The Wind Devil

When I was A kid on my father's ranch in California we used to chase wind devils. After the land had been plowed and harrowed, but before the cotton was up, the wind would raise towering whirlwinds and I used to chase them. It was half terror, half wild joy to be inside a wind devil. There was no breathing in there, no hearing, the noise so overwhelming it was a kind of drowning. You could only stand, deaf, grit-blinded and battered while some part of you was sucked up into the wind, whirled out of you. When the wind devil passed, you could only stand dazed and silly, waiting for the whirled-away part of you to return from where it had been and you could become you again.

After that winter when I was 12 years old I never chased wind devils again. What happened to me that winter was like being inside the biggest wind devil in the world and I just lost my taste for them.

My father had only Mexican workers on his ranch, families up from Chihuahua. They couldn't begin to pick until the morning dew had burned off the cotton, because they would have been getting paid for picking dew. My father wasn't a man to pay anybody for picking dew.

So, waiting for my father to yell that they could pick, they would build twig fires on the field borders and huddle against the cold, the men squatting at their fires, the women at others. Always separate fires. When the dew had burned off, my father would yell and the pickers would get up, wrap their cotton sacks around their shoulders and move out into the fields to pick cotton, 80 cents a hundred pounds, dry cotton, no rocks in the sack, and the straw boss, Gonzalo, saying a quiet word now and then to somebody who was careless about too many leaves in the sack.

I was 12 years old, the boss' kid, and so bilingual I really didn't know which language (continued on page 150)Wind Devil(continued from page 109) was being spoken to me. At that age I accepted the wonder of the life I had in the same way I drank water or breathed air. On those mornings I would move from fire to fire, squatting easily with the men, listening to that easy Chihuahua Spanish, accepted at every fire, part of it all.

But one morning Emeterio Alvarez varied the story of how he passed the black bull three times in a real bull ring when he was young down in Chihuahua and everything began to change. We'd heard the story a hundred times, so many times it had become a ritual and I guess you shouldn't fool around with a ritual. Anyway, that foggy morning, Emeterio added something to this story and things began to shape up into a wind devil that was going to catch me.

Emeterio didn't look like a bullfighter. He was small and stringy with a thick black mustache that was too big for his sad face. He had five daughters he watched over like a small Minorca cock, convinced that each of them was waiting for a chance to slip out and disgrace his name. He was one of those people on whom all clothing seems a little big.

As a kid, Emeterio had caught the bull fever, just like all of us kids on the ranch had caught it from him. You could play at it grimly, taking turns with other kids running at each other with chair legs or dummy horns, caping dogs and goats or anything else that moved.

When Emeterio was a kid, the thing had gotten too big for him. One day, using his shirt for a cape, Emeterio had jumped down into the ring of some village and had passed a real bull three times before the local police hauled him away to jail. He never spoke of the jail or how long his sentence was. It was not part of the story.

"That animal," he would say, always in the same words, "was a perfect bull. Big, Hijo! a male locomotive of a bull, black with horns...Ay!" He would stretch out both arms, curved, the wrists broken in, the tense fingertips quivering menace. He would hold that, then drop his arms, shake his head and whoosh through his big mustache.

"I could have passed that bull all day with its night."

All of us would know there was still one line to come, the mustache lifting away from the teeth, the eyes moist in pride.

"The guardia, he said I had style. Great style."

He would squeeze his stringy biceps where the policeman had held him that long-ago wonderful day and the story would be finished. But we would wait silently for a while, paying respect with that waiting silence to a man among us who had passed a male locomotive of a black bull three times in a real bull ring.

The dew was late to burn off that morning, and the fog lay thick and down-spiriting. People moved in closer to the fires and took heat on their hands and rubbed it on their faces. Emeterio nearly always had some wine in him before he told his story, but that morning he was drinking sour wine, the sour wine of sadness that a warm-blooded human drinks through his pores when he finds himself in a foggy, cold and alien place.

But that morning, when Emeterio was through, when the respectful silence lay as heavily as fog after the last line, he did something different and everything began to change.

He got up, folded his cotton sack precisely and began to pass that black bull, standing with his stomach tucked in, his back very straight, his chin outthrust and his eyes proud and stern. He passed that bull close, you could tell, using veronicas, a whole series of butterfly cape swirls, passing him tight like all bulls are passed when they are bulls running in the ring of the mind.

Everybody stirred and watched him. We weren't watching a ragged little man whirling a cotton sack beside a cotton field. We were all sitting on the expensive shade side of the ring watching a man in a suit of lights passing a perfect black bull, using a deep rose muleta, seeing it all as clearly as Emeterio. Somebody yelled Ole! and all of us picked it up on the next pass, exploding that concerted sound, and Emeterio answered to the Ole!s and brought the bull by so near that the hair rubbed off on his suit of lights. He passed him again and called to him, making that grunting sound, bringing the black bull around tight, skidding, dominating him completely.

And my father came walking out of the field, tall and red-faced and absolutely foreign, yelling that it was time to pick cotton.

Emeterio stood in that attitude a bullfighter assumes when the bull is at the very end of the cape, its horns just emerging from under the cloth, the purity of the pass depending on holding that pose for just precisely the correct number of instants, feet close together, torso twisting, transmuting time, motion and violence into sculpture.

In that pose Emeterio became conscious of my father yelling. He heard him, still held the pose for an instant, and then cracked the sculpture of himself to look down at his spread muleta. The crack in the statue spread in all directions. In seconds Emeterio was only a little man dressed in clothes that would always be too big for him, holding a patched cotton sack. He dropped the sack and looked around him, seeing where he was.

"Ay, Dios," he said softly. "Ay, Dios."

"Let's pick cotton!" my father hollered, murdering the Spanish in that individual way he had, all flat a's and r's, trying to sound like a boss, but a good, friendly boss.

Emeterio stooped and picked up his cotton sack, folded it around his shoulders and began to walk away from the field. My father yelled at him. When he'd hollered twice, Emeterio turned around.

"I'm sad," he said. "I'm sad today."

My father's face got redder. He never could understand that sadness could be so real and crushing that it could disable a man. He could understand a man not working because of a snake bite, pneumonia or a broken leg, but the excuse of sadness just made him mad.

"Let's pick cotton," he said again.

"I'm too sad," Emeterio repeated.

My father walked up to him and stood about two feet taller than Emeterio.

"Maybe you don't want to work here anymore," he said.

"Patrón, I'm too sad today."

"You are sick," my father said loudly, trying to force it. Emeterio was a good worker and our ranch was 50 miles from anywhere and Emeterio didn't have a car. "You are sick," my father said.

Emeterio risked one look at him, then we all watched his pride go down, a big bitter ball requiring two visible and audible swallows.

"I'm sick," Emeterio said when he knew the ball was down.

"All right," my father said. "You wait in t0he car. I'll take you back to the camp."

"I go by foot," Emeterio said and began to walk away, his feet dragging.

Casimiro Gomez grunted and walked out of the crowd, his paunch carried proudly out in front of him.

"I am too sad to work today, patrón," he said in that singsong way he had, and he didn't wait around for an argument. He just went out to the road and marched along behind Emeterio, his paunch showing how mad he was.

Casimiro was a fat one, but nobody ever called him Gordo. Most of us kids called him Don Casimiro in respect, and for the reason that Casimiro was the owner of 2000 goats. Those goats made it possible for him to walk away that day.

Fifteen years before, he had left his village in Chihuahua and, in the charge of a cousin, had left three female goats and a young buck. Those goats, for the first few years, hadn't bothered him. But by the time he had become a permanent worker on our ranch, the goats had possessed him entirely. One day he had calculated the increase from those goats, allowing a reasonable incidence of twins and triplets, but being businesslike and allowing losses for death, theft and barren females. But even so, in the mind of Don Casimiro, in my mind, and in the minds of everybody in the camp, those four goats had grown into a herd of 2000. When his herd reached that number it became too big for him and Casimiro permitted his herd to remain at that fine and staggering number. Just finding graze for them was a huge problem and he walked around with the frowning importance proper to a man who owns that many goats. Manuel Icaza was a little rabbit of a man from the same village as Casimiro and there were enough goats to permit Manuel Icaza to begin to walk around with the same air of harried importance and to approach Don Casimiro with the troubled face of a man of consequence, squatting to draw maps in the dust, pointing out a particular hill which loomed green in his memory.

My father didn't say anything to Casimiro that morning when he walked away, but his face got pretty mean and he swore and then yelled at the rest of them. Gonzalo, the straw boss, went to stand by the scales while the rest of them went to pick. He tried to withdraw himself from the situation, but couldn't. He was the straw boss and profoundly embarrassed.

"Those two," he said, apologizing, "very emotionated."

I was embarrassed, too. I went out into the field and began to pick cotton, but nothing felt right and I left. I netted carp all day and didn't come back to the trailer until nearly dusk. When I came back I saw that the trailer was completely ringed by rocks and clods the pickers had hidden in their sacks to make my father pay for the weight of them. I began to gather up the clods to get them away from the trailer before my father came.

"No," Gonzalo said to me, and I got the same tingly feeling you get when you're trying to get up the nerve to run into a really big wind devil. I just kept on picking up clods and throwing them, hurrying. Gonzalo came over and put a big hand on my shoulder.

"Why?" I asked him. "Why?" But before he could answer me, my father drove up in his square-backed Essex with the trailer hitch to haul the trailer to the gin. He walked around the trailer figuring how many dollars' worth of clods he'd paid to have picked that day. He looked at Gonzalo, his big eyebrows down close over his eyes. Gonzalo looked at him, looked away and swallowed. My father just waited.

"Emotionated," Gonzalo said weakly. "A day of emotionation."

My father just backed up the Essex to the trailer and hitched it. It was dusk by then and Gonzalo and the pickers began to stream down the road toward the camp. I always rode to the gin with my father, but that day I didn't want to. I began to walk after the pickers.

"Get in here," my father said, and I got in the Essex and sat as far away from him as I could.

"What was the matter out there today?" he asked, and my toes and fingers began to itch like they always did when he talked to me.

"I don't know." I scratched my fingers. "Emotionated," I said.

"You've been hanging around the camp too much," my father said, saying I wasn't on his side or something and threatening all kinds of things if I didn't straighten out mighty quick.

"Emeterio was sad," I told him carefully, "because you called him to pick while he was passing the bull."

"Hell," my father said.

"Casimiro owns all those goats," I said.

"Hell," my father said.

He was saying Hell about some pretty basic beliefs and it scared me, but it made me mad, too.

"I suppose Hilario Sanchez didn't get shot in the arm by Pancho Villa, either," I said. "And I suppose Rosa Gutierrez didn't sing over the radio once in Los Angeles."

There were lots of other things I could have brought up. Almost every family had something. One had a map to a lost gold mine down in Sonora. Another had owned a grocery store once. Another family had a cousin who was a cook in the house of one of the biggest generals in Mexico.

But I just brought up Hilario Sanchez and Rosa Gutierrez because those were two things I was dead sure of. I knew Rosa Gutierrez had sung over the radio once in Los Angeles. She just had that look about her.

Hilario Sanchez was one of the gentlest and nicest men I've ever known and sometimes I secretly imagined he was really my father, because he was so nice to his own kids. Hilario had a withered arm and the story was that in some revolution he had been captured by Pancho Villa. Hilario had refused to divulge information that Villa wanted. They had tied Hilario to a post and, while Villa ate and drank, every once in a while he would pick up his pistol and shoot Hilario in the arm. After each shot Hilario would only shake his head. He endured four shots through the arm at the biceps without crying out, just shaking his head after each shot. After the fourth shot, Villa had gotten up and cut the ropes himself, embraced Hilario and had given him a drink from his own bottle.

"Macho," Pancho Villa had said. "Machote," saying that Hilario Sanchez was a lot of male animal, among many other respectful things.

"Hell," my father said about Rosa Gutierrez and Hilario Sanchez.

It made me feel like I ought to say something doubtful about how my father had won second place in the bronc riding at the Salinas rodeo in 1926. But I wasn't that mad.

"You've been hanging around the camp too much," my father said.

• • •

It was true that I spent a lot of time in the camp. It consisted of 50 or so wagonhouses that were really big cook wagons left over from roundup days, tents, tenthouses and sheds, arranged with little streets among them. I liked the nights in the camp best with somebody playing a guitar and singing in that high, sad way they all sang and smelling wood smoke and corn meal and hearing a low laugh off somewhere and the pat-pat-pat sound women make when they're making tortillas. I spent a lot of time there, eating most of my meals at one place or another.

Our house was near the camp, but never of it, a big, rambling place with verandas around all sides, facing out onto a huge court or patio. This court was a bare field with a round concrete horse trough in the middle of it. We held baseball games in the court on Sundays, playing a fly ball into the horse trough as a home run. We always kept the horse trough stocked with carp we netted out of the ditches to take the mud taste out of them. Everybody, during the summer, hung gutted carp from clotheslines and all of us used to always be chewing on dried carp.

For three days after that morning, Emeterio Alvarez was too sad to work. I drifted by his tenthouse a few times and looked in. Each time he would just be lying on his cot, looking up at the tent roof. I coughed once, standing outside, and he made a single shooing motion with one hand. I wanted to say something to him, but nothing I could figure out made much sense.

At dusk on the fourth day he came to the house. He took off his big hat and put it across his stomach. He was very polite and went into the office with my father, and when he came out he looked different. I gave him time to get back to camp and then ran there myself.

It didn't take long to find out. It was the biggest thing that had ever happened in our camp. Emeterio had bound himself, his wife and five daughters to work for my father at half pay until he had paid off a steer he had bought from my father. He was going to put on a bullfight right in the middle of the baseball field.

I ran back to the house and into the office.

"You going to let him?" I asked.

"You don't need a license to be a damn fool," he said. It was one of his favorite expressions and covered an amazing variety of situations.

Next Sunday, Emeterio got together a bunch of men and borrowed a Model-T truck and went out to Deep Wells where my father had a few steers on range. I guess they had a terrible time cutting that steer out and cornering it in open country and getting it up onto the truck. They were tired and dirty and skinned up when they got back to camp and unloaded the steer. When it was on the ground, the steer acted like it was home, snuffling around, not acting fierce. I commented on this to Gonzalo.

"A torero," he told me a little coldly, "has his way of handling difficult bulls."

"This is a steer," I said.

"Necessity is the great teacher," Gonzalo said. "Get three shotgun shells from your father's office. Gunpowder will bring back his spirit."

I was relieved. Once we had fed a mixture of gunpowder and tequila to a banty rooster and it had become a complete terror. That night I took five shotgun shells from the box in the office and the next morning I took them to Emeterio, holding the shells in my hand.

"Let me be alternative," I bargained. This meant that if the steer disabled him, then I would take over. It would have been a pretty good bargain, but I knew he wouldn't do it. He shook his head and I held onto the shells.

"Sword handler?" I asked, coming down several notches, and, after a while he held out his hand for the shells.

Becoming sword handler for the bullfight made me feel kind of responsible in a way. The next morning I went out with a gunny sack and waved it in front of the steer's nose and grunted at it to infuriate it. It came closer, slobbering and snuffling, seeing if there was anything to eat in the sack. Emeterio came running out. He'd changed a lot since he'd bought that steer. He walked around with his mustache bristling and seemed to fill out his clothes more.

"Leave the bull alone," he ordered. "You'll teach him to know the cape."

"He seems pretty tame," I said, "after five shotgun shells of gunpowder."

"I haven't give him the powder yet," he said. "The morning of the spectacle is the time." I was relieved again, remembering what the gunpowder had done to that banty rooster.

• • •

It's funny, but it seems like you can go along for years and it's like someone hasn't noticed you yet, like you weren't worth bothering with. Then, one day you get noticed and things start happening.

Before Emeterio could put on his big bullfight there came a letter from Ojo Azul, Chihuahua, for Casimiro Gomez, the owner of 2000 goats. I met the mailman that day and there was this letter for Don Casimiro. I found him squatting with Manuel Icaza drawing maps in the dust.

"A letter," I told him, "from Ojo Azul. One Jesus Gomez."

He looked up at me, not believing. Fifteen years of silence and then this letter.

"The cousin," he said. "The cousin of the goats."

He took the letter, turned it over several times, smelled the glue, lifted a corner of the stamp and frowned.

"Look," he said, "I am an alphabetic."

It was a delicate way of saying he couldn't read.

Manuel Icaza studied the map in the dust.

"Equal," he said after a while. Casimiro surrendered the letter to me. I opened it and read.

The Aunt Leovigilda had died, such a hard blow, and her son, Leonidas, able and with some facility of numbers, wanted to emigrate to the United States of California, well, would the Uncle Casimiro find him employment.

I read it all, letting my voice fall with finality after the signature. They didn't look up. After a long time Casimiro drew a deep breath. "And of the goats...?"

"Zero," I told him.

"Zero of the goats," he said.

"Zero of the goats?" Manuel Icaza's voice was high and angry.

"One hundred percent zero of the goats," I said, getting it over with.

Casimiro didn't look up. After a while, Manuel Icaza leaned over and spat into the map in the dust. He got up suddenly, violently, and left, looking from side to side as if searching for a betrayer.

I didn't know what to say.

"Look, Don Casimiro," I said. "I feel it." In Spanish that's the way you say you're sorry. You say you feel it and I did. After a while I laid the letter down beside him and left.

It would have been one of the biggest things that had ever happened in the camp, a man suddenly being wiped out like that, but the fever of the bullfight watered down the scandal of it. But it changed things, anyway. From now on Don Casimiro would be Panzon or Gordo, The Fat One or Big Belly. Never again Don Casimiro. With charity, maybe just plain Casimiro. But goats would always be an impolite thing to speak of in his presence.

We worked all day Saturday making the bull ring. We lugged in old corral gates and bedsprings and car doors and pieces of board and anything else that could be propped up. It turned out to be a pretty small ring and really it looked like a junk pile out there in the middle of the baseball field. My father came out onto the veranda and motioned for Gonzalo to come over.

"Have them clean that mess up after," he ordered.

On Sunday I ate lunch with Emeterio and his wife and five daughters. Neither Emeterio nor I could eat much and the women were pretty quiet. Every once in a while the wife would look scared and grab Emeterio's arm and he would look at her sternly. It was pretty emotional. After lunch Emeterio shooed his women out of the tent and began to dress.

He had borrowed Joe Flores' black wedding suit. That suit was too big for Joe Flores and Joe Flores was a lot bigger than Emeterio. It hung on him and he took some twine and tied the legs tight around the ankles. When he stood up the pants legs ballooned down over the twine and he looked like he was wearing black knickers. He had on a white shirt, the collar of it so big that his neck looked thin and corded inside the rim of it. He had on a big red tie. The cuffs of the coat came clear down over his hands and he rolled them back, showing the lining. He had on old tennis shoes and they looked out of place, but still, he looked pretty fine.

The best I could do was an old cowboy vest, and when Emeterio was dressed I picked up the sword. It was a steel finger off an old hayrake. I stuck the hayrake finger under my arm and stood behind Emeterio. He picked up his cape and draped it over his arm. It was a cotton sack painted red.

"The gunpowder?" I asked, and he told me he had given it to the steer at dawn.

"March," he said, and walked out of the tenthouse, his arm folded tight against his chest, his knees lifting high. I was right behind him, walking the same way. When we got near the bull ring the people began to clap and it was good to hear it.

Until I saw my father. He was up on the veranda of the house with one foot on the veranda rail. He was smiling. I didn't mind the smile, but what worried me was that I could see that he had put on his old cowboy boots, the ones that hurt his feet so bad. I stayed just inside the bull ring and Emeterio marched out to the middle, bowed and spread the cape.

"I dedicate this bull to the people," he said.

The men began trying to push the steer out into the ring and it didn't want to go. Emeterio waited, acting like he couldn't see what a terrible time they were having with the steer, trying to push it between the bedsprings and car doors. But finally they boosted it in. The steer trotted a couple of steps, looked around and then began snuffling at its front feet, blowing dust.

Emeterio set himself, gripped the cape and began saying Huh, huh, toro, torito, deep in his throat and to shake the cape and scrape his tennis shoes in the dust. Everybody was very quiet, watching. And in the quiet I heard my father.

"Hell," my father said.

That steer acted like it hadn't had five shotgun shells of gunpowder at all. It didn't pay any attention to Emeterio. It just walked over slowly and began to try to eat one of the women's skirts. She screamed and yanked the skirt away and the steer backed up, a little startled. And Emeterio rushed it, hollering. He just managed to toss a corner of the cape over its head. I hollered Ole! Nobody else did. The steer groaned and began to run around and Emeterio began to chase it, his pants legs flopping and the sweat beginning to run down his face. Every time he'd get close to it, the steer would whirl and go the other way. One of Emeterio's pants legs came loose from its binding, dragging in the dust, tripping him, and he stopped to fix it.

My father came into the ring, stepping tall over a bedstead. He was smiling. Emeterio straightened up and began saying No, no, no. My father, still smiling, headed the steer, feinted it once and then grabbed it and began to bulldog it, leaning on it, twisting its head, and all the time Emeterio kept saying No, no, no. The steer toppled over.

There was absolute silence. Then my father did something I just couldn't believe. He worked himself around and held up one arm to the crowd, like he'd done something really brave and was ready to hear their applause. There wasn't a sound. He kept holding up his arm, smiling, and then he looked around for me and found me and pointed his arm at me, asking me to clap or something.

I guess that's what he wanted. Anyway, I just couldn't. It was like being caught in the middle of the biggest wind devil in the world, like the whole world was a wind devil, really, going around and around. My father kept looking at me in that asking way and I, well, I just couldn't. He let his arm down and he and the steer got up.

Emeterio began to make a low sustained noise in his throat. I looked at him and saw his face. He ran toward me and I was seeing a full-grown man crying. He grabbed the hayrake finger away from me and ran back to stand in front of the steer. He profiled and drove in over the steer's head. The finger of the hayrake zinged and went flying. The steer shook himself.

"You quit mistreating that steer," my father said.

"It's my bull," Emeterio said, still crying.

"You don't have to pay me for the steer," my father told him. He always said he treated his Mexicans right.

Emeterio looked up at him and opened his mouth and the veins stood out in his neck and his eyes bulged, but he didn't make any sound.

"Better clean this mess up," my father said, and walked away, tall in his cowboy boots. We were all still standing there when the screen door slammed behind him.

Emeterio began to walk around like he'd suddenly gone blind. He blundered against a car door and then a bedspring and all of a sudden it came to me that all he wanted, that what he was trying to do, was just to get out of there. I took his arm and he swung around and threw my arm and looked at me like he hated me.

"Gringo," he said to me.

I was his sword handler and he said that to me.

• • •

That night I walked out into the camp.

I stood outside the wagon house where Rosa Gutierrez lived, the one who had sung over the radio once in Los Angeles. I stood in the dark that was so dense I could breathe it. I could see her in there, singing to one of her kids, rocking back and forth.

"Hell," I said so softly she couldn't hear me.

Over by Emeterio's tenthouse I could see his daughters around the door. I went close enough so I could say something to them, but then I didn't.

I didn't look for Hilario Sanchez, he of the withered arm where Pancho Villa had shot him. I'd looked into his wagon-house plenty of nights and I knew he'd be sitting there with a couple of his kids on his lap, playing with them, patting them, holding them. I sure didn't want to see that. Not that night.

I saw a cigarette glow and veered through the night toward it. Casimiro Gomez, the fat one, dragged on his cigarette and I saw his face. Mexicans say Adios to each other when they meet each other and don't want to talk. It means Hello and Goodbye, kind of.

"Adios," I told Casimiro and he said Adios into the place where I'd just been.

I walked out of the sounds and smells and faint fires and stood all alone in the middle of the baseball field and looked back at the camp. Somebody hit a single sad chord on a guitar and it sounded like it came from a million miles away.

Over at the house I could see the light in the office where my father was working. I stood out there in the night between the camp and the house and felt just exactly like a wind devil had just cast me out and I was waiting for the whirled-away part of me to come back and let me be me again.

It still hadn't come back when I stood beside my father's desk. I leaned over and put my palm on one of the spikes that stabbed the bills. I pushed, seeing how much pain I could stand. I pulled my hand back and looked at my palm. I hadn't even drawn blood.

"I think I'll join the Navy when I get old enough," I told my father. "See the world."

He didn't even look up from his ledger.

"You don't need a license to be a damn fool," my father said.