Shaking the Nickel Bush (3 page)

That night, and for the rest of the week, I slept by a feed stack just outside the pens, and I wasn't alone. There were eight or ten other fellows sleeping there, every one of them broke and looking for a cowhand job. That's where I met Lonnie, and I don't know yet whether it was good or bad.

2

Land Rolling!

L
ONNIE
was about my age, and told me he'd been brought up on a Wyoming ranch, drafted, and honorably discharged from the service after he'd nearly died with the flu. Ever since spring he'd been drifting around the Southwest—mostly by hopping freight trains—and hunting for a job as top hand or bronc buster. I think he was too lazy to have made a top hand, and I don't know about his bronc riding, but he was friendly as the dickens and could handle a rope to beat the band; he showed me a couple of real handy tricks on turn-around forefooting. I couldn't run past him fast enough that he couldn't snag me by either foot he wanted to. It was because of Lonnie that I wrote Mother about being sent with another cowhand to a ranch near Phoenix.

I was down to less than a dollar when Lonnie asked me how about catching the night freight and going up to Phoenix. He told me we'd be there by morning and that he knew a lot of fellows around the stockyards. He said that if we didn't go out for top hands, but would settle for jobs at thirty or forty dollars a month, it would be a cinch to get them up there. Right then I'd have been glad to get a job anywhere, doing anything, for five dollars a month and my keep, so I told him I thought it was a good idea.

It isn't easy to flip a rolling freight train for the first time, especially if you have a bedroll lashed onto your back, but I didn't have too much trouble that night in Tucson. Lonnie showed me how to do it on some empty boxcars out near the end of the freight yards, then we hid under them until the night freight pulled out. It was just beginning to pick up a little speed when we ducked out and ran along beside it. Lonnie flipped onto the step of one boxcar as it went past, and I flipped onto the next. We might have been better off if we'd been caught right then, but we weren't. It was about half an hour before the brakeman came down along the top of the train and spied us. He kicked us off at the first stop, about twenty miles out from Tucson.

That was the first of a dozen times we were kicked off freight trains before we reached Phoenix four days and nights later, and we must have walked the tracks thirty miles of the way. Lonnie could get by pretty well by mooching meals at houses in the little towns where we were kicked off. But it wouldn't have been any good for me, even if I'd have done it, because they didn't have any of the things I could eat—unless it might have been boiled eggs. By the end of the second day I'd spent my last dime for salmon and peanuts, and if Lonnie hadn't been a good forager as well as a good moocher I'd have come close to starving.

It was Thanksgiving morning and I was down to my last handful of peanuts when we had our worst luck. A brakeman about the size and disposition of a grizzly bear kicked us off right out in the middle of the desert. I think he must have seen us flip aboard just after daylight, and had waited to catch us at the very worst spot he could. If he hadn't he wouldn't have been carrying a club when he came after us. We were sitting in the end of an empty gondola car, about half asleep, when I heard a thumping above our heads. At the same moment Lonnie scrambled to his feet, grabbed his bedroll, and yelled, “Watch it, buddy! Land rolling!” Then he dived out over the side of the car.

For a second I was kind of bewildered, then I looked up and saw the brakey coming down the ladder of a boxcar right above me. The club he was carrying looked as big as a fence post. I don't remember anything about throwing my bedroll over the side, but I did it. Then I grabbed the edge of the car and vaulted over. I didn't dare dive the way Lonnie had, but I had sense enough to throw myself far out, and not try to land on my feet. I was lucky enough to come down in a patch of rabbit brush, so I only got the wind knocked out of me and scratched up a little. The brakey must have thrown his club at the same second I went over the edge; it was lying within four feet of me when I was able to catch my breath and sit up.

It's a wonder that Lonnie and I didn't get killed, because that train was rolling at least fifty miles an hour. He couldn't have unloaded more than five seconds before I did, but he landed at least a hundred yards farther back, and my bedroll was halfway between us. When he caught up to me he cussed the tar out of me for vaulting, and said I'd have broken my back if I hadn't landed in the rabbit brush. Then he told me that if you dived straight out you'd land rolling, and if you weren't unlucky enough to hit a fence or a rock you wouldn't be hurt too badly.

It had been cold the night before, and we didn't get much sleep because we'd had to be ready to flip that freight when it came through, but by the time we got kicked off, the desert was as hot as summer. We had to walk eight or nine miles to reach the first little town; just a flag stop, with five or six adobe houses and a section hand's shack. It was past noon before we got there, and I was so dried out that my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. After we'd drunk about a gallon of water apiece we sat in the shade of an old tumble-down cattle pen for a while, then Lonnie went to see if he could mooch something to eat. While he was gone I finished the last of my peanuts, one by one, and watched half a dozen hens and a rooster that were scratching in the dust of the cattle pen.

Lonnie was gone nearly an hour, and when he came back he was carrying a bucket about half full of water.

“What you doing with that bucket?” I asked him as he sat down beside me.

“Brung our Thanksgivin' dinner,” he said. “You know, buddy, some of these Mex women ain't so dumb. One of 'em made me pack her five buckets of water 'fore she'd give me a bowl of chile, about half of it gristle.”

“Half a bucket of water won't make much of a supper,” I said. “I wish it was milk. Did you find out when the next train stops here?”

“Ain't none,” he told me as he fished a long piece of string and a chunk of gristle out of his pocket. “Nine miles up the line there's a water tank where all the freights stop at to fill the boiler. We'll have to hoof it.”

As Lonnie talked he tied the piece of gristle—about the size of a small grasshopper—onto the end of the string, then tossed it out into the middle of the pen. The rooster saw it sailing through the air, ran toward it, and gobbled it the instant it touched the ground. It was so big that he had to crane his neck two or three times before he could swallow it. Lonnie cussed in a whisper because the rooster got the gristle instead of one of the hens, but as he mumbled he kept drawing in slowly on the string. At first the old rooster tried to hold back, but, with that piece of gristle in his craw, Lonnie had him hooked like a fish. Step by step he brought the rooster closer until he could snatch him by the neck. Then he whispered to me, “Grab that bucket o' water and duck into the brush!”

I think that was the toughest rooster I ever tried to eat. After I'd sneaked back for our bedrolls we went far into the brush, built a fire, and boiled him all afternoon. The longer we boiled him the tougher he seemed to get, but we had full stomachs when we set out for the water tank.

Lonnie saved the gristle and string, and caught us two fat hens before we reached Phoenix, but he didn't get us any jobs when we got there. He seemed to know most of the fellows hanging around the stockyards, but I think it was only because they were drifters and moochers too. None of them had a job or seemed very anxious to find one. There was only one in the bunch who looked to me as if he might be a first-class cowhand, and he looked as though he'd just been run through a thrashing machine. He had a broken arm hanging in a sling, nearly half his face was covered with bandages, and his clothes were torn in a dozen places. Lonnie didn't know him, and he was sitting off by himself, so I went over and sat down beside him.

“Horse go through a fence with you?” I asked, just to have something to say.

“Uh-uh,” he grunted, “got busted up tryin' to be a movie actor.”

“In California?” I asked.

“Uh-uh,” he said again. “Wickenburg.”

“I don't know where that is,” I told him, “but I thought they made all the moving pictures in California.”

“Wickenburg's about fifty miles northwest, on the Santa Fe,” he told me. “They don't make whole pi'tures out there; just horse-fall pieces that get spliced into cowboy-and-Injun filums. Reckoned I was goin' to make a big stake in a hurry, but I got busted up on my first fall. Most of the boys does. It's a wonder they ain't killed off half the cowhands in these parts.”

I talked to the boy for nearly an hour, and when we were through I knew what I was going to do. It doesn't make a fellow very happy to be told that he may live only six months, but it surely cuts down the gamble on taking chances, and I'd reached the point where I had to do some gambling. I couldn't live forever on chickens that Lonnie stole with a piece of gristle, I wouldn't mooch for a living, there didn't seem to be any chance of finding a safe job, and I couldn't buy salmon and peanuts without money—or send report cards to Dr. Gaghan.

I'd learned to do trick-riding when I was a kid, and my best stunt had been a good deal like a horse fall, except that the horse didn't go down. It had to be trained to make a quick stop from a fast gallop. Then I'd be thrown out of the saddle, turn a somersault in the air, and land on my feet. I hadn't tried that stunt for nearly eight years, but I was pretty sure I could still do it. And if the worst happened, I probably wouldn't be gambling away more than five or six months—ones that didn't appear to be the best I'd ever had.

When I went back to tell Lonnie what I was going to do, he and his friends were sitting in the shade of the weigher's office. Most of them already knew about the horse-fall business, and they told me I was crazier than a hooty owl to try it. One of them had been out there, but he hadn't done any riding, and he said that knowing trick riding wouldn't help a bit; that I'd get busted up on my first or second fall anyway. I tried to get Lonnie to go along, just so I wouldn't be alone, but he wouldn't do it. He said he'd keep hunting us jobs from the drovers that came in, and if I wasn't back in a week's time he'd come out to see I got a decent burial.

I couldn't see any sense in wasting time after I'd decided what I was going to do, so I got out the copy of the last report card I'd had from the doctor in Tucson, made another copy with the weigher's fountain pen, scribbled a name nobody could read at the bottom, and put M.D. behind it. Then I mailed the card and went over to the Santa Fe freight yards.

I'd always found that when I asked a farmer if I could hunt on his land he'd let me, but that he'd tell me to get out if I tried it without asking. It seemed to me it might work the same way on a freight train, so when I got over to the Santa Fe yards I hunted up the conductor of the next freight train going toward Wickenburg. He was a little grey-haired man, with a bow in his legs that a fat hog could have run through, and he had the stub of a dead cigar clamped between his teeth. I told him right off the bat that I was flat broke, that I hadn't been in the service, and that I wanted to get out to Wickenburg to try my luck at riding horse falls for the movie company. He listened till I'd finished, then asked, “Where you from?”

“Boston,” I told him.

“Long piece to come for a chance to get your neck broke, ain't it?” he asked. Then, without waiting for an answer, he nodded his head toward a boxcar with the door halfway open. “Don't smoke in there,” he told me, “there's straw on the floor. You'll prob'ly need it more when I haul you back on my next run. We'll be pulling out in about an hour.”

I might have worried all the way to Wickenburg if the straw in that car hadn't been so deep and soft, or if I'd had a decent night's sleep within two weeks. But I never knew when the train pulled out of Phoenix, and I wouldn't have known when it reached Wickenburg if the conductor hadn't pounded on the door of my private car. By the time I had my bed rolled and tied he was up near the engine, and when I went up to thank him he said, “Don't mention it, but don't be spreading the word neither. See that flivver over yonder with the big hombre by it? He belongs to the movie outfit. He'll haul you on out to the location. It keeps him busy hauling the whole ones out and the busted-up ones back.” Then he stuck out his hand, shook with me, and said, “Good luck to you, bub.”

The location was about ten miles up Hassayampa Creek, near the foot of the Bradshaw Mountains, and the road must have been laid out by a drunken cowhand on a bucking bronco. I think the Mexican fellow who drove the flivver wanted to find out whether or not I was yellow. And if he did, he went at it in just about the right way. I don't believe he ever let that flivver slow down to thirty miles an hour, and I've ridden bucking horses in roundups that stayed on the ground more of the time. I wanted to have asked the driver some questions about the riding, but I didn't dare get my teeth apart for fear I'd bite my tongue. And he was so busy fighting the steering wheel that he couldn't have answered me anyway. There was only one thing in favor of that ride: it didn't last very long before we came in sight of the location.