Free The Cowboy and his Elephant by Malcolm MacPherson

the meeting, but ten minutes later he called Bob to apologize, then asked, genuinely confused, “Why don’t you like me?”
    “Hell, I never said I didn’t like you, Carl. You’re just like apet rattlesnake, that’s all. But I appreciate the apology anyway.”
    “Why don’t you go back and run your ranch? Let me run Texaco.”
    “I respect you and your word, Carl, but I know you’ll pull Texaco apart.”
    “Oh, God, Bob. I’d
never
do that. I’d need to raise thirteen billion dollars to do that, and it would take months.”
    Bob said, “Gee, Carl, we all have our problems.”
     
    A s the bankruptcy negotiations dragged on, Bob saw that Texaco’s CEO did not want to settle. He wanted the U.S. Supreme Court to decide on the matter instead, while everyone else seemed to acknowledge that the Supreme Court probably would never even review the case. Clearly someone had to step in. “We’re running out of time and bullets,” Bob told the Equity Committee.
    In a bold, straightforward move, Bob sat down with Pennzoil’s CEO and founder. Face-to-face, he named a settlement figure—$3.01 billion. “Take it or leave it,” Bob told Hugh Leidke.
    The money would come from the portfolios of shareholders like Bob. But settling for $3 billion was better than paying the original $11 billion levy. The figures whirled in front of Bob’s eyes as the two men talked. To his utter relief, after a tense moment’s deliberation, Leidke said, “Bob, I can live with that.”
    _____
     
    N ow the bankruptcy fight was over.
    Bob was no longer Texaco’s Man in the White Hat.
    And something more—he was no longer the Marlboro Man.
     
    O ne morning Bob woke up to facts that were only then emerging about the dangers of smoking cigarettes. These were not part of the cowboy myth that Bob believed in. What was this Marlboro thing that had been good to him for twelve years? he asked himself one day as he looked in the shaving mirror. Then during a week when he was traveling on a commercial “shoot” in Texas, he told the advertising agency’s producer, “This is going to be my last deal.” He thought, My kids are calling me a hypocrite to my face, and they are right. Being the Marlboro Man is a kick, but the kick is over.
    The producer seemed amazed. “No one ever quit as a Marlboro cowboy before,” he told Bob.
    “That’s probably true,” Bob replied.
    “You can’t.”
    “I just did.”
     
    T he Old West had changed. The young ranchers now were raising kangaroos, ostriches, and llamas; they worked the stock markets on Wall Street as well as the stockyards. Peoplewere being told to avoid red meat. Cheaper beef was coming over the borders of Mexico and Canada. The Marlboro Man was a broken icon. His children now had their own children; he was older; his horse Big Bob was sunken eyed and getting swaybacked. No one needed Bob quite as they used to.
    Where had the time gone? he wondered. The kids and Jane and I were having a good time and then the end of it rolled around awfully fast, and it left a void. It was the same with life. It just came and went, it seemed, and I was too busy living it to watch it pass by.
    He thought about it. The lambs rescued, Lulu lost, his horses now old and tired, and the herds of cows moved on—he was an animal lover, and it was over. “It just came and went.”
    He asked himself, What more can there be?

CHAPTER THREE
    A my searched with the tip of her trunk for the lost scents of her mother, the Sengwa, and the river below the falls. Her eyes could not see over the steel door. She tentatively explored the air and paused her trunk over the nose of a horse standing in front of the stall. Its smell blended with baled alfalfa and the pungence of Western cows. The horse flared its nostrils. Amy’s trunk turned inquisitively upward to catch the scent of Bob’s aftershave. He was sitting on Big Bob, and when he spoke to her, she lowered her trunk out of sight below the door.
    Bob had attended the