The Hi-Lo Country Read online

  The Hi Lo Country

  by

  Max Evans

  © Copyright 2015 Max Evans (as revised)

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, other than brief quotes for reviews.

  Wolfpack Publishing

  48 Rock Creek Road

  Clinton, Montana 59825

  ISBN: 978-1-62918-387-9

  Table of Contents:

  Introduction

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  About The Author

  For patience, loyalty, and understanding, I hereby dedicate The Hi Lo Country to Henry Volkening, Ada Dryce, A1 Hart, and Chuck Miller.

  Max Evans, Taos, New Mexico

  Introduction

  I must confess that this book was damn near as hard for me to put down on paper as it was for its characters to live it—and there was a lot of fun, and problems, in both cases.

  First of all, the book was inspired by my best cowboy friend getting himself killed by Five .38 bullets. At the time, of course, I didn’t know I was inspired. I was just shocked numb.

  Shortly before this shooting took place, I had sold my modest-sized cow ranch near Hi Lo and moved to Taos, New Mexico, to become rich and famous. What I did, with great rapidity, is become a pauper and slightly infamous. It took me several years of living and learning— and three other books—before I started putting this particular story on paper. When I was about halfway through it I decided it was time to stop for a deep breath and celebrate a bit. I went to my favorite bar where the events of the evening led to a very short fistfight with a fine and brilliant artist who had a skull like a Neanderthal man. I swung. He ducked, and I instantly found out that the bones in my right hand were far less solid than the top of his head.

  Now I had to decide what the best course of action from this point would be. If I took my shattered hand to the local hospital, they would apply a cast and it would be a long time before I could use it. So, I decided to go to my friend the Indian medicine man. I had witnessed some of his miracles and had deep faith in his healing powers.

  After hearing some mumbling explanations on my part, he reluctantly agreed to try to fix the hand so I could soon go on writing. He applied a mixture that looked like ground up Fish guts (it may have been), and then straightened the two most damaged Fingers using popsicle sticks for splints and expertly tied it all up. This left me two swollen, unbroken fingers and two swollen, broken fingers on my right hand which made me mostly a left handed typist for awhile.

  I finally finished the book and mailed it to New York. My agent liked it and sent it to an editor. The editor liked it, and when it was published it just naturally called for another celebration—but I really should have just gone fishing instead. Well, unfortunately, another fracas started, this time over a friend’s bar bill. When it ended there were seventeen people involved. Three went to the hospital. Three of us went to jail. The battered condition WE three were in must have created a puzzling situation as to whom was to be hauled where.

  The jail was an underground dungeon at that time. They’ve rebuilt it since then, I’m told.

  My failure to arrive home that night made my wife Pat pretty upset. She thought I was out running around getting into some kind of orneriness. When we finally got word to her that I was merely incarcerated for simple brawling, she became angry at the other side. She showed up at the jail noticeably agitated, with a clean shirt for me— mine had vanished during the flurry of activity—and a basket of fried chicken that we shared with the other inhabitants.

  The trial was held that afternoon. The three of us were fined all the law would allow, plus damages for broken glasses, etc. I borrowed the money for the fine, which took me a year to repay. This, however, was a small penalty compared to what came down in New York regarding my new novel as a result of this.

  Unbeknownst to any of us there was a UPI man in the courtroom. He sent out a wire describing the battle in terms that would have made Zane Grey jealous. I also didn’t know that my editor was in London and had just sold the British rights to my book before its American publication. He was having a sedate breakfast in Brown’s Hotel when he saw this little UPI item in the London Times. He was incensed by it for some reason and wrote me a long, nasty, lecturing letter. I returned the favor with one of righteous indignation, strongly feeling it was too late for a lecture and suggesting that what I needed was a little compassion. Our previous, fine relationship had ended. Inside sources later revealed to me that this editor had sent down orders that only fifteen review copies of my book were to go out and no advertisement for it at all.

  In my mind The Hi Lo Country appeared to be as dead as last year’s plans.

  It wasn’t. A “hot” young director named Sam Peckinpah read The Hi Lo Country, called my agent, and said he wanted to meet the guy who wrote it. We met in an Oriental restaurant in Studio City, had a fine old time and he optioned the book for a movie. Sam had three pictures booked ahead, so the option on the book ran out.

  By now several other people had miraculously gotten copies. Among the many actors who wanted to be part of the film were: Brian Keith, Lee Marvin, Charlton Heston, Robert Culp, Slim Pickens, Ali McGraw, and others. Some of the producers and/or directors, besides Peckinpah, who wanted or tried to get it made were: Saul David, Buzz Kulick, Tom Gries, Marvin Schwartz, David Dortort. I sold so many options and there were so many scripts written and so much money spent that I truly have lost track. I horse-traded it back and forth so many times to Peckinpah that we once had to hire two separate firms of lawyers to find out who owned it. The book was batted around like a rock ’n roll groupie, or the shifting wind of Hi Lo. Now, after almost two decades, I finally own the film rights clean and clear as distilled water. My agent thinks we’ll actually get it made into a movie now, but I’m just happy to have it back in book form again.

  Most of my novels and short stories are set in the country around Hi Lo. The geographical Hi Lo country covers the northeastern half of New Mexico, a lot of southern Colorado and extends over into far West Texas. The indomitable spirit of that land should cover the world and beyond.

  In my early writing career I was aware that all the millions of words—mostly myth—from around 1870 to 1900, had been overly covered. From then through the ’20s the myth continued, but at least Will James told about the real west during his time. I became obsessed with the fact that the west of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s would also slip by and become mythologized out of recognition as the previous two periods had. I have nothing against the myth anymore than I do fairy tales. However, I feel it is crucial that history be recorded close to the time it happens or the mists of legend alter it beyond recognition.

  Since I had been brought up—or more properly “kicked up”—by several remaining old-time cowboys, and had been made a cowhand under them, I chose myself to attempt to put this period in time on paper, and I chose to try it in fiction. It seems to be more personal and more fun that way. So from My Pardner (1963) which was set in the ’30s, through the early ’40s and ’50s with The Rounders (1960, Gregg Press edition 1980), The Great Wedding (1963), The Hi Lo Country (1961), The One Eyed Sky (1963), The Shadow of Thunder (1969), along with many shor
t stories and novellas, I attempted to show what the American cowboy truly was during those three decades and still is to a lesser degree today.

  In the ’30s the cowboys were still under the influence of old-timers and their ways in spite of the barbed wire. There were only a few old, flatbed trucks in use and hauling was still mostly done by wagon and team. The massive and final transition to the pickup truck was just getting started in the early ’40s when World War II caused a postponement of the inevitable. After that terrible conflict the nation got slowly back into peacetime production, the pickup became more and more dominant. By the end of the ’50s just about every ranch in the west had at least one. The transition was completed by Detroit, Michigan. Now this is not to say that the horse isn’t used and needed on isolated ranches today, but the total dependence on the horse and an era is gone forever. I lived it and I’ve tried to write that period as straight and true as my ability allows. How well the words are strung out, only the readers can judge, but the actuality of those times are sure as hell there.

  The younger cowboys I worked, sweated, fought and played with are aging now. They will soon disappear just as most of the old-timers have who influenced them. Just the same I will always remember a few things. On a real working ranch the rope and “cow savvy” were always more important than the gun. Another thing—in my young cowboying days, I cannot recall a single cowhand sitting in a bar feeling sorry for himself. He was there to drink, try to find a woman, dance, gamble, have fun, and for a spell, get in out of the wind. The fistfights were just something to add to the short time of relief. Few held grudges and most were buying one another drinks before they could wipe the blood from their faces.

  In the Hi Lo country the wind blows hot or freezing about three hundred days a year. Fighting just that alone would cause a man to have a tendency to turn loose when he had a chance, not to mention the bucking horses, the kicking calves, the poor wages, the fence building and windmill repairing, the hay hauling in blizzards, and the chopping of ice with an axe from a tank so the stock could water. Then there are the droughts that shrivel everything on the earth: the grass, the wild animals, the cattle, the horses, the insects, the birds, bank accounts, and of course, the men and women responsible for the survival of all.

  The Hi Lo country is not just made up of cowboys. There are merchants, mechanics, railroaders, miners, bartenders, poets, inventors, whores, semi-whores, and elegant, dedicated, longsuffering women, every kind that’s anywhere else on the globe. I think here, though, the land and the elements are finally in control. It is a country of extremes. You adapt or die, in body or spirit. Because of this, the inhabitants laugh and play to extremes; they speak with descriptive comparisons in extremes; and as some old cowboy once said, “What the hell, you just live till you die anyway, and the rest of the time you spend shoveling manure so you can get the cows in the barn.”

  I don’t know if God ever intended to give his blessings to the Hi Lo country, but I lived it, loved it and wrote about it. With all the high winds, broken bones and hearts, I’d like to do it all over again. Since I can’t, here it is on paper the best I could do at the time.

  Max Evans

  Albuquerque, New Mexico

  One

  I watched them lower Big Boy Matson into his grave. It was a large coffin, and yet I half expected it to burst apart from the weight and size of the man. Not only his physical bigness but from the whole of his being.

  I stood above the crowd of big-hatted men and dark-dressed women. I stood alone. Not very long ago I had been one of them, but I had left and gone to another part of the land. The people were fast becoming strangers to me as I to them; but the land, the great swelling earth under my feet, was mine, and I belonged to it even as the man it now reclaimed.

  As the preacher said his last words and the coffin sank out of sight, I looked down from the wind-stroked hill to the town, Hi Lo, New Mexico. It didn’t seem to be affected by the death of its strongest son. Maybe like the rest of us the event had been anticipated for so long it had lost its impact.

  Even I, his best friend, felt no sadness. No tears. There was only a vacancy, as if the bicep of my arm had been torn away.

  He had died very young, but nothing seemed to have been wasted. This was strange, for he had had so much to give. The violence of his death had been no surprise, but the way it had happened was. It was as if a village had been vacated because of an impending flood, and had been destroyed by an erupting volcano instead.

  I walked to my pickup truck, got in, and looked back at the scene for the last time. I said, "Goodbye, you old son of a bitch; I hope they have broncs in hell.”

  The town of Hi Lo squatted, hugging the earth as if at any moment the constant wind would blow it into the dust of the arroyos. But as doubtful as it appeared about its geographical position, it seemed even more uneasy about its social standing. Its frame and adobe houses were scattered untrustingly over a relatively large area. Long ago, in the early 1900’s, the homesteaders had settled the land and merchants had come from far places to build the town. Rock and mud houses had sprung above the natural contours of the mighty grass-covered hills like trees in an orchard.

  The inhabitants of these homes filled the town with trade, and the councilmen planned for a city. Building jammed against building, while in the country, across several million acres of grassland, neighbor joined neighbor on every 160 acres.

  The plows dug into the grass, and horses lunged against their traces, drawing the furrowed lines behind them. Trees were planted, wells dug, children sired, and the tom land was sown with beans, corn, cane, and wheat.

  Some prospered for a time. The crops were harvested and sold. New rooms were added to the new homes. New plows were bought, and bigger and stronger horses to pull them. The men with the best crops bought land from those with the poorest. Little by little, unnoticeable at first, the number of farms shrank as the size of a few others increased.

  But then the land rebelled against this violation—although in her own subtle way she assisted the strong in overtaking the weak by deceit: gradually at first, then with mounting force, the furrows blew level in the drying wind. The deserted homes fell, one rock, one adobe at a time. The men who survived let the plows rust away, and stem by stem, acre by countless acre, the grass returned. It was a land meant for livestock. Cattle country. And so in the end it was.

  The great ranches took hold. Thousands upon thousands of cattle ranged its hills, its mountains, its brush-covered canyons. The people were scattered thinly across the land, and the town, most of its trade gone, shriveled to only five hundred inhabitants.

  It was a lonely land, and its people came to the dying town of Hi Lo to visit, to talk cow talk and horse talk, to get drunk, to gamble, to whore around. Hi Lo was the hub of the limitless grasslands and wild gorges. But the land had left its curse upon it too. For over three hundred days a year the wind drilled at it and sucked at it as a reminder of the desecration of the plow. The men of the ranches remembered and understood, and suffered the wind with amazing forbearance.

  Hi Lo has its business section, though small, like all its counterparts. Every shop of the town fronts on the highway that rims parallel to the railroad. In the summertime business is brought by tourists who stop for gas, food, or liquor between the widely scattered oases of New Mexico.

  In the fall the ranchers drive their cattle into the stockyards and load them on the trains for Denver or numberless feed lots in Texas, Illinois, Oklahoma, and Kansas. The profits determine the well-being of the ranchers, the cowboys, and the citizens of Hi Lo throughout the sharp, bitter winter.

  The everlasting wind naturally creates great thirst. Hi Lo has two establishments for the relief of this torture. The Wild Cat Saloon is on the south side of the highway, and directly across the street stands the Double Duty Saloon. The two places eye each other like two young herd bulls. The former is managed by a short overstuffed man called Nick Barnes. He serves his drinks slowly, methodically, i
nvariably saying: "Drink up, you bastards, and order another round. You didn’t come to stay, you came to play.” The latter is managed, so to speak, by Lollypop Adams. No one knows the reason for this name. Lollypop is tall and skinny, like a reared-up greyhound, and all bones except for his stomach, which has a slight swelling. This slight paunch comes from joining the boys too often in their festivities. Everybody comes here to drink and play cards, tell lies, and get out of the goddam wind. A man really has to be in bad shape to be thrown out of one of these places. Business is not always good, and fist fights from pure boredom and wind-tense nerves are as common as gnats after a pig’s rump.

  Down the street a way is the general mercantile, Hi Lo’s supermarket. Everything a man needs to fight this country can be found here if he has the money or the credit. Nearly everyone has credit at least for a year—from one shipping time to the next. Mitch Peabody, a beady-eyed little man, owns the store. But it’s his wife, twice as heavy, who runs it and sees to the profits. Rose is her name, and her bountiful breasts are her fortune. One rancher said that in the past twenty years he had bought over a thousand pounds of female breast from the Peabody mercantile. Rose, when weighing nails, beans, sugar, or anything else that’s sold by the pound, always manages to have one breast on the scales. This is partly unavoidable because of their size. But when Abrahm Frink once said, "Two dozen bolts and a pound of teat,” his credit was cut off forthwith.

  There are three gas stations, one with a fair-to-less-than-average mechanic, and a small hotel with a restaurant, The Collins Hotel by name. And there is a moneylender, Steve Shaw, who is not exactly a fixture of the town because he owns a ranch and spends as much time in the country as he does at his office in Hi Lo.

  There are others, of course, but it is not these I am mainly concerned with. They are so close together they no longer have individual personalities, but have intermingled and welded into one lone identity—just simply Hi Lo, New Mexico. It is the people scattered out across the land that make Hi Lo whatever it is. They are strong and weak in varying degrees. They all contribute something to the town, something of themselves and each in his own manner. Hi Lo may not see some of these people for months. But she waits, knowing they will come. I think the one she looked forward to seeing most, and dreaded most, was Big Boy Matson. But this is not just the story of Big Boy or myself or the woman Mona, with her terrible gifts of love and guilt and grief. No, this is not enough to give you a complete picture of the Hi Lo country. I have to include many others—cowboys, cattle barons, farmers, inventors, artists, sheep-herders, thieves, drunkards, killers. All these are the spokes projecting from the hub, which is the town.