Jim Kane - J P S Brown (2 page)

In the morning the man will go one way walking in
that free, graceful placing of his
huaraches
and I'll go another way horseback. I'll look over my
mares and see if that final sorrel mare has foaled yet. I'll fix some
fence and make a circle looking for jaguar tracks to see if any have
been around the mares in the night. In the evening I'll ride back to
the house through a forest of
nopal
so thick I won't be able to see the house until I am in
the clearing. At the corral I'll take a dusty foot out of the stirrup
and get down off my horse and call my son, when and if I have one, to
me to help me unsaddle. He'll tell me in fine Spanish how he and the
dog captured an iguana but the dog had fatally wounded the iguana and
it had only just finished dying. The man who helps me will return at
about that time and discuss the capture of the iguana with me and the
boy and give a quiet observation about the habits of iguana which I
will remember the rest of my life. The boy will remember it longer
because he will have a longer life and I will have learned about the
iguana much later in life than he did.

The sun was out on the road and an iguana, an
ancestor of the animal Jim Kane's boy would one day capture, speared
his way across the road in front of the truck Kane was riding in. He
was a long, emerald streak. His long tail, held high at the base,
seemed to lift him and rudder him as he flew an inch above the dark,
water-shiny pavement. Many other iguanas, not as wise or as fast as
Kane's boy's iguana's ancestor, had been caught by the tires of
machines on the road and were no longer jewel-like living spears but
were now muddy grease spots.

The man, the boy, and I will go to the house and sit
down at a table under the porch. My wife, when and if I ever have
one, will bring us hot coffee while we talk over what became of the
day. The boy will drink one-third coffee and two-thirds hot milk and
plenty of sugar. The man will have half and half and plenty of sugar.
I will have mine black with no sugar and I won't have to tell my wife
how to brew it as I will love just the way she does it. I will love
her more each time she does it because she loves to do it so much.

Maybe she will have a dogied horse colt she is
raising on a bottle because a jaguar got his mother. This colt might
be living by the kitchen door, still weak and too timid to fight the
many flies around his eyes, while the man and I discuss how we are
going to get the
tigre
that
killed the colt's mother. The boy and his mother, together, will put
salve on the colt's eyes.

We will not use poison on the
tigre
,
we say, we want more vengeance than that. We'll let the blood out of
him and have him killed close to us so we can get his hide to hang on
the wall. That is the only honorable way to kill a tigre on his way
to putting us out of business. A
tigre
like that, a killer of the gentle, an
acebado
,
would be the only kind of
tigre
I
would ever kill. The man will excuse himself after this discussion
and say he wants to go home a different way to cut for the jaguar's
tracks before dark. Inside, while I'm lighting the lamps and getting
ready for supper, I'll consider that a man like the one who is
helping me is surely a fine man.

Jim Kane slept for more than a hundred miles and woke
up to another heavy rain. The road was deeper under water and the
trucks had slowed. They came to Culiacan in the night. The city was
dark, probably from a power failure caused by the storm. At the edge
of town, the authorities directed the trucks  across the river
through the water because they were not confident of the strength of
the bridge. In the dark town in the black rain the people waded in a
foot of water on the sidewalks in the lights of the trucks going by.
When the trucks stopped for gas, Kane undressed in the cab and
climbed into the back of the truck in his shorts and boots to see if
he could help the old mare back to her feet. She was still down in
the corner in the muck. The other mares around her had not done her
much damage by stepping on her since horses naturally hate stepping
on any living thing. But her own efforts had hurt her. She had banged
her head so much against the comer of the rack in her efforts to get
up that both her eyes were grotesquely swollen. Kane worked with her
while the trucks were serviced and the drivers ate their supper, but
he failed to help her. Anyone would say she would be no great loss.
She was an old
canela
,
cinnamon-colored, mare. She was parrot-mouthed and dead of hair but
she had a fine filly colt. The filly was a wide-chested,
straight-legged colt and she had a clean, white blanket over her rear
with purple spots on the blanket. The mama had come along only
because the filly was too young to wean.

Kane had six mares like the old
canela
.
All were making this trip because they had that one, saving grace;
they had given birth to fine offspring that needed them. Kane was
sure the old mares wouldn't bring four bits when their colts were
weaned. Anyone could tell him that. But Kane liked them. They would
be called a bad investment but he wasn't sorry to be husbanding them.
They looked like Don Quixote's Rocinante. They were peak-hipped,
fork-legged, cow-hocked, calf-kneed, slack-lipped, and sparse of
hair. Yes, but look how far and with how willing a heart Rocinante
carried Don Quixote. It wasn't Rocinante's concern that Don Quixote
was a madman. If Rocinante had been well fed and nicely groomed for
it he might very well have served Richard the Lionhearted. He
certainly had the heart for it. So how does jousting with grown men
require any finer or more noble an effort than jousting with
windmills to a horse like Rocinante? The old cinnamon mare was still
trying her best to get up onto her own feet and make a living after
thirty hours of being down in the muck. Kane still felt she might get
up if he had some help and a dry, sunny day.

"
Pheeootah!" the little driver said when he
got back to the truck. "How you stink, man!" He found a
clean cloth_and wiped the manure and water off the seat covers in the
cab.

"
These are my new seat covers, man," he
said, folding the cloth carefully and putting it back in its place
under the seat.

"
They clean easily, don't they?" Kane said,
laughing at him. The driver didn't answer but started the motor and
let the truck idle and stared at his lights through the rain while
the other trucks started up and pulled away from the station. By noon
the next day they were in Guaymas. The sun was out and the
temperature was close to one hundred and ten degrees with not a
breath of air moving when the trucks stopped in Guaymas for gas.

Kane got his driver and the tall driver to help him
with the old mare. He climbed into the slop with all his clothes on
because it was Sunday and the station was crowded with people,. He
tied a rope around the old mare's girth and threw it over a beam that
ran across the center of the truck above the rack. He pulled on the
rope and the two men on the ground held the slack over the beam. When
he and the two men had lifted the mare three feet off the deck, Kane
got under her with his back against her belly and lifted her to her
feet. He stepped out from under her. The old mare swayed on her own
feet. Her eyes were swollen as big as softballs. The hair on her side
and hips had been scalded off by the hot, briny muck. She looked like
an old; abused praying mantis but she was standing again. She had
been down in that corner for forty hours. She breathed a deep sigh.

Kane climbed down off the rack, proud of the old
mare. He didn't care that he was covered with the hot slime she had
been lying in.

"
You are not riding in my truck on my new seat
covers as nauseating as you are now," the little driver said to
Jim Kane. Kane smiled at him, not believing him, and reached for the
door handle.

"
No,"
the driver said and when Kane looked at him he saw the man was
unhappy. He did not share Kane's sense of accomplishment. He did not
consider Kane fit company on the road anymore. He was not going to be
a Christian about Kane's filthiness.

"What is your problem?" the tall driver
asked the little driver. "I suppose you think you are going to
leave the man here?"

"
It is not my problem what happens to him,"
the little driver said solemnly. "Not even his own mother would
ride with him."

"Stupid! It is only a little manure of a horse.
Horses have clean manure. You act as though you never saw a little
manure before."

"
Only a little manure? Look in the back of my
truck. A ton of
mierda
and
urines
of a horse. I
won't stand for any of it inside my cabin. We have been fifty hours
on the road now with very little sleep because we have not been able
to stop long enough because we are hauling these ghosts and they
might die on the road. And now this man wants to deposit more slop
inside my cabin. No. I'm sorry. If he likes it so much he can ride in
the aback with his beasts. He is not riding with me. I am not a
beast.

"
Of course you're not. I can't stand it any
longer myself, " Kane said. "Pardon me, I have been in too
much of a hurry. Wait a few minutes and I'll clean up." He got
his suitcase and went to the men's room and washed and changed. When
he got back to the truck the little driver had spread rags over the
seat to make sure Kane didn't dirty his seatcovers anymore.

The old cinnamon mare stayed on her feet to
Hermosillo, where Kane unloaded the horses and fed and rested them in
the stockyards of the Cattleman's Union for a night and a day. 
She stayed on her feet all through the next night to Frontera. She
walked off the truck under her own power at the Cattleman's Union
corrals in Frontera and Kane's investment in her and the other
forty-nine head was still intact.

The next day the American veterinarians took blood
samples of the horses. Kane caught them one by one and held them
while the vets bled them. The samples would be sent to
Washington, D.C., to be tested for infectious
diseases of horses.

The temperature was one hundred and five degrees,
heavy clouds were building up, and the humidity was high. The vets
chose the hottest time of the day to work the horses, the time of
Mexican siesta between noon and 3 P.M.

After Kane had roped and eared down the thirty-sixth
of his fifty horses for the vets, he began seeing everything in the
corral from the end of a long, dark tunnel. He caught the
thirty-seventh horse, a five-year-old bronc stud. He was leading the
stud through a gate when the stud spooked and ran over the top of
Kane. Kane had a trick knee, a knee that had been operated on but had
not been remedied by the operation. The stud ran into that knee and
knocked Kane down. The knee responded by going numb and then catching
fire, a white fire that matched the white suffocation of the day in
the corral. The vets and their helpers stood in the shade of the
ramadas
and watched
Kane pick himself up and catch the stud again. He led the stud to the
shade. He hung on to the stud's ears as though they were handlebars
and got hold of one of the ears with his jaw teeth.

He was watching the vet, an old man with a very
unsteady hand, trying to find the vein in the throat with the needle.
The tunnel he had been seeing everything through for the past thirty
minutes began to lengthen and narrow. All he could see now was the
man's hand, the syringe, and the place in the horse's neck where he
was trying to jab the needle. Then all Kane could see was the needle
and the dirty thumb punching and probing the neck for the vein. The
poor little stud was so thin that not much blood was coursing there.
Then all that was left to see was the old, trembling thumb of the
vet. Kane forgot about the corral and left it and went sailing far
away from the tight hold he had on the stud. He passed out and vets
hauled him to the hospital with heat exhaustion.

Before he recovered in the hospital, Will Ore, the
broker, came to visit him with the results of the blood test of his
horses. Will Ore specialized in the import and export of livestock.
He had corrals on the Arizona side of the border. He was from
Oklahoma and like most dark-complexioned men from that state did not
deny his Indian blood. He had a tendency to get fat but running the
corrals and chasing cattlemen and Mexican politicians kept him worn
down to a frazzle. His good humor kept the frazzle from tearing off
at the ends.

He told Jim Kane that all the old mares like the
cinnamon mare had tested out clean and healthy but four of the best
mares were suffering from durine, a venereal disease of horses.

That is, they had been suffering before Will had shot
and burned them by order of the American vets. He had also removed
and burned all the manure in the corral the horses had occupied. Kane
was going to have to pay Will for the removal of the manure and the
complete disinfecting of all the fences and troughs. A padlock had
been snapped on the corral and the horses had been put under
quarantine for thirty days. They would be bled again in fifteen days
and again when their quarantine was over. If the two tests showed
that the remaining horses were healthy, they would be free to cross
the border into the U.S. after the thirty day quarantine.