Strange Cowboy (24 page)

But the fence did not require its repair back then; my anonymity at work persisted;
still crying to be born, from an abcess in the ballsack, I could make out the mewlings
of a second child. I wondered what had come unstuck in me to open up such vision.
Sure, we had our troubles, the missus and myself, who did not? Yet these troubles,
along with their offspring, were they not the vanguard of a future love, whose peaceable
assurances were reified by former strifes and triumphs and the gestures and the words
performed and spoken in the tenor of forgiveness? Once my eyes were open, the opportunities
for reaping love and beauty from my wife alone were staggering. This was in the May
of a year, I ought to mention, several days of a May erupting from a stiff, protracted
winter, days it seemed to me as if my life were passing in a basement closet, and
I had come up from that closet, climbed those basement steps to join the day, and
the Maylight struck me blind and unaccustomed. Naturally, I saw right away how I might
overwhelm us. I looked about our house and thought perhaps that I was asking too much
of myself to start anew in life with wives and children. What could be more fragile
than a child? What lay nearer to its ruin in my life than marriage? My wife, when
I presented her a single, wild rosebud, asked me, “What do you want?” She was not
alone. The child, for instance, shrieked and beat his fists against his eyes to think
that I might bathe him. Even the bag-girl at the Bi Rite, the slow girl with the lank
brown hair, threatened me to summon for her “super” if I said another “stinking word”
about her pretty eyes.

In this way, I decided I might practice the display of my affections for awhile on
less demonstrative beauties, tongueless
creatures such as pine cones and creosote, sageleaves, sprinkler heads, and crabgrass.
My plan foresaw me shifting my admiring regard from various inanimate particulars
within a landscape, to a landscape as a congregated whole—vistas, ranges, mesas, playas—then
on to those remembered animates beloved of my boyhood: the barnyard duck, Losivya,
our milker, her pinkly leathered udder, and an old paint horse called Chaos, who would
not be broken past the snaffle bit and held his breath against the cinchstrap. Here
also came to me those easy days I ran the shady creeks, tipping stones and wading
out there with the spikedace and the loachminnow, Lincoln Dahl, nut-husked child in
cutoff shorts, glad-hearted riffle beetle hunter, natural born lover of our native
water umbels and the fat-flanked German brown. Nor did I neglect a pet. Rex. Tabby.
That lop-eared bunny and a handsome pair of potbelly pigs. Suburbia’s enmildened wildlife.
Caged things, leashed, lawnbound, flitting imports. I sprinkled bonemeal over the
goldfish globe. I learned the finch’s whistle, cocked my head and listened with the
robin for a worm. After I had learned to love the worm, I told myself, surely then
must be the time to show myself to humankind.

A man, I meant, a woman, my wife and my child, both of whom, according to my plan,
I would revisit through descending levels of abstraction. God, for instance, the supreme
abstraction, I began with God, the slender, mythic versions of a deity as I myself
in private, and our several competing clerical officials out in public have conceived
Him. Him first I practiced humanly to love. Next, species. Next, race. Next, nation,
state, county, town. I reapproached the news, our County Crier, read less coolly through
our crimes and marriages, our births and our obituaries. This one bought, that one
sold. We met in an exchange. We shook hands.
We rode away a little with our neighbors in those properties and monies we gave up;
we carried off with us a little of our neighbors in the properties and monies we accepted.
What a kid I could be in the way the world worked! What ceremonial affections I could
lavish on my morning mush! Over my steaming bowl I might incline to hear the fragmentary
human histories residing in the husbandry and manufacture of my milk, those wholesome
grains, this sparkling, purecane sugar. Farmer, herdsman, bottler, boxer, marketeer:
an urban girl, a brown boy chopping tall fields in the tropics, a taciturn Wisconsinite,
glib-quipperies concocted by an officeful of avid graduates, timely, democratic phrases
funneled westward from Manhattan. Perhaps these were the voices I had heard once as
a boy and since forgotten, conflations rising from the steams I heard my son address
each breakfast in a coded babble I would think could be his blessing. I, too, might
hear them.
Imjibway, ahshwhahtoon
might mean
God bless you
in a tongue I learned by minding boiled peas. Who knew? Certainly, I saw my commerce
at the Bi Rite solemnized. I saw the bagger girl seduced by my solemnity. We could
at least be grateful for each other. We could make each other feel good. This was
the great news I would bring back to my wife and child. According to my plan, I must
greet them from my labors smilingly, buoyed up by fragrant blooms and sacks of sweets
and unexpected playthings, a long stride and a true kiss from the winsome Papa. Hello,
there, loves! Listen up, we can make each other feel good! Yet the question left to
me was
how.

Patience, I thought, planning, practice, and perfection. Said my father, “Practice
makes perfect, only if it’s perfect practice.” So can it be surprising I commenced
in practice on my chair? And should a husband be surprised to learn how long he has
been sitting in his chair, once he finds himself accustomed to the
endless possibilities for adoration in its perfect comforts? Here was the chair I
had selected for myself, and yet it seemed to me that I had never really even seen
its color. A weave, I saw, a woolen, blanketlike effect of blues and pinks and brownish
grays I must have chosen after its resemblance to the desert. Home, I must have seen;
from those desert hues I quickly made out for myself a history of lathered horse and
apple pie; it was possible for me to follow any strand and make out from its course
the lay of the light on a shed at dusk, a sunup on a clear spring day at Soldier’s
Meadows, the silver glimpses of the irrigation ditch that passed through weedlots
at the Wilson Place. I stroked the armrests of my chair, found them tender, fibrously
responsive. I observed our mutual accomadations, the chair’s conformance to the heft
and contour of my person. I rotated the seat of the chair, purchased an upholstery
brush and rid the cushioned surfaces of grosser foodstuffs. I rigged a slim attachment
to the vacuum and I vacuumed lint and hair and dander. I consulted experts who could
recommend to me a non-abrasive stain remover, a build-up resistant polish, several
trusted, name-brand lubricants to smooth the action of the footrest and recliner.
I sampled various deodorizers, tried out powders and sprays, passed through lilacs,
grapes, and myhrs and settled finally on a hypoallergenic spruce designed by Swiss
clinicians. I began to sense in my chair a feminine mystique. I named her, held her
name a secret, promised her a satin coverlet to warm her in my absence. At work, in
bed, on family excursions, I would often miss her, my chair, I worried was she being
eaten up by moths, had my wife remembered to adjust the louver to protect her from
the sun, did she suffer jealousy to see me leave the house without her. My chair,
my confidant, it was she to whom I could report the trials of my days; it was in her
soft embrace I sojourned irreproachably in
wish and reminiscence. She denied me nothing, desired nothing I could not find out
to give her. I slept in her. I could not be certain sometimes that she was not something
of a flirt. I might come home from work one day and see a bit of her foot exposed
from underneath the coverlet and think this was her way of telling me
come hither.
Other days, in other lights, I might find her appealingly tawdry, prim, sultry, gay.
I recall a dozey Sunday afternoon, a late and snowy winter night, a fire ticking in
the woodstove, rain outside, heat, a cool breeze blowing through the doorscreen, and
there I sat, reclined, unweighted, traveling, ecstatic.

I could not have told you anything I missed. A Monday came and went, a Humpday and
a Friday. I shipped. I received. I deposited a check. I wrote a check, deposited another.
The lawn greened, browned, lightened up into a brittle dun. I coiled hose. I hung
a rake. I stowed the mower. Molars were cut. Abrasions sustained. Word was we would
soon be out of diapers. I recall I saw my wife through periods of serious brunette,
a soft perm, a henna, and a bob. I might have offered her some comment. A compliment,
some gentle criticism, an acknowledgement of her unswerving courage. How about that
midi-skirt? Or that cherry high-gloss? In retrospect, I understand her glosses, pedicures,
and burnt meats were a “cry for help,” as she herself was later to describe her conduct,
yet I believe it was her popcorn that recalled me from my chair and to my further
purpose, which after all was to eliminate the need in her domestic life for crying,
if the help she cried for could be served out from a husband’s practiced loving.

I wanted to love. I meant to help. I sat across from her and watched her lifting out
that popcorn from the bowl to her mouth, handful after handful, feeding herself from
the cup of her hand to the flat of her hand, as a child is taught to feed a goat,
my wife
picking spilled bits from the folds and hillocks of her sweatshirt, sifting through
the unpopped kernels in the bowl until she satisfied herself that she was finished.
Then she licked the butter from her fingers, stood up from her chair, brushed the
salt off from her lap and passed me with her empty bowl into the kitchen. I sat and
stroked my armrests, discomforted, and I thought,
Well, so here I have come, this far apart.
The boy in bed. Soon the wife in bed. And here I will sit. And here I will wait.
And there I sat, waiting, staring at the ceiling. All was well. All quiet. No leak
then. A good, strong fence, I told myself. Put it up myself. Healthy garden. Windows
caulked. Another eight years, easy, in the carpets. I heard my wife shut off the kitchen
lights, heard the hall light on and off, listened to the pipes fill, rush and groan
and thud and empty. Repeat. Fill, rush, groan, empty. Water on the face, a lather
and a scrub, warm rinse, cold rinse, fill the basin cold, a thirty second soak, repeat.
My wife’s ablutions. Her regime. A plan for her more youthful her.

And my plan, I asked myself, my vision, what had happened? How much time had suddenly
transpired through which I might have seen to my plan’s completion? How many husbands,
I wondered, must sit alone out in their chairs at night, peruse their lists and honestly
allow themselves to cross their children and their wives off? All is well. All quiet.
Repeat. All is well. This one in bed, that one in bed. Good night, good night, repeat,
good night. Popcorn, I thought. Candy. The Rexall and the Roxy. And repeat. Together,
I was thinking, we once passed in from the desert day into the darkened theater and
held each other’s hand and watched the same dream played out on the screen before
us. Sacks and sacks of sweets. A kiss, she said, she craved a kiss. And there I sat,
in my chair, and it occurred to me that while I watched her with this bowl of popcorn
I must also crave a kiss; it occurred to me that I
was possibly too late. Likely we were both too late. A husband, a wife, that kiss,
that word must always limp along behind its vision.

All along, I think I was afraid. A husband fears. He looks across the lampstand to
his wife and does not go there. I believe I was not wanted there. I sat and thought
we lived together now, outside of want, and wondered must it come to this with others.
My neighbors, married, enfamilied, did they sleep and rise together, find each other
in their dreams, the rituals of daily living? I did not think so. I thought my neighbor
turned toward his hubcaps so as not to turn toward his wife. I thought the wife had
turned toward the garden so as not to turn toward the husband. I thought the sons
and daughters turned toward the present so as not to turn toward the future and the
past, the husband, the wife, that mother there and father. Young, younglings, threes
and fives and sevens on our block—everywhere they looked, it seemed to me, was want.
And my son, one of them, of us, of me, would he find himself as I have, seated, wakeful
and alone, turning through a shrinking future and a growing past and wondering where
want went? Would he come to miss his Roxy? Would he hold a sack of sweets one day,
and would there ever be a girl who craved whatever he might hold inside his sack,
or would the two of them devise a sign by which their cravings could be known to one
another, in the dark, in a reconstructed theater, would there be a place where they
might touch each other to describe that what they felt there while the movie played
was neither fear, nor sadness, nor good humor, but desire? Would such a sign persist?
Or would desire be forgotten for the drama played out in the movie? Would they survive
the intermissions? Would they forget themselves, insist they had become someone completely
other?

Well, I looked up at the boy, saw him watching out the windshield through the rearview.
Rubble there. The Humane Society. Hope. Lily Fong’s, the renderer’s. My boy. What
had he heard from me? How long had we been sitting? Long enough, I saw, to have the
windshield clear. Long enough to have an inch or so of snow fall. We were clear now,
we could go, I thought that I could feel my son look out into the snow and ask himself
what kept us. I thought then of my father, and the sunrise, and my own impatience
and reluctance with my father once the sun had risen. Perhaps, I thought, I was to
my son as my father was to me; perhaps my sunrise was his snowfall; my basin was his
rubble; my Whim his Hope; my silence his inheritance in understanding.

What kept us? What had he heard, my son, that I could not yet tell him? I felt myself
corrupt. He was a good boy, Lincoln. He must have loved that dog. A Schnauzer. Imagine.
He went about in cutoff shorts, barefoot, no shirt, his back inflamed by traceries
of itch and welt. He shined. He wept when he wept and when he finished weeping did
not bother over why he wept or put off being happy. He smiled on oily rainbows in
the gutter puddles. He stripped the bark from sapling limbs and put his tongue out
to the moist, white meat. He licked mirrors. He stepped on clover bees. He liked not
to wear his glasses. What did he see? What did he prefer of his original illuminations?
Blurry world, I thought, he made it by his own lights, a place to run in, trippingly
his, abrupt, perhaps, hyperbolized, monstrous green smears, waxen domes, foreshortenings,
phantom elongations, warps, sounds in color all mistakenly correct.