What Do Cowboys Like?

by Ann Tracy

  “I’ll write about us all some day,” I said. I had my secrets.

  “We believe you,” they told me, and I could see that they did. I was proud to be believed by friends so elegant, with the pleats of their skirts like razors and their socks all neatly cuffed. I loved them.

  On the down side, two sophomores dared to ask me what cowboys liked, and when I went to chemistry I saw that someone had scrawled “Get it up cowboys” on the stairwell wall. Lucilla Shark would have had something to say about that.

  I was supposed to go to Viv and Sabra’s room after school to plot some innovations for graduation; we had found that advance planning meant power. I knew I’d be better off to go home, but they seemed safe company and I’d grown calmer in the course of the afternoon. On the way out we stopped in the home-ec room to pick up some forks for a dorm party. People drifted in and out there at the end of the day, just in case someone had made extra cookies, and we let ourselves be swept into the sociability. I was hoping that Dwight would come by. He sometimes did.

  I perched on the edge of a table, keeping an eye on the door and playing with the pleats of my skirt while Viv and Sabra bustled about at the other end of the room. Mine was a reversible skirt, both new and fairly expensive, and I liked it. The side I usually turned out was gray, but its neutral pleats opened to show slashes of the reverse side’s red plaid. I smoothed the pleats together to cover the red, let them loose to flash their color. In my absentminded vanity, I must have looked like a peacock playing with its tail. I attribute a little of what happened to that factor. And I was making myself feel aloof on purpose, sitting higher than other people, getting ready to run for the door if I felt emotional.

  There was half a pitcher of Kool-Aid on the table (somebody tackling the simpler culinary problems of real life), and I sipped a bit out of a paper cup and told myself that pretty soon I’d be out of there and into the increasingly soothing sequence of Viv and Sabra’s room, my house, my room.

  Two boys came and sat by the Kool-Aid pitcher. Two boys with Elvis Presley hair and knowing smirks. Two scumbags, in fact. Leroy Richardson and George Paston. They were as far from being Dwight as people of the same age and sex could get. I said hello, at least I probably did, but they were ostensibly talking to each other and I tuned them out with all my might.

  “Did you hear about the crab that broke its legs and had to walk around on crotches?”

  Yuk, yuk. Snarf, snarf.

  “It was Christmas eve and everyone was feeling Mary.”

  Snort, snort. Titter, titter.

  I sipped the last of my Kool-Aid and went on sipping at air, keeping busy, hiding my hot face in my cup.

  “Long, wicked long, guess who’s wicked long?”

  “Oh ho, Richardson!”

  “Oh you George, wicked long!”

  They’d be getting to cowboys next, I supposed. Maybe I could leave first. And then I heard what I suddenly knew to be Dwight’s steps in the corridor and shyly looked away from the door, pleased to pieces that I knew his steps from everyone else’s. There’s love for you. I’d blessedly lost track of the scumbag conversation, but now through my haze I saw Leroy’s face before mine, an angry face, a face that hadn’t liked being ignored. He sounded vicious as he leaned forward and hissed, “Did you hear me?”

  I shook my head.

  “I said, ‘Your friends Viv and Sabra are cowboying around Augusta every weekend.’ What do you think of that?”

  I’d read enough to recognize a thrown gauntlet. Time slowed and I saw everyone clearly while I revolved what to do—Dwight in the doorway, Sabra and Viv outraged beside the refrigerator, Leroy’s slavering lips that had just uttered such blasphemy. What I did wasn’t impulsive at all, as everyone assumed later. It was a clear, Lucilla Shark decision to stop sitting on the sidelines of the action and take a stand, join in. I picked up the pitcher of Kool-Aid and emptied it over his face, giving his greasy head a little whack with the empty pitcher for punctuation, not hard enough to crack his skull and let the bugs out, but enough to show I wasn’t kidding.

  I can see now several reasons why I did it. It was one cowboy remark too many. It was an attack on my adored friends. It was said out of meanness. But more than these things, I couldn’t bear the suggestion that my friends, my Viv and Sabra, were doing, doing, things that I couldn’t even stand to talk about. That they should be on the other side, with scumbags and insinuators, was not a tolerable thought.

  The sensation of rage caught up with me only after the world began to move again, and then it made my knees shake. I slid from the table and held onto a chair to steady myself as I looked around at the amazing scene I’d brought about. Leroy’s head was bleeding in dramatic quantities, and although I remembered that head wounds do that and it doesn’t mean that the bleeder is killed, I was a little taken aback as it sheeted over his forehead with the Kool-Aid. The Kool-Aid was red, too, but not the same shade or density as his blood. It seemed possible that I was going to be in trouble. Leroy looked dazed. Peering through the torrent from his forehead, he was chasing an ice cube down the front of his shirt. He was bound to holler soon. Had I thrown myself outside decent society forever?

  Then Sabra and Viv were beside me. Sabra squeezed my hand. “Thanks, Fish,” she whispered. To hell with decent society, then.

  Viv had her fists on her hips, considering the medical problem. “Well, my lord, Fish, I appreciate it too,” she said, “but don’t you think you went a little too far? Somebody get some dish towels. It serves you right, Leroy.”

  Her tart tones got us all moving. Dwight beat me to the dish towel drawer, for I was still a little shaky. I hardly dared look at him. Would he think I was the she-devil of the western world? Would he ever like me again? I cared about that, despite the lunatic high I still felt from bashing Leroy. (Death to Cowboys. Do you love me, then?) But Dwight had thrown his arm across my shoulders for a quick, reassuring hug.

  “You’re quite a fighter,” he grinned. “Whap. Pow. Glad I got here in time to see it.” What a relief.

  Leroy kept his mouth shut while we—mostly Viv—mopped him none too gently off. We were almost done when the principal came in. The intensity of his “All right, what’s happened here?” made me see that my trouble might be major. I was mostly so bookish and well behaved that adults didn’t shoot that tone in my direction. Now he was making serious principal noises.

  Viv’s quick wits were up to it. “Fish dropped the pitcher and it hit Leroy,” she said. “I don’t think any real damage was done, Mr. Judson.”

  “The pitcher isn’t broken!” I said, and burst into lucky, convincing tears. They’d probably be taken for remorse, not just fear and a hard day.

  Leroy kept his mouth shut. Maybe not a total scumbag.

  “Just slipped out of her hands, sir,” Sabra added. “I saw it.”

  “Me too,” Dwight said. “What a splash! Poor old Leroy.”

  Leroy’s buddy George was silent for once. Probably he enjoyed the sight of anyone’s blood.

  “Well,” said Mr. Judson, who could tell something was wrong but knew when to quit, “you haven’t any business fooling around in here after school anyway. You see what happens. Clean up and get out of here.”

  “And you,” he said to Leroy, “come along and have the nurse take a look. Don’t drip on the floor. It’s my experience that you have a pretty hard head.” Leroy tried a wan grin. He and his friend left.

  The rest of us gazed at each other with relief.

  “Quit blubbering, Fish,” said Viv. “Nothing to worry about now; he won’t tell. Give me those dish towels, Dwight, and I’ll put them to soak in the sink, and then let’s get out of here.”

  Sabra was straightening chairs and putting the shades right. “You were loyal, Fish,” she said.

  “I admit it,” said Viv. “Not everyone would have tried to kill the garbage mouth. What a mess.”

  “Fish is pretty special,” said Dwight.

  “She’s that, all right,”
said Viv a little grimly. But I knew she was pleased, all the same. I began to dry my eyes on my shoulder. Gosh, I was tired.

  We skipped the planning session. It was late. The others needed restaurant coffee. I needed solitude. I slipped through the downstairs and up to my room, where I flopped on the bed. I was too tired to set up the typewriter, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t plan.

  “It was a far, far better thing she did,” I whispered to the ceiling, “than she had ever done before.” Me and Charles Dickens.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I waited all evening for the ringing of the phone, for Mr. Judson breaking it to my parents—“Your daughter, in the home-ec room, with the Kool-Aid pitcher,” a horrible real-life game of Clue. But the phone never rang, and nobody made any bread-and-water jokes at breakfast.

  I was halfway afraid to go to school that morning, but also halfway eager, as if I’d put down a book at a suspenseful point and wanted to see what would happen next. As I suspected, everyone at school knew about Leroy. November is a dull month. Where I walked, heads turned and smart alecks ducked. Cowboys? What cowboys? Nobody in my hearing dared to allude to anything west of the Mississippi or south of the waist. Viv and Sabra stuck pretty close, and so did Dwight. I’d never felt so much a celebrity. The man from Time might come any day now. Good thing my tennis racket was ready.

  I felt taller, and although I was deep in guilty-teenager embarrassment, I also felt more adult. I had stepped over into a world where I took action, instead of just doing what people expected. Previously I’d now and then screwed up, or argued about something I perceived as a principle, nose to nose with a teacher, but nobody had bled. Nobody had had to lie for me or soak dish towels in cold water.

  The first class was Advanced Math, and we had a test, so that was fairly safe. Viv and Dwight were in that class, and Dwight changed his seat to sit behind me, like a shield. I could relax, knowing that he was between me and the rest of the people. On the way out of class a couple of guys made a show of climbing over each other to get out of my way, but Dwight shot them a look and took my elbow.

  His next class was downstairs, but he walked with Viv and me to my history class, where Sabra was waiting. I felt a diminishing of safety when Dwight left. Though Viv and Sabra were tough and loyal and there were two of them, he had a better grip on the boys. Girls were no problem; one or two of them said, “Good for you!” or “Give it to him, Fish!” but most of them kept still. I was almost to my seat when a voice from the back cracked, “And now Miss Fisher will tell us about the Pubic—er, the Punic Wars.” It was Willard Jewell, of course, but he wasn’t mean, just irrepressible, so that was okay, sort of. I cast him a half smile before I sat down. I opened my book and read it with a fervor that shut out the classroom. I had no idea what it said—can an ostrich report on the sand around its head?—but I’d already studied it anyway. I was aware of Sabra and Viv sitting very straight, looking ready for a fight. The Missouri Compromise passed by my ears. Compromise? Never!

  Third period was study hall. That would be tough, for there we sat in assigned seats. I liked the teacher who supervised, but I didn’t put much faith in his protection. He was strange—that was what I liked—a man perhaps in his early sixties, with a wild eye and an unpredictable tongue. He was one of those people who show up sometimes in a teenager’s life bearing hints of inconceivable freedom in the adult world, the possibility of never doing the expected and thriving anyway. Once I heard him, in the middle of a blizzard, shouting at the janitor through the snow, “Flog your wife! Flog your wife! She said it was going to snow!” Half way through the period he stopped by my seat and grinned a grin of complicity, without saying a word. Did he see in me a fledgling weirdo, as I saw in him possibilities of a later self? Nobody teased me. I got a little work done.

  Fourth period was English. Sabra was in my section, and when I came out of study hall she was loitering near the door in a coincidental-looking way and walked with me. From the other end of the corridor Dwight saw her, smiled, and nodded. English was always good. My territory. I’d already spot-read through the anthology, could flip the pages and find friends. “Go down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn’t far from London!)/And you shall wander hand in hand with love in summer’s wonderland.…” You bet. Or now, even, without the lilacs. If you wandered hand in hand with love in November, it would seem like summer.

  Of course in English there were a few jokes—The Pitcher of Dorian Gray, “The Charge of the Kool-Aid Brigade,” and so on. Not brilliant wit, but not too scary either. The teacher was in her first year out of college, but she had fairly good control of the class, and since we’d first made her laugh, broken her in, she’d been okay. We were doing “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and I must confess that the slimy things crawling on the sea did make me think a little of Leroy. Coleridge seemed to suggest that I wasn’t allowed to hate him, but indeed I halfway liked him since I’d taken out my frustration on him and he hadn’t made a fuss. I still didn’t like the things he had to say, though. I was the opposite of the Mariner, compelled, not to open my mouth, but to close my ears.

  Towards the end of noon break, when people were drifting back to home room and I was already hiding out at my desk, I looked up to find Dwight beside me. As nobody had yet taken the seat ahead of me, he sat in it sideways and turned to face me.

  “You doing okay?” he asked.

  “I guess so,” I said. “Everybody’s being real nice. You too.”

  He shrugged it away. “Your parents know?”

  “I sure hope not.”

  “I don’t think anybody’d tell them, do you?”

  “Not unless Judson does, and I guess he would have by now if he were going to.”

  “I don’t think even Judson would want to hurt you, Fish.”

  While I took in the implications of that kind remark, Dwight was hunting for something in his shirt pocket. Having found it, he held it out to me in the palm of his hand. It was a little round pin about half an inch across, rimmed with decorative knobs.

  “I found this in the restaurant,” he said, looking embarrassed. “You can have it.”

  Me? Me? My heart bumped against my white blouse. I grinned like a fool, I think. Me, of all the people he could have given it to. He made it sound like a Cracker Jack prize, and I didn’t care if it was—it felt like the Kohinoor diamond. I took it, hoping that the sudden sweat on my palm wouldn’t wash it away, and with some difficulty fastened it through the collar of my blouse.

  “Thanks,” I said. “It’s neat.” Oh, the inadequacy of words!

  That night I laid it in my pink-lined jewelry box, where the wind-up ballerina could guard it. It was too holy to wear. I looked at it a long time before I put it away. Not 14 karat, but no Cracker Jack prize. Had he really found it? Could he possibly have got it on purpose? Never mind, it had sat in a pocket over his heart and he’d chosen me to give it to. One of life’s more encouraging moments.

  I felt that something had been said (Are we engaged, Ma?), but I didn’t know what. That led me to further thoughts about the difference between life and art. Or at least off and on it did. I thought about life and art, and then I thought about Dwight. I thought about life and art and what it would be like to be a madly successful author. And I thought about life and art and my new blue skirt’s possible erotic effect on Dwight. And I thought about life and art and some Band-Aids I’d seen in colors and shapes, and whether I’d dare to stick a red heart on Dwight’s hand. But in spite of all the pleasant detours, I did come to some conclusions. My earlier idea that life was fuzzy and undramatic compared to art was only part of the truth.

  There were some things, like the giving and receiving of a little round gold pin, that nobody—not I, Lawrence, Poe, Dickens, whoever—could catch the glory behind. Art couldn’t in fact do those things as well as life. I don’t know what those medieval scholars decided about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, but there were five or six dozen on the pin that Dwight gave me.
Probably they were still hoofing it up in the box with the ballerina. What can you say about stuff like that? Maybe a poet could do it, but I wasn’t a poet, and none of the rhymes for “pin” were very romantic, anyway.

  I searched the stories I knew for love scenes where the participants couldn’t quite tell what had happened, though they knew that something had. About all I could think of was Anne of Green Gables’ daughter Rilla wondering whether she was engaged when a boy told her not to kiss anyone else. Or maybe the lovely weaver in Precious Bane telling Prue Sarn, “It must be toerts, not frommert.” I could see why writers didn’t get into it much. Like me, they preferred Heathcliffe/Catherine explicitness. I could make the pin something bigger, but I couldn’t make it anything better.

  After supper I went to my room and intensified my mood by playing records (a teenage frailty that not even my father would find suspicious): Love Is a Golden Ring, Cherry Pink and Apple-Blossom White, You Don’t Know Me—all my sentimental stuff. Then I took my pencil and tried, but the result was only different from life, not more magical.

  “I found this in Cambridge,” he said, “in the gift shop of the Harvard Museum, where I’d gone to see the glass flowers.”

  As the apple blossoms drifted down around them she took it in her hands, a string of golden amber beads and enameled flowers.

  “It’s the most beautiful thing I ever saw,” she breathed.

  “That’s why I thought of you,” he said. “Let me fasten it around your throat myself.”