The Last Rider
Tonto, a.k.a. Jay Silverheels, is dead, but whatever the newspapers said he died from—it wasn’t so. He died because all those saloons he used to hang around in were remodeled into singles’ bars or boarded up for good, he died because of Wallace “Mad Bear” Anderson, he died because Scout finally had no gittum-up left, he died because Alcatraz was invaded, he died because of television. You’d think that Clayton Moore would have already retired, pulling the mists of yesteryear around him like an old bedroll, but the last I’d heard he was still on the circuit. Newspaper stories reported that he’d been made to wear dark glasses for a while, until his lawyer fixed it so he could wear the mask again. What the hell—you take a man’s mask away, what’s he got left?
The old man on horseback wasn’t Clayton Moore, although he was rigged up to look like him. He was the last rider in the Maid of the Mist Parade, Niagara Falls, NY, sitting up very straight in the saddle, looking directly ahead. The first thing you noticed was that his dirty gray horse was just plodding, head held low as if a stray blade of grass might be coming up through the asphalt somewhere and he didn’t want to miss it. He was swaybacked, slab-sided, with ribs showing, his bony head hanging out there on the end of his neck as if by an act of will. His knees and hocks were stained. You could tell that he’d been curried, though, that somebody had done the best he could, had worked on him like an elderly person tries to brush the stains from a worn piece of furniture to make it presentable for company. But no amount of brushing makes it new again—poor eyesight conspires to make the job seem a success.
The thin man on his back wore a soiled white western shirt and pants, a much-used Stetson that had once been white, and a black eye-mask. He might have been in his late sixties, but he looked closer to eighty. White hair curled over the back of his shirt collar. What appeared to be an old Army .45 was holstered at his waist. The adults along the curb started to smile when they saw him and the horse, but then the smiles faded and if they had intended to say something, it died in their throats. The kids were less thoughtful. “Looka that!” one hollered. “Glue factory!” another said loudly, dodging sideways when his mother cuffed him. “Shut up!” she said. The old man on his horse plodded on, all the more a spectacle because of the well-groomed, healthy mounts that pranced ahead of him. The whole incident was over in about three minutes. Who would remember something like that for very long? But that wasn’t to be the last time I saw him, and so I remember everything clearly these many years later.
* * *
Late fall and I was parking my car in the garage I rented in the alley near 7th Street and Niagara. It was after nine, dark, temperature already dropping into the twenties, wisps of fog easing from backyards into the alley, mist rising out of the sewers. As I snapped the padlock on the garage door, I heard voices. A small group was coming my way. Some of them I recognized from the neighborhood—Ruthy, teenage hottie, Ricco, Aldo, and Teddy. There were two guys with them I didn’t know. They were all sixteen, seventeen. The guys were big, loud, looking for something to happen.
Ricco and Aldo pulled at Ruthy’s jacket, backing her against a garage. “Screw off! I said screw off, you guys!” she screeched. She pulled away, swatted at Aldo. “Ah, come on, Ruthy,” Ricco coaxed.
“Come on, bullshit!” she said. “What’s with your friends? They got no other place to be?” I was still fiddling with the lock, pretending to have some trouble getting it shut. They knew I was there, but acted as if I wasn’t. Then one of the guys I didn’t know picked up a chunk of concrete and threw it through a garage window. The sound of glass shattering was very loud in the alley. He yelled, elated—he’s just made the winning basket in the closing seconds of the game.
How did the old man on the horse get so near without us seeing him? It was dark, I told myself, everyone’s attention was distracted by Ruthy, the window breaking, the shouting, the feet in the gravel at the broken pavement edge. But he got close enough for me to tell that he looked the same as he had the day of the parade except that now he wore an ancient overcoat—and then he spoke.
“Hold on there!” he said. His voice echoed, deeper than what you could imagine would come from a skinny old man.
“What the hell’s that?” Aldo said.
The horse clopped nearer, clear now, even in the fog. “It’s a guy on a horse!” Ricco said.
“Hey—hey—what’s he gonna do?” Teddy asked. He moved sideways, ready to run, but afraid to in front of his friends. The horse stopped an arm’s length from them without any command from the old man.
“I’ve always believed that the end of the world will be signaled by the sound of breaking glass,” he intoned. “An abrupt smashing that ends in tinkle.”
“What the hell you talkin’ about?” Aldo said. “And who you supposed to be anyway?
The old man ignored him. Suddenly he urged the horse forward, separating Ruthy from the group.
“Young lady,” he said, “if these outlaws are bothering you, I can offer a ride away from here.”
“She ain’t going nowhere,” Ricco said to the back of the old man’s head.
“You don’t own me, Ricco!” she retorted. “I decide if I stay or go.” She took a deep breath and looked down. “I stay,” she mumbled, almost an apology.
The old man clucked to the horse and it stepped awkwardly backward. “It woulda’ been nice, though,” Ruthy called. “I never had a ride on a horse.”
Aldo laughed. “You ride outta the alley with this guy and you still ain’t had a ride on a horse!”
The old man acted as if he hadn’t heard. “Respect!” he said in a hollow voice. “They should have respect for you, because you deserve it. When a lady is not treated like a lady, she should make new friends.”
“You hear that, Ricco?” Ruthy shrilled. “He’s right, ain’t he?”
“Right’s ass!” Ricco sputtered. “Who the hell you think you are, you crazy old bedbug sonofabitch!” He moved forward and grabbed at the old man’s leg.
“Keep your hands off!” the old man said. He pulled his foot from the stirrup and drew back to kick Ricco away. But Ricco grabbed him around the ankle.
“Get his other foot, Aldo!” he called to his friend. After a quick scuffle they each had a foot. “Let’s pull him off!” Ricco said.
“Leave him alone!” Ruthy yelled. “He didn’t hurt nobody!”
They paid no attention. Pulled first to one side and then the other, the old man struggled to stay astride his horse. For a moment it looked as if he were an old rag that Aldo and Ricco were using to polish the saddle. His hat fell off. He bent forward to grasp the saddlehorn with both hands.
Then he managed to get a shorter grip on the reins. With a clattering the horse wheeled in a circle. Aldo let out a cry of alarm and went down, hit by the horse’s neck. The rump swung into Ricco, who went sprawling into a cluster of empty garbage cans. He’d struggled to one knee when he saw that the old man had drawn his pistol. It was pointing steadily at him.
“This is a .45 auto,” the old man said. “The gun that won the West.”
“Watch it, for crying out loud! Watch it!” Ricco said. He had a hand up in front of his face.
“You watch it, son. Get your friends around where I can see them.”
“Do what he says!” Ricco urged.
They gathered cautiously near Ricco.
“We didn’t mean nothing,” Aldo said.
“Shaddup!” the old man ordered.
For a long moment no one moved or spoke.
Then headlights appeared at the end of the alley. A car moved slowly toward the group, freezing them in their odd arrangement. The old man ignored the lights. The breath of the horse blew out in clouds.
“Did you ever see a horse fly?” the old man asked.
The car stopped two garages away. Mr. Baines walked through the headlights beams to his garage where you could hear him remove the padlock and slide the door open.
“Did you ever see a garbage can die?”
“This is crazy--” Ricco started.
“Shaddup!” the old man said. “You don’t know anything, do you? Don’t say a thing!”
Mr. Baines had walked into his headlight beams again when the .45 went off with a roar. Flames spewed out of the barrel. A garbage can shuddered, rocked back and forth, a hole as big around as a broomstick punched in it. Mr. Baines had winced or hesitated slightly when the gun fired, but kept on without looking, got in his car and pulled the door shut.
Ricco flinched when the car door slammed. Then he moaned softly. Mr. Baines drove inside his garage. The headlights went out. In a moment he closed the garage door, padlocked it, and disappeared around the corner, heading for his house.
“You just saw a garbage can die,” the old man observed. “Young lady, do you wish to go home?”
“I do,” Ruthy said meekly. She retrieved his hat and handed it up to him.
“Goodbye, then,” he said, not looking at her. “Remember what I said.” The .45 was still trained on Ricco. Ruthy went into thin air between garages.
“Well, boys,” he said, “I got miles to go. I reckon there’s a lesson here someplace. Be good, won’t you?”
You could have heard a flake of paint drop from one of the garages. Blocks away a car horn sounded. The safety clicked off on the .45.
“Won’t you?”
There was general chorus of agreement.
“Good, good,” the old man said. He holstered the gun, turned his horse, clucked to him. “Let’s go, old fellah.” The horse moved off at a little faster than a walk down the center of the alley. The clippedy-clop of his hooves echoed like a sound effect, halved coconut shells struck against a table top. Light fog drifted in behind him, and after a long moment you couldn’t hear him at all, either.
Ricco got to his feet, staring down the alley, and then looked quickly over his shoulder as if the old man and horse might suddenly appear from the opposite direction. Then he looked at me.
“Who was that old fucker?” he demanded
“I dunno,” I told him.
* * *
So now I’m interested. As a part-time newspaper reporter I’m naturally inquisitive, and when I’m not, I fake it. But this time I don’t have to pretend. Who is this old man? Why is he riding around in the dark? Where’s he keep a horse in the city? That same night I jumped in my car and drove up and down streets and alleys until I covered eight square blocks. Didn’t see a thing. Over the next few days I ask around. I’m looking for an old cowboy on a dirty gray horse. People are looking at me funny. I offer twenty bucks if anybody spots him and he’s still there when I arrive. Call me at work, call me at home. I give out my numbers. I get a couple of crank calls. One night the phone rings and a woman’s voice asks if I have my heart set on an old man on a horse, if I wouldn’t settle for a young woman straddling a footstool. Another night I go racing across town to end up at a billboard of the Marlboro Man. Other than that, nothing happens for a month. Snow is on the ground.
Then the calls really start coming. He’s going under the viaduct by the old Shredded Wheat, he’s in Whirlpool Park, he’s off Upper Mountain, riding along the top of the reservoir dike, then following Garlow toward Mr. Hope, he’s in a field off Buffalo Avenue, near Hyde Park by the railroad tracks, he’s at Devil’s Hole, he’s going down Recovery Road away from Military, he’s in the alley behind Portage Road, he’s going down the embankment at the end of 13th at North, then east along the rail line. I’m going, too, driving like a madman, always too late. Sometimes there are tracks in the snow, but blocks away I can never find them again. He’s everywhere and nowhere. People are getting excited now. More than the twenty, they want me to catch up with him.
But I’m more puzzled than ever. He’s never seen twice at the same place. Is he always on the move? In this kind of weather? I wake up in the middle of the night, the wind blowing outside. Where are they now, I wonder. He has to feed the horse, to be in out of the wind. There used to be abandoned barns dotting the countryside, half collapsed, but enough left standing to be a stall, at least. There was old hay in some of them, too. Even ten years old, in the center of the stack there’d be some bales good enough to eat. Especially for a hungry horse—better than nothing, anyway. But I can’t remember that any of those barns are still in existence, any I knew about. In some vacant factory building, maybe. There’s enough industrial property closed down. Might be someplace with a working water line even. Wherever he is, seventy-five, eighty dollars worth of hay, twenty-five worth of oats, if he had it stocked up somewhere, might squeak him through the winter.
In March I got a call from a cabbie named Roger, who claimed to have seen him just ten minutes before, heading out of town on Packard. It was snowing and just after dark, but I was there in less than fifteen minutes. There was no sign of him. Even an old horse can cover a lot of ground in nearly a half hour. I drove all the way to Six Corners, turned and headed back. On impulse I swung north down New Road. About a quarter mile from Porter, I thought I saw the horse crossing the intersection, ghosting through the falling snow. I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like a man on horseback. At Porter I had to wait for traffic. New Road was cinder on the other side, a half mile to the dead end. I stopped as soon as I crossed, got out and found tracks.
There were no houses on that side, just field, railroad tracks, and what was left of Porter Woods. I drove slowly to where the road ended. The trail in the snow continued. I followed on foot. The tracks swung west over the railroad, past the junkyards, over Lockport Road. My feet were wet and numb, eyes watering, when I saw the flicker of a fire about three hundred feet ahead. I crept a little closer, until I could make out the horse standing rump to the wind, snow settled in the sway of its back. The man was hunkered near the fire, perhaps adding a stick of wood. They were down in a little swale at the base of a landfill that had once been a flowing creek lined with old willow. A few survivors still grew there.
Now what, I thought. Stagger up to the fire half frozen and say what? Howdy? Did I expect a dented old coffee pot to be balanced over the flames? To bed down for the night and wake in the crystal morning, blanket covered with snow?
Headlights moved in the distance as somebody drove south on 190. I turned and headed back for my car. How I made it, I don’t know. My hands were so cold when I reached it that I scarcely had enough strength to depress the door handle button.
Two days later I paid Roger the twenty. “Well?” he wanted to know. “Well, nothing,” I told him. “Just a crazy old man who liked to ride around at night on his horse. No story at all.” He seemed disappointed.
I was, too, but it was a story I didn’t have the instinct to follow out to the end. It wouldn’t have had enough of the who, what, when, why in it anyway. In the final weeks of March the paper took two articles from me, one about a woman who made rag dolls out of remnants, another about driving cab for a living. I put Roger in that last one. Then the soft rains of April started and the grass sprouted up green in the vacant lots, along the railroad tracks, in the scrap land around the factories. My phone had stopped ringing. I slept soundly. An old man was out there somewhere riding his old horse beyond the end of the trail, doing an occasional good deed.
The old man on horseback wasn’t Clayton Moore, although he was rigged up to look like him. He was the last rider in the Maid of the Mist Parade, Niagara Falls, NY, sitting up very straight in the saddle, looking directly ahead. The first thing you noticed was that his dirty gray horse was just plodding, head held low as if a stray blade of grass might be coming up through the asphalt somewhere and he didn’t want to miss it. He was swaybacked, slab-sided, with ribs showing, his bony head hanging out there on the end of his neck as if by an act of will. His knees and hocks were stained. You could tell that he’d been curried, though, that somebody had done the best he could, had worked on him like an elderly person tries to brush the stains from a worn piece of furniture to make it presentable for company. But no amount of brushing makes it new again—poor eyesight conspires to make the job seem a success.
The thin man on his back wore a soiled white western shirt and pants, a much-used Stetson that had once been white, and a black eye-mask. He might have been in his late sixties, but he looked closer to eighty. White hair curled over the back of his shirt collar. What appeared to be an old Army .45 was holstered at his waist. The adults along the curb started to smile when they saw him and the horse, but then the smiles faded and if they had intended to say something, it died in their throats. The kids were less thoughtful. “Looka that!” one hollered. “Glue factory!” another said loudly, dodging sideways when his mother cuffed him. “Shut up!” she said. The old man on his horse plodded on, all the more a spectacle because of the well-groomed, healthy mounts that pranced ahead of him. The whole incident was over in about three minutes. Who would remember something like that for very long? But that wasn’t to be the last time I saw him, and so I remember everything clearly these many years later.
* * *
Late fall and I was parking my car in the garage I rented in the alley near 7th Street and Niagara. It was after nine, dark, temperature already dropping into the twenties, wisps of fog easing from backyards into the alley, mist rising out of the sewers. As I snapped the padlock on the garage door, I heard voices. A small group was coming my way. Some of them I recognized from the neighborhood—Ruthy, teenage hottie, Ricco, Aldo, and Teddy. There were two guys with them I didn’t know. They were all sixteen, seventeen. The guys were big, loud, looking for something to happen.
Ricco and Aldo pulled at Ruthy’s jacket, backing her against a garage. “Screw off! I said screw off, you guys!” she screeched. She pulled away, swatted at Aldo. “Ah, come on, Ruthy,” Ricco coaxed.
“Come on, bullshit!” she said. “What’s with your friends? They got no other place to be?” I was still fiddling with the lock, pretending to have some trouble getting it shut. They knew I was there, but acted as if I wasn’t. Then one of the guys I didn’t know picked up a chunk of concrete and threw it through a garage window. The sound of glass shattering was very loud in the alley. He yelled, elated—he’s just made the winning basket in the closing seconds of the game.
How did the old man on the horse get so near without us seeing him? It was dark, I told myself, everyone’s attention was distracted by Ruthy, the window breaking, the shouting, the feet in the gravel at the broken pavement edge. But he got close enough for me to tell that he looked the same as he had the day of the parade except that now he wore an ancient overcoat—and then he spoke.
“Hold on there!” he said. His voice echoed, deeper than what you could imagine would come from a skinny old man.
“What the hell’s that?” Aldo said.
The horse clopped nearer, clear now, even in the fog. “It’s a guy on a horse!” Ricco said.
“Hey—hey—what’s he gonna do?” Teddy asked. He moved sideways, ready to run, but afraid to in front of his friends. The horse stopped an arm’s length from them without any command from the old man.
“I’ve always believed that the end of the world will be signaled by the sound of breaking glass,” he intoned. “An abrupt smashing that ends in tinkle.”
“What the hell you talkin’ about?” Aldo said. “And who you supposed to be anyway?
The old man ignored him. Suddenly he urged the horse forward, separating Ruthy from the group.
“Young lady,” he said, “if these outlaws are bothering you, I can offer a ride away from here.”
“She ain’t going nowhere,” Ricco said to the back of the old man’s head.
“You don’t own me, Ricco!” she retorted. “I decide if I stay or go.” She took a deep breath and looked down. “I stay,” she mumbled, almost an apology.
The old man clucked to the horse and it stepped awkwardly backward. “It woulda’ been nice, though,” Ruthy called. “I never had a ride on a horse.”
Aldo laughed. “You ride outta the alley with this guy and you still ain’t had a ride on a horse!”
The old man acted as if he hadn’t heard. “Respect!” he said in a hollow voice. “They should have respect for you, because you deserve it. When a lady is not treated like a lady, she should make new friends.”
“You hear that, Ricco?” Ruthy shrilled. “He’s right, ain’t he?”
“Right’s ass!” Ricco sputtered. “Who the hell you think you are, you crazy old bedbug sonofabitch!” He moved forward and grabbed at the old man’s leg.
“Keep your hands off!” the old man said. He pulled his foot from the stirrup and drew back to kick Ricco away. But Ricco grabbed him around the ankle.
“Get his other foot, Aldo!” he called to his friend. After a quick scuffle they each had a foot. “Let’s pull him off!” Ricco said.
“Leave him alone!” Ruthy yelled. “He didn’t hurt nobody!”
They paid no attention. Pulled first to one side and then the other, the old man struggled to stay astride his horse. For a moment it looked as if he were an old rag that Aldo and Ricco were using to polish the saddle. His hat fell off. He bent forward to grasp the saddlehorn with both hands.
Then he managed to get a shorter grip on the reins. With a clattering the horse wheeled in a circle. Aldo let out a cry of alarm and went down, hit by the horse’s neck. The rump swung into Ricco, who went sprawling into a cluster of empty garbage cans. He’d struggled to one knee when he saw that the old man had drawn his pistol. It was pointing steadily at him.
“This is a .45 auto,” the old man said. “The gun that won the West.”
“Watch it, for crying out loud! Watch it!” Ricco said. He had a hand up in front of his face.
“You watch it, son. Get your friends around where I can see them.”
“Do what he says!” Ricco urged.
They gathered cautiously near Ricco.
“We didn’t mean nothing,” Aldo said.
“Shaddup!” the old man ordered.
For a long moment no one moved or spoke.
Then headlights appeared at the end of the alley. A car moved slowly toward the group, freezing them in their odd arrangement. The old man ignored the lights. The breath of the horse blew out in clouds.
“Did you ever see a horse fly?” the old man asked.
The car stopped two garages away. Mr. Baines walked through the headlights beams to his garage where you could hear him remove the padlock and slide the door open.
“Did you ever see a garbage can die?”
“This is crazy--” Ricco started.
“Shaddup!” the old man said. “You don’t know anything, do you? Don’t say a thing!”
Mr. Baines had walked into his headlight beams again when the .45 went off with a roar. Flames spewed out of the barrel. A garbage can shuddered, rocked back and forth, a hole as big around as a broomstick punched in it. Mr. Baines had winced or hesitated slightly when the gun fired, but kept on without looking, got in his car and pulled the door shut.
Ricco flinched when the car door slammed. Then he moaned softly. Mr. Baines drove inside his garage. The headlights went out. In a moment he closed the garage door, padlocked it, and disappeared around the corner, heading for his house.
“You just saw a garbage can die,” the old man observed. “Young lady, do you wish to go home?”
“I do,” Ruthy said meekly. She retrieved his hat and handed it up to him.
“Goodbye, then,” he said, not looking at her. “Remember what I said.” The .45 was still trained on Ricco. Ruthy went into thin air between garages.
“Well, boys,” he said, “I got miles to go. I reckon there’s a lesson here someplace. Be good, won’t you?”
You could have heard a flake of paint drop from one of the garages. Blocks away a car horn sounded. The safety clicked off on the .45.
“Won’t you?”
There was general chorus of agreement.
“Good, good,” the old man said. He holstered the gun, turned his horse, clucked to him. “Let’s go, old fellah.” The horse moved off at a little faster than a walk down the center of the alley. The clippedy-clop of his hooves echoed like a sound effect, halved coconut shells struck against a table top. Light fog drifted in behind him, and after a long moment you couldn’t hear him at all, either.
Ricco got to his feet, staring down the alley, and then looked quickly over his shoulder as if the old man and horse might suddenly appear from the opposite direction. Then he looked at me.
“Who was that old fucker?” he demanded
“I dunno,” I told him.
* * *
So now I’m interested. As a part-time newspaper reporter I’m naturally inquisitive, and when I’m not, I fake it. But this time I don’t have to pretend. Who is this old man? Why is he riding around in the dark? Where’s he keep a horse in the city? That same night I jumped in my car and drove up and down streets and alleys until I covered eight square blocks. Didn’t see a thing. Over the next few days I ask around. I’m looking for an old cowboy on a dirty gray horse. People are looking at me funny. I offer twenty bucks if anybody spots him and he’s still there when I arrive. Call me at work, call me at home. I give out my numbers. I get a couple of crank calls. One night the phone rings and a woman’s voice asks if I have my heart set on an old man on a horse, if I wouldn’t settle for a young woman straddling a footstool. Another night I go racing across town to end up at a billboard of the Marlboro Man. Other than that, nothing happens for a month. Snow is on the ground.
Then the calls really start coming. He’s going under the viaduct by the old Shredded Wheat, he’s in Whirlpool Park, he’s off Upper Mountain, riding along the top of the reservoir dike, then following Garlow toward Mr. Hope, he’s in a field off Buffalo Avenue, near Hyde Park by the railroad tracks, he’s at Devil’s Hole, he’s going down Recovery Road away from Military, he’s in the alley behind Portage Road, he’s going down the embankment at the end of 13th at North, then east along the rail line. I’m going, too, driving like a madman, always too late. Sometimes there are tracks in the snow, but blocks away I can never find them again. He’s everywhere and nowhere. People are getting excited now. More than the twenty, they want me to catch up with him.
But I’m more puzzled than ever. He’s never seen twice at the same place. Is he always on the move? In this kind of weather? I wake up in the middle of the night, the wind blowing outside. Where are they now, I wonder. He has to feed the horse, to be in out of the wind. There used to be abandoned barns dotting the countryside, half collapsed, but enough left standing to be a stall, at least. There was old hay in some of them, too. Even ten years old, in the center of the stack there’d be some bales good enough to eat. Especially for a hungry horse—better than nothing, anyway. But I can’t remember that any of those barns are still in existence, any I knew about. In some vacant factory building, maybe. There’s enough industrial property closed down. Might be someplace with a working water line even. Wherever he is, seventy-five, eighty dollars worth of hay, twenty-five worth of oats, if he had it stocked up somewhere, might squeak him through the winter.
In March I got a call from a cabbie named Roger, who claimed to have seen him just ten minutes before, heading out of town on Packard. It was snowing and just after dark, but I was there in less than fifteen minutes. There was no sign of him. Even an old horse can cover a lot of ground in nearly a half hour. I drove all the way to Six Corners, turned and headed back. On impulse I swung north down New Road. About a quarter mile from Porter, I thought I saw the horse crossing the intersection, ghosting through the falling snow. I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like a man on horseback. At Porter I had to wait for traffic. New Road was cinder on the other side, a half mile to the dead end. I stopped as soon as I crossed, got out and found tracks.
There were no houses on that side, just field, railroad tracks, and what was left of Porter Woods. I drove slowly to where the road ended. The trail in the snow continued. I followed on foot. The tracks swung west over the railroad, past the junkyards, over Lockport Road. My feet were wet and numb, eyes watering, when I saw the flicker of a fire about three hundred feet ahead. I crept a little closer, until I could make out the horse standing rump to the wind, snow settled in the sway of its back. The man was hunkered near the fire, perhaps adding a stick of wood. They were down in a little swale at the base of a landfill that had once been a flowing creek lined with old willow. A few survivors still grew there.
Now what, I thought. Stagger up to the fire half frozen and say what? Howdy? Did I expect a dented old coffee pot to be balanced over the flames? To bed down for the night and wake in the crystal morning, blanket covered with snow?
Headlights moved in the distance as somebody drove south on 190. I turned and headed back for my car. How I made it, I don’t know. My hands were so cold when I reached it that I scarcely had enough strength to depress the door handle button.
Two days later I paid Roger the twenty. “Well?” he wanted to know. “Well, nothing,” I told him. “Just a crazy old man who liked to ride around at night on his horse. No story at all.” He seemed disappointed.
I was, too, but it was a story I didn’t have the instinct to follow out to the end. It wouldn’t have had enough of the who, what, when, why in it anyway. In the final weeks of March the paper took two articles from me, one about a woman who made rag dolls out of remnants, another about driving cab for a living. I put Roger in that last one. Then the soft rains of April started and the grass sprouted up green in the vacant lots, along the railroad tracks, in the scrap land around the factories. My phone had stopped ringing. I slept soundly. An old man was out there somewhere riding his old horse beyond the end of the trail, doing an occasional good deed.
"The Last Rider" first appeared in Stone Canoe, A Journal of Arts and Ideas from Upstate New York, Number 3.
