The Busted Thumb Horse Ranch (10 page)

The stuff that’d been minute ice particles had
turned to snow as we wet our whistles in the saloon.
There was some wind behind the snow, but
visibility wasn’t too bad. We rode at a walk. At one
point I reined in, swung down, and stepped over
to the packhorse at the end of the rope wrapped
around my saddle horn. The clerk had done what
I asked; there was a bottle of whiskey carefully
wrapped in a grain sack and brown paper.

“This will warm us up a bit,” I said to Armando.

We got to the ranch just before dark and tied
the packhorse to the rail in front of the porch.
Then we saw to our own horses, rubbing them
down, graining them, filling their buckets with
fresh water. When we got back to the house, the
packhorse had been unloaded and he stood there
looking hungry. “You go on in,” I said to Arm.
“I’ll look to this guy—give him a little treat.”

Although he wasn’t sweated at all, I rubbed
him down and gave him a bucket of molasses
grain and another of fresh water. Arm’s and my
horse picked up the scent of the molasses immediately
and started nickering and carrying on for
their share. “Hush, you silly bastards,” I told
them. “You didn’t carry nothing but a couple of
men. This fella carried everything the ladies
wanted.” I picked a nice leather halter an’ brought
it into the house with me.

It was warm in the kitchen and there was a
good fire in the living room. Blanca and Teresa
fed us our usual steaks, potatoes, and some cut
carrots as a special treat. After we ate we moved
out to the living room to watch the fire.

There’s something hypnotic about watching a
good fire burn. It takes a man away, deep into his
thoughts—his good thoughts—and makes him
feel at peace with the universe.

I found my eyes closed and my chin on my
chest and decided to head up to bed.

“Put your clothes outside your door,” Teresa
said. “We take care of them.”

I entered my room. On my bed were brand-new
denim
pants and a nice work shirt, along
with socks and long johns. I moved that stuff to
the floor, stripped, put my old clothes outside my
door, and climbed into my bed. I heard Armando
come up the stairs and then, a few minutes later,
the soft steps of one of the women. After that I
heard nothing.

The next morning I looked out my door, expecting
to see my washed clothes. There was nothing
there. The space in front of Arm’s door was bare,
too.

“Hey!” I called. “Where are our duds?”

Blanca came to the stairs and glared up at me.
“Those was rags. They smelled like the peeg pen.
Some we cut for washing cloths, the other we
burned. Use the clothes you found on your bed.”
She turned away, not caring to argue the subject.
I dressed. Everything felt stiff and scratchy, but
had that fresh fabric smell that was pleasant but
never lasted long. Arm came out of his room
dressed exactly as I was. We looked at each other,
both embarrassed.

“Maybe you geeve up the horses an’ go work in
the mercantile,” Arm said. “You dress for it.”

“Me? You look like that damned fool Dansworth
did yesterday, ’cept fatter.”

Arm made the gesture with his hand that was
understood in all languages, and we went down
to eat.

After breakfast and a smoke, I got the halter I’d
brought in the night before. “I didn’t want cold
leather on the stud’s face,” I explained to Blanca.

“You need a wife,” she said, “then you don’t
bother with no loco horse.”

I got a bucket of grain and a flake of hay from
the barn and when I got to the corral, Arm was
already sitting on the top rail. I climbed up and
over. The bay looked at me as I approached him,
but there was no fire in his eyes. He was slowly
becoming accustomed to me—and figuring out
that I was the guy who fed him daily.

I tossed the hay at the snubbin’ post and set
down the grain bucket in front of me. Naturally,
he was going to go for the grain first. As he
dipped his head I held the halter in front of his
muzzle an’ he slid right into it. I closed the buckle
and took a couple steps back.

The stallion stood there for a long moment, trying
to figure out what the hell was going on.
Then, he decided he didn’t like whatever the
thing was on his muzzle and behind his ears, and
commenced to buck, squeal, rear, strike, and anything
else he could think of. He even dropped to
the ground and rubbed his head back and forth
trying to get rid of the halter. I stepped back another
few steps to be out of his range if he decided
to kick my ass for me. He didn’t.

“Now he gonna try to scrape it off with his
good foot, like the
perro
scratching a flea,” Arm
called to me. I nodded. That’s what ninety-nine
out of a hundred horses would have done. The
bay didn’t, perhaps because he couldn’t carry
most of his weight on his twisted foot. Instead, he
lowered his face into the grain bucket and began
to chew. I walked over to where Arm was an’
climbed up. “Tell the truth, I thought you were
pooshing
too fast with the halter this day,” he
said, slapping me on the back. “But I was wrong.”

“I’m a little surprised myself,” I said. We sat
there and watched the stud empty the grain
bucket and walk over to the hay. I found myself
looking at the strange tracks he’d left in the inch
of snow that’d fallen overnight. He tracked
perfectly—rear hoof dropping precisely on top of
the imprint in the snow made by the front hoof.

Armando must have seen where I was looking.
“Ees too bad. With four hooves, the horse, he run
the ass offa them thoroughbreds the reech people
race. He beat the short horses, too.”

“They’re not called short horses no more,” I
said. “Now they’re quarter horses.”

“Well, hell. Same teeng.”

We sat on the top rail for a time. I have to admit
that watching a horse eat hay isn’t what a fella
would call exciting. “Wanna go fetch our mare?”
I asked Arm.

“I got only a little money an’ you ’mos busted,
too. I’ll get some from under the bed for both of
us. Then we ride, no?”

I’ll be the first to admit that keeping all that
money under my bed wasn’t the smartest thing
we’d ever done. Still, we figured we’d often need
quick access to it and neither of us trusted banks.
Neither of the ladies would steal a sip of ice water
in hell, so the money was safe where it was.

It’s hard to remember how cold winter is when a
man is in the midst of a West Texas summer. But,
winter is a bitch, and it seems like the wind never
stops. A bucket of milk left outside will freeze
solid, troughs for animals constantly need ice
broken in them, and firewood is consumed at an
impossible rate to keep at least one part of a room
warm, directly in front of the fireplace. Good, well-cared-for
saddles creak and groan, well pumps
freeze, making them impossible to use, and wind
whistles through the best of houses—including
ours.

We rode into Hulberton with scarves wrapped
around our faces, bundled in herder’s coats, and
thick sheepskin gloves. Our horses grew beards
almost immediately—the freezing of their moisture
as they breathed out. Running a horse
could—and probably would—burn his lungs because
of his gulping of the arctic air.

And let me tell you this: there’s nothing quite
like a West Texas storm. Cattle on pasture huddle
together and freeze solid, as dead as the statues
they appear to be. A yard of snow isn’t a big deal;
some of the storms last three and four days and
dump five feet or more of snow.

Farmers, ranchers, and settlers string ropes between
their houses and barns. It’s easy to get lost
in the blinding white fury of a storm. Men and
women freeze to death a few feet from their
homes.

We rode up to Tiny’s barn and tied our horses
at the rail. They’d be fine; the cold wasn’t a real
ballbuster, and the wind was slowing down
some.

Tiny had most of his sale horses in stalls and
those outside clustered together at the edge of the
barn, out of the wind. Tiny was graining the stalls
as we shoved up the front sliding door wide
enough to get in, and then closed it.

“Your mare is in the second stall from the end,”
Tiny said. “I got a pot of coffee going on my forge
fire. Help your ownselfs—I’ll be with you in a
bit.” Arm and I did just that, using metal cups
that hung from horseshoe nails on the wall. It
was no surprise that the coffee was half whiskey.

“Ees good,” Arm said. “Warm a man’s blood,
no?”

We took our coffee down to the second-to-last
stall and looked over our mare once again. She
was as near to a perfectly conformed horse as I’ve
ever seen. There was a gentleness in the depth of
her chestnut eyes as she looked at us for a treat.
Tiny had a bushel of crab apples against the wall.
I got one and palmed it to the mare. She took it—
gently—and crunched away at it.

“We done good,” Arm said.

I pulled off a glove and reached into my pocket
for Tiny’s money. We watched the mare until Tiny
was finished with his chore, and then the three of
us walked back to the coffeepot. I handed our
friend the cash.

“I got the bill of sale all wrote out,” Tiny said.
He took a neatly folded sheet of paper from the
drawer of a small table and handed it to me. I
didn’t check it over any more than Tiny counted
the cash I’d given him. That isn’t the way we do
things. A man’s word is as good as he is, and Tiny
was a good man. He poured himself a cup of coffee
and topped off our cups.

“You gonna take her back today? She’s welcome
to stay here as long as you want,” Tiny said.

“We got the hay an’ grain already,” Arm said.
“We’re ready for this fine mare.”

“Dansworth was snooping around again yestiddy
evening,” Tiny said. “What he told me
was that he was looking for a couple horses to
save his trip from bein’ a waste, but he spent most
of his time lookin’ at your mare.”

“I guess that dude sumbitch can look all he
wants, but he no gettin’ near our mare,” Arm
said.

The sliding door began to open and all of our
heads snapped in that direction. The two men
who’d stopped at our ranch eased into the
barn and shut the door behind him. They approached
us.

Ignoring Tiny and Armando, one of them
spoke directly to me. He reached into his pocket
and pulled out a wad of bills. “This here’s five
hundred dollars,” he said. “Mr. Dansworth wants
that mare.”

“Mr. Dansworth can go to hell,” I said.

“What he wants, he gets,” the man said. “He’ll
own that mare one way or another.” He turned
and he and his partner went to the front of the
barn and out. They left the door open.

“You boys keep a close eye on that horse,” Tiny
said.

We had a helluva storm a couple of days after we
brought the mare to the ranch. Arm and I rigged
a shelter for the mustang. He would have battered
his way through a stall in five minutes—
he’d never been in an enclosed structure before.
The mare, our horses, and our packer we kept in
stalls. We’d run a stout length of rope from our
back door to the barn door—and we needed it. I
also ran one from the house to the corral where
the mustang was. I doubt if I’d have been able to
find the barn or the corral, ’cept for sheer luck,
without that guideline. Every year we hear about
a man or woman freezing to death within a few
yards of safety in their home or barn.

The wind howled like a devil hound from hell
and the snow was whipped parallel to the
ground, mounding into massive drifts against
anything that attempted to challenge the power
of the storm.

Teresa and Blanca didn’t seem to be bothered
by the storm. They had all the supplies they
needed to feed us royally for at least a few weeks,
and the safety of our horses was of no consequence
to them—it was clearly defined man’s
work.

Armando and I had different perspectives on
our weather-imposed captivity. We found a
checkerboard on a bookshelf and it didn’t take
long to make little discs to use as men: mine were
carrot coins and his were slices of pickle. We
played several games, all of which I won. That
pissed Arm off no small amount—he wasn’t a
man who could live with losing at anything.

His face was almost scarlet red and his hand
trembled as he moved his pieces. “Arm,” I said,
“let’s knock it off, okay? It’s only a dumb game
and you’re gettin’ all wound up ’bout it.”

“Ees a gringo game, no? If we play a Mexican
game, I keek your white ass.”

“Maybe so. The thing is—they’re only games.
Ya know? I don’t see why you get so bent an’
twisted over a game. It’s crazy.”

“Now I am loco, no?”

I sighed. “Let’s have a drink.”

Arm’s usual calm demeanor returned immediately.
“Ees bes’ idea you’ve had in a long time,
Jake. You gotta learn to calm down, no?”

I fetched a bottle from the kitchen cupboard
without responding.

Later—after we’d done some damage to our
booze supply—Arm bundled up to check things
out in the barn, muck the stalls, and feed hay and
grain. I put on pretty near every piece of clothing
I owned and followed the guide rope to the corral.
Horses are herd animals by nature—they
don’t like being alone. I think that worked in my
favor with our stud. I wasn’t another horse, but I
was better than no company at all.

I slung a ration of molasses oats over my back
and
a flake of hay under my arm—I’d stashed a
bale of hay and a supply of grain in our mudroom
when the storm was still building—and
went to visit our stallion.

It ain’t like he greeted me with a smile and a
song or as a long-lost brother, but he didn’t offer
to take me apart, either. The shelter we’d built,
which was a simple triangle of barn wood with
one open side, was holding up well. Snow was
drifted against the windward side, which actually
kept some of the horse’s natural heat inside
with him.

I fed him his grain and broke up the flake of
hay in front of him. He dove into the grain and
began to nibble hay. I reached very, very slowly
for his face when he raised his head to chew. He’d
built up quite a beard of frozen spittle and exhalation,
and I figured it couldn’t be any too comfortable
for him. He took a half step back, but
then stood. Moving as slowly as I possibly could
I reached out my right hand and busted off a
good part of the icicle. The bay’s eyes widened
for a moment and his muscles tensed. I was set to
leap to the side if he lunged at me. We stared into
each other’s eyes for what seemed like a long
time and then the horse dropped his head and
went back to his hay.

What the hell, I thought. In for a penny, in for
a dollar. I touched his shoulder very gently. He
tensed up all over again, staring at me with a
long stem of hay hanging from his mouth.
We watched each other again for a bit and he
went back to his hay and I kept my hand on his
shoulder.

Some of the best trainers and horsemen I know
mumble to their horses, not necessarily making
any sense, but making human sounds. Some
sing—Christmas carols, sea songs, bawdy stuff,
whatever—but it’s all done in a droning sort of
monotone. I decided not to push my luck.

There were lots of horse apples behind the bay,
but I didn’t dare fork them out. I moved a good
amount of them with my boot so he wouldn’t be
standing in them. I’d have loved to take a hoof
pick to his feet, but anything like that would be a
long time coming. I broke up the ice in the small
water trough in his shelter and left him with his
hay. I felt real good about how it’d gone.

I followed the line I’d rigged from the corral to
the barn to help Arm with the chores, but he was
almost finished with his work there. He had the
mare out in cross ties in the midaisle between the
lines of stalls, and was checking her hooves.

He was at her right rear. “Look,” he said. He
tapped the mare’s hock and she immediately
raised her hoof up to be examined. Arm straddled
it and cleaned the manure out of it with a hoof
knife. “This gal, she had real good care an’ training,
too. I peek up all her feet jus’ as easy as this
one.”

I looked over my horse, Arm’s, and the packers.
Arm had mucked the stalls, cast a few handfuls
of lime on the floor, and put down lots of fresh
straw. The water buckets were filled and each
animal had a ration of hay. “I don’ give molasses
grain today—eet gives them too much desire to
run, no?”

“Good idea. We don’t know how long the storm’s
gonna
last. Seems like the sumbitch has already
gone on forever.”

“Es muy verdad.”

We followed the guideline to the house. Arm
was in front of me by maybe a yard, and I couldn’t
see him at all. It seemed to me that the storm was
becoming stronger and the snow thicker, rather
than abating.

Once in the house holding mugs of half coffee
and half booze, Arm suggested another game of
checkers. I declined. “I don’t feel like arguing
with you, my friend. You’re too much of a
pendejo
—making up your own rules and pissing
vinegar every time you lose—which is every
game we play.”

We sat at the kitchen table. Armando grumbled
a bit about the checkers, but then we began to talk
about both our favorite topics—horses, and particularly,
our horses—the mare and the stallion.

“Theese is not the best time to breed,” Armando
said. “It ain’t the natural time, you know?
If we cannot bring mare into heat, our stud will
do her no good.”

“Yeah. But even during the winter, the cycle is
about twenty to twenty-five days. If we can tease
hell outta her with the bay, an’ then breed, we
could catch her at the right time.”

“
Sí.
But eleven months later—een winter
again—we have a foal.”

“Well, hell. That gives us plenty of time to insulate
a birthing stall an’ a stall for the mare an’
foal to wait out the rest of the winter in.”

“Eensulate?”

“Yeah. Double-board it covering cracks, hang
thick
blankets to keep out chill, maybe—if we
need to—cut a barrel in half an’ get a small fire
goin’ in it. Anyway, we got nothing to lose by trying,
right?”

“
Sí.
If the stud, he is a good breeder, we keep
him on her two, three times a day. Then, if she
gonna take, she weel.”

“She’ll take, okay,” I said. “An’ once she’s in
foal
we can search out some more horses.”

Armando sighed, sipped at his coffee, and then
said, “Ees a long time to get this operation goin’.”

“You got somethin’ better to do, partner?”

“Sheet. Always with the smart-ass answer you
are.”

We went to bed that night and in the morning
the storm was gone, only the hugely mounded
drifts of snow letting us know it had made us
prisoners for a few days. That’s the way the West
Texas weather runs. A storm will blow like hell
for a couple, three, maybe four days, then it’ll be
gone as suddenly as it hit.

After our usual overly large breakfast, we decided
to ride into Hulberton and visit with Tiny.
There was nothing we really needed, but we were
both stir-crazy. As it turned out, our horses were
as anxious to get out as we were. We saddled up
in the barn, led them out, and climbed on them.
We had a short rodeo then: both horses bucked,
twisted, snorted, and tried to get under the bit.
We laughed an’ slapped the silly sonsabitches
with our hats, letting them burn off some boredom
and energy.

There was a couple of feet of snow all over, and,
like I said, massive drifts here and there. Traveling
in
snow tires a horse—there’s a drag on the
feet and legs—but ours were so fired up at being
outside that they kept on attempting to run. After
a few miles they calmed down some and behaved
themselves.

We heard Tiny’s hammer striking his anvil
way the hell out from town, just as we almost always
did. The sound was good and clean and
bell-like, and for whatever reason, it seemed to
lift from us the weight of the boredom the storm
had generated. We let our horses pick up their
pace regardless of the snow.

Tiny had a bucket of beer next to his forge, but
there was precious little left in it. “Why I do this
shit, I dunno,” he said, holding up a piece of an
ornamental door latch he was making.

“You get paid good for it, no?” Arm said.

“A whole lot more than it’s worth,” Tiny said.
“Anyway, have some beer.”

“There isn’t enough left there to give a flea a
footbath,” I pointed out.

“Not in that bucket—but the one sitting in the
snowbank outside is full.”

I went back out, saw the bucket, and carried it
in. We each had a couple of coffee mugs full while
Tiny’s craftswork cooled. “I got somethin’ real
fancy to show you fellas,” Tiny said. “Come on
back.”

He led us to one of the rear stalls. In it an Appaloosa
colt—maybe five or six months old—
stood on spindly-looking legs, his eyes open
wide, looking at us not with fear, but out of curiosity.
“He’s a strange one,” Tiny said. “He ain’t
been weaned much more’n a month or so, or ’least
that’s
what the fella sold him to me said. He said
the mare got a twisted gut an’ croaked. He—the
colt, I mean—ain’t stole. I got good papers on
him.”

Arm and I stood at the stall gate looking the
little guy over. He was near the prettiest thing I
ever saw—but I guess I’d say the same thing
about just any colt or filly. Arm leaned over the
gate. The colt moved a couple of steps to him and
put his muzzle up to Arm’s face. Arm breathed
into the little guy’s nostrils for a minute or so before
the colt stepped back.

“How much you want for him?” Armando
asked, already hauling money out of his pocket.
Tiny laughed. “I figure you’d want him. Lookit
the color—them splotches an’ spots of black
against his gray, well a man jist don’t see too
often.”

“Havin’ a young ’un around can help bring a
mare into heat, even if it ain’t hers,” I said. “Have
you had a halter on him yet?”

“The fella sold him to me had a rope halter on
him an’ was leadin’ him like a packhorse. He’s
been handled a lot, too. You can tell that right off.
You seen how he interduced hisself to Arm.”

“Why’d the owner sell off such a fine colt?” I
asked.

“He was a farmer—I seen him a couple times
in the saloon. He said farmin’ ain’t nothin’ but
sweat, debt, an’ disappointment an’ he was sellin’
his place an’ everything on it an’ goin’ to Chicago
to live with his brother—gonna work in his
brother’s store, is what he said.”

“Well, I’ll tell ya, Tiny,” I said. “This boy, he’s
goin’
home with us if we have to tie you up an’
steal him.”

“It’d take more’n you two pissants to do that,”
Tiny laughed. “I gotta get forty-five dollars an’ a
trip over to the saloon. Hell, I gave almost that
much for him.”

“Boolsheet. Still, is a good price.” He handed
some bills to Tiny. “You ready for that trip ’cross
the street?”

The saloon was, as usual, murky, with dingy
clouds of tobacco smoke and the stink of stale
beer and spilled whiskey and blood permeating
it. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust.
When they did I noticed that the two riders who’d
been at our place before the storm were standing
at the bar, along with a half dozen cronies just as
low-down and dirty as they were. The original
two moved out from the bar and both started
flapping their gums to the others. Finally, the
largest of them walked over to us. He wore his
gun low and he had the shiny, oily-appearing
eyes that indicate that a man enjoys inflicting
pain. He stood facing the three of us.

“Pancho,” he said, “I heard you an’ your little
friend threw a couple of my boys lookin’ for work
off your land, an’ didn’t even offer a cup of coffee
to them.”

“My name is no Pancho,” Arm said. “An’ that
trash wasn’t lookin’ for no jobs.”

“My name ain’t Pancho neither—an’ I’ll stick
by what my pard just said.”

Tiny said, “Bring the rest of your litter-mates
over here. We’ll take the whole damned bunch of
you on. Otherwise, shut the hell up.”

Tiny was standing in the middle, between Arm
an’ me. “I ain’t armed,” he said. “But if you slugs
want to trade punches, let’s have at it.”

“You got it all wrong,” the big fella said. “Me
an’ the boys is jist out here tryin’ to buy some
horses for Mr. Dansworth.” He smiled, showing
he was missing several front teeth and that the
ones he did have were yellow-gray and leaned in
all different occasions. He put his right hand out
to shake with Tiny. Out of instinct, I guess, Tiny
extended his hand. Then the big guy clobbered
Tiny with a sucker punch left to the mouth that
snapped Tiny’s head back. That was a signal to
the men at the bar to join in an’ have some fun
kicking our asses. I grabbed up a chair an’ busted
it over the head of one of the rushing bunch. Tiny
drove his right fist into the big man’s gut and
caught his nose and mouth with his knee as the
big fella doubled over.