Eli Boyd, a semiretired ranch hand who worked his own twenty acres up near Hope Mountain when he wasn’t working on somebody else’s spread – which was too goddamn often as far as Eli was concerned – drove the old Ford flatbed at a steady fifty miles per hour and just as steadily told Daniel jokes, tales, yarns, and no-shit true stories of the Old West, back when a man could ride two days to hump the schoolmarm and never cut another human track along the way. Daniel listened, from Aura Wreckers in Sun City to the I-40 junction. One story in particular seized his imagination.
Eli began, ‘Cowboys are known fools for drinking up their wages, and I was doing my part till something happened that stopped me cold. Ain’t a pretty story, but by God it not only saved me money on liquor, but all the expensive craziness that goes with it: dancing girls, bar repairs, bail, court costs, and them goddamn hospital bills.
‘Happened in Colorado high country up outa Durango, musta been ’round fifty-five, fifty-six, somewhere in there. I was working for the Randall boys then, and me and one of their cousins was moving some horses up to summer pasture. We got ’em up to the line shack ’bout nightfall and put ’em in this little ol’ barn the Randalls’ great-great-granddaddy had built. Then me and Jamie – that was this cousin’s name, just a kid really, nineteen or twenty – we went over to the line shack and grubbed up and shot the shit for a while before we hit the rack, pretty tuckered from being in the saddle since dawn.
‘Jamie was a strange kid, a bit on the jumpy side and not real overwhelming in the smarts department. Stark fact of it is, Jamie may have been an in-breed somewhere in the Randall line. Folks ’round Durango used to claim the only virgin Randall women were the ones who could run faster than their brothers.
‘For all Jamie’s dumbness, he was good with horses. It was like he’d drawn what little brains he had all together and brought it down real hard on one thing, and that thing was horses. That kid loved horses. And he was
‘So we’re sacked out and sawing logs when these high, shrill whinnies out in the barn snap us awake. We both jump pronto in our boots and grab our shooting guns.
‘“Wolf?”’ I whisper to him as we head for the door.
‘“I don’t know,” Jamie says, and his voice is real thin and tight.
‘We’re just gettin’ to the barn when these two young buckskin mares come bolting into the corral and I could see right away in the moonlight that their legs was chewed all to hell. I knew then what had happened; feller I used to ride trail with in the Junipers had seen it hisself when he was a young poke. The barn rats had gotten into some fermented silage and gone full-berserk frenzied, rampaging through the stalls eating the horses’ legs from right above the hoof clean up to the knee – left it that flat, stringy, bluish-white color like you get when you skin out a deer. The horses looked like they all had white stockings, not much blood at all. Sweet fucking Jesus, it was ghostly!
‘But what really froze my blood was them rats squealing, so high-pitched it could shatter your skull like cheap glass or at least leave you deaf from all the needle holes in your eardrums. The squeals from the trampled rats sounded different than the shrieks of those that only wanted to eat on some warm flesh.
‘I mean to say my jaw’s down around my knees,’ cause even though I’d
‘And all of sudden Jamie screams, “The horsies! The horsies!” Like a little kid. He runs for the barn.
‘“Don’t, Jamie!” I yell. “Don’t shoot, it’ll spook ’em worse.” Damn if he doesn’t toss his gun away. But just before he goes in he stops and yanks out an old rusty icepick some hunter left stuck in a corral post.
‘Now you notice I ain’t running to stop him nor help him. It’s right there in Article Twenty-two of the
‘I stood there in my boots and long johns and waited for the horses to get out in the corral where they had room to move. The noise died down enough for me to hear Jamie panting inside the barn, “You fuckers, you fuckers,” and the thud of the icepick in the plank floor. I struck some fire to a hurricane lamp and went inside.
‘Jamie was down on his hands and knees. The back of his right hand, the one without the icepick, was about chewed down to bone. An ugly sight, but it wasn’t much compared to what Jamie was doing. He’d got a rat trapped in the corner of a stall and just kept stabbing it and stabbing it, fifty, sixty times, that icepick a blur in the lamplight.
‘“Jamie!” I yell, and he wheels to look at me, muscles in his cheeks jerking, white spit frothing from his mouth, his eyes turned back ’round normal but looking a thousand glazed miles away. And he roars like a goddamn mountain lion, “Noooo! Noooo!” and goes scuttling after the rats, which are writhing in little squealing clumps eating their dead.
‘He gets one his first stab and keeps stabbing it until another leaps at his face and he wheels and chases it into a stall where I can hear his sobs and the thud of that icepick like someone beating on a heavy door. All of a sudden he lets out a scream so powerful everything freezes to silence, the whole barn absolutely still. And he whoops, “I
