Jim Kane - J P S Brown Page 5

  "Now, Jimmy, don't start worrying," Kane said. "It's too late to worry. No one is going to blame you. We'll start after the cattle tomorrow when they are cooled down. We can't go in the dark after the few that are on the highway. We might run one in front of a car. I don't entertain the hope that we have not suffered a catastrophe, though. We have. But we just can't gather the cattle before your father comes to help us."

  "How long will it take us?"

  "My conservative guess is thirty days and that is only because I am sure they can't escape completely. They are surrounded by water, aren't they?"

  "What water, Jim?" Jimmy Keys asked, trying to smile.

  "The Pacific in the west, the Atlantic in the east, the Arctic in the north, and the Antarctic in the south," Kane said.

  Jimmy Keys stopped trying to smile. "Well, if I'm to be of any help to you I can't get drunk!"

  "Nobody is asking you to get drunk. Don't get drunk if you don't want to. Don't drink anything if that is the way you feel about it."

  "I'm sorry, Jim."

  "Goddam it, don't tell me you're sorry. You were drinking wine and enjoying it a while ago. But maybe mixing wine with beer will make you sick. Why don't you find out. Learn something tonight even if it is that you would rather drink wine with your friends than beer with me. Find out who your friends are and make a choice."

  "OK, Jim, OK. Don't get mad."

  "Fine," Jim Kane said. "Let's get after it. Let's fill up. Lean days are ahead."

  And speaking of lean days, Kane said to himself my own livestock will come to lean days if I don't do something about it soon. My horses aren't out on the highway now but they will be very soon unless I find a home for them. So instead of wasting time lecturing juveniles maybe I better find a home for myself and my own livestock because nobody is going to do it for me. He telephoned Will Ore.

  "When is my stock going to come over to the Promised Land, Will Ore?" Jim Kane asked when Will Ore answered his telephone.

  "Not for three weeks, at least, " Will Ore answered, recognizing Jim Kane's voice.

  "Ah, you have lost track of time,.Will Ore," Kane said. "The mares had been in quarantine thirty days yesterday. That means they will be eligible for U.S. citizenship tomorrow."

  "I have news for you, Jim. The first day of quarantine did not begin until the results of the first blood test came back from Washington. That means the quarantine began eight days after the mares were tested. They were tested again fifteen days later and the second fifteen days' quarantine did not begin until the results of that blood test came back from Washington. The mares are going to be tested again in fifteen more days. They wont cross until . .

  "Ah, the Pharaoh still holds us," Kane said.

  "What?"

  "That means the mares won't cross for at least three more weeks," Kane said.

  "That's what I've been telling you," Will Ore said.

  "Why didn't anyone tell me this before?"

  "I didn't know it myself until the results of the last test came back and I saw the time you were credited with on the quarantine papers."

  "This means we have been standing in the corrals thirty days but it only counts for fifteen days' quarantined."

  "That's exactly it. They are charging you with the two weeks of government red tape."

  "Yes, and who is paying the feed bill? Are you feeding the mares two weeks of red tape?"

  "I'm having them fed a good ration of molasses, milo maize, and ground alfalfa. They look good."

  "Was their second test cleanly,

  "They are healthy as can be."

  "And they only have two weeks to go?"

  "Three weeks, Jim, with the red tape time."

  "Then the goddam Pharaoh is in the Promised Land too," Kane said.

  "What?"

  "Never mind. I'1l see you in three weeks," Kane said and hung up.

  5

  Frontera

  An old dry farmer had one ancient mule, one old broken plow, one half acre of land, and one old falling-down shack that sheltered his poor, dried-up old wife. One day the mule dropped dead in the field. The farmer looked down at him and said, "Well, I guess them that has must lose."

  The Keys outfit worked three weeks gathering the wily, miscreant Brahmas. Trucks came for the cattle that had been caught but ten head were still out after three weeks. They had found new water and new haunts after their wild run. Three head had been killed in the run. Seven head had been broken and crippled so that they were no longer livestock or merchandise. These were found in the places they had dragged themselves to die and were gathered with rifles.

  When the trucks with the Brahmas had gone away Kane turned his colts out to pasture and drove to Frontera to see to the crossing of his Jalisco horses. They had been tested a week before and the results would be back from Washington. Frontera, Arizona, is a small town that lies across the border from Frontera, Sonora, and does a heavy commerce with Mexico. It is the seat of the county and headquarters for the county's ranchers and border cattle traders.

  Kane parked his car at the Montezuma Hotel in the evening and went inside. He hired a room and went into the bar. Four Mexican-American girls were lounging there in the red-leather booths for the cocktail hour. Their black, shiny hair was rightly coiffed. They wore dark dresses. Their light skin gleamed in the dark room. Their eyes were oriental over small Indian noses. These girls were strangers to Kane.

  The three men at the bar were not strangers to him. Eligio Gavilan, the owner of the corrals where Kane's horses were quarantined; Pedro Villasenor, a Sonora rancher; and Bob Stacy, a commission buyer, invited Kane to have a drink with them. Jim Kane stood at the bar with the three men and laughed as he half-listened to the good time they were having over their evening drinks. He thought, now I am home again. Here in this bar about twenty-five years ago my father brought me into the company of hawk-nosed, lean-faced cowmen to have my first shot-glass of beer. We had come to town that morning in the Model A from the ranch. I was bucking and playing in the front seat as my father drove slowly along. I pitched against the door, the door opened, and I fell out onto the pavement on my head. My father stopped the car in the middle of the street and set me back on my feet and brushed me off and got me to laughing. He left the car in the street and marched me in here to get me a mans shot. I remember the bubbles climbing on the sides of the shotglass in the beer in their mysterious chemical way and the fresh, dry bite of the beer in my mouth.

  The Montezuma had been host to cattlemen for fifty years. The cattlemen who had congregated here had not been the stereotyped, hard-shooting, demon-riding, woolly-chapped, silver-spurred, floppy-hatted cowboys of paperback and television. These men had been good in a fight or on a horse but they had traded on this border in well-shaped fine hats, clean clothes, and had not been strangers to neckties, suits, or shiny boots. They sat at this bar and bought and sold and shipped sight unseen thousands of Mexican steers to men they had never met except over the telephone. They traded for thousands of cattle while they gambled their profits on cattle still unpaid for over high poker stakes and free whiskey in a room upstairs in the Montezuma. And the next morning before sunup they had made it down rough roads and rougher trails to ranches in Sonora and Chihuahua to look at and trade for more cattle in one day than the average person sees in a lifetime.

  They had not been the same kind of men as the three men Kane was with in the Montezuma now. Kane thought, these men, like me, have the knack for staying broke. They are remembering and telling glowingly admiring tales of former traders that haunted the Montezuma and they try to emulate those men. But they always try with someone else's money and without ever getting out of the Montezuma. They don't make their ventures work by getting horseback and doing the work themselves to ensure success. They lie in wait here for some poor fish with a bankroll to come along with his heart stimulated by Mexico, cattle, whorehouses, and tequila. The poor fish is probably a man who made plenty of money in the furniture business and knows nothin
g about cattle anyway and knows absolutely nothing about the Mexican standoff. Nothing in all his years of shrewd furniture business will have prepared him for the Mexican standoff, the no-quick-way of doing business in Mexico. So when the hours drag into days that drag into a month and the poor fish finds he can't make the quick money on steer trades in Mexico that he thought he would be able to when he bought his first big hat and boots to wear around the lobby of the Montezuma, he loses heart and leaves these border guys on the Montezuma barstools where he found them and goes back to his furniture business.

  All the traders aren't like these three but these are representative of 99 per cent of border traders. A very few are men who put up their own money, get horseback to take care of it, and then hope the cattle market will hold long enough to keep them from going to the poorhouse. Very few good traders have survived.

  Kane had known one such man who had done everything right for many years. He had ridden his horse right, had made sound trades, had kept his word, paid his bills, been admired by the Mexicans and Americans in the business, and had made money every year. One year he came into the Montezuma during the most active part of the trading season. This time he did not saddle a horse to do his work with, but instead hired a suite of rooms with three telephones. He stocked the bar in the suite with bourbon, his favorite. He stocked a cognac for his favorite client, a Mexican general who had many ranches and many thousands of cattle. He stocked anisette for the generals mistress. He stocked tequila and beer for his Mexican vaquero friends and corn likker for his American cowboy friends. He stocked Scotch for his commission buyer friends. He sat in his suite all through the season and only went out when he was accompanying his big-shot buyers to the whore-houses, He politicked and machined along with the border system through one million dollars' worth of cattle trades in three months' time. When all his trading was over he picked up the saddle, blankets, bridle, and spurs from the corner of the shite where he had laid them when he had come to town, sneaked down the stairs off the lobby between midnight and dawn, coasted his car out of the parking lot, started his engine in the street, and went away broke.

  The only assets he took away from the Montezuma that were truly his own were his saddle, blanket, bridle, and spurs. These tools had been kept well-dusted in the suite by the maids. The well-dusted aspect was the only new aspect about his assets that he took away from the border. He had never been one to fuss with his gear and tack and the money he had used in his big trades had been mostly borrowed money, He had gone away from the Montezuma luckier than most border traders, unluckier than a very, very few. He had also been smart enough to know never to come back to the Montezuma. Men like Eligio Gavilan, Pedro Villasenor, and Bob Stacy were the kind that endured on the border but they endured staying broke. Eligio, through some genius of politics in him, had acquired complete control of the quarantine corrals the Mexican government had built in Frontera, Sonora. More than fifty thousand cattle passed through his corrals every year and his fee for use of the corrals was one dollar a head besides all the feed he poured through the mangers at 300 per cent profit, plus all the cattle that disappeared from their rightful owners and appeared much later in his hands.

  The Mexicans called Eligio "El Parsignado," the pious one, or, more literally, the man who covers himself with signs of the cross. In the scale house where cattle were weighed for their customs duties before crossing the border, Eligio had hung a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

  Every morning on arriving at the corrals he would go directly to the scale house and bless himself and say a short, fervent prayer before the Virgin. It occurred to his vaqueros that Eligio was not quite as devout as he made himself out to be. They replaced the Virgin with a picture of Pedro Infante, a Mexican movie star, and Eligio went on for days with his ritual without noticing that it was Pedro and not the Virgin who was recipient of his praise.

  Though he always showed the pallid, harried face of the lost bankrupt and seemed unable ever to meet a financial obligation of any kind, one day it occurred to all his friends and creditors that he was living in an $80,000 home in Frontera, Sonora. Eighty thousand dollars in Frontera, Sonora, is one million pesos.

  A Mexican politician friend of Eligio's, a man who had been instrumental in gaining for him control of the Mexican quarantine corrals with the understanding between them that they would share equally the vagabond and carefree money that would be found when cattle streamed through the corrals, heard of Eligio's new house. This politician was a fine and generous man who helped everyone, hoping that everyone he helped would help him back, and thus, was chronically down at the heel. He went to see if Eligio, after three years of overseeing and watching for the blithe gold attached to the horns of the cattle that passed through the corrals, had gleaned enough to be in a position to help him.

  Eligio met the politician at the Montezuma. They ordered brandy together and the politician paid for it. They ordered the second brandy and before they left the bar, tired of out-waiting Eligio, the politician paid for the second. On the way back across the border in Eligio's chartreuse Cadillac Eligio stopped at a hamburger drive-in and ordered two hamburgers with French fries and the politician paid for them. Eligio's great house on the hill did not look so great in the darkness. Not a light shone around it. Not a person met them at the door. Eligio led his patron through the house, lighting each room and showing it briefly and unlighting it as they passed through. Finally, they came in the dark house to a small den that smelled of unswept manure, body odors of steers, vaqueros, and horses, and Eligio's own nervous stink. Eligio had brought his patron a long way without being dunned so he felt he could point to one accomplishment.

  "Don Pancho, one advantage of my house that I insisted on when it was constructed, and I had little to say in its construction," Eligio said humbly, "is its sound-proofed rooms."

  "Yes, I can understand your need," said the politician. "You need the sound-proof rooms so as not to hear the voice of your conscience."

  Kane was thinking this same Eligio was the man in whose hands his Jalisco horses abided. The feed bill on the horses must be quite formidable because Eligio had not said anything about the horses since Kane had joined his party. He probably didn't want to ruin Kane's drink or spoil the contented good humor of the gathering.

  Another of Eligio's companions was a middle-aged, curly-headed Mexican cattleman named Pedro Villasenor. Pedro owned and was trying to stay on top of two hundred sections of desert ranch country north of Puerto Libertad in Sonora. He had all the tools with which to run his ranch efficiently: horses, vaqueros, one windmill (he admitted this was inadequate), a good complex of corrals, a nice house to live in, a generator that provided electricity, and a refrigerator with plenty of capacity for cold beer. He did not have any cattle.

  Pedro was in Frontera now looking for someone who would put up the money to stock his ranch with cattle. He didn't have any grass for any cattle either. His ranch was as dry and barren and hot as the wrong side of the moon but he had hopes it would rain this winter because it rained on his ranch once every ten years and it had been nine years since it rained last. He also had high hopes it would rain because he had been overextended at the bank now for three years and the bankers had told him positively no more credit, and they were going to foreclose on him after one more season.

  Pedro was wooing Bob Stacy, an elderly Arizona trader in steers, who was the third companion at the bar. Bob Stacy didn't own the cattle Pedro needed. But Bob Stacy was alert. He was always on the smell to ferret out a dollar in commissions among his connections no matter how hopeless a deal appeared to be at the start. He had been making his living many years bringing together the man with the bed and saddle with the man with the ranch and cattle or the man with a bankroll. To such men he provided an introduction and won commissions without ever leaving the bar or lobby of the Montezuma.

  Bob Stacy was not a thief. His word was good. He only had to make sure the two men he introduced could produce. He himself w
as not a producer. He was the coyote who was too old to hunt for himself but not too old to follow the hunter and the game. Now he had to be increasingly sure that the game was fat and that there would be a reasonable surplus of meat in any deal for him or he wouldn't roam. He was not particular or persnickety. He didn't require the choicest cuts of meat. He would be content with the less desirable bites such as the heart, the brains, the tripe. He got indigestion anyway from too much bulk. He would take what the hunter did not like. He would take suet if only suet was left to him. But whatever he gleaned had to be fresh and not contaminated by a poor hunter or diseased or badly treated game. He only entered into deals in which his portion of the game did not perish. You see, he was an old and crafty coyote and a fat one and he had enough reserve saved up to enable him to pick and choose. Kane bought a round for his three friends and then went and telephoned Will Ore.

  "Have you ordered the trucks for my immigrant horses? Have you latched onto the buyer I sent to you who was interested in the horses?" Kane asked Will Ore.

  "Where are you, Jim?" Will Ore asked.

  "At the Bar Montezuma. Come and exult with me."

  "I'll be there in a minute," Will Ore said.

  Kane ordered another round for his companions and drank with them again. He felt happy. His companions were for him and he was for them. He was glad to see Will Ore when he came rolling in and then Will Ore said, "Your horses had glanders this time."

  "What in the hell is glanders?" Kane asked, still exulting. Glanders didn't sound like another catastrophe.

  "Glanders is a lung disease contagious to humans," Will Ore said in a voice like lead falling in an abandoned mine shaft.

  "And?" Kane asked.

  "We are quarantined?

  "We can't go through that again. Why didn't glanders or whatever it is (he found the word describing the new catastrophe too easy to repeat) show up in the first tests?"

  "I don't know."