Lone Ole Cowboy

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

Lone Ole Cowboy

The thing about being on the run is that it feels like nothing's for you. You see people going about their lives, concerned with their normal routines, but you're watching it all from a bubble. You’re separate, somehow. Trapped. Staring out at a quiet reminder that nothing ever waits.

When I found out my wife was cheating on me, I didn't do a thing. I didn't change up my routine or let on that I knew. It's not that I didn't care. I just knew it was my fault. I had become miserable by not becoming the person I wanted to be, not accomplishing the things I swore I would. Over the years it had taken a toll, and by the time I finished paying it, everything about our life together was poisoned.

Writing is the only thing I was ever good at. That ability to record the present, to harness the chaos of the moment and present it to others, it slowed the world and focused it. It led me to dream about becoming a writer, but now I know that was just a delusion. Later I would take the Civil Service test in an attempt to become a cop, but that didn't work out, either — something about living in the wrong county — so here I was: Working the overnight shift at a warehouse in Pennsauken, New Jersey. Crappy medical benefits. No pension. Bad hours. I spent my nights waiting for retail products like mouthwash and deodorant to be sorted, sent down a line of rollers, and conveyed to a spinning platform so they could be shrink-wrapped on a pallet. Then I would load those pallets on shelves with a forklift, log their location and repeat the process. And that was my life, 11PM to 7AM, five nights a week. An endless, mechanical flow of monotony void of passion, imagination, or any hope for change. A colorless, black-and-white metaphor for what my life had become.

On my way home that night, I was already annoyed, having spent half the drive stuck behind an old lady doing 30 in the fast lane. She was hunched so far over her steering wheel that she could have been a raisin hood ornament, most likely running errands to places that weren’t even open yet. When I finally got to a place where I could pass, she looked over to me and smiled, making me feel even worse than I had before. It made me wonder if everything was getting more annoying, or if I was just getting angrier by the day. On top of that, the blower in my 2002 Ford Taurus didn't work, so I had no way of defrosting my windshield. If I held my hand on it, and then used my windshield wipers, a handprint-shaped portal opened up on the world in front of me, but the process was slow. Daylight savings time was still a couple days away, so the sun didn't rise until close to 7:30. The morning was unseasonably cold, and all I wanted to do was fall into bed.

The name of my street mocked me as I turned the corner and my headlights hit the reflective letters spelling out Serenity Avenue on the road sign, and I was still three or four houses away when I saw the truck in my driveway. I thought about just driving by at first, having become an expert at denying reality, but where would I go? Muscle memory guided me into my driveway and so there I was. Idling. Sitting in my unseasonably cold car with a million miles on it, with a defroster that didn't work, staring at a brand-new pickup I could never afford. Then, as if on cue, my check engine light came on, and I stared at the little orange indicator light for what felt like a very long time. Until my eyes rose up from my dashboard, over my steering wheel, to the Pennsylvania license plate through the smudge of my palm print:

2XB 2221

And in that moment, something inside of me snapped.

In the military, where my wife and I had met, I had a sergeant who would say if you're not 15 minutes early, you're late. It used to annoy me, and I didn't agree with it, but I always got the point. Don't even leave the chance of being late, and I wasn't even important enough to warrant that kind of caution.

The .45 caliber Glock I had in my trunk was a gift from my father. It was meant for target practice in preparation of the police academy and a career in law enforcement. He had died 5 years earlier and I had never been able to bring myself to sell it, because to do so would be acknowledging my failure. I kept it in a plastic lockbox in my trunk, gathering dust for the last half decade. The magazines had to be kept separate in accordance to New Jersey law, so I kept those under my seat. The second I opened my door it was like I was moving underwater, and I walked with the same thoughtless, mechanical function as the lines I spent all night watching.

I don’t remember the actual act, but as I walked into my house toward the bedroom I remember what I was thinking: Songs we listened to, things we did, places we wanted to go and things we wanted to do. We were happy once but those days were as distant as my dreams. When it was over, the man lying next to her was dead, and I dropped the gun and left it like a gangster in one of those movies. She must have been in shock, and given how little I remember of the event, I guess I was, too. Maybe she thought I would turn the gun on her. I like to think she knew I wouldn’t. When we were in Iraq, skills became reflex. You did without thinking, and that’s how I walked back to my car. I pulled out of my driveway, drove to the end of my street, and hung a right toward Route 73. The sky was in its milky-white transition between darkness and light, when the imminent rise of the sun touched a night still holding on. I could already tell the day would be overcast, and I threw my phone out the window, having watched enough TV to know they could track it.

The next thing I remember is being at a Wawa gas pump, with a bored looking kid wearing a Philadelphia Eagles hat and AirPods moving with a detached nonchalance I knew well. Wherever I was going, I would need fuel to get there, so it seemed like a smart idea at the time.

I was watching the comings and goings of people all around me as I waited. The sun was up now, and its gray light illuminated the hustle and bustle of daily routine and morning coffees. Working overnights for so long, I had experienced a phenomenon similar to what I was feeling at that moment. The sensation of being out of step with the rest of the world, but this was different. This was like being wrapped in dread, as if dread were something tangible like a cloak. The clunk of the pump handle when my tank was full jarred me out of introspection and back into the present.

The kid was coming back to my window.

“You want a receipt?”

I shook my head.

He handed me my card back.

“Have a good one,” he said, and he tossed me an upward nod, but his tone held the latent contempt of indifference.

Using your debit card? Really?

I flinched.

"What?"

He stopped in his tracks.

"What?"

"Did you just say something?"

“No,” he said, rolling his eyes, and he continued to the car behind me.

I looked at myself in the rearview mirror and sighed as I started my engine. Then I drove around to the front of the store and parked in Spot 55 as marked by a red and white sticker on a post directly before me. A freight truck was jackknifed off to the side of the building. Its trailer was effectively a giant billboard that read Today’s mood is freshly brewed beside a steaming cup of coffee, and I admired the parking job. I had driven trucks that size on convoy duty in Iraq, and that maneuver would have required no small amount of skill. For all I knew the driver was a fellow veteran, and shared the same kind of prestigious work I did.

Colors seemed brighter as I opened the car door, sounds seemed crisper, and I expected to be arrested as soon as I stepped outside. When I wasn’t, I walked into the store as mindlessly as I had walked to my house. A man held the door for me and smiled politely as I picked up my pace and said thank you, then I walked to where I knew the pair of ATMs were, right past the lottery ticket machine that dispensed scratch offs. I took out my wallet, and as soon as I opened it heard that voice again.

Man, you’re batting a .1000 with these decisions, aren’t ya?

I looked around. Either embarrassed that I was hearing voices or by the possibility someone else heard. The home screen displayed my information and I followed the prompts, taking the last $360 out of our checking account. As I listened to the whirring and clanking of mechanical rollers dispensing the bills, I thought about how angry my wife would be when she saw the transaction. As if that would be the foremost item on her mind that morning. Surrounded by it, in the midst of it, my mind felt the pang of normalcy the way an amputee felt limbs gone for years.

With the cash I bought a bag of Hot Fries, a blue Gatorade, and took a breakfast sandwich from the heated cabinet when I got to the counter. Two magnets, a cheerful-looking goblin and ghost smiled approvingly at my selection, and it wasn’t until seeing them that I remembered it was Halloween. When I turned around, there was a cop standing right behind me, and I dropped my change at the sight. As I ducked down to collect the coins, I had to shift and shuffle the other three things in my arms, and then popped up like a jack-in-the-box.

“You alright?” he asked, plucking a stirring straw from between his teeth to say it. He was holding his morning coffee in one hand and a couple sugar packets in the other, having watched my ordeal with calm interest as some indecipherable transmission came over his radio.

“Yeah, I’m good. Sorry.”

He raised his eyebrows, probably wondering why I was still standing between him and the clerk.

“Thanks,” I added like an idiot, and started for the door.

For awhile I just drove around aimlessly. In denial. I ate the breakfast sandwich and drank half of the Gatorade. At some point I realized I needed to get off the road. It wouldn’t be long before that cop was saying damn, I just saw that guy!

Then the memory of the Westwood Motel hit me like a bolt of lightning. My friends and I used to go there to drink when we were in high school, and even then it was the kind of place time forgot. In hindsight, it’s like my car drove itself there, because I don’t think I ever consciously decided to go. When I saw it I remembered why. It looked good for only two things: getting murdered or cheating on your spouse, and both of those things were newly relevant to my life. It was also off the beaten path, and for now at least, that would have to be enough.

A sign stood near the mouth of the parking lot boasting of Color TV, as if that were still a perk worth proclaiming, and judging by the rusty pole it stood atop, it had to be decades old. The sun was up, but the neon light was still on with the oo in Westwood flickering.

Parking lot gravel crunched and popped under my tires as I pulled to the management office, and the first thing I noticed was a plastic jack-o-lantern in the window, smiling with a cutout grin as if it knew what I had done. There was also a sign that read OPEN, so faded by the sun it had probably never been flipped around. Bells heralded my entrance into the office, and it looked about the way you would expect the central hub of neglect, roughness, and illicit activity to look. I found myself judging the sort of disreputable guests that must have come through there over the years, until I remembered that I was now one of them.

The desk had a stack of magazines on it sitting beside a fish tank that needed to be cleaned with no fish in it. The glass was obstructed by algae, and the water was cloudy, but I could still see a small ceramic sign decoration in the gravel that read: Amity Island Welcomes You.

Behind the counter, Good Day Philadelphia was on a small flatscreen TV. Alex Holley and Mike Jerrick were talking about a new ice cream place opening up in Center City, but the volume was too low to hear them clearly. When I cleared my throat and approached, my attention was drawn to a desk bell. I hit it, and a heavyset man came out from a room in the back.

He was chewing something, giving me the impression I was interrupting his breakfast, although by the looks of him I doubt he was eating the first meal of his day. There was a couple days’ growth on his face and he was wearing a t-shirt that had a bear in a spacesuit on it. The bear was wearing glasses and the spacesuit had wings, all underneath the name Teddy Swims in wavy, bubbly letters. I thought it was strange that he had stumbled reluctantly out of the back at the sound of that bell, but the louder ones that clanged against the glass of the door had not been enough to get his attention.

“By the hour or the day?” he asked, expression bored.

“Day?” I said. I hadn’t intended it to sound like a question but that’s the way it came out.

He nodded.

“86.”

The ATM had dispensed my cash in 20s, so I counted out 100 dollars and handed it over. He yawned as he pushed a few buttons on an ancient register, and the drawer opened up with a ding. He handed me my change and turned back to a key rack behind him, taking one off and laying it on the desk instead of just handing it to me like he could have.

Picking it up I glanced at the plastic tab attached to it: 222.

“It’s just across the lot there,” he said with a lazy point, and without another word went back to the room he came from. He was clearly accustomed to not asking questions, and I was so tired that I showed the same level of interest in hiding my car. I not only parked it in plain sight, but directly outside of the room I would be staying in.

I parked next to a BMW, probably belonging to some guy who had told his significant other he was heading to the office a little early today, and walked straight up to the door with the diagonal 222 stacked together like stairs. It was flanked by a rectangular window with a heavy curtain on one side and a 7Up soda machine on the other. I put the key in the doorknob, turned it, and without so much as a look around collapsed onto the bed.

I was out before my head hit the pillow.

The dream I had was as vivid as memory. I was sitting on a dock, looking at a group of small fishing boats anchored in the bay before me, kicking idly in the current. Beyond them, immense masts rose up like tombstones, bits of torn sail playing against the wind like phantoms of the once-proud ships that no doubt lay below. On the opposite bank was another dock, a mirror image of the one I was sitting on, with a green light swaying through mist. My wife came up and sat beside me, leaning her head on my shoulder. She hugged my arm, the way she used to when she was trying to calm me, when my moods had begun to deteriorate past the point of no return. When she expressed affectionate tolerance for my failings. You can’t be loved if you don’t love yourself, however. At least you can’t realize you are.

Her weight lessened until her substance dissipated completely, and I turned to her to find I was alone. Moving to the edge of the dock, I gazed into the murky depths of the water but couldn’t find my reflection. I ran my fingers over the surface but pulled them away when I felt something slimy ooze past on some secret errand of its own. When the last ripples faded away, the dark water mirrored the starless sky perfectly.

My eyes shot open and I was staring at the alarm clock reading 10:22. The dream only felt like it lasted a minute but I had slept through the day and well into the night. My mind was a cavern of echoes and cobwebs, and I rose into consciousness with the terrible lag of my reality returning.

I swung my legs to the side and scooted to the edge of the bed. It made me think of the dock in my dream, but my only view was heavy, maroon curtains obscuring a rectangular window. I ran my hand back through my hair and stared at the wood-paneled walls as feelings of regret and sadness washed over me. I made an effort to clear my mind, turning my attention to the nightstand where there was always a bible in motel rooms like this. Holding one suddenly felt like a good idea, but the book I found in the open drawer was not the bible at all. It was a volume I had never heard of:

Mules and Men
by Zora Hurston

The sound of footsteps walking on gravel made me freeze.

Parked your car right in front of your room …

There was a knock at the door and I slid the drawer closed without looking.

You’re like the worst fugitive ever.

Whoever it was knocked again, harder this time, but with a rhythmic, friendly cadence. I could have looked through the peep hole before opening it, but I didn’t, revealing a guy who looked about my age standing in the doorway. If I had seen him on the street, I would have thought he was too old to be wearing his hat backwards like that, but he pulled it off.

“Trick or treat,” he said, and my expression must have conveyed what I felt because he laughed. I didn’t recognize him, but recognized his voice immediately as the one I had been hearing. “A little Halloween humor for ya.” A cold rush blew in. Air that felt much colder than it should have been. “Lucky for you, your car doesn’t look like your car to anyone else. You’re welcome.”

I peeked past him and saw my Taurus there.

“I said anyone else, stupid.” He glanced past me, looking into the room the way I had looked past him. “You mind?”

"Do I mind?"

“Moving out of the way. It's freezing out here."

I stepped to the side and he walked past me into the room. I closed the door, turned around, and found him watching me.

“Thanks,” he said, taking off his jacket and tossing it on the bed. “Although if I were a vampire you’d be pretty screwed right now.” He sat beside his jacket and groaned with the sound of compressing springs. “I cut a stout blackthorn and such. Know what I mean?”

No. I did not.

“I’m not, by the way,” he assured me with a sort of contemplative pout, then he nodded toward the nightstand. “Could have been, though.” He tapped the side of his head and pointed at me. “The value of truth over narrative.”

From the way he was sitting, and the way he was wearing it, I could see the MLB logo on his hat but not the team. By the color it could have been Dodgers or Mets. Maybe Royals?

“Mets,” he said, sounding somewhat annoyed. “Speaking of which …” He leaned forward and took the remote from the TV stand within arm’s reach, then fiddled with it for a second. “What is this thing from 2004?”

He looked up and squinted as a horizontal line split the screen and expanded in both directions. I recognized the picture it revealed immediately. It was that Van Helsing movie from the early 2000s. The one with Hugh Jackman. I had been stationed in Korea when it first came out, and remembered thinking it was a disappointment.

“Well, you would know all about disappointment, wouldn’t you?” The question startled me for more reasons than one, but before I could respond he started flipping through the channels. “Sort of the keystone of your nature, really.” He hunched forward and rested his forearms on his knees. “Do people even watch movies like that anymore? With commercials and everything?” I thought no, but said nothing. “That’s what I thought,” he said. “What year is this?”

“The year?”

He nodded.

“Yeah. Actually, nevermore. It doesn’t matter.” He waved his hand in the air. “Nevermind, I mean. Same thing.” The picture on the TV turned black and white, officially making the Westwood Motel sign false advertising. “It’s all Philly channels down here anyway.”

“What are you even—”

"See ..." He took an apple out of his pocket and rubbed it on his shirt. "Didn't have pitching. Pitching is the key. Don't got that you got nothin'." He took a bite of the fruit, and a crunching sound preceded him standing. Then he walked to the curtains and pushed them aside to look out the window. "Stearns is smart, you know? But trying to be the smartest guy in the room?” He clicked his tongue. “Can't do that. That'll catch up to you every time." He paused for a second and shrugged, losing interest. “Hell, don’t listen to me. For all I know they won it all this year.” Something captured his focus and he hesitated again. I couldn’t see what he was looking at, but his reflection was clear in the glass. “To be honest, I’m as out of time as you are.” He motioned back to the TV without looking. “You ever see this one?”

It was a commercial for a concert venue in Fishtown. It looked vaguely familiar, but it was also anticlimactic, and the absurdity of the moment started to resonate.

"I'm ... I'm sorry, but do I know you?"

"You are sorry, yeah," he said. "And no. You don’t.” The reflection of his eyes remained fixed on the view outside. “You’re wondering if I’m real and that’s an interesting thought. Logical even.”

“Is it?”

“After 24 hours with no sleep you lose about 25% of your cognitive ability. They teach you that in the desert?”

“Yes.”

The reflection nodded.

“Scary part is you don’t know it when it happens.”

“I did sleep, actually.”

“Oh, good. Guess that means I’m real, then. That’s a relief.” He cast me a sidelong glance. “Just be careful. Sleep is the cousin of death.”

“I knew a guy who—” used to say that came out in slow motion, and I could suddenly see my breath.

The reflection in the window changed and I gasped, falling back as if physically pushed. The man who had entered my room remained still, with another turning to face me out of his body like a snake twisting out of its skin. My posture straightened reflexively at the sight of Technical Sergeant Anthony Stone. We used to make fun of his name because it sounded fake. We also used to call him old man, although he was at least 5 years younger than I was in that moment. He looked exactly the same as the last time I saw him.

Great guy. Convoy commander.

Killed in Action in Tikrit. January 2006.

“How …”

“Still on the how of it all, are we?” A green light traced around the apple he was holding and it rippled before turning into a cigarette. He brought it up to his lips, but his attention was on studying me. He took a drag and the coral flare of the ash splashed his features.

“Those are very bad for you,” I said, as instinctually as I had straightened to attention. It’s exactly what I would have said the last time I saw him, in the exact way I would have said it.

He squinted his left eye against the smoke.

“Well, I’m dead, so …” He turned back to the window like he was waiting for something. “Hell of a night you’re having,” he said, expelling smoke from his nostrils. “They’re gonna think this is some PTSD thing. What you did. Cops are probably expecting you to be one of today’s 22.”

“I would never do that.”

“Good. Choose to keep writing your own story, right?”

I nodded, but that dread I felt when I first woke up descended on my mind.

“I’m pretty sure I’m at the end of mine,” I said, and I watched him for any reaction. If he was feeling anything, he let no trace of emotion betray itself on his face. “And I didn’t hurt her.”

“I’m aware,” he said, expression blank. “I wouldn’t be here if you did.” He crossed his arms and sighed. “Can’t say the same about the guy she was hooking up with.”

“I know, I just snapped. I can’t believe I—”

Stone waved his hand dismissively, just as the other guy had.

“Yeah, I don’t care,” he said matter-of-factly. “Sleeping with another man’s wife is like playing with fire. Can’t fully control it.” He leaned a little closer to the glass and voiced his next thought distracted. “Play in the dirt ya get dirty, feel me?” I smiled behind his back. “Hell you doing with a gun anyway? Weren’t you gonna be like a writer or something?”

“Yes,” I said, and the smile left my face.

“Not exactly the next John Polidori, are you?”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“I rest my case.” The window came alive with sunlight and night turned to day in an instant. The entire room was filled with the kind of starched sunlight I had only ever experienced one other place before. Where no darkness was safe, no matter the niche or crevice. The kind of light you couldn’t hide from. The kind of light that left men without shadows. My dead friend smoked his cigarette down to the end and then stabbed it out on the wall.

“Come here, I wanna show you something.”

I drew even with him, squinting as my eyes adjusted, and the sight of a massive, rectangular pyramid drew my gaze like a magnet. The scene was from 20 years ago but I remembered it like yesterday. When my convoy team was on Balad Air Base, exploring the Ziggurat of Ur.

“It’s oriented true north,” Stone said.

“Yeah?”

He tilted his head slightly to the side.

“Dedicated to the moon god Nanna. Neo-Sumerian Empire.”

“You seem to know a lot about it.”

His face was directly beside mine as we stared together.

“Mm,” he mused. “If you had been about 10 feet closer to that IED, you’d seem to know a lot about it with me.”

My attempted response came out as a jumbled stutter as I watched myself with my friends and my wife. She had sand in her hair that day, and it sprinkled my face on the wind when she turned her head. What I was watching, in recent years, was just pictures left to passing time, but this was real.

“It’s been a long time since she’s looked at me like that,” I said.

“Yes, well …” Stone shrugged, but his eyes never left the window. “To be fair you turned into a loser.”

“Thanks.”

“My pleasure.” He gestured, with the barest flick of a few fingers, back to the window when I started to look away. “You can erase someone from your mind. Getting them out of your heart is another story.”

“That’s deep,” I said.

“That’s true,” he corrected, blocking my attempt to undercut the sentiment with a joke. He had spoken with the kind of eloquence that comes from deep emotion and his serious look never wavered. “The present is like a firefight, kid. Takes courage to stay in it.”

I watched our past selves standing and joking in the heat of the afternoon sun.

“Man, I messed up.”

“Yes,” he answered with no hesitation. “How is she, by the way? Girl looked like a Barbie doll the last time I saw her. Best shot I’ve ever seen.”

Both of those things are still true, I thought but didn’t say.

I was drifting into my thoughts, even amidst these impossible happenings all around me.

“Like a dream within a dream,” he acknowledged. The white flash of my younger wife’s smile distracted him for a second. “Really dropped the ball with that one.”

“My attitude dropped the ball,” I admitted. “What I did this morning dropped a bomb into our lives.”

He stood straight from his hunched position and took a step back, but I never moved.

“Even a mushroom cloud can have a silver lining,” I heard him say from behind me, and as he spoke I remembered something else about the day we were watching.

“This is the day you—”

I stopped myself, and a green light began emanating from the top of the ziggurat. I couldn’t make out what it was, but it grew more pronounced as the sun began to set.

“It’s okay. You can say it.”

“Died,” I finished the thought, and the breath that carried the word fogged up a patch on the window. The light continued to fade and I was staring through a palm print that expanded like ice. I stepped back as it coalesced into a stained glass window, heavy and dark, like the kind in old pubs. As the clouds outside shifted, misty moonlight spilled across the ridged surface, a sepia tide as slow as molasses.

Night had returned to the room, illuminated by the glow of old light bulbs, and when I turned I saw the man with the backwards hat. He was more familiar now, like somebody you know in a dream.

“Who are you?” I asked.

The lights went out the second I asked the question, and only the peripheral glow of the soda machine tickled the window frame. The stained glass was gone and I could see the red glow of the motel's sign in the distance. Flashes of lightning filled the room, strobing over The Backwards Hat Man who laughed as it draped him in blue. He ran his tongue over fangs and an intense, manic energy uncurled from the base of my spine. Spasms ran up and down my arms and I started trembling as I fell to my knees. Looking up, struggling to breathe, the man swam back from the dark by the flash of his bluish-green silhouette. He stood haloed within an eerie, luminescent island – a ghost-light subtracting color from all things around.

Slowly but surely, the room was relit one detail at a time, until Mr. Backwards Hat was revealed holding the apple with the tips of his fingers. I opened my mouth but said nothing. He cleared his throat like he was drawing something’s attention and I got back to my feet. As I rose to full height, things moved back to normal speed, like a rubber band snapping back.

"Damn ..." He looked down and to the side, staring at me out of the corner of his eye as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. "I was just thinking about something that’s gonna drive me crazy. It pretty much sums this whole thing up and it’s right on the tip of my tongue." Facing me squarely again, he snapped a few times, and the channels changed in tandem until the TV showed my Taurus idling in my driveway.

"Is that ..."

I looked over and he was staring at me.

"You know it. Dylan Gossett song?"

"I don't know who that is," I said.

"Is there an echo in here?" He snapped his fingers again and the channel flipped. It showed me walking down a street with my wife, but I couldn’t quite place it. It was like a camera tracked us to the entrance. Above it, an electric sign read:

THE FILLMORE

I stared as he continued speaking.

“Your wife loves him. Well, his music anyway.” He shook his head and shrugged. “Anyway that isn’t the point.”

Fear aside, my annoyance filled the space between us.

"What is the point?"

"That you still love her. Wouldn't be here otherwise.” The screen switched back to black and white and I watched it as he was watching me. "That was just last month, wasn't it? She made you take her to see him in concert, but was hoping you would have a good time, too. Of course, you weren't really there, were you? Never present, that’s your problem.”

I did remember it now. I spent the whole night thinking about how I would have to work the overnight shift after we got home, and how we shouldn’t have been spending money on something like that. The result was that I had almost no memory of the concert or venue at all. As if it never happened.

"I'm something, something, something from a southern part of state,” the Backwards Hat Man was saying. “I highly doubt he was talking about Jersey when he wrote that, and you’re not the kind of cowboy he was talking about, either. Not like a rancher or someone who ..” He paused to refocus his thoughts. “Someone skilled, tough, independent, and reliable.”

“That doesn’t describe me at all. At least not anymore.”

I met his eyes, seeing a touch of the madness I had witnessed before.

“… hard-headed, angry, resentful.”

I pointed at him.

“Now we’re talkin’.”

“It’s all of that,” he said, calm and cold as if stating a simple fact. His expression softened as he continued. “You can see yourself as this lone wolf, goes his own way …” He snorted. “But with that mindset all you are is a moron,” he said, forcing a bleak smile. “Anyway, in that song …” Taking a bite of the apple, he continued through his chewing. “In that song he fled west with the sun, and you sort of fled northeast to this crappy motel but beggars can't be choosers, am I right?"

Red and blue lights splashed intermittently over his face, followed by the sound of slamming car doors and radios.

"They don't have hounds, but they did track your scent in a manner of speaking,” he said, completely focused on the view outside the window. “This room might be trapped in the 90s, but this phone they tracked sure isn't." He held up my phone without turning.

“What is …” I hesitated, startled. “Why did you bring that here?”

“Music is as close as we get to heaven in this world, and I’m afraid it’s time to face it,” he said with finality, ignoring my question. “More literally than you know.”

“I thought you were here to help me,” I said, sounding as pathetic as I felt.

“Why would you think that?” he asked, and for a second I thought I saw fangs again. “I’m sorry. If I gave that impression, I’m a liar.” He picked his coat off the bed and took a shiny blue bag of Andy Kapp’s Hot Fries from one of its pockets. “Our power comes from the lies we tell ourselves.” The footsteps in the gravel grew louder. “And believe me, we’re all liars.”

I looked down at the cell phone. The Lock Screen was of my wife and I in Key West, a trip she planned for months and paid off in installments so we could afford it. I was miserable from the shuttle to the airport to the shuttle back to the car. I stared at the picture of us both eating ice cream.

The time display had been changed to military: 22:37.

"Pretty good response time, I’m impressed. I only turned it on as I got here.” He glanced to his watch and took another bite of the apple. “Safe money’s on them breaking down the door without knocking,” he said.

"Who are you?" I asked, my tone was desperate. I needed to know before this was over. No matter what was coming.

“That’s the question you should be asking yourself.” He squinted ever-so-slightly. "Looks like you're about to come face to face with that other failure of yours.” He raised a finger as if making a point. “Wanted to be them, too, right? A cop at some point? Well these ones look half your age.”

"Who—"

"Judgement Day, I’m afraid. Here they come,” he said, narrating the scene through the window. "These guys definitely didn't do what you did. Resting on your military days, on your laurels in Mount Laurel."

He chuckled and things slowed down. I felt air on my face and closed my eyes as tight as I could. The door was kicked open with a crash and I held my breath; ready to face the music and my fate. There was a tightness in my chest, followed by the sensation of being sucked through a straw made of light.

For a while I was in darkness and absolute silence, thinking I was dead. I opened my eyes slowly and one at a time to see the keystone symbol on a license plate through my windshield. The air on my face was coming from my vents and I was idling in my driveway.

I glanced up to see my wife looking out at me from our living room window. She was wearing the bathrobe I got her for Christmas, probably the only thing I ever bought her that she actually wore.

That’s right, Mary, the voice of Backwards Hat said in my mind, speaking in an absurdly over-the-top impression of Jimmy Stewart. Every time a bell rings, an angel blah blah blah.

My wife’s expression was one of shock. Maybe shame. Until I nodded at her and raised my hand in a motionless wave. She raised hers to mirror the gesture, and when I lowered mine she did, too. The look on her face was one I hadn’t seen in forever and not long ago through a window of my own.

My radio turned on by itself, displaying 106.5 as a smile crept onto my face as slowly as the sun soon to rise on the road behind me.

Well, I'm a lone ole cowboy from a southern part of state

The muscles of my chest loosened without prompting as I imagined today would be the first of the rest of my life.

And I wake up with the sun and the wind on my face

I wasn't sure where I would go, since I couldn’t go home, but then I remembered a motel not far away. It wasn’t much, but had color TV.

My lady lost the love, well, I found the hate

I backed the Taurus out of the driveway and my check engine light went off as I got to the end of my street.

I'm a lone ole cowboy from a southern part of state

“Well that’s something, at least,” I was thinking, and I smiled as I made the right turn.