BARNEY McCABE

From The Orchard Stories
Originally Published in Muleskinner Journal Twelve Bonus Edition 2024

Travis Cunningham sat on the side of the road like a dusty wraith in the noonday sun. Tangled hair the color of straw stabbed out from under his battered hat. His weathered skin like old wood aged him beyond his scant twenty years. Hunger was on him like plague. Hunger was loose and ranging the landscape, following the wind that howled out of the plains, whirling everything into a maelstrom of hopelessness. The wind had blown Travis from Oklahoma like so many of his ilk and set him adrift into the parched wild west. So he found himself hungry and frightened on the road to Seligman, Arizona, begging and hitchhiking his solitary way across the high desert to the Promised Land.

Three days ago, he’d drawn a bead on the prominence of San Francisco Mountain of Flagstaff, using it like the pilgrims of the century past to mark his slow progress west. Its broken peaks shone white in the cobalt blue of the weird Arizona sky, so blue it made him dizzy. His hunger angled on him like a cunning opponent, gnawing at his belly like an eternal question. The road was lousy with the dispossessed; broken people with a cast of grey and a pall of dust about them, their jaws set, their teeth gritted in an unnatural determination borne of desperation and fear and Travis had sickened of them.

Route 66 was the way west, the only way west, and it was crawling with poverty and want. So when the road T’d at Ash Fork before he ever made Seligman he mouthed the sound of the word “Prescott” painted on a weathered sign and decided then to cut south and shake the losers.

But the route from Ash Fork to Prescott was as empty as 66 was full and he questioned the wisdom of his decision as he sat on the side of the road in the weeds. Flagstaff had been heavy with Ponderosa forest on the shoulders of the big mountain. The town had smelled of woodsmoke and locomotives and everywhere the honey and butterscotch of the pines. Here on the high desert road down to Prescott, the forest had given way to land that was tinder dry, suffused with the tang of piñon, juniper, and chaparral. The air cracked his nostrils and the cold sun, unstunted by clouds, beat on his battered hat pulled low over his eyes.

He shifted his gaze up the road and in the unbroken distance saw a solitary stranger walking slowly his way. The wind freshened and coursing through the gnarled piñon made a muted whisper. He watched the stranger intently, fixed, as he seemed, in the shimmering distance that made him look like a quivering haint on the horizon, weirdly, like he was looking at him through water. Travis betrayed no interest but felt the steady rise of blood in his head as he tracked his slow pace up the empty road.

“Hello, stranger,” he said flatly to the man when he came close.

The stranger stopped and fixed Travis’ gaze for a few seconds. The stranger finally said, “Hello,” vacantly, as if he had been startled dumbly out of a trance. He was gaunt as the land through which he walked. The man looked a long time at Travis and said absently, “I been walking quite a spell, I like as didn’t even see you there. Name’s Barney McCabe.” McCabe reached out his hand. Travis stood and shook it. “Travis Cunningham,” he said.

Together they traveled south along the dusty road, walking and hitch-hiking through Drake, then Paulden, where the road crossed over Big Chino Wash, a big gash in the broken tumble country that spilled down from the height of the Mogollon Rim from which Travis had come. From there they hitched a ride into Chino Valley which was dotted with small farms and horses winnowing in high grassland pastures.

“Citrus orchards,” McCabe said suddenly, “that’s where you oughta be. In the citrus orchards round Phoenix. Shit, everybody’n their brother’s heading to California. There’s work in the citrus orchards. Course, you gotta work with the Mexicans, but that don’t make me no difference. A stiff’s a stiff.”

They walked and Travis pondered. He wasn’t afraid of work. He knew how to farm, so long’s the ground stayed put and didn’t blow to hell and gone on the wind.

“I’m telling you, Travis, ain’t no dust bowl in the orchards,” McCabe said, as if reading Travis’s thoughts. “And it’s warm in Phoenix. Goddamn hot in the summer. But warm today, I’ll reckon. Not like this thin cold that eats through to your bones.” McCabe gathered his desolate coat around his shoulders against the steady wind of Chino Valley.

“You worked in the orchards yourself?”

“Not yet, but I aim to,” McCabe said.

They spent the night in a church in Prescott near Whiskey Row off the Courthouse Square. Travis was able to get something to eat for listening to the Jesus talk. The preacher was a curiosity, more cowboy than parson, short on emasculated meekness and long on hard living in Arizona. This was cowboy country and the preacher looked like he could sit a horse.

Travis stayed warm enough to sleep but only fitfully even after the hard miles and dinner in his belly. He was haunted by dismal memories of home and the injustice of having to make tracks for parts unknown, one step ahead of the posse. He was scared. Scared to death. The Jesus talk was about man’s duty to his fellow man in these hard times and it was about work, hard honest work. Work that perfected a man and which was his duty to god. The preacher was long on work and seemed to have missed the news that there just wasn’t enough of it to go around. For Travis it was not a lack of willingness but a lack of availability. Hell, if there’d been work, he’d still be home, not in this god-forsaken god-fearing flophouse plum in the middle of nowhere, Arizona. This place had just now been wrenched from the Indians who had lived here since god created it. He felt like he had been dropped into the wild frontier.

“Work perfects a man,” the preacher had said, “like fire tempers glass and steel, making a finer and more useful a tool for His work.” No, Travis wasn’t afraid of work, he was afraid of not having any and he was afraid of starvation. Starvation works a powerful robbery on a man’s dignity and the end was about as sad ugly as it got. He was not above work, but he was not above stealing either, if he had to. Or worse, if he had to. But he’d rather work than steal, no matter how grim things got.

The work of stealing this land from those whose it was by rights had been the business of pillage and theft on a grand scale, the likes of which had never been trumped by any grand plunder from time immemorial. That had been real work. And the plunder continued apace, abetted by the implacable wind and drouth. The Cunningham home place in the hills outside Norman had gone the way of those of the Kiowa and Cherokee. He felt the ice in his blood that they had when the soil within which his roots were sunk was torn from under him by the black blizzards churning the sky and by the treachery of the banks. Foreclosure writs issued like so much confetti on the infernal wind, causing a shuddering foreboding to rumble the countryside. The Oklahoma hills groaned with the terror born of the rebuke of injustice implacable, defying calculation and remedy. It was not the mere land and the crops and the livestock that withered under this furious blast, it was the people who withered and died. The ice in his blood was for the fury at that injustice and for the dying that began when the Cunninghams were ripped from the land as by an enormous conscienceless sickle that glinted dully in the dust clouded sun in the hand of some pitiless god.

McCabe woke Travis from his tormented sleep and they went to see the cowboy preacher and the rest of the dispossessed and sat down for flapjacks and coffee. McCabe put his mouth to Travis’ ear, “I don’t mind this cowpoke’s hospitality, but if he were in my house telling me this shit, I’d tell him to go fuck himself while I was throwing him out the door.” McCabe stared hard and straight at Travis, who sat bemused, nonplused, holding Travis’ eye, taking his measure, making Travis guess his mind, then gave a small grin. McCabe looked at him steadily and took a pull from his coffee cup. “Finish your chow and get plenty in you. We’re bound for Phoenix,” McCabe said, finally looking away. “No grass growing under these stiffs’ feets. No, sir.”

The Courthouse in Prescott was an imposing gentlemanly Neoclassical building, four-storied and four-square, dominating the center of town like an enormous Sphinx, with grand and ample columned verandas facing each of the points of the compass, girdled about by a fair green shaded by towering cottonwoods that cozied the park. It made one forget that messy matters of law and justice were being wrestled within the mansion at its center. McCabe and Travis dandered out of town, watching sullenly the careful eyes of the law who watched them back in turn. Travis took in the courthouse passively, acquiescing to it as he would a church, giving cold grudging deference to its solemnity but repudiating its claim to righteousness.

McCabe gave it little notice, and snapped, “Last place you’ll find me is in a goddamn courthouse at the mercy of fancy talking lawyers sucking up to drunken judges on the take. They’d have to kill me before they got me into court.” He laughed quietly to himself after he said it, walking steadily out of town with Travis, vaguely perplexed, at his side.

Senator Highway, the tortured road from Prescott down to Phoenix by way of Crown King, led them through the Bradshaw Mountains. The mountains had been honey-combed by miners who’d staked dubious claims helter-skelter in the forested canyons, working mines that paid but most that did not, feigning compliance with the law that held that if a man located a claim and made it pay, he could patent it, take it to himself for his depredation and rapine. But these men were miners in no way, the ones who lived in little hobo squatter camps along the road, taking space from Uncle Sam on the Great Public Domain, the other side of civility and civilization, and who made their meager livings by the sweat of their poaching and pilfering. Hard time hunger was spreading all over the land. Hobo life was skint as flint. It was 1935.

Travis and McCabe spent the day hatching plans for Phoenix. McCabe was confident of work, not Travis. The six weeks of hard cold nights since the banks took his home had made him bitter. He expected the worst.

“I can see myself in them groves, with the fruit just hanging down to the ground, yes sir. You’ll see,” said McCabe, his hands swinging at his sides. “It’ll be damn near impossible to starve even if they don’t pay for shit. Hell, we can just eat off the trees.”

“What you talking about, Barney?” Travis said. “Them orchards is owned by somebody and they’re damn sure not gonna let stiffs come along and rob them. You can’t live on oranges alone anyhow, the more you eat the hungrier you get. And another thing, it ain’t even spring yet, there won’t be a ripe lemon in the whole valley, unless I don’t know nothin about farming. You weren’t raised on no farm, that’s for damn sure. Where’d you get all these silly notions about citrus orchards, anyway?”

McCabe ignored Travis, sporting nonchalance, looking at the sun streaming through the trees on the forested hills and up the valley through which the little creek was running high with the early run-off. The wind was still here in the woods, which was good; Travis’ tattered coat was no proof against it. But the trees kept the sun from his shoulders and he shivered in the morning shade. They hadn’t made very good time, walking all the way. The road they trudged devoured automobiles that drove it rarely, bouncing and groaning over the ruts and washouts. The two automobiles that passed showed no inclination to stop. Instead, they gave the two young men looks of faint disapproval; the way comfort looks at want, through the lens of twisted guilt, imputing to the miserable a full measure of blame for their sad circumstance. The honest ones, and they weren’t here, knew it was dumb luck who was down and out and who was not, but to think too long on it made even them worry for the day the tables would turn. Here, now, privilege was angry, wanting to obliterate from sight cruel inequity. McCabe flipped them the finger.

“Hell I don’t know about farming,” McCabe said, after a long time during which the two had walked in silence. “It don’t take no genius to know that the desert where the orchards is has an early spring the likes of you would never know about. Show what you know, the fruit gets ripe in the winter. In the winter, you dumb Okie, and they pick from December to March. Why, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit, there’s still a lot of picking for the two of us if we could just get down off this mountain.”

“Tell you what, brother,” Travis hissed, rounding on McCabe, “we don’t know each other a damn sight well enough for me to take that shit offa you. Call me dumb Okie one more time, you simpleton son of a bitch, and I’ll thump you so bad your whole family’ll die. You hearin’ me? So you keep a civil tongue in your head, and I’ll try not to break your face.”

“Whoa, partner,” McCabe said quickly, chagrined, contrite. “No hard feelings. I’m just trying to keep my hopes up this ain’t just another dead-end for me. It’s too long I haven’t known how things are gonna pan out and I want this notion to work. And I’d like you to buddy up with me so’s I don’t have to go it alone like I been. I’m telling you, I think this is going to be alright. I’m seeing a little bit of prosperity for us, brother. I just know it’ll be good. I’m not telling you to stick with me and I won’t take it on me if the whole thing goes bust, but I figure you and me are going the same way, we oughta throw in together. The last thing I want is fightin’ you. Hell, I barely got enough fight in me to get to Phoenix. I don’t want to be pissing it away up here in the mines, so’s I wind up with a busted head and no good to no one. I’m truly sorry if I hurt your feelings. I won’t call you a dumb Okie anymore. What are you, anyway, a dumb Arkie?”

McCabe reached over and popped Travis’ hat off his head and ran down the road laughing. The night came down quickly on the rutted road in the canyon. No one had stopped to give them a lift. Each of them had a pack with blankets and sleeping bags, but the chill worried Travis. He’d spent too many cold nights in the weeks since Oklahoma. He dreaded another here in the mountains. On the high plateau across western New Mexico and in the Indian Country of northern Arizona, the road had been thick with his people and he had always found a big camp and a fire and a warm place to lay his head. Here in the Bradshaws alone with McCabe, he was laid out by dismal heartache for all he had left, for all that had been taken from him. He didn’t cry anymore, hadn’t since he was fourteen when his father last dared even try to whip him. But he felt like it sometimes when the loss welled up and crippled him. He raged at what brought him to this perilous place, poised for what seemed like forever on the brink of huge uncertainty, the gaping canyon of starvation and destitution falling away on all sides.

The dandy man who came to the farm, dressed like a Saturday night out, carried with him an alligator downtown attaché case, his dandy man purse, full of papers from the court and the bank and asked to see the old man. The old man wasn’t home, he’d said. He was in the fields across the valley, but his mother was home. She’d do, the dandy man said. The dandy man gave his mother the notice of foreclosure, Travis standing next to her, and he watching the bewildered grief come across her face like the soft handed son of a bitch had taken a horsewhip to her. Travis didn’t understand the man’s slippery condescension. His words were like pokes in the eye. Words that spoke of the inevitability of eviction and what that meant - ruin and dislocation and the horror of loss. When Travis protested with respectful deference, the dandy man ridiculed him for not understanding the plain meaning of the words written on the foreclosure notice. “What’s the matter, you dumb Okie,” the man said, “can’t you read?” That raised the blood in him right quickly. On the Cunningham home place them was fighting words. When the man wouldn’t stop his ridicule or have the good sense to apologize, Travis picked up a tire iron and clipped him viciously upside the head. He hit him hard like he meant it, blind from the fury and deaf from the blood rushing his ears like a tangle of train wrecks that drowned the wails of the dandy man down, screaming amazed disbelief and bleeding his life into the dirt. His mother, disconsolate and hysterical.

It was after that Travis lit out. He’d told his sister and his two younger brothers that he’d find the family after he’d found work, he didn’t know where, but he’d write them at their cousins’ in San Bernardino, California. For right now and for all time, Travis had to get away, one step ahead of the law and the banks.

That tire iron killed the dandy man dead as hell three days later.

He thought of all this as the sun westered into the mountains, casting cold shadows across the road. The trees were silhouettes in the twilight.

McCabe said, “Let’s find us a place to camp, partner. You start looking for wood. It’s going to be cold tonight, let’s make hay while the sun shines.” Travis unloaded his pack in a little clearing off the road close to the creek and began picking up dry tinder in the woods. They ate bread and beans and sat close to the fire. They could see in the distance, through the thick trees, the fires of the hobo camps. The night was cold and thin in the mountains and smelled of wood smoke and piney pitch. The stars through the trees were ice crystals in candlelight.

“I got no family,” McCabe said. “I don’t know if that makes it harder or easier than for someone like you. I got no one to worry about and no one to worry about me. My folks died when I was twelve years old. I stayed a while in the church orphanage in Iowa until I was sixteen, then I lit out. I been on my own ever since. Haven’t stayed put long enough anywhere to call home and what with no work nowhere, I just keep moving. I been on the road for near a year and a half. From Michigan to Seattle and then California for a while, but that place is mean and crowded. So I come to Arizona to see about the citrus orchards.”

“No people at all?” Travis asked.

“None a’ tall,” McCabe said. “No brothers, no sisters. I expect I got cousins and aunts and uncles somewheres, but they never bothered to fetch me from the orphanage, so I got no feeling for them. I had a girl in Seattle for a while, and one in San Jose, where I was picking peaches, but that’s all about heartache and hard feelings and I don’t need no part of that no how. So I got shut o’ them. If I dropped off the face of the earth right now, nobody’d be the wiser or the sadder for it.”

Word come down from Oklahoma City that the law was looking for Travis and the farm was lousy with State Troopers who charged his mother and father with knowingly harboring a capital felon. Travis hid in Yarnell’s barn, old man Yarnell none the wiser for it, so when the Troopers questioned him he honestly told them he had no idea where Travis was. He’d chucked his clothes and burned them, obliterating for all time any evidence of the dandy man’s blood. Travis’ sister Molly had come to Yarnell’s barn in the night in the thick of the Troopers with a change of clothes, braving discovery and bearing news of the catastrophe that had come to visit the Cunninghams.

“Daddy’s in jail and they’re talking they’re gonna take momma in too,” she said. “They’re saying he knows where you’re hidin’ at and they’ll keep him in ‘til he rots or tells them, don’t make them no never mind. Travis, you just gotta get outta here now. Go far away. We love you. You did what you had to. We’ll keep mum, but you gotta go. Leave the state, ain’t no good for no one no more anyhow. Go west where there’s work. Write us in San Bernardino. Change your name. We’re all done here. Soon’s daddy waits ‘em out in jail, we’re all bound for California. We’re all done here.”

Travis didn’t know where the wind had blown his family, he only knew that the banks had caused all the trouble and that no one but they were to blame. He needed to change his name, change his face.

* * *

The moon was over the wooded hill in the deepest part of the dark morning when Travis woke frozen on the ground. He looked around him in the trees and saw dimly the orange glow of the spent fires of the camps far away in the woods. He knew what he had to do like he knew his worn boots. He snaked out of his bedroll and shook from the chill in the silent darkness. McCabe was breathing heavily when he stoned him solemnly on the back of the head. “Nothin’ personal, partner,” Travis whispered. McCabe sighed hugely when the blow struck, but that was all. Travis took the rock to his head one more time with a grunting heft and this time it sank into his mushy skull like into a cantaloupe. Travis carried McCabe into the trees and worked until the sun hinted at the eastern hills, then buried him naked. He washed his own clothes in the creek, changed into Barney McCabe’s clothes and into Barney McCabe’s name and walked down the road to Phoenix in the morning sun. “He didn’t have no family anyways and besides, it’s all the bank’s fault,” he said to himself flatly as the sun came up over the desert mountains. Three days later he was picking grapefruit and driving tractor in Chandler’s orchard. Barney McCabe was a good worker. Kept to himself. Didn’t have any family, he said. Raised in an orphanage in Iowa, he said.

Copyright© 2010, Thomas Phalen, All rights reserved.