North Dallas Forty (26 page)

I walked to the front of the Lincoln and took a seat on the fender. Neither man seemed to notice.

“Goddam, don’t that beat all.” The bright-red fat man began pacing nervously, his head down, talking into the ground. “A nigger cowboy tellin’ me I can’t see my own girl.” He cocked his head back to look at his car. He didn’t seem to see me.

“Just move on, man.” David shoved his thumbs through the belt loops of his Levi’s and hooked a rough-out boot over the bottom rail of the gate. “I don’t want any trouble.”

“If you don’t want no trouble, then you better let me on through.”

Suddenly, David grabbed Beaudreau by the lapels and shook him like a rag doll. “Look, you fat son of a bitch, you’re lucky I don’t kick the shit outta you.” Beaudreau’s face blanched. The anger drained away and was replaced by terror.

“You better not hit me.” Beaudreau’s lower lip quivered as he tried to hold a confident smile; it degenerated into a fearful sneer.

“I’ll kick your teeth in, if you ever call me a nigger again. Now get the hell outta here before I change my mind.” David shoved the frightened man backward and Beaudreau fell on his ass.

When he regained his feet and dusted himself off, Beaudreau turned to face me. “This is all your fault,” he cried, pointing a shaking finger at me. Sweat had soaked through his jacket, making maroon half-circles under his arms. “You made a fool outta me last night. In front of everybody. That’s what I get for being your friend.”

“Beaudreau, you dumb cocksucker.” I was enraged by his assumption that we had ever been friends. “I ain’t your friend. I’ve never been your friend. I don’t wanna be your friend. If you don’t get outta here and leave these people alone. I’ll kill you myself.” I pushed the sobbing fat man toward his car.

Beaudreau turned the big Continental around and started back down the drive. When he had passed my car, he stopped, stepped out, and kicked the rear fender with a white foot. “Fucking pro-football player. Big man,” he screamed at me. “Goddam asshole, that’s what you are.” He jumped back into the big orange Lincoln and roared away, spraying gravel all over my car.

“Jesus Christ.” I shook my head.

“Sorry you had to get involved, but thanks.” David took off his hat and wiped his forehead with his shirt sleeve.

“My life is filled with shitheads like that.” I stared down the road into the settling dust. “They all watch too much television ... or maybe not enough.”

“Sorry about locking you in last night,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder and smiling warmly. “I thought you were staying longer.”

“So did I.” The conversation struck me as strange. “I came to see Charlotte. Is she around?”

“Up at the house. Trying to decide whether to castrate a calf.”

“Hope it’s not anyone I know. Do you think she’d mind if I went up?”

“I can’t say for her, but I don’t,” David said, “and I live here too.”

I tried to fix a peculiar feeling I was getting. I studied the smiling black face to learn more. There didn’t seem to be any more.

“Besides,” he continued, “if she decides to save that calf a lot of anxiety and all-around wear and tear by cutting off his balls, I’ll have to hold him. I could use a ride up to the house to hear the verdict.” He paused. “Don’t say anything to her about Beaudreau. It’ll just upset her for no reason.”

“No problem,” I said. “Jump in.”

He swung open the gate, then jumped into the front seat of the Buick. The gravel crunching and popping under the tires, we drove to the house.

“Does she do this often?” I asked.

“Do what?”

“Emasculate God’s creatures.” I shuddered involuntarily.

“What do you consider often?”

“I guess once is all I could stand.”

As we approached the house I saw a small gray outbuilding. A Brangus calf stood in the middle of an attached corral.

“The condemned,” David said, following my gaze.

“Jesus!” I said, feeling my testicles draw up into my throat.

Charlotte was sitting on the kitchen steps. David and I left the car and walked toward her. She watched us but made no sign of recognition. Next to her on the step lay a yellow bonehandled knife and a whetstone.

“Decide?” David asked.

“Yeah,” she replied, her face grim. She turned to me and broke into a friendly smile. “Hi.”

“Hello.” I tried to control the muscles around my eyes and also to read more emotion into her greeting, but failed at both. The whole situation seemed so strange. I was glad to be there, although not particularly anxious to watch the calf’s psychotherapy.

He will be a lot quieter, I thought. So will we all.

“Let’s do it,” she said, standing up and brushing off the seat of her tan corduroys. She turned to me. “You coming?”

“Why not? I’m an adult. I’m entitled to know.”

I walked several steps behind, listening to a discussion of the nuances of gender conversion. I remembered a long-past fight with my ex-wife over whether or not to castrate our dog. “Fixed,” she had said, like it was going to be a technological improvement. I was not swayed by her argument that the dog “didn’t care.” I tried to explain that just because a dog didn’t
say
anything about his balls didn’t mean they weren’t of some concern to him. My logic eluded her and although I won the argument, she later used the incident in court as evidence of my sexual insecurity.

“... calf fries ...” was what I thought Charlotte said. I certainly hoped not, but anyway her voice brought my attention to the black calf, now slowly backing away from us.

David took a rope from around the gatepost.

“Somebody’ll have to help us get this around him,” he said, trying to back the calf into a corner of the corral. “I can’t throw a loop.”

Feeling silly and out of place, I ambled across the center of the pen to join David, who had cornered the calf behind the water trough. The young bull appeared to be four or five months old. As we stalked, it bolted directly at me.

Instinctively I dropped my shoulder, preparing to lock my arms around the neck and hold on until David could get the rope on him. The tackle was perfectly executed, my shoulder hitting the calf in the brisket. I had expected a shock, but this was like tackling a ’49 Hudson. Years of football training told me to hold on but my life instincts told me to let go. I let go and tumbled to a heap in the center of the corral.

I sat up, spitting out sand and cowshit, waiting for my nose to stop burning and my eyes to stop watering.

Except for a skinned bruise on the soft underside of my bicep, where the calf had stepped on me, and a numb cheekbone that had smacked into the animal’s shoulder with enough force to break the leg of an NFL back, I felt surprisingly fit, and devastatingly foolish.

While David and Charlotte alternately laughed, inquired after my health, smirked at each other, and then burst into laughter again, I began to compose myself. Finally I stood up, slowly but grandly, and casually dusted myself off.

“The sun got in my eyes,” I said, hitching up my pants.

Their renewed laughter brought a smile to my face that made my cheek hurt. I decided that calf needed his nuts cut off and I was just the man to do it.

Despite his claims to the contrary, David was a fair hand with a lariat and soon we had thrown and tied the calf. It lay struggling on its side with three legs bound. I was at its back with my knee on its neck, pulling on a rope rigged as a halter. Bending the head up and back. I tried to keep the animal immobile as Charlotte approached with the knife. I stared into a wild, rolling brown eye.

Milking the testicles into the top of the calf’s scrotum, Charlotte grabbed the loose skin at the bottom of the sac and quickly cut it off.

“You didn’t even say I love you,” David grinned.

Jesus ... Jesus, I thought, tightening my grip on the rope and watching the brown eye grow wilder.

Two large, milky-white blue-veined oblongs hung part way out of the gaping bloody hole that had been the bottom of the calf’s scrotum. Charlotte took one of the oblongs in her palm and carefully, with the point of the knife, slit the thin white sheathing; out popped a pink gonad the size and shape of a hen’s egg. It was still attached up inside by a cord the thickness of a lead pencil. Charlotte grabbed the pink testicle firmly, wrapped the cord a couple of turns around her index finger, then clenched her fist, and pulled as hard as she could. The calf lurched and made a frighteningly human groan as the cord tore loose with a pop somewhere inside. Eighteen inches of cord came away with the testicle.

“So much for foreplay,” I said.

She quickly repeated the procedure on the remaining gonad, then sprayed a bright-purple disinfectant into the empty scrotum, pushed the loose edges back up inside and untied the calf. It lay motionless for a moment, then scrambled to its feet and trotted off to the other side of the corral seemingly undisturbed.

“Jesus—Jesus—Jesus—
Jesus!!
” I moaned. “Jeeesus!”

David and Charlotte both smiled back at me as I followed them, shaking my head and moaning nonsense to the Savior.

The recently liberated testicles, cords, and miscellaneous tissues were in Charlotte’s hand. When we reached the house she tossed them at two cats who were sitting under the kitchen steps. I watched the cats sniff and paw at the balls. Then I followed the others into the house. Jesus.

The moon was up and we were sitting on the patio at the back of the house watching the shadows across the pasture. It was chilly and Charlotte had wrapped herself in a large Indian blanket. The plates from dinner were stacked beside her chair.

“I hope you didn’t mind my coming. I tried to call.”

I shifted uncomfortably in the canvas director’s chair, trying to ease the pain in my back. The deadness in my right foot and the pins and needles in the leg reminded me that I had forgotten to ask the trainers what the cause could be.

“I’m glad you came,” Charlotte replied. “It’s been a nice evening.”

Charlotte had cooked steaks outside while David and I had rolled joints and talked of Fuller, McLuhan, Cleaver, Nixon, Carlos Castaneda, and the upcoming New York game. The game was the only subject in which I was sufficiently versed to feel comfortable, although I found the others, with the exception of Nixon, profoundly more interesting.

After we ate David excused himself and returned to the bungalow to do some work.

Night sounds floated in from the shadows—an occasional night bird, dogs barking from distant farms and the rustling and snorting of animals in the nearby corrals and barn. Miles away a car door slammed. The wind picked up slightly and made a funny hissing sound as it eased through the needles of the big pine that rose above the patio. There were several gunshots. An owl hooted, its high-pitched “whoo” sounding like a Hollywood sound effect.

I fished a joint from my shirt pocket. We had run out of papers early in the evening and Charlotte had quickly solved the problem with unabashed pioneer spirit. I held up the exceptionally long joint and in the moonlight could make out the words super tampax. I snorted a small laugh and lit up, passing it to the slim hand reaching from beneath the blue-and-red Indian blanket.

“They sure make king-size joints,” Charlotte observed.

“Enough to rival the legendary Austin torpedo, I would say.”

Glowing brightly as she inhaled, the cigarette softly illuminated the dark depressions of her eyes. They were big, round shadows with a slight flash of light like catching a glimpse of the water at the bottom of a deep well.

My aching back and legs drew my attention and I shifted, searching a position that would strain as few nerves and muscles as possible.

“Nervous?” Charlotte asked, watching me fidget.

“No. Just sore.”

“Do you want to go inside?”

“Not unless you do. This is fine.” I made a sweeping gesture with my hand. “This here is a real fine universe.”

I pulled the collar of my sheepskin coat up around my neck, burrowing my chin down inside. The sound of distant music and laughter stilled our Hollywood owl. There was a loud yell and a door slam and the night was silent again.

“That’s the Bartlette kids,” Charlotte said. “Their place is six miles that way.” She pointed in the opposite direction from where I thought the sounds had come from. “The youngest son is engaged to a Mexican girl. It’s causing quite a community crisis. He met her at Methodist Youth Fellowship.”

I leaned back and smiled into the sky. The sky was filled with shining, flashing, changing little spots of light. They say you can never see more than five thousand stars with the naked eye. I didn’t see one less. A meteor made a desperate try for Dallas but disappeared in a green-red blaze. I took the joint from Charlotte’s outstretched hand, which immediately slithered back beneath the blanket.

“God, it’s beautiful here,” I said. I felt Charlotte turn to look at me. I took a long drag on the weed and turned to meet her gaze. “Would you please sleep with me again?” I asked.

Pulling the blanket up around her shoulders, she smiled, got to her feet and walked into the house.

“That’s Tchaikovsky, isn’t it?” I was lying naked across the bed, a pillow under my chin.
Swan Lake
drifted in from the den. It was one of the few pieces of classical music I knew.

“Did you see
The Music Lovers
?” Charlotte asked.

She was brushing her hair out and letting it fall down over her bare shoulders. She laid the brush down and arranged herself next to me on the bed with her arm resting lightly on my back. I could feel the warmth of her leg pressing against mine. Her fingernails scratched lazily on my arm, raising chills. She pushed her other hand up the nape of my neck, lifting my hair away, and sliding across my back she kissed me warmly on the shoulder. I could feel her breasts, the hard nipples brushing along my shoulder blades.

“It was a grand movie,” she continued. “I loved Richard Chamberlain.” She gently pushed me onto my back and kissed me wetly on the stomach.

We made love carefully and with few variations, often stopping to look into each other’s eyes to try to read the feelings there. I watched her face and listened to her ragged breathing, trying to anticipate her climax. My back began to ache violently, distracting me enough to postpone my completion.