You pull the trigger on your Remington six-iron, oiled and slick for quick release from the holster, and it kicks back as the brass bullet flies loudly from the barrel. The man facing you thirty yards down the dusty street, drunk and sloppy and possibly aware he's now involved in what will surely be written up in the Wild West nickel periodicals being sold back East, which you've been devouring as if they were books of the Bible, has also drawn his weapon and fired, a half-second slower than you. You knew it was going to happen that way, you gauged his sobriety and knew he was impaired and slow, an easy target, churned up by whiskey and the snarling of his equally drunken and windy friends.

But you're standing on this street, smoking gun in hand, to reclaim your name and gather some fame, and he's the chosen one, the unfortunate means, for him, by which your fame is going to happen. You're mostly happy with your choice but not completely, you're almost sad this fool is going to die for nothing. He might have children and a wife who will become victims themselves, but still, it's the choice he made. Truth be told, you might have goaded him into it, lied to him when you told him in that growly voice you sometimes use that when he spit his tobacco wad into the spittoon by the bar he missed and hit your boots. And out here there's nothing lower a man can do to another man except shoot his horse or insult his wife.

You'd picked him out of the saloon crowd because he looked like a farmer, with the overalls, sweat rings under his arms, and a tarnished pistol on his hip. Him being a farmer meant he was probably handy with a rifle and a branding iron but not so with a hand gun, and he was drunk enough to be sloppy and slow when all he was doing was laughing with his friends, all just having their fun. You chose him because he was going to be an easy win.

Coward.

You're about to put a rest to that.

The farmer's pistol puffs forth a second time and the retort ricochets off the buildings on the street while you're doing the math, recalling an old ciphering sum your teacher gave you a few years back. If a man on a horse is traveling west from point A at fifteen miles per hour and a man on a faster horse is galloping east from point B at twenty miles per hour, and there's fifty miles between point A and point B, where they gonna meet? You're thinking you drew first and your bullet's flying close to four hundred miles per hour, and your bullet is nearer to him than his is to you, although ciphering this one wouldn't matter none at all as his shots are going to go wild anyway because he's drunk and loose and that's why you chose him, right? Drunk and messy and soon shot dead.

The bullet whizzes by, or it might have been a bee that brushes brushes your arm. You react instantly, thinking you must have missed him if he got off a second shot, so again you pull the trigger and your gun thunders and kicks back.

Your mother loved you, that's for certain, with the heart and tender arms of a mother who couldn't have loved her family more. Just as she loved Jedediah and Laura, both of whom died too young, Laura of the fever when she was just five, and Jedediah up at Chancellorsville back in '63. Fact is, you wanted to join up too, go with him, be with him, but your pa said you were too young and that Jed had made his choice at seventeen years old to wear the battle gray and fight for old Dixie, while ma said she didn't want Jed to go and fight over some slave business, you never even had any slaves, and she said no boy of hers should be shooting at other American boys, and you, well you're only twelve anyway so don't even think about guns and going to war, you just aren't joining up and that's that.

Your pa got drunk the night Jedediah and some other boys left for camp, and stayed drunk for another year until Jed took a ball in Chancellorsville and the news came back but nobody came with it, and after that pa lived with the whiskey until it took him apart and he fell off his horse. Then it was just your ma and you and the memories.

You challenged this farmer when he said there ain't no tobacco juice on your boots, boy, no one spit on anyone's boots here. And you said who're you calling 'boy' in that voice you can put on sometimes, that challenging voice, that big-man voice, like someone who's been bellowing at the moon and shouted himself hoarse. In your heart you know he called you boy because he was right, he was a full grown man and you're just barely scratching twenty. And when you moved your hand over your gun anyway, in that steely, defiant way you learned in the stories, he told you to keep your hand away from your pistol, son, that is no place you want to go.

After pa died and you and ma needed money, you set out to get some. You had the farm, small as it was, and you worked it with her day and night for years, sold a cow here and there, ate some of the chickens, raised vegetables and alfalfa and corn, but you still needed the money and you were the man of the house so you went out and got your pa's gun and horse and road twenty-eight miles to the next county, tied a red bandana around your face and walked into the First Missouri Savings Fund Bank with no idea what to do next. You were bewildered, and realized it was the first time you'd been inside a bank building without your pa. You stood there, gun in your belt, bandana across your nose and mouth, wide-eyed and frozen. A teller looked up from his window and said boy, either you take that bandana off your face or the sheriff's going to come over and throw you in jail. And you did, you pulled the cloth down and croaked you was sorry, it's just dusty out there and I was looking for the feed store, so he pointed and you just ran out of the First Missouri like a . . . 

Coward. You've had enough of being called boy.

The drunk and sloppy farmer in the saloon again told you to take your hand away from your holster. Men around him backed away, giving him space. He asked you what your name was and you told him they call me The Jackeroo Kid, because you'd learned in the stories that Kid what they called the roughest and toughest of the Wild West shootists. The men laughed, a loud, raucous laugh, and snickered and pointed. It was the first time that had ever happened to you, and you sure as hell did not like it. The farmer shook his head and said, look boy, or Kid, now don't be a damn fool, you got a ten-dollar Stetson on a five-dollar head right now, so go home, your ma and pa need you, you don't want to keep this up. Leave your gun alone and go home.

You again told him he'd spit on your boots and he said he did not, and you said you and me are gonna take this outside right now. The farmer said you don't want to do that, you really don't, and you said it's either here or out on the street, you and me, what's it gonna be.

Where all those words came from you had no real idea, probably from the stories, but you weren't shaking or scared, and the coward business seemed to be sliding off your back. You were freer than you ever been since you let Jedediah go and die alone. And you weren't no boy no more.

Well, the farmer said, if that's the way it's going to be we'll go outside but I am surely sorry about this, and another man in the crowd said don't do this son, it's going to go bad on you. The farmer frowned at the ground and shook his head and sniffed once or twice, and you thought, who's the coward now?

You try to squint to see if a red blotch has formed anywhere on the farmer's shirt, or if he's staggering or grabbing for his wounded gut, but you taste dust and think a bullet has hit the ground and kicked up some dirt into your mouth. You reach up with your sleeve to wipe your face but your arm scrapes the dirt and you realize you're down. You look up at the sun above you, your gleaming gun next to you in the dust, your sleeve bloody and your arm heavier than it should be. You reach for the gun and the next bullet smashes your skull, sending bone and brass splinters into your brain at four hundred miles an hour, and as the sun goes dark your brother reaches out with a Wild West weekly, and you see it's a story, The Jackeroo Kid's story, your story.