Strange Cowboy (26 page)

“Not Pop. He knew where he was sitting. So when this fellow, Leslie Little Dodd, right
when we are in the quiet romance minutes of the movie, he starts to pissing on the
concrete, well, you can bet my papa wasn’t last to hear him.
Jesus Christ
! a fellow hollers. Up behind us you start hearing,
What the hell, what are you doing, this ain’t a stall,
like that. And pretty soon you’ve got a real scuffle going on up there, and Pop and
I, we make our way up to the action, and then the lights come up enough for us to
see that it’s this Leslie, a fellow used to work for us, and he was drunk, bad drunk,
everyday drunk, which is how he was for years, which is why my papa had to fire him.
They were calling Leslie names—redskin, breed, and such—and they were telling him
that if he couldn’t keep it in his pants, then to keep it on the reservation. Some
men held him, and somebody threw soda in his face and someone turned a popcorn bucket
over on his head and pushed it down across his eyes, and I remember seeing where he’d
wet himself and how I couldn’t tell by looking at his mouth if he was laughing or
was crying. He kept trying to say something, but nothing coming out of him was English
or was word enough so anyone could understand him. Worse was Pop. Him, too, you couldn’t
understand, only louder. Those men, they got the main part of his meaning, so they
turned loose of Leslie, and things got simmered down, and folks were looking one and
to the other to decide what next, when Leslie lifts that popcorn bucket from his head
and sizes us all up as like he’s choosing which ones he’ll be wanting to remember.
He was so big, and weaving, if he didn’t have so mean a purpose, I thought he’d fall
right down. He had that butter smeared down from his forehead on his cheek, and that
stringy hair and soda dripping from his chin and you could smell him stinking from
bad wine and pee and throw-up. Pop, all he did to make himself stand out
from all the rest, he lifted up his hand to help this Leslie leave the theater, and
this Leslie, he looks at Pop and he says
Dahl,
and then he hauls off and he slugs Pop on the one side of his head and falls on top
of Pop where he is sitting in that chair and there Pop’s had the stroke will kill
him.

“Not that I remember much of how he finally died. Mama saw to that. I don’t think
he fought her. He might not have known her. I never thought at least that he knew
me. But then you couldn’t know because he couldn’t say. I wasn’t let to see him much.
Run and play,
that’s my general recollection of that time with him. My general picture of him sees
an old guy looking mostly bone and mostly white. In bed, you know, white sheets pulled
up to these white pajamas, white whiskers, white hair, white pillow, white curtains.
Some of that might not be true, but it was Pop, how I remember Pop, and how I told
myself it wasn’t Pop in there and dying.”

I said, “Pop grew.”

I said, “Winters, down there at the tall stacks on the heifer lot, he’d get a hayhook
into each end of a bale and work it off his knees and line those bales out fast enough
to keep two good men behind him busy cutting wire and feeding.”

I said, “People don’t know stacks and hayhooks. People don’t know crop.”

“Kickball,” I said. “That’s what we used to play. Baseball, slaughterball, war.”

Well, and so my son, what should he have said? Had he been willing, and were speaking,
what was left to the boy for saying? We had come at last to Grandma’s house. I presented
the boy the box of No. 7, hooked the little wire on his mittened thumb and coaxed
him with some pressure at the elbow to give up his hold on Hope.
Through the Visqueen you could see that she had ceased to leak. She had stiffened,
her fur congealed and matted where it peeled and gathered from the shoulder at the
forepaw.

“She’ll be fine,” I told the boy.

I reached across and opened up the door for him.

I said, “Shall we?”

Happily, no scene ensued. He went easily away with me, did not look back behind himself,
nor especially before himself, but seemed content to hold my hand and let himself
be led, as I imagined blind men let themselves be led, with neither fear, nor great
excitement, but with quiet, central dignity, erect, benign, in pacific resignation
to the good will and the able vision of their shepherds. I suggested the boy speed
his pace, he speeded his pace. I suggested he lower his head, he lowered his head.
So perhaps, I thought, despite the insults and the cool regard, the bumps and broken
bones and minor lacerations he had suffered while enduring my sporadic care, he found
it in himself to find in me an untried plain of fatherly affect on which to sow his
seedling trust. Or perhaps he had forgotten who I was. Or else perhaps he loved me.
Maybe this was the sort of love a connoisseur of love would know at once was blind.
Poor boy. Creaturely thing. Pup, cub, cygnet, gosling. Whose claw did he hold here?
From whose beak must he feed?

“Step,” I said, and he stepped.

“Branch,” I said, and he ducked.

“Speak,” I wanted to say, and did not say, not wanting to experience again, so soon,
the diminished limit of my patriarchal charm. I guided us inside the vestibule, where
I recall the rush of heated air, damp shag and urine, a view through the heavy glass
of
several muted inmates clumped about the gas log glowing in the common room. I passed
the boy through several more commands—stamp, and head up, hat off, mittens, jacket—then
crouched down to inspect the boy at wheelchair height, flattened his hair where it
was mussed, mussed his hair where it was flattened. I retrieved my handkerchief from
his jacket pocket, held it up against his face and gave him the command to blow. I
am afraid I chucked him lightly on the shoulder, meaning to assure him all was right,
we had the tactical advantage here with Mother of surprise.

Yet where was she? Not, as I was thinking, in the common room. You grow up by her
and you expect to find her there, in common rooms—kitchens, parlors, dens—any voice-imbued
interior designed and furnished to facilitate communion. You expect to find her centered
there, dispensing. A drink, a bite, a bit of gossip, candor, a solicitation and considerate
response for anybody’s next best word.
I like to go where there is talk,
she said,
I like a chair to face a chair and not a fireplace or window.
So where was she? When we entered through the vestibule, and listened for her voice,
and sought her face out from the others, and when we finally worked the courage up
to ask, we neither found nor could be given any clear idea where to find her. We found
this one gray, and that one gray, and this one we found blue, and bluer, verging on
a modish, pinkish-purple, my mother’s housemates permed and curled, teased, sprayed,
fluffed, and draped, thinned and widely, smartly parted, bald. Too, we found plenty
of cologne, and scents a woman wears when she must feel her life achieve its unappealable
decline, perfumes that I imagined had been purchased by the quart, Lilies of the Nile,
Passions, Obsessions, and Escapes, all of which, conducted through the florid pores
of their suspiring skins, summoned to my mind insecticides and tall, cold cans of
aerosol
repellents. My mother’s scent. Her hair. Yet not my mother. Not her chair, nor her
cane nor walker, no extrusive tubing, no, not for mother, no tank for her, no oxygen,
no buzzbox, not a wire, not a brace or clamp or bolt. With mother, you saw no outward
evidence of metalwork; the foreign bodies salvaging her person were internal. She
had that bag. She gets those shots. She’s the one whose son provided her the flow-chart
and the wristwatch with the pre-programmable alarms to keep her straight on colors,
times and doses.

“You know,” I told the bunch, “deety-deet, deety-deet?”

“She’s the one just got her hair done,” I explain.

“Slight?” I say. “Yea high?”

“The one who likes to talk, the one who holds opinions.”

Dahl, I might have said, sweet on a fellow here called Vernon? All her natural teeth?
Quit smoking? No drinking? Always leaves a smidgen of her supper near the center of
her plate? Ranch days, she has maybe told you, she lost her taste for food by boiling
years of Idaho potatoes? Spud, salt, butter, spud? Lettuce being iceberg? Eaten first?
From a bowl? Shake your vinegar and corn-oil in that special bottle with a packet
of Italian? Fried a lot of eggs and bacon? Fried onions, squash, and too, too many
freezerfuls of stringy rangemeat?

Well, so, and maybe she had mentioned her interpretation of the bow. Maybe spoken
more than once about the possibility of Rome. Sure she would retire to a life of steamer
trunks and postcards. Would have built herself a house whose windows showed on Tuscan
grain, and olive orchards, and the vineyards and chateaus of old Bordeaux, I think,
on a stony cliff, high out on the headland, where the lighthouse shines out on the
sea, her sea, an Atlantic, far in from the heart of her America, where she might
look up from a poem and tell herself that yes, this is my tranquil widowhood, my claims
from life of living. She would like to say,
I got around.
She would say,
You won’t catch the grass grown up on me.
She would be closing in on eighty. Twenty years at least must yet be left to her.
She needed twenty years, she said, twenty tranquil years, uninterrupted; she had lived
so much she must remember. She rocked. She nodded. A poem lay in her lap. She was
entitled. She postponed, had compromised desire. Yet here, in her lap, lay a poem.
She felt she understood it. She was old, old, would live to be one-hundred years and
more; she suffered upward to a sense of humor.

“Surely you must know her,” I said. “Cancer? Puny thing, not much left inside her?
Surely you must know her,” I said, “Mrs. Dahl?”

Yet no one seemed to know her.

“Maybe she has typed an angry letter,” I suggest. “She said that she was going to
collect some names, see about petitioning for better help?”

Yet no one seemed to have received my mother’s letter, nor did they mean to seem to
know much of the English language. Mum was their word; the game here was to show us
nothing more than grunts and shoulders. Because of course, of course, they knew my
mother. Of course, perhaps, they did not like her. Perhaps, too, it was me they did
not like; me, perhaps, they did not trust. Could I be the son? What was really in
that box? Who was this child? What provoked his silence? And if I were my mother’s
son, then how come I must ask them where her room is?

Well, you understood them. Even so, I tried not to go too hard on myself, not to take
myself too personally, convinced myself that I had somehow been construed as news,
an instance of
a broadcast, an item or a topic, living proof of this or that abstract debate I overheard
my son and I had interrupted. Corruption, pollution, violence, malevolence, unholiness,
a universal disrespect for elders. To a man of them, and to a woman, you would not
catch them being young. The way things are, it was agreed, “why these days, it’s an
outrage.” And there we came, my son and I, how-things-were-and-would-continue-worsening-to-be,
youthful and outrageous. Right away you understood how you could not compete with
them, could not argue for your place beside them, could not match them with your mother’s
anecdotes, quantity for quantity in suffering. Had things turned out much differently,
I would have kicked them in the catheters and crutches. I think we all were breathing
easier when there arrived at last an Anchorage authority to help excuse us.

“May I help you,” said this woman, the authority, and my son and I were led down through
the narrow, yellow halls to Mother’s.

The authority’s brief?
Mrs. Dahl has turned in early. You may find her partially sedated. These days, Mrs.
Dahl is keeping to herself.
And the authority’s manner? A sensible step, a flat white shoe, a ballpoint pen attaching
to a clipboard by a beaded chain. Notes, peckish pauses. Two taps with the clipboard
on a door unfavored by the photographs and postcards or the articles of written speech
and strings of popcorn or a simple declaration of a name which might have made it
Mother’s.

“Here we are,” the woman says. “Mrs. Dahl? Here is your son. He’s brought your grandson
here to see you.”

So, Mama.

I bet eighty-seven pounds. Milk-blue eyes, pink scalp through the silver roots. She
held a hairbrush in her fist. Wore a floral cotton robe. Bare feet. Bare hands. A
magazine across her
lap devoted to our current stars. She was, she said, a fright. Said we should have
called. Pilly robe, her hair, said a lady needs fair warning. Interns, girls, that’s
who cuts your hair here, did she say so? Hope? she said. A dog? Yes, but had she introduced
us yet to Vernon? A nice man, Vernon, minded his manners, said that one day soon he’d
take her to the top of Pancake Summit. Mother, this was Mama. We see her pick the
little pills off from her robe, touch her finger to her tongue and turn her pages.
We learn the big-armed man has died. Died, too, the man with seven fingers. Says she
disremembers how the big-armed man, Vernon’s competition, older than he looked, she
disremembers. We hear the other drank himself to death. Water. Had a theory water
made him hurt less. Set a chair up in his shower, drank until his cells were floated
too far off from one another and it killed him. She is certain she has eaten. She
turns her pages. Stars and stars, celebs. Big teeth and cleavage. We are not to mention
slippers. Hope? she says. And, No. 7? Ninety-two, my mama says, the last time anybody
weighed her. And what else? A visit from the second-grade, try-outs for the chorus,
a fire in the greatroom, had we seen it? She wonders: Was she spoken of, out there?
Had anybody missed her? Give her time, she says, not to worry, she’ll be ready.

She says, “I am off my guard, dear.” Says, “I’ve got nothing here by way of food to
feed you.”

Her pink scalp, liver-spotted, bowed down to the glossy pages. A leading lady in divorce
court. A princess in a minefield.