Free The Brave Cowboy by Edward Abbey

her limbs were comely, her flesh inviting, but the vague smile on her face suggested detachment, disinterest, the perils of ennui.
    The bartender pushed a schooner of lager toward Burns and picked up his quarter. Burns drank deeply, thirstily, then lowered the vessel, wiped his mouth and looked around.
    Three men sat at one table talking quietly in Spanish, sipping at bottled beer, chewing piñon nuts. They were looking at Burns with sullen curiosity, their eyes flat, incommunicative, with the opacity of hard rubber, their faces round and coarse featured and colored like the stubborn earth that fed them. They looked at him for several moments, while he returned their stare, then in unison all three appeared to lose interest and they looked away and at each other, continuing their sibilant low-toned palaver.
    Alone at a table near the jukebox sat a young man with closed eyes, a wide-brimmed dark felt hat, tight shirt, boots, one good arm and one empty sleeve; in his one hand he held a pint bottle of whisky, half gone. The empty sleeve was doubled up and fastened to the shoulder of the shirt with a brass safety pin.
    No one else was in the bar.
    In leisure, with grace and affection, Jack Burns finished his beer, the keen edge already taken from his thirst and the contagion of the afternoon—almost evening now, with the sun lowering on the five volcanoes in the west. He finished his beer, ordered a second. Requested a second: the bartender was no man to be commanded. Burns requested a second beer and after a respectable interval of time had passed he received it But the lapse of time was of little concern to him; he held the schooner in his hands, caressed its cool moist surface, revolved and lifted and weighed it, set it down and took it up again, playing with it casually for several minutes before taking the first drink.
    Time passed: seconds, minutes, a half hour with theease and changelessness of time in dreams and in old cathedrals. The shaft of sunlight that poured through the window by the door steadily altered its angle of declination, and as it changed the small parallelogram of light that fell on the nude behind the bar rose up from her thighs and lap to the belly and hips. The flies crawled over her body following the light and warmth.
    The young man with one arm sat unchanging in his comatose slump, his eyes still closed and his body motionless. But the bottle that had been half full was now almost empty.
    Burns began his third beer. He had already quite forgotten the wine and ice cream curdling in his stomach.
    The three men at the table had left and been replaced by a dozen others of the same caliber and brand: laborers on the way borne, mud farmers, men from the railroad shops.
    Burns was now sitting at a table near the bar, waiting, patient as a snake in the sun. Between beers he ate peanuts and piñon nuts, tossing them by the palmful into his mouth, and dropping the little cellophane bags under the table and around his feet. He rolled a cigarette, smoked it down, and requested another beer. The beer came, standing in the big mug with overflowing head among the wet rings on his table. He blew off some of the foam, buried his nose in the mug and drank, deeply and slowly; a slight yellow glaze began to dull the intensity and conceal the depth of his eyes. Quietly, in a gentlemanly manner, the cowboy was getting drunk.
    There was music, occasionally, when someone had a spare nickel for the jukebox; the records with their concentric striations, scratched by a blunt steel needle, produced a proximate musical effect; Mexican voices in a kind of vulpine harmony, guitars, loud trumpets pitched a semitone too sharp, the rhythmic grinding of the machine. No one listened to the music, no one cared, drunk or sober; the noise was not meant for entertainment but for the sustaining of a certain psychologicalatmosphere, the pervasion of space, the dispersal of unseemly silences. So that a man without anything to say and unable