The Vaquero

Reno blinked at the ceiling. What sort of end was this for a man who lived outside half his life. He hadn’t thought of his father in decades, but it hit him that he died much the same way— lying in bed waiting for the end. Lucky bastard. Had only to wait a year. In that time plotting the murder of his wife and shooting squirrels. Crazy bastard.  The San Francisco Chronicle reported he killed 750 squirrels the day before his death–all from his sanatorium bed no less. What year was that? He had just started walking, must have been about 1890. Why had he hung on for all these years? Toughness? Cowardice? Fear for his soul? He knew plenty of vaqueros who had shot themselves. Did he know them or had he read about them? He knew a couple. Suicides in the papers seemed common. Usually in some sad shack out in the desert. Maybe they weren’t so common. Happened though. Lucky bastards. The years after the accident blurred together, yesterday or a thousand years. Didn’t matter, they were all the same.  That man before was someone else. He peered into his life, a voyeur. Strange. How could he know so much about that man and not know him.  He laughed. Did he think he had become some kind of philosopher? If a man spends decades on his back with nothing to do but think, what does that make him. Hell, maybe he was a philosopher. Maybe he should have wrote some of these thoughts down. Too late now. Reno looked out the window. Cars cruised by on the blacktop. Funny. He remembers the same street– dirt, dusty–with horseback riders, wagons. Lying here had made him a time traveler. Changing times are experienced through the motion of life. Like a movie show he saw it, out his window, the papers. An observer, not a participant.  Changing times, progress they called it. What a funny idea. His life frozen in time for decades, every day like the one before. Before the accident he remembered he had been a cog in progress. It was in the papers. He had driven a car to Nevada from Red Bluff. The roads were rough, had to change a couple of tires along the way. Passable though. The papers celebrated the accomplishment. Others followed. Hell. Reno did it, we can too! Strange. The excitement he felt riding that “modern machine.” He didn’t have many regrets. Unusual for a man in his condition. There was nothing he could have done about the accident. That was bad luck. He regrets that celebrated day he drove up the mountains, had forsaken his horse. He didn’t think he had a part in changing much, but he wished he hadn’t gone along with it. He read in the papers the “last buckaroo” died. Here he was still alive. Well, that’s how many of the true ones went out. Nobody knowing. No obituary or grave marker. He’d have a nice grave. That was all arranged. They’d put his nickname on there–Bingo.