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Boiled Vultures
The first time I saw him, he was standing in his front yard in Patagonia, Arizona, with a pack of dogs roiling at his feet and a high-stepping emu penned off to the side. Fifth-generation Arizona cowboy and cattleman, former U.S. Marine, occasional gold prospector, and a well-respected novelist, J. P. S. Brown spent the best part of forty years on horseback in the Sierra Madre Occidental -- the Mother Mountains of the Mexican West -- a rugged, forbidding, lawless region for which I felt an unfortunate fascination.
The dogs came forward and sniffed politely at my legs and he shut them away in the screened front porch of his house. He was a big, broad-shouldered, stout-bellied man in his early seventies, an aging alpha male with a bad knee, a white mustache and small smoky green eyes that were shot through with intelligence and authority. "Joe Brown," he said, extending a leathery right hand.
We exchanged opinions on the likelihood of rain and then I asked him about the emu. It was standing by the fence now studying us. It bore a strong resemblance to Samuel Beckett. "You can pet him if you want to," Joe said. "He likes affection but you have to watch him."
I went over and started stroking the emu's neck. The skin on its neck was blue under a patchy covering of feathers. The neck began to undulate as I stroked it, the eyelids lowered and fluttered with pleasure and then it made a sudden, vicious, lunging peck at my ear. I whipped back my head and let slip an involuntary oath.
"Yup, he's a feisty one all right," said Joe Brown, smiling proudly.
"Where did you get him?" I asked.
"There was a fad for emu ranching around here a few years back. When the ranchers went bankrupt, a lot of them just let their stock go loose in the desert. Most of them got killed by coyotes or starved to death. This one showed up starving for water at my horse trough and fell in with my horses. He thought he was a horse for a while but he's getting over it now. He's a good old emu."
He pronounced it eh-moo, as if it were a Spanish word.
"Does he have a name?"
"We call him Eh-moo."
I judged that the preliminary courtesies had now run their proper course and started wheeling the conversation around to the Sierra Madre. Joe Brown surveyed me from under his hat brim and listened carefully to what I had to say.
"How's your Spanish?" he asked.
"Pretty basic but I'm working on it."
"How are you horseback?"
"Not good. I've been on a horse four times in my life and none of them were happy experiences."
"Well," he said curtly. Joe Brown learned to ride at the age of three and once wrote most of a novel from a horse's point of view. "You're not going to find anyone who speaks English up there. And they're not going to wait for you to catch up afoot."
He limped over to his pickup truck, planted his cowboy boots, and started unloading fifty-pound bags of horse feed as if they were feather pillows. The truck was an old white Ford. A sticker in its rear window declared, "BEEF: It's What's For Dinner." There were low gray clouds scudding overhead and the smell of rain falling somewhere else on the desert.
Joe Brown finished unloading. He gave me another long searching look. "Let's say you were fluent in Spanish and a horseman," he said. "I still don't see how you can do this without getting killed."
"I was hoping you might have some advice for me about that. I was thinking about posing as an academic of some kind, a historian maybe, and trying to steer clear of the really dangerous places."
"Look," he said and now his eyes bored into mine in deadly earnest. "I don't know you but you're a friend of someone who's been a very good friend to me. If you go up in those mountains, what you're going to find is murder. Lots of murder. The last place you want to find is the heart of the Sierra Madre, because that's where you'll get shot on sight, no questions asked, and the guy who shoots you will probably still have a smile on his face from saying hello."
"That's the type of place I want to avoid."
"Well, stay out of the Sierra Madre then."
"I don't think I can. And I don't think it's as dangerous as it used to be."
The sky was a dark pearl color now and the first fat raindrops came spattering down. "I guess you'd better come inside," he said.
From Joe Brown's front yard the foothills of the Sierra Madre are ninety miles away. He used to fly down there in a Cessna, back in his cattle-buying and gold-prospecting days, and he is still enowned in the town of Navojoa, Sonora, for buzzing the roof of the local whorehouse while flying drunk. On the second pass, with his favorite whore beside him in the passenger seat, he managed to knock off the TV aerial so the madam could no longer watch her soap operas.
Farther east in the border town of Douglas, Arizona, the foothills of the Sierra Madre are only twenty miles away and from the southwestern bootheel of New Mexico they are closer still. The mountains climb out of the desert on bony, outlying fingers and knuckled ridges, rising up into high cliffs, peaks, and battlements, with further ranges stacked up behind them in paler shades of blue. Crossed by only one railway and two paved roads, lacking a single city or large town, the Sierra Madre Occidental extends away behind those northern ramparts for 800 miles.
Or it extends for 930 miles. There are quarrels among cartographers, wild discrepancies on the maps. Where does the Sierra Madre end and a new chain of mountains begin? When the king of Spain asked Cortéz to describe the geography of Mexico, the country he had just conquered, Cortéz is said to have crumpled up a piece of paper and thrown it down on the table.
The worst mountains, the most crumpled and impenetrable, were the Sierra Madre Occidental and the Spanish authorities, like the Aztec emperors before them, were never able to bring them under government control. Some isolated mines, missions, haciendas, and military colonies were established but the population remained predominantly Indian and largely unsubdued.
Apaches terrorized the northern 250 miles. The warlike Yaquis were in the northwest and a nightmare horde of Comanches ravaged the eastern flanks every September, riding down from Texas and Oklahoma on horses festooned with human scalps, blowing on eagle-bone whistles, raping, killing, torturing, snatching up children, and riding away with the livestock.
The Spaniards and mixed-blood mestizo Mexicans who made their ranches and villages in the Sierra Madre developed a rough, violent, fiercely independent culture that had more in common with the American frontier than the civilized parts of central Mexico. Feuds and vendettas flourished. So did banditry, alcoholism, a fanatical machismo, and a deep distrust of law, government, or any kind of outside authority.
In the 180 years since independence from Spain, the Mexican nation-state has made a few inroads into the Sierra Madre but it still relies on the army to defend the small pockets of control it has managed to establish. Local power is in the hands of feuding mafias and regional strongmen who usually operate outside the law. Bandit gangs are still at large and some of them are still riding horses and mules like their cinematic counterparts in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre ("Badges? I don't have to show you any stinking badges!").
The Sierra Madre Occidental still contains unconquered and largely unassimilated Indian tribes. Three hundred miles south of the U.S. border, in the early years of the twenty-first century, it is still possible to find Tarahumaras wearing loincloths and living in seasonal caves. At the southern end of the Sierra Madre are some twenty thousand Huichol Indians, most of whom are still guided by their shamans and the hallucinogenic visions they experience on peyote cactus.
The range is mostly volcanic, a southern continuation of the Rocky Mountain chain, rising up to nearly eleven thousand feet at its highest point and torn apart by plunging ravines, gorges, and the immense, steep-sided canyons known in Spanish as barrancas. Four of them are deeper than the Grand Canyon of Arizona, three others are nearly as deep, and there are six more only slightly less daunting. You can stand on the rimrock in high pine forest with snow on the ground and look down on the backs of parrots and macaws flying over semitropical jungle at river level -- a sight guaranteed to wow the passing traveler and sink the hearts of any army or police force.
The Sierra Madre Occidental was the last refuge for the Apaches, some of whom were still living free and raiding Mexican homesteads into the 1930s, and in the last thirty years it has become one of the world's biggest production areas for marijuana, opium, heroin, and billionaire drug lords. It was my bright idea to travel the length of the Sierra Madre and write a book about it.
Joe Brown hung up his hat, smoothed back his thinning hair, and limped with stately dignity across the kitchen linoleum to the coffeepot. He poured out two cups and we sat down in opposing armchairs in the front room. The house was clean, modestly furnished, and decorated almost exclusively with images of cows, horses, cowboys, and Indians.
"It's always been dangerous, it's always been an anarchy, but now nearly all the decent people have been killed or run out and all the bad guys have automatic weapons, at least in the part of the Sierra that I know," he said. "It's become the kind of anarchy that gives anarchy a bad name."
A few months previously, Joe Brown had won the Lawrence Clark Powell award for his lifetime contributions to the literature of the American Southwest and northern Mexico, mainly in light of his first novel, Jim Kane, which was filmed as Pocket Money with Paul Newman and Lee Marvin, and The Forests of the Night, the best novel ever written about the Sierra Madre with the arguable exception of B. Traven's The Treasure of the ...
