Olja Savicevic - Adios, Cowboy

He hadn’t known Daniel well, and he doesn’t remember whether they ever exchanged a word. And he doesn’t know why they laid into him, he never asked. They beat up plenty of others, too. Sometimes they’d dream up a reason, sometimes they were just bored. Nothing particular. Mostly boredom. A reason is easily found.

And if the wolf doesn’t have a cap, the bear clobbers him while the rabbit cheers. If he does have a cap, same thing.

When Daniel killed himself, everyone said they were sorry. Everyone, apart from Angelo, went to the funeral: Tiny and Ear. Fuck it, the boy was a depressive, they said, which was shitty of them. If he hadn’t killed himself, maybe they would have done it, who knows, Angelo thinks.

That time when they had run into Daniel in the empty car park and hammered him, he had turned around to check whether Daniel was alive.

He hadn’t stopped, as he wasn’t crazy; if you weren’t with them, with Tiny and Ear, you’d be the next to be crying, pissed on, in the street. The whole town knew that. Apparently.

Angelo shakes the doubt from his heart as easily as a puppy shakes off dirty water.

He’s still young enough for ordinary shower gel to be able to wash him clean and the wind to dry him, he thinks.

That’s why he sails like a harvest moon, full of himself.

He doesn’t pause until, from the top, he catches sight of a colorful apparition moving in the distance in the same direction as him.

At the same time, just a few minutes’ walk away:

What the hell was that dotard Ned up to now? thought Tod.

He had been holed up in that chemical toilet for twenty minutes.

If Tod had had his way, those idiots who had carried out the massacre of the fowl would by now have been in a police car on their way to their idiot village, which like all idiot villages in this world no doubt prides itself on its idiocy.

But Ned, oh yes, that guy never for an instant forgets that he is Ned Montgomery, man. He had swayed up to the gunslinger from B, like a cowboy, with a cigar in his mouth, and said: “Save the damn bullets, boys.”

That was how Tod’s teacher, in Gilroy, California, would have confiscated the kids’ water pistols till the end of the lesson, thought Tod.

And what a spectacular final showdown, man, why this isn’t Hollywood, for God’s sake, give me a break, amigo. Let’s go, finally, finish the job and pick up our check.

“Hey, Ned, you okay, old man?” Tod knocks on the door of the chemical toilet. “D’you think you could get a bit of a move on?”

(Swearing from inside.)

The door opens and Ned comes out, in clean clothes.

“Surprise,” says Ned.

“Hee, hee,” he says. “I’m going to shoot in the damn final showdown too,” he says. He takes two golden Colts, of the six he has, out from under his leather coat, real buffalo skin, and spins them on his fingers. An old trick, Ned Montgomery never needed a double.

I’ve never understood what in hell’s name he needs with those six pistols, man, he’s not Shiva! thinks Tod.

Hell, Ned, that’s not in the screenplay, he starts to say, but his cigar singes him.

Mr. Montgomery, that’s not in the screenplay, the Americano director starts to say, but concludes that it’s not advisable and there’s no point in protesting.

“Let’s go, boys,” says Montgomery, tilting his hat. “Let’s go film! Drag yourselves over to me here, since I’ve dragged my magnificent butt over the ocean to you. It’s time for a real goddamn turbo western party.”

“Oh, man.”

We left Angelo sailing like a full moon, above the olive groves and stopping, for a moment, when he catches sight from the hilltop of a figure a bit further off stirring up dust in the same direction as himself. He recognizes Tomi Iroquois’s relation, the one who hisses at him when they meet on the road, so he slows down, letting that crazy woman move as far ahead as possible.

Today the charmer Angelo believes that he’s happy, because he thinks he’s in love with Rusty, the girl who, at this moment, on the other side of town, is getting onto a train and leaving him.

But he knows nothing of that, he takes his harmonica, his Pocket Pal, out of his pocket, spreads his palm, and his hand opens into a peacock’s tail while his lips become a starling’s beak. He weaves tunes, a little sweet and a little sad. In his head he is Sugar Blue.

He dreams about a great career as a musician, and he thinks about an ordinary, true love.

He believed that love was big and clear, but real and tangible, like a monolith, which is a fairly ignorant notion. Now that he’s inside it, he can see a bit — it’s a moist box containing two blind hungry greedy kittens. There’s no way out and nothing else exists.

You wanted to tell her things about yourself, sweet Angelo, while you lay naked and completely exposed like really small children, your limbs intertwined in the chilly cellar room.

But you didn’t, that’s how it turned out, she fell asleep or you fell asleep. In short, you put your snout into her ear and mumbled: “Sleep, Rusty.”

She’ll be your best friend, your fratella , your favorite lover, you convince yourself, after just a few days, pressed into those few hours of intimate contact — and your wife.

You really believe that you’re in love with that gangling, rusty girl who is just leaving town, while you, fool, have no clue.

In that unrepeatable second being counted out by your fast, unaccountable heart, you defy the wind, more boldly than the fleeting Kairos and you believe that you are stronger than everything that has lain in store for you so far. Like — the story is about to take a new direction.

And it is, but not exactly the way you hope, sweet Angelo.

Do you not know that it’s your fault your rusty bride has just taken her seat in the train and is leaving you?

Be careful, because this will be a bad day even for people with better luck.

They fired, she crumpled.

She had crept up, stepped out in front of the camera, and yelled: “Now you’re going to pay for your sins!”

All the actor cowboys stopped with their Airsoft responses in their hands.

One shouts: “Lily’s back, brother! She liked it.”

And he fires rata-tat-at-atat in her direction. Some others join him. They laugh. Good joke.

“Are you crazy?” someone shouts.

“Scram, out of my sight!” he shouts, from behind the container.

“Call the police!”

Maria thinks: those are real rifles and pistols, they’re shooting at her.

Fucking cretins, fucking cretins, they’re shooting at her.

She’s cut her lip and her blouse is filthy. She throws two smoke bombs, nimbly, like a real railway-track savage, rolls back, behind the horse’s paddock, aims between the feet of some of the enemies and fires. Her Winchester isn’t a model; her bullets are real. Maria Čarija can hit the eye of a bird in flight, if only she wants to.

The cowboys all shit themselves, they scamper behind barrels, props, horses, anything. Some fly headfirst into brambles, not caring, running for their lives.

Fucking cretins, now dare to shoot.

“Throw down your weapons, in Christ’s name!” shouted the man in the long leather coat she had seen half an hour earlier in the pickup. “All of you!”

He has stepped into the middle of the flatland with his arms raised — he is standing in the line of fire. He throws down one by one, all six of his golden pistols, so that Maria sees. Beside him, Maria observes, stands a man with a camera, also with his hands up, and that guy who looks like a bearded, bald woman, from the pickup, who showed her his finger. He’s crying.

Maria holds her rifle against her shoulder, her hand is still. She watches them — through the barrel — as they fill their pants.