Jennie Darling

Copyright © 2025

All Rights Reserved

Cody was not Cody’s real name but a name he gave himself as a kid after he met Roy Rogers and Dale Evans at a rodeo in Madison Square Garden. The name stuck because Cody liked it and his parents never bothered to take it away. Knowing how strange their only son could get, they gave him a pair of toy six-shooters and a straw cowboy hat and chalked the whole thing up. As a concession to Cody they watched “Bonanza” on television as a family every single Sunday night.

Given a choice Cody would have become Cody Rogers, maybe a distant cousin of Roy’s, and he would have been roping cattle and driving off injuns somewhere in the middle of the Great Plains. As it was the best Cody could do as an adult was go to his job at Kinko’s and then FedEx Kinko’s in Wichita while using every free minute to think about the Old West without ever going there himself to avoid the disappointment. Once Cody did in fact take a Trailways all the way to South Dakota and then a rental car to the Black Hills where you could stand and imagine how Custer, with that hair of his, must have felt the minute he knew he was going to get scalped. That should have been the first of many bus rides for Cody but it turned out to be the last until the day he quit FedEx Kinko’s and took his Social Security early. The plan was to find a nice old town in the West and start writing with the FedEx Kinko pens on the legal pads he had been stealing from the store for years and years.

Once he got to Grand Junction, Cody decided to go by his new pen name Cody Rogers because nobody in Colorado knew him to begin with. He bought an old Silverado truck with a gun rack, a vintage Winchester rifle, a pair of snakeskin cowboy boots, and a very large black cowboy hat with a brim as wide as a bookshelf. A splurge meant barbecue at Ma Kettle’s with the ribs splashing wet to keep in the spirit of the enterprise. You should not be surprised to hear Cody had never been happier—waking up with the blackest coffee he could stand, putting on his cowboy boots and cowboy hat—writing up a storm on the yellow pads, starting with Comanche Daughter and then Jennie Darling, with both of the stories set on the frontier at the fictional Fort St. Jude.

Life was good but also as good as it was going to get. Cody’s hatred of almost all living things found its way onto the page in one novel after another about gunfights and shootouts with bad girls working the saloons who really were bad. Face it: Cody knew diddly about what it was like to be a cowboy back in the day when cowpokes would hitch up their horses outside the saloon. He knew even less about girls in petticoats, good or bad: he actually knew next to nothing about women at all. Grand Junction in its present day was nothing like the Old West anyway, not unless you counted diagonal parking as a vestige of hitching your horse while you pushed through swinging doors to get a snort.

The books and the movies about the Old West could take him only so far, and Cody was not much of a writer to begin with. Even so he sent off copies of Comanche Daughter and Jennie Darling typed up on the self-correcting Selectric to publishers who published Westerns: they would sit on them for months at a time, like a hen that won’t lay an egg, when they could have said go to hell Cody Rogers within a matter of minutes.

Due to all of the above, Cody was starting to boil the way he used to at FedEx Kinko’s when someone treated him with less than proper respect as he rang them up. He was alone now with his yellow legal pads and his FedEx Kinko pens—and his cowboy hat and his Silverado and his rifle—but he was also starting to know how stupid the whole thing would look if anyone besides him was there to see it. To make it worse Junction was hot as a pistol: it wasn’t even summer yet, so things were only going to get worse. That’s the last thing Cody was thinking over a plate of pulled pork and fried onion rings before he blacked out and smacked his head on Ma Kettle’s vintage linoleum table.

***

I can’t be dead, Cody was thinking, or else I would not be thinking that I’m not dead.

There was a logic to it but what difference did it make, really? The reality was that Cody had been struck by lightning in Junction within the first nine months of his early retirement because of a bad ticker, the one his doctor in Wichita, a Shockers fan who would not shut up, had been warning him about for like a thousand years. The writing had been helping him blow off steam for sure but that was not about to make up for a lifetime of animal fat, deep-fried food, and the stress that came from an all-purpose resentment about his lot in life. If you had to ring up Cody at that exact moment he would have come up as a copycat, and not a very good one at that.

They had to carve him up like a pig just to keep him alive.

In the recovery room at St. Jude’s they were trying to tell Cody what the hell just happened but it went in one ear and out the other. When he finally woke up his chest felt like someone had hacked it open—not to mention the wires running into his arms and out of his nose. At some point a shrimpy Tex-Mex doctor with peach fuzz and a social worker in a pigtail wearing bright yellow Crocs came to talk to him about the long way home. At a certain point in their conversation Cody realized they were referring to him as John Doe and he started tapping the social worker on the wrist.

Cody, Cody said. Cody. Cody Rogers.

C-O-D-Y? she said.

Cody rocked his head yes against the pillow.

C-O-D-Y? R-O-G-E-R-S?

Cody rocked his head yes again.

Social Security Number? The social worker said.

Of course there was no record of Cody Rogers of Grand Junction, Colorado, or anyone like that at the Colorado State Department of Motor Vehicles. The social worker finally found a Cody Rogers from Topeka in a database of Social Security Numbers for veterans of the Vietnam War. The real Cody Rogers had enlisted and gone back to Nam three times and got out with two Purple Hearts and all his limbs. Of course that Cody Rogers had nothing to do with the Cody Rogers that Cody had made up because of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, but that was no reason for him to look a gift horse in the mouth. Two weeks later the social worker, wearing green Crocs, came to see him again.

Cody? She said it loud enough for him to be deaf. I am going to assume that you’re indigent—that you can’t pay—unless you tell me different.

Cody blinked as a way of saying yes because why should he pay if he didn’t have to?

As a veteran, we can place you in the VA Hospital up on North Street. They’ve got a TCU, a Transitional Care Unit, right there in the hospital. Because of your service to your nation you don’t need to worry about a thing. This is just our country’s way of saying thank you for your service and for keeping us safe. God bless you. You earned it.

The social worker was practically yelling at him now, though in a nice social-worker way with her hair down and her bangs hanging in her eyes. All Cody had to do say yes to receive unlimited free medical care from Uncle Sam. Cody did what most any red-blooded American would do in that situation.

Sure, he said.

***

Sometimes you really should look a gift horse in the mouth.

That was the lesson for Cody after his transfer to the TCU. He could still barely walk—that was bad enough—but in the TCU he was surrounded by veterans better left for dead, slumped or hunched over so badly they could not walk without help or without one of those electric NASCAR wheelchairs. One old guy in a wheelchair just babbled all day though no one could understand a word he said. People were soiling themselves left and right so it either smelled like a latrine or like Mr. Clean was in the house. The worst was the amputees and they were everywhere: men who had given up arms and legs in foreign wars for reasons still not altogether clear. Cody was happy they never complained about it but it was no fun being around people who had been screwed by their country for no good reason.

It took five or six days before he realized everyone at the TCU thought Cody Rogers, Vietnam War veteran, was dying too. One day he caught sight of himself in the mirror and it scared the hell out of him: his face was paste, his hair gone from gray to white just like that after the heart attack. From that moment on Cody knew that if he didn’t get out of that place he was going to croak.

In a month or so Cody was moving around with a cane, sitting up for his meals, and trying to sleep through all the crap they put you through at night—popping him with pills, jabbing him with needles, taking his temperature while they blabbed away—not to mention his roommate yakking in his sleep about crossing the Yalu in the Korean War. It was more than enough to drive him nuts, so when the social worker came by with a clipboard he was ready to do anything to get out of Dodge.

Another lesson: be careful what you wish for.

Next stop for Cody was the Palisade Nursing Home one town over from Junction, and he knew right away that he was making a big mistake. Palisade itself was weirder than hell: in the middle of the desert everything was green, like someone had installed a gigantic sprinkler that watered every lawn. There were vineyards there, too—wine in the middle of Colorado for God’s sake—and it was like the town had a pass to make believe you could actually grow things where there was no water. Palisade looked nothing like the Old West whatsoever.

As a practical matter something went out of Cody the minute the social worker with white clogs wheeled him through the doors of the Palisade Nursing Home. If the veterans at the TCU in Junction were dying—and they were—then the patients at Palisade Nursing Home, veterans and non-veterans alike, might as well have been dead. Everyone there was much older than Cody: at the nursing home, a big excursion for patients came when someone from the staff rolled your non-motorized wheelchair in front of the big bird cage they kept in the hall. The staff clicked on the brakes and left the inmates there indefinitely. No one was going anywhere.

The first time they tried that with Cody he started to scream so loud they never tried it again.

The particulars of what he yelled don’t matter: the result was that the Palisade Nursing Home staff, understaffed to begin with, knew enough to leave the crazy Vietnam vet alone. Cody would sit in the one chair in his room and either look out the window or watch cable, but after a while—who knows how long—he saw no reason to get out of bed other than to do his business in the bathroom.

Cody used those days to dream of life in the Old West. Maybe he really was dreaming—or just in a dream-like state—either way Cody was able to conjure up memories of his life on a horse with a six-shooter, tipping his hat to the purdy women in the saloon who knew he always took good care of them after his adventures. Maybe he was a sheriff or a rancher or just somebody like Ben Cartwright on the Bonanza TV show who always did good—Cody could not get it straight—but in any case he was a righteous man in a time of lawlessness, one of the many men who made this country what it is today.

To cut to the chase: Cody Rogers (or whatever his name was) was dying in the Palisade Nursing Home without the benefit of loved ones. Whatever stages he was supposed to go through were long-gone by then, and he had not turned the television on in days and days. He could still eat Jell-O and get to the bathroom but that was about it. His dreams or whatever they were of the Old West were providing him with comfort but also with a story line for a life he had never led. It was all a lie: in what should have been his final days Cody could taste the dust in his mouth and knew what it was like to warm yourself against a night fire in silence lit up by a sliver of silvery moon. Maybe it was the morphine but Cody was finally happy with the life that he had never had but might have been able to write about under different circumstances. He had never done enough living to learn anything much about life, and maybe another bus trip or two to the Badlands would have made a difference—there was no way to find out. Maybe this was not the way life was supposed to end for him but who knows when the script is always changing and the story never turns out the way you think.

Cody, on his trusty horse Rifle, was riding into the sunset.

The social worker in the red Crocs came to the Palisade Nursing Home to get Cody’s signature and to say goodbye. Cody was so far gone by then that all he could make out was her saying something about making sure he was comfortable and that he would not suffer under any circumstances. It was code for the morphine drip, of course, but Cody missed the message and signed on the dotted line because she told him to.

Mr. Rogers? The social worker lips were so dry she had to lick them over and over again. Thank you again for your service. This would be a different country without men like you.

***

And that would have been that if Cody could have lifted himself out of bed when nature called.

Unbeknownst to Cody, the night orderly named Jennie had actually grown up on a ranch and her brothers and her father were actual cowboys. From what Jennie could remember there were always cattle to be driven somewhere but that was before the foreclosure: she could hardly remember anything beyond just being alone in pigtails with the pigs. She liked the Palisade Nursing Home because she was as alone as a person could be and still cash a paycheck for a full day’s work. There is probably a word due west of lazy to describe her work ethic but not even that would cover it.

If he had not been living in the Old West of his imagination Cody would have been amazed at how little Jennie could accomplish in the course of a single shift. A good night’s work for her meant she could watch her movies start-to-finish on the internet on her phone with the headphones on without lifting a finger other than to drink her 32-ounce Slurpie from 7-11. She would stop the movie if she had to—that’s why God invented the pause button—but as far as Jennie was concerned it would take a five-alarm fire to get her down the hall before the credits rolled.

Cody had never used a bed pan in his life—not even after the heart surgery—and he was not about to start now. All he needed was a hand up from whomever was on duty, for someone to take him by the elbow just in case of a teeter or a totter. Cody had never hit the buzzer before, either: the last thing he wanted was to need anything from the same staff that rolled old people in front of bird cages for the purpose of entertainment. Different as he was, the last thing Cody wanted was to be a burden on society or anyone else for that matter. It was one thing to benefit from the system inadvertently as a Vietnam vet with all expenses paid, but something else again to need a helping hand till the cows came home.

Needing others like that was like a death sentence to Cody: he had no choice now but to press that buzzer—and wait.

Jennie was too busy with Titanic after the iceberg hit to jump up just when it was getting good. With her headphones on she let the buzzer go on and on as she so often did because that was the nature of the beast in an old folks home in the dead of night. She would get to them when she got to them, once the Titanic went ass over teakettle in defiance of gravity if not the laws of computer-generated physics. Maybe Jennie was being heartless but the old folks could wait because they always did.

Hell—half of them could not tell overnight from five minutes later.

Cody, with all his anger and infirmities, could not believe this was happening to him. It was one thing to be alone out West—the son of a gun never minded being alone—but something else for someone to act as if he were some figment of someone’s imagination who did not actually exist. How many times had he hit the buzzer before? None—that’s how many—it was an unforgiveable insult to be ignored like this, the way some people would ignore you when you rang them up at FedEx Kinko’s. It signified a basic lack of respect. Cody knew that would not have been tolerated for a New York minute in the Old West, where a man could take justice into his own hands.

He knew what was coming next but as a defense mechanism his mind went right back to Fort St. Jude, and the love of Lieutenant Mordechai Savage for Jennie Jones, the only daughter of the widowed General Junius Jones. This was the part of the sequel after Jennie got hitched to the Lieutenant but before the injuns butchered her in cold blood because she was a soldier’s squaw—before Lieutenant Savage and General Jones took out their revenge on the entire tribe and then some. As he reached the climax in his mind, Cody could no longer control himself: he kept the buzzer pressed all the way down even after it was too late.

***

The social worker, in black Crocs, said she had never seen anything like this in all her years on the front lines of healthcare.

Maybe Cody should have rolled over and died after that awful night in the Palisade Nursing Home but other forces were at work. When Jennie let him lay there in his own waste Cody finally had a reason for living, like someone had stuck a cattle prod up into his nether regions at the last possible moment. He started to get better, first by sitting up again, then by walking, with a cane up and down the Astroturf halls under the bad lights.

Bad ticker and all, Cody was not about to cash in his chips when there was still work to be done.

Five months later he kissed the Palisade Nursing Home goodbye, though not quite for good. It took two days for Cody to pay his bills and tidy up things at home, but before the week was out his Silverado was washed and waxed and packed up with his FedEx Kinko’s pens, the boxes of yellow legal pads, his dishes and silverware—and the vintage handcuffs he started collecting before he passed out at Ma Kettle’s in the first place. Cody put on his black cowboy hat and his snakeskin boots. Then he picked up his Winchester and slammed the door shut behind him.

At the Palisade Nursing Home, Jennie had just begun streaming Unforgiven when Cody was turning out the lights for good at his place one town over in Junction. She was not even halfway through the movie when the buzzer started down the hall and she had to turn up the sound on her headphones to hear the shootout in full stereophonic sound. She got through the whole movie and into the credits before she put the headphones down, took a final slurp on her Slurpie, and went down the hall.

Remember me? Cody said.

He was sitting in the one chair in the same room as before. He had the buzzer in one hand with the Winchester across his lap and the black hat tipped back on his head. He put the buzzer down and pointed the Winchester at Jennie’s head.

Is this the way you treat our soldiers? Cody said.

This is America, honey. We treat everybody the same. Like shit.

So you’re honest, Cody said.

I’ll tell you what I think if you want to know.

What are you thinking now? Cody said.

I’m thinking you’re one of those fake cowboys we get over here. I mean, look at you. You probably have never fired a firearm in your life.

Cody got up with the Winchester in one hand and the vintage handcuffs in the other. He closed the door and pushed her down on the bed with the butt of the rifle. Sitting on her chest he cuffed her hands together to the bed frame over her head. Then Cody stood at the end of the bed and stuck the point of the rifle into her stomach. He was not just boiling but boiling over, like an American war hero still messed up by Nam.

Who do you think you are? Clint Eastwood?

Cody Rogers, Cody said.

You probably made that up, too.

Who the hell do you think you are? Cody said.

I’m Jennie.

Jennie? Cody said. Jennie?

Jennie Constable. That’s my real name. Do you even know who you are?

Cody spread her legs into a Y with the butt of the rifle. He moved the rifle to between her legs and fired through her skirt into the mattress with a big WHOOMPF! From the smell Cody could tell she had voided herself. It was seeping out all over the bed and Cody could smell it. He put the buzzer between both her hands over her head, and then he left her trapped there with the vintage handcuffs in her own waste.

Ride ’em cowboy, Jennie shouted. Yee-haw!

Cody could hear the buzzer all the way down the hall. He took her headphones from the front desk and never looked back.

***

Cody changed his name to Tex Kitteridge and moved on. It was not as if the whole thing had never happened—Cody was not that crazy—but he still had to find his place in the sun before the Grim Reaper returned to rip his heart out one last time. Cody was thinking of writing stories of a more contemporary nature, like the one about the nurse and the buzzer that no one would believe in the first place. Durango might not be half-bad for a writer if there weren’t too many hippies there—or maybe Mesa, or even Steamboat in a pinch.

Out West, a man had to be left for dead before he could find a fresh start.