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                                                                    Overture: Coyote and Raven

“Fun!” said Coyote, grinning. “That’s it. That’s it and all of it. You need more fun, sobersides."
"That's fine for you, Coyote," said Raven. "You roam around the country with that grin, always with that grin. You eat
whatever comes along, and at night... at night you keep everyone awake with that singing of yours."
And that Raven, he shook his head all solemn-like. "Some of us have to work hard to eat."
"Ah, work!" said Coyote, closing his left eye and hopping to the left, just as an experiment. "Work is good, Raven.
Sometimes even the singing is work, you know. The singing, the rapturous singing about the world. The telling of a
thou¬sand stories. Watching the world move about you, Raven. That can be work, too."
"That's ridiculous," said Raven.
   "Of course it is," said Coyote. "Ridiculous and fun. But only the best lives are ridiculous and fun. You just take my
brother, for example. For him, life has been both ridiculous and fun, and that's why people can't really figure him out."
"Your brother?"
Coyote lolled his tongue out in ecstasy as he rolled over and scratched behind his ear. His eyes squinted to a close as
he contemplated for just a second the parameters of sanity and the direct benefits of peak rabbit years. Then he
powdered his head with dust in a coyote dance and sat spraddle-legged and grinning at the regally wise bird.
"My brother,” Coyote said. "Yes, my brother has made a life of ridiculous fun an art form. He howls at the moon in the
books he writes. He lives a ridiculously fun life and spits in the eye of convention."
"Your brother?"
"Has been for years now," said Coyote. "A brother in every sense. He can laugh. He can howl. He can bite and
scratch. He can stare at the moon and see wondrous magic."
Then that Coyote, he laughs to see Raven shaking his head.
"Scoff if you will, Raven, but I'll tell you about my brother, anyway, because it makes a great song. A great evening
song. And it's worth it.
"To start with, they call him Ol’ Max ..."



                                                                      In the Bunkhouse
That was the summer we couldn't wait to get to the bunkhouse each night. It was back in the early 1960s sometime,
and we who packed the mules for Sequoia-Kings Pack Trains had stumbled on a little treasure.
Each night, in the half hour or so before we blew out the coal-oil lamp in the small bunkhouse, those of us who could
read would take turns reading aloud the chapters out of a novel called The Rounders.
We laughed until the tears poured down our cheeks in that warmly-lit room that smelled of hand-rolled-cigarette
smoke, horse sweat, the mangy cow dog under Rocky's bunk, and socks that needed burying.
  This horse had me slightly boogered. You would figure that
  most horses would come nearer bucking downhill than up.
You would be right, except for Old Fooler. I don't say he
  bucked uphill exactly. It amounted to the same thing,
  though. I learned this a very hard way.
  I was watching him real close as I rode across the
  ripened grama-grass-covered hills. We moved down into
  this little draw and started up the other side. Just as we
  topped out, he fired. Naturally, the saddle slips back a
  little when a horse is pulling upgrade, but the way Old
  Fooler jumped it had lapped right over his rear end. He
  lunged way out and kicked back with both hind feet. It
  snapped my head back like the tip end of a bull-whip. My
  teeth chipped enamel at every jump.
     Well, I made one mistake I would never make again
   with Fooler. If you can use a loaded quirt, that's fine. It will
   take a lot of sass out of some pretty mean horses. I raised it
   up high and took a hard swing, aiming to hit Old Fooler right
   between the ears. I didn't much care if he did fall on me. I
   figured this might help us both. I should have kept my right
   hand on that saddle horn where it belonged, though, for all
   I hit was air. I smacked the ground like a dead buzzard.
     It was about three miles by bird travel to the gate opening into
   home pasture. That was where Old Fooler was headed. He was
   still bucking, and I could see them stirrups clanging together above
   his back. Then he disappeared over a rise and there wasn't a
   thing to keep me company but one little white cloud about a
   thousand miles off over the northern mountains. I saw that cloud
   when I looked up at the sky and asked the Lord to please not let me
   kill myself and to give me the wings of an angel so I could fly after that
   horse and break his goddam neck.
                                                               —from The Rounders
  And each night, as the story progressed, we found more and more in this book a close look at the life we led.
Someone had finally put down on paper some of this ridiculously fun life we led, those of us who were starting out in
life, and those of us who were about to finish. But we all laughed, and we all nodded at the right times.
One night, after the lamp was blown out and we were still chuckling in our bedrolls over that night's chapter, we finally
heard from Old Grant Dalton. Grant had known Butch Cassidy and Charlie Russell, back in his younger days, and
now, in his eighties, he was the Supreme Court of the bunkhouse.
"What's the guy what wrote that there book?" Grant asked.
   One of us rolled over and flicked on a flashlight briefly.
    "Max Evans."
    "Well, hell, goddang, I mean to say, you take in there that writer?" He paused a second before delivering a
cowboy's most supreme book review. "He's been there."
In the wondrous brew that makes up life, that novel, The Rounders, created a bittersweet effect on Max Evans' life. It
made his reputation. Despite a lifetime of writing perhaps the finest literature ever written about life in the West, it is still
this one book about two cowboys who can't seem to win but refuse to lose that people tend to remember best. It
brought Max his first real money, his first real fame, his first movie.
But writing about Dusty and Wrangler all those many years ago also labeled him a "cowboy writer," a "Western writer,"
and those labels have stung him for more than forty years. But he grins and shrugs because what else can you do?
Max Evans was once an eleven-year-old cowboy himself in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New
Mexico. For years he lived the life, roped the calves, rode the horses, drank the booze, fought the fights. He spent his
nights reading in the bunkhouses, too.
And then he taught himself to be an artist, and later he taught himself to be a novelist.
Literature about the real West has never been the same, but many people still think of Max Evans as "that Western
writer" because of The Rounders.
Ol' Max hasn't owned a horse for many years, and none of his fictional characters has ever had a shoot out on Main
Street, but the label still sticks. Maybe it's because there aren't too many literate cowboys around and there is a certain
novelty about it.
But there's one . . . one former cowboy who became a soldier and a miner and a gold smuggler and a movie producer
and a screenwriter and a calf roper and an artist and a hustler and a bar brawler and a teller of great stories.
And a writer.
     A writer of novellas—little books, as he calls them—and novels and screenplays and short stories that look at the
warts and bumps and beauties and passions of living in the West.
     Each life is a succession of stories, a series of stories stacked up behind us as we travel through. Very few people
have more stories behind them than Max Evans. Some of them can't be told. Most can.
These stories paint the picture, just as Max did back in the old days in Taos. His life can be told not only in his own
stories, but in the stories of his friends—and, sometimes, in stories passed down from father to son. One evening when
I was teaching a journalism class, we were discussing Max's work, and one of the students said his father was a Santa
Fe cop who had arrested Max one drunken night for what he called "cutting down all the stop signs in Santa Fe."
Max later admitted going on a midnight revenge mission against stop signs as a way of avoiding getting more traffic
tickets, but he denied cutting down all of them.
As he put it, “Hell, I didn’t get more than half of them cut down before they caught me.”
But the prelude to long and hilarious retellings of great juicy segments of Max Evans' life often begin simply: "There was
this one time when me and Ol' Max were ..."
To a newcomer, Max comes across as a stocky-built man with a forelock that looks like it should have a surfer on it, a
nose that's been broken twice by horses and twice by men, and a face that appears to have been dragged behind a
freight train. He soon reveals himself as a seanachie, an old-fashioned Irish storyteller. To a newcomer, along about the
third beer, it also occurs that this man with the still-thick Texas accent and the coarse language is a man of dreams and
poetry and beauty and passion and love and mysticism and has an absolute lifelong loyalty to his friends.
"Let's face it," Max said before this book was begun, "I've lived many, many lives and none of them half-assed."
Which just goes to prove that a half-blind old cowboy named Grant Dalton was right when he summed it up nicely
with, "He's been there."
So let's take a little ride together and have some fun . . .

                                                                        The Fight
Unfortunately, the best stories about Ol' Max can't be told until about fifty years after the last cockroach dies.
                                                                                             —Jimmy Bason, rancher and friend


Writing about Dusty and Wrangler wasn't enough to brand Max Evans as a cowboy writer, though. According to Max,
it was The Fight that did it.
In a career of legendary bar brawls ("I've been in jail twenty-two times in New Mexico alone for being drunk and
disorderly, mostly when I was a very young and foolish man"), there was one fight in Taos in the early 1960s that
swerved Max's canoe on the river of life, a donnybrook that took a man who wrote about the soul of the American
West and relegated him to the literary purgatory of "regional writer." And for that reason, Max has always considered it
The Fight.
    But at least it was one helluva fight.