The Brave Cowboy (2 page)

Stared at it from under the brim of his black slouch hat, his head tilted back against the tree, the hat pushed
forward and almost down over his eyes. The attitude of his head and hat, the gaze from narrowed eyes down past the flanges of the nose, the cigarette jutting at an acute angle from his mouth, made his stare seem disdainful, unconsciously arrogant.

He was a young man, not more than thirty. His neck was long, scrawny, with a sharp adamsapple and corded muscles; his nose, protruding from under the decayed brim of the hat, was thin, red, aquiline and asymmetrical, like the broken beak of a falcon. He had a small mouth with thin dry lips, and a chin pointed like a spade, and his skin, bristling with a week’s growth of black whiskers, had the texture of cholla and the hue of an old gunstock.

The young man smoked on in contemplative silence, staring at the city. He seemed to be thinking as he sat there in the sun, the juniper growing out of his back and neck. Every line, fiber, bone and muscle of his body bespoke repose, the assured unselfconscious tranquillity of a sleeping hound. His hands, big and long-fingered like those of a flutist or a good plank-stacker, and hard, brown, leather-skinned, rested like a pair of lifeless tools on his lap, on his groin and genitals. Every now and then a puff of blue smoke drifted out from under the hatbrim, from an apparently immobile mouth and throat. But despite the appearance of a complete somnolence suggested by the relaxation of his body there were indications of an internal activity discernible at two points: the eyes. Deep in the grotto of darkness formed by the tilted hat and the high ridge of the nose the two eyes, like instrument dials of the mind and emotions, registered thought, perplexity, a faint hairline trace of anxiety.

He spat out what was left of the cigarette.

On the other side of the river, miles away, the city lay waiting, stirring faintly but in silence—vague wisps of smoke and dust, glints of reflected light from moving objects, a motion of shadows—not yet fully awake and too far to be heard. In the early morning light, viewed
from the west by the man sitting against the juniper, the city appeared as an undifferentiated patch of blue and gray shadow, edges ill-defined, southern and eastern extremities invisible, all blended with the vast wings of the shadow of the Sangre Mountains.

The river, curling beyond and below the edge of the lava flow, was hard to make out from that distance and elevation; here and there he could see strips and sheets of opaque water but mostly nothing except the ragged fringe of vegetation crowding the banks and islands and old channels of the river.

The silence was intense, burning, infinite. He could hear the silence, or what seemed like its music, the singing of the blood through his ears.

Far to the southeast, from the direction of the giant military air base adjoining The Factory, came the shattering roar of a jet engine. The sound rose, drove like an iron wedge through the sky, scoring the air with its transparent vibration. Then retracted, faded, died, and the vast silence closed in again, and sealed its perfect dome over the desert and the river and the valley.

The young man leaned away from the juniper, bending the hinges of his long legs, and stood up. He was over six feet tall, with about two-thirds of that altitude composed of attenuated fuse-like legs. He spread the ashes of the fire with his boot, kicked sand over them, buried the bean can under a rock and scattered the coffee grounds. The skillet and spoon he scoured with a handful of sand, and packed back into the saddlebag. He rolled his light mummy-type sleeping bag into a hard tight bundle, tied it and laid it across the saddle on the ground. Then he looked for the mare.

The mare was watching him now; she stood about fifty yards away in the rocky draw, ears alerted, black tail swiping at a horsefly, shaking her black shaggy mane and watching him. A three-year-old, well-muscled and close-coupled, with slender hocks and a glossy chestnut coat. She had good wide-apart eyes and a stiffly-arched neck and her name was Whisky.

“Whisky,” he called, “here girl.” The mare’s ears went back. “Here girl,” he called, and lifted the bridle and reins from a branch of the juniper. The mare eyed him suspiciously, not moving. He reached down into one of the saddlebags and found a small withered yellow apple and held it in the air, baiting the horse. “Come here, Whisky,” he called softly, “got something for you.” The mare shook her head, watching him, swept a fly from her haunch and stamped at the sand but did not step toward him.

He shrugged his shoulders wearily and walked to-ward her, eating the apple as he went. He saved the core and when he had advanced to within a few yards of the horse tried again to tempt her. “Whisky,” he called gently, proffering the apple core, “here girl. Come here, girl.” This time she responded, lurching toward him awkwardly with her hobbled forelegs.

The man smiled and stepped to meet her and fed her the apple core from his palm, holding her head against his chest and whispering into the tense ears. “That’s a girl, now you’re gettin the idea.” He rubbed her face and forehead and patted the strong nervous neck. “You’re a good girl, Whisky. You’re not so dumb, little girl. No sirree, you’re all right.” While he was murmuring into her ears he started slowly and stealthily to slip the bridle on; but she resisted, jerked her head up and tried to back away. Quickly he jammed his thumb inside her cheek, forced her mouth open and inserted the bit, pushed the headstall over her ears and fastened the throatlatch. “Easy, girl, easy,” he said as the mare laid back her ears again. He caressed her neck and thumped his fist on her powerful shoulder. After a moment he half-knelt to unbuckle the Mormon hobble around her shanks. The mare trembled when the strap slipped off but made no trouble. “That’s a girl,” he whispered. He straightened up, holding the hobble in one hand, passed the reins over her neck and quickly smoothly pulled himself up and astride her bare back.

For a second the mare stood rigid, frozen in outrage;
then before he could put a spur to her she leaped forward as if stung, stopped suddenly, arching her back with convulsive violence, and left the earth in another mighty leap, came back down and hit with braced legs, a sickening bone-jarring shock. The man on her back gasped through his grin, shook his head and leaned forward and clutched at the mane with one hand, twisting the strong hairs around his fingers and wrist. “Come on, you bitch!” he shouted, and whipped the mare across the flank with the leather hobble.

She sprang forward again, bucked once, twice, then broke and ran; laughing and cursing, the man turned her with a touch of leather on the neck, kept her turning round and round in a tight circle until she began to tire a little, then brought her at an easy canter back to the campsite, stopped her short and slid off. He cradled the mare’s head in his arms and talked low-toned soothing nonsense into her quivering ears, while the dust they had raised went drifting by to settle again on different ground.

When she seemed quiet enough he spread a pad on her back and threw on his saddle, an old worn all-purpose outfit with a double rig and rolled cantle. He caught the cinch ring swinging underneath on the other side and pulled it up and passed the latigo through it a half dozen times and jerked it tight. The mare was holding her breath: he deflated her with a pair of good driving punches to the belly, drew the latigo tighter and secured it on the tongue of the ring. After this he hung on the saddlebags and fastened them, tied the bedroll on behind the cantle, and looped his almost-empty government canteen close to the saddlehorn. He had still more gear to attend to, a guitar and a rifle laying on the ground in the shade of the juniper. The rifle, a thirty-two caliber lever-action carbine, went in the scabbard slung under the fender on the right side of the saddle; the guitar he slung across his back by its braided rawhide cord.

All was ready now; the mare waited impatiently under her firm burden of metal and leather, waited for the
man’s approach and the springy pressure of his long weight on her back. She had to wait; he seemed in no hurry now after completing his preparations. Instead of mounting he stood facing the east and the city, slouching comfortably over his backbone and pelvis, thumbs hooked in the pockets of his jeans, the black hat tilted forward over his eyes.

The sun was now an hour higher in the sky, a good ten feet above the violet crest of the mountains. The shadows contracted, creeping back, and the first miasmic shimmer of heat waves began to obscure the detail of rocks and brush. Between the man and the river a spinning dervish of air and sand, like a translucent tornado, danced across the plain with the weightless buoyant grace of a moving spotlight; at its base the tumbleweeds bounced around and around like figures in a square dance.

The mare pawed at the sand, jerking her head nervously, and the leather gear on her back creaked and rustled—the most reassuring and satisfying of sounds, that agitation of used, worn, familiar leather. The man heard it, turned, caught up the dragging reins, put a hand on the pommel, his foot in the stirrup and swung up into the saddle. The mare was already facing the east, the river; he touched her with his spurs and she started off, breaking almost at once into a trot. He pulled back a little and kept her at a brisk walking gait, beading not for the center of the city but toward the northern tip of its elongated trunk.

Mounted and armed, he rode for the city, the slanting blaze of the sun twinkling on the buttplate of the rifle, the silver buckle, the spurs, touching with fire the brief puffs of dust rising up from each step of the horse, glistening on the smooth hide of the mare’s shoulders, thighs, operating muscles. The man himself, in his worn dusty clothing, did not reflect much light; in the full glare of the morning sun there was something shadowy and smoke-like about him, something faded, blurred, remembered.

He gazed straight forward as he rode, apparently indifferent to the vast sweep of desert around him, the sky singing overhead. The five volcanoes to the south, lined up like old ruined tombs, swung slowly around on his wheeling horizon. Riding into the brush of grease-wood, live oak, mesquite, he flushed a covey of quail; they rose in unison from the desert floor, shrilling and fluttering, flew ahead for a distance and dropped in unison to the ground again. When he rode up to them they rose into the air again, flew ahead and dropped into the brush, still in front of him. He ignored them, thinking of something else, his eyes under the shadow of the hat fixed intently on the vague complex of the city.

His course brought him to an arroyo, whose sandy bed he followed for a mile or more until it veered too much to the south. Under the arroyo’s banks, on the fine drifted sand, he noted the delicate hieroglyphics of field mice, lizards, gophers, jackrabbits, quail and buzzards, but in the light of day only a few lizards appeared, swift and rubbery and insignificant, to watch the passage of man and horse.

When the arroyo turned he rode up out of it and across the lava rock again, through scattered patches of rabbitbrush and tumbleweed, until he came eventually to a barbed-wire fence, gleaming new wire stretched with vibrant tautness between steel stakes driven into the sand and rock, reinforced between stakes with wire staves. The man looked for a gate but could see only the fence itself extended north and south to a pair of vanishing points, an unbroken thin stiff line of geometric exactitude scored with a bizarre, mechanical precision over the face of the rolling earth. He dismounted, taking a pair of fencing pliers from one of the saddlebags, and pushed his way through banked-up tumble-weeds to the fence. He cut the wire—the twisted steel resisting the bite of his pliers for a moment, then yielding with a soft sudden grunt to spring apart in coiled tension, touching the ground only lightly with its barbed points—and returned to the mare, remounted, and rode
through the opening, followed by a few stirring tumbleweeds.

He rode on, approaching the rim of the ancient lava flow and the glint of the river beyond it, the willows, the soft yellow-leaved cottonwoods on the banks of the river. The rider relaxed in the saddle, turning in the seat, and lifted one leg and rested it on the mare’s neck. After a while he pushed back his hat and unslung the guitar from his back and struck off a few running chords. The mare answered with a twitch of her ears and stepped forward quickly. He strummed a few more chords, tightened one of the strings, and then began to sing, very softly, addressing no one but himself and the mare.

His hard, wind-honed, sun-dried face softened a little under the influence of the music, became human, almost gentle.

The mare’s iron-shod hooves clinked on the black rock; a whisper of wind drifted through the brittle clicking leaves of the greasewood. Beyond the river and ten miles east of the city the Sangre Mountains began to reveal themselves in more detail as the sun rose higher, the rampart of blue shadow dissolving in the light, exposing the fissured red cliffs, the canyons and gorges a thousand feet deep, the towers leaning out from the main wall, the foothills dry and barren as old bones, and above and behind these tumbled ruins the final barrier of granite, the great horizontal crest tilted up a mile high into the frosty blue sky, sparkling with a new fall of snow. The mountains loomed over the valley like a psychical presence, a source and mirror of nervous
influences, emotions, subtle and unlabeled aspirations; no man could ignore that presence; in an underground poker game, in the vaults of the First National Bank, in the secret chambers of The Factory, in the backroom of the realtor’s office during the composition of an intricate swindle, in the heart of a sexual embrace, the emanations of mountain and sky imprinted some analogue of their nature on the evolution and shape of every soul.