Olja Savicevic - Adios, Cowboy

“Hey, ciao.”

“What?”

“For a Few Dollars More? ” I asked, partly to show I was in the swing, because I knew that was the theme. To be honest, there aren’t many tunes for the comb, at least not as far as I know.

“Yep,” he said, carrying on playing. “Morricone.”

I hadn’t impressed him.

“You’re Rusty,” he said, looking me up and down.

His tuxedo was dusty, under it was the bare torso of a golden lad, and around his neck was a white silk scarf. Seen from close up it was obvious that he was a little peacock, he couldn’t be more than twenty.

“I knew your brother,” he said, and spat on a bug crawling in the dust, quite accurately.

Usually people don’t say that, I reflected, usually they don’t mention Daniel to me, they are careful about that.

In his yellow eyes Angelo has a black spark, on his short boots spurs for the requirements of the film, I observed. On the spurs, appropriately a star; and on his Adam’s apple, quite inappropriately, a drop of dark sunlight.

“So, you act?” I asked, and spat as well, it just came over me. That explains why he goes around in these clothes.

“You could say I act. But I don’t say anything, just play music,” he said, scratching his dark chin.

“I’ve been sort of thinking about becoming an actress,” I said frivolously. “But I’ve given up the idea. The ideal thing seems to me to travel around the world, writing tourist guides. Can you believe that there are lucky guys who do that for a living?”

“Oh,” he said seriously, “I think you could be whatever you want.”

What does he mean by that whatever you want , I wondered. Presumably that’s something good, I reflected; a compliment, maybe.

“How do you know Daniel?” I asked.

“I didn’t know him that well, just from the street, you know,” he frowned. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “It was me who asked.”

The prairie is beautiful at this time of year. In summer no one feels like farming, so it’s all overgrown with tall dry grasses stretching all the way to Majurina, to the three-story building with no facade, where Maria Čarija and her relatives, their children, dogs, hens and goats live. In front of their building and the houses some hundred meters away where their close kin, a whole tribe, live, there’s no longer a single blade of grass. Vegetables and fruit do badly; they say that Majurina is a sand bar, left when the sea retreated, and that everything drains away through that soil. The Iroquois have a small herd of goats, which have of necessity become fairly independent and take care of themselves. Those goats sometimes climb trees to browse on the leaves, and that’s quite a scene — as though goats were growing on the trees.

Some of the actors went up to the houses and wanted to take photographs of them, but the “Iroquois Brothers weren’t thrilled at the idea,” said Angelo, laughing. The drop of light jiggled on his throat.

The strangest thing about a man’s body has always seemed to me his Adam’s apple. But his was acceptable.

“Come with me, I’ll show you everything,” my harmonica man beckoned me and I followed him, his boyish nape, the curls on the back of his head, his arms, shoulders, back, his small muscular bum, his downy bare ankles, his voice of soft cotton, with deeper tones. What flickered in his vocal cords echoed deep in my belly and between the fingers I had thrust into my pockets.

The insatiable one had talked about love as a sudden thunderclap. “ Colpo di fumine, ” she used to say. What would she say about Angelo if she could see him?

“Handsome as an actor,” my great-grandmother would say.

“Shame he’s a tart,” my sister would say.

“Love is overestimation of the sexual object,” Freud would say.

Maybe I’m falling in love again, I reflected anxiously.

He turned around to check that I was following him.

There were some interesting objects on the set. Colorful as a circus, a whole world within another, and both of them in a third; horses, cameras, and people.

I glanced all around to see whether I could catch a glimpse of Ned Montgomery.

I imagine the cowboy as he is on the poster in my bedroom — a tough guy of unshakable resolve with a cobalt gaze and eyebrows of wire, a great white hero. Although, to be honest, in all the more recent pictures in the newspapers he’s already old and crumpled, with a very red neck.

“He doesn’t come here,” said Angelo.

“They say he was a great actor,” he added.

“Right,” I nodded. “For some, maybe the greatest.”

Hen extras of various colors were wandering about, so the trampled, scorched grass was full of chicken shit. I kicked several little balls away with the tip of my trainer.

“The Indians use it to make us tea,” said Angelo, squinting unobtrusively at my boobs, I observed.

“Oh sure,” I said for the sake of saying something. He laughed again, displaying his teeth, small and white, like milk teeth.

In front of one tent sat a magnificent witch doctor resembling an extinct bird with yellow, red, and white feathers. A gloomy, proud wizard, a priest of flora and fauna. “Oneiric being,” my sister would say.

“That’s the old Gippo, the one who begs round the boutiques,” said Angelo.

She appears in one scene as the tribal witch doctor, he explained. Her heavy feathered headdress rests on her shoulders, a shawl like wings; she has a red mark on her forehead.

“Let’s ’ave a look,” said the Gypsy as soon as I approached, taking my hand and looking at my palm. I drew it back and shoved it into my pocket.

“The Gippo doesn’t have panties under her skirts and if no one gives her anything in a shop, she stands on the threshold and pees down her legs, as though it’s nothing to do with her,” Daniel had once said, I recalled. But now she was wearing trousers. Her great, luxuriant tits were confined in a richly embroidered waistcoat.

“You ’ave night in your soul, I can read that from your brow,” the Gypsy told me crossly, and spat into the dust.

“You guessed right,” I said, and put both hands on my hips. “But I have a warm and sunny heart,” I said, as a joke and because of Angelo.

Her eyes widened — two drops of pitch — then narrowed to dark spark.

“Well, you may ’ave a ’eart, but if you ’ave a ’eart, you can’t ’ave panties,” said the Gypsy wizard, dragging her feathers of Paradise through the dust among the sparrows and scavengers.

The sun was now high above us, but its metal glare was softened by the approaching autumn. Some stars from the soaps that Ma watches emerged from the wigwams, I recognized them. They greeted Angelo. We walked along beside the facade of a building made of plasterboard and plywood, somewhere in the Wild West.

My new friend was in a good mood, my words stuck in my throat.

“You’ve got something here,” he said, removing an insect from my T-shirt.

He did that on purpose, I reflected. We were sniffing each other like two spaniel puppies, one red, one black. Any minute now, our tongues will start lolling.

“Come on, angel, take out your harmonica and play me something,” called an actor. I recognized him from a children’s program.

Our attention was drawn to a cloud of dust out of which emerged a cabriolet — the young lady in the light-colored suit, this time with her hair down and dark glasses on her face. The one who had picked him up that afternoon when I was watching them from my window. She gestured to him, pushing her dark glasses up. The boy stirred lazily, put his comb into his back pocket, and strolled toward her.

Damnation, they would say in a western.