Horse Pistol                       

                                                              6,026 wds             

         The best compliment given or received in that country is, “He was a good cow man.” A cowboy just drives the animals, but a cow man knows th    ys and sells them, lives by and with them and does everything in between. Mr. Herbert Falls was a good cow man who died of cancer at the hospital where i worked. Some men came to see him before he died. They were grim, most of them, all lean and so tan their skin looked like leather except for the sharp white line from the middle of the forehead up where their hats kept off the sun. As they stood around waiting for the elevator after their visit i overheard one of them say Mr. Falls was a good cow man. Another who was not as unsmiling but tough as the others said, “I sure don’t like being in the horse pistol.” About thirty seconds later i understood what a horse pistol is and the words stayed with me all day.

To make Mr. Falls feel better i told him what i had heard his men say and his tan, square face brightened. He was being fed through a nasal tube and a wider tube running from a hole in his side attached to a bag evacuated his bowels.  

I was an orderly assigned to care for Mr. Falls in his final days. Many years later this is what i told the guys i worked with as a janitor.  We sat around the snack room at break and i said, “He was a tough old guy with a bag hanging from his side because they had cut out part of his colon and stopped up his lower digestive tract until he healed, but he didn’t heal. He   died one morning just before i came onto my shift and i had to shave his corpse before his wife arrived.” 

“You shaved a dead man?”

“Sure.”

They looked at me silently, amazed. To amaze is a pleasant feeling. 

“That’s disgusting.”

"It was necessary," i calmly replied.

“Why did you have to shave him? Why not let the undertaker do that?” 

“Because of his wife,” i said. “The early morning shift had cleaned him up and called her, then they left off their shift and the head nurse came in and saw he was unshaved and she couldn’t get any of them to stay and do it. Mrs. Falls raised hell about everything, she liked making noise, a skinny bitch with a tight belt and big silver buckle. We knew she would raise hell if the old man had a morning stubble.”

As this settled onto them i had the feeling Don was about to start in again about his father with Alzheimer’s, so i blocked him.

“Mrs. Falls was vicious. Her husband had this strap on him to keep him in the bed so he wouldn’t roll out onto the floor. He was mostly delirious. He might try to get up and injure himself so she would untie this strap so he would get hurt and she could sue the hospital. We knew she did all kinds    of things like this so when she left his room after her evening visit we went in right away and changed his water, fixed him securely in the bed, checked out every possible way she could screw him up. She always found something to bitch about so we knew she would pick at his unshaved face. We had to eliminate every possible reason for complaint.” 

“So you shaved a dead man,” Peter said.  He still looked stunned. 

“He was my patient, i had to. It was easy, i didn’t have to worry about nicks. They don’t bleed much because the blood has drained away or settled and hardened inside them so you just hold up the nose and scrape it off.”

Darryl, who rarely spoke, said, “Undertaker’s just a janitor anyway.” This put a cap on it, Darryl was good at that. He listened well and distilled the conversation, pondering his words well before speaking, so we listened to him. He was a natural leader, good or bad i couldn’t say because he had decided not to lead anyone. Everyone else on that crew was big and hefty, including me. Darryl was small and trim. During that summer 

when i worked part-time with them for a janitorial service i remember everything Darryl said. From the other guys it was mostly forgettable small talk. 

I fell silent and Don brought out another episode in the continuing catastrophe of his deteriorating father and Peter told us of his grandfather, a crusty old grump, dead twenty                                     years now, who chewed tobacco in the house with a gallon coffee can rusty and leaking beside his favorite tv chair. The brown ring in the carpet is still there, his legacy.      

    “There are marks around the ring,” Peter said, “where he missed the can. But he didn’t miss it much.” Personally, i found this as grotesque as shaving a corpse but said nothing. 

Working at the hospital was my first full-time job. I was still in high school. Arriving in the clear mornings at six-fifty was the best feeling. The windows of the tan brick building reflected the sun. My mother or brother drove me to work when the weather was bad. Most of the time i rode my bicycle and entered at the basement loading dock, leaving my bike in the bushes. 

Bales of laundry stood on the platform where the trucks backed up to load them and carts with high canvas sides and wheels at each corner, bulging with dirty linen crowded the hall and the air with a faint odor of blood and soap. Beyond these was the punch in time clock, placing the time card back in the rack. Beyond the clock in the cement floored, dark hall, were two elevator doors.  The hospital was built on a bluff and at the foot of the bluff was the loading dock and parking lot. This basement level contained the pharmacy, physical therapy, a few offices, storage rooms, kitchen and cafeteria. 

The first floor opened onto the top of the hill and was made up of lobby, chapel, pathology laboratories,

administration offices, emergency room and operating rooms. On the second floor was the Intensive Care     Unit, geriatrics and non-surgical patient rooms. The third floor was pediatrics and surgical recovery (post-op) and the fourth floor obstetrics. My mother was an obstetrics nurse on the fourth floor. I was an orderly on the second floor.

Around the corner from the elevators and the nurse’s desk on the second floor was a 'safe room.' The bathroom had no mirror and there were bars on the small opening in the heavy door. In the room mattress-like material three inches thick covered the walls and the inside of the door. There was no window. Patients violently ill, delusional or under guard were kept in the safe room for legal reasons or for their own safety, as in the case of Elena Ramirez.

Elena never fully regained consciousness, so we only know the general outline of her story. At sixteen she ran away to California with her boyfriend. Their relationship became disagreeable to him and he beat her severely and abandoned her. Elena called her father in Cheyenne, asking for help. This angered him, but he agreed to help her. He drove to California and there he, too, found the situation unacceptable and beat her. It was said by a nurse who spoke to the attending physician that, judging by the nature of her wounds, her father beat her repeatedly during their return trip. When they arrived home Elena would not regain consciousness so her father took her to the emergency room. After that day he was unavailable for consultation.

Elena had a fractured skull and her face was broken and swollen in many places.  She often cried out and tossed in her bed. She was kept in the Intensive Care Unit or the safe room tied to the bed frame with a wide, canvas belt around her midsection and each wrist secured to the bed rails to prevent further injury. Elena twice underwent surgery to correct the cerebral trauma and spent her last days in the ICU unit.

    After Elena Ramirez, the room was occupied by a man with cirrhosis of the liver and hepatitis. His mid-section expanded until it was painful to look at him, his thin smock stretched so tight it opened at the rear to expose his shriveled yellow buttocks. He was a barrel-chested man with very thin legs that looked thinner and weaker as his waist-line grew. Fortunately he was bed-ridden or his legs would have snapped under the bulbous load. He arrived cheerful and alert and was kept in a regular room for a few days, then moved to the safe room as he deteriorated. His skin and eyes turned yellow and his gaze blank. He too was tied up in bed with additional bands of canvas securing each wrist to the bed rails. He spent hours each day turning his wrists, flexing his hands and moving his arms, attempting to free himself.

We watched him disappear into a balloon of flesh, his personality, memory and vitality thinned to a tight cord within   a globe of fluid. He received no visitors. No one knew where he had gone in his mind, or if he was still present in any part of his body, but his yellow eyes followed motion and we knew that one fierce desire thrived amid his glandular wreckage; he was determined to escape. If he was ever loose and allowed to roam the halls patients and visitors would receive a horrible jolt.

One afternoon the aide in charge of this man set him on a bed-pan, a difficult task, and left the room without strapping him back to the rails of the bed. In the nurse’s report she was cited for carelessness, but i knew her to be attentive beyond the standard requirement, though sometimes belligerent or at least condescending to patients not expected to recover. She was about forty-five and still strong and young looking. I had lunch with her from time to time and listened to her. She was intelligent and observant. To this aide there appeared to be an unacceptable level of illness and if the patient fell below it and would certainly die it was senseless to give them much care or comfort. She herself was healthy and cheerful and carried a challenging attitude. This i interpreted as a belief that strength of body can be won by strength of will, that determination can beat disease and the victim of illness, bloodied but unbowed, might climb to good health and vigor if they truly desire it. “Physician heal thyself,” is not for doctors alone, her attitude indicted. This is why she left the delusional patient in the safe room untied and unattended, to give him the chance to sit up, look around and shout, “I’m sick of being sick, now i’m going to be well!” And so the body follows and sickness flees. 

I entered the room before the aide returned and saw her bulbous patient crossways on the bed, the pan tipped over on the bed, the lumpy, tan contents smeared on the bed-sheets. The same oily tan was smeared on the tight smock and gobs of tan hung in the man’s hair. I smelled it and i had to step back. He looked up at me, eyes empty as holes in a piece of wood and his hands gooey at his chewing mouth. 

I rushed into the bathroom expecting to vomit, but i didn’t vomit. I couldn’t stay there leaning over the sink. I had to move, i had to act. At the nurses desk i informed them as calmly as i could that the safe room patient needed help immediately and i myself felt incapable of providing it. They saw how much he needed help by the absence of blood in my face. I saw the aide going into the room and counted the seconds ~ now she faced him, saw him besmeared, now she had to steady herself, she gathered strength, then the door slammed.

Everyone who heard the door slam knew something had gone wrong. They questioned me and i told them, very briefly. There was a frantic rush to calm nerves. A volunteer was called for and someone, (not me) hustled into the room to help the aide with the patient. A hasty consultation took place in the room behind the nurse’s station.  Later in the day a report was drawn up. The aide at fault received a ‘personal reprimand’ that did not appear on her permanent record. The report concluded, “Any patient placed in the safe room requires exceptional care. No margin of error is permitted.” The ward clerk printed a similar notice in large black letters and taped it to the heavy door.  

Years later when i learned Guy de Maupassant, a French writer, maddened by syphilis, degenerated in the same way just before he died, his stories filled me with fear and enthusiasm.

My qualifications for becoming an orderly were not the best. My mother was an obstetrics nurse on the fourth floor and she first asked my older brother Arthur if he wanted to be trained as an orderly and work in the hospital. Arthur looked at her like she had rocks for brains. At that time Arthur was looking at everyone like that, it was his style. Our mother didn’t know it, but Arthur had fallen under the spell of two brothers at school. This team had developed a very powerful, harsh stare expressing (as they believed) infinite contempt, complete impatience and hot anger barely under control. Arthur strove to master this contempt-at-a-glance, but his round face did not carry severity well and our mother was merely confused. 

She turned to me, her last son and final opportunity, knowing she could get what she wanted from me. 

You can go to the hospital and learn the lessons of life and death, earn money and live out in the big wide world!

The big wide world, that’s me!

My mother knew how cramped and restless i was in that little town and how curious i was about people, places and life. I was interested in extremes and afraid of extremes. I didn’t want to see anyone die, every death brings our own death closer, but seeing it happen might make dying easier. It’s not my favorite subject, but i won’t live forever and if i turn away from it i’ll feel like a coward and miss some vital information. One grows used to it and might learn to relax amid the fear and suffering. One day the pain will be my own. Will i have the skill to speak of it? Now i could begin to make preparations to squeeze through that final door which, some believe, opens unto the first.

Our training for the work of aides (female) and orderlies (male), began one Monday morning in a basement room beside the cafeteria dining room. Our teacher was a short, plump nurse my mother’s age (50) or older who stressed the essentials. She had a passion for the functions of the body and her good humor and liveliness made her instruction easy to bear.

For variety, a different nurse instructed us every other day. For two weeks ~ three hours every morning, five days a week ~ we followed a basic course of study. We bandaged up make-believe wounds, practiced resuscitation, gave bed baths, learned bed pan and urine pot techniques and how to change bed sheets while the patient is in bed. It’s simple and easy, depending on the temperament of the patient. You roll the patient to one side, make half the bed, then roll them over the long lump of linen running the length down the middle of the bed and make up the other half. Most important, our main purpose was to help people, to be kind and make it easy for them to rest.

The patient upon whom we practiced acts of kindness was a sexless, heavy plastic form badly worn from years of bandaging and bathing. The arms were squared off at mid-forearm, the legs at mid thigh. In many places the skin had rubbed through and seams were breaking open and, especially in the head and neck area, a fibrous white mesh protruded. Sticking out of the seam going over the top of the head over the ears (the ears were just lumps), and down both sides of the neck, the fringe looked like a thin, sideways cut Mohawk. 

The first time the nurse showed us the creature someone said, "This thing should have a bolt through its neck.”

       Bolted or not, we gave it all the care we would give a real person, speaking to it in low, soothing tones, asking it if it had an appetite this  morning and determining, as we were taught is most important, if it had a good or bad attitude. A patient with a good attitude is likely to improve. If the nurse teaching us left class early, before we put up our training tools, as she often did, we would heave the worn out rubbery, stuffed monster we had recently been so gentle with into the closet head first.

There were three girls and three boys in the class, none of us over eighteen and all of us related to someone who worked in the hospital. Among the girls was a slim, pretty, charming and energetic beauty whose mother was a charming, energetic nurse on the surgical floor. Mother and daughter were both very popular. Another of the girls was a small, sharp eyed blond with thin lips, and the last a husky farm girl who looked at me like she would drag me into the hay right now were we on her daddy’s farm. She was ready for the plow and planting and a bumper crop could be expected. She had a heavy torso, heavy legs and jaws. This princess of the pasture rarely spoke to me, but often sat or stood close to me in class and looked at me with wide brown eyes behind which lurked, i was sure, dreams of milk and children. 

I was not interested in this bean field babe, i was interested in the bright, slim, energetic girl who swiftly rejected me, knowing the true purpose standing erect and ready behind my sensual smile. 

Her story was sad. After we graduated and had been working for several months her boyfriend, a small, very 

handsome and exceptionally arrogant hero was in a car wreck and lost his right leg. The leg was so badly mangled it had to be amputated at the knee. For most of the week he was in the hospital she neglected her other patients to give him special care. We were assigned five to seven patients a day and we decided how much attention we paid to each. 

He was not good to her, he probably took out on her the anguish of losing his leg. She became distracted at her work, there was a fight and afterwards very ugly, sexually explicit rumors. He said he didn’t want to see her anymore. She quit and i never saw her again. The only classmate i did see again after leaving that job was the small, sharp-eyed blond. We met on the mid-way at Cheyenne Frontier Days, the annual rodeo and carnival called the Daddy of ‘em All. It was two years later, i spoke to her but she said she had no recollection of me. 

Our training complete, diplomas distributed at a brief ceremony in the cafeteria, we went to work. My first patient was Mr. Hinkle, a sixty year old hardware store manager who had suffered a mild heart attack. He was as embarrassed as i was when i gave him a bed bath. He washed his groin, armpits and face and i washed the rest of him.

There were two beds in each room and Mr. Hinkle was very different from the man in the other bed. He was Mr. Morris, first name definitely not Hugh. Also sixty, Mr. Morris had had a heart attack too, but unlike Mr. Hinkle, his skin was dark red, eyes blood-shot and he smoked a small cigar with his oxygen on, a very dangerous act. The light blue tube ran from a nozzle in the wall, split in two and each side of the loop ran over his ears and under his nose. The nurse came in and told him to put out his cigar. He refused. The head nurse was summoned and when she arrived told Mr. Morris to stop smoking. He refused. She told him he would die if he continued to smoke, but that was up to him, for her part she could not allow him to endanger another patient in the room and he must stop. He refused and accused the nurse of not providing a wheel chair so he could smoke in the hall. 

“If you can’t move me out in the hall by god i’ll smoke where i am.”

I asked the nurse if i should turn off Mr. Morris’s oxygen. “No, no. He has to have it on twenty-four hours.” 

Then she asked Mr. Morris to please stop smoking and he inhaled deeply and smiled and put his hands behind his head, stretched and shook his head, no, the smoke curling out of his mouth and nose and around the oxygen tube. The nurse threatened him again, he said no.

In the hall by the nurses station we briefly discussed what to do and decided to get Mr. Morris a chair so he could smoke in the hall and to move Mr. Hinkle out of the room as soon as another bed became available. Fortunately we didn’t have to do that.

The next day as we were cleaning out Mr. Morris’s room we found several empty pint whisky bottles stuffed into a hole in his mattress. We figured for the length of his stay Mr. Morris had to drink one each day, yet no one could figure out who brought him the whisky, no one saw him drinking it and the nurses said he didn’t smell too bad.  

I asked Mr. Hinkle about his ex-roommate and he said, “Oh hell i don’t know. I never even knew he was drinking. Tell you the truth, i’m glad he’s gone, not that i had anything against him, but he did run his mouth, talking in his sleep, kicking around, cussing. He didn’t have a lot to say, either. I guess being in the furniture business forty years don’t keep you too lively. Not that i’m glad he’s dead, but i need my sleep.”

Some other patients; Mr. Edel, a courier in World War I who told me he still had nightmares about running through the trenches besmeared with gore and littered with offal and broken corpses.

Mr. Heine, restaurant owner, retired. He owned and ran The Chili Bowl at 16th and Hardy. You knew the place by the giant bowl on the roof. Mr. Heine’s abrasive and vigorous personality and late hours made his place a favorite of late night people and restless, rebellious youth looking for kicks or a place to sit, sober up and talk.

Mr. Kennerly, still extremely handsome and one of the richest men in town, but he couldn’t pay himself to stay sober so he occasionally checked into the hospital to dry out.

Sister Mary Felicity, in bed for twenty years and cared for by the hospital, a Catholic institution. Sister Felicity worked for the poor before she became depressed and dependant. Now the good sister ate very little, requesting that her food be given to the Fong family. Nobody knew who the Fong family was or where they could be found.

Mrs. Foster, who threw a bowl of macaroni and cheese at me and hit her doctor instead. 

Mrs. Dodd, very old and suffering from Parkinson’s disease. She remembered swimming Crow Creek with her sisters and friends when suddenly the bank of the creek was lined with twenty braves sitting their horses, weapons easily at hand, watching the naked girls. Parkinson’s turns the face but not the eyes or mind to stone. When she told me of her early days on her father’s ranch her eyes were bright and happy. She married a railroad man and moved to town. Several of her grandsons were my classmates at school.

One patient i was not assigned to care for and whose name i never knew was a woman who had worked in the hospital as an aide for thirty-five years. She had cared for people in the same room where she lay and saw some die in the same bed where she now lay dying. She herself would be dead in fifteen minutes and she knew it. Her lungs were slowly filling with blood, there was no way the bleeding could be stopped. Her family gathered around her, i thought, counting and not wanting to count.

I didn’t know this when i walked into the room with a jug of ice water. She looked at me with intense eyes, she smiled. Her face was strained with pain and darkening from lack of oxygen.

“Would you like some ice water?” i asked.

She struggled to smile again and shook her head, no. Someone in the room asked me in an unpleasant tone to please leave. The crowd looked at me so sharply i knew the whole story immediately and left quickly, 

In the hall the nurse who followed me out asked why i brought water into the room. I said i was bringing fresh water to all the rooms.

“Well, she doesn’t need it now. She’ll be gone soon.”

Our hospital routine was simple. After arriving in the morning and punching in, we took the elevator to our assigned floor and reported to the nurses’ conference room. There we were instructed on patients, given the list of who we would care for that day and their special needs and changes. From there we spread out on the floor to gently wake patients, assess attitudes, take their temperature, observe rate of respiration, wash faces and help them prepare for breakfast. Last of all, i woke patients who i knew liked to sleep late. 

Orderlies were not given female patients to attend to, but aides were assigned male patients and would bathe them, give them bed pans, take rectal temperatures, etc. I was happy not to have to give any old ladies bed baths. 

Working in the hospital all summer and, back in school, on weekends and in the evenings three or four times a week, was not a gloomy experience. It filled me with energy, i was glad to be healthy, alive and young amid all that age and dying. At times it seemed like everyone in the world was less lively and had more problems than me.

     My sharpest memory was of watching Mr. S__ die. He had been in the hospital a short time, had come in loud and proud and left a frigid slab. We observed his loss of good attitude, weight, his face growing pale, the onset of tremors. One sunny afternoon at 1:15 he died. His decline took five days. Here was a hardy, proud old man honored for successes, having sold a necessary service to society who thought his presence indispensable. Mr. S__ went to fill a slot in a cemetery already crowded with other indispensables.

By that time i had learned much, but had seen only one other person die. I was not sickened. It was what i expected. The old woman, Mrs. Randall, looked dead already except that she had big rolling eyes and would move a hand or, judging by the twitching of her throat, try to speak. In her last moments she jerked a little and stopped moving and breathed out and didn’t inhale. That was it. It was not gruesome at all except i thought her eyes might pop out.

When a patient was “ready to go” the word spread fast. Depending on the patient and their condition, number of family members present and their attitude, doctor’s orders and so forth, the death room was avoided or sought out. I wanted to observe death for several reasons; to prove to myself that i had the courage to keep my eyes open no matter what happened and in this way grow to know and control the fear of it, and to collect an interesting story that would set me apart from others. This reason is still very important to me, though i have learned, even as i struggle to feel unique, that there is comfort in blending with others. 

Mr. S__ had been my patient, so i could come and go through his room as i pleased. On the day he was “ready to go” i contrived to bring him a jug of water. It’s good to have a reason even if you don’t need it. On the way there i saw the approach of several nurses and aides like myself who had no real reason to go into his room. I came through the room adjacent to the one in which Mr. S___ lay and in to see him by way of the bathroom between them, saying hello, how you to the two patients sitting in their beds and who probably had no clue as to what was going to happen one room away. In the bathroom i picked up a small towel, useful in getting up spills, and softly stepped in to see Mr. S__.

Upon entering i encountered the backs of many nurses and aides. As i was unnecessary there, i didn’t press for a closer look. There must have been ten people in that room, most as unneeded as myself, for who could save Mr. S__ if all the medical knowledge at hand had so far failed? Only Mrs. S__ was truly needed at her husband’s side.  It promised to be a good show. I felt i would experience a unique scene, a transfer of power, a moment of grace or disgrace and my muscles tightened in readiness, as if bracing for a blow.

Without speaking, Mrs. S__ looked at us gathered there, tears on her cheeks. Her husband’s eyes darted from side to side and rolled and he began to shake, then settled into quiet breathing. In another minute he was shaking again. He kept his mouth shut tight and this made me wonder if he might suddenly blurt out something or deliver an address, reveal a dark, malodorous or magnificent secret.

Mrs. S__ held his hand. One of the nurses put her hand on her shoulder, but i don’t think Mrs. S__ noticed. She, too, seemed to be expecting some sign or word. This continued for ten minutes, shaking and calm, shaking and calm, as the calm intervals between each period decreased.

I collected all possibly important details from the room, silently spoke the names of all present to fix them in memory. Above the bed, as in each room of the hospital, hung a crucifix or an image of Christ revealing his sacred heart. Above the bed of Mr. S__ was such a portrait of Christ with his hand in a wide chest wound, hand bloody, showing us his heart. It struck me as appropriate to have this in a hospital room, an image of Christ with his calm blue eyes on us as he performed an act of self-surgery.  

The face of the dying man now darkened and his lips parted, then clamped again, then he became very still and blood flowed from between his lips, like a swift, wet snake leaving his body, spreading onto his chin and chest. As suddenly as the blood flowed i knew i would be sick. The moment i feared was upon me.

I looked for a container. The trash can beside the bed was out of the question. What would they think if i pushed through the crowd and stuck my head in a can beside the dying man? The window was closed, but even if i could get it open, vomiting out a hospital window was clearly prohibited. What a sight for the visiting relative, a boy chucking his vittles from a second story window. I turned and rushed for the bathroom and smacked my forehead right into the edge of the door. I almost dropped my water jug, recovered and made it to the sink. 

Someone closed the door behind me.

Eating in the hospital cafeteria never stimulated my appetite because the food served there was the same food i distributed to my patients before coming down on the elevator to eat. Usually i brought my own lunch, carrots or a piece of fruit. As i didn’t have much appetite on the job, this was enough. 

That noon i had eaten two bananas. An additional unpleasant aspect of eating in the hospital was the smell of my hands. We used a very distinctive smelling anti-bacterial soap to clean our patients and when raising my lunch to my mouth i could smell this soap on my hands. With a banana, the unfolded length kept my hands farther from my mouth than other food. Even so, i did not savor or chew the bananas well, but bit them off and swallowed the segments almost unchewed. 

       That is how my lunch returned to me over the sink, one segment at a time. They were about the same size coming out as they were going in, rounded and lubricated now and lined up in my throat, shaking me when they passed back up through my neck. Sweat bathed my skin, i shook and quivered with each eruption until the last cork or plug-like piece of banana popped out into the sink.

I turned on the water to rinse my face and cool my lips and hot mouth. Someone came in and closed the door. I wiped my face with a towel someone handed me and i turned my head. Watching over me was the farm girl with her big brown eyes and bulk and longing for good husbandry.

“Are you awright?”

“Sure, now i am. All that blood took me by surprise.”

“It surprised me too,” she said in a bright tone, without pity in her tone as though instead of a man dying she had seen an elephant balanced on a ball or a clown fall off a unicycle.

This is what i thought of her before she helped me, that her size deflected or absorbed the shock, so through her vast spaces her cargo may vibrate but never shift and the structure undamaged. Now as she stood beside me i felt warmed and drawn to her.

She wet a washcloth and daubed my forehead, resting her hand on my shoulder as she stretched up on tip-toe and pressed the cloth onto my cheeks. Her hand held me steady, she looked into my eyes. Before i could think again of her as i had before i felt her strength keeping me steady. I wanted to hold her and kiss her. The taste of expelled digestive fluid tainting my mouth, however, was bitter. I took the washcloth from her and wiped my lips and chin. 

“I’ll be okay now, thanks.”

Her hand remained on my shoulder.

       “Are you sure? I can get you some aspirin.”

“No, i don’t need it. I’m better now.”

“I best be getting back then.” She left the room. Over her shoulder through the open door i saw the body of Mr. S__ sitting in the bed, blood like a flower grown down his smock. Mrs. S__ was just then leaving, as aides were beginning carefully, respectfully, to move toward cleaning up her husband. As soon as the new widow was gone their treatment of the old boy would be more direct. The door closed.

I continued to see the face of the aide who helped me. I didn’t want her to go, i wanted her to look at me and rest her hand on my shoulder. Was it possible that i loved her?  

End of “Horse Pistol”                                                   

Where i come from gun control is how steady you hold your weapon. Senator Alan Simpson R-WY