Ronnie and Larry

I first met Ronnie in the summer of 1867 on a cattle drive from the panhandle to Chicago. We got along great, even though he was more of a silent-type and I would never “shut the fuck up,” according to him. We spent a lot of long days together out on the range and we had a lot of adventures.

I remember one time waking up in the middle of the night as a pack of starving coyotes attacked our herd and we had to fight them off. We were running this way and that, Ronnie using a long knife, me using a frying pan. Since it was the middle of the night, I was running around in just my boots (I can only sleep in the nude), and I could tell it made Ronnie uncomfortable even though he was trying to focus mostly on the coyotes. Eventually he yelled, “Would you put on some damned pants, Larry?” I acted like I didn’t hear him.

Out under the stars night after night, a man can’t help but get kinda philosophical, ya know? I had a lot of long talks with Ronnie about life and what it was all about.

“Hey Ronnie, you ever look at a rabbit’s face and think it’s probably smart as hell but it can’t talk ‘cause no one never learned it any English?”

“What?” Ronnie would often say.

“You know, a jack-rabbit’s face. Like, it’s wise, you know? When it’s looking at me, I swear to God, Ronnie, I feel like it’s trying to communicate.”

“A rabbit? Why would a rabbit want to talk to you?”

“To tell me its secrets? Hell, I don’t know, Ronnie. If I knew that, you think I’d be herding cattle for a living?”

“What else would you be doing, Larry?”

“Probably living amongst the rabbits.”

We’d talk about all kinds of different things.

“Hey Ronnie, you ever think about what it would look like if you put a rabbit on a horse and gave it a little cowboy hat?”

“I told you I don’t care about rabbits.”

“Oh. I thought you were bullshitting me about that.”

One time I took a pretty nasty spill off my horse and it looked like I might’ve hurt my leg pretty bad. Ronnie came right over to make sure I was okay.

“Can you walk on it?”

“I don’t know, Ronnie, it hurts like hell.”

“See if you can put any weight on it.”

“Ronnie, what if I can’t dance again?”

“Dance? I think that’s the least of your worries. Now try and stand up, it may not be that serious.”

“If I can’t dance, who’s gonna dance with my wife at our wedding? Some other guy? Some other man’s gonna be dancing with my new bride?! Even if it was like a platonic thing, like, if it was her dad or brother or something, that still makes me kinda sick just to think about it.”

“What are you talking about, Larry?”

“I don’t know, Ronnie. Help me get my pants off.”

Turned out my leg was fine.

Yep, Ronnie and I were best friends. He didn’t like to call us that, but we both knew how much we meant to each other.

“You think one day we’ll retire and be neighbors, Ronnie?”

“I sincerely doubt it.”

“I think that’d be really nice. You and your family on one side of the fence, me and mine on the other. Sometimes we’d sleep out in the yard to remind us of our cattle-herdin’ days, but not too often, so as not to make the wives suspicious or anything.”

“Suspicious of what?”

“You know how women are, Ronnie. They’ll be jealous of all the time we spend together and they’ll be jealous of what we have that they’ll never have.”

“What’s that?”

“A best friend.”