The Brave Cowboy

by Edward Abbey

  “There’s always one way or another,” Burns said. Carefully he set his black hat on his head. “Well, I sure hate to leave this very entertaining party…”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “I’m coming too,” the boy said.

  He laughed at them. “Not noways you ain’t. Neither one of you. No sir.” He looked around the kitchen. “Got a hacksaw?”

  “If you can manage to see him today then I can too,” she said.

  “I doubt that. I doubt that very much. Got a good hacksaw?”

  “I don’t see why I can’t go with you.”

  “I can. How about a file, then?”

  “What are you talking about?” She stared at him. “Jack—just how do you expect to see him?”

  “Me?” He gaped stupidly at her, rubbing his dark bristling chin. “Doggone, I forgot to shave.”

  “Jack, you be careful. If you get in trouble you’ll just have to stay there, I won’t get you out.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Sure.” He blinked at her, then walked slowly to the corner of the kitchen where he had stowed some of his gear—the rifle, the saddlebags, bedroll, dirty clothes. He rummaged through one of the saddlebags, then came back to her with a slim canvas bandoleer, its loops filled with cartridges. “Take this,” he said, handing it to her.

  She took it and her hands dropped under the unexpected weight. She said: “What on earth am I supposed to do with these? I don’t want to shoot anybody. I don’t think I do, at least.”

  “Look,” he said. He unzipped a long pocket on the inside of the belt, exposing a packet of rich green Federal currency. “In case somethin goes wrong, I want you to use this dinero.”

  “Use it? What for?” Fascinated, she peeked at the corners of the bills. They seemed to be all ten’s and twenties. “Jack—did you—?” She let the question hang fire.

  Her eager curiosity made him smile. “No… I’m ashamed to say I worked for every bit of it; that’s my wages for six months in a sheep camp you’re lookin’ at so hard.”

  “But what do you want me to do with all this?” she said.

  “You’ll think of somethin if you get hungry enough.”

  She gazed at the money for a long moment; he reached out and discreetly zipped the pocket shut “Don’t give me a hard time,” he said. “There ain’t as much there as it looks, anyhow. You keep it for me and use whatever you need.”

  She looked up at him. “This is very kind of you, Jack. But I don’t think I’ll need it. I expect to find work.”

  “That’s all right, you keep it for me just the same. I’m afraid I’ll lose the dang stuff if I tote it around.”

  “You could put it in a bank.”

  “Banks? Don’t trust em—bunch of crooks.” He turned toward the door. “I’m leavin your car here.” The woman and the boy stared at him; he smiled. “I’ll be back in a little while.” He looked at the boy. “Seth, if I’m not back in the mornin you give my mare a half bale of alfalfa and a peck of feed. Will you do that for me?”

  The boy nodded, licking at his spoonful of ice cream.

  “Wait a minute,” Jerry said. She ran into the other room, returned with a sealed envelope in her hand. “Look,” she said, “if you do see Paul—and God only knows how you plan to do it—anyway, if you do see him, give him this letter. Okay?”

  “I sure will,” he said, and dropped the letter down inside his shirt. “Well…” They stared at each other. “… Reckon I’ll go now.”

  Jerry smiled uncertainly. She said: “You be careful, Jack.”

  “I’ll be careful.” He gave them a little wave, like a half-salute, and went out, closing the door.

  Jerry listened to his steps crossing the back porch, fading away over the hard baked mud of the backyard and down the lane to the road. She stood quite still, listening, the heavy bandoleer in her hands, and when she could no longer hear him she went to the window. He had already reached the road; she watched him striding along in the dust through the scalding glare of the sun: black hat, white shirt, shadowed face, dark lean legs moving steadily like a pair of calipers out for a walk. He looks better on a horse, she thought, letting the bandoleer rest on the sill; her fingers caressed the cool brass shells of .32 caliber cartridges.

  The boy watched her, saying nothing, the secret in his eyes.

  When Burns was gone from sight she went to the cupboard and put the bandoleer deep in the back of the top shelf. Then she went to the shelf above the stove to see how much the bread had risen.

  Joplin, Mo. 3

  ART HINTON, TRUCKDRIVER, PULLED HIS TRACTOR-trailer off 66 and onto the gravel lot of the Benson steakhouse. He was not hungry; he needed some coffee to keep his eyelids propped open. This was late in the afternoon, with the sun a vague butter-colored disc floating down through a vapory sky over the green damp hills of Missouri. He had come from St. Louis that day and had a long way to go.

  When he stepped down from the cab he heard a chorale of crickets, treefrogs, bullfrogs, katydids and harvest flies singing, shrilling, screaming at the world with the elemental and impregnable monotony of surf. He heard them, flipped a cigarette butt toward the field beyond the parkinglot and stepped inside the chrome-plated neonized redbrick restaurant. What he wanted was peace, order, and the reassurance of human voices. Behind him his truck waited, engine idling, one among six similar diesel monsters parked at the far edge of the lot. Hinton’s trailer, like most of the others, was brightly painted and lettered. His bore the following superscription in huge red letters against a background of gleaming aluminum:

  ANOTHER LOAD OF ACME BATHROOM

  FIXTURES!

  AMERICA BUILDS FOR TOMORROW!

  Inside the cafe things were not so bad. The air was cool, conditioned for human consumption and reconsumption by tireless electrical engines pumping ammonia through coils of copper tubing. The light was soft and indirect, and even the somewhat rambunctious music from the jukebox was muted to a comfortable degree by the cork-sheathed walls, the heavy cumulus of cigarette smoke, the fragrant gases from the kitchen, the drone of conversation, the general gloom. Hinton sat down on a red simulated-leather stool at the counter, leaned on his elbows and studied the menu. Near him sat other drivers, some of them talking, some of them eating; behind him at the tables and in the booths sat the insurance salesmen in their impressive suits, lower class tourists with their families, and pleasant young men probably working for the CSI or FBI or SSC or AEC or CIA or CCI.

  When the waitress came, a girl pretty and clean in her starched uniform, he ordered black coffee, coconut cream pie, and a glass of milk. A habit of his, coffee and milk together: the latter seemed to him to complement the destructive erosion of the other. The pie was placed before him in a few moments; he ate it slowly, drinking the milk with it, saving the coffee for last. He listened without genuine interest to the conversations around him:

  Twenty cents a mile is ridikalus, I tole him, abslootly ridikalus. What did they have on him? The usual stuff. Well hell it all depends; if you’re haulin from St. Louie to L.A. it’s too much, sure, but from St. Louie to say Tulsa—it might pay. Just might. Not very much: a lot seems to have been well covered up. Robbie, don’t spill your food on the floor. Please Robbie. Let him alone Martha. People like him really intrigue me, you know, really intrigue me. Let him alone, Martha, what the devil does it matter now? How do they dream of getting away with talk like that? Well I don’t care; I still say it’s ridikalus. You might be right.

  He sighed, finished his pie and began sipping at the coffee. A good coffee, hot, black, rich with the authentic flavor of the bean, but his enjoyment was modest, almost perfunctory: his palate scalded and corroded by tankcars of boiling lunchroom brew, bitter and brackish, and by vats of cheap whisky, and rotted by tons of soft sweet mediocre food, he had forgotten the delight of hunger, the pleasures of thirst. Forgotten, though he must have known them; he looked across the counter at his image sunk in glass, sipping coffee, staring directly at
him from above the glasses, Heinz soups, napkins, pats of butter. A small brooding face foreshortened by time and inbreeding, a middleaged hillbilly looking at him, reflecting his natural features, his mood, his thoughts.

  —Of weariness, boredom, of a path winding through laurel and under pines toward home, the dark cabin on the mountainside with its shingle roof and long front verandah where at this very moment, probably, his father and younger brother were sitting, smoking, not talking, watching the lights come on far below in the valley of the Shenandoah.

  The lower eyelid of his left eye quivered, jerked again when he touched it He made a nervous grimace at himself in the mirror, left a quarter for the waitress, picked up the check and walked toward the cashier in her little fortress of glass, tin, cigarettes, candy, cigars and pocket packages of Kleenex. He gave the woman the slip of paper without looking at it, or at her.

  “Forty cents, please.”

  He gave the woman a dollar bill. “You have any Dexadrine?”

  “Yes sir.” She leaned under the counter, opened a drawer, came back up and set a small metal box on the glass between them. “That will be forty—fifty—ninety cents all together. Ninety from a dollar.” She rang the cash register and gave him a dime. “Haven’t you been here before, trucker?”

  He looked at her now, picking up his change from the rubber villi on the glass. “Yes,” he said; “a few times.” He was certain he had never seen the woman before. She was not very attractive. “I guess I’d like one of those chocolate bars, too.” He put the dime back on the pad.

  “I thought I seen you in here before.” She slid open the door of the glass case and reached inside. “Which kind?”

  “Any kind, I don’t care. They all taste the same.”

  “I never forget a face,” she said. She gave him a Hershey bar, and after recording the sale, a nickel. “Where are you heading for this time?”

  “Duke City.”

  “Duke City, New Mexico?” The woman smiled at him. She was short, dark, and about forty years old; she had a large red wen on her jaw.

  “Yes,” he said. He picked up the candy and the nickel and glanced toward the door.

  “They say Duke City is a nice town.”

  “I guess so. About the same as any other.” He started to leave.”

  “Come back again.”

  “Sure.” He opened the door and went out.

  The sky had cleared a little and the sun seemed much lower now, spinning like a gold coin on the rim of the world: the restaurant, the parked trucks and cars, the beech trees, the fallow fields on the other side of the parkinglot, the cement highway, the slabs and blocks of Joplin to the east, the truckdriver Hinton, everything, everything visible, was washed and blurred and mesmerized by an overwhelming radiance the color of new honey. Hinton walked blindly toward his truck, unwrapping his candybar, while the cicada in the field and the frogs in the swampy ditch sang hosannas to the sky.

  PART TWO

  The Prisoner

  “There was a Prisoner, dreaming of Liberty…”

  4

  JACK-SON!

  Yay!

  Have you seen my ole gray mule?

  That I has not.

  Has somebody here seen my gray mule? Six feet high and bucks like a fool; likes gingerbread cookies and pampas grass, has a notch in his ear and a star up his ass. Now if you done seen my ole gray mule, I’m tellin you straight don’t be a damn fool; but show me where he is and sure as I’m alive, you’ll get a pot of honey from the ole beehive.

  Greene, ain’t you never gonna pipe down?

  Never!

  You better.

  Never!

  Timothy, you got the makins?

  I got a half sack Bull Durham and not a single goddamn paper.

  I got a paper.

  It’s a deal, son. Save that light, Hoskins, we got two hot babies comin up. Steady boy and watch her roll, save that tobacco while I get the coal.

  Thanks, Timothy.

  How long you in for, boy?

  Thirty days flat.

  Vaggin, pimpin, or hustlin?

  Went through a red light with my eyes shut. Judge called it reckless driving.

  Mighty reckless drivin. Now tell me the truth, boy.

  I lifted a knife at Monkey Ward’s.

  Ah hah. You tried to. Good knife?

  Seven ninety-five plus tax.

  Good, good, son. You shrewd like a chicken.

  Butt, Timothy?

  Butt me no butts. Already spoken for. Hoskins gets it. Rev’rend Hoskins on his Flyin Machine, waitin for Peter to open the door, got hog drunk and hit the floor.

  Lay off it, Greene.

  Never!

  I’m tellin you.

  Never!

  Paul Bondi smiled as he listened, his hands clasped under his head, his body stretched out at full length on his steel bunk. A gray Navy blanket, a pad and a steel bunk for tonight. He lay watching the stripes of sunlight on the steel ceiling, listening to the others but thinking his own thoughts:

  These fellows have something, he thought, have something which I lack. The vital impulse, along with their lice and bad-smelling itches and wino-red eyeballs. They—

  Someone flushed a toilet; the powerful gasping explosion of water sent a wave of reverberations through the steel walls over the cement floor; the entire plumbing system strained and vibrated with the detonating ferocity of a heavy machinegun. Bondi could feel as well as hear the clangor and clamor of outraged steel; the vibrations passed in sine curves through his skull, vertebrae and the bones of his legs.

  That plumbing, he thought—like a siege, jazzy and vigorous. Suction strong enough to drown a man. Why? Must be a reason. A reason for everything in the county jail. County jail is a thoroughly rational institution, is it not? What could ever take its place?

  Crazy, man!

  Crazy is right. See that ole cat there, steppin on his tongue, belly bulgin with beans—?

  Fuller’n a tick—

  That’s right, fuller’n a tick. Ole Hoskins, thass who; ole black-balled sonsabitch. Hoskins!

  Ho?

  Les hear tell about the man what ate electric eels to give the girls a charge.

  Go long, man. You divin for Hell, talk like dat.

  Rev’rend Hoskins is now gonna say a prayer for us all, poor sorry sinners like we is.

  My butt, Timothy?

  Take it and keep it, friend, or pass it on, as you please.

  Thanks, Timothy. You can have my oatmeal in the morning.

  Keep it, friend, I beg you.

  Character or depravity, what does it matter? Under the aspect of eternity, so to speak? Now you’re talking like an old balding philosopher, tovarish. Watch that stuff. Keep it screened out. Serenity is for the gods—not becoming in a mortal. Better to be partisan and passionate on this earth; be plenty objective enough when dead.

  Again the explosion of a flushing toilet and the barrage of anguish from the pipes; through bone and marrow the vibrations jittered, grinding down delicacy, grace, tact, the arts of sense and human concord. Forty men locked, barred and sealed in a cage of steel and cement. Forty bellies semi-bloated with gas, intestines packed with the residue of half-digested pinto beans. Long conversations lost in the shuddering roar and rattle of plumbing.

  Sic transit gloria mundi, he thought.

  Think we’ll get a break tomorrow?

  Quien sabe, cuate?

  Well we should. They got men sleepin on the floor downstairs. Hate to think what she’ll be like come Saturday night.

  Who said Saturday night is the lonesomest night?

  They got worse jails. Ever been in the one at Juarez?

  Ho, Jackson! Gimme light, man, light.

  Oh I’m walkin to the river, gonna jump in, I can’t float and I can’t swim, but I’m an easy man… to drown. Cause my baby done leave me, yes my baby done leave me down. So I’m walkin to the river, gonna jump in and drown. And drown. And drown.

  Flush that noise! Pass
it on to Texas!

  Go fly a kite on the moon, you slew-balled old fart.

  Chinga madre! Eh, cabron!

  You shut up, Greene.

  Never!

  I said shut up.

  Never!

  Who got a match?

  I ain’t got a match. Ain’t nobody got a match. What you want a match for, man?

  Gimme a match before I spit in your eye.

  Sure, sure. Don’t get mad.

  Don’t get mad, he says. Don’t get mad, the man says.

  When they gonna let me outa here? Why don’t the Judge gimme a break? I ain’t no bad boy; just a happy little wino.

  You’ll get a break all right—right over that thick dumb empty halfbreed skull of yours.

  Ah, chinga tu…

  Greene?

  Never!

  Where’s that little book I give you?

  Ain’t here, man. All gone, man. I give it to that smooth cat in Cell Number Three. Now that’s for a fact man.

  Well I want it back.

  Kiss it goodby, friend. Give it a wave, cuate. Don’t cry.

  Goddamnit, Greene.

  Never!

  Greene—

  Never!

  Now defiance is all very well (said Bondi to himself: the last thread of sunlight had vanished from the steel ceiling) and very sweet, an ideal tonic for the delectation of the soul. Pure naked sheer defiance—defiance for the sake of defiance—sweet and precious as liberty itself. The act of liberty. Timothy Greene and his perpetual thundering Never. But is there a blind edge to it? Should be tempered, no doubt, with good manners. Also, it might be enslaving. Always defiant, a man would be mad, would have destroyed his power of choice. And the power of choice—that is what I am here for.

  What are you in for, Rev’rend, anyway?

  Me, son? My body’s here but the spirit’s free as a bluebird.