Letting Loose the Hounds

by Brady Udall

  Even though my father’s head had stopped bleeding, the sheriff wanted to call the ambulance in from Round Valley (there was no doctor in Salado in those days) but my father kept assuring everyone he was feeling fine, all he needed was a few more drinks to get rid of the headache he was having. In the end, the sheriff stuck them both in the same jail cell to sleep off their drunk. Some time that night in that puke-smelling cell full of drunks and no-goods and bums, my father died of bleeding in the brain, his head resting on the lap of Calfred Pulsipher, the man who killed him.

  Out here in Arizona, Jesus is my only real friend. He is a tiny wetback, barely five feet tall with his boots on and even though he’s lived on American soil for over two decades his English is as piss-poor as if he showed up here last Christmas. He has star-quality teeth and likes to keep his hair coifed and oiled with one curl hanging down on his forehead in the manner of old time movie actors. He’s worked for Mr. Platt off and on for a good many years and while the others here resented me, pissed on me for being young and ignorant, enjoyed watching me make a fool of myself, Jesus helped me out from the start, taking time to show how to dally a rope, say, or throw a calf for branding.

  Right now Jesus is explaining, in his own way, why he doesn’t like people calling him a Mexican. He doesn’t consider himself a Mexican at all, he says, because he is actually a full-blooded Yaqui Indian and very proud of it, a direct descendant of the Aztecs, who were, according to him, the most proud and powerful nation the world ever saw. And who, according to him, had it not been for malaria, typhoid and other white-man plagues, would have kicked some Spaniard ass.

  “I’m not eh-Spanish,” he says, thumping his chest like a little brown Tarzan. “I’m Yaqui.”

  “It’s not eh-Spanish,” I say. “That’s not how you say it. You got to get your S’s right. She sells seashells by the sea shore. Okay, I’m going to say a word and you repeat. Snoopy.”

  “Eh-Snoopy,” Jesus says.

  “Sssssnoopy,” I say.

  “Ehhhhh-snoopy,” Jesus says.

  “Ah shit,” I say.

  “Ah shit,” says Jesus, proud of himself for making such great advancement in the language.

  The guy truly is hopeless. Since he has done so much for me, I figured the least I could do was help him polish his English, but now, after nine months of correcting his pronunciation and word order, he hasn’t improved a bit.

  “Why don’t you want to be an American?” I say. “All you have to do is get your green card, you’ve lived here long enough. Then you won’t have to run from the border patrol any more.”

  “American?” Jesus says, a look of disgust twisting his wide brown face. “Americanos fat pigs, you know, honk honk.”

  “I’m fat, is that what you’re saying?”

  Jesus lifts up my T-shirt to have a look. He nods gravely. “Maybe,” he says.

  We stop for gas and coffee at Sud Baker’s, a little eatery/truck stop. Once we’ve finished off our eggs and sausage, and with Jesus taking forever in the john, I pick up a loose copy of the local paper, The Apache County Sentinel, and there, right on the front page is that son of a bitch Calfred Pulsipher himself. It looks like an old wedding picture: Calfred’s got these ridiculous lambchop sideburns and a thick polyester tie and one of his eyes, his left one, seems to be looking at the mole on his forehead while the other is pointed straight ahead. A fat woman, Calfred’s wife, I guess, is sitting next to him, all dressed up. Underneath the picture it reads, The Pulsipher children would like to congratulate Calfred and Erma on the occasion of their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.

  A trembling starts in my stomach and moves out to my arms and hands. When I first got here I tried to look up Calfred’s name in the phone book and when I couldn’t find it, I convinced myself that he was dead or had moved away to Alaska. I thought I wouldn’t have to worry about him anymore.

  A secret: since I was five years old I have been a murderer in my heart. I’ve tortured, mutilated, torn, skewered, beaten, killed Calfred Pulsipher ten thousand times over. I’ve burned his house down, kidnapped his children, cut the head off his dog. I’ve dreamed, time and again, about being there that night at the Sure Seldom. In my dreams I’ve stopped him from killing my father in various ways, perforating him with an ice pick, shotgunning him in the gut, beating him bloody with a chain. I even made plans, back when I was twelve or thirteen and crazed with puberty, for stealing a car and a bigass case of dynamite and coming all the way out here and blowing him into the outer reaches of space.

  Growing up, I used to read a lot, mostly Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour, and in those books if someone killed a member of your family or a even a friend, it was pretty much your duty to pay the son of a bitch back. It’s what anyone who had any courage or sense of justice did; it’s what cowboys did. It’s what my father would have done.

  My father’s name was Quinn. He was a big man with a barrel chest, curly red hair, a missing front tooth—everybody loved him. He lost the tooth to the back hoof of an Appaloosa gelding and he never got it fixed because he thought the hole in his face made him look friendlier. He was an excellent golfer (ten handicap), liked old blues music, and had a deep-seated fear of bees. Although I was a kid, not much more than a toddler when he died, I know all kinds of things—facts, stories, anecdotes—about him. After my mother took me away to Stillwater, friends would call or sometimes stop in and they’d tell me things my father used to do, the kind of man he was. I remember a few of the visitors, usually it would be a man in Wranglers, alone, or maybe with a frizzy-haired woman with big earrings, and always they’d say things like, Oh my God, he looks just like Quinn, doesn’t he? Or, Listen there, he’s even got Quinn’s voice. And without fail my mother would break down and have to leave the room.

  My mother, I think, went certifiably crazy during the year after my father’s death. Nobody really knows about this except me, because I was the only one who got to witness all the lunatic things she did. One of my clearest memories is of my mother, just a few days after we’d moved to Stillwater, running outside in only her underwear as a stranger’s car pulled up to the curb, hysterical and shouting, “I knew he’d come back, oh my God, you’re back! Look Archie, Daddy’s home!” Or the time she ripped through the house, clearing out cupboards and cabinets, trashing the attic, sure my father was there because she could smell his English Leather cologne.

  Finally, she went to see a doctor who introduced her to the wonderful world of pills. It’s a world she’s been living in ever since.

  Now, out here on the ranch, I’m always finding reminders of him. A few weeks ago, I was down near the mud pond just south of the big house, mending fence with Richard when I found the letter Q carved deep into one of the anchor posts near the dam. It’s kind of a tradition out here for the person that builds a fence to carve his initial into the final anchor post and I knew without a doubt it was my father that had done it. I imagined him there in the very spot I was standing, his shirt off, his big round shoulders covered with sweat, making cracks with his crew and grinning that gap-toothed grin while he cut his first initial into the thick cedar post with a buck knife.

  By the time Jesus and I get to Sell’s Pasture it is already upwards of ninety degrees and with the white sun burning into everything it feels like we’re moving across the surface of Venus. After we pull off the highway, I have to guide the truck over three or four miles of a rutted two-track, me and Jesus bouncing all over the seat, the stiff sagebrush on the truck’s underside like fingernails on a chalkboard. On our way over to the windmill Jesus notices a bad case of pinkeye on a Hereford calf. By the time he’s got the medicine kit from the glove compartment, run the calf down on foot, lassoed it, thrown it to the ground and begun to doctor the eye, all the time keeping one eye on the calf’s very pissed-off mother, I’ve climbed the ladder up to the platform and am doing my best to dismantle the windmill head and see what the problem is.

  The windmill stopped working only a few days ago, so t
he galvanized holding tank is still half full of algae-green water and a few mangy cows are hanging around to check out what’s going on. They don’t have anything better to do, blinking those big dull eyes. I’ll tell you one thing about cows: they’re dumb-asses. They’re so dumb it’s hard to understand how stupid they really are.

  Once in awhile I’ll look down and see a metallic flash in the green water—huge shaggy goldfish and carp they put in the tanks to keep the algae down. These things grow to be as big as poodles and they swim around flapping their tails like they own the tank.

  About a hundred yards away, over next to a juniper tree, Jesus struggles to keep the bawling calf down while performing the delicate work of injecting medicine directly into its eyeball with a syringe. I shout encouragements from up on my perch and Jesus grunts and hisses and calls the calf a big-time donkey turd. By the time he’s done he’s sweating, covered with dust, the calf has crapped green pudding all over his pearl-buttoned shirt and what’s worse, it’s not even ten o’clock in the morning. He walks up to the holding tank, slings his hat like a Frisbee, sheds the rest of his clothes and steps in, the thick water closing around him. He slides down so that his head is just above water, still as a turtle on a rock.

  I am banging away with my Vise-Grips at a stuck bolt, trying to loosen it, when I miss the bolt completely. My momentum throws me off balance, the whole windmill shifting underneath me, and I slip sideways off the side of the platform. I grab one of the supports to keep myself from falling, but my legs are dangling out from under me and with my White Mule work gloves on I can’t get a good grip on the smooth, two-inch pipe. My hands begin to slide and my stomach curls up on itself and I look down past my feet and try to figure out the best way to fall without snapping my spine. Below me, Jesus leaps out of the tank, naked as a newborn, the huge fish writhing and bucking in the swampy water, and begins scrambling up the metal scaffolding, his wet hands and feet causing him to slip and flail and clutch.

  I start bellowing, a loud panicked sound like a heifer giving birth, which causes all the cows in sight to spook and set off sprinting for the safety of the trees. Somehow I hold out, yelling the whole time, until Jesus reaches the platform from the other side and grabs my belt and with the strength of a man twice his size hauls me up.

  I lie on my back for a minute staring at the blank sky and listening to my heart thumping so hard it sounds like bones are popping in my chest. Above me Jesus is standing there all goose-pimply with this huge grin on his face, as if my near-death experience has made his day. He keeps shaking his head; he just can’t get over it. “Arshie hanging, feet kicking, help, help!” Jesus says, pantomiming the whole incident. “Arshie shouting like woman, ooooooha!, every cow runs away.”

  I get up and try to grab him but he ducks out of the way and cowers at the corner of the platform, mocking me, covering his head with his hands. “Big fat Americano scaring me. Oh boy,” he says.

  I stop going after him; I’m still a little nervous about one of us falling off this thing, and then I notice that Jesus has the biggest pecker I’ve ever seen. I get a good look at it and there’s no doubt—I’ve been in a lot of locker rooms and seen quite a few, but this one takes the cake.

  “That’s a considerable pecker you’ve got there,” I tell him, keeping a good grip on one of the supports.

  He looks down at it, lifts it up with his hand like it’s a vegetable he’s considering purchasing at the supermarket. “Oh mama,” he says.

  He picks up the Vise-Grips, goes right to work on the stuck bolt, and starts lamenting that his wife took his kids to visit relatives down in Mexico and it’s been two long weeks since his pendejo saw any action. He begins to croon some mournful Sonoran ballad, using the Vise-Grips like a microphone, and for some reason it seems perfectly appropriate that he is nude and fifty feet in the air.

  We get the head dismantled and find that the windmill needs nothing more than new suction leathers. In no time at all we’ve got the thing fixed, put back together, and I’ve joined Jesus down in the cow tank.

  The inside of the tank is as slimy as frog innards and the huge fish curl around my stomach and legs and I still haven’t decided whether the whole sensation is disgusting or kind of pleasant. We sit there for awhile and even though the windmill has been fixed, there is no wind to speak of and the big fan is completely still and useless as before. This kind of silence drives me crazy and I bear it for as long as I can until I ask the question I’ve been waiting to ask somebody for nine months: “You know who Calfred Pulsipher is?”

  Jesus, who appeared to be falling asleep, sits up and looks right at me, but he only shrugs and mumbles something I can’t understand.

  “What?” I say.

  “Nada, nada,” he says.

  “Do you know him?”

  “Pool-see-fur,” Jesus says, rolling the word across his tongue. I don’t mind Jesus screwing around with me but sometimes he drives me nuts.

  “Come on, you Mexican,” I say. “Does he live around here?”

  “Oh, he live around somewhere.”

  “Where?”

  Now he’s giving me that sly half grin that Latin males everywhere are famous for. “Why you want to know?”

  Since I’ve been here I haven’t talked about Calfred Pulsipher or my father with anyone and now that I have, it feels like I’ve betrayed myself in some way. Even though I’m pretty sure everybody on the ranch knows my situation, not one of them has ever mentioned it, and that’s the way I like it.

  We look at each other across the tank, Jesus waiting for an answer and me not ready to give it.

  Finally a mangy Hereford, either a very brave or a very stupid one, comes strolling right up to the tank to have a drink. Jesus hollers at the cow, calling it some of the most vile words in the English language and his pronunciation is absolutely perfect.

  I didn’t believe I could actually enjoy ranch work. I’ve heard some of the hands complain about certain kinds of work, mostly jobs that require getting down out of the saddle, but I pretty much love it all: branding, clearing ditches, building fence, irrigating. I love hauling hay, throwing those bales around as if they have offended me. I don’t even mind getting up before the crack of dawn, even if I have to do it with Richard the army general barking in my ear. I like the way the world feels empty at that time of day; it seems as if you are the only one alive, early in the morning when you’re up before everybody else and you can step out into the low light with your cup of coffee and hear a horse chewing grass from two hundred yards away.

  Every day you get something new thrown at you; I mean, one thing I’ve never been around here is bored. You work all day, so busy sweating and busting your ass that you don’t even have time to think; you go and go and go until you look up and notice the sun is nearly down and it’s time to pack it in. There’s nothing as nice as that ride home; the truck rumbling loosey-goosey down the road with a mind of its own, the radio hissing out Mexican trumpets, that sweet aching tiredness settling deep in your joints. You go home and fix yourself some dinner and even though it’s nothing more than chili out of a can and a tube of instant biscuits it’s the best damned meal you’ve ever had.

  The only thing that will ruin a day like this is getting a call from my mother. My mother calls once or twice a week to make sure I’m caught up on all her problems. A few days ago she called me just as we were getting in from a day of calving out heifers to tell me that she had broken up with her boyfriend.

  “Archie?” she said. “Archie? Are you there, honey?” Her voice was as high-pitched as a train whistle.

  “I’m right here,” I said.

  Suddenly she began to weep and I knew immediately that she had taken too many of one pill or had mixed some up that weren’t supposed to be mixed. She was speaking in that hysterical little-girl voice that I remember hearing so much after my father was killed.

  “He left me, Arch, he’s gone.” She was practically shrieking. I didn’t know who the hell she was talki
ng about. I was able to piece together that her current boyfriend, a hot tub salesman named Chet, had decided to go back to his ex-wife in Florida. I told her I was sure she’d be able to find another boyfriend in a day or two.

  “I miss you honey,” she cried. “I want to see you. You’re the only one left.”

  A number of times she’s called me, trying to get me to come home, even though she herself is the one that did what was necessary to get me out here. One particularly bad night a couple of months ago she accused me of abandoning her, just as my father had done. Every time I talk to her it breaks the spell; I’m not Archie the cowboy anymore, but Archie the delinquent with his afflicted mother and dead father, with all his crimes against society. Honest, it makes me feel like crap.

  Good thing that’s a feeling that doesn’t last long. I can hang up the phone, go to bed, sleep like a dead man, give Richard a hundred-watt smile when he rousts me out of bed, ready to get out on the open range and make those cows pay.

  I’ve just come into town from shoveling about three tons of cowshit out at the loading corrals and now I’m here in a bar called Whirly Burly’s (the guy at the door didn’t card me; because of my six-four frame and five-o’clock shadow I haven’t been carded since I was fourteen). I’ve decided to go through with it, I won’t wait any longer: I’m going to locate Calfred Pulsipher and let him have it. I figured the natural place to look for him would be a bar; the man was a full-time drunk and I doubt he’s changed his ways. But, I have to admit, this doesn’t seem the kind of place you’d find somebody like Calfred Pulsipher, full as it is with a bunch of yahoos dressed up like they’re waiting to audition for Oklahoma!