The Brave Cowboy (13 page)

Hoskins stirred heavily, his old blue serge whispering. “Match? Well, maybe I do. Now just maybe I do. I won’t say for sure, mind, but just maybe. Let’s see here…” Searching again, every hidden pocket. “Maybe now…”

“Not exactly?”

“Not to see you off,” Burns said. “To get you outa here.”

“Out of here?”

“Might be,” Hoskins said, still searching, “just might be now.”

“Yes,” said the cowboy. “I thought you might need some help. I know a hundred good hidin places.”

Bondi finally understood. Liberation, he thought, and smiled. As easy as that. Jack’s been to too many Westerns. Too much Zane Grey. “Maybe you don’t fully understand why I’m here,” he said.

“I think I do,” Burns said. “But you can’t
stay
here.” He looked closely at Bondi, perceptibly anxious. “You want to get outa here, don’t you?”

“Here you are, young man.” Hoskins proffered one match. “I knowed I had one somewheres.”

“Thanks,” Burns said; he struck the match on his teeth and lit his cigarette. “You can’t stay in a place like this,” he said to Bondi; “you’d go loco.”

Stark naked loco, Bondi thought, grinning internally. Maybe I’ve already sprung my gyroscope. “Well, I won’t be here very long;,” he said, knowing this the answer Burns did not want. “They’ll take me out of here soon enough.”

“Wait a minute.” Burns hesitated, glancing around: no one was watching them. “Look,” he said, drawing one pantleg up over his boot top. “Look in the boot.”

Bondi looked and saw the tang and heel of a file gleaming dully against the cowboy’s pale hairy shank. “How did you get that in here?”

“Never searched me.” Burns lowered his pantleg. “I’ve got another one in the other boot.”

“Then you’re not planning to stay for a while?”

“We’re gettin outa here tonight.”

“This is a serious business, huh?”

“Sure it is. That’s why I brought the files.”

Bondi considered. Everything was against it, of course, but for a moment he surrendered to fantasy and temptation; to break free, hide in the hills, riding by
night… He could not conceal from himself his delight in the
idea
of outlawry—the guns and romance. “You amaze me, old man.” he said; “and I can see now that you’re more or less serious about this… practical joke. But after all—I came here voluntarily. What would I prove by escaping a self-imposed sentence?” He smiled wearily. “We martyrs can only choose once.”

Burns puffed on his cigarette and stared at the floor.

“The whole thing is crazy,” Bondi said. “Suppose we break out of this place? What then? I’ll be an outlaw for life. What about my academic career?”

“How’s it comin along in jail?” Burns asked.

Bondi smiled and scratched his scalp. “Well… you can see. I had to make a choice. It was either prison or graduate school.” He rubbed his eyes; the slightest excitement seemed to aggravate the irritation. “And what about my family? I’ve got a wife and a kid. I’m a man with responsibilities. I believe you’re crazy, old comrade, coming here with a proposition like that.”

Burns stared at the floor. “You can’t stay in jail for two years,” he said; “you’ll go crazy.”

“You’re already crazy.”

“You won’t be able to take it.”

Bondi laughed. “But good lord, Jack—it
is
two years, not a lifetime. If I were in for life your idea would make some sense. But surely two years in prison is better than a whole lifetime as a hunted man.”

“Not for me,” Burns said. “Anyhow, it won’t be like that.”

“You’ve been brooding over lonely campfires too long, my good friend.”

Burns smoked his cigarette down to the last pinch of tobacco. “You can’t stay two years in jail,” he said; “it’ll kill you.”

“It might at that. I was thinking the same thing this morning.”

“And even if you could last out the two years—what then? What’ll happen to you then? You’ll just get in some kinda trouble all over again. You’re that breed.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Prob’ly. I can see you refusin to pay your income tax because you don’t like the way the Government spends your money, or somethin like that.” Burns field-stripped the fragmentary butt of his cigarette, dumping the remains into his shirtpocket. “And two years from now, if the big war ain’t started yet, things will be a lot tougher than they are now. You might have to wear some kinda uniform by then.”

Bondi could not help smiling. “You’re so damned eager to get me out of jail because you want me to become an outlaw like you. But I’m not that kind of animal. I have a great deal of respect for law and order and decorum. When I’m sentenced to prison I believe in serving out my term in an obedient, conscientious manner. I think it’s only the proper and decent thing to do. And now you come to town, insinuate yourself somehow into the county jail, and begin tempting me with your romantic, outlandish, impossible, nineteenth-century notions. Frankly, Jack, I’m a little shocked.”

It was the cowboy’s turn to smile. “Hell, Paul, I’ve gone to a lotta trouble on your account. I came here to rescue you and by God I’m gonna do it.”

“But I don’t want to be rescued.”

“I’m gonna rescue you whether you want it or not.”

Bondi sighed and put an arm around the cowboy’s shoulders. “Why don’t you sing us a song? Write any new songs lately?”

“Sure,” said Burns; “I got one called ‘Restless Feet Must Roam.’ And one I call ‘Song of the Timberline.’ But I ain’t got my guitar with me.” He tugged at the bristles on his chin. “And I sure don’t feel like singin anyway. I can’t understand what’s the matter with you.”

“With me! You’re the one that’s all balled up. You outrage my common sense. And what about my principles?”

“You proved your point by comin to jail,” Burns said. “The idea now is to break out before they break you.”

“They won’t break me. I’ve got a nimble and pliant will, and the powers of a chameleon. I’ll conform for a year, or two years if necessary, and when I get out I’ll be a wiser man. Maybe a- sadder man. Possibly bitter, too—I hope not.”

“You didn’t look very cheerful when I came in,” Burns said.

Bondi rubbed his eyes. “Well, I wasn’t. It’s the Russian thistle that’s breaking my spirit now. One of the reasons I’m so eager to go to prison: I’m anxious to get out of New Mexico.”

“Come with me,” said Burns; “we’ll go high up in the Rockies—maybe the Shoshone Forest in Wyoming. I know where there’s a cabin, a good tight windproof cabin, at the foot of a glacier. In winter it’s snowbound—no one can get within twenty miles of it. We’ll lay in a good supply of venison and elk and pine logs and just sit tight while the snow falls. I’ll write songs and you can work on your treatise on whatever you’re workin on now.”

“A new theory of value,” Bondi said; “a general theory of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, progress and regress.”

“And Jerry can paint her pictures,” Burns went on. “And Seth—we’ll educate him, the three of us. We’ll learn him to read and write, I suppose, and better things too—how to track deer, how to fish through ice, how to trap the silver fox, how to make things, useful things like bows, arrows, snowshoes, bullets.”

“Is he your son or mine? I want him to be a classical scholar.”

“All right,” Burns said; “you can joke about it but I know you’re interested,. I can see a peculiar light in your eyes. You’re thinkin how much you’d like that kinda life yourself.”

“There is a certain primitive attraction in it,” Bondi said, “but what about the future? Are we to spend the rest of our lives shooting animals, chewing skins, hiding out from game wardens and county sheriffs?”

“Look,” Burns said, “I don’t understand why this has to get so consarned complicated. I read in the paper you were in jail so I came to town to get you out. That’s all there is to it.”

“Keep talking: you may convert me yet. I’m still mildly interested. But remember my wife and kid and my professional standing.”

The cowboy fidgeted with his bands. “How can I talk with you when I don’t have a cigarette to roll or a guitar to pick on or even a stick to doodle in the sand with? This ain’t no place for humans.”

“I remember thinking exactly the same thing this morning.”

“And when do we eat? I’m mighty hungry. No supper last night, not much of a breakfast this mornin. How about some dinner?”

“You’re about an hour late,
compañero
”

“It don’t seem right. They lock a man up for practically nothin and then starve him to boot.”

“You’ve got a legitimate complaint.”

Burns lowered his voice. “We gotta get outa here, Paul. This place is frazzlin my nerves. We’ll file our way out tonight; what do you say?”

“Why go to so much trouble?” Bondi said. “What are you in for—drunk and disorderly conduct? They’ll probably let you out in the morning.”

“It ain’t so simple as that. They’re holdin me for investigation, too,” Burns said, and he grinned like a schoolboy. “The FBI is gonna investigate me; they think maybe I’m a draftdodger like you.”

“Where were you in September, 1948?”

“By God, you sound just like that bookin officer.”

“But were you in the States then?”

“Hell, I don’t know. I think I was down in old Mexico.”

’Then you never registered either?”

“Not me; and even if I’d a-knowed about it at the time I still wouldn’t of done it—the Government’s
never gonna brand a number on me again. Only I had sense enough to keep quiet and not write letters to my draft board.”

“But now you’re caught.”

“That’s what
they
think,” Burns said.

“And you’ll go to prison just like me.”

“You know me better than that, Paul.”

Bondi blew his nose on a piece of toilet paper and blinked his watery eyes. “Sometimes I think we’re both crazy. We don’t seem to realize that it’s no laughing matter to pull tail feathers out of the American eagle. How’d you get away with it for so long? Didn’t your old draft board ever write to you about it?”

“They didn’t know where to look for me,” Burns answered. “I ain’t had a steady mailin address for nearly four years, not since I got outa the Army.” He rubbed his knees. “Say, my legs are gettin cold.”

“It’s the cement floor,” Bondi said. “Let’s walk around for a while; if you sit still for too long in this dungeon you’re sure to get neuralgia or rheumatism or mildew.”

They stood up and began pacing the floor along the inner corridor—thirty feet north, thirty feet south, back and forth in the manner customary to all caged animals. “In fact,” Bondi was saying, “I’ve been falling to pieces; my dandruff, always bad, has recently got worse; I’ve picked up athlete’s foot somehow; my hay fever is still critical; and I’ve got a dull gnawing ache in one of my wisdom teeth. I hope I get sent to a quiet, clean, well-lighted prison.”

“You’re gonna light for the hills with me,” Burns insisted. “This land of life is no good. Not even for philosophers.”

They neared the steel bulkhead of the cellblock, turned and started back. The bullpen was quiet now, inactive, with most of the prisoners spread out on the tables and benches—the afternoon
siesta.
The cockroach races were over, the stories all told; only the boys
at the window, watching the girls pass by, enlivened the air with their comment and disputation.

“Don’t step on this gentleman’s feet,” Bondi warned. The Wetback from Laguna lay in their way, hat over his eyes. “I’m not sure but I think he carries a knife. He’s rather truculent for a Pueblo man; bitter about something.” Bondi stepped over the Indian. “By the way, Jack, if you’re serious about breaking out of here—how can you trust thirty-eight other men? I’m thinking of the noise; everyone in the cellblock will be able to hear you if you try to file one of these bars. What’s to stop one of them from calling a guard?”

“That’s a chance I’ll just have to take,” Burns said. “As long as the noise don’t go through that steel wall I’ll be happy. I won’t make much noise, anyway.”

“Another thing: how long will it take you to file through one of these bars?” Bondi reached out and put his hand around a bar, pushed and tugged at it for a moment; the bar remained as firm, rigid, immutable as a mathematic abstraction. “You might not be able to get through one in one night; and in that case you’d have to make sure to get back in the same cell the next night, which isn’t easy.”

“Damned if I’ll spend another day in this place,” the cowboy muttered. He too wrapped his fingers around one of the bars of the gridded wall. “Are these bars solid?” “I’m sure I don’t know.”

“If they ain’t we could file through a couple of them in a few hours—three or four hours, maybe. You on one, me on the other.”

“Me? Good heavens, I’m no jailbreaker.”

Burns studied the pattern of the grid for a few moments: the vertical bars six inches apart, braced by and interlocked with a series of horizontal bars—flat not cylindrical—about eighteen inches apart. “You know,” he said, “a man just might be able to crawl through by only cuttin out one bar. That’d give him a hole a foot wide, a foot and a half high. I might be able
to do it—go through on my side. One shoulder at a time, maybe; slow and easy-like.”

“You’d have to cut out two,” Bondi said; “you couldn’t squeeze through any other way.”

“We’ll see,” said Burns.

They resumed walking up and down the length of the bullpen. Nobody paid them any attention; in a county jail the privacy of conversation is highly respected. And the guards, the jailer, were elsewhere: upstairs, downstairs, outside—hiding from the smell, the dampness, the tedium, the general dreariness of incarceration.

“Then,” Bondi said, “if you do get through the bars you still have the problem of getting through a window and down to the ground.”

“The window’s nothin,” Burns said; “just lift off that screen. Tie two or three blankets together for a rope; climb out, hit the ground, and start walkin. Nothin to it.”

“Which window would you prefer?”

“Well… what’s on the other side? the west side?”

“An alley and the back of a department store. The police cars go through that alley on their way to the parking lot behind City Hall. It’s not very dark at night.”

“That’s the way we’ll have to go. We can’t go out on the north right by the street. Same for the east—we might land right in the Sheriff’s arms.”