About Cowboy Up
Edited by Rob Knight
254 pages / 115500 words
ISBN: 1-933389-16-8
Available file types - html, lit, pdf, prc, paperback
Ride ’em cowboy! That’s what you’ll be shouting once you’ve read the Cowboy Up anthology. Editor Rob Knight has gathered a great selection of stories from authors like Sean Michael, BA Tortuga and Parehlion, featuring cowboys from around the globe and across more than a hundred years.
These stories all illustrate the best and worst of the breed. Stubborn, independant, and sexy as all get out, the cowboys of Cowboy Up will leave you smiling, sometimes crying, but always admiring the tough, rugged man that rides the range and keeps his bedroll warm at night. Get yourself a cowboy today!
Review
Alex Draven, Editor of the High Ball imprint writes: Rob Knight can’t possibly have known when he put this anthology together that anyone would be reading the first story, Dallas Coleman’s Stormclouds, with the backdrop of Hurricane Katrina on the news and in their mind. It’s certainly an unsettling starting place, because Coleman produces an excellent understated tale of just exactly why you should never stay angry with someone you love – and I almost said ‘account’ because everything about this short story’s relationships feels solidly true.
The same can be said about all the stories in this anthology, which are consistently good both as cowboy stories, as queer fic, and as short stories, each one giving a concise but vivid picture of both setting and characters, which sharply differentiates each story in the collection. They range over a good chunk of both time and geography, and all of the chosen authors have a real knack for working both setting and characters into the warp and weft of the language.
Above Snakes, for example, carries its Texas with it, even while the cowboys concerned are riding North and figuring out that it’s not only the state that seeps into a man’s blood with long association. Chris Owen’s Added Money takes us a couple of hundred years forward in time and a couple of thousand miles North, but similarly snaps the setting and the characters into sharp focus, this time on the contemporary rodeo circuit, for a coming out story that’s both sweet and hot.
The setting of Parhelion’s Dry Bones could be described as somewhere between a Western and Indiana Jones, drawing on the huge cultural differences between the settled East and the wild West to frame a pair of characters you’ll be hard pressed not to fall in love with, drawing you into Joss’ confusion about his feelings towards his partner.
The Good Life, by Torquere veteran Sean Michael, looks at a gap that is hardly any smaller in the present day, leaving an experienced rancher and a city-boy accountant face to face over death and inheritance. Secrecy and the problems of being gay in a very conservative and macho community is a theme that all the stories in this anthology touch on, but Pacer’s reply to the direct question ‘you are gay, though?’ just kicks.
A summary of Male Order Bride might lead you to expect a ‘Some Like it Hot’ style comedy, but Eumenidies instead gives the reader engaging personalities and a side-line on the post-Civil-War West and race relations, filtered through a relationship neither man can quite believe in at first.
Surrender follows the thread of a cowboy denying his feelings to himself and everyone else through a contemporary love story, which suits the anthology not just for its setting, but also its terse language – these are characters significantly more comfortable with either hauling off and punching someone, or finding a way to do something amazing for them than they’ll ever be talking about their feelings.
Julia Talbot’s Gaucho Code dips below the Mexican border, and twists the usual short story format, beginning at the end, and then delivering a tale quite unlike the one you were probably expecting. The characters fill the page so beautifully without a lot of extraneous language, and something about them just suits the wide open plains of their setting to a T.
In one sense you could say that This Legacy in my Hands does a similar thing, introducing one of the characters in their coffin with a beautiful frame of first-person memories of a relationship gone sour, but with all the good times right there waiting to be recalled.
BA Tortuga’s Barn Dance ends the collection on a happier note, with a story about music, finding love in unexpected quarters, and enjoying extremely hot sex along the way. The historical post-Civil-war setting is worked into the tale, leaving all the characters with scars and shadowed places, which just serves to make their coming together far better than any picture-book-perfect pairing, and the touch of bitter only heightens the sweet.
All in all, Rob Knight has, once again, put together a stunning anthology of short stories, each one complementing without imposing on the others, and covering a real range of moods and settings. An excellent and enjoyable read.
Sample
From Stormclouds, by Dallas Coleman
It was fixing to storm; he could tell because that knee of his always ached so the morning before it blew up outside. He ought to get himself moving, get himself on the ball and round up the pasture horses. Damned things would panic if things got nasty outside and they weren't put up high and dry.
The cattle would come easy. Well, they would assuming Ray Baker's old stallion hadn't caught wind of Peg and Candy being in season and trampled the fence down. Not that Peanut wasn't a fine bit of horseflesh, but Trace was wanting a pureblood to put on ‘em both, get him a couple colts worth selling. Of course, if Peanut hit that old fence hard enough, the herd could eat on Ray's good rye grass and leave his for haying. Maybe that wouldn't be all bad after all...
Trace looked over his near-empty coffee cup across the old table at the fisted hands sitting on the scarred pine. Almost made him smile, too, those gnarled fingers sitting on the gnarled wood, both dark, familiar. Almost made him smile because Dwayne was saying goodbye now, wasn't he?
Not that Trace was listening, not even a little bit. No sir. He was looking at the faded blue suitcase – they'd got that in Shreveport years ago, to bring home the horse blankets they'd bought from a flea market -- packed full of blue jeans and shirts and Stetson cologne and God knew his UT cap was probably in there ‘cause Dwayne'd been coveting it for damn near ever.
Asshole.
Ten years. Ten whole goddamned years of sweat and tears and sex and what? What now after loving and building a house and a ranch and a... a... a them? Dwayne was bored. Tired of working dust to make hay. Wanting to make real money, see the sights. Get the Hell out of Dodge. Find some young fella who wasn't looking at the near edge of forty through wire-rimmed glasses.
Folks'd say – if folks did say, because they were all good at pretending that him and Dwayne weren't what they were – that he was a damned fool, trying to bring a fine little moneyed piece of Savannah gentry over to Odessa. Taking on with someone five years younger that he'd met in a truck stop, of all things, back when him and Jenn were still pretending that they were married and happy and in love.
Shit.
Dwayne'd turned his eye right off the bat, blond and tanned and broad shouldered in that football and fresh-out-of-the-Marine corps sorta way. The man had been something else, then, girls swooning and shit. Been bold as brass, too, coming up and sitting down, giving him a once over. All balls and want and pride – Tracy'd been hooked and good.
They'd looked good together, then. They were of a height – Dwayne a little bulkier, him a little leggier. Dwayne'd liked his freckles, his bright red curls, his green eyes. The first thing the man had ever said to him was, ''Tell me now, do you have a temper, Irish?''
From Dry Bones, by Parhelion
Joss got them the job rather than Ox, even though Ox was the one with book-learning about giant lizards. But what Joss didn’t know about giant lizards or books, he did know about reading a man from what he wore. Under their dirt the Easterner’s boots had a high and polished gloss that meant he had money to spare, more than enough to pay Joss and Ox to guard some bones. And the two of them needed money. They were out of work, which was a sorry place for any cowboy to be.
Their last boss, Mr. Aloysius Norton, had taken a notion to run off a family of farmers at the eastern edge of his acreage, but neither Joss nor Ox held with that kind of fuss. Besides, in this year of 1896 most of the Mexicano farmers had been around New Mexico Territory a lot longer than any of the Anglo ranchers, even if their land-titles weren’t always right to hand.
Joss had explained this with soft words to the foreman, and then Joss had explained this with hard words to Mr. Norton himself, since speaking soft didn’t seem to be working. That final exchange ended up with Joss and Ox riding out from the ranch with their horses and belongings early on a moonless night beneath a clouded-up sky. When the faint light from the ranch buildings fell away behind them, they’d had to swing down and lead the horses. Riding cross-country, the local arroyos sort of leapt out in front of a man in the dark.
“Couldn’t do much else but quit, I’m afraid,” he’d said to Ox.
“Yup,” said Ox. The big fellow never said much, which was kind of funny because he sure had a lot of words stored up inside his head.
But Joss had always reckoned that he could jaw enough for the two of them. “I still don’t see how not wanting to monkey around with some granger and his womenfolk makes a man yellow.”
Ox had grunted, which he did do quite a bit. Joss could tell the sound was one of agreement, and that had made him feel better. Although he might have been elected the speaker of the two, Joss liked to believe that he fronted a republic. So he did get worried when Ox made it known that he disagreed with whatever notion Joss had in mind.
A long night of walking had taken them into Chamilla just before dawn, where they’d rested a few hours. Then a longer day of riding alongside the railroad ties of the Denver & Rio Grande had taken them on to the burg of Bacaville, which was beyond the stretch of Mr. Norton’s shadow. By the time they topped the final ridge, drew reins, and looked down at the cluster of adobe buildings and the larger rows of wooden structures, all tinted red by the last sunlight, they were played out. More important, their horses had been flagging for the last ten miles.
Joss laid a hand on Taffy’s neck. Back in Chamilla, before the bit went in, the critter hadn’t even had the spunk left to try and get his tongue petted, an annoying habit that had lowered his price to where Joss could afford him, years back. “We have enough in the stake for the livery stable?”
“Yup.” There was a long pause, and then, “Baths, too.” After a longer pause, Ox added, “And a woman.”
“A lady,” Joss corrected, out of habit. He had memories of his Ma, back before they moved out west and she’d become a laundrywoman, that made him careful about his language.
Ox considered, and then nodded agreement with his eyes narrowed against the sunset. “A lady.”
“All right, then.” He eyed Ox. “Will that leave enough money for a couple of days’ room and board, and a newspaper for you?”
“Yup.”
Which was about all he’d get out of Ox on the topic, Joss knew. So he turned his mind to the evening ahead.
From The Gaucho Code, by Julia Talbot
The second time Peter Schrader felt a noose around his neck, he figured maybe it was his fate to die by hanging.
He'd've thought he'd get the firing squad here. That's what you read in the penny dreadfuls anyway, that you got yourself shot in South America, not strung up. But no, this was a hanging, good and proper.
The rough nap of the rope already had him itching, raw and prickly and probably red. Sweat ran from his hairline, down into his eyes, and Pete blinked it away, thinking how it was good it was hot. Even he couldn't tell if he was crying.
He didn't want to die. A soft snort escaped him as the British missionary fella read the twenty-third Psalm. They called that irony, he supposed. When he'd left Texas with a bullet between two of his ribs he hadn't cared whether he lived or died. When his brother Carl had come down with the shaking fever in Mexico and passed on so fast they didn't even have time to say a prayer or two, he hadn't cared.
Damn Jorge anyway, for making him care.
Blinking, Pete looked at his judge and executioner. The stone cold old bastard stared right back, eyes burning like the lake of fire that surely awaited a man like Pete.
And he knew that whether he wanted to or not, he would die here today, dancing at the end of a rope.