The Last Cowboy

by Lee Gowan

  “It was Vern,” he said, so Gwen would know he hadn’t lost his mind. The expression she gave in response, however, did not suggest that the attempt to convince her of his sanity had been entirely successful.

  The fire had spread like a river finding an opening in a dam. Sam ran down the hill for a pail of frog pond, but by the time he got back the balestack was spewing flames and greasy black smoke into the pretty blue of the sky, and the intensity of the heat made it impossible for him to get close enough to toss his gallon of green water onto the inferno. This, he now knew, was what always happened when you tried to make the imaginary become real.

  Vern argued that it would be better if Sam took the blame, because he was young enough—only six—that his behaviour could be excused. Vern, at ten, was old enough to know better. So Sam agreed and confessed to the crime, saying Vern had not known he had the matches, and he had lit the fire when Vern wasn’t looking. In the end, it didn’t matter much. Their parents were overwhelmed by the scale of their mischief. Old Sam said they both ought to have their hides tanned, but their father didn’t seem to think that would be an adequate punishment for burning down a barn.

  “True enough. They hang barn burners,” Old Sam told them, with a weary shake of his head.

  A few months later, when Vern stole Sam’s favourite toy car and blew it to pieces with a .22, Sam told his mother what had really happened that day at the balestack. For this revelation, Sam was given a sound spanking and ordered never to tell lies. And so it was that at six Sam learned that, once surrendered, truth was not so easily recovered.

  “I love him,” Gwen said.

  “Pardon?”

  He turned to her. She gripped the wheel with grim fortitude, staring straight ahead. “I love Vern. And he loves me. And I can’t live without love any longer. You don’t love me, Sam. Don’t lie to yourself about that. All you care about is your career. And there’s nothing wrong with that—you really are good at what you do. Not just good. You could be a … anything you want. I really believe that. I don’t think I should stand in your way any longer. Vern and I want to be very open about what’s happening. We want to do the right thing. The children are the most important thing the three of us have to consider in all of this.”

  “Vern?”

  She gave him a look that suggested he’d said something particularly offensive. “Well, what the hell did you expect?”

  It was perhaps the most ridiculous rhetorical question Sam had ever been asked. “Not this,” he blurted.

  She kept staring straight ahead. “Well, then you’re even more blind than I’d given you credit for.”

  He too looked ahead at the road to see what it was she saw up there that he couldn’t quite make out. Nothing. Just an endless broken yellow line shut in by two unbroken white borders and a white Corvette they were fast overtaking.

  “I guess that’s right. I guess I must be the blindest man in the whole wide world.”

  “It doesn’t matter anymore,” she said. “It’s out in the open now. Vern and I couldn’t stand to live this lie any longer.”

  They whizzed past the Corvette, its driver glancing at them with revulsion.

  “You and Vern wanted to do the right thing.”

  She turned to him and scowled. “What do you mean by that?”

  “That’s what you said: you and Vern wanted to do the right thing.”

  She held him in her gaze long enough to transform her face into the most profound look of hatred he had ever seen directed his way, and he had seen many profound looks of hatred from clients whose loan requests he had refused.

  “Fuck you,” she said.

  Finally, she turned back to the road.

  “Stop the car,” he said.

  Apparently she didn’t hear him.

  “Stop the fucking car!”

  She braked gradually, signalling so that the Corvette was able to avoid rear-ending them, and they rolled along the shoulder for a hundred yards before they were finally stationary, her shoulders heaving with a heavy sigh, relieved of a burden that had at long last been lifted. She didn’t look at him. He opened the door and stepped out into the wide world. The wind hit him immediately, clearing his head. He did not shout one last damnation at her, and he didn’t slam the door, just shut it firmly so that it clicked into place. Superb German engineering. There were hints of beauty in the most unlikely places. As matter-of-factly as she’d stopped, Gwen proceeded again. Standing in the crested wheat just off the shoulder of the road, the hot wind whipping past him, he watched her disappear.

  He stood there waiting for her to return.

  Twenty minutes later he had begun to understand that she wasn’t going to appear over the horizon any time soon.

  He thought about death. For the first time in his life, he really wished he were dead. He had the feeling that if he were to lie down and fall asleep he might never wake up. Was that possible? Or would he have to make some greater effort? He didn’t have the energy. He was just too tired.

  For many minutes he stared at the surface of the highway, shocked to realize that there were bits of glass sparkling in the concoction of tar and sand that made up the asphalt. The highway was made of glass, stars of blue light, fragments of broken windshields. All those rubber tires supported by glass. Gradually, the fascination passed. For another while he threw rocks at an Elrose 15 sign and considered throwing them at the few cars that straggled by, the drivers swivelling their heads, curious about the man in the Italian suit glaring at them from the side of the road.

  She was fucking his brother. For how long? Had it possibly been years? Was that why she had stopped making love to him? There had been so many excuses. After Benjamin was born, she told him she no longer felt like a woman, only like a mother, and he’d have to be patient. And then, when that phase passed, she’d simply told him she was tired. When he reached across the bed to touch her, she would kiss him and say, “Good night. Go to sleep.” And, after all, Ben was still waking them at night. She was still feeling like a mother, though she did not make that excuse. She was just tired or didn’t feel like it. And then after another year, when Sam had begun to feel like a toy that had been wound too tightly too many times, she had told him that she no longer felt that way about him. He had changed. He was too distant. He wasn’t romantic enough. He was too uncommunicative. Too dark and brooding. (Weren’t dark and brooding once considered romantic?) All he cared about was the bank. It was his fault she didn’t want to make love with him.

  The broken toy had changed.

  The worst of it was that he’d believed all of these excuses. He’d blamed himself entirely. He’d scolded himself for making sex so important to his happiness. If he could get over the wanting of it, the fixation on it, he could start to do things that had once made her love him and their lives would be better again, and maybe she would even want to make love to him again.

  Should he start hitchhiking? She’d expect him to catch a ride and roll into town in a couple of hours. But what then? He couldn’t go home and he couldn’t face his parents, and he couldn’t stand the thought of the pleasure any of his clients and acquaintances would be deriving from his predicament. He imagined the entire town of Broken Head seething with stories, exchanging details of his cuckoldry over beer and peanuts, tea and sugar cookies.

  How could they?

  How dare they humiliate him?

  The only possibility of salvaging any dignity was to kill them both.

  It wasn’t that he believed he could actually accomplish the deed, but it was the only thing he could think about that gave him any relief from his anguish. What would he use? One of his father’s rifles? The little .22 Vern had once used to obliterate his toy Camaro? He visualized the barrel against Vern’s forehead, the expression on Vern’s face, the recoil, the bloody emulsion of bone and brain spattering the wall behind Vern’s head, the impact of the body hitting the floor and settling with a slight bounce.

  He’d noticed in movies how bodies
bounced when they struck pavement or floor.

  Was it dangerous to hitchhike in an Italian suit?

  Saskatchewan. There was a tumbleweed stuck in the barbed wire fence across the ditch. He walked over, pulled it free, and threw it into the pasture, but it caught again in a clump of wild mustard. He climbed through the fence and gave it a kick to set it free and it bounced off across the field, stirring up small puffs of dust with its progress. If he’d done this to gain some sense of satisfaction or accomplishment, he found that he had not succeeded. He climbed back through the fence, careful not to snag his suit on the barbs.

  Back on the shoulder of the highway, he took a deep breath and, for no definite reason, started walking south, in the direction of Broken Head, in the direction of home, but he was not going home, he was watching the broken line at the centre of the highway, thinking—yes, actually thinking that there was no sense in looking at life as a linear series of events building in some general progression towards death. No sense believing a life could be neatly encompassed by something definitively unified by a self named Sam McMahon. He was walking beside a highway in the middle of nowhere. What business did Sam McMahon have here? There was a farmhouse in the distance he’d never ever noticed before on the million trips he’d driven on this road, and now he might walk to that farmhouse and ask for a meal, and there might be a woman there who might take him in and feed him and make love to him and ask him to run her farm and marry him. Or she might shoot him before he ever reached the door. Or she might make love to him and tell him that she was just leaving for Paris, where she ran an advertising agency when she wasn’t slumming on her parent’s farm, and would he like to come along? Or she might pretend she wasn’t home, watching him through the window, peering from behind the pink curtains as he knocked on the door, shouted hello, tried to peer through the pink curtains and finally skulked away. Or she might make love to him. Anything might happen, and he might be anywhere at any time and there was no more meaning to Sam McMahon then there was to a scribble in the margin of a Broken Head phone book found on the bank of a river in Islamabad.

  He became so engrossed in these matters that he was not even fully aware he had stopped walking and was staring into the ditch, looking at a beer bottle that some happy or desperate teenager had tossed there, either frivolously littering or in some truly significant act of rebellion against his parents and the world.

  “Are you all right? Do you need a ride?” a woman’s voice asked.

  Sam turned slowly, expecting to find that he was alone, and saw that a sports car had pulled to a stop on the opposite shoulder. German, he thought. No, a Toyota. A tiny Native woman was speaking to him through the open window of the car. No, perhaps she was Asian. As he stepped closer, he could see a video camera lying on the back seat of her car, and a briefcase in the front, but otherwise he saw with otherworldly clarity that the vehicle had never been occupied by anyone before. The exterior was perfect, and so was what he could see of the interior. Not a mark or a scratch or a discarded Kleenex floating on the upholstery. No hint of an accent in her voice. He felt dizzy—a little unsure that any of this was really happening. He actually wondered if he might be dreaming. Yes, maybe this was a bad dream. No, that hot breath was the real wind gusting against him. There were no winds like this in his dreams. Perhaps Gwen had sent the woman to rescue him.

  “Are you …?” he started to ask, before he realized just in time that the question was absurd. He thought of another, more appropriate: “Where are you heading?”

  “That way,” the woman shrugged, looking south, then north, avoiding his eyes. “Where are you … heading?”

  For a moment he didn’t know how to answer, but he found himself blurting out, “Broken Head.”

  “Oh?” She met his eyes. Hers were brown. Her nose was slightly too large for her face, he thought. She was smiling slightly, like Mona Lisa, as if she already knew too much about him and she was about to ask him something to which there could be no answer but “yes.” There was nothing in her voice to suggest any origin but here. Not here. She sounded as though she might have been from the television. This could be a commercial for the car or maybe some soft drink. Or it might be one of the bank’s expensive new spots. “I noticed Broken Head on the map,” she said. “That’s quite a distance, isn’t it? Maybe I could take you to the next town. Is it … Elrose?”

  She pointed at the road sign two hundred yards north of them. He had walked two hundred yards south.

  “Yes, sure. That’d be fine.”

  He waited for a response before he realized she was waiting for him to get into the car. As he was about to round the car to do just that, she suddenly did respond: “Listen, this might sound strange, but would you mind if I took your photograph?”

  He stopped. “Pardon?”

  “Do you mind if I take your picture? I’ve never been here before, and it’s such an incredible landscape, and when I saw you standing there in that beautiful suit …”

  Sam squinted down at his suit, out across the vista and back into her eyes. Her eyes were a warm brown and angled like some predatory bird: falcon or eagle or owl, he wasn’t sure which. “Oh, thank you …”

  “Do you mind?”

  He looked around again, searching for cameras in the ditch, or an audience watching from the other side of the fence. “You’re a tourist?”

  She had taken two cameras from her briefcase and was already getting out of the car. “Well, not really, to be honest. I’m kind of a photographer, but the photograph wouldn’t be used in any … public kind of way.”

  “Not in any … public kind of way?”

  “No. Not without your permission.”

  He approached her tentatively. She was standing in the centre of the highway. “Why do you want to take my picture?”

  “Oh! It’s just that the way you looked out here struck me as a good photograph. If you don’t want me to, that’s fine.”

  He looked around once more to see if he could see what she saw. A row of cedar fence posts so rotted the page wire was holding them up. Gwen was right. He was blind. He was the blindest man alive.

  “Okay. Right here?”

  She looked both ways to see if any traffic was coming. None. “That wind feels like a blow-dryer, doesn’t it? I’d like one right in the middle of the road, if you don’t mind?”

  “No. That’s fine.” He smiled weakly. “I’m a middle-of-the-road kind of guy.”

  She chuckled, and he stepped onto the dotted line, and she took his picture. Twelve times. From slightly different perspectives.

  “Should I look at the camera, or away from it?”

  “Whatever’s comfortable. I feel like we should have some kind of permit to be doing this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s just so weird that there’s so little traffic that you can do this. It’s the kind of thing that takes so much planning in the city.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Toronto.”

  “Toronto,” he agreed. “I like Toronto.”

  She kept taking pictures.

  “What if I stand on the side of the road with my thumb out?”

  She smiled and shrugged. “Sure. Whatever feels natural.”

  “Natural? Well, maybe that would be a little contrived.”

  She snapped a few more. “Maybe you could just look into the ditch the way you were when I first saw you.”

  “Was I?”

  “Yeah. You were looking at something in the ditch.”

  “Oh? All right.”

  He took five steps to the edge of the road and stared into the ditch. The beer bottle was still there. He glanced over and she was studying him critically, obviously not happy with the way he was looking at the beer bottle.

  “Did your car break down?”

  “Pardon?”

  “I don’t see your car. How did you get here?”

  He was silent for a moment, staring at that beer bottle, the peculiar
brown of it, the label washed away by weather, the efficient hand-length of the neck. Perhaps that’s why the stubby had died: the neck was so short you were forced to hold the body of the bottle, and that allowed your blood to warm your beer. Perhaps it wasn’t just marketing that made the long neck win. He glanced her way, and she had started taking photos with the second camera. “How did I get here? Well, my wife stopped the car and left me here. She told me she wanted a divorce. She told me she’s having an affair.”

  The woman lowered her camera until it was at her waist. “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  He shrugged. “It’s not your fault.”

  And then Sam began to cry, his entire body heaving with sobs so huge he could not get control of his breathing and began to feel panicked that he might suffocate on his own terrible grief. The woman looked a little alarmed, and for a moment she raised her camera as though she had decided to take another picture, but then she let it drop against the strap around her neck, rushed to him and encircled him in her thin arms.

  “Oh, my goodness. Let’s get you into the car.”

  Surrendering, he grasped her tightly and allowed the tiny woman to escort him to the passenger door and put him inside the car. Her blouse was silk. She smelled of some secret scent, the origin of which he could not pinpoint. By the time she came around and got in the driver’s seat, he’d let every particle of his sorrow spill out and, wiping the tears from his eyes with his shirt sleeve, was already beginning to feel ridiculous for exposing himself in such a childish way.

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. I’m all right. Sorry about that.”

  She smiled slightly. “It’s not your fault.”

  “It just hit me.”