by Lee Gowan
“Do you still ride?” Erika shouted back, missing the point entirely. She obviously wasn’t hearing him properly. He leaned closer and she turned her head, offering the whorl of her ear and a dangling star-shaped earring.
“No,” he spoke directly into her. “Not since I was a kid.”
She said something he couldn’t catch, and he turned his head, offering his ear to her.
“How big is your ranch?”
“My father’s farm? A couple thousand acres.”
“A couple of … ! How big is that?”
“Ummm … Three square miles, give or take …”
Her gasp made him sit back and cross his legs.
“I envy you so much!”
Her shout was so loud that he heard every word clearly—so loud that the urban primitives at the next table, sporting enough metal in their faces to warm the heart of a steel company executive, turned to Sam and stared, apparently wondering what there was to covet in this man in the fancy suit.
“What do you mean?”
She read his lips and leaned closer, and he offered himself again, and this time he actually felt her lips brush his ear as she spoke.
“This city is eating me alive. You can’t imagine. Eating me … from the inside out. It’s insidious. I grind my teeth when I sleep. I’ve had to have three operations because I’ve worn out the sockets in my jaw.”
He nodded and glanced from her eyes to her damaged mouth, and finally down to her exposed cleavage, before he turned his ear to her again. “My dream is to get my own little place in the country some day. Horses, a few chickens, a big dog, maybe a llama. I love llamas. Heaven!”
Erika had been sitting next to him at a production of Carmen, had laughed out loud when the toreador stripped off his shirt and flexed his pectorals at them. During the intermission they’d started chatting, she complaining about how her date had stood her up again because he had to do some stupid heart operation, and after the show she’d asked him if he’d like to go for a drink and brought him to this tiny club with walls that looked like the inside of the threshing machine where his father had once caught him smoking. He ordered a glass of red wine and she ordered something called a Stir Trek, which turned out to be a fluorescent blue cocktail. She offered him a taste and he found it much like rubbing alcohol. He told her so: “It tastes like rubbing alcohol.” She shrugged and lifted her glass above a candle guttering in a rusted spherical pod that might have housed a hi-fi speaker back in the seventies.
“Looks cool, though, doesn’t it?”
When he stopped his rental car in front of her building, intending only to drop her off, she leapt on him, crushing his lips with hers to prevent any attempt at escape. This sort of thing had never happened to him before. He’d often fantasized about having sex with women other than Gwen (or rather, he’d often fantasized about having sex, period) but he had never pursued these daydreams—the condoms this afternoon notwithstanding.
The elevator in her building wasn’t working. Holding his hand, she led him up the stairs to the seventh floor. Before she unlocked her door, she kissed him like melting butter and whispered in his ear: “Ooooooooo, Cowboy. You look like you’ll be good for a ride.”
NOVEMBER 5th, 1970: NEAR BROKEN HEAD
NIGHT FALLS. Those two words make the passing of the last two hours sound almost perfumey and pleasurable, like a lovely lady in a dim parlour, but as a matter of fact there was nothing the least bit pretty about them. Yeah, I suppose there was the last light glittering the frost on the pines around the vegetable garden, the cornstalks leaning eastward, the blush in the sky where the sun showed its embarrassment for a day of feeble effort, but light and words are separate aliens who have only heard about each other on the radio. The long and the short of it was it was supper as usual. The five of us crowded around the old table, jostling elbows to shovel down what we need to keep us alive for another day’s trip to the outhouse.
Except that even the outhouse has been retired.
For some strange reason the son’s wife went and paid what had to amount to a half dozen bushels of wheat for a lamb’s leg that’d been shipped all the way from New Zealand. The small one sat there looking like the coyote having dinner with the weeping shepherd. Staring into his mashed potatoes and gravy. He was next to me, as usual. Sam by Sam. I’ve lost my spot at the head of the table. The son’s there now. You’d think he’d be embarrassed to sit in my chair—the chair I ordered with the others from the Eaton’s catalogue forty years ago, when he was no more than a pooping and screaming and puking little bit of red flesh, clutching at his mother. The chair I ordered to try and make his mother happy. Little good it did in the end.
There wasn’t much being said, aside from the usual muttered requests to pass the salt or the milk or the devil’s sorry soul—which, in fact, I’ve never been called on to pass, though for years now it has always been within arm’s reach—and so I decided to motivate a little discussion by tapping my fork on the corner of my plate and saying to the son, “The boy tells me the Chinaman’s buyin’ eggs.”
The son looked at me but, as is his practice, decided to calculate my agenda before responding, leaving it open to his other half to fill in the blank.
“Mr. Chong?” she asked.
“No. Chiang Kai-Shek.”
Once she’d uttered his name, she didn’t have much else to offer, so she looked to her husband and then at her plate.
“Anybody ask him what he figures about what’s goin’ on over in Vietnam? Young Sam and I were watchin’ it on your box just now. Watched them carryin’ out a few boys riddled fulla metal.”
The son sighed. The young one hunched a little more over his plate.
“You shouldn’t be watching that, Sam,” the son’s wife said.
“Of course he shouldn’t. We should toss the cursed box in the burnhole tonight. That’s the only way you’re gonna stop him from seein’ young men bein’ shot to pieces. At least he ain’t over there bein’ shot at, though. There was a young fellow from Wyoming, couldn’t be much older than Vern, tellin’ about how they got ambushed by … what do they call them now? Gooks. Used to be Japs, now they’re Gooks. I spoze that’s what they call progress. Anybody ask Mr. Chong about that?”
The son had figured out the lay of the land by that time, I guess. “No, Dad,” he said, “I don’t talk to Mr. Chong about Vietnam. Why would I? What would he care about Vietnam? He was born in Regina.”
I chewed for a moment in order to give the appearance of properly considering his question. “Well, bein’ a scientist and all, he must be a pretty smart guy. He might have an innerestin’ perspective on things.”
“He might,” the son nodded in his insolent way. “He thinks we should sell all the cattle and raise buffalo. They’re natural to this ecosystem, you know.”
That silly grin on his face.
“Yeah? I guess he’s never tried to brand a buffalo, then, has he?”
“No, I don’t spoze he has.”
“Funny how educated people are constantly talkin’ about things they know nothin’ about, ain’t it?”
“It is,” the son said, and he tore a bun in half, as if that sealed the matter.
This was generally the son’s strategy: work the conversation around to something we couldn’t very well help but agree on. He thinks that’ll satisfy me, and often enough it does. I am old and tired and reluctant. I am ready for a wooden box without a window.
We ate on in silence for a space, our silver scraping on the plates. Or stainless steel, I guess, as the son’s wife has packed away Mary’s silver in the china cabinet my brother bought Mary for a wedding present. John. The son’s named after my dad, and my brother was too. Buried him three years ago. Wasn’t much loss to the world or to himself as the Alzheimer’s or something had made him into a baby years before. Last time I visited he peed his pants right in front of me and started bawling like he wanted me to change him.
In the end, tired as I am, I could not hold
the peace.
“Well, if the Chinaman wants to turn the prairie back to the buffalo, then what does he want with my horse?” The son just kept chewing. “Or maybe he wants to make himself into an Injun. Is that it? Is he plannin’ on ridin’ Nitro while he shoots his bow and arrow at these buffalo of his?”
That got everybody looking at one another, but it was more than a few seconds before the son found his tongue.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, glancing at the boys to warn me to the fact that we oughtn’t to have this discussion in front of them. As if hearing their grandfather and their father raise their voices at one another is any worse than watching boys die on television. “Mr. Chong doesn’t have your horse,” he said.
“Where is my horse, then?”
The son looked down at his plate and stabbed a bit of the black sheep. “In a better place,” he said, before he put the meat in his mouth and chewed.
A better place. What would he know about a better place? There is no better place than this one, and if he doesn’t know that, then he doesn’t deserve it, and I’d like it back right now, thank you very much.
But that’s not what I said.
“You’ve got no right to sell my horse!”
Funny how a shock like that can make you so silly as to rely on something as flimsy as your own pitiful moral indignation. The son, bless his heart, just turned around and gave me back a little of his own.
“He wasn’t your horse. You gave him to me when he was a colt, when I was fifteen. Remember?”
I hadn’t seen that coming. I should have. When you give something to someone and they throw it away and you bend over to pick it up for safekeeping, more likely than not it’s about to become their most prized possession.
“But you never rode him.”
“I tried to ride him, and he threw me and broke my leg.”
“That’s right. You couldn’t ride him, so you sold him to the Chinaman. You think it’s a fine thing to be chasin’ the cattle around with a goddamned pickup truck. What kind of an excuse for a cowboy are you?”
He tried to smile, but the smile had long since been wiped right out of him. “He was too dangerous. I should have sold him years ago. He almost killed you.”
If I had two good legs, I’d have been jumping up and down. “He did nothin’ of the kind. Old age and my own stupidity almost killed me. To give you one for instance, I should’ve never bin stupid enough to give away this place to a whelp like you. Who’d a thought I’d hear my own son call a twenty-two year old horse ‘dangerous.’”
The son looked me up and down as though he was measuring me for that box I was desiring. “Old age doesn’t necessarily make you less dangerous.”
I had a hard time getting to my feet, which made me all the madder because it spoiled the effect of the exit I was trying to make. “That’s a truth you will learn to regret,” I told him, as I hobbled out of the dining room and off to my bed, like a whipped child, to sulk and lick my wounds.
At least I still have my old room. The only reason is because the boy built on an addition with a bigger bedroom for him and the wife. But then, maybe there is another reason. Maybe he’s afraid to sleep in here with the ghosts. It’s the same room I have slept in, mostly alone, for the last forty years. Not that Mary was the only woman who ever slept here. There have been others. Even when Mary was alive, there were others, though not as many as she seemed to think. Not that I give a damn what she did or didn’t think. And I told her so too. I asked her was it natural for a man to unzip his pants for one woman alone? I owned bulls, I told her, that had three heifers in an afternoon. So why should men be expected to be any different, if that was the natural state of things? And she asked me if I was no better than an animal, and I said, No, thank you, I guessed I was not, and that I hadn’t seen too many men who could make a claim to being half so good as the average animal.
Oh, yes. I was a cruel one. Cruel enough to speak the truth.
If the truth be known. And it will.
I found Mary in this room. Came in from checking the cattle and she didn’t answer when I called, and so I called again and the son woke up and started wailing, so I went in to check on him. I picked him up and held him in the crook of my arm, let him suck on my finger to stop the noise, and I walked on down the hall looking for her, calling again, “Mary,” already fairly certain what I’d find when I opened the door. I didn’t know beforehand—or I knew it, but I didn’t know I knew it until that walk down the hallway. I opened the door and there she was, and I didn’t even stand and stare but just turned around and took the boy back to his crib and put him down, and he started screaming again.
Then I went and cut her down.
“Cancer of the breast?” the neighbours say. “More like cancer of the heart.”
They blame me. Have blamed me all of these many years. As though I had told her where to set the chair and placed the rope around her neck. As though she had no other choice, considering my great evil.
We had talked about that. About choices. I had explained to her that our choice, this marriage thing, had obviously been a mistake, and it was my choice to make amendments. On the other hand, I did not want to take away choices from her, and so I would allow her to stay and live on with me if she could accept the arrangement as I saw it working for me. I would leave the choice to her, but she would need to realize that if she stayed it was by her own choosing.
She called me selfish, and I told her that freedom was a selfish thing. How could it help but be?
And so, in the end, she chose her own sort of freedom. Which was all well and fine with me. The neighbours blamed who they had to, but I guess I can shoulder the weight of an entire world’s blame if that’s what the world needs to feel all right about itself.
I hired a woman to nurse the son. With a bottle, I mean. Her breasts were empty. Not that I gained that knowledge by hand. I never touched Molly, though once again the neighbours whispered otherwise, which was not fair to Molly. Not that Molly cared any more than me. She, I have come to believe, was the perfect partner for a man. This man, at any rate. Ugly as sin and a bit of a battle axe, but she raised the boy up straight and tall and proud enough to put his father in his place. Five years ago, when her heart gave out, I mourned her more than I have any man or woman since my own mother and father. The son, I think, has not entirely gotten over mourning her yet.
The son does not even remember his real mother, and he has me to thank for hiring the one he did know, but he finds his own needs to blame me for Mary’s passing. Always has.
And now he has sold my horse out from under me, leaving me swinging, slowly turning, as Mary was when I walked into the room.
Fortunately, when I point my toes I can still touch the ground.
JANUARY 2nd, 1971: NEAR BROKEN HEAD
“THEY’RE NO DIFFERENT than children, these men are,” Irene’s mother had once told her. She was rolling some dough into a piecrust when she shared this secret. (It was something her mother had definitely said and the pie had definitely been apple). Irene remembered thinking at the time that “these men” meant her white father, whom she had never seen—not even in a photograph—and who was only ever mentioned in ways that suggested he might have been more than one man, almost any man: there were no real peculiarities about him worth working your tongue over. He was one of “these men,” who were this way or that. He was the average man.
It was Luke who taught her what her mother had meant. When he cried or fretted or was unhappy in any of the many peculiar ways he was unhappy, Irene put him to her breast and he was contented again. The only problem was (at present) the door handle against her backbone and (in general) the fact that her nipples were so sensitive the nuzzling gave her little electrical shocks that made her want to push him away, which was why she held onto his ears and tried to direct him. Eventually she would lower him down to her belly and then down even farther. She preferred his tongue down where he could do things to
her she would never have imagined possible—things even he didn’t seem to be aware were possible. It was not something they talked about, that’s for certain, and there was certainly no talking going on when she opened her eyes and saw that outside the Studebaker the whole world had been erased by blowing snow, leaving only a blank white square of windshield.
When she told him, Luke stopped what he was doing to check out the situation, but he said that they might as well go on with what they were doing, and maybe it would let up a little by the time they were finished. So they did, though Irene was distracted by the sound of the wind and the depth of the whiteness outside. And when they’d finished, it had not let up.
They sat awhile, waiting, until Luke admitted it wasn’t getting any better and decided they’d better try to get back to the highway. Irene had no idea which direction that was. She was too scared to ask Luke if he did. He must. He was driving.
Once they were out of the farmyard, even the glimpses of objects they’d been allowed—the farmhouse, the wooden grain bins—fell away, and they could no longer see a thing. Luke rolled down his window so he could see the edge of the driveway, and they crawled along towards the grid road, Irene staring ahead of her into the whiteness. And then they stopped, and Irene could hear the wheels spinning, and Luke said, “Shit.”
He made her get behind the wheel, though she wondered how she could drive them out when she had no idea where she was going. “Just go straight ahead. Don’t turn the wheel, whatever you do. And once you get rolling, stop!”
He got out and pushed from behind, rocking the car, but when she pressed the gas pedal she could hear and feel the tires spinning. Luke opened the door and scolded her for using too much gas, then took the key, and she heard him opening the trunk and getting the shovel. The storm was so wild that most of the time she could not even see him as he worked around the car, but every now and then, when he was only a few inches from the windows, his form would appear, bending, hurling the whiteness into whiteness. When he was satisfied he’d cleared a track, he came back and gave her more instructions, reminding her to keep the wheels straight and to give just a little gas. He went back and rocked the car and she touched the gas and felt the car start to move.