The Brave Cowboy (28 page)

Past the limits of the city proper now, Johnson and the radio operator jounced along in their hard-sprung jeep, watching the inert passage of a few bars and gas stations and small farms on their left and right. Mailboxes presented themselves, flagged and numbered, and
when Number 424 appeared the sheriff slowed for an appraising look at the low adobe house among the tamarisk and apricot trees, at its weed-grown corn patch, the jungle of sunflowers, the outhouses, corral, woodpile, backyard.

“Whatcha lookin at?” the radio operator said, breaking the long silence. Johnson gave no answer. “What’s here?” the operator said, looking out himself.

Johnson stepped on the gas again. “That’s where this fella Bondi lives,” he said. Used to live, he meant He chewed slowly on his gum, speculating.

“Oh…” the operator said. “And that’s where…?” He twisted his head around to look back. “Yeah…” he said softly; he put one hand down on his pistol butt.

On they went, through the rural fringes of the suburbs: small farms, irrigation ditches, yellow cotton-woods and long brown patches of corn stubble, barbed wire fences, more mud houses, old Chevies blocked up and disemboweled amid a litter of tools and worn parts, red chili peppers and colored maize drying on the walls, small angry dogs yapping under the wheels, Mexicans sagging in off-plumb doorways, pickup trucks parked in wagon sheds, the smell of horse manure, burning cedar, greasewood, sand, rock, the long cool smoky blue dawn…

Johnson stepped on the brakes, pulled at the wheel and the jeep skidded around a corner fence post, rattled over a wooden bridge and then rolled east and upward across the desert toward the shadowy, intangible mountains.

“How far out there?” the radio operator asked; he held on to the dashboard with both hands as the jeep swayed and bumped over the seldom-graded road. A flying stone clanged against the muffler. “Huh?”

“About ten miles to where we’re going,” Johnson said.

“You think you know where this Burns character is out there?”

“I think so.”

The jeep nosed suddenly down into a wash, bounced over rocks and potholes, roared up the other side. The operator braced himself against the floorboards, while his stomach rose, shook and sank again. “Ah… did you—” The jeep jolted over a ridge of base rock that underlay the road. “—Did you go out there last night, Morey?”

“Yes.”

“What makes you so sure he’ll still be there this morning?”

“Nothing.” Johnson lifted one hand from the wheel and scratched the inside of his thigh.

The road climbed to the edge of the mesa and then straightened out on the long broad plain that rose gradually toward the base of the mountains. Here the road’s surface had acquired the character of a washboard, an unbroken succession of lateral corrugations which made the jeep shake and vibrate with such vigor that it seemed certain to fall in pieces before another mile was covered; however, Johnson merely stepped harder on the gas pedal and as the machine’s speed increased it achieved a kind of aerodynamic synchronization of velocity and traction with the ribbed road, reducing the bone-and-bolt-shattering vibrations to a steady, rhythmic, dependable rattle.

The radio operator took advantage of the comparative stability and lit himself a cigarette, though not without wasting several matches in the wind. His cheeks distended, his eyes half-closed, he puffed out smoke that shot past his ears like a fleeing soul. “Haven’t been up this early since last deer season,” he said cheerfully. He looked through the windshield at the long dark horizontal wall of the mountain, which seemed to recede before them as they approached. Las Montañas del Sangre de Cristo. “Been a long time since I watched the sun come up.” He looked for this phenomenon in the yellow sky above the mountains and within a minute, as if his words constituted a celestial command, the sun began to appear above the mountain rim, looking
dull, reddish and somewhat late. “Must be a lot of dust in the air,” the operator commented. But even so the light was strong enough to make him squint.

The jeep raced over the road after the retreating edge of the great shadow. Behind them the dust boiled up and hung in the air along the road like a long limp dirty wind-cone.

“Might be a nice day yet, though,” the operator said. “You—” The road fell steeply beneath them, the jeep hurtled down into a deep wash, crashed through a congregation of tumbleweeds, went zooming up the opposite bank spitting fumes, dust and gravel from behind. The road led on, climbing and winding among boulders, cactus and scattered junipers. Johnson shifted into second gear. The operator completed his statement: “You never can tell for sure just by how things happen to look in the morning.”

The sun rose higher through the eastern haze; it began to burn and glare, a hot shimmering disc of fire. The operator squinted and grimaced; Johnson pulled the forebrim of his Stetson farther down.

The road followed a fence; here and there were survey stakes, outlining the streets and lots of an imaginary suburb; a big billboard, alone and conspicuous in this wilderness of rock and sand, addressed them in flattering terms: OWN YOUR OWN MOUNTAIN RANCH ESTATE HOME—Barker Realty, Inc. Johnson grunted. The jeep clattered over an old wooden cattleguard, past a National Forest marker and up into the foothills, the dark wall of the mountain rearing above them, shutting off the sun again.

They came to a junction of roads, one going northeast toward the base of the main wall, the other south across the mesa and around the foothills. The sign pointing left and northeast said: Public Campgrounds, 2 miles; Ranger Station, 4 miles;—the other sign said: US 66, 12 miles; Duke City, 22 miles. Johnson turned to the right.

This was a wider, better road, paralleling the face of
the mountains; Johnson followed it for about three miles, then turned east at the bottom of a sandy wash, steered between a pair of junipers and up over rocks and sand toward the canyon known as Agua Dulce. The wheels thrashed and spun in the deep sand; Johnson engaged the front wheel drive, shifted into low range, and the jeep ground ahead, whining and shaking and still in second gear. What they drove over now was not a road but a pair of dim tracks, an ancient wagon trail with beds of sand sucking at the wheels, shale and slate to slash the tires, potholes and ledges and fangs of rock ready to break an axle or shear through an oilpan. Juniper boughs whipped across the windshield, cactus clawed at the wheels, dead brush exploded under the bumper and fenders, but Johnson, with a kind of resigned abandon that seemed to evade disaster only through a fatalistic indifference, drove the jeep—property of Bernal County—up, over, into and through every kind of obstacle that a difficult fate and spontaneous nature had ranged in his path.

The wash narrowed and deepened ahead, became an arroyo with vertical banks and overhanging bluffs. Johnson drove on, upward, around a turn—cotton-woods appeared, three giant sear-leafed trees with elephantine trunks, and beneath the trees a patch of grass and reeds and the ledge of limestone that embraced the spring. The sheriff stopped the jeep, shut off the engine and climbed out; the radio operator hauled himself out on the other side, stumbling and nearly falling on his face.

“Jesus, Morey…”

They heard a hissing of compressed steam, the chug and burble of water—spontaneous noises coming from under the hood of the jeep. “Jesus, Morey…” the operator mumbled again. He wiped- his forehead with the sleeve of his jacket.

Johnson, studying the ground under the trees, made no reply; he observed the droppings of a horse near the patch of grass, hoofprints in the damp sand, a sprawl
of sliding impressions on both banks of the arroyo. He stared up the arroyo, up the hill beyond it, up into the canyon behind it, up at the remote and tortured face of the mountain towering beyond and far above the canyon. The sensation of awe was perhaps not a part of Sheriff Johnson’s repertory of emotions; yet something in those heights of naked, perpendicular crags and cliffs made him halt in his tracks and suspend, at least for a few moments, his chain of guesses, facts, and inferences. He stared upward, unblinking, at that implacable wall.

“Hey, Morey!” The operator had scrambled up the bank and was now standing on its edge. “There’s an old house up here—this the old Brown homestead?” He received no answer. He glanced around, looked down, stooped, then knelt for a close scrutiny of something on the ground. “Morey,” he said eagerly, “somebody’s been walkin around up here! Jesus—the biggest shoe-prints you ever saw in your life. They don’t look human…”

Johnson did not answer; he scarcely heard. The expression on his face had changed, losing its air of general apprehension, and become tense, concentrated, fixedly attentive. Far up that canyon, twisting slowly up through the dawn air, he had seen or thought he had seen a wisp of smoke. But too frail, too distant—he closed his eyes for a few seconds, then opened them and looked again. He was not mistaken; he saw smoke. A blue thread of smoke, pale and shifting, hovering on the bounds of invisibility, and a long way off.

“How about these feet, Morey? You oughta come up here and have a look. My God, they’re gigantic…”

Johnson relaxed, scratching his groin; he spat the wad of gum out of his mouth. He turned and went back a few steps and sat down on the fender of the jeep. The radiator was still sizzling and bubbling, though with less agitation than before.

“Morey…?”

Johnson looked up at the operator. “That’s all right,” he said; “don’t worry about them. I made them tracks myself, last night. Come on down here, see if you can contact any of the boys.”

“Okay…” The operator stared westward, down and toward the north reach of the city. “There’s a car comin across the mesa now. The other guys, probably.”

Johnson looked in the same direction and saw a funnel of dust creeping toward the mountains, following the long hairline over the plain that marked the road. Ten miles and nearly a half hour away, he estimated. “Come on down,” he said to the operator.

The operator slid down the bank, emerged from a cloud of dust and sat down in the jeep. He flipped a switch, put on his earphones, and waited for the transmitter to warm up. “Who you want me to call?” he said. “Glynn?”

“Call Glynn,” Johnson said; he tilted back his head and looked up again, up at the rim of the mountain five thousand feet above. A fringe of snow sparkled there, blue and icy; a plume of cloud floating east made the mountain appear to move, like a great ship advancing across the sky. Falling… The sun would not clear that wall for another hour.

The operator flicked his switches, twiddled with his dials; the mouth of the loudspeaker began to hum and crackle with static—electrical, strange, with a certain mathematic symmetry, like a message in code from another world. The operator spoke into the microphone: “CS-3 calling CS-4,” he said, “this is CS-3 calling CS-4. Can you hear me, CS-4? Over.” He waited; the speaker crackled out its pattern of static, gave no intelligible answer. The operator repeated his call, reversed the switch, waited again. Johnson waited, sitting on the jeep’s fender, listening. No answer. “They don’t get us,” the operator said; “they must be on the other side of the mountains now. When they get up on the rim they’ll hear us.”

Johnson nodded. “Call them other fellas,” he said.

“See if they’re on the way here. Make sure they’ve got the Indian with them.”

“Okay, Morey.” The operator performed his routine and was answered at once: the others were coming across the mesa, the Indian was with them, they would be there in half an hour, over and out. The operator removed his earphones and picked at his nostrils with his little finger.

While Johnson gazed soberly and intently up into the canyon. The trace of smoke was so vague and tenuous that he still could not be quite certain that he really saw it. He muttered to himself, a man with a problem, and scratched in vague distraction at his armpits. Finally he eased his rump off the fender and stood up. “I’m going up the canyon,” he said to the operator; “you stay here with the radio. When the others get here tell one of them and the Indian to come on up the canyon too; the other man stays here. When you get Glynn on the radio tell him to keep a sharp lookout up there on the rim.”

“You think this guy Burns is up in there?”

“He might be,” Johnson said. He started off, stopped and turned again. “Say—call them boys again, tell them not to try to bring the car up the wash. Too rough, they won’t make it. Tell them to go south another mile, then follow the old fence line road. It’ll bring them out pretty close to here.”

“Okay, Morey.” The operator stared after Johnson’s retreating back. “You forgot the shotgun,” he shouted. Johnson flapped his hand downward, not looking back. The operator shrugged and went to work with his radio.

A long walk: the sun came over the rim of the mountain, a furious white heat, fanned by the blue winds; below, Johnson stopped and leaned against the rock, took off his hat and wiped his brow; he was sweating but his feet, still in the shade, were cold. While he rested he heard a mockingbird call, a descending glis
sando of sweet lilting semitones—faintly derisive. Johnson removed his leather jacket and draped it over his forearm. He looked down: already far below, he could see the jeep, a dull gray object of uncertain dimensions, and the scrubby hills, the road, the dust trail of an approaching car. He looked up and saw rock, nothing but rock, walls and slabs and grottoes of rock. He could see no trace of smoke, from where he stood, and could hear no sound but a whisper of wind, the periodic drip of unseen water, at long intervals the mockingbird’s cry.

He resumed his climb, scaling rock slides, struggling up the canyon slopes to outflank the more difficult dams of rock, trudging up the almost-level stretches of sand between each barrier. Now and then he could make out hoofprints, sometimes the mark of a shod horse, more often the sharp dainty imprints of deer.

The climb and the altitude stimulated an unexpected thirst for water; he began to wish that he had brought a canteen along.

The canyon narrowed and turned, shutting off the view to the west, reaching up toward the high ridges, the pines, the final wall of granite. Johnson climbed another smooth water-worn facing of rock, scored diagonally with a thin feldspar dike, and stopped on the brink of it, gazing ahead. He saw the willow thicket at the foot of the gray water-slide, the bear grass and greasewood, and on the right, a few yards up the slope and about a hundred yards from where he stood, a glistening, bulky object hanging from the limb of a tree. Nearby, from a tiny mound of sand and charcoal, a faint thread of smoke rose up toward the sky.