by Gerald Duff
“How could they?” Jimbo said, thinking chess piece, what kind of a colored boy is this? “You mighty right when you say that. You’re signed on with a new outfit now. You don’t work for the old one no more. You know what happens when a cowboy leaves his old spread and signs up with a new outfit?”
“No sir,” the kid said. He had refused the diet cola Jimbo had offered him and was drinking from a plastic bottle filled with plain water. That too Jimbo wanted to ask about later. Kids want their sugar, they want their caffeine, they want every manner of drugs percolating through their systems. That’s why there’s so much money to be made in the street. Any fool but the federal and state governments knows that. You can’t keep the young off of and away from dope. They will have it, and they will have it now.
“You don’t have to call me sir all the time,” Jimbo said. “You can just say Range Foreman. That’s the name I figure fits me best. But let me tell you what happens when that cowpoke leaves the old outfit for a new one.”
“Tell me, Range Foreman. I’d purely like to know.”
“He shakes hands with the new boss,” Jimbo Reynolds said. “He don’t need no paper with writing all over it and a place for names to be signed. That’s city dealings. That’s what folks do when they’re expecting to get cheated. A cowboy don’t expect that, to be cheated or hornswoggled or two-timed. He ain’t made that way. Understand?”
“I reckon I do, Range Foreman.”
“So what he does after he moves in with a new outfit and they tell cookie to set out an extra plate for him in the bunkhouse, what the cowboy does is he changes the brands on all his gear from the old one to the new one. He will literally take out an old Barlow knife from his kit, and he’ll cut off the old brand from his saddle and his boots and his rifle and wherever else he might have carved it to show what was him in the old life. And then you know what he’ll do?”
“Put the brand from the new outfit on his gear?”
“You got it, son,” Jimbo said. “That’s exactly what he’ll do. He’ll mark his goods just like he’s been marked.”
Jimbo took the last sip from his diet cola and nodded toward the bottle of water the colored kid was holding.
“You want to palaver with the Boss a little more with me here, before we leave the Cathedral and hit them nasty old Memphis streets?”
“Yes sir, Range Foreman,” the kid said. “But first I want to tell you my new name, and see if it’s all right.”
“Everybody’s name is all right,” Jimbo said, “long as it’s really his and he can live with it.” Looking at the kid’s eyes as he waited for him to speak, Jimbo wondered what kind of label he’d come up with. Probably in his case, colored kid he was who’d just been told about black cowboys in the old West, it’d be Ned, or Buffalo Kid or some moniker like that. Derivative, to be expected, worshipful, but hell that was all right. The kid needed to rename himself after the conversion experience he’d been going through, and whatever made him feel whole and a part of the Big Corral would serve. It’d bind him, and this is forevermore a binding game.
“What’s your new name here in the outfit the Boss runs?” Jimbo said, casting his voice in the warm and encouraging range the kid now needed to hear, whether he realized it or not. “Tell me, son.”
“Colorado,” the colored kid had said, holding his bottle of distilled water in his hand there in the steel-sided Cathedral of the Big Corral as though it was a chalice. “Not Randall Eugene McNeill no more, not him, not that one I used to be. He’s dead. Colorado, that’s who I am now. That’s me. Colorado.”
“Colorado, huh?” Jimbo Reynolds had said, wishing he had a little bourbon to mix with the dregs of his diet cola to round things out before he left for the house. “That’s a new one for me, I got to admit. I’ve heard plenty of cowpokes called names like Texas Jack or Montana Slim, and handles like of that. There was even one old boy I run into a long time ago that called himself Louisiana Crawfish. But I got to say I never heard of a cowboy with just the name of a state as his handle. You spent a lot of time in Colorado, son?”
“No, Range Foreman,” the colored kid had said. “I never been anywhere but Memphis and over into Arkansas and down into Mississippi a few times.”
“You just like the way Colorado sounds, then, I reckon,” Jimbo Reynolds said. “Maybe seen pictures of all them pretty mountains and that snow on them.”
“I have, all right,” the colored kid had said, “but that’s not the reason, Range Foreman, that I want my new name to be Colorado. It comes from a movie I saw on TV once, an old one. Now I watch it every time I can find it.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s that?”
“It’s one with John Wayne in it, and some more old guys, but the one they call Colorado, that’s what gave me the idea for my new name.”
“Any picture with John Wayne in it has got to be a good one,” Jimbo said. “He was a true American, a real cowboy. He saw everything clear and called things exactly what they are. He did not pussyfoot around.”
“Ricky Nelson was the one they called Colorado,” the colored kid said. “Nobody respected him at first. They all dissed him, but he ended up being the one that made everything come out right in the end.”
“Colorado,” Jimbo Reynolds had said, “how about letting me introduce you to the Boss by your real name, and then let’s mosey on to the ranch house and put on the feedbag.”
“To your house? I can go with you to your house?”
“Go with me? Lord, Colorado, you got to see where the ranch foreman lives. Every new hand in the outfit needs to go to the ranch house when he signs on.”
The last prayer in the Cathedral with the kid who needed to be called Colorado because of being seized by the idea of some characters in a movie starring that draft-dodger John Wayne had been a good one. And somewhere near the end of the session with the Boss, it came to Jimbo Reynolds that the kid might be useful. He could fetch and carry, he likely had good connections with a black gang or two and with what made them function so well in Memphis – we’re talking non-prescription medications, Jimbo said to himself, chuckling at the phrase as he thought it – and the colored kid needing to enter a new life as a cowpoke named Colorado was obviously crazy enough to be trusted to do what he was told. He compared himself to a chess piece, and he didn’t know anybody in the employ of the Big Corral well enough yet to start plotting against his employer.
That would come with time, Jimbo knew, as it always did with anybody having to depend on somebody else and take orders from above, but there was a window of opportunity when you could get some reliable service out of a new hire for a period. Even a black punk kid from Memphis who thought he had become a cowboy called Colorado.
So on the way to the Nathan B. Forrest Estates, Jimbo Reynolds had stopped at Lil’s Western Emporium on Winchester and outfitted the new hand just signed up with the Big Corral from head to toe. Lil herself had overseen the selection of wardrobe, and she had done a bang-up job, no expense spared, smoking one hand rolled cigarette after the other, chuckling and grunting like a bag lady the whole time like she always did. She sounded to Jimbo like a woman fixing to come any minute but in no hurry to get there. Get into it, girl, he thought. Please yourself, and who’d begrudge you.
By the time Jimbo led Colorado into the counting room of the house at 4 Fallen Timbers and locked the reinforced steel door behind them, the black kid was walking in his new boots as though he’d been born to the saddle somewhere west of Yuma. He’d even spoken to Fulgencia when he met her downstairs in a speech pattern a thousand miles removed from the urban mumble of South Memphis, tipping his hat as soon as he saw the lady, scraping at the floor with his new boots, and howdy ma’aming her like a rodeo rider in town for the bull riding competition.
Like always, Fulgencia had looked at the colored kid in his new outfit and treated him as though not a thing out of the ordinary was taking place before her. Damn, Jimbo thought, that is a virtue and a blessing and a side benefit worth gold
, the way an illegal will tuck tail, tend to business, and never ask a word about anything that pops up in front of her. I could bring in a kangaroo in a cowboy suit and introduce it to her, and this goodlooking Mexican woman would call him mister and offer to shake hands.
“Colorado,” Jimbo Reynolds said, gesturing toward the expanse of the counting room and all it held, “could you give me a hand with some chores here? We got some work to do, if you’d throw in with me on it. The Boss has give us a job that needs tending to. It has to do with children. It’s kind of an outreach program.”
“I guarantee I can,” Colorado had said, slapping his gloves against the palm of one hand, “just show me what needs doing, Range Foreman.”
TWENTY-ONE
Colorado
The first thing that had popped into Randall Eugene McNeill’s mind when he knew he was entering a new life surprised him. Why would it be that, he asked himself, a thing so small in the scheme of change that was coming over him and transforming him into a new man that it shouldn’t have registered in his thinking at all?
Was he really so limited in his ability to comprehend the implications of events that he would worry about what he should be wearing on his feet? It didn’t make sense, and it certainly wasn’t a subject he would ever raise with the Range Foreman. That was a solid fact he knew he could hold on to. If he let the Range Foreman know that he was wasting the power of his mind by thinking about footwear, he would for certain be pegged as a cowpoke not serious about the real responsibilities of his new life. And he had to have a new life which left behind the old one where Randall Eugene McNeill lived and had done that thing he did. He had to kill the old self and let the new one be born. He was being moved to a new location on the board, and it was his responsibility to understand and accept what the moving hand had done.
But there it was, what he was thinking about, and Randall Eugene couldn’t get it out of his mind. Footwear. He was afraid of how wearing cowboy boots would affect him. Would they feel funny on his feet? Would they pinch his toes, the way they came to a point in front? What about the hard high heels, elevated in a way no other shoes he’d ever worn before had been? Would he have the sensation he was always tipping forward as he walked? Would he feel that he was about to fall every step he took? Would having to compensate for a different angle and the lack of a soft cushioned support make him walk funny? Would he have to think too much about himself because of what he was walking around in?
He knew what Air Jordans and Eclipse Supremes had done in the past for his stride and his look as he glided in a controlled step. What had carried him in the old life let him forget some small part of having to think about what it was to be Randall Eugene McNeill.
That was always the hardest thing, the thoughts that wouldn’t let him go to sleep at night, and when he finally did, would give him dreams to wake him into the dark place where only he was, no one else to think about, no other thing to put his mind on to give him some relief from being who he was.
They all saw him all the time, and he knew that they were watching, and that made him watch himself, and that was the last thing he wanted to see and have to think about. No more moving on his own, that was what he craved, and that was what the Boss and His Range Foreman would do for him.
So when the Range Foreman took him into the store on Winchester filled with the clothes cowboys wore, Randall Eugene was afraid to look at anything the old white woman with the cigarette hanging out of her mouth showed him in any more than short snatches of attention. It seemed that if he let his eyes focus for more than a second or two on any item she put before him – the bright shirts with snap buttons, the jeans with what she called a boot cut, the bandannas to tie around your neck, the leather chaps worked with silver studs and fringes, the cowboy hats with different creases that made them have names like Tulsa and Dallas and High Country – any glance that Randall Eugene allowed to linger for a space would pull at him and tug him back into being the man he wanted to escape the mind and body of.
“Give him a Fort Worth roll,” the Range Foreman had said. “That hat crease is just right for him. That hat says Colorado this is you.”
And when the Range Foreman said that, the pressure eased and the things outside Randall Eugene backed off, and their power to pull at him weakened, and the material of the cowboy clothes and their colors and the metal of the fasteners and the leather of the fringes and the belts and the boots became just stuff, and Colorado knew he was Colorado. He adjusted the Stetson so that it set forward a little on his head, and the cowpoke looking back at him from the mirror was inside him and lived there and didn’t have to think about doing that. He held on to himself and where he was in the dressing room and in the building and in Memphis, Tennessee, and in the squares of the pattern on the streets he could see all around him and everywhere in the world, and he did all that just by being there.
Colorado took a deep breath and let it ease out as he turned to face his Range Foreman.
“See what I told you, Lil,” the Range Foreman said. “That cowboy right there with the Fort Worth roll to his headgear is Colorado, and he’s looking right at us.”
“Yep,” the woman had said, stubbing out her cigarette in an ashtray made from a black cooking kettle. “I reckon he is. Now you going to want to try on some boots, I expect. I got some real nice snakeskin dudes over here for y’all to look at. Prime hides.”
“No, Lil,” the Range Foreman said. “Colorado ain’t looking for no show boots. He wants him some footwear fit for working cattle in brush country. Where’s your bullhide selections?”
So the boots themselves made no demands, asked no notice, and from the time Colorado followed the Range Foreman out of the cowboy store to get into the car for the ride to the spread belonging to the Big Corral, Colorado was at home in his walk, in his garments, in the pattern, and in himself.
“Range Foreman,” he said, thinking how to put what he meant in the right words, “I want to thank you for the clothes, and the hat, and the belt.”
“Don’t thank me, Colorado,” Jimbo Reynolds said. “I’m just doing what the Boss said, what he always says. Outfit the new cowboy, that’s what He requires of us. Give the new hand what he needs to do his job. That’s all the Boss asks, and that’s all I’m doing.”
“Yessir, Range Foreman,” Colorado said. “I’m much obliged.”
“Colorado, I tell you what. We all are,” Jimbo Reynolds said. “Let’s get on to the house. Lord, that Fort Worth roll looks good on your head.”
***
Now in the counting room of the range headquarters of the Big Corral, Colorado moved around inside himself with an ease and thoughtlessness he’d never felt before. Don’t think about that, he told himself as he sat before a table covered with roughly stacked piles of currency, most of it crumpled and turned randomly in every direction, ones mixed with fifties, tens, and fives and even an occasional two mingled with hundreds, don’t think about not thinking. If you think about something that isn’t, then what is can come to life and stick up in your path like a gravestone in the weeds.
Don’t think, but don’t think that you’re not thinking.
“It’s a satisfaction to me to see you working here beside me, Colorado,” Jimbo Reynolds said. “I purely love to watch a young hand take on a job and just settle into it. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Yessir, Range Foreman,” Colorado said, looking at his hands sort through the pile of bills before him, turning each one so that the presidents all looked in the same direction and lay precisely atop the one beneath and the ones his hands placed steadily above. “I believe I do understand you.”
Colorado allowed a small tendril of admiration for the way his hands were working curl up from somewhere inside the center of his mind. That should be all right, he told himself, a cowpoke taking pride in what his hands could do. They were his hands, addressing a task given him, and he was a hand himself. That’s what the Range Foreman called him, so his mind could contain
the pride he felt and let it grow a little. Just keep it small. Keep it inside the fence it lived in. It’s only a hand. It can’t think. It can only do.
“A cowpoke doing a job,” Jimbo Reynolds said, “tending to his business, giving the Boss a good day’s work for his upkeep and his wages, that’s one of the prettiest things I believe He gives us in all His creation. We don’t need nothing else.”
“Yessir,” Colorado said, thinking I can even listen to what the Range Foreman is saying to me and talk back to him myself, and watch my hands still doing their job, and it’s all one thing. It’s all holding together. “I believe I know what you mean, Range Foreman.”
“A course you do, Colorado,” Jimbo Reynolds said. “Your inner cowboy is coming out, and he’s showing his hand, and it is a full house, not a card lacking. The deal has done favored him.”
How does he know that, Colorado asked himself, how does he see what’s in my head and how all the parts of me are coming into one thing I can live with? I reckon it’s because he’s the Range Foreman, and he knows what he’s supposed to know. He’s doing what he is.
“You keeping your count, Colorado,” Jimbo Reynolds said. “I can tell you are, because you’re paying attention, and you’re being careful, and you’re being dutiful in the performance of your chore. You’re cowboying up every minute you’re doing your job. You’re letting the Boss see what He wants to see in a man.”
“Thank you, Range Foreman,” Colorado said, observing the true deft movements of his hands among the bills. “I want to do just that. I want to cowboy up all the way.”
“You showing me something, Colorado,” Jimbo Reynolds said, “and you’re showing the Boss, too. Lord, I love the way these love offerings to Him smell. Some just call it the scent of money. To me, it’s like sage blossoms in the spring when the wind moves over them. They look like blue bonnets ruffling in the breeze, them bills, the way you’re putting them in place in the good old way like the Boss purely wants them.”