‘The Horse’ by Willy Vlautin      (2024) – 194 pages

Back when live music was still considered something exciting and important, the casinos in the Nevada gambling cities of Las Vegas, Reno, Lake Tahoe, and other towns would hire live bands in order to attract crowds. Al Ward, now sixty-four, has spent much of his life playing in these bands and in his spare time writing country-western songs.

Some of the songs he has written: “Halfway Between Her and You”, “The Bottle’s the Only Friend I Got Left”, “Lynette”, “A Girl on the Streets of Tucson”, “A Busted Windshield and a Broken Hand”, “Waiting on a Winnemucca Bus”.

“And no matter what he did or how hard he tried, his songs were good but never great. How many notebooks had he filled with half-good songs, songs that were almost?”

When Al was just nineteen, he played in a band with the singer Mona Maverick who was “curvy and blonde like an aging Playboy bunny”.

“With makeup and in the right light she looked to be in her late twenties, but in the morning with no makeup she was every day of the thirty-eight-year-old bulimic alcoholic she had become.”

Mona came to Al’s room one night. They wound up in a short marriage.

And so it goes.

For a time he plays with two brothers called the Sanchez Brothers who are on the verge of making it big singing Al’s songs with Al playing in their band and the band even moving to Nashville until one of the brothers overdoses.

Later he meets the love of his life, Maxine, but that gets messed up too.

Al is now an old man, a drunk and lazy ex-musician, and has become thoroughly disenchanted with the music scene. He has secluded himself in the Nevada desert fifty miles from the nearest town. He lives by himself on canned soup and instant coffee.

A blind horse wanders on to his property. The coyotes attack the horse, and Al shoots one of them. Al wonders if he should just shoot the blind horse and put it out of its misery, but he can’t do it.

It’s a sad life, but sometimes reading about the hard-luck life of someone else can cheer one up.

Grade:    A-