Strange Cowboy Read online

  “He’s just staying younger longer,” says my wife. “If you ask me my opinion, I would say you’re jealous.”

  Very possibly, I think, and yet I wonder was I ever, in any sense that matters, his age? In what way can a blonde boy be a lankish brown? In what way is the boy who sat a blooded horse the boy who topples face-first from a plastic rocker? Myself, I grew up with rocks and fur and feathers. I knew how to use my knife, could get a drowned cat skinned quicker than the time it took to have the flies swarm. My son, on the other hand, has got his allergies to every weed and blooming beauty; he turns a lurid shade I’ve seen of sunsets in a smog belt, puffs up like an adder in the presence of a living cat, is induced to nausea, having sighted dead ones being picked at by the magpies on the roadside. He has yet, so far as I know, to fetch the blade out from the handle of his knife without extensive counsel. The fly swarms of my youth, no doubt, would make of him a walking fester, while he chewed his tongue and clawed the handle with his fingerstubs.

  No, I should say that we were doing well, my son and I, to leave our mutual affiliation be. We seemed neither of us bothered much to be particulates accounting for the general decline, the trend away from bats and balls and gloves, paternal intervention, relative to rearing children. As for me, my sleep had been untroubled, this past year, my dreams have reinspired me to look upon the breasts and buttocks of my wife in otherwise than glands and cushions; I have waked up every now and then as in the early days, clammy in the old illusion, thinking I might suckle there, tweak, caress, and penetrate, while the boy has had far fewer days consumed in idle weeping. I have even caught him, on occasion, smiling at me, showing me a semi-toothsome, frightened, hopeful grimace, which recalls me to a boyhood vision of my father: old, alone, wrinkled, gummy, clutching at his troubled kneecaps on the toilet, engaging bravely with his hemorrhoids and constipation, straining to postpone his second stroke.

  “Is he happy?” said my wife. “Well, look at him, why don’t you? Can’t you see the boy is smiling?”

  Undoubtedly, she says, I will regret not having been a bigger part of our son’s future memory. I don’t smile enough, my wife says; the smile, she must remind me, is the Invitation to Desire, the Living Wings of Memory.

  She says, “You keep it up, and he won’t want to remember anything of you. Nothing. Do you read me? I said that he’ll remember nothing, nothing, nothing.”

  Yet if the boy will not recall me chopping wood or lying on my back beneath the family wagon, will not be able, as my wife insists, to reproduce me on my hands and knees, riding him about the cold linoleum, singing songs and spooning dribble from his chin of twice-mashed carrots, will not remember me, the father, smiling, then will my son at least not see me someday in his future, just right here, in this chair, poised, seated, an integrated man in a disintegrating household? Anything, I told my wife, is something. Through speed and speciation the smallest vital crumb on earth exerts a force commendable to memories extended well beyond the retrospectings of the local child.

  “Just think about those guys we saw on that show on Rome,” I said. “The Master of the Bearded Unicorn; The Master of the Virgin Torso. Not all of us can be a Botticelli.”

  Surely, there must one day be a shrine built to the memory of every mastered passion. A place of record and collection, visited and mythic. Mine is to sit. I broaden, sitting. For me, for the boy, I foresee a chair-sized chamber in his skull to which he pays his visits, waits for a word, watches for a gesture, sees me, uncorrupt, anonymous, Master of the Seated Half-Dads. I believe that I may not be bested in the seated greeting. I have the effect, upon a person’s entering our household, of having stood, kissed a cheek and begged a person please to help himself. Should I choose to, it is possible for me to cause a person to believe that I have suffered polio, or multiple sclerosis, nervous, muscular diseases, past or in remission, whose ravages have wrested from my life the spry, athletic days I sit in order to display myself as having once been promised. I am the only person, to my knowledge, who is able to consistently relieve himself of his dyspepsia through certain bowel-specific postures. Naturally, I cannot satisfactorily describe my power, nor why I believe in its effects. I have simply asked my wife to look at me, see me in my chair and ask herself how any son could grow up crossing at my footrest and forget me?

  Until today, on occasion, my wife has temporarily forgone the boy, admitting she is not so sure she’d want to have me as a memory either, if she had not known the Me she knew in courtship. She insists I was a different man then, wants to know if I remember our inaugurating days of marriage, the brief, halcyon months of carnal love and culinary amplitude, before the news broke that the boy would come. In those days, she explains, I bought her silken underpants. I lapped mousses from her cleavage. Apparently, I said I liked the flavor of her cunny-stew. I would growl—it seems to me, implausibly—coming up from there, smeary-lipped, and kiss her. I was truly, truly frightening, and bigger, it had seemed to her, hurtful, in a handsome way, when I forgot myself. She recalls our favorite game was Horsey. I neighed. It seems to me no likelier than growling, but she claims she spurred me on and slapped my flanks, unmercifully, at my urging. She loved, loved, loved to ride me. I was the stallion of her childhood dreams come true. She sometimes called me Silver. Other times she called me Trigger, and on the nights I reared and bucked the rankest I became, to her, Black Beauty. It wasn’t any pervert, she insists, nothing bad, or even too unique, in our part of the country, where so many of us grew up in the neighborhood of horses, and those of us who didn’t grow up with a horse were made to grow up wanting one, or just, it seems, with wanting.

  “Oh, it was a romp,” she said. “My God, I swear that I could feel it when you—you know—I’m not kidding. I even knew which times you gave me more than others. I swear I knew which time it was you finally knocked me up.”

  My wife said it was then, with the advent of the boy, that I began exploring Oriental diets. I went easy on the cream. I distrusted cuts of meat much larger than my thumb. I suddenly liked rice, discovered strength through fasting. In the eyes of my wife, I was in the process of becoming, increasingly, less Me. To support herself, my wife hauled out the snapshots of our happiest occasions as a family, showing me consistently appearing not the way I ought to. I hear my wife inform me that my duty to the boy, in part, is to provide for him a model. If I had stood a little nearer to him, smiling, preferably, “expressing interest,” said my wife, then I might have kept the boy from getting hurt so often—his fingers broken on the day we fed the horses, his chest bruised by the goat, his hide chewed off by colonies of fire ants he’d found to crawl through at the picnic. I could have been a hero to him. As it stands, my son’s past with me has been a woozy spiral of neglect and woundings. Lucky for us—for me, she meant—he isn’t likely to remember. Till now.

  “He’s at the age where he remembers,” said my wife. “Give the boy a party. Anything is possible. I bet he’ll forget you were the one who burned his drawings.”

  I was doubtful. At our best, the boy and I these past few weeks have been reactive agents in a mother’s midnight stab at family alchemy. There I hear him padding up behind me where I’m resting on the sofa; there he hovers at my elbow while I read the morning paper; there I see him tug my pantleg just below my operation. Or else I see him on the carpet, with his tablet and Crayolas, filling in what seem to be the contours of a snowman and a lizard. Of this last occasion I recall I watched him long enough to know that he was whistling through his nose, and that the damp spots on his tablet were the emblems of his deepest intellectual exertions, the stream of spittle falling cleanly from his chin while he had pondered the expressive capabilities of reptiles, as he knew them.

  I said, “Whatcha doin, sport?” surprising him, despite myself, judging by the swerving action of the Crayola he was working.

  He sat back on his hams and strained his head around and up to see me, as if he was emerging from a shell. His eyes were monstrous, distorted by the
thickness of the spectacles his sight depends upon. I half expected him to answer me in tongues of damaged birds and fawning quadrupeds. Aawrock! I heard him saying, Feed me, please, hngrrahh, chirrup!

  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.