Crow Fair

by Thomas McGuane

“Really? I think she’s quite happy.”

  “Ms. Lowler, I’m going to be candid with you: there comes a time.”

  “Does there? A time for what?”

  “Ms. Lowler, have you had the opportunity to familiarize yourself with the principles of the Hemlock Society?”

  “I think it’s quite marvelous for pets, don’t you?”

  Later, when Mother started thinking Kurt was Wowser, he really got onto the quality-of-life stuff. I waited before asking him the question that was burning inside of me. “Have you ever done it?”

  “I’ve never done it but I’ve seen it done.”

  There were times when Mother seemed so rational apart from the fact that what she told us fitted poorly with the Mother we used to know. She said, for example, that Wowser always wore Mr. B collars with his zoot suit.

  Kurt told me that he never knew what would happen when he visited Mother. Lately she’s shown an occasionally peevish side. Today she suggested that he “get a life.” This was about a week after Mother had started confusing Kurt with Wowser, and a few days after Kurt had started addressing Mother as Doozy in the hopes of finding Wowser before he could add his own stain to our family reputation. “You’re in a different world when your own mother doesn’t recognize you, or thinks you’re the stranger who gave her a hickey.”

  This brought up the Hemlock Society all over again. I told Kurt to forget about it. “Why?” said Kurt. “That’s the only way we get our real mother back. The human spirit is imperishable, and Mother would live on through eternity in her original form and not, frankly, as ‘Doozy.’ They really should weigh the spirit just to convince skeptics like you. I see the expression on your face. You could weigh the person just before and just after they die. Then you’d see that the spirit is something real. Scientists have learned how to weigh gravity, haven’t they? It’s time to weigh the spirit.”

  I’d give a million dollars to know why Kurt is in such a lather about our “standing” in town. Does anyone actually have “standing” in a shithole? Well, Kurt thinks so. He thinks we have standing because of Mother’s regal presence over the decades, which, I will admit, was widely admired but which seems to be under attack via these revelations about Wowser and Doozy. I shudder to think what would happen if Kurt found out who Wowser is. Sadly, we know who Doozy is. Doozy is our mother.

  I said to the shining young couple across my desk, “If you take this loan, at this bank’s rates, at this point in your lives, you could find yourselves in a hole you’d never dig out of.” Was this me speaking? This was an out-of-body experience. I didn’t tell them that if I went down this road I’d be in the same mess I was recommending they avoid. Feeling my heart swell at the prospects of this couple was more than a little disquieting. From their point of view—and it wasn’t hard to see it in their eyes—I was just turning them down. They would have liked me better if I’d hung this albatross around their necks and let them slide until we glommed the house. After they were gone, I slumped in my chair—a butterfly turning back into a caterpillar. I hadn’t felt quite like this since I repeated ninth grade with Mrs. Novacek busting my balls up at the blackboard doing long division.

  Kurt has this habit of picking up his napkin between thumb and forefinger as though letting cooties out. It’s his way of showing the restaurant staff that nobody is above suspicion. He was on his third highball when I said, “There were times when Mother could be pretty hard.”

  “Where do you come up with this shit?”

  I felt heat in my face. “Like when she was den mother.”

  “Of course she was hard on you. You were still a Bobcat after two years. What merit badges did you earn?”

  “I don’t remember …”

  “I do. You earned one. Handyman. You earned a handyman merit badge. I never ever knew anyone who even wanted one. I had athlete, fitness, engineer, forester, and outdoorsman in year one. And Webelos. I didn’t find Mother hard, ever. Unless you mean she had standards. Where are you going? You haven’t even ordered!”

  After the lunch I missed, Edwin, our bank president, came to my desk for the first time since spring before last and asked when I would start moving product like I used to. The young couple must have complained.

  Visiting Mother with Kurt was getting to be too hard. The last time we tried, Mother got a mellow, dewy look on her face, and at first Kurt thought it was her pleasure at seeing us. Then he seemed to panic: “She calls me Wowser, I jump out the window.”

  Mother said, “Wowser.”

  Kurt was blinking, his nose making a tiny figure eight, but he didn’t jump out the window. So I started seeing Mother on my own. I didn’t try to make anything happen when I was with her, and we mostly just sat in silence. She would look at me for a long time with a watery unregistering look, and then, once in a while, I’d see her eyes darken and focus on me with a kind of intensity that lasted for a good long time. I think I knew what was going on, but I was darned if I would start yammering at her like Kurt did to get her to put into words what couldn’t be put into words and only produced some crazy non sequitur from her deepest past. Of course if it featured Wowser, Kurt was on the warpath. If she just chattered about this, that, and the other without naming names, then Kurt would announce she was talking about Dad. But mostly he couldn’t handle her obvious mental absence.

  “Mother, I just heard the sprinklers go off. Now that’s summertime to me. Mother! Are you listening to the sprinklers? It’s summertime!”

  “Kurt,” I said. “It’s not registering.”

  “Mom! The sprinklers! Summertime!”

  Kurt had a brainstorm, and it turned out very badly. I say this not knowing how it went down, but I know it wasn’t good. He decided that since Mother was mistaking him for Wowser, he would just go ahead and be Wowser—“Wowser for a day.” He came home shattered. I really don’t know what happened, unless it was Mother’s golden boy turning into some vanished adulterer, a role in some ways similar to the one he’d been playing around town and in his safe houses for years. Finally, and without telling me anything, he calmed down. He said, “I think I have a headache. Do I? Do you think I have a headache?” It was getting to him.

  When we were young, I was always a little stand-offish. That is, I was a social coward. But not Kurt. By the time he was twelve, he’d be sticking out his big paw and telling grown-ups, “Put ’er there.” They liked it, and it kind of made me sick. Now he revealed an uncertainty I hadn’t seen before; but it didn’t last. He was soon on the muscle again. Kurt: “I see literally—literally—not one thing wrong with my taking on the identity of Wowser in pursuit of truth.”

  Mother’s love of excellence was not something I always embraced. It certainly raised Kurt to the pedestal to which he had become accustomed, but it unfairly cast my father in a negative light. Truth be told, I was far more comfortable with Dad than with our exalted mother. What you saw was what you got. He was a sweet man, and a sweet old man later, who was not at war with time. He noticed many things about life, about dogs and cats and birds and weather, which were just so many impediments to Mother. Kurt was right: left to Dad we would have probably not gone very far, nor been nearly so discontented.

  I’m on the hot seat looking into the piercing eyes of my boss: “Earl, how long have you been with the bank?”

  “Twenty-two years.”

  “Like to see twenty-three? Not much coming over your desk except your paycheck. Desks like yours are financial portals. You know that.”

  “My, what big teeth you have.” I was fired that day.

  Where had I been all my life? I had grown up under so many shadows they were spread over me like the leaves of a book. Only Dad and I were equals, just looking at life without being at war with it. There was no earthly reason I should have been a banker beyond serving the shadows. By all that’s reasonable, I should have been at the post office like Dad, taking packages, affixing stamps. Reciting harmless rules, greeting people. I loved greeting people! In my occupatio
n, you had to screw someone every day, even if it was your own family.

  I went to see Mother on my own on a beautiful day with a breeze coming up through the old cottonwoods along the river and cooling the side street where the rest home sat in front of its broad lawn and well-marked parking spaces. The American and Montana flags lifted and fell lazily. It was hard to go indoors. A few patients rested in wheelchairs on the lawn, the morning sun on their faces. I recognized old District Court Judge Russell Collins. He had no idea where he was, but his still-full head of hair danced in the breeze, the only part of Judge Collins moving. The others, two women who seemed to have plenty to talk about, barely glanced at me.

  I sat with Mother in her room. It seemed stuffy, and I got up to let in the air. A glance at the spruces crowding the side lawn made me want to run out into the sun as though these were my last days on earth. I was unable to discern if Mother knew I was in the room. She rested her teeth on her lower lip, and each breath caused her cheeks to inflate. It was very hard to look at, which doesn’t say great things about me.

  I’d had enough of these visits to feel quite relaxed as I studied her and tried to remember her animation of other days. Why had she married Dad? Well, Dad was handsome and for thirty-one years held the Montana state record for the 440-yard dash. He looked like a sprinter until he died. His luck and happiness as a successful boy lasted all his life. Even Mother’s provocations bounced off his good humor when she attempted to elevate his general cultivation with highbrow events at the Alberta Bair Theater in Billings. Dad liked Spike Jones, “the way he murders the classics.” I remember when he played “Cocktails for Two” on the phonograph when Mother was at a school board meeting. I loved the hiccups, sneezes, gunshots, whistles, and cowbells, but Kurt walked out of the house. I thought Dad held his own with Mother. Kurt thought she made him look like a bum.

  Kurt asked me to come over and help him get some things out of his garden, a jungle of organic vegetables that he plundered throughout the season as part of his health paranoia. He said that he intended to share some of this provender, as though to suggest that I would be suitably compensated. He was pouring with sweat when I got there, shirtless, his ample belly spilling over the top of his baggy shorts. He had on some kind of Japanese rocker shoes that had him teetering down the rows and doing something or other, strengthening his calves or his arches, I don’t know. He took me to a cucumber trellis that was sagging with green cylinders of all sizes and told me to take my pick. I had a big brown shopping bag, and I started tossing cukes in there until he insisted on picking them himself, giving me the worst ones, ones with bug holes and brown blemishes.

  “Doozy has completely confused me with Wowser.”

  “I think you’re encouraging that, aren’t you?”

  “I’m learning way too much about Wowser, Earl. All their adventures. Roadhouses, et cetera. God-awful barn dances in the boonies. I imagine Dad is spinning in his grave.”

  Maybe Dad strayed, too. I didn’t think so, and it wouldn’t really fit for him. Dad was as plain as a pine board; but Mother, with her art and opera and shiny pumps—well, I could see it. Ambition is never simple. “Kurt, she has dementia. She could be making this all up.”

  Then he was right in my face. I could feel his breath as he rapped my elbow with a trowel. “How little you know. Dementia means she can’t make it up.”

  Kurt wanted me there to knock down his potato pyramid: he’d start his plants in an old car tire, and as they grew he began stacking tires and adding dirt until the whole assemblage reached eye level. Now was the payoff, and he wanted me there. “Ready?” I said I was, and he pushed over the stack of tires, spilling dirt and hundreds of potatoes at our feet. He put his hands on his hips, panting, and smiled at the results. “Take all you want.” I took a few. He’d be hiking up and down the street giving the damn things away.

  I had a sudden insight. “Kurt,” I said, “you seem to be competing with Wowser.”

  He slugged me. The cucumbers and potatoes fell from my hand. He must have fetched me a good one because I could hardly find my way out to the street.

  I let it go. I can’t believe it, but I did. I just wanted to keep these things at a distance. Kurt continued to press the staff at “Cloaca” about whatever Mother might be saying that others would hear. He was obsessed by the unfamiliar nature of her coarse remarks, which he said reflected the lowlife thrills she had experienced with Wowser. I had dinner with Kurt and his wife at the point that things seemed to be deteriorating. Their two boys were displeased to have me, their uncle, even in the house. These are two weird, pale boys. I don’t think they’ve ever been outdoors. I always ask if they’ve been hiking in the mountains. They hate me. Beverly was quite the little conversationalist, too. She asked why I didn’t have any girlfriends.

  “They just haven’t been coming along.”

  “They may find you drab. I know I do.”

  Beverly had made some desultory attempt at meal preparation. She’d been drinking—nothing new—and there was not much left of her former high Texas sleekness besides her aggressive twang. Kurt always looked a bit sheepish around her and was anxious when, over the sorry little meal, she brought up Mother, a subject Beverly found hilarious. Years ago when Mother was at her best, she had made no secret of her disapproval of Beverly, whom she called a tart. Local wags said that she and Beverly were competing for Kurt, and there may have been something to it, as I could bring around a rough customer with a gold tooth or neck tattoo and Mother would greet her like a queen. Of course I resented it, and of course I was pleased when Beverly, having gotten wind of Mother’s new interest in Junior, said, “Old Doctor Kurt got his tail in a damn crack, ain’t he?” I haven’t really liked Beverly since the day of their marriage, when she called me a disgrace. There’d been a bunch of drugs at the bachelor party, and I had an accident in my pants; the word got out, thanks to Kurt.

  “It’s just all part of the aging process, hon,” Kurt said pandering to Beverly. “The sad aging process.”

  “That right, Doc? Just don’t drag your mother over here and give her a shot.”

  Like I said, she’d been drinking.

  Mother had nearly hit bottom. She was still following things with her eyes, like a passing car or a cat, but not much. No, not much. I continued to see her, but I didn’t know why. No, it’s hard to say why I went. I’d say now that she was damn near a heathen idol, propped here or there, in a window or facing something, a picture, a doorway; it didn’t seem to make much difference. It wasn’t pretty at all. But Kurt kept at it until something went wrong. Evidently he broke some furniture, kicked down a door, shouted, cried. Police were involved on the assumption he was drunk. Fought the cops, got Tased, booked, released, and then a day later fucked up his rotator cuff yanking on a venetian blind. It was a week before I felt I could go near him. I thought it might be best to quietly approach Ms. Lowler.

  “It has been a nightmare,” she said. “And not just for me. The other residents were terrified. We’ve had the doctor here for them. It’s a full moon, and they don’t sleep well anyway. Ever since your brother started pretending to be your mother’s boyfriend, she has become more and more agitated. I personally think it has been quite cruel. Then he wanted to move her to his own house, which seemed I hardly know what.”

  He wanted to put Mother to sleep like an old cocker spaniel. I don’t know why this agitated me so; she was all but asleep anyway—I suppose it was the unexpected memories that rushed back at the thought of her no longer existing—Mother hurtling along in our old Econoline with a carload of kids, bound for a dinosaur exhibit, an opera, a ball game, or off to Crow Fair to watch the Indian dancers and eat fry bread. Crow Fair was right in the middle of when Dad and I liked to fish the Shields, which I would have preferred, while Kurt was happy to drink in all the culture with the possible exception of Crow Fair, which he considered just a bunch of crazy Indians. Maybe not fishing with Dad was why my memory was so sharp.

  O
r why it came to me: Mother was herding a little mob of us like a border collie through the tepees and concessions, thousands of Indians and spectators, smoke drifting from campfires, Crow elders in lawn chairs talking in sign language, young dancers running past us to the competitions in a rush of feathers. Our guide was Mr. White Clay, who helped Mother lead us to the rodeo grounds, the powwow, the fry-bread stands, and the drumming of the Nighthawk Singers. Mr. White Clay looked more like a cowboy than an Indian in his jeans, snap-button shirt, and straw hat. He was tall and dark like many Crows, and it was surprising how Mother deferred to him and how well they seemed to know each other. He had quickly familiarized himself with our group and was vigilant in rounding up anyone who strayed. It was wonderful to see Mother so relaxed, so willing to let Mr. White Clay handle things. We kids had to call him Mr. White Clay. Mother called him Roland.

  My face was burning. I cut my conversation with Ms. Lowler so suddenly she was startled. I went home, burst through my front door, and picked up the phone. I called information for Crow Agency and requested a number for Roland White Clay. He answered. He answered! I told him who I was, who my mother was, who my brother was, how old we were then. Mr. White Clay was silent. I asked if we could come to see him, and he said with odd formality, “As you wish.”

  I had found Wowser.

  I will never know why I told Kurt, but that’s what I did. It took him a while to absorb this and determine for himself if I was imagining it. But he remembered, too. He remembered. He said that when he was “Wowser,” “Doozy” had given him the impression that after the war Wowser no longer belonged in a tepee. Kurt said, “In case you hadn’t noticed, I have forensic skills.” I told him I hadn’t noticed; but he went on rather plausibly. Evidently Wowser’s stationing in Southern California had briefly transformed him from Plains Indian to Zoot Suiter; and more troublingly, Mother had gone from den mother to tart. Maybe they had fun. But Kurt wasn’t happy. He said it looked like he would have to move. My brother move away? After all these years? I couldn’t possibly face that. Kurt was there at the Grass Dance with Mother on that faraway and now sadly beautiful day. He said, “We’re gonna drag that Indian back up here and let him and Mother have a grand reunion. That’s when this Wowser retires.”