the lake. Its water grew more bitter year by year. Glendon rode on.

  While I was still in New Mexico, waiting for Charles Siringo to emerge from his ravings, Glendon trotted down out of the Vallecitos into a watershed of bubbling streams and species of flowered prairie grasses he had not seen in thirty years. At the bottom of this valley a slender river twisted through farms and small ranchos where the cowhorse Sparrow had to be dissuaded from testing herself on the feral longhorns lurking against the hillsides. The vaqueros Glendon encountered in this promising valley didn’t look like the desperates with whom he had rustled thousands of cattle in his youth. They were clean and strong with straight lustrous teeth and direct eyes suggesting a hold on the future. Their horses were muscled and full-barreled, larger and prettier than Spanish ponies. These cowboys didn’t mind a lone horseman traveling through and confirmed for Glendon that the river he followed was in fact the Rienda. Yes, it went all the way to the ocean. Yes, a region of citrus orchards awaited him downriver. No doubt the cowboys sensed in this veteran horseman a lush deposit of stories, for they asked him to stay for an evening of music and fiery drink, but Glendon said no, he was too near the end of his own tale now. He nudged Sparrow and they continued on, keeping the river on their left.

  Days of asking brought him to a valley of crippled trees. Some had leaves in the lowermost branches but many were dead brittle. He rode Sparrow through this shinbone copse, hopeless all of it except for one small quarter of dwarfish citrus with branches underfed but at least green below the bark. Emerging from these Sparrow stepped into a broad grassy lane that led to a painted two-story wrapped in a porch. A man sat on the porch in a ladderback chair. He was sleeping but woke as Glendon rode up. An ash cane lay across his lap and he took it up and touched the floorboards with it.

  “Are you Claudio Soto?” Glendon asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you marry Arāndano Ordonez?”

  Claudio stood from his chair and held onto it for balance. He had long graying hair that thinned and reached his shoulders in coarse wisps.

  “Is she at home now?”

  “No. What is it you want?”

  Glendon sat on his horse wondering what to say.

  “You may come in if you like,” said Claudio.

  “Maybe we could talk out here.”

  The two men stood in the dusty yard, Claudio leaning on his cane. He bore Glendon no hint of a grudge. In fact he seemed pleased to meet at last the man he had long thought of as a fabled rogue—the winsome gringo who married the local girl only to vanish just ahead of horse soldiers sent by then-president Díaz. Claudio saw himself as the beneficiary of this desertion. He was a gentleman. In all his years with Arāndano, he had not asked her for the details of her first marriage.

  “But you have had quite a life,” said Claudio, for word of Glendon’s exploits and the company he kept had drifted back from time to time.

  “No, I expect yours has been the life,” said Glendon. He then described how Blue had ridden into his mind, persisting there day and night, carrying her rifle. He described the dread and regret that came over him. “Now I am getting old and wish to lay things down. I came to make apology.”

  “Apology.”

  “That’s right.”

  Claudio appeared to think about this for a while. He had gotten the habit of thinking a long time before he spoke. Sometimes he seemed almost to go to sleep.

  “She will be home by dark,” he said. “I will talk to her then. Don’t come up to the house until I put a light on the porch.” He turned, then added, “The bunkhouse is empty. Go clean up if you like. There is a well in the back.”

  Glendon washed and put on a clean shirt he had carried all the way from Minnesota folded in tissue paper. He shaved the whiskers from his face and took the end of his whiskey and poured it on the ground outside the bunkhouse. He had nothing left to eat in his panniers, but after a while Claudio hobbled down with a covered plate. Glendon said it wasn’t necessary but Claudio left the plate in his hands and went back to the house. Lifting the lid Glendon found cold chicken and green beans and two slices of Spanish bread flavored with anise seed. At this all his nervousness went away. He sat down saying over the food a blessing taught to him by Crealock the preacher, whom he suddenly missed. He took the plate to the back door of the bunkhouse and ate standing outside, looking up at the hills while the shadows lengthened. Afterward he returned to the well and pumped up some water and cleaned the plate and the knife and fork, then sat down to wait for nightfall.

  “It’s peculiar, to reach your destination,” he told me. “You think you’ll arrive and perform the thing you came for and depart in contentment. Instead you get there and find distance still to go.”

  I nodded and he went on. Sitting in the darkening bunkhouse he could hear noises from the house—a gramophone, a pan being scraped. Then a horse entered the yard trotting. He knew it was Blue. He didn’t go to the window but sat in the bunkhouse knowing she was there. He felt something he couldn’t identify, as though he might be someone else entirely from the man he had become.

  She left the horse tied in front of the house and went in. Forgetting his clean shirt Glendon walked out and patted the horse. He unslung its reins from the porch rail and led the animal to the barn. It was a compliant bay a full hand taller than his Sparrow, and it nudged him forward to a tie stall where he removed its saddle and lifted its feet one at a time. He spoke to the horse in congenial tones—there were oats in a canted bin and he measured some into a bucket and brushed the horse while it lipped the oats. When he got back to the bunkhouse his shirt was full of horsehair and he had no other to put on. He looked out the window and saw Claudio stepping out on the porch to hang a lantern on a nail. Glendon crossed the yard brushing off his shirt and saw Blue standing in the lit entryway behind her husband.

  I said, “Was she glad to see you?”

  Glendon smiled. “She didn’t honestly say much to me, Monte. No—up to now, Claudio has pretty much done the talking. He’s a rare fellow. I hadn’t reckoned on it.”

  “And what have you been doing, these two weeks?”

  He nodded round us at the lopped and suffering grove. “Working. They employ this fellow Joaquin who shows me what to do. He’s got one arm and talks Spanish twenty hours a day. I can’t hardly keep up with him.”

  “How long will you stay?”

  “Until she lets me talk to her. Or until she tells me to go.” There was a cumbersome pause, then he said, “What about you, Monte—how come you’re here? Ain’t you going home to Susannah?”

  “Yes, pretty soon I think.”

  He held my eye. “Oh, now, Becket.”

  I dropped my gaze.

  He said, “You know what I’ve discovered?”

  I shook my head and he said, “The world’s unkind to fools.”

  He seemed altered, as I said; taller, even. His
motions more exact.

  I said, “Glendon. You are sober.”

  “Yes, I gave it up.”

  “Are you glad?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “I have heard it is a tough habit to leave behind.”

  “Tougher to keep up,” he replied.

  5

  “Are you a bandit too?” said Claudio Soto.

  I stood on the lamplit veranda shaking hands with our vivid and crumbling host. His hands were purple and his hair a white phantom. He wore the cavernous pants of declining men.

  He said, “This is your plan, Glendon? Fetch up all your compañeros and rob an old man of his orchard?”

  I said, “I’d be grateful for a place to stay a few days. I’ll work with Glendon if I may sleep in your bunkhouse.”

  “It’s more and more interesting,” said Claudio. “Who will walk in next?”

  We followed this old ruin into his house. It was adobe and cool as a shovel of earth. When my eyes became accustomed I saw patterned rugs, furniture of massive build, on the west wall Christ crucified, and a low bookshelf on which half the volumes were dictionaries and reference works in diverse languages. Later I would discover biographies of poets and musicians, histories of conquest, theoretical investigations into alchemy and the physics of time and the character of God, but for now Claudio pitched away toward his kitchen and we followed out of fear he would crash to the floor.

  “Sit and rest,” he said. He opened the icebox and got down on one knee and selected a clay pitcher of water and two ripened limes. Slowly and at some cost he stood and retrieved three crystal glasses from an open shelf; he wiped them with flour sacking, sliced the ends off the limes and with startling vigor in his purple hands squeezed the limes over the pitcher until their juice slid into the cold water. The clay sweated and ticked. Claudio wiped his hands on the sacking and filled the glasses and set them before us.

  “How have you arrived here?” he inquired of me.