Page Title

                                                                  Dogs around the sun
                                                                  cats around the moon
                                                                  I’ll ride that pony
                                                                  ‘long about June

     It is a curse, in a way, but a beautiful, seductive curse.
The horses come in the night now. They come in the night some of the time, but more often just before dawn, that time
when I used to get up and stumble out of the bunkhouse into the frosty snap of a desert morning. But now it’s just an
early morning curse, coming when my wife is asleep next to me, and the false dawn is just a streetlight outside. It is
then the horses come, pounding through my memory with the same ferocity they once had when I was in the saddle.
They run, these horse ghosts, with the crazy flight of the stupid and panicked, and with all this they are still given a
blessed grace and fire that most men never see in a lifetime. The wild ones still live out there, I know, but I don’t got a
loose hanging there. Not any more. People say you put the wild horses away and save them for other 19-year-old
boys. People say you move to town, marry a good woman and go to the office every day. People say this is maturity,
and maturity is a good thing.
People …
But people haven’t been there, haven’t seen the frosty breath of wild horses rise like fog on a sagebrush flat on the
desert mountain ranges. People haven’t sat there, holding a big roping horse quiet, both of you with muscles clenched
as you reach for that rope and build a loop, just the right-sized loop, praying the horses won’t see the movement or
sense your position behind the hill.
Life is comfortable now. You see, the memories don’t shortchange a man enough to mask the way it really was in
other ways, too. The cold mornings when the bedroll felt too nice to leave, the sudden violence when a colt slams you
to the ground, the rides through the wind and the snow. Memory doesn’t let you forget being broke, either, or not
knowing what in the world would ever become of you. It wouldn’t let you forget the times you looked at the old
bunkhouse cowboys, who had nothing in their lives but a wire-patched pickup truck and an old cowdog, and
wondering whether that would be you in another 40 years. And it didn’t let you forget the terrible loneliness of being
by yourself in that bedroll and wondering if there was any woman anywhere on earth who might want to share it with
you.
That was nearly 20 years ago. The woman next to me is the third to share my name in these years. The two young
children in the other bedroom carry another man’s name, but I am the guy who gets to take them on picnics and listen
to their problems. These are gems of life more precious than diamonds.
There are children with my name, too, but they live in other places with other men. They can be found only on
telephone lines and on an occasional weekend when it suits their mothers. The bitterness is mostly gone now. Left in
its place is just the constant dull pain that won’t quiet down. The fault finding is over. It was my fault. All of it. It’s
easier that way. And it’s just wait and call, and be alone and daydream of sharing a home with them someday.
A man I love and admire took me to one side at a family picnic 10 years ago now.
“Being a man means doing what’s necessary,” he’d said. “Remember that. Doing what’s necessary.”
So now I work for a magazine in the city and drive back and forth every day and do what’s necessary. But it’s not
bad. There’s always Jan at home, with a smile softer and more knowing than angels. And there are the kids, too, and
being called “Pop,” and going places on weekends.
If there’s some hassle at the office, it’s nothing a real High Sierra packer can’t handle, even if he wears a necktie now.
There are always those Friday nights when a guy can have a beer and tell stories about the mountains and the mules
and the horses and men whose lives touched his and he wonders whether they believe him, but he’s had two beers
and doesn’t give a damn.
So now sometimes I lie awake and hear Jan breathing softly and sweetly beside me and try to fight the images of
those horses racing down the arroyos in wild panic. Jan is my lodestone, my center. I try to forget how it felt to have a
thousand pounds of roping horse beneath me, and how it was to be part of that horse as we gained slowly on the
stragglers. I try to concentrate on the next month’s issue of the magazine or the little bed of irises I’m trying to grow,
and put in a dark corner the feel of the nylon three eigths catch rope as it flies forward past the hammered-flat ears of
my horse and flares to encircle the neck of a running mustang. I try to think of how sweet Jan looks in the mornings
with her sleepy smile and forget the exhilaration of a large wild animal slamming into the end of that rope, spinning
around and screaming.
Damn these hauntings! There should be an anti-memory pill for ex-cowboys. You think of a horse … hey, drop one
of these babies and wait 20 seconds and the desert haze disappears and the smog and traffic return.
It would keep a man’s mind on the traffic instead of looking at a sour dark cloud over Los Angeles and being taken
from the center lane to the back of a gentle horse moving slowly down the darkly canyon trails as the sun kisses the
faraway Inyos goodnight like a gift to a blazing whore. And then I could hear the radio news instead of the horses and
mules snuffling for the morals full of rolled barley we hung on their heads. I’d listen to the horns honking, instead of the
creaking of the packs on the mules as each slid down a piece of slick rock on the high switchbacks.
But it’s too easy to recall the ribald lies that made weary cowboys laugh with eyes red from too many hours in the
saddle. When I step on the gas, I can still feel the coiled-spring tension of the bronc as I ease my spurs up over the
shoulders and nod for the gate. On drives home in the rain, I can almost trade the rhythm of the wipers for the hooves
of my horse picking its way down the trail, the sheen on the glass lets me feel again the jet of icy water pouring off the
funnel of my hat brim onto the neck of my horse as the light fails down the mountain toward the fog-shrouded lights of
the pack station.
It is a disease, a lingering malady nearly invisible to others who don’t have it. It is a disease that sits just below the
surface, waiting for its chance to break out again and ruin a guy’s carefully thought-out life. It is a disease caught by
just a few. Just a few of the luckiest, most blessed people in the world.
And in these soft hours of morning, when the lacy curtains begin to take form and when the pictures of the children on
the dresser still show only as silhouettes … in this most vulnerable of times in a man’s day … the horses come. Those
beautiful blessed damned horses that a man will never see again.
And if a guy should lose a tear or so in mourning, please look the other way. The horses would understand, but no
one else would.
As I stir, an arm reaches across my chest, warm from sleep, and that sweet smile hits me, and the horses vanish like
smoke from a dream fire.
“You awake already, Buck?” she says.
And I just nod and smile, and then I lie there basking in the feel of her arm across my chest and listen as her breathing
becomes steady in sleep again. It’s like a promotion, isn’t it? Horses to this. I’ve been promoted, and I deserve it.
A man does what is necessary.
I should’ve known it was too good to last.

                                              Chapter Two

Reality hit just inside the door of the office. Grab coffee, loosen tie, here it comes.
The big eight-page section? The one that goes in the middle of the book? No sign of it. We’re two days from shipping
this issue and no sign of it. What’s worse, of course, is we’ve cover blurbed this thing in living color with a big yellow
splash just above the flag, which has to be done long before the magazine is shipped to the printer because the cover’s
in four color on heavy slick and is done on a Miehle press and you just have to know what you’re going to have inside
when you ship it.
No sign of it. Nothing. No phone call. Eight pages with a cover blurb and a big yellow splash, and that yellow splash
will be my ass if something doesn’t come through. Called the writer’s house in Wyoming and his wife said he was off
fishing someplace, she thinks, and she doesn’t know if he shipped the story to us or not because he’s always writing
things for magazines and sending things off and who can keep track of all of it, and why doesn’t he want to get a real
job anyway, and she thinks he may be home Friday sometimes, but don’t count on it because you never can tell about
him but I can try then, anyway, and what was my name again?
That’s great. Big old splash right on the cover. Everything a man ever wanted to know about canoes. Turn to the
middle of the magazine for the whole scoop.
It means either that story comes in tomorrow, and then gets edited, set in type and pasted up overnight, or it doesn’t
come in at all, and we ship a damn magazine with eight blank pages in the middle, or I can write the sucker myself, if I
knew anything about canoes, and I don’t. Or, I can get on the horn and try to find another outdoor writer in the
country or in the damn world who knows as much about canoes as this idiot in Wyoming does and ask him to write
some 5,000 words about canoes and ship it overnight to us, and that means paying him about double what we’d
ordinarily pay and what the hell would that do to the working budget?
And if the story from Wyoming comes in tomorrow and I’ve already found someone else to write it, that means
paying a total of three times the usual amount for a story.
So I make some decisions which I trust will get us out of this jackpot, Good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, and
I take another half pill right after lunch, but it’s not helping much. I’d go for a walk, but the whole thing would fall apart
if I did. The art director can’t find a rifle line-up photo for javelina for that piece that was supposed to be sent over in
galleys from the typesetters today, and we’ve had to redesign a waterfowl story twice today because the photos were
lousy. We had good ones in stock, but they had the hunters shooting off the page, and if they’d been shooting
doubles, I’d have flopped them, but one guy had an autoloader and every hunter in the world knows they don’t make
that model left-handed and we’d get mail saying we don’t know ducks from sour squab, and I’d be honor bound to
print them, and I can’t handle a bunch more of that.
So on top of everything else, Andrea sticks her head in my office and says, “I’m sorry to bother you, Buck. I know
this is a bad time, but there’s a guy on the phone who says he’s Ol’ Smoke and he has to talk to you because it’s a
matter of life or death.”
She looks at me for a minute. “You know someone named Ol’ Smoke?”
Well, as a matter of fact, I do.