Strange Cowboy (17 page)

As it happened, I was not to be rewarded with an answer to these questions. As for
the renderer, I was thwarted first-off by the door. The door, I mean to say, was covered
over with a quilt of padded leather. It was soft! Unknockable! Innocuous! I was made
to ring a bell! My potency, paternity, my easy native pride: was it likely any audience
would sense in my performance such enlargening virtues, once their final, manifesting
act reduced to the circumference of a dime? I mean the button, the surface it required
of the ringer and my fingertip to register the belltone?
Having witnessed such an act, would anybody call it bravery? I asked myself: What
if I should jab? Repeatedly? Or should I press just once, I wondered, firmly, or grindingly,
perhaps, and grind until the hiree whose job it was to tend the door had seen enough
of me to understand that here was the sort of man who, when it came to doorbells,
ground them?

Well, I had not known how complicated it could be to get out of the car and ask. If
I could not appear to be courageous, could I at least seem funny? Was there any way
in which a father might arrange himself to indicate a threat? I thought along these
lines of several of our younger Winnemuccans I had seen who waited on our bus. I recalled
the predatory aspect they imparted through the rakish, feline deformations of their
postures. I considered their apparel. Their sleeveless shirts. The extravagant display
of volume in their trousers. I thought, too, of where they chose to pierce themselves,
and the iconography I saw was needled on their forearms and their biceps. Those icons,
what ethic is it they encode? And those trousers, what weaponry is stockpiled there?
I myself, when I was young, had worn my trousers tight. I suppose I owe my wife, improbably,
initially, to fashion. On her good days, typically those few directly prior to her
menses, she likes to reminisce about the snugness of my trousers through the region
of my groin, where I recall the denim used to bind, and chaff, and on a hot day caused
me such discomfort as to render any sign I showed of menace more actual than act.
No secrets, she explains, meaning what she saw was what she got. Which meant a certain
length, of course, and girth, an estimate, at least, of the inflated, rigid version
of the length and girth, based upon the flaccid, and also some idea of the groin’s
unwholesomeness, the incubative possibilities the fashion of our day was prone to
generate. The groin, like the lung, must breathe.
It may be that the yeasts and cheeses some of us were growing in the sultry furrows
of our privates were the milder predecessors of the knives and guns the current fashion
lends to the imaginations of the youth who sponsor and adore it. Such excitement,
says my wife, what a time it was to be at play in fields so reckless.

As for me, the fellow standing meanwhile at the threshold of the renderer’s, well,
my trousers fit, I was not pierced, I doubted I might summon passion from a doorbell,
I believe I understood that anybody watching should have seen a person capable of
neither loving nor of killing, a man without commitment, unpostured, unfashioned,
brownish-gray, submortal. Was this the thanks I got from God? Had I come from so far
off my chair to learn that I was even less than what I had so dreaded? After having
striven for so long to be so little, to owe so little from the little I’d become,
I should have thought I would be glad to have the bell unanswered. Which means I must
have not been glad but been unhappy, or if not unhappy, then certainly confused, and
also not unlonely.

Surely I had seen a light in there; it was such a light which led me to infer an audience,
after all, an audience which led me to infer a need to act, a need to act which led
me to despair, and then to loneliness, once I was relieved from the necessity of acting.
Unless I acted for myself. One always has one’s self, naturally, and his boy, of course,
if one is me, though when I turned to see if he was watching, saw that I was likely
standing several paces past the limits of his vision. For what portion of his life,
I wondered then, had I stood at such a distance, performed at those removes from him
where light diffused in shapes unhinged to meaning? In the early days, before I was
ashamed to go about before him naked, I may have seemed to him to be a pallid bank
of fog. A slim vapor. Had he seen through me? When I held him in my lap, an infant,
milky-eyed and gazey, had I meant nothing more to him than clouds meant? A threatening
of rain? Did he think somehow that I would pass? When he reached his hands up to my
face, waved his fists at me and squealed and gurgled, had he meant to make a wind,
some molecular disturbance that might hurry my dispersal? Was I so gray? Had I, through
these intervening years, allowed myself to come as close to him as I must come, in
order for the boy to really see me? Would he be forever reaching through my person
to the sunshine?

No doubt, as my wife suggested, I am prone to give the boy a little too much credit.
Nostalgic, sentimental, flighty—“in case I had forgotten”—what I needed was to be
brought down to earth. Learn to swing a pick. Fix a fence. Eat some liver. Realistically,
I knew the boy would probably have kept his eye throughout this time on Hope. Well,
so, better on Hope than on me, I thought. I thought, A Buick. And, A forceps. I touched
my fingers to my temples. I thought, Jesus, was it Doctor Root, or Doctor Sneely?
By and by I thought to ring again, and again, until I thought I had exhausted every
possibility for ringing. I jabbed, that is, and ground. I used my thumb enough to
know that nothing in it could be funny. Then I tried the door itself. Locked. Surprisingly,
I was not unpuzzled. The stink of the place—I mean the renderer’s—the smokebelch from
the chimney stacks, the several cars I saw still parked out in the lot had led me
to believe more strongly than the light alone that someone there was there. Whereas
they were not. Or else they were deaf. Perhaps there was some aspect of the renderer’s
occupation which either caused or favored deafness. Or perhaps the manager was deaf,
and was moved by either sympathy or bitterness to hire only those few applicants whose
handicaps were his, whose ability to hear, I mean to say, would not allow
them to exceed him in the workplace. Then again, it could have been that nobody was
deaf, but rather everybody had their ears corked, muffed, perhaps, in order to protect
them from the roar and shriek of the machines I featured that a renderer might use
to speed the rendering.

Really, how much did I know about this rendering? What was really being rendered?
And from what? Myself, I featured peelers, cutters, trimmers, crushers. Pumps and
vacuums, roiling vats of hide and bone and fat and gristle. Horses, cows, raccoons.
Consumme? Candlesticks? Could it be that all this industry reduced itself to soap?
Soap made sense to me. There was a logic to its being the residuum of stink and filth
I could appreciate. Alchemy, a crucible, the purifying fires. And what of me, I got
to thinking, and what about my mother? When it came my time, and I took her place,
would the odors I exuded be the sign of fires burning from within me, the soul’s long
purge of the corruptive body? were the stinking halls my mother walked the route we
all must walk to purification? And Hope, I thought, unhuman, soulless, unrendered,
what sort of purity could such a dog expect her stink to fetch her? What might a veterinarian
have told a boy that seemed to me untellable to fathers? Well, I began to see the
rudeness of these renderer’s more kindly, having thought myself to understand the
gifts their labor might bestow on Winnemucca’s dead, as well as Winnemucca’s living.
Perhaps they did not answer to the bell because they were afraid that somebody acquainted
with their handicaps and muffs might kill and rob them from behind, plunge the knife
into their spines and pick their pockets while they bent to work the meatsaw. Who
could blame them? History recounts repeatedly how men possessed by lesser fears will
fail to answer greater calls to help than mine was. From our last one-hundred
years you may recall your Nazis and your Jews, your Armenians and Turks, you may drive
your shiney duely through the Paiute reservation. Who knew why this thought should
offer me such satisfaction? I felt relieved, at least, if not satisfied; I was grateful
for the company I felt residing in the string of thoughts accruing to this last regarding
history; I believe that I had thoroughly forgotten which thoughts they replaced; I
mean those thoughts which in departing caused me for awhile to feel so lonely. Such
a short while, really, such a shallow loneliness; in truth, in retrospect, I could
kick myself for not allowing such a loneliness to deepen. Really, I thought, really.
What kind of company resides in the remembered legacies of misanthropic forebears?
Would I not have been better off alone? Could a person ever be sufficiently alone?
Always, to my mind, there was too much to remember. The Humane Society, for instance,
Lily Fong, the weather. All of them I had forgotten, briefly, and then again remembered,
being moved unhappily by memory to leave the quilted, leather door behind me, and
consider what might be before me, insofar as further action went.

What to do, what to do?

For starters, I unzipped my parka. Seemed to me the temperature had risen. Whereas
the sky had lowered, was suggestive of that quality of cover which the aviator designates
a ceiling. Low ceiling. Visibility about one mile. Winds calm. Barometric pressure
twenty-nine-point-nine and falling. Storm weather. Advisories and warnings. Snow.
Big snow, according to the weatherman, according to my wife; add another two or three
degrees, I thought, and the ceiling would be opening in flakes. I could smell it,
snow,
a metallic odor, incisive, immanent, it cleaved and seemed to me to burn, electrically,
a cleaner, silver burn I made out from the burning fat and hide and what I recognized,
on coming closer up to Lily Fong’s, was burning garlic. An unctuous, brownish burn,
thick and slippery, I was thinking, coated.

Naturally, I recalled I had not eaten yet, and had been hungry, more or less, since
I had seen my wife prepare her liver. On the other hand, and also naturally, I was
more or less not hungry. Rumors, the power of suggestion. I am ashamed to say that
I am one among those native speculators who remark the motives for establishing a
kitchen in the neighborhood of both the renderer’s and the pound.
Sha Cha Kitty, Peking Lab, Terrier in Brown Sauce. Compose yourself,
I told myself. I said,
Don’t just stand there, you’re a big boy now, you’ve got money, it’s a business here,
you’ve got a simple question, go right on in and order up and ask it.

So I went on in. Not right in, mind you, here again I had my difficulties—“all good
things are difficult”—my difficulties in this instance owing to the handle, which
I ought to call a knob, and to a little strip of carpet, olive shag, which happened
to be stapled to the doorjamb to obstruct the draughts, I guessed, and dust, in recognition
of the season and the climate. The door stuck, I mean to say, and the knob, like the
air, seemed slippery, as if whatever coated what a person breathed here also coated
what he touched. This made sense to me, in the way that soap made sense of rendering,
in the way that I required of myself the memory of my chair, in order to make sense
of my endeavors with the shovel, and the vet, each succeeding thought and act required
to secure the boy a dog. The memory of my chair, for instance, made sensible my thinking
on the Asiatic physiognomy, my thinking being that the slipperiness I noted in the
air and on the doorknob must
occur as well within the Asiatic colon, serving there to speed the transformation
of ingesta to digesta, which process served in turn to nurture those more lithesome,
more placid, less constipated races I myself have sought to emulate by giving up my
meats.

Yet where was sense? Where lithe? I walked inside the place and there I saw that Lily
Fong had gotten fat, and mean, as soon as I had grown sufficiently accustomed to the
dimness of the place to see her, and the place itself, I saw, was nothing that a country
boy could sensibly have guessed of his Chinese. Here at Lily’s, Chinese meant the
shag I stepped across was just a remnant of the stuff they’d hung the walls with,
an olive border someone must have thought would be most pleasing if concluded roughly
halfway to the ceiling. I suppose that I foresaw a wallpaper of leafy, golden scrolls
and solid crimsons in velour relief, a teapot and a fishtank, paper lanterns, maybe,
a shrine to an imperial past. I was prepared at least to see a booth. Did it make
sense, I asked myself, to run a joint without a booth? Did it make sense for Lily
Fong to keep fast to her stool, not to rise, cross the room and greet me?

Well, so, perhaps her weight upset her; maybe, seated on her stool, she was able to
forget the weight she carried on her bones, just as I was able, seated in my chair,
to forget sometimes the weight I carried in my thinking. Perhaps I had recalled her
to her gland. Then, too, I recalled from my experience with persons of her bulk how
deeply their activities depended on some system of digestible reward. She could not
help herself. She could not eat me. And what could she have made of me, I wondered,
my face, the whole while I assessed her person? Because I did not limit my assessment
of her person to her weight, no, I had also to assess the way she chose to clothe
her weight, her kimono, or her robe, something legless, in any case, conical and woolen,
though a person could have wished
that it were pile. Something not so itchy. A proprietress of eateries, I thought,
should be a little more aware of the unsavoriness of scratching; I thought, in Lily
Fong’s case, that she was being almost pointedly repellent in choosing where to scratch.
Now, imagine how a person such as I am must have felt, given the complexity of what
there was to feel, when I discovered that it wasn’t Lily I have been describing here,
but Lily’s mother! This woman, there she sat, called out from her darkened corner,
labored up and groaned and scratched across to me and asked me would I like to see
a menu, Lily’s mother!