Cowboys Are My Weakness

by Pam Houston

  I felt the first drops of rain and tried to yell up to Zeke, but the wind came up suddenly and blasted my voice back into my mouth. I knew there was no chance of catching him then, but I dug my heels in and yipped a little and Shock dug in even harder, but then I felt her front hoof hit a gopher hole and the bottom dropped out and she went down and I went forward over her neck and then she came down over me. My face hit first and I tasted blood and a hoof came down on the back of my head and I heard reins snap and waited for another hoof to hit, but then it was quiet and I knew she had cleared me. At least I’m not dead, I thought, but my head hurt too bad to even move.

  I felt the grit inside my mouth and thought of Zeke galloping on across the prairie, enclosed in the motion, oblivious to my fall. It would be a mile, maybe two, before he slowed down and looked behind him, another before he’d stop, aware of my absence, and come back for me.

  I opened one eye and saw Shock grazing nearby, broken reins hanging uneven below her belly. If she’d re-pulled the tendon in her fetlock it would be weeks, maybe months, before I could ride with him again. My mouth was full of blood and my lips were swelling so much it was running out the sides, though I kept my jaw clamped and my head down. The wind was coming in little gusts now, interrupted by longer and longer periods of calm, but the sky was getting darker and I lifted my head to look for Zeke. I got dizzy, and I closed my eyes and tried to breathe regularly. In what seemed like a long time I started to hear a rhythm in my head and I pressed my ear into the dust and knew it was Zeke coming back across the field at a gallop, balanced and steady, around the holes and over them. Then I heard his boots hit ground. He tied Jesse first, and then caught Shock, which was smart, I guess, and then he knelt next to my head and I opened the eye that wasn’t in the dirt and he smiled and put his hands on his knees.

  “Your mouth,” he said, without laughing, but I knew what I must’ve looked like, so I raised up on one elbow and started to tell him I was okay and he said,

  “Don’t talk. It’ll hurt.”

  And he was right, it did, but I kept on talking and soon I was telling him about the pain in my mouth and the back of my head and what Billy had done that day in the barn, and the ghosts I carry with me. Blood was coming out with the words and pieces of tooth, and I kept talking till I told him everything, but when I looked at his face I knew all I’d done was make the gap wider with the words I’d picked so carefully that he didn’t want to hear. The wind started up again and the rain was getting steady.

  I was crying then, but not hard, and you couldn’t tell through all the dirt and blood, and the rain and the noise the wind was making. I was crying, I think, but I wanted to laugh because he would have said there weren’t any words for what I didn’t tell him, and that was that I loved him and even more I loved the prairie that wouldn’t let you hide anything, even if you wanted to.

  Then he reached across the space my words had made around me and put his long brown finger against my swollen lips. I closed my eyes tight as his hand wrapped up my jaw and I fell into his chest and whatever it was that drove him to me, and I held myself there unbreathing, like waiting for the sound of hooves on the sand, like waiting for a tornado.

  DALL

  I am not a violent person. I don’t shoot animals and I hate cold weather, so maybe I had no business following Boone to the Alaska Range for a season of Dall sheep hunting. But right from the beginning, my love for Boone was a little less like contentment and a little more like sickness, so when he said he needed an assistant guide I bought a down coat and packed my bags. I had an idea about Alaska: that the wildness of the place would enlarge my range of possibility. The northern lights, for example, were something I wanted to see.

  After the first week in Alaska I began to realize that the object of sheep hunting was to intentionally deprive yourself of all the comforts of normal life. We would get up at three a.m., and leave the cabin, knowing it would be nearly twenty-four hours, if not several days, before we would return. Everything depended upon the sheep, where they were and how far we could chase them. Boone was a hunter of the everything-has-to-be-hard-and-painful-to-be-good variety, and there was nothing he liked better than a six- or seven-hour belly crawl through the soggy green tundra.

  The weather was almost always bad. If it wasn’t raining, it was sleeting or snowing. If the sun came out, the wind started to blow. We carried heavy packs full of dry and warm clothing, but if we saw some sheep and started stalking them, we had to leave our packs behind so that we’d be less conspicuous, and often we didn’t return to them until after dark. We got our feet wet very early in the day. We carried only enough water so that we were always on the edge of real thirst. We ate Spam for lunch every day, even though smoked baby clams and dried fruit would have weighed considerably less in our backpacks. It seemed important, in fact, not to eat any fruits and vegetables, to climb up and down the steepest part of every mountain, and to nearly always get caught out after dark.

  Boone and I were a good team, except when we fell into one of our fights, which were infrequent but spectacular. In Alaska we seemed to fight every time we had a minute alone, and those minutes were rare with a series of hunters who were scared of the bears and half in love with Boone’s macho besides.

  When Boone got really mad at me, when his face puffed up and his temples bulged out and he talked through his teeth and little flecks of spit splattered my face, it was so comic and so different from his guidely calm that I was always waiting for him to laugh, like it was all a big joke that I hadn’t quite gotten. And when he grabbed me so hard he made me yell or threw me on the bed or kicked my legs out from under me it always felt less like violence and more like a pratfall. Like we were acting out a scene, waiting for some signal from the audience that the absurdity of Boone’s actions had been properly conveyed.

  Several times in my life I’ve sat with women, friends of mine, who reveal, sometimes shyly, sometimes proudly, bruises of one kind or another, and I know I’ve said, “If it happens one time, leave him,” I’ve said, “It doesn’t matter how much you love him. Leave him if it happens one time.” And I’ve said it with utter confidence, as if I knew what the hell I was talking about, as if violence was something that could be easily defined.

  It was never that clear-cut with Boone and me. For all the shoving around he did, he never hit me, never hurt me really. I’m big and strong and always tan, so I don’t bruise easily. And I was always touched, in some strange way, by the ambivalence of his violent acts; they were at once aggressive and protective, as if he wanted not to hurt me but just to contain me, as if he wanted not to break me but just to shut me off.

  We took four hunters out that season, one at a time for fourteen days each, and gave them the workout of their lives. We hiked on an average of fifteen miles a day, with a vertical gain of between four and five thousand feet; roughly equivalent to hiking in and out of the Grand Canyon every day for two months. At first confused by my presence and ability, the hunters would learn fast that I was their only ally, the one who would slip them extra candy bars, the one they could whine to.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” they’d whisper to me when Boone was out of earshot.

  And I’d say, “How about a little lunch, Boone?” and Boone would look at me exasperated.

  “We’re hunting, baby,” he’d say, as if that explained everything. “We’ll eat as soon as we can.”

  We did the dishes with stream water that had so much silt in it that they looked muddier every time we washed them. The cabin was only eight by ten and we took turns standing in the center of the floor over the washbasin to brush our teeth, and then one at a time we got ready for bed. Two half-cots/half-hammocks folded out of the wall into something like bunk beds. The hunter slept in the top bunk and I got the bottom. Boone spread his ground pad and sleeping bag on what was left of the floor.

  Every night we’d wait until the hunter started to snore and then Boone would climb into my bunk and we’d make slow and utterly sil
ent love. There was barely enough room for my shoulder blades across the cot, barely enough room for both of our bodies under the hunter’s sag, but we managed somehow to complete the act and I discovered, for the first time in my life, that restraint can be very sexy.

  Boone would usually fall right asleep and I’d be so tired from the day’s hunting that I’d sleep too, even crushed like that under the weight of him. Sometime before three-thirty we’d wake up, stiff and numb, and he would slip out of my bunk and onto his knees on the floor. He’d stay there, kneeling for a while, rubbing my temples or massaging my fingers until I fell asleep again. When the alarm went off he was always buried in his sleeping bag, everything covered but one arm reaching toward my cot, sometimes still up and on the edge of it.

  I don’t think any of the hunters knew what was going on except for Russell, who got so crazy for Boone in his own way that he was afraid to leave Boone and me alone, afraid he’d miss a moment of intimacy, afraid even to fall asleep at night. One night, close to climax, we bumped Russell hard, hard enough so that I felt it right through Boone. Boone lay still for a long time until we all fell asleep, and we never even finished making love. The next night we waited forever for Russell to start snoring, and even when he did I thought it sounded forced and fake but Boone seemed convinced by it and he crawled into my bed and made himself so flat like a snake against me that I couldn’t tell my movements apart from his.

  We hunted in grizzly-bear country, and on cloudy nights when the transistor could pick up the Fairbanks station we’d always hear of another mauling, or another hunter’s body that Fish and Game couldn’t find. We didn’t go anywhere without rifles, and when our bush pilot found out I didn’t have a gun he pulled the smallest .22 pistol I’d ever seen out of his pocket.

  “It won’t stop a bear unless you put it inside his mouth,” he said. “But it’s better than nothing at all.”

  And then he told a story just like all the other stories. In this one a bear took a man’s scalp off with one swipe of the paw, and then the bear crushed his skull against a tree trunk, and then he broke his back against a rock.

  But it wasn’t the fear for my life that I thought would get to me, it wasn’t the fighting or the hard work or the bad food. The only thing I really worried about in Alaska was how I’d feel when the hunt was successful, how I’d feel watching the animal go down: the period of time, however short, between the shooting and the dying.

  Boone told me it wouldn’t be as bad as I expected. He told me our hunters were expert marksmen, that they would all make perfect heart-lung shots, that the rams would die instantly and without pain. He told me that the good thing about hunting Dalls was that you always harvested the oldest rams because they were the ones with the biggest horns, they were the ones whose horns made a full curl. Boone said that most of the rams we would shoot that season would have died slow painful deaths of starvation that winter. He said when they got weak they would have had their guts ripped out by a pack of wolves, sometimes while they were still alive.

  Boone talked a lot about the ethics of hunting, about the relationship between meat eaters and game. He said that even though he catered to trophy hunters he had never let his hunters shoot an animal without killing it, and had never let them kill one without taking all the meat. The scraps that had to be left on the carcass became food for the wolves and the eagles. It was the most basic of spiritual relationships, he said, and I wanted so much to believe him that I clung to his doctrine like hope.

  But I still always rooted for the sheep. Whenever we got close I tried to send them telepathic messages to make them turn their heads and look at us, to make them run away after they’d seen us, but so often they would just stand there stupidly and wait to be shot. Sometimes they wouldn’t move even after the hunter had fired, sometimes even after the dead ram had fallen at their feet.

  It was at those times, in the middle of all the hand clasping, the stiff hugs and manly pats on the back, that I wondered how I could possibly be in love with Boone. I would wonder how I could possibly be in love with a man who seemed happy that the stunning white animal in front of us had just fallen dead.

  The first sheep that died that season was for a hunter named James. James owned a company that manufactured all the essential components of sewage-treatment plants. He was jolly and a little stupid and evidently very rich.

  On the first day we were all together, James told us a story about going hunting with six other men who all had elk permits. Apparently they all split up and James came upon the herd first and shot six animals in a matter of seconds. I tried to imagine coming into a clearing and seeing six bull elk and shooting all of them, not leaving even one.

  “I knew if I just shot one they was gonna scatter and we’d lose them,” he said. “They was standing real close together and I knew if I just let the lead fly, I’d dust more than one.”

  For the first ten days of James’s hunt we had so much rain and such low clouds that the sheep could have been on top of us and we wouldn’t have seen them. Our clothes had been wet for so long that our skin had started to rot underneath them. Each morning we put our feet into new plastic bags.

  On the eleventh morning the sun came out bold and warm. During the cloudy days the short Alaskan summer had slipped into fall, and the tundra had already started to turn from green and yellow to orange and red.

  Boone said our luck would change with the weather, and it wasn’t two hours and six or seven miles of hiking before we’d spotted five of the biggest rams Boone had ever seen in the valley.

  They were a long way from us, maybe three miles horizontal and three thousand feet up, the wind was squirrelly, and there was no real cover between us and them. Our only choice was to go right up the creek bed on our bellies and hope we blended with the moving water and the slate-colored rocks. The bed was steep for a couple of hundred yards, and there were two or three waterfalls to negotiate, and I thought we were going to lose James to the river once or twice, but we all made it through the steep part only half soaked.

  Then we were in the tundra with almost no protection, and we had to crawl with our elbows and our boot tips, knees and stomachs in the mud, two or three inches per advance, wet, cold, dirty.

  I thought how very much like soldiers we looked, how very much like war this all was, how very strange that the warlike element seemed to be so much the attraction.

  The crawling took most of the day, and it put us in a good position for the afternoon feeding. We got behind a long low rock outcrop where we could get a good look at the rams, and sure enough, they had started coming down off the crags they bedded on during the day. Four of the five were full curls, all with a lot of mass and depth. We couldn’t get any closer without being seen, so all we could do was lie on the rocks in our wet clothes and wait for them to graze in our direction.

  Every half hour Boone would raise his body just enough to see over the ridge that protected us. He’d smile or give us the thumbs-up. Three more hours passed and the numbness which had started in my feet had worked its way up above my knees. Finally, Boone motioned for James to join him on the ridge. For the first time in hours I moved, getting up on my elbows to see the rams grazing, no more than a hundred yards away. I watched James try to position himself, try to breathe deeply, try to get the best hold on the gun. Boone was talking softly into his ear and I could only hear fragments of what he was saying—“very makeable shot,” or “second from the right,” “one chance,” “get comfortable”—and I tried to imagine some rhythmic chant, some incantation, that would sanctify the scene somehow, that would make what seemed murderous holy. Then the shot exploded in my ears and one of the rams ran back up the mountain toward the crags.

  “Watch him for blood!” Boone said to me. And I set my binoculars on him but he was climbing strong and steady. I was pretty sure it was a clean miss but I didn’t say so because I didn’t want James to get another shot, and the other four rams were still standing, staring, trying to get our scen
t, trying to understand what we were and what we were doing on their side of the mountain.

  James was in position to shoot again.

  “What do you see?” Boone asked me.

  “I haven’t got a look at him from the front,” I said, which was true, even if beside the point.

  James relaxed his hold on the gun. A gust of wind came suddenly from behind us and the rams got our scent. Just that fast they were climbing toward the fifth ram, and in seconds they were out of shooting range.

  “He’s clean,” I said. “You must have shot over his back.”

  “Okay,” Boone said to James. “We’re gonna let them get a little ahead and then we’re gonna follow them up to the top. Baby, I want you to stay here and watch the bottom. Watch the rams, watch our progress. Once we get to the top we’re going to start to move south along the ridge. I want you to stay a few hundred yards ahead of us. I want you to keep the rams from coming down.”

  It was another three thousand feet to the top of the ridge. The rams topped out in twenty-five minutes. Boone and James hadn’t gone a quarter of the way. I knew that if the rams would just keep going, if they would drop down into the debris on the other side, Boone and James would never get to them before dark.

  I watched two rams butt horns against the darkening sky and I thought that maybe the reason why the ewes and the lambs lived separately was that the rams were not so different from the hunters after all, and in some strange way I was consoled.