The Western Lonesome Society

by Robert Garner McBrearty

  He dozes. He is at one with Tom on the frontier. A ghost appears to Tom as he wanders alone by the creek near the Comanche camp. Well, not quite alone, for he has come to keep an eye on Alice, the girl taken from the burning cabin. She goes to the creek each day to be alone in the trees, and he wants to make sure she doesn’t run off because he knows they will find her and be hard on her. She must wait for the right moment to escape with him and Will. He watches from far enough away not to frighten her, but he wants to be glimpsed. He wants to let her know there is someone watching over her. “Why’d you let them kill me?” the ghost of the old rancher, Alice’s father, asks.

  “What was I supposed to do?”

  “Hell, son, you could have done something. At least expressed your reservations.”

  “I was just holding the horses.”

  “Oh, sure, somebody’s got to hold the horses.” The old man raises a quivering finger, points at Alice, at her buckskinned back as she stares across the prairie, stares south, toward the settlements. “You took her. You bring her back.” The old rancher dissolves from view, adding, as he fades, “Stop holding those goddamned horses.”

  But it’s not so easy to keep from holding the horses. Autumn nights in North Texas. Chilly full moon nights. Comanche moons. They ride through the night and fall upon lone cabins like howling ghosts. They’ve got some repeating guns now, taken from killed settlers. The young braves have lost interest in the bow and arrow, though White Crane tries to teach them, to encourage them. They laugh at him. Daily, he loses more control.

  The spirits of the dead, the slaughtered, follow Tom. Holding the horses. Just holding the horses. Meanwhile, Alice and Will await him back in the camp. Will wants to start coming on the raids. Tom can’t let him. He can’t let him get mixed up in this. He has to take him home before the spirits haunt him as well.

  A cabin sits in blackness. They leave the horses with Tom, go on stealthily on foot. He wishes the settlers would wake. Sometimes if they fire from inside the cabin, it’s enough to drive the Indians off. But usually the Indians are in on them, battering down the flimsy door before the settlers can react. Then it’s the screaming. And Tom’s praying the screaming doesn’t go on too long.

  But there’s no screaming from inside this time. What the Indians do not know yet is that they have hit the cabin of Ranger Alvin Johnson, the toughest man north of the Red River, and there are only tough men north of the Red River.

  Ranger Alvin lives alone. He likes it that way, a lone man in a lone cabin on the lone prairie. He’s been preparing for such a night as this. This is no ordinary front door. No indeed. It’s bolstered with iron taken from broken down wagons, burnt out wagons, wagons deserted on the prairie, the bones of their once inhabitants now bleaching in the sun, but that is the cycle of life, where the remnants of dreams are now woven into the doors and window bars and coverings that protect Ranger Alvin’s cabin, a veritable fortress.

  His ears are well-trained. He has heard these Comanches coming for miles, felt the thud of their horses’ hooves sending waves through the darkness, and he is pumped, he is primed. He met an old Chinese man a few years back who taught him mysterious dance-like movements that energize him, send tingles through his arms and legs, so that even at the age of sixty, he is now as spry as a man of thirty-five. And there is something hostile about Ranger Alvin, from many years of riding the plains. He just feels hostile. He’s spoiling for a good fight.

  When they start battering the door, he lets them. He’s curious about just how much pressure that door can withstand. Now they seem to have some sort of big log or something. It thunders against the door, vibrates it a little, but that’s all. Now the howling. Oh boy, they’re letting out their war whoops, meant to terrify him. That’s rich. He slides open the artfully designed knee-high metal porthole, and blasts his shotgun into their legs, mows three of them down. Now they’ve got something to howl about.

  White Crane gathers one wounded man beneath the arms and drags him back up the hill to where Tom holds the horses. The other Indians join him, dragging the other wounded. They want to go back in. But this time White Crane is insistent. They’re cutting their losses, riding back to camp. White Crane mounts his horse. Like a great solemn shadow he sits between them and the cabin. Tom joins him on his own horse; side by side they stare down the others. White Crane’s eyes flicker toward him and he realizes something has changed. If White Crane ever doubted his loyalty, his doubts are gone. This is his son. His son! The other braves mutter, but they back down.

  The troop rides off, the wounded slumped over their horses. They ride through the darkness when White Crane motions them to stop. He listens. They hear it then, the faint drumbeat of a horse’s hooves across the prairie. The whistling whine of a bullet, and one of White Crane’s men pitches off his horse.

  Ranger Alvin Johnson, a one man army, is taking the fight to them. He wears an iron vest, and his coonskin hat is lined with iron as well. He’s got a repeating rifle, three pistols, two bowie knives, and a derringer up his sleeve. If he reaches over his shoulder, he can take hold of a war axe. At a moment’s notice, a release catch underneath his horse’s belly will produce a sawed off shotgun.

  They never see him. They hear the drum of the hooves and the whistle of the bullets and then another man falls.

  Finally, it is only White Crane and Tom. They ride for three extra days, leading miles and miles from the camp before following a winding way back through crevices in canyon walls, barely wide enough for one man to ride through at a time.

  Trust Issues

  In the room above his garage, Jim’s therapist tells him to talk about his trust issues.

  His friends report to Jim that they have seen Cicely with Bobby G., her old boyfriend. Bobby G., tall, suave, Italian-Mexican looking guy.

  What happened? he asks her. Were you with Bobby?

  Of course not, Cicely says. I saw him at the Mall and we talked. That was all.

  That was all? You saw him at the Mall and talked, and that was all?

  We had a Coke at Woolworth’s. Okay? We had a Coke.

  You had a Coke at Woolworth’s? That was all?

  Well, okay, and then I gave him a blowjob in his car. Well, she does not admit this, but he can read between the lines. Somewhere before or after this Coke at Woolworth’s, she’s leaving out the small matter of the blowjob in the car.

  Cicely, Cicely, Cicely, your black straight hair, your belly so trim and flat, and your breasts growing now, and I know by now you’ve grown old like me, but leave a part of you, will you, there forever at the drive-in, tossing sweatily with me, not Bobby G . . .

  Were you with him?

  With him?

  You know what I mean.

  She laughs. Of course I wasn’t with him. God, how could you think that when I love you?

  But there are rumors, whispers, sightings . . .

  As he pumps into her at the drive-in, as he moves in and out, she whispers: Look at me, look at me.

  In the darkness, he sees her white teeth. A reflected movie light on her pale, tightened brow.

  Look at me, she whispers.

  He looks.

  But don’t stop moving.

  He sets a steady rhythm, not overly excited. They did this an hour ago. And the night before that. And the night before that, and he’s becoming a bit jaded about the whole thing.

  I wasn’t with him, she whispers. I swear to you, as you move in and out of me, as you move in and out of me, as you come, as we come together, I swear by the joining of our bodies.

  The therapist lies on the couch and lets out a long whistling laugh. “This is rich.”

  “I just didn’t know the truth,” Jim says. “That was the whole problem. I just didn’t know the truth. It was the not knowing the truth that bothered me. It was not knowing who you could trust. If you could trust anybody.”

 
; “You didn’t know the truth?” The therapist chuckles. “Sure you knew the truth.”

  “I did?”

  “We both know the truth. She was fucking Bobby G.’s lights out.”

  “You think so?”

  “She was fucking half the school. God, Jim, you are such an asshole. Don’t you see it? Your first love was a nymphomaniac. Have you kept up with her at all?”

  *

  Jim lies on his office floor, in a fury, snarling and trying to break one of the legs off his chair with his bare hands, and he realizes he must have read something that Dr. Dalton, the word terrorist, had written. But what? He tries to be careful, tries to screen out anything Dalton has written. Soon, he fears, he will not be able to read anything at all. The wrong word, the wrong syllable, throws him into a frenzy.

  Is it possible his own words could have such an impact? Not arousing fury, perhaps, but love, animated, wondrous thoughts, elevated thoughts, thoughts that will heal, soothe the huddled masses yearning to be free . . . Is that it, then? Is it a battle between Dr. Dalton and him? What if he could counter Dalton, produce a story so full of love that men and women working in spirit-killing corporations might drop their shorts in hallways, make love over copy machines . . . But no, no, he does not mean to advocate promiscuity, only the love-force at work in society, in the work place, in the home. Cicely, Cicely, did he misjudge her? Was she only trying to spread the love-force in her own way? If they had only known how to channel the love-force . . .

  For Your Eyes Only

  I summon the muses. Come to me, big Ernie, come to me now. A boxing story? Fishing? Hunting? I stalked the fat marlin through the sweet November woods in the Rocky Mountains, a big fish pausing on a broad rock as I took aim . . . I squeeze the trigger careful-like, real careful-like, nice and smooth and slow and careful-like and easy-like.

  I attended a parent-teacher conference when one of my kids was seven and the teacher was going on and on about his writing and how it wasn’t so hot and all, and she goes on and on and I’m thinking: Geez, I thought his stories were pretty good and all, imaginative, kind of lively, what are we expecting here from a seven-year-old? Chekhov? But she’s really raking him, and she’s going on about his “P’s” and his capital “E’s” and it sinks in on me that she’s talking about his handwriting. His penmanship.

  And it reminds me of one time when I was flying on an airplane with old Ernie and the fellow next to me was wondering what I did and I told him I was a writer and he thought that was great and asked me if it was hard to get all those letters on the little gold trophies. When I said I was a writer, he thought I meant I was an engraver. Old Ernie thought that was a riot, but after some Pernod at lunch, he got nasty and threw the poor fellow off the plane. Then Fitz stopped by and he and Ernie got loaded and pulled out their penises and compared them, and then J.D. who was sitting across the aisle slipped off to the restroom and we never saw him again.

  But I was trying to politely tell the teacher that I didn’t give too much of a damn about my kid’s penmanship. I wanted to know if the kid could write. Did he have the juice?

  Later I took him up to the loft and we worked on some stuff—a few b’s, a couple of o’s. I thought he wrote a mean Z. I mean it was an out of sight Z, and I called his teacher and I screamed: You should see the Z this kid wrote! It’s a beautiful Z!

  He couldn’t write, my mother’s ghost is saying on 60 Minutes. I mean he couldn’t handwrite. He drove the poor nuns nuts. They couldn’t read a word he wrote. No one had any idea for a long time that he could write.

  Mike Wallace gives a small, ironic smile. They didn’t think he could write?

  That’s right. They thought he was slow.

  And they said he couldn’t write?

  They said he couldn’t write.

  Do you ever wonder what would have happened if he’d believed them?

  Oh, he never doubted himself.

  Never?

  Not for a minute.

  Was he . . . arrogant?

  It was more like . . .

  He knew?

  He knew.

  He was too arrogant! My younger brother screams, appearing in the studio, an unscheduled appearance. He was an asshole! A real asshole!

  Mike Wallace gives his small, ironic smile. So some thought he was a real asshole? Did the nuns think so, too?

  Oh my yes, I think they always thought that, my mother says.

  I’m back on the plane and the fellow is saying: Engraving? That’s a great profession. How do you fit all those letters on those little gold trophies?

  The Hound of Death

  Ranger Alvin follows the tracks all the way back to camp and he’s hidden now somewhere on the edges of the camp in winter, picking the braves off one by one. Go out to gather some wood. The sound of a heavy ax falling against a head, and another one is gone. Sometimes Tom imagines that it’s his father, Edmund, come to rescue them.

  One morning Ranger Alvin rides through the camp shooting down everyone who comes out of the tipis. White Crane orders Tom to grab Alice and Will and the other children and run into the brush while White Crane rallies the braves for a counterattack.

  Ranger Alvin rides into the brush. He’s hot on them, breathing heavy, his ax swinging toward the head of a running child when Tom leaps up on the back of his horse and knocks him off. With his heavy armor Ranger Alvin can barely rise, but when he does, he looks into Tom’s blue eyes, snarls, “You traitor!”

  But Ranger Alvin is surrounded now by braves firing their weapons into him. Most of the bullets and arrows bounce off the armor, though some find their way through. He snarls at them with each new wound. He walks slowly, stiffly, toward one of the horses, leaves the brush as they shower him with arrows and he mounts the horse and he is off, riding across the prairie, but when he gets back to his cabin he falls into a deep depression and during that time he begins to question his ways. Why is it that I have known so much violence, he wonders. Why can’t I be at peace with my fellow man? What is it inside of me that has led me to be so out of balance?

  And it is said that Ranger Alvin no longer took up arms and was seen gardening, never wearing a stitch of clothing.

  A Mysterious Student

  Drops Off a Story

  A knock on his office door makes Jim spring up. It is a young man, Dave, one of his students, handing him a story. “Would you mind if I left this with you to read?” he asks.

  Jim stares suspiciously at him. “Did Dr. Dalton send you?”

  “Dr. Dalton?”

  “Never mind.”

  He leaves Jim with the manuscript. Jim sits at his desk, groaning. One never wants to be left alone with a student manuscript.

  I got drunk a lot back then, the young man wrote.

  He groans. Will he have to read a story about a young man getting drunk?

  There were two girls . . .

  Of course there were two girls. The drunken young man, the two girls . . . We are not off to a promising start here. But at least he is not flying into a rage, so apparently the manuscript wasn’t secretly written by Dr. Dalton.

  I think they were angels.

  Angels?

  I got drunk a lot back then. I lived in an efficiency apartment in Austin. I had a bed. I had a kitchen table and a couple of chairs. That was about it. One night the toilet ran over. I didn’t know what to do about it. I didn’t know anything about toilets, so I just tried to forget about it. I just let it run all night and in the morning I was tramping around the flooded apartment, so I went out for the day and when I came home that night there were the two angels sopping things up. I don’t know how they got in. You idiot, they said. Your apartment’s flooded. But they were nice about it.

  I’d start drinking on one end of Guadalupe Street. I went into a bar on the corner of Guadalupe and Martin Luther King and had a beer and a shot. The
n I went up Guadalupe Street to the next bar and I had a beer and a shot. I went up the street like that, stopping at every bar for a beer and a shot. There were seventeen or so bars that I could hit in a few miles. I walked the whole way so it was good exercise and it kept me from putting on weight, and then I’d walk home for miles and sometimes along the way heading home, there the two angels would be—and they’d laugh at me and link arms with me, one on each side of me, and lead me back to my apartment. I could never remember from time to time what their names were, or which one was which exactly. I’d just hear them laugh and there they were. I couldn’t even describe them exactly. One of them had bad acne but a great smile. One of them had long blonde hair. It was all very friendly. It wasn’t like we were going to have sex or anything.

  One night I passed out on the strip of grass outside my apartment complex. There they were, lifting me under the armpits, laughing. You can’t sleep here, Dave, they said, and up the stairs we went with their hands supporting me under the armpits. Angels. I read them my poetry. How beautiful, they said, we love it. I don’t know what they did during the day. I didn’t see them every night. Sometimes I wouldn’t see them for a few weeks and I’d think they were gone or wondered if I had imagined them, but then one night they would appear, walking beside me on the sidewalk as I staggered home from the bars. They’d laugh. Are you drunk, Dave?

  One night I cried. I guess so, I said. I guess I am drunk. I was twenty-one. I got drunk a lot and wrote poetry. I had a small inheritance from my grandfather. I didn’t have to work just then. I went to some classes. I wanted to find some meaning in life. I believed in God, sort of, but I wanted to do things my way. I just wanted an occasional assist from the angels.

  At the far end of Guadalupe Street, out where it got kind of wild and weedy, I came to the strip joints.

  I fell in love with a stripper named Candy. She was older, twenty-four, and she was gorgeous. I mean, you could see why she was a stripper. You could see the talent there. I guess, technically speaking, she wasn’t really a stripper. I mean she didn’t really come out with anything much she could strip off. She wore a g-string and pasties over her nipples and that was all except for some kind of gold band around her waist.