Riding off into the Sunset: Starring Gary Cooper

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• Riding off into the Sunset:Starring Gary Cooper
• William Gay (bio)

In the west, the sun had gone as the last vestiges flared in chromatic red and orange and windrows of lavender clouds dulled to smoke gray. Somewhere westward, night was already facing him, and he went on toward it as if he and the darkness had some appointment to keep. For some time he'd been aware of sounds, the equable cries of birds, a truck somewhere laboring through the gears.

The next morning Bascom woke with light the color of haze heavy on his eyelids, heat bearing down on the flesh of his face and throat. His throat felt as if it had been cut with a rusty pocketknife and he had a thought to feel and see, but some old caution stayed his hand. Some things are better not known. He judged it better to enter into the day with caution, who knows what lay ahead?

Or behind. He lay very still and tried to locate himself. Where he was, where he'd been. Jagged images of the night before came unsequenced and painful, little dayglow snippets of chaos. Like [End Page 523] snapshots brought back from a demented backroads vacation. He'd been in a car, six or seven men sitting crammed tightly shoulder to shoulder. Had there been a woman? He seemed to remember perfume, soft drunken laughter. A siren, the systole and diastole of a cruiser's lights. Riding through the actual woods down to a hollow, brush whipping the car, the breathless impact of a tree trunk. The protest of warped metal and a final shard of glass falling like an afterthought.

Running through the woods. One picture of him frozen in air, limbs all outflung and his mouth an O of surprise and an outstretched vine or bramble or perhaps clothesline hooking him beneath the chin and his terrific momentum slinging him into the air. Later on, the cry of some beast he suspected was yet unrecognized by science, some horrible hybrid of loon and mountain cat. Oh Lord, he said aloud, then immediately wondered if there'd been anyone about to hear it and opened his eyes to see.

The first thing he saw was the sun and he wrenched his face away in agony and saw a field of grass, a horizon of stems and clover blossoms like trees in miniature. A sky of a malefic bluegreen that seemed to be alive, pulsing and throbbing. He looked back into the ball of white pain that stood at midmorning.

An enormous blue monolith seemed to rise above him, and it took him a few moments to realize that it was his left leg distended into the air, rising at a precipitous angle and tending out of sight into the malicious sky he wanted no part of. As if some celestial beast or outlaw aberrant angel had snatched him up by the left leg to hove him off, found him ungainly or not worth having and departed or simply paused to rest.

Well now, Bascom said tentatively.

After a time, he realized that the cuff of his jeans was caught on the top of the chain-link fence and hung him here in dismissal. Well son of a bitch, he thought. Reckon I was chasin something [End Page 524] or runnin from it. He remembered voices and gunfire and riders and their steeds that seemed to have been lithographed on the stormtossed heavens themselves. By inching forward, he was able to jiggle his leg. He looked as if he was climbing the fence with his buttocks, using them as a snake uses its ribs. In this manner he was able to accumulate enough slack in the denim to wrench his leg free. He rolled backward and sat up in the grass with his legs folded under him and his face in his hands.

Oh Lord, he said. A person ought not have to live like this.

He looked about cautiously, like a player sweating over the last down card in a poker game. Who knew what he'd find? A dead body, a canvas bag of money stenciled first national bank, a...