Is there room for Western fiction in the New West?

As I’ve done a couple of times in the past year, I’m republishing some of my older short stories (which have already appeared in multiple paying publications) at this site. But while cross-genre Westerns ride strong in the saddle in contemporary settings such as romance and mystery, is there a place for a contemporary Western that’s just a straight-forward Western? An urban Western, perhaps? Today’s post, “Eight Seconds,” was a finalist in Western publisher Moonlight Mesa’s 2010 Cowboy Up contest and published in MMA’s March 2011 print volume, Award-Winning Tales. It was republished again that fall in Pulp Modern (Autumn 2011). Both are still available on Amazon, Moonlight Mesa's at a reasonable price. But the Pulp Modern paperback will set you back a cool $2,904, so why not try this story from the volume for free? It’s chock-full of classic Western elements – cowboys, Native Americans, and rodeos. What’s not to love?

 ***

EIGHT SECONDS

The obituary comes in an envelope with no return address, just a Dallas postmark from a zip code near the Intertribal Center. I think at first it’s a plea for funds—“$20 puts food on the table for hungry Indians”—that kind of thing. I usually give a hundred. A hundred bucks isn’t much to me now and it quiets my conscience a little. I rip it open, feeling inside for a return envelope to put my contribution in, but there’s only the piece of newsprint, and I read, remembering what had happened to Jimmy Kotay.

***

Big Jimmy and Little Jimmy, they called us, but we were the same height and build, Little Jimmy maybe a shade slimmer. He had walked, late, into my class at Vista College.  That was my second try at physiology, and if I failed again, Ma could pack away the dream she had of me being anything but a cowboy or a drunk.

Little Jimmy was way past the five minutes the lecturer Samuels allowed everybody to finish a cigarette, take a leak, and grab a cup of sludge from the pot in the school secretary’s office, before sliding into their desks.

Samuels shoved his glasses to the top of his head to give Little Jimmy the full effect of his pale-eyed stare. “You must be Ghulam Jilani,” he said, looking from the newcomer to the class roll.

“Just Jilani,” Little Jimmy said.

image: pixabay

In his tweeds and tie, Little Jimmy seemed to have wandered into the wrong class. Except for Samuels in his stained lab coat, the rest of us looked like starving students—clothing ripped and faded, hair long and greasy, the men three days from a shave. Little Jimmy told me later he thought we were refugees, and he wondered what disaster had made us flee to a small town in Texas. He sat down by me, maybe because I looked the least unshaven. Not that I was a stickler for grooming—us Kiowas just aren’t much in the beard department.

“Why the hell are you so late?” I whispered.

He pursed his lips reprovingly. “I was deciding which tie to wear. I wanted to make a good impression.”

Except being a clotheshorse wasn’t the only reason for his lateness. Being late was as much a habit for Little Jimmy as being hung over was for me.

Only I didn’t learn that right away. That first day, he looked so neat and prim, his mustache barbered within an inch of its life, I choked on my coffee when he told me his dream. We were sitting over vending machine cups in the student center where he’d followed me. He talked and I tried to ignore him while the TV blared the theme to a rerun of “Bonanza.”

“My mother always wanted me to be a doctor,” he said.

“Yeah. Mine too.” I pulled out papers and a tobacco pouch to roll a smoke. 

“Of course, I won’t be able to break the news to her until I’m famous, but I’d like to do so before she hears about my exploits in the news.”

“Your exploits?” 

“My exploits as a cowboy.” 

“You gotta be kidding. You want to be a cowboy? Like me?” 

“I thought you were an Indian.” 

“I’m a cowboy and an Indian. I can play both parts in the Westerns. But if you got to pick sides, yeah, be a cowboy. At least cowboying earns a few bucks when somebody needs an extra hand.  There’s no pay in being an Indian.”

I tossed my cigarette butt in the last inch of cold coffee. Little Jimmy sat, very straight and quiet in his tweeds.

“You need money?” I asked. “You could try out for the school rodeo team. They give scholarships. That’s the only thing that’s keeping me here.”

“I have a scholarship from my country.” He turned back to “Bonanza.” I could tell he was sore about being laughed at.

“I can teach you, Jilani.”

“Teach me what?”

“To be a cowboy.”

He turned to look at me again and his face lit up like Christmas when he saw I wasn’t stringing him along. He held out his hand. “Call me Jimmy.”

***

I did roping, mostly, on the team, and some bronc riding. A few afternoons of working with Little Jimmy showed me he wouldn’t learn to rope that semester, maybe not that lifetime. But as a beginning bronc rider, he wasn’t bad. He was stronger than you’d think for a skinny kid and he had a natural rhythm for the ride. I tried him out in a few local rodeos. He insisted on using what he called his alias, although I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how his mother would ever hear about it.

“Try not to talk any more than you have to,” I told him. “That accent of yours is bad enough, but if this crowd thinks you’re a Muslim, they’ll go crazy. If anyone talks to you, say ‘no hablo ingles.’”

“What if they talk to me in Spanish?”

“There was a cowboy on the circuit once from a town called Iraan.” I said it the right way—Eye-Ruh-Ann. “When he was announced, they nearly booed him out of the arena. Thought he was Iranian.”

“I certainly do not want anyone to think I am Iranian,” Little Jimmy said.

He went by The Karachi Kid. Pakistan wasn’t in the news much back then and nobody knew where Karachi was. The unfamiliar name and his brown skin and me hanging out with him made everyone think he was Indian, too, in spite the hair on his upper lip. With a kidnapped white girl or two in my family tree, even I sported a stringy mustache.

In a quiet way, Little Jimmy was popular at the rodeos—a polite, nice-looking kid who kept to himself. Always sober. The day he stayed on a bronc for seven seconds, everybody applauded. They knew applause was all he’d get. It takes eight seconds to win.

***

The Sunday morning things started to go bad I had slipped out of church craving some hair of the dog. I should have realized the church door had opened when I heard the swell of the hymn.

He wore a purple robe,

He wore a purple robe,

My Lord wore a purple robe.

Then the door shut and Ma yanked the flask from my mouth and smashed it against the cracked dirt of the yard.

Coach washed his hands of me that afternoon. “You’re a bright kid, Jimmy. I’d hate to see you have to slink back to the rez. But if I smell whiskey on your breath at a meet again, you’re off the team. And you can kiss your scholarship goodbye.”

As soon as he turned his back, I took a gulp from a fresh bottle, for luck.

By the time they called my event, I couldn’t find my gloves, but I was past worrying about a few rope burns. I pulled on my black hat with the feather in its band and swaggered out for team roping. I was the header. My sorrel parked himself next to the chute where a white-faced steer snorted, ready to jump as fast as the gate opened. The heeler was already in place, giving me a measuring look across the steer’s back.

The steer broke from the chute, the sorrel close to his shoulder, the heeler’s horse at his flank. A loop blossomed at the end of my rope, hanging in the air for an instant. Through the loop, like a frame, I saw Ma’s face in the stands.

The loop dropped over the steer’s horns, the rope’s free end hissing through my fingers. I dallied up, throwing the rope around the saddle horn, my eyes never leaving the steer. I didn’t even feel the rope burn. The big whiteface stopped with a jerk, my saddle creaking as he hit the rope end. The next instant, the heeler’s loop caught the steer’s back hooves as they left the dirt. I glanced at the board, loosening my rope to let the steer up. We’d made great time, nearly a second faster than our closest competition. The heeler flashed me a grin and raised his hand.

When I went to return the high-five, I thought at first my fist must be cramped from the speed of the dallying, because I couldn’t see all the fingers. From the stands, somebody screamed and I wondered why Ma was crying when I’d done so well.

Then I saw what she saw—no, understood what I’d seen but hadn’t believed. Where two of my fingers should have been there was only spikes of bone poking from blue-white stumps. The rope loop I’d dallied so fast was still twisted tight into my skin, the loop that had popped off my fingers with all the weight of the steer thrown against it. I couldn’t look away from the sight of that hand, even when I heard Ma and Little Jimmy beside me. I tried to dismount, wedging the heel of my numbed hand against the saddle, leaning on Little Jimmy. And then I fell into Ma’s arms.

***

A couple of weeks later Little Jimmy sat watching me determined to roll a smoke. My bandages had just come off and the stitched-down flaps of skin on the missing finger ends had healed over, pink and shiny. They itched like crazy.

Little Jimmy had searched the arena for my lost fingers, thinking they could be sewn back on. But the sorrel had trampled them with backing up to keep the rope tight, and by the time Little Jimmy picked the fingers out of the dirt, they were too far gone to be reattached, even if the doctor had been willing.

Fingers or no fingers, if I couldn’t qualify for another event soon, I was off the team with my scholarship forfeited.

“Let me ride for you,” Little Jimmy said.

I thought I hadn’t heard right.

“Not roping,” he said.  “Bronc riding.”

I licked the edge of a cigarette paper, considering. It was crazy. But we were the same size, and with my feathered hat pulled down to his mustache and with the right horse. . . .

That would be Sunny—seventeen hands tall, and heavy, the biggest bronc in the college’s string. His ears flattened and he twisted his rear end toward me when I went to halter him. But he was only a bad actor because he was old and hurt so bad, a worn-out riding stable horse. Being on the bronc string was his last stop before adios and a Mexican slaughterhouse. The best riders hated drawing him, because with his arthritis, he could hardly give much of a show. I didn’t expect him to have too much fight for Little Jimmy to deal with. And nobody would be surprised about me riding Sunny, thinking I needed an easy qualifier while my hand healed.

I led Sunny and the sorrel who’d be my pick-up horse to the arena the night we practiced. I put on Sunny’s rigging, pissed that Little Jimmy wasn’t there to help, loaded the old bronc in the chute and took a snort to stop the ghosts of my lost fingers from howling. I’d switched to vodka—less smell on the breath—after Coach’s tirade. The drink and the pain pills from the school clinic made me dopey as I leaned over the chute, looking at Sunny. He stood a hand and a half taller than my sorrel and weighed three hundred pounds more. He looked big as an elephant.

“What took you so long?” I asked when Little Jimmy showed up, late as usual.

He ignored me, climbing onto Sunny and fussing with his rigging.

“What the hell are you doing?” He wasn’t just rosining his glove. He was tying the glove to the rigging—a suicide wrap.

“That shit’s just for crazy bull riders,” I told him.

In the moonlight, Little Jimmy looked pale for a kid with a brown face. “I’m not coming off this horse until my eight seconds are up.”

“It’s your funeral,” I said. Then I threw the gate open, my stopwatch ticking, and scrambled onto the sorrel.

Little Jimmy made a beautiful ride—laying back on Sunny, his spurs raking the old bronc high and handsome, one hand in the rigging, the other waving to God. He was still on top eight seconds later when I reined the sorrel close for the pick-up. Little Jimmy clapped his free hand onto the rigging and tried to jerk his other hand from its hold. Horror spread over his face.

“Pull out of the glove!” I leaned back to undo Sunny’s flank strap.

Little Jimmy panicked and jumped for me, still tied to Sunny like he was. He fell, his fall pulling the rigging loose. It slipped halfway down Sunny’s side. Little Jimmy held out his hand for me and I reached out to catch him, touching the fingertips of his glove, feeling them slip through my three-fingered hand. I couldn’t look in his eyes. Then he dropped between my horse and Sunny.

Sunny screamed in fear at the swaying weight dragging on his side, at Little Jimmy’s leg flailing against his flank. I grabbed Sunny’s neck rope, but he wasn’t thinking like a tired old bronc, glad to get his chore over with. He wasn’t thinking at all. He was twelve hundred pounds of mindless terror.

I heard a crack as Sunny’s hooves hit Little Jimmy and I screamed with Sunny, but Little Jimmy was past screaming.

Somebody flipped the lights on. The arena was full of people running. A shot echoed and Sunny collapsed onto the sorrel and me, and onto Little Jimmy.

***

“Where am I?” was the first thing I said. And when some stranger’s voice said, the hospital, “Oh, God, where’s Little Jimmy?”

“Your friend?” a nurse asked.

She wore a starched white cap, like nurses did back then, and she was young, too green to know how to give bad news. There was blood everywhere, even on the nurse. Her face was the color of her cap.

“I got to see him—I got to tell him—” I grabbed the neck of her uniform, seeing my hand, the stitches torn open and oozing blood again, like it belonged to somebody else.

Her mouth worked. “You don’t want to see him.  It’s not—there’s not—" Then she puked all over the gurney.

A man stepped up and hauled her away. “Your name?” he said, flipping through a clipboard.

“I’m Jimmy.” I stopped, thinking of Little Jimmy’s scholarship, and the one I’d lost. “Jilani Farouk, that is. Jimmy’s my nickname. My full name is Ghulam Jilani Farouk. I’m a student at Vista College.”

***

Everybody at the college understood how I felt. They handled the paperwork for my transfer through the mail, knowing I didn’t want to see anybody while I recovered from my grief and the injuries I’d got trying to save the life of my friend Jimmy Kotay. In spite of the rumors that ran wild after the accident, the autopsy on Big Jimmy didn’t show a drop of alcohol in his blood. Lucky the coroner didn’t know the body he looked at should have been short a couple of fingers.

I hated that they put Sunny down. But it was for the best. He hurt so bad. And I told myself it was for the best that I’d changed places with Little Jimmy. His scholarship put me through college and medical school.

I felt bad for Ma, but worse for Little Jimmy’s mother. At least Ma’s dream had come true, even if she didn’t know it. And she was sure her son was safe in the arms of Jesus and that he hadn’t died drunk. But Mrs. Farouk…. I wire her money anonymously every year, like I do for Ma.  Lately I’ve thought Mrs. Farouk must be getting pretty old. Maybe she’s even dead and someone else takes the money in her name. I can’t afford to ask.

***

I stand in the front hall with the obituary clipping in my hand.  The next thing I know, my wife— my nice, blonde-haired wife—leans over my shoulder, smelling like Chanel and the spearmint gum she chews since she broke her cigarette habit.

“What is it, honey?  Is that the family of your Indian friend, the one from college?  And they remembered you after all this time?  How sweet.”

I can’t say anything, but it’s not just from shock at reading the news of Ma’s death. It’s from seeing the secret I’ve never told anyone, the secret I left everybody I loved for, set down in black and white.

Somewhere in this big city I’ve fled to, someone has learned the truth. Somebody I passed on the street, somebody in the crowd smoking by the stairwell after an AA meeting, knows me. Or maybe somebody in the stream of patients at the county hospital where I work has seen that the name on my ID badge doesn’t match my Kiowa face. Somebody who’s dug deep enough to find that pauper’s grave in Vista with its ten-fingered skeleton. Because next to the printed list of Ma’s family on the obituary, they’ve penciled in the name of another survivor—Jimmy Kotay.

The End