The dusty porch of Levi’s Feed Store wound around the front and sides of the rickety wooden structure that formed the nexus of all transactions in the little town where I grew up. Named after my great grandfather Levi, on my mother’s side, who opened the store back when there wasn’t even a main road, it was more of a general store now, providing supplies for all the neighbors, not only the farmers and ranchers. Much more than that, and in all its iterations, it was the central location where people gathered to talk and gossip about the town news, which in those days rarely amounted to more than weather warnings and health issues for the regulars. Occasionally a transiting cowboy would ruffle some feathers and they’d have that to occupy their interest – cowboys being the most exciting thing about our town – but for the most part it was just a place to pass a few minutes of each day socializing. Small towns accustomed to solitude sometimes forget how much humans enjoy interacting with one another until they have a place to gather. My great grandfather Levi, the man after whom I was named and christened, a man who was dead long before I was born, never intended it to be such a space – a joke that my mother loved to tell people who were barely interested.
It was strange to see my name emblazoned in faded paint above the front door of the store once I learned how to read. No one else had such notoriety, and while everyone knew I wasn’t the Levi to which it referred, there it was – the same spelling, the same sound, the same family. To avoid any lingering or future confusion, my parents would call me ‘Leve’ – trading the last ‘I’ for an ‘E’, and pronouncing it like the word ‘leave’. Over the years it would come to be a wish, a command, and a promise, while in my mind it sometimes sounded like no one wanted me around. Leve. Just Leve.
Parents rarely mean to fuck up their children like that, and even more rarely manage to escape it.
It was on this dusty porch where I sat in a rickety old rocking chair on one of the first warm days of spring when I saw The Cowboy for the first time. I didn’t see him approach – he simply was there, walked by, and then was gone. Did he nod or smile? I couldn’t tell you; I honestly don’t remember. Locals would later expand their tales and claim that he walked into town with a swagger, a certain spring in his step that set some immediately at ease and others instantly on guard. He never would be able to reconcile the two; we never gave him that chance.
There was dust in his beard and hat, the way dust was everywhere that summer, and every summer. That’s what I thought I would remember about this spring and summer – the heat and the dust – the way they followed everyone everywhere, the way they got into the ground, into the air, into all the crevices and spaces might think could be spared – and the way they held there, stubbornly lodging and adamantly refusing to go. What I would remember instead was the middle-aged man who changed my life, striding into town for those all-too-brief seasons, and whose absence would never be filled for as long as we both lived. I remember the way his jaw moved with the steadied practice of a long-time tobacco chewer. That scent of menthol still prickles my skin, the strange phenomenon of smell triggering a physical response like no other I’ve experienced since. It makes me tear up as much as it raises my cock, and I’m powerless against both. Lately, it’s actively brought bile into my mouth – strange and awful the way memories morph over the years, turning the stomach and churning the mind until you forget what joy you ever felt in someone, or what thrill they ever brought into your existence.
He didn’t have a name – none that he revealed. The town came to know him as the Beasley Boy – the Beasleys were the childless couple who rented him a small room kitty-corner to their old unused outhouse – even if the lines of his face told all of us how far he was from boyhood. (I would come to discover he was ancient for what he was – all of forty – precisely twice my twenty years on earth, making me precisely half of him.) To me, he would always and only be The Cowboy.
On that first day he walked into town, he turned to survey the porch but I honestly can’t remember what he did first. A nod? A smile? I didn’t think to remember, but I was instantly transfixed on his countenance, and the strange feeling it gave rise to somewhere in my body. He had the look of certainty to him, like he knew exactly who he was and nothing would sway him otherwise. I aspired to have a small amount of such surety, but even all these years later I’m not sure of anything.
He couldn’t know it then, not consciously, but a few weeks after this he would tell me his senses were on alert as he walked by me on that first day, the way a dog pricks up its ears when the trouble or danger isn’t fully known, only felt. He would say his heart stirred a little but attributed it to the beans from breakfast, and then he laughed it off, and I’d never know what was real and what wasn’t.
Once he passed the porch my head turned to follow his; he turned around and gave a me a slightly grim smile. Too grim to make me smile back, so I looked down instead. When I lifted my eyes to find him again, he was no longer looking.
The ocotillo patch down the road from the store was barren of all but its spikes. Soon the leaves would appear for their brief season, and the scent of creosote would rise from the earth, perfuming the air like some enchanting fog. For now, there was still just dust, lifting from the porch as The Cowboy walked into the distance, into the sun.
~ The FALL of The COWBOY ~ Autumn 2026
