The Modern Cowboy

by Jordan Dilley

In our house, nostalgia is a religion and John Wayne is our God. Minor deities include Audie Murphy, Robert Mitchum (the one that looks like Dean Martin, but is not), Walter Brennan, and a host of others who have been dead for at least twenty years. A stack of DVDs and video cassettes, flashy sleeves faded and frayed at the edges from repeated removal, flank the TV cabinet. A novelty print with the typical cactus in the foreground, sunset mesa in the background, complete the shrine that is at odds, vying for attention with the chintz sofa and matching curtains.

When TCM and AMC, the primary traffickers in leather holsters and bucking ponies, host cowboy movie marathons, Mack settles into the corduroy recliner. The lines between Mack’s eyebrows soften and his grip around the silver can of beer loosens. If my brother Charles or I are dragged into it, Mack’s insistence that “This is culture!” and “You gotta see the Duke in this one,” it’s an afternoon spent pinned to the brown shag carpet, following a story line that never changes. Bad guys start problem in rough western town. Good guy who’s struggling with a personal problem (at least in the later, more sophisticated films, according to Mack), makes bad guys go away. Good guy secures love interest. Tidy.

Charles, who is more acquiescent to these afternoons then I am, holds a wooden pistol and fires pretend shots into the TV. The shiny metal lever clicks each time he releases the trigger. He begged our mom to buy him a BB gun, to which she said, “Over my dead body.” Charles said that could be arranged, and pointed his wooden pistol at her abdomen. Mack whipped the toy out of Charles’ hands and raised it above his head like he would knock some sense into him. Mom’s open mouth look of shock stopped him, so he threw the pistol into the alley dumpster instead. Charles dove into that dumpster when he was supposed to be getting ready for bed, retrieved the pistol, and hid it under his bed. Only in the last few days has he dared wield it publicly. 

Mom, who is cutting coupons from the Sunday paper and chain-smoking Pall Malls (but with the fan blowing towards the open window for our health), doesn’t bat an eye. As if she’s made peace with the possibility that Charles might turn serial-killer one day, she yells at Mack to turn the volume down.

I join mom in the kitchen and sit opposite the nicotine draft. 

She casually shows me a coupon. “Fifty cents off that fiber cereal.” Regularity is just one of the ways she tries to offset the tar building up in her lungs. 

“Here,” she says, shoving a pile of papers toward me. She hands me a pair of scissors, then sits back and takes a long drag. Tendrils of smoke branch until they reach her curly hair, seeping into the spirals. I flip through the paper, cutting coupons for frosted cereals, bags of potato chips, things I know she won’t buy. 

The sounds of hooves stampeding, men yelling, and Winchesters drift in from the living room, riding a nicotine Jetstream out the window. Mom scowls and rubs her temples. “Every day it’s the same. Why can’t he watch a ballgame once in a while?”

She looks at the half-empty pack of Pall Malls and sighs. They aren’t as good as the Camels she used to smoke; she claims the nicotine is lower. But they’re cheap enough that she can smoke a pack and a half every day without Mack getting mad. Apparently, he doesn’t have a problem with secondhand smoke, or if he does, he sees it as a minor risk, like retrieving a piece of burnt toast from the toaster.

In the pile of coupons, I find an advertisement for an upcoming gun show. Shit brown lettering tells of a two-day extravaganza held at the fairgrounds featuring a raffle and a performance by a western group called Sonny’s Boys. Whoever made the flyers even burned the edges to make them look more authentic. 

Mom sees the flyer and snatches it out of my hand. “That’s the last thing I need,” she says, crumpling it into a ball and tossing it into the trash can before Mack can see it.

When he moved in with us two years ago, Mack suggested a gun for home protection. “Just a little Glock, keep it on the top shelf of the closet,” he said. Mom wouldn’t hear of it. What if one us kids accidently shot ourselves? Or someone stole it and committed a crime? Mack waved her questions away without answering them, but she won in the end. 

Next Saturday I’m sitting on the back porch, watching Charles aim his pistol at a row of soda cans. I imagine he’s a good shot by the look of intense concentration on his face, but I suppose I’ll never know for sure.

Mack saunters out the back door, Stetson half-cocked. “Got a surprise for you guys,” he says, grinning. 

I raise my eyebrows skeptically. The only surprises we’re accustomed to aren’t exactly grinning affairs. Like when mom brought Mack home after meeting him at the gas station where she bought her smokes and Mack bought his chaw. We hadn’t seen hide nor tail of our father in years, but that didn’t mean we were eager for a new one, especially one whose teeth were stained by chewing tobacco. 

“Round up your brother and meet me in the car,” he says without further explanation.

I have an inkling of where we’re going, and when Mack pulls into the dusty fairground parking lot, a huge banner, flapping in the summer breeze, spans the entrance to the fairground arena: 

21st ANNUAL GUN SHOW

ALL AGES WELCOME

RAFFLE DRAWING AT 2PM, CHANCE TO WIN WINCHESTER MODEL 1892

After paying for our tickets, Mack makes a beeline for the jumbo pickle jar stuffed with little red tickets. He makes us write his name on all our raffle tickets before stuffing them into the middle of the jar.

We stand at the alley entrance, waiting for Mack to make a move. He rubs his hands together like he does when Rio Bravo flickers to life on the TV screen. But Mack’s eyes shift from booth to booth, overwhelmed. For all his posturing, this insurance man is out of his element. I know I should intervene, save Mack with some comment about how large the event is, or suggest we claim our seats at the stage where the Sonny Boys are setting up, but it’s like I’m watching Mack’s dilemma on the other side of a glass, a firm and appreciated barrier. 

In the end, it’s Charles pulling Mack’s arm toward a booth selling BB guns that saves him. Charles salivates over a row of shiny Daisys, his fingers grazing the barrels with reverence. Mack is discussing the different makes and models with the salesman who insists Daisys are the perfect “gateway gun,” a phrase even Mack frowns at. 

“I wish I could buy you one,” Mack finally says, hand on Charles’ shoulder, “but your mom would kill me.”

“We don’t have to tell her about it,” Charles says, the polished butt of an 880 multi-pump pneumatic shining in his eyes. 

I put my hands on their backs and steer them toward an innocuous booth of nylon holsters, free monogramming included. Mom would fly off the handle and throw Mack out if Charles came home toting one of those, and Mack’s portion of the rent is the only thing keeping us in our two-bedroom clapboard. 

While we’re at the booth, Charles casting longing glances at the Daisy bb guns, a man wearing a polo and khakis throws his arm over Mack’s shoulder.

“Present for Caroline, or yourself?” he asks, pointing to the pink holster Mack is holding.

Mack rolls his eyes. “Didn’t think this was really your scene, James.”

“Oh, it’s not,” James says, eyes rolling over a group of camo-clad men. “But everyone needs a little life insurance, especially with guns in the house.”

Mack frowns at the implication that all gun owners are a claims adjustment waiting to happen. James drones on about work, asking Mack why he isn’t handing out his card, all the while implicating that he’d be better at his job if he just put in the extra effort. “Can’t make top in sales without a little hustle,” James says. 

Mack ignores James. He works to live, not the other way around, Mack tells him during a lull. James shrugs, reminds him of an important meeting on Monday about policy changes, and walks off. Mack half-heartedly leads us on, but when he lingers over a cross-stitch of cowboy boots, I know the wind has gone out of his sails.

We snag a few seats for the Sonny Boys, three white bearded men in Wranglers and black suede vests, with a guitar and harmonica. When they start singing “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me,” tears form in Mack’s eyes and trail down his cheeks. He blots them away with the hem of his shirt and clears his throat. I reach into my jeans pockets for a crumpled tissue, but before I can offer it to him, Mack is standing up. The Sonny Boys end their set to scattered applause. We head to the exit, Mack telling me to meet them in the car when I say I’m going to the bathroom.

When I get back to the car, Mack has the windows rolled down and is singing along to the radio. Charles is smiling in the backseat, bouncing on the gray upholstered seat, a far cry from the hangdog expression on his face from earlier. When we get home, Charles throws open the car door and races to the trunk. Mack opens the trunk and hands him a long slender box with “Daisy” emblazoned on the side.

“While I was in the bathroom?” I ask.

“Please don’t tell your mother.” Mack is watching Charles who is already ripping the box apart, bits of red cardboard scattering in the driveway. Mack’s hands are twitching like he wants a turn with the BB gun.

“Oh, I won’t have to tell her,” I say as Charles takes off through the back gate, a plastic container of BBs bouncing in his pocket. A minute later we hear the decided ping of a BB finding its target. Chances are, by the time mom gets home from work, they’ll be a dozen pockmarks in the fence and some on the outside of the house.

“He wanted one so bad,” Mack says, quietly. “Look how happy it’s made him,” he adds as Charles whoops after another ping. 

For the next hour until mom gets home, Mack watches Charles shoot cans, rocks—anything that can be propped against the fence—until he runs out of BBs, slapping his legs whenever Charles makes a particularly impressive shot. By the time they come in, Mack is whistling one of the songs from the gun show and telling Charles they’ll have to pick up some more BBs soon.

Like I predicted, when mom gets home, she explodes on Mack. In-between shrieks I catch phrases like “enabling him,” “wishful thinking,” and “psychotically obsessed.” Mack’s mumbled responses don’t travel through the kitchen door where I’m listening, ears straining against the lacquered wood. When he walks through the door, he doesn’t notice me, standing off to the side, a guilty eavesdropper. 

He collapses on the couch and stares so long at the sunset mesa on the wall I get worried. I turn on the TV and switch the channel to AMC where thankfully a group of pony straddling, scruffy jawed cowboys are chasing a pack of outlaws. I stare at Mack, hoping their predictable antics will soothe him. He finally fixates on the TV, cowboys riding their ponies against a backdrop of big sky. 

“If you look at the horizon, you can see powerlines,” he says, before his eyes wander back to the mesa on the wall.

Jordan is a writer living in the Pacific Northwest who holds an MA in literature. Her fiction has appeared in Orson’s Review, Potato Soup Journal, and is forthcoming in The Woven Tale and The Bookends Review. She is the author of a novel.