Bronco Bill came to terms with his bisexuality. He no longer felt the need to mount a bull just to feel the hands of other men on his body while he braced himself in the chute. His whole life the only way he could get close enough to other men was to prepare for violence. The moments he felt most like himself were when he waited for the gate to open, other men leaning over him with the musky smell of their sweat in his face.
Wyatt went to therapy. He processed how he was recreating his father’s absence and his mother’s emotional neglect by distancing himself from everyone, always leaving for somewhere else. As he rode out into the prairie between sessions, he decided maybe it was time to find somewhere to stay for a while.
Jumpin’ Jack was the best damn rodeo rider anyone had seen, even though he wasn’t yet twenty-one. That is, until he fell off his horse and hit his head. Now he sits in a chair in his mother’s kitchen and drools on himself, waiting to be fed.
Thelma threw in her dish towel and showed her skill with a lasso. No one counted her among the Cowboys, though. But she was better than most of the men.
Earl couldn’t keep up. He couldn’t stand seeing the dirt that once painted men’s nails replaced by pastel lacquer. The sight of another man crying made him want to vomit, or punch him, or both. He was the last real man, the last Cowboy, he told himself.
After Jack’s accident Earl lost his tolerance for things he didn’t understand. There were mysteries he couldn’t concern himself with, and he used to be content to let them exist, far from him and big as the sky. When he looked up into the blue, holding his unconscious son’s head in his lap, for the first time he demanded an explanation. He got nothing. He couldn’t be content with that.
Thelma became as inscrutable to him as the desert. It changed her differently. She had her mother sit with Jack at the house while she went out riding, competing in amateur competitions as if it hadn’t nearly killed their son, who Earl said got all his strength and quickness from him. She was more interested in being a Cowboy than a mother or a wife, he grumbled when someone congratulated him on her winning streak.
Wyatt worked at the stables and helped Thelma with her horses. When Earl realized Wyatt was helping her with more than just the horses he couldn’t bring himself to care. He scarcely touched her anymore. The night Earl came home and found them in his bed together he just put his hat back on and went to the bar.
Bronco Bill sat on a barstool, handsome and neat as two fingers of whiskey. He let Earl join him. They had known each other since they were boys, and Earl never would have taken him for a queer if he hadn’t heard Bill say it openly himself. He was the kind of guy who beat the shit out of another guy for looking at him funny. He maintained the order, and was the last one Earl would have thought would succumb to crazy ways of thinking. Two fingers turned to four, then to a whole hand that Earl allowed to graze against the back of Bill’s. At first Bill pretended not to notice, until Earl got drunker and told Bill he always wondered what it was like to suck a cock. Bill slid back on his barstool and told Earl he had been seeing this couple, a rancher and his wife, and they were in a “closed polyamorous triad” or some such shit Earl couldn’t comprehend. He did understand he had gone too far, so slugged Bill in the gut and yelled loud enough for the bartenders and everyone else to hear that he didn’t go for that sissy shit, and stumbled outside, erecting himself against the stiff night air.
Earl packed up his truck, resigned to leave the town to their new kind of lawlessness. If there were any real cowboys left maybe he would find them out there, and they could come back together to straighten everything out. He said as much to Thelma and Wyatt and drooling Jack before he drove away. He hoped they would all remember, the men holding each other’s manicured hands on their way to therapy and the women ignoring their husbands’ dinner, that once there used to be real men, real Cowboys. But they were all gone now. The world had no more use for them.
