by Elmer Kelton
Danny was so intent on Manuel that he did not see Buddy Thompson step up beside him with a short piece of lumber. Buddy swung it, and Danny hit the ground like a sack of feed dropped from a pickup.
Buddy’s voice was even and without sign of excitement. “Danny, you wiggle one finger and I’ll bust you again.” He stepped carefully around the prostrate Danny Ortiz and gave Manuel a quick scrutiny. “He didn’t touch you with that frog-sticker, did he?”
Manuel shook his head. “He didn’t even get it out of his pocket.”
Buddy leaned over and felt of Danny’s pockets. “He ain’t even got one. I’d of swore he had it.”
Manuel looked down at the stunned Danny Ortiz, then up at Buddy. He felt frustrated, somehow cheated. “What did you hit him for?”
“Looked like he was goin’ for a knife.”
“I could of handled him.”
“Not if he’d cut you open.”
Manuel felt a resentment he did not quite understand. “But he didn’t even have a knife.”
“He might’ve had one; there was no way to know.” Buddy stared at him, puzzled. “Dammit, Meskin, I can’t figure you out. I was just tryin’ to take care of you.”
The resentment colored Manuel’s voice. “I don’t need somebody fightin’ my fights for me. I don’t need a gringo to take care of me; I can take care of myself.”
Buddy seemed inclined at first to continue the argument, but he shrugged in resignation. He still did not understand. “Aw hell. If I made you mad, I’m sorry. Anyway, if I hadn’t hit him, Kathy would’ve.”
Manuel glanced in surprise at the girl, who stood a little behind Buddy. “Kathy?”
Buddy said, “Where do you think I got that chunk of wood? She had it in her hands. I took it because I figured I could hit him harder than she could.” Buddy turned to Anita, sitting in the car, badly shaken. “You take care of yourself, Anita. If you ever have any trouble this hard-headed brother of yours can’t handle, you just whistle. I’ll be in San Angelo.”
Anita only nodded, her hands clasped in front of her chin in the aftermath of fear.
Manuel looked first at Danny, who still lay on the ground, rubbing his head. Then he looked at Kathy, not quite believing. “You were fixin’ to hit him?”
She had none of the brashness about her now that she had shown on the dancefloor. “Seemed like a good idea,” she replied seriously. “I didn’t want him to hurt you.”
Manuel muttered a few strong words under his breath and got into the car.
Hands sticky with bread dough, Anita Flores stood on tip-toe to look out the kitchen window toward the barn. In the reddening glow of late afternoon she could see José Rivera loading heavy feed sacks onto the back of the blue pickup for the next day’s feeding.
“The men must be in, Mama,” she said. “I can see José.”
Rosa Flores, a lock of black hair dangling down over her forehead, leaned forward to open the oven door of her butane stove and peek in at leftover roast kid she was warming for supper. She stepped back as the oven’s heat rushed into her face. “Do you see your father?”
“No, only José.”
“It seems to me you can always see José better than you can see anybody else. Hurry up with that bread.”
Anita finished kneading the dough and spread it out in a flat pan without cutting it into biscuit shape as the Anglos would. Nor would she give it much time to rise. Mexican bread was customarily baked flat. Rosa Flores turned up the oven heat for bread-baking temperature and took out the roast. It was warm now, and it would hold its heat on the back of the stove.
Rosa said, “Miz Mary told me she heard in town there was a little trouble at the dance. You didn’t say anything to me about it.”
“Trouble?” Anita kept her back turned. “What kind of trouble?” But she knew her mother must know much of it; it took something very serious to make Rosa Flores lapse back into Spanish with her children. Rosa was speaking Spanish now.
“Trouble between your brother and that Danny Ortiz. It is strange that neither one of you mentioned it to your father or me.”
“It was nothing. Manuel was going to bring me home, and Danny did not want him to. They argued a little, that was all. Manuel was right in the matter.”
“So right that he struck Danny with a piece of wood? It is said that Danny’s head is bandaged today.”
“It was Buddy Thompson who hit Danny with the wood.”
“What has Buddy Thompson to do with you? I do not like you dallying with those Anglo boys. You know what they want from the Spanish girls.”
“Buddy did not hit Danny for me; he hit him for Manuel.” She suspected Rosa knew much of the story anyway and was simply trying to drag it out of her. She told the rest of it, her face flushing.
Rosa said something bitter under her breath. “That Ortiz family ... like father, like son!” Her eyes were severe. “You could have gotten your brother hurt, even killed, do you know that? From now on you will have nothing to do with that Danny Ortiz—nothing. A boy like that can do whatever he wants to, so long as it is only to a Spanish girl. The law will pay no attention.”
She was silent a minute, thinking. Finally: “Your brother, he really stood up to that Danny, did he?”
Anita nodded. “Yes, Mama. If Buddy had not hit him with the wood, Manuel would have beaten him.”
Rosa looked out the window, watching for the men. She said, “He is a foolish boy.” But Anita saw that her mother was smiling, a little.
Candelario pushed through the back door with a bucket about a third full of eggs. Grunting, he lifted the bucket up onto the cabinet, about chin high to him. Rosa glanced into the bucket and said without patience, “Hijo, that is not all of the eggs.”
Quickly defensive, he replied, “That is all I could find.”
“Then you didn’t look.”
“Mama, some of those old hens, they hide from me.”
Rosa stared hard at him, then evidently figured the boy had done the best he could, for a boy. Probably had his mind on horses and cattle and ropes like Tom Flagg, instead of on something as lowly as chickens and eggs. The only use Candelario had for chickens was to practice roping at them—or Sundays, on the dinner table.
Anita suggested, “Mama, I think maybe a few of the hens have been going into the brush behind the barn. I’ve finished with the bread. I can take the bucket and go look.” Her inflection asked permission.
Rosa looked out the window again. José was almost finished loading the pickup. “Don’t you waste any time out there talking to that José. I can’t feed all these hungry mouths without more eggs.”
Bucket in her hand, Anita went first to the chicken house, for there was always a chance Candelario’s mind had wandered to God knows where and he had simply missed some of the eggs. Fractious hens cackled and fluttered around in a wild flapping of wings as Anita entered the house. She poked two or three of the calmer ones up from their nests. One cantankerous old biddy fluffed her brown feathers and pecked irritably at Anita’s hand. Anita found three eggs under her. She had probably kept Candelario so buffaloed that he hadn’t tried to look.
From there Anita started toward the barn. José was too busy to have seen her yet. She liked to watch him when she could do so without his knowing it. Something about him stirred an interest in her that the boys in town never had. She sensed that he might feel the same, but he had done nothing and said nothing to give himself away. Sometimes she sensed his eyes following her, but when she turned to look, his gaze would shift elsewhere. But she could sense a hunger there that excited and pleased her. She had been tempted a time or two to try a little harmless coquetry on him, the kind she had learned to use on the boys in school. It meant nothing and was usually pleasant for both boy and girl, unless the boy took it to mean more than it did, as in Danny’s case.
Something about José always stopped her. Perhaps it was the loneliness she saw in him.
José dropped a sack into place on the bed of the
pickup and glanced around, catching sight of Anita. She gave him a cautious smile. “Hello, José.”
He was a moment in answering. “Buenos dias.”
She paused, cautious because her mother might be watching through the window. Needlessly she asked, “What are you doing?”
“I am loading the feed so it will be ready in the morning.”
He always spoke humbly, Anita thought, as if he regarded her of higher station. It was much like the deference the Texas Mexican people affected toward the Anglos, often without meaning it. Put-on, make-believe to get along better in a world where someone else had power over you. But she sensed that with José it was real. He had been here several weeks now, sleeping in a shed, eating with the Flores family. She had seen him at least twice a day—three times on Saturdays and Sundays—and she would have thought he would be over his shyness by now. At first she had enjoyed this deference, for no one had ever shown it to her before. It had been a tonic to her ego as a woman. Now she was tired of it. She wished he would talk to her easily and without reserve, as any Spanish boy in school would have done.
She said, “I am looking for eggs. I think some of the hens have been hiding around the barn to lay, perhaps in the mesquite. Have you seen any?”
“Yes, sometimes. There is one old red hen ...”
For a moment she thought he would voluntarily climb down from the pickup and show her. He pointed. “Back behind the barn. I have seen this old hen go into the brush and I have thought, ‘Watch out, vieja, one day you will find a coon or a badger waiting for you.’ ”
Anita at first resisted a temptation to feign helplessness, then yielded to it. “I don’t know if I can find it myself.”
Immediately she felt foolish. José jumped down and brushed some of the feed dust from his clothes. His sleeves were rolled up, and Anita could see how his arms had thickened and muscled since he had been here. Mister Charlie had brought José some new clothes from town and had burned the old ones that had been so loose.
He said, “Follow me. I will show you.”
She had rather have walked beside him, but he moved at such a fast pace that she couldn’t keep up. She fell in behind him and contented herself with trying to walk in his tracks.
José pointed. “It was over there.” He started into the tangle of mesquite and stopped, holding out his hand. “Give me the bucket. You should not walk out into these thorns.”
“I do it all the time.”
“Your legs are too pretty to be scratched.” He said it without intending to. She could see sudden misgiving in his eyes. “I did not mean to speak that way. It is not my place.”
He took the bucket from her hand and moved into the brush. She watched, shame touching her for ever having taken him lightly. She could see him moving around in the mesquite, bending now and again, pushing aside the green limbs into which the spring sap had brought life. When he came back and held out the bucket, she saw he had found six eggs.
“Some,” he said, “have been there too long. Be careful when you break them.”
She didn’t care about the eggs. “José, are you afraid of me? Or is it that you do not like me?”
“I am not afraid of you. And I do like you. The trouble is ... pardon me ... I think I like you too much.”
“Then why ...”
“I am only a cowboy, and a Mexican.”
“I am a Mexican too.”
“But not the same. You are of this country. I am mojado . I have to run like a thief when I see dust on the road, when I see a stranger. It is not good for a man to run; it makes him less than a. man. It is bad enough that I am only a cowboy, and you are the daughter of the mayordomo .”
Mayordomo. To her the word conjured up the image of a manager on some great feudal cattle ranch, not the only hired hand of an outfit so small it could hardly afford to hire a second man unless he worked for wetback wages.
Anita spoke, “José...” and found herself run out of words.
Again he held out the bucket. This time she took it. She saw sadness in his dark eyes, then he bowed slightly and left her standing there by herself. His dignity remained intact, but hers was shattered as the eggs would be if she dropped them.
Chapter Eight
DRY WEATHER HAD PUT NO GRAY IN TOM FLAGG’S hair. He listened to the roar of the rodeo crowd as he rode Prairie Dog in slow circles around an open field south of the arena, warming him up. The grandstands were packed for the afternoon performance, the dusty outer lot jammed with cars parked in lines suggestive of regimentation and therefore repellent to Tom. Whenever he went to a rodeo, he usually located a back entrance and parked along a fence or wherever the hell it suited him. It rankled for someone to tell him how and where to park, to be just another one of the crowd, herded around like a sheep. Occasionally when he arrived early enough, before the police, it pleased him to stop squarely in the middle of the lot and leave the car sitting there to foul up their parking arrangements.
From the loudspeakers’ racketing echo he could tell the saddle-bronc riding had begun. Calf roping would be next. He reined the bay toward the car and trailer. Chunky Shorty Magee hunched there, smoking a cigarette and watching him quietly, listening to a Hank Williams song on the car radio. They traveled together—Tom, Shorty, and Chuck Dunn—sharing expenses.
Tom swung down from the saddle and reached into a big round aluminum can shaped like a hatbox. He brought out several coiled ropes and checked them one by one, like a baseball player trying the bats. Tom never put a spare rope on his saddle. Rules allowed a cowboy two loops provided he carried a second rope. Tom disdained the second loop. If he couldn’t catch his calf the first time, he waved it goodbye.
Behind the chutes a pair of young contestants with bull ropes slung over their shoulders practiced at being bow-legged, as a cowboy was popularly supposed to be. Tom gave them a disdainful glance, regarding them as green-horns out of some oilfield town or fugitives from a milking stool. Bronc riders tried out saddles, sitting in them on the ground and testing the length of the stirrups. An arena director yelled at them to hurry up, but they studiously ignored him. They were an inherently independent breed, these seasoned rodeo hands. They had twenty ways of telling a man to go to hell without speaking a word.
Tom listened to the rise and fall of the collective crowd voice as riders broke out of the chutes on twisting, snorting broncs. He did not have to hear the loudspeaker to know when a man rode well and when he bucked off the first jump or two out of the chute.
“Funny,” said Shorty, “the way people enjoy it more when a cowboy gets throwed sky-high than when he fits a good ride.”
Tom nodded. “Bloodthirsty, the whole damn bunch. People go to a baseball game, they like to watch a player show his skill. Go to a rodeo, all they want is to see somebody bust his butt.”
It wasn’t that Tom lost any sleep worrying about the bronc riders. Ropers and riders were two separate breeds, going their own way for the most part, each perhaps a little intolerant of the other, the riders considering roping too tame, the ropers considering the riders a shade crazy for letting those widow-makers stomp their brains out in the first place. A majority of the better bronc riders tended to be from the North and Northwest, the ropers from the Southwest. Thus they were divided by geography as well as by approach to their profession.
Two barefoot boys uneasily worked their way toward Tom. They stopped fifty feet away, watching him in some degree of awe. Their clothes were dirty, their hair long and uncombed. One wore what had once been a cowboy hat. The ragged brim sagged, as dead as an empty sack.
Shorty eyed them with amusement. “There’s an audience for you, Tom.”
Tom turned to the boys. “You buttons can’t see nothin’ from out here. You belong up in the grandstand.”
The older boy came a little closer. The smaller one hesitantly followed a couple of paces behind. “They won’t let us in. We got no money.”
Tom frowned. “You boys ever seen a rodeo?”
&nbs
p; The older one shook his head. “But we watch them rope out here sometimes on Sundays. We can see them through the fence.”
“There’s lots of things for a boy to see in a rodeo. Broncs, bulls, clowns, and stuff like that.”
“We see the clowns out here ridin’ around on their mules before they go into the arena.”
Tom said ruefully, “You’ve missed the good part. Some clowns ain’t very funny outside of the arena.” He looked at the smaller boy. “Bet you’re a pretty good rider.” The boy said no, he had never been up on a horse. Tom asked, “Want to set a spell on mine?” The boy stepped forward eagerly. Tom lifted him into the saddle. “Don’t you kick him, now. Prairie Dog’s a ropin’ horse. He takes off like a shot.”
While the boy sat proudly, Tom fixed his rigging. He ran the end of the lariat beneath the neck rope and fastened it to the horn. He coiled the rest of the rope and tied it with the horn-string to stay until he was ready to use it.
He looked around then and saw the woman. She sat in a black Cadillac parked nearby, and she was watching him. She made no effort to look away when Tom gave her his attention.
“Shorty,” he said, “don’t look now, just ease around in a minute or so. Woman sittin’ in that car yonder—you ever seen her before?”
Shorty didn’t wait; he turned and looked boldly. “Can’t say as I ever did. Wisht I had, though.”
“She’s been eyin’ me for some reason. Noticed her out here this mornin’.” He glanced at the oldest boy. “She live around here?”
The boy declared, “No, sir. I’d of sure remembered her.”
Tom frowned to keep from grinning. “Button, you’re too young to pay attention to women like that.”
“I mean the car ... I’d remember if I’d seen it before. Anyway, it’s an out-of-town license plate.”
Shorty said, “How come no woman like that ever watches me?”
