What Do Cowboys Like?

by Ann Tracy

  The cowboy question had become the perfect embodiment of my insecurities. The answer to the riddle had to be sexual, didn’t it? I mean, would they make all that fuss if the answer was “horses”? So the question conjured up not only my possible ignorances but the things that I didn’t want, didn’t feel ready, to know. By supplying the right answer, I could probably escape this vicious, haunting question. But the question was vicious and haunting largely because it suggested answers that I didn’t want to give.

  The boys never did it, though, when Dwight was there. If he walked up, the question dissipated and blew away like bad air, and so did the fear. I could breathe again. Being with Dwight was like being safe on home base. With Dwight there, your cuts healed and the rain held off and x always equalled the right answer. If I had to learn cowboy lore, I preferred to learn it from him, but with him I never felt ignorant; I felt that if the answers mattered, they’d be along later. Need I mention that I was still in love?

  Loop by loop, my psychic tangles unsnarled themselves as I watched a weed, a tree, a shadow. I picked up a damp, cool white rock by the Grange Hall steps and rolled it in my hand, counting the rusty veins. A car passed. Did the driver notice me, poetic, sensitive, advanced lover of all nature except the birds and the bees? “Every prospect pleases,” I told myself, “and only man is vile.” And boys are viler. But not Dwight.

  I did not ordinarily go farther south than the Grange Hall on my walks, or perhaps into the little field just beyond it. I don’t think that I had been forbidden to do so, but some instinct suggested that the last of the public buildings was a natural boundary. My grandmother had told me that she once knew a crazy woman who believed herself to be tied to her house by an invisible rope. It was quite a long rope and let her go to some places but not others. “Why don’t you shop at such-and-such, Nell?” the neighbors would ask her. “Can’t, rope’s not long enough,” she’d say. My rope was about a mile long, maybe. Feeling it jerk, I started back up the hill towards school and home.

  Imagine my delight at seeing Dwight and Willard Jewell out for a stroll themselves and coming towards me. I loitered a little at the cemetery fence again, waiting for them, while they picked their way carefully past the stretch where a neighbor’s manure spreader had hit some bumps. Ah, the romantic countryside. I would have tried to ignore the grosser parts of life, but it was no use with Willard, who was singing “Tiptoe through the Cowshit” while Dwight cheered him on. We all treasured Willard Jewell’s wise-mouth clowning, as good as Jackie Gleason, and if his quick wit suggested to any of us that he had brains he should have been cultivating, we managed to forget it; we needed him just as he was.

  Dwight and Willard came across the grass and leaned on either side of me against the cemetery fence. Willard’s mouth had changed stations but not stopped broadcasting. “Just out for a stroll through nature’s beauties,” he said expansively, “the cow—birds, and the cowslips, and the cow—”

  Dwight reached past me and kicked him, giving me a sidelong glance to see whether I was embarrassed. “We saw you out for a walk yourself and thought we’d meet you,” he said. I was enormously pleased.

  “I used to spend a lot of time in here when I was little,” I said. “I liked all those neat verses on the stones, and I used to play hide and seek with the minister’s kids.”

  “Give us a tour, Fish,” Dwight suggested, taking my elbow. We walked through the gate three abreast, but Willard, who tended to turn into things, turned into a tour bus driver and began to megaphone through his fist, “And on your left, under a tasteful marble stone—note the willow design, folks—,” and showing off my childhood favorites seemed the wrong tone.

  We all flopped down on the grassy sides of the winter tomb and began playing with leaves. I hunted for pure hues, fanning them out like a color wheel. Willard tucked leaves behind his ears, and Dwight lay on his stomach, stripping a leaf down to its veins and looking restless.

  “Madame wants a bouquet,” he announced suddenly, jumping up on Deacon Phillip Hammond (1869–1912) and launching himself from there onto the lowest branches of a maple. This was better than orchids, for I had observed that boys often climbed things—trees, swing sets, door frames—and hung from them when girls they liked were around. And I was the only girl in sight. When he dropped back to earth with a leaf bouquet in his teeth, some conversational barrier seemed to have been breached, and we began to ask each other questions, casual, even superficial questions, but it wasn’t a thing we usually did. We usually knew each other in context, and that was all. After a while it fell into a pattern, like a game.

  “What’s your father do, Jewell?” I asked, rolling onto my back so as not to disturb Dwight’s leaf bouquet in my buttonhole.

  “Same thing as these folks,” he said, his hand sweeping the cemetery. “He’s dead.”

  “Gosh, I’m sorry,” I said. “What happened to him?”

  “Bunch of Japs shot him,” Willard said, looking unconcerned as hard as he could. “He was in the South Pacific. I was just a kid. But my grandfather—he got run over by a train.”

  Dwight and I were delighted. “How come?” we chorused.

  “He was drunk. Walked onto the track and said, ‘You think you’re big, by holy—’”

  We all laughed and rolled in the leaves. Grandfather Jewell, if he’d ever existed, had long since been cleaned off the rails; only the joke of his death was left. He sounded like Willard.

  “My turn,” said Dwight. “What does Fish do in the summer—fish?”

  “Actually, I do fish once in a while,” I said, still giggly from Willard’s story. “We have this summer cottage up north on Portage Lake. We keep going there, and there’s no phone and no mail and nothing to do but stick hooks into worms. I hate it.”

  I felt a pang of shame as I said this, as though I’d been mean about a family member, someone kind and loveable with embarrassing habits. I hated only part of it—those eternal evenings of lamplit solitaire, the anxiety of wondering whether I’d have mail if I were home, loneliness that drove me to hold my sweatshirt in my arms at night for comfort.

  “It doesn’t sound so bad,” Dwight said kindly. “Just lie back and pull in the dinner, what a life.”

  “It’s boring,” I said again, unable to change direction. I thought of the wood smells and water sounds that had put me to sleep every summer of my life. Me on the screen porch, my insteps against the window ledge while I got dizzy from too many hours of cramming down War and Peace, and the base of my spine ached against the metal lawn chair. The glass jugs of well water in a row on the bench behind me, water that tasted of confinement and screw-on metal tops. (If Dwight kissed me, would I too taste of confinement?)

  It felt strange to be talking about that private, non-school part of my life that none of my boarding friends had seen. I liked the questions very much, especially the fact that none of them were about cowboys. My fingers wove themselves deeper into the cool grass. And here, I said to myself, we are, in our moment above ground, our moment to have longings and secrets and autumn sun. Our moment in annihilation’s waste. That title should work okay.

  Willard rolled onto his side. “Right, Dwight,” he said, “You haven’t told us all your secrets yet. Now for the sixty-four-dollar-question—”

  All at once I felt my face turn pink. Willard might ask anything. Dwight looked appalled too. What was Dwight afraid he’d ask? Could it be something about me? Could it? Ashamed of my blushing, I felt myself turn redder yet. Willard Jewell was looking at us both with interest and compassion. “The sixty-four-dollar question,” he said gently, “is don’t you think we’d better get Miss Fish home before she’s late for supper?”

  I wasn’t late, I was early, so I ran up to my room to reread the passage I’d managed the night before while Mom was at Ladies’ Aid.

  Her poster gleamed in the moonlight—“Death to Cowboys.” She felt a wild sense of liberation as she reread its vicious letters.

  All at once she was awar
e of movement on the other side of the tree. She tensed and felt her bones turn to mud. She put a steadying hand against the rough bark and held her breath. For a moment a figure with a hammer in its hand set her heart racing, but then the familiar and secretly loved features of Brownell Flite resolved into clarity. He gazed at her poster with wonder.

  “I was putting up a poster too,” he whispered. They stared into one another’s eyes.

  Lucilla sank to her knees in the cold grass, overcome by the pulsing of her blood in her veins. “Do you love me, then?” she whispered painfully.

  In answer Brownell sank down to meet her and warmed her in his arms. “I always have,” he murmured.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Half a dozen short writing sessions (and some amorous rally scenes) later, my father began to puff up with theory. This had been bound to happen sooner or later. Attacks of theory were almost his only child-rearing flaw, but they were a bad one. He once had, for instance, the idea that when you made a call you should let the number ring only twice, and until the idea wore off he’d hung around the phone barking “That’s enough!” when he figured we’d gotten to the third ring. Or he’d decide that Herbie had too many pairs of pants or comic books or whatever. These attacks didn’t last long, usually, but they were hard on us. I hated to be jerked around by somebody else’s whims. Once at the cottage when I was having cramps and reading, he decided that I was ill from idleness and would feel better if I painted screens. Finally my grandmother came out to help me and in the end the two of us poured the rest of the paint down a hole and told him we’d used it up. I imagine that afterwards I looked to him brighter-eyed, happier, better content; but I wasn’t.

  Now, Sunday night, sitting at the table eating supper, I realized that I was in for it, that my literary sessions in my room had not gone unnoticed. My father’s tone was playful, even benevolent, but not misleading to one who knew him.

  “It’s a hard thing for a person to have too much time on her hands,” he began. “Why, it can lead her to lock herself in her room and forget the light of day.” Forget the light of day? For a moment I was startled; had he read my night scene, that he was able to make that all too pertinent remark? But then I knew that he hadn’t. Sneak-reading was not his style. “Sometimes a person needs the fun of a little responsibility,” he went on.

  I could feel my lower lip begin to poke out. Nasty word, responsibility. Sure to be unpleasant. A foreboding tear slid down my nose and splashed onto my tuna mushroom-soup potato-chip casserole. Everyone was kind enough to ignore it. I stared at my plate and swallowed a bite of casserole before it got too salty, for I suspected that the bad news was just beginning.

  “Chickens,” my father said with satisfaction. For a moment I peered at the casserole, wondering if it was a new recipe, but it tasted like tuna. Nope, he wasn’t talking about supper. “Eggs,” he went on, “the rewards of industry.”

  I tried to retreat inside myself and get away from this increasingly ominous conversation. Sometimes I could do that, but not often. I couldn’t do it now. I was about to be hauled into something ridiculous, lesson-teaching, humiliating, and smelly. There was no stopping it, or stopping the increasing leak at my eyeballs. Where was the Little Dutch Boy with his thumb when I needed him? Mom and Herbie were listening with wary interest, dry-eyed. They hadn’t been spending too much time in their rooms, they were safe.

  “We could put about three dozen hens in the back corner of the garage,” he planned happily. The back corner of the garage? It was full of cobwebs. Spider-webs. SPIDERS! Rather death than spiders!

  “Spidery,” I whimpered. He rose above it, indeed soared over it without a glance.

  “You can feed and water them every day and collect the eggs,” he said, “and then you can sell the eggs and you’ll see that work pays off. It will get you out of your room and get you some fresh air.”

  Fresh air, ha! I’d been in henhouses, though not any oftener than I could help. Fresh air, my foot! Ammonia and feathers and feed and hen mites, that’s what you breathe in a henhouse. Add cobwebs for the garage, and maybe a little car exhaust. Yummy!

  “May I be excused?” I croaked. They let me go, but words not meant for my ears drifted after me up the stairs—immature, responsibility, Plymouth Rocks, educational.

  In my room I wept and paced behind the closed door. Did any other authors go through this, turned into egg-sellers against their wills? Embarrassing! Smelly! Scary! Boring! Dictatorial! What would my friends say? When Dad saw that I still spent time in my room (because finish the novel I must), would he want to start me raising calves? Why didn’t I live in a city, where chickens were zoned against? I’d never had anything against chickens before, but now I hated them with my whole being. Poultry phrases clucked through my mind—chicken out, chicken-hearted, chicken-shit, laid an egg—and none of them were good.

  At last I flung myself down on the bed, wrung with emotion, and rubbed my wet cheek on the chenille. I dozed off briefly then, but when I woke up ten minutes later, drooly and dazed, I had an encouraging dream to remember—Dwight, like a pied piper in his band uniform, playing his saxophone and leading a thousand chickens out of town to their deaths.

  I went to school on Monday with chickens still roosting in my mind, shuffling their skinny feet and laying no eggs. This was an inner upheaval that I did wish to share with Viv and Sabra, for I needed their supportive indignation. With difficulty I waited until noon break; after all, I didn’t want the whole school to know. I spent the morning obsessed, drawing hens in my notebook margins, hens in Indian costumes dumping eggs into Boston Harbor, 36 × hens + As = 3 dozen dead hens, Où sont les poules d’antan? A chicken for every academic pot.

  When the bell rang I grabbed my coat and made sure to intersect Viv and Sabra as they headed to their rooms; I of course went home to lunch.

  “Emergency!” I puffed and caught at Viv’s sweater, noting as I did so that even her internal heating system was better than mine, for though she always wore lighter clothes than I and let her coat fly open all winter, she never caught colds.

  She brushed my hand away like lint but I could see in her face not only coolness but a marshaling of forces. If I really had a dragon, she was prepared to slay it. Sabra, on her other side, held her sympathy cocked and ready.

  “Now what are you talking about, Fish,” Viv said too firmly for a question. “You’ve looked all morning like you’d sat in an ants’ nest.”

  “Nest is the key word,” I said, feeling myself grow hot. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but my father is going to make me raise chickens.”

  “My lord, chickens,” Viv said, looking staggered. “If that isn’t the damndest piece of nonsense I’ve ever heard.”

  “It’s the rural factor,” Sabra groaned. “My father brought home an actual lamb he’d gotten from some old farmer who bought feed from him, and expected me to raise it with a bottle.”

  “I didn’t know that!” Viv and I chorused, delighted.

  “I was too embarrassed to tell anyone,” Sabra said. “I was only in seventh grade and I didn’t want to be a shepherdess.”

  “What did you do with it?” I asked, imagining Sabra as the prettiest shepherdess in Arcady.

  “I gave it to my little sister. She was too young to take care of it, so it just went away. I suspect we ate it later.”

  “Gross,” Viv and I said absently.

  “My brother’s too smart to take the chickens,” I said, “so what am I going to do?”

  By now we were at the girls’ dorm, and my friends were anxious to go in and drop their books. They looked at one another and came to some conclusion.

  “Restaurant?” Viv asked.

  “Three forty-five,” Sabra answered.

  I began to feel some slight return of exhilaration, absent since supper the night before.

  “Look,” Viv and Sabra said, “You just meet us at the restaurant at quarter of four. We’ll round up the boys and we’ll have a council of war. H
e can’t do that to you.”

  The restaurant, in fact, always made me nervous. It was the place where I was most keenly aware of not being very good at adolescence, aside of course from the acne and tears. Or to put it another way, I was unavoidably doing adolescence, but I was lousy at being a teenager. I thought the music was too loud, though I liked the songs, except the silly ones, and though I rather admired the clouds of cigarette smoke, I found breathing difficult. Furthermore, I was so unresigned to wearing a body that it embarrassed me to fuel it in front of my friends. All these misgivings notwithstanding, I looked forward to the council of war.

  My mother looked pleased and interested when she heard where I was going, for I suppose it pained her sociable instincts to see me steering clear of, and I quote, the Teenage Hangout. Any day now, she was probably thinking, my daughter will straighten out and start to put tea cozies in her hope chest.

  By hanging back I managed to enter the restaurant at the same time as Sabra and Viv. The boys were holding a booth for us, piled in three on one side, with the other side for us. I was happy to see Dwight there to fight for me, and Willard Jewell. Skinny Marcus Andover was with them too, as he often was. He didn’t say much, but he added tone, for he dressed well and smiled in the right places, and we thought his name was elegant. The girls shoved me into the bench first and followed me. I felt secure, hemmed in by friends. I was happy. I beamed at Dwight.

  “She doesn’t look too worried,” Willard said. “Not exactly ready for the funny farm.”

  “Don’t say ‘farm,’” I begged. “See-I’m shaking.” I held out my hand, which was indeed trembling with excitement, angling it a bit towards Dwight in hopes that he’d take it. He didn’t. Well, I could see how it would be awkward for him. Willard Jewell felt my pulse, shook his head, held a paper napkin to his breast in a gesture of final respects.