“Meet the new cowboy?” came the question for the third time that day.
Shaking my head with an amused grin, I told the customer only Ma had officially met him.
“Seem nice?”
“She said so,” I proclaimed, a little more boastful than intended, “Said he was dusty but knew enough to stock up on soap. Not all the cowboys bother.”
The customer moved away without smiling. I wasn’t sure I’d made a joke, so no wonder she wasn’t convinced.
It was Monday, and the Cowboy hadn’t shown for dinner yet. They usually came by on Sunday afternoons, and Ma had made a little extra fuss for it, even if she pretended she wasn’t. She was adamant about Sundays being for rest, but she still went out of her way to make a big Sunday dinner. It was harder to get my head around such stuff when I was a kid; now I accepted the contradictions because it was easier that way. It felt like growing up was all about accepting things that didn’t make sense, and learning not to question them unless you wanted trouble.
When the Cowboy didn’t show for dinner, we eased into the evening with a little less tension – Ma having a second beer and Pa undoing his belt before he even got up from the table. I was not-so-secretly relieved as well; as much as I wanted to learn from the stranger, I wanted to do so out in the wild, where it mattered – not at the dinner table, and definitely not in front of my parents. They were already suspicious of my reluctance to take over the store, and Ma could suss out an interest of mine no matter how deeply I tried to conceal it. By the time she burped out the ending to her second can, she’d almost forgotten about the Cowboy, until she eyed the extra plate on the counter as she was cleaning up. I watched her put it back into the cupboard as Pa shoved back from the table.
That night it was nice enough to leave the window open to my bedroom. The moon was overhead somewhere – I couldn’t quite see it, but I saw its light, the way it illuminated the backyard and the stretch of power lines, undulating and sagging between their tall wooden poles. The stars blanketed the dark sky – the promised storm had never materialized, not yet at least, and the night was clear. Coyote cries sometimes pierced the quiet, but on this night they were still and silent. April anticipation hung in the air – the promise of spring fulfilled, and yet somehow not quite complete. I was old enough to feel the longing for something that spring inspired, even if I couldn’t quite figure out what it was that I wanted. If you asked me, and no one ever did, I might say I wanted to be a cowboy. With my bedroom door closed, and the window open to the stars and the sky, I let my heart whisper it to the night.
At quite a distance out of town, the Beasleys’ bunkhouse glowed with the light of a single candle. Stepping out onto the porch, the Cowboy walked a few steps into the moonlight, his naked form and shadowed contours looking more animal-like than human. He took in the whole sky, with its stars and moon, and listened for a message on the wind – a wind that never came.
~ The FALL of The COWBOY ~ Autumn 2026
