Strange Cowboy (29 page)

“You never saw a snow like this in Rome,” my mother said.

She said, “Your grandad had a saying. He used to say,
I didn’t leave my keys in Egypt.
”

Piazzas, fountains, cypress; poplars, silos, mesas—we see them, yes, such beauties,
I think that nobody must finally refuse them. And yet I refused them; someway I have
made myself the origin of small, insidious refusals.

I told my mother, I said, “Mother, you were never once in Rome.” I said, “Lincoln,
understand—about the elephants?—your grandma here is just pretending.”

She was sitting straight up, Mother, just beside me, leaning forward, as I saw her,
chin up, eyes up, hands clasped at her breast, a jawbone and a sheen of moistened,
painted lip, a gaze, forward, wide, unblinking. I allowed myself to think I saw the
people and the places she described as if they lived before her. Particles and waves,
forms enacted by a massy, supple, shadowed light, creased and reaching, voiced, Roman,
a demitasse, a saucer, laughter, smooth stone and a long view—I saw these beauties
of my mother’s call her from a past she had not lived enough till now to see transpire.
I let myself see in through her beneath her coat, her wind-resistant sportsuit, clear
down through her ribs and to her lungs and heart and to the valved and urgent, branching
ways she was refiring in breath and blood and her confirming, other-earthly spirit.
Anybody saw where Mother went; we know by now how Mother gets there.

“Gaga,” Papa called it,
Mama cracked.

The light cast briefly on her face, then passed her face, and in the dark I felt the
rend in Mother closing when I asked and she could not recall the Russian’s name. The
French name, when I pressed her for it, was a name she said she always had some difficulty
in pronouncing. It was a lot to ask, she said; she repeated she was old; she thought
if I would not be “half so pushy,” then the names would come to her; she said it was
a lot of life here she was trying to account for, a lot to ask a woman I would not
have asked except the woman was my mother.

I said, “What about the Little Lord, He Crapped His Pants? If you have been to Rome,
then where are all your relics?”

“He’s mean,” my mother told the boy. “Is he so rough on you all?”

And yet I meant no harm. I had a story, too. All this day, other days, for weeks I
think before this day, months maybe, maybe years since I first saw this child and
understood I was a father, I have been trying here to tell the boy this story, recount
a day for him that was for me the first remembered and the most enduring time through
which I could sustain myself in the belief that all I saw was me and mine and all
for me and could not be or ever once have been without me. I was needed. My mama and
my papa, my guests, the desert hills and all its creatures I had loved—it was possible
for me to feel they all were needing me to be there.

I drove, moved us past the town lights to Golconda. Traction was poor. The road was
slow and steepening. The snow fell out before us as a tunnel, surging, closing down
and opening up, white, and whiter; you saw out to the hood of your car, not out past
your windshield and your wipers, then out and far enough again to guess the pavement
from the ditch, the shoulder from the sagebrush. I hunched myself against the wheel,
gripped the wheel and pulled at it as if I meant to strip it from the column. I did
not think that either Mother or the boy took note much of our local danger, nor my
effort to preserve us from it, nor the folly I foresaw in seeking out a view upon
a snowbound summit.

I said, “I helped you set the whole thing up, remember? You had those seating cards.
Don’t get yourself mistaken,
that was your advice,
don’t get yourself mistook.
And you taught me how to bow, except, did you know what, I never really learned.
I think partly why I never liked to dance was how important you said bowing would
be after.”

I told my mother not to worry, I wasn’t blaming her about not dancing, dancing wasn’t
me, I recounted for the two of them my thinking even then that dancing was for sissies.
I drove on, recounting, too, the sawdust and the plywood, refreshing my mother with
the memory of Poplar Juan and Uncle Ikey, Grandpa Al and furze, any salt-and-peppered
dish or sour custard I believed was capable of contradicting Mother, failing to observe
that Mother had retired from entertaining any contradiction. I pressed and pulled
the wheel, felt us on the verge of cliffs and drifts, the riverbank, the hayfield,
any greater solid than ourselves with which we might collide before the summit, and
Mother wasn’t listening. Of course, if I myself had been more thoughtful of the summit,
the idea might have come to me much sooner simply to pretend our having finally achieved
it. No vista in this weather favored any other vista; the view from the top must be
the same as the view from the bottom; any sense of privileged seeing must in any case
be ours to bring about. At any point, I might have said,
Here we are,
and not been disbelieved; I might have quieted myself, left my mother and the boy
a little nearer to the heights they had achieved before I started speaking. As it
happened, I did not quiet, no, but drove and talked the two into themselves until
their eyes descended several heads beneath their sockets and I understood their view
must reach no further than the unlit skin that stretched across the ribcage.

“Almost there,” I got to saying, “almost there,” and, “here we are, we made it!”

I turned the dome light on, rolled the window down a crack. I commended the air. I
asked the boy if he would like for me to roll his window down so he might put his
hand out. He seemed not to want to. He seemed, along with my mother, to be carved
of pine,
sapless, lamps out, wind-pocked and shellacked. Stiffs, I thought, two stiffs now,
three, if I should count the dog—one stiff dead, one dying, one unwarmed as yet to
living.

“Mama,” I said, “here we are. Isn’t this the place you wanted us to come to? Golconda,”
I was saying, “Pancake Summit?”

Failing to enchant, failing to revive. I stepped out, thinking to revive myself, at
least, avert a further failure. There we were, in this pullout we had come to, a carwide
swath of level ground where drivers could attend to their disasters free from traffic.
Flat tire, radiator, transmissions, squabbles in the backseat, emergencies of nausea
and urination, a feeling in the driver’s heart that he must pause, regroup, extract
himself from motor-speed, recover to himself the still, atomic core from which he
feels himself erratically disbanding. Too many irons and fires, I was thinking. Too
many fathers, too many mothers, wives, and children. One of each. One of anything—a
Humane Society, an Anchorage, a dead dog and an angry neighbor, a barn, a mailbox,
and a ceiling—one present, one future and one past, too many and too much for me to
govern in conjunction—each scent, each promise, wound, and color each discrete, and
pulling outward, calling me away, and away, each away and outward from the other.

I stood a time outside the car and felt myself, the outward pull unspinning me; I
stood out there and felt unspun, slowed down, the voices and the images and thoughts
I heard and saw that day dispersing through the falling snow, coming each to rest,
I felt, each thought to a flake, each fleeing voice and whispered image coming finally
to rest, cooling and reposed, crystalline and falling over me again, onto my head,
my shoulders and my arms, over on the earth where I might gather them and bring them
back again to an enchanting, potent order. I saw Mother wave a gossamer scarf
from the upper deck. Papa on his belly to a blade of wetted grass. Papa taller, saddled,
he and Whim set out to gather. My wife, too, I saw, dressed in a cotton print, sitting
by a river where she read a book, looked up from her book, closed her eyes and laid
her head against a hollow in the silvered driftwood where she fell to sleep and waked
up unalone and unremembering who she shared the shore with. I saw my son call out
and lean and work the runners on his sled as if my son and speed were fast companions,
unstuck from the level ground to which his age, his hands and eyes confined him. I
saw myself in him, my son and I as one, careening, riding level ground through wild
descents of seeing, and reseeing, my son and I revived, reenacted, able to act, acting,
reenabled. I scooped the snow up from the hood of the car, I could do that now, used
to do it all the time, I thought, thinking,
Yes, well, pretty fun, a snowball! What you do, Dahl, is you take and shape out snowballs
round and hard and packed together tight enough for throwing. You throw one. You watch
it out into the dark and throw another. That’s your shoulder you feel, throwing, you
can throw your shoulder out, remember? You blow into your hands. You stamp your feet.
You pack another snowball and you pick a target. You let her rip. That’s how. Let
her rip. Have a little fun. From the hips now, Dahl, you make a whip there, mister,
shoulder, elbow, wrist, you let it fly, you snap it off, you really want to wing it.

In this way, or in some way very like it, I was made to
wing one.
And then I winged another. I clobbered a roadsign and a fencepost. I forgot myself,
my volume and my tone,
my frame of mind,
I cleared the windshield, got back in the car and headed us, perhaps a bit too eagerly,
downhill.

I suppose I hoped I would be seen as something of a hero. Athletic, after all, a performer
for my mother and my son of a profoundly moral, spontaneous transformation, a Houdini
of oppressive moods, a kid, at least, at heart. I had a pretty good arm. The snow,
as I saw it in the mirror by the domelight, made a pretty, curling frosting of my
hair. Next to them, I was bigger; I seemed to have assumed my bigness, gently; I suffused
a human rendering of nature, beneficent and elemental. Was I a man to talk his mother
out of Rome? Would I begrudge a boy a circus? Could they hope from all they’d seen
that I might come around at last to asking their forgiveness? I acted. From here on
out, I thought, I would dedicate myself to words and deeds of restoration.

I said, “Mama, what did I do ever nice for Pop? Tell me more,” I said. “About the
clowns, how about? Did we hire a clown, or was a clown just uncle Ikey?”

I was warming up, then, I think I was sincere. I drove us and I did not have the feeling
anymore that we were playing games. My mother was old, and earnest, sicker than I
thought, more deeply interrupted. This was not the time, perhaps, for a forgiveness,
neither mine nor hers, not the time for an apology, an enthused contrition. Yet was
I as serious, earnest, really, as a mother? Was I really seeing all that I am saying?
I sat in my chair, today, this was, not so long ago, and saw another boy completely,
a wheezy, stump-tongued creature, club-footed, excessively mucosic, an impossible,
in any case, a catastrophic permutation of my seed—did I say that? Each succeeding
birthday cause for his diminished celebration?
Get the boy a nose job. Keep him in correctives.
Was this me?

“Tell me more,” I said, “tell me more,” and when I understood that no more would be
told, not soon, not by Mother, not by son, I said, “Okay, a little peace, then, here,
a little quiet.”

Yet I could not keep quiet; I did not understand. All day long, I thought, I had been
talking to myself, no kind of talking maybe, yet a kind of talking, no kind of listening,
yet listening, a kind of hearing, a listening to myself, myself overheard. I did not
understand myself. I could not resist myself. My day, this day, its perceptions and
its memories, its distillations and its forecasts rose and formed in me, sailed and
sunk in me without expression, uncontested. I repeated. I sifted, cycled, could not
align myself, a mood in my wife with the thought in my head; I despaired that there
might never come a day my son and I would each be hearing from a clear desire if I
should call him sweetheart. I could say it now, say,
sweetheart,
and yet I could not. I was afraid the boy would fail to hear me; afraid my mother
would insist I was too late. And yet by now I needed anyway at least to speak; it
was as if I had been gaining to myself an irreproachable momentum; as if months and
years in me of running-starts could finally not be turned away from leaping; if I
should die, if I should die, my body, I was thinking, was a mailsack stuffed with
unsent letters.

I drove. I took better care. To talk.

To say, “I think I’ll call it quits on the Humane Society.”

Or, “We’ll leave off Hope at Hans’s, see if he can keep her in his freezer.”

They made it easy for me. By their silence I began to see that I could say whatever
thing I wanted. We made our turns, ploughed our way against the storm, and with the
storm, and then again against the storm and to the butcher’s, and the glimpses I could
fill out from my mother and my son appeared to me to be as trackless and as white
of judgment or suggestion as the snow that lay before us. Whatever thing. Anything.
I went ahead and told the boy what I intended by the freezer. I asked about my mother’s
medication. I said maybe I would take her home with us tonight, dial the Anchorage
for her, call in well, pour her out a good, stiff drink. I thought to lure them, I
suppose, startle them into speech, though neither son nor mother were prepared as
yet to say a word. I kept talking. Wrecklessness, abandon, an uncomplicated swell
I felt at the root of my crotch, surprised to say, directed my mouth; I followed;
I led; I spoke in low, coaxing tones, in chords and single notes, in gallops, trots,
and canters, epigrams and anecdotes, reportage, biography, and idiot confession.

I don’t know but I felt really, really good.

I said, “Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.”

And, “Silence is golden.”

And, “I’ve always been a talker.”

I said, “Furze. One thing I keep coming back to is old grandpa Al’s furzebox. Listen,
Lincoln. Did I tell you yet about your uncle Ikey? Guy who did the stunt with dental
floss? Guy who let the sheep in?”