I drive my pick-up up to our trailer and park close enough to the front door that I am able to jump from the cab onto the doorstep without touching the ground. Inside the door, sitting side-by-side at the kitchen table are my wife Charlene and Sonny, our boarder. They’re holding hands. Before I can say anything Charlene tells me, very calmly, that she and Sonny are an “us” now, and that “we” are not an “us” anymore, and that from this date on she and Sonny will be in the big bedroom and I am to repair to the small bedroom in the back of the trailer and to commence paying for room and board just the same as Sonny had previously.

Sonny, the sorry bastard, palms his hat ‘round his head with his free hand and looks down at his boots the whole time.

I want to say something, but I can’t make a single word come out. We (they?) don’t have air conditioning and all of us stand still for a second and the sweat pours from us each and every one.

“Sonny owes me a saddle,” is what I say.

A couple of years back, before he moved in to board, Sonny and I had rodeo’d in Old Cheyenne. He was skint at the time, but I wasn’t, or at least not as skint as he was, so I paid his entry for him. I told him that if he won that new saddle put up for the saddle-bronc event he owed it to me. It was a long shot and two days of hard rides for us. We slept in a horse trailer with two Blackfeet brothers who were riding in the relays. We drank bad coffee mixed with good Canadian rye whisky in lieu of breakfast. We told each other stories about our father’s and grandfather’s horses in order to fall asleep at night. Sonny won. He did offer me the saddle straight-up and quick, like we’d agreed, but I told him to keep it. I told him that he won it by his own efforts, and that all I did was throw in some money – but it was only money. If he felt it fair he could buy me a couple of beers some time and we’d call ‘er even.

Right here, right now, standing in the kitchen looking at him and my wife, he with his head down and she with hers up, I feel like I’ve been fooled twice and there is a saying about being fooled twice.

I leave him staring at his boots and fingering his hat band. I go over to the fridge. There’s a ten-dollar dollar-store gift card on top so I take it. I open the fridge. There are two beers so I take them too. I walk out without looking at Charlene even so much as out of the corner of my eye. I can open the pick-up’s door from the landing and I slide in without touching the ground. The starter is failing, it takes me three tries but eventually it does turn, like it always does. There will come the day when it won’t but thankfully today is not that day.

I drive, I drive, and I drive. I’ll drive to Great Falls for sure, and Billings more than likely. Hell, if I can make Old Cheyenne before the starter goes or she overheats and seizes up I’ll drive to Old Cheyenne. I’ll sleep in the truck, sleep moving or parked. I’m trying to think of the last time I was happy and I realize that it was there at the door of our trailer just a few minutes past. I just didn’t know to be unhappy.  I think about the way we were before the air-conditioning broke down, where once we were as blissful as a pair of rats eating shit out of an old cowboy boot. A hundred miles down the road I see a gopher run over on the highway. His back legs have been crushed but he’s still alive and he’s tryin’ with all that he’s got left to pull himself off of the highway with his just front legs and not die out there in front of the world where everyone can see him in his misery. His eyes are big and bright and black and shining hard. I see him and he sees me. That’s when I pull over and I stop and I cry.

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Steve Passey is originally from Southern Alberta. He is the author of the short-story collection “Forty-Five Minutes of Unstoppable Rock” (Tortoise Books, November 2017) and chapbook “The Coachella Madrigals” (Luminous Press, August 2017). Read more here: stevepasseywrites.wordpress.com

Photo: Ben VanHorn