The Cowboy's Convenient Wife

by Joanna Bell

At one point, a girl I thought I vaguely recognized sidled up to me and brazenly slid her hand over my thigh. I looked up, blinking through my drunken stupor. Yeah, I did recognize her from somewhere. High school? Maybe. Or maybe I fucked her once, back before Astrid Walker turned my dick into a one-woman organ.

  "Not really lookin' for company," I slurred.

  I wondered, as the overwhelming scent of vanilla and fruit filled my nostrils, if the women of Sweetgrass Ridge held secret meetings where they decided on what perfume to wear that year. Because they all wore the same one, I was sure of it. No matter where you went in town that sharp, fruity, cupcake-y note hung in the air. Even Darcy wore it, although I was pretty sure she wore the expensive version.

  "No?" The girl replied, slipping her hand a little further up my thigh. "What's wrong, Cillian? You look lonely."

  Astrid didn't wear perfume that smelled like fruit and cake. Astrid didn't usually wear perfume at all. When she did, it wasn't the kind that made her smell like a bakery.

  I closed my eyes and thought of Astrid, of the way her neck smelled – of clean skin and girl and lost futures.

  "Cillian?"

  "Huh?" I blurted, having forgotten I wasn't alone with my misery.

  "I said you look –" the girl broke off and reconsidered. "Actually, never mind. Do you want me to get Bob to call a taxi?"

  "What I want is for you to leave me the fuck alone," I replied.

  So she left me alone. Everyone left me alone. They always did. I wasn't always a morose drunk. Sometimes I was aggressive and volatile, and people were afraid of me when I got like that.

  I settled back into my drunken memories and I swear it felt like no more than 5 or 10 minutes had passed when I looked up to find the bar empty and the staff shooting each other meaningful glances, trying to figure out whose job it was to kick me out. It was after 3 in the morning – I'd been at the bar for more than half a day.

  I wandered out into the night before anyone could ask me to leave.

  It was snowing, and a cold wind was blowing down from the north. I went to pull my jacket tighter around me only to find I wasn't wearing a jacket. Did I leave it at the bar? Did I just forget to put it on before I left my condo? I didn't know, and I didn't much care.

  I walked down Main Street with my head down, facing into the wind, attended to by the ghosts of the past. There was the hotel where Astrid spent her first ever night in Sweetgrass Ridge. There was the rink, where my brother Connor spent the vast majority of his spare time.

  I always made fun of him for his obsession with hockey. We all did. But that night, stumbling drunk and freezing down the empty sidewalk, I felt an unexpected rush of compassion. Connor loved hockey. Why did we have to try to diminish him for it? Why did we have to diminish each other for loving anything – or anyone? Why did it have to be the way it was in our family?

  Why couldn't my mother have lived?

  Across from the rink, about a block further down the street, was the Super Mart. Hazy memories of standing on the end of the shopping cart as my mom shopped for groceries crowded my whiskey-addled brain. She used to tell me what she needed so I could pull it off the shelf and put it in the cart. I liked doing that when I was little. I liked being useful.

  OK, Cillian. Chocolate chip cookies. Two boxes please – there are a lot of cookie monsters in our house.

  Sometimes, after I put the items in the shopping cart, my mother would reach forward and tousle my hair, smiling.

  That girl worked at the Super Mart, too. Jackson's girl. My dad and Darcy really freaked the fuck out when they found out she was pregnant.

  The wind howled down Main Street. I could no longer feel my ears, my fingers, my toes or my face. I kept walking. And as I kept walking and the wind blew harder something strange started to happen. I warmed up. The warmth crept into my extremities first, and then into my core. I was staggering down a deserted, freezing street in the middle of the night and I was as cozy as I would have been curled up in front of a roaring fire at the ranch.

  We used to have fires at the ranch, in the big hearth in the living room. That's where we used to set up the Christmas tree as well, before my mom died. Darcy prefers to put the Christmas tree up in the other, more formal living room. Darcy prefers plastic trees, too. Fewer needles to deal with. My mom liked real trees. She liked the smell.

  I loved those Christmas mornings of early childhood, when I still believed in Santa Claus and nothing – nothing – was more exciting than laying in bed, waiting for my mom to come in and give me the signal that I could get up and come downstairs.

  One year, I got some really delicious candies in my stocking. They were some kind of soft caramel with pecans in them, circular shaped, and they were so good. For years after that I would ask for them but no one seemed to know what they were called.

  Maybe I could look them up on the internet?

  That's what I thought about as I sat down on the sidewalk and leaned back against the brick wall of the Yellowhead Bank – those delicious caramel candies. Also, of Astrid. Would she like them? She would probably know what they were called, even if she didn't like them. Astrid was smart. She knew things I didn't know. That's why she couldn't be with me. Smart people think dumb people are boring.

  I smiled as I thought of Astrid. My wonderful lost girl and her pretty little face, the way her chin narrowed slightly at the tip, like the bottom of a cartoon-heart.

  I miss you. Please come back...

  ***

  I woke up with a jolt. Someone was trying to lift me to my feet. I didn't want to get up. I was nice and warm right where I was – and very sleepy.

  "Get off me!" I snarled, attempting to lash out and then realizing my limbs weren't quite working properly.

  "Sir. SIR! Please keep your hands where we can see them!"

  It was a cop. It was 2 cops, actually. Fuck. Fuck.

  I kept fighting. I don't even know why, I don't think they were trying to arrest me. Not at first, anyway.

  "Oh shit. That's Jackson Devlin."

  I slumped back against the wall as two well-fed Sweetgrass Ridge police officers looked down at me, and then back at each other.

  "Is it?"

  The one who thought I was Jackson leaned closer. "Yeah. Yeah – I think it's him."

  "Schhhnot –" I began, which is the sound that comes out of your mouth when you're drunk and hypothermic and you try to say 'it's not.' "Schnot Jaaa –"

  "No way," the second cop said. "That's not Jackson. I saw him earlier today at the feed store with his kid. That's Cillian – the other one."

  "It isn't!" His partner insisted. "Look at him. It's Jackson! We should, uh – what should we do?"

  "Schnot Jackshon!" I finally managed to yell. "Schnot Jackson! I'm – I'm –"

  "Cillian?"

  "Thass me!"

  The cops didn't know what to do with me. If I'd been some other drunk, with a different last name, they would have thrown me in the drunk tank for the night no problem. But I was Jack Devlin's son, and that meant they had to be careful.

  "Maybe we should call Jack?" One said, after a few minutes of back-and-forthing.

  "At this time of night?" The other replied.

  "Jus' lemme go," I said, struggling to my feet. "Jus' lemme –"

  "Can't do that," came the reply. "You're half frozen to death, Cillian. Why don't you come back to the station with us and we'll get you warmed up and figure out what to do?"

  "Nah. I'm goin' home. I'm goin' –"

  They grabbed me, one on each arm. Most people, when grabbed by the police, are smart enough not to fight. Not me. I jerked away, trying to free myself and succeeding only in falling to my knees. The officers pulled me to my feet again.

  "Calm down," the bigger cop warned, although even then his tone was more concerned than aggressive. "We're just trying to help you."

  "I don't need any help!" I yelled, managing to get one arm free and swinging blindly into the snowy darkness.

  "Hey! C
illian! HEY! STOP IT!"

  But I was too drunk and too stupid and too broken to give a single shit what happened to me. I think I almost wanted a beating. Then I could wake up the next day covered in bruises and pleased, somehow, that the outside of me finally matched the inside.

  I took another swing. That time I connected – with who or what I didn't know but I hit something for sure and the next thing I knew I was face-down on the frozen concrete.

  I immediately began to struggle once more.

  "Goddamnit!" The junior cop yelled. "Just stay down, man! We're trying to help you!"

  But I was beyond help. I was also bigger than both of them, and filled with the belligerent strength of a man who knows he has very little to lose. A night in jail? Charges for assaulting a police officer? Who cared? What did any of my shitty life matter?

  Given the chance, I rolled away and staggered to my feet again. And then, when I tried to punch a cop for the third time in one night, they finally lost their concern for what Jack Devlin would think.

  Someone punched me in the kidney and I buckled, almost falling flat on my face. A second blow caught me on the chin just before I was swept off my feet and tackled. I think the punches would have kept coming, too, if a fourth voice hadn't suddenly rung out from across the street:

  "Hey! Get off him! What the fuck are you guys doing?!"

  ***

  I woke up the next day on an unfamiliar sofa in an unfamiliar place. At first I thought it was Jackson's trailer at the ranch – but it was too tidy to be that old shitbox.

  I sat up, groaning as the amount of pain I was in hit me. My head was pounding – my jaw in particular. When I tried to touch it I actually shrieked like a little girl, flinching away from my own hand. There was a tender spot on my back, too, and then another one on my shoulder.

  Where the fuck was I? And what the fuck happened?

  Oh. Oh yeah.

  It came back to me. Not all of it. Just enough to figure out why I was bruised and aching. It wasn't my first drunken brawl – but it was my first drunken brawl with the police.

  With much huffing and puffing, I managed to sit up.

  "I'll make some coffee."

  I jumped at the sound of a man's voice and then fell back, moaning softly.

  In the trailer's small kitchen, someone was standing in front of a counter. I thought it was my dad at first, but then whoever it was turned to face me and I suddenly realized it was my uncle – Uncle Dave. I was in his trailer. Fuck.

  I tried to stand up to leave but the throbbing in my jaw was too much. Also, I couldn't see properly. My vision was weirdly blurred in one eye.

  "What the fuck?" I whispered as I sat on the sofa closing one eye and then the other, trying to figure out what was wrong. "I can't fuckin' see."

  The smell of coffee filled the air and I heard liquid being poured.

  "Got yourself a big old shiner," Dave replied. "Whole eye is swollen shut. You take cream and sugar?"

  "I don't want your fuckin' coffee," I growled. "How did I even get here? I need to get home. Help me up, I need to go back to my –"

  "Cillian."

  "What?"

  My uncle set a mug of steaming coffee down on the cheap coffee table in front of me.

  "Drink this – and shut the fuck up."

  Hungover and injured I may have been, but I wasn't so out of it that my uncle's tone didn't snap me right to attention. Uncle Dave couldn't use that tone. Not with his brother – my dad – and not with me or any of my brothers. He wasn't one of us, in spite of his name. He was a fuck-up. An embarrassment.

  He did not get to bark at me like that.

  Until he did, anyway. Until the day I was too messed up to do a damn thing about his disrespect.

  I drank my coffee.

  "How did I even get here?" I grumbled.

  "Bob called me from the Lone Pine. Said you just wandered out without a jacket on, so I got in my car and drove around for a bit, looking for you. Not sure what you said to Rick and Joe but –"

  "Bob called you?" I interrupted, surprised. I thought everyone at the Lone Pine hated me.

  "Uh-huh. Didn't want you to freeze to death, I guess."

  "Makes sense," I chuckled grimly. "Fuckin' place would go under without me."

  "I think he was just concerned for your safety."

  Is it pathetic that up until that point in my life I'd hardly experienced anyone being genuinely concerned with me? There was mom, and then there was (briefly) Astrid. That was it. My mom died and I fucked it up with Astrid. And other than those two, I wasn't sure there was anyone else on earth who gave two shits. A lot of people gave a shit about Jack Devlin's son, of course. And some gave a shit about Jackson Devlin's asshole little brother. But not many gave a shit about me.

  Not that I acknowledged any of it that day. As soon as I was finished my coffee I struggled to my feet and called a cab to pick me up and take me back to my pizza box strewn condo. I didn't thank Dave for saving me from a beating. I didn't do anything except grunt when he called out the door after me that I was welcome anytime.

  I always thought my dad's kid brother was a loser. A failure. Jack Devlin made something of himself. He grew the ranch from a large operation to a huge one. He doubled and tripled and then quadrupled profits. He added thousands more acres to the Devlin holdings. He was a success. Uncle Dave worked menial minimum wage jobs and lived alone in a rented trailer on the wrong side of town. Growing up, I was strongly encouraged not to spend any time with – or waste any thoughts on – my uncle. It was almost as if my dad thought his brother's second-son failure disease was contagious or something.

  Jack was wrong about a lot of things. Jackson figured it out before I did. He was the only one of us who ever gave Uncle Dave the time of day. I always thought it was because he was soft. Jackson wasn't soft, though. He just intuited – a lot sooner than I did – that not everything our dad said was the 100% gospel truth.

  After a few days alone in my condo, licking my wounds and dedicating myself to a hair-of-the-dog method of hangover remediation, I woke up one morning feeling like absolute shit. My bruises were fading into that distinctive yellowish-blue hue by then but the bad feeling ran a lot deeper. The hangover wasn't just about being dehydrated or short of electrolytes or whatever the hell a hangover actually is – it almost felt spiritual in dimension. I was on a bad road. I had been on that bad road for awhile. When a man is young and strong he can take a period of rough living but for some reason I woke up that day aware I was phasing out of being able to handle it, moving past the place where my body could tolerate my endless attempts to drink away my self-loathing.

  I didn't drink that day. I didn't get dressed or shower or eat either, but I didn't drink. And then the next day I didn't drink again. Same for the third day, too. That was the day I remembered what Uncle Dave said when I was leaving, that I was welcome anytime.

  Why would he say that? I sat on my sofa for an entire afternoon puzzling that one out. Sometimes I feel like being raised by a man like Jack Devlin is almost a kind of disability. Uncle Dave told me I was welcome anytime because I was... welcome anytime. It just didn't compute in my brain, though. It didn't make sense. Why would I, an arrogant little fucker from the jump, be welcome in the house of a man I treated with nothing but disdain?

  Because not everybody is like Jack Devlin is the answer. Not everybody is like me.

  The next day, instead of back to the Lone Pine – which is very much where I wanted to go – I went to my uncle's trailer.

  "Thank you," I said quietly when he opened the door and invited me in and asked me what was up. "I just wanted to thank you for stopping those cops from beating the shit out of me. Thank you for, uh, for helping me."

  "It's not a problem, Cillian. I guess I'm just worried about you."

  I looked up, assuming he was joking. He didn't look like he was.

  "Are you?" I asked.

  "Uh-huh."

  "Why?"

  "Because you'
re family, that's why. We may not be very close – and that probably isn't your fault – but that doesn't mean I don't care about you boys, or think about you."

  "My dad always said we should stay away from you."

  Uncle Dave caught my eye. "Yeah, I know. We never really got along, your old man and me."

  Like I said, I was well into the process of realizing what a piece of work my dad was by then. I'd spent over a year doing little more than getting drunk and fighting and what did Jack Devlin do? What did he do when his second-born son was obviously in the kind of trouble you don't always get out of? Nothing, that's what.

  Less than nothing. I ran into him on Main Street once, after I came back from California. I was unshaven, still wearing the crumpled clothes from the night before. I was ashamed, too. So ashamed I couldn't even look him in the eye.

  You want to know what he said after he looked at me the way you might look at something foul on your shoe? He said I shouldn't bother showing up at the ranch for Thanksgiving unless I could take a shower and put on some clean clothes.

  I never really saw that side of Jack Devlin before. I heard of it. I heard about his habit of negotiating feed suppliers into prices so low some of them went bust off the back of the deal. I heard about him threatening the mayor when a piece of land close to the ranch sold and my dad got word the zoning was going to be changed as part of the deal. I heard about how the buyers lost their life savings when the promised re-zoning didn't come through and they had to resell the property at a major loss.

  I even heard the rumors it was Jack Devlin himself who bought it at the newly discounted price.

  The problem was I had that thing that sons sometimes have for fathers – especially fathers whose approval they grew up craving. I believed his intentions were good. I know how stupid that sounds, but I did. I thought Jack was just protecting his family. Growing his business.

  When he told me my uncle was a loser and that I should stay away from him, yeah I knew that was cold but again – I thought it was for my own good. I thought my dad was helping me. That's why I believed him. That's why I stayed away from my uncle.

  It's why I helped him fuck Jackson over, too. And that's not me blaming my dad – I had a chip on my shoulder the size of the whole Devlin Ranch when it came to my big brother, so let's just say it didn't take too much arm-twisting. But Jack spun that as noble as well, if you can believe it. Told me and Darcy and my brothers that he was doing it for Jackson's own good. For the family's own good. Told us that pregnant gold-digger was going to drain off the family wealth to such an extent our own children would be destitute.