Strange Cowboy

by Sam Michel

  My wife said, “Is that all?”

  After I recounted to myself the little history I’d just delivered—its corridors and concrete, its sunlessness, its stinks and howls and pleady eyes, the old bones, and the stiff hearts, and the old, encalming mysteries disrupted—I confessed to her I could not see what more.

  My wife laid down her fork. She faced me. She jammed her fists into her haunches and accused me “just for starters” of hysteria. She said that I was being “awfully sentimental” for a farm boy, said she thought that I was giving Lincoln Jr. too much credit. She reeled me back into his age. Its blessings and encumbrances. She raised her voice, speeded up her speech, erupted in a whirligig of homey nounals. The roof over our heads, our lucky stars, chicken and peas, pots to piss in. I remember our fence, the fridge, the mailbox, and the boy, of course, and I remember Hope, Hope, Hope. All else was for me a gravy stain my wife had slopped onto her sweatshirt, approximately sub-navel, from where I came, I thought, to apprehend an immanence the sound and the finish of a saltborn foam. I clung in it. I waited her out. In the quiet lapse between the body of her speech and its conclusion, I attended to this stain, believing I might be delivered to what lay beyond those bones and howls I turned up at the bottom of a life and always missed out knowing. An unimpeded joy? An unpanicked God? A happily hereafter?

  In parting, I think I said to her, “Well, we’ll see.” Or, “That’s what you think.” Something spoken from the corner of my mouth, several things, half-spoken, over my shoulder, or to my feet, things like: “I’m the guy who wears the pants around here.” Or, “I hope he picks himself a Dane.” And, “Why don’t you go and dig your own grave?”

  Mutterings, sore sportsmanship, a few rounds fired from the hip in fast retreat. Nothing deeply satisfying. And then less so, owing to my having shortly to return to her, to ask her where the boy was.

  “He’s out there with Hope!” she said. “What did you think? My God! Now get out! Before I—I don’t know—before I kick you out! And I’ll warn you one last time—if you don’t come back with a dog, I’ll take that cleaver there, and I’ll make—I’ll make—I’ll make mince-meat out of your recliner!”

  And so, at last, and once again, I am delivered to the boy. He was there, with Hope, in the gutter, just this afternoon, just as she had promised. How long, I asked the boy, had he been out there? He could not say. I mean he seemed incapable of speech. I repeated myself until I could not doubt I had been heard, and understood, and yet still he did not speak. I was skeptical, as usual. As usual, I suspected he was acting on his mother’s counsel. His eagerness to shape a word, so far as I recalled, was never stymied by the limitation in his actual capacity to do so. He did not require words, as we know them, he made them up. They hovered, ineffable, like music, sometimes, hymn-like, I almost want to say seraphic. Perhaps it was the thickness of his tongue by which he was inspired and assisted. A mania to compensate. Perhaps he really could not help himself. With my son, if it wasn’t music, I thought I sometimes heard him speaking French. Swahili. Dog. Wren. Anything. Though when I pressed him he admitted it was nothing. Then continued.

  So what possessed him? Why such silence? Why such distance? Oh, I knew why, of course, in my heart—but I was cautious not to have myself determined by the heart’s discoveries, preferring not to chance the misery the winsome quickness of the heart so often used to cause me, before I learned to let myself be patient of the plodding, rural action of my mind. So I took my time and watched, leaned a little nearer, saw the fluids leaking clearly from his nostril. I saw his lips begin to move, shaping what I thought might be the silent mouthings of his private language; saw at length the tears come down, watched the little chest expand, heard the wheezing there, the whistle in the nose, saw the cloud come out of him, hover, and disperse, and I gathered up these public emblems of his private life inside my mind and I thought: Hope, my wife’s first errand, my son’s best friend... Well, she was a mess. I do not think she can have suffered. Not much. With Hope, I told my son, it must have been the blinding panic, instantaneous, when she saw the time to move, and found her legs were not what they had been, and she could not move, and understood the chase was over, no more leaps, no more sprints and tumbles, no more barking at the wheels and bumpers of the vehicles that nearly crushed her, but had passed her by, and passed her by, until this final set of wheels had come, and there she was, crushed, completely, mercifully, I told the boy, her life gone out of her before she ever really felt it.

  I waited on the boy, gave him ample time to doubt me. There was room in my surmise of the dog for some dispute, as for instance with regard to what she did or did not feel, whether life had truly left her in an instant, or had lingered, cloyingly, and frantically, like a crab, when the tide comes in, and when the tide goes out, as we have come to know life’s habit. Yet if dispute was in my son, he did not voice it. I turned myself to Hope, who was as she was, indisputable. There were the heart and the lung, the craw and the kidney, the diminutive version of the liver I recalled my wife was inside frying. She should be here, I was thinking of my wife—the splintered ribs, the flattened paw, the eyeball lying on the pavement—a viscous fruit, it seemed to me, tethered on a bruisy-colored cord extended several inches from a crumpled socket—she really ought to see.

  Here was Hope, one of God’s, God made Hope, a dog, and worse, a Schnauzer. Another test, I thought, to measure our devotion to the beasts He put us here to share the world with. Could I love a Schnauzer? A dead one? Could I find it in myself to seek out Hope’s replacement? From a theological perspective, the task seemed more compelling to me than it had when I perceived myself proceeding under purely matrimonial duress. I felt suddenly, haltingly expansive. I let myself believe I’d glimpsed the outer and the inner limits of His Plan; I believed in effects, and therefore causes; I saw myself enfolded in His Flock, a necessary actor in the drama of His Final Judgment. I was tentative, however, I paused to check my progress through the stopgaps of my mind, fearful of discovering, through the semi-rigors of my custom, some reason in myself that needed His elimination. I balked. I turned toward myself, instead of Him, threw custom to the winds and listened to my heart. Might I indulge my heart, I wondered, set forth as if I were a free man, capable of tolerance, where I had been intolerant, of patience, where I had been impatient, capable of loving where I had not loved, where salvation lay in loving? Well, all sorts of crazy thoughts were moving through my head, understandably, I had not seen a corpse since Father’s.

  I asked the boy, “Are you sure it was a Buick?”

  I said, “Would you like to hold the sack?”

  I asked him, “Do you need to use the potty?”

  Naturally, the way we went was slow. We moved as water moves, on a flat, in a desert, in a flood, toward the sink. It was messy work, despite the sack, she was a mess, a person can imagine. Had I procured material less permeable than burlap, you might not have had her dripping. All the way up to my neighbor’s porch, across the pavement, and the concrete, the frozen turf and porchboards. Briefly, I wished I owned a pick. And yet I doubted I could swing one. Growing up, we used a backho for our burials. I had forgotten. I had forgotten, then remembered, too, the reason I requested burlap, recalling to my mind its prevalence around the barnyard, and the common sense my mother said it made to use it for the sacking of our smaller animals, those we loved enough to bury, and those we had respected, enough to keep the dirt off. Yet I do not recall these animals as ever being messes. Their deaths seemed never accidental. Any evidence of violence reposed within the peaceful brisket. This was called going-to-sleep. It’s what it looked like, prior to the rigormortis. For the dog, I wondered, what should I call it, for my son? I thought I ought to call it something. I thought I owed the boy a name to help him shape whatever must have moved ungoverned there inside him.

  To see him there, across the burlap—so small, his little grip, the smeary glasses, the complications of his feet, so serious, resolved—I don’t know, I guess tha
t I was proud to see him keep his end up. So few do. In circumstances such as these, our friends and relatives far oftener are the cause of our most memorable regrets. I myself was grateful to discover that it must have been a day for Keno, that our neighbor wasn’t home yet, fearing, had he been there, that I might have dropped my end, smack onto my neighbor’s porch, betraying in the sound of the corpse my deepening urge to flight. But we did not flee, and soon I understood our trouble, more pressing even than the freeze, was seepage. We stood there on our neighbor’s porch, and the little spots of stain I watched were merged and grown beneath the burlap sack between us. You could not rub it out, the stain, though I tried, with my foot, rubbing briskly at the porchboards, with the grain, and then again against the grain, all vainly. Matters rather worsened. It was as if the dog had meant to force out every drop of life from every vital organ on her master’s porch, as a token of farewell, perhaps, and a sign to him suggestive of the kind of spirit that would work so hard to see a dog’s farewell erased.

  Was it possible, I asked myself, in so little time, to have fallen so far from the right reward of my intentions? I had come to help secure her from the gawkers, after all, from the elements, from the magpies, ants, and maggots. It was me who fetched Hope from the gutter. I might say that I was moved by God, and by my son, from light and love to bury her. But how could any neighbor know this? By now I understood that any discourse hinting at communion with His holiness, in my mouth, was anathema. Dubious, at least; unlikely, anyway; definitely iffy.

  “Nothing to be done,” I said to the boy. “What say we go dig ourselves that hole?”

  He seemed to be agreeable. Though who knew? The mouth ajar, the tongue retracted, the whites apparent clear around the iris—he could have been exhausted. He wasn’t saying. I did not ask. My question for the boy was nearly always what he did, not how he was. The few times I forgot myself and asked him how he was, the boy became confused, and then embarrassed, and then desperate, as if mine were an inquiry to which he’d given little thought; as if how he was were a condition he might puzzle failingly for his entire lifetime, once a person set him thinking. Drawrin, diggin, singin, nothin: these were the sorts of soothing truths for which I learned to hold the boy accountable. Slow enough, I thought, asking all the questions necessary to decide us on the place where we might do our digging. Our yard, or our neighbor’s yard? front yard, or the garden? Would it be “nicer” if she rested near the fragrance of the flowers, or the nourishment of vegetables? Would the dog be happiest within the hearing of our neighbor, or of us? Or would she be the happiest to hear the quiet, and the wind, the grasses and the leaves, the gentle luffs and hisses in the barren branches? Though I cannot recall the sequence, there seemed to be an admirable logic present in the boy’s responses to my questions, the direction his resistance took us, an ironic and befitting and inexorable thrust which left us standing with the dog and shovel at the fencebreak.

  Yet what is there to say? I mean about inexorability? About irony, the fencebreak, and our digging? What is there to say about a hole that can’t be dug? I mean to say our shovel broke! The boy went first, and then I went, and then the shovel broke! I hadn’t thought that ground could be so hard; this wasn’t any digging; there wouldn’t be a hole; there would only be my son’s dismay, and mine, and the stubbornly reanimated question: Okay, all right, okay, so what about the carcass? My thoughts, in part, were these: Well, at least the dog is drying up some. Could just leave her till the next good warming trend. Could maybe find her twin. Mean dog, I thought, homely. Pound’s about to gas her. Naw, I thought, boy would blab. His mother. Likely some foul habit of the dog’s the neighbor would discover missing. Licks the lint between his toes. Cleans his teeth. Old man like my neighbor. How’d we get so needy? Well, I took my time. I saw things through to their impracticable negations. She isn’t going anywhere, I reasoned, the day is pretty young yet, you’re the one in charge here. I told myself, Think, man, there must be some decision you might make whose opposite cannot be equally decisive. Yet if there was, I did not come to it, and decided I would rather think about it later. Why not take her for a ride, I thought, wrap her in a sheet of Visqueen from the garden, stow her in the trunk and drive?

  So this is what we did. We did it smoothly. Too smoothly. Despite his protestations to the contrary, a father likes to see his son put up a fight from time to time, to keep the father honest, yes, and also to assure a father that the son will one day do his fighting for himself, as I have come to fight for myself, whenever fighting cannot be avoided through a peaceable retreat. My son, my son, where had he gone to? He worked, he continued to support his end, he was careful not to spill a drop of Hope as we unrolled her from the burlap to the Visqueen; yet when he stood still, he seemed scarcely more alive to me than did the dog. The last I saw of color in his cheek subsided shortly after I convinced him that my notion was to take the dog to Hans, the butcher, not to render her in cutlets, but to keep her there in Hans’s freezer, as a means of seeing to her preservation.

  Well, I kept love in mind, God, my God, I tried to keep things lively. I was on the up-and-up about the burlap, confessed my squeamishness, my mean desire to keep the trunk clean. I explained permeability, condensation, rot. I believe that I became a little bit intoxicated, offering myself in speech, and for this, I had my son to thank. His silence. A person seldom hears such silences, in the company of other persons. Quiet, yes, but oftener than not, on the cusp of silence, a word or two intrudes itself as if from deep inside the brain, or underneath the bones, madness in the retina, a melancholic jaw, an entire sentence, a question from the honest, acheful heart—You never really loved me, did you? Whereas the boy had seemed to still his heart, neither brain nor bone of him intruded any voluble intelligence that I could cipher. I felt invited, unable to refuse him. I think I really chattered, yammered, to myself, and to the boy, mindlessly, if this is possible, heedlessly, at least, how else explain my making mention of the vet?

  Of course, it wasn’t so outlandish. Looking back, it seems to me a veterinarian was well within the category of our crisis. But at the time I only understood that I had crossed a line, volunteered myself beyond the several errands I recalled my wife put forth, in providing for the safety of my chair. The dog was dead. Why tease the boy with healers? Naturally, the boy was cheered. His color was restored. In his cheek, that is—the purple in his tongue, the blueness of his lips not having ever left him. I might have said this. I have said so much. Little I intended. I told myself: You’ve been standing at this hole for quite awhile now, Mr. Dahl. I wonder, why should you loiter so caressingly among your plainest failures? An old question with me, one of the kind that make me feel as toothless and as near to torpid stupefaction as my son. I can’t say why I still enjoy them. I puzzled myself a time there, gathered Hope into my arms and led us to the vet.

  I thought I saw the day improving, though I think it was the drive misled me. I determined our velocity, the temperature, our tilt. My toes warmed. My jaw was thawing. By and by, I recovered the ability to whistle. I put my arm up on the seatback, regarded the boy, aimed the vent on my side his way. I cruised. The scenes we passed appeared to cruise along beside us. I recall a gang of children playing kick-the-can. A woman pruned a thicket. A woman swung a maul. We passed a scarecrow dressed as Santa Claus, a beige dog on a chain. We traversed the strip of neon lights and Christmas-colored bulbs, the clots of burdened shoppers, steered ourselves through town and on into the desert. How near the desert was! How quickly it arrived! How long since I had seemed to see its flats and hills, the fallow fields and sheds and tractors carved and gray and resting here and there throughout the silver tips of frosted sage, the bitterbrush and deerbrush and the button! How easily I was returned among those treeless banks whose ways I used to walk to hunt for lizards and for scorpions and snakes, for arrowheads and crockery and blue-green bottles, my eyes tricked out for difference, right up where the hills pitched into mountains, the old forbidden twisted steeps. I
felt so young, so good, I think I must have temporarily forgotten Hope. I nearly asked the boy if he would like to toodle, drive around, make a little tour of Papa’s boyhood haunts.

  I thought then of the vet, as I had known him from my boyhood, around the time my voice changed, and my steer died, slowly, and painfully, according to this vet’s extended, unfruitful diagnosis. I asked myself: All these years, how many other steers have died while in his custody? How many deaths has he left unexplained? I asked myself: How old must he be? Was he sick, I asked myself, or dead himself, and would he have a goiter? Instinctively, unfortunately, I turned the rearview mirror on myself and started fingering my hairline. I pulled the slack out from my neckskin, pressed and pulled the skin that hung and gathered up in creases underneath and at the corners of my eyes. I checked my teeth for bits of lettuce leaf and brussels sprouts, green accumulants between the tooth and the receding gum. Had I aged well? Gained? Lost? I wondered whether I was the man of the boy the vet had found so tall and straight, “self-possessed,” I think he said, “level-headed” through what must have seemed to me a senseless loss. I tried anticipating compliments, considered some polite responses, decided I would give the credit to my father. My father’s time, his generation, which meant the vet’s time, too, of course, the credit due to him I merely saw myself repaying. Such thinking should have pleased the vet, I must have thought, though soon enough I saw the man was deeply unperturbed, as bland as suddenly I could recall him being when my steer died.