The Western Lonesome Society

by Robert Garner McBrearty

  Tom knows Will thinks of running off, of going back to the Comanches. Sometimes he thinks of it himself. He’s lonely, too. The other kids like him, but he feels a world apart from them.

  He rides his horse to the hill overlooking Alice’s house. Watches over her until the light fades. Time to get back for supper. He’s riding home on the wagon road when he’s confronted by six young braves from the old tribe.

  They surround him, three blocking the road ahead and three closing in from behind. Too late to draw his pistol. Too many of them. They know him. They’re friends. Or used to be anyway.

  They stand their horses in close to his. Laugh at his haircut and his clothes. They press in on him, horses snorting and tossing their heads. His hand lingers near his holster.

  The braves question him about the settlement, about who lives where, the number of people in each cabin, the number of men, the kinds of weapons they have.

  A lot of guns here, he says truthfully. If they hit a cabin, the Rangers would be on them before they made it back to the Red River.

  They glance nervously at each other. One of them takes hold of the reins of Tom’s horse. His voice turns soft and pleading: Come home with us.

  Maybe I’ll join up with you later.

  Their faces turn sullen. Look at those clothes. Cowboy now. They hunch forward on their horses.

  They ask about Will.

  Dead, he says.

  They were once his friends, his family. He warns them, in truth, that the Rangers are growing stronger, better armed, making more patrols.

  They don’t fear the army, but they fear the Rangers. They look about, eye the road north and south. He wonders if they’ll kill him. Or take him. His hand drifts to the butt of his gun. They know he’ll kill two or three of them anyway before they get him. They mutter, but they let him ride through.

  He feels their eyes on his back. He keeps his horse walking calmly, slowly.

  As he widens the distance, he kicks in his spurs at the same moment they give a war whoop. They’ve worked up their nerve. They’re after him now.

  The bullets whiz past. An arrow sticks in his saddle. Lucky they got even that close. They’ve mostly lost their knack with the bow and arrow. An old timer would have drilled him dead. He’d be riding right now with a two-foot shaft of arrow sticking through his breastbone. For a moment, he feels an old pride for White Crane. These young braves are just fools and incompetents compared to White Crane.

  He’s got a great horse, W. Ricky, tall and wide and black and fast. W. Ricky runs the race of his life, lathered and panting, Tom low over his saddle. He outdistances them, but leads them away from the cabins before turning back for home. Rides a trail to confuse them. Not that they can read tracks worth a darn, not like in the old days.

  But it’s only a matter of time now. They’ll ride back and tell White Crane, and White Crane will come for him. White Crane will kill him and his parents and take Will back. There will be no resting now, no peace. Every moment of every day, he will be on alert. He will kill White Crane or White Crane will kill him.

  The Trip to Spain

  Picture this: a man walks through his house in the dead of night and the stupendous flatulence of his Labrador wafts over him in the hallway. The Labrador gives him a quizzical look, releases another cloud of gas. The Labrador shuts its eyes, goes back to dreaming of squirrels. The man considers writing a children’s story, based on the Labrador’s relationship with squirrels. There is a big brown squirrel in the backyard, king squirrel, who taunts the old dog daily, showing him its buttocks and flying up and down trees. But one day, the Labrador traps a small red squirrel, prepares to eat it. But there is something in the squirrel’s eyes, something soft and innocent. He lets the squirrel run to safety. The king squirrel has witnessed this act of mercy. The king squirrel sends an emissary. Would the Labrador be willing to meet, to negotiate, to work out a treaty regarding usage of the backyard?

  The man puts this story on hold, spends a restless night. His wife is snoring, her mouth exuding a not-unpleasant odor of peanut butter. His teenagers are stirring in their sleep and calling out the names of girls. Who are these girls? What dreams are his boys dreaming? What kind of father has he been? He must take the children fishing and elk hunting. He must teach them how to box.

  His thoughts drift to their trip to Spain the last summer. His student Dave has suggested jazzing up the story of the trip, and the man has tried several versions, writing in the first person and in the third, but finally he decides to abandon Dave’s idea, abandon making things up, and just write it as pure memoir:

  We traveled to Spain, my wife, me, my fifteen-year-old son Leonard and my thirteen-year-old, George.

  There were some cobblestone streets going up a hill with white stucco buildings on either side of the narrow streets, and we had told the boys they could go walking on their own as long as they were back before dark, which was pretty late that time of year, oh ten p.m. or so. They had to be back at our quaint little apartment where my wife and I sat drinking sparkling water and discussing deep philosophical matters and learning interesting new things about ourselves, things we had put on hold for many years while we raised the children and focused on their needs, but we now realized it was important to work on our own relationship and I was suggesting we take off our clothes so that we might better see where we presently stood when there was a terrible rattle at the door below the apartment and we ran down to find George beating on the door and crying out that Leonard had disappeared. They had been walking when Leonard was just gone.

  He had turned his head in time to see a shape, well, it might have been more a shadow, he had a sense of more than one man somehow close, and then he looked frantically around, beat on doors, and a few people came out and scratched their heads and looked at him and he tried to speak Spanish and they invited him in, and he sat for a while in a kitchen with some friendly people and it occurred to him that, friendly and cheerful and helpful as they were, they knew nothing about Leonard so he ran back here to see if his older brother had returned.

  But he hadn’t. And my wife and I ran out with George up the hill to where Leonard had disappeared but there was no sight of him. We looked around and then went down to the police station and through some bars I saw Leonard bare from the waist up and he let out a terrible howl and I said that was my son.

  The police said that he had committed a crime, but Leonard shook his head, indicating he was innocent.

  I felt my wife at my side, urging me to do or say something.

  Perhaps this wasn’t a good idea, but I cold-cocked the policeman nearest to me, took him down with one punch and grabbed his gun and ordered the police to release Leonard at once, which they did. I took all their weapons and marched the police into the cell and locked the door. “Cool,” George said. “Should we all take a gun?”

  “No guns,” I said. “We can’t shoot our way out of this one. We’re going to have to use our heads.”

  We recovered Leonard’s shirt from a hook on the wall and we all ran out of there.

  “Now what?” my wife asked.

  “We’ll need to change our appearances.”

  We stopped into a pharmacy and bought some hair dye and scissors and we went back to our apartment and changed the color of our hair and cut the kids’ hair short, which I’d been wanting to do for some time anyway. By the time we got back downtown to the bus station, though, it was obvious that we were in trouble. There were police all over the place and they were checking passports. There were some big dogs out. The mood was ugly and tense and some rippling conversation went through the crowd that there were four crazy Americans loose somewhere in the city. We looked at each other.

  We had noticed some rough streets not too far away where drunks would simply lie down for the night and sleep it off, and we went there, arranging ourselves as comfortably as we could on the cobblestone s
treets. We passed the night uneventfully, even got a fair night’s sleep considering, and in the morning there was a social station set up at one end of the alley and we were given some hot coffee and donuts.

  The bus station was guarded and the train station would be as well, so we decided our best bet would be to stay in town for a while. We went into an internet café and my children were able to use the computer to find us a vacancy. Why yes, it was available today.

  We walked there, met a friendly man who showed us in. But then there was something about us that alarmed him. We didn’t want to do this, but we had no choice. We tied him up and put him in one of the beds, assuring him that we would make sure he was safe.

  My wife was starting to have some problems with all of this. She wondered if we should consider turning ourselves in, but the rest of us voted her down. We figured someone might come looking for the man, so we couldn’t stay here long, but it was nice to get a breather and we all had a good shower. We loosened the ropes on the man so that he would not be too uncomfortable.

  From there, we got on a tour bus that took us to an old castle on the edge of town. We mingled in with the other tourists and spent a pleasant day taking photos. But we noticed one of the security guards glancing our way and we became nervous.

  A bunch of police with their guns drawn charged our way. We ran up some stairs and out onto a tower. We looked below, saw a glimmer of green river, and jumped. We went perfectly into the water and shot downstream. We clutched onto the side of a barge and dragged ourselves on.

  The rest of it was rather simple, some time in the desert in Morocco, a period with a nomadic bandit tribe.

  I guess the difficulty in telling a story like this is that people wonder if you’re telling the truth or making something up. I’ve simply tried to tell it the way it really happened. I think we were all closer as a result. There’s something about a family sticking together through a crisis.

  The Therapist Weighs In

  There you are on a summer’s day, feeling fine, sitting in your office, when suddenly you’re bent over, holding your guts, breaking into a sweat, and the next moment you’re punching the walls and you know you’ve been had by Dr. Dalton. He’s snuck something into your reading material. You’re in a frenzy. As you leave the office, you hear Dalton cackling from down the hallway.

  So you go to see your therapist in the room above your garage.

  “You know what I fear, Jim?” the therapist says.

  “What?”

  “I fear you’re losing your fucking mind, that’s what I fear. Can I tell you a story, Jim? I grew up in Venice. Venice, California. I was just a surfer kid. Golden. Beautiful. Mindless. Getting my rocks off every night. Can you imagine the thrill of stripping a tiny bikini off a woman with an amazing body? I mean, what’s better than that? But one day my best friend was eaten by a shark. Right in front of my eyes. One moment we were as happy as could be, riding a wave, and the next thing you know there was only a surfboard there and a pool of blood.

  “My point? I see that you’re expecting me to say I mended my ways, cleaned up my act. Well, I didn’t. I became even more promiscuous. I became a drunk. I wandered the beach cafés and got drunk and I lowered my standards. I’d screw anyone. I screwed some real prizes. But I burned inside, Jim. I burned with pain and anger and yearning. I sought out prostitutes. I read the classics. It was meaning I wanted. Meaning. But all I found was brutal sunlight and naked flesh. Am I boring you, Jim? Actually our time is up. Leave a check on the desk and close the door quietly.”

  “But I live here.”

  “Who asked for your opinion?”

  The Story of the Major

  Time to go boxing.

  He’s talking about the real boxing. He’s not talking about a couple of lean, well-trained guys fighting for millions of bucks.

  He’s talking about a couple of middle-aged guys flailing away at each other in a palooka gym until Jim falls to one knee, gasping, not because he’s been hit but because he’s out of breath, and there’s no one to cheer, no one to yell: Get up, you lunk!

  So he has to hear that voice inside. And just why the hell should he get up anyway? There he is, caught in an existential dilemma. Get up, why? No money at stake. Past pride. Past hope. Listening to his own breath whistle raggedly. Wheezing. Heart pounds. This could all be over. He could easily say, “That’s enough today.” Get up, why?

  Perhaps images of his entire life sweep over him as he pauses there on a knee, considering . . . Oh, probably not. Just how quickly does the subconscious work after all, and isn’t that a big load really, a big fictional load that allows characters to have these enormous breathtaking revelations and lyrical flashbacks and flashforwards all in a matter of seconds and what probably goes through Jim’s mind as he rests on one knee, panting, is the simple thought: I’m going to have a heart attack . . . The gym coach asks, “Are you going to get up, Jim? Do you want to call it a day?”

  Why the hell should he get up? But for the hell of it, let’s say that he is swept by images of his life. Let’s go ahead and say that he is remembering a sports glory day of his youth. He’s seventeen and a senior, graduating in a month. He didn’t play on the football team the last couple of years, had a run-in with his coach. But he’s in a pick-up game with some of the guys from the team. They’re toast. They can’t tackle him. They lunge futilely at him. His short powerful legs propel him through their grasping arms, and they know he’s the best player out there even if he didn’t play on the team. He had the best trainer there ever was, his brother Len. Len showed him everything there was to know about football, played with him so many afternoons and evenings he’d grown fast and cagey chasing Len, dodging Len. This is it. This is all the sports glory he’ll ever have—this day. He won’t make an eighty-yard run in the Rose Bowl. He will not be featured in Sports Illustrated. And even Cicely will not be there to throw herself into his arms and whisper: My hero. But on an evening in April, as his senior year draws to a close, he will have this. This moment.

  They play late into the evening. It’s too late in the year to worry about studying. They’ll all graduate anyway. The war’s winding down, the draft over. No worries for the future. So they’ve got this, this long afternoon and evening and into the gloom of dusk as they play and play and play, the real football, the unpadded tackle football. As the other boys, the players from the team, grow weak and tired, he grows stronger with each run, surges with power and energy, makes cuts that he’s never made before, cuts that no one has ever made—leaves one hip behind, separates his thighs from his knees. And finally makes no cuts at all, just plows over them, drags eight or nine players across the field. He’s unstoppable. His own teammates join the other side. He plays alone against twenty of them. Still, they can’t stop him. They mutter among themselves. Their own accomplishments seem as straw. And yet, they are exhilarated, too. They have touched greatness this day, this spring evening as the light fades.

  And Jim O’Brien, on one knee on the canvas in a palooka gym in a small city somewhere in the West, is swept by images of that day. So is it some dream of glory that makes him rise from the canvas?

  No, no dream of glory. But maybe he wishes to honor that young man of many years before, and so he rises.

  “Are you sure?” Ron, the gym coach, asks. “Do you still have the gas?”

  “I’ve got plenty of gas,” he says, and he lets out one to show them.

  “Geez,” Ron says, waving his hand to ward off the malodorous fumes which waft over the ring.

  “Hey, let’s stop,” his boxing partner Pete says, “if you’re going to fight that way.”

  Voice thick through the mouth guard, Jim says, “Let’s go.”

  And they go on, beating the living daylights out of each other. Later, Pete will go back to his job as a certified public accountant, but for now these two middle aged men are boxing, the real and the true boxi
ng in a dead end gym in a forgotten corner of the world.

  *

  Brief interview on 60 Minutes with football players from the day in question:

  Frank R.: “I wouldn’t describe it quite like that.”

  John S: “I remember something. I mean the guy could play. When he wanted to. He was kind of a loafer as I recall.”

  Ronnie C: “It’s bull. If he was that good, why didn’t he play on the team?”

  Arnold W: “Yeah, it was pretty much what happened. It was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever witnessed. Not that big a guy, and he dragged us all across the field. He whipped our asses.”

  Bobby G (laughing): “We went to school together? To tell the truth, I don’t remember him at all.”

  *

  Back in the boxing gym, Pete, who may be a ringer, ex-Golden Gloves or something, hammers him in the forehead, and Jim sinks to a knee again.

  Pete stands over him, bounces on his toes, blue mouthguard full of foam, blood at the rims of his nose. “I’m sorry, Jim. Are you okay?”

  Which is good boxing. Which is good attitude boxing. None of this prancing around stuff, taunting your opponent, snapping your teeth and beating your chest.

  Good manners is what real boxing is all about.

  He pants. Down on one knee, forearm across thigh. And as he pauses there, more images and flashbacks sweep over him.

  He’s at a sleepover at his friend’s house, a Vietnamese kid adopted by an American fighter pilot, a Major. He’s a tiny, slender kid, but he grew up fighting to survive in the orphanage, and when a bully at the parochial school pesters him, he drops to a squatting position and grabs hold of his testicles, latches on with both hands and squeezes with steely little fingers. Ignores punches and kicks and squeezes until the bully collapses and blubbers for mercy, beating in agony at the warm grass of the playground, the steely fingers still squeezing. Squeezing. Squeezing, while the bully sobs and writhes in the grass, kicking his feet and blubbering. No one bullies him after that.