Slim Randles

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. The run, these horse ghosts, with the crazy flight of the stupid and panicked and with all this they are still given a blessed and fire that most men never see in a lifetime. The wild ones still live out there, I know, but I don't. Not anymore. People say you put the wild horses away and save for other nineteen-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 forty 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 like to share it with you.

That was nearly twenty 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 faultfinding 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 ten years ago now.

"Being a man means doing what's necessary," he'd said. "Remember that. Doing what 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.