Once There Was a Cowboy

“The falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…”

-Yeats

Jack and No Name wandered far. They had no destination, they just rode. Southwest they traveled, and in another place and time Jack would have gloried in those mild spring days replete with gentle rain and ethereal desert blooms. He barely noticed the splendor through which they rode. Refreshing rivers leapt and sang where in only a few short months would lie sun-blanched arroyos as dry and silent as bone, stunning scented flowered displays springing forth as though conjured and normally secretive desert creatures capering about openly. It was as though the rocks themselves shouted out their joy.

The oven door slammed open, however, as they passed through Southern Idaho, the summer heat arriving with a vengeance, as though it had burst through containment and roared through the gates of hell itself. Jack grew thin, and his clothing faded in the unrelenting sun. To the west, the jagged tops of the Sawtooth range loomed like embattlements as rider and horse moved like gaunt shadows in the deepening heat and gloom of those forlorn peaks. For several nights a lone wolf trailed the pair, his howls mournful at the rise of the moon, but there was no answer, and soon they saw and heard him no more.

There were no answers for Jack either, as he tried to make some sense of his losses. The reality was he’d never recovered from his tragic parting with Suzanne, and really, who could blame him? In one dizzying free fall, Jack had lost his innocence, his purity, his integrity, his life’s ambition, the woman he loved and his child. He’d been turned into a covert liar with nothing to lose and nothing to gain. In Jack’s mind, he was a nobody. His relationship with Utah, and the desire to live up to his friend’s belief in him had allowed Jack to maintain a tenuous grasp on his self-respect and ultimately, his faith. Then Utah was gone. Why would God have taken Utah, and not him? It made no sense at all. Jack had nothing left to offer anyone, yet God had taken Utah and left Jack here- alone, weak, lost, worthless. Sifted.

The days rolled on endlessly, and the shards of Jack’s faith withered in the sun-torched and barren landscape. He now questioned God’s integrity, his honesty and his love, and his anger rose with the desert heat, and by degree he grew wild in his pain and sorrow. The questions and misgivings turned to railings against the God he’d followed so diligently, and for so long. In withering temperatures, the man cried out in anger and shouted blasphemies. Dust devils snaked and demonic mirages shimmered and danced in delight at the collapse of the man’s faith. At last, his voice a dry croak, he lapsed into silence, as empty as the dry and cracked water holes and cisterns they passed.

They followed the furnace-scorched desert flats through Northern Nevada, and the heat-etched basins offered no respite there. Cloudless skies and the relentless sun’s rays pounded and baked and rolled like waves of hellfire over the pair. Sinewy corded mountain ranges loomed purple and grey in the distance, wavering and hazy, and nights on the volcanic escarpments offered only slightly cooler temperatures. There was little water, and only the occasional wasted stream or cattle watering station kept them from drying up and blowing away along with the sage and dust that ran before the never-abating winds that swept those ranges. Jack would throw himself down to his knees then, and gulp the brackish water- not unlike one of the half-wild cattle that moved reluctantly out of the pair’s path in that wild and desolate country. The Tuscaroras, Santa Rosas, Jackson, Black Rock and Granite mountains were not kind to travelers in the heat of summer...