When Joseph Walker Needed Company, He Dropped into the Cowboy Bar for a Burger and Beer

I took a shower at the truck stop and knocked the dust of my Braves cap.  A fresh pair of Carhartts and my plaid button-down shirt, and I was ready for Friday night.  Hunting a beer and a burger, I walked into the Cowboy Bar in Montello, Nevada and took a seat at the bar between some old-timers and a brunette in a tank top.

I figured I’d sit for a minute or two to get a feel for the place before trying to talk to someone, so I waited on the bartender to finish serving the old-timers.  There were ten or twelve people lined up against the bar.  Elk antlers, old signs, and deer heads hung from the wall.  “You can always tell a Kemper,” one old timer was saying to someone whose last name was probably Kemper, “but you can never tell him much!”  They laughed.  I was eyeing the taps – Budweiser, Bud Light, Budweiser American Ale and something else – when the brunette turned and said, “Hi.”

She was pretty.  A few years younger than me, but not too many.  Dark brown eyes and fair skin, and she looked good in her tank top.  For a roadside bar in a town of 506 people, she was as pretty as I was going to find.  I congratulated myself on having picked the right seat.

“Hi,” I said.  “What’s your name?”

Meghan was travelling to Wendover, Nevada and had stopped into the Cowboy Bar for a cup of coffee.  An older lady who I took to be her mother was sitting on the other side of her.  I told them I was from Georgia, and had traveled west to work on a book about the Walker Expedition, which had traveled from western Wyoming to the Pacific.  Meghan’s Mom told me that she had grown up in Fontenelle, which I knew to be a small town on Wyoming’s western edge.

“Bumblefuck, Nowhere,” Meghan editorialized.  I teased her about denigrating her Mom’s hometown in front of her, and Meghan confessed that she had wrecked her first car in Fontenelle.  Or, rather, her first car had gotten wrecked there – the story went that a drunken oilmen had left his truck out of gear, and the truck had rolled over Meghan’s Datsun 280Z while the car was parked.  Crushed it flatter than a cow pie.

Meghan got up to visit the restroom, and I fell to talking with one of the old timers to my left.  He rolled his own cigarettes from a can of tobacco he left on the bar and kept asking if I was old enough to sit at the bar.  I lifted my hat and showed him my balding head but he said that didn’t prove anything.  Meghan drifted back to the bar and sat down.  He’d known a guy who’d lost most of his hair by the time he left high school.  I told the old timer that I was old enough to sit at the bar but, being born in 1982, I was sorry that I had missed the ‘70s.  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Meghan glancing my way, but I decided to let her wait.  As to the '70s, it was the old timer's view that I hadn't missed much.  I told him that I’d have looked good in bellbottoms.  He replied that they had been expensive.

When the conversation lulled, I turned back to Meghan.  “So what’s in Wendover?” I asked.

“A deer widow party,” she told me.

“Deer widow party?” I asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“What is that?  Is that like . . .”  I pointed to a buck mounted on the wall, “. . . a party for his old girlfriend?”

“No,” she smiled.  “It’s for when your husband or significant other leaves you for deer season,” she said.  “It’s a girls’ party.  If your husband or boyfriend leaves you and goes hunting – which, that’s not what happened to me, but I’m going anyway – you all get together.”

Not what happened to her, I thought.  She’s telling me she’s single.  Alright.

“So all the girls get together to drink wine and raise a little hell?”

“And gamble,” she said.

She asked me about Georgia, and I got to bragging about Columbus.  How the Coca-Cola recipe was invented in downtown Columbus, although Atlanta took the credit, and how we had won the Little League World Series in 2006.  I was just mentioning the AFLAC duck when a guy showed up and leaned on the back of her barstool.  I went on with the duck story.  His body posture was possessive, but Meghan wasn’t paying him any attention.  I decided I wouldn’t either.

She asked about my book, and I got to talking about how I wanted to write it.  The guy acted interested in the book too, but I talked mostly to her.  She had such a pretty face.  I told her it would be part personal narrative, part history.  They guy said he liked history, and asked if I had ever seen the TV show “Cash Cab.”  I said no and Meghan said the show had nothing to do with history.  I was just telling her about the way history often gets mistold when her Mom stood up to go.

Meghan saw her stand and then turned to me.  “Goodbye,” she said.  “We’re going to Wendover.”  It was an abrupt departure.  I wished her well.  The guy stood up and left with them.  He shook my hand.  "You're Wendover-bound too?" I asked him.

"Yeah," he said.

I sat at the bar with my half-empty beer, waiting on my burger.  What kind of a guy goes to a deer widow party, anyway?  It was a satisfying thought until I realized that I would have gone too, if invited.  The bar felt emptier.  I ate my burger when it came, spoke with another old timer, then walked out into the cold to my truck.

When I opened the truck door, Duke stood up in his seat wagging his tail.  He was happy to see me, despite not having seen any girl dogs in quite some time.  I put the key in the ignition and turned it one click, waiting for the glow plugs to heat the diesel.  Duke kept wagging his tail.  I looked over at him.  Duke lacks feminine beauty, but he’s a helluva dog.  I cranked the truck.  All the roads in America lay ahead of us.  Maybe I should have called that beer glass half-full.