Thief (11 page)

“Sure,” I said. “I always look out for myself.”

I never told Julian what I had done. I just added it to my list of exclusions and lies.

BECAUSE I DIDN’T WANT
to get too caught up in Breville, or perhaps because it was summer and I had time to dally with whomever I wanted, I placed
another personal ad, this one in the Bemidji paper. I could have picked up someone at the Royal or some other local bar if
that’s all I was looking for, but it wasn’t. I wanted something more than just a drunken fuck, and I thought that a person
paying to answer an ad would have at least that much invested.

A cowboy visiting friends in Blackduck answered, and I called him at the number he left. We seemed to have little in common,
though. After he told me the story of how a horse had kicked him in the knee at the Cody rodeo— bad enough to put him on crutches—
we had trouble just keeping the conversation going. But when I tried to get off the phone, he said, “Now, don’t go and hang
up yet. You’re like E. F. Hutton. You talk and I’ll listen.”

He was making an effort, it seemed, so I decided to give him a chance, and when I showed up at the appointed time at the Paul
Bunyan statue in Bemidji, right beneath the horns of Babe, I was glad I hadn’t been put off by his manner. The cowboy stood
six-five, with blue eyes and jet hair. His shoulders were broad and his
hips were narrow, and not even his crutches or hobbling could take away from his handsomeness.

“So, you weren’t kidding about your knee,” I said in those first flustered seconds after shaking his hand, when I was still
taking in the good-looking whole of him. “Are you seeing a doctor?”

“I’ve been doctoring myself,” he told me. “Ibuprofen and beer.”

We sat by the water and again he told me the story of the horse kicking him in Cody. After that, he confessed to me that he
was nervous about the date.

“I had a few beers before I came here,” he said. “Liquid courage.”

“Would you like to go have a drink now?”

“No, no,” he said. “I had them at home. It’s cheaper than drinking in a bar.”

And of course that told me a couple of things, but I didn’t let any of it register in my face.

When some teenage boys walked by, laughing and talking loudly, I looked away from the cowboy for just a second and drew my
purse a little closer to my side.

“You don’t need to worry about that as long as I’m here,” the cowboy said. “I don’t let anyone bother a woman, even if I am
on crutches.”

We sat talking about his trip out here, and he told me about the dog he lost in Cody after the rodeo. He had the dog so well
trained it didn’t need a leash, and when he’d gone into a bar, he felt safe leaving the dog in the back of his pickup.

“If he left, it’s because someone took him,” the cowboy said. “He’d never leave on his own. When I bought steak, I’d buy one
for him and one for me.”

“Did you look for him?”

“I gave up after a day.”

“Do you remember the name of the bar where you were? You could call.”

“I remember,” the cowboy said, looking out over Lake Bemidji. “I should. I should call.”

“What was your dog’s name?”

“Bear. But I called him Bud Dog for short.”

I didn’t say that Bud Dog was longer than Bear. I knew what the cowboy was saying, and I knew he missed the dog.

I guess we’d talked long enough then, or long enough for the cowboy to decide he liked me, because he looked back at me then
and invited me up to his friends’ house in Blackduck.

“Bob and Thrace can grill us up some steaks,” he said, so politely and gravely I knew I wasn’t supposed to take him up on
the offer.

“If you like, we could drive back to my place and I could fix us some dinner,” I said, though I knew I had next to nothing
in the house and was no cook, even on my best days.

“Well, that sounds nice, too,” the cowboy told me. He was measured as he said it, so maybe the relief I thought I heard in
his voice was all in my imagination. But that’s what I felt— relief over not having to meet his friends and gain their approval
as well as his.

We made the long drive back to my cabin, with the cowboy following me in his old blue pickup. When we stopped along the way
to get beer in Emmaville, I walked over to his vehicle before I went into the store. “So, are you sure you like me well enough
to come all this way?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t like you. Do you need me to lick your fingers?”

He sounded petulant and I didn’t know what I’d done to break the bantering mood we’d established by the lake, but I chalked
it up to what ever pain his knee was causing him. When I pulled out of the parking lot of the Emmaville General Store, the
cowboy again fell in line behind me.

By the time we got to the cabin, it seemed he had lost his impatience.

“I guess you only date guys who are as tall as you are,” he teased when we got to the low-hanging branches of the jack pine
by the cabin door. At five-four, I had no trouble scooting under the limbs, but the cowboy not only had to duck but also bend
at the knee. On crutches and one good leg, it was awkward.

Inside and seated, though, with a beer in hand, he again became handsome and charming, telling me one story after another.
He was named after an archangel by his Jehovah’s Witness parents, whom he’d run away from when he was thirteen. He once swallowed
a bullet on a barroom dare. Another time, to prove a point, he jumped in the Kern River with his boots on and fully clothed.
Just a couple weeks ago he stitched up his own leg with needle and thread when he got cut in the woods, helping his Blackduck
friend with some logging.

“And once I put my finger through someone’s windpipe because he was hurting someone,” the cowboy said. He then told me the
story about hearing a woman screaming for help in the parking lot when he lived in Denver. A man was assaulting her and the
cow-boy pulled the guy off . Since the cowboy didn’t have any kind of weapon with him, he punched the attacker in the face
and then punctured the guy’s windpipe with his finger.

“I told you I don’t allow anyone to hurt a woman,” he said.

I let the cowboy go on talking because he seemed to need it, and because my stories about working with teenagers and grading
papers paled beside his tales.

“Do you think you could fix me something to eat now?” he asked me after his second beer. “That’s how my last girlfriend got
me. She promised me three squares a day.”

I didn’t know if spaghetti and leftover chicken constituted a square meal, but that was what I had in the house, so that was
what I made the cowboy. He went through three helpings, along with four slices of bread. If I’d made more food, he would have
eaten it, but
there was no more. For dessert, I put half a pack of cookies on a plate and the cowboy ate all but the one I took to keep
him company.

“I gave my last four hundred dollars to my friends,” the cowboy told me then. “I’ve been staying with them, and they’ve been
feeding me. And Monday I have a doctor’s appointment.”

And that’s when I knew precisely where things stood with him.

After dinner the cowboy hobbled down to the dock with me and watched me swim, and then we came back to the cabin and he went
through my video collection to find something for us to watch. He picked out a PBS documentary about the West that I was previewing
for my American literature class. At one point when some scholar was talking about Crazy Horse, the cowboy leaned close and
kissed me, as I’d been hoping he might. But the thing went no further, not even when I said, “Hmm, that was good.”

“It was just chicken scratch,” he said, and we went on watching the documentary.

It wasn’t until the video was over and the cowboy said, “Well, I guess I should be going,” that I realized there was a formula
I was supposed to follow, a series of offers to be made and rejected, then revised and accepted.

“It’s awfully late,” I said, and it was— nearly two a.m. “You can stay here if you like.”

“I can sleep on the sofa.”

“You can sleep in the bed with me if you want,” I said, and then I quickly went into the bathroom to brush my teeth so he
could have a second to mull it over.

That must have been how long it took him to decide, too, because by the time I came back from the bathroom, he was stripped
down to his underwear and lying on the bed. When I saw him, I felt the same thing I always felt when I was about to lie down
with a stranger— I loved the directness of it, the intention. I felt it
even more strongly when I saw the cowboy’s body. His bare chest and the dark hair on his thighs made me want to lie down with
him. But something about him— knowing he had a bum knee, or even the full white briefs he was wearing that made him look old-fashioned—something
about him made me wonder if he didn’t need a soft place to fall more than he needed a lay.

It was only after we were lying in my bed— him in his white underwear and me in a cotton nightgown with my eyes closed, trying
to pretend I was going to sleep— that he revealed the next part of the formula.

“Are you attracted to me?” the cowboy said into the dark room. He sounded unsure— unsteady, even— and I thought about what
he might feel like, lying there in the rough cabin with his crutches beside the bed. He wasn’t whole, but what ever it was
that had driven him to seek out company must have been stronger than what ever pain he was in.

“I am attracted to you,” I said.

It was all I had to do. The cowboy rolled over from lying on his back and pulled himself on top of me. After a couple minutes
of kissing and rubbing at my breasts, he lifted himself with his good leg and worked his way inside of me. Because he couldn’t
hold his weight evenly, he lay heavily on me. I told myself that was why I felt a kind of panic, but it was more than that.
He was a foot taller than I was, and strong, even with his bad leg, and even though I’d felt such desire for him all evening,
once he got inside me, the plainness of the act struck me. It felt rushed and wrong.

When the cowboy came after just a little while, he shook his head from side to side, like he was seizuring. Then he made a
sound I’d never heard a man make before. It was a cross between a whine and a howl, like a coyote or a dog. The whole thing
scared me, and I felt some kind of shiver at the back of my neck and over my scalp, but I told myself,
That’s just the way he is, that’s just his
way
. And in a second or two, even though the sound scared me, I wanted it, too. Wanted him to be an animal.

After it was over, he rolled off me but kept one hand wrapped in my hair. I still felt the shivery thing over my scalp, but
I also felt bound to him, to the naked thing he’d shown me.

“You’ve got me here now,” the cowboy said then. “What are you going to do with me?”

At first I thought it was some of the same bad temper I’d heard when we’d stopped in Emmaville, but when I looked at him in
the dark— there was enough moonlight coming in the window that I could see his face clearly— I saw it wasn’t that at all.
So I climbed over his bad leg, spread his thighs, and took his cock in my mouth. Then there was nothing he could say.

The second time we screwed, I sat on top of the cowboy. The ceiling of the cabin was so low that once I straddled him, I could
touch it. Not just touch it— I could press my palms flat against it. I did it a few times, so he could see my breasts go high
and so I could have something to brace myself against as I fucked him. It was better that way than the first time when he’d
been on top.

“Am I hurting you?” I asked, thinking of his bum knee and the crutches beside the bed.

“You hurt me good. Grind away.”

I did it hard enough that he moved up on the bed a little with each push. That kind of screwing didn’t make me feel much of
anything, but I liked seeing him move like that.

When he came, he shook his head again and made the same sound he had the first time. I was ready for it this time.

When I got up in the middle of the night to walk down to the dock to swim, the cowboy didn’t wake or even shift on the bed.
I knew it was the beer and the fucking that made him sleep so hard, but it made me marvel. Now that I had fucked him, he stayed
fucked, asleep and entirely trusting, even though I was a stranger
to him. I could have gone through his wallet or gone out to the kitchen to get a knife. Yet I didn’t want a knife, and I knew
he didn’t have any money. I didn’t even want to check his driver’s license to see if he had told me his real name.

The next morning, when we woke up, I gave the cowboy a blow job. I kept the head of his penis in my mouth and worked my lips
and hand over the shaft of his cock until he came. When he was done seizing and howling, he said, “No one ever done me like
that before.”

I didn’t know if he meant he never got to come in a woman’s mouth before, or if my combination of hand and blow job was unique.
I thought I might ask, but as we were lying there, sweetly, the cowboy lightly fingered the notches in my throat.

“See, you can go in with your finger, right between the ridges,” he said.

I could have knocked his hand away or told him he was scaring me, but I did neither. Instead I went still like an animal and
in a little while he moved his hand away from my throat.

We had sex a couple more times that morning, and then I made us coffee, eggs, and home fries. When the cowboy tried my coffee,
he told me it was too strong.

“It’s good for another kind of a day, when you want to get something done,” he said. “Another day I’ll sit here on your sofa
and read the paper and you can make me that kind of coffee.”

So I poured myself a cup, threw the rest out, and started a new pot for him.

When the cowboy and I sat down to eat, I told him how I’d found the cabin to rent.

“I don’t miss anything about the things I left behind,” I said. “I wish I could just stay here.”

“Why don’t you?”

“It’s a summer cabin. I couldn’t make it through the winter here. And I have a job to go back to in September.”