Chapter 1: The Cowboy

Jesse

I sat quietly and listened to the preacher give the eulogy for my best friend. Cody was more than my best friend; he was the man I had loved since high school. Now I have lost him forever.

I need to explain. I met Cody George my first day in high school. He lived outside of town on a ranch. I lived intown so we had gone to different grade schools, but the county had only one high school. It was just luck that we were in all the same classes. I always managed to sit next to that good-looking boy and soon we were talking and comparing notes. Over the next month we became friends, and by Thanksgiving we were inseparable.

Neither Cody nor I played sports. Not the traditional sports anyway. Our school had a rodeo team and Cody made the team. By our sophomore year people were starting to take notice. Cody was good!

I was at every event, cheering him on. I remember one afternoon he was bucked off a rank horse that no one had been able to ride. I met him behind the chutes and was offering my opinions about how nobody could ride that horse. He stopped me.

“Jesse, there never was a horse that couldn’t be rode, and there never was a cowboy that couldn’t be throwed!”

I would remember that forever.

His senior year he received scholarship offers from universities that had rodeo teams. He turned them all down. Why? Terrorists had flown planes into the towers and Cody thought it was his duty to go fight them. I disagreed. I tried to talk him out of it, but he joined the Marines and left after graduation.

We were both still virgins!

While Cody went to war, I went to college. I majored in Banking and got a job in the summer working as a teller in our local bank. I wrote Cody letters and e-mails every chance I got. He always returned my letters which kept me informed about his life.

I was in college, away from home for the first time in my life so I took advantage of my freedom like all my new friends. At a party one night I lost my virginity. I did not tell Cody because I imagined he was drinking and carousing with his Marine buddies.