OK, a couple more weeks to go, and I’d be back on the farm for the rest of the summer with Mike. But this business of taking a course at the university had not been such a great idea for either of us. When it was over, it left us with only a few weeks before school started up in the fall again and then I’d have to go back to teaching.

The couple of weekends we’d managed to have together just left me feeling like some kind of orphan the rest of the time. Only the filmmaking course I was taking was saving me from feeling really sorry for myself, because it kept me too damn busy to think about anything else.

When Mike called that morning and said he was coming for the day, I’d been up all night with my first turn at an editing table. My partner, a guy from McCook, had got a heavy date with one of the other summer students, a high school teacher from Omaha, and he’d blown me off--no doubt fucking his brains out while I sat there working alone.

By the way, the teacher he’d set his eye on was married, but that didn’t seem to slow him down any. He was married, too.

You want to know the truth, I don’t understand other people sometimes. I’ve never even gotten close to fooling around with someone else. Maybe I’m just not adventurous, but no one’s ever come anywhere near taking Mike’s place for me. Dumb as it sounds, I’m old-fashioned as they come.

Which may be the reason I got myself into this film project. I’d got it into my head almost from day one that I was going to make a documentary about an old folks home. It just seemed like something that hadn’t been done before, and I figured here were people with time on their hands to sit and talk to me. And maybe I’d be able to show how old people get screwed the way they get shoved off, out of sight and out of mind, into crumby, crowded places to be forgotten.

You know, I have this side of me that wishes we’d all do a better job of looking after each other. Sometimes I think it comes from being queer. But who the hell knows. I’ve known of queer guys so self-centered they made me want to throw up.

Anyway, turns out it’s not easy getting into an old folks home with a 16-mm camera and a sound man. It takes some fancy talking and finally a connection I hadn’t counted on--the director of one place had gone to school with a senior administrator at the college where I work in Kearney, and a phone call was all it seemed to take to start opening doors. After a cautionary lecture, we were in.

I had to promise, of course, that I wasn’t going to do some muckraking exposé that would embarrass the guy. But then it was clear that I probably wouldn’t want an administrator at my college knowing I’d made an old buddy of his unhappy. My paperwork for a future raise or a promotion could have a way of sitting forever on his desk, and I’d be the loser. No point in bending over if you don’t want to get fucked.

I’m not that kind of guy anyway. I play nice. Doesn’t mean I don’t have the balls. I just prefer wearing a cup.

So anyway, my partner and I--his name is Scott--are scouting through the common rooms there at the home, chatting up folks and looking for likely candidates. Right away, most of them take us for TV reporters and start in complaining about policies at the home, the food they all agreed was "uneatable," and a social director who was always yelling at them. One old guy said his room was so small you couldn't cuss a cat without getting hair in your mouth.

This wasn’t what I was after. I had this idea I’d get them to talk about their lives--saying wise things, as I supposed the elderly were capable of, having learned their fair share of life’s lessons--and I was going to drive to the places where they’d lived and use footage from there to heighten what I expected to be the poignant ironies of growing old.

Or some such half-baked idea. We’d been told by the teacher of the course that documentaries were about discovery anyway. We weren’t supposed to start out with preconceived ideas about what we were going to find.

Like I say, I try to play by the rules, even you might say, while I’m breaking them--as most people would regard my having regular sex with another man. So I was letting the truth reveal itself to me. Forget that I, the filmmaker, routinely go to great lengths to conceal the truth about myself.

But then we were not making a film about me anyway--that truth could wait for another day. My partner Scott didn’t even seem to suspect I was queer, though if he’d taken enough time to think about it--always obsessed with the women in the class--he might have figured it out.

So we meet this guy the first day we’re at the home. He’s right away curious and wants to know what we’re up to. Before we know it, he’s trying to give us whatever it is we want.

His name is Oscar, and he looks like he could be eighty or ninety years old. His face is like weathered leather. An old boot worn in sun, rain, mud, dust, and probably cowshit, well past the point where there’s any wear left in it. His body stove up and thin as a rake handle. But eyes bright and alert, and full of the devil.

Him it took no time at all to suspect I was not what I seemed. Although that came about later.

Oscar--if you haven’t guessed already--had been a cowboy. So he said, but after a couple sessions with him, I was not so sure if even half of what he told us was the truth. When I’d decided it was no more than half true, I still didn’t know which half to believe.

He said he’d worked ranches in various places from the age of fourteen, lying about his age to get his first job as a wrangler on a ranch in west Texas, outside Odessa, in 1901. Over the years he’d seen it all--surviving during the Depression in Wyoming by running bootleg whiskey, rounding up mustangs for rodeo rough stock, and riding herd for two brothers who later turned out to be cattle thieves and did time.

Was any of this true? Who could say? Any witnesses were surely dead and gone by now. As we shot interviews with the two other people we’d settled on--both of them sweet old ladies, soft-spoken, and sincere, with stories to touch the heart of the most cynical audience--I began to think he wasn’t a good idea for the film.

Anyway, I didn’t have time or budget to go to Texas or Wyoming and shoot the places he was talking about. When he figured out why I was losing interest in him, he began telling me about his last job. It wasn’t exciting as his early years, but somehow, like the drifting cowboy he wanted us to believe he’d been, he wound up in Nebraska, working at a ranch in the Sandhills.

Now this got me going again. It was a long drive from Lincoln out to the Sandhills, but not out of the question. Scott, my partner and sound man, had simply put his foot down. He wasn’t going to make any out-of-town trip with me. He was having too much fun chasing tail, as he liked to put it--an expression that has always struck me as being hopelessly straight and corny. And he’d be returning soon enough to what was apparently a pretty dull life in McCook.

But I didn’t need a sound man. I just needed to shoot film, and I’d let the people we were interviewing provide the sound in voice-over.

So I booked a camera, got some more film stock, and told the teacher I’d be away for three days. There wouldn’t be time to stop at the farm to see Mike again. And so I made the most of that Sunday with him when he came to see me, though I hadn’t slept at all the night before.

I was waiting for him in my dorm room when he arrived, in my underwear, and it took us no time to get down to business. There was that first big, long hug after I’d locked the door, the one that always means it’s been way too long since we last saw each other.

And then there was the slow but determined shedding of clothes--his in this case--as we forget there is a world out there and just concentrate on seeing and feeling each other naked. I could write a book on what it’s like just unbuckling Mike’s belt--that resistance at first and then the letting go are for me the moment when the man I pretend to be starts to disappear. There is nothing like desire to tell you what kind of man you really are.

But, don’t worry, this is not that book.

When I got him undressed, and the only thing he had on was his Old Spice and a big old hard-on, we got into bed and stayed there the rest of the day. The walls being less than soundproof, I had to shove a pillow over his face a couple times when he got a little loud with his enthusiasm.

"Was I making noise?" he said afterwards.

"Don’t you listen to yourself?"

"Why would I do that? It’s you I came here to see."

So with my dick in a state of complete exhaustion, I sat with him that evening wolfing down burgers and fries at a McDonald's--we hadn’t eaten all day, just some day-old doughnuts and cokes I’d had in my room--and then he was gone in his pickup back to the farm. I felt the usual emptiness in the pit of my soul knowing I wouldn’t see him again for a while--and my balls ached for any number of reasons--but when I got into bed I quickly fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

The next day, a Monday, I was up bright and early and off to the Sandhills with my camera. And the deal was that Oscar was getting himself sprung from the home to go along for the ride and show me around the ranch country where he’d spent his last years as a working cowboy.

He met me out front, having checked himself out--or whatever he was supposed to do--as the sun was rising behind the state capital building, that giant penis of the plains, the Cornhusker equivalent of the Washington Monument.

He had a cracked leather valise with him, heavy and big enough for a much longer trip. He tossed it into the back seat of the Camaro and got in beside me.

"Snazzy car," he said, admiring it.

He was dressed for the West, in jeans and a denim jacket, with a white snap-front shirt and a belt buckle big as a salad plate. His boots I could see, because he’d stuffed his jeans into them, were bright red with what looked like wild roses stitched into them. On his head he had a hat I’d never seen before--and it brushed the roof of the car as he sat down inside--a handsome, gray Stetson.

"Snazzy outfit," I said, aware that I looked pretty nondescript sitting there beside him in my khaki pants and loafers, and a short sleeve drip-dry shirt.

"Let’s hit the trail," he said, anxious to get going.

And we did. By noon, after 224 miles of interstate highway, we were in North Platte. From there, after we gassed up at a truck stop and had ourselves some lunch--Oscar went for the chicken-fried steak smothered in gravy--it was seventy miles of two-lane, all the way out to the middle of nowhere, a wide spot in the road called Mullen.

The day was--as Mike would say--hotter than a sonofabitch. We stopped at a sleepy, old air-conditioned saloon for a couple beers, and Oscar got to jawing with the bartender, who seemed to remember him.

Oscar was trying to place the whereabouts of every old working buddy he could think of. Some were dead and gone, he learned, some had moved on, some were still working on ranches here and around.

"What you been up to?" the bartender finally said.

"Making movies with my friend here," he said.

"You from Hollywood?" the guy asked me, with growing interest, like maybe I’d come in there looking for acting talent.

"He’s a college professor," Oscar said, and he said it with what was probably undue regard, but not the irony that you get from most people out here who wouldn’t trust an egghead college professor with their dog.

"Is that right?" the guy said, clearly not sure now what to make of me. "Is it a western?" he wanted to know, still hopeful.

I shook my head. "A documentary."

"About me," Oscar explained, more to show off his own importance than to be helpful, but the bartender still looked puzzled and didn’t offer to pursue the subject further.

I had the idea that late afternoon would be a good time to shoot some footage of the hills and ranchland, and I wanted to scout for a good location, so I persuaded Oscar to leave the bar and drive out to maybe a ranch where he’d once worked.

"How close are we?" I asked him. He hadn’t been very forthcoming with this kind of information.

He didn’t say anything, just pointed me north out of town after we got into the car, which had got hot enough inside to bake a pizza on the dashboard.

After another hour, we had traveled enough miles on dirt roads to make me wish I’d thought twice about this whole escapade. My arms and shoulders ached from hanging onto the steering wheel as we encountered endless stretches of ruts and washboard. Meanwhile, dust drifted in the open windows whenever we stopped for Oscar to get his bearings.

I began to wonder if he knew where he was taking me. We had passed a good number of ranches, and after an hour or more went by, I was beginning to get impatient.

"How about here?" I finally said. "This is good." We’d come over a low ridge and there was a tree-lined stream below us, with a gathering of black angus cattle at a windmill. The kind of scene you find on postcards for tourists.

"No, it’s a little farther yet," he said. And we kept on going.

Finally he said, "This is it." And we turned off the road at a gate post with a weathered sign that said Poverty Flats Ranch.

The ranch buildings were another half mile ahead, and when we got there, we thought for a while there was nobody around until a woman, probably the rancher’s wife, appeared on the front porch.

She was friendly, as country people can be with strangers, and I realized that that’s exactly what both of us were. While I thought we’d found a ranch where Oscar had worked once, I could tell that she’d never met him before.

Oscar had got out of the car to talk with her from the front gate, tipping his hat back a fraction of an inch with one finger, and stood there with that polite respect men out here will assume with women--especially unmarried men--calling her "ma’am." And it occurred to me that Oscar had never mentioned being married in his life, or even close to it. I was going to have to ask him about that.

He was inquiring about someone he knew, another cowboy I gathered, and she was shaking her head.

"He left a while ago," she said. "Don’t know where he went. You’d have to ask my husband, but he’s out with the boys rounding up some steers that run off. Don’t know where you’d find him."

He thanked her, touching a finger tip to his hat again, and she watched us leave as we drove away.

"What’s going on?" I wanted to know. I’d begun to believe he had something else in mind for this trip besides my documentary.

He just shrugged and looked out the window, like he didn't hear me.

"I’ve got a movie to make," I said. "It’s not supposed to be some kind of sentimental journey for you to look up old friends."

"Make your movie," he said, suddenly a man of few words. "No one’s stopping you."

"OK," I said. "I’m going to that place back there I liked." And when I got there, I left him in the car while I set up the camera and took a long, slow pan across the landscape. The angus had moved on, unfortunately, but the late afternoon shadows were showing up the contours of the hills nicely.

"I’ve been thinking about where to stay tonight," he said, when I got back in the car. "There’s a nice motel in Valentine--The Raine Motel--sleep in the Raine it says outside."

"I’m not going to Valentine," I said. "It must be another seventy-five miles from here--at least." And I wasn’t even sure where we were. "I saw a motel back in Mullen. We’ll stay there."

"Suit yourself," he said, sounding disappointed.

"You know someone in Valentine you want to look up?" I asked.

"No," he said, sounding the slightest bit hurt now. "I thought you’d like to stay at a nice motel. That’s all."

It was getting late by the time we got back to Mullen. I got us a room, while Oscar wandered up the street to the saloon, where I found him a while later, sitting by himself in a booth. He’d ordered some food and had a plate of French fries slathered in catsup.

"Help yourself," he said and stabbed into a piece of meat that had been broiled beyond recognition.

"I’m sorry," I said and apologized for being short with him. I’d kept forgetting it was him doing me a favor--he didn’t have to help me make this movie--and not the other way around.

He insisted that apologies were not necessary, and we left it at that.

As I got a bottle of beer and considered the yellowed, plastic-covered menu, wondering whether to risk getting something to eat from the kitchen, I said to him, "You never mentioned ever having a wife or a girlfriend."

He didn’t say anything at first, just concentrated on sawing another chunk off his steak.

"A working cowboy don’t make enough money to support a wife and family," he finally said, studying a slice of white bread he was holding and not looking at me. "Not back in my day anyways. Wages was twenty-five dollars a month, and that’s when there was work to be had."

"But didn’t you ever want to?" I realized this could be a sensitive subject, even after all these years, but looking at him in his go-to-town get-up, I saw that he must have been a good looking man in his prime and proud of it.

Now he looked at me, with not sadness like I’d expected but a bit of mischief in his eye. "How come you want to know?" he said.

"I dunno. I just got curious." I waved away his question and said, "It’s none of my business."

But he wasn’t done with the subject. "You’re not married, are you?" There was a little smile creeping onto his face.

"No," I said, and I was suddenly sorry I’d brought this up. I didn’t think he was going to turn it around on me.

"Why’s that? You’ve got money. You don’t have my excuse."

"It just hasn’t ever happened," I said. I wasn’t going to even suggest that I might be queer. Not here in a redneck bar, and not with someone I hardly knew.

He glanced around the room where a handful of mostly men in cowboy hats sat around or stood at the bar with beers they were slowly drinking and smoking cigarettes.

He lowered his voice now and winked at me. "You’re a good looking young man. What’s stopping you?"

I don’t generally talk about my private life, I wanted to say, but I knew it would make me sound so much like a, well, an egghead college professor, I just said nothing and hoped he’d figure it out without my having to say it.

"I think I know," he said, slyly.

Now I was getting uncomfortable.

"All those young coeds? You must have plenty of opportunity."

I knew what was coming and shook my head no.

"Why buy the cow," he said, "when the milk’s for free."

"It’s not like that."

I looked around the room, wondering if anyone had heard us, but there was no sign of it. Two cowboys pushed in through the door, nodded to us as they passed by and then called out to some guys they knew at the bar.

"OK. It’s not like that," Oscar said, giving me a steady look now, and popped a dripping French fry into his mouth.

What he was thinking I had no idea. I was still curious about him, but I sensed that he was being as guarded about his private life as I was about mine. If nothing else, we had that much in common.

And as we consumed more beers, we talked about other things, and I gave him quarters for the juke box so he could play Merle Haggard and George Jones songs. I listened as he carried on about the old days, when he was still young. And as the empties accumulated on the table, he became more wistful.

A long time later, walking out into the night, I felt a little light-headed, and Oscar had fallen silent, stopping where it was dark enough to look up and see the sky full of stars.

"Nothing finer," he suddenly said, "than crawling into your bedroll out on the prairie and seeing the heavens just brimful of those little bitty lights, right down to the horizon. Takes your breath away." I thought I’d never heard him sound so sad and mournful for what was past and would never return.

Then we finally found ourselves at the motel room and after I fumbled with the key for a while, we got in.

As soon as I closed the door, I picked one of the two beds and fell onto it. Lying there, still dressed with my eyes closed, I wanted no more than sweet sleep to overcome me, the sooner the better.

Then I felt him sit down on the bed beside me, and my eyes came open again.

"We used to sleep two to a bedroll," he said. "We were young and far from home, and it didn’t make the nights seem so lonesome."

My thoughts raced back to the talk about marriage in the bar.

"Would you let an old cowboy feel less lonesome tonight?" he said.

I took a long moment to respond. "If that’s all you want," I finally said and moved to make room for him.

Then he lay down on the bed with me and said in a soft voice, "I was kinda figurin' you wouldn’t say no."