Swift as a cat Burns stepped forward and slapped the man hard across the mouth, driving him back against the bar. A dislodged glass rolled in a half circle, fell off the bar and rolled again, unbroken. “Never call a man that,” Burns said; “just you never call a man that. No matter what, never do it. It’s very bad.” He spoke quickly and quietly, breathing fast. “I might kill you for callin me that, fella. That’s how bad it is. Don’t ever do it again.”
The bartender got busy at the telephone.
The one-armed man sagged against the bar, stunned and off balance, speechless and shocked and outraged. Around the barroom men had risen and were talking excitedly, staring without sympathy at the cowboy. He looked at them, waiting for the charge from the one-armed man. “Now you fellas stand back,” he said. “If this cabron wants to fight so bad why by god I’ll fight him. Do it with one hand behind my back, too.” And he slid his left hand under his belt at the small of his back and kept it there. “So don’t nobody interfere or I’ll use both hands.”
The bartender hung up.
The one-armed man roared out at last like a child coming out of a fit, lowered his head and plowed into Burns, butting, kicking, and flailing away with his one violent arm. It was a poor fight: two one-armed men, they made a sorry spectacle with their wild swings and misses, their awkward lunges and tipsy staggers. And the cowboy was getting the worst of it: without experience in one-arm fighting, he nearly fell on his face every time he swung and seemed unable to defend himself adequately—he received several jarring blows on the face and chest. But he kept on, and being much the taller of the two, with a longer reach, he began after a while to give as much as he took.
The fight went on as the two men staggered around through the barroom clubbing each other with skinned and bloody fists, falling over feet and chairs and spittoons, upsetting tables, spilling drinks, breaking bottles. The onlookers had a difficult time merely keeping out of the way, especially when the combatants began throwing things at each other—beer bottles, glasses, chairs, the steel puck from a shuffleboard table. The bartender, like a goalie in a hockey game, spread his arms and threw his body around to save his precious merchandise from destruction, but was not altogether successful: Scotch, bourbon, tokay and muscatel dripped from his shelves and formed dark pools on the floor.
Finally the fighting became general: Burns, knocked down, was getting back on his feet, forgot that he was supposed to be one-armed and used both hands to raise himself. At once there were cries of objection and someone, a little bowlegged man with a face brown and wrinkled as an old saddlebag, stepped up and kicked the cowboy in the ribs, A few seconds later the little old man was crawling under the table clutching at his mouth, a tooth missing and blood streaming from his nose: his three grown sons took his place.
Eventually and much too late the police arrived: a sheriff’s sergeant and two deputies, three men with leather belts, .38 caliber revolvers, boots, badges and leather blackjacks. The bartender pointed out Jack Burns or what could be seen of him—a pair of high-heeled boots, swinging arms, the black hat miraculously still attached to a lean, bony and bleeding head, all somehow entangled on the floor in a cluster of squirming human bodies.
The deputies dragged him out, indiscriminately clubbing any heads that got in the way. Burns tripped one of them, punched the other in the belly, and received a sharp leaden rap on the head in return, and a pair of handcuffs on his wrists. Still conscious, he continued to struggle until the sergeant approached him from behind, blackjack in hand, and tapped him expertly on the base of the skull, blacking out the nerve center of the cerebellum.
Limp and inert as a sackful of old rags, long legs dragging, he was hauled out of the bar and across the golden dust of the road to the car, a bright new Ford with siren, red lights, and Bernal County insignia. The sun was low in the west now, a globe of fire singing between the black cones of two burnt-out volcanoes: an immense wave of light streamed over the desert, flooding the cottonwoods and adobe shacks and the red willows along the ditches, pouring across the mesa and mixing with the iron and granite of the mountain crags ten miles away. The men blinked against the glare as they dumped Burns into the back seat of the car. His hat fell off and flopped softly down in the floury dust of the road; one of the deputies picked it up and dropped it on his face. One of the men said: “Will he be quiet now?” and the sergeant said: “He’ll be quiet long enough.”
The booking officer, a huge man hulking over a tiny portable typewriter, thumping on its keys with two fingers like Polish sausages, peered across the high desk at the ragged figure cowering before him.
“What’s that?” he growled; “what the hell kind of a name is that?”
“Konowalski,” the little man repeated—a scarecrow, tattered rags on gray sticks, a sagging ruin of a face scored by hunger, blighted by hopelessness. “John Konowalski,” he said again, as if not sure of the name himself. He proffered it timidly, expecting a rejection.”
“Spell it, for chrissake.”
The gray face seemed lost in reverie; the throat gulped, the eyes wavered.
“Spell it!”
“K—” the little man said; “K-o-n-o—”
“K-o-n-o—?” The booking officer frowned at his typewriter, pronouncing the letters silently as he typed them out. He turned to the deputy standing beside the rags. “Joe, the next time you pick up something with a name like this just run it on out of the County; don’t bring it up here.” The deputy grinned. The booking officer turned back to Konowalski. “Okay: spell it out.”
“K-o-n-o-w-a-l-s-k-i…”
“Jesus Christ what a name. With a name like that you oughta be in jail. You oughta sue your old man.”
“It’s my name,” the little man said.
“You can have it, fella.” The booking officer typed a few more words. Then: “Address!” he barked.
The little man swallowed with difficulty, opened his mouth. His eyes were like a pair of bleared and bloodshot testes; they were focused on nothing. He swallowed again.
“What’s your address?”
“Don’t have none.”
“Don’t have none? Where the hell do you live?”
“How can I live anywhere when I can’t find a job?”
“Just answer the question, fella.” The booking officer hammered on the vibrating typewriter with his two big middle fingers. “What’s your occupation?”
“Occupation?”
“That’s right; what’s your trade?”
“I got no job.” The little man shuffled his feet, shrugged his shoulders slightly under the ragged coat. “Can’t find none.”
“Well, what do you work at when you do, if you ever work?”
“Laborer.”
“Okay, okay, that’s all I wanted to know.” The booking officer attacked the typewriter again. He typed out a few lines, then noticed the old man and the deputy still standing there in front of the desk. He said: “Call him, Joe.”
“Where’ll I put him?”
“One of the blocks.”
“They’re all full.”
“Well…” The booking officer typed out another word on the formsheet in the typewriter, then looked up again. “Throw him in the tank for a while. We’ll find a place for him later.”
The deputy put a hand on the little man’s shoulder. “Come on,” he said.
“Wait a minute,” the man said. The deputy hesitated “What you locking me up for?”
The booking officer frowned at the paper in his typewriter, his fingers poised on the keys. “Vagrancy,” he said, not looking up. He started to type again.
“I didn’t do nothin,” the old man said.
“No address, no job, no money—that’s vagrancy. Lock him up, Joe.” The booking officer typed out another word, his lips silently framing the syllables, then removed the sheet from the typewriter and filed it in a manila folder on the desk. Wearily he turned his head toward the two deputies waiting on the bench, with the long collapsed b
ody of Jack Burns between them. “Okay, boys, what you got there?”
“Wait a minute,” the old man said, as the deputy started to pull him away. “I didn’t do nothin. I was just walkin through town. So I got no money, no job, is that a crime?”
“That’s vagrancy,” the booking officer said. “M you don’t believe me you can argue with the judge in the morning. He likes to argue. Now for godsake, Joe, get this crumb out of here.”
The deputy named Joe unlocked a blank steel door at the far end of the office and pushed the old man inside into a windowless room littered with prone sick bodies under a yellow light. Through the open door came a powerful stench of vomit, urine, animal filth. “In you go,” the deputy said, and slammed the door shut. Dimly, through the wall of metal, they could hear the old man talking, protesting: I can’t breathe, he seemed to be saying, I can’t breathe in here.
“All right,” said the booking officer, “what’s this?” He was looking down at Burns’ inert, bloodstained body, held half erect by the two deputies, “Can it talk?”
“He’s all right,” one of the deputies said. “He acted kinda feisty for a while and the Sarge had to clip him. He’ll come around in a minute.”
The booking officer put a new formsheet into his typewriter, rolled it around the drum, clicked off five spaces. “Drunk?” he asked.
“Yes,” the first deputy said. “Drunk and disorderly; started a fight in Miera’s Bar. Resisted arrest.”
The booking officer typed down this information, or part of it. “Where’d you say it was?”
“Miera’s Bar, North Highland Road.”
“When?”
“Five thirty to six this evening.”
The booking officer hammered on the machine, then looked up. “What’s his name?”
The deputies looked at each other. The first one said: “Who knows? No one at the bar knew him.”
“Well, didn’t you search him?”
“Yeah, sure.” The deputy was holding his cap, upside down, in his hand; he lifted it and spilled the contents onto the desk: a few dollar bills, some coins, matches, a sack of Bull Durham, a pocket-knife, the black dried shrunken ear of a bull.
The booking officer looked disdainfully at the cowboy’s property. “Is that all? Isn’t there any identification?”
“No,” the deputy said; “that’s all he had.”
“No draft card?”
“No.”
“No driver’s license, no social security card, no discharge card, no registration card, no insurance card, no identification at all?”
“Nope. That stuff there is all there was.”
The booking officer appeared to be extremely annoyed. “My god, he must have something on him! A man can’t walk around loose without any I.D. at all!” He gave the unconscious Burns a look of disgust and exasperation. “Didn’t he have a billfold?”
“Wasn’t none on him,” the deputy said.
“Where’d he keep his money?”
“In his pocket.”
The booking officer clenched his hands and chewed vigorously on his lower lip. “Jesus!” he said. He stared at Burns’ sagging head. “No cards, no papers: who the hell does he think he is?” He turned back to his typewriter, two big fingers poised for action—he had nothing to write. “Goddamn!” he said. And then: “Wake him up. Wake the sonofabitch up.”
The two deputies shook the cowboy, and slapped his cheeks, but there was no response.
“Throw some water on him.”
One of the deputies filled a paper cup from a water cooler and threw the cold water in Burns’ face; he stirred slightly, groaned, then relapsed into darkness again. The booking officer growled, got up from his stool behind the desk and opened a cabinet built into the office wall. He groped around for a moment, muttering to himself, then found a small bottle and passed it over the desk to one of the deputies. “Hold that under his nose.” The deputy held the tiny vial under the cowboy’s nose. Nothing happened. “Take the stopper out first,” the booking officer said, patiently. The deputy obeyed. “Now wave it around under his nose.” The sharp fumes of ammonia penetrated the air; the deputies held their heads away from the bottle.
Burns began to struggle feebly, trying to avert his face from the bitter pungent bite of the gas. He moaned a little and pushed at the air with his shackled hands; his eyes were screwed tightly shut. “Hold him still,” said the booking officer, “and keep that stuff under his nose till his eyes open and he starts to talk.” Burns turned and twisted, straining to free himself from the grip of the two deputies. “Hold him!” the booking officer said; “give him a good strong dose.”
The cowboy writhed, kicked, opened his eyes and stared blindly at the ceiling. “Lemme lone,” he gasped, “lemme lone, lemme lone, damnit, lemme lone.” He fought against the steel chain binding his wrists, the arms holding him down. “Lemme lone, I say, by god lemme lone.” His black hat was knocked off again and fell upside down on the floor; the three men, straining stepped on it, tramped all over it. “Lemme lone,” and swaying like figures in an intense ritual dance, Burns shouted wildly, “lemme lone, goddamnit!”
“Okay,” the booking officer said, “turn him loose. Let go of him, he’s awake.”
Tie deputies stepped back, releasing Burns; one of them still held the bottle but it was empty—a dark stain spread over the front of his shirt. Burns stood alone in the middle of the room, sagging, weaving, about to buckle at the knees; he wobbled backwards and hit the wall and leaned against it and managed to stay more or less upright, rubbing at his eyes with both fists, talking angrily to himself: “The bastards, the dirty hogs, the damned dirty rotten bastards, the sonofabitches…”
“Okay, cowboy, that’s enough. Snap out of it.” The booking officer waited; Burns continued to mumble bitterly. The booking officer shouted: “I said that’s enough. Shut up!”
“Crawlin snakes,” Burns said, “the dogs, the rats, the goddamned disrespectful potato-eaters, the no-good lowdown sneakin coyotes…”
The booking officer turned to one of the deputies. “Where’s Gutierrez?” he said.
“I don’t know,” the man answered.
“What?”
“I don’t know. How should I know?”
The deputy named Joe now spoke up: “He’s upstairs,” he said. “Gutierrez is upstairs.”
“Call him.”
The deputy scurried out of the office and down the hallway past the water cooler and the elevator door and a fire hose coiled in a niche in the wall and stopped at the foot of the stairway. “Gutierrez!” he yelled; “hey, big bear!”
“Slimy sneakin skunks,” Burns said, rubbing his eyes, “cowards, rotten crapeatin cabrones…”
They heard the crash of a steel door from somewhere upstairs, the meshing of locks and then a voice, an animal snarl. The deputy returned to the booking office. “He’s comin,” he said; he stared at Burns.
Who was still talking: “Bunch of hamstringers,” he said, “lyin two-faced two-headed split-tongued drygulchin pig’s litter, yellow-livered yellow-bellied bitch’s sons…”
The booking officer ignored him as he made an inventory of Burns’ property, stuffing the articles into a manila envelope, sealing it and putting it away in a steel filing cabinet. Then he waited.
“Bastards,” Burns said, “absolute bastards…”
Something was tramping through the hallway, a dark shape and ponderous heavy-footed body coming toward them over the cement floor through the yellow light of the hallway. The bearman, Gutierrez.
He entered the office. “What d’ya want?” he said sullenly; he was sweating: under each armpit was a crescent stain spreading slowly through the khaki.
“Help this man stand up,” the booking officer said, pointing at Burns. “Help him to talk polite.”
Gutierrez glanced at the sagging, muttering, indifferent figure of the cowboy. “I was goin out,” he said; “I’m off in five minutes. I need somethin to eat.”
“I kno
w,” the booking officer said; “this won’t take but a few minutes. I want to find out this man’s name and so on.”
Gutierrez shrugged, then reached out and put a huge hand around the back of Burns’ neck. “Okay, man, stand up straight and answer the questions.” He lifted Burns away from the wall and held him up before the desk.
“Get your dirty paw off me,” Burns said; he slashed laterally at Gutierrez with his handcuffed fists. “Get away from me.”
Gutierrez snatched at the flying hands, caught them and held them still, pushed tightly into Burns’ stomach. “Behave,” he said, “or so help me I’ll break your backbone.” He dug his fingers and thumb into Burns’ neck, crushing nerves and blood vessels.
“What’s your name?” asked the booking officer.
“I can’t talk,” Bums said. “This black gorilla is stranglin me.” He struggled against the man’s grip but could do nothing; Gutierrez held him as if he were a child.
“What’s your name?” the booking officer asked again.
“Make this ape let go of me and maybe then I can talk.”
“What’s your name?”
“John W. Burns. Make this bear loosen up on my neck.”
“Loosen up a little,” the booking officer said to Gutierrez. To Burns: “Where do you live?”
“Anywhere I fed like.”
Gutierrez again pressed his iron-hard fingers into Burns’ neck. “What does that mean?” asked the booking officer.
“Figure it out for yourself.”
“Help him answer the question,” the booking officer said. With one hand Gutierrez forced Burns’ head forward and down until his chin was jammed against his chest and the vertebrae of his neck stood out like knobs under the inflamed skin. “What’s your address?” said the booking officer.
“I don’t have none,” Burns mumbled hoarsely.
“You got to have an address.”
“I don’t. I just wander around wherever I feel like.” He breathed with difficulty and involuntary tears were forced from his eyes. “You bastards,” he moaned.
Gutierrez kicked him in the small of the back with his knee. “Where do your folks live?” the booking officer asked.