Strange Cowboy (11 page)

“Forgetfullness,” my wife would use to say, believing it was charming, until it meant
my not remembering the day that we were married. No bouquet, no card, no dinner out,
no Happy
Anniversary. She was dressed. Not dressed, but
dressed.
Something classic-drab, and middle-lengthed, a fabric and a cut I recognized a woman
in our town would air for several days, preceding an Occasion. She wore Occasion Shoes,
an Occasion Scent from which I could extract a vision of Occasion Panties. She had
got her hair done. Had it teased up off her temples and her nape into a modest hive.
She did her lids, her rims. She curled her lashes, plucked and penciled extra arch
into the brow, hollowed out a cheekbone. I remember thinking she seemed regally surprised,
undecidedly Cleopatran. She told me she’d been waiting. Later, because of the date,
and the hour of my arrival, she told me she expected something different. Maybe I
had rented a tuxedo. Maybe I would hand her up into a horsedrawn carriage. Maybe I
would fly her off to Dallas. Whereas there I was, dressed down, afoot, unready to
go anywhere, same as always, only later. I asked her, when she told me what the day
was, was she certain, could she not have been mistaken of the date? Doubtless, I confessed,
we might be certain of the season; I claimed to recognize—by the blackened branches,
the frost-scorched blooms and birdless vista—that we had come at last into our month,
but come into our day? Our very day? Its very week? Its only number?

I said, “I thought that we were married on a Wednesday. The date—I could have sworn
it was an odd.”

Soon after, as an unexamined token of my want “to do what’s right,” I removed my belt
and gave it to my wife, dropped my pants and grasped my ankles and instructed her
to “let me have it.” And she would have, she explains, her first want was to hurt
me. In retrospect, she faults our posture, something physical for having compromised
her wants, she recalls my hair. Possibly, she says, beneath the kitchen light, its
unfavoring flourescence, she
was astonished to observe what such abundancies of bottom-hair should really look
like; possibly she held off with the belt for fear of rupturing a pustule. She felt
repellently embroiled, she said, felt herself to be a witness to an accident, a private
mishap, as if the hirsute, pallid hash I sat on was the outgrowth of a quarrel I carried
on within myself, a domestic spat my wife perhaps believed was best left unintrusively
concluded. Then, too, poultry crossed her mind; my testicles, seen lolling from my
backside, inducing her to visions of the turkey’s wattle, the scalded, wrinkled throatsack
of the barnyard cock.

“And I really never noticed how much lower one was than the other,” says my wife.
“I never thought about how you could really get them swinging.”

Naturally, they swung. I grasped my ankles, as I said, and I braced myself, and flinched,
despite my wife insisting hers were nothing more than “love-strokes,” and between
each stroke, when I allowed myself to look, I saw them, meat and nuts, Pauls and Peter,
cock and ballocks, swinging. I felt betrayed. It seemed gay to me, this swing, incongruous,
a lark, certainly unstoic. This wasn’t punishment, was not even science, not the classic
physics; it was difficult for me to see in such insouciant movement a numeric ratio
relievingly descriptive of our folly. I wanted cool. Objectivity. Formula. I thought
I might experience at last, by virtue of my wife, the heaven-headed vision builded
on the rock-hard footing of a categorical imperative.

Eventually, whether from my head’s displacement in the pulmonary loop, or from embarrassment,
or both, I felt the blood collect behind my eyes; I thought my eyes might burst, my
ears; I felt myself delivered not by science, not by knowing, but by feeling, but
discomfort. I sought to cleave to this discomfort, and soon
enough had also the discomfort of a cramp to cleave to, a stitch in my side, a crick
in my neck, the sudden, peripheral awareness of my mother. As for my wife, I was not
too long in understanding she had meanwhile found out for herself a system of delivering
her strokes by which each stroke was paired with the announcement of each ornament
my oversight had ruined for our evening. One stroke for the stockings, said my wife,
one stroke for the pearls, each stroke falling with a force, I thought, commensurate
with the ruin each intended to redress. The hair, for instance, stung me nearly not
at all, whereas the watermelon douche provoked a tingling in my system from the sphincter
to the sinus. I was happy, then, to have made a little sense. Gradually, as the strokes
accrued, I thought I might have been delivered further from my folly, a little nearer
up to moral vision through the parsing of a rank. Hard to say, however, how many strokes
I had endured, how much was truly on its way to order, before my wife was humped along
my spine, pantingly, muttering obscenities and petting my erection. Hard to say how
many times my seeking after punishment has landed me in love. In my experience, a
hand is raised against the naked skin—my skin—a clap sounds, a gasp, a cry, and there
I see myself, despite myself, aroused to tumefaction; there I see another striving
forth of foreign life.

In seeking after punishment, it may be I conceived this son, who was in turn delivered
to the clap and the gasp, the cries we were relieved to hear had landed him in living.
He breathes, he cries, he lives; he breathes, he cries, he lives. Life, we say, my
wife and I, happy to observe his mastery of the habit, its variable expansions. Through
the years, we see our son has come to be selective of his food. We see he has his
joys. He plays, he hits, falls sick, gains weight, grows height, sheds shoes, soils
himself and
sings. He thinks, my wife informs me; he will, she says, remember. And will he, I
must wonder, love? And will his love occur to him, obscurely—when it slows, unheats,
congeals—as his reward for an unconscious quest for punishment? When he wakes at night,
will there someday be a woman sleeping there beside him? Will he remember how she
came to be there? Will he lean to her, draw nearer to regard the addled cheek, slack
beneath the winter starshine; will he listen at her mouth, hear her dogged, longing
blood, lay his fingertips against her forehead, find her pulse and worry: What have
I done wrong? Will there have been an unrecited sin he wants to call up from his past,
for which he hopes he might, following a life endured beside this woman, finally be
absolved?

He did not believe so. He was a simple boy, a literal man, he lived a simple want.
Initially, he liked this woman’s walk. He liked the reedy swing to her arm, the way
she carried her shoulders one up higher than the other. Her dresses cost a dime. She
drank honeyed milk sometimes at night and sometimes read the menu to him if they ate
out nights for dinner. She coddled eggs for him. She taught him Hot Corn, Cold Corn;
they sang Vine Covered Cabin. He found a note inside his pocket, once, a promise of
a kiss she’d written on a circus cookie boxtop, a clue to lead him to another clue
to where he could—in a bath, in a bed, in an April garden grown of daffodils and tulips—find
her. What life had he kept from her? What greater love? Who was she to him, that he
must hold her? And who is he, I ask myself, to me? How is it that I hold them? A lover
and a wife, a spectre of a mother, maybe, and a son: no avenue, I think, to absolution.
Lately I have watched him draw, seen him mooning over tubers, have been compellingly
perplexed to witness his devotedness to Hope. My son continues in his life as foreign
to my mind as tumefaction; as strange to me as
those rebukes I carry, sacked and corded in my pants, from which he is, in part, descended.
And my wife, no less strange to me, her love, what has it fetched her? She will not
call it punishment. She calls love love.

“I have loved,” she says. “I know how to punish.”

I did not doubt her; I believed, saw she wore a body muscled by the heavy repetitions
of her loving. Her bones warped purposeward. She stepped sexlessly, was ponderously
doggish, moved as if she were unaudienced, as if motion had reduced itself, for her,
to the provisioning of sustenance and shelter. She meant what she meant. A husband
could not shake her. There was no flight to her. No abandon. Every feather of her
heart had turned to lead; her heart was pumping lead; her veins conducted lead; lead
lay grayly in her eyes, fell grayly anywhere she looked and found her future. She
shook a highly moral fist. She wagged a bladed finger. Had she struck me, I do not
believe I should have been allowed the breath to air myself in speaking. Not that
we spoke. Not then. Not today. We were both of us unaired. Shut up. Densening. Clearly,
I would not remember. We understood, I think, that I’d forgot. Her purpose. Why she
stood. What she said. I remembered rather what she interrupted. My thought, its thrust,
the relative importance of a breath.

Because it was a breath I had been thinking of, breathing, my father’s breathing,
on my birthday, early, early on, the first thing of the day I can remember.
Breathe,
I thought, and felt as if my wife, her breathing, our need of breath, of speech,
had landed me where I had been before she interrupted. Speak. Speak, speak, speak,
and
breathing,
I was thinking, Papa’s breath. I was returned there. My wife returned me, with a
difference, past beyond accordions
and bagpipes to a blondeness and a gleam, an original necessity, a narrow bed where
I had pulled the sheets up to my chin and watched the stars shine out and fell to
sleep and waked up being five.

I was saturated, then, built again of widenesses and suddeness and leap. I wore a
bowtie. Suspenders. I said
and then
a lot, remember? And then, I was sleeping, and then I waked up, and then it was dark
and I could smell my daddy’s breath. Cigarettes, I could have said. Coffee, last night’s
supper, middling bourbon, my father’s want to wake, and to sleep, to wake and not
want to be sleeping. I was five. I knew what I meant. I knew more than I could say;
I believed that what I said was everything I knew. He was a shape there, in the dark;
he felt stiff to me and whiskery; I felt him breathing. And I could smell his breath,
and the smell of him that was not his breath; I likely might have pulled Amelia Dangberg’s
hem and said:
He smelled like Losivya.
Which was true. He smelled, as I recall him, like the inside of his pickup. Which
was also true. Diesel fuel, dog and cow, days of sun, unpaid bills, bent nails and
a cracked dash and a prayer for coolness and a little rain. It was true he waked up
in the dark, true he drove out in his pickup to his fields and checked his heifers,
true he drove back to the barn and milked. He might have pulled a calf. He might have
lost a calf. He wanted me to call him Pop. I felt the size of his desires. He did
not need to tell me when he lost a calf that he would rather not have lost it. He
might have lost a sheep. His mare, perhaps, could break her leg, stepping through
the cattle guard. Hail could fall, drought persist, hoppers swarm, markets plummet,
the meanest southward breeze could scratch him from the winner’s board in futures.
He came in to me. He knelt beside my bed. He laid his hand against my back so I could
feel it through the covers. He was the freeze to
me. He was the cat that sat beside the milkpail while he milked, the leppy calf that
waked up bawling for its mother. He breathed straw and seed. This was new, my father
waking me, he never waked me up before, and still I knew him. He was river-gleam;
the sun beat through his palms; a dry wind sifted through his ribs and smelled to
me like leaves and hides, like dust, like lung, like Pop.

“Hey,” he said, “wake up. Wake up,” he said, “it’s me, your Pop.”

Perhaps he had foreseen me, was afraid he saw a boy whose life would pass him by unready.
I was that boy. I am this man.

“Nothing has to be so perfect,” says my wife. “He’s your son. He’s five. He wasn’t
there. It’s a story, why don’t you just make it up?”

So I addressed my son at the kitchen table over mugs of chocolate. I shouted from
across the yard. I came upon him chipping paint from off the mailbox, stripping paper
from the walls, watched him chop the blooms off from his mother’s amaryllis. He carved;
he scrawled; I asked him what he thought he must be thinking. He looks up at me, somewhere
close these past few days beyond me; when he speaks, I have the sense these days his
speech is not delivered from his mouth, but from the place where he is looking.

“Dreams come from my sheets,” he says. “At day they wait, and then at night they come
out of my sheets until they wake me up so I can see them.”

He says, “I’m really happy I like water.”

He pulls the petals from the blooms he chops, touches out his tongue against a leaky
gouge.

“For me,” I say, “I remember I was cold. I forgot it even was my birthday, but when
my papa said it was, then I remember I got warmer.”

I told the boy I wore pajamas.

“We said PJ’s,” I explained to him. “We never called them jammies. What I thought
about the leaves was that the trees had gone to sleep and accidently dropped them.”

My son looks down from me. He names a rock. He looks up past beyond me, asks me when
the lizards will come back, and will the desert ever be a forest.

He says, “Hopey sweats in her mouth.”

And, “Yellow moons are hotter than a white moon, did you know it?”

So far, understandably, his interest in my story is remote. I do not believe my offerings
to him have caused him any interruption from himself; I often think there is no self
to him which might be interrupted. I think I make no difference. I go and I come to
him as the tide goes, as the wave comes, as the fish is washed upon a shore and turns
its eye up at the sun and is devolved to gape and bone and scatter. I bear him nothing
new. Profoundly. He knows the wind can feel because it’s it that moves it. His feet
are hooved. He barks. He spins a web out from his body, hangs suspended in the canopies
and catches gnats. His young are very old.