In 1884, following a gamy string of bad luck and sorry particulars concernin’ underaged chickens, public drunkenness, poor-fittin’ boots, and a wagon train of lies tied to my shaky name, I come to be midway on the Chisholm Trail, age seventeen years poore. We are pushing through to Kansas some six hundred miles to move herd and dump Mary-Tom Clement in Kansas City, and everyday eating dirt pies and cursing so damn loud Chang, our Methodist bean master, howled and signed the cross. Chang groused too, drivin’ the chuckwagon. And every gopher hole and lonely rock shook his pans, rattled his teeth, and jolted his bony butt.

Chang comes from Brinson, a pit-stain city—a downstate sour place, left after Sherman burned the life out Georgia—straddlin’ the ‘Bama-Georgia line, which though I have not visited, sounds like the buttcrack of Hell. Chang once told me how a middle-aged Chinese, such as he—with adopted parents so damn old they got two toes in the grave—come to siblingdom with Chattahoochee River-trash like Mary-Tom. But that story contains hooch and unhappiness and Presbyterians and does not bear repeating here.

Mary-Tom, Chang’s sister, bullshitted the cattle drive interview. She don’t know four camp songs, just the one. And it’s only so many times you can swallow ukulele “Clementine” on mosquit-ridden eves before wishin’ a horse would kick you in the head. The trail boss, Elijah Meeks, wants her dead, but Mary-Tom is Chang’s family, so for the time, we stuff cow patties in our ears and pray Mary-Tom gets what’s comin’.

See, me and Chang are sweet on one another, but we keep it mighty quiet. Most nights we stay on the outskirts of camp. At night, it gets so dang cold my buttcheeks pucker like they’re suckin’ a lemon. Chang and me—with just the horse blankie—bundle up. Which Chang don’t much like, on account of me wanting to be the “big tortilla.” But each night, with Chang right next to me, his breathing is the last thing I hear. 

I hold him tight at the thought I could ever lose him. 

Speakin’ general like, Elijah Meeks ain’t bad for a boss. He gets the twitchy-pants every now and then and stumps-up and learns us good, though you may as well teach a dead man to boogie. Today, he’s speeching on “adulteratin’,” which neither me nor Chang knows what is: “Adulteratin’ is the black-fires of H-E-L-L. Adulteratin’ is sexual congress with more than one partner. At the same times.” Which confounds Snooks, since “adulteratin’” sounds mighty fine by his reckon.

By most counts, Elijah is one dandy dude, and when he stream-bathes—which ain’t often—Mary-Tom gets twangy with sexedness, puts bark in her mouth, and flops around the riverbank. Which is a bit surprising, ‘cause Mary-Tom don’t give two shits when I get nekked. And I’d as soon make whoopee to a gopher hole than smooch Mary-Tom.

She’s a hooch-thief to top it all, too. Mary-Tom once thieved my stash and got roostered after night beans and whipped my bottle overhead like a lasso. I said, “Cut that shit out,” which she didn’t much care for. But she let go of the bottle, it nailed a sleeping Chang in the trousers—square in his moneybags—and he howled like a sissy and signed the cross.

Wasn’t nothin’ worse than being “sissified.” Any man would do much of anything to prove otherwise. On the drive previous, after saloon-gossip caught our scout, John Cougar, wearing Mary-Tom’s petticoats, he jumped clear into Akiree Breaks outside Benkelman to prove it weren’t true. And afterwards, you had to admit, “he was the bravest dead man” you ever known.

His funeral was mighty fine—there was even a bugler, but he was green and mostly just tooted on it. Still, we took off our hats and dumped John Cougar, stolen petticoats and all, behind a chokeberry bush. Elijah wanted a “proper burial” so we made a marker out of John Cougar’s trousers—stuck ‘em up on a stick and they flapped in the wind (they needed airin’ anyways). Mary-Tom dressed in widow’s weeds, even though they wasn’t married. Chang got a bit teary-eyed, and hoped our ends would be so good.

Night time.

Anywho, Elijah’s at it behind the Conestoga with this sex machine he calls, “The Chokemaster”—he’s hanging from on top the wagon like a horse-thief, ‘cept he did it to hisself—when this Indian rides up a spiffy war pony in the near-distant gloam. He regards our low-rent crew: the gurgling bath and soup pot; the clothesline of Mary-Tom’s sheet-undies billowing in the wind; the rank skillet where Chang bakes biscuits. They say you can never know, but you can tell this boyo don’t think much of us.

Which is all to say, this smug sumbitch has got grit runnin’ up on us, the last feller to do so Chang shot cold in the back. Chang gets mean drinkin’ rawdog hooch he calls “Changberry.”

“Mend your ways,” the Indian says.

“Mend what?” I’m on a respite from Sunday soup, sanding bunions off my toes.

The Indian regards Elijah dangling from the Conestoga. “That is the wrong way to live. Mend your ways,” the guy repeats. He throws a funky mink pelt into our bubblin’ pot and grabs the Changberry from Chang while we’re distracted. 

I stir the soup and test it.

“The chow ain’t right!”

The Indian throws our Changberry bottle on the fire, makin’ an explosion that near roasts my tootsies.

Snooks Tatum jolts awake, wearin’ his sleep-mask. “God take me!”

Chang signs the cross.

“I am Chief Thunderbear,” guy says, somber as a churchee fart. Thunderbear sweeps his hands. “Big country. Bigger arseholes.”

Snooks sniffs suspiciously.

Elijah’s purple in the face—the rest of us being sour too, as the Changberry is already sorely missed—and what can you do when someone calls you an “arsehole”?

“Your unhappiness is a coat upon you,” Thunderbear says.

“But I ain’t got clothes on,” Chang says. And it’s kinda true. He cooks in the buff, when the fancy strikes him.

“You’ve got cheek,” Elijah wheezes, “casting judgments upon our Sunday routine.”

“That is the line of life,” Thunderbear says. “There is no one to say what time is worth.”

Mary-Tom pipes up. “You are wild in reckon to bring the melancholia upon us.”

But the chief gives us the melancholia anyway—which if you’re green to, means feeling wrong in all the right places, like maybe realizin’ your boots don’t match your chaps, or that your folks died of curable disease, or that you’re too fat to ford the river, or that you jumped into a canyon to prove your quality, or you have to choke yourself just to rub a chub, or realizin’ these are things you did to yourself and even deserved—and Chief Thunderbear rides clear gone into the grown dark, leaving us. Our worst selves unveiled unto the night.

And it would be, on the borderlands beneath the Hell-heavens, when our bad luck bunged us but good. The rustlers swarmed in like riders of the dark, firin’, blarin’ torches, cuttin’ our herd, scatterin’ everyway. And one of ‘em square rifle-shot Chang out through his belly.

The bad men took what they wanted while the rest of us stayed with Chang, his life leakin’ from him, and the prairie burned down ‘round us while my heart was breaking.

I had him in my hands when he went.

He died of a Monday.

Chang got buried, but it weren’t proper. There weren’t no bugler, and we had nothing but butter beans to mark him, and Mary-Tom jumped in the grave to join Chang in the scorched dust. All of my heart wished I was dead in the ground with him. We just stood there, nobody saying nuthin’. And then it was done.

Afterwards, we all went our ways.

Snooks went down home. Elijah went back to bein’ churchee. It all felt funny, not bein’ on trail. It’s not something I’m proud of. That’s just how it was. With me and Mary-Tom we had us an understanding. We did not love each other, but we had loved Chang. And maybe that was enough. So exceptin’ worse ideas, we got married and even opened a general store on the spot where we’d buried Chang.

I tried not to get the melancholia.

Though in the end, our marrydom didn’t pan out. After five days, Mary-Tom rode off—on a leaden-footed mule, under the cover of dark—which I took to be the end of our marrydom. I went from husband to has-been in the time a shit bricks in the sun. Though I cannot say I blame her. Insults. Banjo duels. Dildos. Chang. It was all done fer.

Afterwards, the years took a’ hold, and I leaned into becomin’ an old fart, and got used to the store and even got a bit used to myself.

Back on trail, some days it had been that we rode early, and I was in the chuckwagon with Chang while the sun was bornt across the sky, bringin’ a day that was alien to the one before. We were with one another. In the face of such a thing, I could feel the hole of my life close up just some.

See, it’s a terrible thing, to misunderstand your life. To know folks will not account yer days, as you cannot account them yourself. There are some that will say none of this ever happened, that men in these times did not fall in love, and I might agree it was true, that I never loved Chang, nor done a nastiness upon my folks. But I did.

Now, each morn I pause before the store swings open, and the wretched flood come—before cowpokes kick my knees, before Andy Evans groans about his winter wheat, before pencil-dicks romance the butter churn, before skunk-faced widders haggle me for nickels I need and pennies they don’t, before, in short, I suck prairie pies—the north train whistles, heraldin’ the end of trail, the death of Chang. I stand stiff with uselessness, railroaded by approachin’ age, my hands graspin’ the ghost of people and places long since dead. And each morn I get a feelin’ I could name, when the locomotive gets goin’ and leaves me here, alone.