Olja Savicevic - Adios, Cowboy

Before his eyes fill completely with blood, Ned catches sight of a man on the television in a black-and-white fatherly voice repeating: “Go west, young man. There you will find wealth, fame, and adventure. ” And now the ads.

Go west, young man. And there you will find wealth, fame and adventure.

Holy shit, turn it down!

Go west, young man, and there you will find / Go west, young man, and there you will find / Go west, young man…

“Hey, you! Hey, kid! Hey, Tod, goddammit! Someone’s trying to sleep here, for God’s sake! Turn that fucking thing off!”

He tries to say that, he hears the words in his head, but his tongue won’t obey him, it lies in the bottom of his mouth, like something dead.

“Well, well — Ned, you’re alive. You’ve forgotten what today is? It’s half past two, man, we don’t have much daylight left. We have to show up at the shoot, man, it’d be okay to get there on time, you know,” says Tod. “At least for the final showdown.”

Ned tries to raise his head, but it doesn’t work, it’s nailed to the pillow.

“You recognized that, huh? Who says: go west, young man? Senator, it’s Senator, what’s his name… Sorry, I’ll be right back, that’s my cell,” says Tod.

“And why the fucking fuck, go fucking west. What a damn idiotic fascination. Myth. Any shithead with any brains and a few dollars in his pocket goes to the fucking east these days. Near, far, and the not-so-far east — whatever. Why even such a fuckup as me goes east,” replies Ned Montgomery, but his words still refuse to emerge from him.

After a few tottering false starts, he gets up, straightens, and staggers towards the toilet.

“What a dream, oh my God, what a goddamn nightmare,” he thinks. “When I drink, I always dream the same crap.”

When Tod had tipped him onto the bed early that morning, drunk and filthy from the previous night, he had pulled off his trousers and soiled underpants — they were tossed down behind a chair — and now Ned, at this moment, leaning against the wall, notices his thin hairy legs, knobbly knees, and drooping balls a little surprised, as though he is seeing that jumble of skin, hair, and organs for the first time.

Tod is sitting at the improvized desk where there is a laptop, a few unwashed coffee cups, and a scatter of Snickers wrappers. He is smoking a cigar.

“When we get to the final showdown, did you know, man, that in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral thirty-four bullets were fired in five minutes. But it took them four days to shoot those five minutes! You didn’t know? What kind of film star are you, man?” he shouts to Ned through the half-open toilet door.

What in hell’s name is that dickhead Tod doing now?

Ned tries to aim at the toilet bowl, but his urine trickles in a feeble, painful stream down his legs onto the tiles. He curses, wipes himself down with toilet paper, and flushes, leaning his full weight on the handle.

Tod is now sitting on the floor of their apartment with three remotes in front of him, clicking on a laptop with one hand and holding a cell phone under his chin.

“Look!” he whispers in Ned’s direction, gesturing toward the new film on the television.

John Wayne really was a tall son of a bitch, taller than me, Ned thinks, squinting at the TV and swaying toward the minibar. Since he quit smoking, he has needed increasing quantities of whiskey and beer.

In front of Tod there is a large cardboard box crammed with videocassettes. A black video player, dating from the late nineteen-eighties, is farting and purring.

“What the—”

Tod tosses him a pair of his underpants from the pile of clean clothes that the maid brought that morning washed and ironed: “Put those on, man, you look spectral; skin and bone. Your damn tool is fatter than your leg.”

“—hell is that?” Ned finishes his sentence, trying to squeeze the whiskey from the bottom of the bottle into a glass.

“These? Westerns. Recorded from the TV, hey, hey. Oh you wouldn’t believe it. I’ve been looking at them all morning, my bro. I’m crammed with noble emotions, man. Look me in the eye! I feel somehow mythic. At least until I look at you. Sweet Jesus, Ned, you’re a carcass. A phantom. You’re destroying my idols, man.”

Ned finally pulls on his underpants, flops into an armchair, and yawns broadly.

Wayne, known as Courage, drunk, fires at a rat and says to the ugly girl: “You can’t take out an injunction on a rat, you gotta either let it go or kill it.”

An optimistic approach, thinks Ned. That’s why the damn idealism of westerns kicked the fucking bucket. Time trampled them.

“You have to learn to live like a rat, Johnny,” says Ned to the TV.

“A girl brought us this box, full of cassettes, this morning. a devotee of yours, man, you know those dolls,” Tod goes on. “She wants Mr. Montgomery to have it — why, imagine. I said, Go on, honey, don’t worry, give it to Uncle Tod. And I took her by her little hand. He, he. A doll, get it? When she went out the door, I thought the box would be going straight in the trash, but in the end, you see, I’ve had a good time with these films, man. Like I was a kid again, you know?”

“Throw it in the damn trash. What’ll I do with it?”

Those fans are sick, they keep bringing him all kinds of fucking garbage. Can you actually be a fan and at the same time be a normal man or, especially impossible, a normal woman, thinks Ned.

“Hey, Ned, look, there are some of your films as well. Virgil’s Return .”

“Throw that shit in the trash and let’s go to the damn shoot.”

Before leaving, he takes a look in the mirror and tries to pull his stomach in. In the end he gives up and simply takes his shirt out of his jeans. Tod’s right, he looks like an old fart, he thinks.

“Well, sister, the time has come for me to ride hard and fast,” Wayne’s voice can be heard as they close the apartment door.

It’s going to be a bad day even for people with less luck.

Everything points to it, Ned, it would’ve been better if you’d stayed in bed.

“You coming, man?” Tod yells from the elevator.

“Let’s go, sister, the time has come for us to ride hard and fast,” replies Ned, pressing the 0 button.

It’s a sunny day in Majurina. Čarija and Tomi’s three triplets stand on different sides of a wire fence, talking.

“Pa says ’e’ll frash yous if yous mention the dead again,” says one of the little blond girls.

Maria looks at them longingly: Tomi’s triplets won’t let her hug them or pick them up. She’d carry them to and fro, up the field and down the field, until they grew big, she’d dress them in party skirts. She’d sing to them. Since she first heard them crying in the next-door house, here in Majurina, she thinks only of them. She thinks of her hens as well, because they’re her responsibility.

“Pssst, listen, the dead occupiers’re clattering their little bones under the earth,” says Maria Čarija.

“‘s not true,” says one of the triplets. “Tomi says you’re crazy.”

Maria offers them rubber sweets through the wire fence.

“Here, signorinas — and ask your teacher! All the pits and streams’re full of the bones of the dead occupiers,” says Maria.

“But we doesn’t go to school, Aunty Maria, we’re too little. You’s talking rot.”

“Anyone can see you don’t go to school! Eating sweets with filthy hands,” says Maria, spitting on her skirt and using it to clean her nieces’ little fingers as they push them through the fence.

Later, Maria Čarija puts on her patent-leather boots, pink, a bit scuffed, with broken heels, and thrusts her things into a plastic bag: a comb, dry twigs, a Rubik’s cube, lip salve, and hair slides. And since she feels that the bag is half empty, she adds what is on hand: one of her father’s socks, a route map of Croatia, mascara, two used pairs of panties with lace, L’Italiano per Lei , and a pebble she found by the railway line. Satisfied and quite ready, she sets out to look for her hen.