I
NO LONGER FOLLOW that old North Star. It floats in the sky, filled with betrayal, swallowin’ up the light and hope of a lot of folks. I figure that’s what makes it burn so bright. I counted on it every night, riding across the Panhandle atop old Rusty, thinkin’ it was leading me to a better place. If there’s a better place for old cowboys like me, I haven’t found it yet. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been sittin’ on a horse. I don’t like how feet feel on the ground, rough pavement scuffing the bottom of boots, the earth hanging on to my soles. My skin looks like leather, burnished to a fine patina from all the sand that blasted it over the years. This old face is dark as a berry, my stomach white as a trout’s belly. The hat’s seen better days, too. It’s a Stetson, bought with hardearned money, brown as the Texas hills and broken in just so. Fits like an old friend. Everyone calls me Lanky, though the name my Momma gave me is Milton. Ain’t no cowboys around named Milton, and Lanky kinda fits, because I’m lean and spare as a fence post. I grew up on a farm outside Carthage, Missouri.
We had an old mare named Trudy, and I rode her out to the pasture every day to bring in the milk cows for my daddy. She was slow as a spring thaw, but we got the job done, my short legs sticking straight out across her broad back, flicking a rope back and forth and hollerin’ at the cows. They were heading for the barn, anyway, their udders full and throbbing with milk. I rode Trudy to school every day, too, until the 6th grade. Daddy figured that was all the learning a farmer needed. I was plucked from the schoolhouse and set down in the barn, forking hay and mucking stalls. You’d think I’d seen enough cow shit in my day, but when I grew up, I had a keen interest for the West and cowboys. It was the late 1920s. The country was already startin’ to change. Cars and trucks replaced the trains and wagons as people made their way west. Newly carved roads lead all the way to California, the land swollen with promise. I heard about big ranches in Texas and Wyoming. Spreads that covered hundreds of square miles, churning out beef cattle by the thousands. They needed wranglers. So, I hitch-hiked my way from Missouri to Texas, gaping at the miles of dust and ravines,
