The Brave Cowboy (8 page)

The sound of a man singing.

B
URNS
DID
NOT
WALK
FAR
;
HE
STOPPED
AT
THE
first bar he came to, a small
cantina
at the edge of the unpaved road and close outside the official limits of Duke City.

He paused at the door; around him was the brilliance and gold and blue of the light, the sky, the white purifying heat, the withering leaves of the cottonwoods, the dust, and the fragrance of tamarisk along the irrigation ditches. He went in and found a dusky coolness, darknes, the smell of beer, the smell of wine, the smell of Mexicans and dogs and the unemployed. The act of entering the bar was like entering a grotto, leaving the real or perhaps only imaginary world outside in the dust and sun.

The cowboy did not wait for his eyes to adapt themselves to the comparative darkness but followed his nose and intuition straight to the beertaps at the bar. He leaned there, put his booted foot on the rail, and waited.

After a few moments, the parts of a man materialized and became visible in the thick gloom behind the bar. A small man, bald and fat and brown as a bean, with truculent eyes and an itchy little mustache. He said nothing; Burns said nothing. The man waited a moment more and then said: “What’ll you have?”

Burns leaned against the bar and gazed thoughtfully at a big painting on the wall above the mirror and the rows of whisky bottles:
The Cowboy’s Dream.
“A tall beer,” he said, not looking at the bartender. The nude
in the painting looked down at him from astride a cloudy horse; her limbs were comely, her flesh inviting, but the vague smile on her face suggested detachment, disinterest, the perils of ennui.

The bartender pushed a schooner of lager toward Burns and picked up his quarter. Burns drank deeply, thirstily, then lowered the vessel, wiped his mouth and looked around.

Three men sat at one table talking quietly in Spanish, sipping at bottled beer, chewing piñon nuts. They were looking at Burns with sullen curiosity, their eyes flat, incommunicative, with the opacity of hard rubber, their faces round and coarse featured and colored like the stubborn earth that fed them. They looked at him for several moments, while he returned their stare, then in unison all three appeared to lose interest and they looked away and at each other, continuing their sibilant low-toned palaver.

Alone at a table near the jukebox sat a young man with closed eyes, a wide-brimmed dark felt hat, tight shirt, boots, one good arm and one empty sleeve; in his one hand he held a pint bottle of whisky, half gone. The empty sleeve was doubled up and fastened to the shoulder of the shirt with a brass safety pin.

No one else was in the bar.

In leisure, with grace and affection, Jack Burns finished his beer, the keen edge already taken from his thirst and the contagion of the afternoon—almost evening now, with the sun lowering on the five volcanoes in the west. He finished his beer, ordered a second. Requested a second: the bartender was no man to be commanded. Burns requested a second beer and after a respectable interval of time had passed he received it But the lapse of time was of little concern to him; he held the schooner in his hands, caressed its cool moist surface, revolved and lifted and weighed it, set it down and took it up again, playing with it casually for several minutes before taking the first drink.

Time passed: seconds, minutes, a half hour with the
ease and changelessness of time in dreams and in old cathedrals. The shaft of sunlight that poured through the window by the door steadily altered its angle of declination, and as it changed the small parallelogram of light that fell on the nude behind the bar rose up from her thighs and lap to the belly and hips. The flies crawled over her body following the light and warmth.

The young man with one arm sat unchanging in his comatose slump, his eyes still closed and his body motionless. But the bottle that had been half full was now almost empty.

Burns began his third beer. He had already quite forgotten the wine and ice cream curdling in his stomach.

The three men at the table had left and been replaced by a dozen others of the same caliber and brand: laborers on the way borne, mud farmers, men from the railroad shops.

Burns was now sitting at a table near the bar, waiting, patient as a snake in the sun. Between beers he ate peanuts and piñon nuts, tossing them by the palmful into his mouth, and dropping the little cellophane bags under the table and around his feet. He rolled a cigarette, smoked it down, and requested another beer. The beer came, standing in the big mug with overflowing head among the wet rings on his table. He blew off some of the foam, buried his nose in the mug and drank, deeply and slowly; a slight yellow glaze began to dull the intensity and conceal the depth of his eyes. Quietly, in a gentlemanly manner, the cowboy was getting drunk.

There was music, occasionally, when someone had a spare nickel for the jukebox; the records with their concentric striations, scratched by a blunt steel needle, produced a proximate musical effect; Mexican voices in a kind of vulpine harmony, guitars, loud trumpets pitched a semitone too sharp, the rhythmic grinding of the machine. No one listened to the music, no one cared, drunk or sober; the noise was not meant for entertainment but for the sustaining of a certain psychological
atmosphere, the pervasion of space, the dispersal of unseemly silences. So that a man without anything to say and unable to think could still imagine himself at the vortex of an activity, however meaningless.

The young man with the one arm still had not moved but sat slumped in his chair as if dead; under the big hat his face seemed tense, listening, but the eyes were not open. The whisky bottle was empty, with the fingers of his one hand curled tightly around its neck.

When the light and flies had passed above the breast and reach the neck and shoulders of the nude in the painting, the young man opened his eyes and looked at Jack Burns. Burns felt the weight of that look and set his schooner down on the table, gently. As he turned his head to face the one-armed man the other inverted his grip on the neck of the bottle, brought it back behind his ear and threw it, spinning, at the cowboy’s head. Burns ducked, and the bottle smashed to pieces against the adobe wall behind him.

At first nobody stood up. And nobody said anything; the jukebox ran down a record into oblivion and then there was a short spell of silence. Nobody got up; the cowboy sat where he was, relaxed and a little drunk, staring with no more than a polite interest at the man who had thrown the bottle at him.

When the jukebox had stopped its howling and the room became silent, Burns spoke: “Why’d you throw that bottle at me,
cuate?
Never seen you before in my life.” He tossed a handful of peanuts into his mouth, dropped the bag on the floor and waited for a reply. The one-armed man stared bitterly at him and said nothing. “How about it?” Burns said, a bit more loudly.

The one-armed man did not answer, and did not move. Burns glanced once around the room at the silent men, the alert faces and hands. He swallowed his mouthful of chewed peanuts, took a sip from his beer, and waited without visible anxiety for something tangible to happen again.

This time the one-armed man threw his glass; Burns
jerked his head aside and the glass bounced off his shoulder and slid and rolled across the wooden floor.

“Now looky here, friend,” Burns said, “you sure you got the right man? We ain’t even been properly introduced.” He sat up more formally in his chair.

The young man with one arm stood up, saying nothing, and walked toward the cowboy. His eyes were half open now, a pair of yellow slots, and his lips moved and twisted though no words came through. He came close to Burns, standing above him; he reached up, took off his hat and swung with it at Burns’ face. The cowboy flung himself backwards, his chair going over and sliding out from under, leaving him sprawled on his back on the floor.

The one-armed man stood looking down at him, a sick grin on his face, his eyes gleaming with derision and triumph, his one fist clenched. He started to talk: “Whatsamatter, cowboy, you afraid to fight? You afraid of a one-armed man?”

Burns raised himself to his elbows and looked up at the man. His face had gone cold, expressionless, his eyes were bleak and suddenly sober. But he said: “I don’t want to fight you
cuate.
I’m a peaceable fella, don’t like to fight.” He started to get up and the one-armed man kicked his legs, and he fell flat on the floor again.

The one-armed man looked down at him, grinning. “Can’t stand up, cowboy? Whatsamatter with you? Like a little baby.”

Quickly Burns rolled away and over, and when the revolution was completed he was standing on his feet, erect and ready; the one-armed man, who had moved to trip him again, stopped in surprise. “All right,” Burns said; “now what were you sayin?”

The one-armed man hesitated, no longer grinning. Then he said: “I ain’t afraid of you, cowboy. I don’t give a damn how big you are or how many arms you got.”

Burns said: “Fella, you’d be a lot better off if you’d
stop worryin about that one arm. If you ain’t satisfied with one arm you oughta get it chopped off.”

The one-armed man spluttered after a reply: “You mind your own goddamn business. I lost my arm at Okinawa. What’d you do? I’m a better man than you are, no matter what.”

Burns smiled, though his eyes remained hard and watchful. “Maybe you are,” he said; “it’s a hard thing to settle. Maybe you are. Why don’t we have a drink and talk it over?”

“
Chinga!
” the other said; “you’re afraid, you
hijo de puta.
”

Swift as a cat Burns stepped forward and slapped the man hard across the mouth, driving him back against the bar. A dislodged glass rolled in a half circle, fell off the bar and rolled again, unbroken. “Never call a man that,” Burns said; “just you never call a man that. No matter what, never do it. It’s very bad.” He spoke quickly and quietly, breathing fast. “I might kill you for callin me that, fella. That’s how bad it is. Don’t ever do it again.”

The bartender got busy at the telephone.

The one-armed man sagged against the bar, stunned and off balance, speechless and shocked and outraged. Around the barroom men had risen and were talking excitedly, staring without sympathy at the cowboy. He looked at them, waiting for the charge from the one-armed man. “Now you fellas stand back,” he said. “If this
cabron
wants to fight so bad why by god I’ll fight him. Do it with one hand behind my back, too.” And he slid his left hand under his belt at the small of his back and kept it there. “So don’t nobody interfere or I’ll use both hands.”

The bartender hung up.

The one-armed man roared out at last like a child coming out of a fit, lowered his head and plowed into Burns, butting, kicking, and flailing away with his one violent arm. It was a poor fight: two one-armed men, they made a sorry spectacle with their wild swings and
misses, their awkward lunges and tipsy staggers. And the cowboy was getting the worst of it: without experience in one-arm fighting, he nearly fell on his face every time he swung and seemed unable to defend himself adequately—he received several jarring blows on the face and chest. But he kept on, and being much the taller of the two, with a longer reach, he began after a while to give as much as he took.

The fight went on as the two men staggered around through the barroom clubbing each other with skinned and bloody fists, falling over feet and chairs and spittoons, upsetting tables, spilling drinks, breaking bottles. The onlookers had a difficult time merely keeping out of the way, especially when the combatants began throwing things at each other—beer bottles, glasses, chairs, the steel puck from a shuffleboard table. The bartender, like a goalie in a hockey game, spread his arms and threw his body around to save his precious merchandise from destruction, but was not altogether successful: Scotch, bourbon, tokay and muscatel dripped from his shelves and formed dark pools on the floor.

Finally the fighting became general: Burns, knocked down, was getting back on his feet, forgot that he was supposed to be one-armed and used both hands to raise himself. At once there were cries of objection and someone, a little bowlegged man with a face brown and wrinkled as an old saddlebag, stepped up and kicked the cowboy in the ribs, A few seconds later the little old man was crawling under the table clutching at his mouth, a tooth missing and blood streaming from his nose: his three grown sons took his place.

Eventually and much too late the police arrived: a sheriff’s sergeant and two deputies, three men with leather belts, .38 caliber revolvers, boots, badges and leather blackjacks. The bartender pointed out Jack Burns or what could be seen of him—a pair of high-heeled boots, swinging arms, the black hat miraculously still attached to a lean, bony and bleeding head, all
somehow entangled on the floor in a cluster of squirming human bodies.

The deputies dragged him out, indiscriminately clubbing any heads that got in the way. Burns tripped one of them, punched the other in the belly, and received a sharp leaden rap on the head in return, and a pair of handcuffs on his wrists. Still conscious, he continued to struggle until the sergeant approached him from behind, blackjack in hand, and tapped him expertly on the base of the skull, blacking out the nerve center of the cerebellum.

Limp and inert as a sackful of old rags, long legs dragging, he was hauled out of the bar and across the golden dust of the road to the car, a bright new Ford with siren, red lights, and Bernal County insignia. The sun was low in the west now, a globe of fire singing between the black cones of two burnt-out volcanoes: an immense wave of light streamed over the desert, flooding the cottonwoods and adobe shacks and the red willows along the ditches, pouring across the mesa and mixing with the iron and granite of the mountain crags ten miles away. The men blinked against the glare as they dumped Burns into the back seat of the car. His hat fell off and flopped softly down in the floury dust of the road; one of the deputies picked it up and dropped it on his face. One of the men said: “Will he be quiet now?” and the sergeant said: “He’ll be quiet long enough.”