Olja Savicevic - Adios, Cowboy

This keeps happening: she finds the hen, with white feathers, a whole kilometer beyond Majurina, where the cowboys are making their film.

Maria calls to the hen: “Come chook, come chook, chook-chook-chook.”

That call is familiar to starlings and pheasants, they all come for the grain, all except that one hen.

Around the container trucks and tents down on the flatland, a small garden has sprung up with a wooden fence and a mini chicken coop. They’ve brought in feathered extras and they feed them with GM maize, which Čarija’s hen is mad about and goes charging off against the natural limitations of her kind: showing distinct signs of curiosity and free will.

In some poultry sense, she is the first astronaut to have descended from the Milky Way.

At the filling station, Ned Montgomery watches his agent Tod pour gas in a short-sleeved T-shirt bearing the inscription BIG BLACK. Tod’s smooth, bald head gleams in the sun, his big blue eyes squint in the sun, and his big feminine backside sways after him, as though it has a life apart from the rest of his body. All in all, if it weren’t for his beard, Tod would look like a fat woman, thinks Ned.

Tod pays and comes back with a heap of Snickers for himself and two cans of beer for his partner. It suddenly occurs to Ned, clutching the steering wheel in an effort to control the way his hands are shaking, like a disagreeable discovery his own organism had hidden from him, like, for instance, a wart in a private place, that this damn son of a bitch Tod is the only person in the world on whom, at this moment, he can rely, the only one, since his wife died, who takes some kind of care of him.

How did it happen that Ned Montgomery has become the more fucked-up half of the Ned and Tod team? thinks Ned.

They look like those pairs of comics, dancers, or gay designers. But it could be worse, damn it all; they could be Ned and Ted.

He doesn’t remember which came first, Chiara’s death or bankruptcy and mortgage or divorce and all that chaos that crashed down onto him while he was sleeping, blind drunk and totally stoned, on the floor of some hotel room.

But if your name is Ned Montgomery, some bastard named Tod will usually show up to put you under the shower and settle your bills. That’s a piece of luck, probably.

However you look at it, I am at the tender mercies of my fucking agent Tod, this goddamm freak who wears T-shirts with the names of goddamn bands, smokes cigarettes like goddamn Orson, and who I didn’t even know till four years ago, thinks Ned. I don’t even know if I like or loathe him.

But anyway there’s nothing to be done right now, drink up your beer, put yourself in the hands of Jesus and be grateful, Montgomery.

A little girl with peroxide hair had washed and polished the pickup’s windows: in the windscreen is clear bright sky, motionless and aseptic blue, evidence that perfection exists. A few moments before a real autumnal northerly gale had got up, shaving the town and Old Settlement dry.

“Oh man, that’s some evil wind, let’s go,” he says, banging the car door, climbing into the passenger seat and lighting a cigarette, that damn brute, his coproducer, co-screenwriter, copilot, friend, Tod.

At the same time:

Down on the exposed flatland, among the burrs, in front of the prefab town, the cameraman, the director, assistants, and the whole retinue of actors are swallowing dust, smoking, and staring into the distance waiting for Montgomery’s pickup.

The old man has let them know he’s not satisfied with the scenes of the final showdown. They’ll have to shoot them again, he said. In his damn presence, he said. He hadn’t seemed all that interested in the film, he hadn’t appeared all this time, so why does he suddenly care about the final showdown? the film crew wonders.

Some gunslinger extras from the local gun club are sitting on a little wall beside the chicken coop behind the horse paddock, some distance from the rest of the team. They’re on their way back from a shooting contest. Some of them have spent the morning trickling spit and making little muddy oases between their feet, others loading their weapons for practice. They keep together, but apart from the rest of the team, drinking beer and saying nothing. Waiting makes them nervous.

One of them has taken his weapon out of the club’s minivan and is shooting at empty bottles; the others join him readily. They have shattered the bottles into tiny pieces and shifted their aim to the hens, which, not suspecting anything bad, are calmly pecking a few meters away and just occasionally squawking, disturbed by the splintering glass.

The lads are trying to shoot their heads off with one shot, and for the time being it’s going well.

The hens don’t even get a chance to spread their wings in surprise and squawk before a bullet whines and guillotines them. Some run around headless, others fall at once, as though scythed.

“Idleness is evil, man,” Tod will say later, commenting on the massacre.

The rest of the crew, it seems, finally realize what’s going on, because they start shouting. A small Americano in a Borsalino (most of the others have taken off their cowboy hats, because of the wind), who could be the director, yells that he’s going to call the police.

“Bastards! Don’t shoot the chickens!” shouts the Americano.

One bullet whines in his direction (“This one’s for you!”) but the firing and shooting of the poultry stops.

Now both sides, each from their own end of the open space, are weighing each other up distrustfully.

An ominous silence hovers in the air; only the wind whines and sends an occasional plastic bag bowling along from the prairie. Crows sit on the black branches.

But if we listen more closely, we can hear a rustle, then footsteps through the grass and a voice.

An unknown woman appears from behind the paddock with plastic bags in her hands and, as far as can be made out, she seems to be calling a hen.

The gunslingers turn their heads toward the new arrival. They stare at the vision of a young woman with large yellow teeth.

When she notices them, she completely changes and smiles at them seductively. Totally deranged bitch, they think. Her skirt — Spanish style, with a floral pattern — is pulled up under her breasts, and she is wearing boots with no heels. Under her shock of bleached white and yellow curls, two wild, enflamed green eyes gaze steadily at the men.

Then Čarija screams softly: she catches sight of the dirty white hen whose body, headless, is still twitching.

The aroma of a butcher’s shop wafts on gusts of wind.

“Hey, here’s Lily of the West come to see us, brother!” says the first gunslinger, apparently the group leader, judging by his stance.

Čarija spits a gob in his direction, which hits him in the face.

“Crazy bitch, damn you!” says the first gunslinger, loading his gun.

“Eeehaaah!” shouts another, cracking his whip in the air toward the girl. Maria jumps out of the way and growls. “Eeehaaah, brother!” The man cracks his whip in the dust.

The men start laughing.

The woman drops her bag in alarm and its contents spill out. Then she runs a few meters, stops in the middle of the field, and — not taking her eyes off her enemy — with her fingers spread she pats her open mouth several times briefly and jerkily: “Va-va-va-va…”

And speeds to the hill, more swiftly than a vixen.

“Oh, brother, that’s some crazy bitch,” says gunslinger number three. He blows at his trigger, takes aim, and shoots off the head of a crow attracted by the smell of fresh hen’s blood.

But where have Ned and Tod gone?

Just here, the road their pickup is travelling on abruptly changes from four lanes to two. The speed limit is sixty, but everyone drives at least eighty, if not a hundred kilometers an hour: drivers here usually lose all sense of speed. Sometimes, at precisely this place, from one of the un-made-up side tracks, a farmer in a tractor comes onto the highway, slowing the traffic completely, virtually stopping it.