Strange Cowboy (19 page)

And if I judged myself, I thought, even by that little corner of myself still showing
in the mirror—then what? I asked myself, Could it be guilt that turned a father’s
skin so gray? When I wake up, I asked myself, and I stand onto my ankles, and they
snap and tingle and I hobble to the mirror and I ask myself, why me, should I be looking
toward my loved ones? Toward God? And punishment? Punishment, I thought, more punishment,
again? Yes, I thought, of course, more punishment, I could see it, the long
complaint I have engaged against my body coinciding roughly with a southward turn
in my behavior, which roughly coincided with the advent of the boy. I neglect to feed
the boy and come down with a rare intestinal virus; I let him color in the semi-dark
and learn that I, too, will very soon require glasses. I confess that I was tempted
to advance, in these connections, from coincidence to cause, and to see this sort
of causal sequence run from my abuse, to my son’s unlucky suffering of my abuse, to
my suffering his suffering.

Yet I did not advance. I was cold, and quick, sitting in that car, I saw very quickly
to the cause of causes, in relation to our miseries, looking to the egg from which
the boy was hatched, and before that, to the seed that breached the egg, which was
my seed, after all, from which I saw no evidence of pending misery, being blinkered,
at the time, by the spastic, wavelike thralls on which the seed is customarily expulsed.
I liked the custom. I wanted the boy. I felt very young, in those days, I wanted my
wife as well; frisk and promise were allied in my caresses. I whispered to my wife,
embellished pretty tales I knew from nature. I felt her breathing in my palm, her
heartbeat, I was an ardent monitor of pulmonary function.

There I was,
I used to tell my wife, a boy, at sunset, or at sunrise, somewhere near the treeline
on the mountain, riding downward through the wash to gather strays back to the herd,
until I could not see the herd, and could not hear it, and only heard my horse, and
my saddle, and the little autumn birds a person saw aloft at dawn and dusk, and the
click of distant leaves below me, which perhaps I only had imagined hearing, it had
been so quiet then, and still, excepting for the hooves, and the leather, and the
sound of the bit in the horse’s mouth, and the sounds I
thought I heard the sage make while I watched it turning color. Sighs, I told my wife,
I thought I heard the sagebrush sighing, and the rocks, too, sighing, and I thought
I also heard the pine groves and the aspen sigh, and way down low I saw my papa’s
fields, and the windrows of our poplars, and the billowed canopy of cottonwoods, beneath
which was my mama’s garden, and the schoolhouse, and the bunkhouse, and our own house,
which I sat up in my seat to listen for, this sighing. It was as if the country all
along had understood itself in color, had known it wasn’t gray, as if a rock would
have me understand that it was blue, and red, and green and pink and yellow, as if,
I told my wife, the sagebrush needed to explain itself, and time was short for explanation,
and the explanation must be long, and given to me all at once, the entire vibrant
spectrum buzzing through its ragged leaves in these few minutes while the dust was
up, before the dust was settled, and the sun had shifted, and any rider passing where
I passed might look out on the land and rightly call it gray, or brownish, I suppose,
might look out there and fairly see a broad, gray scoop, monotonous, brownish, silvery
and gray, unremarkable and silent.

Yet the desert was not silent, not for me, was not dulled for me or flat or prey to
any judgment save for wonder. I saw pungency and vibrance. I heard this breath. Not
my breath. I myself was breathless. I meant to tell my wife it felt to me as if my
breath were not my own, but was the desert’s breath, if this made sense, a borrowed
thing, or something shared, like a secret, I was thinking, told, received, dispersed
and altered and repeatedly partaken. I was a secret. I, too, was shared, dispersed,
I felt myself dispersing. I was alone, a kid on a horse, I told my wife; I might have
thought, I might have reasoned, thinking, Yes, of course, yes, yes, yes—the sun that
colors me is the same as the sun that colors the rock, and
if the rock was gray, then I was gray, and if the rock is colored, then I am colored;
I thought I must be watched; I thought my watching was returned to me; my admiration
made me admirable; I felt loved, even, even as I loved the land that lay below me.
I asked my wife to please remember I was only eight or nine. I was supple. I was willing
still to have a little faith in difficulty. I had done some difficult things. I soaped
my saddle, I polished my bit. I kept the oats turned and I combed my horse’s mane
out and I picked his frog. If this was love, God’s love, well, I thought, then I had
earned it.

I said, “God loved me. I believed this. He loved my mama and my papa. He loved His
desert. It’s because of love, I used to think, the reason why He turned the sun against
our color, dropped us in the blaze and covered us in dust.”

But why? By her heartbeat, and her breathing, I knew my wife was mine for love if
I could tell her why. Why dust? Why dropped? What kind of lover colors his beloved
gray? So I told her what I had been thinking, and was reluctant to acknowledge knowing.
That life was short, for instance, and that life was long. That I was never born,
that I would never die, that being born and dying marked the increment through which
I was to recollect the permanence and fullness of my being. Did she know what I meant?
Being dead, I told my wife, was only seeming not to be, and living only seemed to
be the necessary root of being. I made a little ratio for her, suggesting that the
time of our grayness was to the time of our color, as the time of our being was to
the time of our living.

I said, “Did you never feel that you were here before? When you were little, or even
not so little, didn’t you believe that you could make the rain stop, just by thinking
of the sunshine? Or
when someone only even says a certain word—cobblestone, say—and even if you’ve never
seen it, don’t you think you know the sound of cobblestone, with maybe horses on it,
pulling buggies down some busy rue in France?”

I rendered clicks and cobbled clucking sounds against the roof of my mouth. I whispered
to my wife, I asked her, “Don’t you ever feel as if we’ve been together for forever?”

Myself, I said, back then, that very day, riding on that very horse, I was a facilitator.
I told my wife I was an organizer, a shaper. Nothing passed through me that I did
not permit. I was permitting everything. I transmitted. Here, then, came a broadcast
clear from Ottawa, here from Bangladesh. Here were mortars and pestles, ground corn
and northern forests and an oceanful of ripened wheat. A czar fell. Cathedral bells
were ringing. A mosque, I knew, must be a long way off from me, yet here I felt the
pilgrim’s lips against the heated stone, saw the coiled spires tip and shimmy whitely
on the azure skies of Mecca. I saw the seas restored, the fishes spawned within the
broad shores of our basin. I was a strange cowboy. I was still a kid, I told my wife,
but I was old enough to gather cattle on my own; I was old enough to feel at once
as if I were a long way off from my perceptions, at once as if I were the slender
tube through which my farthest-fetched perception was projected. I believed I saw
my mother, miles away and several thousand feet below me. I heard her. She was scraping
plates into the pigbowl. She was tuning out the station with the news on Papa’s futures
for a little music. I heard a coffee-colored voice pronounce
Corelli.
Across the barnyard I could hear the teacher knocking chalk dust off of her erasers.
I saw her raise the flag. My horse’s name, I tell my wife, was Grief. A palomino.
My pal Grief. Gelding. A good horse
for a boy to ride, docile, old, sure of foot, named for the burden he caused Papa,
whenever Papa tried to shoe him.

Lying as I was with her, in my youth, in love, I think there must have been some wholesome
shred of me believing in the independent truth of all I told my wife, despite the
effort I expended from my mind and heart and body to invent it. Had there never been
a horse on earth, I think I could have been persuaded by my wife’s desire to ride
one that the earth had all its years been grazed and galloped on by horses. So much
of belief depends upon being believed. Rare days, those days; it seems a dream we
ever lived them. Yet there we were, our bodies bearing wakeful testimony to the most
outlandish fictions. Secretion and pulse, erection and distension, tremor, shudder,
uproar, heat. Our planet was flat; ours was the densest matter in the heavens; from
our bed we saw the pull we mastered over heaven’s flaming orbits.

My wife rolled over from her side and to her back and stared up at the ceiling. Her
chest moved with a vigor which occasioned me to think back on those luckless pilgrims,
laid out flat and loaded down with stones until they either broke and burst or cried
out to be burned alive so as to purge their souls of witchcraft. Had my wife appeared
to me to be a witch? Did she see the two of us together in a future incarnation, as
if tied together at a stake, burning in some purgatorial likeness of a fire? She wanted
to live, she said. Her chest moved with the vigor of the saved, I thought, and the
condemned, and she was saying that the way she felt, the way I made her feel, she
wished that she could live forever.

“Every year,” she said, “more than once, what we have to do is read each other back
our letters.” She said, “Don’t not tell me what you want.”

My wife sat up astride me, closed her eyes and clasped me in her hand as if she gripped
a saddle horn, steered me north and south, pulled me up and let me have my head as
if she might be reining.

“Say I’m nine,” she said. “Say that I’m alone. Just alone as you were.”

She opened up her eyes and eased me up inside her, had me know that I was to imagine
she was riding down my wash.

“Arroyo,” I believe she said, “any horse but Grief.”

So I said it, to myself, and then to her; in time, I recall it very clearly now, she
had me cry out loud that I was Silver, I was Trigger, Star, as I have said, Black
Beauty. Truly, she must have been a God to me, a goddette, maybe, my re-creator, the
giver of my words to flesh. She reminds me, and I remember, too, how we kissed once,
“smack out in the middle of the sidewalk,” at dusk, not dark, right outside the Rexall,
where I recall our love displayed itself one night in the abandonment to liberal purchases
of candy. I was so sweet to her, she says, so dear, I bought her whips of licorice,
watermelon Jolly Ranchers. The idea, says my wife, was to take our bags of candy to
the Roxy, and the candies I had picked for her, and the candies she had picked for
me, yes, she says, we were to share them; we were to touch each other, in the dark,
on the knee—this was our signal—and each of us would come to say that there was something
missing from the bag we held, some little sampling of a sweet we could be craving
in the other’s. And could we say that craving led us into marriage? Did we crave a
house on O Street? Crave a broken fence, a leaking roof, a dead dog, a damaged son,
our laughing, weeping, muted Lincoln? I looked up at the boy in the mirror. Lincoln.
We fetched ourselves a Lincoln
Dahl, another. This one here is five, I thought. I thought, And then? And then I thought,
And then before?

Well, before there was no other. Before was my wife and me. Our town was a looking
glass; our faces shined in love for us from every flowerbed and fencepost. Before,
we incandesced, went unimpeded; before was a night our lives might be recounted as
a story to a lovely stranger, a corner we had turned and felt our hearts ache after
parting. Was this true? Having turned that corner, did I really pause and wait for
her; did I think by waiting I might cause her to return to me; was she really so much
on my mind that I expected to discover her beside me, in the cafe, at my desk, where
I looked up from my coffee and my ledgers?

My wife says, “I never thought those leaves I used to talk about could sound so foreign.”

Is this possible? Leaves, foreign? Leaves, charming? After all that poetry and song?
Leaves, I thought, why not? One year, she explained, she might be attracted to a leaf
exhibiting acute serrations; another year she fancied over every other leaf a leaf
she thought must be the most severely veined; once she chose a leaf for nothing other
than its simply being orange. This was the year, she said, she’d heard that no word
rhymed with orange, and this leaf, she believed, was the absolutely orangest.

“Crazy,” she said, “right?”

She counted twenty-seven leaves the year we started kissing; said that year she would
be searching out the finest leaf from the greatest oak; said she might start saving
shapely acorns. She saved bugs, picked lint. Nearly every single day, she strove religiously
to eat a lemon. She invested heavily in facial creams, steamed her face and packed
her face with mud and rarely left the house without a sunhat, years before the skin
craze came to Winnemucca. Believe it
or not, she said, the year she could not do the splits—the year they cut her from
the pep squad?—she was so distraught she dabbled for awhile in yoga. In two months,
said my wife, she was kicking higher than her head. But did she ask those girls to
let her please rejoin them? She did not. Do I know what she did? I did not. Well,
what she did is she marched right up to where these girls were practicing, kicked
her one foot up above her head, dropped down in a splits, jumped back up and kicked
her other foot above her head and spit right on the hardwood of the ballcourt. And
how did I like that for verve? How bout that for moxy?

Moxy,
I was charmed by it, just as I was charmed by her proclivity to save, and by the
glossy habit of her hygiene, and also by the little prettinesses she admitted any
girl must understand the charm of, before the boy who found such prettinesses charming.
I felt us in my ribs, then, a feathered dig, felt to me like being tickled. I thought
I felt my skull dissolve; we must have thought the charms we swapped were inexhaustible.
What could not be made a leaf? Here were miles of bloom and freeze and sun for us
to drive yet; through gusting fields of tumbleweed we counted out the tenths of miles
and pushed my yellow pickup through its hundred-thousandth. We raised up plumes of
alkali, played the country stations on the AM band across the arid creekbeds, braked
for rattlesnakes and tortoises and herds of antelope we sometimes caught out on the
high plateaus in springtime. We warmed our feet up on the dashboard. We found ourselves
a swale where grasses grew up taller than the wheelwells, parked there, spread a blanket
on the pickup hood and loved. My face was in her neck and in her hair and then I moved
in her and later thought I must have been as near as I would ever be to God, the religious
sense a boy will carry
forward in his life from rocks and Mother, my rocks, my mother, my sense of the word
we used when we were coming.