The Man from Montana

He strode onto Main Street from the Sunday matinee of Brokeback Mountain, blinking a bit at the bright sunlight. He pushed back his Stetson, stared down the single street, past the town, across the range to the horizon, and spat his tobacco juice with good aim but no hurry, mulling over the film and a thing or two. He opined, That's no way to plug a man, no way to drill for oil. Where was the hip action? Where were the rope burns? He got on his horse, the love of his life aside from his mother, the sky, the mountains, America and freedom. He rode his horse hard but fair, galloping to the ranch, both of them lathered with sweat by the end of the run.

He secured the cattle, tethered his stallion and wandered to the local watering hole for a Budweiser in his impossible quest to find a woman who could shoot the breeze and a rifle equally well. He was wary of women with tattoos. Didn't they know branded fillies were owned by someone? Once the marks appeared on flesh, the only possible end would be a feeding frenzy, boots and belts left over when the animal had served its purpose. He told this to a bartender with a desert rose on her wrist, and was met with the thorns of her palm against his cheek.

He sat alone on his stool and his thoughts were like the stiff but aimless winds stumbling against the boulders on a hidden slope. He sipped his beer and rolled a cigarette, the same brand as his father, back before the obstinate old man attended the Big Rodeo in the Sky, to the end an unbroken bit of beef jerky sticking in the craw of the world. He looked through the threads of smoke into the bar mirror. Same scars, same missing tooth, same dark mustache, though his sideburns were meandering toward coyote gray. He wondered if it were time to break in a new pair of boots. This pair fit him well, but the leather was wearing through in parts.

On his walk home, he grew sick of the coughing, the spasms, his shredded lungs, and tossed his boots hard against a cactus that looked like a woman from Wyoming after he left her high and dry. Except for his hat, the rest of his clothes soon followed: socks, shirt, pants, underwear, until he was wandering the dusty culvert in his birthday suit. When he got back to his bunk, he cursed the keys left behind in his trousers, and threw pebbles at the window of the daughter of the ranch owners. She shook her head, but came down to the patio, and spat: "You're lucky you're dying or I would've left your bony ass out here."

He knew a little something about bones, having broken a few and having once been given the skeleton of an armadillo fashioned into a rattle by his grandfather, a half-Crow womanizer turned family man. He followed the girl to his bed and spent some of his semi-retirement teaching the younger generation a bit of what he knew. He watched the rays of the setting sun track across soft mountains, her flat belly, watched them make dust motes flash like sparks from a dying fire. “Do-si-do, spin your partner,” he said to her, maybe smiling, and “Where are the square dances of yesteryear?” quieter, just to himself.

He rose and dressed in his Sunday best and HOSS BOSS belt buckle. “Let me check on something. You go ahead and stay put.” He went outside. Shadows from the local mountains spread across the land in great patches. There would be no moon tonight but plenty of stars. He returned to the cactus he had maimed, sucked on a divot, pulled a few spikes and feasted on this desert communion. He prayed for his lost boots, his lost son, his southerly sins and the strength to cross his final steppes.