The Brave Cowboy (3 page)

The young man rode on, loafing in the saddle and singing to himself and the mare, but with his eyes still sighted on the northern fringe of the city where the houses turned to mud and dried out among cotton-woods and irrigation ditches on the edge of the all-surrounding desert.

He passed within a half mile of a sheep camp: black tarpaper shack, a cardboard housetrailer resting on two flat tires, a brush corral, a flatbed truck with dismantled engine, a watertank and its windmill with motionless vanes, a great glittering heap of tincans; no men or sheep visible. Creeping toward this establishment from the north along the vague scratch of a road was a cloud of dust, moving with what at that distance seemed like agonizing deliberation; at the point of the dustcloud was a minute black object, tremulous in the shimmering light, apparently in motion, disappearing now and then, reappearing, silent and busy and persevering: a truck or car bouncing along at forty miles an hour over a washboard road. The distance and the silence, the grotesque disproportion between the small dark agitated object and its enveloping continuum of space and silence, gave its activity an absurd, pathetic air.

Horse and rider came to another obstacle and a second halt—the black drop-off, the congealed rim of the lava flow, a jumbled mass of rock falling steeply to the
plain ninety feet below. The man turned the mare to the north and followed the edge of the cliff until he came to a place where descent was possible. He dismounted then and led the mare down slowly and cautiously, squeezing between the black boulders, switching back and forth across the face of the slope.

Above him, flowing over the dark burnt-out iron of the mesa, the sky turned deep liquid blue, vivid, burning, profound, the bottomless sea of the atmosphere. The young man stopped once and stared up at it, rubbing his jaw, and then went on. The mare followed him reluctantly, eyes rolling and knees trembling, before plunging and sliding down from one ledge to the next. The black rock was sharp-edged, hot, and hard as corundum; it seemed not merely alien but impervious to life. Yet on the southern face of almost every rock the lichens grew, yellow, rusty-brown, yellow-green, like patches of dirty paint daubed on the stone. Horse and man passed other signs and stigmata of life: the petroglyph of a wild turkey chiseled in the stone, a pair of tincans riddled with bullet holes of various caliber, brass cartridge shells, an empty sardine can dissolving in rust They were nearing civilization.

It took about ten minutes to make the descent. At the bottom, among the scattered slabs of lava, the man swung back in the saddle and went on over the last mile or so of sand and rabbitbrush to the river. He traversed the trails of jeeps and motorcycles, picked his way through a litter of tincans, broken bottles and windblown kleenex, and came presently to the high western bank of the river. Here he stopped again and rolled another cigarette.

In front of him the sand sloped down an easy fifty feet to the slow brown silt-fat water of the Rio Bravo. At this point the riverbed was about a hundred yards wide, with a fourth of that distance under flowing water and the rest consisting of mud, sand and quicksand drying out under the sun. Twenty-five yards wide, two or three feet deep, except where the heart of the current
had gouged out a little more, the greatest river in New Mexico rolled sluggishly south, rippling and gurgling past the willows, the cottonwoods, the wild cane and cattails, toward the desolation of Texas and the consummation of the open sea eight hundred miles away.

He puffed on his cigarette and spurred Whisky down the bank. “Hup,” he said, as she tried to resist, “come on, little
puta.
” She yielded, crouched down on her hind legs and half-slid, half-fell down and across the deep soft sand to the water, trailing dust and the transparent but powerful flak from a series of startled farts. She splashed for a moment in the swirling water, then jerked violently at the reins, plunging her head to drink. The rider let her have her way, while the water roiled around his boots. He touched the hot canvas cover of his canteen, lifted it from the saddlehorn and dipped it in the water and let it cool for a while.

Blowing smoke, he watched the blue fumes twist in the downdraft over the water, diffuse and vanish in the cooler air. From where he waited he could see nothing of the city; the heart of it was two or three miles to the south, beyond the trees, fields, ditches and suburbs. On the opposite bank was a solid growth of willows and beyond that a grove of cottonwoods with golden leaves; nothing more was visible. But he had left the zone of silence; though he could not see the city he could hear it; a continuous droning roar, the commingled vibrations of ten thousand automobiles, trucks, tractors, airplanes, locomotives, the hum and whine of fifty thousand radios, telephones, television receivers, the vast murmur of a hundred thousand human voices, the great massive muttering of friction and busyness and mechanical agitation. The rider puffed calmly on his cigarette, waiting for the mare to cool her belly.

When she was satisfied he tossed the butt of his smoke into the river and they started across. The current was stronger than it looked; near the center the mare lost her footing and floundered around, while the man hastily pulled his rifle from its sheath and held it
above the water. The mare started to swim back to the west bank and he swore at her, turned her around and kept her going in the right direction until she was wading again, splashing across a submerged sandbar and up onto an island of mud and twelve-foot willows.

They stopped here, while he poured the water out of his boots and out of the saddlebags and out of the soundbox of the guitar. The mare waited for him impatiently, swishing her soggy tail at the flies that swarmed through the bars of light and shade. He finished in a hurry, slapped at a mosquito settling down on his neck, and remounted and rode out of the willows.

Mud lay ahead of them, liquescent oozy mud with the consistency of warm gruel, an unplumbed deposit of fine slit that had once been part of the tilth and topsoil of Colorado and would eventually become the property of the Gulf of Mexico. There was no way around, unless they retreated to the west bank and went five miles south to the highway bridge. Aside from that there was nothing to do but go over or through the mud.

They went through it, the mare sinking in well over her fetlocks, lunging and staggering ahead, every lurching step accompanied by the suction of gasping slime and exploding pockets of air. The rider urged her on with his spurs, soothed her with soft words and caresses, forestalling panic, at the same time scrutinizing the creamy surface that lay ahead for a sign of quicksand.

But there was none; they reached the east bank at last, wet and splattered with mud. The man dismounted, kicked some of the mud from his boots and urinated there on the grass and mushrooms under the cool shelter of the cottonwoods. He remounted after a minute and rode on straight east through the trees until he came to an irrigation ditch. He stopped again here and washed some of the sweat and dust from his face and wet his hair and slicked it back with his hands. He could hear a meadowlark whistling in the alfalfa field beyond the ditch, and the steady rasping of cicada. The sun was high now, approaching noon and very hot.

Without remounting he led the mare on a narrow wooden bridge across the ditch and through a wire gate in the fence on the other side. After he had closed and fastened the gate he climbed into the saddle and rode up the quiet dusty lane under a nave of cottonwoods squatting fowlwise along the road, their leaves burning, dying slowly, golden and heavy with dust. On each side of the road were fences enclosing pasture and alfalfa, and corn already cut and shocked. The fencerows were almost hidden by jungles of wild sunflowers standing ten feet tall, the rusty brown heads drooping with the weight of their seed. He could smell tamarisk and plowed earth and the smoke of burning cedar. As he rode on a flock of crows took alarm and flapped out of a cottonwood ahead of him, squawking anxiously, and a fine haze of dust filtered down from the trembling leaves.

He passed a man in rubber boots and big straw hat, with a spade in his hands, contemplating the trickle of water that ran through the little ditch beside the road. The rider nodded his head gravely and the man with the spade returned his salute with a cautious handwave.

Dogs began to appear, and children, as he rode past old adobe houses with heavy corroded walls and secret windows. The skinny yapping dogs thronged around the mare, nipping at her heels, and she lashed out at them with her iron hooves and broke into a trot. The rider hauled back on the reins, slowed her to a fast walk. “Easy, girl, easy,” he said quietly.

The little dark children of the farmers trotted along beside him in the dust, staring, grinning, making remarks:

“Eh charro, dónde va? Dónde va, meestair cow-
boy?
”

Women came to the doorways in the adobe walls, leaned there casually and scratched at their armpits, watching him ride by with their soft brown animal eyes, curious, appraising, not unfriendly. The rider smiled at them, tipped his hat courteously to each one—dust sliding down from the brim onto his wrist—and some
quality or question in his grave smile made the women smile back, uneasily, shyly. There was a silent and tentative exchange of recognition, as though the man on horseback were not a stranger, or something more than a stranger, a figure out of a grandfather’s tale heard in childhood, a man thought to be utterly forgotten now returning and riding visibly and audibly down the soft brown dust of the street.

The women touched the medallions lying between their breasts and watched him go.

The children followed him beyond the village, staring at him, trotting beside the horse, asking questions:

“Dónde va, don charro? Eh? Dónde va?”

“Quien sabe?” he answered; “who knows? Who cares?”

The biggest boy, bold and dirty, with a dead cigarette stuck on his lower lip and two gray ropes of snot discharging from his nostrils, was not so deferential: “Eh huesudo, where you come from, huh? What’s your name? Barbudo?” Some of the little boys sniggered as they trotted along. “What’s your name, huesudo?” the biggest boy said again, grinning at the others. “Barbudo? Viego jodido y reculón? Eh?”

The rider looked down at him. “Watch your manners, mocoso. Quitense.”

“Malas cachas!”

The rider stopped his horse. “Come here,” he said quietly, detaching his rope from the saddle swell and shaking out the loop. The boy hung back, alarmed. “Venga!” the rider said; “pronto!” He gave the loop an experimental twirl above his head. To the other boys he said: “We’ll use that tree there,” and pointed to the nearest cottonwood.

The boy with the cigarette turned and ran back down the road toward the village, squealing for his father; after a moment of hesitation all the others turned and ran with him. The rider grinned after them, then pulled the mare about and jogged on toward the city.

He passed between rows of tall golden poplars
standing like flaming torches beside the road, past more fields of corn and alfalfa and dead sunflowers, over another irrigation ditch and into the suburban outskirts of the city. The road became a street, with a gravel surface and neat drainage ditches on each side, and the houses were neat and clean and made of cement or brick or cinder blocks with a stucco finish; each house was neatly fenced off from its neighbors. There seemed to be no children in this area, very few dogs, no chickens or geese or crows. The women remained indoors and stared out with pale bleak faces at the strange creature going by on horseback—the rider had occasional glimpses of these isolate housewives, disembodied faces transpiring in the casement windows like potted plants, forlorn, unwatered and unfertilized.

He came at last to the world of gas stations, supermarkets, drugstores, parking meters, and to the first paved street. Whisky stepped onto the hard asphalt, tossed her head and stepped back, fighting the reins.

Automobiles rolled by, the drivers gaping blankly at the horse and man.

The rider watched for an opening in the traffic, while the shopkeepers and motorists stared at him, then spurred the mare sharply forward. She snorted and shook her head, then lunged onto the pavement, her iron-shod hooves slipping and clattering on the hard surface. In the middle of the road she tried to turn and go back. Fat automobiles gleaming like toys came hissing up, horns blaring challenges, white faces staring from behind their glass. The mare spun completely around, a full circle, while the man prodded her with the spurs, flicked her with the loose slack of the reins, talked to her quietly and urgently. She tried to turn again, eyes wild and rolling, nostrils flared, slipped and almost fell, finally leaped forward again and off the road to safety.

While the cars roared past behind them the rider removed his hat, brushed back his black hair, wiped his brow with the back of his hand. He patted the
mare’s sweating neck, talking quietly into her straining ears. When she had regained a good measure of confidence from his reassurances and the feel of the rough tractional soil of the earth beneath her hooves, he let her go on, following the continuation of the dirt road that led east between hayfields and orchards.

A quarter mile further and they came to a highway, the important north-south highway linking Duke City to Santa Fe and the north—four broad lanes of smooth asphalt quivering under the continual battery of cars, trucks and tractor-trailers. The rider “stopped to survey this obstacle, the slippery pavement and the dense moving wall of steel and hard rubber. There was no possibility of outflanking this barricade; though he rode for years he would find no end to it; the track of asphalt and concrete was as continuous and endless as a circle or the walls of a cell. Therefore he sat and waited, hoping for a break in the flow of traffic big enough to sneak a four-legged animal through.

As he was waiting he noticed something strange spread out flat on the surface and near the center of the road: a piece of animal hide, the hairy yellow coat of a dog or coyote. Smeared out and around the hide was the dried blood and glandular juices of this creature which had attempted to jaywalk on Route 85. The big wheels and rubber tires rolled over the corpse with regular and barely perceptible thumps, the faint mechanical recognition of an existence that had not been meant for amalgamation with tar and gravel.