Cowboys Are My Weakness

by Pam Houston

  Some people have such a fear of the prairie it makes them crazy, my ex-husband was one, and they even have a word for it: “agoraphobia.” But when I looked it up in Greek it said “fear of the marketplace,” and that seems like the opposite kind of fear to me. He was afraid of the high wind and the big storms that never even came while he was alive. When he shot himself, people said it was my fault for making him move here and making him stay, but his chart only said acute agoraphobia and I think he did it because his life wasn’t as much like a book as he wanted it to be. He taught me about literature and language, and even though he used language in a bad way—to make up worlds that hurt us—I learned about its power and it got me a job, if nothing else, writing for enough money to pay off his debts.

  But I wasn’t thinking about any of that when I set off across the meadow at an easy hand gallop behind Zeke and his gelding Jesse. The sun was low in the sky, but it wasn’t too long after solstice and in the summer the sun never seemed to fall, it seeped toward the horizon and then melted into it. The fields were losing heat, though, and at that pace we could feel the bands of warmth and cool coming out of the earth like it was some perfectly regulated machine. I could tell Zeke wasn’t a talker, so I didn’t bother riding up with him; I didn’t want Shock to try and race on her leg. I hung back and watched the way his body moved with the big quarter horse: brown skin stretched across muscle and horseflesh, black mane and sandy hair, breath and sweat and one dust cloud rose around them till there was no way to separate the rider from the ride.

  Zeke was a hunter. He made his living as a hunter’s guide, in Alaska, in places so remote, he said, that the presence of one man with a gun was insignificant. He invited me home for moose steaks, and partly because I loved the way the two words sounded together, I accepted.

  It was my first date in almost six years and once I got that into my head it wouldn’t leave me alone. It had been almost two years since I’d been with a man, two years almost to the day that Charlie sat on our front-porch swing and blew his brains out with a gun so big the stains splattered three sets of windows and even wrapped around the corner of the house. I thought I had enough reason to swear off men for a while, and Charlie wasn’t in the ground three months when I got another one.

  It was in October of that same year, already cold and getting dark too early, and Shock and I got back to the barn about an hour after sunset. Katie and Irwin were either in town or in bed and the barn was as dark as the house. I walked Shock into her stall and was starting to take off her saddle when Billy stepped out of the shadows with a shoeing tool in his hand. Women always say they know when it’s going to happen, and I did, as soon as he slid the stall door open. I went down when the metal hit my shoulder and I couldn’t see anything but I could feel his body shuddering already and little flecks of spit coming out of his mouth. The straw wasn’t clean and Shock was nervous and I concentrated on the sound her hooves made as they snapped the air searchingly behind her. I imagined them connecting with Billy’s skull and how the blood on the white wall would look like Charlie’s, but Shock was much too honest a horse to aim for impact. Billy had the arm that wasn’t numb pinned down with one knee through the whole thing, but I bit him once right on the jawline and he’s still got that scar; a half-moon of my teeth in his face.

  He said he’d kill me if I told, and the way my life was going it seemed reasonable to take him at his word. I had a hard time getting excited about meeting men after that. I’d learned to live without it, but not very well.

  Shock had pitched me over her head twice the day that Zeke asked me to dinner, and by the time I got to his house my neck was so stiff I had to turn my whole body to look at him.

  “Why don’t you just jump in the hot tub before dinner,” he said, and I swung my head and shoulders around from him to the wood-heated hot tub in the middle of the living room and I must have gone real white then because he said, “But you know, the heater’s messing up and it’s just not getting as hot as it should.”

  While he went outside to light the charcoals I sat on a hard wooden bench covered with skins facing what he called the trophy wall. A brown-and-white speckled owl stared down its pointed beak at me from above the doorway, its wings and talons poised as if ready for attack, a violence in its huge yellow eyes that is never so complete in humans.

  He came back in and caught me staring into the face of the grizzly bear that covered most of the wall. “It’s an eight-foot-square bear,” he said, and then explained, by rubbing his hand across the fur, that it was eight feet long from the tip of its nose to the tip of its tail, and from the razor edge of one outstretched front claw to the other. He smoothed the fur back down with strong even strokes. He picked something off one of its teeth.

  “It’s a decent-sized bear,” he said, “but they get much bigger.”

  I told him about the time I was walking with my dogs along the Salmon River and I saw a deer carcass lying in the middle of an active spawning ground. The salmon were deeper than the water and their tails slapped the surface as they clustered around the deer. One dog ran in to chase them, and they didn’t even notice, they swam around her ankles till she got scared and came out.

  He laughed and reached towards me and I thought for me, but then his hand came down on the neck of a six-point mule deer mounted on the wall behind me. “Isn’t he beautiful?” he asked. His hands rubbed the short hair around the deer’s ears. It was hanging closer to me than I realized, and when I touched its nose it was warmer than my hands.

  He went back outside then and I tried to think of more stories to tell him but I got nervous all over and started fidgeting with something that I realized too late was the foot of a small furry animal. The thing I was sitting on reminded me a little too much of my dog to allow me to relax.

  The moose steaks were lean and tender and it was easy to eat them until he started telling me about their history, about the bull that had come to the clearing for water, and had seen Zeke there, had seen the gun even, and trusted him not to fire. I couldn’t look right at him then, and he waited awhile and he said, “Do you have any idea what they do to cows?”

  We talked about other things after that, horses and the prairie and the mountains we had both left for it. At two I said I should go home, and he said he was too tired to take me. I wanted him to touch me the way he touched the mule deer but he threw a blanket over me and told me to lift up for the pillow. Then he climbed up and into a loft I hadn’t even noticed, and left me down there in the dark under all those frightened eyes.

  The most remarkable thing about him, I guess, was his calm: His hands were quieter on Jesse’s mane even than mine were on Shock’s. I never heard him raise his voice, even in laughter. There wasn’t an animal in the barn he couldn’t turn to putty, and I knew it must be the same with the ones he shot.

  On our second ride he talked more, even about himself some, horses he’d sold, and ex-lovers; there was a darkness in him I couldn’t locate.

  It was the hottest day of that summer and it wouldn’t have been right to run the horses, so we let them walk along the creek bank all afternoon, clear into the next county, I think.

  He asked me why I didn’t move to the city, why I hadn’t, at least, while Charlie was sick, and I wondered what version of my life he had heard. I told him I needed the emptiness and the grasses and the storm threats. I told him about my job and the articles I was working on and how I knew if I moved to the city, or the ocean, or even back to the mountains, I’d be paralyzed. I told him that it seemed as if the right words could only come to me out of the perfect semicircular space of the prairie.

  He rubbed his hands together fist to palm and smiled, and asked if I wanted to rest. He said he might nap, if it was quiet, and I said I knew I always talked too much, and he said it was okay because I didn’t mind if he didn’t always listen.

  I told him words were all we had, something that Charlie had told me, and something I had believed because it let me fall into a vacuum whe
re I didn’t have to justify my life.

  Zeke was stretching his neck in a funny way, so without asking I went over and gave him a back rub and when I was finished he said, “For a writer lady you do some pretty good communicating without words,” but he didn’t touch me even then, and I sat very still while the sun melted, embarrassed and afraid to even look at him.

  Finally, he stood up and stretched.

  “Billy says you two go out sometimes.”

  “Billy lies,” I said.

  “He knows a lot about you,” he said.

  “No more than everyone else in town,” I said. “People talk. It’s just what they do. I’ll tell you all about it if you want to know.”

  “We’re a long way from the barn,” he said, in a way that I couldn’t tell if it was good or bad. He was rubbing one palm against the other so slowly it was making my skin crawl.

  “Shock’s got good night vision,” I said, as evenly as I could.

  He reached for a strand of Shock’s mane and she rubbed her whole neck against him. I pulled her forelock out from under the brow band. She nosed his back pockets, where the carrots were. She knocked his cap off his head and scratched her nose between his shoulder blades. He put both hands up on her withers and rubbed little circles. She stretched her neck out long and low.

  “Your horse is a whore, Raye,” he said.

  “I want to know what you said to her to make her follow you into the trailer,” I said.

  “What I said to her?” he said. “Christ, Raye, there aren’t any words for that.”

  Then he was up and in the saddle and waiting for me to get back on Shock. He took off when I had only one foot in the stirrup, and I just hung around Shock’s neck for the first quarter mile till he slowed up.

  The creek trail was narrow and Shock wanted to race, so I got my stirrup and let her fly past him on the outside, the wheat so high it whipped across Shock’s shoulder and my thigh. Once we were in the lead, Shock really turned it on and I could feel her strength and the give of her muscles and the solidity of the healed fetlock every time it hit the ground. Then I heard Jesse coming on the creek side, right at Shock’s flank, and I knew we were coming to the big ditch, and I knew Shock would take it if Jesse did, but neither of us wanted to give up the lead. Shock hit the edge first and sailed over it and I came way up on her neck and held my breath when her front legs hit, but then we were down on the other side and she was just as strong and as sound as ever. Jesse edged up again and I knew we couldn’t hold the lead for much longer. I felt Zeke’s boots on my calf and our stirrups locked once for an instant and then he pulled away. I let Shock slow then, and when Jesse’s dust cleared, the darkening sky opened around me like an invitation.

  It wasn’t light enough to run anymore and we were still ten miles from the barn. Jupiter was up, and Mars. There wasn’t any moon.

  Zeke said, “Watching you ride made me almost forget to beat you.” I couldn’t see his face in the shadows.

  He wanted silence but it was too dark not to talk, so I showed him the constellations. I told him the stories I knew about them: Cassiopeia weeping on the King’s shoulder while the great winged Pegasus carries her daughter off across the eastern sky. Cygnus, the swan, flying south along the milky way, the Great Bear spinning slowly head over tail in the north. I showed him Andromeda, the galaxy closest to our own. I said, “It’s two hundred million light-years away. Do you know what that means?” And when he didn’t answer I said, “It means the light we see left that galaxy two hundred million years ago.” And then I said, “Doesn’t that make you feel insignificant?”

  And he said, “No.”

  “How does it make you feel?” I said.

  “Like I’ve gotten something I might not deserve,” he said.

  Then he went away hunting in Montana for six weeks. I kept thinking about him up there in the mountains I had come from and wondering if he saw them the way I did, if he saw how they held the air. He didn’t write or call once, and I didn’t either, because I thought I was being tested and I wanted to pass. He left me a key so I could water his plants and keep chemicals in his hot tub. I got friendly with the animals on the wall, and even talked to them sometimes, like I did to the plants. The only one I avoided was the Dall sheep. Perfect in its whiteness, and with a face as gentle and wise as Buddha. I didn’t want to imagine Zeke’s hands pulling the trigger that stained the white neck with blood the taxidermist must have struggled to remove.

  He asked me to keep Jesse in shape for him too, and I did. I’d work Shock in the ring for an hour and then take Jesse out on the trails. He was a little nervous around me, being used to Zeke’s uncanny calm, I guess, so I sang the songs to him that I remembered from Zeke’s records: “Angel from Montgomery,” “City of New Orleans,” “L.A. Freeway,” places I’d never been or cared to go. I didn’t know any songs about Montana.

  When we’d get back to the barn I’d brush Jesse till he shone, rubbing around his face and ears with a chamois cloth till he finally let down his guard a little and leaned into my hands. I fed him boxes full of carrots while Shock looked a question at me out of the corner of her eye.

  One night Jesse and I got back late from a ride and the only car left at the barn was Billy’s. I walked Jesse up and down the road twice before I thought to look in Zeke’s saddlebags for the hunting knife I should have known would be there all along. I put it in the inside pocket of my jean jacket and felt powerful, even though I hadn’t thought ahead as far as using it. When I walked through the barn door I hit the breaker switch that turned on every light and there was Billy leaning against the door to Jesse’s stall.

  “So now she’s riding his horse,” he said.

  “You want to open that door?” I said. I stood as tall as I could between him and Jesse.

  “Does that mean you’re going steady?”

  “Let me by,” I said.

  “It’d be a shame if he came back and there wasn’t any horse to ride,” he said, and I grabbed for Jesse’s reins but he moved forward faster, spooking Jesse, who reared and spun and clattered out the open barn door. I listened to his hooves on the stone and then outside on the hard dirt till he got so far away I only imagined it.

  Billy shoved me backwards into a wheelbarrow and when my head hit the manure I reached for the knife and got it between us and he took a step backwards and wiped the spit off his mouth.

  “You weren’t that much fun the first time,” he said, and ran for the door. I heard him get into his car and screech out the driveway, and I lay there in the manure, breathing horse piss and praying he wouldn’t hit Jesse out on the hard road. I got up slow and went into the tack room for a towel and I tried to clean my hair with it but it was Zeke’s and it smelled like him and I couldn’t understand why my timing had been so bad all my life. I wrapped my face in it so tight I could barely breathe and sat on his tack box and leaned into the wall, but then I remembered Jesse and put some grain in a bucket and went out into the darkness and whistled.

  It was late September and almost midnight and all the stars I’d shown Zeke had shifted a half turn to the west. Orion was on the horizon, his bow drawn back, aimed across the Milky Way at the Great Bear, I guess, if space curves the way Earth does. Jesse wasn’t anywhere, and I walked half the night looking for him. I went to sleep in my truck and at dawn Irwin and Jesse showed up at the barn door together.

  “He got spooked,” I told Irwin. “I was too worried to go home.”

  Irwin looked hard at me. “Hear anything from Zeke?” he said.

  I spent a lot of time imagining his homecoming. I’d make up the kind of scenes in my head I knew would never happen, the kind that never happen to anyone, where the man gets out of the car so fast he tears his jacket, and when he lifts the woman up against the sky she is so light that she thinks she may be absorbed into the atmosphere.

  I had just come back from a four-hour ride when his truck did pull up to the barn, six weeks to the day from when he left. He got out slow
as ever, and then went around back to where he kept his carrots. From the tack-room window I watched him rub Jesse and feed him, pick up one of his front hooves, run his fingers through his tail.

  I wanted to look busy but I’d just got done putting everything away so I sat on the floor and started oiling my tack and then wished I hadn’t because of what I’d smell like when he saw me. It was fifteen minutes before he even came looking, and I had the bridle apart, giving it the oil job of its life. He put his hands on the doorjamb and smiled big.

  “Put that thing back together and come riding with me,” he said.

  “I just got back,” I said. “Jesse and I’ve been all over.”

  “That’ll make it easier for you to beat me on your horse,” he said. “Come on, it’s getting dark earlier every night.”

  He stepped over me and pulled his saddle off the rack, and I put the bridle back together as fast as I could. He was still ready before I was and he stood real close while I tried to make Shock behave and get tacked up and tried not to let my hands shake when I fastened the buckles.

  Then we were out in the late sunshine and it was like he’d never left, except this time he was galloping before he hit the end of the driveway.

  “Let’s see that horse run,” he called to me, and Jesse shot across the road and the creek trail and plunged right through the middle of the wheat field. The wheat was so tall I could barely see Zeke’s head, but the footing was good and Shock was gaining on him. I thought about the farmer who’d shoot us if he saw us, and I thought about all the hours I’d spent on Jesse keeping him in shape so that Zeke could come home and win another race. The sky was black to the west and coming in fast, and I tried to remember if I’d heard a forecast and to feel if there was any direction to the wind. Then we were out in a hay field that had just been cut and rolled, and it smelled so strong and sweet it made me light-headed and I thought maybe we weren’t touching ground at all but flying along above it, buoyed up by the fragrance and the swirl of the wind. I drove Shock straight at a couple of bales that were tied together and made her take them, and she did, but by the time we hit the irrigation ditch we’d lost another couple of seconds on Zeke.