OUR BRIGHT FUTURE | Creative Nonfiction by Blue Guldal

“Ain’t Montana preedy?” Cowboy said, sweeping his arms across the orange-pink sunset. We’d met him in a bar late afternoon. The girls called him Cowboy because of his hat and swagger.

The girls and I were new scientists with promising futures, attending a prestigious undergraduate conference in Missoula. We’d just met earlier that day in a poster session. They were nice to me, the atheist-Muslim foreigner with cropped blue hair, bound for the top-ranked genetics program in the country. My gaydar searched for a kindred queer among my new acquaintances, but found only hetero femmes.

(On my East Coast campus, the captain of

the women’s basketball team was

the only out athlete.)

“You from somewhere else,” Cowboy said when we met. The ability of heavily accented Americans to pick out the foreigners was like a xenophobic gaydar, operating on the principle of not recognizing yourself in another, but on spotting the differences. I smiled at Cowboy’s question-cum-statement, relieved that he caught on to my foreignness instead of my queerness.

(A few weeks prior, the captain

was taking laundry out of the car.)

Still, I was glad we found Cowboy. I had just turned twenty-one, but didn’t drink, so the girls had appointed me chaperone for the night. The bars were full of older men who bared their teeth in what passed as smiling. The drunker the girls got, the more they allowed the men to buy drinks and get handsy. The task of keeping them safe was making my shoulders ache. So when young and polite Cowboy came along, six feet something and all muscle, I let myself relax.

“Next bar, please!” Emily, a loud extrovert from Idaho, demanded.

“Yes, ma’am.” Cowboy tipped his hat in exaggerated flourish.

The roads in Missoula stretched into the mountains like deep, dark rivers. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the smooth blacktop was hiding something underneath. Something this land knew down to its bedrock, and I didn’t, not yet.

Laura from Arizona puked on the road. Half-digested fries splashed bright yellow against the blacktop. Suze, a shy Wisconsin girl, fished out a tissue from her bag and wiped Laura’s face.

As we crossed the street, someone tapped my shoulder from behind.

(Someone hit the captain

from behind with a beer bottle.)

I flinched. All at once, Cowboy shoved me aside and started yelling at the tapper. Then, it was fists, elbows and Cowboy’s face shiny with sweat.

“Jay-sus,” Laura said, swaying next to me as we watched Cowboy punch the tapper down. She smelled like dried bile at the bottom of a leather purse.

I made to interfere, but Emily said, “Leave it.” I opened my mouth to protest, but what was I going to do anyway? Emily yanked me away. “I said, leave it!”

We stumbled out of the black molasses river to the opposite bank in what seemed like slow, painful motion.

In the middle of the road, Cowboy towered over a man cowering behind outstretched arms. “Filthy redskin!” he shouted.

(Someone shouted, “Fucking

dyke.”)

This was the first time I heard that word spoken out loud.

The man held his bleeding head and turned his face up to the sky.

(The captain

passed out on the

road, bleeding.)

A cup of coins had spilled onto the blacktop next to him. He sat motionless, yet somehow moved away from us, as if sinking into the dark waters. All we did was stand there and watch.

(Campus security didn’t take the attack seriously. No

one was caught.)

In front of the bar, the girls formed a circle around Cowboy, who was grinning like the villain in a superhero comic. My shoulders started aching again. Suze pulled me toward the group, into our bright future. I looked back across the street, at the man who had tapped me on the shoulder. He stood silhouetted against the crimson Montana sunset.

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