Tell Your Story Fall 2022 Writing Contest — 1st Place
They Will Try To Kill You
In the background, like white noise, there is the steady racket of corn being dried. The harvest has finally begun. It has been delayed because of the daily deluge that has been falling from the sky. In Argentina, rainfall comes in biblical proportions — much like everything else. Every morning, the huge, scarlet, other-world harvesters go marching to the fields, a flock of little green tractors following behind like tagalong mascots. Jesus is cutting three thousand hectares of corn, which means every day is a twenty-four hour cycle of work with no let-up.
I ask Jesus for a job.
“No,” he says. “Women don’t work the corn harvest.”
“Give me something to do.” I am begging. The truth is that he doesn’t even have to pay me. I have been spending most of my time watching my zucchini and carrots grow.
Jesus scratches his head. “You can help rake the corn into the sluice,” he says. “That’s safe.”
So there I am, standing in the gigantic bucket where the harvester shoots the corn. Three of us are supposed to rake it into the slot at the bottom. The bucket resembles a funnel, only a gazillion times bigger. I try to keep up. The corn spits dust as it flies through the air, and everyone is coughing. The men hold their arms out to prevent me from slipping under the spout. Flying corn can be dangerous. It’s hot, dry work, but I don’t mind doing it one bit, because it is labor.
As the evening falls, Jesus gives me a little money for my day’s work and tells me not to come back. I am not offended.
When I return home, Alejandro tells me we have a job at the cattle auction — three days a week, three dollars a day for the two of us, and we get breakfast and lunch. It’s a good deal.
“When do we start?”
“Tomorrow,” says Alejandro. “Bring your knife. You’ll need it.” My knife is a solid frontiersman, six inches of blade, with a black sheath. I bought it in Buenos Aires at Alejandro’s insistence. So far, I have had no use for it.
The following morning we set out bright and early. The auction is held in an unfarmed area toward the highway. Gauchos on horseback drive the cattle through a maze of pens into a spacious amphitheater flanked by bleachers. The men tell me they are not gauchos, but troperos. Gauchos are a thing of the past, they say. They are wearing flat gaucho hats, with kerchiefs around their necks and alpargatas, rope-soled slippers, on their feet. They live on their horses, going from auction to auction, driving the cattle. As far as I am concerned, they are gauchos.
On our first day, the boss man spells out our jobs. Alejandro is to remain in a balcony above the cattle. His job is to mark the cattle with a red paint brand after they are sold. My job is to open the gates to allow the cattle to run into the pens. I am the only person on foot. I am also the only woman.
One of the troperos, a broad-beamed man, looks down at me from his equally broad horse. “You have the most dangerous job here,” he says. “The cattle can gore you.”
I must have looked clueless, because he spells it out for me. “These cattle are wild. They’ve been running free their whole lives. They will try to kill you.”
I shrug.
“This is what you do.” He extends his arms straight out from his sides, like a bird flapping its wings. “If it’s a bull, just wave your arms and yell ‘hoo!’”
I try it. “Hoo!”
“Good.” He nods approvingly. “Bulls run in a straight line with their heads down, but when you flap your arms and yell, they will stop. The cows are the dangerous ones. They keep their heads up and watch you.”
Cows? Those placid, dewey-eyed, cud-chewing Bessies? Nope. As it turns out, the cows also have horns, and they are just as mean as the bulls, but smarter.
For the first two hours, the men merely unload the cattle from the trucks and herd them into a large corral. At ten o’clock, we break for breakfast, which is a half carcass of beef laid out on a metal bedspring. It has been cooking above a bed of hot coals since dawn.
The boss man hands Alejandro and me a bottle of wine each, along with a loaf of bread.
“You have your knife?” says Alejandro.
I draw it out of my waistband.
“Cut off the part you want.”
So, this is breakfast: beef, bread, and wine. The troperos and branders take out their knives, cut off chunks of meat and eat them directly off their knives, tearing off hunks of warm Italian bread with their teeth, swigging wine as they go. The beef is succulent, flavorful, unlike any beef we can buy in the States. Everyone is in a fine mood, joking about particular parts of the bull that they have induced the less wary among them to eat.
“And it just stretched, and stretched, and stretched.” Loud guffaws follow, as they repeat the steps of the prank. Their jokes are lewd, but somehow not crude.
Soon it’s time to begin the auction. Now the real work starts. I get ready for the first run through the gates.
The troperos drive the cattle on horseback, and as they approach each pen, I open the gate. These animals have short legs and shaggy brown hides. They look nothing like the slick-haired domestic cattle I am familiar with. The last gate leads to the auction area, where the bidders sit on high bleachers as the auctioneer describes the animal. At a sign from the tropero, I open the gate, and he drives the animal through. I listen to the bidding, and after the animal is sold — for an incredibly cheap price — I watch it being driven into the narrow slot where Alejandro leans down and stamps a symbol on it to identify the new owner.
It’s not hard work. The cattle, for the most part, are cooperative. One of the bulls lowered its head and prepared to charge. But when I “hooed,” just like the tropero showed me, it stopped in its tracks, confused. In that moment I lost all respect for bullfighters. Bulls run in a straight line, so there is no danger if you simply step to the side. The cows did indeed watch me, but if they began to run toward me, all I had to do was climb over the fence. Realizing it couldn’t get to me, the cow would stop at the fence and back up. I didn’t feel I was in any danger.
At one o’clock we break for lunch, which is exactly the same as breakfast, but now we are eating the other half of the steer. After a couple more hours of auction, it is time to go home. All in all, it’s an easy way for us to make three bucks.
The question is how to live on it.
“Can you ride a horse?” Alejandro asks me.
When I was a kid, I used to ride on swaybacked old nags that occasionally worked up to a trot, but mostly shambled along at a weary-of-all-of-it-all walk. “Sort of.”
“The man who organizes races is looking for a jockey, and you are small enough.”
I can’t believe Alejandro is actually going to try to pass me off as a jockey. But he tells me to come along, so away we go to an office on the race track. Alejandro talks me up as a horsewoman, but I can tell the man is having none of it. I look nothing like a jockey.
“Come back later, and I will watch her ride,” he says to Alejandro.
As we walk home I tell Alejandro that there is no way I am going to be a jockey. He just smiles and puts his arm around me. Anything for a job.
At the next cattle auction we show up bright and early. For breakfast, I cut off the pieces of beef I want to eat and chew great chunks of bread, but I pass my wine bottle to someone who looks thirsty. I listen to the jokes and stories, which are truly hilarious, but I do not let them know I get the jokes. This is an all-male assembly, in an all-male world, and I am not one of the boys.
I watch the horses grazing in the field next to the auction ring, cropping the emerald grass with their strong teeth. I notice that none of them are gelded. The stallions move through the grass leisurely, their huge members practically touching the ground. I can see where the phrase “hung like a horse” comes from. I also see the inspiration for the troperos’ jokes.
We are called to our positions, and the wild cattle come through. After an hour, I turn to see a Holstein with a calf. A black and white milk cow — with no malice in her! These are the docile Bessies that fueled the dairy industry in upstate New York. To me, they look like home. I open the gate, and she walks daintily through it, like the lady she is. Then the bidding starts — at one dollar. When she sells for five dollars, with her calf, I want to die. Five dollars! I could have bought her!
A commotion brings me out of my fantasy of becoming a cow owner. A truck has arrived, and the men are having a hard time getting the animal down the ramp. It’s a huge cebú, a Brahma bull, metallic slate gray from head to tail, and furious. It doesn’t want to descend; it’s lunging wildly, straining at the rope around its neck. They finally get it down the ramp and into the first pen. I am told to stay where I am at the final gate, not to follow the beast through.
By the time it gets to me, I see murder in its eyes, and it’s enormous, easily twice the size of the wild cattle I’ve gotten used to. When it charges, I do not yell “hoo!” and flap my arms. I scramble straight up over the gate and into the auction ring. The bull does not stop, but rams itself against the gate, trying to get at me. The boss man makes a sign that I am to open the gate, but I can’t open it from the outside. My heart is pounding in my chest. I give him a “so-what-am-I-suppose-to-do, die?” shrug. But I start to climb up the fence, back into the pen, in hopes that the cebú has calmed a bit.
It hasn’t. No sooner does it see my leg coming over the top than it charges again. It really does want to kill me. It wants to kill everyone. It’s roaring and heaving, and the troperos can’t do a thing to control it. My workmate is on the other side of the gate. His horse is rolling its eyes, and the tropero has a tight look on his face that says he won’t risk getting his steed gored. I am to be left alone with this monster. Then the animal leaps! It hurls itself into the previous pen, and keeps leaping until it has completely cleared the enclosures. Then it takes off at a clip into the empty flat land surrounding the auction.
The spectacle leaves us all astonished, and paralyzed. For a moment nobody does anything. Then six men get into the truck and chase after the beast. I suspect they will not be successful.
After that drama, the remainder of the auction passes in a flash. I go to meet Alejandro, and find him chatting up the troperos. He’s standing next to a black stallion, talking to its owner.
“He says it’s okay for you to ride it,” says Alejandro.
I examine the animal. It’s bigger than the horses I have ridden as a kid. The saddle is light, not even as substantial as an English saddle, and there is no pommel to speak of. Before I can say “Don’t do this to me,” Alejandro has hoisted me up. I am now at least fifty feet off the ground. I feel for the stirrups, but my clumsy Goodyear-soled clod hoppers won’t fit through them. The alpargatas the troperos wear are as narrow as slipper socks.
Alejandro leaps onto a mare and takes off at a gallop. The stallion gives chase. The monster I am riding is running fast as the wind, with its head down, and there is nothing for me to hold onto — no pommel, no stirrups for my feet, back too wide for me to grip with my legs. I can see the ground rushing by under the horse’s head, and I know that in a minute I’ll go flying over its head, onto the road, where this stallion from hell will trample me to death, if the fall doesn’t kill me first.
Alejandro circles back on the galloping mare and stops at the knot of troperos, who are watching the chase with amused looks on their faces. The stallion stops in front of them, and I slide off its back onto the ground and lie there in a heap, unable to move. By now the troperos are openly laughing. I am too shaken to be angry, but if I could move a muscle I would choke Alejandro, who is laughing with the rest of them.
On our way home, I barely say a word to him.
“No seas así,” he says. Don’t be like that; as if it was all good fun. I suppose it was — for him.
I don’t tell him anda a la gran puta madre que te parió because I like his mother. Instead, I say, “I’m not going to be a jockey.”
The next auction is the last in the series. After this, the troperos and auctioneer will move on to the next town. There will always be more cattle, more buyers. I will miss the breakfasts.
My tropero gives me a good-natured grin when I take my position. It is the first time I have seen him smile. These are not men who have much use for facial expressions. He drives the cattle into the pens, and I open the gates. The work is familiar now. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a big truck pull up with its load of cattle.
But there is only one animal inside — the cebú. Six men clutch the ropes, prodding it down the ramp. The beast — massive, enraged — tries to lunge at them, but it doesn’t know where they are. Blood is pouring out of its eyes, or rather where its eyes once were. They have blinded the beast to make it more tractable. This time they do not run it through the gates; they haul it directly into the ring, where it is immediately sold.
When the cebú is led away — bloodied, roaring, still resisting with all its might — I feel pity.
