Rabbit Boss

by Thomas Sanchez

  “Indians not what?” Mister Fixa smiled, the man’s words still banging in the air. “You see, when my eyesight left me my hearing followed too. Indians not what?”

  “ALLOWED! INDIANS NOT ALLOWED!”

  “That’s what I thought you said the first time,” Mister Fixa grabbed me as he pushed right past the man’s arm like a snowdrift collapsing a fence. “Bob’s my son. That makes him halfbreed. Your sign doesn’t say HALF-BREEDS NOT ALLOWED.” And we were in.

  “Wait a minute!” The man chased us across the red and gold carpet and grabbed Mister Fixa by the shoulder, “O.K. old man, I’ll let you take the kid in. But one thing. We’ve got a Sundown Ordinance in Reno, and I suppose you’ll say you’ve never heard of it, so I’m warning you on it right now. No Indians on the streets within the town limits after dusk. Indians on the street after sundown are fined $500 dollars, shot on sight, or both. If you’re anywhere in these parts with him after dark old man you better make sure it’s in the Indian colony outside the town limits, or thirty miles away. I’m warning you on it now!”

  Mister Fixa wasn’t paying too much attention to the man’s advice. The gaze of his graystone eyes was moving elsewhere, rubbing up against the high waxed grain of the dark wood lining the walls of the great gambling hall that went on the length of three of his cow barns. The light thrown down from the blazing chandelier the size of a sinking moon lost itself in the expanse of the hall so by the time it hit the floor it wasn’t much more than a shadow. So Mister Fixa could see everything just fine, with a true appreciation. He stood there with the echoes of shouting men and the whacks of new card decks on the green felt tables filling the big empty space along the roof. He was turning all those sound of spinning roulette wheels and tumbling dice into the sound of cow hooves pounding on a solid earth floor, and the honk of calves trying to jostle closer to their mothers. Mister Fixa was standing in the fanciest barn in the world. “Bob,” he said, “let’s you and me get down to business.” He turned away from the doorman and we walked straight for the side of the hall with a sign hanging down out of the roof announcing in gold letters THE FIRST HALL IN THE STATE OF NEVADA TO HAVE STRAIGHT FROM THE INTERNATIONAL WORLD FAMOUS CASINOS OF EUROPE–THE ODDS ARE ON–THE SLOT MACHINE!” And there they were, gleaming in a bank of five rows of silver, the money gambling machines. And men were using them. Pulling, jerking, yanking, sweating, banging down the lever cast in the metal shape of a man’s arm. Letting the arm flip back as the roll of painted fruit spun beneath the glass eye sunk in the top of the machine where its head should be. Each man hung in the moment when the roll stopped, reading the way the fruit lined up and waiting for the machine to excrete a clang of silver dollars out its money scoop at the bottom. “It doesn’t make no difference how soft or hard you pull that arm down Bob,” Mister Fixa told me low beneath his breath as we waited for one of the men to give up his machine. “The trick is all in how those fruit line up across the top. And only God and Lady Luck knows the answer to that. Some fruit is worth more than others. Three cherries would make a man rich. One lemon and two pears will just buy him a drink. These old Cowboys think it’s all in how you pull that metal arm. It’s like kicking a dog in the ass, if you kick him just in the right place you’ll kill him. But the machines aint dogs. They got steel for their bones, and wires for their brains. No matter how you pull the arm that machine’s going to go on doing just what it wants. It’s going to pay you when it gets good and ready, and steal from you when you’re looking it right in the face. The reason those Europeans had this money gambling machine before we did is because they understand machines. Now you take playing Blackjack at one of these tables here, the thing that’s always in your head is the dealer can cheat you in a hundred ways before he’s ever cut the pack. But if you gamble with a machine you’re safe. You’re either going to get an honest one, or a dishonest one. Machines won’t cheat you the way a man will, because they don’t have nothing to gain by it. A machine that is dishonest is that way by mistake. A man who cheats you knows what he’s doing. I like to take my chances with machines, sure you can get a dishonest one making mistakes. But you can get an honest one making mistakes the other way, one that will pay you every time. There’s a lesson in that Bob. Only gamble with a machine, never a man. The man who cheats you isn’t making a mistake.” Mister Fixa would never use a machine that another man just got off of. He said the machine had to cool down. He didn’t like to feel the heat in the machine’s metal arm from another man’s hand. When a man he had been watching down at the end of one of the rows backed off of a machine and Mister Fixa thought it was cool enough for him, well then he just walked right up to it, took hold of the arm, grabbed a silver dollar from the canvas sack I held open to him, slammed it in the money slot at the top of the machine and banged the arm down. “One arm bandit,” he hissed under his breath. “I come to stick you up.” With one hand he kept feeding the mouth of the machine with silver, while his other hand pumped the metal arm steady in a rhythm like he was milking cows, only his gaze was fixed right on the roll of painted fruit whirring and spinning into a streak of solid color beneath the glass eye. Sometimes the clang of money rang out when the right fruit lined up and a bunch of dollars dropped to the scoop, but he never stopped to rake them out. His whole body was shaking like a big wind was blowing up around it. He wasn’t shaking because he was old. He stood up powerful in front of that machine and I could see the muscled line of his heavy shoulders twitching beneath the flannel shirt. Mister Fixa might as well not be in that casino with the money gambling machine. He could be out in the middle of a big field, alone with the machine, because everything that was going on was just between him and that machine. There was nothing else around, bird, beast, or man; just me holding open the money sack. A smell started coming up off Mister Fixa. It was something I never sniffed in the air except when he was with the machine. Seeing the sweat breaking out along the ridge of his forehead and dropping like tears into his faded eyes I tried to figure the smell. There was a time in late spring, me and Mister Fixa was branding calfs and I got stupid by not watching all the time where the red hot iron was and I got a big piece of my leg burnt right through my pants. I won’t forget the stink that made, the smell of hot iron and burned flesh mingled together. I guess that was the closest I come to figuring the smell thrown off Mister Fixa, the smell of iron and flesh burned together. “Bob! Pay attention to what you’re about. You’re throttling the neck of that money sack like it was a Sunday goose.” I pulled the sack open further, but it was empty. “That the end of it, huh?” Mister Fixa had his whole fist into the sack trying to catch one last silver dollar. “Well then,” he pushed himself back from the machine and his whole body went slack like it was dangling from a rope. “Let’s see what we’ve been paid,” he raked the loose dollars out of the moneyscoop and piled them up in stacks of fives. “Ten stacks Bob, the machine gave us back $50 for the $250 we put in. Well we’ll keep the bandit honest this time,” he winked, moving back up to the machine and getting a firm grip on the arm. “Open up that other sack.” I opened the second sack and he emptied it out quicker than the first. But the machine paid him back another full sack, so with that, and what he won the first time around, he went at it again until the sound went off in the machine that made us both jump back as if a tree had ripped out and fallen straight in our path. A couple of men came running over and one reached in back of the machine and cut the sound that now wailed like a duck winged by a shotgun. “Mister,” the man wearing the soft creamcolored Stetson hat said, “You just hit the JACKPOT. You won yourself 500 silver American Eagles. If you’ll be so obliging as to make your way over to the cashier we’ll make good our debt and you can get right on again with business.”

  “Take Bob with you, and pay him, he’ll fetch the jackpot back to me. I aint leaving this machine.”

  I went over to the cashier with the men and watched them count out five hundred new silver dollars and brought them in a sack right back to Mister Fixa. �
�Let’s get going Bob,” he smiled, but his teeth were chattering because the big wind blowing up around his body had got mighty strong. “Open that sack Bob.” I opened it wide and he pushed his weight up to the machine and went at it again until he lost everything. He reached into his front pocket and brought out two more dollars. “Come on,” he went straight for the bar, put down one of the dollars and the bartender gave him back a bottle of whiskey for it “Bob,” he looked down at me with a serious look in his faded eyes as he rubbed a thumbnail across the hard eagle face of the dollar in his palm. “I could put this last dollar in the machine. But I’m not. I’m giving it to you. I’m gambling on the future of your life, that’s the best bet I’ll ever make.” It had come down dark when we went for the door and got outside. We were stopped by the man who wanted to keep us out that morning. He leaned right into Mister Fixa’s face, “Mister, it’s after sundown.”

  Mister Fixa took one funny look at me, grabbed a blanket from the back of the buckboard and spun me around in it until there was no part of me sticking out but my face. He threw me up on the buckboard seat, jumped up beside me, took a swig from the whiskey then jammed the bottle between my teeth and dumped a gulp down me. “HΙΕΕΕΕΕΕΕΥΑΗ!” He slapped the reins over the horse’s back and we rode out of Reno as fast as we had rode in. Somewhere outside of town we turned our heads back but couldn’t see the lights going up into the dark sky anymore. Mister Fixa laughed, and he didn’t stop until we rode back in through Beckwourth and were in the Sierra Valley.

  One winter when I was with Mister Fixa he didn’t wake me before dawn to milk the cows. I woke up just like a clock anyway and went out into the barn and found him dead. It was winter, his favorite time of year, but he was dead just the same, propped up against a half used bale of hay. He didn’t have a jacket on and his shirtsleeves were rolled up high on his arms like he was ready for work. I felt those exposed arms. They seemed to be iced up so I rubbed them between my hands to see if I could get some heat back in them, but none would come. The lids of his eyes were shut down tight. I pulled them back with my thumbs. His eyes were the color of eggs. I took my thumbs from them but the lids didn’t close up again. He was just leaning there against the hay bale with his old eyes turned inside out and staring off someplace where I had never been. The cows were all moving and bumping in a restless way as if they wanted to follow Mister Fixa off to wherever he had gone. I got them all yoked into their stalls, forked in their feed and milked them dry before turning them out to corral. I shoveled the floor clean of manure, and down by the open door where there was some sun I leaned hard on the shovel with the stains of slick manure gleaming on its blade and looked at the old man, remembering how he said, staring straight into my face with the dying glow of his gray eyes, “Son, if this is the worst shit you ever have to shovel in your lifetime you’ll be a luckier man than most.” I watched Mister Fixa across the barn for a long time. There were arms of sun poking through the chinks in the roof, falling down in a haze through the high rafters and laying bright hands of light all over his silent body with its gaping eyes the color of eggs blind to the morning of a new day. There was some time there when I stayed in barn, never leaving it for two or three days maybe, just milking the cows and stacking the heavy milkpails by the door. Then I went into the house, underneath my bed in a sock were the silver dollars the old man gave me after each of the time he had lost all his money to the machine. There were five silver dollars, five times we had been to Reno. I stuffed the sock in my pocket, went out on the road and started walking.

  There was a sign I once saw four or five times in the Loyalton dry-goods store. It was a big sign that covered most of the wall above where the men’s pants were stacked: CAN’T BUST ’EM! FRISCO JEENS! There was a face bigger than the heads of ten men and covered with black hair grinning down from the sign with a mouth cut like the blade of a knife and two eyes that threw out a light like the blare of a lantern in a room you’ve just come out of the dark into. “What is it?” I said to Mister Fixa. He leaned up against the counter of pants and studied the face on the sign for sometime, putting a flat hand above his faded eyes so he could get a worse light to see better in. “Bob, that yonder is what goes by the name of a GO-REEL-AH.” I dreamed about the Goreelah that night so hard I woke myself up. I was sweating so much and my teeth were chattering so quick I thought I’d bite my tongue off so I rolled over to make sure Mister Fixa was sleeping in the room with me when the square cut head with the mouth cut like the blade of a knife broke out of the dark. The black hair covered face was right over me with its blazing eyes lighting up the long slit of a grin. “FRISCO JEENS!” “WHAT! Get out of here! What is it Bob!” Mister Fixa jumped up from his bed and stood in the center of the room ready to fight the very darkness itself, but before he knew it I leaped across the room and grabbed his leg and held on so the strongest hands couldn’t pull me off. “Stop your crying now Bob,” Mister Fixa put his hand on my head. “What was it you saw?” “FRISCO JEENS!” “Frisco Jeens? What do you mean, Frisco Jeens?” “He was coming to take me.” “Who?” “FRISCO JEENS!” “What do you mean he was … Wait, you mean the GO-REEL-AH? You mean the GO-REEL-AH was coming to take you?” “Yes!” “No he’s not. He’s only a painted picture you saw. He isn’t real.” “But he’s alive somewhere. Somewhere he lives. Where is it he lives Mister Fixa?” “Bob, I’m going to tell you the truth. He lives in Frisco City. He lives in Frisco City in an iron bar cage where he can’t hurt nobody. Someday you can go yourself to Frisco and see what I saw is true with your own eyes.” And that’s where I was headed, going down the road away from the ranch, making my way to find Frisco City to see for myself that what Mister Fixa said was true. I was walking fast and it was no time at all before I passed through Sierraville and up the road out of the valley when I heard a buckboard coming up behind me. It didn’t go on by. The horse slowed and followed along so close behind me that I could feel his breath on the back of my neck.

  “Where you going boy?” the man called down from the wagon.

  I swung around to get a look at his face and see if there was anything in it that told me to run as fast as I could into the trees, but there wasn’t much I could see beneath the brim of the hat except the chin, it jutted out from the rest of the face like a clenched fist. Run or talk, I said to myself. Run or talk. Quick! “I’m going to FRISCO JEENS.”

  “You mean Frisco City, don’t you? I’ve been there myself.”

  “He’s in Frisco City and that’s where I’m going.”

  “Well ain’t you lucky then because I happen to be passing right through there myself. Why don’t you hop up and keep me company? He reined the horse in and the wagon stood still in the middle of the road. “Hop up.”

  There was a woodpecker banging away at the belly of a pine about four trees in from the road, his sound filling in all the space between me and the man. When the woodpecker stopped I jumped up on the bed of the buckboard, “O.K. Mister. I’ll ride with you to FRISCO JEENS.”

  “Well then,” he turned around to me. “Get on up here in front, no need to ride in the back like you was a sack of grain.”

  The higher we rode in the mountains the more the valley rolled out below us until it could be seen from end to end and straight across. It was the first time in my life I saw it all in one piece. From where I was the trees raced down the slopes to the valley floor, where the broad flatland heaved itself up into the intruding trees, holding them back along a thirteen mile line by leaning the muscled crest of its rippling high bare ground into the full force of the mountain’s face. The valley calmed itself down by the time the lap of its flatland reached the further wall of mountains that came out of the east from Nevada. There was no fight on that side of the valley, the mountains didn’t send their trees down the deep cut of long slopes into the lake of flatland because the trees had been slashed off, milled and sent roaring out of the valley on the backs of woodeating locomotives.

  “You see yonder?” The man pulled
the buckboard up short, pointing a finger down across the red haze of the valley’s sky to the blow of blue smoke shooting off at the bald foot of the far mountains. “That’s the Feather River Lumber Company, and all that town growing up around it is Loyalton, folks used to know it by the name of Smith’s Neck, but when the war between the States come on good the Reverend Adam G. Doom got the townsfolk all the way down to the smallest child to sign a petition declaring total allegiance to the Union cause and loyalty to the one true President. Loyalton, the town would be forever called from that time, the most loyal town in the land. That was back in ’63, I ought to know it’s true, my daddy was the Reverend Adam G. Doom.” He pulled his arm back and stroked the fist of his chin with a thumb, “I’m Carson Doom.” He gave the horse a whip and we were moving higher, but I kept looking back to where he had pointed because over to the side of the rising line of smoke which cut the mountains in half behind it was a hook of ground throwing off a glint beneath the red sky, the glint was Smith’s Neck Creek, they hadn’t changed the name of that, and I could follow it around the hook with my eyes until I saw a squared black space punched in the distance of the valley floor. It was Mister Fixa’s barn, and he was in there dead. The hard metal silver dollars pressed through the sock in my pocket against the flesh of my leg as the wagon bounced higher into the sky.

  The man took the buckboard beyond where a fast bank of clouds knocked themselves apart on the stone fingers of the mountain peaks. We were headed down now along the sweep of river he called Yuba. The river slid with a roar over boulders it had blasted from earthen nests under its full spring power. Somewhere along there the road came out of the trees, passed over the river on a hanging white bridge, and forced a narrow slot back into the high trees, making a space just large enough on both sides to hold a single row of buildings linked together by a boardwalk. The horse began slowing down like it knew where it was going and the man brought it up in front of a short building with its small door thrown open to the sun pushing down through the trees. “Is this FRISCO JEENS?” I asked the Reverend Doom as he jumped off the wagon to loop the reins around the hitching post, but before he could answer a man came through the open door of the house saying, “Well now, what brings you to Downieville Reverend?” Then he caught a look at me. “Where’d you get him?”