Blue Rodeo

by Jo-Ann Mapson

  This August night Owen lost four straight hands of gin, playing distractedly. He turned his cards over on the telephone cable spool that functioned as Joe’s game table. Forty-six points plus twenty-five for gin—a new record for Joe, who usually lost the majority of the games.

  “Your mind is somewhere else, brother,” Joe observed. “You draw three tens, then one by one, throw them back like fingerling trout. The ten not a big enough card for you?”

  “You cast some Indian spell on me just so you could weasel me out of my last five bucks. You’re buying supper next week.”

  Joe tipped his mended chair back and grinned. The arms were worn down from the turquoise paint to a colorless wood. “Maybe that good-looking tall lady took your attention home with her.”

  “For all your ribbing, I sure don’t see any women around here.”

  “Women hold the power, Owen. A man has to be in excellent condition to handle one. See, I’m still in training. I’m in no hurry. Maybe this neighbor of yours, maybe she’ll be my next woman.”

  Owen gave him the eye. “Maybe so.”

  “Maybe yours.”

  The thought didn’t sit well, and he had to respond. “Look, just because she lives down the pasture doesn’t mean we’re going to end up tugging sheets.”

  Joe’s face grew serious. “Up from the earth comes the first sprouting and you grow together, off the same stalk, like tall sweet corn. Sha, it happened to a cousin of mine. He let this woman make him supper, and all of a sudden he has twelve daughters and a great big wife.”

  Owen shook his head. “Red trampled my foot today. I can’t hardly concentrate when I’m craving aspirin.”

  “Woman hooves are sharper.”

  “Won’t argue with you there. Got a scar or two to prove it.”

  “Let me fix some herbs to take your pain away. Some rub-on arnica.”

  “No thanks. The last time I let you talk me into that meadow tea, I got a week-long case of the runs.”

  “Got herbs for that, too.”

  “Well, I don’t want them. What I need is a good night’s sleep and a couple of those Advil tablets, and my five bucks back.”

  “A little late for that, brother. But I’ll see what I can do in the way of nice tea for you. Let me check the pharmacy.”

  The pharmacy consisted of several shoeboxes filled with paper envelopes of dried plants. Joe fancied himself a kind of herbalist and had learned a great deal about medicinal plants from his mother and grandmother. As hokey as they sounded, the teas often worked. Owen had seen him doctor one young ewe who’d hemorrhaged her first time lambing with bellota de sabina, a remedy made from the juniper mistletoe, with obvious success and little fanfare. He’d made Owen a lemongrass poultice now and then, for a bruise or sprain, and the treatment had hurried the healing process along. On cold winter days Joe fixed yerba buena teas that sent heat into the far corners of his body. He watched his friend hold the envelopes up to the kerosene lamplight and identify them by their tiny peculiarities. Hopeful was asleep on the hearth, his three legs stretched out in front of him, soaking up the heat of the small fire. Atop the jutting mantel leaned a single homemade arrow, flint pointed skyward. Joe wasn’t a bow-and-arrow hunter, in fact, Owen had never seen him use any kind of weapon, save for a small curved knife for castrating lambs. He’d served in Vietnam, come home medaled and wounded, and after the parades and newspaper articles, had his nervous breakdown very quietly, only going so far as to see the enemy in out-of-the-way places, and most frequently in the bottom of bottles. At AA meetings Joe would say his name and only one other thing: I’m thankful to be here with brothers and sisters who’ve seen it, too, as if they all were privy to the same monster they drank to escape. They couldn’t be. Owen knew two things: Joe had tried to drown himself, and Owen had too. They might have worn different colored skins, but they spoke the same language: recovering alcoholic. It was more than enough to base a friendship on, and a sober friendship was an interesting thing. The doctors at the Indian Health Institute had Joe on medication to keep him even, and everything went along just fine when he remembered to take it. But sometimes he forgot the pills, or his checks didn’t arrive in time and the pills ran out, or he worked up enough courage in his mind to believe he didn’t need them anymore. During those times there was no telling where you might find Joe Yazzi—wandering the Bisti Badlands in his overcoat, walking the centerline of the highway toward Gallup, or sitting in his old painted blue chair, here in the cabin, sunk so deep inside himself that he wouldn’t hear a word you spoke. Owen watched out for him. He told Joe he should get a dog, that a dog kept you current. When it didn’t get fed, it sure enough let you know what day it was. But Joe had seen unspeakable things happen to dogs in Viet Nam, and his own white dog had come to what he referred to only as a “bad end.” Maybe so. Owen didn’t press.

  Hopeful stretched, seeming to soak up the last of the fire, which was in danger of dying out if Joe, busy taking a twig of this dried grass and that powdery berry, didn’t feed it a stick.

  “Here,” Joe said, pressing the completed packet of herbs into Owen’s hand. “Steep this in hot water for fifteen minutes, and drink it before you go to bed.”

  Owen took a sniff of the herbs. “Smells like licorice.”

  “That’s star anise. Now the star anise makes a wonderful cure. Just the one to take for a nervous midnight bellyache. Be sure you thank Grandmother Earth for her gifts, or you might insult her. You don’t want that. She might give your ewes hoof rot.”

  Owen tucked the packet into his shirt pocket. “This isn’t going to make me have ‘visions,’ is it?”

  Joe adjusted the envelopes and replaced the lids on his shoeboxes. He set them on one of his few rickety shelves alongside a yellow coyote skull. Owen could see the hole where the bullet had entered, right above the left eye socket. “The herbs for encouraging visions ain’t for white boys, Owen. Any visions you come up with you probably can blame on Margaret Yearlegs.” He laughed and ducked comically, as if his words might cause Owen to throw him a retaliatory punch.

  “Right.” Owen adjusted his hat on his head and found his keys. “Come along, Hope. Time for us to get gone.”

  The heeler jumped up from his resting place on Owen’s hearth and followed his master to the truck. Outside the moon was full, a yellow thumbprint in the inky sky, shining down, filling animals’ heads with notions that would cause them to misbehave in most peculiar ways and dousing the humans in a kind of daze as well. Joe Yazzi stood out front of his ramshackle house with the old truck tires holding down the roof to keep it from blowing away. He pointed to the moon, chuckling as if it were some colossal omen for their future. Owen waved and drove the truck down the dirt road to the highway and through town in silence.

  Long ago, before he owned the truck, someone had ripped the radio out. He didn’t need music. The truck was helpful when he needed to go somewhere or feed animals. He had covered long distances on Red in silence, too, including a trek from Durango through the woods and camping by the Navajo dam. He’d heard the story of the Coloradans moving the entire town of Arbolejes north of the New Mexico border because it lay in the floodpath. Moving a house was one thing, but they had gone so far as to move an entire graveyard so that their ancestors might rest high and dry, with only the manageable rain and normal snowfall touching their graves. Moving the dead—it sent a chill down his back, causing him to pull his collar up. Foolish old moon. When it was full, a man had trouble sleeping. It made his friends talk in mysterious stories. At least Hope was behaving Owen checked the rearview mirror just to touch base, and caught sight of the pointed ears.

  They made the turn down the gravel road past the yellow-tipped rabbit brush to the Starr farmhouse. Her bedroom light was on, light coming through the window. Though she wasn’t conveniently silhouetted in the window, he could see every inch of her in his mind. He unloaded the dog, who propped his front end up on the rear tire and peed. It was a constant marvel, the dog’s ability t
o adapt to life without his fourth leg and still maintain dignity. Owen checked Red, who, backlit by moonlight, stood out in the pasture like a paper-doll horse. In a month or two the horse would gladly come into the barn at night, but for now he preferred the wide-open spaces. Inside the bunkhouse he switched on the radio, tuned it to an all-night request station out of Albuquerque.

  “Are you crying, loving, or leaving?” the disc jockey asked a female caller.

  “Crying,” she answered, her voice low and dull. “I want to hear ‘Desperado,’ the Ronstadt version, and you can dedicate it to Keith, or even better, the entire male race.”

  “One of the finest songs ever written,” the disc jockey said, and cut directly to the music.

  Why don’t you come to your senses…. Owen listened carefully to all the words Linda threw her heart so deeply into singing. You been out riding fences for so long…. Well, Linda, truth of things was, sometimes there wasn’t much else for a man to ride.

  He made his tea from Joe’s herbs, but before he drank it, he went outside and hung up two pair of damp jeans and flannel shirts in the moonlight. His briefs he laid over a chair inside the bunkhouse. Some things a man needed to keep private.

  The herbs delivered him dreams. He stroked his way to wakefulness feeling that he’d spent his sleep like carnival dimes, a flash of silver thrown recklessly into the air, winning fragile glass adventure in exchange. He was a boy again, learning to cut cattle alongside his brothers, smelling the scared animals’ excrement, the meaty aroma of trailside slaughter for the unlucky cow who’d shattered a leg, the bawling of her orphan calf nearby, desperate to mother up to something familiar. Then he was in a bed covered in roses—it was summer and there were enough roses around him for a funeral. He smelled Sheila’s hand cream, pink goo she always overdid, trying to keep her callused work hands city-smooth. Her pinched face loomed over him with accusations he knew he deserved. You son of a bitch you’re drunk again, and the landlord’s asking me where the rent money is…. It dissolved into alcohol and shattering glass. His young friend with the rattlesnake hat, that same punch moving as inevitably as a train toward his face, but this time rising up, his broken bottle taking Owen’s eye out easy as an ice cream scoop. Maybe it had happened that way, and Owen was the one who died that afternoon, and this living he’d done since was some kind of lengthy trek through purgatory. He sat in his bed, drenched in the sweat of fear, teeth chattering, his bedsheets damp, as tired as if he hadn’t slept at all. There was a knock at the door. It was morning. He was alone. Sometime in the night Hopeful must have gone out the window. He was an agile dog, what you might call stealthy.

  The knocking persisted.

  He got up and hitched his jeans over his lower half. He had his fly halfway buttoned when the door opened.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought no one was home. I brought your thermos back,” Margaret Yearwood said. “I took the liberty of filling it with coffee. Don’t worry, it’s not some fancy blend, it’s plain old Maxwell House. Good God, did I wake you up?”

  He tore a flannel shirt from the closet and pulled it over his bare shoulders. “Don’t worry about it.”

  She stood in the doorway, sunlight coming over her shoulder, fingering its way through her hair. “Sorry. I thought you were an early riser.”

  He ran his hand over his thinning hair, trying to smooth it down, and looked around desperately for his hat. “I am. What time is it?”

  “Little after nine.”

  “Nine?” He inhaled sharply. “Well, I guess I’ve got some hungry horses waiting on me.”

  “Horses?”

  “I feed the Dofflemyers’ animals from late August through spring. Pasture across from the river on the west side. They’re summer people, teachers down in the Duke City. Nine o’clock. I hate like heck to get animals off schedule.”

  He could see her looking at his underwear, spread out over the chairback and sides, then politely pretending to be admiring his solitary painting, a thrift-store-find, second-rate oil of a cowboy napping against a cloud, a cloud horse flying by, the Bar-4-Y brand on its ample flank.

  “Interesting painting. I could give you a hand catching up.”

  “With what?”

  “Feeding the horses. What did you think I meant?”

  He buttoned his shirt. “I don’t know. Sleeping late has me all goofed up.”

  She pointed toward his shirt. “You’re one button off, Mr. Garrett. That won’t get you through the day. Better start over.”

  He looked down at his shirt, the buttons and holes all kitty-wampus. The woman stood before him, watching his fingers work. He felt his shallow breath catch in his throat as he redid the buttons. Hat, hat—where was that brain bucket when you needed it most? Now was when he could use a drink. Higher Power still in bed, or off attending to someone with a bigger problem. Drink something else. “Would you like some of your own coffee, Mrs. Yearwood?”

  “No Mrs. and no more ma’am’s, please. I keep looking up, expecting my mother in her church clothes and white gloves. Margaret’s fine. Coffee sounds good, but I’ll bet it could wait until after we get those horses their breakfast.”

  He brightened. Patience was a wonderful thing to discover in another human being and seemed to be a rare quality in a woman. “Can you drive a column shift?”

  “Is that the one like an H on the steering wheel?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Well, it’s not my strongest point, but lately I’m learning to adapt.”

  He found his socks and boots and put them on. “And how’s that going?”

  “Let’s just say it’s going.”

  Hat—as mysterious as Joe, it suddenly appeared over there on the ladderback chair, upside down, the way he’d learned to set it so the brim didn’t break. The other way was supposed to bring bad luck. Gratefully he put it on. “Okay then.”

  They took his pickup, loaded up with hay. At the Dofflemyers’ pasture, she drove while Owen knelt in the bed of the truck, tossing flakes out to six nervous mares who began claiming their hay piles with snapping teeth and short kicks. Hopeful went out after them, his three legs moving him swiftly if bumpily over the fence gate. Idiot dog. Owen whistled him back. Inside the truck he could hear Margaret laughing, and it was Margaret the dog went to, not Owen. A first, because up until now Hope had seemed to be a one-person animal. Owen got in the truck cab and let Margaret drive the rest of the way home, the heeler between them like a canine chaperon.

  “Thanks,” he said when they paused at the road to let a Jeep pass. “If you’re looking for a job, you’d make a good hand.”

  “Not at present, but I’ll keep it in mind. And you’re welcome.”

  Red came trotting up as they returned, wanting his own breakfast. At the barn door Margaret killed the engine and opened the driver’s door. Red squealed from the fence.

  Owen said, “I’ve kept him fed eight years, but the horse still can’t quite believe regular meals.”

  “I remember when my son was like that. Then he turned thirteen.”

  “That’s a hard age, all right.”

  “Yes, it is. Fifteen’s even more—” she hesitated a moment “—challenging.”

  Owen studied her face. From the smile at Red’s behavior it journeyed a thousand miles back to California, where it met up with whatever trouble had driven her here. “Well, this big baby,” Owen said, “he’s easy enough to please. A slice of apple, a palmful of brown sugar, he’ll hop this fence and find a way into your kitchen.”

  She had to squint and shade her blue eyes in the bright sunlight. “I’ll remember that if I get lonely.”

  “Remember you have a neighbor, too.”

  The smile came slowly back.

  Overhead, clouds moved, casting shadows on the pasture. Far in the distance the sheep traveled in a small pack, their rounded backs moving together like animated, dusty hummocks. Owen’s stomach felt like an empty suitcase, hollow, but remembering being packed up full for previous tr
ips. He thought maybe he should ask her to breakfast, to thank her for helping with the horses. The only women he ever ate with were Verbena and Minnie Youngcloud, and breakfast with them was coffee and hot, fresh bread, interspersed with grandchildren coming and going, hens being shooed outdoors, great fables of Verbena’s distant love life. “You probably already had your breakfast, didn’t you?”

  She shook her head. “I ate so much last night I didn’t get hungry yet. Up here I can eat when I feel like it. No one else to cook for.”

  “I know a great place for eggs.”

  “I’m not keeping you from your work?”

  “You woke me up for it, and I’m grateful. Just sit tight, I’ll bring the coffee out here in the sunshine.”

  He squirreled the underwear away in his clothes box and cracked six eggs into a bowl, adding a little milk. No one to cook for—a boy fifteen—divorce—that little gift that frequently accompanies the forties. While the bottom half of the omelet fried, he chopped up a tomato and two sweet chiles, grated the last of his cheese into a bowl, then folded it inside the eggs. He salted and peppered the top, dumped salsa on that, eased it onto his one good clay plate and brought out two forks. Margaret sat on the end of the truck bed, Hopeful alongside her, studying her, allowing her to scratch his neck.

  “Your blue dog here. How many generations has he fathered?”

  He stood at the end of the truck bed, handing Margaret the plate. “Despite his lack of standard equipment in the leg department, he’s in demand as a stud. People around here use the Queensland for working cattle and sheep. I let him throw a few litters every couple years. Your dog’s probably some fancy breed I never heard of, probably twice as valuable as Hope here.”

  She shook her head no. “A bona fide mutt. My son bought her for four dollars outside a health food store near where we used to live. In his words, ‘Some junkie was trying to sell her so he could afford another hit.”