There Is No Otherwise Read online

  That much was what sixteen years had taught JP about his self and when you know yourself, everything else falls into place.

  Just like priests and prophets, cowboys are always coming up against the signs of the end times. If they're honest, their ways can't go on much longer and they know it. The range is fenced. Highways block the old paths. The wolves die out. The springs dry up. The banks foreclose. And maybe that's why sometimes the smallest of things, a lost calf bleating in the distance, an old lady's time coming to its end, can seem like the very death of the world.

  The old lady was dying, the old man was going to shit, and the whole ranch was going to shit too. A week ago JP watched a lawyer from Frost Bank come down the driveway and when he got to the end the old man unloaded a rifle over him. The lawyer threw his papers out of the car window and the old man said if he saw any more suits from El Paso he wouldn't be liable. JP said if the bank took the ranch he didn't know what he would do. The old man looked at him and nodded.

  That land had been in the Tobin family a long time and the old man did not want to be the one that lost it. Tobin's ancestor arrived at Ellis Island with nothing more than the shirt on his back and a score to settle with his maker. Before he was done he had taken over the paper to more land than comprised the entire county he had left behind in Ireland. Somewhere in the old man's desk was still a bunch of Spanish deeds sealed in wax with the insignias of long dead Mexican governors. The family had owned that land since the time of the Texas Republic.

  But the writing was on the wall. It seemed the only thing that wasn't getting more expensive by the day was beef.

  JP flicked his cigarette across the yard and it arced like a meteor. He went back to the bar.

  ‘You get lost?’

  ‘I was just thinking.’

  ‘In the crapper?’

  ‘In the back.’

  ‘You weren't upstairs were you, JP?’

  JP shook his head.

  ‘You'd tell us if you were.’

  ‘I might,’ he said.

  *

  THE MINUTES OF THE night stretched on and the stars slowly rotated above. The boys sat and drank, they grew quiet, each occupied with his own thoughts. Something about the place called for reflection.

  At last though, and inevitably, the women arrived.

  Arliss exhaled smoke toward the light bulb above them and said, ‘what have we got here, boys?’

  JP looked up and saw the door open. Three girls entered coyly. Like so many things in the world, nothing about them told of the trouble that would follow.

  *

  ‘NOW THEM'S WHAT I'D call women,’ Arliss said.

  He looked up at the bartender and the bartender said, ‘te lo dije’ and grinned.

  ‘Just like you said, old man.’

  The girls stood at the door awkwardly and the bartender came round and took them to a table. They sat and spoke quietly among themselves. Now that they were here the boys weren't quite sure what to do with them. The girls looked up and smiled but mostly they were shy. For their part, the boys tried to keep straight faces but they weren't good at it. They'd had a long week and they were rightly starved for this kind of attention out on the ranch. Before the Mrs had taken ill, and she was in her seventies, she was regularly the only woman they set eyes on from one week to the next. Unless something was needed from town, which was by no means every week, the closest thing to a female the boys saw on the ranch was a cow.

  There wasn't much between the girls so there wasn't much to discuss by way of divvying up. They were all young and they each had similar dark features and long hair. They wore homemade dresses. They could have been sisters. One of them was slightly heavier than the others and she seemed to be the most assertive. The boys couldn't stop looking at them.

  ‘Does this feel a little awkward to the either of you?’ JP said.

  ‘It's not like El Paso,’ Modine said.

  ‘That it aint.’

  ‘At least there a man knows what to do with hisself.’

  Arliss said, ‘you two wouldn't know a good thing when you saw it.’

  ‘I know a good thing,’ Modine said. ‘I just don't know how to approach it, is all.’

  ‘All we got to do is talk to them.’

  JP put his hat on. ‘Talk to them?’

  ‘Take that hat off, JP.’

  JP took his hat off.

  ‘Are these girls even whores?’ Modine said.

  No one said anything. They watched the girls. They were beautiful. After a minute, Arliss said, ‘I don't think so.’

  These were the type of girls a man could look at and think about his life in a different way. It wasn't all about moving the herd where it needed to be and mending fences and checking the water level. Maybe the truck would last through the winter and maybe it wouldn't. Maybe the bank was owed money. A man looked at girls like these and realized that life was a bigger thing than what his part of it showed him. He realized he didn't yet know everything about his life; hadn't yet seen all he was going to see. Someday he'd see ten miles of yellow grass blowing in the wind like a liquid, or wild horses running through that grass like they were a part of it, or even the pyramids of Egypt and Buckingham Palace. He realized that maybe one day he'd be married to a girl like this and spend forty years waking up next to her and then she'd cook him breakfast. He saw that what life was this day it wouldn't always be. The surest thing about the future was that he didn't know it. Anything might be. And at the end of it, even if he'd seen nothing like it on this earth, he would see the heaven.

  JP said to Arliss, ‘maybe you should go ask the bartender what the deal is.’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Arliss said. ‘Anyone would swear you two had never spoke to a girl that wasn't working.’

  The truth was though, there wasn't much call for socializing out on the ranch, and when Modine or Arliss did get in to El Paso or Juárez it was to a whorehouse, and there wasn't much call for socializing there either. JP had never been with a woman of any kind but even if he'd been to Juárez it wouldn't have done nothing to prepare him for this.

  ‘God damn it,’ Arliss said, ‘I'll take the one in the red apron,’ and he stood up and walked over to her and said, ‘buenas noches.’

  ‘Buenas,’ she said.

  ‘Con permisso?’ he said and held out his hand and she took it and he walked her to the bar and bought her a glass of beer.

  JP and Modine looked at each other.

  ‘God damn it,’ JP said.

  Modine said to him, ‘don't sweat it son. If I was as inexperienced as you, I'd be nervous too.’

  ‘Could you hold it with the smart talk for the next few minutes, Modine?’

  Modine said, ‘so which one are you after?’

  JP said, ‘the thin one.’

  ‘How'd I know you'd say that?’

  JP nodded.

  Modine stood up. ‘I guess that leaves me with the leader.’

  JP followed him to the two remaining girls and they took them by the hand to the bar where Arliss was already sitting with his girl. They bought them drinks and found them seats.

  Everyone was smiling and agreeable. It would be fair to say things were going well. Before long JP was sitting back at the table with his girl on his knee and he wasn't certain he had ever seen anything so beautiful in all his life. There she sat without a care, her one leg swinging a little. She was younger than he was, fifteen maybe. Her skin was unmarked. She couldn't have weighed but a hundred pounds. He might have died and gone to heaven with her sitting on his knee, but just then, just as he felt he could close his eyes and let the angels take him, the door of the bar burst open, and this time it wasn't no women.

  Those who dance must pay the fiddler.

  *

  IN DIMMITT TEXAS JP had been a sheepherder all his days until his father died and his mother remarried a man from Guymon Oklahoma who worked at a hog processing plant. She was following the new husband up to Guymon and JP had a choice of going with her, which
is what he thought he would do, but on the drive up to Oklahoma, just south of Dumas Texas, JP pulled over the car and told his mother he reckoned he wasn't ready to quit the state. He said he'd go south and find work and come up and visit her at a later date. She wrote out the address she'd be at in Guymon on the inside of a wax paper coffee cup but when he looked at it a couple of days later it had worn off and he couldn't make out the letters.

  He had with him a bag of clothes and a few dollars but he didn't want to leave his mother short on gas so he gave that to her. She took it and he stood by the side of the road while she pulled out and he kept his right hand raised like he was taking an oath. In truth, he probably was. He watched her drive off to the north like she was his child and was leaving home for the first time. He was on eighty‐seven and he walked back south till he reached a ranch‐to‐market road and turned east onto it and started walking that way. It was a wide‐open country and he didn't know what was ahead. When he heard a car coming toward him he put out his hand and caught a ride as far as Panhandle Texas in Carson County, which he thought was a pretty sorry looking place. From there he made his way south catching rides and sleeping rough through Childress and Vernon and Abilene and San Angelo and Odessa and Pecos until he was three miles from the entrance to the Tobin ranch, east of El Paso.

  When he first started working the ranch, Modine and Arliss told him there was a stink of sheep on him that made the cows jittery. He told them it would wash off given time and true enough, in time, they stopped ragging him on it.

  JP also had a habit of dallying a rope and he couldn't get quit of it no matter what they said. They figured it was a sheepherding custom but it wasn't. Dallying was just what came natural to JP and changing it would have been like trying to write with his left hand. The old man ordered him 35‐foot rope from a dealer up north to accommodate it and when JP told him he'd wean himself off the habit the old man just told him not to be ashamed of who he was and where he came from.

  *

  WHEN THE DOOR BUST open it did its full one‐eighty rotation and slammed against the wall it was hinged to. JP looked up. Four men were coming in off the street, entering the dim light of the bar like pale fish surfacing from a depth. JP expected them to be Mexican but when they stepped into the light they were white. They stood in a cluster blocking the door, looking round the room. It seemed they had known what to expect.

  Over at the bar Modine and Arliss got to their feet. One of the men was waving a 1911 model Colt around and he motioned for the girls at the bar to come over to him. The girls ran over. Modine's had to refasten her dress strap and the man with the pistol slapped her across the face. She didn't say nothing back to him. Modine made to move but Arliss held him. The man with the gun smiled.

  ‘Come on, bitch.’

  Arliss kept a steady hold of him.

  JP looked to see what the other men were packing but none of them had drawn. He thought of the Winchester Modine had in the truck but right now it was less than useless. It might as well be at the ranch.

  One of the men, the worst of them, took a step toward JP. JP had hardly noticed, but he was still sitting at the table in the center of the room with the bulb overhead and the girl on his knee. The man was fat and wore a duster and JP couldn't tell what sort of sumbitch he was. His face was overgrown and he wore his hat low over the eyes. You could hardly see him, which to JP meant he was either a coward or a very bad man. His arms lay straight by his sides and he could have had anything at all up those coat sleeves. There was something off kilter about these men that JP couldn't put his finger on. He didn't peg them as cowpunchers. They weren't army men. They weren't convicts neither. And the semi‐auto wasn't the type of handgun you expected to see in a place like this. It was government issue, most likely stolen or picked up at a pawnshop round Fort Bliss or some place.

  These men didn't belong. Either they were fools or cowards or neither, and that was what JP was afraid of.

  The man was looking at the girl on JP's knee.

  ‘Fun's over, baby. Let's go.’

  She didn't move.

  The man kicked over a chair. ‘Vamos,’ he shouted.

  The girl made to go but JP held her. ‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘Do you know these men?’

  The man spat. ‘I aint gonna say this but one more time.’

  JP saw it in the man's eye — what wasn't cowboy nor soldier nor thief but some other thing.

  He let go of the girl and she ran over to join the others. He looked over at Modine and Arliss. There wasn't much they could do pinned by the forty‐five. The bartender was gone god knows where. JP thought of the wife and child up the stairs. None of the other men had drawn yet. There was still time now to do something and very soon that time would be passed and there would be no coming back to it.

  The man said to JP, ‘you like playing with other men's things?’

  JP had always known that sooner or later there would be some man that put a gun to his head. The only thing to do when that time came was tell the son of a bitch to pull the trigger. He still had the cigarette in his mouth and he drew on it and exhaled and as he did he crossed some transition inside his soul that separated the boy from man. It was as invisible as the line between Texas and New Mexico.

  He said to the fat man, ‘you only got one chance to listen to me cause either way there aint gonna be another. You can turn around and leave right now and this is over.’

  The fat man sneered. His companions laughed. ‘Fine last words,’ he said. Then he put his hand in his pocket and JP figured here was a gun coming but the man drew a long knife with a thin blade and no guard. It was more like a spike than a knife.

  What JP did, and he did it faster than any man might, was reach up and crush the light bulb above him in his hand and at the same time rise and throw forward the table into the sudden darkness. The table blindsided the man and in the same motion JP was running toward him. He heard the gun go off several times and in the darkness each shot was a flash of light that strobed the room. No other gun fired and JP was fairly certain M1911 cartridges held just seven rounds.

  He rushed forward blindly and he hoped Modine and Arliss were doing something similar.

  He hit the fat man like a freight train and felt the leather of the duster against his face. The two crashed backward and when they landed JP was on top. He hit the man with his fists again and again until he felt the cold bite of the blade up in his ribs. He knew it was coming and he moved instinctively. He grabbed the wrist of the fat man's knife hand, pulled it out, twisted it, and forced it back into the fat man's own fleshy abdomen. JP felt the man's body tense as the blade moved into him. He put all his weight on it, forcing the knife in so that even the hilt was lost in the man's belly. The man grew limp. He gurgled. JP backed off and got up.

  Lights came on behind the bar.

  JP looked around. The girls were still against the wall, staring, terrified. Arliss and Modine were in various states of struggle with the other three men. The one who'd had the gun no longer had it.

  The lights had been put on by the bartender, who was standing behind the bar with a sawed‐off shotgun rigid against his hip.

  Everyone looked at the fat man. He was struggling weakly on the ground, the knife somewhere inside him. He was going to die. JP looked up at Arliss and Modine. They looked back at him with a look he'd never seen before.

  Arliss said, ‘let's go.’

  ‘Wait,’ JP said. He turned to the bartender. ‘Did you plan this?’

  The bartender had the shotgun in JP's direction. ‘Qué?’ he said.

  ‘Llamó a estos hombres?’

  The bartender said nothing.

  ‘Let's go,’ Arliss said again.

  JP looked at the bartender, and at the little girl who so recently had been on his knee, making him think on his life differently. Then he looked at the fat man expiring on the ground, and turned to leave.

  *

  MODINE DROVE. ARLISS HAD the Winchester on his lap. JP was be
tween them, slouched against Arliss.

  Arliss said, ‘how's that wound, JP?’

  ‘It's ok.’

  ‘Keep pressure on it.’

  ‘I am.’

  They passed back through the towns of Mesquite and Vado. No one spoke. JP watched the lights of the oncoming cars burn toward them like meteors. Arliss pressed in the lighter.

  JP said, ‘light me one.’

  Arliss lit three cigarettes and said, ‘what did I tell you about the anticipation, Modine?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Modine said.

  JP said, ‘anyone behind us?’

  ‘Nothing. You relax.’

  ‘I caint.’

  They drove on a while, passed a motel on the edge of Vado. JP said, ‘still no one?’

  ‘JP, if someone's coming, I'll tell you.’

  JP nodded. He looked at Modine. ‘Take the Anthony Gap.’

  ‘The Anthony what?’

  ‘Just watch for the 404.’

  Arliss said, ‘JP, I thought you never been out of the state.’

  ‘I had the sense to look at a map.’

  They found the 404 just before Anthony and tore eastward along it through the Franklin Mountains for ten miles and came out the other side at Chaparral.

  JP said to Modine, ‘still nothing?’

  Modine looked in the rearview mirror. ‘Nothing.’

  They drove on. Cows lined the fence along the side of the road. There were hundreds of them, all ranked up, all watching them pass. The headlights lit them one by one like they were searching for some cow in particular.

  JP said, ‘they'll track us down if they want to.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Modine said.

  The road turned south toward El Paso.

  ‘God damn these sumbitch cows,’ JP said.