Olja Savicevic - Adios, Cowboy

Van Cleef whacks Cooper, who gives as good as he gets. They clobber each other, draw back, gnash their teeth, and, waving their hands, they throw themselves on the earth, dust, and scattered straw.

Feathers, straw, dust, and hats — fly through the air.

Cooper gets to his feet, staggers slightly, raises his hand, and misses Lee. But Van Cleef nevertheless smashes into a log and gets a mouthful of earth. He wipes his bloody nose with his sleeve and, seeing the blood, goes berserk.

“You see, Tod, that would never happen in a real western,” says Ned. “The ones who look like damn Lee, they never fight, they’re too well-bred for that, and they’re too good a shot to get their hands dirty.”

At that Van Cleef’s double hurls himself furiously at the fake Cooper, striking sparks from the dust. Their wet neckerchiefs stick to their bare chests while drops of sweat break out on their high, tanned foreheads. As the cowboys roll and groan and scratch, the horses neigh in terror and one runs off — who knows where.

A quasi Grace Kelly whom, according to the screenplay, all the men address as “Hey, gorgeous” or “Hello, sweetheart” approaches her window several times in panic and each time brings her little hand to her lips in horror.

And then Gary takes out his pistol: BANG! And the director in a panama hat shouts: “CUT!”

“You see, Tod, that would never happen in a real western,” says Ned. “The ones who look like good old Gary hit their mark infallibly, but they never, ever draw first.”

What else did Maria find in the cellar?

Sugar and saltpeter.

“This is a rather more complicated smoke bomb,” squad leader Dujković, a friend of Tomi Iroquois, had said once long ago, while the war was still on, “but it can be made in larger quantities.”

The Iroquois Brothers, all nine male relations plus Maria Čarija, had arranged themselves on the settee and the floor, watching, while Dujković stood in the middle of the kitchen, stirring:

“All we need is saltpeter (potassium nitrate, KNO3) and powdered sugar. You can buy saltpeter in any chemist’s, ten grams for three kunas, and sugar isn’t a problem. We can buy larger quantities of saltpeter for fertilizer in a shop in Trogir, two kilos, but it’s less pure so I don’t know if it would work in this combination. The proportions of saltpeter to sugar are three to two. So you take three grams of saltpeter and two of sugar. Take that and put it into a shallow metal pan, where you can mix it easily. Now turn the cooker ring to medium, perhaps a little higher, but not too high, and place the pan on it. In the meantime, while the ring is heating up (don’t do this with gas, as the temperature is too high and it might set fire to the kitchen, as happened to me once), mix the saltpeter and powdered sugar, put it into the pan, and keep stirring. Gradually a sticky mass will form, eventually becoming coffee colored. When that happens, take your freshly made smoke bomb off the heat and form it into whatever shape you like. To test it, set light to a small quantity with a lighter… there, there! It’s smoking, see! Ammonia nitrate is a wickedly insensitive explosive. It’s more likely that your pillow would explode than AN. It becomes sensitive in combination with liquid explosives, and can be detonated by quite a weak detonator. This is how I get a proper explosion: buy KAN fertilizer or fluorine, or pinch it from your uncle’s cellar.”

Rumor had it that Dujković was a little mad and that he had gone to pieces over a Serbian girl when her parents left for Belgrade overnight, taking her away.

Dujković later told everyone prepared or obliged to listen to him, including the Iroquois Brothers, that the “runaway had screwed with him at fourteen.” When he got drunk, he would yell that he’d “make that little Serbian bitch pay” when he found her. He joined the Home Guard before he was eighteen and at nineteen he trod on a booby trap. They say that one day he simply ran into a minefield.

The girl came to look for him some years later. When she couldn’t find him, she sat down on the steps of her former house and stayed there for eight hours. She never came back after that.

Maria had seen them, she wasn’t the only one chasing Daniel — they were hunting him like hounds after a fox.

They had brought a little girl with them, sister of Ear and that new kid who had recently moved to the Settlement.

A rottweiler known as Tiny, who ended up with a bullet in his back, and red-haired Daniel were standing, legs apart, in the middle of an empty car park, measuring each other up in a macho way. Then they launched themselves at each other and got a good hold. Tiny swung at Daniel, who gave as good as he got. They laid into each other, snorting and waving their arms, they threw themselves down on the asphalt and sand and the flowerbeds around the streetlights. Daniel got up, staggered, and missed Tiny. But Tiny still crashed over a step and got a mouthful of earth, he wiped his bloody nose with his sleeve and spat, and — seeing the blood — went berserk. And he threw himself at Daniel and everything exploded. Daniel grabbed his jacket and hurled him onto the ground. And then Ear, a mad terrier, Tiny’s mate, whacked Daniel on the neck with a piece of board. Tiny growled and drew out his infamous long flick knife, snapping it open.

Daniel stepped back between the parked trucks and drew his pistol, braced himself, stretched out his arms, and aimed at them.

But everyone in the Settlement knew that this pistol didn’t work. Maria knew too. They knew about it in town, and at school, about the boy who carried a dud pistol.

There was a silence, then laughter, and guffaws.

And then, quite unexpectedly, Daniel fell. No one had touched him; he simply collapsed onto the ground. Tiny kicked him, hit him, put his knife under his chin, but Daniel didn’t stir.

When he began to groan, they started kicking him in the thighs, arms and neck.

“That’s enough. Come on, Ear, enough, you’ll kill him,” said Ear’s sister.

“Don’t hit him in the head, I’m not getting banged up because of that cunt,” said Ear to Tiny.

“You’re a real coward, Cornboy, you fainted like a proper piece of skirt,” said Tiny to Daniel.

They moved away for a while, muttering, then finally undid their flies and pissed on him. You’ve got to do that, it’s classic. They took what he had in his pockets and tossed the pistol toward the trash.

The new guy, the one with the mouth organ who used to hang around with them at that time, didn’t touch Daniel, he stood to one side with his hands in his pockets, he looked around as he left, but he didn’t go back.

Maria waited till the sons of bitches had moved sufficiently far away, pushed her way between the trucks, and crawled up to Daniel.

He opened his eyes and sniffed his clothes, touched his head where it had hit the asphalt.

She watched him and as he didn’t say anything, not even scram, she put his pistol in his hand and lay down beside him.

It was cold on the ground, but he didn’t say get lost, as he sometimes did.

He just gazed at the moving clouds and the bright glare of the sun between them. She knew, because she was gazing at them too.

It was cold on the ground, but still — this time, she could have stayed there till morning.

Later she made little bombs just for him, for self-defense, they looked like the Albanian sweet-makers’ rum-bombs, two and a half kunas each; but she never got around to giving them to him.

Whenever he sets off to the cowboys, to his first film job, Angelo, maestro on the mouth organ, doesn’t walk along the road, he takes a roundabout route, through fields and vineyards, then over the railway track, through the undergrowth and tall grass, avoiding the streams overgrown with thorn bushes in which children and asparagus pickers sometimes find the washed and gnawed bones of dead animals and people, left over from several earlier wars that had rumbled through this transitional port of history and geography, somehow incidentally, in passing — leaving behind a lot of waste, desolation, filth, and hysteria. This young man, you will observe from the way he moves, like a highwire dancer, is taking care not to tear his tuxedo, not to dirty his trousers, not to catch himself on a cherry branch as he treads along the dry stone walls that stretch infinitely in four directions.