What’s the moral of this story? Always listen to your kid brother, because he knows best? Well…yes and no. (I’m a middle child myself, so I’ve been on both sides of that fence.) My version of this legend has the exact same moral, although by the time you’ve finished reading it you’ll probably be wondering if I’ve been eating some strange-looking fish lately. So, with apologies to the venerable Seminole storytellers, here we go…
The Actual Story
Once upon a time…not so long ago…in fact, it could have been just yesterday for all I know…there lived two friends. These friends called themselves Buck and Bob. These fine fellows were pleasant enough. They said “please” and “thank you,” stood up whenever a woman entered the room, and even tipped their hats to passing horses. The problem was, most of these horses were imaginary, for though Buck and Bob fancied themselves as old-fashioned cowboys with lassos and boots and hats, neither of them had actually seen a real live horse.
Their home town, Dodge City (one of the many Dodge Cities that were sprinkled throughout the West at one time or another), was a very exciting place to live, I’m sure. Located smack in the middle of the Great American Desert — Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, or more likely, Our Collective Memory of the Mythologized and Romanticized Old West — this Dodge City suffered from a bad case of being ever-so-slightly behind the times. You see, they’d just recently built a gas station in the town limits. Dodge City was so boring that even truckers would drive through without stopping, and the residents who owned cars were too bored to drive them anywhere.
Sadly for our two unsung heroes, this meant that the cowboy, or at least the brand of cowboy they aspired to be, was a breed of human being that had gone the way of the dinosaur and the sabre-toothed tiger. You can’t honestly blame them, though; after all, in Dodge City news from the outside world trickled in about as fast as a bucketful of garden snails. Even when the news was worth noticing — wars, presidential elections, celebrity divorces — most people were too busy gambling, drinking, or cussing to bother paying attention. So Buck and Bob must be forgiven for being ignorant of the more modern trappings of civilization.
Anyhow, that was Dodge City. Not exactly the perfect place for two young, talented cowboys such as Buck and Bob. And eventually they realized that, too, but they couldn’t exactly do anything to improve their lot in life, for the closest town was another Dodge City two hundred miles away (a much cooler, hipper Dodge City…they had two gas stations). So like so many bold, big-dreaming men before them, Buck and Bob found their hopes shattered beneath bottles of tequila and dead diesel engines.
One dreary afternoon when the sun was making it downright suicidal to be found outside an air-conditioned building, Buck and Bob were sequestered in Dodge City’s saloon doing what they did best these days — slouching on stools with shot glasses glued to their lips, their eyes and faces drained of any sign of vitality, verve, or vivacity. Life could have progressed in the same dazed, drunken fashion if it hadn’t been for Big Bill the bartender. Big Bill (gifted that name by a local prostitute who’d just felt sorry for him) was the most eccentric man in Dodge City. His latest project involved erecting makeshift wooden wings on the sides of his truck for the sole purpose of intimidating passing birds and discouraging them from using it as a toilet.
Bill sidled up to our two forlorn heroes and plopped a pair of foaming beers down in front of them, which they accepted quite mechanically. Bill stood there for a moment, watching Buck and Bob further intoxicate themselves, and then laughed his booming, full-bellied laugh as he shook his beach ball-sized head.
“You two cowpokes spend too much cash at my place,” Bill told the drunks. “Normally I wouldn’t give a hoot, but I knew your dear departed Ma. And she wouldn’t’ve wanted you to blow all the money she left you on me and my merchandise. You fellas look like you could use a little somethin’ to do other than throw up in my men’s room.”
At this, Buck and Bob finally showed some signs of life. Bob actually blinked. Buck spoke up in his affected “cowboy drawl,” a speech pattern that he imagined real cowboys would use. The ones on T.V. did, at any rate.
“What’re you jabberin’ about, Bill?” he asked, not taking his eyes off the beer.
“Well…” Bill glanced around furtively to check for eavesdroppers. There were none; everyone else was too busy staring at their own beers and muttering about their own miserable lives to no one in particular. Confident that his words would not be overheard by those who probably would’ve liked to be overheard by someone, Bill leaned across the bar to his two prized patrons and dropped his voice to a whisper.
“I got a friend who likes takin’ trips overseas, and last summer he sent me this horse-lookin’ creature, except it’s a lot bigger and it’s got a big bump on its back. Says he got it from someplace called Sahara. Said I’d like it. Only problem is, I gotta keep it tied to the side of my house cuz it wants to kick the rear of everything that moves. Now, I got a bet for you boozehounds. If you take that animal out into the desert and he poops out before you do, then I’ll give you, say…hundred and fifty bucks. That’s uh, for both of you.”
You might as well have dropped a nuclear bomb on Big Bill’s doorstep. In a split second the looks on Buck and Bob’s faces changed from severely bloodshot to less severely bloodshot.
“You serious, Bill?” Buck hardly dared to breathe. Here was their chance, at long last, to prove to the world that they, Buck and Bob, were indeed the mightiest cowboys in the West, for they would certainly be able to outlast some wild hump-backed horse-lookin’ creature.
“I’m serious,” Bill said, his grin oozing trust me.
It was all too much for poor Buck. He expressed his excitement the only way he knew how, by flinging his half-empty beer glass directly into the patronage of the Dodge City saloon. They were still too busy muttering about their miserable lives to notice that glass shattering amongst them and drenching them with cheap alcohol. Besides, they were used to it by now.
“So where’s this horse-lookin’ creature?” Bob asked.
Things proceeded smoothly enough after that, for a little while. Big Bill led the cowboys out to his house, which hadn’t been painted since the Mexican-American War, and introduced them to his camel. Naturally, none of the town’s citizens had ever cared to learn much about camels, so they all assumed it was a horse that’d experienced some horrible accident. The camel kicked and spit and tugged at the rope securing it to a pole in the back of Bill’s house. Buck, Bob, and Bill chose to take refuge behind Bill’s winged truck, for none of them had the stones to approach the flailing beast from any angle. Eventually, Bill despaired of waiting for his pet to calm down and pulled a pistol from the depths of his voluminous belt pouches.
“As soon as I blast the rope off him he’ll start runnin’ into the desert!” he shouted over the racket. “You better move if you wanna keep up!”
With that, Bill began shooting at the rope. The Dodge City sheriff, rolling past the house in his car, paid absolutely no attention to this extended volley of poorly-aimed bullets; he assumed it was yet another barroom brawl that had “somehow” found its way into a private residence — a daily occurrence in Dodge City. With the attitude of Indiana Jones and the skill of a nearsighted three-year-old, Big Bill blasted at the rope for at least half an hour and succeeded in putting at least seventy bullet holes in the wall of his house before he finally got one through the rope. As soon as its restraint snapped, the camel was off, galloping at full speed into the endless desert sands, where the future holds much for camels but not much for anyone who claims to be a human being.
Yet off dashed Buck and Bob, hurtling across the blazing sands after the runaway hump-backed