“I told you I don’t allow anyone to hurt a woman,” he said.
I let the cowboy go on talking because he seemed to need it, and because my stories about working with teenagers and grading papers paled beside his tales.
“Do you think you could fix me something to eat now?” he asked me after his second beer. “That’s how my last girlfriend got me. She promised me three squares a day.”
I didn’t know if spaghetti and leftover chicken constituted a square meal, but that was what I had in the house, so that was what I made the cowboy. He went through three helpings, along with four slices of bread. If I’d made more food, he would have eaten it, but there was no more. For dessert, I put half a pack of cookies on a plate and the cowboy ate all but the one I took to keep him company.
“I gave my last four hundred dollars to my friends,” the cowboy told me then. “I’ve been staying with them, and they’ve been feeding me. And Monday I have a doctor’s appointment.”
And that’s when I knew precisely where things stood with him.
After dinner the cowboy hobbled down to the dock with me and watched me swim, and then we came back to the cabin and he went through my video collection to find something for us to watch. He picked out a PBS documentary about the West that I was previewing for my American literature class. At one point when some scholar was talking about Crazy Horse, the cowboy leaned close and kissed me, as I’d been hoping he might. But the thing went no further, not even when I said, “Hmm, that was good.”
“It was just chicken scratch,” he said, and we went on watching the documentary.
It wasn’t until the video was over and the cowboy said, “Well, I guess I should be going,” that I realized there was a formula I was supposed to follow, a series of offers to be made and rejected, then revised and accepted.
“It’s awfully late,” I said, and it was— nearly two a.m. “You can stay here if you like.”
“I can sleep on the sofa.”
“You can sleep in the bed with me if you want,” I said, and then I quickly went into the bathroom to brush my teeth so he could have a second to mull it over.
That must have been how long it took him to decide, too, because by the time I came back from the bathroom, he was stripped down to his underwear and lying on the bed. When I saw him, I felt the same thing I always felt when I was about to lie down with a stranger— I loved the directness of it, the intention. I felt it even more strongly when I saw the cowboy’s body. His bare chest and the dark hair on his thighs made me want to lie down with him. But something about him— knowing he had a bum knee, or even the full white briefs he was wearing that made him look old-fashioned—something about him made me wonder if he didn’t need a soft place to fall more than he needed a lay.
It was only after we were lying in my bed— him in his white underwear and me in a cotton nightgown with my eyes closed, trying to pretend I was going to sleep— that he revealed the next part of the formula.
“Are you attracted to me?” the cowboy said into the dark room. He sounded unsure— unsteady, even— and I thought about what he might feel like, lying there in the rough cabin with his crutches beside the bed. He wasn’t whole, but what ever it was that had driven him to seek out company must have been stronger than what ever pain he was in.
“I am attracted to you,” I said.
It was all I had to do. The cowboy rolled over from lying on his back and pulled himself on top of me. After a couple minutes of kissing and rubbing at my breasts, he lifted himself with his good leg and worked his way inside of me. Because he couldn’t hold his weight evenly, he lay heavily on me. I told myself that was why I felt a kind of panic, but it was more than that. He was a foot taller than I was, and strong, even with his bad leg, and even though I’d felt such desire for him all evening, once he got inside me, the plainness of the act struck me. It felt rushed and wrong.
When the cowboy came after just a little while, he shook his head from side to side, like he was seizuring. Then he made a sound I’d never heard a man make before. It was a cross between a whine and a howl, like a coyote or a dog. The whole thing scared me, and I felt some kind of shiver at the back of my neck and over my scalp, but I told myself, That’s just the way he is, that’s just hisway. And in a second or two, even though the sound scared me, I wanted it, too. Wanted him to be an animal.
After it was over, he rolled off me but kept one hand wrapped in my hair. I still felt the shivery thing over my scalp, but I also felt bound to him, to the naked thing he’d shown me.
“You’ve got me here now,” the cowboy said then. “What are you going to do with me?”
At first I thought it was some of the same bad temper I’d heard when we’d stopped in Emmaville, but when I looked at him in the dark— there was enough moonlight coming in the window that I could see his face clearly— I saw it wasn’t that at all. So I climbed over his bad leg, spread his thighs, and took his cock in my mouth. Then there was nothing he could say.
The second time we screwed, I sat on top of the cowboy. The ceiling of the cabin was so low that once I straddled him, I could touch it. Not just touch it— I could press my palms flat against it. I did it a few times, so he could see my breasts go high and so I could have something to brace myself against as I fucked him. It was better that way than the first time when he’d been on top.
“Am I hurting you?” I asked, thinking of his bum knee and the crutches beside the bed.
“You hurt me good. Grind away.”
I did it hard enough that he moved up on the bed a little with each push. That kind of screwing didn’t make me feel much of anything, but I liked seeing him move like that.
When he came, he shook his head again and made the same sound he had the first time. I was ready for it this time.
When I got up in the middle of the night to walk down to the dock to swim, the cowboy didn’t wake or even shift on the bed. I knew it was the beer and the fucking that made him sleep so hard, but it made me marvel. Now that I had fucked him, he stayed fucked, asleep and entirely trusting, even though I was a stranger to him. I could have gone through his wallet or gone out to the kitchen to get a knife. Yet I didn’t want a knife, and I knew he didn’t have any money. I didn’t even want to check his driver’s license to see if he had told me his real name.
The next morning, when we woke up, I gave the cowboy a blow job. I kept the head of his penis in my mouth and worked my lips and hand over the shaft of his cock until he came. When he was done seizing and howling, he said, “No one ever done me like that before.”
I didn’t know if he meant he never got to come in a woman’s mouth before, or if my combination of hand and blow job was unique. I thought I might ask, but as we were lying there, sweetly, the cowboy lightly fingered the notches in my throat.
“See, you can go in with your finger, right between the ridges,” he said.
I could have knocked his hand away or told him he was scaring me, but I did neither. Instead I went still like an animal and in a little while he moved his hand away from my throat.
We had sex a couple more times that morning, and then I made us coffee, eggs, and home fries. When the cowboy tried my coffee, he told me it was too strong.
“It’s good for another kind of a day, when you want to get something done,” he said. “Another day I’ll sit here on your sofa and read the paper and you can make me that kind of coffee.”
So I poured myself a cup, threw the rest out, and started a new pot for him.
When the cowboy and I sat down to eat, I told him how I’d found the cabin to rent.
“I don’t miss anything about the things I left behind,” I said. “I wish I could just stay here.”
“Why don’t you?”
“It’s a summer cabin. I couldn’t make it through the winter here. And I have a job to go back to in September.”
“If you like it, you should stay. You’d find a way. At least you have a place you want to be.”
“Why, where would you like to be? Where’s home for you?”
“Always the questions!” the cowboy said, laughing, leaning back in an old wooden chair until it tipped back on two legs. “I haven’t had a home since I was thirteen. That’s when I went to work with my uncle. And that’s when I became ‘as one dead’ to my family. Did you ever hear of that?”
“Is it a religious thing?”
“It’s what you do to someone who doesn’t believe in Jehovah, even if it’s your own son.”
I was going to ask if it was like shunning, which I’d heard about, but then I looked at the cowboy’s face. He seemed deeply troubled— angry and agitated. It happened in an instant, too, just the way it had seemed to happen the night before when his mood went from teasing to impatient right before my eyes. So I didn’t say anything. I just sat, listening and watching. Picking quietly at my eggs.
“My own mother and father,” he said after a while. “I’ve been on my own ever since. To them I don’t exist.”
“So that can’t be your home.”
“No can do.”
“Well, maybe the thing to do is pick a place where you’re happy,” I said. “Pick a place and say, ‘This is it.’ ”
“Do you think?” the cowboy asked.
At first I thought he was making fun of me for trying to make it all sound so simple. You know, that I thought he could just pick a place and it would make everything all right. But I looked at his face and I saw he wasn’t making fun of me at all. He was asking me, genuinely.
“Yes,” I said. “I think maybe the thing to do is decide to try to be happy.”
“Do you think I could make a living down where you live?”
“In the Cities? It depends what kind of work you do.”
“Heating and air-conditioning. I’ve been in it for fifteen years.” “I don’t see why not. There’s plenty of people down there. Plenty of businesses.”
“Could I move in with you?”
“Do you want to move in with me?”
“Would you have me?”
“Sure,” I said. “Sure. I’d love to have you.”
It was out of my mouth before I could stop it. But after I said it, I realized I meant it. Just as I had felt myself open up to him the night before when he shuddered and howled, it now seemed like something inside of me was breaking open again.
He nodded then, but we didn’t talk about it anymore— we just went back to bed and he ki-yi yowled for me again.
When the cowboy said goodbye that afternoon— after we called out to the Silver Dollar in Cody to see if anyone had found Bud Dog, after he took a shower and gave me a narration of his scars, after I marveled again at the smoothness of his skin and the exact quality of softness and hardness I felt in his arms, after he let me help him with his leg brace— he told me he’d call me the next day when he got back from his doctor’s appointment.
“We’ll make some plans,” he said.
“All right,” I said. “All right, then.” And I gave him the rest of the cookies for the trip back to Blackduck.
The rest of that day and the next morning, I thought of him, sketching out our life back in Minneapolis. I thought daydreamily about the way things could be, but I also made myself think about what I’d be taking on with him, with his moodiness and seeming destitution. They were warning signs, I knew— I knew that. But difficult people were capable and deserving of love— I knew that, too. And none of it mattered anyway, because for what ever odd set of reasons or pheromones, I’d already fallen in love with the cow-boy. I’d already decided to open my life to him.
20
BUT THE COWBOY NEVER CALLED. Not the day he said he would, or the day after, or the day after that. When I finally broke down at the end of the week and called the Blackduck number he’d left when he answered the ad, I only reached his friends.
“He’s gone back to Wyoming,” the wife told me. “He had some business to settle there.”
When she said that, I thought of the conversation Julian and I had had a long time ago, when we were just becoming friends.
“I always think it’s love,” I’d told him. “I always think sex will be a mainline to the heart.”
“You mean every time you screw, you think you’ll fall in love?” “I’m usually a bit in love already,” I said. “It’s stupid, I know.” “It’s not stupid,” Julian said. “It’s just a fucking tragic flaw.”
It was impossible to explain to him in his world-weariness what I meant, what I believed in my heart, what I still believed. It wasn’t that I thought every lay was love, and there was a part of me that doubted everything about the cowboy. Even as I was bewitched by him, I’d wondered at some of the things he’d said, which seemed like lines from some Merle Haggard song.
But without some belief on my part, without some spirit of generosity, there was no point in bothering with any of it. No point in stripping down, in spreading my legs, in opening myself. At the moment I picked a man, he was not troubled, not rough traffic, not just the embodiment of animal magnetism and sexual attraction. At the moment I picked a man, he held all possibility, all eloquent potential. And if only he could turn out to be what he promised to be at the outset, he would be— could be— a great love. That was the river I kept going to, drinking from. It didn’t matter if the cowboy was what he said he was or not. Something in me liked something in him. If he had frightened me the first time he fucked me, he had also opened me up. I don’t know how else to say it.
“Tell Brill I asked about him,” I said to the wife. “When you speak to him again, tell him I wish him the best.”
And I hung up the phone.
21
I DIDN’T WANT TO CALL JULIAN with the story of my latest failure in love— as appropriate as his lecture would have been, I still didn’t want to hear it. But I felt fragile and distracted, so I started a letter to Breville. He was someone faithful to return to, if only on paper.
“Sometimes it seems my life has been shaped by my rape— the entire last seventeen years,” I wrote to Breville. “If I had to say one thing that has been the most damaging, it has been constantly seeing myself in the light of that night. Constantly wondering what I might have been like if it hadn’t happened. Would I be able to be friends with men instead of just fucking them? Would I see them and myself differently? Would I see my vagina differently? My pussy? My cunt?”
I threw the letter away. It made me seem like too much of a victim. And instead of writing to Breville at all, I got in the car and drove down to Stillwater to see him. I told myself the drive would do me good, get me out of the space I was in, but of course it wasn’t just that. I wanted to see Breville just like I would any friend.
I’d never shown up like that, unannounced, and I waited a long time before the guards called, “Visit for Breville.” And when I got into the visiting room, to the taped-off square, I could see the concern on Breville’s face before he embraced me.
“What’s wrong?” he said as he held me. “Did something happen?”
“Nothing happened,” I said.
When we got to a couple of chairs— not our usual spot, because it was late in the day, and the visiting room was crowded— Breville asked me again if something was wrong.
“Really, nothing’s wrong,” I said. “It’s just been a hard week. I needed to get away.”
I could see I’d alarmed him, so I made myself sit back. He kept watching me, and I let him. I watched him, too. He looked different than he had other days. His hair was neat, but I could see he hadn’t showered or shaved that day, and he was wearing a dark green T-shirt, jogging pants, and prison-issue canvas shoes.
“You caught me off guard,” he said when he saw me looking. “I was actually cooking dinner.”
“You get to cook?”
“We make things on our wing,” he said. “We have a micro wave and put together stuff from the commissary. Prison cuisine.”
“I probably shouldn’t have dropped in on you.” “Don’t sa
y that,” Breville told me. “I’m glad to see you. But what happened?”
“Life,” I said. “Just life.”
He seemed to relax a little the longer I sat there, but I could see he still wondered what it was all about. And I think on some level he must have known, because after about fifteen minutes of small talk he said to me, “You don’t have to do my time with me, Suzanne.”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t need to do my time with me. You need to live your life.”
“I am living my life.”
“Are you?”
“I am,” I said. “Living my life. Believe me.”
He looked at me for a long time when I said that. Neither one of us said anything then.
In a little while a voice came over the loudspeaker, saying, “Breville, five minutes.”
I’d been there for less than an hour, not my usual two.
“They limit it sometimes,” Breville said. “When the room’s crowded. Can I call you? Are you staying down here to night with your friend?”
“I didn’t make any plans.”
“So you’re driving back up there?”
“It stays light late.”
“Do me a favor, then,” Breville said. “I want you to call my mother. Call her and talk to her.”
“Why should I call your mother?”
“She’s good to talk to. You can talk to her about anything.”
“I’m okay,” I said. “I have friends to talk to. I just needed to go for a drive and I came down here. There’s nothing to worry about.”
“Then call her for me.”
“For you?”
“I mean, call her for me. Do it for me. I want her to know you.”
“Can I think about it?” I said. “Can you let me think about it?”
“Sure you can think about it. Of course you can.”
Still, he said her number several times and asked me to repeat it twice.
“Just in case,” he said.
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