C O W B O Y

Cowboy had a face that looked like the sea had smoothed it over. He came into the cafe and waited while I ordered.

“I’m a kung fu master,” he told me in a voice that sounded like gravel and cigarettes, “but these days I just teach the little ones, the women, the kids.”

I nodded, glancing at the window. Beads of rain curled down the glass, making a fun house of the world outside.

“I walked 500 miles, from the West Coast to Halifax,” he told me, or I think he told me. Sandpaper tongues make rough shapes out of vocal cords. “Where you from?”

“Toronto,” I said, working a lid onto the coffee cup. ‘I need to buy a Keep Cup.’

“Toronto!” he spat back. “I hate it there.”

“Yeah,” I started, “it’s not actually where I’m fr-“

“Tell ya what, time I went to Toronto, I got off the plane, got out at the station, went to my room at the Royal York. I tried to talk to the folks outside, couldn’t get a word from anyone. So I took my suitcase, walked down to the front desk and said to the guy, ‘Ok, I wanna check out. How much do I owe ya?’ He said, ‘You didn’t even use the room.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ And I got in a cab and I said, ‘Driver, how much to Montreal?’ and I paid him the cash and we went.”

“Montreal,” I said, tasting the cobblestones in my mouth as I looked into Cowboy’s eyes. Green and glassy, East Coast water pooling in the concrete pits of the dock. “Montreal is good.”

“Yeah, but not Toronto. I hate that place.” He looked down as if shaking his head clean of the memory. When he lifted his eyes back up to me, they were warm again, shiny. “What you doing here, darlin?”

“I’m acting,” I said.

“Acting- oh!” Something leapt behind those polished eyes and Cowboy pulled a bag from the air, dropped a hand inside. “Acting … then I got something to show ya.” His fingers shivered the spines of papers as he spoke. “You ever feel lonely in this life, like nothing and nobody loves ya?”

“Yes,” I said. I thought of the year that lay curled like parchment behind me. A single laugh fell through a crack I hadn’t noticed carved into the back of my throat. “Oh yeah.”

The old man handed me a piece of crinkled paper.

“I wrote this,” he said.

I opened it up and poetry dripped across my palms. Had to cup my hands to keep the honesty from escaping in rivulets down my wrists. Typewritten stanzas, photo copied to near invisibility, leapt from a page whose dog ears stood alert to their contents.

“It’s beautiful,” I said. I didn’t want to give it back. “How do I get a copy?”

“You put it in your bag,” Cowboy said.

“Oh- oh!” I folded the paper. “Thank you. It’s- thank you.” I fumbled. This stranger had taken morning and moulded it into magic.

“Here,” Cowboy said. He dipped his fingers back into the belly of the bag and fished out a pile of neatly folded pages. He slid the top page off the stack and offered it to me.

“It’s your resume,” I observed. His face wrinkled conspiratorially and he pressed a weathered thumbnail beneath a line of text.

“Body guard,” I read.

“Details: safety duties,” he read on, his fingers scratching quotations into the air. He winked and I laughed out loud. He had, at least in part, or in some realm of perception, been telling me the truth.

“One night,” he said, as I slipped the resume into my bag, “I was walking down Gottingen. You know that 24 hour karaoke bar they got all days of the week?”

“Sure,” I said. I didn’t.

“Every day of the week, the karaoke bar,” Cowboy cried, “even Monday and Tuesdays! I’m going down there,” and I imagined the old man crooning into a smoke filled room. I felt sure that when he held a microphone, dusty honey crawled out his lips. “I’m going down there, and three men come to me. They say, ‘Hey old man, you got any money?’ I say, ‘Sure I do. Why do you wanna know?’ ‘We’re gonna take it from you,’ they say.” Cowboy slung his hands onto his hips as that light jumped back into his marble eyes. “I say, ‘Ok. And how do you figure you’re gonna do that?’ And they say, ‘We’re gonna beat the shit outta you.’ So I do this-” Cowboy pulled an arm back and sunk into a lunge and suddenly his wrinkled body looked impossibly strong; for a heartbeat of the clock hands I could see the silhouette of a whole life behind the weathered skin- “and I break the one guy’s nose and the other guy, I snap his arm and I break it in three places.”

“You’re- yea!” I said. I’m grinning like the shine of the espresso machine.

“And these guys, they’re going, ‘Hey, hey, we were just joking!’ And I say, ‘No. No you weren’t.’”

Cowboy didn’t try to keep me when I said I had to go. He just grabbed me in his arms and hugged me.

“Will I see you around?” I asked him.

“Oh sure,” he said. “I told ya. Halifax is my home.”

“You’re really cool,” I told him.

“You are too.” The words rolling off his tongue like tobacco through a frog’s croak.

As the bus pulled up outside I touched his shoulder.

“I wish I could talk to you all day,” I told him. I meant it.

The bus rolled to a stop beside us and the old man fixed his rain coat. I climbed on board, dropped the two coins into the box as Cowboy saluted me. The doors closed and when I looked out again, he’d somehow disappeared, evaporated into the humidity that hangs beneath an East Coast storm.

In my hand, I’m holding the resume. I unfold it. James Douglas Moore.

And then, in a digital signature across the bottom of the page, “Cowboy.”