Jim Kane - J P S Brown

by J P S Brown

  Kane and Pajaro were no longer tired. A predator beast had freshened their trail for them.

  "Well, he sure was there," Kane said. "Pajaro and I saw him, didn't we, Pajaro?" Pajaro was now again doing the going down of the trail that was expected of him but with more impulse in each chamber of him than before.

  A few hours later Kane and Juan Vogel rode into Macarena. They dismounted in front of Antonio Almada's store and were invited to sit with him under the portal that shaded the back of the store. Antonio Almada was schoolmaster, mayor, postmaster, and comisario of Macarena, Chihuahua. His wife brought mezcal and lime halves to chase it with while Almada pumped Kane and Vogel for news of Rio Alamos. Pajaro and Vogel's bay horse were being fed tasol and corn in a courtyard below the porch where the men were resting. .

  "The alazanón is one of the largest horses I have ever seen," the schoolmaster said. "A good horse. Bueno, is he fino, a horse of fine blood?"

  "He is what we call quarto de milla, a quarter horse," Kane said.

  "A boy who came off the trail ahead of you told us that Juan Vogel was on his way here to Macarena accompanied by a giant gringo riding a big sorrel horse that wore horseshoes weighing a kilo apiece."

  "As you see, Jim Kane is no giant. He could not be much longer than two meters and the alazán wears shoes that weigh only a pound a piece," Juan Vogel said. Now that he was in off the trail and resting he could smile and be pleasant.

  "I would like to mount such a horse one time," the schoolmaster said.

  "He is well-educated," Juan Vogel said. "Jim roped calves for us at Gilaremo when we branded. The horse works alone while Jim gets down afoot to handle the calves he has roped."

  "I've heard of horses who work that way. The Texans have such horses. Are you a Texan, Senor Kane?"

  "No. I am from Arizona but Texans and the vaqueros of Arizona work cattle more or less in the same way."

  "I would like someday to mount such a horse," the schoolmaster said again.

  Kane did not offer the man his horse. Instead, he sipped the mezcal the man had given him.

  "Jim says the horse is a one-man horse. He doesn't work for other men," Juan Vogel said. s

  "Ah, well. Justly so. We of Chihuahua say that we never loan our pistol, our woman, or our horse," the schoolmaster said.

  "In Sonora they say the same thing," Juan Vogel said.

  "We of Arizona believe the same," Kane said.

  "What did the big horse do when you saw the lion?" Juan Vogel asked, laughing.

  "Not much," Kane said, studying Vogel's face for foolishness. "You don't believe I saw a lion, do you?"

  "I don't say you didn't see a lion. I only say I didn't see a lion," Juan Vogel said, keeping a sober face.

  "What lion? Where?" the schoolmaster asked.

  "Jim and the big horse saw a lion that did not look like a lion on that long descent into the canyon of Los Sauces," Juan Vogel said.

  "What do you mean, 'the animal didn't look like a lion'? Was it a lion or wasn't it?"

  "It must have been a lion," Jim Kane said. "But it was not like any other lion I have ever seen. It was bigger than an ordinary mountain lion. It was lighter in color and had a much larger head. It moved heavily but was not big-bellied."

  "Maybe it was an onza," the schoolmaster said.

  "I've heard of the onza but I thought it existed only in legend, " Kane said. `

  "The onza is fable to people who do not live in the Sierra. To us of the Sierra the onza is real."

  "Well, the man saw him so he was not a legend. just another old lion." Juan Vogel said.

  "We call onza the animal who could be the cross between the tigre, or jaguar, and the leon pardo, or puma. He is bigger than the puma. He is yellow-dun in color with a long-haired dark strip down his back. Some say he is a hybrid like a mule and cannot reproduce. I don't know if this is true but I have seen onzas myself," the schoolmaster said.

  "When did you see an onza?" Juan Vogel asked skeptically.

  "Seven years ago Tino Sierra's vaqueros killed two half-grown onzas and brought them here," the schoolmaster said."Believe me, they were real onzas, Señor Kane. At least they were specimens of the animal we know as the onza in the Sierra. No known specimen of the onza exists anywhere in any museum or zoo in the world. I know this because I investigated in Chihuahua City that year when Tino's vaqueros brought those animals in. I know something else about them . . ."

  "And what would that be?" Juan Vogel said.

  "The animals Tino's vaqueros brought in had only one gut from their throats to their anuses. They had no stomachs."

  "Ah, now you have gone too far, Antonio. You can't expect us to believe animals of such simple digestive systems could survive in the Sierra. They would have no stomach for it," said Vogel, laughing at his own wit.

  "And another thing," the schoolmaster said.

  "What now?" Vogel said.

  "The guts of those young onzas were full of grass."

  "Enough. You'll finish me off with your discoveries," Vogel said, laughing as hard as he could to make the schoolmaster stop looking so sober and believable.

  "We know the onza thrives in the Sierra, " the schoolmaster said, refusing to smile. "Many of us believe they do very little harm. Maybe they do us no harm because this is the only terrain left to them in which they can survive."

  A boy of about fifteen came in carrying a carton of canned beer.

  "With your permission, profesór," he said to the schoolmaster, "my father sends this cartoncito to Señor Vogel and the Americano with his compliments?

  "What else did Tino Sierra say when he sent you with the beer, Amador?" Juan Vogel asked the boy, laughing and opening three cans of warm beer.

  "He said he would send more beer when this carton was finished."

  "What else?"

  "He said he would continue to send beer and if you got drunk on his beer before you came to our house he was going to find a club and come over here and beat you with it," the boy said, smiling.

  Vogel roared, laughing. "Tell Tino Sierra we'll be over when we finish this carton," he said.

  The boy left. The schoolmaster, Kane, and Vogel drank the ten cans of beer in the carton. The tall and sturdy wife of the schoolmaster set a table with clean linen and silver and served them a supper of jerky, potatoes, beans, and flour tortillas.

  When they had finished supper and were smoking and Kane was thinking he was ready for his bed, the boy, Amador Sierra, appeared again with another carton of beer.

  "With your permission, profesór . . .the boy began.

  "¡Ah, cómo chinga ese Tino Sierra!" Juan Vogel said.

  "Come on, Jim. We'll do well by going over to visit him now and getting the errand over with, otherwise he will bother us all night."

  Tino Sierra was a man sixty years old. He was the man who had matched Kane and Vogel in the arm wrestling in Teresita's restaurant the day Kane had arrived in Rio Alamos in search of the Lion. Tino was an Indian. He owned a store in Macarena. He worked several gold mines and he also bought gold from individual miners in the Sierra. He owned a cattle ranch and he took cattle on trade in his store.

  Kane was told by Juan Vogel that no one had ever seen Tino Sierra wear a coat or a pair of shoes. He disdained the tire-soled huarache. Instead, he wore a sole of thin leather on his huarache. He slept on the floor in his store between the counter and the door. He could not sleep on a bed for he knew no boundaries in his sleep and was so bronco he bucked off a bed in the night.

  Juan Vogel said that about twice a year Tino Sierra took his gold to Guadalajara to sell. He took two gold bars weighing a kilo a piece in his pockets and walked the hundred miles to San Bernardo where he caught transportation to Rio Alamos and Guadalajara. He covered the one hundred miles from Macarena to San Bernardo afoot in two days, the same time the buses took to carry him the thousand miles to Guadalajara. Juan Vogel said Tino Sierra carried his huaraches in his hip pockets on those hundred-mile walks to San Bernardo so he wo
uld not wear them out.

  Tino Sierra always got drunk in San Bernardo when he returned from Guardalajara. This drunk that he always celebrated in San Bernardo was the cause of his always going afoot across the Sierra. He was incapable of staying aboard a horse when drunk. He could not ride from Macarena to San Bernardo because he would have no way of returning the horse to Macarena.

  Tino Sierra, drunk in San Bernardo with his 25,000 pesos in his pockets from his gold` money and a pack train with provisions bought and paid for, always felt rich enough to wear his huaraches on the trail home to Macarena. He would set out in his huaraches and when he began to sober up would lie down under a sheltering rock to sleep. He would remove his huaraches so he could sleep more comfortably and would always forget them when he resumed the trail, sober, in the morning. He always arrived home in Macarena barefoot again.

  Juan Vogel and Jim Kane heard a guitar, an accordion, a violin, and someone singing somewhere up the street. They smelled hot chili and the powdery fluff of flour tortillas. The night freshened the smells of the brush around the town. Stars reflected in the wide, deep Otero River that flowed under the cliff below the town.

  The music was coming from Tino Sierra's store. Most of the people of Macarena were there. Kane and Vogel passed through the people on the back patio where the musicians

  were playing.

  Tino Sierra was dancing solo in the middle of the patio. He was dancing the Mayo Indian venado, the deer dance. His dark, lean face was shiny with grease and sweat. His gray hair was neatly barbered under the straw hat. His white dress shirt was filthy and unbuttoned. He was barefoot. He had lost his huaraches somewhere again. His broad feet looked numb and rubbery as they stamped and scuffed and shuffled on the beaten dusty ground of the patio; as numb as the immobile face, the stiffened arms and torso, and the rigid legs that pounded the feet in time with the music.

  Tino Sierra's wife, a plain, thin woman, gave Kane and Vogel seats at the kitchen table by an open oven where she was cooking.

  A tiny boy sat at the table eating his supper of red chili meat and tortillas with his fingers. His round black eyes stared at Kane unashamedly as he ate and got chili all over his face. His little legs stuck straight out from the chair under the table, He wiggled his bare toes, ate his chili with his fingers, and stared at Jim Kane. This was Miguel, five-year-old son of Tino Sierra.

  Amador, the older son, came up to the table and got permission from Juan Vogel to take Pajaro and the bay horse to the river to water.

  "OK!" a voice rasped incongruously through the quiet-voweled Spanish of the voices at the party. "Nevairbecausstheless, OK! Yo boracho spik Eenglis!" Tino Sierra said, planting both hands on Kane's shoulders from behind. Then he laughed and said, "I knew Juan Vogel would come when he found out I was giving my beer away. "

  "I wanted to see you drunk again, Tino," Juan Vogel said. "It is so seldom that I see you drunk and barefooted and with your shirt unbuttoned."

  Tino walked around the table and stood over Juan Vogel. "Has the gringuito beaten you up lately? Maybe I can pay him to beat you up for me," he said.

  "No. He likes me now because I brought him to the Sierra. I gave him the opportunity to see the onza today and to see savages like you at play. Button your shirt if you are going to stand over me like this! It gives me nausea to see your naked navel!"

  "Hah! Because you wear an undershirt all the time and underpants, you believe me to be a savage because I don't wear them. This for your undershirt!" Tino said, and grabbed Juan Vogel's undershirt where it showed inside his shirt collar and ripped it out. The snaps of Juan Vogel's Western shirt unsnapped and Tino tore the whole undershirt out without harming the outer shirt. He waved the undershirt over his head.

  "I present to you, my invited guests, half of Juan Vogel's interior clothing. I will produce the lower half next," he shouted bloodthirstily.

  "Come on then and get it over with. " Juan Vogel laughed.

  "Not now. Later, when you are not prepared for it," Tino said. "Now we must have respect for the feast day of my comadre, Isabelita." He left them for a few moments and came back with a comely young girl whom he presented to Kane. "Jim Kane, this is my comadre, Isabelita. You may dance with her but do not take her out of the house. That honor and privilege I reserve for myself, " Tino said.

  Kane danced with the girl and other girls Tino Sierra presented to him. The fiesta gained momentum. The mezcal and beer took hold of the guests. Just when it seemed to Kane that the musicians were making their best music and warming to it with the spirits, the fathers of the town crossed the patio and took their daughters arms and escorted them home. Tino was insisting on accompanying his comadre Isabel when her father arrived and took her away from him. The hour was early but the dancing had ended. .

  Tino Sierra was drunk as were all the men who remained at his house. The musicians were drunk and continued to play and sing. They charged fifty centavos for a song. They did not rest. They patted their huaraches on the ground keeping time. The bones in their naked toes rose and settled in the dust in pace with their music.

  Juan Vogel had been in the store. He came back to the table where Tino Sierra now slumped. Two men were with Juan Vogel. Vogel carried a pair of new boots. He turned Tino's chair around so that Tino's legs were out from under the table. Tino only vaguely noticed this. Juan Vogel picked up one of the legs and placed the sole of one of the new boots against the bare sole of Tino's foot, measuring it. Tino began to regain consciousness.

  "These will fit. Hold him now," Juan Vogel said to the two men. One man, smiling self-consciously, held Tino's arms and shoulders against the back of the chair. Another man sat on his lap. Juan Vogel straddled a leg and began working one of the boots onto Tino's stubby foot. Tino came to. He bucked. He kicked at Vogel with both feet but the weight of the men held him down. He howled when he realized the fullness of the atrocity being done to him. He shouted obscenities at Juan Vogel. .

  "Quiet! Sssst! Tino! Don't be a bad talker," his wife admonished him. She was drying her dishes. Little Miguel watched from his chair by the fire, smiling and wiggling his toes with happiness.

  When Tino saw that all his protestations and threats did not influence Vogel, he sulled. His leg became so limber that the man on his lap had to hold the leg so that Vogel could push the other boot on. When both boots were on the limp feet the three men turned Tino Sierra loose.

  He sat in his chair seeing no one. He refused to look at the booted feet. He ignored the feet as though he had disowned them and they were no longer part of him.

  "Come on now, Tino," Juan Vogel said. "Get up and walk. See how reasonable people get about in this epoch."

  "¡Viva México!" Tino Sierra shouted as though he, a patriot, had just been stood against the big wall for his turn before the firing squad.

  "Try to walk, Tino. The boots are from your own shelves. They won't kill you," Juan Vogel coaxed.

  "¡Viva México! ¡Viva Benito Juarez!" And bad act the mothers of all the French tyrants!" Tino Sierra shouted with brave style into the face of his persecutor.

  "Come now, Tino. The revolution has enabled all men, even Indians like you, to throw away their huaraches and wear leather boots." Juan Vogel said.

  "And bad act the mothers of all mercenaries! German!" Tino Sierra shouted at Juan Vogel.

  Juan Vogel stopped laughing. He lifted Tino Sierra off his chair and tried to stand him up in the boots. The boot soles would not touch the floor. Their outer edges dragged. Tino sagged. His arms slid through Vogel's hands, his limp hands met over his head, his rear end bumped the floor. Vogel motioned to his two deputies and the three men lifted Tino again. Vogel held him from behind by the waist of his pants and tried to make the boots meet the floor properly as the two men carried Tino along. The toes of the boots pigeon-toed and dragged across the floor refusing to step, but making twin toe trails across the dust of the patio where Tino had so recently danced so manfully the fine cultural dance of the Mayos.

&nbs
p; They left Tino Sierra sitting on his crumpled legs in the center of the patio. He had triumphed. He had not taken one step in the new boots. Juan Vogel went into the store and filled a liter bottle with mezcal from a barrel and gave it to his deputies. Then Kane and Vogel went back to the schoolmaster's house and went to bed.

  The two deputies built a fire for the night on the edge of the river under the cliff below Macarena. They sat by the fire with their blankets over their shoulders, the bottle of mezcal between them.

  "That Juanito Vogel thinks of imaginative jokes to play," one of the deputies offered sadly.

  "Yes. He and Tino Sierra are always joking with each other;" the other deputy said. "Very funny. All very funny, ha, ha." He tried to laugh. He could not be altogether happy because he wanted to start drinking from the liter of mezcal and he could see his companion wasn't in the mood to drink yet. His companion wanted conversation first.

  "Yes, it was all very funny, but Tino irrigated everyone with curses," the first deputy said.

  "I don't believe he meant our mothers," the second deputy said. "He wouldn't have meant to curse our mothers. It was Vogel he was angry with."

  "Vogel and the French. Is Vogel a foreigner? I never thought he was."

  "Vogel is German. His father was German."

  "Still, his father was born in the Sierra and his mother is Mexican. She was raised in the Sierra. In Chinipas."

  "Yes, his mother is Mexican."

  For a moment they silently thought over this last truth they had unearthed.

  "It all leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. I am sorry I helped Juanito Vogel," the first deputy finally decided.

  "Compadre, have some of Tino's wine to clean your mouth," the second deputy said, keeping his eyes on the mezcal.

  The first deputy reached for the bottle. A heavily whirring, swishing object hit the fire beside the two men and sprayed them with flame and sparks. A second whirr, a second swish, and sparks exploded inside the head of the first deputy just as he looked up into the clear night to see where the first missile had come from.