Jim Kane - J P S Brown (29 page)

"
Me too. Surely yes. But with my little old
lady," Placido said.

"
Don't you have at least one little song left in
you, Chato?" Kane asked.

"
No. Ya no
. I have
had my fill of music now for a while," Chato said tiredly and
took one last swallow and stood up.

"
Let's go, Placido." They shook hands with
Kane and left. Kane was not ready for bed, but he did not want to
leave the room Don Tomás had so carefully corraled him in for the
night. He took off his clothes, turned down the covers and blew out
the lamp. The room had no windows. He opened the door. He lay down
and he could see the sky under the eave of the
portal
.
The music was outside his door. He had been given the room adjoining
his host's. What more did he want?

In a quiet dream, not asleep, he heard only one
guitar playing softly, a guitar that seemed to hold vigil on the
fiesta. The fiesta had not died but was slipping away contentedly
toward tomorrow.
 

19
The
Sierra Madre

A
serrano
is
an inhabitant of the Sierra Madre. He is a mountain man. He is very
much more his own man than the city man is. He has to do so much more
with only his own faculties, his own hands. I know
serranos
who have to walk seventy
miles to get to a store that stocks axes. Automobiles will never be
available to him. He doesn't miss them. He can make better time in
his mountains on foot or horseback.

The
serranos
lead
very uncomfortable lives compared to what people in Brentwood,
California, believe is comfortable.
Serranos
live at all times on the sides of the real
mountains. They hang their corn crops on vertical slopes. They herd
their cattle around rocky, brushy cliffs where, they should slip and
fall, they would starve to death and the buzzards would eat them
before they hit bottom. There is no level plain upon which the
strolling is good. The streets fall through the villages and are so
steep that they have been washed deeply by the fast water of the
summer rains and only the bedrock of the mountain remains.

The
serrano's
life is not cluttered with possessions, nor
with luxuries such as "fine" foods, liquors, bedding,
entertainment, or roomy abode. He has little use for money, which is
probably the reason he always has a little. He is a rich man as a
rule, not only because he has little use for money but because he has
such a superabundance of what he needs.

The little Cessna 170 bucked and yawed and fought to
clear the oak-topped peak in the high wind of the Sierra Madre. It
cleared the oaks by yards, pointed itself down the other side of the
peak, and leveled off It landed on the side of a hill going uphill on
a narrow strip of rain-washed red earth by a rock wall that swept
past the right wing. It rolled to the top of the hill and stopped.

Kane and the Lion stepped to the ground. The
leather-jacketed pilot unloaded two boxes of oranges, a bundle of
blankets, and a new radio and set them on the side of the strip. He
looked impatiently down the hill at a group of whitewashed buildings
that shone in the clear mountain air at sunup. He walked back to the
plane and opened the planes cowl and checked the oil. A cold wind
uncombed his long hair and he put both hands on the hair to hold it
down. He ran a pocket comb carefully through the hair and patted it
back down.

"Too much wind," he said.

A
vaquero
spurred
a black mule up over the hill. The
armas
over the
vaquero's
knees flapped in the wind. The mule shied at the shiny
contraption parked on top of the hill, too much gleaming metal for
his comprehension. The vaquero
spurred
the sidestepping mule around the pile of provisions the
pilot had stacked by the runway.

"
Where is the
doña
and the little girl?" the pilot asked.

"They are on their way," the vaquero
answered.

"
Please go back and tell them to hurry. There is
too much wind,  the pilot said.

The
vaquero
spurred
his mule into a running walk and went back down the hill and out of
sight.

"
When shall I come back for you?" the pilot
asked the Lion.

"Day after tomorrow," the Lion said.

"Please be here early in the morning. We should
have come much earlier than this. Too much wind."

A young woman riding a mule came over the hill. A
metal suitcase was tied behind the cantle of her saddle. She wore a
large straw hat with the brim pulled down. A white cloth under the
hat protected the back of her head and neck and was tied under her
chin. She was bundled in coats and sweaters and long skirts. She sat
the mule sidesaddle but when she dismounted she uncovered a common,
goose-necked
vaquera
saddle.
She was very light-skinned and her face was pinched by the cold wind.
A little girl rode up behind her on a small
corriente
pony. The woman helped the little girl dismount. The
pilot loaded the woman's blankets and her suitcase and helped the
woman and the little girl into the plane. The woman took off her hat
and white cloth and shook and fluffed her long brown hair. The pilot
started the plane's motor. The tail swung around. The plane taxied
over the hill out of sight. The plane roared, came back, lifted into
the air past Kane and the Lion, and banked around the oak peak toward
Rio Alamos.

"
Come on," the Lion said. "No need for
us to wait here and freeze in this wind." He winked at Kane.
"We'll wait for Arce at my father-in-law's house."

They climbed over the rock wall and stumbled down the
steep, frost-hard, rocky hill toward the little town. They stopped at
a white adobe house. The pine shingles on the roof
of
the house were hand-hewn. The Lion knocked on the door and roared.

A small, whiskered old man, his face dry and darkened
by sun, mountain cold, and woodsmoke, answered the door and quietly
welcomed the Lion. Inside, the earthen floor was packed hard and
clean. The white plastered walls were washed. A fire in an adobe oven
warmed the room. Kane and the Lion sat on rawhide-covered chairs at a
scrubbed, slatboarded table. A large woman in a shapeless cotton
dress, an immaculate floursack bandana tied around her hair, her face
clean and shiny and smiling, served them hot, black, syrupy coffee
and white cheese.

The Lion lost his roar in that home. His speech
became quiet, controlled. He and the old couple discussed the Lion's
errand in the Sierra. A young man entered and respectfully,
wordlessly, shook hands with the Lion. The old man sent the young man
to the plaza of the little community to watch for Arce. Later the boy
came back and told them Arce had arrived.

The town lay in a hollow. Houses had been built on
the edge of a small, open plaza. The boy led Kane and the Lion across
the plaza to a large store. The proprietor of the store told them
Arce was on his veranda. Kane and the Lion passed through the store,
up a short flight of steps, and out onto a long, open veranda that
overlooked a deep canyon behind the house.

Arce was drinking coffee at a small table. When he
turned in his chair Kane noticed he wore big
serrano
spurs on his black dress shoes. He had turned the spurs
around so that they rested on his instep, allowing him the freedom of
walking Without dragging the spurs on the ground. He was glad to see
the buyers. He stood and smiled and the thick coffee filmed his teeth
a tawny yellow.

Arce was very gracious and introduced
Kane and the Lion to the proprietor and asked them if they needed
anything from the store before they left for Arce's ranch. They said
they did not.

"
¿Bueno?
" Arce
said apologetically, as though he regretted they had to leave so soon
after so long a journey as the one from Rio Alamos to the Sierra.
"
¿Nos v
á
mos?
Shall we go?"

"
We're ready," the Lion said.

"
Only I don't know if the Senor Kane is going to
like the beast I brought for him to ride. Is he
de
a caballo
, a horseman?"

"
Don't worry about him. If he falls off we don't
need him anyway," the Lion said.

Three mules were saddled and waiting outside. All of
them were small, weighing six or seven hundred pounds at the most.
Spurs hung on the saddlehorns of two of the mules. Kane put on a pair
of the spurs and mounted a brown mule. The tree of the
vaquero
saddle was narrow and the stirrups were too short.
Kane's knees were doubled up uncomfortably. The stirrups were so
small and the noses of their tapaderas so short that Kane's feet
would not slide all the way into them. He had to ride on the toes of
his feet.

The Lion was in a worse predicament. He was a much
bigger man than Kane; His legs were so doubled up under him that his
Levis crawled up and showed hairy legs over the tops of his boots.
Only the very tip of his boot fitted into the stirrup and the long
spurs hung straight down.

A group of
serranitos
had gathered in the plaza to watch the departure of Arce
and his buyers. They had been amused at the picture Kane made on his
mule but when the Lion mounted they laughed quietly.

"
¡Vale nada!
"
the Lion said. "It makes no difference!" He spurred the
little mule into a lunge and warped the bridle reins over the mule's
rear end. The mule paced down the street looking back at the Lion
alternately out of the corners of his eyes as though he thought he
really had a lion on his back. The three men rode out of` town and
across a high, open plateau. The grass covering the ground was flaxen
with winter. The cold wind was blowing. The little mules kept up a
fast running-walk on the plateau. They slowed when the trail dropped
into a deep, wide canyon. The canyon could have been a mile wide.
Houses of a ranch at the bottom looked tiny, animals diminutive.

They rode four hours down the canyon. They passed
through cornfields that had been grown on the almost vertical sides
of the canyon. The tiers of dry cornstalks stood above the trail over
the riders, heads and below their feet fell straight down into the
canyon. On the trail they encountered cattle that unhurriedly took
high ground above them at the sight of the riders and in a moment
disappeared in oak brush.

From the plateau, the trail passed down through
thick, tall oak; tall, fernlike
higuera
;
and dense scrub oak. Overhead, the tops of mountains were crowned
with forests of pine. Above these, so high their colors only
occasionally glinted in the sun, flocks of squabbling parrots passed
on their seemingly urgent business, quarreling about it as they went.

The men left the big canyon through a gap and rode
down over a dim, brushy trail into another narrow, deep canyon. The
floor of this canyon leveled off and widened and came to a dead end.

Arce stopped his mount at a place by a stream where a
half acre of ground had been carefully cleared of brush, stumps, and
rocks. A thick rock wall had been built around this clearing.

This was no stock pen. It had no gate. Arce
dismounted and Kane and the Lion awkwardly got down and stretched
their legs.

"
We can rest here," Arce said smiling. My
ranch is only a few hundred meters from here. I want to show you this
place and ask our American friend his advice about business I may
undertake inside this
trinchera
,
rock wall.

"
You see how steep the walls of the canyon are
here? How good the earth is? How plentiful the water? This stream
never dries. I have often wondered about the possibilities of success
of a certain crop in this place. What do you think of the possibility
of raising
amapola
in
this place?" he asked Kane. ‘