Strange Cowboy

by Sam Michel

  This, then, is the impasse we had come to, how it was that I was sitting, out of mouth, out of money, just this afternoon, thinking about breathing, when I heard my wife call out to me, and saw my wife come out to me, where she stood beside me, requiring me to see to some disaster whose specifics I had thoroughly forgotten. I could have simply asked. Yet there I sat, silent, nearly silent, wondering could this disaster be my mother. Was her sack come unattached, I asked myself, had she eloped with Vernon? Would she describe to me a kiss they shared, some means they had contrived to join in copulation? Or had she finally died? Or, what? What did she want, my wife? What was I doing? A bagpipe, was I thinking, an accordion, St. Pete’s? Undoubtedly, I am an imaginative laggard, my own most eager interrupter. I go so far, up to points, advance and loiter on a lifelong precipice commanding fog-choked basins of aboutness. If I stand beside a point, it is for the perfect reason that I cannot see one. The principles associating the commemoration of a boy’s fifth year of life with Bonnie Dahl’s Catholicism, we learn, are not too handily apparent. The catholicity of mind, in my experience, exceeds the senses, and also vice versa. I see, and cannot think what I am seeing; I think, and cannot see what I am thinking. Bury my head, or pull it out; open my eyes or close them: too much from the easy chair is brutely present. My wife, for instance. Who is she, in the long run, what was my wife before she called out for her life and found it was beyond her calling? She used to lie down with a friend, a girl, nine or ten, beneath a cottonwood in autumn. They were girls in jeans and flannel. They held hands. The dry grass pricked and tickled at their necks. They had a favorite, softest place, a narrow gully in the rootswells. They said, What do you want to do? We could, no.... they said, we could, Well... and, No... they said, and so on, says my wife, “forever.”

  “The sky,” she says, “where you could see it through the leaves, it was so blue and hard around the edges, but when I see it now I always think of butter.”

  Not so long ago, last week, I believe, we stood together, hovered at the louver slats and watched our son entice the neighbor-dog with bones the butcher Hans stopped off to make the boy a gift of. We pressed our cheeks against the slats, our foreheads, we leaned our hips and shoulders to the windowframe and doodled on the smudgy glass. The day was brilliant. The very air suspired glint and salutation. The fenceposts and the flagpoles, the hubcaps, hoods, and rearviews, the trashcans, even, the tin lids and the corrugated ribbing—every surface dense enough to take a shine was winking. It hurt to look and not to look there, to see and not believe what you were thinking. I thought I heard the leaves sing on the chainlink, I thought I heard the grass rhyme.

  And my wife, she seemed so full to me, expectant; when I saw her hair curl in the sunlight, I was thinking flaxen. I almost thought that I could touch it. Her. She was plump, smoothened, tan, she had the look to me of unfullfilled expansion. She bore no outward sign of her retreats. No stretch marks, wrinkles, scales, no shame or wish, no worry I could see was showing from her eyes for what she was and was becoming. She could have worn a skirt. She seemed to me a girl in plaid-and-white I used to dream of from the private school I never went to. I saw my wife transported to an era of her life she had survived in pinks and blues of fabrics not dissimilar to cashmere. Angora, possibly. I suppose I wanted then to hold and pet my wife, recall her to the time when it was she who cheered us through our fields and tracks and diamonds, all the greening seasons of the adolescent games our student body would anticipate by burning stacks of palettes, putting to the flames the effigies our glee club had constructed of our rivals in the desert. I saw her there, in the fire’s flicker, in her plaid, and pink, and was afraid for her, and wanted to protect her, and to burn for me, as if it were for me she cheered, for my defeats and victories she rallied us around the firering to celebrate and suffer.

  She sighed, took me by the elbow, offered me a penny for my thoughts. According to my wife, my chin was up. I seemed to her as if I teetered on the brink of breaking forth in something worthy. Yet I was simply unprepared; I was honest, unrevised; I told the truth before I knew it.

  I said, of our son there on the sidewalk, I said, “I don’t know, the boy just looks so porous.”

  And then my wife became herself again, the cooler, brittler woman I have seen too often these days at the window, smiling, piningly, as if she would, but could not join our son for fear of ruining the balance in the moment we were watching: a boy, a dog, playing Tug of War with beef ribs on the sidewalk. I studied her, searched for avenues by which I might retrieve her. I saw the light divide in bars across her body where it struck her through the parted slats. She wore a sweatshirt reminiscient of my mother’s. Nothing I could see of her was reminiscient of angora. No cheer. She sighed again, more deeply; her voice was mingled in the sigh, underneath her breath; I marked the falling accent from the high note to the low note; I watched the fog of the breath the note was sounded on, contracting on the windowpane.

  I thought: Porous. I asked myself: Why porous? I thought: What if something in me had been worthy? And what if I had broken forth in it? Why does honesty, I wondered, so seldom coincide with preparation? I looked at her beside my chair and wondered if I were to crawl up in her womb and pluck my seed out with my teeth, hold it in my mouth and spit it in the river, would she find her life recalled to her, would she luxuriate beneath a butter-colored sky? Did I correct her, insist her skies were lemon-lime? Did I neglect her hair? Did I kindle the fire with little Lincoln’s drawings before I learned they were to go to school with him, or after? Did he cry because I threatened him, or did I threaten him because he cried? Or did he cry at all, and was he rather mute? And did I really burn his artwork? Have I truly given Hope a chicken bone? feigned the limp I have acquired since my operation? And my beauty, that handsomeness, does it square with what I’m seeing in the mirror? Was that me, tweezing whiskers from my shoulders? Is my cheek no longer red, as my mother has observed, but blue; are the hairs that sprout from there forever to grow denser? Science tells us that the ears and nose enlargen even while the spine of humankind contracts. Our gums recede. Our teeth rot. We learn our fingernails are curling in the coffinbox. Is it true? Who has seen it? Enough, that is, to move from seeing to believing?

  Speaking as myself, at times, my beliefs are likelier to coincide where fact elides in me through a desire. Depending on the pitch of my ambition, it is possible for me to sit here in my chair and see my wife in memory as if she were my wife in flesh, and to see my wife in flesh as if she were my wife in memory. I look at her, asleep, her head cushioned on the pillow. Her lips part, her breath quickens; I see her tongue come to her teeth, she smiles. I think: Beauty, do I know you? Are you wearing skirts beneath these blankets? Are you mended? Smoother? Whole? I wonder sometimes if I lift the covers will I see the girl the boy I was did not have eyes for seeing. Blind eyes. A kid’s eyes. I was ungrown. Unaware. I was of my time. I was the same age she was. Still am. We match each other in successive phases of ungrowness, continue to be insufficiently contrasted. My most vivid sight of her is elsewhere. The accomplice of the clearest vision is regret. I must invite it, that corny, olden pang. No doubt, someday, I will come to see her as she is today; no doubt, as my flesh grows farther from the bone, I will be seeing hers grow closer. I am tantalized by ghosts, traces of the past in bursts of light and odors. I want to be a girl, hold her hand, lie beneath the cottonwood and not know what I’m doing. I must pause for her; I lie awake and watch; I sit; I fetch; I revel.

  Yet the time had passed for revel. Certainly, I thought, I was required, necessary, beyond the scope, it seemed to me, of any party. There I sat, blinking from my chair, smiling, possibly, blandly panicked, feeling not unlike a man who cannot name a single soul of the seven souls he’s just been introduced to over cocktails. Worse, of course, owing to my recent dabblings in sobriety, not to mention the disparity I must have sensed between the wife there on her feet, and the husband on his back, his heels propped and his shoulders swallowed in the sc
ulpted fluff of his recliner. See her eyes. The last time I had seen such clarity illuminate those viscous bulbs was when we learned about my operation. Mirth was not the word. Hilarity, perhaps, hysteria I think I saw there in my wife as our physician held his thumb some distance from his index finger, meaning to approximate for us the length of the incision he would make to open up my scrotum. If I liked, he said, I might choose general anesthesia, though he himself preferred to “go with local.” I might watch, if I liked. Mirrors could be placed. Vas deferens, mesorchium, tunica vaginalis: some men, said the doctor, enjoyed to see how they were plumbed for sexing. I was not that man. It was my wife, not me, who was amused to learn why one hung lower than the other of my testicles; my wife who asked the doctor how much four-and-a-half drachms would weigh out in potatoes, after he had given us the skinny on the prostate. When the doctor said that in addition to eliminating any fear of reproductive consequence in loving, I might also save myself, down the road, from an enucleated lobe, I do not believe that it was sympathy, not relief I saw illuminate my wife, but glee, yes, but spite. My body was no friendlier to me than hers was. She squeezed my hand, I won’t deny it, though the pressure she applied there was untender.

  Regard her, I was thinking, see her standing at your chairside. Underneath the corduroy and cotton there resides a smattering of bruise and scar and stubble, an exagerrated bicep, a broadening back, a chronic ache she worries at the lumbar, a mismatched, frayed and spotted slub of underthings, selected, I believe, perversely, antagonistically for function. She pares her nails for function, cuts her hair for ease. She has carried a child. In her belly, on her hip, in her heart. She was past belonging. She would not be anybody’s woman, no man’s, in any case; every plane, every line in her face was drawn into her lips, it seemed, her face was hinged there on a clench, a tiny pucker, an enormous debt, prerogative. I thought: She was duped; this woman hawked her dreamlife for a vacuum and a rude maternal urge. I have rights, she seems to say. It isn’t fair. I was only doing what my mother and my country and my body told me that I ought to. I was planning on a life, can’t you see that, I am fighting for my life here.

  No, I think, not tenderness. Tenderness, to my mind, collapsed entirely between us with the demolition of the Roxy. Brick by brick the kisses we once promised we would hold to heart forever were unhoused in us, according to the weight and the acceleration of the ball the mayor ordered to be swung there. The force of history, this was, the lore of balconies and velvet. This had been our theatre. My wife pressed her face into my neck and wept and she was saying, Lincoln, Lincoln, Lincoln. I recall this as the only time in our familial life that she was able to forget her character as Mother. She hushed the child, and when he did not hush, and persisted to express his need to urinate, she told him he could “hold it,” and when he said he could not hold it, she insisted that he could, and when he did not hold it, and he wet himself, she got down on her knees and took him by the collar, shook him once and asked him why on earth he didn’t go ahead and go behind the grader? All for me. In public. For our Roxy, our love, for the last time she remembers feeling freely. She turned her face up from my neck. Her pupils crowded out the iris. I felt her wanting me to plunge there, through that blackened film; I felt a desperate crushing of the distance wedged between us; she was down there somewhere; it seemed to me as if a hand might soon emerge and grasp my throat to drag me down there with her.

  “Oh, God,” she said, “I didn’t have to marry you.”

  Why a certain woman’s tenderness should fail to rouse her beauty, where her spite succeeds, must be a question certain husbands have been asking since the day that God contracted Adam with a wife, and with that wife, contracted him with child. To me, my wife is rarely lovelier than when she seizes up an opportunity to foist the boy in my administration. I cannot resist her. I have tried to please her. But is she pleased? Who has pleased her? A father? A mother? A doctor or a teacher? A lover, husband, Hans? Perhaps, I thought, she’d got the butcher up her sleeve. Perhaps her loveliness did not depend for him on her unhappiness. Who was this Hans, and was it true, as my wife suggested, that she had given him “ideas”? A real man, she calls him, composed of flesh and blood and bone and gristle, a useful man, the sort of man who did not place himself above the plumbing of the family toilet. Well, I thought, okay, well, yes, then, she must be taunting me with Hans, my history. Old Hansel. German, Old World, Nature’s European. Futile, I was thinking, to try and argue her away from those few corporal truths embodied by Herr Schmeltzer. I thought: Who would butcher? Who plumb? What sort of retrovert would bark his knuckles changing spark plugs to establish his capacity for bleeding? I was, I know, once again beside the point. Not the proof, according to my wife, but the act; not the actor, but the witness. The character of men, apparently, is incidental; virtue is the showershow of sparks erupting from the nose pressed to the grindstone.

  Says my wife, “Hans is not a showoff.”

  She stood. Silent. Not silent silent, but speechless silent. She buzzed, machinelike, like a distant industry, antiquated, relegated, poorly tended, yet up, up and running, a wife, the original design. I heard her body talk as if through thicknesses of padded wall, heard her pumps at work in there, valvings and gurgles, acidic transformations, grinding teeth, brainwaves, psychic mutterings, a cyclic monologue she narrows and repeats, sharpens and enlargens, a colossal, stabby racket she conceives of as her refuge, a psalm she sings of clarity and purpose. It isn’t fair, you cheated, I never really loved you, you are not the man I married.

  I changed. I cheated. How? If I look, inspect those years from five to roughly forty, what they held for me and what they promise, I find I am an agent, a private-eye, a green detective in my own life’s history without a common law to guide me. Had I only learned, perhaps, when I was young, and hungered for a dogma, the strictures of my mother’s church. Sadly, says my mother, I was a maverick catechumen, unable to abide through any lingering coincidence of memory and hunger. True, she rapped my knuckles, smartly, with the ruler, in recognition of my absence; true, I was brought back, by her interventions, to myself. Where had I been? she wondered; where on earth could I be going? I confessed I could not say. What would I have said? Out the window? In the barn? Pillaging my mother’s bedroom? Even from the easy chair, hovered over by my wife, her wants, her need, our son, I can still recall myself with mother, at our catechism, remembering her bedroom. I liked the smell of Mother’s bed. I liked her creams and lotions, her drawer, the clingy, silken pretties I discovered there. I tried some on. I was sitting at my catechism, feeling I was in my mother’s underpants, before my mother’s mirror, remembering how it felt to see myself as I might see my imminent beloved. She was gauze and sheen. She was a slip, and stockings, the shrouded furze, I thought, much prettier than I was. I tried a pout on her. I crossed her legs. This girl had known herself. She kept her teeth to herself, a thin regard, a shadowy circumference. Her hair sang; her scalp paled; she was rockbound and wavestruck; it seemed to me that her head was the head my mother taught me from Corinthians, upon which all of the ends of the world had come, and having come there once, were to come and come again there, relentlessly regathered. I think that every boy who steps into his mother’s silks must draw a mustache on the Mona Lisa.

  Where had I been, my mother wondered, and I may have said, “I was remembering Losivya, ma’am.” Or, depending on her question, where we were in any given lesson, I said, “Peter’s keys?” Or, “The lamb of God?” And, “Eve?”

  Daunted, maybe, accused, perhaps, convicted, even, by the presence of the interrogative in my declaratives, I recall I spread my hands out next across the knotty pine, eager to receive the ruler. In the end, my mother must have wearied beating me. Had she persisted, I would tell my wife, I might have been, in faith, a more securely grounded husband, a truer star as Father. Fill my shoes with rocks, better bind me shirtless in a horsehair jacket. Reprimands, a caution, tips, hints, suggestions, orders and reminders, the Ought, the No, th
e Pretty Pleases in my life are lost from me as soon as they have ceased resounding on the eardrum. According to my wife, I am the sort who makes of Yes a Maybe. Tell me that a straight line is the shortest way between two points, she says, and I will argue for the scenic route from Happy Hour to Homestead. I go in for milk and come out with a grapefruit and an avocado. I call a pigeontoe a clubfoot, a gift a curse, a smile a grimace, a memory a nightmare.

  “Forgetfullness,” my wife would use to say, believing it was charming, until it meant my not remembering the day that we were married. No bouquet, no card, no dinner out, no Happy Anniversary. She was dressed. Not dressed, but dressed. Something classic-drab, and middle-lengthed, a fabric and a cut I recognized a woman in our town would air for several days, preceding an Occasion. She wore Occasion Shoes, an Occasion Scent from which I could extract a vision of Occasion Panties. She had got her hair done. Had it teased up off her temples and her nape into a modest hive. She did her lids, her rims. She curled her lashes, plucked and penciled extra arch into the brow, hollowed out a cheekbone. I remember thinking she seemed regally surprised, undecidedly Cleopatran. She told me she’d been waiting. Later, because of the date, and the hour of my arrival, she told me she expected something different. Maybe I had rented a tuxedo. Maybe I would hand her up into a horsedrawn carriage. Maybe I would fly her off to Dallas. Whereas there I was, dressed down, afoot, unready to go anywhere, same as always, only later. I asked her, when she told me what the day was, was she certain, could she not have been mistaken of the date? Doubtless, I confessed, we might be certain of the season; I claimed to recognize—by the blackened branches, the frost-scorched blooms and birdless vista—that we had come at last into our month, but come into our day? Our very day? Its very week? Its only number?

  I said, “I thought that we were married on a Wednesday. The date—I could have sworn it was an odd.”