TALES OF THE SOUTHWEST: A TALE OF TWO HATS

By Grant McGee

I was at my day job at the car dealership, shuttling cars around the lot from the service entrance back to where they get worked on.

I opened the door to this one car and there was the hat.

Best way I can describe this hat to you is I wouldn’t wear it.  Well I might wear it if I was drunk.  I’d call it the kind of hat a sportin’ man would wear.  This hat was gray, kind of checkered with a short brim.  It was a woman who drove the car to the dealership.  I don’t know if it was her hat or someone else’s.

I’m glad I saw the hat though because it gave me a laugh.

The hat took me back to 1992 when I lived in Roswell, New Mexico.

I had a grand time living in Roswell.  I played the Country Music on an AM station that could be heard as far north as I-40 and sometimes even Albuquerque to as far south as Presidio, Texas.  If you’re not familiar with The Great American Southwest, well, let me tell you that’s a pretty big chunk of real estate.

I had good friends in Roswell too.  Two of my best friends were my buddies C.B. and Kent.  I called Kent “The Bard of the Pecos,” he was educated, witty, knowledgeable and very much like a brother to me.  Kent went “On to Glory” two years ago.  C.B. left Roswell a few years ago and lives up in Colorado.

I was always telling Kent he needed to write down his stories.  He grew up in rural eastern New Mexico and was as real as real can get when it came to being real.  He called it straight all the time.

Like the time he held down a day job at a library.  He was the only man on the staff and he didn’t get along well with the head librarian.  He told me she would frequently chastise him for little things.  This got on his nerves.

One day the head librarian was particularly cranky and hassled him because he hadn’t arranged the books perfectly in this one section of the library.

“You have a problem with that, hunh?” Kent asked her.

“Yes I do,” she replied.

“I suppose this means that there’s no chance of you and me having chandelier-swinging sex later on then, is there,” he said, looking her straight in the eye.

Kent said he could see the librarian turn red.  Then she turned around to her assistant.

“Have I told you about the new knitting book we just received,” she said to the other woman.

Then there was the time Kent sent me an email about the Cowboy Music and Cowboy Poetry craze of the late 1990’s.  He opened the note with a reference to Cowboy singer Red Stegall…

“Red Steagall is better than I remember him being. I have a Red Steagall record album somewhere and if I remember right, it's just beer-drinking shit, nothing great. Prop me up against the jukebox kind of stuff.

You know, I was raised in cowboy country, grew up on a ranch, worked with cowboys, around cowboys and for cowboys the better part of ten years. Two old cowboys named Mutt and Shorty.

I never heard either one of those guys read poetry, wax eloquent about poetry or even know what poetry was. So cowboy poetry for me kind of rings untrue.

I can just not see Mutt sitting around writing or reading poetry about “The Last Roundup” or Old Blue or the family spread.  More believable would be about the town whore, Onybelle that Mutt dallied

with about twice a week for 20 or more years. Onybelle was the ugliest, smelliest, foulest women in The Territory.  Mutt always came back to the ranch smelling of f*(&#! $%^^y.

Or maybe them talking about that rancher’s daughter who was the reason the rancher killed a man in town.

The man drove the school bus and the rancher’s daughter was the last person on the run. Well, guess what? They made a stop for "oil checks" before they got to the ranch house. When the rancher found out the kid was having a tryst with his daughter, he walked up to him on the town square in Portales and said, "I'm going to kill you, you sonofabitch." He pulled out a .45 and shot him dead. Spent five years in the state pen for the deed.

Now, I can imagine Shorty or Mutt talking about that, but not about "great trail rides I have known."

Cowboy poetry is for cityslickers. Or cowboy wannabees. Oh well, it makes good stories, I guess.”

So one evening we were hanging out at C.B.’s house having some refreshing adult libations and shooting the breeze.  We like to do that, the three of us while we listened to Bluegrass music.  Shoot, a few years in the future we got together and produced a weekly bluegrass show that was heard on over a dozen radio stations in three states, but that’s another story.

C.B. was sporting a new hat he’d bought at The Big Store in town.

“You like my new hat?” C.B. asked us.

The hat was green checkered, had a small feather coming out of the hat band and had a short brim.

“Well,” I said.  “It’s kind of a sportin’ man’s hat.”

“Did you buy two of them?” asked Kent very matter-of-factly.

“Two?  Why would I buy two?” asked C.B.

“One to shit in and the other to cover it up with,” said Kent.

Seeing that hat in the car made me remember my old friend.

And I sure miss him.

                                                                          -30-