Marathon Cowboys

by Sarah Black

  He smiled when he saw Jesse. “JC3, as I live and breathe.” But his eyes were on me. He stood up, offered his hand. “Gary O’Brien.”

  “Hi, I’m Lorenzo Maryboy.”

  “You’re Devil Dog?”

  I stared at him. What? “Yeah, I am.”

  “I’m a big fan. I was in the USMC… how long ago was that? Good God. I got out in ’92.”

  “You were in for Desert Storm.”

  “Yeah. You boys got that job finished up over there that we started?”

  “Not hardly.” He grinned then, and dropped my hand.

  “I like the comic a lot, Maryboy. You gonna keep going with it?”

  “Yes, I am. I’m staying with Jesse’s granddad. He’s offered to be a mentor, help me get going.”

  “I loved his cartoons too.” He pointed behind the workbench. One of The Original’s comics was back there, hand drawn and signed. “I was sorry when he decided to retire. Jesse e-mailed me a copy of the design he had in mind for your boots. Now I see you, I think it’s gonna be perfect. You Navajo?”

  I nodded.

  “I thought so. Here, let me show you.”

  He pulled some pieces of black leather out of the workbench, showed me the design he had impressed in the leather. Jesse leaned over too, studying it. Two old-fashioned six-shooters with the barrels crossed, and the rope in a circle around them. Jesse reached down, ran his fingers across the design. “Gary, you think we should color the design?”

  They both looked at me. I shook my head.

  “All right, then.” Gary pulled out a tray of gel, had me take off my shoes and stand in the gel with both feet until he had a good impression. “This is the way they make orthotics,” he said. “I used to date a podiatrist. When she criticized my boots, I broke up with her and stole her foot mold.”

  I slid a glance over to Jesse. He was biting his bottom lip. Gary showed me a couple of pieces of leather, the rough crocodile and a thick buffalo leather, and the weirdly patterned rattlesnake. Gary was wearing soft moccasin boots made out of a beautiful yellow-brown leather, elk, probably.

  I looked at Jesse and shrugged, and he pointed to the crocodile. “Gary, I think, give him a walking heel. When do you want us back?”

  “Week?”

  “Sounds good.” We shook hands again, and on the way out the door I saw a tiny sketch hung behind the workbench—an angel, curly golden hair, blue robe and white clouds, ascending into heaven, wearing a pair of brown cowboy boots. It was signed JC3. “I sure have enjoyed your comic,” he said. “I’m looking forward to more.”

  “Thanks, man. That’s nice to hear.”

  “I’ll send you an e-mail with a price quote, okay?”

  Out in the truck, Jesse gave me a nudge. “You’ve got a fan!”

  “Did you set that up?”

  He shook his head. “I called and told him we were coming. When I mentioned your name, he said, ‘Maryboy? You mean Devil Dog?’”

  “I’ll make him a cartoon.”

  “He likes making boots for artists. He usually gets a little thank you for his collection.”

  “I wonder if he can make me some moccasins too. Did you see those ones he was wearing? I’ll see how long it takes me to get the boots paid off.”

  “Would you rather have moccasins? I didn’t even ask you, Mary. I hope I’m not trying to push you into anything.”

  “Those are the best boots I’ve ever seen. I won’t be able to stand it now if I don’t get them. How much do you think they’ll cost?”

  He shrugged. “Six hundred?”

  “Sweet Jesus.”

  Jesse crossed his arms, gave me a look. “Now you’re starting to sound like The Original. You’re twenty-seven, so figure you can wear them till you’re seventy-seven. That’s fifty years, times twelve months, and that’s how much it will cost you per month for those boots. ”

  “How much?”

  “You don’t expect me to do the math in my head, do you?”

  We drove in silence for a while. He was leaned all the way back, the bucket seat reclined, and had one boot up on his knee, wiping off the dust.

  “Jesse, I’m sorry about Sadie.”

  He didn’t speak for a moment. “She was my little pet, my baby. I used to dress her up and carry her around in my wagon. She always had those red curls, and I must have fixed her hair a million times. But she was never strong. It was like her backbone was made out of paper. One strong wind, she was laying on the ground at somebody’s feet.” He rubbed both hands down over his face. “I’m talking about her in the past tense. God. She came to San Francisco because I was there, and….”

  His voice dropped off, and he stared out the window. “We got one more Bathtub Mary to visit. The one down in Santa Elena Canyon. You up for a little more? I can drive if you get tired.”

  “I’m okay for now. Maybe I’ll turn the wheel over to you on the way home. We should have got some bottles of water in Lajitas. Just driving through the desert makes me parched.”

  “We can stop in Terlingua, get some sodas or some tea or something.”

  “Cookies. A burger. That was a lovely salad we had for lunch, but I’m about ready to run into the desert and wrestle a longhorn to the ground.”

  “How’d you like that steak for supper last night?”

  “Oo-rah.”

  “That’s what I thought. Is it true Marine Corps testosterone is a stronger vintage of testosterone than the rest of us mortals have?”

  “You bet.”

  We stopped in Terlingua, and I ate a burger and fries and a beer, and Jesse had a pot of Earl Grey. He held out his hand when we were done, and I gave him the keys and settled myself in the passenger seat for a nap.

  He woke me when we were close to Santa Elena Canyon. The air was cooler here, with a hint of moisture in the air. “Are we near the river?”

  “Close,” he said. “We’ve got a bit of a hike to see this. Not too far.”

  He parked the truck, and we climbed up a little trail until we crested a hill. “It’s right down there,” he said, pointing. From the hill, it looked like the first one we’d seen, tiny and handmade. When we got closer, I could see this one had been made by children. The Virgin was plaster, worn by the rain, about a foot tall with pale blue robes, her arms out and her eyes raised to heaven. The pictures surrounding her were all of older people, and the notes and prayers had been written in crayon or pencil, by young hands.

  Jesse reached down, cleaned the sand around the shrine. “I came here when my grandmother died,” he said. “I was about seven, I think. Maybe six. We put her picture inside, and a prayer card, and I lit a candle and prayed that the Virgin would make sure my grandmother got into heaven, even though she had spanked my butt the night before she died, and kept me from those cookies.”

  That was the moment, watching Jesse pick dead leaves from the shrine, that I fell in love with him.

  Chapter Seven

  THERE was a slow roll in my chest, like some strange, distant planets had suddenly come into alignment. I rubbed the scars on my chest, remembered the split second after the bomb fell when I didn’t realize I’d been hit, and I stood up to go help my buddies, and then I saw the smoking pieces of black metal sticking out of my chest. My stomach had dropped, and something, my heart, I thought, had done a slow roll. So what did it mean, that the way I felt when I realized I had fallen in love was the exact same way I’d felt when I nearly died from exploding shrapnel?

  I closed my eyes. Tried to force the entire idea out of my head, because if it was in my mind, it would be bound to come out of my mouth, and Jesse, he was not going to say I love you back at me. And when that happened, things would change between us. I looked at him, kneeling in the sand, his hair curling in the heat around his beautiful tiny ear. Too late, too late, things had already changed. Shit. Shitshitshit.

  Jesse drove home in the dusk, the orange and purple sky darkening around us. I stared out the window, wondering what to do. My natural inclinat
ion in the face of disorder was to start organizing, cleaning up, so to speak, throwing away the trash and cleaning out the drawers and putting things back in some semblance of workable order. You couldn’t really do that, though, when the source of the chaos was unexpected love.

  I knew what I had come down here for. It was something that belonged to me, and was going to rise or fall on my hard work. I was starting to feel a real affection for that old man who had reached out to me, offered a hand to get me started. I didn’t want to do anything to make him sorry he’d made that gesture. And I wanted Devil Dog to succeed. I wanted to do work that meant something to me. But it felt like my head and my heart and my belly and my balls were full of Jesse—the way he smelled, the way his honey-corn-silk hair curled over his collar. The stormy blue of his eyes, with their humor and intelligence. His mind. Oh, God, I was so in love with his mind. And his flirty gay-boy come-on in red shoes. And the way he dragged a couple of green velvet Victorian couches into the studio, called it Paris on the Rio Grande, stripped down and gave me a blow job with all the joy of a kid licking an ice cream cone in July.

  I wanted him. I wanted him all for my own, his heart and his mind. I wanted us to be partners. Real partners, forever and ever, amen. I wanted us to ascend to heaven on the same cloud, a couple of cowboy angels in handmade boots. But somehow I didn’t get the feeling he took me as seriously as I took him. Well, we didn’t know each other that well yet. He didn’t have a clue how strong I was, or how hard I’d worked my whole life. The way you made it, growing up in Navajo country, was never allowing for the possibility of defeat or failure. It was just not an option. So I was going to win him, and we were going to live and love happily together for our entire lives and make beautiful art, and there was just no room for failure. I sat up, stretched. Okay, that was settled.

  He was grinning over at me. “So what’s up with you?”

  “Just thinking.”

  “About your comic? Are you gonna keep the same name?”

  “Probably.” I rubbed my chin. “I thought about changing it to Devil Dogs at War, but I don’t know. I like Devil Dogs.”

  “So tell me about it. Why Devil Dogs at War?”

  “That’s what I’ve decided on using as the framework. A comic strip with a couple of narrative threads and a platoon of Marines at war. An unnamed, continuous war.”

  “Why unnamed?”

  “You give something a name, you give it power. That’s what the Navajo think. War is a shitstorm of screwups and greed and laziness and broken promises. It doesn’t deserve a name.”

  Jesse thought about this for a bit. “So the narrative threads are going to be about the people in the platoons. You aren’t going to comment specifically on current events.”

  “I don’t think so, though I may be really tempted. I think it would be easy, but would weaken the strip over time. I don’t want to find myself boot-deep in some political cesspool.”

  “Not wearing handmade crocodile boots with original art by JC3.”

  “Not at a dollar a month for fifty years.”

  “What?”

  “Fifty times twelve is six hundred, knucklehead.”

  “I think your dick just grew an inch!”

  “Can you convert that to centimeters?”

  It was after midnight when we rolled into Marathon, and The Original had left the porch light on for us. I walked down to my room, and Jesse stopped in to his grandfather’s room to tell him we were back safe. Then he leaned against my bedroom door frame. “I had fun today.”

  “Yeah, me too. What are you gonna do tomorrow? Start work on the angels?”

  Jesse nodded. “I think so. I’m gonna get up early. I need to get to work.”

  “I’ll see you in the studio, then.” I pulled off my T-shirt, threw it on top of the duffel bag on the floor, skinned out of my jeans. Jesse took a good long look, then he sighed, blew me a kiss, and went down the hall to his bedroom. No way were we fooling around in his granddad’s house, with the old man sleeping across the hall.

  I slept hard, then something woke me a couple of hours later. My head was full of strange dreams, all murky pictures of the Virgin of Guadalupe in her pale-blue robes, looking down at me. She was as big as the sky, and I wrote her a note, telling her how much I loved Jesse. She spoke, though her plaster mouth never moved, and the compassion in her eyes was strong. “You may be in over your head, Lorenzo Maryboy.”

  Then I was sitting at the kitchen table with The Original, and I was crying, and he was stroking my hair. “Child, don’t tear your heart out with desire. Nothing lasts forever, not even love. You know the words? As for man, his days are like grass, he flourishes like a flower of the field; then the wind blows over it and it is gone….”

  I stared at the painted wooden ceiling. Maybe I was in over my head. Maybe nothing, not even love, lasted forever. “You’re going to have to prove that to me,” I said, wondering if the Virgin was still listening to me, or if she’d said her piece and moved on to less hardheaded men.

  I was wide awake. I looked at my watch. Three thirty a.m. I got up, pulled on my shorts and the dirty T-shirt I’d worn on our field trip. Then I carried my shoes and socks to the kitchen, put them on, and slipped out the front door.

  The air was cool and sweet, and most of the houses had their porch lights on. I wondered who they were waiting up for, sons and daughters who had moved away? Strangers looking for a home? The low, lonesome sound of the train whistle cut the night silence. Several of the town dogs ran with me, keeping me friendly company, and I saw Eden, who owned the bakery, flipping the lights on, yawning. She looked startled for a moment when I ran by with my group of dogs, then she recognized me and gave a friendly wave.

  I ran for an hour, let the musty clouds of the dream blow out of my head. I didn’t want to wake everyone up, so I hosed off my face and chest out in the yard, took a drink, and went into the studio to work.

  I wanted to work on the cartoon I’d thought of in the truck, my funny, obscene cartoon of me and Jesse. I sketched us out—he was on his knees in front of me, my dick in his mouth, and I was scooping his brains out of the top of his head and shoveling them into my mouth. Then I had another image, Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, so I gave myself some fur and paws and wolf ears, and let Jesse’s red cape fall back from his head and puddle on the ground at his feet. His lips were pink and lush, and the brown cock in his mouth was considerably bigger than my own, but I knew it would make him laugh. I made the background the desert between Terlingua and Lajitas, drew a tiny Virgin of Guadalupe in the corner, her hands on her blue-robed hips and a disapproving frown on her face.

  I slipped it between two pieces of watercolor paper with a note on the front—Eyes only—and left it on his desk. Then I stretched out on my green velvet sofa, watched out the window as the quiet dawn colored the sky shell pink.

  He crawled into my arms an hour later, a sleepy nuzzle on my neck. “Jesse, I haven’t had a shower. I’ve been out running.”

  “Oh, yummy. You all sweaty, zo-zo?” He nudged my arm above my head, sniffed at my armpit.

  “Ew! You nut, what are you doing?”

  “Take your shirt off.” He was tugging at the hem, pulling it up, and I stripped it off. Now his hand was slipping into the waistband of my running shorts. “What have you got on under here, a jock?” He lifted the waistband, peeked inside. “Oh, fuck me! You are wearing a jock. Come on, let’s get these off.”

  I raised my hips, let him tug the running shorts down my legs. “Jesse, I haven’t had any coffee yet!”

  “Your own fault, slipping out of the house when the moon was full. I kept waiting to hear you howling.” He pulled the shorts off my feet, stared down at me. “My word. Would you look at that. Roll over.”

  “What?”

  “Roll over! Don’t you know what a man’s butt looks like in a jock?”

  “Um, yeah?” I rolled over, and he crawled up on my legs, filled both hands with my ass, slipped a finger under the el
astic and popped it. “Ow. Jesse, don’t make me kick your ass.”

  He was giggling now, and he reached down, licked my lower back, slid his mouth down, and took a big sucking bite out of my butt. I could feel him back there, a blond vampire boy. Then I realized what he was doing. “Are you giving me a hickey? Now I really am gonna kick your ass.” He reached over the side of the couch, picked up a magic marker, and wrote something next to the hickey.

  “There. All done. Now roll over again.” I rolled over, and he studied my rising cock, stretching the cotton knit of the jock. “Well, look who’s awake!” He slid his fingers under the elastic, slipped the jock down off one leg. “My, what big teeth you have, Grandmother!”

  I caught him around the waist, lifted him, settled him between my legs. I wrapped him up until he couldn’t move. “Hello, Red Riding Hood. Are you lost in the woods, little girl?” He giggled against my neck, curled against me, and I wrapped my arms around him and gave him a squeeze. He was slender, so beautiful and elegant. I felt like I could crush him between my hands.

  “I love the cartoon. You are a fucking cartooning genius, my friend.” He leaned up on his arms. “So, my little zo-zo. What shall we do?” He reached down, captured my cock in his hand. “I told you that you could have me.”

  “I don’t think so. Not if that would require my moving. I’m kind of relaxed here. Anyway, I got you trapped now and I don’t want to let you go.”

  He gave a little wiggle, testing the strength of my arms and legs. “So here we are, nose to nose, mouth to mouth, cock to cock. What shall we do?”

  “I bet I can make you come first.”

  He grinned down at me, his eyes dark. “I bet I can make you come just by kissing you.”

  “Not a chance. I’m a rock-hard devil dog, you dig? And you’re a pretty little flower, a sweet-smelling blossom. And I’m going to pluck your petals.”