The Brave Cowboy (32 page)

Johnson made a mental note, unwrapping the last of the bandage. He looked at the injury. The ankle was blue and swollen, hot to the touch. “Oughta have splints on this,” Johnson said; “it might be broken.”

The injured man opened his eyes and smiled weakly at the sergeant, “Didn’t I tell ya?” he said; “goddamnit, didn’t I tell ya?”

“Bullshit,” the sergeant growled; “I know a broken leg when I see one.” He scuffed around in the sand, staring down the canyon. “Jesus, what a place…” he muttered.

Johnson carried a notebook in his jacket; he pulled it out and broke off the stiff cardboard covers and folded them double. “This’ll have to do,” he said to the young man; he placed the improvised splints on the sides of the swollen ankle and started to rewrap the bandage.

“And why couldn’t they send a “copter out to pick us up?” the sergeant said. “How can they expect human beings to climb around over this stuff?” He waved a hand at the mountain now surrounding and supporting them. “Why couldn’t they send a ’copter?”

“I don’t know,” the sheriff said. “We asked for one.” This here’s a cranky case, he was thinking. Parlous upset. I should’ve known better than to let the Air Corps get into this.

“You’re Johnson, aren’t you?” the sergeant said; he stared at the sheriff with narrowed, cynical eyes, licking the sweat from his upper lip.

“
Sheriff
Johnson to you.” Johnson made the final turn in the bandage and fastened it with the two little metal clips. “That feel all right, son?” The young man nodded.

“You sort of made a mess of things today,” the sergeant said, after a short pause. “Isn’t that right,
Sheriff
Johnson?”

Johnson slapped on his hat. “Mind your manners,” he said, standing up. “And your own business.” He put a hand under the armpit of the injured man, Who was smiling slyly. “Come on,” Johnson said, “let’s get this fella down outa here.”

“Okay, okay,” the sergeant said; “sure. Okay. Yes sir, Mister Sheriff.”

Far above them, across the canyon walls, the wind roared through the fiery blue ether of the sky.

When they returned to the foot of the canyon, some three-quarters of an hour later, they found waiting for them—considerably modified by a driving storm of sand and dust and whirling tumbleweeds—an Air Force ambulance with two young Medics huddled in its lee, smoking cigarettes; also, the radio operator, looking flustered and anxious. “The General wants to talk to you,” he shouted at Johnson through the yellow current of the wind.

Johnson turned the damaged airman over to the Medics, then struggled through the dust toward the jeep. “What general?” he growled. Sand pattered the metal surfaces of the machine, against the radio, against his leather jacket. “You mean that Air Force fella— what’s his name?”

“Yes,” the operator said; “him.” He pointed to the microphone. “All set. They’re waitin for you to call right now.”

“All right,” Johnson took up the microphone. “This is Sheriff Johnson calling Kirk Field. Come in, Kirk Field. Over.” The operator flipped the toggle switches and the loudspeaker crackled and hummed; the operator turned up the volume against the whine of the wind. Suddenly the great voice of General Desalius boomed at them, thundering over the wind and the flapping canvas of the jeep:

“Sheriff, this is General Desalius. Sheriff, what have you done with my helicopter?” Without waiting for an answer the voice roared on, making the speaker screen rattle like a piece of loose tin. “Is this nonsense true that that jailbreaker, that scum, that common vagrant, shot down my helicopter? Eh, Sheriff?” There was a pause; a different voice, startlingly mild and meek, said: “Over.”

Johnson replied: “That’s right, General. The helicopter was damaged by small-arms fire and forced down. A crash landing. Nobody seriously hurt. Over.”

The sergeant and one of the Medics approached, listening.

The rich powerful bellow of General Desalius burst from the speaker again, while the radio operator, with a grimace of pain, removed his earphones and held them on his lap: “Sheriff, don’t kid me! That’s ridiculous! Impossible! This bandit—why I’ll blast him off the face of the earth! Where is the rascal? Why I’ll burn him out with napalm, I’ll cook him with phosphorus! Where is that vermin? He can’t—where is he? By god, I’ll drop an atomic bomb on the bastard!”

The two Air Force men were grinning openly, nudging each other. Johnson turned down the volume. The General stormed on:

“Do you know how much my helicopters cost, Sheriff? Do you? Do you have any notion at all?” Another pause; again the anonymous, meditating voice said: “Over.”

Johnson tried to restrain his mounting anger and disgust. “No I don’t, General,” he said. “Over.”

“One hundred and twenty thousand dollars!” the General howled. “Apiece! You hear that, Sheriff? One hundred and twenty thousand dollars, that’s what my “copters cost! One hundred and twenty—”

Johnson switched off the speaker, frowning bitterly. In the comparative silence that followed they could all hear the rasp and rattle of the earphones on the operator’s lap, still vibrating with the thunder of the General’s anger. But a mechanically reduced thunder, a strange and artificial diminution of what had been so overpowering a moment before. The effect was curious and contradictory—a bellowing in miniature, like the roar of an outraged insect.

Johnson felt a peculiar shame, not for himself but for his kind. The wind and dust assailed him, the sun pale beyond the yellow sky, but he stood motionless, his hand on the radio, his eyes fixed on the ground. He became aware, after a few minutes, of the two Air Force men still watching him. He looked at them and they grinned in a furtive, malicious way. The sergeant
said: “The General’s real wigged out, huh man? Really flippin his lid, huh?”

Johnson made no answer. “What about the pilot?” the sergeant said.

“What about him?”

“Are you gonna bring him back to the Base?”

“If he ever comes down outa those rocks,” Johnson said.

“Well, we’re not waiting.” The sergeant and the Medic turned back and climbed into the cab of the ambulance, started the engine, turned noisily in the sand, motor roaring, and drove off down, the road. A pair of ragged tumbleweeds went rolling and flopping after them.

“Well?” said the radio operator; the earphones had stopped vibrating on his lap.

“Well what?” Johnson said.

“Are we gonna give up and go home?”

Johnson turned and gazed up the canyon toward the mountain. Fragments of cloud floated across the face of the cliffs, trailing blue shadows over the naked rock. Patches of snow glinted like glass along the crest Somewhere up there, among those pines and tumbled boulders, under the leaning crags.…

“You think they might find him yet?” the operator said.

“We’ll wait,” Johnson said. “We’ll wait till sundown at least.” He turned up the collar of his jacket against the singing wind. He looked around. “Let’s see if we can’t get this jeep a little farther up the wash, close to the wall. I’d like to get out of this wind before the sand chokes us to death.” This operator stared at him. Johnson said: “Okay? What’s the matter with you? Let’s go!”

B
URNS
CLIMBED
UP
THE
SLOPE
,
CARRYING
HIS
CARBINE
and leading the mare. His beaten black hat, now sprinkled with pine needles and a few dry juniper berries, was pushed far back on his head, revealing his tangled forelock and a brow smeared with dust and sweat. He was breathing heavily, panting—in the cool shade of the cliff his breath turned to a foggy vapor— but he climbed on at a steady rate, not pausing, his eyes and ears alert, scanning the ridge above him, the slope below, the high rim of the mountain.

The mare slipped and stumbled after him, head and neck drooping, flanks shining with lather. She carried the guitar now, slung to the saddlehorn, and a load of venison stuffed and insulated inside the bedroll behind the cantle.

He kept going until he was within a few yards of topping the ridge. Here, among the concealing yellow pine and piñon he tied the horse and went on alone, crouching a little, to the crest of the ridge. He stopped and made a careful survey in all directions. He saw the airplane to the north, cruising slowly up and down the canyon he had left an hour ago. Above him, on the east, were the red cliffs and the long horizontal strata of sedimentary rock that formed the rim and crest of the mountain: he knew that there was somebody up there looking for him; he had seen the glint of metal, and a flashing mirror communicating in Morse to his pursuers below. Now, however, he could see no one,
no sign of man—except the two giant red and white television relay towers perched on the edge of the rim several miles to the northeast.

He looked down into the valley to his south and for a long time could see no man, no enemy. There where the mountain formed a bend, like the inside of an elbow, the forest had crept down and thickened and flourished until the entire valley, or basin, perhaps two miles across at its widest point, was dark and carpeted with the dull drab green of pine and cedar. A man and horse could be tracked but not easily spotted once in there; Burns’ eyes were held, his mind and nerves hungering after those trees and that space of security. He removed his hat and pushed back his damp hair; he noticed the blue juniper berries rolling in the crown of the hat and ate them, filling his mouth with the sharp cooling familiar flavor—a little bitter, with the pungency of turpentine.

As he chewed the berries he turned on his heels, squatting, and looked back and down, to the north and northwest and west. He saw two men coming slowly down the slope on the north, less than a mile away; he saw a group of men, five or six, trudging up the floor of the canyon, heads bent to the ground, their rifle barrels shining; he saw, far below at the fanning mouth of the canyon, the dull gleam of automobiles, the minute figures of men moving about; he saw the valley of the river far to the west, though river and city and the five volcanoes were all invisible under the pall of smoke and dust. He looked again at the bright silvery wreckage of the helicopter down on the opposite hillside—all that crumpled metal, that expensive mangled machinery—and wondered now where the third man was, the one with the rifle; the other two he had seen go limping homeward and knew he had nothing to fear from them but a distant ill-will.

Finally he stood up, went back to Whisky and unwrapped the bridle reins from the branch of the piñon. Rubbing her nose, patting her wet flanks, he talked to
her: “Okay, little girl, we better get a move on, we still got a few hundred miles to go.” He looked up through the black branches of the tree at the towers of granite hanging over them, the remote and silent monuments of an earlier world. “Maybe we’ll have to climb that old headwall yet, little girl.” He stared up at it while the mare nuzzled his chest, thrusting her snorting nose under his arm. A small fragile white butterfly twinkled within the influence of the tree, dipped and turned in the shafts of sunlight, rose up among the clean branches through the tree toward the bare rock beyond and was suddenly lost, extinguished, in that gulf of light and space and muted thunder. “Come on, girl,” Burns said, tugging gently at the reins; Whisky stepped forward and he turned ahead of her and led toward the ridge.

They crossed over under the shade of the pines. Below, the earth fell away steeply, with little cover—boulders and yucca and cholla—toward the valley and the forest. Burns was about to start down when something hot and invisible struck past his cheek with an insane, furious velocity; he heard a metallic twang, the shattering of wood, and as he was falling to the ground, the clear definitive report of a rifle from somewhere down below. He hugged the earth like a lover, his toes digging in, his chin and mouth buried in the dry, fragrant tilth of needles and sand. The first thing he thought, while his gaze searched the brush and rocks below, was: My guitar!—the bastard!—he hit my guitar!

At the moment he could see nothing in the shape of a man; he looked back at the mare, saw her standing alert and uncertain, eyes wide, nostrils flexing, testing the moving air. On the saddle hung the wounded guitar, smashed through bridge and box, a splintered ruin. Burns swore and stared again down the steep hillside, hunting among the boulders and chaparral for a sign of movement, for a shape, a shadow. There was nothing; he became aware of his own hands on the
earth before him: brown, leathery, scarred by bark and cholla spines, a pair of complicated tools, impersonal, removed from him—under one hand lay the rifle. He cocked it with his thumb and waited for something to appear below. He waited for ten seconds, thirty, a full minute, while the light wind brushed the trees around him. The stillness was almost complete: he could hear the agitation of the pine boughs, the dry brittle clicking of a dying locust, his own hard breathing, but nothing more. He waited, uncomfortably conscious of his uncertainty, of the men—seven of them? eight?—approaching from the rear, of the restless mare shying back now, ready to drift off: the inevitable thought came, that he might be better off without the horse, might make the crest of the mountain easily, if alone, and lose himself in the forests on the east. He considered the proposition and rejected it.

His senses functioned independently of his brain, still watching and waiting for a trace of the enemy somewhere below. Yet nothing moved but the black shadows of the boulders, the sun edging down through the sky to the yellow horizon of dust on the west. Burns made up his mind to retreat.

He crawled backwards on his belly, groping behind him for the trailing reins of the bridle. He couldn’t find them; the mare backed away, slowly, one step at a time. Burns crawled back until the trunk of a pine gave him partial shelter on the front; he rose to his knees, turned and grabbed the dragging reins as Whisky stepped backward again. His nerves tingled, expecting another shot, the hot lash of a bullet in his neck or shoulder or ribs, as he pulled his body around to the safe side of the mare, and then led her back to the northern slope of the ridge. He leaned against her for a moment, resting his shaking limbs, breathing in as a kind of security and strength the warm powerful familiar stench of the sweating horse.