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.
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| image: pixabay |
“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?”
“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.
