Zane loved his carfee almost as much as he loved biting dust at high noon and wranglin’ doggies. He drank carfee in the morning, thick as molasses and as bitter as a nine year saddle horn. For dinner he had more carfee, even if it was ninety degrees in the shade and he was sweating like a drunk in church. And for supper-- sometimes Zane didn’t even bother with supper, didn’t bother with the beans and the bacon, the steaks and potatoes, the ham and the corn-- he just drank carfee, smiled his caffeine-brown tobacco teeth at the other boys and said, “Damn, this is sum gud carfee.”

In fact, the only time Zane didn’t have his morning carfee was the time the Jesse boys from the O’Malley ranch kidnapped him. The Jesses were mean, sure as shootin’, the kind of boys who would pay a compliment to an old lady and then smack her just to see the surprise on her face. They had it in their heads that if they stole some of the cattle on the Triple-Z ranch where Zane worked, they could put the ranch out of business and get in good with their boss the widow O’Malley, who was damned rich and even purtier. But like most mean people, the Jesses were stupid, too.

First, they kidnapped Zane in the middle of the night by sneakin’ into the bunk house and clobberin’ ‘im over the head with a bottle of whiskey. That was their first mistake. Zane loved his carfee but the one thing he could not tolerate at all was whiskey. Beer was okay, a shot of rye now and then to put your back on straight was alright, too. But the last thing those Jesses should have used was Rot Gut 30. They were lucky it stunned him like it did-- if he had seen the way that bottle broke all over his bed, well, let’s just say they would have walked with that peculiar kind of limp a man walks with when his own legs have been ripped off and he’s been beaten with ‘em. That the other boys in the bunk didn’t wake-up wasn’t luck at all, just fact-- after a day of ridin’ the range and a big ol’ bacon and steak dinner, most cattle-men can sleep through a tornado. Breakin’ bottles? T’ain’t nuthin’.

They next things those Jesse boys did wrong was to lock ol’ Zane in the hay shed at the widow O’Malley’s. Sure, they had to make certain he was out of the way when they went to rustle some Triple-Z cattle. But if there was one thing Zane thrived on, it was heat. Once when he was out on the range he came across a fresh dug mound. It was too small to be a grave of any kind, so, curious, Zane dug it up and found a tin full of chilies and peppers. One bite and Zane’s hair wouldn’t lay down. He ate the whole tin, chili juice on his chin and his face turnin’ red like an October sunset. If them Jesses thought puttin’ Zane in the sweat box was gonna take the fight out of him by the time they got back, well, they thought wrong.

The other thing wrong with puttin’ Zane in the hay barn was that it was close enough to the Widow O’Malley’s house that Zane could smell the carfee when he finally came to. And it was good carfee he was smellin’-- Zane liked his burnt mostly, the kind of bitter that could put wrinkles on a eight-ball. But the widow O’Malley got hers direct from New York City, and had ‘em slow cooked and then poured genuine boiling water over them, not the usual well-grit stuff that cow pokes usually made their carfee out of. And she always put just the tiniest little bit of vanilla in every cup.

Well, the smell of that carfee was like to make Zane bust. He had morals, and knew he had to get back to the Triple-Z ranch and fix whatever got broke on account of his note bein’ there. But he wanted that carfee something awful. Zane wasn’t what you’d call a thinkin’ man-- not much room for philosophizin’ when you got five hundred head to figure on. So the way Zane decided it was, he’d just barge in, drink a coupla chugs from that there coffee pot, and then high-tail it back to the ranch. On a stolen horse if he had to.

But like I said, that was the one morning Zane didn’t get his morning carfee like regular. The Jesse boys had him locked up tight in that hay barn, and he was sweatin’ hard enough to make his clothes soggy and his boots pool up. He could smell the whiskey on him, and he knew he was far from his own ranch because he made sure the hay barn at the Triple-Z was neat as a pin and this here hay barn was a dang mess. Zane was gittin’ madder by the minute, and then he realized that the coil of rope he was holding in his hand to strangle whatever dam fool finally came to let him out weren’t a rope at all but a dried up rattler. And where there’s one rattler, there’s more, and sure enough, like magic, when Zane hurls the useless carcass across the barn here come five more rattlers out of the nearest hay bail, spitting venom and rattlin like they knew they was gonna die there in the heat but they were gonna take it out on a sorry representative of the civilization that brought barns to the prairie in the first place.

Now Zane’s got no fears, no fears except those that’ll get him passed the pearly gates when he dies. And his healthy respect for the Lord A-mighty just made him hate the serpent even more that got Adam and Even kicked out of paradise in the first place. But Zane didn’t have no carfee in him, and it was clouding his judgment. Stomp ‘em? Grab ‘em by their tails and whip their heads off? Kick’em so hard they splat against the wall and spell out “sinner”?

Zane couldn’t decide and it cost him, cause like they say, sometimes indecision is worse than a bad decision, and soon he had five fat mother-rattlers hangin from his four limbs, and before he had time to flex and make their fangs pop out like a cork from one of them fancy-nancy champagne bottles, there was enough venom coursing though his veins to kill a grizzly bear and every one of her little cubs. The snakes, satisfied and feeling smug, dropped off and slithered away. Later on, fat and lazy with pride, they got stomped by horses somewheres outside on the ranch.

Zane had been bitten by rattlers before, every good cowboy has, and all it usually took was a shot of extra-bitter carfee and the venom just squirted itself right back out the holes it came in through. But Zane was already dehydrated and the venom set up shop and started to work on his head. It was dark in the barn and certain parts of his vision started to go pale, and then white out. The shafts of light he could see began to shimmer and sway, and Zane had a second before he went straight blind to realize the swaying was him, not the light.

His legs started to get a bit of a wobble and soon Zane was careening all over the barn, trying to keep his balance. He was too much of a man to holler and bang on the walls when he’d figured he was trapped but now he couldn’t help it and he hit one wall after the other with the full force of his big ol’ body. Dust fell down from the rafters with every punch and in a matter of minutes the barn was beginning to sag from side to side.

The venom got inside his brain, and while his legs threw him around like a preacher gets throwed inside a runaway stagecoach, he commenced to hallucinating. There was all the Injuns he never got to kill on account of Injuns bein’ decent folk after all and not the savages that his granpa told him about. There was all the Mexican desperadoes that he never got to plug between the eyes since his boss’s ranch was an easy 500 miles away from the border and besides every single Mexican that had walked across the border had been as hard a worker as any man Zane had ever met. And there was all the folks with black skin that Zane never got to boss around himself, on account of most of the ones he met were farmers on their own land and the rest held office jobs in the city as bankers. All of em, every one, picked him up good naturedly, and good naturedly hurled him through the barn doors, sending him rolling into the hot midday sun in a cloud of dust and hay and splintered wood, just as the barn gave up and collapsed in a cloud of dust and hay and splintered wood.

The widow O’Malley, as purty as anything that was ever embroidered, crocheted or appliquéd, ran out of her house with a hot pot of coffee, the only weapon a nice woman will wield, and dumped it on his face.

Zane’s eyes popped open, and he looked into heaven. “Ma’am, could you tell me what time it is?” He asked her, and for Zane the cowboy, veins full of used-up venom and a face covered with fancy-nancy coffee, it was the nicest thing he ever said to anybody.

For her part, the widow O’Malley was struck by the odd handsomeness of a man who was covered with hay and splintered wood and dust and coffee grounds and enough sweat to wash a herd of Holsteins. “It was a little after noon the last time I checked,” she told him.

Zane was too polite to lick the coffee off’n his chin, so he just inhaled deep the smell coming from his own face, and then sat up. He found his hat, which he always wore, even when he was sleeping, put it on, and then, since he was in the presence of a lady, he took it off again.

“I’d be much obliged if I could get an afternoon cup of carfee from you ma’am,” he said, and of course, she wasn’t a widow anymore too long after that.

And the Jesses? Well, they did live to tell the rest of the story, although it’s kinda tough to understand what they’re sayin, on account of having that peculiar accent ya get when your arms been ripped off and shoved down your throat.