Jim Kane - J P S Brown (7 page)

The kid went over backward in his chair. Kane pushed
the table aside and grabbed up the blond locks with both hands, led
the heavy head up, and slammed the face of it into his knee.

"
No, please," the kid begged.

Kane laughed at him and gave him the knee again.

"
Oh, please, " the kid cried.

"
Stop him! Stop him! He'll kill him," a
girl cried.

Kane released the boy and watched him collapse slowly
to the floor. He turned, grinning toward the rest of the kids. Jimmy
Keys was watching over them with an ax handle in his hands.

"
Let's go now, " Kane said. "Pick him
up, girls, and let's go."

Jimmy helped load the ace into the back of the jalopy
and got in back with him and the girls. The two other big boys got in
front, one behind the wheel. Kane walked over to the driver's side.

"
I'm driving," he said.

The kid looked straight ahead and reached to turn the
ignition key. Kane thumbed him hard in the ribs and shoved him over
on top of his partner. Kane drove the jalopy to Frog Turpin's
Frontier Bar on the highway. He and Jimmy got out of the jalopy and
the kids roared off to town and new adventures.

Frog was tending his bar. Kane went to the pay phone
and called Bob Keys and told him about the cattle. He left out the
part about the juveniles. Then he went to the bar, and ordered a
double Old Crow.

"
Jimmy has been telling me your Brahmas ran
tonight," Frog said.

"
They ran and ran and ran, Frog," Kane
said.

"
Four or five big steers came by here on the
highway about an hour ago. They were going north."

"
Was a big banana-horned steer with them?"

"
One like that was in the lead. He was big as a
horse."

"
We'll get them in the morning. Right now it is
time to get drunk. Jimmy will drink beer. I will drink Old Crow.
Please keep our glasses full, Frog."

"With pleasure," said Frog, pouring Kane's
second double.

"
Don't you think we'd better go a little easy,
Jim?" Jimmy asked.

"
How do you go easy, pard?"

"
I mean we have a lot of work to do in the
morning. A lot of riding. Those cattle are on the highway now. If
there is an accident and we are found here drinking we might get in
trouble."

"
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
nothing 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.