BRONZE → SWAY → QUICKSAND

A hotel driver dropped Jimmy off at the Jackson Town Square in the center of town.

Jimmy wanted to tour the local art galleries.

His son was a figurative sculptor—classically trained at the National Academy in New York and the Florence Academy of Art in Italy.

Jimmy had a great appreciation for artists, especially sculptors.

The bronze works and paintings he saw by some of the West’s most renowned artists were like traveling by stagecoach through American history.

By mid-afternoon, he was ready to eat, drink, and mingle.

The Cowboy Bar, as the locals called it, was like sitting courtside in Jackson Hole’s Town Square—one of the only places in America where the full range of the country’s money, labor, and ambition occupied the same few blocks at once:

Billionaires with second—or fifth—homes.

Seasonal service and hospitality workers, often living three to a room forty minutes out.

Ranchers whose families predated the money.

Retirees who came to golf, hunt, and fish.

Newlyweds on a honeymoon they saved two years for.

Ski bums and bunnies who arrived for one season and never technically left.

· · ·

As he entered The Cowboy Bar, the sloppy, messy, hypnotic song “Sway” by the Stones was playing.

That’s how Jimmy felt—sloppy, messy, hypnotized—by the time he reached the bar.

It was immediate.

Her eyes were already locked on Jimmy.

A bartender occupied an extraordinary position to observe it, assess it, document it, and never be it.

Present but invisible.

Intimate but detached.

Jimmy saw her too.

An empty seat at the bar was just a few feet away from the door.

But the distance felt like a mile.

You know that feeling when you’re walking in slow motion in real time, like wading through quicksand?

That’s how Jimmy’s legs felt.

With each step, he sank deeper.

· · ·

Dakota Iman Redfeather.

Mid-twenties.

Tall. Statuesque. Slender.

Long black hair, draped against flawless tan skin.

Dark piercing eyes.

Full, pouty lips.

Beautiful was obvious.

But there was something else about her.

The French call it je ne sais quoi.

She had something you felt before you understood it.

She commanded the space around her.

Dressed head to toe like a Ralph Lauren RRL model, she exuded the frontier spirit of the American West.

A freshly pressed white collared shirt.

Sleeves rolled up just enough to proudly display a feather tattoo on one arm.

A leather belt with a silver and turquoise buckle accented her vintage 501s.

Cowboy boots that looked as though they had actually met a horse completed her style.

· · ·

In a town built to sell an idea of freedom and reinvention to people who could afford it—and those who could only dream of it—Dakota watched an entire cross-section of the country cycle through her bar on the way to somewhere else.

She had to hear this one’s story.

“Something to drink.”

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