This is a true story.
It’s about 1990, and a friend of a friend is gettin’ married in a few days.
We work at pack stations and ranches up and down the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California, and on this night we’re all dressed up in our go-to-town best – jeans, western shirts, White packer boots, satin wildrags and our best felt hats – intending to meet up in Bishop for a night out. Not exactly a bachelor party, but something like it.
I roll up at the ranch where Russ works and Russ and Lee are there waiting. I’m the designated driver because I’m not much of a drinker, but since I have a tiny Toyota pickup, we’re going in Russ’s truck, a big old 1966 Chevy pickup.
Russ is a cool guy with a little boy named Sky inherited from a divorce, and a degree in teaching. But he’s also a mule packer and cowboy, and a good one. He has a slow, sly sense of humor, and is plenty of fun to be around.
Lee is … well, Lee’s something of an enigma to me. He’s one of those loud little rooster types, and everybody who knows him either likes him a lot, or hates him a lot. Except for the fact that he’s not very big, he’s like a big goofy dog, completely immune to being embarrassed at the dumb stuff he often does and says. This summer, the constantly-repeated joke phrase tossed at him has been “The horse you killed, the man you killed, and the trailer you burned down.”
I’ve been out of the loop this summer so I’m sketchy on the details, but apparently one of Lee’s horses died in the backcountry. And then there was the pack trip guest who got altitude sickness, and Lee tried to bring him out of the wilderness over a high-altitude mountain pass, and the guy died en route. Lee brought him home, in broad daylight and on public hiking trails, tied over a saddle like you see in the movies. And then there was the trailer Lee lived in at the pack station that caught fire while he was dozing, probably from a cigarette that fell out of a sleep-limp hand, and was consumed by flames.
Everybody who does know the details seems to think that all of them, and especially all of them together, were the results of boneheaded mistakes. But hey, cowboys do shit like that. Nobody really begrudges him a comical adventure or two. Well, except maybe for the dead guy’s family, and the owner of the horse and the trailer. And possibly a few hikers who have that dead-body-tied-on-a-horse scene branded into their memories. But none of it was, like, illegal or anything. Lee didn’t even get fired.
I don’t let on, but Lee also scares me a little bit. There was this other incident where he pulled a revolver out of his boot one night after drinking and started waving it around in Tyrone’s house, drunkenly endangering Tye’s wife and dogs, before shooting a hole in the roof. Tye’s an ex-cop, and guns are totally, absolutely no-shit serious to him. I wasn’t there to see it, but the report I got was that Tye grabbed Lee by the throat and slammed him up against the wall – feet off the ground – and shouted at him “Do you want to die?!” Lee scares me not because he intends to be scary, but because he’s … well, kinda like a too-playful pit bull.
Anyway, Russ and Lee and I roll up at Whiskey Creek and pile out, not quite swaggering through the door in our cowboy outfits. The party’s already in progress, and whiskey shots slide our way immediately. I take a Coke.
A good time is had by all for the next hour or two. We decide to head for another tavern in town, a seedier, smokier place a mile or so down the road. Out in the parking lot, Lee makes a mock-belligerent remark to the groom, a huge Paiute Indian (I think) who happens to be a Whiskey Creek chef, and the man jokingly picks Lee up by his shirt collar and the crotch of his jeans and holds him overhead, where Lee flops and gasps like a landed fish.
The rest peel out of the parking lot and head for the tavern, but Lee and Russ and I pause for a few minutes to compare notes on how Lee looked up there. Lee seems a little gimpy down in the area where that big fist had gripped him, but even he thinks it’s hilarious, and we have a good laugh with the chef. Afterwards we stroll out to Russ’s truck, which is parked on the side street next to Whiskey Creek, at a T-intersection with Main Street. As we get in, we can’t help but notice two cop cars at a traffic stop directly across Main Street, with three cops at the scene. One is talking to the driver, one is watching traffic, and the third is standing back on the sidewalk, scanning the whole scene and resting his hand on his weapon.
I slide into the driver’s seat, happy that I haven’t been drinking. If I’m stopped, no sweat. I can pass a breathalyzer, line walk, anything. Lee and Russ slide in from the passenger-side door, Lee in the middle. I crank up the truck and pull gingerly up to the intersection, being over-careful about looking sober. The cop on the street is staring directly at me.
“Watch this,” says Lee drunkenly. “I’ll show these sonsabitches somethin’.” He reaches down, pulls up his right pants leg, slips out that revolver, and starts raising it toward the dash.
I keep my face carefully bland, but inside I’m screaming “Holy shiat! This dumbass is gonna get us all killed!” Russ reaches out calmly and grasps the cylinder of the gun and holds it down.
I’m already at the intersection. I have the choice of sitting there at the intersection, in plain sight of three city cops, or pulling out onto Main Street and hoping they don’t notice anything suspicious. A third option occurs to me: I throw open my door and dive out onto the pavement shouting “Look out! He’s got a gun!” Lee and Russ might go down in a hail of bullets, but at least I’d survive. And I could say afterwards that I barely knew them.
But I LIKE Russ. So I pull out slowly, all the while watching out of the corner of my eye as Lee and Russ struggle with the gun – Lee to raise it up into plain view of the cops, Russ to keep it down below the level of the dash and the door.
My eyes jump nervously to the rear view mirror a dozen times as we roll on up Main Street, and I can’t believe the cops fail to follow us. They’ve noticed nothing.
Russ keeps his hand on Lee’s gun. “See, that’s the thing about revolvers,” he says mildly. “If you hold your hand on the cylinder so it can’t rotate, the guy can’t fire it.”
My panicked heart is still racing when we get to the other tavern. I park on Main Street and get out, eager to get away from Lee and Russ and the pistol. Lee and Russ are still struggling with it. “Okay,” I say. “We’re getting out now. Let’s get out.” They still struggle, arm against arm, and I dread to think that the gun muzzle will intersect a leg or a foot, or some other body part, and discharge.
“C’mon, you guys, let’s get out. We’re getting out now. Lots of partying to do!” I slam the truck door and start across the street to the tavern, making vaguely encouraging beckoning motions with my hands. Inside the truck, on the streetlight-lit street, there’s a flash and a loud pop.
My mind is blank for a second, my jaw hanging, and the next thought that bubbles up into my head is the weak realization, “That stupid son of a bitch has shot Russ.” I just stand there in the middle of Main Street for a moment.
But then Russ and Lee are getting out together. Lee is saying something in a dopey drunken voice: “Now see there? We play for keeps but nobody gets hurt. You know it? We play for keeps but nobody gets hurt.”
It sounds to me like shit-for-brains nonsense. But Russ seems okay, not even very shook up. Lee tucks the gun back into his boot, slurs his dumbass catchphrase one more time, “We play for keeps but nobody gets hurt.” The sharp smell of gunpowder wafts along with us as we troop into the tavern together to rejoin the party.
I ask Russ about it a few minutes later. “Man, I thought he’d shot you.” “Nah, he shot a hole in the floor of my truck.” “Did he do it while you guys were struggling with it?” “Nope. He did it after I let it go. I guess just to show me.” “Sheeee-it.”
I never drank with Lee again. We stayed sort-of friends, but I made a point of catching him during the day, before any drinking could take place.
Russ gave up mule packing the next year and went back to teaching on the western slope of the Sierras, in one of those little foothill towns, where he and Sky were happy. Tye and his wife moved up north, and he got into detective work, while she wrote books and cowboy poetry.
I drove draft horses for the next several years, then moved to Flagstaff, Arizona, where I pretty much quit cowboying for some indoor work.
And Lee? Lee moved out to Nevada and married a good-looking blonde gal. The last I saw of him, he’d taking up horse training and had a beautiful little daughter. They lived in a big old house in one of the many dry, dusty towns over there, and his wife and daughter just seemed to love him to bits.
The day I visited, the six-shooter was not in evidence.