“Do you ride a horse?”
“You askin’ if I can?”
“When you rustle the cattle.”
“I work afoot. Shake out a rope on the cow, put a feed bag on her and lead her to the truck, if I don’t use a trailer.”
“Then why do you wear spurs?”
“I walk in a bar, they hear my spurs jingle jangle jingle they know who I am.” Darcy grinned, three or four days’ growth on his face. “My boots are about worn through, but I never once had these can openers off ’em.”
Jurgen said, “I like the sound they make, that
“You hear it,” Darcy said, “look out. They’s a cowboy come in the bar.”
Jurgen smiled. “Instilling fear in the hearts of the customers, uh?”
Darcy said, “Somethin’ like that.”
Jurgen asked him, “Do you know who I am?”
“You’re one of the Kraut prisoners broke out of somewhere. Walter says you stole a truck and drove out the front gate in it.” Darcy said, “I never tried to escape. I looked at gettin’ out in two years and I did, got paroled, but then busted my foreman’s jaw- we’re workin’ down in a mine and he give me some lip-so I was thrown back in to finish my time. This prison’s on a hill, two thousand yards from the Cumberland River, if you ever got a chance to see it from inside. Eddyville, named for a Civil War general.”
Jurgen was thinking, General Eddie Vill?
“General H. B. Lyon,” Darcy said. “Eddyville’s where he was from.”
Jurgen said, “Well, we both know what it’s like to be a prisoner, don’t we?”
Darcy said, “You don’t hardly have any accent.”
“I try to improve my English.”
“What’d you do in the war?”
“I commanded a tank in the desert of North Africa, sat in the turret with field glasses and directed fire. Our sixty-millimeter gun could destroy a British Stuart at more than a thousand meters. Other times I flew a single- engine reconnaissance aircraft, looking for British tanks they would try to conceal, covering them with Bedouin tents.”
“Is that right?” Darcy said, sounding interested, though Jurgen doubted the cowboy knew what he was talking about.
Darcy said, “You must’ve killed some people.”
Jurgen said, “Well, when we hit a tank it would often go up in flames. Sometimes one or two of the crew would get out.” He paused and said, “We would machine-gun them,” and paused again. “But not always.”
“I been shot at,” Darcy said. “Haulin’ ass out of a pasture. I pick up steers from growers that set their price of beef high and wait for buyers who don’t mind payin’ it.”
Jurgen had to think about this. He said, “The butcher is told how much he can charge for a pound of meat. But the grower, or the feeder, can ask any price he wants?”
“That’s how she works.”
“It doesn’t seem fair.”
“Don’t knock it, it’s why we’re in the black market business makin’ a good buck.”
“I’m surprised Walter has the nerve.”
“You kiddin’? Walter’s fuckin’ the United States government, breakin’ the law in the name of Adolf Hitler, ’cause Walter’s a hunnert percent Kraut.”
“You don’t care he’s your enemy?”
“Walter? The enemy’s over across the ocean, Walter’s my partner.”
“So you don’t care you’re breaking the law.”
Darcy looked surprised. “It’s what I do. How I make my livin’. I round up cows in the dark of night. It don’t have nothin’ to do with the government, my gettin’ back at ’em for puttin’ me in jail. Man, I’m an outlaw. I been one since I was a kid. I stole cars, I sold moonshine, I hit guys and the fuckin’ court’d call it ‘assault to do great bodily harm.’ Damn right, guy gives me lip, I’m suppose to take it?”
Jurgen was nodding. “Yes, of course, you’re an outlaw. You don’t need motivation to steal cows in the dead of night, other than it makes money for you.”
“So I can eat,” Darcy said. “Listen, take a ride with me in my truck. I’ll show you how to rope a cow and put her in the trailer.
Tell you what to say to her she won’t start mooin’ at you. You’re keepin’ an eye on the house, light showin’ in a window upstairs. You’re not nervous, but you wonder what the hell they’re doin’ they’re not in bed asleep.”
“Or they’re in bed,” Jurgen said, “and enjoy to become intimate with the light on.”
“My favorite place to screw Muriel,” Darcy said, “was on the squeaky glider on the front porch of her mom’s house. Was before we’re married. You ever met Honey?”
Jurgen shook his head.
“You ought to meet her. She’s the smartest girl I ever knew and she’s my sister. No, she
Jurgen shook his head again. “You’re married?”
“Sorta. I hardly ever see Muriel.”
“Children?”
“Listen, I spent every night of a year trying to knock Muriel up. It must be a female thing she can’t have children. But if you want to go out with me some night, become the world’s first Kraut rustler, lemme know.”
Jurgen said, “I don’t have a cowboy hat.”
Darcy said, “I got hats, partner. What size you wear?”
Darcy stopped at a bar in Farmington and had a few shots with beer chasers thinking about his sister, wanting to know what she was up to visiting Walter. And who the guy was with her. Darcy hadn’t called Honey since he’d come up here, he was still getting around to it. He said, Shit, go on over there and introduce yourself to your sister and see if the guy’s with the law.
It was dark by the time he left the bar and drove past the house, pulling his trailer.
The car Honey’d been in wasn’t in the driveway. He cut through the field to the barn lot. The only cars here belonged to Walter’s Kraut meat cutters. Shit. He could say to Walter, “My sister come to visit you, huh?” Get him to tell what was going on. He’d take a leak and stop in the barn first. See how the cutters were doing and kid with ’em. Those old guys and their six-inch blades they kept sharpenin’, they could take the coat off a cow, Jesus, like it was buttoned on. There was only one area of their dressing down a cow where he disagreed with them. How they killed it.
Jurgen was watching the guy acting as the stunner this evening, holding a .22-caliber rifle in one hand he pointed at the cow’s forehead, no more than a few inches from the end of the barrel, and shot it and the cow buckled in the chute, not dead but stunned, knocked cold.
Coming up behind Jurgen, Darcy said, “You see the cow lookin’ up at the stunner? She’s thinkin’, The fuck you doin’ with a .22? Use a man’s gun. You want to kill me, fuckin’ kill me, man. Get her done.”
Darcy, still talking, moved up next to Jurgen.
“Cruelty to Animals says you got to stun the girl, so she won’t feel it when you hoist her up head-down and slice through her arteries and
“The offal,” Jurgen said.
“That’s correct, what she was gonna make cow pies out of. Hell,” Darcy said, “all the time you spend in here watchin’, it tells me you’re thinkin’ of becomin’ a butcher once you’re free.”
