Wolves At Our Door

by J P S Brown

  Ali interned as a doctor in a Tucson hospital. Kane had been around him only a few times since he had grown into a man but had him figured as a little softy. His hands looked tender and did not fit the shovel handle. He could barely lift it. He could not bury its steel where he needed to and seemed threatened by it. It could hurt him. The looks he gave Kane and Vogel as he tried to stick the shovel in the ground and change the water from one row to another were soulful as a girl’s. Help me, I know you can do this better, they said.

  Vogel suffered a little cough. He smoked three packages of cigarettes a day, but had never been bothered by a bad cough as other smokers were, only this little one, and only lately.

  In the orchard, Vogel took a drag of a cigarette down the wrong pipe, had a coughing fit, and woke up Ali’s doctor’s office. The young man put his ear to Vogel’s chest and asked him to cough again, then tapped on it with his forefinger, then did the same with his ear against Vogel’s back. He came back in front of Vogel and his eyes were not soulful anymore. They were speculative as a wolf's who had just heard the sound of a soft, juicy rabbit close by.

  "How long have you had that cough?" Ali asked.

  "About eight months. It’s nothing," Vogel said.

  "It doesn’t sound like anything serious. Does it hurt?"

  "Not at all."

  "Still, it seems chronic."

  "I had bronchitis with a bad cough last fall. It left me with this little thing that doesn’t even bother me."

  "Still, to relieve all doubts and fears, you should have an examination. You’re a smoker and I bet not a moderate one. Why don’t you let me arrange for you to have an examination at my hospital?"

  "You mean in Tucson?"

  "Yes. Let me arrange it."

  "I don’t know when I can do it. I don’t want to go all the way to Tucson only to have a little pinchi cough listened to."

  "Well, don’t wait too long."

  "Look, Juan, you’re going to Nogales with me when we cross the Lupino toretes," Kane said. "I’ll take you to the hospital then."

  "We’ll see," Vogel said.

  Kane and Vogel led their animals out of the stalls to saddle them, and Abdullah, Lupino’s chief horse wrangler, came out to greet them. A desert Bedouin from Arabia, this caballerango had come to La Golondrina with Lupino’s first Arabian horses more than fifty years ago. Kane and Vogel were Abdullah’s friends, and they often talked about him. As far as they knew, he had not made friends with anyone else except Ibrahim and his little namesake Abdullah in all his years in the Sierra.

  Kane and Vogel felt an affinity with Abdullah because of his dedication to the husbandry of the Lupino livestock. Nothing in the world mattered more to him than La Golondrina horses, and Kane believed the horses felt real affection for him. Kane had always suspected that no horse could love a man, because no man could be equal to the matchless horse. However, even though Abdullah did not solicit the affection of any person or animal, Kane could see his horses loved him. No matter how much other people claimed their horses loved them, Kane believed that a real bond of love between a man and a horse was only rarely seen.

  Abdullah gave Kane and Vogel abrazos at arm’s length, one very light pat on the back apiece, and the trace of a smile. His hawk face remained severe, but the trace of the smile unmistakably showed, even in the predatory eyes. "God be praised," he said to them.

  "Thank you for the care you gave our animals, friend," Vogel said.

  His saddle lay by the door to the stall in which Negrito the mule had been stabled. He unbuckled his saddlebags, took out two cartons of Lucky Strike cigarettes, and handed them to Abdullah.

  Kane took two boxes of .30-30 cartridges from his saddlebags and gave them to the man. "These are also for you," he said. Abdullah carefully accommodated the cigarettes in one hand so he could take the cartridges in the other. "Come," he said. They followed him into the stall that served as his quarters. The room was full of the vapor of strong coffee. The partners sat on a wide cot, and Abdullah handed each a small cup of thick, hot, heavily sugared coffee. A clean, worn carpet covered the dirt floor. Abdullah sat in a corner and folded his legs. The stall was uncluttered and furnished only with the carpet, the cot, a military surplus locker box, a washstand, ceramic washbowl, and an enamel water pitcher. His bedding lay rolled and tied with rope on the foot of the cot.

  His bare and horny feet appeared never to have worn shoes. The blunt toes, brown nails, and calloused heels looked scuffed and worn with everyday use, but healthy and supple.

  He carefully opened a new carton of cigarettes, opened a package and extracted a cigarette, and offered it to Kane, then offered it to Vogel, then wet the end with the tip of his tongue, put it in his mouth, and struck a match to it. His big toes caressed his second toes in a wiggle of delight.

  "The Gato is much horse," he said as he drew on the cigarette. He exhaled slowly and noisily and watched the smoke leave his lips and flow into the room toward his friends. He looked at the cigarette in his right hand, passed it to his left, took hold carefully of his coffee cup on the locker box beside him, lifted it to his face and sucked at it noisily, swallowed with the strangle sound of a horse, and exhaled with a loud, satisfied gasp.

  Abdullah seemed to feel that the sounds he made for his swallows of hot coffee were as good as conversation, because all he did for the next few minutes was sip his coffee, puff on the wet end of his cigarette, and watch its smoke. Once in a while he gazed into the eyes of the partners and nodded as if to say, "Yes, this is all right."

  The partners often told their friends and loved ones about the sounds Abdullah made when he called his hot coffee to its consumption. At their breakfast tables, they imitated his routine. Kane’s grandchildren and Vogel’s wife and daughter knew exactly how Abdullah took his coffee. Now, with straight faces the partners called their own coffee and smacked their lips over each mouthful and swallow the way he did. They swallowed with the noise of horses and gasped with satisfaction afterward because they knew he thought it proper to give evidence of the pleasure of each sip, and that was all the communication they needed, for a while . . . except for a nod or two . . . and a look into the eyes . . . and a look at the smoke.

  In his broken Spanish, Abdullah finally said, "Your young colt is already much horse, and with those stones, will be much of a sire."

  The partners sipped their coffee and nodded. Abdullah nodded too.

  Kane found something new about the man’s face every time he looked at it. He was not sure how many years it had been since his birth in Araby but he knew that he was not a youngster when he came to the Sierra with Lupino’s horses. Lupino said that he had won fame as a master horseman in his own country before he left, so he must have been at least thirty, more likely forty. Kane had known him fifty years, yet he did not think his face had changed any more than the topography of any mountain in the Sierra had changed, or the desert of his Arab homeland. Old lines on his face had always been too deep to get deeper. The short, narrow hawk nose and hawk eyes in that face could seem a threat to other humans, as though the face was a weapon, as a hawk’s eyes and beak are weapons. His movements were still supple. Kane had never heard him cough, never heard him groan under a weight. He did not walk, he glided. When he took hold of something his grip was sure and did not fumble. He did not "get on" a horse, he stepped into a stirrup and took his seat.

  The only time he had ever said a word of praise to Kane, he said, "You sit a horse well." Kane knew he sat a horse well, but when that old horseman said it, he finally felt rewarded for his lifetime of horsemanship. When that old Arab wanted to have his way with a horse, he only conveyed the thought to him. When somebody else wanted to have their way with the same horse, a whole team of men might have to throw him down and sit on him.

  The partners finished their coffee, and before they could set their cups down, Abdullah took them and made them disappear. He opened the locker box and brought out a heavy object wrapped in new, white felt, the cloth
used in the Sierra as sweat pad under the saddle. He unwrapped the felt and uncovered a shiny blade. The handles had been fashioned from bull horn and looked old and smooth, except for the shiny brass ends of the pins that held them in place. The blade was two inches wide, eight inches long, curved from hilt to point on the cutting edge, and straight backed, except for the last three inches at the point, which dipped from the spine of the blade to the tip and had been honed to facilitate entry of the blade into flesh, with no effort on the part of the handler. A golden snake with ruby eyes twined around the length of the hilt. A hawk’s head with yellow agate eyes graced the

  "Ibrahim has one," Abdullah said. He extracted another cigarette from his new package.

  Kane did not ask if any other Lupino had been given a knife. He knew the reason Ibrahim carried one. He was a husbandman to the core like Abdullah. He knew why Nesib Lupino did not have one. He probably had never shown interest in Abdullah’s artistry. He probably had never praised or thanked Abdullah for the decades of care and advice the old maestro had given the Lupinos either.

  After a while Abdullah said, "The others believe their ticks are gazelles."

  FOUR

  With the help of Lupino’s vaqueros, the partners drove the three hundred young bulls through La Golondrina Pass where Martinillo and a crew met them. The crew would brand, castrate, and vaccinate the herd at Guazaremos. After that, it would be driven out of the Sierra to San Bernardo in the foothills on the Sonora side where trucks would haul it to the U.S. border for export.

  The hacienda buildings had been destroyed by fire early in the drug war and only now were being rebuilt. Che Che Salazar had been born and raised on the hacienda and was in charge of its reconstruction. The son of a former mayordomo of the ranch and a mother who had been a servant of the Vogels, he had been its caretaker since the age of seventeen when don Panchito Flores Valenzuela, its former caretaker, died after seventy-five years on the job.

  When the drug wars began and young natives of the region joined the fight against the intruders from Sinaloa, Che Che had been overlooked because of his busy stewardship of the hacienda. However, he had been more active than any of his peers as a marijuana grower in competition with the Sinaloans. As a vaquero for Vogel and Kane, he had helped gather herds of livestock in the farthest corners of the region. He knew every fence, every canyon and mountainside, in the night as well as day. When he elected to grow his own crops of marijuana, he found very secret places for it.

  Without a word to anyone, Che Che stole some seed and planted his first crop. He worked barefoot with a broken-handled shovel to divert a stream into his first rows of mota, marijuana. He watched the Sinaloans and taught himself how to care for his crop and how and when to harvest it. He watched them bale and package it, stole their materials, and did the same with his own harvest.

  At the age of eighteen, when he needed to look for a buyer for his first crop, he had never been out of the Sierra Madre. The Vogels lived in Rio Alamos, Sonora, so he walked in his tire-soled huaraches to San Bernardo, caught a ride on a Montenegro truck to Rio Alamos, then showed up at Juan Vogel’s door. Vogel’s wife Alicia gave him a cot and meals on her patio while he searched for a buyer. He roamed the town as an illiterate young man from the Sierra whom no one suspected of owning a $20,000 dollar, five-burro pack string load of marijuana. He did not have to search long for a buyer, because when Alicia told Juan Vogel the reason he was in town, Vogel referred him back to the Montenegros.

  So Che Che sold his first crop inside the family of El Trigo, because Manuelito Montenegro, his brother Pancho, and Juan Vogel were life-long compadres. The Montenegro brothers' trucks hauled all of Kane's and Vogel’s livestock. They owned mercantile stores in every village in the mountains of Chinipas and Loreto. They dealt in illicit crops as well as legal ones, and they were honest with Che Che.

  That was the only time in his thirty years as a marijuana grower that Che Che’s closed mouth caused a false start. He could have asked the Montenegros to buy his crop when he first arrived at their store in San Bernardo and asked for a ride to Vogel’s house. He never again made a false move. The only people who knew that he grew the mota, even after he bought his first pickup truck, were the Montenegros, two of Adan Martinillo’s sons who drove trucks for the Montenegros, Juan Vogel, and Jim Kane.

  The new car dealer of his first pickup taught him how to drive it. He loaded it with new clothes and provisions and drove it as far into the Sierra as he could get it, then ditched it about three minutes before it fell completely apart. After that, he worked to repair an awful jeep road that Vogel and the Montenegros had once built from San Bernardo to El Trigo. It had fallen in disrepair after ten years of heavy rains and no maintenance. Che Che finally repaired it enough so he could jockey another new truck all the way to El Trigo and back down to San Bernardo again before it fell apart, but that was the last time he used a pickup in his business. He preferred to pack his crops out of the Sierra on burros, because he could hide burros better, use different trails, travel at night, and did not have to buy new ones after each trip.

  Che Che did not mind negotiating his jeep road with a pickup in the day, but he needed to transport his crop off the mountain at night to escape detection. The headlights of a pickup hardly ever shined on that road. Its switchback turns were so numerous and tight that the beams of the headlights only shined uselessly over thousands of feet of space most of the time. Che Che told Jim Kane that his nerves had not proven to be cold enough to help him drive a pickup over that road even one more night.

  As Kane, Vogel, and Martinillo neared El Trigo on their return from La Golondrina, Kane asked Martinillo about Che Che.

  "Ah, he knows you’re coming, and he’ll be ready for you with a swallow of soyate rnezcal," Martinillo said.

  "He’s a good boy," Kane said.

  Vogel chuckled. "He’s listo enough. Ready for anything."

  "You should know something, Jim," Martinillo said. "When I found out that you’d been hurt, I made a special trip up here to tell him. You know what he did?"

  "No."

  "He sat on the ground, held his face in his hands, and cried for an hour."

  "No, hombre."

  "He loves you a lot."

  "Well, he’s been like a son to me and my compadre Vogel."

  "Just so you know."

  "I wonder where we’re going to sleep," Vogel said. "He sent word that he could give us better accommodations this time."

  "Who helps him rebuild the place?" Kane asked.

  "Carpenter and bricklayer help in the Sierra is occupied too much with its own affairs," Vogel said. "Everybody makes more money doing other things, as you well know. He can’t get help, but he seems to do well without it."

  "It rained this winter and the streams are up," Martinillo said. "Che Che could do as his neighbors do and grow the mota, but he told me he wants to stay with this job until he restores the hacienda buildings."

  That told Kane that Martinillo still might not know that Che Che grew his own crop of the stuff, or Martinillo thought that Kane did not know. At any rate, Martinillo gave no sign that he knew Che Che grew marijuana. The secret was being kept, and that was necessary for Che Che’s protection.

  "We pay him well, don’t we, Juan?" Kane asked Vogel.

  "Yes. He has other businesses, though. He packs provisions and foodstuffs up from San Bernardo with his burros, and he drags pine beams down to San Bernardo. He sells his harvests of beans and corn. You know that he runs fifty cows with us now. He makes and sells cheeses from the milk. He cut all the lumber for the new roof of the hacienda with an ax and dragged it here. Alone, he laid the cement of the floors, patio, and veranda. He made the adobe. We pay him for the materials and his work. He does well and never stops working"

  The walls of the house had been rebuilt with new adobe but not stuccoed yet. A bundle of new ax-hewn ceiling and attic beams stood on end in a corner. The ends of the beams had been rounded when the burros dragged them th
rough the mountains. Kane could smell the new pine fifty yards away.

  Che Che appeared in a doorway leaned against it, and smoked homegrown tobacco in a corn leaf. Kane thought, Anyone would think he couldn't afford tailor-made cigarettes, with his money. Pretty soon he’ll he good for a loan. Che Che came forward and held Gato while Kane dismounted, then gave Kane an abrazo with tears in his eyes. He and Martinillo led Gato and the mules around to the stables to unsaddle and feed them.

  The partners dragged their spurs across clean cement through the front door to see how much of the work had been finished. The kitchen and a big room beside it were completed. Two cots in the room were made up with sheets, pillows, and blankets. A washstand, washbowl, pitcher of water, and an old mirror were set up between the cots.

  Che Che’s wife Juanita came to the door to say hello and tell the partners their supper would be ready soon. While she prepared scrambled eggs and fried jerky, white ranch cheese, fried beans, flour tortillas, and coffee, Che Che brought glasses and poured them full of lechuguilla, the mezcal of the region, from a five-gallon demijohn.

  Kane and Vogel recounted their visit to La Golondrina for Martinillo. They wanted him to know about the horse race, Lupino’s stipulation that nobody spy on the training of his horse, and the fight between Kane and Rafa Lupino. Kane told Martinillo that he wanted Marco Antonio to train Gato for the race.

  Juanita served their supper and Che Che brought the three men ice-cold bottles of Pacifico beer. "I tried to get Superior beer, because I know how much you like it," Che Che said. "But nobody in Rio Alamos has it anymore."

  "This is fine," Juan Vogel said. "All our old-time friends and companions in adventure have begun to disappear, even the beer. We have to make new ones, or do without and miss them. It’s the pain of survival that old geezers sooner or later are bound to feel."