The Brave Cowboy (21 page)

“Jack—”

“Yeah?” Again he prepared to mount, his foot in the stirrup, his back toward her.

“Jack…” She stepped forward and touched his shoulder and he faced her again, waiting. “Kiss me,” she said.

“I want to,” he said. But he made no move. “I want to.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“I don’t know. Nothin, I guess.” He reached out then and embraced her and kissed her gently and quickly on the lips. “What I’m afraid of,” he said slowly, “is me. That’s all.”

“We’re both afraid of the same thing, then,” Jerry said.

“Maybe everybody is.”

Jerry smiled at him while her vision dimmed. “You’d better go,” she managed to say.

“What’s so funny?” He returned her smile with a stiff, uncertain grin.

“You’d better go, Jack.”

“Yes,” he said. “I know.” He released her and turned and pulled himself up, a little wearily, into the saddle. He adjusted the guitar and bandoleer on his back, tugged at the forebrim of his hat.

“Goodby, Jack.”

“Goodby, kid,” he said. “Say goodby to Seth for me.” He touched Whisky with the reins and she turned, facing the mountains. “Take care of your old man,” he said. “When I come back I wanta see you
both
out here.” The mare pranced and whinnied and shook her head, impatient, indignant, eager for flight.

“Yes,” Jerry said, “I hope so. God, I hope so.”

“I’ll see you in a year or so. Maybe sooner.”

“Yes,” she said; she shivered in the keen air, blinking the mist out of her eyes. “Be careful, Jack.”

“Adios,” he said, and flicked the mare with the
leather, and at once she began to trot, then canter, away from the house and corral and toward the mountains. Burns reined in a little and slowed her to a brisk trot. Jerry, watching him turn in the saddle and wave back at her. Weakly she pulled one hand out of a jacket pocket and held it up for him to see, but he had already turned and straightened and was facing the east.

She stood in the bleak gray light, huddled and cold in the jacket and her pajamas, and watched Jack Burns ride away: she saw him cross the embankment by the big irrigation ditch and disappear for several minutes and heard or thought she heard the rattling dance of Whisky’s iron shoes across the wooden bridge; she saw horse and rider reappear on the higher ground beyond the ditch, figures already greatly diminished by the perspective of distance; she saw them slowly mount the rise to the edge of the mesa and there, where she knew there was a fence although now it could not be seen—the light obscure and shifting—she saw the cowboy dismount and work at something in front of the horse, then remount and ride on; she saw them, the man and his horse, fade, melt, diminish by subtle gradations of light and dimension into that vast open expanse of stone and sand and space that swept on, mile after mile after mile, toward the dark mountains.

The qualities of light and space deceived her, baffled her—she felt that the figure of man and horse, now one, might recede from her, shrink in magnitude forever and yet not completely and finally disappear—if only she had the power to prevent it. And in that momentary hallucination she felt that it was suddenly terribly important that she stop them—as if the limits of her vision were an abstract, impossible barrier dividing reality from nothingness.

The hallucination passed. She peered into the gloom of the dawn and saw nothing but shadows. The cowboy was gone.

From a cottonwood tree near the ditch came the whirring call of a grouse hen, the cawing of approach
ing crows. Jerry shivered, urged her cold aching limbs into motion and returned to the kitchen. She had water to carry, she remembered, a breakfast to make ready for Seth, lunches to pack, dishes to wash, a job in the city at nine o’clock—no end of things to do.

H
INTON
STOPPED
AT
A
DIESEL
STATION
ON
THE
western outskirts of the city to refuel He gave his credit card to the station operator and then walked to the next-door diner—an aluminum-sheeted neon-lighted potted-pine establishment specializing in truckdrivers’ disorders—for an attempt at breakfast.

Six-thirty in the morning: he closed his eyes against the swirling dust that blew along the highway, stinging his face with particles of sand. He felt bad, anyway: his stomach was raw, empty, completely wrung-out, the muscles stiff and sore from last night’s struggle with nausea; his throat was burning and strained; his mouth—he would have preferred not to think of that at all—was dry, his tongue shriveled, coated with unfamiliar chemicals. He tried not to think of it; he went inside and sat down in a booth by the windows.

The wind-driven sand scratched at the glass as Hinton stared gloomily out, watching the trucks roll by on the road: a train of trucks, westbound, roaring past in the dusty-yellow light of early morning, a racing caravan that seemed to have no end. He speculated idly on the immense expenditure of human labor represented by that flight of tin and cardboard and plastic and men, and groaned inwardly; dejection overcame him—he was sick of the business, sick of his sickness. He opened the menu and tried to imagine a breakfast honest and homely enough for his tired wracked cowering stomach.

“Yes, sir,” the waitress said, bending toward him
slightly in her white morning-fresh uniform, a tender and all-forgiving smile (it seemed to him) on her face, a thoughtful regard in her young eyes—the nurse and her first patient.

“Hello,” he said. For the first time since leaving St. Louis, two days before he felt a reawakening of his essential humanity, an interest—in the case of this girl not merely sexual—in another human being. He found himself looking at a face that did not instantly depress him, that did not turn his own into a sour, sullen reflection of his jangled entrails.

“What would you like?” the girl said. Her hair was glossy and long, the color of mellow applejack, and in her eyes was a dance and glister of light that he had not seen for—how long?—six years? “Would you like some fruit juice?” she said; her teeth were so fine as to be almost translucent. “We have fresh orange juice, sir; I made it myself just a few minutes ago.”

“I used to know a girl like you,” Hinton said; “— back in Virginia.”

“My folks come from Indiana, sir.”

“You don’t have to call me ‘sir’.”

“You don’t look like a sir,” she said, smiling.

“I’m not.” He paused, and looked down at the table-top: there lay his two hands—wide, short-fingered, a bit soft in the palms, fingernails fairly clean. “I’ll have the orange juice,” he said.

“Yes sir.” She recorded this request on her little green pad—a novice, he thought. New: she won’t always be as green and beautiful as she is now—not for long. “What else, sir?” she said.

He sighed and glanced dutifully over the menu. A girl like this, he was thinking, sweet as a wild haw— she must have grown up in the open. Won’t last long in this hothouse. He stared at the menu. “I’ll have sausage and eggs,” he said. But instantly his stomach recoiled before the provocative image of a fried egg. “Change that,” he said. The girl scribbled, crossed out,
erased. “Make it sausage and wheatcakes. Do you have real maple syrup here?” he said.”

“Yes sir.” She hesitated. “I think we do.”

“The kind that comes out of maple trees?”

“I think so, sir.” She looked genuinely concerned, biting her lip and glancing toward the kitchen. “I’ll make sure,” she said, starting off.

“Wait a minute,” he said. She stopped. “Don’t worry about it; just bring me whatever you have. I trust you.”

“Yes sir.” She smiled again, blushing faintly. He admired, from his remote isolation, the utility and structural delicacy of her ears: receptacle for lies. “Are you all right, sir?” she said, looking closely at him.

“What?” His left eyelid was twitching again; he rubbed it, and the other eye too. “I’m all right,” he said. “I feel fine.”

“Yes sir.” She stood there for a moment, watching him; he looked at her and he thought he knew what she was thinking: What a tired, sad, ugly old man he is. But I’m only thirty-four, he wanted to say. He wanted to say: I have bad dreams and there’s something wrong with my insides but I come from a good mountain family. But of course he said nothing, and after this moment of questioning and wondering the girl turned away from him and went to order his breakfast.

Afterwards, while she watched him from behind the counter, he tried to eat. He drank the orange juice without difficulty and ate most of the sausage—it was not good but was good enough, despite the haste and lack of pride involved in the making of it—and he even started on the wheatcakes. He wanted very much to eat everything before him, knowing that the girl was there not far away and watching him with some concern. She had had no hand in the cooking, being merely a waitress; he knew that well enough but still felt an urgent if obscure obligation to eat all that she had borne to him, as if it were a moral responsibility.

She brought him coffee and he drank that easily, pouring the fiercely hot brew down his seamed and
hardened gullet without even feeling it. He nibbled some more at the wheatcakes and forced down almost the last of the sausage, and then surrendered and got ready to leave. He looked at the bill she had left on the table: his breakfast came to a dollar ten, including tax. He owed the girl, according to his code and calculation, an eleven-cent tip. He put a dime on the table, considered for a minute or so and then pulled his wallet out of his hip pocket and opened it. Inside was money, a fat wad of the stuff, green and gray and crackling and greasy, with its definite, peculiar odor. He leafed through this material, seeing a few ones, several fives, many tens. He removed a one-dollar bill and slipped it under his plate, then paused again, staring at the money. He put the one back in his wallet and took out a five and placed it under the dish, carefully, and then he got up and went quickly to the cash register on the counter. The cook was there waiting; Hinton looked again for girl and saw her at a booth, feet apart and firm on the floor, the upper half of her body slightly inclined toward the bald pate and crusty face of another customer. Hinton paid, picked up his change and went out without looking back.

T
HE
BIG
ROOM
CONTAINED
THE
FOLLOWING
OBJECTS
: (1) On the wall, a photographic portrait of Harry S Truman, framed in plastic and shielded from the mortalizing dust by a veneer of glass; a good likeness, healthily tinted—-the blue Missouri eyes stared seriously and hopefully into the future, the pink cheeks attested to three squares a day, the pink neck swelled sedately from a clean white collar. (2) Filing cabinets, chairs, telephones, an electric fan, coat hangers and hatracks. (3) A padlocked weapons rack supporting two sawed-off shotguns, four Browning automatic rifles, four Thompson submachineguns, and two teargas guns. (4) A shortwave radio receiver-transmitter complete with operator. (5) A big ugly desk with papers, boxes, calendars, two telephones, an ivory donkey, blotter, ink, pens, rocks, coffeestains, fingerprints and boot scratches. (6) Behind the desk a big plain man, the passive sedentary relaxed two-hundred-pound corpus of Morlin Johnson, duly elected sheriff of Bernal County, New Mexico. Sheriff Johnson held an open package of chewing gum in his right hand.

The man at the radio desk half-turned in his chair, pushed his earphones above his ears—while red and amber signal lights flickered irritably on the panel—and spoke to Sheriff Johnson: “Gutierrez says they broke out sometime between three and five-thirty this morning.”

Johnson unwrapped a stick of gum. “When?”

“Between three and five-thirty.”

“Why?”

“Why?” The radio operator shrugged his shoulders. “How the hell should I know?” Then he grinned self-consciously. “Oh balls, Morey,” he said.

Johnson placed the stick of gum between his teeth and chewed it mechanically into his mouth, like a stock ticker champing up blank tape.

His ruminations were prolonged, sober, comfortable. “Musta been cold that early in the morning,” he said at last. He unwrapped a second stick of gum and inserted it into his chewing machine. “You took care of the routine, I guess?”

“Yeah,” the operator said. “Gutierrez did as soon as he discovered the prisoners missing.”

“Gutierrez,” Johnson said; “Gutierrez…” His mouth tightened after he rolled out the name. “That muscle-bound half-wit,” he muttered; he spoke to the operator again, not looking at him. “He notified the city police?”

“Yes.”

“The state police and the military police and the reservation police and all the rest?”

“Sure.”

“Okay…” Johnson masticated his wad of gum. He shoved a hand down inside the front of his sagging trousers and scratched his pubic hair. “Two Navajos and a white man, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“Are they all three going together?”

“They don’t know if they are or not.”

“Did Gutierrez question the other men in the cell?”

“Sure; they didn’t know nothin.”

“Gutierrez grilled them, huh?”

“Yeah.”

Johnson growled and frowned heavily at the ivory figurine of a donkey set on his desk. The donkey was flanked on one side by a brace of telephones, on the other by an Esquire-girl calendar. He rolled the gum
in his mouth and scratched his armpits. “Anybody go out for coffee yet?”

“Glynn and Herrera went.”

“Both of em, huh? One man to carry, one man to guard, I suppose?”

The radio operator grinned weakly. “Well I don’t know. I guess so. I don’t know.”

“How am I gonna keep this job when you boys carry on like that, always screwin off in the poolroom or in the cafe?”

“Well hell, Morey,” the operator said, “don’t we all vote for you? Hasn’t my grandmother voted for you every two years since we buried her?”

“All right,” Johnson said, “let me think. I’m trying to concentrate.” He unwrapped a third stick of gum and put it in his red mouth and then scratched the back of his neck, his scalp; he looked at the scurf under his fingernails. “What’s the story on the escaped prisoners?”