The Pastures of Beyond (17 page)

Suddenly Rose darted out of the crowd, rolled the big man over, and caused him to expel the meat. Al's face went from purple to red, and pretty soon he was able to sit up and talk. Rose and I helped him over to a bench near the fire. The near-death experience had scared him pretty badly, and he kept promising first Rose and then me that he was never going to take another drink.*

“Do you think he can do it?” Rose asked when we were finally alone. “Just quit cold turkey like that?”

“I don't know,” I replied. “You‘ll have to ask someone who drinks. You, for instance. What do you think?”

She regarded me for a moment without answering. There was no sign of embarrassment. If she remembered anything of the day I had found her on the sidewalk, she gave no indication. “It's going to be harder for Al, since all his pals will be pestering him to drink with them. But when I think of the fright I saw in his eyes, I think he can.”

“And how about you?” I asked. “Could you quit?”

She took me by the sleeve and led me away from the others, where no one could hear. “I already have,” she said. She turned and regarded me. “We've never been serious about each other, but we've been like brother and sister for a long time. Can I trust you with my secret?” she asked.

I nodded.

“I'm going to disappear, and I don't want you to worry. The folks at nursing school have given me another chance, dependent upon my drying out. The only way my people will let me alone is if they think I'm dead. If I refuse to party with them, they give me the silent treatment and make me feel like hell. Pretending to die is rough medicine, I suppose, but I've racked my brain for another way that will work.”

I had a little emergency money hidden in my wallet, my share of what a cowboy named Frank Mendes had paid me for mugging for him when he won the wild horse race at Salinas the year before. I offered it to her, but she shook her head.

“I'm fine,” she said, her face flushing with embarrassment, and moved quickly back into the crowd.

It was starting to snow, and most of the Indian families were packing it up for home. I offered two or three Indians I knew a job, but none of them were interested. “Try old Coyote,” one of them said. “He's getting out of jail tonight, an' maybe he'll want to work.”

The jail was across the Williamson River from the town, and it was empty. It was snowing so heavily that the roof of the community hall was in danger of collapsing, and the prisoners had all been let out on work detail to shovel off the roof before the big Saturday-night dance. It was the last day of Coyote's sentence for being disorderly, and he was just putting in time. When I saw him, he was doing more leaning on his shovel than moving snow.

Once the snow was off the roof, they shoveled a path around the edge of the building to the big woodpile at the back, then went indoors to build a fire in the big doublebarrel stove. Coyote remembered that he had a pint of whiskey hidden in the rafters from a previous dance, and by the time the crew was ready to quit and go back to jail, they were pretty happy. I made Coyote an offer, but he was in the mood to party and shook his head. I stuck around, hoping I might find someone else at the dance.

Coyote went back to jail with the other prisoners. He took a shower, grabbed a few belongings from his cell, plastered down his hair with Rose Hair Oil, drank the rest of the fragrant hair dressing, signed out with the town cop, and departed for the dance.

Hi Robbins had brought his rosewood baby grand piano down from Sprague River in the back of his pickup and got stuck in the snow before he could get it in the door, but there were plenty of sober folks about to manhandle the big piano into the hall.

By the time the dance had started, the barrel stove was cherry red, and the milling mix of dancers on the floor, about half loggers and the other half Indians, sweated in their flannel shirts and Levi's. Up in the bleachers, a host of ladies sat visiting or nursing their babies, bouncing with the beat of the piano and hoping someone would ask them to dance.

The door slammed frequently as men visited their pickups parked out in the snow, and now and then one could glimpse a flask sticking out of the rear pocket of a man's trousers.

I noticed one woman I'll call Cindy, who was the butt of jokes around the community. She never missed attending a dance, but there were rumors that no one had ever dared ask her out on the floor. It was even noised about town that once Cindy had gone for a swim in the Williamson River, and all the downstream fish had died clear to Klamath Lake.

That evening, having just come from jail, Coyote had run out of whiskey. He gathered some of his cronies and told them, “Hey, you guys. I gotta deal for you! You find me a pint of whiskey an' I'll dance a whole dance with Cindy over there.”

“Aw, Coyote,” someone laughed. “You wouldn't do that!”

“You get me a pint an' you'll see,” Coyote replied.

His friends disappeared out to their pickups, and pretty soon they came back with a brown paper bag smoothed around a pint with no cork that had evidently been made up of the remnants from several bottles.

Coyote went behind a screen and gurgled down the whiskey, wiped his lips, tossed the bottle in a corner, and went off to ask the woman to dance. He pushed the woman round and round the room, being careful not to get her too close to the stove.

Once the dance was over, Coyote got together with his friends behind the piano.

“Hey, you guys,” he said. “I got another proposition for you. You get me a fifth of Early Times, an' I'll take old Cindy out behind the hall an' make whoopee with her on the woodpile, an' I'll let you watch.”

“Aw, Coyote,” someone giggled. “You wouldn't dare!” “You get me the whiskey,” Coyote said. “An' remember, it better be Early Times, not that slop you brought last goround.”

It took a little longer this time, but pretty soon one of the men came back in the hall with the bottle, and Coyote was seen whispering in Cindy's ear.

He took her by the hand, led her out into the cold darkness, and as he went out the door, Coyote motioned to his friends to follow. Leading her around the building, he pushed her down on the woodpile, while Coyote's friends all gathered in the dark.

During the ordeal, Cindy happened to hear someone cough behind them, raised herself on one elbow, and said, “Oh, my, Coyote. We got audience!”

Once the game was over and the booze was gone, Coyote got tired of being teased by his friends, and by the next week he got to thinking that fifth of whiskey was the most expensive he'd ever drunk. Cindy considered him her new boyfriend and followed him about whenever he came to town. Coyote even asked the sheriff if he would put him back in jail.

He was sitting in a local bar one night when Cindy came waddling in out of the cold. She was holding her hands together in front of her, with thumbs together, fingers overlapping, peeking between her thumbs and giggling as though she had something live in there.

“What the hell you snickerin' at, woman?” Coyote snarled.

But Cindy just backed up against a stool, peered into her hands, and laughed and laughed.

“What the hell you got in your hands, woman?” Coyote glowered.

“I ain't goin' to tell you. I got somethin' live in there an' I ain't goin' to tell. You gotta guess!”

Coyote turned his back on her and sipped his drink. But when he turned around again, she was still there, peering into her clasped hands and humming a tune.

“I tell you what, Coyote, you guess what I got in my hands, an' I spend all night with you in bed with no clothes on.” “Hell, woman,” Coyote said. “I know what you got in

there. You got an elephant.”

“Oh, Coyote,” the woman chortled. “That's close enough!”

The dances at the hall were mostly a wintertime affair, for in the summer men were busy working, hunting, or fishing. Hi Robbins kept his rosewood baby grand piano in an old deserted house he owned near Sprague River. I saw the piano often enough when I was loading truckloads of hay I'd bought from Hi. The roof was just beginning to leak on the finish. I begged Hi to sell it to me, but he said it was a gift he'd given his daughter, who had just passed away, and he wasn't interested in letting it go. That fall, some out-of-state deer hunters discovered the piano and loaded it in their pickup. It was a sad loss to the community, for that baby grand had brought music to many a dance, and was a part of local history.

 

 

* True to his word, Al Shadley never took another drink.

Chapter Seventeen

M
Y UNCLE MADE THE MOST OF MY PRESENCE
at the ranch by spending his days in Klamath Falls. He owned an office building which held several businesses plus a classy café called the Pelican Café. He was proud of that establishment, claiming that he wanted Klamath Falls people to have access to a San Francisco–class restaurant. Now in his late seventies, he served occasionally as a customer greeter, sitting at his own table up front where he could visit with his cronies as they dropped by. It was also a convenient place for the café management to display and sell the local newspaper. There was a dish on the table into which customers could drop the price of the paper. My uncle could often be seen obliging customers by taking money from the dish and making change.

I was on my way down Main Street to have dinner at the café with my uncle when an elderly Indian stopped me, shaking his brown fist in my face. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” he shouted. “You ought to be taking good care of your uncle instead of making him work at his age. I just saw that poor old man selling newspapers in the front of that café!” My uncle didn't seem to appreciate the fact that I was putting in sixteen-hour days, seven days a week, trying to run a ranch that had formerly required five or six men. I was pretty desperate for help when an old character named Charley Tucker came to work for me. I might have been forewarned by the man at the employment office who phoned that he was sending Charley out. “Who knows? Maybe he'll turn out better than he looks,” the man said.

“Better take his temperature before you send him,” I said. “The last man you sent out here died before he got out of his car.”

I was getting pretty tired of milking the old Jersey cow Buck liked so well and would have settled for anything just short of a corpse to help. Charley arrived late that afternoon in a beat-up old Chevy. Without so much as a by-your-leave, he unloaded his big green footlocker at the bunkhouse and moved in.

Without doubt he was the homeliest man I ever saw. As a scarecrow, he could have kept the crows out of fifty acres of corn. Six foot two, and so skinny his clothes flapped in the wind, he had a beat-up nose as crooked as a rail fence, large sun-scarred ears in a state of perpetual peel, faded blue eyes that appeared to have gone twice through Tuesday's wash, and the shifty, stubborn look of someone trying to claim an adventure he has just read in a magazine as his very own.

The one good sign, beyond a greasy cowboy hat, was his boots, which showed a wear spot where a stirrup had rubbed on a bunion. If they were indeed his boots, Charley had spent some time in the saddle.

I soon discovered that Charley's foremost trait was being proud. When I suggested that he take over milking the cow, Charley pulled himself up straight and said, “Nope. I don't do that. Iffen I play with a set of tits, I want to hear giggles, not have someone kick over the damn bucket.”

Charley and I soon came to detest each other, but we were kept together by our mutual need. He needed a job that kept him out of the bars, and I needed someone to help around the place. I guess that, beyond his hard appearance, the thing that really ticked me off was his stories.

He threw out his stories like challenges. “Call me a liar if you want, but when I was elephant man for the circus —” Another daily statement that never failed to clench my jaw in anger was, “You may not believe this, but when I was a cavalry sergeant in China, during the Boxer Rebellion —” Frequently he would ruin my day by the statement, “Back during the Second World War, when I ran the taxi fleet in Anchorage, Alaska —”

What really used to send me into the abyss was when he would talk about his sweetheart, Marge, “the most beautiful girl in the world.” Marge was an obsession with Charley.

“One winter back during the Depression, my sweetheart, Marge, and I were hitchhiking across the Salt Lake Desert, heading west toward Wendover” dropped with a thud on conversations. I was convinced that Charley Tucker had never been loved by anyone, and that they even had to tie up a hind foot on his mother to let him suck. The woman named Marge had to be a fabrication out of a bout with booze.

Once, by sheer accident, I let him continue. “It was snowing hard and my little darling clung to me for warmth. I gave her my overcoat, determined to die for her if I had to.

Then, suddenly, out of the blizzard, a truck came by heading west. The trucker stopped, but he only had room for one, so I sent Marge with him and told her to wait for me in the next town. She blew me a kiss as she tossed my overcoat down. I came to a fork in the road just after that, and I knew there was no telling which way the truck had gone.”

Charley lasted about a week that first time, before he got angry with me for questioning a story and left for town. About once a year he would show up again, and I would hire him because it was hard to find anyone who would work that far from civilization, and the man was cheap by virtue of the fact that sooner or later he would quit in a huff and walk the thirty miles to town without bothering to collect his pay.

Sometimes the employment office in Klamath would send him out in response to my plea for even a slightly warm body to help feed the cattle; sometimes he would come dragging in on his own afoot with the story that his danged pickup had just quit him down the road. During the fifties he worked for me and quit some forty times, but always he would show up again, looking older and more dissolute with every arrival, and he would hardly set his feet under the dining room table than he would begin, “One time when I was elephant man for the circus —”