by J P S Brown
Jim Kane
J P S Brown
1970
For my Mother,
Mildred Rex Sorrels Brown
Me imperturbe, standing at ease in Nature,
Master of all or mistress of all, aplomb in the midst of
irrational things,
lmbued as they, passive, receptive, silent as they,
Finding my occupation, poverty, notoriety, foibles, crimes,
less important than I thought.
Me toward the Mexican sea, or in the Mannahatta or the
Tennessee, or far north or inland,
A rioir man, or a man of the woods or of any farm—ly'e of
these
States or of the coast, or the lakes or Kanada,
Me wherever my life is lived, O to be sewbalanced for
contingencies,
To confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents,
rebuffs, as the trees and animals do.
--Leaves of Grass
WALT WHITMAN
Contents
BOOK I
1 The Flight
2 Bed and Saddle
3 The Colts
4 The Stampede
5 Frontera
6 The Banker
7 Gunga Din
8 Afoot
9 The Sale
10 The Commission
11 Rio Alamos
12 A New Country
13 The Patriarch
14 A Man From the Monte
15 The Weaning
16 Brahma
BOOK II
17 The Charreada
18 The Dance
19 The Sierra Madre
20 Merry Gentlemen Resting
21 The Husbandman
22 The Circle
23 The Brown-and-White Spotted Aristocratic Corriente
BOOK III
24 Onza
25 The Eagle
26 Chinipas
27 Creel
28 Rajén
29 The Tailing
30 The Trago
31 Bullpen
324 The Drive
33 The Horse Killers
34 Cuiteco
35 The Cuidadores
36 Quarantine
37 Settlement
38 Big Country
BOOK ONE
1
The Flight
An arriero is a driver of animals. A drover. If a man herds a bunch of cattle or a remuda of horses or drives a packtrain of mules or one burro loaded with Firewood, he is an arriero, Arrieros usually are horseback. A person who drives a car is not called an arriero but a good saying has been passed down from the time when there were no cars. With this phrase a man might answer politely, with meaning, a lady who thanks him for fixing her flat tire: "Arrieros somos. En el camino andamos. Algun dia nos encontramos." "We are drovers. We travel the road. Someday we are bound to meet."
Guadalajara, Jalisco, is one thousand miles from Frontera, Sonora, on the U.S. border. Jim Kane hoped that he wasn't going to be rained on every mile of the way. He loved rain the way any man who had been raised on a droughty ranch in Arizona loved rain. But Jim Kane was on this road to Frontera in the rainy season of September with five truckloads, fifty head, of Mexican Appaloosa horses he had bought in Guadalajara. The trucks had been under continuous cloudburst for ten hours from Guadalajara to Acaponeta and now, at 3 A. M., were stalled in Acaponeta because none of the town's gas stations were open.
Kane climbed into the back of a truck and tried once again to help the old mare to her feet. She was down in six inches of mud, manure, urine, and rainwater with her head wedged in a forward comer. She was on her side with her legs doubled against the rack of the truck. Kane pushed against the mass of horseflesh around her to make room so he could drag the old mare out of the comer by the tail. The black rain redoubled and the whole storm seemed to Kane to be funneled into the truck onto his bare head and bare back. The horses hunched their backs against the storm and bowed their heads under each other's bellies and would not budge for Kane. He gave up and climbed over the rack and jumped to the ground. He washed manure and mud off himself from a deep puddle of rainwater on the ground by the truck. He opened the door of the cab and got his dry shirt and leather jacket from under the head of the sleeping driver. He got his hat from the top of the seat and walked over to the shelter of the gas station the trucks were parked by. He sopped the water off himself with a handkerchief already wet from being in his hip pocket. He put on his shirt, jacket, and hat and lit a cigarette.
A goddam gully-washer, he thought. Just what we need. A toad-chokin', horse-drownin', frog-stranglin', snake-floatin' gully-washer. Cowboys in the dry country would be happy to call a rain like this names like that. We went years on the ranch where I grew up when it didn't seem to rain as much as it has rained on me in the last hour. I only weighed a hundred pounds when I was fifteen years old I was so dried out. When we finally starved out completely my dad traded one hundred and eighty square miles of drought country for a thirty-room auto court in the cool pines near streams and lakes of cold water so he could live out the rest of his life in a place where he could have a sweet drink of water any time he wanted one. Now I'm thirty years old, weigh two hundred pounds, and a gully-washer is putting me out of business.
One of the drivers of the five stock trucks, a tall, energetic young man with mussed hair and eyes that were trying to come awake too soon, said "Buenos días" to start his day and came over and began pacing around the station. He stopped by the window of the office and cursed.
"Someone is in there," he told Kane. He pounded loudly on the door. "He's alive! Wake up!" he shouted, and pounded again.
The master of the nightwatch of the Acaponeta station came to the door buttoning his pants.
"What do you want?" he asked.
"Gasoline, what else?" the tall driver said.
"We are closed, " the master of the station said.
"Well, open up," the tall driver said.
"How much gasoline do you want?"
"The five tanks of the trucks. You sell gasoline, don't you?"
The master of the station finished displaying his act of buttoning his pants before the customers he might or might not serve and turned back into the office and switched on the lights of the station. Kane went to the truck he rode in and roused his driver, a short, solemn little man. The driver drove the truck up beside the pumps. The stationmaster came out stuffing a huge .45 automatic pistol into his belt. He shuffled around the truck to the pumps, stopped, looked at the pumps, and turned to Kane.
"Do you want that of a peso or that of eighty centavos?" he asked.
"Peso gas," Jim Kane said.
The attendant turned back, shifted the pistol to a more comfortable position between the belt and the large belly,cranked the pump, and filled the truck's tank with gas. He kept squirting the nozzle after the tank was full and gas belched onto the pavement. He squirted the nozzle again for good measure. This last squirt also ran out onto the pavement. Now he was sure the tank was full. He screwed the cap back on the tank and hung the hose on the pump.
Kane was in the dry cab of the truck and the caravan was headed up the road again when he felt that he might, possibly, be a fool. He thought, no one rides horses anymore and here I am with all my stake invested on this road in fifty head of scraggy, stunted studs, mares, and colts that will look so bad when I get them to the U.S. that no one but me will want them. I am their husband and I'd better be in love with them because I'm probably going to be stuck with them for quite a while until someone else can see how a buck can be made on them. By that time I will be broke again. I will be a day late and a dollar short again.
This had been the suspicion eating at him
since he had turned loose the money for the old mare and now it took a big bite out of him. He did not state this suspicion to himself often but it was an empty-pockets feeling he got when he thought of his future with the horses. Not the feeling of being broke a man had when he had a job and was earning only a little money but the feeling of physical loss a man kept after he had lost a full pocket of money. Kane had brought $5,000 with him to Mexico to buy these horses. Now he had the horses and only $80 in his pocket and the freight paid to Frontera. His dad had once told him because he loved him, "Stay out of the horse business, Jim Kane."
No, Jim Kane said to himself. I also heard my dad swear once that he would never trade another horse, buy another Brahma steer, run another horse race, or marry again and within six months of that oath he had committed all four of those mistakes again. I am going to find a big demand for fifty-inch-tall Appaloosa horses instantly on arriving with them on the border. I am going to sell for a profit so big I will be able to come back down this road again and buy twice as many of these colorful little horses. These little horses will make me independent in my pursuit of happiness and give me extra money for singing and dancing along the way. After all, who else has ever done this? I am the first. No one in the horse business knows that central Mexico is full of little Appaloosas. The ponies are just the right size for twelve- to sixteen-year-old kids. They have the greatest variety of color of any Appaloosas I have ever seen. How about that blue and white polka-dotted stud riding in the third truck up there ahead of us? They are not dwarfy like the Shetland or the Welch ponies. They have full manes and tails, not ratty ones like the U.S. Appaloosas. Just let's look at it this way, have faith in the way these little horses will charm the Western riders club members and their twelve- to sixteen-year-old kids.
Yes, and faith is what Don Quixote had when he was battling giants as he tilted with the windmill. And he promised Sancho Panza that after the battle he would be rich enough so that he would be able to give Sancho a dukedom or at least an earldom.
No. Keep faith. You have to now. You married these horses so now stay with them. The trouble with you is you are tired.
The rain was misty now in the daylight under the solid clouds as the trucks went on up the road. A slender man in his loose white garments and stiff-brimmed straw hat stepped out of the broad-leafed jungle by the road to walk out of the mud onto the pavement. He carried a machete and he walked in his tire-soled huaraches looking straight ahead and not looking at the trucks as they streamed by him spraying a coarse mist with their tires. He was going to work early. Kane envied the man because he was walking freely and unpreoccupied in a simpler pursuit of his happiness than Kane. After the trucks had passed the man, Kane thought, maybe soon I'll have myself a little place down here to raise these little horses and I'll have a man like that to help me.
In the morning the man will go one way walking in that free, graceful placing of his huaraches and I'll go another way horseback. I'll look over my mares and see if that final sorrel mare has foaled yet. I'll fix some fence and make a circle looking for jaguar tracks to see if any have been around the mares in the night. In the evening I'll ride back to the house through a forest of nopal so thick I won't be able to see the house until I am in the clearing. At the corral I'll take a dusty foot out of the stirrup and get down off my horse and call my son, when and if I have one, to me to help me unsaddle. He'll tell me in fine Spanish how he and the dog captured an iguana but the dog had fatally wounded the iguana and it had only just finished dying. The man who helps me will return at about that time and discuss the capture of the iguana with me and the boy and give a quiet observation about the habits of iguana which I will remember the rest of my life. The boy will remember it longer because he will have a longer life and I will have learned about the iguana much later in life than he did.
The sun was out on the road and an iguana, an ancestor of the animal Jim Kane's boy would one day capture, speared his way across the road in front of the truck Kane was riding in. He was a long, emerald streak. His long tail, held high at the base, seemed to lift him and rudder him as he flew an inch above the dark, water-shiny pavement. Many other iguanas, not as wise or as fast as Kane's boy's iguana's ancestor, had been caught by the tires of machines on the road and were no longer jewel-like living spears but were now muddy grease spots.
The man, the boy, and I will go to the house and sit down at a table under the porch. My wife, when and if I ever have one, will bring us hot coffee while we talk over what became of the day. The boy will drink one-third coffee and two-thirds hot milk and plenty of sugar. The man will have half and half and plenty of sugar. I will have mine black with no sugar and I won't have to tell my wife how to brew it as I will love just the way she does it. I will love her more each time she does it because she loves to do it so much.
Maybe she will have a dogied horse colt she is raising on a bottle because a jaguar got his mother. This colt might be living by the kitchen door, still weak and too timid to fight the many flies around his eyes, while the man and I discuss how we are going to get the tigre that killed the colt's mother. The boy and his mother, together, will put salve on the colt's eyes.
We will not use poison on the tigre, we say, we want more vengeance than that. We'll let the blood out of him and have him killed close to us so we can get his hide to hang on the wall. That is the only honorable way to kill a tigre on his way to putting us out of business. A tigre like that, a killer of the gentle, an acebado, would be the only kind of tigre I would ever kill. The man will excuse himself after this discussion and say he wants to go home a different way to cut for the jaguar's tracks before dark. Inside, while I'm lighting the lamps and getting ready for supper, I'll consider that a man like the one who is helping me is surely a fine man.
Jim Kane slept for more than a hundred miles and woke up to another heavy rain. The road was deeper under water and the trucks had slowed. They came to Culiacan in the night. The city was dark, probably from a power failure caused by the storm. At the edge of town, the authorities directed the trucks across the river through the water because they were not confident of the strength of the bridge. In the dark town in the black rain the people waded in a foot of water on the sidewalks in the lights of the trucks going by. When the trucks stopped for gas, Kane undressed in the cab and climbed into the back of the truck in his shorts and boots to see if he could help the old mare back to her feet. She was still down in the corner in the muck. The other mares around her had not done her much damage by stepping on her since horses naturally hate stepping on any living thing. But her own efforts had hurt her. She had banged her head so much against the comer of the rack in her efforts to get up that both her eyes were grotesquely swollen. Kane worked with her while the trucks were serviced and the drivers ate their supper, but he failed to help her. Anyone would say she would be no great loss. She was an old canela, cinnamon-colored, mare. She was parrot-mouthed and dead of hair but she had a fine filly colt. The filly was a wide-chested, straight-legged colt and she had a clean, white blanket over her rear with purple spots on the blanket. The mama had come along only because the filly was too young to wean.
Kane had six mares like the old canela. All were making this trip because they had that one, saving grace; they had given birth to fine offspring that needed them. Kane was sure the old mares wouldn't bring four bits when their colts were weaned. Anyone could tell him that. But Kane liked them. They would be called a bad investment but he wasn't sorry to be husbanding them. They looked like Don Quixote's Rocinante. They were peak-hipped, fork-legged, cow-hocked, calf-kneed, slack-lipped, and sparse of hair. Yes, but look how far and with how willing a heart Rocinante carried Don Quixote. It wasn't Rocinante's concern that Don Quixote was a madman. If Rocinante had been well fed and nicely groomed for it he might very well have served Richard the Lionhearted. He certainly had the heart for it. So how does jousting with grown men require any finer or more noble an effort than jousting with windmills to a horse like Ro
cinante? The old cinnamon mare was still trying her best to get up onto her own feet and make a living after thirty hours of being down in the muck. Kane still felt she might get up if he had some help and a dry, sunny day.
"Pheeootah!" the little driver said when he got back to the truck. "How you stink, man!" He found a clean cloth_and wiped the manure and water off the seat covers in the cab.
"These are my new seat covers, man," he said, folding the cloth carefully and putting it back in its place under the seat.
"They clean easily, don't they?" Kane said, laughing at him. The driver didn't answer but started the motor and let the truck idle and stared at his lights through the rain while the other trucks started up and pulled away from the station. By noon the next day they were in Guaymas. The sun was out and the temperature was close to one hundred and ten degrees with not a breath of air moving when the trucks stopped in Guaymas for gas.
Kane got his driver and the tall driver to help him with the old mare. He climbed into the slop with all his clothes on because it was Sunday and the station was crowded with people,. He tied a rope around the old mare's girth and threw it over a beam that ran across the center of the truck above the rack. He pulled on the rope and the two men on the ground held the slack over the beam. When he and the two men had lifted the mare three feet off the deck, Kane got under her with his back against her belly and lifted her to her feet. He stepped out from under her. The old mare swayed on her own feet. Her eyes were swollen as big as softballs. The hair on her side and hips had been scalded off by the hot, briny muck. She looked like an old; abused praying mantis but she was standing again. She had been down in that corner for forty hours. She breathed a deep sigh.
Kane climbed down off the rack, proud of the old mare. He didn't care that he was covered with the hot slime she had been lying in.
"You are not riding in my truck on my new seat covers as nauseating as you are now," the little driver said to Jim Kane. Kane smiled at him, not believing him, and reached for the door handle.
"No," the driver said and when Kane looked at him he saw the man was unhappy. He did not share Kane's sense of accomplishment. He did not consider Kane fit company on the road anymore. He was not going to be a Christian about Kane's filthiness.
