“Looking for a cowboy?” Raphael’s voice is heavy with sarcasm.
“Perhaps I will get lucky. Should I return with one, or two?”
“You don’t understand,” Raphael says, but Willy is gone.
Raphael wakes the next morning to Willy bustling about the room, peering in drawers, opening cabinets. He turns up a Gideon Bible. “What are you looking for?” Raphael asks.
“Oh, nothing.” Willy turns. Above his left eye a black-and-purple cauliflower blooms, flecked with dried blood. Raphael props himself on his elbows. “My God, Willy, what did you do to your head?”
Willy shrugs. “I went to a bar. I was watching. I asked for a cigarette. Then they turned on me, a foreigner, they said. A fag. I knew this anger and I left.” He touches his bruise. “I did not leave fast enough.”
Raphael turns to the wall. “You should put some ice on it. There’s a machine in the hall. It’s free—you don’t need any money to operate it.”
“It is nothing. You will see as much in your time. Maybe worse.” Willy roots through scattered clothes. “I am not complaining. My cowboy followed me out. He took me to his place, to feed me drinks and nurse my wounds.”
“So where is this cowboy,” Raphael says to the wall. He hears the door open. “Taking your time in here,” a voice says in a flat western twang. Raphael flips over. A tall, thin blond in glove-tight jeans and a pearl-buttoned shirt lounges in the doorway, smoking a cigarette. He wears boots studded with turquoise and tipped at their toes with silver. With the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger he inhales a last drag, then flicks the butt into a puddle outside the door. On its quick hiss Raphael’s heart sinks.
“I beg your pardon,” the blond says. He winks at Raphael. “I had no idea.” He turns his back.
“Wait,” Raphael says. “You don’t understand.”
Willy bends to the foot of the bed. “Good. It is found.” He stands, clutching his shoulder bag to his chest. From the bag he pulls a patterned, lidded tin. He opens it and removes several bills. The blond takes the money, then shies from Willy’s hug. Raphael watches him climb into a late-model Corvette. He guns the engine and rumbles from the parking lot.
Raphael leaps from the bed and slams the door shut. “Ass-hole. You told me you were broke.”
“So I keep a little reserve for emergencies. Is this so terrible for a stranger in a foreign country?”
“That was no cowboy,” Raphael says. “That was a goddamned whore. And you let yourself be hustled.”
“Call him what you like. He helped me when I needed help.”
“Much like myself,” Raphael says. “Only he had the sense to get paid.” He throws himself around the room, tossing aside Willy’s clothes, pulling on his own jeans. “Well, I’m happy you found your cowboy. Or maybe I should say he found you. The guy who knocked you upside the head. He was the real cowboy.”
“The man who hit me was not a cowboy. He wore a white shirt and brown pants.”
“The only kind left,” Raphael says. He strikes his knee against the half-open drawer and kicks it shut, savagely. “Welcome to America.”
In Nevada, fences drop away and signs crop up along the interstate: OPEN RANGE, CATTLE CROSSING. Every mile or so fake cattle guards are painted across the pavement to fool the cows from wandering. Yet they see no cows, no water, little wild-life, only endless sagebrush, with an occasional raven circling overhead or a black-and-white chukar winging up from the shoulder.
Traffic is light; Willy drives. Raphael has nothing to do but nurse his anger. “You will see as much in your time,” Willy said to him only that morning. “Maybe worse.” Raphael leans back, closing his eyes to imagine what might possibly be worse, to be confronted with a picture of himself, an aging man standing on street corners, provoking brawls in redneck bars, hiding wounds from a suspicious wife.
Climbing Battle Mountain the Rambler boils over. They stop, let the engine cool, start again, but the grade is steep and the car rebels after a few miles. Raphael cannot remember the last service station. He has no credit cards, little money. A few cars and trucks speed by, their drivers’ eyes fixed on the road, avoiding Raphael’s hopeful looks.
He turns to Willy. “OK, so earn your keep.”
Willy smiles, rolls his eyes. “My keep? I do not understand.”
“You’re the mechanic. What do we do now? Let it cool? Push it over the mountain?”
Unbelievably, Willy’s eyes fill with tears. In the roadside’s parched glare, his fingers resting on the lump above his eye, he looks older, old. “I am no mechanic,” he says. “I bought a used car in Canada, I was to drive it to California. I was to stop in Dodge City, in the Monument Valley where the movies are made, in the Death Valley with its twenty mules. Then I broke down in St. Louis. I had been standing by the road for hours. I looked at you. I liked you. I wanted to give you a good reason to keep me along. Everything else I have said is true. Only there did I not speak the truth.”
Furious, Raphael climbs from the car. He raises the hood, to be confronted with a hot maze of wires and plugs and blades, all mysterious and to his eyes potentially lethal.
Willy stands beside him. “Perhaps if we let it cool—”
“You lied!” Raphael, who has never raised his voice to an older man, is yelling. “I could have left you sitting in Salt Lake. But no-o, I go back, looking for a mechanic. And what do I get. A liar. A fag.”
Willy sets his chin, plants his feet. “That is enough. You turned back for me. You are old enough to face this.”
“I turned back for a mechanic.”
“You turned back for love.”
“Love,” Raphael says. His voice trembles with contempt. “What can you know about love?”
Willy sits on the fender, crosses his knees, rests his chin on his fist. “Please,” he says.
“Please what.”
Willy waves his hand, an angry flick. “Please continue. I am waiting to have it explained.”
Raphael crouches by the open hood, numbed from himself. He rests his chin on his hands, watching the radiator cap bubble and seep.
Willy touches his shoulder, and Raphael is so tired and angry that he does not shy away. Willy points to the north. The sky is searingly blue, but nearby a mustard-colored cloud boils upward. As they watch, it grows closer, until its mass separates into tens, hundreds of cows. Within minutes they take refuge in the car from a slow-moving river of bellowing, stinking, long-horned cattle.
Raphael looks back. Down the road men have blocked traffic. They must be yelling to drivers, but Raphael can hear nothing over the noise of the herd. To the front his view is blocked by the raised hood. He does not see the horse or its rider until he is looking at spurs, glinting at eye level from a battered, square-toed boot.
“What the hell are you doing here?” The voice comes from above. Willy is out of the car before Raphael can answer. “Stuck!” Willy cries. “Overheated!” Raphael pokes his head from the window.
The cowboy rides a gray-flecked quarter horse. Erect in his saddle, he wears faded jeans, a ten-gallon hat, a bandanna around his sunburned neck. He swings a tight-muscled leg over the saddle horn, tosses the reins to Willy, pokes around in the engine. “Fan belt,” he announces. “Loose.”
“You will be able to help us?” Willy asks shamelessly.
“Maybe. With the right tools.”
“There’s a toolbox in the trunk,” Raphael says. “There’s a couple of wrenches.” He climbs from the car and retrieves the tools.
Standing in the spring sun, watching this stranger tinker with the engine, Raphael finds himself acutely aware of his world in a way he has never before allowed himself to feel. The warm tan of this man’s boots against the asphalt; the leathery copper of his skin against the mud-spattered blue of his jeans; the heat of Raphael’s own palms, burning to touch this handsome, hardened man.
Raphael forces himself to look away. He closes his eyes, trying for the last time to conjure a vision of the woma
n, any woman, who must be waiting in California . . . no luck. He has lost the art of outwitting himself, to the cowboy on the roan horse; to Willy, standing at his side.
The cowboy returns the tools to Raphael. “That should get you up and over the pass. But you need a new fan belt. Stop in Winnemucca at the Texaco, on the east side of town? Ask for Sonny Devine. I expect he won’t charge you more than twenty bucks.”
“Thanks for stopping,” Raphael says. He would like to say more, but he has lost his voice to the heady smell of saddle soap and horsehair.
“A cowboy,” Willy says. “An American cowboy.” His hand slips from the bridle to the horse’s neck. He fingers the saddle’s worn leather. “A picture,” he says. “Please wait, only a moment. I must have a photograph.” He dives into the Rambler and retrieves his Instamatic. He hands it to Raphael. The cattle press too close to the car to allow Raphael to step back, so he climbs to the car’s hood. He snaps Willy and the cowboy, standing beside the horse.
“You’ll want one with the cows in it,” the cowboy says. “For the folks at home. They don’t make cows like this much anymore. A dying breed.” He scrambles atop the Rambler before Raphael can object.
Raphael stands next to Willy, while the cowboy fits his eye to the viewfinder. “Closer,” he says, waving them together. “I want to get them cows.” Willy does not budge. Raphael hesitates, then steps to Willy’s side to droop his arm around Willy’s shoulder, casually, as if it might have dropped from the cloudless Nevada sky. “Say horseshit,” the cowboy says, and snaps the picture: Willy and Raphael, grinning, Raphael’s arm around Willy’s shoulder, while behind them the long-horned cattle moil and balk under the glistening, snowcapped peak of Battle Mountain.
The cowboy returns the camera to Willy, mounts his horse and wheels around. “Hasta luego,” he says, and clops through the herd and across the highway, toward the rolling plain to the south.
Willy crows with laughter, clapping his hands and dancing around the car in little skips. “For this only, I would have come across the world!” he cries. He dances up to Raphael, takes his shoulders in his hands. “My thanks to you and your wonderful car!”
Raphael jerks back from Willy’s hug. “We’d have been in California by now if it had been left up to me.”
“But you see it is not left up to you.” Willy executes a small bow. “These are the workings of love.”
Raphael slams the hood and climbs into the car.
The herd clears the highway. In minutes Raphael and Willy are over the pass. Raphael puts the Flash-o-matic in neutral for the long downgrade. The pavement clicks by. The sun sinks. He lowers the visor against its brightness. Willy tilts back the passenger seat, closing his eyes.
Raphael steals a sideways glance. Above Willy’s eye the lump swells, but a smile wrinkles the corners of his lips. The sun glints from his red hair as he hums a little song. Raphael fights the tune (where has he heard it before?) but it sticks in his head, leading him on to the place where he is going.
Guilt
[1981]
This was how Joe Ray Hardin came to sell clothes:
Woolett & Parks was the only clothing store in Jessup County. Spring and fall, April and October, Leo Parks made trips to Chicago (and later, with the rise of the New South, Atlanta), where he bought suits, dresses, slacks, and shoes to match the budget and measurements of everyone in Jessup County who wore more than bib overalls (those he ordered in bulk).
Taste was not a problem. Leo Parks determined taste, and he took care to ostracize the newfangled, the outré, the fashion statement (“as if anybody in Jessup County had anything to say,” he told Joe Ray once, in a rare moment of self-revelation). Leo would study any Louisville-bought dress that showed up at midnight mass, or at a wedding, or at a funeral. “Poor box,” he’d say, right out loud on the church steps, where the wives that bought and the husbands that paid would be certain to hear. And sure enough next season you’d spot that dress in the back left pews on a black girl whose mother had added a strip of red sateen to hide the tucks at the waist.
Men were not a problem. Know their family, know their genealogy, know their income and social standing (Leo knew all these), and you could look at a sixth-grader and tell what clothes he’d be wearing in thirty years.
Women were the problem. Women’s sizes were the problem; women’s sizes were the challenge of the trade. Women’s sizes often changed between order and purchase. Leo would see Frampton Hughes driving out of town alone at a time of day when civilized people were sitting down to supper. Then he’d have to guess how much weight Millie Hughes would gain across the duration of Framp’s latest affair. He’d have to anticipate whether to add a half or a whole size to accommodate the extra pounds. Then he’d have to present the new purchases to Millie as if they were the latest thing, taking care not to draw attention to the added sizes. And there was always the chance that Framp would tire of his latest fling before Millie bought the next season’s dresses. She would be back to dieting, and nothing to do but put that dress on the sale rack.
Because Leo Parks had been a longtime acquaintance of Tom Hardin’s, Joe Ray spent his high school summers working at Woolett & Parks. A few days to recover from his high school graduation party hangover and Joe Ray was headed for the military, headed for Indochina, until the Army got wind of his haberdashery skills. He spent two years measuring men for uniforms, then went to the state university on the GI bill, where he met Catherine. They had almost graduated, they were hopelessly “in heat,” as Catherine came later to call it. Then Catherine discovered she was pregnant.
Wide through the hips, large-boned but small featured, Catherine was not that beautiful; but she was born to money. No great fortune; “middle-class,” she called herself, like everyone Joe Ray knew, though her lawyer father earned enough that a maid came twice a week to their suburban home to pick up the clothes Catherine left strewn about. Joe Ray called himself “middle-class,” too—he who’d gone into the Army because he couldn’t afford tuition at the public university, and who’d never have gone to college at all but for the GI bill.
She had money; they had options. Her father was eager to pay, no questions asked and hopeful that this experience might break his daughter of this relationship. Catherine promised she’d think over carefully what her parents said. They sent her to French Lick for a long weekend to be alone with her thoughts and the enormity of the idea that at twenty years old she would have a child. And she went to French Lick, and thought it over carefully, and believed she was choosing her fate and that of her unborn child; but there was no decision to be made. The tyranny of desire is absolute. Within a month they were married, and Joe Ray was back at Woolett & Parks.
Across his years in the store Joe Ray came to know (as Leo Parks had come to know before him) the breadth, height, inseam, and shoe size of every person in the county. The job required a diplomat’s discretion, a banker’s financial acumen, a writer’s perceptive eye, a politician’s dissembling, a gigolo’s charm, a suitor’s manners. From Leo Parks, Joe Ray learned these talents and more.
He was heir apparent to the store—Leo had two daughters, both married to prosperous suburbanites, neither interested in selling clothes in a small town buried in the hills, and anyway, as Leo pointed out on the first of the times when he took Joe Ray with him to Chicago, wearing was for women; buying was for men.
In Chicago they stayed at the Drake—Leo’s room had a lakefront view. When Joe Ray met him there for late afternoon drinks, Leo had dressed for dinner in a tailored, three-piece silk suit. As Leo was knotting his tie Joe Ray stole a glance inside Leo’s suitcoat: Carson, Pirie, Scott. It was a revelation to Joe Ray that Leo was capable of such extravagance. His own suit (polyester blend, bought, of course, through Woolett & Parks) smelled faintly of mothballs, which Leo kept in open boxes scattered around the store.
Looking over the lakefront view Leo mentioned that he was getting old, time perhaps to think of handing on management of the business.
Before Joe Ray could muster a response Leo was ushering them down to supper. That night as Joe Ray lay listening to the muffled sounds of Michigan Avenue he calculated how many years it would take to buy out Leo’s daughters, what it would be like to own a set of tailored dress clothes that didn’t smell of napthalene. He fell asleep thinking of the store foyer, with its floor mosaic in hexagonal blue and white tiles:
Woolett
&
Parks
How much would it cost to have it retiled? Would Hardin’s fill the wide entryway?
Then they built the bypass and it was over. Now it took only an hour to drive to Louisville. The women flocked to the malls, to be caught in traffic jams on the interstate or on Shelbyville Road, to park and walk a half mile across baking or freezing asphalt, to enter a vast warehouse where the help (just try to find them) was ignorant, aloof at best, abusive at worst; to choose from racks of poorly designed, ill-fitting, cheaply made—
Leo sold the Woolett & Parks building, with its high pressed-tin ceilings and hand-turned poplar banisters, to the highest bidder—a chain of hardware stores who had plans to use it to store paint. Joe Ray was too proud to beg and not sure what he would beg for. He worked wordlessly through the Christmas sale, the going-out-of-business sale, the final FINAL sale.
When looking for someone or something on which to fix blame for the course of his life, Joe Ray thought of those few trips to Chicago. Had he never been to the Drake, had he never seen Leo Parks in a tailored suit, he would never have imagined such possibilities. But once experienced they became not only possible but necessary, and falling shy of them was failure. This was America, after all, where (as Tom Hardin had often seen fit to remind his sons) the only obstacles to a man’s career were his own faults and laziness. Joe Ray was not lazy, and he was by any standard smarter than Leo Parks, and with an education. That left only the intangibles of character. And so, in the months following the closing of Woolett & Parks, when Joe Ray cast about for someone to blame, he saw no one to turn on but himself.
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