I only saw it once, the mare in Bandera where my girlfriends and I spent New Year’s Eve that time an eight turned into a nine, or a seven turned into an eight.  

            That part I don’t remember, the exact year. And some other things.

            What I know is that we went, me and Rhonda and her new friend, a British girl whose dialect I surely mocked, because I’m like that when I drink too much, do drugs. And we did.

            Rhonda and I ferried the Brit from San Antonio into the hill country, north to a cowboy who lived amid cedar trees and limestone, playing protectors since this was their first date.

            Then there he was, the cowboy whose name I forget, but remember as tall and lank and dressed in slim dark jeans he’d tucked into his boots unembarrassed. Having grown up in Texas, I understood everything about him in an instant on a level the British girl never could.

            In that instant, I wanted him to like me. In those seconds, I envisioned a life on the cowboy’s ranch, his accent curling familiar in my ear, my boots never leaving the cocoa-brown cedar needles littering the white limestone like shreds of burnt confetti.   

            I wanted that very much.

            But even I knew friends don’t do that to friends, steal their even first-date boyfriends.

            Even so, I fell deeper in love when the cowboy pulled his truck up to a fence running parallel to a pasture cleared of trees. We four got out, and he whistled. A chestnut mare loped across acres and up to the rail. There, she bent her graceful neck and allowed us to stroke her blazing white forehead.

            I could not get over that. Could not get over knowing an animal that well, having it love me so much it would race over a field for my caress.

            More than smitten then, I let the cowboy see the wonder in my face. He looked deep into my dancing eyes and may have seen that I was a better fit for him than the British girl who likely only rode English, if she rode at all. I’d trained western all the way.

            But the cowboy turned to his date, touched her shoulder, and helped her up into his truck. I scrambled into the backseat with Rhonda.

~*~

To celebrate the New Year, the cowboy boyfriend took us to Arkey Blue’s, a honky-tonk below street level, back before it had a website and likes and ratings on Trip Advisor because none of that existed.

            What existed was a band in the corner playing country, a dancefloor the size of a dining room table, and Stetsons as far as the eye could see. Which wasn’t far. The place was tiny.

            One by one the boyfriend taught me and Rhonda and his Brit how to do the two-step. But when I begged for more, pulled his elbow, tugged his pearl-button sleeve, and tried to drag him back out onto the dancefloor with me, he was a gentleman.

            He called over a friend and handed me off, saying, “She likes a strong lead.”

            That dark-haired stranger and I spun around all night. The only breaks I took were to sneak off to the john with Rhonda to do coke in a stall so small my hair trailed down her breasts when I bent to the mirror, my inhalations sucking away ounce after ounce of white.

            She was rich and generous.

            Then it was back out to my barrel-chested cowboy, to twirl in the corners of the dancefloor which had gotten very crowded because it was New Year’s Eve.  

            Have I mentioned that?

            A seven was turning into an eight, or an eight into a nine. I can’t recall.

            But I do know that after midnight, after the band stopped, after the bartender shouted Last call!, the cowboy drove off with the Brit. Left alone, Rhonda and I followed the cowboys we’d danced with out to a limestone shelf with a view of the city lights, maybe twenty doting the hills.           

            The shelf had held a hotel, but it didn’t anymore. What remained was a poured concrete slab atop a dank basement. Rhonda and I trailed our two cowboys down the steps into that dark labyrinth, none us carrying a phone with a flashlight because that utterly did not exist back then, not even in anyone’s imagination.

            This is what I’m trying to explain.

            So it was just the two of us, the four, reading nasty graffiti spray-painted on the walls, grossing out about mattresses rotting deep in unlit corners. Rhonda got scared.

            Even coked up, she had more sense than me. Or she believed herself more worthy.

            Her generous spirit fled, she demanded the cowboys take us back up the stairs and out onto the concrete slab atop the limestone hillside. And she made them say goodnight. Then Rhonda and I left.

            Except I told those cowboys where to find us.

            I would like to forget that.

            But I remember Rhonda got very upset, asking why I’d told them our motel’s name when we’d escaped. There was no good reason except that I wanted to be loved in whatever form it came, felt that I deserved some random compensation for letting the good cowboy get away.

            It follows then that our cowboys followed us to our room.

            The good cowboy and the British girl had disappeared behind a door hours ago for him to do to her the things I wanted him to do to me. So it was Rhonda and me alone behind the hollow-core on which our two cowboys knocked their rock-hard fists.

            I went to answer it, and Rhonda screamed.

            Face blanched with fear, she hunkered beside the bed like this was a tornado drill. Spittle had dried white in the corners of her mouth, a dot of red congealed below her nostril. Seeing her like that, it was hard not to laugh, especially when she whisper-screamed, “Don’t answer it!”

            “But they know we’re in here,” I countered. “The lights are on.”

            “Turn them off,” she hissed. “They’ll leave.”

            I did. And they did, eventually, ride off into the night like Rhonda wanted.

~*~

The next day, coke leaving my brain like beef soup leaching through a sieve, I endured the ride south to San Antone unable to avoid hearing the British girl up front talk about how much she loved her cowboy, how much he loved her, how good he was in bed.

            Laying flat on the back seat like a patient unetherized upon a table, I died a little bit, knowing no one would ever love me like that.

            And they didn’t. Not for ages.

            But it did eventually happen, eventually I found love, but only after all the things that did not exist that night in Blanco came into existence, had existed for a while, had become commonplace by that time—phones with flashlights, Trip Advisor ratings, websites and likes.

            Happened after lots of bad cowboys, if you get my drift. Happened after I wandered Europe getting painful lessons from a French equestrian, a Belgian assassin, an Albanian Italian, a German law student, an American seismologist, a Bavarian engineer, and a few more.

            Last I heard, the cowboy and the Brit divorced.         

            These days, I no longer live in Texas, and I do indeed love my husband, yet I remain sure my life would’ve run smoother ages sooner if the cowboy and I’d been braver that night, less polite. His bay mare could have polished my rough edges faster than I managed alone.

            From her, I could have learned how to be eager and willing to please, how to love with every ounce of a ten-pound heart, how to lope across an entire field whenever the cowboy puckered his lips and called me to come, all the days from that one to this one.  

            All of this would have happened sooner if only that cowboy had kept me on the dancefloor a little longer, smoothed away my rough need, twirled me in the corners for a few more hours, like a seven turning into an eight.