Month: April 2012

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On Tax Day, Auditors and Cow Manure

Tuesday last was tax day and as I usually do around April 17, I ponder taxes, money, accountants.

All of this, of course, fuels imagery that erupts from the past: characters, events, some funny, some sad, some unwanted, some I am glad I remembered.

In 1979-1980 I worked for a big corporation in the ag business; cotton, lettuce, ranches, feed lots. I was part of a team who ran a feedlot on the Gila River Indian Reservation at a place called San Tan, southeast of Phoenix.

When somebody from the Phoenix corporate office called and said “Audit,” images of three-piece suits came to mind. Imagine a suit (an auditor) on a cayuse. A twirling lasso cutting the breeze, stirrups, chaps, saddle (an auditor?).

When you work outside at a feed yard you fight manure dust biting the eyes, the ears, the nose. Flies, sweat, cattle wild with fear. Frightened cattle don’t eat. That stops them gaining weight. It costs money when they don’t gain weight.

Not making money…hmmm…the thought of an auditor causing loss of money seems an oxymoron, but a lot about the cattle feeding business is strange. Somewhere the task of providing protein for a hungry world gets caught up with the drive to make a buck. We all understand making a buck, but when keeping track of making bucks hinders the efficiently production of a t-bone steak, it causes a buckaroo to pull off his Stetson and scratch his head.

They’d be out on Saturday morning. That’s what they said. “Saturday.” It was going to be 105 degrees so that meant a dawn start. We’d need to chouse the cattle before they had time to eat.

My cohorts, Robert, the manager, and Ed, the cattle boss, showed up before the sun sliced the eastern horizon. We copied lists and lot numbers and waited for the auditor.

A dark blue BMW pulled up. Two men, one whom I recognized as the corporate controller and who was wearing fancy orange and gold Nikes, and another whom I had never seen, got out and stomped up to the front door. Both looked rough…hangover rough, pallid skins. A day’s dark whiskers glooming their faces. When the controller walked in, those orange and gold Nike’s cut the dim like the glint of coin in a counting house. I thought to myself, those shoes are a bit brash for knocking around in cow manure.

Robert said, “It’s going to get hot fast. And it’s hard on the cattle. We best be moving now.”

Two cowboys showed up on horseback. Flies began what flies do: eat, lay eggs, die and bother horses, cattle and humans. The sun grew surlier as the day swelled.

As soon as the auditor and Mister Controller picked a pen of cattle (we were trying to see if the actual count matched what the records said) the cowboys drove the lot into an alley between the pens and we’d count. Dust rose with the temperature. The auditor broke an early sweat and Mister Controller complained about everything: the heat, the flies, the dust.

If the count was off, we’d run the lot out into the alley again and count them a second time. The cattle didn’t like it. Once or twice, big hump-backed smoky-gray south Texas steers hurdled the sucker rod fences which dismayed the auditor, messing with his tallies. Ed and the cowboys cackled. Mister Controller spent a lot of time pontificating on cattle, especially south Texas, half wild smoky-gray hump backs. It sounded like a bunch of…how should I best say it?…like a bunch of manure.

We had eight or ten lots to tally and were keeping pretty close on our counts which made Robert happy…less chousing the cattle. It was hard to tell what the auditor thought. He looked to me like he needed a cool place to vomit up his hung-over guts. Mister Controller kept babbling about cattle this and cattle that.

On the last lot, we drove the steers out into the alley and threaded them back in. In the middle of the pen, a big wet spot about ten feet across marked the tan dust a dark brown. All of us, the cowboys, Robert, Ed and me, avoided that spot. There was a leaky water line down below the four or five feet of dried manure.

Robert and Ed told everyone to stay clear of the wet spot. As we finished the count, Mister Controller crossed the pen, wiping his hands like he’d just finished a big chore.

He yelled at the auditor, “What’s the count look like?” as he stepped into the big wet spot. Ed yelled, “Hey, don’t go there.” Mister Controller frowned and said, “I don’t take orders from…” and he began to sink. As if it was all a fantasy, he walked on into the middle of the spot with a look on his face like he couldn’t believe what was happening to him. He sunk past his knees. Robert yelled, “It’s like quicksand.”

Mister Controller stopped and glanced down as he sunk an inch at a time. He stuck out his hand. “Help me.” The auditor looked at me and I shrugged. Mister Controller looked at me, too, but I shook my head. He almost sobbed, “Why?” One of us, I don’t remember, said, “Because you’ll pull us in.”

One of the things a cowboy loves to do more than anything is build a loop and rope something. They will rope anything…a dog, a goat, a horse, a set of horns on top of a saw-horse. I don’t know if one of us suggested it, but before you could slap a blow fly off the side of your face, the two cowboys had their ropes in their hands building loops. Mister Controller sank deeper, his face paralyzed by the realization he was caught in the nefarious grip of cow shit.

One loop, then two, whirled in the hot air. Somebody chuckled, and then laughed as one loop, then two, flopped over the torso of Mister Controller. Drawn tight, trapping his flailing arms. He yelled, “Hey, wait a …” We laughed, even Mister Hung-over Auditor, as the cowboys pulled Mister Controller out.

I don’t know how much weight gain was lost as a result of the audit. But there were other rewards, wastes and squanders. Mister Controller lost one of his fancy orange and gold Nike’s. Sucked right off his foot into that manure sinkhole. I have often wondered what else he lost.

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On Honky-tonks, Wild Folk and Newborns

Our daughter, Sarah, and her husband, Baruch, are expecting their first baby in July. We have grandkids already. One, Justyce, is already zooming her way to young adulthood. The prospect for the arrival of a newborn is damned exciting.

As I think about this new granddaughter, the season is Spring and outside the daffodils are smiling the color of the sun. Down the streets, pear trees’ white blossoms balloon the moods of commuters. Pink and reds and purples emerge. It is a season of birth, re-birth, new growth.

Then I think about the old days and how mothers produced sons and daughters that were cold as stone when they emerged from the womb. Youngsters died of measles, mumps, smallpox, scarlet fever before they had a chance to mate, get drunk, find Jesus, get old. Those were the days of small farms where women and men hoed rows of corn and dug their spuds. Milked cows, sheared sheep, cooked oat cakes over cast iron stoves that threw heat like the halls of hell. Chores galore; stirring dirty clothes in a big cast iron pot full of boiled water and harsh lye soap. Candle making, quilting, sewing; all created a dire need for lots of hands. Lots of children were needed to help out on the farm

In 1971 my father and I took my son, James, to see the movie Man In the Wilderness, set in the Northwest during the early 1800s, with Richard Harris and John Huston. The characters in the film were fur trappers and one of them, the Richard Harris character, voyeured a Native American woman giving birth to a child. Out in the thick woods, she just squatted, without help, as her man kept watch from afar, I suppose to keep grizzlies and wolves from attacking her as she birthed that baby.

At the time, I thought that scene was a little over the top in terms of dramatization. I remember my now-long-deceased friend Richard Madewell scoffing, “That’s all a bunch of BS to sell movie tickets.” I tended to agree. Son James, who was about three years old, seemed more interested in the bear that attacked Harris’s character and didn’t have much to say about the on-screen child birth.

That was back in the honky-tonking days of my youth. I spent spare time down at the bar on Main Street where the skid row drunks sat on the high curb and waited for the sun to come up and the bars to open. My watering hole was a rough location, a bar as old as any of the businesses in town.

Big fans beat the air around the pressed tin ceiling with its fancy curlicues and circles. We listened to Dire Straits and the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, tunes from the Allman Brothers’ Idlewild South.

We downed flat draft beer and shots of cheap tequila, Bloody Marys, Spañada, wine coolers, bad Scotch and VO with Seven, not to mention more nefarious substances. We shot nine ball and eight ball, got in fights, in shootouts. We got drunk, and not drunk. Hippies, cowboys, college professors who taught Español, drug salesmen of both the legal and the not legal, ag teachers, baseball glove vendors, miners, cotton farmers, plumbers, sheepherders, butchers, house painters, short order cooks in Mexican food restaurants, wives, daughters, they all made their way to sit on the tall stools at the ancient bar.

Some wild individuals denizened the joint. One pair I recall—it was just around the time I went with father and son James to see Man In the Wilderness—showed up one day and joined right in. They usually arrived for tamales and red beers…that was breakfast. He had long, stringy hair and wore a beard a foot thick. He donned a stained and battered New York Yankee hat and claimed to be from Manhattan but his deep Texas accent belied that. His mate was wild, too, wore fringed buckskin shirts and trousers, blue and red and yellow beaded buckskin moccasins that looked like they were made before Geronimo went to Florida under guard of the United States Army. She claimed she made all her own clothing and I did not doubt that.

For some reason they liked to drink around me and I’d have to be pretty toasted to stand the scent of lard and mesquite-coal smoke that hung all over them. She bragged about cooking over one of those old cast iron stoves my grandmother used back before my mother was born. I didn’t doubt that, either. They rented a falling-down adobe building with rotten wood floors that was about as old as our town. The adobe sat behind Ronquillo’s Radiator Shop…I think I remember this right…at the corner of Sacaton and First. I always knew it as the Prickly Pear House because a prickly pear sat out in front of the old adobe. The cactus had big flat paddles wrinkled like the face of my grandmother and probably as old.
This particular wild bunch would also show up in the afternoon and drink their favorites….shots of Jose Cuervo with draft Coors back. One, two, three.

I always thought it was strange that she drank like that…as well as smoking unfiltered Camels and no telling what else…because she was heavy with their first child. Heavy….hung out like a hot air balloon. But one, two, three, down the hatch, she’d laugh and dance to Dickey Betts’ guitar riffs in “Memory of Elizabeth Reed.” Awkward and scruffy, she shuffled and puffed on her smoking Camel.

One hot August afternoon under the cooling click of the ceiling fans, a few of my friends and I sat and sucked down cold glasses of draft as the two of them, both of this wild pair, pirouetted and wheeled to the tunes blaring out of the juke box.

She suddenly stopped and yelled, “Honey, it’s time.”

Without another word they stomped out the front door. A moment later his thick-bearded face showed back in the doorway as he yelled, “Be right back.”

The barkeep chuckled and mumbled, “Right. She’ll be lucky if she and that kid survive, as much poison as she puts in her body.”

Two hours later they were back. That hot air balloon was suddenly gone and the leather blouse with the fringe on the seams looked almost big enough for two of her. She held a red, wrinkled baby in an old wool blanket. Her man began handing out cheap stogies with a cigar band that announced, “It’s a Girl.”

I said, “They let you out of the hospital that fast?”

She twanged, “Didn’t need no hospital. Done it myself.”

We all looked to her man. He grinned and nodded, “I watched, but that was all. She just squatted and spurted that young’un out.” He grinned and hugged her. “She’s one hell of a woman.”

The baby squalled and the mother giggled. The father let out a roar, “Barkeep. For my lady-love, a Jose Cuervo and cold Coors back”

He spun around, his long hair whirling like a jigging woman’s skirt. He yelled, “I’m a daddy.”

I sure hope Sarah and Baruch experience a different kind of delivery.

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The Wind

The wind blows in Idaho this time of year. Totes the angry vestiges of another aging winter. Grass leans, limbs break, birds balance in the tops of aspen branches that tilt away from the gales that holler off the east Oregon desert. Time moves east to west around here, the wind sweeps west to east and yells back at us about what we time-mailed West Coast way yesterday.

And yesterday the wind blew, and last week, most of the week except for one or two golden days where the rays made us think of planting spinach and snap peas; but then, here it rolled in again, the blustery breath of early spring, stirred up by differences in barometric pressure. Wind is air movement pushed out of high pressure areas into low pressure areas. Winds create havoc in hurricanes and typhoons, can lift the land off the top of Wyoming and haul it all the way to the bottom of the Atlantic. It carves, cuts and makes you crazy.

Once Betty and I stood above the Palais de Papes in Avignon, Provence, admiring a late spring view of the Rhone, the hills, the old town, when a blast of hot air known locally as the Mistral almost knocked us over. I recall reading somewhere about that wind, and Gauguin and Van Gogh and how the Mistral helped drive Van Gogh crazy.

When I lived in southern Arizona, the wind got up in the spring and blew a layer of dust for days, stinging eyes, skin, the leaves of newly planted pansies, testing your ability to stay focused on the business of getting by. In the summer, great hullabaloos formed up over Tucson and harangued our way, as if to furiously eradicate the city of Phoenix and everything in between.

I lived in that desert in early the seventies, not too long back from the war and metaphorically speaking, walking backwards into a stiff gale. In 1972 I recall standing outside my house and watching one of those brief and violent late afternoon holocausts rear up and try to exterminate everything in its way. Spiny Sonoran Desert mountain ranges over four thousand feet up were dwarfed by the chocolate brown fury. It roiled and rolled, like a flood rush of muddy water. When it attacked us, the sky turned black, trailer houses moved twenty feet to the northwest, telephone poles snapped like match sticks, privet bushes lost half their leaves. Everything and everywhere owned a coat of fine brown clay.

When Betty and I lived in the high mountains of southern New Mexico, the wind blew from late February through May. Steady. Brisk. The moan and whine of old spruce trees as they rubbed up against each other and the wood in your back porch deck. The gales, gusts, and breezes that hauled Arizona’s surface over the Gila massif, the Black Range, the San Andres, finally picking up the white gypsum sand outside of Alamogordo. Plastering it on the sides of mountain top Ponderosa pine and red fir so that it looked like snow. The season of creaks and cracks and listening to the trees complain in the middle of the night. Worrying about the hood of your car. The roof over your bed.

In Cloudcroft, NM, the bars bustled that time of the year. Men stormed in and threatened each other with big Bowie-type knives, .357 magnums, fists, snow shovels. The schnapps and cheap whiskey spilled all over the bar tops. Boot heels up in the air. Old woodstoves smoking where the melting snow leaked in and dripped dripped dripped.

Everyone seemed on edge. That was the time of boredom, before planting, before moving the cattle, often too muddy to go into the woods to work. Just time to drink and dream and stew. That’s when the Apaches would come to town and irritate half the white folk. I don’t know if it was all on purpose, the back and forth between the white folk and the natives. But it bubbled up everywhere: in the mercantile, the gas station, the Western Bar. Barkeep Frieda used to get after the young Apache men as they taunted her over their glasses of draft Budweiser. She’d call the law. They’d laugh. The law would show up. Sometimes a fight ensued.

Once a young Apache man came to town and ran out of gas in his pickup. The wind blew that day, too. I recall the fluttering skirts and scarves of women bustling on the boardwalk, the American and New Mexican flags slapped straight out from the flag pole.

That young Apache man went around and begged for change to buy a couple of gallons of gas. I sat in the Western Cafe and drank hot coffee and watched. He tried at the gas station. They threw him out of the bank. He walked up to the door of the bar, but thought better. I don’t know, maybe he’d been kicked out of there before when he wasn’t so needy.

He went from store to business to store down the length of Burro Street. Out of sight I wondered about all the animosity between whites and browns, whites and yellows, black and brown, yellow and red, hell, anything that makes one different is enough to start the process, like a little breeze that gets up in the afternoon, then steadies into a wind that gusts with particular fury. Sometimes it’s a typhoon and blows the world down onto its knees.

After finishing my coffee, I walked down to the post office to get the mail. The wind forced me to tilt my back into it. People in the street leaned this way and that, any way they could to fight the power of what they could not stop.

After I checked my mail box, I saw that young Apache standing at the door, hitting everyone up for change. He wasn’t having any luck and I wondered how I could slip by him and out into the wind. I didn’t want to get caught and have to say, “No.”

For a moment, a gaggle of women dammed up against the entrance…purple pant suits and the quilted outers of down jackets. L. L. Bean boots. I saw my chance to escape but by the time I arrived at the door he was standing forlorn and single. I figured if I didn’t look him in the eye, he’d leave me be, but for some reason I looked him in the eye. What I saw was nothing to fear.

He said, “Hey, man, I ran out of gas and I…”

I already knew his story. It’s as old as mankind. For some reason, against my will, I stuffed my right hand in my Levi pocket and pulled out a lump of dollar bills, quarters, pennies, dimes.

I shoved it at him, “That’s all I got.”

I swear some tears rose in his eyes and I doubt it was from the wind. He started to pull off a silver and turquoise ring the size of my thumb, and said, “Here, man,” but I threw out my clenched fist and said, “Naw, ain’t necessary.”

He began to say something else, but I didn’t stick around, just had to get out into that wind.