Cowboy Up Read online

  COWBOY UP

  COWBOY UP

  GAY EROTIC STORIES

  EDITED BY

  SHANE ALLISON

  Copyright © 2017 by Shane Allison.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television or online reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Published in the United States by Cleis Press, an imprint of Start Midnight, LLC, 101 Hudson Street, 37th Floor, Suite 3705, Jersey City, NJ 07302.

  Printed in the United States.

  Cover design: Scott Idleman/Blink

  Cover photograph: iStock

  Text design: Frank Wiedemann

  First Edition.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Trade paper ISBN: 978-1-62778-240-1

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-62778-241-8

  Contents

  Introduction

  Swopes and Kalvo • ROSCOE HUDSON

  The Cattle in the Corn • BRENT ARCHER

  Hittin’ the Dusty Tail • ERIC DEL CARLO

  West Texas Winter • MICHAEL BRACKEN

  The Singing Cowboy • ROB ROSEN

  Neon Cowboy • ADRIK KEMP

  The Good, the Bad, and the Ojete, or A Fistful of Huevos • SALOME WILDE

  The Naked Cowboy • SHANE ALLISON

  Saddle Up • JAY STARRE

  Rogayo • LANDON DIXON

  Mexican Good Looks • JOEL A. NICHOLS

  A Stray for Keeps • J. D. WALKER

  About the Authors

  About the Editor

  INTRODUCTION

  Last Friday night was the best and the worst night of my life. The worst because I got stuck in a thunderstorm from hell. There’s a plethora of things I hate about Florida, and hurricane season is at the top of the list. Just when I thought things could not get any crappier, my older-than-Jesus SUV blew a tire when I swerved to keep from hitting a deer that was standing in the middle of the road. The deer survived but my car didn’t fare so well. Luckily, I came out unscathed but with a flat. I knew the spare was back at my house in the garage along with the jack. It didn’t matter anyway. I didn’t know a thing about changing a busted tire. I reached behind my seat to grab an umbrella, but there wasn’t one. I was screwed from both ends. I realized that I had passed a country-western bar a half a mile back, but with the way the rain was coming down, I decided to wait for the storm to let up. It seemed like the more I waited, the harder the downpour. I tried to call my dad, but due to the storm and that I was stuck out in the sticks, I wasn’t able to get a signal. My luck was for shit so far. I had to get to my aunt’s and couldn’t sit there all night not knowing how long the storm would last. I pulled my jacket over my head, got out, and made a run toward the bar. I hate getting wet, but I didn’t have a choice.

  By the time I reached the bar, I was soaked. I could barely make out my hand in front of my face, since my glasses were peppered with drops of rain. Country music blasted from inside the bar as I dried the lenses of my glasses with my shirttail. The minute I walked inside, all eyes were on me like I had just stepped off a spaceship from Uranus. I figured there must be a phone I could use. I was shivering with cold from the rain and I was soaked from head to toe. This silver daddy of a guy walked over to me with slicked-back salt-and-pepper hair and a thick handlebar moustache, wearing a black T-shirt. He was the type I usually went for, but I was nowhere in the mood to even think about some sexy beer-belly bear when my SUV was stranded in the rain on the side of the road. The cotton top barkeep asked what he could get for me. A hot cup of cocoa with marshmallows was what I wanted, but I knew my chances of getting something like that in the hole-in-the-wall hick bar was about as likely as my going down on Zac Efron, so I told him a beer would suffice. I could feel the stares on me like hot rays. They looked like they had never seen a black man before, and shoot, maybe some of them never had. I was too wet and annoyed to care.

  The bartender set a glass of beer in front of me. I fished a wet ten dollar bill out of the front pocket of my jeans and handed him the money. He wasn’t very happy, but money was money. He cracked wise about my getting caught in the rain. I told him that I’d had an accident up the road, but he didn’t seem concerned. When I asked him if there was a phone I could use, he pointed to a pay phone at the other end of the bar. “How retro,” I told him, though I doubted he heard me over the Kenny Chesney twang coming from the speakers in the ceiling caked with dust and grease. I drank about half a glass worth of the swill that passed for beer before I made my way to the rear of the bar. I slipped a quarter in the slot and dialed my daddy’s cell phone number. It rang four times before it went to voice mail. It was typical of him. What’s the point of having a phone if you ignore the calls? I made a mental note to never call him if I’m knocking on death’s door. I would have better luck reaching E.T.

  I was about to call my cousin when I felt someone shove me in my back. I turned around to find this jerk-off of a hick standing before me wearing a dirty cap, a blue T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off, and dirt-filthy tattered jeans with snakeskin boots caked with mud. I’ll never forget him, seeing as how his teeth were rotting from dipping snuff, and the fact that he smelled like a wet dead dog. “Can’t you read, boy? That phone says whites only.” He and his two other rough-looking buddies laughed at his joke that I didn’t find at all funny. I told them that I didn’t want any mess, but looking at them, I could see that trouble was exactly what I was about to get.

  When I tried to walk back to the other end of the bar to avoid a fight, the leader of the pack shoved me again. “Ya gotta pay if you want to use that phone.” His breath smelled like a hog’s ass. I didn’t like fighting, but I wasn’t the type to sit there and take an ass-whipping either. I knew that I couldn’t take on all three, just the toothless, hog-breath-smelling leader. The tension in the air was thicker than the cigarette smoke. I dropped an f-bomb in his face like a fart, which only made the hick and his opossum pack madder. He was about to draw back and hit me when this cowboy wearing a Stetson, a plaid shirt, jeans, and black boots appeared almost out of nowhere. He obstructed the hick’s punch, yanking his arm back behind him. Before long there was pure chaos. The cowboy that had come to my rescue had single-handedly taken on all three men. Two of them were lying on the floor in the fetal position while the leader struggled to pick up the few teeth that had just been knocked out of his fool head.

  The cowboy asked me if I was okay. I stood there in complete shock and amazement at what I had witnessed. This stud was like Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, and Chuck Norris rolled into one.

  He asked me if the SUV in the ditch up the road was mine. “Yeah, I ran here to call for help. My phone won’t get a signal down here in the boonies.” Pearls of rainwater trickled down his face, dripping from the rim of his hat. He said his name was Doug. He asked me where I was headed and if I needed a lift. It was probably a crime in ten counties for a man like him to be so sexy. I thanked him for his help and walked with him out of the bar. I noticed his knuckles were scuffed, smudged with blood from the brawl. I didn’t say anything. I figured a guy like that was used to kicking ass. My heart was still racing from what had happened. When we pulled up in front of my place, I took out my wallet to pay him for his hospitality. Doug placed his hand over mine. “No need for that. Forget about it,” he said.

  “You gotta let me give you something for saving my butt back there.” I probably would have been the one picking up my teeth if he hadn’t come along.

  “Isn’t there anything I can do?”

  We stared a long time at each other in the truck that smelled faintly of c
ologne and cigarettes, wondering who was going to make the next move.

  If you’re eager to find out what might have happened next, dip into the stories ahead. Cowboy Up is my new, naughty creation brimming with both modern-day and Old West stories from raunchy ranch hands to horned-up all-American cowboys. May you enjoy these tales as much as I have.

  Shane Allison

  Tallahassee, Florida

  SWOPES AND KALVO

  Roscoe Hudson

  Swopes fled to Colorado two months earlier before a posse of white men in East Texas got the chance to string him up. He bargained for a room behind Tessie Rose’s, worked off his rent fixing whatever she needed fixing, fended off Tessie’s whores, and choked on the sticky sweet perfume Tessie claimed she bought in Paris. One Thursday night, Tessie sashayed into his tiny room, tits pushed up to Jesus in a velvet coral dress. Kalvo followed her, eyes down, Stetson in hand, boots shiny as gold bits. Swopes liked the look of the man: a sturdy, square-jawed gent from somewhere back East trying to pass for a gunslinger, but his accent would always give him away. Slicked-back raven hair, deep-set cobalt eyes, a mike-white face that had never taken a punch. Kalvo spoke plain, promised Swopes quarters in the lean-to back of his house (he told Swopes he would have to build a fourth wall if he was shy and of a mind to), three squares a day, and twenty dollars a week. Heaps more than white men got for ranch handing. That’s when Swopes knew the man was desperate.

  When he got to Kalvo’s homestead the situation was rough. Acres of fallow land. Skinny chickens. A rickety barn sheltered a cow that had stopped giving milk. Worst of it, the well, like the cow, had all but dried up. Two tombstones beneath a spruce tree near the barn—one big, one little—faced the mountains that rose like the chests of sleeping giants in the distance. Wild flowers had been placed on the big tombstone. A mournful ragdoll perched on the little one. Kalvo never spoke their names.

  The lean-to back of the main house was just as Kalvo had described—three walls, the front open to nature—but larger than Swopes had imagined, furnished with a cot, table, chair, kerosene lamp, and a zinc washtub big enough for a man of Swopes’s burly size. A Bible commanded the entire space from the center of the smooth spruce table. When Swopes picked up the Bible and opened it, dandelions fluttered out of First Corinthians.

  His first morning on the ranch, after Kalvo fed him grits and eggs, Swopes got to work helping Kalvo resurrect the place. Kalvo seemed so green to Swopes he wondered how the rancher had managed to survive out on the prairie for as long as he had. Swopes had to teach Kalvo the ways of both farming and the land that even a suckling homestead baby would have known as well as scripture. Swopes led him around like a tot; he stomped and swaggered about the spread like he was the rancher and Kalvo was the hand. They accomplished more in six weeks than either of them thought possible. They turned over the dried-up soil, tossed on fertilizer, and hoped for rain. Swopes repaired the roof of the barn and reinforced its structure. He fed the cow a special diet; before long it squirt buckets of milk. Eventually Swopes and Kalvo dug a new well. It took Swopes no time to build a privacy wall for the lean-to from pine siding Kalvo had stored on the ranch from way back.

  Swopes only entered the main house once to collect his pay. The whole transaction was of a breach of custom. Each Saturday at dusk Swopes knocked on the back door and waited for Kalvo to walk out and press the bills into his calloused palm. On the fourth week, however, Kalvo didn’t answer when Swopes knocked. Tentatively, Swopes opened the squeaky door (he kept promising himself to oil it, though Kalvo never complained) and stepped inside. Unlike the sorry state of the rest of the ranch when he first arrived, the order and cleanliness of the main house impressed Swopes. Scrubbed pots and pans hung on the wall. A piano stood in a corner, covered in a patina of dust; a guitar and a harmonica lay atop it. In the corner opposite a fireplace, a dress form stood naked and neglected. Swopes called out Kalvo’s name again; silence replied. He took off his boots and softly trod the silent floorboards. A long cottonwood harvest table stretched across the main room and the walls of that room were lined with leather-bound books standing in polished bookcases. Swopes ran his fingertips across the tops of the books, recognized many of the titles and names raised in regal gold letters on their spines. There were so many books Swopes felt a pang of longing, both for the books and for Mama and Sarah, for the mornings they taught Negro school children and the nights he sat up in bed and read himself to sleep by candlelight.

  The backdoor squeaked. Swopes spun around with a start.

  “Take one.”

  Kalvo was standing in back of him, shirtless and sweaty, dusty from head to foot.

  “My apologies, Mr. Kalvo, sir.” Swopes tingled all over at the sight of him. Sweat streaked his back.

  “My apologies to you, Swopes, for being so late. Got myself good and dirty out back a-ways. Thought about planting that west field.”

  “I would have helped you, sir.”

  Kalvo shook his head. “Got a wild hair, that’s all. I owe you.”

  He reached into the pocket of his denims, took out the bills and, as usual, pressed them into Swopes’s hand, palm on palm. The touch of Kalvo’s hand was soft even after all the hard work they had put in on the ranch. Swopes’s cock and nipples began to stiffen. He and Kalvo held hands for a little longer than either of them realized and didn’t let go until Kalvo brought up the subject of books again.

  “You want to learn to read I’ll teach you.”

  “I can read.”

  “Capital. That’s very good, Swopes. My father always said a good man knows the word of God but a righteous man must read it daily.”

  He took a thick book off the top shelf and presented it to Swopes’s chest. Swopes felt himself being seduced by both the gilded pages of the book and the pungent odor of the rancher. How long had it been since he had read a book or bedded a man? He accepted the book and humbly excused himself out the way he came, not even stopping to put his boots back on.

  Only a few minutes later Swopes was hanging a door on the lean-to when Kalvo emerged from the back door of the main house carrying a washtub and a towel draped over his arm. He set the tub near the well, filled it with well water, stripped, and stepped in. Swopes stopped his work and watched the white man splash around and soap himself. Kalvo stood bare ass to the sun and soapy all over. The scent of the soap Kalvo used wafted down to the lean-to, enticing Swopes. Tessie had gifted him the soap on the night they met. She called it sandalwood. Swopes stood in the doorway of the lean-to watching Kalvo scrub his armpits and asscrack, stroke his pecker. He gripped his own crotch at the sight, let one of his thumbs dance on his nipple. Kalvo bent down and dipped a small bowl into the sudsy water. He lifted it above his head, tilted it, and let the water cascade down his body.

  Swopes loosened his denims, pulled out his cock, and stroked it, not caring if his boss saw him or not. A squirt of spit and he was good. Precum seeped from his cock; he looped it around the long sloped head of his dick and kept jerking as he ogled Kalvo’s hairy firm body, its muscular symmetry, the meatiness of his thighs and calves, the flex of his arms. Kalvo, staring directly at Swopes, grasped his own pecker in both fists and tugged furiously. Swopes sucked on his middle finger and plunged it into his asshole; he slid it in and out as he pumped his leaden dick, a quick-slow-quick syncopation that countered Kalvo’s swift pulls. They came together, both shouting so loud the mountains echoed, as if a chorus of ten thousand horny cowboys denied sex for far too long had all drained their balls at exactly the same moment. Pearls of Kalvo’s spunk dribbled into the bathwater as Swopes’s seed ejected from his cock like Roman candles and streaked the dirt. He doubled over and heaved. Kalvo toweled off and hurried back into the main house. The sound of the back door slamming was like a gunshot to Swopes.

  A week later Kalvo swaggered into the lean-to. He wasn’t one to knock. He hitched a thumb in his britches, braced his forearm in the doorjamb. “Wash up and shine your boots. Got a thirst. Hate drinkin
g solo.” Swopes watched the ample round humps of Kalvo’s rear as he stepped back to the main house. He’d never known a white man with a plumper ass or thicker thighs. Swopes put aside his borrowed book. He scrubbed up, gave a quick spit shine to his boots, put on a clean shirt and pants. After donning his prospector’s hat he went outside and mounted his horse.

  Swopes’s and Kavlo’s horses trotted side-by-side. A crescent moon ornamented the starless sky. They may as well have been the only people on Earth. A chill wind blew through the barren trees and surrounded the cowboys like dead souls.

  “Like what?” Swopes asked.

  “Never heard that?” Kalvo scratched the stubble on his chin. “When it gets chilly like this it’s like haints rising up out the grave. It’s what my granny always said. It’ll be an early winter sure enough.”

  Swopes looked around. He observed the trees and meadows, random critters scurrying and noising the silvery night. He let his eyes rest on Kavlo, the set of his mammoth shoulders, the wide spread of his chest. In the moonlight he looked like a fallen Union soldier resurrected from a valiant death. He wanted to reach over and stroke Kalvo’s face to make sure he was really there.

  Spirits were high at Tessie Rose’s place. Every cowboy, ranch hand, gambler, gunslinger, and trader within ten miles packed both floors of the bordello, making an unholy rumpus. The piano player, Sherrod, the only other black man in the room, pounded out a manic ditty while some of Tessie’s girls whirled around the dance floor holding up men so drunk they’d never remember how much money they came into the joint with but were certain to leave broke as beggars. High-stakes poker kept a lot of the customers preoccupied. The whores upstairs, the ones unoccupied, leaned over the railing, swung their titties, and yahooed. Swopes and Kalvo shouldered through the crowds. Once they bellied up at the bar, Kalvo ordered a bottle of whiskey and set it between them.