It was a long time ago now, when the mustangs still ran wild along the banks of a river we knew by sight but not by name in the foothills of the Nevadas. Some folks said the whole herd’s chief lineage was a bunch of escapees from the old Comstock Lode mines; horse flesh too clever to be contained by the likes of men who spent most of their time under the earth, the rest getting drunk enough not to remember it.

            Others said the biggest of them were Spanish blood, from the days of the conquistadors in their funny tin helmets. When we were going out there back then, some still stood seventeen, eighteen hands if they were a foot. They’d crush a man and roll away with a snigger if a buster who didn’t know his grip and prayers was fool-stupid enough to try his luck.

            The station wagon bounced across the hardpan same as it always did, that last time we went out, and those few days stand out in my mind as scenes chiseled into marble, like picture-panels in the train stations of my childhood.

            In the front seat, shotgun side, Billy spoke.

            “We’re here, fellers.”

            I looked around. The sun stood tall and the sky, cloudless as it was, offered no sanctuary. A man’s soul could only stand naked out here. Billy was right. We were there.

            It was Billy Sykes knew a fella who knew a fella who knew a rancher with too much land and too few hands come back to the range after the war, and for a few sweet years for a few weeks each year, we’d all pile up in Duck Carver’s old wagon with the rotted door panels and head for the nameless river at the edge of the mountains.

            We’d go down there together, but it’d be Billy that called us, his warbly tobacco chewer’s drawl letting us know the dates, the plans, the headcount we were expected to bring in. In them days those horses were nothing but a nuisance to men like that rancher. For us, they could be half a year’s earnings, if we chose the right ones for our own.

            That was the deal with the rancher, the man with too much—wrangle enough of his ferals to keep the government boys off his back for destruction of federal grazing lands, we got to keep as many as we wanted, long as we moved’em. A good deal, especially when most cattle men thought that knowing a ribeye from a sirloin meant they could pick a winner for the rodeos.

            When the government boys came around the next year, the cycle would repeat, Billy calling me and Duck, Esteban Corillo, who we’d met in the service, and if he could be found sober enough Watley Janes would come along, sweating out liquor on the ride down—but then for a few days in the nowhere his eyes would be clear of some of the worry they’d held since he’d come home. 

            I reckon all of us wondered if our eyes cleared up like Watley’s when we were out there, but none of us ever mentioned it. I figure none of us wanted the answer.

            Duck did the driving; he’d gotten addicted to it in the Army motor pool and he felt safest behind the wheel of something that could move, preferably fast and away from whatever there was to come that maybe he couldn’t see. It was a long drive, but after he near about slapped Billy the first time out for suggesting he ought to take a spell, none of us ever brought it up again.

            Billy would always sit up front, looking for some station on the radio dial that might get us half a Benny Goodman number. It’d be me and Esteban in the backseat; if Wat was there we’d wedge him up between us. I don’t know how many times Watley drooled on one or the other of us, sleeping it off between our shoulders like that. I stopped counting after the first ride down.

            Watley never asked for a drop in the Nevadas, never cracked open the little tin flask he kept around. When on the way back he’d buy a pint of good bottled-in-bond to nip at, it wasn’t anything for the rest of us to say nothing about.

            We went down earlier than usual that year, the land hot. Watley was along, snoring between me and Esteban as we played cards in silence, listening to the sounds of the high-frequency broadcasts Billy would stumble across.

            Esteban and I had marched half of Europe together, and that’s no comment on a thing except that play cards with a fella in a foxhole when the ground can become shrapnel, and you learn to not mind playing in silence. Esteban was the quietest of us, but he was the only one of us then with a wife who still seemed to like him at home, and a kid he could sit with without yelling at or sobbing randomly, even if he didn’t remember how to play.

            “Yep, we’re here, boys,” Duck echoed. He didn’t drop the car out of gear yet.

            “Well let’s head on down a little spell here, off the left up there, you see? Go off that way, let’s see what there is this year,” Billy said in his rushing way. He loved to direct things, Billy, even if he wasn’t so good with anything but horseflesh.

            Duck was an amiable sort, the type of fella who didn’t mind taking orders not because he liked being bossed around, but because he liked knowing what was what. He goosed the pedal a bit more in low gear and the old Plymouth lurched over the ruts, Esteban’s six horse trailer with our own mounts in it screeching on its springs behind us.

            We’d load the trailer twice, maybe three times for ourselves, but never took more than three new horses to a man. None of us needed more than three, couldn’t’ve handled more than that at a time even if we’d wanted to. There was money in breaking the right ones if you knew folks as wanted them, but take on more than three and the margins got slim quick. 

            Cresting to the area we always camped, Duck stopped the car abruptly.

            “Jesus God,” he said quietly.

            Maybe it was his tone, but we all looked forward, wary.

            I said nothing when I saw them before us, didn’t know there was anything to say. A choking, wet sound came from Billy’s throat; I expect he’d swallowed a bit of his chaw. He did that often when he was surprised, Billy. I always thought it would kill him someday, often took the chance to kid him so. Billy actually died when he shot himself in the autumn of 1961, but that’s a different story.

            “Dios mio,” Esteban said softly.

            Just coming around, it was hungover Wat that said it best.

            “Well I think, boys…boys, I think that’s about the prettiest thing I ever seen in my whole miserable life.”

            He was crying, and we all knew it. We said nothing.

            There was no further for the Plymouth to drive. The horses began just some twenty or thirty yards beyond where Duck had stopped the car, barely acknowledging us, only the nearest flicking up their dark eyes from the sweetgrass they came here for. They stretched like one vast coil of chestnut and raven muscle, their masses so great in number that it was impossible to see where the herd stopped along the water, where it started. The youngest frolicked in the shallows—it could only be told from the water kicked up and the far-off sound of the laughter unique to a happy, pleased horse. Horsemen know that sound, know it goes quick usually once a mount is broke, and that sound is a part of the breaking, so the logical mind knows it has to go. It doesn’t mean the same mind can’t admire the beauty of the sound while it’s there, though. Mourn the loss of that sound, because once it’s gone it ain’t never coming back.

            Duck, pragmatic fella he was, spoke again.

            “Billy. That’s got to be a good twelve, maybe fifteen-hundred head out there. More.”

            “That’s two-thousand unbroken mounts if there’s one out there, amigo,” Esteban interjected.

            I could see Billy swallow, work what was left of the chaw around.

            “Alright. Alright, yeah, yep. I’m starting to see it, fellers,” he finally managed in that high drawl of his.

            “Starting to see it?” I found myself leaning up, pushing my face between Duck and Billy. “You’re starting to see it? Billy, what the hell does that mean? You told us we were out here to wrangle up about a hundred. A ‘light year’, you called it. Billy! Does that look like a God-blessed ‘light year’ to you out there?”

            I was pointing through the window by then, and I reckon my voice had gotten loud.

            It no longer shames me to say—I’d come back from the war with some spare anger leftover. Didn’t quite know what to do with it, even a few years on then, as it was.

            Something bumped my outstretched arm, made me look down and back.

            Barely sitting up, wobbly, Watley was holding out his small tin flask toward me. He jostled it in my direction, and without words I took it. If Watley offered a man a drink, it was because he saw something about to give way in the fella, was the way he’d said it once when I’d asked him about the drink. Told me he drank because he saw something about to give way in himself these days every time he looked in a mirror.

            I didn’t look in any mirror just then, but I took a swallow of his Old Forester, and let the burn soothe me. Billy didn’t deserve no yelling at.

            “Well fellers, now you see that’s what had me plumb thrown about this whole other thing that rancher said when I’s on the phone with’em the other day. I mention that to y’all? I did, didn’t I? I was sure I could’ve swore I…” Billy trailed off, and we let him. All of us were looking at him now.

            Duck’s long, slow sigh.

            “What didn’t you tell us, Billy?”

            Lying was no kind of regular thing with us. It can’t be when a person gets to be that close to another for that long, and for a long time the five of us were brothers. Billy got confused sometimes since getting back, and acceptances had to be made. He’d get terrible headaches some days, and though the Army docs had told him to take up a softer line of work after the service horses were what he knew. So he kept on.

            “I’m sorry, now, all I meant was our work is light this year. You see, that rancher feller, we got the same deal as usual, y’all know? But he said he had him another crew coming up in a couple days gonna’ help us round’er out. Now I didn’t want to say nothing too much ’cause we’re getting our usual deal, so I reckon ain’t no harm in a few others throwing a hand in, right?”

            It was quiet in the Plymouth for a long moment. What was unspoken was common thought though—the wrangling weeks were ours, the time we got among ourselves and the land and the animals we knew how to work. For a certain type of mind there is no greater comfort than to be doing exactly what you know you are on this earth to do.

            It was Esteban who leaned forward, his face contemplative. “Boys,” he began in his quiet rasp, “that is a lot of horses out there. We’ve been at this a few years now, si? Yeah? It’s treated us well, yeah? This is too much for the five of us. This many would be a full-time job on a ranch back when we were kids, and we still wouldn’t be enough. So let’s let this other crew on, we’ll see what they’re about and go on, yeah? Remember, we didn’t always have full bellies, none of us.”

            He was the peacemaker, Esteban. He was right, too—we all remembered the soup kitchens and long trails of hobos. It was right of him to say. It would have been pure greed not to let a working man have a turn at all that opportunity.

            “He ain’t wrong,” Watley said quietly, taking the flask back, sliding it into his rucksack.

            “Now fellers, I’m glad y’all see it my way,” Billy began.

            “Shut up. Billy, for once just shut up a minute,” I began. Duck turned his deep beagle eyes toward me, and his eyes, like Esteban’s logic, were right. I swallowed.

            “Billy…I don’t like you not telling us things,” I said, “but Esteban’s right. A person needs work, they need work. So, what’s the plan?”

            We had four days before the others were to arrive. Then there would be a truck—maybe two—with new men, coming up from the rancher’s main operation some eighty miles south.

            “I reckon he wants’em to get broken in right, send up a bunch’a greenhorns with a few good busters, have us on around here too, show’em how it’s done,” Billy’d finished, grinning with the brown smear of his tobacco on his teeth.

            I’d broken and smiled at that. Billy had an infectious good cheer. He was the kind of fella it was hard to stay mad at, no matter how much you wanted to.

            “Yeah Billy. We’ll show’em how it’s done,” I agreed, and then we made camp.

            Duck would set us up, getting the occasional shaky hand from Watley with the tents or our mounts. Setting camp to right was good steady work that suited Duck to a tee.

            Esteban, Billy, and me unloaded our gear from the back of the Plymouth, and gloves in hand, headed for the fence assemblies.

            All the while we worked, there were eyes watching us. It was a new sensation. The second year we’d come up there had been maybe four hundred head, and the job had taken almost a month, with trailer after trailer going to the rancher’s permanent lands with proper fences where he’d get no fines for his ‘fresh mounts, not yet broken’. This was different.

            I didn’t and still don’t know why there were so many that year. I’ve read in the intervening years that wild horses can breed exponentially, and while that goes a bit over my head, my youngest son’s translation got through to me: Horses breed and fuck like rabbits, Dad.

            It must have been a very exponential year for the horses.

            That afternoon putting the first lengths of split-rail up, the whole situation had the feeling of spectacle, like we were putting on a show for the horses.

            Maybe we were. If we were, I hope they enjoyed it. I hope they knew that despite what was to come, we didn’t mean them any harm.

            The second night out it was the five of us in on the card game, not just me and Esteban, and it was five-card draw, nickel ante—heady stuff.

            We were tired, but it was the good kind of tired. Do enough and the body will learn the feeling of good tired and bad, and they are different. Good tired comes from a long day’s work in the sun. It can come from mowing the lawn before a cold beer that hits the mouth just right, assures you that life is in fact just fine. Every once in a very great while, if a person is lucky, that tired comes as you hold the person you love most in the world close, and it comes with a smile.

            Then there’s the other kind of tired. I’ve known that kind, too. Ten hours humping your kit up the side of a vertical damn mountain, watching the fella ahead of you catching one of them little stick grenades they’d throw from above, half that fella becoming so much red mist spreading across you. The tired of aching hands after firing the Thompson what feels like all day, never knowing if the ammo’ll give up before those goddamned sons of bitches in the barn you’re shooting to shit will.

            I don’t like that kind of tired. Not at all.

            “Hey? You going to see that or you out?” I realized Billy was asking me. Duck had already folded at Billy’s raise on the night’s third hand while I’d been reflecting on the past.

            I set my cards down, facedown. Couldn’t remember what I had, but that happened sometimes.

            “I’ll fold,” I said quietly, as though I’d been pondering it.

            Billy looked at Watley, who grinned, setting his own cards down.

            “Too rich for my blood. I’m gonna see how this shakes out between y’all ’fore I take a piss though,” Wat said. Second day out could still be shaky for Wat, but he’d been mostly alright—he was on to the gulping water part now.

            “Okay, Esteban, just me and you, hombre, what you got old son?” Billy cackled.

            Esteban smiled his quiet smile, set down his cards—three deuces.

            “I’m sorry, hombre,” Esteban teased in a growl, rolling his ‘r’ hard a way Billy couldn’t.

            Before Esteban could take the whole eighty cents worth Billy reached out his hand, displaying his cards—three eights.

            “Now hold up there, pard, looks like I’m the one’s sorry,” Billy cackled again, sweeping his hand over the small pile of silvers as Watley stood.

            “Tu madre es una puta,” Esteban said, laughing the profanities at our friend.

            “Yeah well, Mama did get around a little, Daddy always said,” Billy joked, and he had me laughing too when I knew I oughtn’t be. He was just like that.

            “Y’all boys play nice, now,” Wat said as he stepped off towards the edge of camp, where we’d dug the privy.

            There are many strange things to be seen in this life if you just keep your eyes open, and some will be terrible and some will be wonderful. The wonder is no good without the terror. When Watley walked back to the fire some minutes later, tightly smiling, a young pony walking with its head tilted at an angle slow and cautious behind him, like a puppy been kicked too much, I think we all saw some of the wonder in life.

            She trailed behind him, her gait awkward, but then I saw the left eye gone, that side of her face not covered in fine pelt but the kind of pink scar tissue that never fully heals. Brush fire—we’d seen it before, just rarely on animals that survived long after. Her scars were months old.

            “Well…this little filly…well she just wandered right on back up behind me, boys. Won’t scat off or nothing,” Wat said, sheepish. He flared his arms at the pony, and though her head whipped around to see, the good eye blinking, she did not cower or back.

            I looked at the others and saw all of us glancing across each other, the same thought in our eyes. We all carried a gun out there; Wat had an old Colt pocket auto he’d stole out the service and used to shade coyotes with when he had to. A three-eighty will put down a man; it’ll put down a horse. It’s a sin to see a horse living as a cripple, especially a wild one—breaking one that’s a cripple is more dangerous, too, and less profit at the end. 

            Esteban’s hand instinctively floated towards the big thumb-buster single action at his waist—but I’d seen the bashful smile of Watley’s more than Esteban had, maybe. I held a hand out towards him, low, stayed his pistol. He raised his brows, said nothing.

            “That’s quite a specimen you got there, Wat,” Duck said, bemused.

            “What the world are you going to do with that thing?” Billy asked close behind.

            Before Watley had to answer I spoke for him.

            “He’s going to keep it, ain’t you, Watley? That’s a downright docile little pony there, she ought to tame up real good. Kind you can hire out for the kiddies on Sundays, right Wat?”

            We all knew what I’d just said was as full of horseshit as the soles of our boots—that pony’s face would scare most children. Hell, it’d scare most grown men I’d worked with, scars like that. But at the edge of the light, with the filly behind him patient, Watley was nodding.

            “That, well, yeah, that’s right. I’m gonna make this little gal a real fine Sunday rider. Look how gentle she already is, fellas,” he said, and as we watched we saw he was correct. The pony quivered with nerves—anyone who’s spent a week or two around brokes and not-brokes could see it, she wasn’t used to people—but when he put his hand on her neck, just down from her good eye, she stilled. It was a calm still, and soon she dipped her face towards Wat’s own.

            A wild horse will bite, and they bite damn hard. They don’t generally nuzzle themselves forward to a person, but as we watched she did, and Watley was no longer with us, he was somewhere else, with her. He put a hand on the horse’s jaw, rubbed the fine hair, massaged the deep cords of muscle in her neck. Walking canted like that she was over-developed on one side, weaker on the other, and from fifteen feet away you could see the animal leaning more into Watley as he worked over the tendons drawn tight.

            “I’m gonna call you Glory. Morning Glory. My mama used to plant them when I was a kid, they’s pretty like you—how’s that sound, huh girl?”

            The words weren’t for us, I just don’t think he cared if we heard them. I’d swear to this day that horse lowered her head more towards his own when he said that.

            “I think she likes that, Wat,” Billy said. I wasn’t the only one seeing what I was seeing.

            When Watley broke his eyes from the horse and looked back at us we could see they were shining again, just not with hangover.

            “You boys go on ahead – I’m going to fix Glory here up with some water and oats.”

            He walked off, and she followed, none of us pointing out the horse had a river just the other side of the herd, plenty of sweetgrass to graze on. We got our picks, that was the rule. If Morning Glory was Watley’s first choice, she was his. That night we all went back to cards, and the next day working when Watley would bring up ‘Glory’ we’d nod and listen like it was a home-raised foal he was particularly fond of.

            Morning Glory, with her half-face, was just a part of the gang now.

            Them next two days passed about as serene as a fella could hope for, and though it’s Monday morning quarterbacking, I wish I’d savored that more. The winds were starting to come down off the mountains, signaling the season change, and the hardpan reflected the heat of the sun back up at the same time, so it seemed at moments like I was straddling not just a place but a time, hovering on the outside edges of it and looking in. 

            Each night we’d make the coffee and heat up tins of chow by the fire. Afterwards, the rest of us drinking more coffee and playing cards, Watley would excuse himself quickly, but we didn’t worry about the little flask. He’d walk off with a handful of sugar cubes from the Ritz tin we kept’em in next to the coffee beans, and soon we’d hear the happy crunches of a horse delighting in sweets it never finds wild.

            The fourth night, taking our cards around the fire, we wondered aloud, knowing it’d be the last chance to talk before the new crew came.

            “I’ll declare fellers, that gimp pony’s best thing to happen to old Wat in many a moon,” Billy said, nothing but gentle surprise in his voice.

            “Connecting up with the right animal’s a powerful thing, you all know that,” Duck reminded, “Watley wouldn’t be the first man come back from war find peace in a horse or a dog ’stead of a woman or a business. And it’s better than the bottle,” he finished, quieter. Duck’s father had been a drunk, the hitting kind, and Duck himself never touched a drop.

            “What happens when that animal is too much for his little place, eh? What happens when he throws a three-day winter bender, if he keeps a cripple horse?”

            It was Esteban, and while he was the gentlest of us, he was also still the one most grounded in the world, was the way I thought of it. This wasn’t a time to be realistic, though—we’d seen the calm in Watley the last couple days, a new calm, different and wholly good.

            “He wants to keep the goddamn horse, let’em keep the goddamn horse. Fuck’s sake, fellas,” I said, perhaps more meanly than I meant it. But Billy and Esteban both nodded, Duck flashed a thumbs up even as he didn’t disrupt the passing out of the next hand.

            We played cards in the silence of the night, with the world around us, and listened to our friend feed the gentle young horse that had found him in the dark.

            Days running horses on the hardpan start early as necessity dictates, even if the animals are vast in number. We always ran at them in two teams atop our own mounts, well-trained animals they were, good of heart. It takes an animal of steady nerve with good trust in its rider to come down running hard and fast at others of its own kind in all their variety: the chestnut and raven hides, the bold splotches of the Appaloosa blood in their herd somewhere, every now and then more distinct speckling, though Painted-mixes by the river were always wary. Seeing the ferals run like that is motion that has always—at least since the war—made me pause and reflect, that if there is no God, there ought to be.

           The teams were me and Watley, Duck and Billy that day, swooping in on the big animals, running them into fine, arrow-shaped little groups that we’d force into the wide pen we’d made with the split-rail, Esteban working the fences that day, manning the make-do gate. Taking one animal at a time to separate off and break was the old way, but we weren’t here for that. It took people who knew each other the way we did to run the animals several-at-a-time in smaller, cut-away groups, and we were good at it. We’d already been at the ropes a good two hours when we heard the horns of the first deuce-and-half truck out on the highway a few miles off, a second close behind.

            Seeing the trucks coming, the four of us circled up and sallied back towards the camp and Esteban, letting our mounts ease up to a medium trot—they were already hot, too.

           We had maybe a third of our expected number ran in so far, quick work made easier by how many there were. As we reached him, Esteban passed up Duck’s binoculars. We passed them along in turn.

            “What the heck they brining out here? More pens?” Duck asked.

            Neither of the big ex-Army trucks had a horse trailer hitched to it, and only the first had men crowding the bed. The second had some kind of load strapped in and covered with a tarp. Both pulled long, low, flat-haulers like you might see lumber moved on, empty, and that didn’t make a lick of sense.

            “I expect you’re right, Duck. More fencing, most likely,” Watley said.

            Billy frowned; I kept looking through the glasses. Billy was right to frown, I thought. Cut it any which way, something didn’t work out here. Even if that was a dozen fellas they had shoved in back of the first vehicle, where were their mounts? The dumbest rancher alive knew you didn’t run horses from an automobile. Empty trailers? What the hell were they thinking?

            “Billy…” I began.

            “I reckon, well, fellers I reckon they must have them a truck backed up behind, or something, late as it is already, I imagine they must’ve had them some kinda auto trouble or…”

            “God fucking damnit!”

            The words came out of my mouth before I could stop myself, but I didn’t stop myself much in those days anyway.

            “What is it, amigo?” Esteban asked as Billy was still grasping for words. Watley just looked at me, curious. I tossed Esteban back the glasses.

            “Take a look. Goddamned war party is what. Billy, what in God’s name you get us into this time?”

            I looked at Billy as Esteban lifted the glasses again, though he hardly needed them now—the trucks were turning onto the hardpan just where we had a few days before.

            I knew what he and the others were seeing, ahead of the dust they were stirring up. Each man in the back of the first truck had a rifle or shotgun with him, muzzle to the air.

            “Billy,” I repeated, but he just shook his head, staring himself now. From the expression he held, this was a surprise to him too.

            “I…I don’t know, fellers. I don’t. Let’s try and get this figured out, sure it’s some sort of misunderstanding about what’s getting done out here—and now, see there, what I tell you, I said they must’a had them some sort of trouble, would have another car along here directly, look’it that,” Billy finished, brighter again, easing up to dismount.

            In the dust at the highway another wagon was turning off, a big luxury job, maybe a new Packard. This one took it easier coming in, even as the trucks were beginning to park near the Plymouth.

            “I’ll stay up here, thanks,” Duck said, staying firm in the saddle. A well-trained horse was almost as good as a car, for Duck.

            “Make mine the same,” I said, even as Watley joined Billy and dismounted, all of us moving a little slower now, Esteban flanking us.

            “Alright, but you boys is acting real impolite,” Billy tsk’ed, taking lead.

            The newer wagon, still shiny despite the dust, was parking, and men were pouring from the trucks, mostly the first—I’d been right, there was only cargo in the second bed. The realization of what that cargo was brought something cold to my stomach. For many men of my generation, the sight of a tripod mounted machine gun is nothing that can be hidden by a tarp.

            While I was wondering what the hell was going on, a wide-bellied man with grey hair and glasses too small for his face was exiting the shiny wagon. The man himself, our rancher.

            “Ey-yahh…” the portly old man groaned as he adjusted himself. “Oh, my lord them long car rides kill a man’s back, they surely do,” he said to nobody in particular, neatening a white suit tailored for a smaller but still fat man he had perhaps once been.

            “What say, Billy?” The rancher shouted in a reedy voice that dripped of the Old South. From the way he said it you could tell he didn’t know which one of was Billy.

            “Billy, where you at, boy?” He said again, coughing phlegm into a handkerchief he rapidly balled back into one tight suit pocket.

            Billy nodded, responded slow. He’d seen the shape of that tarp too. We all had.

            “Yeah, that’s me. We spoke on the phone, I reckon.”

            The rancher looked up, a new smile you couldn’t trust on his face.

            “Well now, we finally get to meet, eh?” He took Billy’s hand in a shake I’m not sure Billy wanted, nodding at the rest of us, on foot and on horse, “and so these are the boys you brung down, eh? Good stuff, fine stuff you boys have been doing for me, I thank ya kindly, I surely do,” he said, nodding again and again all the while.

            We worked for the rancher, true, sorta. Don’t expect none of us liked getting talked to that way, though. I know I didn’t.

            “Boys, I’m giving y’all all a bonus this year, I mean cash folding money here, two hundred to a man for each of you, since we won’t be needing y’all’s services out at the Big J anymore,” he was saying now, still nodding, reaching into the tight jacket for a leather billfold.

            “Hm? I am sorry, señor, I am not so quick with the English—what was that part you said?” Esteban said, throwing a heap of his own horseshit on his accent, a trick he’d learned long before the Army.

            “Oh?” Said the rancher, pausing. “What’s that? The money, you mean?” He asked, hand still clutching the billfold, half out his jacket, half in.

           “About no more work,” Esteban clarified, his English back to perfect.

           The rest of us just looked at him.

           “Oh. Well, Mr. Haskins here,” he said, indicating a tall, slim blonde fella leaning against the second truck, “he’s my right-hand man over at the J—he been talking to them federales, we got us a much quicker solution from now on. Bought this off the Navy, government auction—show these boys, Mr. Haskins.”

           “Mr. Virgil, ready arms,” the thin man, Haskins, said. Another man next to him sprung into the truck bed, uncinching the drop-cloth tarp with a pinch. Sun reflected off the dull black metal of a 1917 Browning heavy gun.

           I found my voice without realizing I was speaking.

           “Yeah, that’s a real fine solution you got there—for Nazis. I ain’t never heard of no thirty-ought caliber solution for horses before,” I said, unable to pull my eyes from the ugly thing I knew so well. Belt fed, water-cooled. Yeah, it was a solution, alright.

           Watley stepped forward, and from my perch I could both see and hear his bafflement.

           “Sir….do you mean you brought your men out here to just kill these horses?”

           The rancher leaned back on his heels, smiling again.

           “Now son, you say that like it’s a bad thing. Y’all know the number of acres the wild horse destroys yearly? These animals ain’t even native! Nothing but a bunch of goddamn pests, all they are. Now I said it before and I’ll say it again, y’all done me some real fine work these last few years, but Mr. Haskins here been talking to the federal folks and he…”

           “And he has established an understanding with the federal government as well as the LiveCo Dog Food Works to supply them with wild horse meat, twice yearly, to be harvested from free-range grazing land, in order to help control the population of feral animals currently invading the western United States,” Haskins completed for himself, stepping forward.

           He had the bearing of a man unafraid to talk down his own boss, dressed like it was about eighty years earlier, with a blue kerchief around his neck. He stopped in front of Watley, a few feet away. Didn’t offer his hand.

           “You boys beat the krauts, kicked the snot out the Japs, now you’re here helping in the war on nature. We’re just here to speed things up. That’s all,” he finished. Wat said nothing.

           We’d all known men with that empty cadence that says tricky words so well, had too often listened to orders from voices like that. People who speak like that—they’re never the ones to be hurt by what they demand.

           On the ground to my right, I noticed Esteban’s hand had taken up residence on the butt of his single action. In a holster looped around my saddle was my own pistol from service days. None of the men around the rancher or Haskins had taken their shooter in hand yet; the man in the truck hadn’t racked the Browning, but their eyes were starting to wander.

           Watley spoke again, softer if anything. “Ain’t what I asked. I asked if you all are planning to kill them horses out there.”

           The rancher smiled again. “Well hell son—that’s the idea, ain’t it? Why catch a cockroach when you can just step on the lot of’em?”

           I don’t know how that sonvabitch Haskins knew where to press, but sonvabitches like that always do. “Shitfire, boy—you act like them ferals is worth something,” Haskins said. “Let me show you how much quicker it is for these poor stupid animals –see that gimpy one just there hanging out by y’all’s trailer? Mr. Virgil, show our friends…”

           The sound was like a string of good firecrackers before Haskins could finish, and we could see the man called Virgil skittering backwards away from the big Browning as Watley pock-marked the piece of machinery with his own little pistol. If he’d wanted to hit the man, he would have, and the four of us knew it, even if the rancher and his men didn’t.

           I have come to decide that unlike most of us, Watley didn’t take to the bottle after the war because of what he’d found his fellow man to be capable of—he’d taken to the bottle after the war because it had shown him what he was best at.

           He stepped forward as his little pistol coughed, slinging its ball rounds into the water-cooler of the machine gun, rendering it useless. Haskins looked toward him in surprise, surprise that bloomed wider was Watley finished the magazine and tipped his gun backwards, slamming the thin little butt of the thing across the skinny man’s nose. He didn’t slow as the bigger man fell back and down, trying to brace himself against the blood and failing—Wat knew how to hit people.

           It was the rancher had the real problem, we could see, because now Watley had his skinning knife off his belt and in hand, and before any of the ranch hands could get their own guns up Watley had the fat man in the white suit on the ground beneath him.

           Even as I could hear the nearest of the mustangs behind us start to scatter, I held no worry of stampede—wild ones are clever, and they’ll run away from trouble when they can; the riverside was theirs and open. I saw my own hand suddenly holding my pistol on other humans, as it had many times before, and once again had the strange feeling of floating outside of time and place, even as I could see each of us had taken up an arm. Esteban’s old thumb-buster, Billy with the thirty-eight he’d put to his own head in a decade to stop the pain, Duck the double-barrel shotgun he kept in saddle-scabbard for snakes.

           It occurred to me then that maybe this was the day we were to die, maybe this was the reward, not peace but at least death in the wildlands of our youth rather than cold forests in other countries.

           Most of the men in front of us, however, were young, younger than us. They held guns, but to a one they were farmer’s guns, mostly held by farmers’ children. The skinny Nordic man was dangerous, you could see that. And the rancher was willful, which makes anyone dangerous.

           But they didn’t know violence the way we did.

           On the ground, Watley was showing the rancher this. “You listen here, you fat bastard. Any one of you touches a hair on that messed up filly’s head—any one of your busters here take a sideways crack at it, least little bit—I’m going to come into your life again someday long time from now, when you ain’t expecting it, and I’m going to take every damn thing you ever loved away, you hear me fat man? That skinny fellow over there? Same goes. You hear me, skinny boy?”

             The blonde was wiping his face with the kerchief now, looking at Watley with disgust.

            “You know we can find you, right? Shit, man, your head get blowed up in the war? We hired you jackasses on!” Haskins shouted around his own snot and blood.

            Wat looked at the rancher.

            “You got kids, fat man?”

            The rancher nodded meekly. He was out of his known world here.

            “Good,” he said. “You want to see’em again, you watch this close, now.” Watley looked up at me; I nodded back. “The fat man moves, shoot’em,” Watley said, turning.

            “I know it,” I affirmed. I wasn’t surprised to see my hand had re-aimed the 1911 even before my words had agreed, and the rancher kept his repose.

            Watley used the butt of the knife this time, but the stupid skinny blonde still wasn’t expecting the speed our small drunk had, and he fell again. The high, keening screams that came next—there’s no need to talk about those, aside from to say, they happened.

            When he stood again Watley had blood on his shirt, and the skinny man stayed down. Nobody moved except Wat, easing back to the rancher, wiping his knife.

            “You see that, fat man?”

            The rancher nodded. It’s a painful thing, to see a big man try and make himself small.

            “Yes, yessir, I sure did, ain’t not one of my boys going to touch that…”

            “Hush up, now. Listen—any time you want to come see me, you just go see hoss over yonder, yeah? Cause now you got my initials case you forget. That’s W for Watley and J for Janes now, you got that? Want me to spell it out on’em? Cause if you’re liable to forget who you’re looking for, I’ll carve the whole thing out on the sumbitch.”

            In the dirt, the blonde began to scream again, but words this time.

            “Don’t you let that fucker near me again! I don’t want nothing to do with your goddamn horse you fucking lunatic!”

            I thought it might take popping off a round into the dirt next to Haskins, but when Watley looked over and waved at him he quieted.

            “You over there shut up now. This between me and your boss now,” he said, looking back at the fat rancher. “You, you’re getting the lay of the land here, yeah?”

            The rancher nodded.

            “Good. Me and the boys going to load up now, and ’til we’re gone y’all going to take your sorry asses right over to that hardpan over there and sit on your goddamn hands. Understand? I mean it, too. Asses on hands, you hear me?”

            Haskins was a brave fella, if stupid. “I can’t sit on my hands you shit head, you just sliced up my chest!” he shouted.

            I didn’t wait this time, felt the 1911 go off more than directed it, and dust exploded near Haskins’ face, settling over him the way that red mist used to do me in them awful mountains.

            “You’ll sit on your hands, I think, amigo.” God bless Esteban keeping what peace there was to be kept.

            It was Duck, orderly fella that he was, that instructed the other men how to lay down their guns in the empty truck bed, Billy who tossed a roll of gauze we kept handy for cuts to Haskins. He’d need it for his nose, and his marked-up torso. Wat hadn’t done any halfway job. 

            “You can’t just leave me out here!” He tried once, as we were loading the last of the camp, “I could bleed to death!”

            It was, of all people, Duck who consoled him.

            “You know, in Italy after a bad jump once—before I got moved to the motor pool, you see—I had to walk about six, maybe seven miles with flak all up and down in my backside? Docs said I must’ve lost a good pint or more.”

            “What’s your point?” Haskins asked. He was indeed stupid.

            “My point is, save your breath—we all suffer,” Duck explained, before slapping the butt-end of the shotgun into the man’s teeth. The rancher stepped back from catching his top man, and Haskins landed where he had stood. 

            Then we got into the Plymouth, and left, with only Morning Glory and our own mounts in the trailer behind us.

            We never ran wild horses again, though we all kept working with them. It might be tempting to wonder what happened next, but like so many things that happen in life and seem important, there was no second half. It was just one more event that we were part of. The rancher never did come find any of us, certainly not me. The parts for that gun were easy to get then, and men like that never let the actions of folks like us stop them in the end, not with their schedules to keep.

            Wat never mentioned that day again, though he would dote on Glory the whole of her fifteen years. It may also be tempting to think Watley did give up the bottle after that day, but while he never quite has, its own grip on him lessened a bit.

            Watley Janes still lives in our hometown, sends me a letter once a month I dutifully reply to within a week. I came to Florida in late 1984 to be near my youngest and his family—by the time I moved I was a widower, and Wat was about the only person left for me to say goodbye to. Duck passed of a stroke in 1973, exactly where he might’ve wanted to be—under the hood of his nephew’s V8 Chevy Nova, looking for ways to up the horsepower again. I’ve said how Billy ended. Esteban was the most surprising though; he took a bull’s horn at the tri-state rodeo in ’66 and never quite recovered. Pneumonia finished him before the summer of 1967 was out.

            The last time I saw Watley before I came down here, I had to ask him if he’d seen the passing of one Elmore Haskins, ranch foreman and cowboy, announced the previous week in the state obituaries.

            He smiled that strange, tight smile, and nodded. I’d wanted to ask him about what I’d seen in the paper for a good week but hadn’t been able to find Wat around his place. He didn’t disappear drinking much by then, but it could happen, and I’d thought little of it.

            It was the smile that did it, that smile that said he knew a secret.

            “Dear Jesus—did you down there to the man’s services?”

            His grin widened.

            “Just the grave, pay my respects.”

            “And?”

            “Well, what I did there—it sure don’t pass for flowers,” he said.

            We laughed then, I admit, as only two mean old men can. Maybe mean isn’t the right nor fair word, but it was something we were capable of once, meanness.

            I reflect on that often down here in the humidity, especially on the nights when I can’t sleep. I sit on my little porch and listen to the ocean a few blocks distant, wonder why my kind feels such a calling to do the worst to each other. I’m not immune from the feeling, sad to say.

            More often though I reflect on the good that can come if we push the nastiness away, do what’s right despite the cruelties. I think about my wife, who I met the year after our last time running the horses, and the way maybe I wouldn’t have been able to talk to her if it hadn’t been for those four days in the Nevadas. My sons don’t know that theory, but in my mind it’s a truth, because those four days reminded me of something I’d forgot. A part of being human, I reckon. That sometimes, even the smallest good won’t happen unless a person stands up in this world.

            That day, the five of us stood tall, and I’m proud of that. If that’s a vanity—well, I reckon we all have some of that.

             We are old now—I am old now—and soon I will go out of my little bungalow and pick up my granddaughter, because I’ve promised to take her to the movies today. She wants to see a new one they’ve been advertising about going to the future, only they end up in the old west somehow. I know she wants to see it because she saw the first one or two, and she thinks the short fella playing lead is cute, though she won’t admit it.

            It's not particularly my kind of picture, all that time travel stuff. This one might be alright, though—in the commercials for it, they sure found some pretty country for their movie. Good horses, too, looks like.

            I’ll take my granddaughter to the pictures today, and because sometimes she asks me about how things used to be, I think afterwards when we get a burger and a shake I might tell her about the mustangs at the nameless river. Not all of what happened that last year, exactly, but maybe a little bit, and the things that came after. I’ll tell her how for years, come each Sunday, me and the others would go see Watley and Glory, sometimes all of us, sometimes just one or two. The way sometimes if he was half-lit Watley would simply lean against her, and together it would be Glory guiding them around her field in a neat tight circle, the horse looking out for the man as much as he did for her. He closed his eyes when they walked like that, and I always found it remarkable, two beasts that couldn’t speak to each other sharing one eye on the world and never losing step.

            Yeah. We’ll talk about Glory, and the way she’d walk with the wrangler that loved her so. I’ll try and explain, there are worse things to come back to than horses.

            There are times that the laughter of the wild horse is the best thing a person can hope to come back to.

…

Born and raised in the New Orleans area, Charles' work can be seen from such varied outlets as Shotgun Honey, Quibble Literary, Unlikely Stories, and various others, most recently having won the Glenn Balch Fiction Award for 2025. He currently lives in Idaho with his dog, Luna.