Free Love and Other Ways of Dying by Michael Paterniti Page B

Cowboys are dead. What’s left is the rednecks and the bankers and the outsiders. The clientele at the Astro isn’t tourists so much anymore: They stay at the chain hotels—the Holiday Inn Express, the Super 8, the Best Western—all those big conglomerates. Now it’s the blue-collar people and traveling salesmen who keep the Astro alive. And Dodge City is losing its white majority—a quarter of the town is already Hispanic. And then you’ve got your Asiatics and blacks. Most all of them here for the slaughterhouse work, though they’re branching out, infiltrating everything. Especially the Asiatics. One day, they’ll have the country club, too, be up there playing eighteen like they were born to it. Scares you, scares Jack Hooker. There are gangs and killings and kids sniffing gold spray paint—what’s called spooking. There’s a rumor around town that some gangbangers are gonna kill a pregnant woman, as some rite of passage, and she’ll have blond hair. And there’s a law now against buying hogs and slaughtering them and hanging them from the trees in order to drain the blood. Do you know what it’s like to drive around the corner and see dead hogs hanging in the trees? Different people, these Mexicans and Asiatics—crawling all over your world, closing you in. And the Cambodians—you can’t help but wonder why they wander in front of your place all day long, eyeing you as they go.
    Thankfully, your guests are mostly like you, helping make an island against the others. Occasionally, some will stick around—for a construction job out at the new Walmart site or maybe doing time at the slaughterhouse, like the rare black manin 107, a night-shift manager. Bev Hooker calls him my black man in 107 in the same way she’ll say my construction crew in 117 and 119 or my British tourists in 120 or my Mexican gals when she refers to her cleaning staff, three women who speak very little English. To help them, Bev raises her voice and speaks slowly when asking for a cleaner toilet or a better-made bed.
    And it almost goes without saying that Jack and Bev are two parts of a whole. Jack sometimes calls her Momma. Never felt the need to go looking after other women. Never once, in all those years on the road, buying cattle. Nights in Abilene or Wichita or Denver or Dallas or Shreveport. Out for a steak. Talking cows. A strong, proud man with a James Dean walk. Turned more than a few heads in his day, you can count on it. But just so lucky to have her. Ain’t wanted another momma, he says. And Bev, she must have come straight up from a cornfield, born into this world with eyes like a clear twilight sky. That same blue. Some days, she might wear shell earrings and a shirt that looks like a big scallop. A prettier version of Shirley Booth. And her hair, swirled like cotton candy.
    Some nights at sunset, Jack and Bev’ll get out the lawn chairs, sit under the eaves of the front office, watching it all add up. People come and go. The woman in 106 is in the pool with her daughter, doesn’t have a bathing suit, so wears her dress, soaked up to her armpits. A group of men shuffle around their pickup trucks in the parking lot. One brings a paper bag full of beer up to his room. Upstairs, there are a couple of windmill collectors: John and Johnny West, their real names, a father and son with their wives. On the road, looking for old farm windmills to buy and refurbish—and then do what with? Maybe keep around the yard. It’s a dying thing, says Johnny, looking over at his wizened, fading father, who’s nodding his head. We want to keep the old days alive.
    Occasionally, some folks aren’t so friendly. Like these two young troublemakers, two wire-rim liberals from Wisconsin who pull up in their VW van. When they ask Bev the price of a single, she tells them; then when they hem and haw, she brings the price down a bit—something she doesn’t normally do. And still they take off, peeling out of the parking lot. Off to the