The Cowboy and the Cossack (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries) by Clair Huffaker Read Free Book Online

funnier, and at the same time getting us the bourbon he’d had brought in on the first boat.
    I can guarantee the above is almost exactly accurate, because Old Keats brought it up to me a few minutes later, while we were all drinking tin cups of bourbon, the two of us standing a little apart from the others. “Strange thing, Levi,” he said, raising his cup to drink with his good right hand. “There is no parliament, no congress, where the men can know each other so completely and well as men know each other who do hard daily work, sometimes dangerous work, together. No, not even the classic ancient Greek or Roman Senates.”
    “Well, I guess that’s fair enough.” The drink was starting to warm and help my gut the way the fire was helping my right side, at the angle I was standing to it.
    “Like what just happened before.” Keats sipped from his cup again. “Poor old Dixie lost.”
    “Well, he shouldn’t have pushed Sammy.”
    “But don’t you see, we all knew he was weaker, for having picked on Sammy’s weaknesses?”
    “Sure. Sort of.”
    “Give me a little more.” Keats put out his cup and I poured from a bottle that was near us on a rock near the fire. “That’s damn good,” he said, tasting thoughtfully. “Jack Daniel’s, Distillery No. 1, 1866. Great bourbon.”
    I looked at the bottle in the light of the fire and said, “Goddamn! You’re right. You’re a damn good guesser!”
    “That wasn’t such a good guess. It was a truth based on knowledge, which in turn was based on many years of happy and often heavy drinking.”
    “Oh, t’ hell with you, that’s really somethin’!” Despite still being chilled by the cold, I couldn’t hold back a kind of genuine enthusiasm. “T’ even guess the year you gotta be smarter’n hell!”
    He raised his shoulders slightly, dismissing this. “I was talking to you about weakness before. And the strongest man I was thinking about has the greatest weakness.”
    “Who?”
    He said quietly, “Shad.”
    “You shouldn’t talk about Shad an’ bein’ weak in the same breath!” I said angrily.
    He gestured with his left hand, raising it as high as he could, to about chest level. “I love the sonofabitch as much as you do, Levi, and I’ve even got a few more years of seniority there than you. But his great strength is what makes his greatest damn weakness. He’s too strong to change his mind. Too strong to see something from someone else’s point of view.”
    I had flared up before, but one thing both Shad and Old Keats had taught me was to always try to calm down, and I did my level best now. I took a deep breath. “Old Keats, sir, Shad can do anything!”
    Keats took another drink, a long one, and looked at me with eyes as sober as two iron spikes driven into a railroad tie. “This deals with what I told you before about seein’ or not seein’ this giant land.” His bad left hand came up and pointed at me again, in a tough but still friendly gesture. “Sometimes it’s hard t’ know, or to ever properly establish, Levi. But all of us, always and always, find in this world exactly what we set out t’ give to it.”
    I stared hard back at him, trying to make my eyes like iron spikes too. “Well, what the hell, then! Shad always gives everything!” My own iron spikes were starting to melt already, because there was no way for me to stay mad for long at Old Keats.
    Keats now lowered his eyes for a moment, then nodded. “He always has—up until comin’ here t’ this damn Russia. But he’s got a hate for it that he may get back times ten.” He put his cup down and started rubbing his hands together. “By God, the blood’s startin’ to flow again. We just may live for a while longer, after all.”
    “Hey, boss!” Sammy the Kid yelled from off on the other side of the fire where he’d been helping the sailors finish unloading our supplies. “Everything’s ashore!”
    The men from the Queen started rowing back in the last small boat