The Brave Cowboy

by Edward Abbey

  The qualities of light and space deceived her, baffled her—she felt that the figure of man and horse, now one, might recede from her, shrink in magnitude forever and yet not completely and finally disappear—if only she had the power to prevent it. And in that momentary hallucination she felt that it was suddenly terribly important that she stop them—as if the limits of her vision were an abstract, impossible barrier dividing reality from nothingness.

  The hallucination passed. She peered into the gloom of the dawn and saw nothing but shadows. The cowboy was gone.

  From a cottonwood tree near the ditch came the whirring call of a grouse hen, the cawing of approaching crows. Jerry shivered, urged her cold aching limbs into motion and returned to the kitchen. She had water to carry, she remembered, a breakfast to make ready for Seth, lunches to pack, dishes to wash, a job in the city at nine o’clock—no end of things to do.

  Oklahoma City, Okla. 12

  HINTON STOPPED AT A DIESEL STATION ON THE western outskirts of the city to refuel He gave his credit card to the station operator and then walked to the next-door diner—an aluminum-sheeted neon-lighted potted-pine establishment specializing in truckdrivers’ disorders—for an attempt at breakfast.

  Six-thirty in the morning: he closed his eyes against the swirling dust that blew along the highway, stinging his face with particles of sand. He felt bad, anyway: his stomach was raw, empty, completely wrung-out, the muscles stiff and sore from last night’s struggle with nausea; his throat was burning and strained; his mouth—he would have preferred not to think of that at all—was dry, his tongue shriveled, coated with unfamiliar chemicals. He tried not to think of it; he went inside and sat down in a booth by the windows.

  The wind-driven sand scratched at the glass as Hinton stared gloomily out, watching the trucks roll by on the road: a train of trucks, westbound, roaring past in the dusty-yellow light of early morning, a racing caravan that seemed to have no end. He speculated idly on the immense expenditure of human labor represented by that flight of tin and cardboard and plastic and men, and groaned inwardly; dejection overcame him—he was sick of the business, sick of his sickness. He opened the menu and tried to imagine a breakfast honest and homely enough for his tired wracked cowering stomach.

  “Yes, sir,” the waitress said, bending toward him slightly in her white morning-fresh uniform, a tender and all-forgiving smile (it seemed to him) on her face, a thoughtful regard in her young eyes—the nurse and her first patient.

  “Hello,” he said. For the first time since leaving St. Louis, two days before he felt a reawakening of his essential humanity, an interest—in the case of this girl not merely sexual—in another human being. He found himself looking at a face that did not instantly depress him, that did not turn his own into a sour, sullen reflection of his jangled entrails.

  “What would you like?” the girl said. Her hair was glossy and long, the color of mellow applejack, and in her eyes was a dance and glister of light that he had not seen for—how long?—six years? “Would you like some fruit juice?” she said; her teeth were so fine as to be almost translucent. “We have fresh orange juice, sir; I made it myself just a few minutes ago.”

  “I used to know a girl like you,” Hinton said; “— back in Virginia.”

  “My folks come from Indiana, sir.”

  “You don’t have to call me ‘sir’.”

  “You don’t look like a sir,” she said, smiling.

  “I’m not.” He paused, and looked down at the table-top: there lay his two hands—wide, short-fingered, a bit soft in the palms, fingernails fairly clean. “I’ll have the orange juice,” he said.

  “Yes sir.” She recorded this request on her little green pad—a novice, he thought. New: she won’t always be as green and beautiful as she is now—not for long. “What else, sir?” she said.

  He sighed and glanced dutifully over the menu. A girl like this, he was thinking, sweet as a wild haw— she must have grown up in the open. Won’t last long in this hothouse. He stared at the menu. “I’ll have sausage and eggs,” he said. But instantly his stomach recoiled before the provocative image of a fried egg. “Change that,” he said. The girl scribbled, crossed out, erased. “Make it sausage and wheatcakes. Do you have real maple syrup here?” he said.”

  “Yes sir.” She hesitated. “I think we do.”

  “The kind that comes out of maple trees?”

  “I think so, sir.” She looked genuinely concerned, biting her lip and glancing toward the kitchen. “I’ll make sure,” she said, starting off.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. She stopped. “Don’t worry about it; just bring me whatever you have. I trust you.”

  “Yes sir.” She smiled again, blushing faintly. He admired, from his remote isolation, the utility and structural delicacy of her ears: receptacle for lies. “Are you all right, sir?” she said, looking closely at him.

  “What?” His left eyelid was twitching again; he rubbed it, and the other eye too. “I’m all right,” he said. “I feel fine.”

  “Yes sir.” She stood there for a moment, watching him; he looked at her and he thought he knew what she was thinking: What a tired, sad, ugly old man he is. But I’m only thirty-four, he wanted to say. He wanted to say: I have bad dreams and there’s something wrong with my insides but I come from a good mountain family. But of course he said nothing, and after this moment of questioning and wondering the girl turned away from him and went to order his breakfast.

  Afterwards, while she watched him from behind the counter, he tried to eat. He drank the orange juice without difficulty and ate most of the sausage—it was not good but was good enough, despite the haste and lack of pride involved in the making of it—and he even started on the wheatcakes. He wanted very much to eat everything before him, knowing that the girl was there not far away and watching him with some concern. She had had no hand in the cooking, being merely a waitress; he knew that well enough but still felt an urgent if obscure obligation to eat all that she had borne to him, as if it were a moral responsibility.

  She brought him coffee and he drank that easily, pouring the fiercely hot brew down his seamed and hardened gullet without even feeling it. He nibbled some more at the wheatcakes and forced down almost the last of the sausage, and then surrendered and got ready to leave. He looked at the bill she had left on the table: his breakfast came to a dollar ten, including tax. He owed the girl, according to his code and calculation, an eleven-cent tip. He put a dime on the table, considered for a minute or so and then pulled his wallet out of his hip pocket and opened it. Inside was money, a fat wad of the stuff, green and gray and crackling and greasy, with its definite, peculiar odor. He leafed through this material, seeing a few ones, several fives, many tens. He removed a one-dollar bill and slipped it under his plate, then paused again, staring at the money. He put the one back in his wallet and took out a five and placed it under the dish, carefully, and then he got up and went quickly to the cash register on the counter. The cook was there waiting; Hinton looked again for girl and saw her at a booth, feet apart and firm on the floor, the upper half of her body slightly inclined toward the bald pate and crusty face of another customer. Hinton paid, picked up his change and went out without looking back.

  PART THREE

  The Sheriff

  “The Sheriff was a Proud man…”

  13

  THE BIG ROOM CONTAINED THE FOLLOWING OBJECTS: (1) On the wall, a photographic portrait of Harry S Truman, framed in plastic and shielded from the mortalizing dust by a veneer of glass; a good likeness, healthily tinted—-the blue Missouri eyes stared seriously and hopefully into the future, the pink cheeks attested to three squares a day, the pink neck swelled sedately from a clean white collar. (2) Filing cabinets, chairs, telephones, an electric fan, coat hangers and hatracks. (3) A padlocked weapons rack supporting two sawed-off shotguns, four Browning automatic rifles, four Thompson submachineguns, and two teargas guns. (4) A shortwave radio receiver-transmitter complete with operator. (
5) A big ugly desk with papers, boxes, calendars, two telephones, an ivory donkey, blotter, ink, pens, rocks, coffeestains, fingerprints and boot scratches. (6) Behind the desk a big plain man, the passive sedentary relaxed two-hundred-pound corpus of Morlin Johnson, duly elected sheriff of Bernal County, New Mexico. Sheriff Johnson held an open package of chewing gum in his right hand.

  The man at the radio desk half-turned in his chair, pushed his earphones above his ears—while red and amber signal lights flickered irritably on the panel—and spoke to Sheriff Johnson: “Gutierrez says they broke out sometime between three and five-thirty this morning.”

  Johnson unwrapped a stick of gum. “When?”

  “Between three and five-thirty.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” The radio operator shrugged his shoulders. “How the hell should I know?” Then he grinned self-consciously. “Oh balls, Morey,” he said.

  Johnson placed the stick of gum between his teeth and chewed it mechanically into his mouth, like a stock ticker champing up blank tape.

  His ruminations were prolonged, sober, comfortable. “Musta been cold that early in the morning,” he said at last. He unwrapped a second stick of gum and inserted it into his chewing machine. “You took care of the routine, I guess?”

  “Yeah,” the operator said. “Gutierrez did as soon as he discovered the prisoners missing.”

  “Gutierrez,” Johnson said; “Gutierrez…” His mouth tightened after he rolled out the name. “That muscle-bound half-wit,” he muttered; he spoke to the operator again, not looking at him. “He notified the city police?”

  “Yes.”

  “The state police and the military police and the reservation police and all the rest?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay…” Johnson masticated his wad of gum. He shoved a hand down inside the front of his sagging trousers and scratched his pubic hair. “Two Navajos and a white man, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Are they all three going together?”

  “They don’t know if they are or not.”

  “Did Gutierrez question the other men in the cell?”

  “Sure; they didn’t know nothin.”

  “Gutierrez grilled them, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  Johnson growled and frowned heavily at the ivory figurine of a donkey set on his desk. The donkey was flanked on one side by a brace of telephones, on the other by an Esquire-girl calendar. He rolled the gum in his mouth and scratched his armpits. “Anybody go out for coffee yet?”

  “Glynn and Herrera went.”

  “Both of em, huh? One man to carry, one man to guard, I suppose?”

  The radio operator grinned weakly. “Well I don’t know. I guess so. I don’t know.”

  “How am I gonna keep this job when you boys carry on like that, always screwin off in the poolroom or in the cafe?”

  “Well hell, Morey,” the operator said, “don’t we all vote for you? Hasn’t my grandmother voted for you every two years since we buried her?”

  “All right,” Johnson said, “let me think. I’m trying to concentrate.” He unwrapped a third stick of gum and put it in his red mouth and then scratched the back of his neck, his scalp; he looked at the scurf under his fingernails. “What’s the story on the escaped prisoners?”

  “Right,” the operator said. He shuffled through the papers on his table. “Here we are: two Navajos, cousins, names Reed and Joe Watahomagie, address given as Tuba City, Arizona, occupation stockmen, convicted of drunk and disorderly conduct and improper approaches to white woman on a bus, Mrs. Florabel Minnebaugh, aged fifty-two. Sentenced—”

  “Menopause?”

  “Minnebaugh. Sentenced to ninety days flat, six days served before escape. Physical description: Reed W., aged thirty, five foot ten, one hundred forty-five pounds, black hair, brown eyes—”

  “Yeah, I know,” Johnson said; “Navajos. Now how about the white fella.”

  “Right. John W. Burns, no address, occupation cattle herder, convicted of drunk and disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, also being held for investigation on suspicion of draft delinquency, sentenced to ten days pending result of investigation, one day served before escape. Physical description: Age twenty-nine, six feet two, one hundred seventy pounds, black hair, gray eyes, dark complexion, nose slightly misshapen as probable result of old injury.”

  “That kind of a guy,” the sheriff said. He readjusted his bulk in the creaking swivel chair, pulled out a lower drawer in the desk and put one booted foot in it. He chewed on his ball of gum. “Draft delinquency…?” He chewed on that for a minute. “Put in a call to the FBI office. See if they’ve got a dossier cm this character.” The operator turned toward his radio panel. Johnson said: “Any of those boys have a previous record?”

  The operator checked his clipboard. “Not in this state,” he said.

  “Okay.” Johnson swung around in his chair and hoisted himself to his feet. “Go ahead with that call,” he said. “I’ll be back in a minute.” He opened a door marked PRIVATE, stepped inside, closed and locked the door behind him. He belched comfortably, rubbed his nose, unbuckled his belt, unbuttoned and lowered his trousers and sat down cm the toilet. He waited, chewing his gum, breathing through his relaxed mouth. He raised his eyes to the calendar on the wall.

  When he returned to the office he found the operator dunking a pecan roll in a cup of coffee; beside him sat Deputy Floyd Glynn in a khaki uniform, gun and badge. There was black coffee and a roll on his desk, waiting for him, and the receiver of his private, unlisted telephone lying off the hook.

  “Barker wants to talk to you,” the operator said.

  Johnson sat down, spat his wad into the wastebasket, took a sip of coffee and picked up the phone. “This is Johnson,” he said.

  The machine buzzed and clicked in his ear. “Took, Morey,” it said, “we’re all set. I’ve been down to the Federal Building this morning: the FHA is gonna back up the loan. We can go ahead right away; I’ve got three subdivisions lined up on the north side of Minolas Boulevard.” The machine paused, silent except for a dim metallic static, “Morey?” it said.

  “Yes?”

  “You’re still interested, aren’t you?”

  “Sure—I guess so. Only I don’t understand about the FHA.”

  “Listen, you dumb Swede, the FHA guarantees the loan. It’s simple: we get the money from the bank—we hire a contractor and we build—we pay off the contractor—we keep the difference between the cost and the full amount of the loan and take a trip to the Riviera.”

  “We still have to pay it all back, don’t we?”

  “Sure—we get twenty years to pay it back.”

  “Well… Where’s it come from?”

  “The rent, you dumb farmer. The tenants pay it back. The FHA fixes the rent, depending on the type of apartment, and allows so much extra a year for installments on the loan, plus a seven percent net.” Johnson made no reply; the machine said: “Look, Morey, meet me for lunch and I’ll explain it all to you. With pictures.”

  “I’m kind of busy today…”

  “That’s all right, this is important. You got to eat anyway, don’t you?”

  Johnson hesitated. “Okay. Okay—m see you then.”

  “Same place, same time?” said the machine.

  “Yeah… So long, Bob.” Johnson hung up. He drank some coffee and took a big bite from his pecan roll; the radio operator and Deputy Glynn watched him. “What’d you find out?” Johnson said, staring at the blotter on his desk, his cheeks bulging, holding the coffee mug under his chin. He set down the roll and scratched the inside of his left thigh.

  “The FBI is interested in this guy Burns,” the operator said. He picked up a notepad and read: “John W. Burns, Socorro, New Mexico.”

  “Socorro?”

  “That’s what it says here.”

  “I thought he didn’t have an address?”

  “They said Socorro.”

  “Okay, go o
n.”

  The operator read: “John W. Burns, Socorro, New Mex. Born 1920, Joplin, Missouri. Moved 1932 to residence of Henry Vogelin, stockman, R.D. #3, Socorro, New Mex. Drafted at Socorro, March 15, 1942. Served five months in U.S. Army Disciplinary Training Center, Pisa, Italy, for striking superior officer, April 22, 1944.”

  “What happened between March 1942 and April 1944?”

  “They didn’t say.” The operator continued: “Wounded in action, November 4, 1944, discharged February 10, 1945 at Fort Dix, New Jersey.”

  “What’s all that to the FBI?” Johnson said; he put his foot up on the desk drawer again.

  “How should I know?” the operator said. “They didn’t say.”

  “All right.” Johnson unwrapped a stick of chewing gum. “What else? Is that all?”

  “There’s more.” The operator read: “Admitted to State University, Duke City, New Mex., September 15, 1945. Known to have attended secret meetings of so-called Anarchist group.”

  “So-called what?”

  “So-called Anarchist group.” The operator paused.

  “What’s that?” Deputy Glynn said.

  The operator looked at Sheriff Johnson; Johnson said nothing. The operator said: “I don’t know. They’re against all government, that’s all I know.”

  “They’re worse than Communists?”

  “I guess so.”

  “They have red eyes and they throw bombs,” Sheriff Johnson said. He yawned and scratched his ribs. “Read on,” he said.

  The operator read: “In March 1946 was one of five signers of documents posted on University bulletin boards advocating so-called Civil Disobedience to Selective Service and other Federal activities. Left University in mid-term, fall of 1946. Subsequent activities and whereabouts unknown. Failed to register for Selective Service as required in September, 1948, by renewed Selective Service Act. This man is wanted for questioning by FBI,” The operator stopped, drank down the last of his coffee. “That’s all,” he said. “They weren’t too happy to hear about him getting away last night.”