Chapter Sixteen

MY UNCLE WAS HAVING TROUBLE FINDING MEN to help at Yamsi that year, and I gravitated back to the ranch from photographing rodeos. “Just temporarily, mind you,” I told him. There were things with my life I wanted to do, and that didn’t include building fence or opening gates for him. I had just gone to a ranch barbecue near Sprague River to look for someone to hire, when I saw a crowd gathered over near the barbecue pit. My old friend Al Shadley was lying on the ground, choking, with a piece of steak lodged in his windpipe. His dark face was purple, and no one seemed to know what to do.

Suddenly Rose darted out of the crowd, rolled the big man over, and caused him to expel the meat. Al’s face went from purple to red, and pretty soon he was able to sit up and talk. Rose and I helped him over to a bench near the fire. The near-death experience had scared him pretty badly, and he kept promising first Rose and then me that he was never going to take another drink.*

“Do you think he can do it?” Rose asked when we were finally alone. “Just quit cold turkey like that?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “You‘ll have to ask someone who drinks. You, for instance. What do you think?”

She regarded me for a moment without answering. There was no sign of embarrassment. If she remembered anything of the day I had found her on the sidewalk, she gave no indication. “It’s going to be harder for Al, since all his pals will be pestering him to drink with them. But when I think of the fright I saw in his eyes, I think he can.”

“And how about you?” I asked. “Could you quit?”

She took me by the sleeve and led me away from the others, where no one could hear. “I already have,” she said. She turned and regarded me. “We’ve never been serious about each other, but we’ve been like brother and sister for a long time. Can I trust you with my secret?” she asked.

I nodded.

“I’m going to disappear, and I don’t want you to worry. The folks at nursing school have given me another chance, dependent upon my drying out. The only way my people will let me alone is if they think I’m dead. If I refuse to party with them, they give me the silent treatment and make me feel like hell. Pretending to die is rough medicine, I suppose, but I’ve racked my brain for another way that will work.”

I had a little emergency money hidden in my wallet, my share of what a cowboy named Frank Mendes had paid me for mugging for him when he won the wild horse race at Salinas the year before. I offered it to her, but she shook her head.

“I’m fine,” she said, her face flushing with embarrassment, and moved quickly back into the crowd.

It was starting to snow, and most of the Indian families were packing it up for home. I offered two or three Indians I knew a job, but none of them were interested. “Try old Coyote,” one of them said. “He’s getting out of jail tonight, an’ maybe he’ll want to work.”

The jail was across the Williamson River from the town, and it was empty. It was snowing so heavily that the roof of the community hall was in danger of collapsing, and the prisoners had all been let out on work detail to shovel off the roof before the big Saturday-night dance. It was the last day of Coyote’s sentence for being disorderly, and he was just putting in time. When I saw him, he was doing more leaning on his shovel than moving snow.

Once the snow was off the roof, they shoveled a path around the edge of the building to the big woodpile at the back, then went indoors to build a fire in the big doublebarrel stove. Coyote remembered that he had a pint of whiskey hidden in the rafters from a previous dance, and by the time the crew was ready to quit and go back to jail, they were pretty happy. I made Coyote an offer, but he was in the mood to party and shook his head. I stuck around, hoping I might find someone else at the dance.

Coyote went back to jail with the other prisoners. He took a shower, grabbed a few belongings from his cell, plastered down his hair with Rose Hair Oil, drank the rest of the fragrant hair dressing, signed out with the town cop, and departed for the dance.

Hi Robbins had brought his rosewood baby grand piano down from Sprague River in the back of his pickup and got stuck in the snow before he could get it in the door, but there were plenty of sober folks about to manhandle the big piano into the hall.

By the time the dance had started, the barrel stove was cherry red, and the milling mix of dancers on the floor, about half loggers and the other half Indians, sweated in their flannel shirts and Levi’s. Up in the bleachers, a host of ladies sat visiting or nursing their babies, bouncing with the beat of the piano and hoping someone would ask them to dance.

The door slammed frequently as men visited their pickups parked out in the snow, and now and then one could glimpse a flask sticking out of the rear pocket of a man’s trousers.

I noticed one woman I’ll call Cindy, who was the butt of jokes around the community. She never missed attending a dance, but there were rumors that no one had ever dared ask her out on the floor. It was even noised about town that once Cindy had gone for a swim in the Williamson River, and all the downstream fish had died clear to Klamath Lake.

That evening, having just come from jail, Coyote had run out of whiskey. He gathered some of his cronies and told them, “Hey, you guys. I gotta deal for you! You find me a pint of whiskey an’ I’ll dance a whole dance with Cindy over there.”

“Aw, Coyote,” someone laughed. “You wouldn’t do that!”

“You get me a pint an’ you’ll see,” Coyote replied.

His friends disappeared out to their pickups, and pretty soon they came back with a brown paper bag smoothed around a pint with no cork that had evidently been made up of the remnants from several bottles.

Coyote went behind a screen and gurgled down the whiskey, wiped his lips, tossed the bottle in a corner, and went off to ask the woman to dance. He pushed the woman round and round the room, being careful not to get her too close to the stove.

Once the dance was over, Coyote got together with his friends behind the piano.

“Hey, you guys,” he said. “I got another proposition for you. You get me a fifth of Early Times, an’ I’ll take old Cindy out behind the hall an’ make whoopee with her on the woodpile, an’ I’ll let you watch.”

“Aw, Coyote,” someone giggled. “You wouldn’t dare!” “You get me the whiskey,” Coyote said. “An’ remember, it better be Early Times, not that slop you brought last goround.”

It took a little longer this time, but pretty soon one of the men came back in the hall with the bottle, and Coyote was seen whispering in Cindy’s ear.

He took her by the hand, led her out into the cold darkness, and as he went out the door, Coyote motioned to his friends to follow. Leading her around the building, he pushed her down on the woodpile, while Coyote’s friends all gathered in the dark.

During the ordeal, Cindy happened to hear someone cough behind them, raised herself on one elbow, and said, “Oh, my, Coyote. We got audience!”

Once the game was over and the booze was gone, Coyote got tired of being teased by his friends, and by the next week he got to thinking that fifth of whiskey was the most expensive he’d ever drunk. Cindy considered him her new boyfriend and followed him about whenever he came to town. Coyote even asked the sheriff if he would put him back in jail.

He was sitting in a local bar one night when Cindy came waddling in out of the cold. She was holding her hands together in front of her, with thumbs together, fingers overlapping, peeking between her thumbs and giggling as though she had something live in there.

“What the hell you snickerin’ at, woman?” Coyote snarled.

But Cindy just backed up against a stool, peered into her hands, and laughed and laughed.

“What the hell you got in your hands, woman?” Coyote glowered.

“I ain’t goin’ to tell you. I got somethin’ live in there an’ I ain’t goin’ to tell. You gotta guess!”

Coyote turned his back on her and sipped his drink. But when he turned around again, she was still there, peering into her clasped hands and humming a tune.

“I tell you what, Coyote, you guess what I got in my hands, an’ I spend all night with you in bed with no clothes on.” “Hell, woman,” Coyote said. “I know what you got in

there. You got an elephant.”

“Oh, Coyote,” the woman chortled. “That’s close enough!”

The dances at the hall were mostly a wintertime affair, for in the summer men were busy working, hunting, or fishing. Hi Robbins kept his rosewood baby grand piano in an old deserted house he owned near Sprague River. I saw the piano often enough when I was loading truckloads of hay I’d bought from Hi. The roof was just beginning to leak on the finish. I begged Hi to sell it to me, but he said it was a gift he’d given his daughter, who had just passed away, and he wasn’t interested in letting it go. That fall, some out-of-state deer hunters discovered the piano and loaded it in their pickup. It was a sad loss to the community, for that baby grand had brought music to many a dance, and was a part of local history.

 

 

* True to his word, Al Shadley never took another drink.