Presence: Stories Page 11

  “Damn right,” Gay said.

  “Hell, Gay, you are the most misfitted man I ever saw and you done all right.”

  “I got no complaints,” Gay said.

  “I don’t want nothin’ and I don’t want to want nothin’.”

  “That’s the way, boy.”

  Gay felt closer to him again and he was glad for it. He kept his eyes on the ridges far away. The sun felt good on his shoulders. “I think he’s havin’ trouble with them sumbitches up in there.”

  Perce stared out at the ridges. “Ain’t two hours yet.” Then he turned to Gay. “These mountains must be cleaned out by now, ain’t they?”

  “Just about,” Gay said. “Just a couple small herds left. Can’t do much more around here.”

  “What you goin’ to do when you got these cleaned out?”

  “Might go north, I think. Supposed to be some big herds in around Thighbone Mountain and that range up in there.”

  “How far’s that?”

  “North about a hundred miles. If I can get Guido interested.”

  Perce smiled. “He don’t like movin’ around much, does he?”

  “He’s just misfitted like the rest of us,” Gay said. “He don’t want nothin’.” Then he added, “They wanted him for an airline pilot flyin’ up into Montana and back. Good pay too.”

  “Wouldn’t do it, huh?”

  “Not Guido,” Gay said, grinning. “Might not like some of the passengers, he told them.”

  Both men laughed, and Perce shook his head in admiration of Guido. Then he said, “They wanted me take over the ridin’ academy up home. I thought about that. Two hundred a month and board. Easy work too. You don’t hardly have to ride at all. Just stand around and see the customers get satisfied and put them girls off and on.”

  He fell silent. Gay knew the rest. It was the same story always. It brought him closer to Perce, and it was what he had liked about Perce in the first place. Perce didn’t like wages either. He had come on Perce in a bar where the boy was buying drinks for everybody with his rodeo winnings, and his hair still clotted with blood from a bucking horse’s kick an hour earlier. Roslyn had offered to get a doctor for him and he had said, “Thank you kindly. But I ain’t bad hurt. If you’re bad hurt you gonna die and the doctor can’t do nothin’, and if you ain’t bad hurt you get better anyway without no doctor.”

  Now it suddenly came upon Gay that Perce had known Roslyn before they had met in the bar. He stared at the boy’s profile. “Want to come up north with me if I go?” he asked.

  Perce thought a moment. “Think I’ll stay around here. Not much rodeoin’ up north.”

  “I might find a pilot up there, maybe. And Roslyn drive us up in her car.”

  Perce turned to him, a little surprised. “Would she go up there?”

  “Sure. She’s a damn good sport,” Gay said. He watched Perce’s eyes, which had turned interested and warm.

  Perce said, “Well, maybe; except to tell you the truth, Gay, I never feel comfortable takin’ these horses for chicken feed.”

  “Somebody’s goin’ to take them if we don’t.”

  “I know,” Perce said. He turned to watch the far ridges again. “Just seems to me they belong up there.”

  “They ain’t doin’ nothin’ up there but eatin’ out good cattle range. The cow outfits shoot them down if they see them.”

  “I know,” Perce said.

  “They don’t even bother takin’ them to slaughter. They just rot up there if the cow outfits get to them.”

  “I know,” Perce said.

  There was silence. Neither bug nor lizard nor rabbit moved on the great basin around them, and the sun warmed their necks and their thighs. Gay said, “I’d as soon sell them for riding horses but they ain’t big enough, except for a kid. And the freight on them’s more than they’re worth. You saw them—they ain’t nothin’ but skinny horses.”

  “I just don’t know if I’d want to see like a hundred of them goin’ for chicken feed, though. I don’t mind like five or six, but a hundred’s a lot of horses. I don’t know.”

  Gay thought. “Well, if it ain’t this it’s wages. Around here anyway.” He was speaking of himself and explaining himself.

  “I’d just as soon ride buckin’ horses and make out that way, Gay.” Perce turned to him. “Although I might go up north with you. I don’t know.”

  “Roslyn wouldn’t come out here at first,” Gay said, “but soon as she saw what they looked like she stopped complainin’ about it. You didn’t hear her complainin’ about it.”

  “I ain’t complainin’, Gay. I just don’t know. Seems to me God put them up there and they belong up there. But I’m doin’ it and I guess I’d go on doin’ it. I don’t know.”

  “Sounds to me like the newspapers. They want their steaks, them people in town, but they don’t want castration or branding or cleanin’ wild horses off the ranges.”

  “Hell, man, I castrated more bulls than I got hairs on my head,” Perce said.

  “I better get the glasses,” Gay said and slid out of the tire in which he had been lounging and off the truck. He went to the cab and reached in and brought out a pair of binoculars, blew on the lenses, mounted the truck, and sat on a tire with his elbows resting on his knees. He put the glasses to his eyes and focused them. The mountains came up close with their pocked blue hides. He found the pass through which he believed the plane would come and studied its slopes and scanned the air above it. Anger was still warming him. “God put them up there!” Why, Christ, God put everything everywhere. Did that mean you couldn’t eat chickens, for instance, or beef? His dislike for Perce was flowing into him again.

  They heard the shotgun off in the sky somewhere and they stopped moving. Gay narrowed his eyes and held the binoculars perfectly still.

  “See anything?” Perce asked.

  “He’s still in the pass, I guess,” Gay said.

  They sat still, watching the sky over the pass. The moments went by. The sun was making them perspire now, and Gay wiped his wet eyebrows with the back of one hand. They heard the shotgun again from the general sky. Gay spoke without lowering the glasses. “He’s probably blasting them out of some corner.”

  Perce quickly arched out of his tire. “I see him,” he said quickly. “I see him glintin’, I see the plane.”

  It angered Gay that Perce had seen the plane first without glasses. In the glasses Gay could see it clearly now. It was flying out of the pass, circling back, and disappearing into the pass again. “He’s got them in the pass now. Just goin’ back in for them.”

  “Can you see them?” Perce asked.

  “He ain’t got them in the clear yet. He just went back in for them.”

  Now through his glasses he could see moving specks on the ground where the pass opened onto the desert table. “I see them,” he said. He counted, moving his lips. “One, two, three, four. Four and a colt.”

  “We gonna take the colt?” Perce asked.

  “Hell, can’t take the mare without the colt.”

  Perce said nothing. Then Gay handed him the glasses. “Take a look.”

  Gay slid off the truck bed and went forward to the cab and opened its door. His dog lay shivering on the floor under the pedals. He snapped his fingers, and she warily got up and leaped down to the ground and stood there quivering, as she always did when wild horses were coming. He watched her sit and wet the ground, and how she moved with such care and concern and fear, sniffing the ground and moving her head in slow motion and setting her paws down as though the ground had hidden explosives everywhere. He left her there and climbed onto the truck and sat on a tire beside Perce, who was still looking through the glasses.

  “He’s divin’ down on them. God, they sure can run!”

  “Let’s have a look,” Gay said and reached out, and Perce handed him the gl
asses, saying, “They’re comin’ on fast.”

  Gay watched the horses in the glasses. The plane was starting down toward them from the arc of its climb. They swerved as the roaring motor came down over them, lifted their heads, and galloped faster. They had been running now for over an hour and would slow down when the plane had to climb after a dive and the motor’s noise grew quieter. As Guido climbed again Gay and Perce heard a shot, distant and harmless, and the shot sped the horses on again as the plane took time to bank and turn. Then, as they slowed, the plane returned over them, diving down over their backs, and their heads shot up again and they galloped until the engine’s roar receded over them. The sky was clear and lightly blue, and only the little plane swung back and forth across the desert like the glinting tip of a magic wand, and the horses came on toward the vast stripped clay bed where the truck was parked.

  The two men on the truck exchanged the glasses from time to time. Now they sat upright on the tires, waiting for the horses to reach the edge of the lake bed, when Guido would land the plane and they would take off with the truck. And now the horses stopped.

  “They see the heat waves,” Gay said, looking through the glasses. He could see the horses trotting with raised, alarmed heads along the edge of the barren lake bed, which they feared because the heat waves rose from it like liquid in the air and yet their nostrils did not smell water, and they dared not move ahead onto unknowable territory. The plane dived down on them, and they scattered but would not go forward onto the lake bed from the cooler, sage-dotted desert behind them. Now the plane banked high in the air and circled out behind them over the desert and banked again and came down within yards of the ground and roared in behind them almost at the height of their heads, and as it passed over them, rising, the men on the truck could hear the shotgun. Now the horses leaped forward onto the lake bed, all scattered and heading in different directions, and they were only trotting, exploring the ground under their feet and the strange, superheated air in their nostrils. Gradually, as the plane wound around the sky to dive again, they closed ranks and slowly galloped shoulder to shoulder out onto the borderless lake bed. The colt galloped a length behind with its nose nearly touching the mare’s long silky tail.

  “That’s a big mare,” Perce said. His eyes were still dreamy and his face was calm, but his skin had reddened.

  “She’s a bigger mare than usual up here, ya,” Gay said.

  Both men watched the little herd now, even as they got to their feet on the truck. There was the big mare, as large as any full-grown horse, and both of them downed their surprise at the sight of her. They knew the mustang herds lived in total isolation and that inbreeding had reduced them to the size of large ponies. The herd swerved now and they saw the stallion. He was smaller than the mare but still larger than any Gay had brought down before. The other two horses were small, the way mustangs ought to be.

  The plane was coming down for a landing now. Gay and Perce Howland moved to the forward edge of the truck’s bed where a strap of white webbing was strung at hip height between two stanchions stuck into sockets at the corners of the truck. They drew another web strap from one stanchion to the other and stood inside the two. Perce tied the back strap to his stanchion. Then they turned around inside their harnesses and each reached into a tire behind him and drew out a coil of rope whose end hung in a loop. They glanced out on the lake bed and saw Guido taxiing toward them, and they stood waiting for him. He cut the engine twenty yards from the truck and leaped out of the open cockpit before the plane had halted. He lashed the tail of the plane to a rope that was attached to a spike driven into the clay and trotted over to the truck, lifting his goggles off and stuffing them into his torn jacket pocket. Perce and Gay called out laughingly to him, but he seemed hardly to have seen them. His face was puffed with preoccupation. He jumped into the cab of the truck, and the collie dog jumped in after him and sat on the floor, quivering. He started the truck and roared ahead across the flat clay into the watery waves of heat.

  They could see the herd standing still in a small clot of dots more than two miles off. The truck rolled smoothly, and in the cab Guido glanced at the speedometer and saw it was past sixty. He had to be careful not to turn over and he dropped back to fifty-five. Gay, on the right front corner of the truck bed, and Perce Howland on the left, pulled their hats down to their eyebrows and hefted the looped ropes, which the wind was threatening to coil and foul in their palms. Guido knew that Gay Langland was a good roper and that Perce was unsure, so he headed for the herd’s left in order to come up to them on Gay’s side of the truck if he could. This whole method—the truck, the tires, the ropes, and the plane—was Guido’s invention, and once again he felt the joy of having thought of it all. He drove with both heavy hands on the wheel and his left foot ready over the brake pedal. He reached for the shift lever to feel if it was going to spring out of gear and into neutral, but it felt tight, and if they did not hit a bump he could rely on it. The herd had started to walk but stopped again now, and the horses were looking at the truck, ears raised, necks stretched up and forward. Guido smiled a little. They looked silly to him standing there, but he knew and pitied them their ignorance.

  The wind smashed against the faces of Perce and Gay standing on the truck bed. The brims of their hats flowed up and back from a low point in front, and their faces were dark red. They saw the horses watching their approach at a standstill. And as they roared closer and closer they saw that this herd was beautiful.

  Perce Howland turned his head to Gay, who glanced at him at the same time. There had been much rain this spring, and this herd must have found good pasture. They were well rounded and shining. The mare was almost black, and the stallion and the two others were deep brown. The colt was curly-coated and had a gray sheen. The stallion dipped his head suddenly and turned his back on the truck and galloped. The others turned and clattered after him, with the colt running alongside the mare. Guido pressed down on the gas and the truck surged forward, whining. They were a few yards behind the animals now and they could see the bottoms of their hoofs, fresh hoofs that had never been shod. They could see the full manes flying and the thick and long black tails that would hang down to their fetlocks when they were still.

  The truck was coming abreast of the mare now, and beside her the others galloped with only a loud ticking noise on the clay. It was a gentle tacking clatter for they were light-footed and unshod. They were slim-legged and wet after running almost two hours in this alarm, but as the truck drew alongside the mare and Gay began twirling his loop above his head the whole herd wheeled away to the right, and Guido jammed the gas pedal down and swung with them, but they kept galloping in a circle, and he did not have the speed to keep abreast of them so he slowed down and fell behind them a few yards until they would straighten out and move ahead again. And they wheeled like circus horses, slower now, for they were at the edge of their strength, and suddenly Guido saw a breadth between the stallion and the two browns and he sped in between, cutting the mare off at the left with her colt. Now the horses stretched, the clatter quickened. Their hind legs flew straight back and their necks stretched low and forward. Gay whirled his loop over his head, and the truck came up alongside the stallion, whose lungs were hoarsely screaming with exhaustion, and Gay flung the noose. It fell on the stallion’s head, and with a whipping of the lead Gay made it fall over his neck. The horse swerved away to the right and stretched the rope until the tire was pulled off the truck bed and dragged along the hard clay. The three men watched from the slowing truck as the stallion, with startled eyes, pulled the giant tire for a few yards, then leaped up with his forelegs in the air and came down facing the tire and trying to back away from it. Then he stood still, heaving, his hind legs dancing in an arc from right to left and back again as he shook his head in the remorseless noose.

  As soon as he was sure the stallion was secure Guido scanned the lake bed and without stopping turned sharply left toward th
e mare and the colt, which were trotting idly together by themselves. The two browns were already disappearing toward the north, but Guido knew they would halt soon because they were tired, while the mare might continue to the edge of the lake bed and back into her familiar hills where the truck could not follow. He straightened the truck and jammed down the gas pedal. In a minute he was straight on behind her, and he drew up on her left side because the colt was running on her right. She was very heavy, he saw, and he wondered now if she was a mustang at all. As he drove alongside her his eyes ran across her flanks, seeking out a brand, but she seemed unmarked. Then through his right window he saw the loop flying out and down over her head, and he saw her head fly up, and then she fell back. He turned to the right, braking with his left boot, and he saw her dragging a tire and coming to a halt, with the free colt watching her and trotting very close beside her. Then he headed straight ahead across the flat toward two specks, which rapidly enlarged until they became the two browns, which were at a standstill and watching the oncoming truck. He came in between them, and as they galloped Perce on the left roped one, and Gay roped the other almost at the same time. And Guido leaned his head out of his window and yelled up at Perce, who was on the truck bed on his side. “Good boy!” he hollered, and Perce let himself return an excited grin, although there seemed to be some trouble in his eyes.

  Guido made an easy half circle and headed back to the mare and the colt, and in a few minutes he slowed to a halt some twenty yards away and got out of the cab. The dog remained sitting on the floor of the cab, her body shaking all over.

  The three men approached the mare. She had never seen a man, and her eyes were wide with fear. Her rib cage stretched and collapsed very rapidly, and there was a trickle of blood coming out of her nostrils. She had a heavy dark brown mane, and her tail nearly touched the ground. The colt with dumb eyes shifted about on its silly bent legs, trying to keep the mare between itself and the men, and the mare kept shifting her rump to shield the colt from them.