Big Jim: A Cowboy Romance

Charlie

My left knee has been bouncing since we pushed back from the gate, and the man in the aisle seat has noticed.

He hasn’t said a word. He doesn’t need to. Every time my knee knocks the tray table, the hand on the armrest between us tightens. He claimed it before I’d even got my seatbelt done up. He claimed it with a forearm roughly the size of my thigh, brown from the sun, the sleeve of a denim shirt rolled to the elbow.

So I press my forehead to the window instead. The plastic is cold and faintly greasy from whoever leaned here last, and I don’t care, because down there is America.

Actual America, the one off the telly. Yesterday I was eating a squashed cheese sandwich in a departure lounge with rain sliding down the glass, and now there are roads underneath me so straight they look ruled on with a pencil, and fields so big they don’t look like fields at all. They look like somebody spilled brown and green paint and forgot to put any edges on it. No hedges. Not one. A swimming pool flashes up at me, blue as a boiled sweet. Then another. Who has a swimming pool at their house!?

I haven’t slept since the first flight. The long haul was nine hours of a stranger snoring on my shoulder and a film about a dog that made me cry twice. My eyes feel sanded. My blood feels fizzy. Three coffees have gone into me since breakfast, plus the little can of tonic the flight attendant handed out, which went warm in my hand before I finished it, and the tonic has gone straight through me.

Of course it has.

“Sorry,” I say to the man next to me. “So sorry. Could I just...”

He turns his head. The brim of his black hat turns with it, slowly, like a gun turret coming round. Under it is a face that would take a chisel to make. A heavy jaw, a nose that’s been broken at least once, stubble a day past deliberate. He looks at me for about a second. Then he unbuckles, and stands, and keeps on standing.

He’s enormous.

I don’t mean tall, though he is that; the crown of his hat brushes the overhead lockers and he has to tip his head like a man under a low beam.

I mean wide. He fills the aisle from seat to seat. A flight attendant coming the other way with a bin bag has to stop and wait for him, and she looks up at him the way you’d look up at a cathedral.

I shuffle out past him with my bum to his belt buckle, because there’s no other way to do it, and say “Sorry” again to the rows ahead in general.

The loo is the size of a phone box. When I wash my hands, the face in the mirror belongs to someone who has been awake for most of two days and is grinning about it like a lunatic.

On the way back he stands again. He doesn’t sigh, quite. He breathes out through his nose, the way a horse does when you’ve done the girth up wrong.

“Thanks,” I tell him. “I'll need it again in a bit, probably. Joking.”

I’m not joking.

Twenty minutes later my right calf knots itself up like wet rope, and if I don’t stand it will cramp, and if it cramps I will scream on an aeroplane over Texas and be deported. I tap his shoulder. It’s like tapping a wall.

“Sorry. Me again.”

This time the sigh is audible.

He unfolds himself into the aisle, one hand braced on the seat back, and I notice his hand this time. Big and square, with a pale old scar across two knuckles, the skin at his fingertips cracked and rough.

Working hands. I know working hands. I’ve been handed buckets and bales and ends of rope by men with hands like that for years, and expected by every one of them to drop it.

He smells of leather when I squeeze past. Leather and coffee and something warm under both, like a saddle left out in the sun. I hold my breath, which is ridiculous, and stretch in the galley until my calf lets go, and look back down the cabin at the top of his hat.

You could be nicer about it, mate. I think to myself.

The third time it’s the loo again. I know. I blame the tonic.

“Sorry,” I say, and it comes out brighter than I mean it to. “So sorry. Bladder the size of a walnut.”

He stares at the seat back in front of him. The side of his face turns hard as a fence post. He stands, and when I come back he stands again, and he doesn’t look at me either time, which turns out to be worse than the sighing.

I sit. I buckle. My knee starts up again.

His knuckles are white on the armrest. Not just pale, white, the bone pushing up under the skin as though he means to snap the thing off and take it home as a souvenir.

His other hand is flat on his thigh and pressing down hard, like he’s holding his own leg to the seat. He has his eyes shut. When he swallows, his throat moves like he’s getting something big down it.

Brilliant. I’ve made a cowboy so cross he has to meditate.

“Is it the jiggling?” I ask. “I can stop the jiggling.”

“Ma’am,” he says, without opening his eyes, and that’s all he says. His voice is deep, flat as the land out of the window, and it doesn’t sound like a word. It sounds like a door shutting.

I stop jiggling. I last four minutes. Then the plane drops, a soft little lurch like a lift setting off, and the armrest creaks under his fingers, and I go from fidgety to desperate to be anywhere but this seat. The captain comes on in a voice like warm syrup to say we’ll be starting our descent shortly, folks, and I know that if I don’t move now I’ll be strapped in with my own skin crawling for the next half hour.

“Sorry,” I say. “Last one. I swear on my life.”

He opens his eyes. He looks at me then, properly, for the first time, and I wish he hadn’t, because it burns right through me. Then he tips his head back against the seat and speaks to the ceiling.

“Lord, give me strength.”

“He’s busy,” I say. “Have you tried breathing?”

Which is rich, coming from me. I know that. He seems to know it too, because for a second something happens at the corner of his mouth, a twitch that could be the start of anything. Then it’s gone, and he stands up for the fourth time like a man being marched to the gallows, and I go and stand in the galley and do calf raises next to the drinks trolley while the flight attendant pretends not to see me.

When I get back, he doesn’t sit down until I’m buckled. Then he does, all of him at once, and grips the armrest again like it owes him money.

We land hard. The wheels hit, bounce, hit again, and the engines roar backwards and the whole cabin leans forward against its belts, and beside me the cowboy makes a sound I’d swear was a prayer.

The plane is still rolling when his belt clicks open. Up front, the seatbelt sign is still lit. A chime goes off and a voice says, “Sir, please remain seated until the captain has turned off the seatbelt sign,” and he doesn’t remain anything.

He’s up and in the aisle, hauling a suit carrier out of the overhead locker, folding it over his arm, shouldering past the first wave of people who’ve barely got their phones out.

From where I’m sitting, I get the full view of him from behind.

Oh, no. No, no.

His jeans are faded pale at the seams and they fit him like they were sewn on him, and the denim shirt stretches across his shoulders so that every time he moves I can see the muscle shift underneath it, and he has, I’m sorry to report, a really excellent bum.

I look at it. I keep looking at it. I’m still looking at it when he disappears through the door at the front, and I sit back in my seat with my face hot and tell myself, firmly, that I’m here for cows.

Cows. Six months of cows, not rude men in hats.

Baggage reclaim is so cold I could hang meat in it. The air conditioning blasts down from the ceiling and raises goosebumps on my arms.

The floor shines like it’s been licked, and the whole place smells of floor polish and burnt coffee. The carousel clanks round empty. An announcement drawls something about unattended items.

I stand by the belt in my jeans and my wellies - I’m wearing my wellies; they wouldn’t fit in the case - and I watch other people’s luggage go round and bounce on my toes.

Then he’s there, because of course he is: same flight, same carousel. He’s three people down from me with the suit carrier over his shoulder and his hat pulled low, and he’s watching the rubber flaps where the bags come through like he’s waiting for them to open fire.

I edge away from him a bit, just a bit, because it’s a big room.

A battered canvas holdall comes through, leather straps and a brass buckle, and he leans in and takes it off the belt one-handed like it weighs nothing. Then he turns, fast, already moving, already heading for the doors, and he cuts straight across the space where I happen to be standing.

The holdall swings. The buckle cracks into my shin, right on the bone.

“Ow! Excuse you, sir.”

He stops. He turns round. Up close he’s even bigger, which shouldn’t be possible, and he looks right at me, straight down from under that hat, and his eyes are red-rimmed and furious. For one second I think he’s going to say sorry.

“I don’t have time to deal with this today,” he says.

And he walks off.

He just walks off. Long strides, the suit carrier bumping on his back, people stepping out of his way without being asked.

I stand there with my mouth open and my hand clamped to my shin. It throbs. There’s going to be a bruise the size of a plum. I’ve come nearly five thousand miles to be assaulted by a holdall, and the man swinging it couldn’t even be bothered to be rude to me properly.

A laugh comes up out of me before I can stop it. A woman with a pushchair glances over, and I wave at her, and laugh harder, because honestly, first day in Texas. I haven’t even left the airport, and I’ve already been mown down by a cowboy.

Fine, good, it’s a big country. Three hundred and something million people in it, and I’ll never see him again.

Across the hall, the sliding doors part. Heat pours in through the gap, a solid wall of it, smelling of exhaust and hot tarmac, and it reaches all the way to the carousel and lies against my face. Out in that white glare, a black hat moves through the crowd, a head taller than everyone else, and then the doors close and it’s gone.

I am not going to think about him again. Not once.