suburban cowboy;alone on a Saturday night/ part 3

suburban cowboy; alone on a Saturday night/ part 3

fiction
Edward w Pritchard

Where is it worse for a cowboy to be alone on a Saturday night? The old bunk house or far out on the open range under the stars watching the cattle doze?

In the wobbly shared bunk house it's warm and there is a card game and a few of the boys will fight over communal things involving a woman that happened two years ago down Santa Fe. Out on the expansive ranges it's cool and the fire crackles and there's hard coffee and lazy harmonica music, Clementine or if near a town Camptown Ladies. Someone always spiritedly sings, someone with a grizzled sad face who was in a church choir a long forgiven time ago.

Sometimes you sit all night cramped upright in saddle on your slumping horse passing guard duty or watching stock. A cowboy is always lonesome especially on forgotten Saturday nights and remembers runs of poetry or a woman's voice. Briars and brambles stick at a solitary cowboy and jump from boots to shoulders.

A done in cowboy sleeps a few hours and then listens to crickets and coyotes. His mind is not still. His bedroll is warm but the ground is hard. Each time a cowboy climbs in or out of the bedroll he shakes it out expecting scorpions and rattlesnakes. Small flying insects drop into dusty eyes. At five am another vanished night's ordeal is over. Dawn is preceded by a cold wistful wind then subdued reds fill the lower sky. The last cramped ten minutes sitting upright before rising is devoted to remembering the girl from Los Cruces. Then breakfast always tack biscuits. If at the bunk house, house breakfast is store meat and crisp fried Navaho bread. Either way, thick coffee is brewed with a bent nail in it.

Rainy weather is common in certain months and rain comes early in the morning. The sound of the rain on the prairie is pounding noise rattling everywhere. But first rains patter, as it thumps the dry desolate sod.

If there's no rain and the night is clear the cowboy watches a million stars and vows to learn the names of a few. The panoply of the night sky rotates the sleeping cowboy from place to place across the West.

A cowboy is a romantic. He sees life as he wishes it could be, not as it is, hard and gritty and alone .  A cowboy totes a dilapidated bedroll as he moves about from place to place and his bankroll was spent last Winter when honest work was scarce. Country roads are familiar no matter the State, but always seem to slope uphill now days.