Strange Cowboy (3 page)

He said, “What?”

I said, “What’re you up to, drawing?”

“Yeah,” he said, “just drawrin.”

I observed him wipe his chin off with the backside of his hand, the backside of his
hand off on his pantleg. There was Crayola underneath his fingernails, a yellow crust
about his nostrils.

“I see,” I said. “Well, carry on,” and left him.

Ask my mother, and my decision not to kneel, not to crouch or hunker nearer to his
level was both natural and right; whereas my wife assures me that by talking down
at him I am establishing a pattern in our dialogues evolving from a base mistake.
According to my wife, I should have let him tell me that the snowman and the lizard
were my wife and me, before I offered my opinion that a snowman and a lizard might
be difficult to find in tandem, in the real world. Whereas my mother did not blame
me, feeling slighted to have thought myself a lizard, or the woman I am married to
a snowman.

Said my mother, “Your wife doesn’t want that crap on the refrigerator any longer than
she’s got to keep it there. Tell her how your daddy used to start our fires with
your
colorbooks, why don’t you? Didn’t hurt you any, did it? Tell her that, why not?”

Simple, according to my mother. We are a simple people, she reminds me, our town folks
and our rural both, happily removed from the complexities so plaguing of your denser,
damper climes. Ethno-racial strife, invitro lesbians, queer scouts, cosmetic surgeons,
metered parking, therapists, nutritionists, last month’s rush on all things chintz:
all of these we read as symptoms of a sickness in the bigger world we designate Outside.
We lean from tractor cabs, balance water, stare into the sun and sweep our dust and
count ourselves as lucky not to be there. Clarity, this is us, simplicity, desert
agrarian, the Good Life. Here, a wife knits cotton caps. Here a husband dials his
wavelength on the FM band and tunes into his futures. We know the value of a pork
chop and a baked potato. We pay a fair wage to our Mexicans, treat our Indians with
every due respect. We here are a community of Cowboys for Christ, your Future Farmers
of America. Around here, one is one
and this is mine and that is yours and you must never claim that you have painted
without having scraped your knuckles on the clapboards, pried the lid off from the
can of paint, dipped your brush and painted. Who did what is plain as doing. Here,
we do. We take only as we need, pare to bones, decide to marry and to reproduce as
easily as we decide to plant and squat and bury. This is how we talk, in any case,
the chest we show our neighbor, the blue-eyed calm we lend to lost, light intoxicated
strangers.

So how is it I remain confused? Why should a husband not know what to do? What could
be more simple than to tell a son a story? Yet I continue not to see too clearly what
requires me to tell this story, other than tradition, or a habit, secured by me through
what my wife sometimes refers to as responsibilities.

“Necessities,” she said. “Call the whole thing progress.”

Well, the whole thing prompted me to sit. I recall I sighed, reclined, pushed my chairback
nearer to the horizontal, raised my footrest higher off the carpet. I focused on the
waterspot that spreads above the TV on the ceiling.
Necessity,
I thought, and
progress.
I sat and thought and then I asked my wife about the Roxy, whether she believed the
mayor’s demolition of the Roxy was a fair example of a necessary progress. I reminded
her how we watched—my wife, my son, and I—while the ball struck at the upper story
of the movie house, where I had explained to them the balcony must be. We stood there
in the crowd the same as all the rest stood: elbows up, our ears stopped with our
fingers. We watched the man manipulate his levers in the crane cab, saw the big arm
swing, and halt, saw the ball continue wallward on the cable. We watched the brick
split and the dust rise. We applauded when a man-sized chunk of theatre was loosened
from the rebar. An engineer among us marveled at the power of hydraulics; he explained
to us inertia
and momentum, and the way in which a force was equal to a mass, if multiplied by an
acceleration. We thanked him very much. We watched the ball swing with a narrowed
eye. We pulled our chins. We pressed our lips. My son confessed a need to urinate.
He insisted on it, tugging at my coattail, while a young man asked me had there really
been a balcony in there, wondered were there really loveseats, and were the curtains
really made of velvet.

I asked my wife, I said, “How
progress
? Why
necessary
? You know, there’s a part of us that is that velvet curtain. There’s a part of all
of us that wants to watch the movie from a balcony. I can’t see the point, telling
the boy what all he’s missing. Really, now, why the hurry to regret?”

My wife picked husks of popcorn kernels from her eyeteeth with her pinky. She probed
her molars, stretching out the one side of her mouth, clear back to the jaw hinge.
I watched her shift her weight from hip to hip; I could hear the waters in her, lapping
at her bellywall. But she would not make an answer, or rather she had made me one
already, in her fashion. What she did—in addition to the popcorn, and the squirming—was
to yawn, and there I saw the little glint of life, and understanding, receding from
the filmy pigment of her iris. She scratched at herself, tweezed an ingrown hair;
she stood and hiked her pants up higher on her haunches: all by way of telling me
that she was shutting down now, I was losing her, my head was
in the sand
again, she
failed to see my relevance.

“I’m not nagging,” said my wife. She said, “Did I tell you I invited that new butcher,
Hans? He’s very nice. He never even charges me the extra for the super-lean. He charges
other ladies, but me he charges just the same as for your fatty. He isn’t ugly either.
He’s tall. He always calls me miss. Poor Hans, I think he
likes me. He’s got a crush. I feel like I should bake a pie for him, but I’m afraid
I’d give the man ideas.”

None of this was too surprising, when she mentioned it. Everything made sense, she
said, or would come to making sense; she said I ought to trust her. My wife drags
home the pointy hats, the balloons and paper plates, the plastic forks and Dixie cups
and cake pan. I have seen the cake mix and the candles. I have listened, soberly,
to guest lists, and to seating schemes, to party horns my wife has learned will fetch
her some attention. She stands outside the bathroom door, behind me at my breakfast,
before me where I used to sit my longest, gladdest hours in my chair, my wife sounding
on her horn to me a little like a lovesick mudhen.

“Go ahead and laugh,” she said. “Go ahead and sit there making fun, Mr. High and Mighty.
It’s supposed to storm tonight, you know. They’re calling for ten inches. Then guess
what? It’ll melt, is what! You’ll be parked there in your chair, staring at that dopey
waterspot, and then the whole entire ceiling will fall in on you! You’ll drown! Right
here in the desert! Right there in that nasty, ratty fabric!”

My wife made up her hands into fists, these lumpy clusters I could see of veins and
hair and knuckles, asking me did I recall the formula for force?

My wife said, “Other men eat meat.”

She said, “Deep, deep inside of you, way down in your subbest-conscience, I believe
you love him. This is your son we’re talking about. Do you always want to be a constant
stranger?”

I am the procreator, she reminds me, the father, what did I intend to do? In the end,
I stood up from my chair, used some force when straightening my chairback, real authority
when lowering my footrest to the carpet. I went over to the window,
peered between the louver slats, and was happy to observe the boy was neither chipping
paint flakes from the mailbox, nor eating dirt, nor digging up his mother’s glads.
There he was, at the far end of our yard, sitting on the frozen ground the nearest
to the neighbor with the Schnauzer, Hope. I watched my son, weighing the pros and
the cons of being better known to him. I tried to put myself in his shoes. I thought:
Life will likely not be good to him, his birthdays causes for diminished celebration.
My son, after all, is much uglier than I was, who was too pretty, said my mother,
for his own good, or anybody else’s good, so far as she could tell it. Fair enough,
I got to thinking—I am pretty, when I come to notice it, if I really look, and keep
in mind the others, far less blessed than I am, the ones with bulbous noses, dented
foreheads, those with stunted digits, clubbed feet, knocked knees, thrusting tongues—my
son. Still and all, I tried not to pity him. I recalled my mama’s counsel that we
all must bear our burdens as we must. If I found myself regarding him with fondness,
I likened the emotion to nostalgia, which passed on quickly into envy, and into something
nearer to disdain. I must have had such skin, I told myself; my hair was once as thick,
my flesh as springy, my bones much more resilient; but I could never in my life have
been so sullen, so dropsied, sluggard, doped, so prone to rare disease; this child,
I said, cannot account for any permutation of my seed.

Not to say that I don’t mean well. I have coached the boy, sung to him, packed him
on my back, pointed out the marvels here of nature in our desert. I sincerely doubt
if he will try to pet another scorpion or pick another cactus. I used to tell him,
“Sharp,” or, “Hot,” and “Ow-ey.” I presented him with rubber balls, Crayolas, and
a knife. I have not imagined he can understand. If I look at him too long, I see his
eyes are thick, torpid, excessively mucosic,
not unlike his mother’s eyes, as I’ve described them, whenever she is failing to perceive
a relevance. As for him, I figure he forgets to blink. A father sees his son will
be the sort who breathes, in sickness, and in health, through his mouth. I have tried,
and failed, to teach him to retract his tongue from in between his teeth, when he
is thinking.

Out there, on the frozen lawn, the boy and the dog, was that thinking? I rapped my
knuckles on the windowpane. I rapped again, kept on rapping till I understood my wife
had cinched the earflaps of his hat too tight for him to hear me. I could see his
mouth move. I watched him wave a stick, coaxing Hope to join him through the fencebreak.
The dog approached, wagged her tail and wriggled for him, licking at her silver whiskers.
I wondered that she never bit him.

“Everyone who’s anyone is coming,” my wife was telling me, “including Hans. He’s bringing
sausages, free of charge. And how do you think that’ll make you look? Where on earth
will you be?”

Tell the boy the little things that I liked at my party, she was saying, ask him what
he’d like at his, so as to get the boy excited. But when I went outside to him, the
boy was not excited.

He said, “You made Hopey run away.”

I regarded my son, his puckered chin and blotchy cheek.

“That’s all right,” I said. “Hopey is our neighbor. She’ll be back before you know
it.”

We stood side by side, my son and I, looking past our fence and to the house where
Hope lived. It was a house the same as our house, only upslope, the same as is the
next house, and the next house on our block, up to the corner.

I said, “Are you cold?”

“No,” he said.

“Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“Tired?”

“No.”

“Well,” I said, “what are you?”

He worked his mouth, preparing, I was thinking, to produce his tongue. His shoulders
seemed to stiffen, his feet seemed somehow more completely fastened to the ground.
The boy was at a loss. He was clenched, wheezy, running through his brain the states
of being, I was guessing, a boy his size might occupy between fatigue and hunger.

He said, “Hopey likes this stick.”

He raised up the stick for me to see it, held it in his glove his fingers were not
reaching even near the tips of.

He dropped the stick.

He kicked it.

I said, “Where’s that rubber ball I gave you?”

“Lost it.”

“And the knife?”

He shrugged.

Behind us, I could feel his mother watching through the louver slats. It occurred
to me that we were standing in a posture similar to that in which we witnessed the
destruction of the Roxy.

I said, “Do you remember when we watched them wreck that theatre?”

“No,” he said. “Not really.”

I said, “Do you remember when we went to see the horses? Or when we had our picnic?”

He did not, or said he sort of did, but in the drifty, halting cadence which assures
a father that his son is lying.

He said, “Maybe if you waved the stick, then she’ll come back.”

I bent to pick the stick up. The stick was barkless, chewed and raw in spots where
the dog had mauled it. I held the thing aloft. The air was still, and then a wind
began to blow, and on the wind, an icy, thin, spitty sort of snow a person learns
will sting him, should he face it. I thought back to all the dogs we once had of our
own, certain brooding mares and heifers, these sows and ewes and laying hens, a nanny
goat named Faith, a rabbit that my mother begged me please to call by Chastity, this
blind, albino Hereford Papa chased about the barnyard, calling Tom. I thought back
to bigger winters, softer snows, and to the welcome melt, the tender, budding orchards
of our autumn apples, the intervening days of ripening and growth, the straw days,
Papa called them, when the sun would warm my hollows and would turn my hair, my mother
said, to strands of gold she wished that she could make a blanket of to sleep in.

“Well, we boil at different degrees,” I told my son.

I dropped the stick. I asked him was he ready. He blinked, licked the glaze from off
his upper lip.

“For what?” he said.

“I don’t know. To go back in, I guess.”

The boy was torn.

Here is Hope, he seemed to say, and here is home.

I said, “Your mommy says a storm is coming in.”