take her back without telling you. That’s why I came here to talk. But she’s got to go. Now.”
Alex lowered the shotgun. “Can’t…can’t you take me in her place? You can do that, can’t you?”
“I…I don’t know. It’s highly irregular.”
“Yeah, you can do that. Take me. Leave Margie.”
“Well, I suppose.”
The screen door creaked open and Margie stood there in her housecoat. “You’re forgetting, Alex, I don’t want to be left alone.”
“Go in the house, Margie,” Alex said.
“I know who this is: I heard you talking, Mr. Death. I don’t want you taking my Alex. I’m the one you came for. I ought to have the right to go.”
There was a pause, no one speaking. Then Alex said, “Take both of us. You can do that, can’t you? I know I’m on that list of yours, and pretty high up. Man my age couldn’t have too many years left. You can take me a little before my time, can’t you? Well, can’t you?”
Margie and Alex sat in their rocking chairs, their shawls over their knees. There was no fire in the fireplace. Behind them the bucket collected water and outside the wind whistled. They held hands. Death stood in front of them. He was holding a King Edward cigar box.
“You’re sure of this?” Death asked. “You don’t both have to go.”
Alex looked at Margie, then back at Death.
“We’re sure,” he said. “Do it.”
Death nodded. He opened the cigar box and held it out on one palm. He used his free hand to snap his fingers.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
“And in you go,” Death said.
The bodies of Alex and Margie slumped and their heads fell together between the rocking chairs. Their fingers were still entwined.
Death put the box under his arm and went out to the car. The rain beat on his derby hat and the wind sawed at his bare arms and T-shirt. He didn’t seem to mind.
Opening the trunk, he started to put the box inside, then hesitated.
He closed the trunk.
“Damn,” he said, “if I’m not getting to be a sentimental old fool.”
He opened the box. Two blue lights rose out of it, elongated, touched ground. They took on the shape of Alex and Margie. They glowed against the night.
“Want to ride up front?” Death asked.
“That would be nice,” Margie said.
“Yes, nice,” Alex said.
Death opened the door and Alex and Margie slid inside. Death climbed in behind the wheel. He checked the clipboard dangling from the dash. There was a woman in a Tyler hospital, dying of brain damage. That would be his next stop.
He put the clipboard down and started the car that was not from Detroit.
“Sounds well-tuned,” Alex said.
“I try to keep it that way,” Death said.
They drove out of there then, and as they went, Death broke into song. “Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream,” and Margie and Alex chimed in with, “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.”
Off they went down the highway, the taillights fading, the song dying, the black metal of the car melting into the fabric of night, and then there was only the whispery sound of good tires on wet cement and finally not even that. Just the blowing sound of the wind and the rain.
Cowboy
I got off the plane at Atlanta and caught the shuttle to what I thought was my hotel. But there was some kind of mix-up, and it wasn’t my hotel at all. They told me I could go out to the curb and catch this other shuttle and it would take me over to another hotel in their chain, and that it was a short walk from there to where I wanted to go. I thought that was okay, considering I had gotten on the wrong shuttle in the first place.
I sat outside the hotel on a bench and waited for the shuttle. It was October and kind of cool, but not really uncomfortable. The air felt damp.
I had a Western paperback and I got it out of my coat pocket and read a few pages. From time to time I looked up for the shuttle, then at my watch, then back at the paperback. It wasn’t a very good Western.
While I was sitting there a little black boy on skates with an empty toy pistol scabbard strapped around his waist went by. He looked at me. His head was practically shaved and his snap-button cowboy shirt was ripped in front. I guess he was about eleven.
I looked back at my book and started reading, then I heard him skate over in front of me. I looked up and saw that he was looking at the picture on the front of the paperback.
“That a cowboy book?” he said.
I told him it was.
“It any good?”
“I don’t care much for it. It’s a little too much like the last three or four I read.”
“I like cowboy books and movies but they don’t get some things right.”
“I like them too.”
“I’m a cowboy,” he said, and his tone was a trifle defiant.
“You are?”
“You was thinking niggers can’t be cowboys.”
“I wasn’t thinking that. Don’t call yourself that.”
“Nigger? It’s okay if I’m doing it. I wouldn’t want you to say that.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Anyone says that they got me to fight.”
“I don’t want to fight. Where’s your pistol?”
He didn’t answer that. “A black boy can be a cowboy, you know.”
“I’m sure of it.”
“They weren’t all cooks.”
“Course not.”
“That’s way the movies and books got it. There any black cowboys in that book?”
“Not so far.”
“There gonna be?”
“I don’t know,” I said. But I did know. I’d read a lot of cowboy books.
“White boys at school said there weren’t any black cowboys. They said no nigger cowboys. They said we couldn’t fight Indians and stuff.”
“Don’t listen to them.”
“I’m not going to. I went over to the playground at the school and they took my pistol. There was three of them.”
It came clear to me then. His shirt being ripped and the gun missing.
“I’m sorry. That wasn’t nice.”
“They said a nigger didn’t need no cowboy gun. Said I needed me a frying pan or a broom. I used to ride the range and rope steers and stuff. They don’t know nothing.”
“Is that all you did on the range, rope steers?”
“I did all kinds of things. I did everything cowboys do.”
