Jim Kane - J P S Brown (11 page)

"
There he is, I see him. I knew if we talked
about him it would be our bad luck for him to show up here among us,"
Garrett shouted.

"
Who is it?" the Aztec asked.

"
Jim Kane," Ira March said.

"
Is he the one you've been talking about all
afternoon?"

"
That is him," Ira March said.

"
Mr. Kane, come over and join us," the
other girl said. They turned on their stools to greet Kane. Ira March
had his arm in a cast. Kane tapped the cast instead of shaking hands.

"
What did it to you?" Kane asked.

"
Saddle bronc," Ira said.

"
Bucked you off?"

"I've got to admit it."

"
Don't feel bad. I fell off one on New Year's
Day."

"
I never fall off because I don't ever get on
one," Terry Garrett said. "Give Kane whiskey," he told
the bartender. "I'm a lover, " he mumbled, squeezing the
Aztec.

Kane stayed with Terry Garrett and Ira March through
the evening. Much later they went to the Toreo Bar which specialized
in strip shows and girls from the streets. The Toreo was the place
border traders went when they wanted to play dirty. They arrived in
time for the midnight floorshow. Ladies of the evening had already
taken their stations at the tables where men drank. The place was
dark. The heads of many brave bulls killed in the Frontera bullring
stared glassily from their places on the walls. The bar was owned by
the Count, a friend of Kane's, who for many years had been the
empresario of the bullring. The Count seldom attended the functions
held in his Toreo Bar.

Ai spotlight fell on a girl as she dodged and
stumbled through the crowded tables from her dressing room. She
arrived at the edge of the dance floor, composed herself, raised her
arms, and tried gracefully to flex her uneducated wrists. Instead of
the flowing movement of hands and arms she had seen somewhere and was
trying to remember and reinterpret, she succeeded only in causing her
many gold bracelets to slide down to her elbows. She stepped out in
long-legged paces at the end of which she unemphatically placed
painted toes upon the floor. She felt her way around the floor, her
waving arms halted by the jerk of each overextended step.
Periodically she sought to recover her balance and dance by violently
nodding her head so that her long, black hair waved furiously like
the wringing tail of a nervous horse. Meanwhile the band, a
nonsyncopated group of union members, independently of each other
blared leering sounds.

When the floorshow was over the ladies of the evening
each ordered another drink and stared stonily past the drinking men
proximate to them at their own reflections in the glass eyes in the
heads of the bulls on the walls. This was a sign that they were
giving the drinking men exactly one drink's time in which to make
their propositions. If, by the end of that drink no formal
commitments had been made to the ladies, the ladies would gather
themselves, their cigarette lighters, and their jeweled purses, and
leave the table, not looking back, to choose another drinker who had
been similarly recently abandoned.

Jim Kane's friends were now in the clearest state of
complete drunkenness. They were ignoring their girl friends and
talking business. They discussed cattle and how much money they were
sure was to be made on the border. Kane listened indifferently. He
had no present business other than enjoying his drink and looking at
the people. Terry Garrett was giving Ira March a lesson in Mexican
border cattle trading. "Ira, if I had been around this border as
long as Jim Kane has and could speak the language as well as he can,
I could be making at least fifty thousand dollars a year. "

"
Is that right?" Ira asked, looking at Kane
with new respect.

"
Hight. Kane and I were raised on this border. I
learned to speak Spanish when I was a kid but I've forgotten it. How
come I forgot Spanish and you didn't forget Spanish, Kane?"

"
I just didn't forget. I have always spoken it.
I stayed here when you left."

"
Well, I used to speak it well but I don't now.
I've been too busy making money all my life. That is one thing I've
got on you, Jim Kane, you don't know how to make money. "

"That don't make a bad feller out of him,"
Ira March said.

"
I mean it. Jim Kane has had more chances to
make real money than anyone I ever knew. He has all the ability in
the world. His deals always go sour because he don't know how to make
money."

"
Well, so what?" Kane said.

"
Well, you sonofabitch, you don't know how to
make money, that's what."

"
I may not know how to make money but I know how
to knock the head rolling off anyone that calls me a sonofabitch."

"
You big sonofa . . ."

Kane stood up.

"
I was just going to say, " Garrett said,
"you big sonofagun, I don't need my head knocked off."

Kane sat down. "Well, I don't need to knock your
head off," he said.

"
I was going to say that Ira and I want you to
buy some rodeo cattle for us and you can make some money."

"I could go for that."

"How well do you know the Rio Alamos area?"
Ira March asked Kane.

"
I've never been there but I have a friend down
there."

"
We need good-horned steers for rodeo. We
believe you can get the best kind around Rio Alamos," Garrett
said. Rio Alamos is in the dirty zone," Kane said,

"
Yes. The tick zone. Anything that comes out of
there for export has to be quarantined sixty days in the clean zone
north of Hermosillo."

''Gawd, don't talk to me about quarantines,"
Kane groaned.

"
The quarantine won't be your concern. You just
buy the cattle and ship them to us. We'll find pasture for their
quarantine."

"
How long do you want me to buy for you down
there?"

"
For as long as we can make money at it." '

"
What's in it for me?"

"
We'll give you two dollars a head and expenses
on all the cattle you buy for us."

"
You'll put up all the money, all the cost of
the cattle?"

"
Of course. We'll count your expenses in the
cost. You draft on us when you get a load together. Include all your
expenses on the draft with the cost of the cattle plus any freight."

"
How soon do you need the cattle?"

"
Yesterday."

The three men firmed the agreement between them by
shaking hands.
 
 

11
Rio
Alamos

Arriba ya del caballo,
hay
que aguantar los reparos. This means that once you've chosen to mount
a horse you have to, as a man, take any pitching and bucking he might
decide to hand you.

In February a dust haze hung over the coastal desert
of Sonora. The Alamos Valley was a green slash in the desert. The
highway led down off a gentle rise, around a curve, through irrigated
fields, through a long line of giant poplar trees, to Rio Alamos. The
big poplars, the
álamos
of
Rio Alamos, were sixty to one hundred feet tall, and were growing so
close together that from a distance their tops could not be
distinguished one from another.

Kane drove across a long bridge spanning the Rio
Alamos. The river flowed widely, sparely, and shallowly to the west
and the Sea of Cortez. Alamo trees lined the road into town. At the
edge of town the highway gave out. It broke into stubborn slabs of
asphalt between which deep potholes grew. Then, at the beginning of
the main street, the front of Kane's car plunged into a dust fine as
flour that boiled inside the car and sloshed like mud from under the
tires onto the sidewalk. The dust, when disturbed, kept its substance
in flight and settled quickly and densely on store fronts and
pedestrians.

A bus was unloading its passengers in front of the
Restaurant Teresita, Kane's destination. People carrying their
bundles stepped off the bus onto the street. They were wrinkled and
soiled as people are who have ridden a bus for days and nights. Kane
walked through them as they stood milling on the sidewalk, their feet
on the ground again, their voices and movements slow and subdued. He
asked a busy waitress in the restaurant for the Lion. She pointed
through the door to the kitchen. In the kitchen were two tables
crowded with
vaqueros
,
the cowboys of Sonora, wearing heavy palm hats and huaraches. The
tables were covered with beer bottles. A big, unshaven cowman who was
greasily dirty from being too long drunk sat at one of the tables.

"
Gringo
," the
big man said. "What do you want, g
ringo
?"

"I want to see the Lion. Is he here?" Kane
asked.

"
You can't see the Lion,
gringo
.
It is Sunday afternoon, don't you know? Don't you have Sunday
afternoons in the United States? The day of rest? Day of worship?"

"
Shut your mouth, drunk," a big, compactly,
firmly fat woman said. She had shining brown skin, brilliant black
hair and wore great, savage gold earrings. "Be quiet. Be
courteous, Juan Vogel," she said. "Or go home and bathe and
drink the water. What is it you want, young man?" she asked
Kane. The big man laughed at the woman's scolding.

"The Lion, Andres Celaya," Kane said. "I
am a friend of his."

"
Go up the stairs and all the way down the hall
on the right. He is in room number one."

Kane walked up a long flight of narrow cement steps
to an open landing where sofas and easy chairs were placed. From this
landing, which was shaded by rubber plants and bougainvillea, Kane
could see over most of the town of Rio Alamos. This house was one of
the few two-story buildings in the town. The whitewash of the
buildings of the town had turned brown like old teeth. Kane walked
down the hall and knocked on number one. A lion roared in answer.

"
¿Quién?
"

"
Jim Kane."

"
Ohhhhhhhl" the Lion roared.

Kane heard the big hind paws hit the floor and the
door of the room was yanked open. The door quivered in the Lion's
hand. The Lion filled the door. The mussed, heavy, blue-black mane
brushed the top of the door frame. The coarse, pock-marked, brown
face grimaced in an old Lion's distortion of a broken-toothed smile.
One big, padded paw, clawless and  callused from traveling too
far after the prey, enveloped Kane's hand and pulled him into the
room while the other slammed Kane on the back in a mauling Mexican
abrazo
.

"
Ohhh, Jim Kane. It makes me happy to see you.
Meet Loli," he said.

Loli was under the covers on a bed. Her bare
shoulders showed above the hands that held the top of the blankets
tightly. Her black eyes smiled at Kane. She said nothing.

The Lion reached under the bed and pulled out a
gallon jug. Raisins, prunes, apricots, and orange peelings tumbled in
the jug as the Lion shook it violently and held it up for Kane's
inspection. A small head of clear bubbles formed on top of the liquid
and then burst away.

"
Bacanora
. Good
mezcal
," the Lion
said. The jug seemed no bigger than a light bulb hanging on his paw.
He picked up two dirty glasses in the palm of his hand and gave one
to Kane. He slapped the woman on the rear, moved her over under the
blankets, and sat down on the edge of the bed. Kane sat in a chair in
front of him. The Lion poured Kane a drink of the
bacanora
.
They saluted and drank the wine. It tasted sweet from the decomposing
fruit in it. Underneath the disguise of the fruit was the taste of
rocky, spiny, sweltering brush distilled by Indian hands.

"
What brings you here, Jim Kane? You come to buy
rodeos?"

"
Exactly. How did you know?"

"
This is my
querencia
,
my haunt, my domain. I know what is best to be had here. If you
wanted anything else I would force you to forget it and buy the
rodeos."