Cowboys Are My Weakness

by Pam Houston

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t here, Casey. I’m sorry I wasn’t near a phone.”

  “I kind of wanted to do it alone,” she said. “I did it. It’s done.”

  Way to the west, across the valley and over the lake, a sliver of sun was hitting the top of Antelope Island, and I wondered if there were any antelope out there, if they understood the limitations of the island they were trapped on. I wondered what would happen to them if the lake continued to rise, if they would move up with the level of the lake, or if they would consider diving in and setting out across all that cold dead water.

  At least two hours a day, I had told the doctor when she asked me how much I was crying, and then she had raised her eyebrows, and then she had written the prescription I hadn’t filled.

  And I looked again at the baby’s long red fingers and imagined some younger version of myself, of Casey, telling the face that would one day be connected to them: “You have great beauty and grace.” And I thought about the passion those fingers might raise and the helpless way the young man who would own them might look at his hands because he couldn’t find answers to the questions that the young woman he couldn’t help hurting was born knowing there weren’t any answers for.

  “I wish Chuck could see him,” Casey said, in a voice that was small but not sad, and I wondered how two men who at one time seemed so different could have turned out, in the end, to be exactly the same.

  I looked hard at her face to try and understand her pain, to try and make up for what I had missed because of my pain, which was so awfully small, to tap into her calm, to appropriate it somehow. But it wasn’t the face I remembered. Everything about it had changed.

  “It’s okay,” she said, and reached her arms toward her baby. And I imagined myself running with him out the hospital doors, the clip on his belly beeping wildly, and I wondered about people who wanted babies to fill spaces in their lives and I knew it wouldn’t work for me because I’d been taught to believe that some spaces you just can’t fill. And when I handed Casey back her baby, when our hands touched underneath his back, I realized I didn’t feel like crying anymore. And as I watched her tuck him back under her arm, watched her tuck the edge of the blanket under each set of those newborn piano fingers, I was breathless and frightened by the frailty of miracles, and full of the fact of our lives.

  FOR BO

  When we come home from the regular Friday-night parties, my husband, Sam, plays guitar for the dogs. They sit next to him on the couch, one on either side, press their heads against his thighs, and wag their tails. He sings every song ever written with “dog” in the title, and then improvises by substituting dog-words for people-words: “You Are the Canine of My Life,” or “Born to Bark.” He can keep it up for hours, and the dogs never get tired of listening. Usually I find him asleep there the next morning, with the dogs piled on top of him and his guitar propped up against the coffee table.

  Every Saturday morning, at eight a.m. my time, my mother calls to ask me if I am pregnant. Her greatest fear is that I’ll start having babies before I finish becoming successful. I come from a long line of successful women, and I know I keep her awake at night with worry. It would greatly ease her mind to know that my husband had a vasectomy years before I met him, but withholding this information from her makes me feel a little powerful.

  My mother doesn’t really like my husband. I don’t think she’s had much interaction with tattooed people. When we go to Pennsylvania to visit my parents, they rent a house in New Jersey—where they don’t know anyone—and we can all lose ourselves in the tan and blondness of the beach. We don’t go there often anymore, and my mother blames the dogs.

  “Those dogs have taken you right out of my life,” she said, one Saturday, long-distance. She doesn’t even know about the horse.

  “We might make it out in September,” I told her.

  “Oh good,” she said. “Rentals are cheap then.”

  My mother worries constantly, but she doesn’t perspire or grow body hair. She is absolutely sure that I am dying of a venereal disease I contracted from my husband.

  “He’s just not sanitary,” she said. “Those tattoos . . . and those great big dogs. You know I don’t even go into Jacuzzis anymore. And I haven’t used a public rest room in years.” Somewhere inside my mother’s body there is a reservoir nearly full of sweat, hair, and other restrained excretions.

  “I’m sending you some hot curlers, and a wonderful new apricot scrub,” she said. “Do you have any new spring clothes at all?”

  My mother is certain that my becoming successful depends upon the curl of my hair and the absence of blemishes on my face.

  “What you really need,” she said, “is a slim white purse.”

  The clock by the bed says eight twenty-five, and I stretch and remember why my mother hasn’t called. She’s flying to San Francisco today on business, and she’s managed a three-hour layover here in Denver so we can have dinner and visit.

  I hear Sam’s circular saw in the backyard. He’s enlarging the deck, making room for the new addition.

  “No dog of mine,” he says, “is going to have to lay around in the dirt.”

  The first Saturday in May is more than just Kentucky Derby Day at our house. Each year since we’ve been married we watch the Derby, get a little stupid on Kentucky bourbon, and head for the dog pound. It’s become a three-year tradition, and if we hadn’t lost Hazel to cancer last winter, we’d be going on dog number four.

  Another tradition in our house is to spend at least half of every weekend in bed, and Sam finishes the porch and joins me under the covers. Sam says our gravestones will read: “They never had a lot of money, but they always had a lot of sex.” You can probably understand why my mother doesn’t like Sam. She gets most of her information from my Aunt Colleen, who moved out here several years ago. Colleen’s got lots of money and very little imagination. Last time they talked, she told my mother that one of these days I would wake up and realize that squalor is not enough, and now my mother is holding her breath. Colleen’s an attractive woman for her age, but her hair is always stiff, and a lot of her clothes have comic-strip characters printed on them. Sam says she shouldn’t knock squalor till she’s tried it.

  I’ve invited Colleen to dinner today too. Sam thinks I’m asking for trouble, but I try to do what I can for my family. Besides, Colleen offered to drive my mother to and from the airport, which means I won’t have to watch her cry.

  We wake up sticky and lazy and fight each other for the first shower. I drip through the kitchen and crack eggs into the cast-iron skillet. I cook enough sausage for all of us, and the dogs sit patiently at my feet.

  Sam has been admiring himself in the mirror for several minutes. It’s finally warm enough for him to wear his new swim trunks. They are sky-blue with pink sharks swimming in every direction across them. The sharks are smiling, and wearing black sunglasses.

  “I am one handsome motherfucker,” he tells his reflection.

  I go to my closet and choose a denim skirt my mother sent me, and a dark blouse that I think makes me look thin and neat. Sam whistles long and clear. The dogs come running.

  “George, Graci, come on in here and take a look at your sexy mom,” he says. Graci licks my knees.

  Our yard is full of wild mint, and I’m mixing juleps for the Derby. Our blender is broken and the drinks taste like bourbon on the rocks, but we swallow whole mugfuls while the TV sings “My Old Kentucky Home.” The jockeys, sitting atop horses no bigger than dogs, are locked one slam at a time into the metal starting gate. The front gates open and the horses race forward, silks shining in the sun.

  The even-money horse pulls up around the first turn, blood pouring from his nostrils. He’s loaded into an ambulance before the other horses turn for home.

  “God would have never made an animal that frail,” Sam says.

  The horse that wins pays 15-1 odds, and it’s the jockey’s birthday so we are happy for him.

  “What luck,
” Sam says, “to be born so short on Kentucky Derby Day.”

  There is a knock at the door and I see Colleen’s red Corvette out the window, still running. I open the door to hugs and kisses out of the side of my mother’s mouth.

  “Are we early?” my mother says, looking at my untucked shirt.

  “No, no. Come in,” I say.

  “Do you think we could rearrange the cars, dear?” Colleen says. “I don’t want to park on the street in this neighborhood.”

  I pull our pickup truck out of the driveway and park it on the street. I get out and my mother hugs me again.

  “This is the brand-new truck?” she asks, over my shoulder. The paint in the bed is already scratched—in some places down to the primer. Muddy cat paws dot the hood.

  “Nothing like a pickup for carting the family around,” Sam says, from the front door. George shoots between his legs and I watch wet paws collide with the pink serge of Colleen’s skirt.

  “Let’s all go inside,” I say. “Honey, maybe you should put the dogs out back.” Sam raises his eyebrows.

  “Please,” I say.

  He slinks to the back door and the dogs follow, tails between legs.

  “That’s not the skirt I sent you?” my mother asks.

  I nod.

  “Sweetheart,” she says, “if you don’t tuck in the blouse it looks like some kind of an old rag.” She has unzipped my skirt and is furiously tucking in my shirt. Long coral nails catch my skin.

  “Now, do you have a contour belt?”

  It sounds geologic. I shake my head.

  “I’ve got one you can have,” Colleen says. “It’s way too big for me.”

  Now my mother is pulling my shirt back out of my skirt. She ties it in a knot at my waist.

  “That’ll do for now,” she says.

  I hear Sam coming through the kitchen. “Hey,” he says, “I think my wife’s old enough to dress herself, what do you think, Colleen?”

  “I’d think so,” Colleen says.

  “You would think so, wouldn’t you?” my mother says. She takes a comb out of her purse and teases my hair in front.

  “You know it’s just because I adore you,” she says.

  I pull gently away and move toward the kitchen.

  “I thought I’d make a salad,” I say. Salad is a safe bet with people like Colleen and my mother, who eat cocktail onions for their nutritional value.

  “Anybody need a mint julep?” Sam asks.

  Wide World of Sports is now covering a weightlifting competition in Hawaii. Colleen is mesmerized, and I watch her lip curl into a sneer of desire and disgust.

  “Don’t you have any vodka?” my mother asks.

  I stand in the kitchen scrubbing vegetables with all my might. I’ve spent half our grocery allowance on specialty foods for this salad: artichoke hearts, crabmeat, feta cheese, imported Greek olives.

  Sam makes another mint julep for himself and two vodkas on the rocks for Colleen and my mother. The dogs scratch and whine at the back door. Sam moves to open it.

  “They’ll be good,” he says.

  George runs straight to my mother and drops a soggy tennis ball between her knees. Graci runs to Colleen, who screams at her to sit. Graci sits on Colleen’s feet and I see a thin yellow trickle emerge between her Gucci sandals.

  “It’s a mistake to yell at Graci,” Sam says. “Her bladder’s undersized.”

  “Everyone come and eat,” I say.

  The four of us sit around the wooden table Sam made with two-by-fours and sixteen-penny nails. Graci is curled under my chair, and it wobbles when she breathes. I see George’s head on Sam’s lap.

  “Great-looking salad, lamb-cakes,” Sam says.

  “Glorious,” says my mother. “I never spring for crabmeat . . . or is this imitation?”

  “No, no. It’s real,” I say. I sneak a piece of feta cheese to Graci. “My pay raise just went into effect.”

  “You got a raise?” Colleen asks.

  I nod.

  “That’s wonderful, darling,” my mother says. “Do you know that your complexion is looking the very best I’ve ever seen it?”

  “It must be the dry air,” Colleen says.

  “And the apricot scrub,” I say. “The apricot scrub is great.”

  “Why, it’s so great,” Sam says, “that I’ve been spreadin’ it on toast.” I watch him eat carefully around the green peas on his plate.

  “Who says salads aren’t filling?” My mother stands and moves toward the window. “I have some curtains that would really work here,” she says. “I’ll mail them to you when I get home if you promise to put them up.”

  I nod.

  “You promise, really?”

  I nod again.

  Sam says, “Would you look at what time it’s gettin’ to be.”

  We stand in the doorway and wave as Colleen and my mother drive away. I feel light-headed and move toward the bedroom. Sam catches my arm.

  “The pound closes in forty-five minutes,” he says.

  I pull the truck up in front of the huge iron gates, and Sam is out the door before I set the parking brake. We are fifty yards from the building and already we can hear the barking.

  “You lose your dog?” a smiling gray-haired man in a police uniform shouts over the ruckus.

  “No. We want to adopt one,” Sam says.

  “Take a look,” he shouts, indicating an iron-barred door. “The ones with the yellow tags are ready to go. Keep your hands away from the biters.”

  When we enter the long gray corridor the dogs give new meaning to the word “deafening.” There must be fifty of them, each straining to be heard above the rest. Before we get halfway down the aisle I see the dog Sam will choose. A mottled, long-eared houndish creature with paws the size of grapefruits, one brown eye and one blue.

  “Nice-lookin’ dog,” he says when we get to the cage.

  It’s easily the ugliest dog I’ve ever seen in my life.

  “I think he likes you,” I say. The blue eye seems to follow Sam down the corridor, while the brown one stays fixed on me.

  “He’s the one,” Sam says. “We’ll call him Arlo.”

  There is another crescendo of barking as Arlo’s cage is opened and he races out into the corridor.

  Sam holds Arlo’s back end on his lap while Arlo eats orange peels off the floor of the truck. We stop in the park to let him run around—get acquainted with us before he meets the other dogs. After two bags of potato chips he almost knows how to sit.

  “He’s gonna be a smart one,” Sam says.

  The sun is low and orange in the sky, and the branches of the young cherry trees are bent almost to breaking with blossoms.

  “Next year we’ll have a girl,” Sam says. “Something smaller that won’t eat so much. After that we’ll probably have to move out to the country.”

  “Or stop getting dogs,” I say.

  Sam’s face clouds with the mistrust he reserves for Colleen and my mother.

  “It’s bad luck to break a tradition,” he says. He stands up and pulls on my hand. “We better get home and get back into bed.”

  WHAT SHOCK HEARD

  It was late spring, but the dry winds had started already, and we were trying to load Shock into the horse trailer for a trip to the vet and the third set of X-rays on her fetlock. She’s just barely green broke, and after months of being lame she was hot as a pistol and not willing to come within twenty yards of the trailer. Katie and Irwin, who own the barn, and know a lot more than me, had lip chains out, and lunge ropes and tranquilizer guns, but for all their contraptions they couldn’t even get close enough to her to give her the shot. Crazy Billy was there too, screaming about two-by-fours and electric prods, and women being too damned ignorant to train a horse right. His horses would stand while he somersaulted in and out of the saddle. They’d stand where he ground-tied them, two feet from the train tracks, one foot off the highway. He lost a horse under a semi once, and almost killed the driver. All the wome
n were afraid of him, and the cowboys said he trained with Quaaludes. I was watching him close, trying to be patient with Katie and Irwin and my brat of a horse, but I didn’t want Billy within ten feet of Shock, no matter how long it took to get her in the trailer.

  That’s when the new cowboy walked up, like out of nowhere with a carrot in his hands, whispered something in Shock’s ear, and she walked right behind him into the trailer. He winked at me and I smiled back and poor Irwin and Katie were just standing there all tied up in their own whips and chains.

  The cowboy walked on into the barn then, and I got into the truck with Katie and Irwin and didn’t see him again for two months when Shock finally got sound and I was starting to ride her in short sessions and trying to teach her some of the things any five-year-old horse should know.

  It was the middle of prairie summer by then and it was brutal just thinking about putting on long pants to ride, but I went off Shock so often I had to. The cowboy told me his name was Zeke, short for Ezekiel, and I asked him if he was religious and he said only about certain things.

  I said my name was Raye, and he said that was his mother’s name and her twin sister’s name was Faye, and I said I could never understand why people did things like that to their children. I said that I was developing a theory that what people called you had everything to do with the person you turned out to become, and he said he doubted it ’cause that was just words, and was I going to stand there all day or was I going to come riding with him. He winked at Billy then and Billy grinned and I pretended not to see and hoped to myself that they weren’t the same kind of asshole.

  I knew Shock wasn’t really up to the kind of riding I’d have to do to impress this cowboy, but it had been so long since I’d been out on the meadows I couldn’t say no. There was something about the prairie for me—it wasn’t where I had come from, but when I moved there it just took me in and I knew I couldn’t ever stop living under that big sky. When I was a little girl driving with my family from our cabin in Montana across Nebraska to all the grandparents in Illinois, I used to be scared of the flatness because I didn’t know what was holding all the air in.