Travels With Cowboy

A long drive down the Central Valley, cool then warm, the kind of day in March when the season can go either way, back to winter or ahead to spring; a day that draws new grass up in unplowed fields and hazes the distance silver. And here we are at last at our motel, the one that welcomes “one small pet.” I take our young Shepherd to the doggy corner, and for the first time Cowboy lifts his leg, as old dog Taco used to do against this very cottonwood. And then he turns and watches me with the old dog’s gaze. The tepid air, no longer winter and not quite spring, takes me back to walking other dogs between hedge and freeway fence. Dogs now dead look me in the eye in the guise of this new Cowboy. And I don’t know where this can take me except the lonely gap in the fence where drifters slip from southbound lane to shrubbery, past the long-haul truckers, out of here by dawn, and all the other chances of losing, leaving, and moving on.