If The Cowboy Was Good

At one time, Daytona, I wanted to be a cowboy.

1970. I came home from school and told my parents about this strange American holiday: "Halloween." Children dressed as ghosts, goblins, and cowboys.

However, despite my breathless wishes, my parents' response was swift.

My father said cowboys were the face of Western decadence. Thieves who rode horses and looked down on honest laborers.

My mother was softer.

“We do not wear masks, like Americans, Ivashechka. We become who we are.”

Despite my shame, I believed her. When you’re six, the world feels like it can be finished.

Still, I clung to that foolish, impossible hope that only children possess and offered one last plea:

“What if the cowboy was good?”

They answered in unison.

“Then he is no cowboy.”

—

Arina’s office is supposed to hum.

The gentle rhythm of her typing, the soft scrape of pencil on paper, the distant clink of her spoon stirring tea. These small, civilized noises tell me that the machine is working.

They’re gone.

Maksim Stepanov sits at Arina’s desk like a thief caught in the act.

Handsome in that typical Moscow way: expensive suit, too much cologne, a watch worth more than most apartments. His father’s connections make him untouchable, which means I can only endure him. I’ve endured the bastard for years.

He doesn’t rise when I enter. He looks up instead, fingers pausing lazily over the keyboard. “Starshy Praporshchik,” he says, voice cool and practiced.

The greeting feels like a dare. The little shit.

I glance around the office. Arina’s order has collapsed into quiet disarray. Her mug isn’t on the coaster. A stack of folders lean at a dangerous angle. A filing cabinet drawer sits half open, tabs askew like someone rifled through them in a hurry. Her chair has been shoved aside, replaced by his own imported monstrosity of leather and chrome.

“Where’s Arina?” I ask. My jaw tightens. She’d never missed a day, and it sets my memory ablaze.

She had no reason to miss. So I move to causes and think of that soft voice, asking me to help find her father. I told her it was impossible.

Lies age better than truth, sometimes. But–

Maksim drums his fingers on an unmarked folder, and it pulls me from my fears. “She asked that I cover for her. She’s still in America, training with Rose.” He continues with amusement, “Quite the extended training camp…”

I can’t be bothered with his snark, but was that the truth?

Ruslan said you'd want this," Maksim adds, sliding a dossier across his desk. Names, lovers, human wreckage wrapped around Daytona Diamonds.

But as I close the file I don't feel contempt, and it frustrates me.

“And Comrades Hessian and Gamble?”

“Delayed,” he says, tapping at his phone. “Their flight was pushed back. Three hours, maybe more.”

Of course. He has all the answers.

The air feels stale, perfumed faintly with Arina’s absence. I rest a hand on her chair, where she always sat straight and precise. The smell of lilac and ink still lingers. The silence presses harder.

I slip the file under my arm. “Call Alexei. Tell him I’ll meet him at the airport.”

Maksim exhales through his nose, not looking up from the screen. “Okay.”

He says it too quickly, too lightly. The kind of obedience that invites correction.

“If you don’t get hold of him in five minutes,” I add, “I’ll make sure your father’s next shipment to Murmansk spends the winter in the dock.”

His fingers freeze. For half a second, something cold flickers behind his eyes. Not fear, but calculation. Then it’s gone. “Understood.”

As I pass the glass door, the reflection catches his face. Maksim is smiling. A small, satisfied curl of the lips, sharp as a razor. He reaches for the unmarked folder on his desk and flips it open. His smile widens.

Something tightens in my chest. A warning, maybe. Or just the echo of worry I refuse to name.

I ignore it.

The corridor swallows my steps as I leave Arina’s vacant chair, and her vacant stand-in, behind me.

—

Vnukovo Airport's private lounge reeks of disinfectant. The Red Army banner hangs crooked from the air vent. Outside, runway lights glow orange. Alexei paces. Three hours of this.

I bite the bullet, because I know he’s dying to tell me something.

“What is it, Alexei?”

He dives right in. “You realize, Vanya, that the other members of the Red Army are talking.”

I stare at my glass of water. “They always talk.”

“This time it’s worse. Freeman and Schwartz are clearly unhappy about the Bandits. They’re the Red Army’s tag team, right? But now we have another one and they’re the champions.”

“They’ll learn,” I tell him, maybe too fast.

“Or they’ll fracture.” He stops pacing and leans on the back of the chair across from me. “The Red Army isn’t just a machine. It’s made of men and women and they lack the ideology to hold them together.”

“Maybe believe your own words once in a while, ‘David Davidson.’” I lean back, meeting his eyes. “You welcomed them with that news article!”

"But I was just..."

"I'm immune to your bullshit, Alyosha."

He hates being caught in his own strategy. I push him.

"You play the ideologue while pulling levers behind the curtain. You spin the words, I live them. Now you want me to apologize for work you sanctified."

He stares at me, lips tight, but says nothing.

I sigh. “Should I turn them away? We’ve known Hessian for almost thirty years and Gamble comes with him. Does the revolution ever reach maximum capacity?”

“Revolution?” He smirks, thumping his chest. “They’re mercenaries. All of them. Rose follows you from defeat. Dawkins hunts for Kai. Freeman and Schwartz…”

Alexei hitches and he narrows his eyes, thoughtfully.

“I don’t really know why they’re here.”

His words sting not just because he challenges me, but because I worry he’s right. “They follow orders.”

“That’s not belief.” His tone rises. “We have, at best, four true Communists,” he counts on his fingers. “You, me, Speedy, and the girl, if she remembers where she belongs.”

I glance up sharply. “Arina is loyal.”

“She is also absent.” He leans closer. “Still gallivanting around America. ‘Training’ with Rose, right? Rose is booked through a buzzsaw. Arina is avoiding us.”

My jaw tightens. “That’s enough, Alyosha.”

“You let her swim too long in Western waters, and Arina might start to like the taste.”

I remember my office. Her desk empty. Her order gone. The words leave before I can stop them. “Do you think she found out?”

Alexei studies me. “About what?”

I shrug, and that’s all the permission he needs to continue.

“We were supposed to build a fortress of principle, not a circus. Now we have eGG Bandits in the fold?”

I rise from my chair, almost welcoming the distraction. “Alexei…”

He rounds the table, finger jabbing. "The Whoresmen! Anna Daniels! Williams, Dick, Diamonds? We never needed them!"

"Troy needed a second front. Hessian's size alone—" I begin.

"Strategists instead of believers?" His voice cuts like steel. "Trading ideology for reach!"

The air vibrates between us. Two old men viewing the same ruin differently. My pulse hammers in time with the turbines outside.

Then the intercom crackles.

“Flight 248 has landed, Starshy Praporshchik.”

Alexei checks his watch. “Saved by capitalism’s punctuality,” he mutters.

I don my uniform jacket and straighten my medals just in time for the glass doors to open. Hessian and Gamble step in, and the temperature of the room shifts.

Hessian nods once. “Comrade Stanislav.”

No doubt they both realize they’ve interrupted a war already in progress.

I force a smile that doesn’t reach my eyes. “Comrades,” I say. “Welcome to the Motherland.”

Alexei doesn’t move, and the silence between us does all the talking.

—

The apartment hums when I enter. I don’t turn on the light. Rain taps the window in slow, irregular pulses. I set Daytona’s dossier on the table and close my eyes.

Steam rises from a phantom bowl. Metal scrapes ceramic. The chair across from mine creaks slightly as if bearing weight. A laugh drifts from the kitchen. Throaty. Feminine. Small feet patter across the tile. My shoulders ease downward for the first time since morning.

I open my eyes, half-expecting Rakhil’s silhouette, but the laugh shifts pitch. Higher. Wrong. The pattering transforms into a girl with dark hair hiding beneath the table, fingers pressed against a purple–yellow stain blooming across her cheekbone. She’s crying.

“Please,” a desperate, male voice scratches from behind a steel door I know too well. “Just five minutes. I only want to see her. My Arina…” The words slur together, wet and desperate.

My hand moves to my coat pocket, feeling the cold outline of the key that never leaves me. Behind the door, he languishes. My prisoner.

The steam dissipates. The humming grows teeth. My eyes snap back to reality as the television flares to life, bathing the room in cold blue. My own face stares back, ramrod straight, chest heavy with medals, mouth forming perfect, empty words.

I pretend that voice isn’t mine.

But it is.

“...decadence masquerading as gallantry,” I hear myself say. “A coward in a cowboy hat!”

I don’t blink. The audio is clean, my cadence precise. Olga Karishnikov nods as every vowel falls exactly where propaganda wants it. I haven’t needed a script in years. Even silence obeys me. The cameras still love their old Russian Bear.

Even though I said those words, the truth is I don’t believe them.

I see myself on screen: broad shoulders, medals on a shelf, a man who has outlived too many versions of himself. I flagellate myself by rewinding the recording by ten seconds and I watch again.

“...he can drink all he wishes and think it is liberty, but it is not!”

The screen vomits Daytona Diamonds at me. Every rhinestone catches light like a knife point. Every chemically enhanced muscle screaming with lies. I want to smash the screen with my fist until my knuckles bleed and shut both him, and myself, up. Yet my hands tremble, because beneath my hatred burns recognition: a mirror held up to a ghost I drowned in ideology.

The Whoresmen hid behind their laughter because they were terrified of silence. They mistook noise for purpose until the act collapsed on top of them. And it all began with Daytona.

He’s not my enemy. He’s my reminder.

Hessian and Gamble aren’t like that. Once they were lackeys. Muscle and mockery. When the carnival closed, their leader left them in the dark, still trapped in someone else’s joke. They came to me with that look I know too well: men used up and told they should be grateful.

Daytona is chaos, yes. But he is also the echo of a man I know very well. It would be cleaner to call him filth and be finished with it.

It would also be a lie.

On the screen, my recorded self thunders about order, labor, unity. Cowboys to be put down like broken horses. The speaker cracks under the weight of my certainty, buzzing into the same mechanical breath that’s choked my office since Arina abandoned her post.

We all wear masks. Those American children on Halloween know nothing of real disguises. Mine has fused to my face, bone-deep, rusted shut.

The remote drops from my hand, striking the armrest. Outside, Moscow bleeds under rain. The city must look like a dying man’s arteries. Everything pumping because death is the only alternative.

The screen freezes on my face, jaw clenched around words I’ve repeated until they’ve hollowed me out. I look like I believe it. I have to.

My hand seizes the phone, then drops it like something burning. Arina. The thought of calling her scorches through me, then withers.

What if she knows the truth?

What if I lose her?

What if she’s finally seen the monster behind my mask?

I snatch the phone again. My thumb hovers over names I could call to feel busy: aides, drivers, sycophants. I press the only one that matters.

He answers on the second ring, as always. “Da?”

“Come to my apartment,” I say. “We need to speak.”

I hang up and let the room be quiet again. The television keeps my face on hold, waiting for a line I won’t give. Outside, a siren fades, and the hum returns. The sound a machine makes when it’s still working but nothing is fixed.

—

The rain hasn’t stopped while I wait. I don’t bother turning the television off, frozen on my face still. It feels right that the interview-self stays to witness.

A knock.

Three times, measured.

I open the door.

Alexei steps inside, shaking the rain from his coat. His eyes cut immediately to the screen and despite all these years, I can’t tell if he’s joking or cynical. Maybe both. “Still watching yourself?”

“Someone has to,” I reply.

He sets his coat on the rack and looks around the apartment. He helps himself to the kitchen table. “You called me.”

“I did.”

“You never call me this late unless something is broken.”

His words are ice, but I humor him.

“Then you know why I called.”

He sighs and loosens his tie. I can tell he’s still frustrated with me. It’s the way he shifts his mustache. I knew the look when it was simply a bare upper lip, but now I can see it from orbit.

“I was thinking about what you said at the airport,” I start.

He clears his throat and crosses his arms over his chest. “I said many things.”

I allow my voice to solidify, slightly. “You said the Red Army was turning into a circus.”

His eyes flick to the bottle of vodka on the counter, still sealed. “Still is, if you keep inviting clowns.”

“Hessian and Gamble aren’t clowns.”

“Yes they are.” He leans forward. “The Gamble Appreciation Society. Then Jiles, Avalon, Bobby Dean, that ghost Doozer. Hessian stabbed you in the back. Now you dress them in red and call them comrades.”

Alexei’s temper is familiar, but not when it’s turned on me. I meet his stare. “And what were we when we began, Alyosha? Soldiers without a war. Men hiding behind a flag and a story.”

“That was belief,” he snaps.

“No,” I say, softer. “That was desperation. You found purpose in the fight. I found it in survival.”

He doesn’t answer.

The rain becomes artillery against glass. The bottle of vodka catches the light, and suddenly I’m drowning in its reflection.

He’s there, clawing at me from inside the glass. Me. Thirty-five years ago. Skeleton-thin. Reeking. A medal-shaped void on my chest like a bullet hole. His eyes burn with that same reckless fever I see in Diamonds. That hunger that devours everything it touches.

The phantom stench of alcohol scorches my nostrils. I didn’t just pawn a medal for another bottle. I ripped it from my uniform while my hands shook and traded a hero’s honor for six more hours of oblivion.

The next morning, I polished that empty space, telling myself the void gleamed brighter than any commendation. Called it survival. But surviving without purpose is just slower dying.

I once believed endurance itself was virtue. That pain purified. Now I know better: endurance just means you’ve become a better vessel for carrying your own ruin.

I wrench my gaze back to Alexei, who watches me like I might shatter. "I used to think I hated men like him," my voice scrapes out. "The truth is he's wearing my face."

Alexei's eyes narrow to slits. The muscle in his jaw pulses once, twice beneath his skin. "I can't hate Daytona," I whisper, my voice barely audible above the rain. "Every time I see him, I see myself crawling across our apartment floor at three in the morning."

His fingers curl into half-fists on the table. The blue television light catches the white of his knuckles. Knuckles that once connected with my sternum as he hauled me upright from a puddle of my own sick.

The vodka bottle sits between us, untouched. "You carried me to the shower with my uniform still on." My throat tightens around the memory. "You said the Soviet Union didn't spend twenty years training me just so I could drown in cheap spirits."

He snorts. "I've carried tanks that complained less."

I lean forward. "What's the difference between what you did for me and what I'm trying to do for them? They're all cut from the same cloth as Hessian and Gamble." I let my words hang in the air before adding, "The same cloth as me."

He clears his throat. He’s thinking, and that is a start. “You sound like a priest.”

“I’m just tired of pretending mercy is weakness.”

Alexei rises from his chair, brushes past me, and plants himself at the window. Rain streaks the glass like tears. "So now purity is a crime?"

"Purity is a lie we tell ourselves," I say, voice low. "And you're terrified to face that."

A laugh escapes him, sharp as broken glass. "The mighty hammer of the revolution, waxing poetic."

"Thirty years, Alyosha. Thirty years since the Union crumbled. What's left of the true believers? You, me, Speedy, and Arina. The core. Even in PCW, we were already ghosts of something dead. The Red Army was never going to be the workers' paradise we dreamed of. But it could still shelter those who deserve a second chance."

Thunder rumbles in the distance, and only then does he turn from the window. His expression is unreadable, even to my practiced eyes. The same dead, emotionless face the day he told me my mother had cancer. Steady, but cracked beneath the eyes.

"The thing that infuriates me most about you, Vanya," he says, words barely audible above the rain.

The silence stretches between us like a tightrope.

“You make me believe you might be right.” He uncorks the bottle, fills two glasses with practiced hands.

“What’s this for?” I ask.

He shrugs and smiles, “For whatever this is.”

I raise mine, but neither of us drinks. We just hold the glasses, reflections trembling inside them. Then, we drink.

He sets his down first. “And Daytona and the Whoresemen?”

I shake my head. “They had their chance. I’ll remind their Diamond that shine is easy. Enduring is the hard part.”

He exhales, almost a laugh. “You always have to win the last word.”

“No,” I smile. “Just the last fight.”

He puts on his coat and stops at the door. His smile is small, tired, and loyal. "Don't make me regret this mercy, Vanya."

"You won't." But even as I say it, doubt flickers in me like a bad bulb.

He leaves. The door closes softly behind him.

I sit alone in the blue light, watching the rain crawl down the pane until it looks like claws. Or tears. Or nothing at all.

I unpause the man on the television and let him speak again, but I don't listen. Part of me wants to call Alexei back. Part of me is relieved he's gone.

Alexei says I make him believe. But what if I'm wrong? What if mercy is just another way to lose?

Maybe that's the trick. Maybe I learned long ago how to sound like a man who's been reforged, while underneath I'm still the same broken metal.

But steel doesn't heal. It only hardens. Or rusts. Or both at once.

I wonder if I ever stopped being the cowboy, or if I just changed horses and called it revolution. And which would be worse?

—

At one time, Daytona, I wanted to be a cowboy. I thought they were brave. Wild. Free.

Now I know better. Freedom without purpose is another kind of hunger. You ride until the horse collapses and call it destiny.

You wear your shine like armor and call it strength. But shine fades, Daytona. It always does.

I’ve seen it before. In your Whoresmen who mistook laughter for belief, in men who wore masks until the mask started wearing them. When yours cracks, when the crowd quiets, when the lights stop making you feel real, you’ll find me waiting.

Not to hate you. Not to mock you.

To remind you what it means to endure. To show you that when the shine dies, only the work remains. Because I’ve been there.

I’ve been you, Daytona.

I am you.

My mother once told me we do not wear masks. That we become who we are.

She was right, Daytona. They both were.

If the cowboy was good… then he is no cowboy.

I turn from the window, but the glass holds my reflection like a prisoner.

The mask doesn't just look back. It smiles.

Maybe I’ve been wearing that cowboy hat all along.