by Larry Brown
I went into a grocery store to get the beer. Usually I went to wherever it was the cheapest. I got beer, barbecued pigskins, Slim Jims to munch on while writing. Sometimes when the muse wouldn’t hit I had to have something to do and sometimes chewing worked. I had to have a cart to hold everything. When I got to the checkout I had to wait in line. I saw people looking at the things in my basket. I ignored them and looked instead at the covers of Cosmopolitan and The National Enquirer. Religious freaks had made them hide the Playboys and Penthouses under the counters several years before. The whole world seemed to be trying to be decent, and I seemed an indecent thing in it. I wanted titties, lots of them. I wanted to hear ZZ Top play “Legs.” I wanted to live in a house on a hill with a swimming pool and a cool back porch where my friends could listen to music after I mixed them drinks. I looked at what I wanted and then I looked at what I had. There was a great gulf between the two of them. My clothes were stained with paint, and my fingernails were dirty. I wanted my children somehow without their mother. The woman rang up my purchases and they came to $29.42, including tax.
10
I knew I hadn’t exhausted the possibilities in New York, but they had nearly exhausted me. I knew that publishers were men and women like men and women here, that they breathed, ate, read, got bored, watched TV My novel had been to so many offices it had become dog-eared, but I didn’t want to retype it. That would have been about a two-week job, possibly for nothing.
I sat there looking at it. It was just a stack of typed paper an inch and a half thick. But I knew there was nothing wrong with it. I knew that all it would take would be for the right person to see it. So far that hadn’t happened.
I opened my copy of Writer’s Market to the section that lists commercial publishers and closed my eyes. I flipped pages this way and that, flipped some more, flipped some backwards, then forward again. I stabbed a page with my finger, and then opened my eyes. I located a name, an address, and copied them onto a large manila envelope. I mailed it without hope or dread, without a covering letter, without retyping it. I just mailed it.
11
The letter from the lawyer came in the mail. It said (along with Dear Mr. Leon Barlow):
My fees for handling your divorce trial and proceedings amount to $750.00. I would like to be paid as soon as possible, of course, but Mrs. Barlow has informed me that you are in a state of near penury. Therefore we have worked out a schedule of payments by figuring $150/month along with your alimony payment. This will be deducted by me before turning over the remainder to Mrs. Barlow each month. Your first payment is due immediately and four more payments thereafter on the 1st of each month. Please remit your payment by return mail.
It was signed by that lawyer, I didn’t read his name. I had forty-seven dollars to my name. I wondered if the jail still fed only twice a day. The only time I had been a weekend guest of that establishment, they had.
12
My uncle came by to see me. He was the brother of my mother, the only one who seemed to understand what I was trying to do. He had no love of reading or even movies except westerns, but he admired will and determination in a person no matter the odds, and he liked to see a man try to rise above his station in life.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“Nothing. Drinking a beer. You want one?”
“I might drink one. You’re not writing anything?”
“Yessir, I’m writing. I’m writing every day. I’m just not publishing anything.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it good enough to publish?”
“Yes. It is.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I read the other stuff they publish.”
“You think it’s politics?”
“I don’t know what it is.”
“How you fixed for money?”
“Pretty bad. I’ve got to get out and find some work.”
“You want me to give you a cow? I can give you a couple of cows if it would help you.”
“What good’s a couple of cows gonna do me?”
“Hell, dumb butt. Carry em to the sale and sell em. They’re worth five or six hundred apiece.”
“I hate to take anything from you. Marilyn’s trying to wring my balls dry with alimony, though.”
“I know it. She’ll do it, too. Any time a man gets divorced in Missippi he’s gonna pay through the nose. She letting you see the kids?”
“No. I haven’t seen them a time.”
“Take her back to court.”
“I’d owe a lawyer some more money then.”
“She’s fucking over you, though. You just gonna lay here and take it?”
“I don’t seem to have much choice.”
My uncle got up and snorted. “There’s always a choice.” He drained his beer and tossed the can into the trash. “Come over to the house tomorrow and we’ll catch those cows, load em up, haul em to the sale. They ought to bring eleven or twelve hundred anyway.”
“What time?”
“Early. We need to be at New Albany by two.”
“I’ll be there. Thanks, Uncle Lou.”
“Don’t mention it.”
13
My uncle had so many cows he didn’t know exactly how many he had. He had cows he’d never even seen before. He was forever trying to catch them and put tags in their ears. He had started with two cows in 1949 and now he had around four or five hundred head, and they intermingled and bred unchecked and ran more or less wild on his place, through woods and pastures and a river bottom.
I showed up at his house wearing cowboy boots, jeans, and a long-sleeved shirt. My uncle had learned to rope and ride cutting horses after the war and he had taught me how. He had a brown gelding named Thunderbolt, who was aptly named. Riding him was like riding a fifteen-hundred-pound jackrabbit. He could start so fast that he could slide you backwards out of the saddle and then make a turn and bounce you off his hip as he was leaving. I had learned to ride him at first by holding onto the horn with both hands. And then I had learned to move with the horse. He was worth $18,000.
My uncle came out of the house. Thunderbolt and another horse were standing saddled in the yard.
“Why don’t you write a western?” he said. “I bet you could sell a western.”
“I don’t want to write westerns.”
“I bet you could sell one, though.”
He pointed to Thunderbolt and I climbed up on him. He got on the other horse and we left through the gate. We kicked them a little and then cantered down through the pasture with the wind in our hair. The cows that had been standing in the bottom suddenly raised their tails like deer and took off running. The horses’ hooves drummed in the earth. Clods of black dirt and grass were torn loose and kicked into the air behind us. Uncle Lou started swinging his rope. Most of the cows had horns, and some had Brahma blood. All of them were heavy and muscular and mean-tempered. What I would have given for my little boy to be in the saddle with me.
We cut a couple of cows out from the main group and raced along beside them. We gradually singled one out, a long lean gray cow with sharp tapering horns. I had to make a loop wide enough to settle over her head. I stood in the stirrups with the running end of the rope in my teeth and whirled the loop over my head and leaned forward and dropped it over her horns. I snubbed it tight on the saddle horn and Thunderbolt put on the brakes. When the cow hit the end of the rope, she went tail over head and hit the ground flat on her back, all the wind knocked out of her. Uncle Lou roped a hind foot and we got off the horses while they stood with their backs arched and holding her tight, and we wrapped two of her feet together with a pigging string. We took the ropes off her horns and the hind foot, and left her on the ground, bawling, with her eyes rolled up white in her head with anger. Then we coiled our ropes and took off after another one.
My uncle had been with a boy from Montana in the war. He had become close friends with this boy and after t
he war was over the boy invited him to come and stay with him and his family for a while. My uncle wasn’t married, and didn’t have anything at home to hold him or draw him back with any immediacy, so he went. The boy’s family had a ranch high in the mountains, and they had been punching cows for four generations. My uncle didn’t know which end of a horse was which, but they taught him. They taught him how to rope and brand and bulldog and bullride and even cook. They taught him how to hunt elk and how to rig packsaddles. They took him in like another son, fed him and washed his clothes. My uncle in turn had showed me some of these things. The thing unsaid that was hurting him the most was knowing that now he might not get to do it for my kids.
We didn’t talk while we worked. We flushed the cows from the woods like coveys of quail, and then he pointed to a brutish-looking cow that was trotting away rapidly through some sage grass, watching us over her shoulder. She had some truly wicked horns. I wouldn’t have gone after her. Uncle Lou rode straight for her. I let Thunderbolt get too close. He put his shoulder against her rump, and she whirled and opened a five-inch cut in his shoulder with her horn. Uncle Lou snatched a 30.30 Marlin from a scabbard on his saddle and shot the cow dead between the eyes and hollered that he’d dress the motherfucker later. Blood poured down Thunderbolt’s leg. The lips of the wound were flapping, open and loose. I could see the muscle beneath it bunching and working. These were the things I had done to my uncle with the circumstances of my own life, my divorce, my writing. I had cost him money and pain in a way that was no fault of his whatsoever. We kept riding. Thunderbolt bore it silently. We roped another cow. I kept working somehow. The day was long and I knew that other days would be long, and I knew that men sometimes had to be close to other men to help them through the hard times. Because that’s what these times were.
14
We stood outside in the dust of the New Albany stockyard. The smell of shit was overpowering. Nobody was being murdered yet, they were just now getting sold. It made me a little sick, but how else could I enjoy my juicy T-bones if not some cattle took the big one in the brain? I tried not to think about them being hoisted, throats cut, skinned, sawed up. Ground up. Once in a while a little piece of rebellious bone from a long-dead cow would rise up in my mouth from the hamburger meat at Kroger’s and threaten to chip a tooth. Revenge of the Cows. Let’s don’t make a movie out of it.
Lots of guys around there had cowboy boots on. Some had barrel chests and bellies and checkered shirts. I felt somehow inferior and unmanly in the midst of them, even though plenty of shit was smeared on my own boots. I leaned, if not physically, at least spiritually in the direction of my uncle, who was at peace there, at one with his own kind. Which I certainly didn’t have anything against.
We had our cow tickets and we perched up on the corral above the auction ring.
Obba deebe mobba beebe forty mouth a poe,
Six potater sebm potater fo potater moe,
I’m a tater you a tater kick him out the doe.
Hummmbabe who gonna gimme ten gimme ten ten
gimme Rin Tin Tin;
Humbabe well you wanna watch this cow on the flo,
Hooma jimmy homma fimmy moe.
It went on like that for a while. I admired the auctioneers. They wore straw hats and were good old boys. They had big, round voices. I hated it that I had a scratchy, raspy voice, the kind of voice that made me sick when I taped it along with “Top Forty Hits” and listened to it late at night, singing songs like “Puff the Magic Dragon” and “Blowin in the Wind.” I had a small cheap guitar I tried to play when I couldn’t write, with twangy strings, but I only knew four chords, G, C, D, and G7. I had once made the mistake of making a tape of myself playing and singing George Jones’s “Yabba Dabba Do, The King Is Gone, And So Are You,” and leaving it lying around. Marilyn had played part of it, much to the amusement of some guests at a party at our house one night, while I was in the kitchen mixing drinks and boiling shrimp, and it hadn’t endeared her to me to walk in and realize what was going on, people sniggering, and so on.
First thing they did was run two shoat pigs out into the ring. First thing one of the pigs did was leap through the pipe bars and shit in a man’s lap. The man was trying to get up out of his chair, and he was holding the pig while it was shitting on him. Later on the man bought the pig, I was sure just so he could kill it. But the pig wouldn’t understand. I’ve heard that pigs are very smart. Pigs learn how to hunt truffles. A pig in Arkansas was trained to point birds once. I believe pigs contributed to Ulysses’ downfall. I’ve eaten a lot of pork chops myself. Imagine the pigs that have to die for us. These pigs go valiantly not even to their graves; they don’t even have any graves, when you think about it. You ever seen a pig graveyard? What would you put on his tombstone?
Here lies no pig;
Don’t dig.
Ain’t no bones,
Just leave em alone.
Some horses ran through, got sold pretty fast. I had eyes for a Mexican-looking señorita who was selling sandwiches. I ate two pork barbecues and then realized that the pigs had probably come through the ring a few weeks before, pigs without a future, pigs without a life insurance plan. Pigs who’d never been set down around the supper table and oinked to. Pigs who just didn’t know how good they’d had it, plenty of mud and corn to wallow among, happy days over with now.
She seemed to be a señorita, but I didn’t know for sure. I was still thinking about Betti Del Oreo. I decided I would write her a real nice letter.
15
Dear Miss DeLoreo,
Thanks for taking so much time to tell me why the story was rejected. Most editors wouldn’t do that. It’s pretty lonely out here, you know, writing all these things and not getting anybody to pay any attention to them. I appreciate you taking the time, though. I’m gonna try to write something better for you. Something that’ll make you stand up and put the gloves on with them.
Best wishes,
Leon Barlow
I was nervous as hell when I mailed the letter. I don’t know why. I didn’t even know her. And maybe she was seventy years old, retired from Florida or something, with skinny knees. But why couldn’t she be some goddess, kneeling in the streets of New York for the right prophet to come along? With the rain in her face, black hair beautiful, screaming for me?
I licked it shut and sent it. I’d enclosed a story, also.
I was waiting for the check from my uncle for the two cows he’d given me that we’d subsequently sold. The other cow, the one he’d shot for goring Thunderbolt, was probably down in the pasture still, stinking, covered with flies, coyotes eating on it, but I didn’t want to go check. There were some things I didn’t want to be around and rotting putrid meat was one of them.
16
I smoked some marijuana and drank a lot of beer one day and then wrote this:
HONED
Honed’s daddy had a good reason for changing his name early. But he was almost too late with the thought. He had Honed up in his arms, wrapped in a nice soft blanket Honed’s mother had spent about eight and a half months knitting, with little flowers and soft bunny rabbits hopping around on it in fields of green clover—real nice stuff for a kid they’d just gotten to know—just pure damn love for the little guy—and he’d been kissing around on Honed’s head and telling his koochie-poo that MomMom was right behind them in a wheelchair and so he was going to warm his bottles and stuff for him for a while, since MomMom had had her puss stretched inside out. But Honed didn’t have any idea what was happening. They’d had to calm him down anyway. He was upset big time. He’d been rudely expulsed from the warm dark saltwater sea of his mother’s belly, where he’d begun to think he’d always be, into the hard red hands of a grinning bald-headed guy with big white teeth (Like fangs! Shit! Honed thought) who hit him on the ass four or five times. And then a whole bunch of people he didn’t even know had been dressing him and undressing him and they even messed with his goober for a while one day—there was still somethin
g going on down there but he was scared to look (I’ve got to figure out what the hell’s going on, he thought)—so he was just mainly trying to sleep and hide from it all he could. He knew that he was helpless and at their mercy. He couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk, couldn’t do anything but shit and cry. And they were all a lot bigger than he was.
Honed’s daddy named him Ned originally. And it occurred to him just as he was going down the hall with Honed in his arms, getting ready to take him home, that people would be saying Hi to Ned a lot in his life (which he hoped would run about a hundred wonderful years) and where they were going home to, they wouldn’t necessarily say Hi. They might say Hey. But a bunch of them would probably say Ho. Ho Ned. Whassup, main? And then when Ned came up in his world and put his legs into his britches like men do, he’d be out in it seeing people. If they said Hi they’d say Hined and if they said Ho they’d say Honed. (He was a little whacky, Honed’s daddy. But he didn’t live long after Honed was born anyway. And he was a good guy. He could have done a lot for Honed. He was a millionaire playboy/professor with two published novels, and the MacArthur Foundation was getting ready to give him about $60,000 a year for five years when he got killed. It actually happened in a freight elevator. It was very ironical. It was at the very top of the Empire State Building, when it was still the tallest. Honed’s daddy was the kind of brilliant person who is severely dumb in other ways. He mistook the freight elevator for the one people were supposed to ride. He rode it all right. He punched floor seven, and what they thought happened was all the relays that controlled the up cables blew, and the damn thing just took off, straight up, flying. Honed’s daddy peed all over himself. It was a horrible death. And he knew he was going to die. That was the thing. He did have enough sense to know that it was going up way too fast, the floors just flashing by on the lights. But he was calm even in the face of that. He allowed himself three-quarters of a second of all-out, mindless mute screaming-ass terror, and then dropped his briefcase and started punching elevator buttons. Nothing happened. A bunch of mechanical things that the elevator people should have been maintaining a little more closely gave way at the same time. Oh, they had a big lawsuit, and Honed’s mother got richer than she already was, but it didn’t bring Honed’s daddy back. The elevator car hit the top of its channel with so much force that it threw Honed’s daddy up against the ceiling of the car and broke open a big place in his head. One cable snapped on impact, and the motor downstairs started freewheeling without belts because they had snapped, too, and the other cable was strong enough almost to hold the car all those hundreds and hundreds of feet above the floor of New York City. But then it snapped, too. Honed’s daddy was on the floor, stretched out, his eyes closed, his fingers trying to dig. The downward rush was so great that Honed’s daddy’s body was actually floating about an inch above the floor of the car a millisecond before it hit the basement.) What Honed’s daddy thought, standing just short of the doors of the hospital with Honed in his arms, was that he would save all those people the trouble of saying Ho, comma, Ned, and call him Honed. And in that way be kind of like a tribute to Honed for someone to say his name. That kind of thinking may be crazy, but that’s the kind of thinking Honed’s daddy did.