The Brave Cowboy

by Edward Abbey

  A different voice, mild and clerical, replied: “Lieutenant Cole speaking. The helicopter will be there in twenty minutes, sir. General Desalius wishes you ‘good hunting!’ Over and out.”

  Johnson set down the microphone, smiling faintly; he scratched his ribs. The operator grinned happily at him. “A character, that General, huh Morey?” The operator’s eyes were shining. “Sounds like Almighty God Himself, don’t he? Huh? Makes a man wonder if maybe he shouldna gone to church this morning.” The operator stared blankly at the bank of the arroyo, smiling, then looked at Johnson again. “Does he look as blowed-up as he sounds?” Johnson was silent. “Do you think he does, Morey?”

  “Who?”

  “This General guy.”

  “Couldn’t say,” Johnson answered, after a moment’s hesitation. “I don’t know the man.” He gazed at his fingernails, then started to clean them with the small blade of his penknife.

  “I never heard nobody like that before,” the operator said. “Like God Almighty Himself…”

  Johnson spat into the sand and scraped at his fingernails. Lapsing into a sullen abstraction, he began to brood over things: prestige, loneliness, money and status, flight, boredom…

  “What do we do now, Morey?”

  The sun gulped and glimmered above them—an unknown object at ten o’clock. Far beyond the sun three jet planes, beautiful and vicious, scored the violet sky with long silver vapor trails; they were nearly gone before they were heard. They passed, and in the wake of their passing, as if disturbed by the remote explosions, the leaves of the cottonwoods trembled on their delicately-sprung stems, shedding wisps of pale coma. Up in the canyon the mockingbird called again; then a wild dove, alone and distant, intoned a few solemn notes, and was silent; while nearby, from among the junipers above the spring, a convocation of locusts added a sustained overtone to the stillness with their sullen, monotonous, interminable vibrations.

  “Huh, Morey…?”

  “What?”

  “What do we do now?”

  “We wait.”

  At their backs the mountain rose, forsaken and naked and sheer, an incalculable mass and shape of undetermined significance, a great petrified god towering over the two men on their simple machine, and over the three cottonwoods and the eye of the spring and the willows and over the subsiding ruin of stone, clay and pine that had once been the home of a man named Brown.

  They waited twenty-two minutes and then the helicopter appeared, abruptly, surprisingly near, and so close to the ground as to make them involuntarily lower their heads. A fantastic machine, gay and sprightly, a mechanical dragonfly with whirring roaring wings and spinning rotor that danced lightly on the air at an easy roping distance above their heads.

  “Get to the radio,” Johnson said. He could see faces pressed to the windows and grinning down at him—three men, one with the muzzle of a rifle showing near his chin. One of them, the pilot, waved at him. The machine hovered so near that he could easily read its markings: USAF “RESCUE”, Model H-19B, AF Serial 53–7434. “You got em yet?” he shouted at the radio operator.

  “Yes, but they’re so close I can hardly hear them.”

  “Give me that mike.” Johnson wrapped his hand around it and spoke: “Ground to helicopter. This is Sheriff Johnson speaking. Can you hear me? Over.” He saw the pilot grinning at him, nodding, while dust swirled through the air and the roar of the engine drowned out all other sounds.

  “They hear you,” the operator was shouting at him, earphones in place. “They hear you, Morey.”

  “All right,” he growled. He continued: “Johnson to helicopter. If you boys want to help us out here’s what I’d like you to do: cruise up and down Bear Canyon—that’s the big canyon to the south of us—and keep an eye out for a lone man on foot or leading or riding a horse. If you don’t see anything in Bear Canyon, hop over the ridge and scout the next canyon south. We’re pretty sure this man we’re looking for is in one of those two canyons. He seems to be headed south, although he might try to climb up to the rim. As soon as you see something let me know. Over.”

  The speaker crackled out an answer, while Johnson leaned close to it with one ear, plugging the other with a finger. “…. to Sheriff Johnson. Pilot to Sheriff Johnson. We got your message, sir. If we find the man do you want us to drop down and pick him up? Over.”

  Johnson squeezed his nose. “Johnson to helicopter: you can try to if you want to,” he said into the microphone. “I don’t know that you’re likely to find a place big enough to set that machine down on, though. If you find this fella and can’t land just stay with him till we can get there. Okay? Over.”

  “Pilot to Sheriff Johnson. We’ll get him. We can pick him out of the top of a tree if we want to. Here we go. Over and out.”

  The helicopter banked and roared away, shining in the sunlight and chasing its shadow over the rocks and foothills. Johnson watched it diminish and then disappear into the mouth of Bear Canyon, the sound of its engine fading out at the same time, cut off by the intervening ridge.

  Johnson sat down again on the fender of the jeep. He searched through his pockets for chewing gum but could not find any. He scratched his crotch idly, without real interest, and stared up at the mountain. “Oughta hear something from those boys,” he muttered.

  “Huh, Morey?” The operator pushed up one of his earphones. “What’d you say?” He waited for a minute, getting no answer. “Looks like we’ll be goin home real soon,” he ventured to say, “Don’t you think so, Morey?” No reply. “What with the helicopter and that Indian—what’s his name?—and two boys up on the rim and all. Don’t you think so? I don’t see how he can get away now.” The radio operator picked some dirt from his nose, looked at it with habitual affection, then got rid of it—somewhere. “What I’d do if I was that Burns guy,” he said, “I’d just give up when I heard that helicopter comin after me. I’d give up right on the spot and save everybody a lot of trouble. Then we could leave this—” The operator looked around at the sun-splashed cottonwoods trembling with golden light, at the twisted junipers and tall spears of yucca on the slopes, at the blue rock beyond the spring, at the mountain and immaculate sky roaring above him. “—This godawful stinkin place. Huh, Morey? We could all go home.”

  Johnson raised himself from the jeep’s fender, fingering his ears as if in pain, and started walking slowly away, toward the trees and the spring.

  “Where you goin, Morey?”

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” he said. “Jus want to…” He let the sentence die in his mouth, and the thought with it. He walked through the cool shade under the trees, over the grass and clashing dead leaves to the spring. The cicada went silent. He looked down at the little pool of water, the size of a bird bath, with its coronal of hovering gnats. He knelt down and put his face close to the water—a vague reflection of himself, dark and wavering, with the hollow eyesockets of statuary, came staring up to meet him; he looked through himself and saw the slight stirring of white sand on the bottom of the pool that revealed where the water welled up from below. As he watched, a miniature crayfish, pallid, silt-covered, slid backward across the sand under the water and merged with the pebbles and algae on the other side. Johnson stirred the pool gently with his forefinger, dispersing the particles of dust and insects that floated on its surface, put his mouth to it and drank. The water was cool, not cold, and sweet with a faint piney flavor.

  He raised his head and wiped his dripping chin. He half-expected to hear a call from the radio operator, but there was none. Above him the trees rustled in a sigh of wind, the sound of their leaves like the tinkle of gold foil; a locust resumed, tentatively, its shrill keening. Johnson remained for several minutes on his knees before the spring and the blue-veined altar of rock behind it, listening, scarcely thinking, surrendering himself to strange and archaic sensations; he remembered his childhood, forty years gone, and a dim sweet exquisite sorrow passed like a cloud over his mind.

  The reed quivered before
his eyes. He rubbed his nose, looked sheepishly and furtively over his shoulder, then struggled up to a standing position. No one had seen him; he tramped back through the fallen leaves to the jeep. “What’s going on?” he said to the operator, who was listening at the radio, earphones in place. He reached for the speaker switch and found it already on: a dull unintelligible murmur issued from the speaker’s mouth. “The trackers?” he said.

  The operator nodded, adjusting a knob on the receiver. His lips moved, forming words in silent repetition of what he heard. He flipped a switch and looked up at Johnson. “It’s them,” he said. “He says they’re follerin a trail but it’s a mighty poor one and the going’s pretty slow. He wants to know if they should come down.”

  “Have they crossed the ridge into Bear Canyon?”

  “Yeah. They saw the helicopter a minute ago.”

  “Tell them to keep at it.”

  The operator relayed the order into the microphone, then switched off the transmitter.

  “No word from Glynn?” Johnson said. “No word from the helicopter?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You’d think we were chasing a ghost,” Johnson growled. “An invisible cowboy with an invisible horse.” He scratched at his neck, squinting one eye, a grimace that lifted a corner of his upper Up in what looked like a silent snarl. “How about that other fella? I supposed he’s dead too?”

  “Haven’t heard from him yet, Morey.”

  “For two bits I’d call the whole thing off.” He muttered to himself for a few minutes. “Have you heard from the State Police? Are they gonna help us or not?”

  “They’ve got two patrol cars on Scissors Canyon and they’re sending the airplane as soon as they can. That’s what they said an hour ago.”

  Johnson scowled and scratched and thought. After a while he said: “Let’s get this jeep out of this goddamned arroyo. I have the feeling we’re getting left behind.” He climbed into the seat and started the engine; the operator hooked up and secured his equipment and got in beside him. Johnson ground into gear, backed the jeep into the north bank, gunned the engine and roared straight toward the south bank of the arroyo, which rose up from the sand at an angle of about fifty degrees. The front end hit the slope, jolted upward, all four wheels churning in the sand; the jeep climbed halfway up the bank and then hung there, wheels spinning, engine howling, the entire chassis quivering. Johnson backed down to the bottom and made a second try, this time attempting to crawl rather than race up the bank, but the jeep would not do it.

  “Get out and push,” he said to the radio operator, who stared at him in alarm. Johnson smiled to show that he was joking. He turned the jeep around and drove back down the arroyo until he came to a place where tributary erosion and crumbling banks made an ascent possible. Once out of the arroyo he drove southeast, following the old trail road that led toward Bear Canyon.

  After some fifteen or twenty minutes of grinding around boulders, in and out of ravines and over the rocky little hills, they came to a wide draw, thick with greasewood and cane cactus, which led up and far back into the heart of the foothills. A fence with a barbed wire gate blocked their way; Johnson stopped, idling the motor, while the operator climbed out, lifted the wire loops from the end stake and dragged the gate to one side. Johnson drove through, passing a small yellow metal sign, pockmarked with old bullet holes, which said: UNITED STATES GAME REFUGE, DEPT. OF THE INTERIOR. The operator closed the gate and got back in the jeep and they drove on, following the dim tracks in the sand and stone through acres of greasewood, huge thriving shrubs of a silvery green, their tasseled stalks heavy with seed. The road climbed steadily, leaving the greasewood behind and entering a zone dominated by cactus—cholla, yucca, prickly pear, and beyond that into the region of junipers and giant boulders, where the sides of the draw closed in to make a canyon. Finally they saw the tan patrol car ahead, rear wheels sunk in the sand, churned around it and saw another patrol car, also from the Sheriff’s Department, and two private cars nearby, on which half a dozen armed men were sitting and talking. Beer cans glinted in the hot sunshine, beer cans and rifle barrels.

  Johnson drove roughly up, the engine whining in low gear, stopped and got out, while the cloud of dust he had raised drifted over him and the jeep and the men waiting there. He knew none of them; some of the faces were vaguely familiar but he knew no names. They watched him, lowering their beer cans. “What the be-jesus is this?” Johnson said. “What’re you fellas doing here?”

  “Hi, Morey,” one of them said, a little man with a quick easy grin and an Army .45 holstered on his hip. “We came out here to hep ya. We’re deputies. Hernandez deputized us. We’re gonna hep ya catch this here jailbreakin Red.”

  “Is that right?” Johnson said; he scratched at his ribs. “Where’s Hernandez?” He glanced at the other County car. “Is he here?”

  “Him and Gutierrez is up in there somewhere,” the little man said, grinning and jerking a thumb back over his shoulder toward the mountain.

  Johnson frowned. He looked up the canyon, saw the red cliffs, small stands of jackpine, the knife-edge north ridge, a circling hawk, but no hint of living men. Then he heard the drone of rotors and saw something slender and silvery turn and flash in the sunlight, far up on mountainside, floating in space. He turned back to the men leaning against the cars; they were watching him. “You boys might as well go home,” he said, “you’re not doing anybody any good out here. I don’t know what’s the matter with Hernandez.”

  “We’re all set to go, Morey,” the little man said. “Join in, I mean. We was just havin a beer before startin—a hot day.”

  “That’s right,” one of the other men said. “You tell us where to go, Morey, and we’ll round up this jail-breaker before you know it.”

  “Would you like a beer, Morey?”

  “I want you all to go home,” Johnson said. “There’s altogether too many men wanderin around with guns out here now. Worse than the first day of deer season. You boys just better go home.” The men stared at him, making no move. “I mean it: clear out.”

  “Hey, Morey,” the radio operator called; “come here!”

  The little man grinned. “You can’t order us around like that, Morey. We got as much right here as you do.”

  “Hey, Morey!”

  “I’ll give you five minutes to get in your cars and get out of sight,” Johnson said. “If you’re still here by then I’ll arrest all of you for interfering with and hindering an officer of the law in the course of his duty.” He pulled out his pocket watch, looked at it—it had run down hours ago—and put it back in his pocket. He turned his back to the men and walked to the jeep. The radio operator was busy, receiving a message. He saw Johnson coming and flipped the speaker switch.

  “We got him, we got him,” said the excited voice of the helicopter pilot, rasping a little through the radio mechanism. “He’s right below us. A man with a black hat leading a horse. Right? He doesn’t know what to do. He’s got a guitar on his back. He’s trying to hide in the rocks.” The pilot sounded extraordinarily excited, like a beagle flushing a rabbit. “He can’t get away, the poor bastard.” There was a long pause; Johnson started up the canyon and saw the helicopter, a tiny speck of silver, hovering in one place on the face of the mountain, up among the tall pines and the granite cliffs. The voice of the pilot again: “Can’t land here, there’s not room for the prop, but we’re lowering a rope ladder. We’ll have him in a minute. One of the boys will climb down and get him.” Another pause, not so prolonged. “Say—!” The pilot sounded a little puzzled; Johnson could hear nothing for several seconds. “Somebody is shooting at us!” the pilot said. “I believe—yes, this guy is shooting at us, Sheriff. He’s shooting at the prop. What’ll we do?” Sheriff Johnson—? Hey!”

  Johnson spoke sharply into the microphone. “Shoot back at him. Keep him covered. For godsake don’t let him get away now! Over.”

  The voice of the pilot, excited and astonished: “He won’t stand st
ill—he’s running through the…” The voice faded out for a few seconds, then came back. “We can’t see him, Sheriff; he’s crawled under a jumble of rocks. We can see his horse; shall we shoot the horse? Sheriff? Over.”

  Johnson swore. “Don’t be a damn fool. Just keep him holed up until we can get there. Don’t take any chances. I didn’t think he would—look: can’t you get out of his line of fire, let down one of your men, then get back over him? Over.”

  The pilot answered at once: “That’s what we’re doing, Sheriff.” Another stretch of silence. “Just a minute.” Johnson and the operator looked up the canyon and saw the helicopter dropping slowly down across the face of the mountain, gleaming like a fish in the brilliant light. They heard the pilot again: “Something’s wrong—the tail rotor. What the hell?” He sounded extremely annoyed. The helicopter continued to sink through the air, falling slowly down, down, down, twisting like a dead leaf. “We seem to be out of control; the tail rotor has been damaged. Damn it anyway…” They could hear the pilot muttering and swearing. “We’re going to hit hard, Sheriff. Hold on a minute, please.” Johnson and the radio operator and the men by the cars all stared up the canyon, watching the helicopter drift down through space, slanting toward the steep north wall of the canyon. They saw it hit a pine tree—dust, bark, and dead limbs exploding in all directions—and then hang for a moment, nose down, the big main rotor still turning, winking light; as they watched the gleaming machine eased down, rolled over and landed belly-up on the rocks. Seconds later came the sound of the crash, a barrage of smashing wood and rolling rocks and clattering, crumpling metal.