Thursday, March the 27th, 2008

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A Cowboy Story

Bristow, Cuddy and I were out on the trail. It pleased me that the shanks and withers of my horse were clearly superior to those of my companions' horses. Were we to gallop to a gulch I felt sure that I would get there first. But we were in no hurry. I was the only one with a working knowledge of the importance of vitamins, so I was in charge of our picnic arrangements, as usual. My plan was for us to chow down at sunset, further up the trail, once we'd passed Binsey Poplars. There ain't no poplars at Binsey, just scrub and tumbleweed, but the place is sainted to the memory of Gerard Manley Hopkins, so that's why the folk there call it what they do. A lot of those folk are monks who spend their days grunting over illuminated manuscripts in the scriptorium, but there's a fair smattering of cowpokes and wranglers and ornery cuss-mouthed old biddies too. You'd need some kind of vade mecum to keep track of all the shenanigans they get up to, and that includes the monks.

Bristow was originally from Finland. His real name had lots of double ‘i's and double ‘k's in it, it was too much of a mouthful, so he was known as Bristow. Back in Helsinki, or Helsingfors, he had a wife, name of Theodora, who wallowed in a swamp of moral turpitude. She had a way of tilting her head at a particular angle that drove Bristow hobgoblin crazy, and that was why he'd left Finnish shores and was beside me now, on his horse, heading along the trail. He was so daze-brained that he thought he knew more about vitamins than I did, but I had him down as a cornpone and buckwheat kind of man, and I was rarely wrong.

I'd been wrong about Cuddy, true enough. Cuddy was a talented countertenor who'd sung a few arias in his time, back east. But then he got infected tonsils and suffered all sorts of disasters. He lost an eye and some of his bones and could no longer pay the rent on his flophouse room, so he hitched a ride on the Big Old Golem Railroad and fetched up on the prairie with nothing but a pair of spurs and a bottle of mouthwash. His hair was yellow and he had gruesome personal habits, but I gave him a horse and let him ride with me. Sometimes a man needs a helping hand.

Cuddy sang as we rode along the trail. “Oh Mama,” he sang, “What colour will the lights be? Will they turn blue on me?” It was a song that Wacko Jimmy Osterburg would record on the phonograph years down the line, but even with his ravaged tonsils I always preferred Cuddy's take on it. You could tell he'd once wowed the plutocrats at the opera house. But those days were gone, and Cuddy knew it. Maybe that's why he never bothered polishing his spurs. My spurs were glistening. I had them made specially, from pewter, by a pewter spur maker back in Choctaw country. They were fastened to the heels of my Bingle boots. The Bingle company makes the sturdiest boots you're ever likely to wear, and I know I'm going to die with my Bingle boots on. They're advertised as “the boots of destiny”, and even if you have no idea what your destiny will be, they're the boots you'll want to be shod in when you meet it.

It was hot on the trail. We came to a place where to one side of us was a swarm of flies and to the other side was a swarm of bees. Cuddy stopped singing, took from his holster his self-loading repeater Chabrol Truffaut-Rivette and shot them all dead, one by one.

The Mormons have a home-made hooch called leopard sweat. You can look that up if you don't believe me. I'm no kind of saint, let alone a Latter Day one, but I had a flask of the firewater in my pochette. The hooch was a gift from a Mormon prophet we'd met yesterday. He was out in what he called the wilderness and had got himself hopelessly entangled in a thorn bush. Bristow and Cuddy wanted to rob him and taunt him with rattlesnakes, but I advised mercy, and I was listened to, so we rescued him from the thicket and got a flaskful of leopard sweat as a result. I was damned if I was going to share it with my companeros. They could make do with their own spit. The pochette, by the way, was a delicately embroidered reticule made for me by a good time girl name of Maud from Old Ma Purgative's Whorehouse back in Vinegarville. This Maud had a way of tilting her head at a particular angle that reminded Bristow of his Helsinki Theodora, so we got out of there quick before he got the jeepers. I was keeping a close eye on him, and sometimes two eyes, through binoculars, if he strayed too far ahead or dallied too far behind. Bristow's horse suffered from sleep apnoea and hysterics, and he sat askew on his saddle, so that was causing us no end of problems.

We were still hours away from Binsey Poplars when the trail was blocked by an incomprehensible and gigantic and hard and rectangular and monolithic slab of pure black iron. It was so huge that we were engulfed in its shadow long before we reached it. Bristow's horse shook with terror and Cuddy's horse went all wobbly. My own horse, with its superior withers and shanks, trotted bravely towards the slab, but it was obvious there was no way to pass it. I tapped at the metal with a tuning fork and out rang a tone at once sweet and sinister. I thought the sound might prompt Cuddy to sing again, but he was busy chewing a prune.

Fatefully, but of necessity, we left the trail, detouring off into unknown country and hoping to rejoin it beyond Stovepipe Hat Gulch. Before we got that far, though, we came to a cluster of ruined and rotting shacks. The horses were thirsty, so we dismounted and took them to a burbling rivulet. As we did so, a group of people emerged from the shacks. There were men, women, and children, all of them slobbering inbred halfwits and all of them armed with Mannlicher Carcano rifles. This, you will recall, was the cheap mail order firearm later to be used by Lee Harvey Oswald to shoot President Kennedy in November ’63. I could see Cuddy reaching for his gun so I socked him on the jaw, knocking him to the ground. I wanted, if I could, to avoid a shootout.

The leader of the slobbering inbred halfwits came towards me. His stride was uncertain and spavined, and as he got closer I saw that his eyes were milky and sightless. Then he tilted his head at a particular angle and, behind me, Bristow let out a horrible scream. I turned and saw that he was aiming his Balzac at the halfwit, but he was shaking too much to be able to make a steady shot. I ran back and knocked the revolver from his paw.

If you read the literature, you will find that cowboys often found themselves in predicaments. Such predicaments may differ in circumstance and detail from those you face in your everyday, contemporary lives, but you are still able to place yourselves, through an imaginative leap, in predicaments distant in time and place. So let us briefly exchange places, you and I. I will leave you with Bristow and Cuddy, the one gibbering at the memory of his Theodora and the other unconscious, while you are set upon by armed and slobbering inbred halfwits in a hot and hostile desert landscape away from the trail, and I shall sit on a bendy bus slewing through rainy windswept streets, bearing me god knows where, and god knows why.