by Baxter Black
Everytime I visit with him, the list of what he’s doin’ changes. A few items come off the top of the roll; some new ones are included at the bottom. But he’s always gotta lotta irons in the fire.
He’s the inspiration for that ol’ Coyote Cowboy proverb “If it takes somebody more than ten minutes to tell you what they do for a livin’, they’re probably self-unemployed!”
There’s lots of us cowboys who’ve spent our lives workin’ for the absentee ranch owner. They put clothes on our backs, feed our families, and let us do what we do best: take care of the livestock and the land. Like bosses anywhere, there’s good ones and there’s bad ones and some are a little eccentric.
STRONG WORDS
Some words are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
—FRANCIS BACON, 1561–1626
“What’s the new owner like?” I asked Roger.
“When he replaced the forty-year-old plumbing in the company house, he went to the top of our list. Plus, he understands cows and is learning the ranch. But he’s a hard charger. He’ll be flyin’ down this afternoon.”
For the visit Roger had borrowed from the local car dealer a brand-new Ford four-wheel-drive, three-seater Excursion with big tires, rhinoceros paint, and a bad attitude. When John, the tycoon, arrived with Larry, his sidekick, we all four loaded into the Excursion for a tour of the ranch. The winter snows had been heavy in northeastern New Mexico. The vast meadows and juniper covered peaks were picturesque. The snow had melted and the ground was soaked. The ranch roads were seriously muddy, and we put the Excursion to the test. Soon the side windows were partially obscured and the windshield speckled. John seemed to enjoy each pitch and yaw.
When the smell of hot antifreeze seeped into the cockpit, I thought maybe John would suggest we turn back, but my experience with entreprenurial giants, CEOs, and middle linebackers is . . . they never turn back! John was sort of a cross between Sir Edmund Hillary and Evil Knievel, maybe even a civilized Ted Turner, or like a Lexus with a front-end loader bucket.
On we went across the ranch, whiplashing back and forth and fighting for the high ground. Roger was clinging to the wheel like Captain Ahab, and John was exhorting him to stay the course. Larry debouched to open a gate, and we locked through like a towboat on the Mississippi. Our post-banging fishtail trowled a layer of mud up Larry’s front. When he turned sideways, he looked like an eclipse.
We clawed to the top of the next hump and saw the county road.
“Whew,” we exhaled.
“We have a flat,” exhaled Roger.
The right front tire, big as a 757 jet intake, was flat on the bottom. Less than six inches of clearance showed between the axle and the saturated earth. We crawled underneath and dug a hole to accommodate the eight-inch jack. In the waning thirty-two-degree sundown, we rotated the handle and watched the jack sink out of sight in the soft ground without lifting the vehicle one micron. “We need something hard and flat to put beneath the jack,” proclaimed John. There were no rocks on the treeless plain. “How strong are your words?” he asked me.
I thought he was referring to my recent display of colorful language. But he pointed to the box of my books nestled in the backseat. It took three of my new 224-page, full-color, brilliantly illustrated hardback books to allow the jack to raise the three-ton Excursion high enough to apply the spare. The books sustained considerable damage. They were transformed into the shape of a Jell-O mold and received third-degree literary lacerations, though not as severe as some of the book reviews.
“Strong words,” said John as I scraped baseball-sized chunks of mud off my misshapen poetic volumes. “I’m sure glad it came out in the hardback edition.”
A little slice from my autobiography.
SUMMER HOME
Over the years, I have tried to give the impression in my commentaries that I am a suave, sophisticated, Cadillac cow person. Sort of a knight in a broad-brimmed hat and jingling spurs. Steeped in western lore and an ardent defender of the code of the West.
Some of you might have pictured me in my young manhood sitting on the porch of my giant ranch home, sipping a light beverage, and surveying my vast cow herd grazing to the horizon. I admit I have not done much to discourage this image.
This spring I revisited a sentimental chapter in my seedy past. As I drove up to the crumbling line shack out behind the feedyard south of Roswell, a chill ran up my spine. Stucco was peelin’ off the chicken wire in big chunks. Somebody had pasted cardboard in the broken windowpanes. Rusty car bodies and assorted, dilapidated machinery were scattered amongst the weeds in the yard. The round corral was fallin’ out around the top, and the bob wire sagged on the posts. As I looked at that tired ol’ house, I wiped a speck of dust from my eye and thought, Somebody has really improved this dump!
Thirty years earlier, I had moved into this ghetto reject in the middle of the night. Well, not exactly “moved into” . . . more like broke-and-entered and camped. I had pried a piece of corrugated tin off one of the windows. By flashlight, I laid out my bedroll and slept, exhausted.
I discovered next mornin’ that the last occupants had left in a hurry. All the furniture remained, including the sheets on the bed. There were even some canned goods in the pantry. Everywhere I walked, I left tracks like a moonwalker in the dust.
I swept it out, took the tin off the windows, and aired out my new summer home. The fresh air seemed to drive out most of the house pets, except the scorpions. I finally just gave them their own room. There was a nest of rattlers under the kitchen porch. I battled them all summer, and they didn’t get in the house, much.
Within two weeks, I had gotten the electricity turned on, but I never did have running water. I packed it from the nearest neighbor. I established a slit trench and kept a shovel by the door. The shovel was handy for killing snakes, too.
I finally located the place’s owner in California. I wrote and offered to pay him rent. He wrote back and suggested thirty dollars a month. I sent him fifteen and figgered that that would cover the whole summer.
Despite my outgoing personality, I never could get any friends to stay overnight except my brother, who was as dumb and broke as I was.
I’ve ridden a lot of borrowed horses in my day. Sometimes they treat me kindly, other times they test my salt. I like it either way. I just like horses . . . even spare horses.
SPARE HORSE
“Come go with us, Cal,” invited Lee. “It’ll be a beautiful ride, and Mel’s got a spare horse.”
A spare horse? pondered Cal. As in extra like spare time, or thin like crow bait, or frugal as in sparing, or duplicate as in spare part, or a horse that is called in when the tenpin is left standing?
“Why not,” Cal agreed. Lee also assured him they had a spare saddle. They gathered in the scenic Wasatch Mountains in the shadow of Mount Nebo. The spare horse turned out to be a good-sized bay mare. . . . “Good,” thought Cal, who weighs in at 250.
However, the spare saddle that Mel brought was indeed spare. It had no back cinch, no breast collar, and a narrow fork that didn’t fit the mare very well.
“I traded work for this spare saddle. Didn’t cost me a dime!” bragged Mel, who was a lug tightener at Big O Tire.
Lee held the mare’s lead rope tight as Cal began his ascent of the sixteen-hands mare. Left foot in the stirrup, hands on the horn, he placed his weight to spring. The saddle slipped to port. Mel stepped in to help just as Cal’s right foot arced up from the ground. The heel of his right Justin roper, at roughly the speed of sound, made solid contact with the fork of Mel’s family tree.
Mel barked like a dog and dropped to his knees.
The mare spooked and pulled back on the lead rope. It burned through Lee’s hands, peeling an ear-sized chunk of [116 ] hide off his right palm and fingers. He wailed like a tomcat with his tail caught in the door.
The mare bolted, and Cal was left behind suspended in midair, levitating horizontally for a microsecond
. One almost expected a magician to appear and run a hoop over his body to prove there were no wires.
Alas, the microsecond ended. Cal fell like a roll of wet carpet and landed flat on his back with a thud. He never bounced. The rest of the crew was too impaired from laughing to help him up. When he finally got his wind back enough to sit up, Mel was standing semi-erect and Lee was licking his palm.
“You still wanna ride?” asked Lee.
“It depends,” said Cal.
“You could ride my other horse,” offered Mel.
“Is it a spare horse?” asked Cal suspiciously.
“No,” said Mel, contemplating his answer, “I would say it is a primary animal.”
I took a course (bad pun) in golf in college but never mastered the game. I only play now when I’m forced to. They never ask me back.
GOLFING DISASTER
I played in a celebrity golf tournament in Oklahoma City a while back. Now, I’ve been to a few celebrity team ropings, a couple celebrity dogfights, a million brandings, and one celebrity rock pickin’—but this was my first celebrity golf tournament. Generous people paid a lot of money to play golf with well-known folks like Joe DiMaggio, Mean Joe Green, and Red Steagall. The money was donated to help the blind.
I got in the golf cart with a feller named Phil. He asked me what my handicap was. I couldn’t think of anything real bad except an addiction to Miracle Whip; however, I was told at one time that my nose would qualify me for a parking space.
He asked me how well I played. I said not too well. I’m sure he thought I was bein’ modest, because after the first hole he turned to me and said, “You really don’t play golf too well, do ya?”
You play eighteen holes to a game. I don’t know why they invented that number. You would have thought they’d play ten or a dozen or an even twenty, but for some reason they choose eighteen. Probably the first golfer just played till his arms were sore and decided that was enough.
When you get down to the nitty-gritty, there’s two weapons you use in the game: the driver and the putter. First, you line yourself up between two swimming pool floats and “tee off.” This is done with the driver, which is a fly rod with the handle sawed off. Only my gun-bearer and guide knew which way to aim. He’d stand up beside me and point off to the horizon. Then tell me to hit the ball off in that general direction. It was always necessary to clear spectators back 180 degrees from my line of fire. It was impossible to predict which direction my ball would go. By the third hole, we’d traded our golf cart for an all-terrain vehicle and the rest of our group was riding in an armored personnel carrier.
Once you make the green, it is recommended that one use a putter. The only comparison I can make to putting is that it’s like shooting the eight ball on a table where the navy has been landing jets. I think I could drop the ball from a hovering helicopter and have a better chance of hitting the hole. Finally, they let me putt with a snow shovel. They said it improved my game.
A nice feller lent me his golf bag and a pocketful of balls. I lost six of ’em. I was ashamed to tell him. I’m sure he thinks I stole ’em. I lost so many balls that we eventually rented a backhoe for the sand traps and hired two scuba divers to join our caravan.
They haven’t asked me back. But maybe I’ll get invited to a celebrity bowling tournament; at least I won’t lose as many balls.
In retrospect, it took a pretty strong woman (Cindy Lou) not to intervene on my behalf and explain that I was not in my right mind. Where’s Hunter S. Thompson when I need him?
GETTING OUT ALIVE
It had been one of those days, and all I wanted to do was get out of town alive. I’d spent three days on horseback and got the job done without incident. Certainly nothing classed as a felony, anyway. Cindy Lou picked me up in the rental car. While loading my belongings I managed to lock the car keys in the trunk. I couldn’t find my guitar and discovered I had left my airline tickets in a restaurant thirty miles away.
Doggedly I pocketknifed my way through the padded backseat to retrieve the keys. I tracked my guitar down to a lonely parking lot where it was waiting faithfully like a good dog. And I located the restaurant, after three calls, to save my tickets.
After arriving at the John Wayne Airport I decided to send a postcard to my Aunt Effie. On the way to the gift shop, I stopped at the stamp machine. Seventy-five cents, it read, for three fifteen-cent stamps. “What a deal,” I thought as I pumped three quarters into the slot. I pulled the lever, and nothing happened. The coin return gave me fifty cents back. Thinking I’d made a mistake, I put seventy-five cents back in, pulled the lever, and nothing happened again. I pushed the coin return and out came two quarters—again.
“Aha!” I said to myself. “That’s how this works!”
I jiggled and shook the machine vigorously. I pounded it. Finally I picked it up and turned it upside down. It weighed about eighty pounds, big as a stop sign. I was so intent on retrieving my quarters, I didn’t hear the screaming. I was interrupted by a tap on the shoulder.
“Is there a problem?” asked the officer, stepping back two paces and unsnapping his holster.
Three of them escorted me through the gathering crowd. I heard the mumblings: “Lynch him!” “Get the vermin off the streets!” “See, Billy, that’s what happens when you don’t eat your broccoli!”
I sat quietly in the steel interrogation chair while the deputy explained that I was being “officially detained” while they ran an FBI check on me.
As he questioned me, witty retorts raced through my mind:
“What do you think you were doing?” (Trying to weigh myself?)
“Do you have some explanation?” (One small step for man, one giant leap for the postmaster.)
“Are you aware that tampering with a stamp machine is a federal offense?” (What’s the difference between tampering and revenge?)
All the while, Cindy Lou stood quietly thumbing through the phone book. “What were you doin?” I asked when I was later released on the condition I leave town.
“Oh, nothing really, just jotting down the number of a bail bondsman.”
Mel and the Cajun Kid were top hands in the rodeo business in their youth. They can sure tell stories.
A STICKY GIFT
Mel said the Cajun Kid meant well. They had been rodeoin’ together for years. So Mel knew that Kid’s gift was sent with the sincerest intention. It never occurred to either of them that the lid would loosen in the mail!
Kid grew up in sout’ Looziana. In his youth he helped make ribbon cane syrup on a mule-driven press. He’d fed the cane into the machine, which mashed out the juice. Dat’s wot dey made dem syrup wit! Wuddn’t as thick as molasses, but it sho wuz sweet!
Mel walked down to the mailbox. It was a hot summer mornin’. Not oppressive, just the pleasant birdsongs and bees a’hummin’. As he closed in on the mailbox, the hummin’ got louder. Soon he could see herds of bees flyin’ over like geese in winter! Beneath his feet, columns of ants marched in single file down the path. They had two infantry and one armored division!
Flies zipped in like fighter planes, butterflies drifted aloft like weather balloons, and a pod of hummingbirds whizzed around the target!
At first glance Mel thought his mailbox was a grizzly bear! The post was covered with a moving carpet of every crawling critter with a sweet tooth! The box itself was swarmed with layers of bees in the shape of a buffalo head!
He took a long stick and pried open the door. The floor was sticky with syrup. Although the can was packed in a wooden box, it was not syrup tight. Ribbon cane syrup oozed over the side and dripped toward the ground like lava. Two-, four-, six-, and eight-legged varmints stood underneath, mouths agape like baby robins!
Using a branch, a piece of baler twine, and a broken chunk of sheep wire, he fished out the wooden box. It hit the ground with a thunk and a gurgle.
Mel ran to the house, backed the pickup down the road, and shoveled the shipping box containing the can into the bed of his
truck. He mounted the seat and sped down the highway. He was followed by a black cloud that could be seen and heard two counties away! He maintained 85 mph six miles before he finally outran the last of his pursuers!
He retrieved his precious cargo, noted the return address on the box, and headed home. As he turned up the drive, he noticed, to his relief, that the plague of syrup slurping varmints were gone. So was his mailbox! The whole bunch had mobilized and just packed it off!
KIDS
I was expressing concern about my eight-year-old son, whose “talking in class” keeps him staying after school on a regular basis. In spite of discipline, threats, and punishment, he still relapses now and then. Granted, he’s remorseful, but sometimes, I guess, he just can’t help it.
After hearing my lament, my friend and philosopher W.C. just shrugged and said, “You can’t swim outside the gene pool.” It was a hard blow to swallow.
When I was in the sixth grade I had my first man teacher. He was retired Air Force and a strict disciplinarian. Demerits were given for talking or misbehaving. A monitor was appointed in each row to keep track. Staying after school was the consequence of too many demerits. Those who had a minimum were promoted each week. That way we learned about military rank. By Thanksgiving there were girls in my class who were five-star generals. I made it to corporal once.
My daughter has inherited her mother’s “keep a stiff upper lip” and “get even” stubbornness. I used to take great delight in hiding behind a door or leaping out from behind the couch shouting, “BOO!” Sometimes she’d cry, but what the heck, she was just a little kid. One Saturday morning I staggered into the kitchen, groggily poured some milk on my Cheerios, and sat down at the table. It was a quiet morning, overcast, cold outside, no leaves on the trees, tan grass, gray bark, chirpless birds, “not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.” Or so I thought.
