The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo

by Ian Stansel

Lena said, “If any of these boys get fresh, just shoot them.”

  The bearded one snorted and another said, “Damn,” and laughed.

  Lena leaned down to Rain and whispered, “You have your pistol?” just loud enough for the others to hear.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’ve got it.”

  The smirks melted and the young people were silent as Lena walked away.

  She checked on the horses, both leg-locked and asleep, and then collapsed onto her sleeping bag. The air was getting cooler by the second and here, away from the fire, she felt the chill intensely. She pulled off her jodhpurs and a satisfying ache shook through her feet. She bent her toes forward and back and was about to wriggle into her bag when a voice sounded behind her: “Those your animals?”

  She started and twisted to find a man, his feet planted in the dirt but with a torso that leaned forward, as if he were about to topple over. He was heavyset—round at the waist—stubbled, and about her age, though it was difficult to be certain in the darkness. His voice had the character of syrup hardened around the edges.

  Lena said, “One of them.”

  “Something you do, huh, ride horses?”

  Lena said nothing to this, as she could not tell if it was a question or a simple note of observation.

  The man said, “Been doing it a long time, probably.”

  “A while. Do you ride?”

  The man let out a curt guffaw and slapped his belly. “I look like I ride horses? I’d break a fucker’s back.”

  “You’d be surprised what they can carry.”

  The man muttered, “Yeah,” but didn’t offer anything else.

  Lena said, “You have a good night.” But the man did not move from his spot.

  He said, “They used to have cars that started with a crank. Right in the front, you know. A fucking crank you had to turn and turn to get the engine running. Nobody’s going to use one of those now, right?”

  “I’m not sure I follow.” Where was her gun? In the pack just next to her. How long would it take her to retrieve it? The buckle was closed. Two seconds? Three? More? What had been mostly a joke with Rain back at the campfire now seemed like a matter of survival. She hated this man for making her feel fear.

  “Nobody’s going to drive around in a car you got to crank-start, because why would they? It’s stupid. So why is it people still ride around on these big old animals?”

  “It isn’t about getting places.”

  The man yanked up the back of his pants. “No, I guess not.” He said, “My name’s Roger.”

  What would Frank do to Roger if he could have walked up to this scene? Put him on his fat ass for starters. Lena would say, Frank, don’t, but she wouldn’t mean it and Frank wouldn’t listen anyway. Stand over old Roger, he would. Like scaring women, do you? he’d say. Well, I like scaring people too. Lena, there in that campground, could see her husband toss his Stetson to the grass. Get serious. That lock of hair falling into his face. His lean body seeming to calcify beneath his clothes. She hated how quick his tendency toward physicality could appear and how she too had come to depend on it over their years together. It was how he made sense of the world, and he made sense in her life. Not of her life, but in it. She knew that had she never met Frank, she would have lived a fine and full existence. She’d probably have married someone else, someone entirely different—nice or mean, tall or short, rich or poor. Someone. And she’d have continued to make what she could of the raw materials of life. But there was no doubt that he made an unexpected sense: his charm, his ambition, his temper, his intelligence, his strength. Even his relationship with his brother. It was all crucial to how she understood him. She’d never before or since met anyone like Frank.

  Lena said, “It’s been a long day, Roger.”

  Roger groaned something, a sullen and unintelligible utterance, and then walked away. When, twenty minutes later, footsteps approached, she knew by the soft falls of the heels that it was Rain. The girl settled into her bag, and her breathing eased into barely audible waves. Lena could smell the punch of campfire smoke off Rain’s coat and boots, discarded carelessly in the dirt. Lena lay for a long time in the dark, thinking about her husband and thinking about Roger. A small but significant part of Lena wanted the man to return, drunker now, pissed off, looking for that high that bullies get when they find a victim. She wanted him to touch her, grab her, make her fear for her life. And she wanted, with steady hands, to show him the barrel of her gun.

  He did not return. And Lena would not recall exactly the muddled thoughts rising and fading in her mind in those last moments before the exhaustion of the day and the intoxication of grief conspired to lure her into sleep. But the next morning, as she and Rain rode away from the dew-damp campground, she saw old Roger sitting alone and slumped at the cold, black fire pit, his shoulders raised into an almost nonexistent neck. He took a drink from a plastic water bottle and then winched the features of his face together and ran his knuckles up his cheek and across his temple. He looked just then like nothing less than a massive hirsute baby woken from his nap and getting up the energy for yet another in a lifetime of tantrums.

  ⟱

  The brothers were a novelty in the relatively staid equestrian community of Northern California. Not that the business was any more decent than others; on the contrary, people in the horse world could be a nasty lot—stealing students and boarders from other stables, spreading gossip, cheating buyers. But above this ruthlessness was a thin skin of civility. The Van Loy brothers had no such skin. They cussed and punched fences. They quarreled loudly with feed vendors in the aisle of the barn. They got eighty-sixed from bars. Their students became used to their instructors showing up to lessons limping and bruised. So they were a topic of discussion, those rowdy cowboys who’d somehow infiltrated the rarefied strata of hunter-jumper training. And they might have remained just that, an amusement, if they had not been so damn good at what they did.

  Lena imagined that most young people went through a certain process of redefining family. You grow up and your world consists of little more than your parents, maybe siblings, grandparents at a stretch. You get married and you love your spouse, but family is still those old parents, siblings, grandfolks. It isn’t until you have kids that you understand that you’ve created a new unit, that that old definition of family has been altered.

  For her and Frank, though, it was more immediate. They didn’t have Riley for close to four years after they hitched, but in between they had Silas.

  After the wedding, Lena and Frank rented a dime-size bungalow in the hills above San Anselmo while Silas stayed behind at the stable with their father, whose health seemed to dip a bit more toward the inevitable each day. She and Frank came back out to the stable daily, from the early, purple hours of the morning until dusk, which slicked over the forested San Geronimo Valley like spilled ink. Most nights they would be home for an hour, give or take, before her brother-in-law’s shape appeared in the frosted-glass front door. He always brought something, a bottle of whiskey or a twelve-pack of Olympia. They drank in those days, all three of them, back when it was still possible to shake off a raging hangover with a couple of Tylenol and a half pot of coffee. The boys, as Lena came to think of them, were woefully clueless about popular culture and would marvel at the records she kept in the hi-fi cabinet. Neither could dance worth a damn, but they played music through the night, and, falling under the power of whatever they were consuming, the three of them twisted and stomped to Springsteen and Journey and Hank Williams Jr.

  Years of this. Good nights and bad. On good nights, Silas would pass out on the couch. Lena would cover him with an afghan and then wake the brothers up the next morning with mugs of coffee, which they would collar with little more than a grunt of thanks, the both of them drinking and coughing into their fists, and Frank lighting a cigarette before resuming some previously initiated conversation as if no time had passed.

  On the bad nights the boys would get to arguing about
this horse or that, this boarder, that student. Frank would tease Silas until the younger brother went silent and it was up to Lena to coax him out of the hole he’d retreated into. Sometimes they got physical, tangling on the hardwood. Lena could never quite tell if it was mock fighting or mock playing, if the anger was the put-on or the goofing was. But they always managed to come out of it with minimal bruising to body or ego. Until the night with the hat.

  They were dancing, the lot of them lit on a bottle of Jose Cuervo that Silas contributed, when Frank retrieved his old Stetson from the hook in the bedroom. He looked good in that hat and he could be a vain man and he came shimmying up to Lena with one of those lusty grins Lena pretended to be immune to. They danced, Frank’s hand pressed to the small of Lena’s back, his face aimed down at her, mouth pursed into something between a grimace and a smirk. This routine might have seemed comical but for the fact that Frank never broke, never let up, never gave any indication that he would ever want to be anywhere but right there swaying with his wife, and his earnestness in these moments was so utterly goddamn sexy.

  The fun would not last. Silas tossed back a shot, sidled up on exaggerated tiptoes, and snatched the hat off his brother’s head.

  “Sneaky fucker,” Frank said, breaking away from Lena and going after Silas, who, now wearing the hat, had taken refuge on the far side of the dining table. Frank said, “Gimme back my hat, you thief.”

  “I think I’ll hang on to it for a while,” Silas said. “It’s a good fit.”

  The two of them circled the table, Lena retreating to the edge of the small living room, watching half in amusement at their boyishness, half in fear that the play might turn to something else. Which of course it did, quickly.

  Frank caught his little brother by the shoulder and after an initial scuffle, they both went down hard. Frank reclaimed his hat, but Silas rolled onto his brother, and their smiles twisted into snarls as Silas got a jab into Frank’s rib and Frank landed a shot to Silas’s side and then wrapped his little brother in a headlock, the sight of which made Lena’s airway feel constricted.

  “Stop it, you idiots,” Lena said, and after another moment—a point being proven—Frank let Silas go.

  “You don’t know when a joke stops being funny, brother,” Frank said to Silas.

  “And you don’t deserve a hat like that.”

  “Fuck you. What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  And then the waters of anger or resentment or jealousy—Lena didn’t know exactly what—suddenly overflowed their banks. “You’re a phony,” Silas yelled. “Acting like everything is beneath you. You ain’t a trainer and you ain’t much of a rider and you sure as shit ain’t no cowboy. So what are you, Frank?”

  Frank set the hat back on his head and lit a cigarette, said, “I know what I am.”

  “What?”

  “And I know what you are. You’re nothing but a goddamn sponge.”

  “Frank,” Lena said.

  “Sponge,” he said again. Spat the word. “And you know it.”

  And that was the way the night ended: Silas slamming the door and stumbling down the wooden steps to the street and his truck. Lena saying, “Goddamn it, Frank.” Frank saying, “Fuck it. Let ’im go.” Silas’s truck laying black trails off the curb.

  The brothers didn’t talk to each other for a week. It took that long for them to cool off, to prove to themselves that they hadn’t given in to the other, for the fight to be forgotten just enough to let the realities of running a business take precedence. Lena didn’t witness the first post-tussle communication. She just saw the two of them discussing something in the middle of the outdoor arena one morning. Like nothing had happened. She wondered for a moment if anything had. In the days between, she’d been a knot of nerves. In the nights she’d slept fitfully. She was happy to see the two of them together, speaking. And she certainly didn’t want the fights or silences to continue. But at the same time, she felt a welling of anger: What had it been for? The stress. The long, dark hours of those nights. No, she didn’t want strife, but she would have liked to see something result from the anxiety. Were things simply fine again?

  They spent Thanksgivings in their tiny house and Christmases back at the old place at the stable. And in between the drunken nights and holiday meals, they rode and trained and taught. It was in these years that the boys’ father died of lung cancer. Slowly. Painfully. He made it around for a while, still a regular fixture at the arena to watch shows and lessons. He watched the transformation of his barn with silent gravity, never uttering a disparaging word about the boys or their plans, even at the start when they lost his boarders and had to take on loans to keep the outfit afloat. He listened carefully to his sons as they schemed and boasted.

  As his life leached away, soaking into his bed and sheets and blankets, as the few breaths he had left escaped his lungs one by one, the boys saw him less and less. Lena watched Frank’s eyes avoid his father in bed. Silas Sr.’s mind struggled to keep up with the demands of conversations, Lena could see this—words and memories turning to smoke, impossible to grasp. And as the old man’s faculties slipped, Frank’s pronouncements of business trivialities grew louder, as if volume could chase away the death lurking between the molecules of air.

  “You’ll keep them together, I know that much,” Silas Sr. said to Lena one time. He was in bed by then, unable to get up even to empty his guts. Lena became familiar with a bedpan and all the functions that necessitated one. Her husband and his brother were a couple hundred yards away giving lessons to the stable’s more advanced riders. Or they were negotiating a sale or purchase. Or giving a tour of the facilities to some moneyed parents looking for a place suitable for their precious one’s hobby.

  The eldest Van Loy took her hand in his, said, “Christ, things fall apart without a woman.”

  A week later, at a restaurant in San Anselmo, Sandra worried aloud. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “You don’t know what, Mum?”

  “This isn’t exactly the life I would have planned out for you, taking care of the dying patriarch of someone else’s family.”

  “He’s my husband’s father. It’s not like he’s a stranger. And that is not my full-time occupation. I’m teaching too.”

  “The kiddies. Sweetheart, you’re too good for that. They’re the scraps.”

  “Thankfully for my students, I don’t think of them as scraps.”

  “But that is what they are, dear. You see that. Lovely and perhaps even somewhat talented scraps, but scraps all the same. Frank assigns the students, yes?”

  “I don’t have the background he and Silas have.”

  “Background doing what? You must see that so much of what they do is performance.”

  “Now he’s, what, a charlatan?”

  “Not at all. Frank and his brother seem to be enormously gifted. But so are a hundred other people in this county. Like you, for instance. But they have the cowboy hats and the belt buckles and the boots. They get drunk and fight. That is their performance. And the fact is that they are men. You need to be careful about how your life is determined, and by whom.”

  Lena threw back the last bit of white wine in her glass and poured more from the bottle between her and her mother.

  “Now don’t be dramatic,” Sandra said.

  “He’s dying. He’s just dying and no one else will be there with him.”

  That night, Lena said to Frank, “He’s going soon.”

  They were in their bedroom. It was summer and the windows were open, but the air was unrelentingly still. Frank was in his boxers, standing and drinking down a glass of water. He finished and said, “He’s been ‘going soon’ for a long time.”

  “He’s going for real now. Do you understand that?”

  Frank glared at her, then let his expression soften.

  She said, “You need to understand that.”

  “I do,” he said. He sat on the bed. “Or maybe I don’t. I think about death and it’s like my m
ind goes blank. Like an engine overheating or something. It just shuts down. Seeing him, I can feel my brain running hot. Surprised you can’t see smoke coming from my ears. Like a cartoon. And then I say to myself, He’s going to be dead, and the word means nothing to me. I guess this is what religion is for. But you know those particular pants never fit me.”

  Lena said, “What can I do to help?”

  “Woman, you’re doing more than your share. I’ll get it together. I got it.”

  But what happened was the exact opposite. Frank’s visits became more infrequent. First he missed a day on the pretense of a full teaching schedule and an obligation to look at a horse in Petaluma. Then it would be two days without his heading to the old house. And each time he did come into the old man’s room, Lena heard more blathering about day-to-day barn business and more excuses for a quick return to the ease of life outside.

  It wasn’t until weeks later that Frank was there to witness his father in the full bloom of his disease. It wasn’t the violent physical battle that Silas Sr. had been entrenched in a month before, when he was still in the midst of a short-lived attempt at chemo, when the treatments had the old man’s body spasming and expelling all manner of waste without warning. Then, the stench of shit and vomit and sweat and death was everywhere. Lena couldn’t get rid of the flies and had to hang fly strips to trap them. The doctors quickly recommended abandoning the chemo regimen. No point. He was too far gone. So the night Frank finally returned, it was relatively quiet. Silas Sr. was grimly gaunt, but he didn’t flail and moan in agony as much anymore. Lena saw the relief relax her husband’s shoulders and soften his face. This isn’t so bad, his expression seemed to say. And it wasn’t. Not compared to the weeks prior. But what Frank didn’t understand, despite Lena’s trying and trying to explain, was that they’d entered something new. The old man was really and truly approaching death. He would stare at the ceiling for an hour or more. Lena could leave his room to get some dishes done or take care of some stable business that couldn’t be put off, and she’d return to find him utterly unchanged. On a few occasions Lena thought he’d already gone. But no. Parts of him were still there in San Geronimo, though it seemed that some aspect of the man was already elsewhere, in the light, the void, the whatever it was.