Cowboys Are My Weakness

by Pam Houston

  His tirade ended in some kind of a question I couldn’t hear but guessed was rhetorical. I said something I couldn’t resist about the shoe being on the other foot, and then laughed out loud so suddenly that he came to the cabin door and stared at me.

  It was going to be dark in a few hours and I didn’t think Boone would let me in the cabin, so I gathered up my underwear and started down towards the airstrip, where we had a tent set up. I knew it was a bad time of night to be walking alone in bear country, but after two long weeks without even seeing one bear, the grizzly had started to seem a bit like a creature of everybody’s mind.

  My knee was swelling to almost twice its normal size, but as long as I watched where I was walking, and didn’t let it bend too far, it didn’t really hurt. It was because I was looking down, I guess, because I was walking carefully, that I got so close to the bears before we saw each other.

  It was a sow, six or seven feet tall, and two nearly full-grown cubs. They were knee-deep in blueberries, rolling and eating and playing. When I saw them they weren’t fifty yards away.

  I froze, and reached for my little gun before I remembered that Boone hadn’t given it back. I took one step backwards and that’s when mama saw me. The sun was just setting, and the late-afternoon light shone off their coats, which were brown and long and frosted at the tips. Mama stood on her hind legs, all seven feet of her, and then the cubs stood too and looked my way. They couldn’t smell me, I knew, and they were trying to. Mama’s ears went back and I thought, “Here she comes,” but then she raised one giant paw in the air and swung it at me like a forehand, and then all three bears ran up into the mountain.

  Boone and I took three more hunters out that season and we got them each a ram. All three hunters made perfect heart-lung shots. All three rams died instantly, just like Boone said.

  One of our hunters, a man named Chuck, was kind and sincere. He got his ram with a bow and arrow from thirty yards away after a ten-hour stalk that was truly artistic. Chuck seemed to have an unspoken understanding with the wild-lands and I was really almost happy for him when the ram went down, and I would have shaken his hand when he and Boone got finished jumping up and down in each other’s arms if he had wanted to shake mine.

  Boone told me I would get used to watching the rams die, and I have to admit—not without a certain horror—that the third killing was easier than the second, and the fourth was easier yet again.

  I got thinner and harder and stronger and faster, turning my body into the kind of machine I couldn’t help but be proud of, even though that had never been my goal.

  Boone and I stopped fighting after the day we hiked to the cabin, but we also stopped talking; what we had left between us was hunting, and making love. I knew as soon as we got back to the lower forty-eight it would be over between us, and so I spent each day hiking behind him, measuring the time by quantity and not quality. It was like sitting by the bedside of a dying friend.

  The nights got longer and longer, and we spent a lot more of them stuck out and away from the cabin. But the clouds were always thick and low, and even on the nights I tried hard to stay awake the northern lights never came again.

  It was late September when we finished. The snow line was below four thousand feet and it was getting well below zero every night, and we’d been camped on the airstrip for three days waiting for the bush plane. The last hunters had flown out days before, and Boone and I had closed up the cabin in silence, like animals preparing for winter.

  It had been hours, maybe days, since we’d spoken, so the sound of Boone’s voice out of the darkness, out of somewhere deep in his sleeping bag, startled me.

  “You know, none of those rams had an ounce of fat on them,” he said. “There’s not one of them that would have lasted through the winter.”

  “Well,” I said. “That’s something.”

  “I’ve been doing this for years,” he said, and at first I thought he was going to say, “And it still isn’t easy to watch them die,” but he didn’t.

  “You really hung in there,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I did.”

  “But it made you stop loving me,” he said. “Even so.”

  Somewhere up the mountain the wolves started moaning and shrieking. I hadn’t told Boone about the night I saw the bears, but the scene had stayed right with me; I couldn’t get it out of my mind. It was the power of the mother bear’s gesture, I guess, the power and the ambivalence. Because the wave of her paw was both forbidding and inviting. Because even though I knew that she was showing me her anger, I also knew that somewhere in her gesture, she was asking me to come along.

  COWBOYS ARE MY WEAKNESS

  I have a picture in my mind of a tiny ranch on the edge of a stand of pine trees with some horses in the yard. There’s a woman standing in the doorway in cutoffs and a blue chambray work shirt and she’s just kissed her tall, bearded, and soft-spoken husband goodbye. There’s laundry hanging outside and the morning sun is filtering through the tree branches like spiderwebs. It’s the morning after a full moon, and behind the house the deer have eaten everything that was left in the garden.

  If I were a painter, I’d paint that picture just to see if the girl in the doorway would turn out to be me. I’ve been out west ten years now, long enough to call it my home, long enough to know I’ll be here forever, but I still don’t know where that ranch is. And even though I’ve had plenty of men here, some of them tall and nearly all of them bearded, I still haven’t met the man who has just walked out of the painting, who has just started his pickup truck, whose tire marks I can still see in the sandy soil of the drive.

  The west isn’t a place that gives itself up easily. Newcomers have to sink into it slowly, to descend through its layers, and I’m still descending. Like most easterners, I started out in the transitional zones, the big cities and the ski towns that outsiders have set up for their own comfort, the places so often referred to as “the best of both worlds.” But I was bound to work my way back, through the land, into the small towns and beyond them. That’s half the reason I wound up on a ranch near Grass Range, Montana; the other half is Homer.

  I’ve always had this thing about cowboys, maybe because I was born in New Jersey. But a real cowboy is hard to find these days, even in the west. I thought I’d found one on several occasions, I even at one time thought Homer was a cowboy, and though I loved him like crazy for a while and in some ways always will, somewhere along the line I had to face the fact that even though Homer looked like a cowboy, he was just a capitalist with a Texas accent who owned a horse.

  Homer’s a wildlife specialist in charge of a whitetail deer management project on the ranch. He goes there every year to observe the deer from the start of the mating season in late October until its peak in mid-November. It’s the time when the deer are most visible, when the bucks get so lusty they lose their normal caution, when the does run around in the middle of the day with their white tails in the air. When Homer talked me into coming with him, he said I’d love the ranch, and I did. It was sixty miles from the nearest paved road. All of the buildings were whitewashed and plain. One of them had been ordered from a 1916 Sears catalogue. The ranch hands still rode horses, and when the late- afternoon light swept the grainfields across from headquarters, I would watch them move the cattle in rows that looked like waves. There was a peace about the ranch that was uncanny and might have been complete if not for the eight or nine hungry barn cats that crawled up your legs if you even smelled like food, and the exotic chickens of almost every color that fought all day in their pens.

  Homer has gone to the ranch every year for the last six, and he has a long history of stirring up trouble there. The ranch hands watch him sit on the hillside and hate him for the money he makes. He’s slept with more than one or two of their wives and girlfriends. There was even some talk that he was the reason the ranch owner got divorced.

  When he asked me to come with him I knew it would be me or somebody else and I’
d heard good things about Montana so I went. There was a time when I was sure Homer was the man who belonged in my painting and I would have sold my soul to be his wife, or even his only girlfriend. I’d come close, in the spring, to losing my mind because of it, but I had finally learned that Homer would always be separate, even from himself, and by the time we got to Montana I was almost immune to him.

  Homer and I live in Fort Collins, Colorado, most of the year, in houses that are exactly one mile apart. He’s out of town as often as not, keeping track of fifteen whitetail deer herds all across the West. I go with him when he lets me, which is lately more and more. The herds Homer studies are isolated by geography, given plenty of food in bad winters, and protected from hunters and wolves. Homer is working on reproduction and genetics, trying to create, in the wild, super-bucks bigger and tougher than elk. The Montana herd has been his most successful, so he spends the long mating season there. Under his care the bucks have shown incredible increases in antler mass, in body weight, and in fertility.

  The other scientists at the university that sponsors Homer respect him, not only for his success with the deer, but for his commitment to observation, for his relentless dedication to his hours in the field. They also think he is eccentric and a bit overzealous.

  At first I thought he just liked to be outdoors, but when we got to the ranch his obsession with the deer made him even more like a stranger. He was gone every day from way before sunrise till long after dark. He would dress all in camouflage, even his gloves and socks, and sit on the hillsides above where the deer fed and watch, making notes a few times an hour, changing position every hour or two. If I went with him I wasn’t allowed to move except when he did, and I was never allowed to talk. I’d try to save things up for later that I thought of during the day, but by the time we got back to our cabin they seemed unimportant and Homer liked to eat his dinner in front of the TV. By the time we got the dishes done it was way past Homer’s bedtime. We were making love less and less, and when we did, it was always from behind.

  The ranch owner’s name was David, and he wasn’t what you’d think a Montana ranch owner would be. He was a poet, and a vegetarian. He listened to Andreas Vollenweider and drank hot beverages with names like Suma and Morning Rain. He wouldn’t let the ranch hands use pesticides or chemicals, he wouldn’t hire them if they smoked cigarettes. He undergrazed the ranch by about fifty percent, so the organic grain was belly-high to a horse almost everywhere.

  David had an idea about recreating on his forty thousand acres the Great Plains that only the Indians and the first settlers had seen. He wasn’t making a lot of money ranching, but he was producing the fattest, healthiest, most organic Black Angus cattle in North America. He was sensitive, thoughtful, and kind. He was the kind of man I always knew I should fall in love with, but never did.

  Homer and David ate exactly one dinner a week together, which I always volunteered to cook. Homer was always polite and full of incidental conversation and much too quick to laugh. David was quiet and sullen and so restrained that he was hard to recognize.

  The irreconcilable differences between Homer and me had been revealing themselves one at a time since late summer. In early November I asked him what he wanted to do on Thanksgiving, and he said he’d like most of all to stay on the ranch and watch the does in heat.

  Homer was only contracted to work on the ranch until the Sunday before Thanksgiving. When he asked me to come with him he told me we would leave the ranch in plenty of time to have the holidays at home.

  I was the only child in a family that never did a lot of celebrating because my parents couldn’t plan ahead. They were sun worshipers, and we spent every Thanksgiving in a plane on the way to Puerto Rico, every Christmas in a car on Highway 95, heading for Florida. What I remember most from those days is Casey Kasem’s Christmas shows, the long-distance dedications, “I’ll be home for Christmas” from Bobby D. in Spokane to Linda S. in Decatur. We never had hotel reservations and the places we wound up in had no phones and plastic mattress covers and triple locks on the doors. Once we spent Christmas night parked under a fluorescent streetlight, sleeping in the car.

  I’ve spent most of the holidays in my adult life making up for those road trips. I spend lots of money on hand-painted ornaments. I always cook a roast ten pounds bigger than anything we could possibly eat.

  Homer thinks my enthusiasm about holidays is childish and self-serving. To prove it to me, last Christmas morning he set the alarm for six-thirty and went back to his house to stain a door. This year I wanted Thanksgiving in my own house. I wanted to cook a turkey we’d be eating for weeks.

  I said, “Homer, you’ve been watching the deer for five weeks now. What else do you think they’re gonna do?”

  “You don’t know anything about it,” he said. “Thanksgiving is the premium time. Thanksgiving,” he shook one finger in the air, “is the height of the rut.”

  David and I drank tea together, and every day took walks up into the canyon behind ranch headquarters. He talked about his ex-wife, Carmen, about the red flowers that covered the canyon walls in June, about imaging away nuclear weapons. He told me about the woman Homer was sleeping with on the ranch the year before, when I was back in Colorado counting days till he got home. She was the woman who took care of the chickens, and David said that when Homer left the ranch she wrote a hundred love songs and made David listen while she sang them all.

  “She sent them on a tape to Homer,” David said, “and when he didn’t call or write, she went a little nuts. I finally told her to leave the ranch. I’m not a doctor, and we’re a long way from anywhere out here.”

  From the top of the canyon we could see Homer’s form blending with the trees on the ridge above the garden, where the deer ate organic potatoes by the hundreds of pounds.

  “I understand if he wasn’t interested anymore,” David said. “But I can’t believe even he could ignore a gesture that huge.”

  We watched Homer crawl along the ridge from tree to tree. I could barely distinguish his movements from what the wind did to the tall grass. None of the deer below him even turned their heads.

  “What is it about him?” David said, and I knew he was looking for an explanation about Carmen, but I’d never even met her and I didn’t want to talk about myself.

  “Homer’s always wearing camouflage,” I said. “Even when he’s not.”

  The wind went suddenly still and we could hear, from headquarters, the sounds of cats fighting, a hen’s frantic scream, and then, again, the cats.

  David put his arm around me. “We’re such good people,” he said. “Why aren’t we happy?”

  One day when I got back from my walk with David, Homer was in the cabin in the middle of the day. He had on normal clothes and I could tell he’d shaved and showered. He took me into the bedroom and climbed on top of me frontwards, the way he did when we first met and I didn’t even know what he did for a living.

  Afterwards he said, “We didn’t need a condom, did we?” I counted the days forward and backward and forward again. Homer always kept track of birth control and groceries and gas mileage and all the other things I couldn’t keep my mind on. Still, it appeared to be exactly ten days before my next period.

  “Yes,” I said. “I think we did.”

  Homer has never done an uncalculated thing in his life, and for a moment I let myself entertain the possibility that his mistake meant that somewhere inside he wanted to have a baby with me, that he really wanted a family and love and security and the things I thought everybody wanted before I met Homer. On the other hand, I knew that one of the ways I had gotten in trouble with Homer, and with other men before him, was by inventing thoughts for them that they’d never had.

  “Well,” he said. “In that case we better get back to Colorado before they change the abortion laws.”

  Sometimes the most significant moments of your life reveal themselves to you even as they are happening, and I knew in that moment that I would never lov
e Homer the same way again. It wasn’t so much that not six months before, when I had asked Homer what we’d do if I got pregnant, he said we’d get married and have a family. It wasn’t even that I was sure I wanted a baby. It wasn’t even that I thought there was going to be a baby to want.

  It all went back to the girl in the log cabin, and how the soft-spoken man would react if she thought she was going to have a baby. It would be winter now, and snowing outside the windows warm with yellow light. He might dance with the sheepdog on the living-room floor, he might sing the theme song from Father Knows Best, he might go out and do a swan dive into the snow.

  I’ve been to a lot of school and read a lot of thick books, but at my very core there’s a made-for-TV-movie mentality I don’t think I’ll ever shake. And although there’s a lot of doubt in my mind about whether or not an ending as simple and happy as I want is possible anymore in the world, it was clear to me that afternoon that it wasn’t possible with Homer.

  Five o’clock the next morning was the first time I saw the real cowboy. He was sitting in the cookhouse eating cereal and I couldn’t make myself sleep next to Homer so I’d been up all night wandering around.

  He was tall and thin and bearded. His hat was white and ratty and you could tell by looking at his stampede strap that it had been made around a campfire after lots of Jack Daniel’s. I’d had my fingers in my hair for twelve hours and my face was breaking out from too much stress and too little sleep and I felt like such a greaseball that I didn’t say hello. I poured myself some orange juice, drank it, rinsed the glass, and put it in the dish drainer. I took one more look at the cowboy, and walked back out the door, and went to find Homer in the field.

  Homer’s truck was parked by a culvert on the South Fork road, which meant he was walking the brush line below the cliffs that used to be the Blackfeet buffalo jumps. It was a boneyard down there, the place where hundreds of buffalo, chased by the Indians, had jumped five hundred feet to their death, and the soil was extremely fertile. The grass was thicker and sweeter there than anywhere on the ranch, and Homer said the deer sucked calcium out of the buffalo bones. I saw Homer crouched at the edge of a meadow I couldn’t get to without being seen, so I went back and fell asleep in the bed of his truck.