Fire on the Mountain (2 page)

A little withered cowboy squatted on top of one of the bar stools, watching us enter, blinking as we let in a blast of fresh air and sunshine.

“Close that door, John,” he said to my grandfather. “Now look at them flies. What’s it like out there? Still hot?”

“Go out and see for yourself,” my grandfather said. He ordered a can of beer from the Mexican behind the bar.

“I go out when the sun goes down,” the little cowboy said, hunkered on top of the stool. Like an Indian, he’d never learned properly how to sit on a chair. “Hello, Billyboy,” he said to me, “what’re you a-doin’ in this corner of Hell? Why ain’t you in school where you belong?”

“It’s June,” my Grandfather said. “Vacation time. Billy’s come to spend another summer with us at the Box V. If you ever went outside in the daylight, Bundy, you’d learn to tell the difference between winter and summer.”

“Winter,” the little cowboy said, peering thoughtfully up at the ceiling. “Summer. Oh, I remember what they’re like, John. I seen ’em both one time.”

“Well, have another look,” Grandfather said; “they need you out there.”

The Wagon Wheel was a good bar. I’d always liked it—roomy, gloomy and quiet, always cool even on the hottest days of July and August. Best of all I liked the mural on the windowless east wall, a great primitive picture twenty feet long and ten feet high showing Thieves’ Mountain against an immaculate blue sky and three ragged black buzzards circling above a horseman in the heart of the White Sands. The horse trudged over the dunes with hanging head and closed eyes. The
rider sat slumped in the saddle, a dark stain of blood on his shirt, the shaft of an arrow sticking out of his back, and a rifle hanging loosely from his limp left arm. The artist had given the painting a title: “Desert Doom, or Forty Miles From Hope.”

I drank my root beer and studied the picture, while Grandfather carried on a sullen talk with the little cowboy.

“I hear you declared war on the United States Government, John,” the cowboy said.

“No, they declared war on me.”

“Maybe the Government needs more help.” The little man paused and said: “Whose side is Lee on?”

“I think he’s on my side.”

“Well, maybe the Government will need more help. I think maybe I oughta volunteer, lend ’em a hand. When the summer’s over, I mean, and it ain’t so god-awful hot outside. You think I should join the Army, the Navy, the Marines or the Air Corpse, John?”

“Bundy, you’re giving me a headache.” The old man finished his can of beer and turned to me. “Let’s go, Billy.”

Grandfather and I stepped outside into the scalding brilliance of the afternoon. The heat was like the blast of a furnace, but the dry air sucked the sweat from my body and gave me at least the illusion of comfort. We made for our truck, with its Box V brand painted on the door panel, and climbed in. After a stop at the new supermarket on the edge of town, where the old man bought some flour and beans, we drove south to the turnoff and headed west over the twenty miles of hard-riding dirt road that led to the ranch.

The landscape before me was much the same as that in the mural on the wall of the Wagon Wheel Bar. To the west rose the broken tooth of Thieves’ Mountain, the peak ten thousand feet above sea level, adorned with a feather of cloud. North were the San Andres Mountains, with the white dunes of gypsum flowing for fifty miles along the base of the range, and to the
south were the Organ Mountains, tapering off into the dimness and emptiness of the borderland and Old Mexico. Even the buzzards were present, two of them, hovering high in the blue, meditating on space, but the savage eyes missing nothing that stirred in the desert below—belly, beak and claws taut with hunger and desire. Next turn around, I thought, if we get the choice, I too want to be a long-winged, evil-minded predatory bird.

We came to the boundary and then to the gateway of my grandfather’s little kingdom. He stopped the truck, I got out, slid back the drawbar of the gate and swung it open. Above my head, hanging from the cross-pole of the gate frame, a weather-silvered board inscribed with the Box V brand creaked on its iron rings. The old man drove the pickup through, I closed and latched the gate, and climbed back to my seat.

We drove on across the salt fiats of an ancient lakebed, where the heat shimmered up in palpable waves. Through the layers of heat and light I watched the dislocated outlines of the mountain ranges flow together, floating on a yellow sea of haze. In that country, fantasy and mirage were always present.

After the lakebed we passed clay hills with the shape of giant beehives, turrets and ledges of sandstone, and a wild garden of yuccas with stems ten feet tall. The road slipped into a broad wash, we churned through the soft hot sand and up the other side through thickets of willow and tamarisk, where a group of the old man’s bald-faced Herefords lay shaded up, waiting for the sun to sink before they’d rise and resume the search for something to eat. The cab of the truck filled with fine dust, a layer of it coating the dashboard, where I wrote my name with my finger:
BILLY VOGELIN STARR
.

We didn’t try to talk much during the drive, with the truck bouncing like a bronco, the motor roaring, the bitter alkali getting in our eyes and teeth. Grandfather stared straight ahead from under the brim of
his grimy hat and clutched at the bucking wheel; I kept looking all around, feeding my eyes and mind and heart on the beauty of that grim landscape. Hard country, the people call it. A cow might walk half a mile for a mouthful of grass, and five miles for a drink of water. If the ranch had been mine I’d have sold the cattle and stocked the place with wild horses and buffalo, coyotes and wolves, and let the beef industry go to ruin.

We topped the final rise and won our first view of the ranch headquarters, a mile ahead and a thousand feet below. There was the grove of cottonwood trees surrounding the ranch-house, the windmill and water tank, and the cluster of sheds, corrals, barn, bunkhouse and other outbuildings nearby, all spread out on a bench of land above the arid bed of what was called the Salado River, where a trickle of hard water meandered from one bank to the other.

Grandfather stopped the truck, shut off the motor, and sat for a while staring down at his home, a sad and perplexed expression on his wind-burned leathery face.

“Everything looks the same as ever, Grandfather,” I said. “Like it did last year and the year before. The way it should.”

He stirred, champed on the cigar, reached over and put his big hand, his gripping machine of bone and muscle and hide, on my shoulder. “I’m mighty glad you’re here, Billy. Stay awhile this time.”

At that moment I was ready to forsake my other home, forsake my mother and father and little sister and all my friends, and spend the rest of my life in the desert eating cactus for lunch, drinking blood at cocktail time, and letting the ferocious sun flay me skin and soul. I’d gladly have traded parents, school, a college education and career for one dependable saddle horse. Later that night, of course, alone in bed, the deadly homesickness would strike me faint.

“Sir, if you’ll let me, I won’t go back. I’ll never go
back. I’ll stay here and work for you for the rest of my life.”

The old man laughed. “You’re a good boy, Billy.” He squeezed my shoulder. We gazed down at the ranch for another minute or so, then Grandfather raised his arm and pointed toward Thieves’ Mountain. “That’s where we’ll be tomorrow. Looking for that pony. We’ll spend a night at the old line cabin and I’ll show you some lion tracks.” He turned the ignition key and started the engine. At the same time I saw the contrails of three jet planes coming out of the north and blazing white across the clean clear blue of the sky. I pointed to them. “Three jets, Grandfather. See them, way up there?” More beautiful, I thought, even than vultures.

The old man didn’t share my sentiment. “Trespassers,” he muttered, the smile fading from his face. His good humor had vanished again. We talked no more on the drive down to the ranch. Parking the truck under the trees, Grandfather walked in silence toward the house, ignoring the dogs that leaped at us, barking with happiness. Wolf, the big German police, leaped on my chest and lathered my face with his wet tongue, and a couple of pups I’d never met before galloped and rolled around us like idiots.

Everything looked and smelled and sounded marvelous to me: the fat trees with their trunks like the legs of gigantic elephants and their masses of translucent, quaking acid-green leaves; the windmill clanking and groaning as it turned in the breeze and pumped good cold water up out of the rock; the saddle horses snorting at the water trough in the corral; the milk cow bawling and the hens squawking; the sound of an angry baby howling over in the mud hut where the Peralta family lived. Best of all was the sight of the ranch-house with its massive walls of adobe brick and its small square windows like the gunports of a fortress.

We climbed the steps onto the long verandah, passed under the rack of buckhorns and the horseshoe, and entered the cool dark interior of the house. At once
I smelled the familiar fragrance of simmering pinto beans, of chili sauce and fresh-baked bread, and knew I was home again.

Through the gloom of the parlor, advancing to meet us, came Cruzita Peralta, Grandfather’s cook and housekeeper. Plump, brown as saddle leather, handsome, Cruzita cried out with delight when she saw me and embraced me as she would a child of her own, half-smothering me against her ample and pneumatic bosom.

“Billy,” she said, “it is so good to see you. My how big you get in just one year, now you come up to my neck, eh? Soon you be big and tall like a real man, taller than your grandfather. Only not so ugly, I think. Give me another kiss, my Billy. I bet you are hungry, no? Such a long trip, all by yourself, like a big man.”

I managed to struggle free of her entangling arms and admitted that I was hungry, that I would like something to eat.

“You better take care of your baby, first,” Grandfather said. “He’s awake again. Then come back and feed this boy. He ain’t had nothing to eat since we left El Paso.”

Cruzita rushed out of the door and trotted through the sun-spangled shade of the trees toward her own house. The old man and I moved through the darkness toward the kitchen, where he fixed me up with a tall glass of ice water and mixed himself a highball of ice, rum and water. Stirring his drink, he sat down at the table and invited me to do the same. The long drive across the desert had burned us dry. Refreshed but tired, we sat in silence and waited for the woman to come back.

I poured myself a second glass of water from the pitcher and looked around, sucking on the ice cube in my mouth. All looked the same as ever: black pot of beans on the stove, a row of pans hanging on the wall, geraniums in tomato cans on the window sill, the big stainless-steel refrigerator and freezer, which worked
on bottled butane, standing in the alcove beside the stove, where the old man had placed them years before. He had no use or need for electricity, but he did like ice in his drinks. The refrigerator, the pickup truck, and the disposable toothpick, he confessed, were the three great achievements of modern man.

Cruzita returned, the baby in her arms, which she placed on the floor away from the stove before serving Grandfather and me each an overflowing plate of fried beans, fried beef, fried eggs, and fried potatoes, all liberally spiced with red chili sauce. With the plates came thick slices of her new-baked bread, and butter, jam, milk, and coffee. With a good appetite I ate the meal I’d been anticipating for a day and a half and nearly two thousand miles on the train. As I ate I wiped the tears from my eyes, blew my nose, drank all the water and milk in sight, and added an extra touch of hot sauce to my beans.

Finished, unwrapping a fresh cigar, Grandfather leaned back in his chair, tilting it against the wall. “Where’s Eloy?” he asked. Meaning Eloy Peralta, Cruzita’s husband and the old man’s hired hand.

Cruzita poured him another cup of coffee. “He say he go to the north line, Mister Vogelin. He want to fix that break in the fence below the cinder cone, where the jeeps come through.”

The old man growled. “Yeah, them soldier boys. By God, if they do that once more I’m gunning for them.”

“What happened?” I asked.

Grandfather gave me a brooding stare, looking at something inside his head. The expression softened. “Well, Billy, they like to hunt jack rabbits, you see, these here soldiers from the Proving Grounds. They got nothing else to do, I guess, so they go barreling after the crazy scared jacks and bust right through my fence. Second time this year. You might think if they want a war so bad they could find one overseas somewhere and leave us citizens in peace.” He lit the cigar and partially disappeared behind a fog of gray smoke.

From outside, the lowing of the milk cow reached our ears. Cruzita was washing the dishes and rinsing them off with boiling water from the kettle on the stove. “That cow,” she said, “always wants milking when I’m busy. Let her wait.”

“She’ll jump the fence,” Grandfather said.

“I finish these dishes first, damn cow.”

“Maybe the calf got out. Ain’t that calf weaned yet?”

“Two more weeks,” Cruzita said.

The cow bawled again. With a clatter of noise she stacked the dishes in the drying rack, scooped up the baby from the floor, and bounced out of the kitchen. The old man and I watched her go.

“Cruzita can do most anything, can’t she, Grandfather,”

“She’s a good woman. She sure has spoiled me. How she can manage to look after all those kids and Eloy and the cow and the hens and me too is something I’m kind of afraid to ask about.” He puffed slowly on his cigar and stared at the dark ceiling through skeins of smoke. His own wife had died fifteen years ago in the hospital at Alamogordo. Watching his old and saddened face, I wondered if he was thinking now about that. I knew that something deep was troubling his mind. I wanted to ask but also knew that when he wanted he would talk to me about it.

The dark and stillness of twilight was filling the room: sun going down beyond the barren snag of the mountain.