Strange Cowboy (25 page)

The wind can feel because it’s it that moves it.

Sure he was a kid back there, a child like mostly any other child, not so unalike,
I thought, from me. I feared he understood
as much. Right then, the way he looked to me, away from me, I believe he had come
up against an uninvited understanding. The old man teaching a boy a lesson, “a thing
or two about life.” This snow, peace, a ruin, just the two of us, on a mission, guy
stuff, No. 7, as good as it can get.
Listen up, this is your papa, Pop’s boy, here I am,
did I say that?
This is the height of my arc, here is the charge of my wake,
is this what he was hearing? Appalled, was he appalled? Was I asking him to love
me? Well, I felt dirty. That dog was dead. I never liked that dog. I was an unbeliever.

Be calm, I told myself, there are other ways, other understandings sons must come
to of their fathers, as when the father strives to stand aside, as I myself have striven
to stand, inwardly aside, above, before, as if I were a herdsman, riding point, out
there in the clean and the clear, where I might be understood as something of a hero.
Yet I could not overcome myself, my original impression, under his regard, of a corruption.
I believed that I had only to recall my thoughts across the time we had been sitting
quietly inside the car together to approximate his thinking, the unthinkable successions
through a father’s years a son is given to remember. What did he know? What sort of
father was I? I sat there with my son, staring in my lap, and I felt my belly spreading
downward to my hips, outward toward my knees. My buttocks sagged, atrophied. My bladder
weakened. I leaked. I retained. I suffered phantom cramps. Thick, corded stuff slid
out of me; I grew breasts, cancerous, glandular appendages, hairy moles I plucked
and painted late at nights behind locked doors and open longings. I balded. My blood
stuttered. My skin broke out in hairthin fissures. This was the boy’s doing. What
he made of me, his sense of me in thought, the clotted blood he must have known was
bound to strike me braindead. I believe he knew his
friends would be off fishing with their fathers while he stayed at home to stew my
prunes and wipe my chin and shit-smeared bung and tell me for the hundredth time he
could not understand me. I would know, as my father knew; I would gape and drool and
hope my son perhaps could read my meaning in my eyes. I would clutch the chalk between
my knuckles and attempt to scrawl out any simple thing I knew I thought and could
not find the word for saying. I was thinking. I remembered. What? I tried to draw
a picture. This is what I think, here is something I remember. A happy man, asleep
beneath a shade tree. The scent of rain on summer pavement. Mama humming, stringing
pole beans in the garden. I saw myself as I had seen my father, this side of my face
hung down from the eye into the neck, that side of my mouth alive, mouthing moan and
froth and whimper and want—fierce, irreparable, a fright. Understand? Look at me,
I am telling you a truth here; there are girls on hot days you must kiss between the
shoulders; there is the soft spot on the belly of a shorthaired dog; a rhubarb pie
is baking; a thrush sings; fogs lift; waves break, days break, bread, hearts, vessels,
understand? Look at me, don’t you miss it, understand? Dirty old man. This is how
I understood my son. I could have been mistaken. For a father, and his dying, I only
had the one. Dirty old man, he said, let’s go, I see, I see. Oh, it’s hell, my father
said. Such happy times. Were these the times my son sensed I was teaching?

I looked up from my lap. Red-cheeked boy, red lips, the white of his eyes a white-white
white. He stared. He did not speak. I did not know him. Five years old, that old,
so long I had lived with him, and what could I have said on his behalf? He sat. He
said nothing. Certainly, I had never been so long with him alone. Calm yourself, I
told myself, you are coming all undone here. I
thought to touch him. I could give the dog a little pat, think up a persuasively conciliatory
remembrance. We were Lincolns, I thought, Dahls. The son’s hand rested on a carcass.
The father’s hand unfolded and refolded on the densening air. I watched the boy and
thought then of my wife, her dream of caring, her night of oval rugs and tangled doll’s
hair and a patch of sun when she was carrying the child and slept alone out in the
desert. Were we anybody’s dream? Say we sat there, as we sat there, unspeaking, untouching,
wanting to speak, perhaps, perhaps wanting to touch, yet not, and not, could we be
felt? Would our wanting perish, having failed to find its first expression? What dreamer
might revive us? Might we be remembered by a nun? Not our names, naturally, but I
was thinking maybe something of our spirit, a time we had achieved together would
survive precisely as it was, pungently intact, distilled, embedded somewhere somehow
potently in wait. I saw this place ploughed under, no more rubble, no more renderer’s
or Lily Fong’s, this place become a graveyard, where a woman someday came to lay a
wreath of flowers at her husband’s feet, and paused, was rather seized by us, this
woman caused by us to wonder for the first time in her many visits to her husband
what this place had been before it was a graveyard, who had passed this way, who here
seemed to speak to her, why she cared, so that my son and I, our time together here
might live again, reembodied in this woman, pondered and feared, felt, tinglingly,
in a spine, through the roots and stiffened shafts of tiny hairs, our ineffectualness
in love recovered, lamented and redressed. Maybe she forgives us. Maybe she prays.

I told my son, I asked him, “You don’t remember anything at all about the Roxy?” I
said, “I sure wish you’d talk to me. Certain words,” I said. “Steamed rice? Mama?
Papa?”

I made faces, exaggerations through the mouth and eyes and brow, distortions in the
manner of a native speaker seeking to be understood, reiterated in his native tongue
by speakers of a foreign language.

“Now you,” I said, though not him, not this day, which is how it happens I am made
to strike the wipers, shift to drive, and please to not forget the headlights. And
how, we wonder, was the weather? And what was the hour? And can the boy have absented
himself so far from physical description? Other than not speak, other than hold the
dog, wipe his nose and stare, what else did he do? Had he lost his cap? Had he needed
to relieve himself? Had he hungered? Across the road, behind the curtained window,
the lights shone from the renderer’s. We recall the smoke rose from the chimney stack.
A lot light had been lit. The snow fell straight. Underneath the weight of the snow
the remnant, planted shrubs were imperceptibly collapsing. The sage collapsed. The
earth stiffened. A wet bird rested on a broken brick. Dusk then—assume that from the
pounded liver, from O Street through the vet’s, the renderer’s and Lily Fong’s had
passed a couple, maybe several hours—the hour now was dusk.

To Damma’s, then, to Mother’s. From an unfamiliar place, we went to her an unfamiliar
way. Little to see out there. More of graynesses, lowering, long planes of gray, no
mountain now, no barn on a horizon, no horizon, nothing distanced, the great, long
lengths contracting now, enfolding, closing down on us, road signs advancing and receding,
nimbuses of glow and slope and bulky, curving motions, the sturdy posts of natural
and human-built intrusions seldom showing now, passing by us hidden, wished for and
implicit. Mother’s. I thought that I remembered a way
there. We did not speed. The road was uncertain, unploughed, poorly marked. We were
first, uncommon travelers. We went softly through the smoothened surface, slowed and
quieted over the hushened pavement. That glow there, was it kitchen light? Were good
people sitting down now to an early country supper? Was a pot stirred? Sure I was
a boy who sat once in that house and listened to the panes shake in the sunwarped
wooden casing. I ate my mama’s cornbread cut in slabs with honeyed butter. We warmed
a bottle for the leppy in the mudroom. Snow seeped through the doorjambs, fell across
the yardlight, cornices of snow were curling over on the driftfence.

Who lived here anymore? Was there any telling in these landmarks that the boy and
I were on our way to Mother’s? When we came up to the driveway bordered by the failing,
sapling poplars, saw the sign lit up with multi-colored bulbs—the N blown down, the
O still unreplaced—then the boy and I would be there, the A CH RAGE, my mother’s home
away from home, a tin tree in the picture-window, a gas log and a faux brick hearth.
Sad, I thought, yet had anybody asked I could have said that I was happy, having fun.
I could say I got a little jump up from my heart each time the car slipped; I could
say I played a country station, say I sang some; I could say I chose to take a longer
way than I remembered needing; I could say that all the longer way I talked.

I said, “Your grandma is your papa’s mama, did you know that? Well, did you know I
had a papa too? He had strokes. A stroke can kill you. Kills your brain, where you
talk, and it also kills you on one side, usually, all up and down your arm and leg.
That’s why Hopey’s master and his cane. With my papa, after the one stroke, he couldn’t
talk, said it was like he couldn’t quite remember how to talk, except then, same as
Hopey’s master—what’s his name?—he
could remember. Still, he couldn’t work right. He couldn’t heft a bale anymore, but
he could drive truck when we were feeding from the flatbed, and I remember also how
he rigged a belt up to the wheelshaft so that he could hoist himself inside the tractor
and the combine. I don’t think he rode though. And he didn’t ask me anymore to feed
with him or farm. He said he liked to turn around there in his tractor and to not
see anyone behind him. Just to watch the earth turn over and to feel the jiggle in
his seat and sunshine on his neck and know that this much anyway was his.

“That’s after number one. After number two you saw him working hard to keep his eggs
from falling off his fork. A person almost never saw him not in slippers. I know that
draggy, scratchy leather sound on the linoleum, it made me and my mama crazy. Sounded
sick, like someone always must be sick, like if you lived with him, then you would
catch whatever
he
had. I remember one day, one morning, when my mama banged the sugar bowl against
the table and she hollered at him that he made her crazy, dragging all day long around
the kitchen, and would he please just for the love of Jesus sit. But he wasn’t any
sitter but was oftenest up, tipping flour, dropping coffee, burning up a pork chop.
And then you have the night I can remember also that my mama waked me up to go and
find your grandad leaning on his walker at the first check of our best alfalfa field,
just leaning, hard to say, like he was planning to stay put awhile, like he had come
to where he wanted. I don’t want to say the moon was full that night, but there was
light enough to see by, silvery and white so you could see my papa, sure, and then
also past where he was facing, over the fields, and out there to the alkali, and farther
where the alkali gave out and you could see the long, dark gap of sage before the
mountains. There was snow there on the mountains yet, and the fields were
young and tender. How he looked, I thought we ought to go to him, but my mama, she
held me and she shushed me up and said again that we should leave him be, that he
was happy there, and I believe he was, and he stayed there all the night, where my
mama sent me out to find him lying wide awake, real wet, and bugbit, really pretty
chewed on, my papa pulling up the grasses with his better hand next morning.

“I guess it wasn’t too long after that we moved in here to town. I don’t say it killed
him, but he started sitting more, traded in his walker for a wheelchair. He practiced
talking. We fixed him up with a chalkboard that he carried in a basket on his lap.
He talked maybe more to me in those days here in town than the days before them at
the ranch all put together. One thing he told me—easiest thing your life will help
you to forget—he said,
Don’t put off.
I don’t think—in town, at least—I don’t think he liked to see your grandma very happy.
I don’t think he wanted to see your gram as young as she was, having her way, being
pretty still and starting out in something new. My mama asked me how I hardly stood
him, cranky as he was, smelly and slow and given so much to repeating. She said for
me to go on out and play, it wasn’t healthy, a boy to tend a sick old man, especially
his father. “You are young,” she said, “go make a friend, leave your papa to your
mama.” She was right, partly, and partly I believe that she was jealous. Because Pop
and I, we used sometimes to walk down to the Rexall for a soda, just us two. Pop would
sit and close his eyes and doze against the sun and I would watch for people. And
if we couldn’t walk, if a place was too far off for walking, then my papa made my
mama take and drop us. Rodeos, the fair, Fourth of July, like that. Pop once watched
me ice skate. Not your grandma though. How I recall it, she got pretty mad at him
one day and said for him to go
ahead and take his time with me, she would have her time when he was dead and buried.

“Still, she cooked for him. Every now and then she said she hoped for early rhubarb.
Or else she said it looked like rain and told me I should run and tell my papa, he
might like to sit out in the car with me and listen. I recall she kept his station
tuned, she didn’t mind as much to hear his futures. She cared for him how he would
let her. Sure she would have liked to go if he had asked her once when we were going
to the movies. I know I almost always wished she’d come, and then especially if I
had known the movies was the place he’d have the stroke to kill him. I don’t say he
died right there, right that minute, but the Roxy’s where he had the stroke, all right.
What I think is that he’d sit there with me every week and get himself all cranked
up inside about how long the movies kept a person sitting. He sat sort of crumpled
up across the armrest, hung his elbow and his chin on my side, and I recall he kept
his eyes throughout the most part of the movies on my lap or in the sack I’d brought
of popcorn or of candies. Let me tell you, at the movies, you have got a hard time
watching, sitting next to somebody who doesn’t really want to watch. And then his
pawing at my sack because he said he didn’t want one when he did. And then whatever
fell out from his mouth and on my wrist when he was chewing. I’ve got memories of
that old Roxy. Your mama and your papa used to court there. And before I went there
with my papa, I would go there with my mama. Mama liked to watch. She used to laugh
and cry or scream and talk right out as like the people on the screen were folks she’d
asked to stop and visit at our place for coffee, and the rest of us all sitting in
the Roxy hadn’t been invited.