Big Lonesome

by Joseph Scapellato

  The other visitors, educated, refined, willful, young, one-eyed or one-eared, they sit in chairs at the back of the salon and wait their turn. They only see themselves: the selves they are and were, the selves they might be, and the selves set like posts between these selves.

  Weary foreign mesmerist says, “My Vital Magnetic Fluid, most-concentrated, is to order your Vital Magnetic Fluid, most-dispersed. But you must look.”

  Weary foreign mesmerist says, “You must look to me.”

  Weary foreign mesmerist says, “Look.”

  Trembling, horseman cowboy looks.

  Horseman cowboy fucks no one, nobody, nothing. He doesn’t kick-smash anything. He doesn’t bellow any black feeling to any sort of sky.

  For he doesn’t know how many days he doesn’t know where he is.

  In this state, he for the first time feels age sink into his body. Age treats his man- and horse-parts just the same, clutching to what it can in an attempt to slow itself. That it’s small surprises him. That this surprise delights him saddens him. When he knows where he is again, he is wanting.

  Wanting what?

  Horseman cowboy fords a river half-dammed with a rotten roof.

  Resentful transcendentalist poet, regionally famous, well-dressed but dirty, swinging on his country-cottage porch swing, he says in a reading-out-loud voice to horseman cowboy, “Trust your impulses. Track them, in trust, to your inner temple. Enter in awe. Worship at the altar of yourself, acknowledging that the altar, the worship, the entrance, the tracking, and the impulse will differ when you meet them next. Find this, all of this, now. Find this again.”

  The porch swing mumbles. Birds squirt strange calls. The light through the trees is yellow-green. A blistered leaf, scabby with insect eggs, flits onto horseman cowboy’s bare chest.

  Horseman cowboy says, “Done all that already.”

  Resentful transcendentalist poet lights a pipe, clouding the face he’s making. Through the cloud he says, “Make art.”

  Horseman cowboy fucks art until art fucks him back, and he kick-smashes art until art kick-smashes him flat, and he bellows black feelings into art until art, heavy and full and whole, bellows empty again.

  The moon gives off a damaged glow behind a cloud the size of the sky.

  Horseman cowboy grows older.

  Horseman cowboy quits for good on fucking, kick-smashing, and bellowing. He lives between a city and a countryside, and then a ranch and a range, and then a long road and a jagged arroyo. He moves more slowly. Feels more slowly. Thinks.

  Wants?

  Horseman cowboy dreams back the places and the folks he could have stuck to. He dreams back the nights he bellowed, kick-smashed, and fucked under. He tries to make a trail from the places and the folks to the nights, but can’t. The tracks are covered.

  Horseman cowboy feels sick.

  So?

  Horseman cowboy is old. His skin wrinkles, his coat dulls. His hands and hooves ache and crack. From the places he lives, he watches dust and fog and star-paths, cattle and cowboys, injured outlaws, families of displaced tribes and settlers, wild starving horses. He watches without rage or sorrow, no longing and no loathing, no hatred, no fear.

  Horseman cowboy is very old. He wears as many blankets as he has. He’s sick.

  So?

  Horseman cowboy can’t see what’s saying “so.”

  Whatever it is, whatever it wants, it’s keeping at it.

  So?

  Horseman cowboy chews his blankets.

  Whatever it is, whatever it wants, it’s going away.

  It goes away.

  Under his blankets, horseman cowboy follows whatever goes away into himself. He finds a border behind a border, and in both, more borders. They are all too far to cross.

  Thataway

  The hard-luck cowboy hauled his garbage bag into the laundromat. He’d walked the whole way from the edge-of-town motel. The sky was bright but the day was brown, the sun buried, a windstorm threshing desert dirt into fields of glowing haze. The walk had taken the hard-luck cowboy an hour and then some on busted sidewalks and shoulders. He’d passed barren strip malls and trash-pierced tumbleweeds. The air teemed with debris. His boots chewed his bare feet. Blown grit pocked his face and caked his body.

  Earlier, when he’d coughed himself awake, sniffed his shirts, pulled the room’s garbage bag inside out to stuff it with his clothes, and stepped into the parking lot, he’d discovered he didn’t know what the hell had happened to his pickup.

  When he wasn’t in motels he was living in his pickup. When he wasn’t in his pickup he was working. When he wasn’t working he was spending weeks high on whatever could be had, crooking himself into something slow and wooden, something proofed against surprise. Not dumb, but damn near it. Despite the onset of this condition his face had a shape plenty of gals found fine. They were drawn to how the good looks had just begun to splinter. The ones with big hearts would think, Care and oil can help this keep.

  The laundromat popped in stale light: a chunky couple texting, a boyish-looking caped girl gnawing on an action figure, a manager pushing a push broom. One long bench per wall. In the corner, a tattooed pregnant gal folded bedsheets, speaking Spanish to someone hidden by a paint-crackled pillar. The layered odors each uncurled: flowers, fruit, ammonia, rot.

  The hard-luck cowboy was a man of many habits—this was his line for gals when they asked him how he made his living—with one of his habits being to shake out his clothes before shoving them into the washing machine. He whip-cracked his jeans. Baby roaches scattered, little brown-black buttons. They zipped off to the darkness beneath a nearby garbage bin.

  In this manner he readied and loaded the clothes he owned, one at a time, each article pregnant with odors, the odors pregnant with images, images the hard-luck cowboy recognized but couldn’t feel one way or the other about—a beer-soaked blanket in the bed of his pickup; a dumpy backroom at Dixon’s; three tidy children on one gal’s couch; a kiss—and when he shut the lid, an old man was standing by his side.

  Standing mighty close.

  Unfazed, the cowboy dug for quarters.

  The mighty close old man said, “Son, that your pickup out there?”

  The cowboy didn’t look.

  “Brown,” said the mighty close old man. “Color of dirt, what we come from.”

  The cowboy rang coins into the slot. He had himself a sideways gander through the shaded window at his brown pickup. Both headlights smashed.

  A windbreaker flapped onto the hood ornament, then off and away.

  “I knowed a brown boy once,” said the mighty close old man.

  The cowboy came up two quarters short. The mighty close old man snapped down a stack of coins and said, “I can’t figure what he was other’n brown. Skin brown. Hair brown. Eyes, even where they was black, was brown brown brown.”

  Borrowed quarters in, the cowboy cranked the machine to cold wash and squared off with the mighty close old man, whose clumped-together face was as unrecognizable as roadkill, profoundly unfamiliar, unlike the face of anyone the cowboy had ever met and forgotten. Only the tongue was alive, wild with pinkness.

  “Brown as what,” said the cowboy, not friendly.

  The mighty close old man looked at the cowboy like the cowboy had asked him where the sky was. Last night this had been the cowboy’s habit—asking anyone who walked into Dixon’s, Where’s the sky?

  Swinging pool cues, Where’s the sky?

  Punting barstools, Where’s the sky?

  Humping strangers, Where’s the sky?

  A bag of drugs, a dying dog, a terrified kid who calls him Dad; the cowboy howling, Sky, where the fuck you been? Sky, what the fuck you think you are anyhow?

  “Brown brown brown,” answered the mighty close old man.

  Filthy wind heaved against the laundromat’s window-walls and the hard-luck cowboy was reminded of the grime worked into his skin and mouth, into his sleeveless t-shirt and jeans, between his forehead and bandana. He
flicked flaky dirt-boogers out of an armpit. When his clothes were clean and dry, he promised himself, he’d change right into them, right here. Then he’d linger in the laundromat for as long as he damn well liked, patting himself, feeling how little time one got with clean clothes, how the act of donning them u-turned them back to dirty dead ends.

  Most things are like that, he thought.

  “I seen that brown boy there,” said the mighty close old man, angling his chin at the bench behind them. On its slats crawled the caped girl who looked like a boy. She’d removed the action figure from her mouth, a caped monkey, and was jamming its head into bench-ruts.

  The cowboy spat a dark glob into the garbage bin. It plocked. The way the old man was carrying on—a cut-rate compound of pride, impotence, and desperation—reminded the cowboy of how he himself would get when he’d get riled, when all he wanted was to father that rile in any son of a bitch in range. He didn’t like it, recognizing himself like that.

  With disrespect, the cowboy said, “I bet.”

  The mighty close old man shuffled so near the cowboy that he seemed about to kiss him. “You tell me,” said the mighty close old man. “You tell me what you think brown boy saw when brown boy looked me in the eye.”

  The most regular habit the hard-luck cowboy had was not sharing much about himself with others. He didn’t share much about himself with himself either. When he thought about this, which wasn’t often, and only ever right before he’d stride into that part of the afternoon or evening he knew he’d only half-remember, he always acknowledged that even to himself he was a somebody else, an image he’d made, spitting or not, that he didn’t feel one way or the other about. He turned to walk past the mighty close old man.

  But the old fellow backstepped and thrust his hand so that the cowboy walked plumb into his palm. Then he raised his other hand and slapped it to himself. His face twitched; different parts began to tremble at different speeds. He whooped, “A showdown!—brown boy’s eyeing me and I’m eyeing back, we’re mean, meaner than a pair of razor-bladed roosters set a-loose in the same coop, staring on and on by that there bench and next thing I know, whang! two planks pressed my body, one in front and one behind, they clapped in so heavy my breath bucked out and my arms went dead and jangly, and I can see you ain’t had the pleasure but believe me when you do you’re in a coffin and it’s caving in. What brown boy saw when brown boy stared me down ain’t nobody seen before, and when I seen him seeing something where for longer than you’ve lived I been seeing nothing, well, that made me more than I was, meaning, too much. I opened my mouth—to say who knows what, who’s got words for a heart attack ’cause that’s what it was, sure as shooting, and something more to boot—and that’s when brown boy jumped into my mouth.”

  The mighty close old man pointed down his gullet with two crooked fingers. His tongue squelched. “Thataway,” he said, wiping his hand on his overalls, “brown boy in and climbing cautious like coming down a ladder with two buckets of paint and a baby, which I done once. And you know where he got, and you know what he did?”

  “Nope.”

  The mighty close old man poked the cowboy’s chest. “Where he got was my stalling heart. What he did was hug it, tight as a mother hugs her dying child.”

  “Which I seen once,” whispered the mighty close old man.

  The cowboy shrugged one shoulder, then the other.

  “I survived!”

  “You don’t look it,” said the cowboy.

  The mighty close old man gasped in such a way that he offered the cowboy a clear view of his enthusiastic tongue, the most loathsome sight the cowboy could at that moment remember seeing.

  “You get it,” said the mighty close old man, astounded.

  This reaction, so sincere, was not the reaction the cowboy had counted on. It began to rile him. He was well-acquainted with this rile: it had come into him last night after beer and beef jerky and whiskey and blow and muscle relaxants, just as it had come into him many nights before, during bar games or wager-making or the sweet-talking of soused gals. When the rile punched and kicked at the door, the cowboy often let it in, though he took his time in doing so because it might turn away on its own. If he wasn’t careful it’d come back a few beers later as the weepies.

  The weepies were worse than anything.

  Falling down and yowling and fist-waving, blubbering on roofs and under cars and over toilets, into mornings that stumbled up from far away. Wanting to get somewhere. No direction a direction that would work.

  Right now the rile was on the porch and peeking in.

  Because of this the cowboy turned to walk off without comment, but the old man hopped on the cowboy’s boots. Perched, he said, “My question is, what-all will you do with how you get it?”

  The cowboy began to say that he’d put it on a cattle prod and twist it up the old man’s shit-chute, but before he could finish, the old man gripped the cowboy’s throat with both hands and started squeezing. The squeezing didn’t hurt. The old man’s face went white and quivery—he was choking the cowboy as hard as he could. Standing still, the cowboy flexed his neck. His throat thickened some, like when the weepies came, and the thickening was enough to make him briefly feel something for the old man, a warm and soggy lowness. They shared a susceptibility.

  The old man, sweating, spluttered foamy saliva. His hands worked that neck like it was the stuck lid on something good. The cowboy spluttered too, through his nose, blasting sprays of gritty snot.

  All the idling others in the laundromat stopped to watch the two men spattering each other, the cowboy looking wooden, the old man looking like he wasn’t choking anybody but himself, until the old man grunted and let go his grip and went down like his legs had been illusions. The cowboy, coughing some, stepped over the wheezing old man and walked to the bench where he sat next to the caped girl, who stared at his wooden face in bewildered admiration. She tried to hide how excited she was that he had sat next to her, but couldn’t. Her parents returned to texting. They smelled like they’d taken baths in bongwater.

  The tattooed pregnant gal and the manager rushed to help the old man up, speaking Spanish to each other and taking turns dealing disgusted glances to the cowboy. They looked exactly like someone the cowboy sort of knew, or at least one of them did, almost, but he couldn’t remember who that someone was or what that someone had meant. Maybe he’d been here before, shaking out his clothes, ignoring lonely men, but maybe not. He leaned his head against the window. The glass wobbled, raked by sheets of grit. Being riled was a feeling the cowboy would rather not be feeling. Being riled was a feeling so big, so rowdy, it made you want to grab it hard and crush it—which you couldn’t, because it was a feeling. A feeling was a nothing. If you were slow and wooden, feeling wouldn’t surprise you, and if feeling didn’t surprise you, you could stick to a principle. His principle had mostly been to blame the sky.

  What was the sky if not a sack of nothing too?

  He peeled off his bandana and scrubbed his face with it. It scratched him pleasurably. Dirt counted as a something, sure, but it came as close to a nothing as a something could. A mostly nothing. Fuck the sky. He opened his eyes. The old man was right there sitting next to him, breathing in wet rasps. The double-loader dinged. The cowboy got up and the old man got up too. His shapeless face flew three colors now: white, yellow, and purple. He followed the cowboy as he transferred his clothes to the dryer. Like before, the cowboy shook each article out. This time no memories arose. He was too riled.

  The cowboy returned to the bench. He sat between the parents, who were very stoned, and the caped girl, who was squirming with hesitation. She wanted to touch him. He clenched his teeth, grinding granules of dirt. The old man bent before the caped girl and sweetly requested that she move down, which she was reluctant to do, but did. Beaming, the old man shook her hand, called her a well-raised boy, and gave her a stack of quarters. She frowned at this reward. He took her place. He leaned toward the cowboy until their shoul
ders touched. He whispered, “Stayed inside me for nine years and a day, all them years they was the best years of my life and I but half-reckoned it and when you but half-reckon it you don’t reckon there’s another half, which feels honkatonk until the day that other half turns you into chickenfeed because the day brown boy left was like most days, excepting that my son died of drugs my daughter died of being overseas my horse died of getting bit by baby rattlers and my ranch burnt down with my wife on the roof.”

  The caped girl, listening, dropped her action figure. Her face twisted with tears.

  The cowboy, not listening, had been regarding his boots, slashed-up and discolored from forgotten escapes. That they had a better memory of the cowboy’s last six months than the cowboy somehow seemed the old man’s fault.

  With a sad whistle-sigh, the old man patted the cowboy’s bare shoulder. He turned the pat into a squeeze and met the angry stare it evoked with the greatest of sympathy and warmth, as if the cowboy had been the one who’d lost everything in one day.

  The dryer buzzed. They both stood up but the hard-luck cowboy punched the old man back to the bench, a right hook to the sternum. The old man gulped for air and raised his hand. The cowboy pushed him so that he knocked noggins with the caped girl and they both fell to the floor. One of them began to wail. The cowboy strutted to the dryer but his garbage bag was gone, someone had thrown it away, so he went to the bin and pulled the plastic bag and turned it inside out—pop cans, candy wrappers, bleach, a bloody shirt, brown boy.

  The cowboy walked back to the dryer and opened it and started stuffing his hot clothes into the bag.

  Brown boy leaped onto the lid, slamming it shut and nearly catching the cowboy by the wrist. He was made of sticks and sludge and his mouth was an oily pulsing hole.

  The old man, sneaking up from behind, slapped his hands over the cowboy’s mouth and screamed, “WHO YOU COME TO KEEP ALIVE TODAY, BROWN BOY?”

  Brown boy oozed, leaking from himself in viscous strands. He was the size of a turkey buzzard and he stank like a vinegaroon. His hands plopped together in prayer.