Fire on the Mountain (4 page)

“I wanted—I wanted to say hello to Lee,” I mumbled.

And all at once there he was, looming up behind the old man and smiling at me. Lee Mackie, tall and slim and dark-eyed, a brave and gallant man. “Hello, Billy,” he said. He held out his right hand. “It’s good to have you back, Billy. You come down here and say hello.”

Wake up!

Hey, dude, wake up!

Dreams evaporating, I felt a rough hand shaking the bed, opened my eyes and saw in the starlight the laughing face of Lee Mackie. I sat up at once, charged suddenly with excitement and a wild delight.

His eyes gleamed in the darkness. “You awake?”

“Yes. Yes,” I said.

“Get dressed. Come and eat. We’re taking off for the mountain in ten minutes.”

I slid out of bed and stood up shakily, rubbing my eyes. Through the window I could see the stars in unfamiliar constellations glittering like diamonds on the deep-velvet sky, a spray of stars so clear and bright they seemed no farther away than the leaves of the trees.

“Here, I’ll light the lamp for you.” Lee felt for matches in his pocket, found them, struck fire and lit the wick of the kerosene lamp on the dresser. “How many eggs, Billy? Three or four?”

“Four.” I looked for my suitcase. The clothes I wanted were inside it.

“Hurry up. We’ll give you one minute to get dressed.” Lee backed off through the doorway and tramped away down the hall, whistling like a mockingbird.

I opened the suitcase and pulled out my blue jeans and the tight cowboy shirt with the diamond-shaped imitation-pearl buttons—a great shirt. The air was chill; I dressed quickly, tugged on my boots, grabbed
my new hat and hobbled out and down the hallway toward the warm glow of the kitchen.

Lee stood bent over the rumble of fire in the cookstove, stirring a mess of eggs and potatoes in an oversize iron skillet. Flame and smoke leaked out around the edge of the skillet—the stovelid had been shoved aside. The redolence of burning juniper graced the air. Lee heard me approach and greeted me with his white grin, nodding toward the table, where three places had been set. I went first to the sink, turned the tap, and splashed cool water over my face. I dried my face with the fresh towel that hung on a handy nail, combed my hair with my fingers, and was ready.

“Get your grampaw in here,” Lee said. “We’re ready to eat.”

I went to the screen door and called the old man. He stood outside on the bare ground below the verandah, talking with Eloy Peralta, two dim figures in the morning dusk. Grandfather dismissed Eloy with a clap on the shoulder and came into the kitchen. We three sat down at the table and ate, by the light of the lamp, the hot and hearty breakfast Lee had made. I was hungry, beautifully hungry, with an appetite I’d almost forgotten I’d ever had.

“That’s the way to shovel it down,” Lee said, grinning at me enthusiastically. “Look at this boy eat, John. You can always tell a cowboy by the way he eats. If he don’t eat like a wolf there’s something wrong with him.”

The old man smiled at me. “We’ll keep him.” His huge left hand was clamped around a mug of steaming coffee; I could see the freckles and the red hair on his knuckles.

“Have some more, Billy.” Lee scraped more of the scrambled eggs and fried potatoes out of the skillet onto my plate. I added a few extra slices of bacon from the second frypan and buttered another slab of bread. “That’s the idea,” Lee said. “Man, if we find that lion today, I sure feel sorry for the lion.”

“Or suppose he finds the horse before we do,” Grandfather said. “That’s a valuable horse.”

“Nature’s plan,” I said through a mouthful of food. They watched me eat.

“Let’s go,” Lee said, as I finished. “I can feel the sun coming up over Texas.” He gulped down the last of his coffee, pushed back his chair and stood up, reaching for his hat. I stood up and reached for my hat and when Lee put his on I put mine on.

Grandfather unwrapped a cigar. “Be right with you boys. Don’t wait for me.”

Lee strode outside and I followed. Parked near the verandah was Lee’s enormous custard-colored automobile, gleaming with chrome and glass. He stroked its sleek enamel as we passed. “Some piece of iron, huh Billy?”

“It’s a nice car, Lee,” I didn’t really pay it much attention; where I came from the streets were more or less solidly paved with these metallic objects and a man on foot could walk across a street only when the machines permitted him to. They were as familiar to me as the feel of soot on cement and the smell of sewer gas. My father leased two new ones every year.

We walked quietly through the gloom under the shivering leaves of the cottonwoods toward the barn and corral. I saw the green ribbons of dawn stretched out above the purple mesa eastward. A horned owl hooted from the willow thickets. Meadow larks and canyon wrens, invisible but present, sang out clear as angels in the pasture beyond the corral and in the alfalfa field along the wash.

“Lee,” I said.

He gripped my arm for a moment. “Let’s not talk about it today, Billy. It’ll be all right. Don’t let it worry you.”

The screen door clapped shut behind us, a loud noise in the stillness, and glancing back I saw the red coal of the old man’s cigar as he came down the steps of the porch.

Lee and I entered the barn, felt our way into the tackroom and loaded ourselves with gear. Lee filled a feedbag with grain and we stepped out of the barn into the corral. Holding a bridle behind my back, I looked at the group of horses stamping and snorting in the far corner of the corral, hungry but worried. To me, in that half light, they looked big as mastodons, their eyeballs flaming with red menace, their hooves pounding like sledges on the hard earth.

Lee handed me the feedbag. “Choose your mount.”

I advanced slowly toward the huddled animals, feeling scared and made even more scared by my effort not to show it. I looked for my favorite, a small buckskin gelding with black mane, broomtail, long legs. This was the horse I had most often ridden the year before. I couldn’t make him out in the shifting mass of horses.

“Where’s Rascal?” I asked.

“Rascal?” Lee said. “Why Billy, that’s the one we’re hunting for today. He’s been missing for a week.”

My grandfather came out of the barn with a saddle on his shoulder. “Take old Blue there, Billy. He’s the one you want now.”

I stepped forward again, holding out the bag of grain, and now the horses came to meet me and crowded close, thrusting their muzzles at the feedbag, shoving me toward the fence and stepping carelessly on my new boots. I offered the bag to Blue, a big gray, draped the reins around his neck and led him out of the mob and back to the corral fence. While the horse ate his breakfast I climbed part way up the fence and laid the saddle pad and the saddle over his broad back.

I no longer felt any fear. The massive bulk of the animal, his powerful jaws crunching bran and barley into gruel, his docile indifference to my activity, inspired me with confidence and affection. I was foolishly proud of the fact that such a great strong beast would submit to my purpose—at least when bribed. I cinched the saddle as tight as I could and climbed aboard to
test the stirrup lengths. Too long: I had to dismount and readjust them. By this time Lee and the old man, pretending not to observe my efforts, had their own mounts saddled, bridled, fed and ready to go.

Blue was nearly finished. I tried to take the feedbag away from him so that I could get the bit in his mouth. He shook his head, hurling me to the ground. I got up, waited respectfully until he was satisfied there was nothing more in the bag, then bridled him successfully and climbed up into the saddle.

The world looked different from up there—better. A primitive joy flowered in my heart as I guided the horse away from the rails and toward the gate. A touch of my heels and he walked forward; a slight tug on the reins and he stopped. I leaned forward and rubbed the mighty shoulders. “Good old Blue …” I felt about ten feet tall, a master of horses and men. The wild birds crying in the desert echoed the delight of my soul.

Lee and Grandfather came alongside, Lee on a dark quarter horse, Grandfather on his big sorrel stallion, Rocky. Grandfather said, “You ready, Billy?”

“Yes sir!”

“Tie this on your saddle.” He gave me a poncho, smiling at me. He faced the east; I saw reflections of the dawn on his glasses. I didn’t understand at first why he was smiling at me in so strange a way, until I felt the tears welling out of my eyes. “Do you feel all right?”

“Yes sir.” I looked away. “Grandfather, I—I’m so …”

“I know, Billy. I know how you feel.” He caressed my back. “Let’s go.”

Lee moved ahead and opened the corral gate, dismounting and remounting with his usual practiced ease. We rode through, leaving the gate open, and the remaining horses followed us. When we broke into a brisk trot down across the irrigated field toward the river of sand, they halted and watched us go, heads up in solemn curiosity. I felt sorry for them, left behind.
At that moment I would have felt sorry for anyone in the world, man or beast, who was not going with us.

When we reached the west gate, Grandfather got down and opened it and we passed through; he closed the gate and drew up beside us as we rode through the willow and tamarisk bordering the wash.
El Rio Salado
. The salty river. We rode across the firm sand and gravel, coated with white alkali, to the narrow channel of water shining with motion on the far side. We stopped there for a few minutes, allowing the horses a final drink before heading into the desert and arid hills beyond.

I watched a pair of sandpipers scamper on twinkling legs beside the water, upstream, and became aware of the quiet rustle of multitudes of leaves overhead. I stared up at the boughs of the cottonwoods on the bank above us, their leaves caught in a fantastic silvery predawn light and fluttering continuously, though I could scarcely feel the breeze. Alive, the trees whispered in soft excitement, enjoying the best hour of the day. The sun when it rose would force them into somnolence through the withering heat of forenoon and afternoon. I knew how they felt and how they could feel.

“Kit fox,” Lee said.

I looked hurriedly around, searching the high ground for a glimpse of a fox.

“Down here,” he said, pointing to the mud near the water.

I looked hard and discerned the tiny doglike tracks coming down to the stream.

“I’m glad to know there’s still a few of them left,” Grandfather said. “They ain’t poisoned them all, yet.”

The horses raised their heads. We jogged them forward, splashed through the shallow current, climbed the bank where it was broken down by the passage of many cattle, and moved through the grove of trees and up the gravel mounds beyond the river bed to the open, range. Ahead of us lay a five-mile expanse of sand, stone and cactus, then the foothills dotted with juniper
and pinyon pine which led up to the mountains and the bald summit of Thieves’ Peak.

The gramma grass, dried out to a tawney brown, grew in little circular clumps under the brush, among the boulders and sand dunes. There was no other grass. The cattle, who went everywhere, ate what they could find but did not and could not depend on this sparse growth for life. They browsed on the tough shrubbery of the desert—the black-brush, chamisa, cliffrose, ephedra, greasewood and mesquite. In hard times, in desperate times, the cattle would even eat the prickly-pear cactus, sometimes helped by the rancher who went before them with a flame-thrower and burnt off the thorns. If this was not enough the rancher would have to buy feed. If he went broke buying feed he could then sell his stock and wait for rain and a better year. If the rain delayed too long he sold his ranch or let the banks take it away. The smaller the ranch the greater the risk, and my Grandfather Vogelin was one of the few independent ranchers who somehow had survived the wheel of drouth and depression. He seldom broke even but he didn’t break.

We rode beneath a giant yucca in full bloom, a kind of monstrous lily with a base of leaves as big, rigid and sharp as bayonets, a stalk twelve feet tall and a panicle of fat white waxy flowers. Scattered across the desert in all directions stood more of these solitary, flowering scarecrows.

“Look at that thing,” Grandfather said. “You know, a man came out to see me one day, said he was from the Range Management Bureau. He saw these here yuccas and he asked what they were good for.”

“What’d you tell him?” Lee said, grinning at me.

“I’m a patient old fool,” Grandfather said. “I tried to humor this fella. I told him the Indians made baskets out of the leaf fibers, used the stalks for fences and shade, and made good medicine out of the flowers. Always saving plenty of yuccas for future use, of course. But the man said to me, We got paper and
cellophane and cardboard now, who needs a basket? He said, You don’t need shade now, you go indoors and turn on the air conditioner when it’s hot. And he said, As for medicine, you get all you need in Juarez for five dollars a gallon.”

“I think he had you there,” Lee said.

“He won the argument,” the old man said, “but he lost his immortal soul. So he tells me this and he asks me, What is the yucca good for? How could I answer a question like that? I know how the yucca feels about it but I couldn’t put it into words any more than a yucca can. I couldn’t say it holds the soil down—there ain’t no soil here. I couldn’t say it casts a welcome shade—it won’t shade a rabbit. Well, he saw he was pushing me into a corner and he made his big play. The yucca is not good for anything, he says. It drinks your water and it eats the minerals in your ground but it doesn’t do you one—one nickel’s worth of good. What should I do about it? I asked him. Kill them, he said; kill every—every horny one of the ugly things. And don’t stop there, he said; look at those cottonwood trees along the wash, sucking your river dry. What can I do about that? I asked. Ring them, he said. They’re bleeding you like vampires—cut them down. Think of the awful waste. Don’t you believe in conservation? he asked.”

“He was threading you like a needle,” Lee said. “What did you say to that?”

“I said yes sir, I believe in conservation, and he said, Then do something about it or someday we’ll revoke your grazing permit, make you eat cottonseed cake and TV dinners.”