The sun was beginning to heat the sidewalk on Hairy Hines Boulevard in Dallas, to boot-melting temperature, and I had just opened the Poo Kickers Lounge for its ‘never too late to have a drink’ afternoon crowd. Most of the locals were still suffering from their previous night’s hangover. Everybody had partied late into the morning’s hour celebrating the election of Richard M. Nixon, the 37th President of our United States. We had finally elected an honest politician.

In walked my first customer. He was a mammoth-sized stranger with a lonesome Merle Haggard look. He was wearing a white Stetson hat with what appeared to be a pigeon feather in its brim, and both feather and hat had seen cleaner days. He was wearing a stylishly out-of–season fringed leather jacket, blue jeans, and obvious metal heel taps that clicked and clacked as he worked his way across the terrazzo floor. He proceeded to sit on a bar stool at the end of the bar facing the opened glass window overlooking the sidewalk, put his back to the wall, and ordered a whiskey straight up. “Nothing in particular,” he said, “Just make sure it’s neat and cheap.” He downed the drink in one quick gulp, and began telling his story of woe.

“Shoot me. Here, use my gun. I’m so stupid I should be dead. They got me drunk. It was a con game and I fell for it. They brought me out to the middle of this field in the pitch-black night and robbed me. I even got the papers to prove it. Full ownership of a horse not worth the glue money I could have got for ‘im. Sure was a pretty thing to look at in the moonlight but ‘e weren’t no damn race horse like they said ‘e was.”

His right hand was caressing bright silver - a long barreled Colt 44. He wanted, hell, he needed another shot of whiskey, and waving his gun in my face was his way of asking without having to grovel to quench his thirst. “Never buy a racehorse at night when you’re drunk,” he said, “You’ll just end up broke like me and have to shoot the bastard. It ain’t easy, believe me. I’d rather put a man down than shoot a defenseless horse.”

He said this while leisurely rubbing the rim of his empty shot glass with the tip of his left index finger, trying to elicit a low whining hum from the faux crystal. His right hand gripped the gun he brandished with bravado and his voice became increasingly louder and belligerent.

“That horse was gutsy. I’ll give ‘im that,” the man said with a look of sincerity in his rheumy eyes. “A stud with bad feet. If only we’d known before taking him to the racetrack. He fell coming out of the gate but got back up on his own ‘cause the jock ridin’ ‘im was knocked unconscious. Must have been all them damned painkillers the little sawed-off put in ‘im. He tried running a mile on three legs and you have to admire that kind of guts. I fell in love with him that day. But he was a lousy lover. Can you imagine that, with all them pedigree papers and all? Fell down every damn time he tried to mate ‘cause he was too weak to stand on ‘is hind legs. Damn! Had to shoot ‘im. Didn’t want too but I had too. Couldn’t make no money on ‘im.”

He kept waving his pistol haphazardly in my direction, “I loved ‘im, but couldn’t afford to feed ‘im. It’s all I could do to buy the bullets to shoot ‘im after all them fuckin’ vet bills came in. You have any idea how much it cost to house and feed a horse? Figured we was gonna win a few races to pay ‘is upkeep and mine. But no! No such luck. I ‘ad no idea ‘is hoof was broke. It just kept breaking worse and worse every time ‘e put weight on it.”

I never doubted the voracity of his horse story and I never doubted for a moment he would use that gun on me if I didn’t buy him a drink on the house.

“Cheers to your belated horse, my friend. May he win all the races in Elysian Fields and mate with the unicorn of his fancy,” I said, as I poured him another shot of Dickle Brother’s Sour Mash. “Have another drink, my treat, and allow me to park your gun behind the bar. In this place, we shoot the shit, piano player, and the occasional horse, but we prosecute if you shoot the bartender.”

He seemed to agree and made a half-hearted attempt to raise the gun from its fallen position. The gun was now dangling at his side pointed downward. In a blinding flash of powdered smoke, the weapon discharged and he was sitting with a sudden wide-eyed look of total surprise. He had a large gaping hole in the right footing of his snake-skinned cowboy boot. Blood began gushing from the top and bottom of the hole.

“Get me a rag to stop this bleedin’ and call me a taxi,” he slurred, “Can’t afford no damn ambulance. Looks like this hoss ain’t gonna be doin’ no more runnin’ neither. I’d call my wife to come get me but she ran off right after I shot and killed Mr. Ed. Let me out to pasture like that damned horse.”

I tossed him a bar towel and without delay called Yellow Cab. Normally, the wait would have been a half-hour or more but there was a taxi in our area dropping off a fare. The taxi arrived within minutes and I instructed the driver to take his passenger to Parkland Hospital’s Emergency Room. We laid plastic trash bags on the flooring of the taxi, and I bundled him hurriedly into the back seat. Off they sped to the hospital with the taxi’s flashers flashing, its horn a honking, and its back seat passenger waving a red handkerchief out the window – yelling - “Outta the way! Wounded horse on-board!”

That was the last time I saw the man we fondly call Horse, but his legend lives on, and continues to grow as all legends do. We heard he lost all his toes in that shooting incident. Some say his whole leg, but people love to exaggerate. Some say he got nailed on the head by a lucky horseshoe that hung over his front door – twenty-seven stitches, but who’s counting? Some say Horse’s wife, a real nag, ran off with the man that sold him the racehorse with the cracked hoof. She and her lover were mysteriously shot and killed. I was told Horse opened a bookie joint with insurance money he collected on his deceased wife, but he lost it all accepting bad bets. Bad bets for Horse, but exceptionally good bets for the winners. Another good bet, I think if old Horse were here to tell you, you should always look a gift horse in the mouth. You might want to check its hooves too. 

A humorist by nature and Cajun by the grace of his parents, D.J.'s poetry and writings have appeared in Hudson View/Skyline, Poems Niederngasse, and Spinning’s Magazine, among others.  He is a monitor at Wild Poetry Forum: and you can visit his personal web page.