Winter came down hard on me and Mister Fixa. It made us both cold. But Mister Fixa liked those short gray days. He said he could see better than ever then, just like a young man. Many times he would challenge me to who could see the furthest. We would walk together out into the empty middle of a snow field and he would set up a few rusted cans alongside the horse’s gleaming bit. Then we would take twentyfive steps away from the sight, turn round, and shout if we could still see the cans and bit. We kept going on like this until one of us didn’t shout, and had lost. It was always me that lost. Mister Fixa could go five miles out and still see those cans and the bright bit. “Can you still see it!” he would shout. “No I can’t!” I would shout back. “Got to train your eyes Bob! Got to train your eyes so they can see the flash of a silver dollar tied on the top of a saddlehorn with the horse galloping half a mile away from you. A young man who can’t see straight, a young man without good eyesight, will get tripped up in this lifetime. Tripped up and cleaned of his valuables. A young man’s got to train himself to see three days ahead of the one he’s living!” It’s those gray days in winter that Mister Fixa liked best, when he could always see further than me. In summer, he couldn’t see anything. I wasn’t much on wintertime. Mister Fixa never took his herd down below the snowline where the pasture was always steady like all the other cowmen did. He had the biggest barn in the valley, and he had it so he could keep all of his cows in it right through till spring. In the mornings when it was still dark he would wake me up, “Bob, you better go out there and tend the herd.” In the night it usually snowed. I had to shovel down the snow to swing the side barndoor open so the cows could get out in the exercise corral after I fed them. They didn’t like getting up out of their straw, even for the morning feed, and I’d have to shout good at them and even kick a few. But pretty soon all of them were rising from the nest they had rounded in the night. I could see the heat coming from their hides off into the cold air of the barn as they staggered into their slots along the feed trough. It didn’t take me long to fork the trough full of alfalfa. When I got that done I stamped my boots on the frozen ground to keep the blood moving and leaned up against the pitchfork to watch the cows. I always tried to figure them. They paid no attention to nothing when they ate. The bulge of their brown eyes glazed over and almost shut as they ground down their feed. The whole time switching their tails and letting loose a fall of heavy yellow water or a thick stream of turd. I tried to figure them at that time in the morning when the only sound roaring in the barn was all eighty of them grinding it up at one end and blowing it out the other. “Buy a rabbit’s foot Bob,” Mister Fixa always stopped my figuring on the cows as he swung open the door, beating his gloved hands against his jacket to feel the heat in his fingers. “You’re going to fall asleep against that pitchfork someday, run yourself through and freeze to death, I’ll have to carry you out in an ice statue. I can see fine this morning, Bob. I can see it’s going to be a fine day. Couple of those cows down at the end are about finished up. I better be getting to milking them before they go stiff.” The morning milking was only done by Mister Fixa. The last milking in the day he always let me do, but never would he let me do even one cow in the morning. He said a cow was like a woman in the morning, you just couldn’t wake her up and start jerking and yanking away at her tits, you had to handle them just right, if you didn’t, if you just let slip the wrong word to her, or said something a little too sweet to her, she was ruined for the rest of the day. I took away the full buckets of warm milk as Mister Fixa worked his way down the line and let each cow out of her stall after he had finished with her, giving her a slap on the rump so she would move out into the cold morning of the small corral. When all the cows were out it was my job to shovel up the manure they left behind. Some mornings were so cold the brown clumps the cows had dropped would already be frozen by the time I got to them. Mister Fixa would hear me talking low beneath my breath about how I hated this part of every morning. He would come over to me and lay a hand on my shoulder, “Son,” he would say, looking right into my face with the dying glow of his gray eyes, “if this is the worst shit you ever have to shovel in your lifetime you’ll be a luckier man than most.”
When they got the new money gambling machine over across the border into Nevada we would hitch up the horse to the buckboard and ride out of the valley through the low pass called Beckwourth. There wasn’t a time we didn’t ride east through that pass in the wall of the Sierra into Nevada that Mister Fixa didn’t say, “Now there was an old boy for you, Jimmy Beckwourth. Me and him was thick as syrup right up to the time the posse from down in Sacramento Valley rode up one night and surrounded his cabin only to find old Jim gone. You see, there was alot of horse thievin going on down in the Sacramento Valley in those days, and in his time Jim was two parts army scout, three parts Injun chief, and nine parts fur trapper. He even rode with Jed Smith in the Santa Fe trade during the ’30’s, Course that was way before Jedediah got caught near the Cimarron River, searching way ahead of his party for water, the Comanches did something so terrible to his body that the ants didn’t even want to eat what was left, course his remains were never found. He was only thirty-two, now there was an old boy for you, Jed Smith. But what Jimmy Beckwourth was most of all was twentythree parts horse thief. The posse that rode up that night knew it wasn’t Jimmy stealing all that horseflesh out in their valley, they knew his rheumatism had set in so bad as to have kept him out of the saddle for more than a year. But the way they figured it was he had the reputation for horse thievin because as a younger man, right before the U.S. and Mexican War broke out, Jimmy stole nearly every horse off of John Sutter that the Californios had, and he didn’t quit there. All they had to do was ride up and hang Jimmy dead to a tree and the real horse thieves would have to quit stealing because then there wouldn’t be no more Jim to blame it on. But Jim was already hightailed into Denver before that posse got off their horses and busted into his cabin. He got married again when he was east, and then he got talked into the new fight with the Crow. He was sixty-eight the winter he saddled up for the last time and rode off into Crow country with every bone in his body creaking like a board. The Crow had always given Jimmy a wide path, ever since his earlier days when he lived with them for more than six years and took one of their women as a wife. She rode everywhere with him, she even had strapped on her horse a leather bag of buffalo chips she used to start her fires with in timberless country. When the New Mexico trade opened Jim took her right into that country with him. But it wasn’t never no good. She wouldn’t leave him, but her eyes always kept turning north, the further they traveled the more she kept looking north, back up to Crow country. It was because he loved her so much that he wouldn’t keep her caged. He came back to their camp one night and found she had cut one of the finger joints off her lefthand. Old Jim knew the reason behind this. She was giving up a part of her flesh for the Spirits to take back to her people so she could always be with them. In the morning he rolled up the blanket they slept on and instead of tying it down behind his saddle he walked over and wedged it in the fork of a cottonwood. It was the sign he gave her. Her life branched off two ways. She could choose her road, but she would always be part of the tree. Well Bob, he watched her swing up on her pony and ride north. Old Jim wasn’t one to keep a caged animal. He says she never took another man. It was only her people she was married to. The Crow called Jim, Chief Chief Bloody Arm. But they took that name from the Snake Indians who give it to Jim after they’d been in a fight or two with him. You see, Jim was a trapper, and a trapper will never use his gun if he can use his knife. Jim used to use his knife so much in battle that his whole leather sleeve was always bloodied up from those he’d carved. What Jim was riding back up to Crow country for was to tell his old friends to make their ways peaceable, that there weren’t much good in starting up a new fight. But the only thing Jim accomplished with the Crow was to die. By the time he come into their main camp he could hardly sit his horse. They hauled him
down, sweated him out, gave him tobacco, told him stories, but he died anyway. It’s this here pass we’re riding through right now that Jim come upon back in ’51. He’d made his way down from Pit River country and it was then he saw this split in the wall of the mountains way to the east. He come through and found himself right at the top of the Feather River. By the next year Jim had put a road through this pass and the wagontrains were rolling through. Jim guided the first wagons on down the ridge to Marysville. The way he says it the only thing holding the wagons together was the same miracle that keeps the sun from falling down on the earth. The men had to hold the wore out oxen by their tails to keep them on their feet. Now there’s a long story behind why Jim set Marysville on fire during the wild celebrating that took place when he brought those first wagons in, but the story’s too long for my lifetime so I’ll only say this on it. Some said Jim was paid by the mayor of Marysville to lay a road through this here pass so that the mayor’s town could become an important trading center, important as Sacramento even. Others say the mayor promised Jim full reimbursement for the road he laid whenever he brought the first string of wagons in. Jim says that’s the way it was. The mayor said it was the first way. Jim insists he has a gentleman’s agreement with the mayor. The mayor said there wasn’t no such thing as a gentleman’s agreement with Jim Beckwourth as he weren’t no gentleman; true his father was a big plantation owner in Virginia, but it was common fact that his mama was a nigger slave, that he himself had been bonded out to a Saint Louie blacksmith in ’21 for fifteen dollars and run off in ’23 to join Bill Ashley’s band of fur traders, now how could a man like that, the mayor said, give the word of a gentleman. Jim didn’t have no words left for the mayor after he said that. He made his way down the street that was full of the festivities celebrating the success of the road he built. He came to the Bear Flag Saloon, strode in and ordered a keg of straight Kentucky Whiskey. He smashed the keg open with the butt of his rifle and let the whiskey run all over the saloon floor before he struck a match to it and strolled back outside to watch the whole street burn to the ground. Too bad too, because that street was the only piece of real-estate the mayor owned free and clear.” Mister Fixa always ended his story by the time we come out at the other end of the pass. He would sit tall on the buckboard seat saying, “Bob, if anyone ever asks you just how this here pass come to be named Beckwourth, you just straighten up and tell them about old Jim.”
Mister Fixa was always in good spirits when we crossed over the border into Nevada. The blood went high in his head, his back stiffened, he breathed deep and his old gray eyes saw out over all that shaved down brown mountain country as far as it rolled. Mister Fixa liked going into Nevada for the money gambling machine, but more than that he liked the way Nevada came up to a man and said take it or leave it; take the desert, the mountains, the coyotes, the silver, the coldest days and the hottest nights of your life. Nevada was not a place to fool with. It would throw a man right out. Nevada was built on solid silver from the grassroots down and right up to the naked blue sky. Nevada broke more men than it built. Nevada was a gamble. Gambling was Nevada. Nevada was always there for a man to bet his life on. And we were coming into it. Me and Mister Fixa. We were coming on in to Reno. “Look at it there Bob!” Mister Fixa stood up on the buckboard and pointed his arm out as far as it would go as we banged over a little slump of hill and saw the Truckee River pumping itself calm and fast around a curve and between a clump of brown buildings stacked up along its banks searching for a new direction in which they could spread. “Look there Bob! Look at Reno Nevada! Reno waiting to take our dues!” Mister Fixa wouldn’t sit down until we rode up Virginia Street and he pulled the buckboard in tight against the boardwalk in front of the GOLDEN NUGGET CASINO. “You bring your ransom Bob.” I pulled the two sacks of silver dollars from under the seat, grabbed their drawn canvas tops tight in each fist and followed Mister Fixa in.
“Wait a minute there Grandpa,” the man standing at the doorway jammed his arm across the entrance and leaned all his weight on it. “No Injuns allowed. The kid stays out.”
Mister Fixa took a step back, the old silver blue of his gray eyes trying to take in the hard reflection off the high black shine of the man’s stubheeled boots. Pretty soon he smiled as if in recognition and lifted his face up, “Me and Bob have been in here plenty of times. Why this place couldn’t stay in business without my annual donation. I’m the one who pays your salary, and from the looks of your outfit I’m not tight with it either. Me and Bob have been coming in here as long as I can remember, and that’s before you were born. I don’t see what’s changed now.” He took a step right against the man’s arm.
“Nothing’s changed since we’ve been in business thirty years Mister. Things are the same they’ve always been,” he stuck his finger up over his head at the sign nailed over the doorway.
Mister Fixa arched his head back and made as if he was reading the sign with the smoothed gray stone of his eyes. But he already knew what the sign read. He knew it back from the days when he could see as good as any man, but that didn’t stop him from turning back and saying, “Well sir, my eyes have gone out on me for some years now. You’ll just have to read this here sign to me.”
“INDIANS NOT ALLOWED!”
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