Rabbit Boss

by Thomas Sanchez

  “Judith! What the hell you got the Injun in our bedroom for,” the door swung open and her husband stood in its center. I pulled my hands up from her lace and hid them in my pockets. “I been looking all over for him. I told Mister Fixa I would have him over to his place by three, it’s nearly two now and the horses are hitched. Get out in the wagon you.” He pointed his finger at me. I turned to see if she would stop him. If she had just made up what she said. But her back was to me and she was looking out at the day. I ran from the house and jumped up in the back of the wagon and he followed. “Go get your things out of the shack boy. And hurry it,” he pulled himself onto the wagon’s seat and picked up the reins. I tied together my extra pair of pants and shirt into a ball and climbed back up on the bed of the wagon. We rode away from the house the color of snow, away from the ranch. I could see her shadow in the window, she was still standing in the bedroom with the lace spread across the bed as we rode away from her to the other side of the valley and through the town of Loyalton until we came to a small house set back off the main dirt road with a big barn behind it. Frank brought the horses to a halt in front of the barn’s open sliding doors and I saw a man, a very old man, deep in the weak light of the barn, moving among the motionless bodies of cows racked into their feed stalls. The old man came out into the sun. His eyes squinted deep in the broad light and he moved quickly back into the shadow of the barn. But his eyes still could not adjust to the sight of us, I could tell from the faded blue of their color that he was almost blind. “Is that you Frank,” he raised his hand above his forehead in a salute, trying to block the sun behind our bodies.

  “It’s me Mister Fixa, Frank Dora.”

  “Did you bring the boy?”

  “I’ve got him right here in the back Mister Fixa.”

  “Bring him in here to the barn where I can get a good look at him then.”

  Frank led me into the shallow light of the barn and stood me in front of the man. “This is him Mister Fixa. This is the Injun boy. I promised I’d bring him, and I did.”

  “This isn’t the one you told me about You said you had a big one. That’s what our deal was, one big one you said,” his hand came up and closed about my arm, the fingers were thick. I could feel the power of his entire hand pinching my flesh. He was old, but he had grown stronger with age. “This one’s skinny as a winter calf. Didn’t you ever feed him none? I don’t see where he’s got enough meat on him to do me any good.”

  “He’ll work hard Mister Fixa, and he’s alot stronger than he looks just now. You just tell him what you want done and he’ll do it for you. And what’s good about him is he’ll do his work and shutup. He aint one of your talkers.”

  “How old you say he is? He don’t look more’n twelve.”

  “Fifteen he is, far as we can calculate. It was back in the winter of ’99 that there was the big Injun fever. He wasn’t up at the lumber mill at Elephant Head with the rest of his kind. We found him over on the north side of the valley with an old woman. She was dead and we figured it was probably Injun fever what killed her, so we burnt their campoodie down and I brung the boy home with me and kept him locked up in the grain shed for three weeks to make good and sure he didn’t have no Injun fever. He’s just kind of been with us ever since. Like I told you, we never really knowed what to do with him. He was there, that’s all, just there. But we did find out he belonged to some of the Injuns what died of the fever in ’99. Birdsong, we found out his father’s name was. People called his father One Arm Henry cause he had one arm blowed off back in the war between the States. Maybe his own people didn’t want him and that’s why they sent him away. He’s a Washo though, he aint one of those Paiute what’ll sneak up and cut your throat in bed. And you can see for yourself he aint no halfbreed. But he’s about fifteen years old the way we figure it. Johnny Doc said at the time we first brought him to the ranch he looked eight, and that were seven years back.”

  The old man loosened his grip on my arm, “You got a name for him?”

  “No, we never did call him nothin but boy. He comes real good with just that.”

  “Well, I guess I could use him then,” the old man dropped his hand from my arm. “Yes, if he comes good whenever you call him I could use him. An old gadget like me can’t move around so well any more when his eyes go out on him. I can see pretty good in the barn here, as good as ever almost, but when I get out in the sun I blink like an owl, can’t see a thing but outlines. Yes, I guess I could use him then. He’s got good eyes do he?” He pinched my chin between two fingers and pushed my head up. He stared straight at me with eyes like a summer sky that had all the blue burned away into a hazy white. “Yes, I could use him, his eyes are clear, that’s the main thing. And they’re brown, brown eyes is stronger than blue.” He let go of my chin and walked away into the darkness at the other end of the barn. The barn was so big and had so many black places that I couldn’t see him moving around, but I could hear his voice as he talked low with words so soft I couldn’t get their meaning. Prettty soon he comes walking around a stacked mountain of baled hay leading behind him a calf with a loose rope around its neck. He stopped the calf in front of Frank and stroked the spine of its back covered with a shiny brown hair that glowed in the dim light. He handed the rope over to Frank. “Well, I guess that takes care of our deal.” He watched Frank and me walk the calf out to the wagon. Frank tied the calf good to the tailgate hitch and I hopped up in the wagon.

  “Get down outta there boy!” Frank grabbed me by the seat of the pants, pulled me out of the wagon and threw my bundle of clothes out on the ground. “You stay here now. You don’t belong with us no more!” He flicked the reins over the horses and I watched as the wagon was rode away with the tethered calf running along behind until it was out of sight.

  I picked my pants and shirt up where Frank had thrown them and the old man pointed to the house, “You’ll bunk in there with me, it’s as good a place as any I guess.” I followed him into the house where he had a small room and a bed waiting for me. I asked him why he wanted me to stay in the house when the barn was so big, but he didn’t say anything. When it came time to sleep I crawled right into that bed, it was the first I’d been in and it was nearly as comfortable as a pile of straw. Night came slow to the valley in the summer, and before it came completely the cows would be moving in off the fields. I could see the line of their bodies in the last light with the bells dangling from their necks, ringing out the last few steps of the long day. There were times when not all the cows came in and the old man sent me out to gather them up to the barn. He showed me how to rack them in the feed stalls and milk them while they ate. He placed his hands over mine, “Hold her tit in your fist like this and keep your thumb steady.” He guided my fingers to pull and squeeze at the full flesh of the tits until I learned the rhythm and felt the milk come until the bucket was full and he would no longer have to hold my hands. Sometimes I would do what he taught me with my eyes closed, pulling with firm hands at the warm tits, listening to the shots of milk drum in even time against the side of the tin pail. I could tell when the milk was going to give out just from the feel of the tit in my closed fist. It made me sad that she would be empty, that her bag was no longer bloated with the pink skin stretched shiny and slick from the weight of its white burden. The barn slowly began to fill my days. The smell of cows and hay was always in my head. Towering above to the high rafters that split the gloom of the vast ceiling I could see the hanging shapes of bats. Many evenings when the sun sank outside and shifted the light of the barn into bottomless shadows I climbed to the squared mountaintop of baled hay and waited as the bats slowly unfurled their bodies and descended silent as knives into the dry flesh of moths racing the hot currents of summer night air. Sometimes the old man would sit with me and talk as the bats ate up their small white targets. He told about the young man that he was, coming to the mountains of the Sierra where gold ran six miles deep and all a man had to do was knock off a piece and he was fit to dine the r
est of his days with the Queens of Europe themselves. But by the time he got to the Sierra the gold had been yanked out by its roots and there wasn’t much left for him to do but pan the backstreams up by the town of Last Chance. Which he did until he heard about the man named Knox who stumbled onto a big ledge of quartz over in Squaw Valley. It was the same kind of rock the men of the Comstock had yanked a fortune out of. It was assayed up to $3.50 per ton, but everybody knew there was higher grade ore deeper down worth five hundred times that. So he went as fast as he could whip his mule from the Last Chance over to Squaw. And that wasn’t fast enough because by the time he got there he found a city had been built up by quicker stampeders in less than a week’s time called Knoxville. But there was room for all to get rich who were willing to die for it. He staked out his own prospect hole, up and out of the far side of the valley, almost in sight of Lake Tahoe itself. It was in the summer of ’63 or ’64 that the storekeeper Tracy blasted the face off the man from Texas with a shotgun as he came through the door, then took the fifty dollars owed him and kicked the body outside. It was one of those summers anyway, right after that, when most of the men began disappearing from the valley as quickly as they had appeared in it. The ore didn’t pan out. There was some who said Knox had salted the claims of Squaw Valley with ore hauled over on muleback from Virginia City so he could make a kill selling provisions and prospect rights, but others said Knox was on the square. There were more who said he wasn’t than he was and wanted to hang him because of it. But then Knox was already gone and there wasn’t reason for any prospector to stay on. But he stayed on. He kept on banging rock until his hands got so hard he couldn’t feel them. All the time he was banging he took account of how those few men left in the valley were running out quick to news of better digs. They all left their livestock behind rather than be slowed down by as much as a half a day. He found himself gathering up stray cattle on his mule and heading them into a valley draw where he could keep his eye on them and not lose out too much time on his banging. The way he told it was his money was about gone so he figured he should herd what cattle he had over to Glenbrook where the lumber mills had been set up to supply the mines with timber for their tunnels. But he found by that time he had too many head to herd with just him and the mule so he only took half, thinking he would come back for the others. He was given so much money for what he took he didn’t need to make the last trip. When spring came up he made butter from all the milk the cows were giving and sold it to towns along Lake Tahoe. That high up in the mountans butter was worth almost as much as gold. So he quit banging on rock looking for gold and went into the dairy business. There were so few others with cows, and so many miners and loggers, that he ended up putting alot of money in his pockets for a few years. But the times were always moving out in front of him. It wasn’t long before others brought up cows and kept them closer to the towns lower down from him. His business couldn’t take that because Squaw Valley was up so high that a good six months out of the year it was so cold he couldn’t get the cream to rise. When the cream finally did rise in the late spring those he had sold to the year before were buying from others and not about to change over again. It was time to leave Squaw Valley, and that’s the reason he did. There were mills opening up at the headwaters of the Yuba and Feather Rivers in a valley to the north, and the way he figured it he’d be the first there with a dairy, and he’d run cattle besides to make sure he had enough to carry him through the cold months. “That’s how I come to Sierra Valley,” he told me, and he told me over and over again. “You’re probably wondering why I didn’t marry,” he would often say, and look straight into me like I was a full man instead of just a twelve year old boy. “Well, I’ll tell you why I didn’t marry, Bob.” That’s when he first started calling me Bob. I’d never been called by any name before except boy, and Bob sounded very close to that, so it didn’t bother me none. I thought he must have just made a mistake, maybe his tongue was as wore out as his eyes. Anyway he called me Bob so much that pretty soon I got to calling myself Bob. “Bob,” I’d say to myself; “Why don’t you wash out all the milk buckets and set them in the sun to clean.” Or, “Bob, hold your head up when you eat, because your hair has grown so far down Mister Fixa can’t see your eyes, and you know what he feels about not looking a man straight in the eyes.” I got to calling myself Bob so much, and Mister Fixa calling me Bob even more, that one afternoon in the Loyalton feedstore Albert Casin, the owner, said to me real quick like he wasn’t even thinking about it, “What’s your name boy?” “Bob,” I said. “My name is Bob.” Later on, sitting up next to Mister Fixa on the buckboard as we drove home I knew I had a name. A name was something that had never been important to me before, but now that I had one I realized just how much it meant. Because it was so important I said right out loud, “Mister Fixa, my name is Bob.” He seemed to know the reason that made those words jump out of my mouth because he turned his faded eyes and looked at me close, “That’s right. That’s just what it is, and when you go all the way to the end that’s who they’ll be boxing up and slipping in the grave. Not just somebody, but Bob.” So whenever Mister Fixa said, “Well, I’ll tell you why I didn’t marry Bob,” I knew he was talking straight to me and just not to the air. “Now here’s the reason why I didn’t ever marry Bob,” he’d continue right on. “You should listen close because somewhere in it there may be something for you to remember. It’s not because I didn’t meet the right woman that I never took the formal vows. Oh no, it’s not because of that, for I did meet her. Up in Quincy City it was, back before your time. I used to go up to the big livestock auction there every late summer, of course now you and me go on down to Roseville which is much closer, but back then I’d go up to Quincy everytime the summer ended to see if I could better my position in life by using my quick eye for cattle flesh; buying at last years prices and selling at next year’s, as the saying tells it. Well, to get down to the short of it, that’s where I met her. She was big with alot of good bones in her body, and a pair of eyes that roamed around the great space of the auction barn like a bear sitting in a shallow pool watching to decide which fish she will finally fetch out with a quick stroke of her paw. I’d seen her at the auction three summers in a row. The first summer she must have been a good seventeen. She was always walking behind her Daddy, slow she was, but big. She had an eye and nose for cow flesh. When she’d see a good piece she would tap her Daddy on the shoulder and whisper into his ear the bid she thought the animal was worth. When the bidding was on he never went over the price she fixed, even if it was only up one dollar. He never missed a cow he bid on. He had one of the largest spreads on the whole of the Feather River meadows, and everyone knew it was all his daughter’s doing, whispering to him the right price and the best trades. So there were alot who fell in love with her because she was that rare woman in a lifetime who could make a poor cowman rich. And there were alot who loved the way her good flesh swung on her bones. But there were more who loved her for both things, and that’s the reason the Quincy Auction was the biggest one in the north State during those years. The word had gone round, and men came up from as far as Minden Nevada. Not to buy and trade prize cattle, but to take home that rare woman as a wife. Now I may not be much to look at now Bob, but in those days I was the kind of man who could catch a glimpse of his own face on the bottom of a shined up skillet and not run away from the terrible sight. Some even said my face was handsome as a tree is handsome. I was always proud of that saying. But when I was a very young man, back right before I came out to California, I started getting terrible pains in my mouth. So I traveled into Shaker Heights city were the mouth doctor was kept and I told him I was going out to California to get rich, but I was having trouble with my mouth, it felt like somebody was cutting up my gums with a knife. Well Bob, he sat me back down in a chair, propped my mouth open with a stick and declared, ‘Haf your teeth have all rot out, and the haf that aint would be better off if they were. You’d be better off if I yanked em all out
, then you’d never have to be worried by it when you’re pickin up all that gold in California.’ That sounded as if it made sense to me Bob, and even if it didn’t there was nothing I could say against it as that stick had my mouth jerked open so wide it was all I could do to gurgle like a baby. When I got out to California my mouth was just like a baby’s, not a tooth in sight. I never missed having my teeth once. My gums were hard as stone so I could still chew everything up good. There were many nights I thought alot about the pain I wasn’t having because I didn’t have any teeth left. But there was one night I wished I had all my teeth even if half of them were rotted out. You see Bob, it went like this, every year the last night of the Quincy Auction they hold a big doings. They cleaned the big auction hall up and fit it out for a night of celebration and dancing. Now there was one girl that a man had to stand in line to dance with, and there were some men who didn’t take much to standing in lines so they would try to cut in on the other man who had waited his turn, which didn’t always end up so good as I saw a couple of fights come up out of that situation. Two men were cut pretty bad and another got a bullet through his arm. Now you guessed it, the girl everybody was waiting on and fighting over was the very one who always whispered to her Daddy the right cow price. As it was I would pass away each year waiting the time when my turn came in line to dance with the rare woman. Well, this one particular year I had waited three hours and more for my particular turn to come up and dance with this rare girl. When she finally took me lightly by the arm and I could smell the hot sweet air coming up off the open flesh of her bare arms, it was just like the year before, the way I had always dreamed it would be again. It was a moment to live a lifetime on. ‘Do you remember me from last year?’ I said. I had been planning up for a year on just what I’d say to her, knowing every word would have to be perfect. She turned her head slow to me, then nodded toward the fiddle music and smiled. I knew by that smile she remembered me. We danced. I was proud with her all to myself in front of the other men. The music stopped. But the blood was jumping and pounding in my head. I couldn’t let her go. ‘Miss, pardon my rudeness, but would you, would you …’ I squeezed the good flesh of her arm then maybe too hard, as I felt something in her body go tight. ‘Miss, would you allow me to get you a glass of refresh-mint?’ She walked with me! She walked with me clear across the floor over to the punchbowl where her Daddy stood and let me pour out a cool glass for her, and Bob, it was the biggest moment of my life, her accepting that glass from me and making tiny sucking sounds as she drank the red water down. I had to think fast and talk quicker as the moment was going and the other men were already moving in. ‘Sir,’ I announced to her Daddy. ‘I would like the honor of marrying your daughter.’ And before he could answer I put in a real quick, ‘I’ve loved her for three years now and this time I can’t go another year without seeing her, it will take me apart and I will die sure! I beg for your answer here and now as she may be married up by next year!’ He didn’t answer me. His daughter set her glass of punch down, leaned over and cupped a hand over his ear. I could actually feel the hot breath of her whisper as I waited for the answer and stood with my mouth open wide and smiling. ‘My daughter says,’ he straightened up and put his eyes full on me, ‘She don’t like a man with no teeth.’ Well Bob, I shut my gaping mouth and it wasn’t until I was fifty miles away from that auction barn that I couldn’t hear the men laughing at me no more. But wait, there’s more to it. You see, I aint never been one of your quitters. So the first thing I do when I get back to the ranch is go straight into Reno where a mouth doctor fitted me up with a whole set of new teeth that made my gums bleed everytime I smiled. When the auction time came round again I waited for the night of the dance. When I came into the barn I made right for her. None of the men said anything to me about the year before and I figured it was because they didn’t recognize me with my new teeth in. I saw her dancing with a man and soon’s the music stopped I went straight over and danced the next one with her, and before the fiddler scraped out the last note I steered her right over to her Daddy, who was standing next to the punchbowl like he hadn’t budged in a year. ‘Sir, I would like the honor of marrying your daughter. I’m a modest rancher from the Sierra Valley, but my stock is strong and my barn is solid, and my teeth,’ I yawned my mouth wide and tapped the front ones with my finger, ‘my teeth are as good as any man’s.’ He didn’t answer me right off as his daughter had put her lips close up to his ear and was whispering low. ‘She says, young fella, that the one you should be asking is her husband here,’ and he nudged the man standing next to him who I recognized as the one dancing with her before I had cut in. ‘It’s alright with me,’ her husband said, ‘that is if it’s alright with her. Aint that right boys.’ He threw his head back and laughed until he exposed the big even teeth of his mouth shining like all the light in the heavens. That’s the short of it Bob, the truth as I lived it, the reason why I didn’t marry, in case you’re ever wondering. You know Bob,” he would continue right on into the dark of the barn that had fallen around us, “I had a brother who married and raised children. What good did it do him? In the end he ended up alone anyway. I don’t see the point of it. Why get married and raise up children? They’re not like carrots when they get full grown and matured, you can’t eat them. But I’ll tell you one thing to remember Bob, the only man I ever knew who was happy married had an ugly wife and a short memory. Remember that, if you’re ever fool enough to tie yourself down, pick yourself the most ugly gal in town and don’t remember anything she might do for more than two days in a row.”