Strange Cowboy

  But the fence did not require its repair back then; my anonymity at work persisted; still crying to be born, from an abcess in the ballsack, I could make out the mewlings of a second child. I wondered what had come unstuck in me to open up such vision. Sure, we had our troubles, the missus and myself, who did not? Yet these troubles, along with their offspring, were they not the vanguard of a future love, whose peaceable assurances were reified by former strifes and triumphs and the gestures and the words performed and spoken in the tenor of forgiveness? Once my eyes were open, the opportunities for reaping love and beauty from my wife alone were staggering. This was in the May of a year, I ought to mention, several days of a May erupting from a stiff, protracted winter, days it seemed to me as if my life were passing in a basement closet, and I had come up from that closet, climbed those basement steps to join the day, and the Maylight struck me blind and unaccustomed. Naturally, I saw right away how I might overwhelm us. I looked about our house and thought perhaps that I was asking too much of myself to start anew in life with wives and children. What could be more fragile than a child? What lay nearer to its ruin in my life than marriage? My wife, when I presented her a single, wild rosebud, asked me, “What do you want?” She was not alone. The child, for instance, shrieked and beat his fists against his eyes to think that I might bathe him. Even the bag-girl at the Bi Rite, the slow girl with the lank brown hair, threatened me to summon for her “super” if I said another “stinking word” about her pretty eyes.

  In this way, I decided I might practice the display of my affections for awhile on less demonstrative beauties, tongueless creatures such as pine cones and creosote, sageleaves, sprinkler heads, and crabgrass. My plan foresaw me shifting my admiring regard from various inanimate particulars within a landscape, to a landscape as a congregated whole—vistas, ranges, mesas, playas—then on to those remembered animates beloved of my boyhood: the barnyard duck, Losivya, our milker, her pinkly leathered udder, and an old paint horse called Chaos, who would not be broken past the snaffle bit and held his breath against the cinchstrap. Here also came to me those easy days I ran the shady creeks, tipping stones and wading out there with the spikedace and the loachminnow, Lincoln Dahl, nut-husked child in cutoff shorts, glad-hearted riffle beetle hunter, natural born lover of our native water umbels and the fat-flanked German brown. Nor did I neglect a pet. Rex. Tabby. That lop-eared bunny and a handsome pair of potbelly pigs. Suburbia’s enmildened wildlife. Caged things, leashed, lawnbound, flitting imports. I sprinkled bonemeal over the goldfish globe. I learned the finch’s whistle, cocked my head and listened with the robin for a worm. After I had learned to love the worm, I told myself, surely then must be the time to show myself to humankind.

  A man, I meant, a woman, my wife and my child, both of whom, according to my plan, I would revisit through descending levels of abstraction. God, for instance, the supreme abstraction, I began with God, the slender, mythic versions of a deity as I myself in private, and our several competing clerical officials out in public have conceived Him. Him first I practiced humanly to love. Next, species. Next, race. Next, nation, state, county, town. I reapproached the news, our County Crier, read less coolly through our crimes and marriages, our births and our obituaries. This one bought, that one sold. We met in an exchange. We shook hands. We rode away a little with our neighbors in those properties and monies we gave up; we carried off with us a little of our neighbors in the properties and monies we accepted. What a kid I could be in the way the world worked! What ceremonial affections I could lavish on my morning mush! Over my steaming bowl I might incline to hear the fragmentary human histories residing in the husbandry and manufacture of my milk, those wholesome grains, this sparkling, purecane sugar. Farmer, herdsman, bottler, boxer, marketeer: an urban girl, a brown boy chopping tall fields in the tropics, a taciturn Wisconsinite, glib-quipperies concocted by an officeful of avid graduates, timely, democratic phrases funneled westward from Manhattan. Perhaps these were the voices I had heard once as a boy and since forgotten, conflations rising from the steams I heard my son address each breakfast in a coded babble I would think could be his blessing. I, too, might hear them. Imjibway, ahshwhahtoon might mean God bless you in a tongue I learned by minding boiled peas. Who knew? Certainly, I saw my commerce at the Bi Rite solemnized. I saw the bagger girl seduced by my solemnity. We could at least be grateful for each other. We could make each other feel good. This was the great news I would bring back to my wife and child. According to my plan, I must greet them from my labors smilingly, buoyed up by fragrant blooms and sacks of sweets and unexpected playthings, a long stride and a true kiss from the winsome Papa. Hello, there, loves! Listen up, we can make each other feel good! Yet the question left to me was how.

  Patience, I thought, planning, practice, and perfection. Said my father, “Practice makes perfect, only if it’s perfect practice.” So can it be surprising I commenced in practice on my chair? And should a husband be surprised to learn how long he has been sitting in his chair, once he finds himself accustomed to the endless possibilities for adoration in its perfect comforts? Here was the chair I had selected for myself, and yet it seemed to me that I had never really even seen its color. A weave, I saw, a woolen, blanketlike effect of blues and pinks and brownish grays I must have chosen after its resemblance to the desert. Home, I must have seen; from those desert hues I quickly made out for myself a history of lathered horse and apple pie; it was possible for me to follow any strand and make out from its course the lay of the light on a shed at dusk, a sunup on a clear spring day at Soldier’s Meadows, the silver glimpses of the irrigation ditch that passed through weedlots at the Wilson Place. I stroked the armrests of my chair, found them tender, fibrously responsive. I observed our mutual accomadations, the chair’s conformance to the heft and contour of my person. I rotated the seat of the chair, purchased an upholstery brush and rid the cushioned surfaces of grosser foodstuffs. I rigged a slim attachment to the vacuum and I vacuumed lint and hair and dander. I consulted experts who could recommend to me a non-abrasive stain remover, a build-up resistant polish, several trusted, name-brand lubricants to smooth the action of the footrest and recliner. I sampled various deodorizers, tried out powders and sprays, passed through lilacs, grapes, and myhrs and settled finally on a hypoallergenic spruce designed by Swiss clinicians. I began to sense in my chair a feminine mystique. I named her, held her name a secret, promised her a satin coverlet to warm her in my absence. At work, in bed, on family excursions, I would often miss her, my chair, I worried was she being eaten up by moths, had my wife remembered to adjust the louver to protect her from the sun, did she suffer jealousy to see me leave the house without her. My chair, my confidant, it was she to whom I could report the trials of my days; it was in her soft embrace I sojourned irreproachably in wish and reminiscence. She denied me nothing, desired nothing I could not find out to give her. I slept in her. I could not be certain sometimes that she was not something of a flirt. I might come home from work one day and see a bit of her foot exposed from underneath the coverlet and think this was her way of telling me come hither. Other days, in other lights, I might find her appealingly tawdry, prim, sultry, gay. I recall a dozey Sunday afternoon, a late and snowy winter night, a fire ticking in the woodstove, rain outside, heat, a cool breeze blowing through the doorscreen, and there I sat, reclined, unweighted, traveling, ecstatic.

  I could not have told you anything I missed. A Monday came and went, a Humpday and a Friday. I shipped. I received. I deposited a check. I wrote a check, deposited another. The lawn greened, browned, lightened up into a brittle dun. I coiled hose. I hung a rake. I stowed the mower. Molars were cut. Abrasions sustained. Word was we would soon be out of diapers. I recall I saw my wife through periods of serious brunette, a soft perm, a henna, and a bob. I might have offered her some comment. A compliment, some gentle criticism, an acknowledgement of her unswerving courage. How about that midi-skirt? Or that cherry high-gloss? In retrospect, I understand her glosses, pedic
ures, and burnt meats were a “cry for help,” as she herself was later to describe her conduct, yet I believe it was her popcorn that recalled me from my chair and to my further purpose, which after all was to eliminate the need in her domestic life for crying, if the help she cried for could be served out from a husband’s practiced loving.

  I wanted to love. I meant to help. I sat across from her and watched her lifting out that popcorn from the bowl to her mouth, handful after handful, feeding herself from the cup of her hand to the flat of her hand, as a child is taught to feed a goat, my wife picking spilled bits from the folds and hillocks of her sweatshirt, sifting through the unpopped kernels in the bowl until she satisfied herself that she was finished. Then she licked the butter from her fingers, stood up from her chair, brushed the salt off from her lap and passed me with her empty bowl into the kitchen. I sat and stroked my armrests, discomforted, and I thought, Well, so here I have come, this far apart. The boy in bed. Soon the wife in bed. And here I will sit. And here I will wait. And there I sat, waiting, staring at the ceiling. All was well. All quiet. No leak then. A good, strong fence, I told myself. Put it up myself. Healthy garden. Windows caulked. Another eight years, easy, in the carpets. I heard my wife shut off the kitchen lights, heard the hall light on and off, listened to the pipes fill, rush and groan and thud and empty. Repeat. Fill, rush, groan, empty. Water on the face, a lather and a scrub, warm rinse, cold rinse, fill the basin cold, a thirty second soak, repeat. My wife’s ablutions. Her regime. A plan for her more youthful her.

  And my plan, I asked myself, my vision, what had happened? How much time had suddenly transpired through which I might have seen to my plan’s completion? How many husbands, I wondered, must sit alone out in their chairs at night, peruse their lists and honestly allow themselves to cross their children and their wives off? All is well. All quiet. Repeat. All is well. This one in bed, that one in bed. Good night, good night, repeat, good night. Popcorn, I thought. Candy. The Rexall and the Roxy. And repeat. Together, I was thinking, we once passed in from the desert day into the darkened theater and held each other’s hand and watched the same dream played out on the screen before us. Sacks and sacks of sweets. A kiss, she said, she craved a kiss. And there I sat, in my chair, and it occurred to me that while I watched her with this bowl of popcorn I must also crave a kiss; it occurred to me that I was possibly too late. Likely we were both too late. A husband, a wife, that kiss, that word must always limp along behind its vision.

  All along, I think I was afraid. A husband fears. He looks across the lampstand to his wife and does not go there. I believe I was not wanted there. I sat and thought we lived together now, outside of want, and wondered must it come to this with others. My neighbors, married, enfamilied, did they sleep and rise together, find each other in their dreams, the rituals of daily living? I did not think so. I thought my neighbor turned toward his hubcaps so as not to turn toward his wife. I thought the wife had turned toward the garden so as not to turn toward the husband. I thought the sons and daughters turned toward the present so as not to turn toward the future and the past, the husband, the wife, that mother there and father. Young, younglings, threes and fives and sevens on our block—everywhere they looked, it seemed to me, was want. And my son, one of them, of us, of me, would he find himself as I have, seated, wakeful and alone, turning through a shrinking future and a growing past and wondering where want went? Would he come to miss his Roxy? Would he hold a sack of sweets one day, and would there ever be a girl who craved whatever he might hold inside his sack, or would the two of them devise a sign by which their cravings could be known to one another, in the dark, in a reconstructed theater, would there be a place where they might touch each other to describe that what they felt there while the movie played was neither fear, nor sadness, nor good humor, but desire? Would such a sign persist? Or would desire be forgotten for the drama played out in the movie? Would they survive the intermissions? Would they forget themselves, insist they had become someone completely other?

  Well, I looked up at the boy, saw him watching out the windshield through the rearview. Rubble there. The Humane Society. Hope. Lily Fong’s, the renderer’s. My boy. What had he heard from me? How long had we been sitting? Long enough, I saw, to have the windshield clear. Long enough to have an inch or so of snow fall. We were clear now, we could go, I thought that I could feel my son look out into the snow and ask himself what kept us. I thought then of my father, and the sunrise, and my own impatience and reluctance with my father once the sun had risen. Perhaps, I thought, I was to my son as my father was to me; perhaps my sunrise was his snowfall; my basin was his rubble; my Whim his Hope; my silence his inheritance in understanding.

  What kept us? What had he heard, my son, that I could not yet tell him? I felt myself corrupt. He was a good boy, Lincoln. He must have loved that dog. A Schnauzer. Imagine. He went about in cutoff shorts, barefoot, no shirt, his back inflamed by traceries of itch and welt. He shined. He wept when he wept and when he finished weeping did not bother over why he wept or put off being happy. He smiled on oily rainbows in the gutter puddles. He stripped the bark from sapling limbs and put his tongue out to the moist, white meat. He licked mirrors. He stepped on clover bees. He liked not to wear his glasses. What did he see? What did he prefer of his original illuminations? Blurry world, I thought, he made it by his own lights, a place to run in, trippingly his, abrupt, perhaps, hyperbolized, monstrous green smears, waxen domes, foreshortenings, phantom elongations, warps, sounds in color all mistakenly correct.

  The wind can feel because it’s it that moves it.

  Sure he was a kid back there, a child like mostly any other child, not so unalike, I thought, from me. I feared he understood as much. Right then, the way he looked to me, away from me, I believe he had come up against an uninvited understanding. The old man teaching a boy a lesson, “a thing or two about life.” This snow, peace, a ruin, just the two of us, on a mission, guy stuff, No. 7, as good as it can get. Listen up, this is your papa, Pop’s boy, here I am, did I say that? This is the height of my arc, here is the charge of my wake, is this what he was hearing? Appalled, was he appalled? Was I asking him to love me? Well, I felt dirty. That dog was dead. I never liked that dog. I was an unbeliever.

  Be calm, I told myself, there are other ways, other understandings sons must come to of their fathers, as when the father strives to stand aside, as I myself have striven to stand, inwardly aside, above, before, as if I were a herdsman, riding point, out there in the clean and the clear, where I might be understood as something of a hero. Yet I could not overcome myself, my original impression, under his regard, of a corruption. I believed that I had only to recall my thoughts across the time we had been sitting quietly inside the car together to approximate his thinking, the unthinkable successions through a father’s years a son is given to remember. What did he know? What sort of father was I? I sat there with my son, staring in my lap, and I felt my belly spreading downward to my hips, outward toward my knees. My buttocks sagged, atrophied. My bladder weakened. I leaked. I retained. I suffered phantom cramps. Thick, corded stuff slid out of me; I grew breasts, cancerous, glandular appendages, hairy moles I plucked and painted late at nights behind locked doors and open longings. I balded. My blood stuttered. My skin broke out in hairthin fissures. This was the boy’s doing. What he made of me, his sense of me in thought, the clotted blood he must have known was bound to strike me braindead. I believe he knew his friends would be off fishing with their fathers while he stayed at home to stew my prunes and wipe my chin and shit-smeared bung and tell me for the hundredth time he could not understand me. I would know, as my father knew; I would gape and drool and hope my son perhaps could read my meaning in my eyes. I would clutch the chalk between my knuckles and attempt to scrawl out any simple thing I knew I thought and could not find the word for saying. I was thinking. I remembered. What? I tried to draw a picture. This is what I think, here is something I remember. A happy man, asleep beneath a shade tree. The
scent of rain on summer pavement. Mama humming, stringing pole beans in the garden. I saw myself as I had seen my father, this side of my face hung down from the eye into the neck, that side of my mouth alive, mouthing moan and froth and whimper and want—fierce, irreparable, a fright. Understand? Look at me, I am telling you a truth here; there are girls on hot days you must kiss between the shoulders; there is the soft spot on the belly of a shorthaired dog; a rhubarb pie is baking; a thrush sings; fogs lift; waves break, days break, bread, hearts, vessels, understand? Look at me, don’t you miss it, understand? Dirty old man. This is how I understood my son. I could have been mistaken. For a father, and his dying, I only had the one. Dirty old man, he said, let’s go, I see, I see. Oh, it’s hell, my father said. Such happy times. Were these the times my son sensed I was teaching?