Faithful Travelers

by James Dodson

  Perhaps it was good for him to talk. He went on a while, babbling about side effects of antidepressants and the social damage he’d done to his family and practice. His partners were being very understanding, he said, but that made him worry. He was pretty sure Maureen was thinking of leaving him. Even his golf game had gone to hell. Thank God for his daughters, though. Megan was still at camp but Julie, the oldest, had been up to see him twice. The hospital told him he was free to go anytime but he really wasn’t. He had this god-awful rash on his back and neck and he couldn’t sleep. His mind was churning like some demented answering machine he couldn’t shut off.

  “Look,” I said to him. “You don’t need to worry about any of that. Nobody’s leaving anybody and everything will be just the same when you get this sorted out.”

  “No it won’t,” he cut me off sharply. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Perhaps I didn’t. Every man’s madness looks different. “You’re probably right,” I said. “The point is, take it easy. Get some rest.”

  “I don’t want to rest,” he said with the first sign of life in his voice—cold exasperation. “Christ, this is not where I’m supposed to be. Six weeks ago I was happy as a clam. I can’t believe it, man.” He didn’t really want my opinion so I didn’t give it. We fell silent while I waited for him to speak again.

  “Where are you?”

  “Pay phone by a trout stream. Someplace in Wyoming. East of envy, I think.” I certainly wasn’t quite west of worry yet.

  “No joking?”

  “No joking. Maggie, Amos, and I are fishing and camping our way out to Yellowstone.”

  “I thought you gave up trout fishing.”

  “Did. Maggie lured me back.”

  “I’d like to meet her sometime.”

  Bobby had never met Maggie; he and Maureen often threatened to come visit Maine but they never had.

  “You okay?” I said quietly, wiping my neck.

  “No. This is hellish.”

  “I know. Stay cool. I’ll call again.”

  I hung up as Maggie was coming out of the cafe.

  “The German man said to say thank you,” she said, opening a fresh grape Blow Pop for the afternoon ride.

  “Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun,” I said. “The Japanese don’t care to, the Chinese wouldn’t dare to. But let’s don’t be beastly to the Germans.”

  “What’s that?”

  “About all the Noël Coward I can recall at the moment.”

  “Was that Mom?”

  “Nope. Just an old friend who took a nasty fall.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Will be, if he takes his medicine.”

  Eighty miles later, we stopped in Greybull, where there was a large plastic horse standing on the main drag in front of Probst’s Western Store: “Cowboy Clothier, Western Shirts, Stetson Hats.”

  We walked in to buy Jack a pair of real cowboy boots and while Maggie was nosing around the vast store, which smelled pleasantly of new leather and well-worn wooden floors, I fell into lively fish talk with Tyson Probst, the firm’s heir apparent, a large, friendly, fair-haired young man who told me he’d attended the University of Montana principally for the excellent trout fishing. He said if we were headed into Cody, we should camp at Buffalo Bill State Park just west of town on the Shoshone River Reservoir. “Keep this under your hat,” he said with a sly smile, “but at the back corner of the campground, on the North Fork, back where the river splits around a little rock island—you’ll see lots of upturned trees from the spring floods—is the best trout fishing in the state right now. No joke. We’re talking major hogs here—fifteen- to eighteen-inch rainbows and cutthroats. I’ve been drivin’ up there every night after work and fishin’ till dark. Man oh man, it’s great. But don’t tell anybody, all right?”

  I promised him I’d keep it under my hat, even though I didn’t have a hat and was tempted to buy one because Saul Bellow once advised men to wear hats so the world could never know what they’re really thinking. Fishermen love to tell secrets and I was glad to have Tyson Probst’s. We bought and mailed a pair of handsome cowboy boots to Jack that were made of nicely tooled cowhide leather, flamboyantly two-toned in beige and saddle brown, real Sunday-go-to-meetin’ boots, and I admitted to Maggie that I wouldn’t have minded a pair of them myself, recalling how I’d spent the first two years of life wearing little more than jeans and cowboy boots, during the two years we lived next to a horse pasture outside Dallas. But that was another story and then she asked for a pair of boots of her own so we bought her some, too—black, pointy-toed jobs with elegant curlicued designs. Real sweetheart-of-the-rodeo numbers, I thought, and then Tyson’s mother Nan wrapped them up for Maggie and said, as if she’d read my thoughts, “You could wear them to the rodeo in Cody tonight, sweetheart.”

  “There’s a rodeo in Cody?” Maggie’s antennae shot straight up.

  “Every night.” Nan Probst handed me the receipt, leaned over, and whispered, “Trust Tyson to know where to fish. That boy’s been trout-crazy since he was two.”

  We drove into Cody an hour or so later, passing the famous landmark Irma Hotel, which Buffalo Bill named for his daughter. It was a couple hours before sundown and a big banner strung across Main Street informed us it was the 150th anniversary of Buffalo Bill’s birth. A party seemed to be under way. The street was full of shoppers and traffic, throbbing with family attack vehicles—Eddie Bauer–edition Ford Explorers bearing mountain bikes, purring Chevy Suburbans with Dallas Cowboy window stickers. Cody looked like a swell place to have a week’s pay in your Levi’s.

  We pulled in to the Buffalo Bill and Plains Indian Museum, parked beneath the shade of a large cottonwood tree, and cranked open the windows so Amos could snooze in peace; then we wandered into the air-conditioned museum, paid our admission, and walked around gawking at Buffalo Bill’s actual Pony Express saddle, his actual buffalo-hide coat, actual knife, actual pearl-handled Colt revolvers, actual horse carriage, actual jewelry, and actual other stuff you can’t imagine one man actually needing out there on the Great Plains.

  I confess a complicated attraction to William F. Cody, a former army scout and Indian fighter turned flamboyant showman. His Wild West Shows toured America and much of western Europe for nearly three decades. At his death in 1917, Cody was arguably the most famous man in the world. Three thousand cars followed his coffin to its final resting place in a cemetery in the mountains above Denver. My father was two years old that year. With his death, the American Wild West was officially dead and ingenious new ways of exterminating ourselves as a race were being field-tested in the trenches of the First World War, but my father’s earliest memories were of listening to his father talk about Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, which he saw sometime around 1910 at the Raleigh Fairgrounds. Walter, my grandfather, was Aunt Emma’s youngest son, the one who, in dim photographs, resembles her the most. A skilled carpenter and general handyman by trade who worked on crews raising the first electrical poles across the South and helped wire North Carolina’s first “skyscrapper,” the Jefferson Standard Building in Greensboro, Walter had retired and moved to central Florida by the time my brother and I knew him in the middle sixties.

  He seemed to us then, smelling faintly of King Edward cigars and paint thinner, a preternaturally calm old gent with paint-flecked pants who lived to fish for bass in a black-water bayou. But he also had an eerily dignified bearing that belied his blue-collar work life, a contradiction that would chew at me for years, until I realized what it was he reminded me of—an aging Indian chief. And then one day my father told me about Aunt Emma, Walter’s mother, the Cherokee foundling, and that explained so much about him—his great calm dignity and passion for nature, his seeming unconcern for the judgments and ambitions of the white man’s world. My father said that even though his family was dirt-poor during the Depression, Walter treated every man who drifted by looking for a meal or a shed to sleep in with the same digni
ty—black, white, Indian. It didn’t matter. He gave them a bed and something to eat and work if there was some to do. My father speculated that he’d gone to see Bill Cody’s Wild West Show at the Raleigh Fairgrounds hoping to see Sitting Bull, the great holy man and Sioux chieftain who wiped out Custer but ended his days touring with Pashuka’s Wild West Show until, fed up with the white man’s ambitions, he returned to the plains to die, seeing his death at the hands of his own people in one of his celebrated visions. When I finally saw a photograph of the great chief, I was pleasantly surprised by the resemblance to my grandfather.

  I told Maggie about this as we drifted from the Bill Cody part of the museum into the section devoted to the life of the plains Indians. This part of the museum was noticeably emptier and we walked slowly past life-sized displays of daily Indian life, looking at buffalo tepees, mothers with babes doing domestic chores, women weaving cloth, hunters crouching behind fake tumbleweeds. “They look so lifelike and real,” commented an elderly woman to her husband, who was fussing with the earplug on his cassette narration device.

  I told Maggie about her great-grandfather’s passion for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and, pausing by an incredible black-and-white photograph of the show’s re-creation of an Indian raid taken in Paris in the 1890s, she mused, “So he saw all this? Wow. Cool. Did you, like, like your grandfather?” It seemed an odd question—and I resisted the urge to ask her to drop the extra “like”—but I knew what she meant.

  “Yes. Quite a lot. He took me fishing when I was about your age. He never said much but I still felt very close to him. I sometimes feel his spirit around me, though maybe that’s just the Indian wanna-be in me.”

  “I feel Granddaddy’s spirit,” she said without the slightest doubt, meaning, of course, Opti the Mystic. Then she asked: “Do you, like, miss your father?”

  “Every day. Same as, like, Black Elk.” I smiled at her. She didn’t have a clue that I was mocking her Valley Girl routine.

  “Who was Black Elk?”

  I explained to her about Black Elk—about his extraordinary vision at age nine; about the six grandfathers and how he left his people to try and find a way to save them but was unable to stem the juggernaut; about how he, too, had toured with Pashuka and then grown heartsick of travel and come home to die, having completed the hoop of his being. I told her, too, a Kiowa story about how the American bison, seeing the end of his days, decided to leave the earth. All religious peoples, I said, share the belief that something is made sacred by sacrifice.

  A mountain opened and the last buffalo vanished from the plains, thereby making it sacred. In the myth, the last bison returned to a place of plentiful prairie grass and beautiful streams, where no buffalo hunters followed, and he found eternal peace—no less a vision, it sometimes seemed to me, than a Southern Baptist’s view of Heaven. The year my father was born in the soft upland hills of Piedmont, North Carolina, there were less than 150 buffalo surviving on the North American continent. The animal was essentially extinct. Now, thanks to the revitalizing efforts of places like Custer State Park and Yellowstone, the bison herds numbered in the high thousands and were no longer an endangered species. It was the plains Indian who never came back, who became, in a sense, sacred by passing from the earth.

  —

  We pitched the small tent by a bend in the Shoshone River, below towering cliffs and across from the rock island Tyson Probst had perfectly described, cooked and ate a quick macaroni supper, then drove back in to Cody to attend the Cody Night Stampede Rodeo.

  The main grandstand was full of spectators and we sat up high, above the stock pens, between a Honolulu fireman and his wife and a large family from Turin, Italy. The fireman was a beefy guy wearing a T-shirt that said, Beam me up, Scotty. There’s no intelligent life down here! He kept firing off flash pictures with a disposable camera over the heads in front of us and declaring, “I hope like hell these things come out.” The Italians were beautifully dressed, a mother, father, and five incredibly handsome and well-behaved children, ranging from about age three to sixteen. They sat silently watching the steer-roping and barrel antics of the Cody Rodeo clowns, betraying little or no feelings about the performance. I wondered what they must be thinking and I tried to strike up a conversation with the mother, who turned out to speak only fragments of English. She seemed delighted that I was interested in their take on the rodeo and tried with visible frustration to understand my explanation of the origins of the spectacle—essentially a cowboy’s way of breaking the monotony of life among the herds, a gaudy homegrown entertainment that began in Arizona in 1888, about the time the last buffalo herds began to vanish and the cow became the dominant creature of the West.

  When the calf-roping segment began, she suddenly looked mortified and asked, “Do they, um, keel it?” I shook my head and said that the calf would be fine and probably only wish it were dead. Then the booming PA announcer’s voice invited all children down to the arena floor to participate in the evening highlight, the celebrated “Calf Chase.” None of the Italian children budged and, to my surprise, neither did Maggie. I suggested that she go, so she could tell Jack about it, but she shook her head resolutely, seemingly more offended by the idea than shy about participating. A short while later, a small calf with a flag attached to its tail loped frantically around the arena while a couple hundred children wildly stampeded after it, slapping, gouging, and kicking the terrified animal. Finally, the calf was cornered and a kind of gleeful pig pile of a hundred or so children developed. A boy emerged from the pile, ecstatically waving the blue flag. Rodeo hands descended and the calf wobbled off in a daze. The crowd cheered lustily. A cannon was fired, setting off several car alarms in the parking lot.

  I sat there thinking what an entertaining show the Wild West had become thanks to the town’s namesake, Bill Cody—but also what a living contradiction. Cody was awarded the Medal of Honor for fighting Indians in 1872. In 1913, the army withdrew the award, citing regulations that permitted the nation’s highest military honor to be bestowed only on enlisted men and officers; Cody had been a mere scout. In 1916, after intense deliberations and the intervention of several members of Congress, the army decided to return the medal to Cody, noting that his service to America was “above and beyond the call of duty.”

  Cody’s life was, in fact, a study in such ambiguity. Among other things, he claimed he’d been a Pony Express rider in 1859, but the Pony Express did not come into existence until a year later, and historians have learned he “borrowed” the name Buffalo Bill from a man named William Mathewson. The great fascination and peril of Cody’s life, historian, poet, and artist N. Scott Momaday has written of him, was the riddle of who he was. The thing that opposed him, and perhaps betrayed him, was above all else the mirage of his own identity. As Momaday and others have pointed out, Buffalo Bill Cody was an undisputed marksman of the first rank, a horseman nonpareil, a legendary scout, and a buffalo hunter without peer—having slaughtered 4,280 bison in less than eighteen months, more buffalo than exist in Yellowstone Park and the Grand Tetons combined today.

  It was only when his life drifted into the realm of fantasy and he retooled himself in the splendor of fringed buckskins astride a great white horse, hat raised to the crowd as he cantered to the center of the arena to open the “spectacle of the American Wild West”—speeding Pony Express riders, a “real-life” Indian attack on the Deadwood stage, famous gunslingers in action, Annie Oakley and Wild Bill Hickok in person, a “faithful reenactment” of Custer’s last stand, followed by a grand finale buffalo hunt featuring live buffalo, perhaps a chance to get Chief Sitting Bull’s autograph for a dollar afterward—on the polo fields of New York or exhibition fields of London or Paris, that Buffalo Bill became something much larger than life itself. What we have in this explosion of color and fanfare is an epic transformation of the American West into a traveling circus and of an American hero into an imitation of himself. We have seen this transformation take place numberless times on
the stage, on television and movie screens, and on pages of comic books and dime novels and literary masterpieces. One function of the American imagination is to reduce the American landscape to size, to fit that great expanse to the confinement of the immigrant mind. It is a way to persist in our cultural being. We photograph ourselves on the rim of Monument Valley or against the wall of the Tetons, and we become our own frame of reference. As long as we can transform the landscape to accommodate our fragile presence, we can be saved. As long as we can see ourselves on the picture plane, we cannot be lost.

  Watching the Cody Rodeo finale, and thinking about the enigma of Buffalo Bill, a womanizing drunk who transformed himself from a frontier hero into a living parody of his own fame, it struck me that what was perhaps ailing my friend Silent Sam in his grass-cloth room in Savannah, what seemed to be troubling so many modern American men and probably me as well at times, was a sense of no longer being able to see ourselves in the picture frame of the landscape—a marriage we’d believed in, a job we thought could never vanish, a center we imagined would always hold. The hard truth was, the West had been tamed and the fascination and peril of our lives was trying to determine who we were—or should become—to avoid being lost.

  Perhaps, on the other hand, I was simply reading too much into a night out at the rodeo. As we left the rodeo grounds, Maggie held my hand and pointed to a cowboy sitting astride a cutting pony in one of the cow holding pens. He was slumped in the saddle like a Frederic Remington original, hat tilted forward, backlit by the still-pinkish corona of the sunset, and I thought, that instant, that he looked almost perfect. Then I noticed he was speaking into a small cellular flip phone.