The Wire Fence                   

1900 wds                                                                                         

Bruce, his son Bart and i strung barbed wire fencing on the north side of his thirty acres. Bruce leased the scrub land for cattle forty miles from town.  

Son Bart was eleven and a prefect miniature of his father. Both very boyish; with small round faces and sharp, beaked noses and very lean bodies; Bruce always had a bulge in a cheek, often both cheeks bulged. Son Bart was too young for tobacco but he did chew gum and pressed the wad aside to form his own cheek bulge.

This was the second time i worked for Bruce on his land. The first time we did some roof repair and patched the front porch floor on the old, empty farm house. No human lived in there house and it stank of mold. I asked Bruce if he planned to live in the dump.

    He said, "My uncles grew up here."

    Bruce kept it open for storage. Under the house many cats resided. On that first day i helped Bruce with a routine cat eradication.

He had caught three in traps around the house. Wearing heavy leather gloves with gauntlets to his elbows he removed the first cat and thrust it headfirst into a rubber boot. The cat’s legs and tail stuck out of the  boot, which he handed to me.

“Hold him tight so i can tie him off,” he said and removed his gloves. I stood holding the cat in the rubber boot until Bruce had tied fishing line around the base of the small testicles below the tail. With a razor knife he cut off the little bags and let them fall aside. Inside the boot i could feel the cat objecting to the procedure.

“Now throw the boot out,” Bruce said, "Toss it out in the yard."

   I threw the boot into the scruby yard which was not much of a yard, mostly sand and weeds and before the boot hit the ground the cat was backed out and running in the air before it reached the ground, and vanished.

     The next cat removed from another trap was a female so Bruce rung its neck and threw the body into the brush. 

“Nothing to cut off that one,” he said. “I let the males live because they keep down the vermin.”

The third cat was male, was booted, cut and thrown.

On the work site this second time the posts were already set in the rocky ground up the hill behind the old house. Bruce and some Mexicans had put them weeks before. That was the real job; the ground was so hard Bruce had replaced the wooden handles of his post-hole digger with steel pipe; they were almost too heavy to lift.   

Bruce drove the truck up the hill alongside the posts with the barbed wire unrolling behind. We strung fifty yards at a time, five strands because he wanted to keep in his goats. And once the wire was unrolled up the hill, a slight incline, we tightened it up and tied it to the fence posts with short lengths of baling wire, tying it very carefully because one nick of the pliers and the barbed wire could break. The snapped wire would curl up and cut up anyone or thing in the way. Cutting that tangled wire off a body could take hours. Have you seen blood in the movies or tv? That tv/movie blood is nothing like the real thing. 

Bart rode in the cab bouncing uphill between Bruce and i. The wire unrolled from the spool on a rod across the tail-gate. Bart carried a small pistol at the small of his back in a canvas holster and had to take it out and hold it or it would grind in his back. He had it in his hand as we bumped our way up the hill playing with it, cocking an uncocking the revolver, opening and closing the cylinder, the receptacle for the six brass cartridges, snapping it closed and spinning the cylinder like a wild west gunfighter. I thought the way he was playing with it, it might go off and put a hole in the dash or the floor or his foot, or my foot. 

Bruce said, “Stop playing with that weapon.”

Bart was about to say something when Bruce said, “I said stop it!”

Bart stopped moving entirely, not even looking from side to side. He gripped the pistol tight in his lap.

In addition to this, Bruce spit his tobacco juice into a coffee can he put back up on the dashboard where it rocked and swayed with the motion of the truck bumping over the rocky ground. That can almost slopped over or jumped off the dash when we hit a rock going uphill or thumped into a hole. 

“Let me out here, Bruce, i gotta pee,” i said and before he could say anything or stop i opened the door, that way he had to stop, and jumped out.

“I’ll see you at the top!” 

Between getting tobacco juice spilled on my legs or getting shot in the leg by the boy gunfighter, i couldn’t say which would be worse.

Stringing the wire was hot work so we worked fast, not talking. We were finished in a few hours. Bruce released his goats. He also ran cattle on the land. The cattle and the goats didn’t get in each other’s way. The land was barren and Bruce had to truck in feed for the cattle. Not so the goats. Goats eat everything.

As we watched the released goats running around with their goofy ears flapping, Bart said, “I hate goats (i was told one bit him) let’s shoot a goat. Daddy, can i shoot a goat?”

Bruce did not look surprised. “Hell no,” he said, “You keep it in the holster.” His voice was so calm i thought he must have told his son to keep his gun holstered many times. “You don’t shoot a man’s goats.”

We paused in the shade of some mesquite trees to rest, drink and eat. Some heifers milled around nearby. They saw the man who brings them their feed, would he bring more? They nosed around in the rocks and scrub, waiting. 

“You see that heifer with her backside toward us?”Bruce asked me.

“Sure.”

“She’s about to drop a calf, you can tell by the lips of that pussy, see that?”

“I see it. I’ve seen better.”

“Looks a lot better when you had a few beers.”

“You don’t have to go into a lot of detail on that one, Bruce.”

“It looks wet, see it? In a few days, or maybe longer she’ll drop a calf. To find out if it’s soon you go up to her and stick your finger in there and work it around good and if it tastes real salty, she’ll drop the calf in one-two days. Go ahead, see it she’s salty.”

Bruce smiled at me. He had small, tan teeth, tan from the tobacco always bulging out at least one cheek. 

“That’s okay,” i said,

“I can wait on that one.”

Bart said, “Why don’t you do what he says?”

“You gotta be kidding.” Later, as i pondered the scene and what followed, i thought using the word kidding in speaking to a belligerent eleven year old, was inappropriate. He was too serious, too stern for that small round face. 

“Come on, let’s pack it up,” Bruce said. “We best get back to town.”  He stood up and we started loading up the truck.  

After loading the tools in the truck i walked downhill and looked along the fence to for tools left behind. Sure enough, there was a pair of end-nippers left on a rock beside a post. I took the nippers back to the truck and put them in the box. Bart stood nearby. 

“Did you find anything, slave?”

“Slave? Why you calling me a slave?”

“That’s what you are, slave. My slave, dad’s slave.”

“And you’re a little shithead, you don’t talk to me like that.”

“i talk to you any way i like, slave.”

I looked around for something to smack that little shit. 

And then he had his gun out and pointed at me. The little shit was pointing a gun at me! He was quick on the draw; he must have practiced to make the draw so quick; that holster was flimsy canvas, it would be difficult to draw from it if he had not practiced.

“Don’t point that goddam thing away, are you nuts?”

“Shut up, slave.”

“Bruce! Bruce!”

Bruce, standing about twenty feet away, called his son and Bart turned toward him. I crouched, picked up a big rock and heaved it at him. It bounced off the side of his head. That felt good; i wanted to kill him. The gun turned as the boy turned from me to Bruce and went off ~ one shot ~  as Bart crumbled to the ground.

I didn’t care so much if i hard hurt him; i rushed forward to tear the gun out of his hand. He fell down the hill as i jumped forward and easily twisted the pistol out of his hand. I threw it as far away as i could. It was a small .32.

Bart didn’t move; he lay motionless. When i turned Bruce was sitting on the ground holding his arm and looking at his bloody hand. The bullet had passed through the inside of his right elbow, shattering bone. 

I rushed over to him and quickly surveyed the wound. I lifted him by the other arm and got him to the truck, then dragged Bart, who was still too dazed to speak or move to the cab. I shoved them in together. As i roared out to the road to the hospital they woke up and settled into a cuddle and held each other, it was touching, even cute, until we got to the hospital. 

At this point the sheriff and his deputy had to get involved and find the gun (no looking for the bullet which passed through and out Bruce’s elbow) and question me because i did bounce a rock off the side off that little shit’s eleven year old empty head. They had to strut and crow around about it since they have nothing else to do in that little town where nothing much happens and people like me, a ‘come here not a from here’ pollutes their rural purity. It was self-defense, they were finally settled on it. 

Bruce’s arm never recovered a full range of motion. I never worked for him again ~ soon after i moved away and later, much later, my mother, still living there, told me Bruce had been shot again, this time killed by his uncle over a land dispute. The old uncle, almost out of his seventies, went to jail for a few years and was released to home care and soon died. 

Bart eventually married and i suppose he still ranches on that scrubby land. If he started out running goats out there i’m sure by now he’s shot some, or all of them.      

end of “The Wire Fence”