The manager stepped in front of the tattooed pregnant gal and raised her push broom defensively, and the caped girl’s parents restrained her as she struggled to join the cowboy, and the old man tried to pull the cowboy away by the head, but the cowboy, stronger, wanting his clothes, they were his, they were clean, grasped the lid’s handle with his free hand and tried to force it open.
“WHO YOU COME TO RUN OUT ON NOW, BROWN BOY?”
Brown boy’s eyes were mouths that drooled.
The old man yanked at the cowboy’s head as if it were a jammed clutch.
Brown boy stomped the cowboy’s hand. The cowboy gasped—his mouth opened, he tasted the old man’s linty fingers—his eyes stung—he let the old man wrench him back, his hand sucking out of brown boy’s foot with a burp—brown boy staggered forward, melting, shrinking like some foul snowman—together they bumbled to the glass door where they pushed against the weight of the wind and tripped outside into ripping walls of dust. The old man led the way to the brown pickup, threw open the passenger door for the cowboy, then hobbled around to the driver’s side. The doors shut, dampening the howls.
The cab was dark, much darker than the sky. Through the windshield and the storm and the shaded window of the laundromat, they couldn’t see anyone. The old man banged the doors locked.
“You don’t get it,” he said, let down.
The muck on the cowboy’s hand crusted. He pulled off his sleeveless t-shirt with his clean hand, wiped, wadded the shirt, and ditched it through the back window and into the bed. His hand remained a hideous brown. The stain smelled of something he knew—a carpet?—a wet sandbox?—a brother?—and was not unpleasant, though he sensed it would be for others. He took big whiffs.
“I wouldn’t do that,” said the old man, locking the back window.
Boiled vegetables, linoleum, a sister?
He hunched, sniffing. He was dizzy with near-knowing.
A future, a present, a past?
The old man jerked the cowboy’s hand away from his face and tried to get the cowboy to sit on it. The cowboy drew it back into a fist and told the old man to get the shit-hell out of his goddamned pickup.
“What you’re sitting in is mine,” said the old man.
The cowboy reexamined the interior. This pickup, neat and stale, in no way resembled his pickup. His pickup wasn’t even brown. The rile, which had been so big, important, and lawful, left his body. He returned to sniffing his hand. He needed to smell himself. He needed the smell of himself to spin him into crying. Not into the weepies: straight crying, like a kid.
“Mine,” said the old man. He gave the wheel a hesitant touch.
Brown boy appeared at the end of the hood. He was half the size he’d been. The wind wobbled him.
The old man made a show of searching every pocket but couldn’t come up with the key. Only a pack of rolling papers tucked behind a visor, and crayons and coloring books stuffed into the glovebox.
Brown boy tried the driver’s-side door and then the passenger’s. The handles rattled patiently.
The smells in the stain ran out. The cowboy slapped at his hand and smelled again. Nothing. He let it fall into his lap.
“I thought you got it,” said the old man. “Then was sure you didn’t. Now I just don’t know.” His face bulged darkly, uniting its patchiness. He sat up more straight. He was having and ignoring a heart attack.
The cowboy felt a skin-rippling chill, and then a head-heat, and then a broad and bodiless itch. Where the rile had been in him now loomed a nothing more nothing than a feeling. Most nothings showed up where a something used to be, and the gone something was what you used to measure the nothing. This nothing had come from where there had never been anything. There was no telling how much of him it would require, and for how long, and to what end. It was much worse than the weepies.
From the bed, brown boy tried the back window.
“I don’t get it,” said the cowboy, afraid.
The old man reached out to touch the cowboy’s shoulder but he couldn’t work it right and his arm thumped into the cowboy’s lap. He flopped around for the cowboy’s hand. Taking it, he said, “Let’s the both of us stay here until you do.”
The windstorm’s dense center closed in. The pickup rocked and creaked.
In the cowboy the nothing expanded inwardly.
Brown boy climbed over the end of the hood. He walked it to the windshield, leaning into the winds that dismantled him, that flayed him of layers. His eyes were whispering.
The old man tugged at the cowboy’s hand. He raised his voice, as if talking into a bad ear: “What I need is to relieve you from the notion that you can save yourself.”
The cowboy sensed he’d have to do a something.
“Stay with me, now,” said the old man.
The cowboy opened the door and slammed it on the old man’s scream. The wind raked his bare chest and back, roaring, a whipping and a whirling and a thickening of air, the way-up sun shut out. Brown boy, the size of a crabapple, faced the cowboy. His puny arms opened for a hug. The cowboy grabbed him—he crushed him in his fist, feeling a sharp pop—he opened and cradled his hand. Powdery grains swirled in his palms, no sparkle, no shine. He snorted them.
The old man opened the door and fell out. He closed it from the ground. He stopped moving.
A car horn sounded, either light and close or loud and far.
The cowboy waited for an effect. The wind encrusted him in dirt.
Carrying their bags and baskets, the stoned parents hustled out of the laundromat, jerking along the caped girl, who protested, who visored her eyes with a hand and searched the haze. She was forced into the brown pickup. They didn’t see the old man, who they almost stepped on, and they didn’t see the cowboy, who they almost flattened as they drove away.
The first stage was a rush of terrible shame. The cowboy’s limbs felt full of wet garbage. Next it would get hard to move. He had to move.
He walked across the parking lot and into the highway, toward the center of the heart of the storm. He waved his hands in front of his face, and when he couldn’t see them through the mad screen of wind and earth, he stopped. I’m gone, he thought. But he wasn’t. And he knew it.
Cowboy Good Stuff’s Four True Loves
“His First”
A whore. She played her clothes like cards. Even with an empty hand she’d be beaming, singing brassy songs to keep the game going. Her room was small and dark and hot, a miracle she made homey.
When their first time ended she strutted fingers up his arm. She crossed to his chest, kicked a rib, clapped her palm flat. She leaned in close. She whispered that a man could make an unknowing whore of any woman, even ladies, just by what was in his heart when he was with her.
In his heart: her brassy singing.
He listened for a spell. Then said, “Don’t you mean what wasn’t?” She scooted back and up and let her voice break big, singing out in that little room.
He shattered into shivers—goosepimples popping off down every limb—heart stumbling.
Every song she sang she’d call “Good Stuff.” The only thing she’d ever say about herself was she used to sing on riverboats in Illinois.
“The ones that come as big as they come.”
When he left Oklahoma with the herd he was feeling that kind of big, like he’d see her everywhere. Why not? It was the way he had of making her go unmissing.
When he saw himself in streams and shiny blades, he’d get to humming.
“The Shorthorn”
Broke down to her belly by a rocky patch. She’d eaten something foul.
Old Jim Bucket with the split chin saw her first, shouted out, and all the punchers pushed the herd the hell away from there, dust churning up in banks, cowdogs barking, the sun hanging high.
Because the others had the moving covered, Good Stuff rode over to the sickened shorthorn to see what could be done. He passed Old Jim Bucket going thataway, looking gray and pouch-faced, puppet-like,
riding hard to fetch the rifle from Flaco. Most said Bucket had been in beef cattle for sixty-five years. When you worked with him, you saw his gift soon enough: the old man had long talks with the animals in his charge, even those that weren’t, his words rolling out in English but with different meanings and deliveries—strange tones and speeds, fits and starts. Every sentence a foreigner in familiar clothes, always learning, always feeling out how best to say what needed to be said.
If you watched this your skin prickled. Even so, Bucket was big with high-rolling ranch bosses. He nearly always brought every animal back.
Good Stuff stuck close to Bucket in his early weeks on the job, sneaking in a listen when he could. He saw the old timer strike it up with steers, bulls, heifers, freemartins, muleys, calves, horses, donkeys, dogs, lizards, and beetles, each creature addressed in a special way. Before they left camp, Bucket had been crouching by his tent, pleading to a tarantula. Asking whispered questions while the hairy critter crawled into the shadows of his pant leg.
“Why no you ain’t,” Bucket said. “You ain’t, why no, you, you ain’t?”
Good Stuff, pretending to tie his bedroll, whispered Bucket’s words to feel how they sat in his mouth.
Bucket, who had now gone to fetch the rifle.
Good Stuff approached the broke-down shorthorn. He dismounted his nervous horse and crunched over slow. The shorthorn’s left side was touching rock-shade, her body heaving, her breathing ugly. He reached to caress her. She snuffled her big head away, then back, eyes swimming, legs crushed beneath her bulk.
He sat next to her on a pile of rocks. Dissipated herd-dirt clouded by, five hundred clomping hooves not so noisy now. She bumped him gently with her head.
He opened his mouth to say something and singing came out.
Not words he knew. All made-up.
The words coming from some hard core of feeling he hadn’t felt but once before, centered, tight as a knot of clutched-together hands.
Something big at the heart of all those hands.
Unknotting out, and opening—everything he didn’t think he had was there—even the melody—until he’d used the words right up. He closed his mouth.
He came back to where he was.
His tongue caked dry. Gleaming black flies. The shorthorn dead.
He turned: the cowboys bent-up on their horses not four paces away, in a half-circle, their moustaches wet. Old Jim Bucket looking like he’d been shot in the throat. The sun squeezing low, swabbing all their faces bright.
“His Second”
Sheriff’s daughter, a schoolteacher. Smart and stout and something else with her hands on her hips.
He gave up cowboying to stay with her near Amarillo, his idea being to learn carpentry. When they went for walks along the town’s parched creek they got to feeling there were parts of each other they didn’t know they had, but had always had, and here they were learning to use those parts to grab on and let go and hold tight. He kicked sticks out of her way and steered them clear of snakes. She blushed, told him what she’d been teaching. He made up songs, his singing coming out in real words, words they knew, and she stopped to sit on stones and write the verses down. When they held hands, roads rose up, bending from behind some way-off mountain. They were the kind of roads you cleared yourself. The kind that came with ranches and children and dogs, well-digging, feed-storing, song-playing on the porch you built on the land you owned, a song for every day, every day a road, every road crooking back to its beginning.
Sometimes they held hands so tight he’d quit feeling his fingers.
Sometimes they talked some silly-talk.
Then one Sunday the sheriff decided she’d marry a banker. The banker owned a railroad. The railroad led to Chicago. The sheriff liked Good Stuff so he told him himself, with whiskey, at the only saloon in town. “It’d be best for you if you left now,” he said, and stood up quick and shuffled to the door, as if showing him the way.
Good Stuff pushed off his stool, the one he’d built, and turned to catch up, not knowing what he’d do, but the barkeep snatched his arm and said, “Hold on, you got free ones coming.”
“I don’t want no free ones.”
“Can’t say no to free ones,” said the barkeep, and poured them out, one two three four. Looking copper in the light.
Good Stuff wouldn’t drink. He sat on his stool and watched the barkeep watch him back.
Most everyone advised against their meeting one last time but they got together anyhow, by the creek. She looked like she’d been dying of dysentery for a week. She said they’d get accustomed to it. She said he could come to Chicago and track her down anytime he damn well wanted.
“By your new last name.”
She pulled damp pages out from under her shirt, her hands shaking. “Your songs.”
The first words he’d ever written down. She’d taught him how: the flip-sides all jammed up with practice-scribbles.
He pushed them back. “Our songs,” he said. It was the most awful thing he could think to say, and also the best.
“His Third”
The Spanish don’s daughter, descended from conquistadors, the most gorgeous woman him and everyone he knew had ever seen.
When California was being named, her granddaddies jumped up from Mexico with servants and gunmen, started planting and shooting, marrying, frying steaks, building floors and dancing on them. Way back they owned one-quarter of the coast.
They didn’t own so much now but were rich and didn’t like gringos, this being one of the reasons why Good Stuff’s face got knocked in when they were found out in her room—he’d had time to cover her and hop the bed before the Spanish don’s men floored him with a flurry of pistol-whipping. She’d watched—terrified, proud, and invincible, the same way she’d watched him undress her.
They hauled Good Stuff down the stairs, tossed him in the cellar, and took turns stepping on his face.
His boots and guitar had been left beneath her bed—a fancy thing, four-posted and perfumed. Her still on it.
The men bolted the cellar door and hurried upstairs. Company had come, other rich folks. A fiesta.
Good Stuff lay on the floor like something spilled from a sack. He couldn’t hold all the hurting at the same time, so it dropped in pound by pound. Through the hurting he heard boots and heels and wood. Music too: horns and guitars, an accordion, many men singing with one voice. Muffled but magnificent.
Hearing this made him hot with a need to touch things. When he could stand up, he did. Blood ran down his neck, shoulders, and chest, shined out in trails from his trampled face. This was the biggest room he’d ever been in and there was plenty to touch: broken farm tools saved out for spare parts, crates of wine, jarred fruits and vegetables, empty bottles lined up in boxes. He grasped every object, rubbed every surface. He couldn’t blink. He’d met her in the road. She was beautiful and he was beautiful, and they traded greetings in English and Spanish, and he played and sang. They both knew that what they were having had nothing to do with who they were, only where they were and how they were, right then, and this truth was as magnificent as the muffled music coming through the ceiling. She’d taken his hand and led him the whole way to the ranch.
Among the farm tools he found an old guitar. Two strings, the base cracked and rat-gnawed. He squeezed its neck. He rapped its frets.
None of this touching really felt like touching, so he started playing, which began to feel like something. His mouth opened and returned to singing without words, just the milky gargle of a bloodied throat:
Ooooh-haeeee, haeee, hauuuu.
Ooooh-haeee, haaoooh.
Haeee, hauuu.
Hauuuu.
The dancing upstairs stopped. The music too.
Ooooh-haeee, haaoooh.
The cellar door unbolted and groaned open. He walked through bleeding and playing, thickly singing his wordless song.
Haeee, hauuu.
Hauuuu.
Blood slickened the guitar’s s
trings. Blood pattered into the sound hole.
He entered a bright hall twice as big as the cellar and crammed with colorful people. Still playing, he passed them in bare feet, dripping across the dancing floor. He couldn’t tell which well-dressed gentleman was the Spanish don. All the faces were soft and well-bred, but pulled tight, shocked without wanting to show it. They looked like they lived sure lives except for maybe once a month.
The musicians smiled stunned smiles. One’s face was switchbacked in half-open scars. Another stamped with an eyepatch. All of them stayed in place, held down.
Good Stuff walked through the adobe arch into the early evening. The Spanish don’s many dogs did not pursue.
The daughter watched him leave the ranch at her window, from where she’d helped him climb in. The cradling range of mountains fading. The daughter wanting badly to be feeling worse than she did.
“The Nowhere Dogs”
When he’d get to whichever somewhere town, he’d sit outside the saloon in the dirt and wait for the nowhere dogs to find him. Sick and old, infected, starved, abused, they’d shuffle up in dozens and take turns resting their muzzles on his boots. They begged to be touched. He’d oblige—he’d knead their necks and ears, their boils and sores and burrs, and the dogs, unfeeling even in their rawest wounds, turned their bodies to invite still more.
Then Good Stuff would open his mouth and sing the willing ones into easy dying.
Anyone who watched, men, women, children, lawmen, undertakers, outlaws, they’d weep, even if they didn’t think they had it in them, the tears tugged into dry air. Then they’d pick up their dogs.
Good Stuff didn’t ask but they’d pay in cake and bread, hats and boots, knives, polish, jugs. Never meat. Never lodging.
And on and on, and over, wordlessly crisscrossing the West, feeling carried.
Big Lonesome Page 3