So Brave, Young, and Handsome: A Novel

by Leif Enger

  Darlys said, “Did you marry again, Glen? Where have you spent all these years?”

  “I build rowboats; it’s pleasant work. I don’t pine for those old days,” he said. “No, I didn’t marry.”

  “Do you ever see anybody? Do you see Cawley or Jip?”

  “No one from that time,” said Glendon.

  “You never much cared for Jip,” she said, with a teasing inflection.

  “I did like him, but Darlys, he was bad to you.”

  “I remember his smile. He was awfully funny—I never had another man who made me laugh like Jippie.”

  “Well, that’s all right,” Glendon reflected. “It’s proper to remember what was good. But look, you’ve turned things to your advantage now. Tell us about your act here.”

  She was, as the handbills claimed, a long-shot artist. She could hit a grapefruit at a thousand yards—“Well, you saw,” she said to me, pleased at having shot that target from under my hand.

  “What’s this Deep Breath business?” Glendon asked.

  “That!” She waved her hand. “Jos Miller gave me the name—he used to carry out a chair and watch me practice. Lord, I enjoyed it. I couldn’t hardly miss when Jos was there. He’d watch the targets with a spyglass. He always said that once I pulled the trigger there was time to take a deep breath before the bullet struck.”

  “That’s a top-quality talent, Darlys,” said Glendon.

  She reached into her jacket for a pair of brawny spectacles. “I got to use these, now. Sometimes I miss even so. Last month I missed four times in a row. I got laughed at, and Jos Miller heard about it. He already cut my pay. If it happens again I’m fired.”

  We sat in the tavern watching heat lightning play above the earth.

  Darlys said, “How come you did that, anyway, Glen? Took me out of the Hole and put me on the train?”

  The question surprised him. “Why, because you asked me to, Darlys.”

  “Did I?” She was disturbed, unable to recall this.

  “Yes, you did.” Glendon smiled. “You were such a sweet girl, what could I do but comply?”

  Blushing, she replied, “What would you do for me now, Glen? Any prettiness I had is gone. Were I to ask, what would you do for me now?”

  “Whatever I could,” he answered, at which she got up and kissed the top of his head and strode out of the tavern.

  “Poor Darlys,” said Glendon, as we watched her go. “It’s a shame about her eyes.”

  “I suppose it is.”

  He rounded up on me. “You haven’t much sympathy for her, I think.”

  I replied, “Her difficulties are of her own making. Maybe she ought’ve gone home to the cheese shop in the first place.” The truth is, I felt more than a little impatient with Darlys DeFoe. Glendon had already rescued her once—it seemed likely to me she was hoping he would now rescue her again. Aware of sounding coarse, I pressed on. “She ought to start thinking about her next act.”

  Glendon looked at me with reproach. “Maybe she’s tried that, Monte. Maybe she don’t have a next act in her.” He rose from the table and laid down some coins. He said, “Maybe you ought to have some understanding of this.”

  It was as near as he ever came to reminding me of my own transitory moment as an attraction, featuring my own long shot, Martin Bligh. How hard I’d looked for the elusive next act! How hard I was looking still!

  5

  Well, Hood was in love. No doubt you guessed it the second he peered out the window at the agile señorita—I guessed it myself and had it confirmed when he wafted in late.

  “Fellows, wish me well, I am in love,” he said, from his blowsy elevation.

  “Is she?” asked Glendon.

  “She will be,” Hood replied.

  “What’s her name?” I inquired.

  “Alazon. Mr. Becket, you saw her—she’s a rose, you got to admit.”

  We got little sleep that night, at least Hood and I didn’t. He was bursting with that girl and insisted on reporting his evening to me moment by moment. Down he went and sure enough they had the cameras running. The film was called Sign of the Red Men. It featured a young jawline of German extraction named Ern Swilling. He said it Svilling, and many at the Hundred and One were betting honest dollars on his future—that you never heard of Ern was fate’s joke on Ern. Anyway Hood went down and crossed the street holding a china teacup in his right hand. I saw that with my own eyes, from the window. The teacup confused me until he admitted stealing it from a display in the tiny lobby of the boardinghouse; he was looking for flowers but found none. Entering the building he didn’t see Alazon right away. A few people stood within a floodlit set of mock walls resembling the inside of a ranch cabin—the clever Ern, a pallid girl called Selma playing his beloved in the film, and a fellow Hood described as “bitten and weaselly” who jabbed a forefinger into his palm for emphasis when speaking. This was the director of the movie and the butt of many gags among the cast, though when I spoke with him later he seemed like any craftsman pursuing distinction against large odds. Drawn by soft talk, Hood spotted the girl with a Mexican boy his own age. A handsome tall lad with an effortless laugh—yet Hood suffered less than one minute of excruciating jealousy because when the girl saw his tentative advance she left her caballero with his sentence unfinished and came and looked up into his face.

  “She’s so pretty, I just forgot how to talk,” Hood told me. I loved him for that. What man has not stood in lumpen torment before the face of beauty? Wordless, he stood sheltering the teacup in his two hands.

  Her English was less complete than her understanding. She accepted the teacup with delight, though I suppose she knew exactly where it had come from. Not the leading actress Hood had supposed, she’d still managed to appear in several films as part of a mob or in church scenes. She laughed him into an easier mood and took him round, introducing him to her friends: her cousin LaJila, who worked in the kitchen and came daily to watch the filming and absorb the language; exhausted old Daniel, who painted wheeled backgrounds with mountains and skies of such genuine appearance that, when rolled outdoors, birds tried to fly through them and fluttered to the ground in confusion.

  “Who’s this now?” Hood asked Alazon, as her tall caballero approached. He was smiling, a terrifying expression to witness on the face of your rival.

  “Ignacio, my brother,” Alazon replied, at which Hood’s belly filled with such buoyancy his feet could no longer feel the floor. Grasping the offered hand he knew Ignacio for an ally and friend. It emerged that Ignacio was the reason for Alazon’s presence at the Hundred and One. The first of his family to come north, he had worked several years as a bronc peeler in the Millers’ breaking pens—painful employment he spoke of with humor and pride. The broncs had dealt him many fascinating scars, also eighteen broken bones “that he knows about,” Hood told me. This line of work seemed to Hood so heroic that when Ignacio invited him to visit the pens next morning and ride for the foreman Hood felt the grip of destiny. “You see? I told you cowboying wasn’t over, Mr. Becket.”

  It had taken Hood about ten minutes to adjust to my real name.

  “It’s what I came here for,” he added.

  “And Alazon, also, I am guessing.”

  “Of course.” Hood thought. “I’d of come for Alazon even if there weren’t no cowboy work to be done,” he declared.

  “Yesterday you didn’t know there was any such person as Alazon,” I said. He was so unbalanced, I couldn’t resist chiding him a little.

  “If there weren’t no such person as Alazon,” Hood proclaimed, “I would have made her up.”

  There isn’t much a fellow can reply to that, so I reminded him that broncos get up early and suggested he sleep.

  “Sure, Mr. Becket,” he said.

  But I was the one needing sleep that night, not Hood. Bunked under the open window I sighed and turned as Hood talked softly on, gesturing with his hands at the ceiling. “I ain’t ever going to forget this,” Hood said. “I am
meant to be here. So is Alazon. Maybe she don’t love me yet, but she’s going to. Didn’t I tell you, Mr. Becket? Didn’t I say this place was something?”

  6

  Sometime in the night the rain commenced. It didn’t pelt or sheet down as it reasonably might after a hundred miles of black cloud, it was only a mild rain and people shrugged at it and went to work. Hood rose early to set off for the breaking pens, and I suppose no actor ever approached an audition with more passion. He cracked his neck and snorted through his nose. Because of his excitement and the damp-flannel feel of the boardinghouse I put on my slicker and walked along with him.

  The pens were at the far end of the parade grounds, a mess in that weather. A handful of cowboys stood drinking coffee under the tin awning, Ignacio among them sporting a wide brim hat and a sash about his waist. He welcomed us both and introduced Hood Roberts to a stocky rooster who handed Hood a lariat and pointed at the knot of grumpy horses bunched against the rails. This was the foreman in charge of the Millers’ vast remuda. He said some words to Ignacio who took another lariat and swung over the fence; his boots hitting the mud made his compadres laugh and elbow each other. “Get that malvado horse,” one cried, setting up a chorus of disagreement. Malvado I understood to mean wicked, but these fellows had given names to every horse present. Therefore Ignacio, now aboard a slight mare prancing through the muck, darted with his lifted reata among Unsightly and Witch Eye and Robbie’s Knee, a youthful bay stallion named for the cowboy he had lately crippled. I was told Robbie wished to come back and prove himself no quitter but had instead received a few alphabet lessons while still bedridden and was reemployed as a sign painter. In horse work you want two knees that bend.

  For Hood, Ignacio chose a short-barreled mare called Espiritu, or Spook. To look at her you wouldn’t have thought she was much—a little brown horse like any other—yet the cowboys cheered at this selection and Ignacio roped and led the mare into a round pen of green lumber nailed to railroad ties set deep in the ground. Here Hood waited with the rain trailing off the back of his derelict hat. He had a light saddle over his shoulder and a scared smile on his face. Among those weathered vaqueros Hood looked perhaps fourteen. Ignacio snubbed the bronc to a railroad tie and Hood stepped up and set the saddle on the quivering horse. She was not quivering with fear. I saw her bilious eye. She quivered with rage.

  Here is my cheerful confession: Unlike many of my boyhood friends, I never wished to be a cowboy. A slim nearsighted child, to me every horse seemed a sinister creature apt to reply with hostility; it was only when I was a bored man in a post office that the notion of “horse” gained allure, and this only on paper. Now, with Hood snugging a wide cinch against Spook’s belly, I recalled the truth, which is that a horse has no need to traffic with people. You are a feeble and tenuous being; the only thing a horse wants from you is your absence. The mare sidestepped and twisted against the snub as Hood got up in the stirrups—could I have stopped the whole thing like an anxious father I’d have done so, but the vaqueros were shouting and Hood was nodding at Ignacio, who reached over the upper rail and released the horse.

  The mare reared back immediately, flailed high and slipped leftward with Hood’s fist in her mane. She came down on four feet and crow-hopped tight circles while the cowboys hollered, then reared again so vertically she fell straight backward onto the fence which became a spout of magnificent splinters. This move was designed to ruin both Hood and the saddle, but Hood dropped off when the balance tipped and the saddlehorn snapped at the pommel. Alarmed shouts arose as two or three hands ran forward shaking out loops, but as the mare swiveled back onto her feet there was Hood Roberts coming up with her, his boots seeking the stirrups. Poor Spook! Throwing her head she bucked amid sprinting cowboys toward the outer fence. She knew it was her final border and she meant to clear or rupture it—forward she went, full on and her head down, cones of mud twisting behind, the wind driving rain in our faces. We saw her front quarters rise and clear the top and Hood’s body straighten as her belly hit the rail. It shattered and fifty feet of fence swayed. The horse fell into free territory with a profound slap that made everyone look down or away and then she was up, dragging Hood Roberts by one stirruped foot. I thought he was dead or soon to be, for he bounced behind Spook like knotted straw as she stretched out toward the Salt Fork. Over a small rise went the two of them, and their sound vanished with them, so that all we could hear was rain hitting tin and dripping off in puddles.

  How we ran, then! The cowboys grabbed what horses they could while the few visitors ran on two legs toward the breached fence. Ignacio saw me afoot and wheeled his delicate mare and gave me a hand up, so I was among the first to top the rise and see what had become of brave Hood Roberts. He was not in sight. Spook was a swimming horsehead angling up-current. The only honest guess was that Hood was under the water, and I can testify that time became a tedious waltz while the mare looked here and there and blew through her nose and considered the weather and perhaps enjoyed a number of choice memories before settling on a place to come ashore. Sure enough, when she came up out of the water there lay a mud boy at her heels.

  I moaned in lament, but Ignacio said, “Look there.”

  “What? He is still hanging by the stirrup,” I pointed out.

  “Yes,” agreed Ignacio, at which I saw what I had missed—when Hood had vanished over the rise, bouncing like straw, his foot had been locked in the stirrup. Now his hand was in the stirrup. His foot was free.

  “What’s happened?” I asked—I still thought he was dead, you see. I thought there had been some freak repositioning during his infinite drag under the water.

  The mare, tired by her escape and her swim, was moving at a slow walk up the riverbank.

  As we watched, the mud boy sliding beside her reached up with his free hand.

  “Caballero,” Ignacio breathed.

  Hood achieved his grip and with a swift heave stood abruptly onto the stirrup. It was as stunning an ascension as any I have seen. He weaved a moment before veering down into the saddle; and the cowboys watching from the rise, and others still coming on their snuffy mounts, began to bellow and hoot, and the spectators scrambling afoot picked up the glad cry even before they saw its cause.

  In all I suppose no more than twenty people saw Hood Roberts’s beautiful reappearance, yet twenty witnesses are plenty to make a legend. Moreover, twenty people in full throat can make quite a sound. Hood heard it even through mud earplugs, he told me later—he said it wasn’t until he heard those cries that he knew he could stay on no matter what, that the fight was his and nearly over. No doubt Spook heard it too, because directly she picked up again and began to run; but she had exhausted all ready weapons now, the bucking and the river and the splintering fence. There was nothing for her to do but run, and it was suddenly plain that no mere running horse could shake Hood Roberts off. Indeed he held on, with his head tipping back in the wind, anticipating her sudden turns, and when Spook at last began to slow he spurred her flanks and made her continue full tilt until foam painted her neck; thereon he turned her with the reins, receiving small argument, and to and fro they went in full view of us all; at last he brought her back to the bank and forced her to dance in the tightest of circles, ten times in each direction—and only then did he give her rest.

  It was the sort of deed people would have made songs about, once, or poetry; and though no one did so now, Hood’s gaudy and dogged and certainly accidental ride sprawled straightaway into the talk of the Hundred and One. As events twirled forward, as Hood first attained grace then tipped away, I was to hear the tale refashioned in a dozen lively colors; how he stayed under the water for ten full minutes; how he leapt to her back on the other side and rode standing upright with his arms outstretched; how the sun itself pierced the great cloud long enough to strike Hood’s shoulders as he swam the mare back across the swelling river. It is a fact that Ignacio took the orange sash from his own waist and tied it around Hood’s as he rode Spook bac
k to the stables; it is a fiction that even Spook herself was won over by her conqueror and would nicker lovingly to him and be ridden by no other.

  A cowboy doesn’t ask for much, that’s my observation. A flashy ride, a pretty girl, momentary glory—for a day or two, I’m glad to say, Hood Roberts had them all.

  7

  The fourth day of rain I entered the President’s Tavern to find Glendon uneasily drinking coffee with José Barrera. José was a trick rider at the ranch. He was at least sixty yet still managed, through a sanguine outlook on pain, to startle crowds by riding at full gallop standing on his head in the saddle. More importantly, he was Blue’s cousin—that’s why Glendon was uneasy.

  “Hello, Monte, come join us. José, this is Monte,” said my friend, with marked relief.

  Jack Waits, I noticed, was going by the wayside. In any case José paid me no mind but shook my hand while telling Glendon, as though I weren’t there, “The whole family thought well of you, and then you ran away.”

  “Yes, it’s true,” Glendon replied, gloomily realizing I was no shield against direct speech. “I ain’t had a day without remorse, José.”

  “So now you are seeking her out again. What for?”

  “To own up. Declare my regret.”

  José drained his coffee and rose. Like many veteran riders he walked hitchingly as though unused to his own feet. He lurched to a tarnished urn on the counter, filled his cup and returned to the table. “She waited for you a long time,” he remarked. “Five years, or six. Her husband is named Soto. He has two fruit orchards and three or four languages. A decent man. I met him only the one time, at the wedding. People said he spent a lot of time thinking.”

  “Thinking?”

  “Yes, he enjoys thinking. He’s a good man so far as I know. What I am saying is, don’t go find her and expect anything to come of it.”

  “I won’t.”

  José said, “She might not forgive you. I wouldn’t.”