Moonshine

“Hey, Terry?” 

I addressed him, eyes closed. Soothed by the smoothness of the hooch as it burnt its way down the hatch. And the hum of fiddlers scraping their wings against the late January air. It was a chilly night in Stanley. The auburn coats of a head of a hundred sleeping cattle glistened under a thin blanket of frost. 

I ignored the hefers as they did us. Eyes fixated on the etched wood post of the corral’s gate. Something so mundane became glaring under the moonlight. Forty freshly cut notches under Terry’s balisong knife. Some forty newborn calves paid homage to the coyotes and the unsung elements this year. We’d just finished counting our losses some hours ago. Losing track of our liquor along the way. But, what’s time when you’re three flasks deep in addiction’s trench? Forty calves in exchange for the survival of what promised to become the best steer our peré’s farm had ever raised. Maybe even the best steer this side of the reserve would ever see. Spring was coming. Everything would be okay. Better than it ever was, even.   

“What’s one of the strangest thoughts to ever cross your mind?”

“Strangest?”

“Yeah…like, most outta this world.”

Terry gave a sharp exhale. I heard him reposition himself in the dark. Probably assuming that of the cowboy’s exhausted sprawl against the wicker framed chair.

“That they aren’t my own.

That they’re input from someone or somewhere else…far off.

Somewhere tucked away and unreachable. Hidden amongst the stars.

Sometimes I think I’m just some kinda electrical receptor.

Intercepting the signal of…

Someone or something’s brainwaves, maybe?

Of a mind much larger and sharper than any we’ve got amongst man’s kind.

I’m just…

a pirate…

radio,

I thought.

Because we’re kind of an ignorant lot.” 

Huh. That sounded a lot like poetry.

“Damn right about that, brother” the chair creaked as I, too, began to cave to its unforgiving tautness. “We think we’ve got everything figured out.”

"Stealing ideas in the middle of the night.

No better than the greedy white man or the hungry coyote,” Terry continued to ponder, "and no more conscious.

“And if it be a voice I’m hearing,

I don’t really know what the interlocutor sounds like.”

In-ter-loc-u-tor. There he goes using those big words again. He’d only gone to community college for a few months, but somehow managed to come back with a whole army of terms and phrases I’d never heard before. I was too drunk now to bother asking him what this one meant.

“No accent,” he continued though he’d never stopped,

“Southern, reserve, city, this or that side of the river, or otherwise.

No inflection.

No indication that the source of inspiration could ever be disclosed or found out.

I’d never get to meet this man or woman.”

Slightly amused now and stupid under the influence, I decided to interject (one of my favorite words Terry’d taught me): “I hate to run the risk of knockin’ the validity of what you’re sayin’ but…

Were you high, Terry?”

I hear him chuckle. Imagining the corners of his mouth gather to reveal his signature wily smirk.

“Maybe, brother. The thought came and went during the full moon in mid december. So off of the moon’s shine,” I hear him take a thick swig from his flask and exhale, "probably...”

- moonshine