Cowboy Dreams

    In 1963, after our sophomore year of high school, there seemed to be a consensus that the time had come to find a summer job. My friend, David, worked at the Alliance Times Herald where his father was the editor. Another classmate worked at the soda fountain in Woolworth’s and another at his father’s car dealership.  The little grocery store my mother owned was not big enough to to need me full time and I lacked the confidence to apply at the local stores so I walked the three blocks to a little office behind Newberry’s Hardware and signed up at the unemployment office. It was one windowless room, one desk and one man with a few folders and a rolodex. The man behind the desk seemed to know all the available jobs off the top of his head which was bald with only traces of a past civilization of hair still visible on it.
    The only jobs he had available were on the local ranches for the haying season. The caveat, he said, was that the ranches were a long ways away and I would need to live there while I worked. The ranchers provided lodging and food and paid a hundred and fifty dollars a month. My only knowledge about ranching came from the dozens, perhaps hundreds of cowboy, movies and television shows I had watched growing up. From that point of reference a job mowing hay on a ranch seemed more like an adventure than a job. I was terrified and thrilled.
     “You have a car?” He asked “Cus there are three other men willing to work there but none of them have a car.” He held his hands apart as if holding up the odd nature of the world and shrugged. I got the joke. I was sixteen years, looked fourteen and was the only one with a car.
       When I turned sixteen cars began popping up in my classmate’s driveways and the desire to own one was at fever pitch for every boy my age. Not everyone was able to have a car but those that did were guaranteed to have passengers. I think my mother was determined that I should have one so I could also have passengers. It was not an easy task for her. She worked ten to twelve hours a day at the little grocery store trying to wring as much income as she could from the neighborhood, which was the reason I needed to stay at home with my father. Later I also worked there after school and on weekends, trying to make sure we survived. Our house was run down and had not been much in the first place. The linoleum in the kitchen was even curling up around the cabinets and walls. We never used it the house much anyway because Mom cooked all the meals on a hotplate in the little room at the back of the store.  We found a cheap forty nine two door Plymouth, the age when cars looked like balloons. It had been a dark blue green but had faded away  on the tops of the fenders and roof to the light grey primer underneath.  It matched the style of our house perfectly.  However, I had a car ready to drive.

       The first person I picked up was Raymond, who only lived one block away from me in a house that was even more run down than mine.  It looked like crumpled up dirty rag.  A squeaking screen door announced the family’s comings and goings to the entire neighborhood. Surrounding the house was a grassless yard with a mangled wire fence containing parts of  automobile engines, axels, discarded fenders, spark plug wires, empty oil cans and bald tires; all sinking slowly into the oil soaked dirt. In the middle, like cathedrals on a hill stood two beat up stock cars, fenders, hoods and windows gone. There was just one seat left for the driver. The interiors were filled with crude roll cages made out of heavy metal pipes. Big metal bumpers were weldon on the fronts like battering rams.   Billy’s father drove them on weekends in glorified stock car races that were more like demolition derbies. The fastest cars started in the back and battled their way through the crowd of cars to the front, often by pushing them out of the way. Snarling explosions of belching flames blasted from the Frankenstein junk yard engines like battle cries, prompting a harmony of cheers from the crowds. I often watched Raymond’s father at night, sparks flying from the welder, as he mended the jalopies back to together from the injuries they had occurred from the weekend battles.The painful screams of the engines being resuscitated back to life often vibrated through the neighborhood. 
      Raymond and I used to play inside those cars, turning vehicles into every imaginative scenario two boys in a jalopy could come up with . However, one day I saw his father screaming in a rage at his younger brother then grab him by the hair, swing him around full circle and pitch him into the wire fence. The child got up crying and followed his father into the house, the screen door screeching. I did not go back to the yard after that out of fear. 
     Raymond soon disappeared from school to begin serving a sentence in reform school for stealing. I did not have much to do with him after that. Recently he had served another stint for stealing a horse. He claimed it was actually his own horse that his father had sold without telling him.  Raymond saddled it up and headed for Canada and posse was formed to track him down on horseback. However, it was a helicopter that finally spotted Raymond just south of the South Dakota border. When I pulled up in front of his house he gave me a big happy wave as he came up to the car. 
      The next passenger was Dick, who swaggered up to the car looking just like a cowboy should look with a pinched, rolled and stretched cowboy hat molded onto his head like hair. He wore an old denim jacket, bleached so soft it could have been a nightgown, and cowboy boots so married to his feet the outline of his toes shown through. He was in his mid twenties, middle height, but broad. He took off his hat as he crawled into the back seat, exposing blond hair combed back in a loose wave. He gave me a couple of quick slaps on my shoulder as he crawled in. “Hey, thanks for the ride”, He said.  Dick had just spent six months in the county jail for cutting up a local Lakota Indian. “Didn’t think anyone would care.” He said with a laugh that was likable as a child’s. 
     Cliff we picked up from the old Drake hotel across from the Railroad depot.  Older, thirty or more, he was well over six feet tall and trim with eyes hunkered down below fortified eyebrows. His cowboy hat had an out- of-the box new look and his shirt was white with pale blue stripes and pearl snap up buttons. He had just finished serving a year in the state penitentiary for robbing a gas station. With the four of us bundled together, I steered the car straight east out of town towards the wrinkled horizon line of the Sandhills.
     A thousand years ago the Sandhills were a barren sandy desert with dunes as large as the Sahara Desert. The dunes are still there but covered with a downy layer of short grasses.  A hand can be plunged past the sparse grass and come up with the cleanest, purest sand west of the beaches of the Carolinas.  It dribbles through the fingers just as nicely. The wind has sculpted the dunes into long fat snakes meandering for thirty miles or more across the plains.  From space the dunes look like waves on a wind blown lake or, further north, like long strands of wet combed hair. The Sandhills are an indecipherable two hundred mile roller coaster ride from Broken Bow to Alliance, to be transversed  over the thin ribbon of asphalt road laid over it like a frayed carpet runner. There is not  a single stop light in the entire distance to slow down for so those with the power and nerve can cover the distance in under two hours.
     In the late 1800’s the early colonizers avoided the hill’s uncharted territory because no crops would grow in the sand. It was not until later, when the ranchers who had settled on the perimeter traveled into its depths looking for lost cattle did they find the wild herds traveling through the low lying valleys where small lakes and marshes were fed by the massive Ogallala Aquifer seeping up from underneath. The Sandhills eventually became a main source of Nebraska’s cattle production and sixty miles in was the fifty thousand acre ranch that had hired us. Thirty miles straight east on Highway 2 to Bingham, twenty miles north on the 191 and ten miles on a crumbling strip of asphalt that seemed to be  dissolving into the sand like a sinking ship. Beyond that, deeply rutted, sandy trails branched off like tentacles, snaking eastward toward some ruts too deep to drive over.   I picked shallowest one and plowed on. Compared to the howling noise of wheels on rugged asphalt, the sand made us feel like we had disembarked upon a vast sea, the soft grass stroking the car sounding like waves. We bobbed over the grassy dunes until in the distance we saw a collection of houses sitting in a broad level valley. The buildings were sun bleached with only a few sparse trees scattered around. The main house was a white clapboard with a low porch running the full length of the front. Standing off to the left was a long barn surrounded by a separate corrals. On the opposite side was a long galvanized metal shed and two or three smaller wooden garages spaced generous distances apart.  In between were perched an assortment of tractors, pickup trucks and trailers. A large bulldozer sat like a rusty giant taking a rest next to a WWII style jeep and a large four wheel drive truck with the cab sitting forward on top of the engine. It looked like its nose had been chopped off. The owner called it “the pug”. 
     We pulled up in front of the house, got out of the car and stretched, a reflex to extend the body into the vast space. The owner walked towards us from the group of tractors and we walked over to greet him. In truth, only Raymond and I were walking, Dick and Cliff were swaggering in the manner of a cowboys swagger. The swagger, I later learned, is all in the engineering of the cowboy boot. The pointed toe clears the air and the high boot heel pushes the legs dramatically forward creating a proud thrusting walk. When I finally bought a pair of my own I instantly developed the swagger and wore them until they became a second skin just like Dick’s. 
     The owner was about my height, which is on the short side, and not much older than Dick or Cliff.  On his head was a dirty white fedora with the brim rolled up at the sides to make it look like miniature cowboy hat.  He introduced himself as Phil Driggs. As he shook each of our hands his left arm was held behind his back giving him the look of an amputee.  When the arm did become visible it exposed a left hand bent almost ninety degrees back from the wrist, the fingers arcing in towards his forearm like a claw. Once out in the open Phil did not seem to be self conscious about it. Apparently, he had just wanted to introduce himself unblemished first. 
     From behind the far shed came a car so low it looked as if the driver could drag his elbows on the ground from inside the open cab. It pulled up to us in a cloud of dust and we crowded around, instantly and unabashedly in love with the little machine. We had never seen a car that did not even come up to our belt lines. It was a MG TA Midget, a British sports car made before WWII. Inside the car was Gene, Phil’s cousin from Georgia. He was not much older than Raymond or me and his southern accent was so thick we all laughed in reflex as soon as he talked. After  he finding out our various histories he claimed he was up here hiding from the law. 
     Phil directed us to the large room attached to the back of the house to unload our bags.  It was long and narrow with a collection of single metal frame beds scattered along the wall, the bare mattresses curled like potato chips. Outside by the door was an open shower stall, crudely made with miss matched boards, and a kitchen sink sitting in wooden frame. The water just soaked into the sand below it. A few yards in the distance was the outhouse. 
     After settling in we met Phil by the sheds where all the tractors were gathered. Next to them was a monster of a machine which had once been a large truck. The cab and upholstery had been completely ripped off leaving nothing but a platform with a tractor seat welded to it facing backwards between the duel rear wheels. The steering wheel, gearshift, transmission, clutch, brake and gas petal had all been reversed so the front hood and engine was now the back end. On the newly created front was attached a giant wooden comb laying flat above the ground. It was made out of long 4” x 4” posts, sharpened at the end and connected in a row. Phil’s uncle had custom built it to scoop up cut hay. It was called the sweeper 
     The haying operation we were hired for had several distinct jobs. The mowers were tractors with long hinged bars on the side with vacillating blades that cut the grass. Next, the raker: a tractor pulling a long bar with a row of half circle tongs attached, gathered the cut hay into a long tumbling tube before dumping it on the ground. Dumping loads end to end created long rows snaking across the field. The monster sweeper was designed to run along the rows of grass and gather it up onto the big wooden comb until it was bunched into a large mound. The sweeper then pushed the mound across the field to the stacker. 
The stacker was a large wooden structure, almost two stories tall and shaped like two ninety degree triangles attached side by side. On the sloping side of the triangle metal rails had been attached that a forked platform rode up. It was connected to a pickup truck by a cable fed through a system of pulleys. The sweeper pushed the mound of hay onto the flat platform and headed back for an another load. The pickup truck took off to the side, the attached cable hauling the mound up a the tall track to be dumped over the top back down to the ground. A ranch hand stood at the bottom with his pitch fork and smoothed the mound out from where it fell to form a base. As each succeeding mound was pitched over the ramp he worked his way up, arranging the hay layer by layer as he went. Once a stack was finished the stacker was moved. At the end of the year the haystack is pushed onto a large flat trailer by the bulldozer and brought to the corrals where the cows were wintering. 
    The first days were spent preparing the equipment for the new haying season. Cliff and Dick were both seemed know mechanics  and Raymond had told Phil about building stock cars with his father so I became the only novice of the bunch. 
“Tell you what,” Phil said to me. “go across to the barn and grab one of the shovels inside. There is a winter’s worth of manure in there that needs to be shoveled out.” I had been sized up and found where I stood in the group which was in the manure.
At the end of the day, after washing up at the outside sink, we were directed inside to the kitchen where a luxurious meal was laid out on a long table with a speckled green formica top worn down in spots to a cloudy yellow. A large platter was piled high with steaks and big bowls of mashed potatoes, green beans and sliced bread were scattered across the tabletop.  The amazing banquet was provided by Phil’s wife, Jennie. She was a small woman, thin with straight brown hair covering the sides of her face as if she were peeking through flaps of a tent.  She did not look much older than a high school girl and did not acknowledge us as we filed in, directing her attention to the pans in the sink instead. She never communicated with us in any way but we were aware of her every move.
     Phil was running the place for his Uncle who had gone south for  warmer weather and stayed there. Phil owned all the cattle and horses and was responsible for refurbishing the equipment, which had declined over the years along with his Uncles interest in ranching. Phil’s father used to own half of the ranch but had sold out his half and moved down to North Platte, a large town next to the largest river in Nebraska, and opened an automobile repair shop. “He wanted to be around people and water” Phil said. Phil dropped out of high school to came back to live with his Uncle. His plan was to buy the place from him as soon as he saved up enough profit from selling his cattle. He needed this to be a good year. 
     After dinner we gathered on the front porch, sitting in the odd collection of chairs and couches scattered there. The porch faced west with an unencumbered view of the distant grassy dunes. As the sun began to set the vast emptiness settled into me. It was a delicious feeling, a satisfying sense that nothing more was needed and no other place needed to be traveled to. Cliff leaned up against a post and stared silently out at the horizon emitting the calm of a high priest. I felt I had stumbled upon a secret order of the nothing that the something always yearns for. 
     The next morning, as we were sitting around the table eating breakfast; batches of pancakes, eggs and bacon; Phil’s son Mikey, no taller than my pants pockets, came out from the bedroom in underwear and boots and marched up to Jennie. 
“God damn it Mom, where’s my breakfast?” He barked in an angry tone that shocked us all. Phil laughed so we all spit up a few chuckles, keeping an eye on Jennie’s response. Quietly she brought Mikey his eggs.
      After breakfast Raymond, Dick and I sharpened the mower blades while Cliff and Gene worked with Phil rebuilding the engine for the bulldozer. The metal mower bars are lined with triangular blades the size of a man’s palm attached to the bar by metal rivets. Raymond’s and my job was chiseling off the blades. Dick then sharpened the blades on the grinder attached to an old weathered work bench so beat up it looked like large mushroom had grown out of the floor. Once that process was finished we reattached the blades to the bars with new rivets. I was kneeling on the cement floor pounding the end of the rivet with a small sledge hammer when I heard a whizzing sound and saw a blur pass by my head.  A metal star made out the triangles had slammed into the wooden wall about a foot in front of my face. My body uncoiled like a spring. Dick and Raymond broke out into gleeful laughter. Sticking out of the wall was five pointed star made out of the razor sharp triangular blades riveted together to make one of the most dangerous devices I had ever seen. Raymond and I immediately made ones of our own. “Hey,” Dick said, “lets play mumbly peg.” My heart suddenly hit its maximum rate. Mumbly peg was a game usually played with pocket knives. In the Nebraska version, two opponents stood facing each other, feet shoulder length apart. They took turns throwing the knives between each others feet. The player had to move one foot to where the knife stuck narrowing the space. This continued, feet getting closer and closer, until one person gave up or accidentally hit an opponents foot and losing the game. Dick’s idea was for us to stand at opposite walls and see how close we would allow the star to stick beside us before giving up. A concept so terrifying neither Raymond or myself wanted anything to do with it.
     “Wouldn’t trust you guys accuracy anyway.” Dick laughed and turned back to the grinder. A couple of hours later the star slammed into the wall beside me and I jumped again. Dick and Raymond laughed together as I turned my face to the wall to choke back tears bubbling up in my throat. Dick had cut up people, had the jail time to prove it. I was afraid this was not going to end until I was also cut. I stood frozen with my face to the wall feeling very much like Jenny at the sink. Dick walked over to me, threw his his arm over my shoulder and pulled me to him. “Hey, hey hey,” he said like cooing to me a baby “just playing”.  
     “I been in a lot of fights.” Phil said the next evening at dinner. “Mostly cus of this.” lifting his deformed hand above his plate for demonstration before laying his arm back down. Clasping a fork between his fingers, his arm circled around the top of the plate to give it the proper angle to stab a piece of steak while he cut it with the good hand. “I walked up to one big asshole that was teasing me once and squatted down in front of him, like a frog. The guy looked down at me like ‘what?’, then I shot straight up and put an elbow so hard underneath his chin he hasn’t looked down sense.” Phil laughed big at his punch line and we joined in. “I got more cut up in a fight I won that any I have ever lost.” Dick said “It was in an alley way behind the bar. The guy threw me into a box of empties. Smashed them to bits. We rolled around all over that broken glass, blood everywhere.” 
     From then on the evening meals were filled with sporadic celebrations of manly battles. After reveling in all their personal stories they moved on to fights they had witnessed and continued on from there to legionary fights they had only heard about. The stories were embellished with dramatic pauses and physical demonstrations punctuated with unrestrained laughs. Cliff, having a composure that did not require boisterous exaggeration, laughed approvingly; as if he would write a good review of the evening’s performances later.  “It is always the little guys that wanted to fight me.” Cliff said finally. “Some drunk punk pestering you until you hit em just to make em happy. There was a bunch of us bigger guys always in getting into bar fights. We never fought each other, just the dumb punks who, for some strange reason, want to take on the big guys. It was a big joke.” 
     Raymond tried a couple of stories of his own but he was too much a child like me to be tolerated. I had nothing. It was not until a couple of years later did I have a real fight. It was over Merl Dean, a girl I madly loved, and my gentle friend Ron who, unknown to me, had stepped in to fill the void I had left open after my shy retreats. After an awkwardly discovering them at a party kissing the kisses I yearned for, I straight armed him right into a wall, hand around his throat and my body stiff as a flying buttress. “He is going to kill him.” I heard someone say and I thought “They’re right.” and let him go, turned away and walked straight out of the house. Out of the corner my eye I saw Merl half reach toward me as I passed.
     After the meal we retired to the porch and Phil came out with his pistol. It looked like a Colt 45 but was actually a .22 caliber, a low powered bullet most popular for casual shooting. Shooting guns was something I was familiar with. My uncles, all farmers in New Mexico, were excellent shots. They would drive nails into telephone poles for fun by shooting at the heads. Even my dad could shoot, although I had never seen him hold a gun until I was seven or eight years old when a friend of his invited us to go shooting. Cans and bottles were set up on a fence and we all plinked away except for my dad, who stood off to the side and watched, looking formal in the dress pants and white shirt he always wore, When his friend invited him to take a shot he declined. I could not believe he would turn down something that, to me, was so exhilarating and fun. We all joined in cajoling to him to try it and he finally took the pistol, positioned himself in front of the fence, raised his arm and in six, rapid fire shots, knocked down six cans. We were all dumbfounded. I am still mystified by his reluctance to demonstrate the skill he had. 
     Phil walked into few paces away from the house while he was strapping on his holster. We settled into the chairs as Phil tossed an empty can into the air in front of him, whipped his gun out of the holster and fired. The can hopped as the bullet hit it. We all cheered. 
     “Hold on,”Cliff said, “let me get my rifle.” He disappeared into the house and came back with the leather gun case he had brought with him. He removed a Winchester 90 pump action 22 caliber rifle with an octagon barrel.  Cliff and Phil stood side by side, guns ready and Raymond tossed the can. Phil got it first and Cliff, his arm moving the pump action almost too fast to see, hit the can again, again and again before it hit the ground. We all laughed and hollered, loving the show. Cliff felt around inside his pockets. “Anyone got a penny?’ He asked. Dick handed him one. Cradling the penny on the knuckle of his thumb he flipped it straight up, whipped the rifle to his shoulder and fired. We heard the ping of the penny, saw the puff of dust where it fell in the distance and ran after it like a pack of dogs. A clean nick was shaved off the side. 
     “No fucking way!” Dick howled. “No way did I just see that! Do it again.” Cliff repeated the feat and we retrieved the penny again, another notch on the side. We were all were stunned, unable to imagine anyone being able to shoot with that much accuracy.
“Well you know,” Dick said as he took off his hat and gave it brush before fitting back onto its preferred slot on his head in an exaggerated fashion. “If you were really good you’d be hittn’ it in the middle.” Cliff gave a soft chuckle. “I hit on the side so it would spin. Why if I hit it in the middle it would fly off so far we’d never find it.” A unified peal of laughter sang off into the desert. “I’ll show you,” he said. “Give me the penny.” 
     We heard the solid ping and, after a long silence, saw in the distance a small puff. We all chased it down and there in the middle of the penny was a shiny dent. We presented it to him with the reverence reserved for a god, what more qualification does a person need for that position?  “Jesus Christ, I was kidding!” He said looking down at the penny in his palm. “That’s impossible, just dumb luck.” Dumb luck or not, we were all in awe.
     The next evening, while Raymond and I were cleaning out the barn from what seemed liked years of packed hay and manure, Phil was giving Cliff and Billy a demonstration of his roping skills. Crouched over  his horse as it charged across the corral, he snagged a bag of oats off the ground with his lasso . Raymond and I watched from the barn door while Phil commanded his horse through a series of sprints and turns across the corral. Up on that horse he seemed to be sprinkled with a dusting of divinity. Twisting in counter balance to his horse’s dance, he became visually transformed into a beautiful man.  A man a quiet woman like Jenny could love. A man who might have been a rodeo king who had won Jenny as a queen.
     As Phil circled around from his grand height he suddenly locked his eyes on me and, with yell and a slap of the reins on the horse’s rump, charged straight at me. At the last second, just as the horse filled all the peripheries of my vision, Phil twisted him to the side, spatters of dirt from the horse’s hooves cascading over me.
    After his show, Phil outfitted Cliff and Dick with their own horses and, together with Gene, took off for ride across the valley. As he was leaving he looked back at Raymond and me and said, “You guys finish up that barn.” The hierarchy having been established, I set back to work but Raymond was furious to be stuck with me. After all, he was the one who had actually stolen a horse. He threw down his shovel and paced around the corral for the rest of the evening. 
     After preparing all the machinery, Phil assigned each of us to a machine. Gene and Raymond were to be the mowers, I was to command the raker and Dick was chosen to drive the sweeper, perhaps not the wisest choice since he would soon be ripping over the open fields at over fifty miles an hour, the duel wheels sending waves of sand to either side of him. Cliff would be the stacker, a higher paid position, because it is  much more physically demanding to throw around hay all day with the pitch fork. Phil would be driving the pickup that hauled the bundles of hay up and over the stacker for Cliff to arrange.
     The first area to be worked was the flat valley surrounding the ranch houses. Climbing up onto the tractor changed my character with each inch of ascension. Sitting high up on the metal seat I felt like a warrior, empowered, resolute and plain happy. Merely by being elevated above my normal stature I had discovered peace of mind.
     Below me Phil was hitching up the tall wooden stacking ramp to his pickup truck to be hauled out into the field. Cliff was sitting in the WWII vintage open-cabbed jeep used for running errands back and forth from the ranch to field, (and for hopping dunes when there was a passenger to terrify). To my sides were Gene and Raymond on the mowers ready to roll out into the field. With whoops and hollers, like cowboys on a cattle drive, we fired up the machines and moved out. The summer haying season had began.   
     It was a very dry summer that year, shrinking the yield of the already sparse grass and requiring more hours of mowing to produce the same amount of hay as the previous years. The first week started out casually but soon the days got longer and then longer again, including weekends. As Phil became more anxious about the amount of hay the land was producing, he urged the mowers to cut the grasses higher up on the dunes. We drove along at a precarious angle rehearsing maneuvers in our head of how to ditch the tractors if they tipped over. Cliff’s had it the worst, pitching and stomping around on the loose hay for hour after hour in a cloud of dust and bits of dry grass sharp as razor blades working down inside his clothes. He spent a lot time in the shower every night after work. The only thing saving him was a young woman who would occasionally show up with a tent so they could spend a night together. Great for him but hearing her distant laughter blending with coyote howls threw the rest of us into spasms of depressed turmoil.  

     There were no more evening horse rides or target practice, Our meager spare time was spent slouched on the porch until opting for the bed. The anxiety eating at Phil made him testy, lashing out in anger at every break down and delay, cursing us for broken mower bars or bent rake teeth. Finally, Phil revealed that unless he could make enough profit this year to send his Uncle a down payment for the ranch the uncle was going to sell the land out from under him. That impending tragedy added another layer of tension to the coming days. 
     Phil’s anxiety did not dampen Dick’s fun or stop him from cutting doughnuts in the sand with the sweeper or occasionally charging directly at us in his version of “Chicken”.  And it did not stop the gentle joy I felt perched high on the tractor or the evening chatter on the porch as night creeped upon us, the darkness giving a thoughtful weight to the words.   
     By the third week our clothes had gotten too stiff to tolerate any longer so Cliff asked Phil if we could use his washing machine. Phil looked over to his wife, whose soft beauty usually took the edge off of day, and she shook her head no. Cliff then asked for Sunday or, at least, Sunday afternoon off so we can drive to the nearest town with a laundromat and wash them. Phil again said no. Cliff raised himself tall and resolute next to Phil and then quietly shrunk into submission before turning away. 
     I had developed an exaggerated affection for Cliff, elevating him into a hero’s status in my mind. It was a shock to see Cliff back down. He joined our collection of helpless men who, at this moment, had not managed to even get a day off to wash our own clothes.  “Come on,” Dick blurted out to Phil. “It’s almost an hour to Ellsworth and they might not even have a laundromat. I mean, Jesus Christ! That’s what I mean.” Dick, the knife man’s, eyes glaring at Phil became sharp as blades. The stories told suddenly became real. Phil, seeming to remember Dick’s bloody history, said “Okay,”you can leave at five tomorrow.” That gave the three ex criminals almost twenty four hours to brew up a healthy anger before piling into my car the next evening and heading for a town.
    The clothes were barely in the only two washing machines in Ellsworth, population 32 -which were situated in the back of the gas station, food and general store - before Cliff bought a case of beer. Dick started off the festivities by smashing the neck off the first bottle on my bumper and drinking right from the sharp edged broken glass, tilting his head back and howling froth at the moon. Any comradeship I had felt with them had blown away like a puff of smoke.  What followed was a celebration outside by my car of all the creative ways the three of them were going to punish, humiliate and grind Phil into the ground. Each successive scenario followed by waves of laughter, especially by Raymond whose laughter had the uncontrollable energy of a child joining in as they danced around my car seeming to dare anyone behind the few lit windows in the town to come out and stop them. I shrunk inside the laundromat staring at the two machines shaking against each other trying by force of will to speed up the wash so we could all leave before something bad happened.
     On the way out of town we passed a police car coming from the opposite direction.  It  turned around to follow us. “Just keep going.” Cliff said turning to look back at the headlights, “Just drive normal.” When we turned north off the highway onto the secondary road the police car turned back. I drove into blackness,  the broken asphalt road leaping into the halo of my headlights as if attacking me. I was driving as fast as I dared just to get back so I was unprepared when the the multiple sandy trails, wiggling like snakes of fire in the beams of light, suddenly appeared. Randomly picking one trail of the five or six options available, I steered the car onto the uneven ruts at about sixty miles an hour, bouncing my head to the ceiling. I was jamming the brakes down when the trail dropped out sight in front of me. Turning the car hard to the right, we plowed along the edge of a steep blowout, the wheels trying to claw back onto level ground before we stopped, half teetering over the empty space of a blowout. 
     A blowout occurs when the winds picks away at the side of a dune until it is blown away to form a  steep cliff. My car was balanced on the top, pausing briefly, before tipping over. The sand pressed gently against my window as the car began its sideways roll down to the bottom and ending tipped up on its side. Cliff was laying on top of me, Dick and Billy where mushed together in the backseat.  We crawled  out of the front passenger window, a slapstick comedy of knees and boots on faces and stomachs before we were all collapsed in the silky soft sand outside. The car, which was wedged into a mound of sand at the bottom of the blowout, was immovable so I took off walking towards the ranch, leaving the three of them spread drunkenly on the ground, not caring if there was a tomorrow or not.
     I arrived about two thirty in the morning and slept in full dress, waking up when the others straggled in hours later just in time for work. Being hauled out of the deep pit of sleep made me so nauseous and dizzy I missed the discussion the rest of the crew was having with Phil but assumed the situation was being explained. However, instead of being able to go back to sleep, we wound up sitting at the breakfast table beginning another work day. Considering the murderous howls of the trio the night before, they ate quietly, all prisoners of the same heart, it seemed.
     That day’s job was to rebuild a makeshift bridge that was getting close to the verge of collapse.  Large wooden posts, planks and shovels were loaded into the back of Phil’s truck and we jumped in on top. Phil drove us to the dry river bed that the old bridge was spanning and then later took me to get my car, neither of us talking. A simple tug from his truck was all it took to flip the car back upright. Other than battery fluid leaking out and corroding the fender there was no damage. I drove the car back and joined the gang digging holes for new posts. 
     Later in the morning Phil came driving towards us with Jennie and Mikey inside the truck., Phil got out and walked over to us wearing a vivid purplish red shirt with yellow piping following the edges of the shoulder panels and pockets. He had a bolo tie with a turquoise clasp and his pants were light purple held up by a bright orange leather belt with a palm sized silver engraved buckle. His equally bright orange boots had a reddish brown highlight around the heel and crisp polished toes. I had never seen a color combination like that on any man before; on tv, in books or on posters. “I’m going to the bank to see about getting a loan.” Phil said. “you all finish that bridge.”
     As soon as Phil’s truck dipped behind the first ridge Dick threw down his shovel and said “There is something wrong with that man.” and starting walking back towards the ranch house.  We all followed except for Gene, who asked where we were going. “To take a nap!” Dick said. “Well, I’m staying here.” Gene said. “Go ahead.” Cliff said.
     We gathered underneath the sparse trees and slept on the soft ground like lions. I woke up to the pop of a 22 caliber bullet. Dick was just outside the perimeter of buildings standing next to the small pond throwing glass jars into the air to shoot at. He was using Phil’s pistol. Cliff stood up and watched Dick for a moment then went into the house and came out with his own 22 rifle plus Phil’s .30.30 lever action Winchester and a box of his shells. With the fear of impending lawlessness crawling over my skin I forced myself up and followed, along with Raymond, who was already begging Cliff for a chance to shoot his gun. Cliff handed him his rifle keeping the .30.30 for himself. I could not understand those three, like vampires after blood they only seem to really come alive when they are threatening the natural order of civility. Still exhausted and unstable from the last twenty four hours of disruption, I leaned against the side of an old pickup truck sitting next to the pond. The nose of a large carp broke the surface of the pond and sank back in, its unnaturally large size surprising us all. Underneath the glare of the sun were several large shadows moving just underneath the surface.. The group moved to the opposite side of the pond for a better look while I remained back leaning on the rear fender of the truck absently rubbing the light blue dust of oxidized paint off its surface and wiping it onto my jeans. 
     “Look at the size of those suckers” Dick yelled and suddenly took a shot at one. The glass of the truck’s door cracked like drum and a spiderweb laced hole appeared. I had jumped an antelope’s leap away. After a brief period of excited chatter it was decided the bullet had ricocheted off the surface of the pond straight into the truck. They were gathered together laughing when Dick leveled his pistol at the window. and shot again. The other two joined in and the glass exploded next me in a haze of glitter. A couple of seconds and it was over. I had stood frozen in position shocked how loud it was on the wrong end of a barrel. Across the pond their mouths were making shapes but I heard nothing for the ringing in my ears.
     I was hoping that this spasm of lawless would be enough to calm them down when Cliff raised the .30.30 and shot. The muzzle blast from the big bore gun had made my guts curl up like a burned snail. A big circle of brittle blue paint exploded off the side of the truck door from the impact of the bullet. It was an astonishing demonstration of deadly power. The three of them were dancing in celebration when they spontaneously raised their guns and pointed them at the truck. I sprinted to the side and for the next few seconds the truck door rang like a steel drum as big black holes erupted like craters from the cascade of gunfire. After the big sound came the big silence. 
     Somberly the gang walked around the pond and took a close look at the damage. They were silent, as if the truck were lying in state. The wounds were facing away from the ranch houses so I was thinking that this crime might not detected, at least not today. There had been enough day today already.
     As we walked back towards the ranch house, Dick dropped back and leaned down at the edge of the pond. He worked loose a piece of hard mud and tossed it in a high arch towards Raymond, who was walking on ahead. It was a perfect pitch, descending directly onto Billy’s head at the same time as Dick fired his pistol up into the air. 
     “Oh god, god, god!” Raymond screamed as he stumbled forward onto  his knees, hands hovering over his head as if he were afraid to touch the muddied scalp. “Oh god, oh God!” He wailed, “I’m hit!” Great sobs came out of him like pitched buckets of water. We were stunned motionless as he hollered. Dick quickly ran up and squatted down beside him, throwing his arm over his shoulder hugging him close. “You’re okay,” he said, “you’re not shot, it’s just mud. I threw mud at you, I’m sorry”. Dick stroked Raymond’s head if he were a child. Raymond felt his head gingerly for the first time, as if he expected to find a crater there. “You threw mud at me?” Raymond said. They stood up silently together while Billy picked at his hair Dick gave Billy another hug and said. “It was joke, I’m really sorry man, didn’t think it would scare you so much.” 
     Raymond’s  tore himself away from Dick, whirled and pointed the rifle at him, waving the barrel like a sword. “That hurt!” He screamed. A snarl was eating Raymonds face like flowing magma and I was totally at peace waiting for the show to proceed to the tragic end. It was past due. Cliff walked up to Raymond and said in casual voice close to a sigh, “Let’s just go back to work.” And he took his rifle back. Dick stepped up beside Raymond and threw his arm over his shoulder again and Raymond allowed himself to be tugged into the embrace, reestablishing a link of brotherhood. Remembering my experience with Dick I figured that was just the way he made friends, brutality first and then affection.
     We were walking towards the the broken bridge where Gene was still working by himself when we saw Phil’s truck come over the hill in the distance. Phil stopped the truck in front of us his eyes squinting a question.  “Just finishing a short break.” Cliff said. Phil just stared at him while Jenny kept her head down. “Rough work.” Cliff shrugged.  
“Go back, to the house we have to get to haying. ” Phil said. He turned the truck towards the riverbed where we could see Gene standing on the edge, probably ready to tell the whole story. Who knows what he was thinking listening to all that gunfire. After a silent conversation, Gene climbed in the back and they headed towards the house. Jennie was looking straight at us as they past, catching my eye for a slice of a second.
     We walked to the shed and filled up our water jugs. We used old gallon glass jugs, with the tea cup handles, wrapped in layers of burlap and wet down to keep the water inside cool. Phil came out of house dressed back into his work clothes and marched towards us, his legs slamming into the ground like he was smashing the earth in the face. 
     “Load up the pug” Phil said to the group then turning to me said “You ride in the cab”.  “The pug” was the 4 wheel drive flat bed truck with the engine under the cab. It had sat unused the entire time we had been at the ranch, but this morning after the shooting spree Dick decided it was time to give it a spin. The battery was dead so he decided to try firing it up with rolling start, a common technique used with stick shifts.  His solution was to hook one end of a length of chain to the front axel of the pug, the other to a hitch on the back of the jeep and taking off as fast as he could until the slack in the chain tightened, pulling pug’s axel right off the drive train without budging it an inch. I had never seen Dick laugh so hard. Using the tractor with the plow on front the pug was lifted as we wiggled the axel back into its proper looking place. We were walking towards the bridge when Phil arrived.
   The irony of having to immediately get back into that same truck and face the repercussions of the damage. My hopes that the pug would not start were dashed when Phil got a new battery from the shed and installed it. I crawled into the cab with the resignation of a death row inmate settling into an electric chair. Everyone else hopped in the back as if we would actually be going somewhere. For a few hopeful moments pug refused to start but it just a tease. Phil put her in gear and the pug lurched forward, the cab twisting violently back and forth as the unattached axel twisted beneath us. He shut off the engine and sat in a mystified quiet. “What the fuck?” He said.
     What followed was a vomiting of rage that spattered my face with his spittle. He seemed to recede into the distance as if I were watching him perform on a stage. Then Phil was out of the cab yelling at the crew before I realized he was even gone.
     “Get off the truck,” Phil growled, “put everything in the hay wagon!”  He beat the earth back to the house to get his pickup. Having heard Phil’s assault in the cab, Cliff looked at me with a slight smile and, with the lightest touch, laid his fingertips briefly on my shoulder. It was if God’s finger had finally touched Adam’s. At that moment Cliff graced me with a sense of benevolent protection.
     The hay wagon was a low flat trailer riding only a few inches off the ground. The wheels were in the middle allowing either end to be tipped to the ground like a teeter totter so a haystack could be pushed up onto it. There were tall, removable wooden rails on either end but the sides of the trailer were open. Along with our supplies, we pitched the long mower blades onto the low deck of the tailor, the newly ground edges glistening in the sun like silver jewelry.  Phil hitched his pickup to the trailer while we climbed on its flat bed holding our water bottles. Gene climbed into the cab with Phil and we took off. Within feet the first bump bounced us up off our feet as Phil accelerated across the field. We grabbed hold of the end rails as we ricocheted up and down off the trailer bed watching chains, wrenches, mower bars, water bottles and our own feet hover in front of us before crashing down into a resonant crescendo of percussion before bouncing up again. The mower bars twirled weightlessly like samurai swords in front us before gratefully bouncing off. We screamed in terror for Phil to slow down. He sped up instead, the pickup’s shocks, axles, loose fenders and doors sounding like a punk rock drum roll for a madman’s execution as the wagon was beaten across the rough ground. 
     Cliff climbed up the front rail. At the top, his out-of-the-box hat blew off and there was a moment of calm as we all watched it sail over us into the thick caterpillar of dust trailing behind. Cliff stared back at it, revenge growing in the furrows of his brow. He climbed down onto the trailer hitch and a proper bounce sent him into the pickup bed bed where he picked up a short pipe and threw it through the back window, shattering it. Phil jammed on the brakes plowing to a stop. We all went careening forward, scrambling to get off the trailer as we rolled. We collected ourselves together and, without a word, starting walking back to the ranch. Phil hopped out of the cab. 
“I’ll send you all back to jail Cliff.” He yelled. “You just see if I don’t!” 
     Cliff twirled around and walked back towards Phil, who  stepped back as he approached. After a short pause, Cliff turned back again towards the ranch, walking past all the jettisoned hardware until he came across his hat. He picked it up and we all stood quietly as he dusted it off and put it on. Phil drove past, far off to the side, and on to the ranch house in the distance. 
     I expected Phil to come back with his gun belt strapped on to mow us all down. Let him shoot us, shoot the cows too, the horses, the chickens and the fat fish in the tiny pond. Shoot the little coyote who followed the mowers for wounded morsels to eat. Shoot the clouds, always teasing us with their moist purple underbellies but never delivering the rain. Shoot down the whole damn earth. This time I was ready. 

       Phil never came out of the house as we walked past to our barracks. None us said a word as we jammed the clothes in our bags, double checking under the beds, before pitching everything in my car. As I drove around the house towards the road, Jennie stepped off the porch in front of the car waving for us to stop. She walked up to the passenger door where Cliff sat and handed him a packet of papers. She looked directly at him for a second before turning around and walking back inside. She had handed us our pay that, in our haste, we had forgotten; cash stuffed in envelopes with our names on the outside. The envelope, with my name written in her hand, was kept.
     The car seemed to drift silently over the soft sand as my thoughts consumed with Jennie, who seemed to have just absorbed all the of earth’s beauty and pathos into her body. I knew nothing of her life, where she had come from or what was going to happen to her now. Our silence was broken when the car hit the black top, the landing pad back to the real earth. “God damn it Mom, where’s my breakfast!” Dick snarled. and we all laughed and then they fell asleep leaving me to drive silently back to Alliance to look for another job. 

           The horse I was riding knew a lot more about rounding up cattle than I did so I was unprepared for the horse’s first bolt of speed toward the scattered herd. Knocked backwards, I grabbed the horn of the saddle with both hands to hold myself upright as the back of the saddle seat whipped my butt back and forth, rocking my entire upper body like a throw rug being shaken out. The surprise had snapped my head back, creating the first injury of the day, but the horse cared less about my condition. His focus was on the quickly retreating cows in front of him. The cattle, two thousands pounds apiece, sprinting at full speed, were no longer lazy bovines chewing cud but a thundering herd of frightening beasts. The horse, himself over a thousand pounds of muscle operating at peak performance, raced around them on the upper side of the hill before careening down straight towards the group. Sand flew up all round me from the cattle’s hooves as they scattered in all directions. The horse stopped, twisted, leaped and twirled like Nureyev at the Royal Ballet, cutting off the terrified cows’s retreat one by one and herding them down to gather at the center of the valley before sprinting back up the hill to round up stragglers. The bouncing rump of retreating cows as they dodged this way and that, their heads twisting from side to side to look back in fear was a comical sight. A godly thrill radiated into me from the charging horse as his body compressed and extended like the pounding of the earth’s heart. Necessity and fear had married my body to his, as if my existence here on earth had finally been consummated into a union with nature. I was ecstatic. 
​     I did not deserve to be on that horse because I had zero riding experience but my new boss, Herb Wait, who owned a smaller ranch on the lower Sandhills about twenty miles south of Alliance said I would be fine. Just like that, it was as if I had been plucked up by the nape of the neck and dropped into a cowboy movie. 
    Herb did not look like a cowboy at all. The ordinary straw hat and blue jean bib overalls made him look more like a scarecrow in a cornfield than a rancher. His face was thin with only one front tooth, which looked excessively long hanging down all by itself. With his hat off, his balding scalp was a white, soft circle compared to the leather tan of his face. He was in his early, maybe late, sixties and had a very relaxed manner with a gentle laughter that spilled out at almost every occasion He rolled his cigarettes so loose half the tobacco fell out on the way to his lips where they were lit by large wooden kitchen matches ignited  by lifting his leg and stroking the tip from his butt almost to his knee. Herb’s wife, Millie, was equally sweet and gentle. I never heard a cross word between them even though I lived in their house for the next two summers. 
     The horse I was riding was named Underwear, which Herb said was in honor of all the pairs he had worn out riding over the years. His legs were visibly bowed, proving his claim.  Underwear and Herb may have known each other longer than I had been alive, been on roundups while I was still crawling on the floor. 
      Ed was Herb's full time hired hand. He also dressed in bib overalls, stretched tight from his full belly and appeared to be about Herb’s age. He never conversed, responding only with “Yeps” and “Nopes” to Herb’s comic philosophies. The two of them worked a casual pace and even had a pair of old, overstuffed armchairs in the repair shop for their rest times. Both of them rose at dawn to milk the cows and haul feed to the pigs before breakfast was even served. I did not have the forearm strength to even milk a cow, giving up halfway through my first try. I loved working there, riding fence, fixing the old wooden wind mills, feeding the hogs, mowing the fields and sitting “tall in the saddle” of Herb’s flashy new red International Harvester with a hood so large it looked like the prow of an ocean liner cruising over the grassy fields.  The time at the ranch was peaceful as working in a monastery for the Dali Lama. If I could bring that time to life with words I would because I cherish it so. 
     The three of us spent several days rounding up the cattle scattered across his land. That is all that needs to be told. Most of the imagery is much the same as in the many movies made when the whole country was in love with cowboys. The variation was that the testicles that were tossed in an ice bucket to be fried up by Millie. The delicious baby rocky mountain oysters were usually not a subject that was filmed. Plus, not a single shot was fired on Herb Waits' ranch.
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