Strange Cowboy

by Sam Michel

  “Thank God I’m not Grace,” my mother said. “Thank God you’re not Owen.”

  My mother said, “Your papa isn’t bad, I’m not saying that. He just doesn’t know the right way from the wrong way, when he comes to be excited.”

  “Metal pigeons,” said my mother.

  She said, “The doctor had to open me to get you. I think your papa was a witness.”

  “Come here sweetheart,” said my mother. “Come a little closer to your mama.”

  So I went a little closer. If I want to, I can see the greenish and the whitish stains my mother never quite got rid of on her sweatshirt. I can feel my face pressed into her and I can feel this cleanser smell and sour smell and I can feel my mother’s voice come down to me against my ear the same as if I listened to her through a pipe or culvert. I feel her telling me to keep on coming closer, I feel her voice divide and grow throughout me, telling me she loves me.

  “You could see how it might ruin her a little bit,” I told my wife, “when grandpa Al decided he would let the lambs in. He let in the calves, and when the lambs and calves have chased the ladies up onto the bandstand, he lets in the milkcow. It was just a stunt of his. He was his daughter’s father. He knew his categories. My mother always said you never have to look much past the family tree to see who’s tearing all your roots up.”

  I tell my wife my mother sat.

  I said, “I was up there in the hayloft still, hiding out with Owen Dangberg and a kid named Dewey. I remember I was looking straight down on her head where she was sitting on the bottom rung of the loft ladder. And then she put her head into her hands and I was looking at her neck. The skin of it. I remember because it looked so white and rashy. I didn’t want Owen or Dewey to see it. She looked wrong, I thought, to sit there on a ladder in a dress and show her neck like that.”

  My wife, when I reach my mother’s neck, and feel myself at some conclusion, is not remotely moved. She says she cannot picture it. She wonders what do lambs and milkcows have to do with us. Our milk comes from cartons, she reminds me, and doesn’t Hans provide our meat? This is the twenty-first century, my wife informs me. In her opinion, we don’t need to be reminded of the technical embarrassments a mother stuck in nineteen-ought would use to suffer for a party.

  “It doesn’t sound like any fun,” my wife protests. “I thought you said that it was fun.”

  “It was something I was looking forward to,” I say. “I said parts of it were fun. Nothing is all fun. Go ahead and name me one good thing that’s pure.”

  I have suggested that my wife observe herself, asked her if her pregnancy and labor with the boy was not in some way an adulterated bliss. A bag of waters, I believe the saying was, she was a waterbag, remember? Did she not recall the retention of her menses, the growths of bones inside her, her bloat and her thrombosis, the kicks and shoves, the hiccups and the heartbeat? I myself recall she wept, just as our physician had foretold it. Her ankles swelled. Her gums bled. She described for me the bloody show; acquainted me with the mucous plug. Sure, we told each other this was what we wanted. We dined out, looked the other way, blamed the broken crystal on a raging hormone. My wife, we said, had got the “dropsies.” She said, “Whoops,” a lot or, “Whoopsey, someone’s got the dropseys!” We knew some items were irreparable. Some took glue. True, my wife directed me to look onto the bright side, where she foresaw a family trip to an exotic beach in no time. We would sun ourselves, boil a lobster, teach the boy to float. No regrets, she would say, all’s not lost, we are at a new beginning. I concurred, in part, and asked her was there nothing I might do for her. She began to smell of Pine Sol. Her knees chapped. Her ligaments, I reminded her, were killing her. Even so, the days were rare when she was not pursuing dust and cobwebs, committing suicide by rubber glove and plastic bucket. I told her, I said, “You are killing yourself.” She said, “I know it,” and suggested I might help her. She pressed brooms on me, and clothespins, and a book describing fifty-seven ways in which a father might be useful. She was repeatedly astounded by how many products dear to her are causing birth defects, in the state of California. So much we saw was dear to us. Dearness colored every shirt and shoe sized zero. So much to us became so cute. My wife held up the sailor’s blouse, the coveralls, and blazer, asking me to picture in these flattened fabrics the cherubic figure of a milk-plumped son. She moved a sleeve about, to stimulate my vision, assisting me to see our sailor’s first salute, this kick our future farmer was to give me in the region of my shinbone.

  I told her I could see it, saw it all, just today, in her face, its distortional facility, even as she stood beside my chair and looked down from above me. Items: Why we absolutely must possess a wicker bassinette; why the boy requires seven sleepers; why the room cannot be painted white, but must be painted blue; why I, and only I, should be the one to paint it. I am made to see the need for sacrifice. My wife, I see her purge. I watch her “cut the fat out,” pare her fingernails and dress for comfort. She models for me, asks me whether she is just as ugly as she feels, and as pretty, and as sotted. She milks herself, in the bathtub, or in bed, wants to know if I have given any thought to formulas, or if I ever worry over the efficacy of breast pumps. We make love, at her request, athletically, and partially, owing to her bulk, and my reluctance. We experiment with pillows, using them as props, where props are necessary, or as cushions, where necessity appears to call for cushions, or else we substitute a pillow for my arm, or for my wife’s arm, should our making love compel my wife to bite, or scratch, or gnash her teeth, destructively, the uppers on the lowers. We get her “all set up.” I pat her on the bottom. She quivers, ripples fatly from the lumbar to the shoulderblade, the shank down to the kneecap. I prod, searching for the crease in her of least resistance. She assists me, reaches back for me and guides me to the place where she would have me. I am had, easily, hardly sensing it, thanks to the enlargement of her orifice, and to the abundance of her discharge. This is highly normal. Authorites assure us that the woman and the man, from this time forth, may very well experience a diminution, in their acts of love, of feeling. To be sure, my wife may do her Kegels, or employ medicinal devices, there is the theory of a pre-delivery massage, as applied, professionally, to the perineum; but better off to not expect a miracle in corporalis, and to focus rather on the “concrete possibilities” residing in a mirror, or in the video cassette; better to derive our pleasures from the spousal yip, the whimper, groan, and scream. “Some stretches,” says the doctor, “take the snap from the elastic.” If he were not a man of faith, the doctor tells us, he would say the vaginal canal was not designed to pass an object sized, and shaped, and builded of such obdurate materials as those we find conspiring in the human skull. My wife and I, we understand this, my wife more clearly than myself. Screaming, she explains, has pleasured her since childhood; it would not surprise her if a scream or two from me might “tickle her to pieces.” For love, she thinks I ought to try at least to whimper. It wouldn’t hurt me, she believes. She says that I, too, must know from time to time an urge to scream; I, too, when feeling lags, and the room is dark, and we are grappling toward the consummation of our fleshly passions, then I, too, must be mindful of the strain love suffers through the willed, enduring silence. My wife, near here, will giggle. When I return from work she tells me she is apt to “break up” over nothing. She says that she is so afraid. A foot, she says, is in her rib. Her cyst grows. So many birds, she says, what happens to them? What makes a lip a lip? What makes a palate cleft? Did I know a turtle lays her eggs in clutches numbering the hundreds? My wife sits on the bed and holds her belly. She holds her knees. She will not let me turn the light on. She naps, sleeps in, says her dreams repeat: abruption, breach, and strangulation; abruption, breach, and strangulation. Our sheets are drenched. Our night is short. She knows that she is being silly. She knows she shouldn’t, but she wonders what the odds are they will cut her. She says she wants to know just who on earth is Braxton Hicks, says she’d take the general o
ver epidural, the analgesic over a narcotic, asks me often why the several, wretched good things in her life are always passing by so quickly. Oh, Lincoln, she says, Lincoln, I’m so lonely. I was seventeen once, she explains. I had time to watch the light go out of days. I liked to cheer. I thought that I would always have a closest friend. In lines, Lincoln, when we are standing in a line, I never thought that you would be a man to stand so far apart from me that anybody else could come between us. Go away, she says, come back, and, on a night she wakes to find me gone off from our bed, my wife will call out through the darkened halls that she’s got two hearts now, four lungs, Lincoln, I’ve got forty toes and fingers! Come touch, she says, come feel! Hey, Lincoln, says my wife, Lincoln, dear, where are you? And then another night, another day, the thing is truly passed, born into another morning. She breaks. She floods. She deflates before me, slackens out into a squalling, prunish wind. I coach her. I interpret data. I clock her, offer ice chips, I suggest she breathe. My duty is to ask her please to focus on that quiet place inside her, a brook, could be, falling high up through a mountain meadow, or underneath that cottonwood beside the stilled and deepening river; I describe for her the pebbled seaside she once went to as a girl, where she must have walked once, and had watched once, and had heard and felt the storied waters turn the pebbles clicking each one over on the other—waters-in, waters-out—smoothening, and polishing, talkingly, to her, through the bottoms of her feet, perhaps, and through her nose, and pores, inspiring confidence, and continuity, whispering to her, this is as it shall be and has forever been, and she is this, and this is she—the waters-in, the waters-out, the smoothened pebble clicking in the rocking tidal wash—at rest in motion, in motion cleansed, safe in rest, undangered and unpained, so long as she remains inside there. Push, I tell her. She must push, scream and count; I tell her, coachingly, that she must breathe. So she pushes, screams and breathes, and breathing she becomes the boy to me, the birth again, again she smiles as she describes the boy’s smile, as I describe my father’s. And then I ask her: Was it ecstasy she felt while chewing through her bottom lip? Did her veins burst from her face for happiness? If it is happiness recorded in the photographs she ordered me to take of her, then why should she be saddened by the image she perceives there?

  “Oh, I look so dumpy,” says my wife. “My hair’s stuck to my head. You didn’t tell me there was blood on my gown. My God, I look like a half-wit. Put those things away,” she says, “that’s not the way that I remember it.”

  She forgets, as an example, that she refused to picture for herself a seaside, or she says that she was drugged. How else explain herself? She knows very well what seasides are. If she said she wasn’t sure if seasides ought to have a lighthouse, or a sandy beach, or rocky, or if there ought to be a boardwalk and a Ferris wheel or rather seaoats hissing on the leesides of deserted dunes, then I should be ashamed for not assisting her in choosing which she ought to picture. And if I truly had been urging on her the deserted seaside, and she truly had rejected it, well, then, I should be ashamed of failing to direct her to the peopled seaside she desired. She liked people. Men. Men and women. She had her hopes, she meant to say; she was “basically an optimist.” She is afraid, she says, of being left alone; she would sooner share a bedroom at the Anchorage with Mother, than be made to contemplate that quiet place inside her. That quiet place, she will remind me, is a pit. She said she was surprised to find it. She went once, as a girl, she closed her eyes and made as if she fell inside herself, falling upward, somehow, somehow thinking she might find, when she had finished falling, something to resemble something bright and clean as heaven. She did not. She lay in bed and fell and kept on falling through this pit until she could not say which way was up, and which way down, or where the light she thought was at the core of her had disappeared to. She was scared, scared, “just a girl,” she said; she thought it might be dangerous to turn her gazes inward.

  “Myself,” she says, “I need to see the good stuff.”

  So who doesn’t? I suggested, in my case, that she regard the good stuff as a person’s favorite serving on a plate of food, perhaps, and to think of me as being one who likes to save his favorite servings for the last. Furze, for instance, I would like to save out from the telling of this party, and waking up with Daddy. Whim, the horse. Barbecue, I tell my wife, the sauce, especially, I would like to save how many friends I played with in the hayloft.

  “It was war up there,” I told my wife. “All smokey, that funny sort of jumpy light. Everything we played was war. Except I never had to die. It was my birthday. I got shot, all right, and the rule was that it had to hurt enough so getting shot would stop me shooting. I couldn’t just go waltzing through the enemy and willy-nilly kill him. We were never anybody in particular. It was always war in general. I couldn’t stand to lose. I liked not dying, but I remember when we lost the way it felt to be the living token of our losing. Oh, I would get hot. Even with the snow outside, all of us had got so hot up there and itchy. We went through lots of armies. I remember we would only stop for cake.”

  But the boy, I tell her, when I told him, could not see the fun there.

  “But did you tell him that the dead ones could come back to life?” she said. “Are you sure he understood that you were just pretending?”

  It was fine, she said, “a start” to have him see the possibilities in war, but did I need to linger always over poor old Owen Dangberg, who said he wasn’t dead yet, who we could only kill, officially, by stuffing up his mouth with hay and tying him in pigging string until the next war? This is a gentler time, my wife explained, “War just isn’t war,” she said; I would need to cull the “rough stuff,” seek the “brightest corners of my memory” and smilingly relay the kinder glories I engaged with on my birthday, if I wanted any “say-so” in the happy maturation of this latest Lincoln.

  Dahl, I thought. Stolid Dahl. Lincoln Dahl is turning five. One week, we once had, a month before his birthday. It seemed to me the boy was failing, only yesterday, to blow out even three of his four candles. Where does all the time go? To the birds, we hear, out the window, up in smoke, it flew. Or it went the way the breath my son expended on his cake went, riding on a germ, directed at a flicker on a nib of wick, a stub of wax, an oblong mound of lemon fluff and chocolate frosting we consumed, appreciated, and digested, squatted, in due time, on the toilet to deposit, the germ of our son’s breath invested in a turd we turned to smile upon, if we were healthy, to curse, if we were ill, to linger over and consider where its future lay, as I myself will sometimes do, thinking: Well, it runs downhill from here on out—from a small pipe, says the plumber, to a big one, and from the big pipe to a bigger, and so on, says the plumber, and etc., succeeding to a cesspool, a treatment plant not far from here, where on an evening when the breeze is right I can’t convince myself it isn’t our son’s breath that I am breathing, the germ of it, and of my own breath and my wife’s breath, and the germ of every neighbor’s breath we share our cesspool with, returning.

  “I don’t know about any of that,” my wife has told me, “but for you, your time is almost all run out.”

  Not so long ago, I felt that I could answer her. There was time enough for me to tell her I was getting somewhere with this story; thanks to her, I said, it happened now I lost it.

  I used to tell her, I said, “This is a family unit, am I right? As in, Keep the family unit constantly advancing? Now I ask you, how am I to keep this family advancing, if you’ve got me always starting over from retreat?”

  Not that all my efforts to deflect her interruptions were repulsive. I invited her, from time to time, to join me. I persuaded her to sit. We could leave the lights on, if she liked, though I suggested that she let her eyes close, or focus on the waterspot; she could hold my hand, suck on something sour, chew a stick of gum. But she could not talk. What we were doing here, I told her, is trying to remember, in order to forget, and trying to forget, in order to remember. Words first, I said, no words. Expe
rience is too much in a word. History is too much in a rush. Too much past intrudes itself into a single recollection, I explain, just as water will intrude itself into a fissure in a rock, and will freeze there, and expand, and melt, and will intrude and freeze and melt again, deepening and widening the fissure in the rock with each succeeding season. I tell my wife that I cannot say goiter without prodding into view my uncle Ikey, nor remember uncle Ikey without also saying goiter, whereas uncle Ikey’s goiter was unknown to me, when I was five, a blemish in experience impossible for memory to rightly visit. If I am to see my uncle Ikey rightly, as I saw him at my birthday, then I must reapproach him, unwillfully, place myself somehow behind experience, prior to my past, as if he were intruding for the first time in my life, as if he once again were fissureless, bigger, my daddy’s older, youngish brother, standing goiterless before me.