Strange Cowboy Read online

  Praise for Strange Cowboy

  Yeah, yeah, Strange Cowboy, Strange Cowboy, you bet, you bet—but I’m telling everybody twenty-one years ago this very same Sam Michel brought out—not that you would know it for the innattention paid—Under the Light. Ok, that plain book was an assembly of stories, whereas this intricate ditto’s a novel. I see the difference, granted. What I also see is a dandy chance for me—Tyrant’s tyranny so very graciously suspended—to send you back back back to the luminous Under the Light and thus to a constellation of illuminings afire within. Justice for Sam Michel!

  —Gordon Lish (Dear Mr. Capote)

  Praise for Big Dogs and Flyboys

  “Adam Oney, the hero of Sam Michel’s bittersweet debut novel, is rightly named after that first namer. His other forebear is Icarus, only in this version, the boy survives to tell his own story with surpassing compassion for all.”

  —Christine Schutt (All Souls, Nightwork)

  “Michel creates a character of enormous, unnerving innocence in prose both stealthy and extravagant. The ending is a knockout.”

  —Joy Williams (Honored Guest, The Quick and the Dead, The Changeling)

  “Sam Michel is such a smart, manic, virtuosic stylist. He’s also a surprising, big-hearted, courageous storyteller, whose considerable talent is firing on all cylinders in Flyer, a book full of odd/beautiful language, and the kind of deep insights that make you suddenly and newly appreciative, of the world around you.”

  —George Saunders (Pastoralia, Bounty-Land, In Persuasion Nation)

  STRANGE COWBOY

  Lincoln Dahl Turns Five

  Tyrant Books

  676A 9th Ave #153

  New York, New York 10036

  ISBN 13: 978-0-9885183-2-2

  Copyright © 2012 by Sam Michel

  Excerpts fom this book have appeared in Epoch, NY Tyrant,

  Massachusetts Review, 3rd Bed, and Unsaid.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction and all the characters, organizations, and events within it are from the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  First Tyrant Books Edition, 2012

  Cover and interior design by Adam Robinson

  Cover photograph by Noy Holland

  www.tyrantbooks.com

  STRANGE COWBOY

  Lincoln Dahl Turns Five

  A novel by Sam Michel

  TYRANT BOOKS

  New York 2012

  For Patricia and for Noy

  LIST OF CHAPTERS

  DUTY

  INTERRUPTION

  ENORMOUS LANGUAGES WERE PITCHED AGAINST US

  RECAPITULATION

  DUTY

  —Mother could be dead—how calm?—how sit?—burning questions—no dogs in the house—no wife in the house—our heaven-scented future—your son has got his birthday—tell the boy your story—he is staying younger longer—clammy in the old illusion—Living Wings of Memory—Master Of the Seated Half-Dads—a chair-sized chamber in his skull—I was a different man—cunny stew—our favorite game was Horsey—invitro lesbians and queer scouts—pork chops and baked potatoes—my story is not his—demolition of the Roxy—the hurry to regret—the butcher’s crush—your subbest-conscience—Father, Son, and Hope—what really killed my father—Mother in The Anchorage—party in the barn—we killed a cow and barbecued our ownselves—God prefers His women—Mother lives—

  My mother sits, dead, could be, though I believe she lives, though she is old in life, and should she not be dead, then might at least appear to some to be more dead than living. She enacts that look. More dead. She has got her blood down, stilled her breath, her face pales in a deeper shade than sleep. In her, a soul seems out. The body seems a corpse, ready to exude. Certainly, she will not be stirred. I have called her name to her, softly, whisperingly across the lamp stand, then more urgently, more hissingly, I think, calling her by both the name I share with her, and then again by the name she went by as a maiden. I tried Gob. I thought it might sound sweet to her, an endearment, should she not be dead, this Gob, an indication of how far this day had taken me, in terms of showing some familial affection. On the other hand, I saw perhaps how she might fail to know me through affection. I was her son, after all, unendeared; if she would rise, what was likelier to coax her rising than the pitch of a familiar spirit? Yet should I call her hag? So soon, that is, so hard up on the heels of Gob, in her condition? And had I really ever called her hag? Nag, I wondered, snag, drag, crag, crack? Was I the son to curse the crack through which another life was passed into this world of miseries and sorrow?

  Not hardly. No, not Dahl. Not Lincoln. No, not me, not hardly. All in all, I like my life, my looks, my mind, my car, my yard, my house, my chair—I am content. Though true enough, my content does not descend from Mother. True enough, I am born, and suckled, shoved off from the nipple and instructed to pursue content on “someone else’s porch swing;” I am told to amscray, me, a kid in dirty dungarees and scabby kneecaps, told to tie my own shoes, make my own lunch, brush my teeth and put myself to bed and learn to tell myself when I wake up in sweats and screams that I am only dreaming. Make no mistake: there is strife there, across the lamp stand, in the easy chair, it takes little to recall those scenes in which the two of us have been occasionally, forgivably unkind. As for me, I withheld. I begrudged. Even now, today, I might have complimented her earrings, Mother’s wind-resistant sportsuit. In her prime, I let her little triumphs in the public eye go unremarked; I exercised myself by steering conversations to a place where I might call her housewife. Yet here I had hoped to leave such unkindnesses behind me. Let a bygone be a bygone. I have resolved to call her nothing, if not something on the lines of Mother. Starting now, earlier, dusk, I think, I am a new man, more principled, less vain, neater, squarer, nice. Then, too, in the case of Mother, I must confess to yielding to an older order, no doubt acting on that etiquette which teaches us to spare the dead, to save out our unkindness for the living. Sure, she could be dead. Her sportsuit seems more to be arranged on her than worn. Her face appears to have lived out rapid epochs of freeze and thaw, cataclysmic weathers whose last calm unveils a wasted flesh, a cell-thin skin forlornly strung out on the cheekbones in the final, waxen melt. Mother, dear old gal, out of blood, out of breath, dead and gone, dear, dead Bonnie Dahl, it seems, the Egypt queen, embalmed.

  Still, I believe she lives, reclined, where customarily I find reclining in her stead the mother of my child, my wife, the one my mother warned me I would one day kick myself from “here to Sunday next and back” for having married. I am calm. Imagine me. This woman, my mother—forget strife, forget content, nevermind what she has burned of mine or not or if it was for five or six or seven hours she would lock me in that closet—only please remember for awhile that it was she who taught me how to ride. Agreed, Papa was the horseman, yet it must be said that Mama was the one to show me how to sit a horse. A pony, then a horse. Happy, and then Grief. Happy through the barnyard, Happy through the heifer lot, then Grief to ride me gently through the lime-white flats and brushy highlands of the wider desert. Yes, though the memory is not available to me for seeing, it is easy to imagine Mama lifting me to sit my saddle, easy to remake my mama’s voice: Here’s your pony, she says, Happy. He was tricky, Happy. A stocky little Shetland cuss who bucked and stomped and bit. I think I did not like him. Left to me, I would not have called him Happy. For me, for days called back from the equestrian arena, happiness did not begin until the day when I turned five, and Mama turned my pony out to pasture, presented me the reins to a swaybacked, longtoothed, buckskin gelding,
no less misnamed than Happy, Grief. Should the bullet pass straight through my brain and leave me lying just as dead as Mother, then I should doubtless hope my last clear vision would depict some scene of me alone with Grief; should science manufacture the elixir to unage me, then doubtless I would choose to age back to that day when first I stroked Grief’s bony withers. For him, and for those knightly days he gave me, I have to thank my mother. She knew. She knows. She is my mother.

  So how calm? How sit, brooding, whispery and hissing, when there I see the cause of much of what is best in me may well have gone and perished? In truth, I might say that I, too, appear to be more dead than living. Parts, in any case. My extremities. Limbs and digits, dead, asleep, numb from the big toe to the hip, the pinky to the armpit. Fault the child. He sleeps against me. Presses heaviest where I expect my blood must run the thickest. It’s for him I whisper. His birthday. It’s for him I think the day has come to pass as it has passed, delivering us to our respective sleeps and failing circulations. Calmly, I regard the child, the top of his head, these flakes that peel up from his part, his dander, I suppose; I note the click and burble in his chest and those spasmodic, clutching twitches he is prone to making with his fisted fingers.

  Outside is the snow. Inside are my mother, my son and me, a sofa, our chairs, the lamp stand, a mess of magazines and salted snacks and our remote. The room ticks. The ceiling sags. We own no dog. Calmly, I ask myself how we have come to be here. There seems time to wonder am I happy. Possibly, happiness has been forever lost for me in any unadulterated station, owing to our family’s mode of naming. Truly, what is riven in the mind of a child who suffers grief at the hooves of a beast called Happy, a child who finds his happiness in Grief? On the other hand, it may simply be that I am the man the saint has cautioned prudence in deciding what to pray for, should he wake one day to find his prayers are answered.

  I am, I know, confused. Calm, and confused, confusedly calm; I, too, have got my burning questions. Why corduroy, for instance, why sweatshirts? And where on earth is my wife? Have I driven her away at last? Will I see her next with something handsome on her arm, returned to serve me papers? And my mother, should she prove me wrong in my belief, and turn up dead, can I have killed her? After all this woman has endured, can it be a heart attack, provoked by me, has pushed her past what even Mother can endure, has finally, suddenly, thoroughly and totally, completely, wholly killed her? Or how about a stroke? Could be I have pushed her to a stroke, just as I believe she pushed my papa. Certainly, she has got her cancers. Her diabetes, osteoporosis, her acute esophageal reflux. Unfunny, that.

  “You wake up with it at night,” my mama says, “and the stuff feels like it’s killing you as dead as dead, like maybe you have gone a little crazy with the chilis in your enchiladas, and you are suffering the Lord’s last rectifying heartburn.”

  Or, if not the reflux, not a cancer or a stroke, then maybe medications. Could be I have overdosed her. Two blues, I believe I gave her, and a green. Whereas I should possibly have made it vice versa. Question one: Should I have made it vice versa? Question two: Should I count myself as culpable for having made it versa vice? With her blood, I wonder, which one is it, thick, or thin? I wonder really are there no such things as accidents, when it comes to doling out the dosage? At my party, when it was me who had his turn at turning five, was it not an accident that I should burn the barn down? Who gave me that torch? And why? And after all that practice, how is it I should not be able even once to dance with Mama? And is it true that I am older now than she was then? Am I old? Middle aged? What is my current ratio, whiskers per square inch of face? Should it not suffice that I am growing out these hairs inside my nose, without my also growing hairs there on the outside? And what about these tufts here in my ears? Why these curling patches on my shoulders, back and belly? I ask you: Where is God? And how? And if He is a Christian, then must He be eternally a Roman? I mean my mother’s question, and my wife’s, the question hinging on the boy’s unbaptized life, his vulnerability, the possibility that he might throw his soul away to the Episcopalians, or to the Lutherans, or the Baptists, or, worst, the nation’s scourge, our desert’s spawn, the basin’s own corruptive cult, the Mormons.

  Yet perhaps I would do well to slow myself, recall my calm. So many questions, what began them? No doubt, perhaps, not God. Not to deny God’s precedent, historically, as a locus from which we have figured to extrude so many such inquisitive beginnings, no, but rather to say that my desire is to cast myself less grandly back. Enough, I think, to wonder why no wife. Enough to ask myself what trouble I have caused my son. Take care of your mother, and God will take care of Himself. The longer I live, the more I am convinced the first of all preceding and succeeding questions must be buried deep within the present past. Yet who will dig there? Who among our kind resists the sweeter lure of an ancestral interruption, the tribe of angels choiring the chorus from our heaven-scented future?

  I may have my eyes tricked out for seeing Mama’s next deep breath, yet what I really see is Mama powdering her cheek, Mama rubbing bag-balm on her calloused heel, Mama kissing Papa on the forehead, before she pulled the sheet up. Same way with the boy, only in reverse. In him, I do not see his scalp so much as I am figuring a future boot size, or will his foot correct itself so he might wear a boot, or will he pass from one grade to the next, graduate and make his way through life without requiring any supplementary assistance. Big bucks, I mean, from me, monies I might rightly rather count on spending on expensive tickets to the beach. I think in this boy’s dander I have seen another old guy unentitled. I see me seated here, a little deeper down here in the impress of my own expiring carcass, a little looser, a little sparser, my fillings crowned, my gums rebuilt, my paunch redoubled, a really pretty old and pretty lost guy dozing off and dreaming of a brown-skinned native, blemishless, nicely plumped up through the hips on coconuts and mangoes, a newly breasted child whose joy in life is listening to me and dabbing aloe vera on my sunburnt ankles.

  I do. I do. I feel sorry for myself. Awfully. And, then I don’t. And then I do. And then I come into a day much like today and understand I might try feeling sorry for my son, or for my wife, or mother, or my father, who is dead, after all, and arguably most deserving of my sorrow. Unless his death was a relief. To him. Unless he meant to spare himself his misery by feeding on those foods most likely to induce in him a chronic constipation, a pressure in the bowels which relayed to the brain with force enough, he might have thought, to cause the stroke which would eventually, mercifully kill him. Whereas Mama saw no mercy in her death. Nor did my wife, nor would I expect my son to even see such mercy in his death, were he able to conceive of death in one way or the other. In the same way, I might understand how the entire lot of them could choose to not accept my sorrow, sorrow being not a widget handier than death in life, according to my mother, “Nothing you can spend, nothing you can keep and wish for luck on in your pocket.” My mother only wants another, longer life. I know my wife would like a better husband. And if I am to listen to my mother and my wife, then I might safely say that in addition to a dog, the boy would simply like a party. A party, says my wife, that I myself need not lose any shuteye over throwing. Myself, I need only tell the boy a story, a story, as it happens, not so simple in the telling as it sounds. I have no doubt, for instance, that this birthday business is precisely how we came unhappily to be here.

  Not that turning five is an exclusively unhappy cause of celebration. For me, do not forget, being five meant Grief. It meant a party spared no lavishness, according to my mama, who will recall as crowning proof of lavishness how she confected an entire five tier cake. Cake, which she didn’t even like, she says. German Chocolate, which she even liked much less. As for me, I will recall that I was giddy, “wound up tighter than a tick,” my Uncle Ikey said it; I was whiney, silent, mopey, five. I wore suspenders, and a shiny pair of lace-up shoes, and this very classy, diamond patterned bowtie, not a clip-on. I recall I wanted not to say a w
ord unless I felt it was the right one, and the first one, the earliest, rightest word I saw that I could fit in edgewise, when the guests came. I was to be seen, my mother said, not heard. I said and then a lot. And then, I opened up my eyes. And then, I put my socks on, and then I put my shoes. I knew enough to play. I thought to listen. I heard my Grandpa Al, who said a boy the size that I was wasn’t all unlucky, being nose-high to the furzebox. There were hundreds, guests galore. Peppermint and barbecue, perfume and ammonia or straw—I could not say what I was smelling. Ranch smells, barn rot. Views of many legs, slacks and dresses, shiny hosiery and shining, silver buckles. People spoke above me. Even then I must have seen that in a world of words I was not favored. So I fudged, or did not fudge, but said that I was waked up by my papa’s voice, and breath, and by his size, this thickish, humid space, a smaller shape of dark I felt his body claiming of the larger dark he woke me into: “My room,” I said, and by his whiskers, as it seemed to me it really happened then, as it likely was expected to have happened, by any guest whose leg I held for long enough to make him stop and listen.

  “Tell the boy a story,” says my wife, something, she says, from back when I was his age. But I ask if this is possible. She has purchased him the bowtie, since I refused to lend him mine, and suspenders, and a pair of shiny shoes and shoebrush and a little tin of shoeblack. She says it isn’t clubfoot, what the boy has, when I asked if she has maybe been extravagant, taking care to keep him shod so fancily, considering his podiatric ailment. He is only slightly pigeontoed, my wife says. The doctor, she explains, has made her understand that all the best Olympic sprinters, “from antiquity on down,” in case I had not noticed, are also pigeontoed. Of the teeth we’ve witnessed springing, willy-nilly, from his jaws, she says they are his baby teeth. She promises that he will shed them, the same as he will shed his baby fat, the same as it had happened once with me, and once with her, as we grew older.