Strange Cowboy

Praise for
Strange Cowboy

Yeah, yeah,
Strange Cowboy, Strange Cowboy,
you bet, you bet—but I’m telling everybody twenty-one years ago this very same Sam
Michel brought out—not that you would know it for the innattention paid—
Under the Light.
Ok, that plain book was an assembly of stories, whereas this intricate ditto’s a
novel. I see the difference, granted. What I also see is a dandy chance for me—Tyrant’s
tyranny so very graciously suspended—to send you back back back to the luminous
Under the Light
and thus to a constellation of illuminings afire within. Justice for Sam Michel!

—Gordon Lish
(Dear Mr. Capote)

Praise for
Big Dogs and Flyboys

“Adam Oney, the hero of Sam Michel’s bittersweet debut novel, is rightly named after
that first namer. His other forebear is Icarus, only in this version, the boy survives
to tell his own story with surpassing compassion for all.”

—Christine Schutt
(All Souls, Nightwork)

“Michel creates a character of enormous, unnerving innocence in prose both stealthy
and extravagant. The ending is a knockout.”

—Joy Williams
(Honored Guest, The Quick and the Dead, The Changeling)

“Sam Michel is such a smart, manic, virtuosic stylist. He’s also a surprising, big-hearted,
courageous storyteller, whose considerable talent is firing on all cylinders in
Flyer,
a book full of odd/beautiful language, and the kind of deep insights that make you
suddenly and newly appreciative, of the world around you.”

—George Saunders
(Pastoralia, Bounty-Land, In Persuasion Nation)

Tyrant Books

676A 9th Ave #153

New York, New York 10036

ISBN 13: 978-0-9885183-2-2

Copyright © 2012 by Sam Michel

Excerpts fom this book have appeared in Epoch,
NY Tyrant,

Massachusetts Review, 3rd Bed,
and
Unsaid.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof
in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations
in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction and all the characters, organizations, and events within
it are from the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

First Tyrant Books Edition, 2012

Cover and interior design by Adam Robinson

Cover photograph by Noy Holland

www.tyrantbooks.com

For Patricia and for Noy

DUTY

INTERRUPTION

ENORMOUS LANGUAGES WERE PITCHED AGAINST US

RECAPITULATION

—Mother could be dead—how calm?—how sit?—burning questions—no dogs in the house—no
wife in the house—our heaven-scented future—your son has got his birthday—tell the
boy your story—he is staying younger longer—clammy in the old illusion—Living Wings
of Memory—Master Of the Seated Half-Dads—a chair-sized chamber in his skull—I was
a different man—cunny stew—our favorite game was Horsey—invitro lesbians and queer
scouts—pork chops and baked potatoes—my story is not his—demolition of the Roxy—the
hurry to regret—the butcher’s crush—your subbest-conscience—Father, Son, and Hope—what
really killed my father—Mother in The Anchorage—party in the barn—we killed a cow
and barbecued our ownselves—God prefers His women—Mother lives—

My mother sits, dead, could be, though I believe she lives, though she is old in life,
and should she not be dead, then might at least appear to some to be more dead than
living. She enacts that look. More dead. She has got her blood down, stilled her breath,
her face pales in a deeper shade than sleep. In her, a soul seems out. The body seems
a corpse, ready to exude. Certainly, she will not be stirred. I have called her name
to her, softly, whisperingly across the lamp stand, then more urgently, more hissingly,
I think, calling her by both the name I share with her, and then again by the name
she went by as a maiden. I tried Gob. I thought it might sound sweet to her, an endearment,
should she not be dead, this Gob, an indication of how far this day had taken me,
in terms of showing some familial affection. On the other hand, I saw perhaps how
she might fail to know me through affection. I was her son, after all, unendeared;
if she would rise, what was likelier to coax her rising than the pitch of a familiar
spirit? Yet should I call her hag? So soon, that is, so hard up on the heels of Gob,
in her condition? And had I really ever called her hag? Nag, I wondered, snag, drag,
crag, crack? Was I the son to curse the crack through which another life was passed
into this world of miseries and sorrow?

Not hardly. No, not Dahl. Not Lincoln. No, not me, not hardly. All in all, I like
my life, my looks, my mind, my car, my yard, my house, my chair—I am content. Though
true enough, my content does not descend from Mother. True enough, I am born, and
suckled, shoved off from the nipple and instructed to pursue content on “someone else’s
porch swing;” I am told to
amscray,
me, a kid in dirty dungarees and scabby kneecaps, told to tie my own shoes, make
my own lunch, brush my teeth and put myself to bed and learn to tell myself when I
wake up in sweats and screams that I am only dreaming. Make no mistake: there is strife
there, across the lamp stand, in the easy chair, it takes little to recall those scenes
in which the two of us have been occasionally, forgivably unkind. As for me, I withheld.
I begrudged. Even now, today, I might have complimented her earrings, Mother’s wind-resistant
sportsuit. In her prime, I let her little triumphs in the public eye go unremarked;
I exercised myself by steering conversations to a place where I might call her housewife.
Yet here I had hoped to leave such unkindnesses behind me. Let a bygone be a bygone.
I have resolved to call her nothing, if not something on the lines
of Mother. Starting now, earlier, dusk, I think, I am a new man, more principled,
less vain, neater, squarer, nice. Then, too, in the case of Mother, I must confess
to yielding to an older order, no doubt acting on that etiquette which teaches us
to spare the dead, to save out our unkindness for the living. Sure, she could be dead.
Her sportsuit seems more to be arranged on her than worn. Her face appears to have
lived out rapid epochs of freeze and thaw, cataclysmic weathers whose last calm unveils
a wasted flesh, a cell-thin skin forlornly strung out on the cheekbones in the final,
waxen melt. Mother, dear old gal, out of blood, out of breath, dead and gone, dear,
dead Bonnie Dahl, it seems, the Egypt queen, embalmed.

Still, I believe she lives, reclined, where customarily I find reclining in her stead
the mother of my child, my wife, the one my mother warned me I would one day kick
myself from “here to Sunday next and back” for having married. I am calm. Imagine
me. This woman, my mother—forget strife, forget content, nevermind what she has burned
of mine or not or if it was for five or six or seven hours she would lock me in that
closet—only please remember for awhile that it was she who taught me how to ride.
Agreed, Papa was the horseman, yet it must be said that Mama was the one to show me
how to sit a horse. A pony, then a horse. Happy, and then Grief. Happy through the
barnyard, Happy through the heifer lot, then Grief to ride me gently through the lime-white
flats and brushy highlands of the wider desert. Yes, though the memory is not available
to me for seeing, it is easy to imagine Mama lifting me to sit my saddle, easy to
remake my mama’s voice:
Here’s your pony,
she says,
Happy.
He was tricky, Happy. A stocky little Shetland cuss who bucked and stomped and bit.
I think I did not like him. Left to me, I would not have called him Happy.
For me, for days called back from the equestrian arena, happiness did not begin until
the day when I turned five, and Mama turned my pony out to pasture, presented me the
reins to a swaybacked, longtoothed, buckskin gelding, no less misnamed than Happy,
Grief. Should the bullet pass straight through my brain and leave me lying just as
dead as Mother, then I should doubtless hope my last clear vision would depict some
scene of me alone with Grief; should science manufacture the elixir to unage me, then
doubtless I would choose to age back to that day when first I stroked Grief’s bony
withers. For him, and for those knightly days he gave me, I have to thank my mother.
She knew. She knows. She is my mother.

So how calm? How sit, brooding, whispery and hissing, when there I see the cause of
much of what is best in me may well have gone and perished? In truth, I might say
that I, too, appear to be more dead than living. Parts, in any case. My extremities.
Limbs and digits, dead, asleep, numb from the big toe to the hip, the pinky to the
armpit. Fault the child. He sleeps against me. Presses heaviest where I expect my
blood must run the thickest. It’s for him I whisper. His birthday. It’s for him I
think the day has come to pass as it has passed, delivering us to our respective sleeps
and failing circulations. Calmly, I regard the child, the top of his head, these flakes
that peel up from his part, his dander, I suppose; I note the click and burble in
his chest and those spasmodic, clutching twitches he is prone to making with his fisted
fingers.

Outside is the snow. Inside are my mother, my son and me, a sofa, our chairs, the
lamp stand, a mess of magazines and salted snacks and our remote. The room ticks.
The ceiling sags. We own no dog. Calmly, I ask myself how we have come to be here.
There seems time to wonder am I happy. Possibly, happiness has been forever lost for
me in any unadulterated station, owing to our
family’s mode of naming. Truly, what is riven in the mind of a child who suffers grief
at the hooves of a beast called Happy, a child who finds his happiness in Grief? On
the other hand, it may simply be that I am the man the saint has cautioned prudence
in deciding what to pray for, should he wake one day to find his prayers are answered.

I am, I know, confused. Calm, and confused, confusedly calm; I, too, have got my burning
questions. Why corduroy, for instance, why sweatshirts? And where on earth is my wife?
Have I driven her away at last? Will I see her next with something handsome on her
arm, returned to serve me papers? And my mother, should she prove me wrong in my belief,
and turn up dead, can I have killed her? After all this woman has endured, can it
be a heart attack, provoked by me, has pushed her past what even Mother can endure,
has finally, suddenly, thoroughly and totally, completely, wholly killed her? Or how
about a stroke? Could be I have pushed her to a stroke, just as I believe she pushed
my papa. Certainly, she has got her cancers. Her diabetes, osteoporosis, her acute
esophageal reflux. Unfunny, that.

“You wake up with it at night,” my mama says, “and the stuff feels like it’s killing
you as dead as dead, like maybe you have gone a little crazy with the chilis in your
enchiladas, and you are suffering the Lord’s last rectifying heartburn.”

Or, if not the reflux, not a cancer or a stroke, then maybe medications. Could be
I have overdosed her. Two blues, I believe I gave her, and a green. Whereas I should
possibly have made it vice versa. Question one: Should I have made it vice versa?
Question two: Should I count myself as culpable for having made it versa vice? With
her blood, I wonder, which one is it, thick, or thin? I wonder really are there no
such things as accidents, when it comes
to doling out the dosage? At my party, when it was me who had his turn at turning
five, was it not an accident that I should burn the barn down? Who gave me that torch?
And why? And after all that practice, how is it I should not be able even once to
dance with Mama? And is it true that I am older now than she was then? Am I old? Middle
aged? What is my current ratio, whiskers per square inch of face? Should it not suffice
that I am growing out these hairs inside my nose, without my also growing hairs there
on the outside? And what about these tufts here in my ears? Why these curling patches
on my shoulders, back and belly? I ask you: Where is God? And how? And if He is a
Christian, then must He be eternally a Roman? I mean my mother’s question, and my
wife’s, the question hinging on the boy’s unbaptized life, his vulnerability, the
possibility that he might throw his soul away to the Episcopalians, or to the Lutherans,
or the Baptists, or, worst, the nation’s scourge, our desert’s spawn, the basin’s
own corruptive cult, the Mormons.

Yet perhaps I would do well to slow myself, recall my calm. So many questions, what
began them? No doubt, perhaps, not God. Not to deny God’s precedent, historically,
as a locus from which we have figured to extrude so many such inquisitive beginnings,
no, but rather to say that my desire is to cast myself less grandly back. Enough,
I think, to wonder why no wife. Enough to ask myself what trouble I have caused my
son. Take care of your mother, and God will take care of Himself. The longer I live,
the more I am convinced the first of all preceding and succeeding questions must be
buried deep within the present past. Yet who will dig there? Who among our kind resists
the sweeter lure of an ancestral interruption, the tribe of angels choiring the chorus
from our heaven-scented future?