WALTZING COWBOYS

It's a big sky. Even though Montana is known as "Big Sky Country", there is more sky in New Mexico. It starts lower on the horizon here, and goes higher, and you see more of it more often. The clouds are puffy-er, the stars are brighter, clearer, and the sun is a magical Zuni/Navaho/Hopi symbol, and it's right there on the state flag. Land o' Enchantment, I guarantee. What sunsets!


We are in the Llano Estacado, the "staked plains". And it's God's country, (not Allah's ... GOD's!). It's God's country because it is land that requires you to face metaphysical questions, just like those deserts the Prophets (and Jee-zus) struggled in. There is some disagreement whether the Staked Plains are staked because the Conquistadors drove stakes into the ground to mark their way across the perfectly flat plain, landmark-less; or whether it's just that the yuccas, bayonet plants and agave all send up these stalks that look like flag poles. I don't care, I always have oriented myself to a description of the land based upon Marty Robbins' lyric, where our hero rides away from El Paso out into the "badlands of Newww-mexxx-eee-cooooh!" These are them badlands, really, the Llano. Baked dirt from the original recipe. But at night you can see every whisp of the Milky Way.


Picture that starfield from Twilight Zone and remember how the camera pans downward to the surface, and you'd see my Momma under the stars, dancing in the street. Yeah, despite the recent family tragedy, tonight she is dancing to the Texas Playboys. It's the "Hot August Nights" celebration; and she and her compadres from the line-dancer class and the local Eastern Star widows club always have a dozen old men sniffing around -- all of 'em can do the Texas two-step.


The town has blocked off the streets for two-three blocks in all directions from the intersection of Broadway and Turner in Hobbs, NM. Tonight we're taking a break from the grief and the long list of chores to kick up our heels with the whole town. Bonnie Taylor has finished up a set of country wailing just now.


The prettiest sight? Take your pick: start with an MGM movie where the ballroom is filled with waltzing couples, and costume them in jeans n' custom Tony Llamas. Beautiful, a hundred summer-straw cowboy hats, whirlin' and bobbin' under the stars to the waltzes. Waltz Across Texas, amen. Or ... a four-year-old dancing on the empty outdoor stage during a break; her long, wild, honey-blond hair flashing under the spots as she tosses it to the recorded beat of "Whiskey for my men, ... beer for my horses."


Oh yeah, Texas Playboys, the last remnants of the famous 'Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys': silverhaired cowpokes playing pedal steel and singing the classics of Western Swing. "My Confession", "Dixie Blues", the Mill's Brothers classic Jazz/Western Swing crossover "Cab Driver", and of course "San Antonio Rose". Mom and Dad used to dance to them all through the 40's and 50's at the Maurice Club out on the highway. I have danced with my Momma this evening and "made points" for it, says her best friend. Then I slipped off with best friend's drugstore cowboy retire-ee of the moment for a long pull from a bottle of Sunnybrook out from under the seat of the pickup, washing down the last of a 'la parilla samwich straight out of the taco stand behind the stage. Real Mexican food cooked by real Mexican women who -- while they chop tomatoes and fresh cilantro together -- out of the corner of their eye watch their teenaged daughters flirting around the tables, (yum x2 ... for the salsa and for their dark eyes).


The Mexican men sit upright in macho pose on city park benches as they watch the greenngoes lord it over the asphalt, remembering that Cortez had it first. The names here are older than anything anybody reading this has for a name imported into the Americas: Baca, de la Vega, Domingues, ... Tellez.


The greenngoes are your basic oilfield trash (me too, really, I admit it, it's in my blood and I come by it honestly), going back 3-4 generations to when Bob Wills played at barn dances to cowboy drillers who fought Comanches all the way into the 1920's. Nowadays they drive new dually pickups with those big Ford diesel engines and red white and blue slogans painted across the back window so you can't see the rifle racks well. But they'd fight any "raghead sonofabitch" in a New York minute, I gare-on-tee.


The slogan they've settled on here in the Llano is ... United we Stand. With the U in blue and the S in red, stars and stripes lettering all along the back glass, sometimes on the fender panel, sometimes even on the tailgate. Just a little notice that they are available to "kick a sand nigger's ass all the way back to Mecca", as if you needed to ask. (Toby Keith even has an anthem about that, too. )


No question. Here is a fundamentalism to counter the arab fundamentalist, and then some. Ever been to Cowboy Church?


You thought that pistol-waving Steel Magnolia in "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" was made up???? My Momma is dancin' amongst a whole orchard full of Steel Magnolias, and if they don't all have pistols in their purses, they only have to say sweetly - batting those wrinkled old eye-shadowed lids - "Honey, let me borra that gun o' yours" in any direction ... hand outstretched. Momma's got two guns, a .38 Colt and a nickel S&W .357 Highway Patrol model with a 6-inch barrel and ribbed-vent sights. Both are home tonight, one in the nightstand, the other in the cupboard next to the china. (Don't worry, there's a loaded 20 gauge Remington semi-auto hidden behind in the curtain next to the front door, too. And at 79, she knows how, believe me.) When 9-11 happened, she could of taken the rat-shot out of the first chamber in the S&W and reloaded everything with wadcutters instead of hollow points.


So it's kind of ludicrous when Ridge and Asscroft exhort more "Homeland Security", now ... isn't it? You kind of hope Saddam or Osama or any of those terr-ists find their way to the Llano. You could sell tickets. Lordy.


I put a new roof on the well house. I cut her trees back away from the house so when the wind blows it doesn't bash branches against the shingles over the porch or the garage. I signed her up for McAfee virus protection online, and taught her how to use the CD writer. (I got a copy of the Texas Playboys CD for that). I made sure the pickup would start, and I put a new clamp on the tractor exhaust. She gets the Taurus serviced in town.


We ate barba-que at Wallace's, had the Sunday brunch buffet at the Western Sizzler with my cousins and all the after-church Baptists. We shopped at the Walmart Supercenter out at the new place on the Lovington Highway. My cousin Carolyn was in town from Dallas. We stood on the back porch while she smoked generic filters and talked about everyone who died in the last year.


I put new blades on the old bedroom ceiling fan and put a new one up over the kitchen island. Mom wanted to give me my dad's gold watch, which he carried all the time I was growing up, and he got it from his daddy; but I left it where it is, behind the glass in the china cabinet, near the Smith&Wesson. I'll get it when the time comes.


After a week of this, she drove me 100 miles to Midland and tossed me out onto the airport sidewalk (they don't let you wait at the gate to watch the plane leave, anymore). And then I took a succession of flying greyhounds, winging through that big sky back to the People's Republic of Eugene.


It's Friday now. I'm back.


Aaaah- haa!