Strange Cowboy (14 page)

Me, I was a western boy, called, I heard, I felt myself step outward from my chest
and saw my breath rise up away from me, saw my father’s breath rise up away, and Whim’s
breath, too, rising now, upward and away from us, escaped, my father’s gift. A bird
passed through from brush to brush, a solitary rabbit. I thought of the deer, and
of the mustangs, and the coyotes and the antelope and cougar, all rising now, all
breathing; thought of the hens down there below us, in the barnyard, the cock’s crow,
the cattle, sheep, the goats, my mother. All rising, all breathing. I thought I saw
their breath, and I saw how now the basin seemed to also breathe, saw the steam rise
up from the basin bottom, watched to see where it would go, higher, higher still,
until I could not see it any longer, and saw instead the sun, nothing, next to nothing,
white, a blank, I thought, I could not see, was blinded, and afraid, and was happiest
to come down from my father’s shoulders, happiest at last to have us turned back down
the hill for Mother. I was
innocent, the birthday boy, my father should have needed better. He gave me everything
he could, a feeling and a vision, undirected, all I could imagine. I imagine he gave
himself to me as a caution. I imagine he invited me. I do not doubt what I felt, my
memory of his power, the restless, burdensome illusion he delivered me of self-creation.
He made his own life. A man could make his life. I imagine he said:
You are the proof of my making.
I imagine he was saying:
You unmade me.
Nothing I imagine feels to me untrue. Nothing has happened. Nothing done or said.
He wanted to kiss me. He wanted to throw me off that cliff, down into the basin. I
imagine he foresaw me here, seated in my easy chair, teasing threads from an armrest,
gripped, looking backward not toward my son, but to him, my father, thinking to begin
my story there, trying to recover to myself another pulse of feeling from a morning
singled out from every other morning I have lived through and forgotten. What better
need? My wife, my son: What truer views of end and confirmation? She came to me, my
chairside, stood before me with the news I had forgotten from the bigger world, just
as my father’s wife had brought him news back from the bigger world before him. And
where should I have been except within a littler world, my own, gone back to the morning
I turned five? I remember I was really riding on my father’s lap then, not his saddle;
he had taken back his reins and held me close against his chest and belly. I watched
our shadows go before us. There was my father’s shadow, the tallest and the first,
and Whim was there, and riding somewhere in the shapes we cast before us would be
me, Lincoln Dahl, another.

—Hope struck by a Buick—Hans’s sausage—Christmas at the Anchorage—save the chair,
bury the dog—the boy is mute—the ground is frozen—God made Hope a schnauzer—remembered
by the family vet—the pound was not a pound—someone there was there—what was really
being rendered?—Chinese food!—the Asiatic physiognomy—boy not have dog for birthday—whose
voice did I refuse to hear?—the cat still has his tongue—snow—your father’s life before
you—the seed is customarily expulsed—God’s love covers us in dust—tremor, shudder,
uproar, heat—candy at the Roxy—the herky, jerky Jesus—ballad of my wife’s more tragic
lover—we might escape ourselves—I was asking you at least to fuck me—my wife’s dream
of the son to come—preposterous nostalgias—what if?—I wish that love could last a
little longer, please—my chair, my confidant—were we anybody’s dream?—the road was
poorly marked—we come at last to Grandma’s—the possibility of Rome—a poem lay in my
mother’s lap—she suffers upward to a sense of humor—he brought your grandson here
to see you—our Hope was a rooster—

The news was Hope. Hope was often news. Old news, reported by my wife, and by my son,
received, then typically forgotten, much as I receive and then forget the record of
our daily weather. Like the pages in the County Crier dedicated to announcing births,
engagements, and obituaries, she would always
be there, Hope, a general condition of our local being. Yet the news today said Hope
was not to always be there, the dog was dead, run down by a Buick. Had it been a European
vehicle, or a luxury sedan, or had my neighbor named his dog a name like Ginger, or
like Buck, or had my son been even second to attend to her, then I am certain that
my wife would never have sustained herself beside my chair for long enough to make
me Hope’s mortician.

“A Buick!” said my wife. “Hope! A hit-and-run, in Winnemucca! It isn’t right,” my
wife was saying, “where on earth is common decency? How much younger can our children
keep on losing innocence?”

Her question did not want for intrigue. I understood it, as she phrased it, though
I knew enough by now to let my understanding lapse in silence. I knew enough to stand,
fetch a shovel. My wife, unsurprisingly, pursued me in my search. It was fine of me
to quit my chair, she was saying, it “certainly was a start;” but the trouble here
with Hope required more of me than my provisions for her burial. Although I could
not foresee each place to which she had it in her mind to send me, I had seen enough
to know that once she had me up, and moving, there would be no peaceful termination
to my movements till the day itself was terminated, and it was night, and movement
found its terminus in darkness and in sleep. I looked forward, and saw as far out
as my neighbor, the possibility of owing him apologies; I looked backward, and saw
as far out as my fence, the likelihood of having finally to mend it. I saw no necessity
in either chore, but only niceties, required by my wife, a middle-class diplomacy
engaged to gratify the shames and mildnesses her people taught her were the bloodroot
of their further being. She was right, of course. This is where we live. But it isn’t
where I come from. I myself had grown up classless. Farther
out. As a boy, I saw the mildness in the lamb and preferred to be the coyote. Why
apologize? The dog was dead, wasn’t she? And if the dog was dead, and we did not anticipate
her resurrection, then what reason could there be for any further talk of mending?

Well, the world seemed strange to me. The mists came down. I found my shovel, true,
and I asked my wife if she’d been hoarding anything along the lines of burlap—but
still I somehow seemed too stiff to myself, a long way off, I was afraid I might start
shouting, asking questions, accepting answers, acting on good faith. Beyond the carcass
and the hole, the shovel and the sack, I did not know what I was doing. I had been
sitting for a long, long while. Where did I intend to dig the hole? What about the
boy? Had I considered prayer? Wasn’t I, my wife kept asking, even just a little, “wee-bit-little”
sorry? I felt as if I were a newborn, besieged by sudden light and consequence. I
felt faces peering in at me, phantom sorrows, joys, and follies I was born to solace
and perpetuate. My wife took hold of both my wrists, just there at the pulse-points,
and she shook them, and I saw in her the causeways leading to the possible conclusion
that a burial was not an end, but an invitation to innumerable, restorative beginnings.
Begun is begun, I thought, the can of worms was open, the squirm and bore irrevocably
commenced.

“You could take the boy to get a dog,” she said.

And as for my neighbor, my wife suggested as a “follow up” to an apology, an invitation
to the party. My son’s party! No sense in our neighbor suffering alone, she thought.
Party horns, pointed hats, balloons, a real-live birthday boy—well, such spectacle,
she said, it would help the poor man take his mind off Hope.

“That’s right,” she said, “we’ll have him over here! He loves Hans’s sausage. Invite
him. And then you come back here, and
you and the boy—father and son—you two can go on down to the Humane Society—you know,
across from the rendering plant, same block there as Lily Fong’s?—and let him pick
exactly what he wants—and from there you’ll have it easy, you know, because you’ll
end up not too far from the Anchorage, and you know as well as I do when the last
time was you saw your mother. Think of your mother. And your son. Forget about me,
just think what it was like to have a dog around the house! Think of who all you’ll
be making happy!”

“Well, now,” I said, “hold your horses.”

First off, I explained to her, our neighbor wasn’t likely to derive much comfort from
the company of children and a few odd strangers, imbibing punch and pinning tails
on donkeys, wolfing cake and sausages in order to commemorate the passage of another
year beyond our little Lincoln’s birth. Revelry, I said, was not a universal antidote
to suffering. I suggested that our neighbor was a member of the old guard, not a public
sufferer, a man no doubt inclined to fight the good wars on his loss and sorrows from
the ramparts of his private heart. I didn’t mean to sound too corny. Not too flowery.
I had no idea what a rampart of the heart was, neither a private one nor a public,
or what either could have looked like, but was moved to figuration by my wife’s vitality,
hoping an indulgent, desperate rhetoric might quell it. Less desperately, I reminded
my wife that our neighbor, like my father, was prone to stroke. He walked with that
cane, I said, and didn’t he have that diet? Feed him sausages and cake, he might croak,
I told my wife. I conjured up scenarios for her in which our neighbor fell into the
punchbowl, or sprawled himself across the floor and twitched, or else sustained a
milder aneurysm, one that caused him merely to forget himself—where he was, to whom
he spoke—so that we
might catch him with a child across his lap, imparting to the child the vivid reminiscences
of favors he, our neighbor, used to borrow from the fairer sex of sheep. I invoked
our neighbor’s dignity, our culpability; I swerved toward my waxing, festal humor.
The boy and I were getting on, I told her. Did I tell my wife, I wondered, that I’d
helped the boy to open up the tin she’d brought him home of shoeblack? Did I describe
to her my patience, while I sought to guide him in its application? Hope, no doubt,
had put the
kibosh
on his spirits; no doubt, I told my wife, it was a little thing, compared with the
dog, my having helped the boy to wash his face and scrub the shoeblack from his fingernails,
but it was “progress,” as she called it, I thought it might be true that we were “getting
somewhere,” I thought I had begun to work us toward a solvent destination.

The Humane Society, I told my wife, was nowhere near to where I thought we should
be getting, and the only destination likelier to spoil the boy’s and my communion
was my mother’s. I asked her had she thought these errands through? Had she foreseen
the narrow kennels? Had she forgot the chainlink? I recalled her to the darkened corridors,
the chilly concrete and the hoses, the stink of wastes and sicknesses and fear and
even loneliness we doubted any hose would wash away and worried whether any animal
we might adopt there wouldn’t carry out to our place with him. And what about the
shaved ones? And the diabetic? And what about the clamor? And this was saying nothing
of the other clamor she suggested, the other stinks and shocks of sight and texture
she intended us to visit at my mother’s. Ping-pong and wheelchairs. Popcorn. Unguatine.
Vitagel. The beseechers: Can you read this label? Will you push that button? Don’t
I know you? And had my wife considered Christmas? Christmas, at the Anchorage? Never
mind my mother; there was a seven-fingered man there, arthritis in the five of seven,
no thumbs on him to speak of—what if our appearance should inspire him to wrap a present?
Youth inspires. Even my youth, relative to theirs, even my appearance has inspired
this old man to pull his comb out, in the past, despite his baldness, and to button
up his pants—so what, I asked my wife, what if my appearance with the boy occasions
this poor patriarch to try his hand at cutting out a cardboard angel? Scissorwork!
Consider it, I told my wife—the resistance of the cardboard, the tricky contour of
the wings, the halo, the pressure of performance, an audience, no thumbs!

“It’s nothing for a boy to see,” I told my wife. “And believe me, I don’t think I
know the person who could keep himself from watching. Nearly all of what you see out
there,” I said, “well, it’s more captivating than a train wreck.”

I recalled her to my mother’s latest romance, this fellow Vernon, as a further instance
in this class of captivator, describing his ability to fit his fist into his mouth,
once he took his plates out. The “fist pit,” Vernon called it, “the deflatable face.”
I could see him putting on a show, I told my wife, really going “whole hog” to impress
the grandson, reliving for the boy the kick that Vernon made to steal his third-place
finish at the Wheelchair Jamboree, stretching out his neck beyond his kneecaps, edging
by this legless, big-armed man a decade Vernon’s junior. I apologized, backed off
a little, told my wife I didn’t mean to make a catalog of inmates at the Anchorage,
neither their infirmities, nor how their infirmities might possibly display themselves
through Holidays and competitions. I supposed my mother’s cohorts did not differ greatly
in their phases of decrepitude from any other citizen expiring down the nation’s hallways
of assisted living. In
the long run, what troubled a person was their power to command the gaze. They were
visions. Visionaries.
This is what you wanted, this is what you’ll get.
It was something like the county fair, I told my wife, going out to visit mother,
like the funhouse mirror where you looked and saw yourself distorted and were sure,
at first, that you could find a way to stand to undistort yourself, to show the people
who were laughing at you that this wasn’t you—you had all ten fingers, both your legs,
all your teeth, you were the person you remembered. The one who bought the ticket,
paid his money, said he always wondered what went on inside there, went inside and
saw. Laughable, I told my wife, nothing to be laughed at. Bad skin. Brittle bones.
Beleaguered hearts. The spine shrinks. The stems relax; the eyeballs come unmoored;
they float in roamy orbits through the sockets. The one eye fastens on the unborn
grandchild, the other on the yellow swing, the other on a recipe for lemon pound-cake,
the other on a pattern for an unmade dress, a missing drill bit, a fifth of bourbon,
on a vintage starlet, a wad of chewing gum, the plot of ground, a bird, a rock, a
shell, on you. These are your mottled, yellow children. By turns, you see their eyes
will glitter, gleam, burn, water, flare and smoke. This is smugness, pity, fear, oblivion,
indifference, love. I told my wife I thought the boy might be preserved from it, said
our duty to him ought to be to keep his mysteries intact.