The Last Cowboy

by Lee Gowan

  I suppose Officer John’s Son will expect my thanks for keeping me out of the hoosegow. He can kiss my withered ass.

  I take a drag on the cigarette and hear my own name, “Sam!” before I realize it’s me calling. Calling myself back from somewhere I’ve gone missing, I suppose. I sit there waiting a long time before the young one finally comes.

  “Turn off that light, will ya?”

  He does, and my reflection disappears, and then it seems like he’s about to leave again—like he figures that’s all I wanted from him and now he can escape the old lunatic before he starts waving his gun around again.

  “Come here,” I say.

  I know they’re listening in the next room, so I wait till he’s really close before I say it, because they have no right to hear.

  “He was a good horse,” I tell him.

  And, of course, the small one doesn’t know what to say. He just stands there blinking at me the way he did in the barn.

  But that’s all right. What could anyone say that would make the slightest difference?

  JUNE 29th, 2000: NORTH OF BROKEN HEAD

  THE INTENSITY of his expression as he stared off into the ditch made me stop the car for him. Or perhaps “intensity” is wrong. The void. Whatever he was seeing had hollowed him out emptier than I have ever seen anyone before. Except my father. He had the same expression my father wears as he watches the television or that squirrel in the tree in our yard. That profile was the reason I stopped. And the beauty of his suit. The way it fit him as though the man or woman who had taken his measurements and sewed the darts had loved his body. And the landscape. The combination—the juxtaposition of that expression, that suit and that landscape that he was looking right through were too much to allow me to drive on by, even though I have never stopped for a hitchhiker in my life—even though I was filled with a fear so palpable that my hands were shaking and I kept the car in gear until I heard his voice and saw his blue eyes focus on me and I came to the tentative conclusion that he wasn’t a psychopath.

  By now I am fairly certain he will not kill me. Unfortunately, I doubt if I managed to steal even a half-decent photograph, as I was only beginning to get him to relax when he broke down, and I missed the best one of him weeping there on the side of the road. I let it go. James Aspen might scold me for being so sentimental, but maybe it’s good that there are limits to my mercenary nature. My mother would think so. Or would she? I shoot my father’s disintegration every Wednesday, but I could not stand there and flash the shutter while a stranger wept.

  My mother may never forgive me for being here to miss that photograph. I’m looking for a location for a scene that hasn’t even been written yet, while my father is dying. But my father’s been dying for months. For more than a year. I can’t stop my life to wait for the end of his.

  That photograph probably would have been too melodramatic at any rate.

  Now, in contrast to the stark emptiness I saw in him at first, the banker is filled with some sort of frantic energy, as though the shock of his grief has moved into his limbs and made him drunk. The mention of James Aspen has made him a little silly. Or maybe he’s just lovesick. He’s like a teenager on his first date. I get the feeling I’m about to be hit by his rebound. He can’t keep his large hands still, moving them from the dashboard to his lap and running them through his thinning hair. His nails are manicured. He has long fingers, beautiful hands. He keeps pointing down the road ahead of us, as if he knows where we’re going.

  How could I have laughed when he told me about his brother?

  But perhaps the location is found. All and all, I was not surprised when he told me he had seen the place in my dreams. Of course he had. Why else would James Aspen have sent me to find him? The only problem is that Sam the banker can’t remember exactly where the location is hidden, and the only person who knows is the brother who cuckolded him.

  “I know it’s north of Broken Head, but I don’t know how far. Or maybe it is south.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  “No … not really … but …”

  He doesn’t speak for far too long, probably twenty seconds, and I wait, expectant, dying for him to break the silence, unable to do it myself. I wonder if I should tell him that my father may be dying and I need to find this cliff as fast as I can and get back to Saskatoon so that I can catch a flight to Toronto. Meanwhile, we’re going in the opposite direction. We’ve passed Elrose and are heading for who knows where.

  “I’m sure I can find the place. I’ve got a fairly good idea of where it is.”

  I’m not sure what to say. This is my job, I could remind him. I’m a professional. Bankers understand professionalism. It would not be responsible to settle for a guide who doesn’t know where he’s going. However, under the circumstances, perhaps it’s only appropriate.

  “So it’s north of Broken Head?”

  “I think so.” He shrugs and chuckles. “We’ll find it. I don’t have anything better to do. At least I’ll feel … useful.”

  “If you’re sure you can find it?”

  “Yes. We’ll find it.”

  He nods his head emphatically and squirms his large body, crossing his arms on his chest to massage his own shoulders through that beautiful suit. “Incredible. James Aspen. It’s really exciting to be part of something like this, isn’t it? I can hardly believe any of this is happening. It’s like some weird dream. James Aspen’s looking for a place that I know.”

  “I know what you mean,” I say. “It always seems like our own world is so average and famous people exist in some other alternate universe.”

  “No. He’s not just famous, he’s an … icon.” He drops his hands to his thighs, shaking his head as emphatically as he was nodding it only a moment before, leaning towards me, his face too close to mine. “And anyway, I don’t feel we Saskatchewanites are average.”

  “No?”

  “No. Average has no meaning here.”

  I can’t help responding with another unfortunate laugh, and this time he does look a bit offended. “What do you mean by that?” I ask.

  He raises himself off the seat, stretches his legs, then collapses so that he’s actually sitting on his hands. You’d think he was stoned on amphetamines or something. “Well, for example, I woke up one morning last winter, and it was forty below. It hadn’t been above twenty below in over three weeks, and now it had sunk to forty. Car wouldn’t start, even though it was in the garage and plugged in. The block heater was burnt out. The bus didn’t come, so Michael had to stay home from school. I called a cab to come out and get me because I had to get to work. The place would fall to pieces without me. You know? I’ve only been away three days, and it’s probably in pieces by now. Anyway, when I walked out to the cab, there was this brutally cold wind blowing from the southwest. Nearly froze my ears off. By the time I got to work it was already ten degrees warmer. Two hours later it was melting. It’d been so cold for so long that people were positively giddy. They were walking into the bank in their shirt sleeves. One guy wasn’t even wearing a shirt. Went from forty below to forty above in four hours. The average temperature in those four hours would be—what? Zero. But what does that mean? Zero has nothing to do with the oil in my car setting my pistons rigid in their cylinders or with that guy walking around without a shirt. If you watched closely, you would have been able to catch the exact moment the thermometer passed zero. But what would make that moment the average moment? It was just a zero moment.”

  All at once he stops talking, and I realize he is expecting some response.

  “Minus eighteen?”

  “Zero. Fahrenheit. We’re in the West, now. You have to learn to speak Western.”

  “Zero,” I nod. “So, you have a child?”

  Like a pricked balloon, he deflates into his seat and stares out at the highway. I’m tempted to reach for my camera, but I know once again that I’ll have to let it go.

  “Yeah. Two. Boys.”

  He’s quiet f
or a while, and he has the look of someone settling into the peace of resignation.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “It’s okay. It’s not your fault.”

  “Maybe … you and your wife can work things out.”

  “Maybe,” he says.

  I take a deep breath and change the subject. “So tell me the story about this trail again. Why was this guy going so fast?”

  The question rouses him a little, and he pulls his hands from under him and studies one of them. The left one, with the ring. “He was joyriding. The car was stolen. God knows why he’d have picked that trail. Anyway, it was the wrong choice. It happened in the winter, but his body wasn’t found until spring. The farmer who owned the land was fixing fence and he smelled something. That’s the official story, at least. Vern—my brother—has this theory that the guy was being chased by the police.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Vern has a weakness for conspiracy theories involving the police.”

  He pauses, and the hand drops to the seat between us. I wonder if he wants to talk about his brother. My first instinct was to avoid the subject, but it’s possible that he wants to get it out of his head by airing it.

  “So what’s your brother’s theory?”

  He doesn’t flinch, but he’s silent for a moment before he shrugs. “It’s hard to explain. You see, my grandfather died the same month that this accident happened. Probably happened. Like I say, they didn’t find the guy’s body for months. Anyway, Vern figures there’s got to be some connection.”

  “Some connection to your grandfather’s death?”

  “Yeah. My grandfather got lost in a blizzard, and by the time the police found him he was … pretty frozen. And before he died, he kept repeating this woman’s name. So Vern thinks there must be some connection between the woman and the guy who went over the cliff. But there was no woman in the car. They only found the one body. It’s not much of a theory, really. But it works for Vern.”

  I light a cigarette. “Does Vern live in a trailer?”

  “Yes, actually.” He turns to me. “How did you know?”

  I shrug, embarrassed once again. “I was just joking.”

  He doesn’t seem to see the humour.

  “Yes, he lives in a trailer,” he says tersely. “And he’s sleeping with my wife.”

  I nod. So much for jokes. “And who was the woman your grandfather was talking about?”

  He looks annoyed. “There wasn’t any woman. He was frozen, delirious. He just kept repeating this name—Irene. I was only nine. They took me to his hospital room because he kept telling them he’d killed me, because he thought he’d lost me in the blizzard, and they wanted to show him I was alive. And I remember standing by his bed and him rolling his head to look at me and he said to me, ‘She saved you too. Irene saved you. She’s an angel. She’s our angel, Irene.’ I’ll never forget the look on his face. Two hours later he was dead.”

  “Irene?” I say.

  “Yes, Irene. Dad thinks he must have been so far gone he mistook one of the policeman who found him for a woman named Irene.”

  “That’s my name,” I say.

  He looks at me funny. “Pardon?”

  “Yeah. I mean, that was my name when I was a kid. I never liked it, so I took the name Ai.”

  He keeps staring at me, so I keep talking. “I was searching for my roots. My father’s Chinese. Ai is Chinese. Or Japanese. The pronunciation is Japanese. It means love.”

  Sam nods slowly, swallowing. “Isn’t that funny? Irene.”

  “Well, it was. But I never liked it. That’s why I changed it.”

  He nods again. “Irene.”

  I nod, and we drive on in silence until we pass the next intersection. Grids, he calls them. Every two miles.

  “Maybe Irene was his sleigh,” I suggest.

  “Pardon?”

  “Like in Citizen Kane? Rosebud was his sleigh.”

  He nods and smiles a little nervously.

  “I don’t think so. Maybe a horse. He was a cowboy.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” he says.

  I nod, “My father loves cowboys,” I say.

  He touches a finger to his forehead and traces a line down to the tip of his nose. “Is that so? My brother’s a cowboy.”

  JANUARY 2nd, 1971: NEAR BROKEN HEAD

  “IS THE BOY near that farm?” she asked him, but the old cowboy only murmured “Irene” between the chattering of his teeth, before he closed his eyes, rolled his head back and let out the most painful moan she’d ever heard. His extremities were coming to life—his ears, his fingers, his toes recovering their circulation—the blood finding its way back through the blue and yellow flesh: Irene could see he was a smoker by the nicotine patches on his fingers. He arched his back and held his hands up before him, opening his eyes to look at the splinters of flesh, writhing so that she could almost imagine a flame like a torch on the tip of each finger. With each horrible moan, Luke hunched harder into the wheel, staring at the tail lights and the flashing dome light of the police car leading them through the drifting snow and down the black strip of highway towards Broken Head. It was over the next hill, perhaps?

  “Can you shut him up?”

  “He’s in pain.”

  “Me too, but do you hear me carrying on like that?”

  She did not respond.

  “What the hell are we doing? This is nuts. This is insane, Irene. We’re following a cop car.”

  The old man moaned even louder and, for some reason, that made her think about the boy wandering lost in this cold.

  “Did the boy have his jacket on?”

  All the answer she got was another moan.

  “Irene, we’re following a police car.”

  “I don’t see what else to do.”

  “Turn around and go the other direction.”

  “Oh, yes, that would be smart. Make them mad, when I’ve got them thinking we’re heroes.”

  “You think they think we’re heroes?”

  “I do. They do. The old man does.”

  “He thinks you’re an angel. Angels ain’t heroes.”

  Was that true? She wasn’t sure of the nature of either angels or heroes. It was something she’d have to think on, and she didn’t have the time at the moment. There was a bad smell. With the heat, the old man was becoming all too ripe, his pores oozing the scent of stale tobacco and old flesh. He seemed to have peed his pants. That made her think of the boy again, and she looked out the window for him.

  “We’re saving his life, Luke.”

  The sound of his moan was so intense it made her close her eyes and watch the shadows of points of light inside her skull, waiting for the pain to recede.

  “He seems to appreciate it,” Luke said.

  “They’d catch us if we went in the other direction,” Irene said. “And what would we do with him even if we did get away?”

  “Dump him out on the highway and let somebody else save him. Just ’cause he’s dying doesn’t mean he has to kill us too.”

  The old cowboy moaned again, this moan—each moan—more excruciating than the last.

  “He’s not dying. We’re not dying. Nobody’s dying. You go trying to take off, and maybe that’s a way to end up dying.”

  “Nobody’s dying,” Luke scoffed.

  The old cowboy shrieked that he wished this were not true.

  “That’s right, old man. She looks like an angel, but she’s a demon. I was as numb as you when I met her, and she did the same thing to me. She brought me back to my suffering.”

  The old man agreed. The truth is, he told her without speaking, that the only way to be good was to be dead. Good and dead, so they said, and they knew what they were talking about. He had come too far and bled too much to have to be born again. Why hadn’t she left him in a snowbank? Why hadn’t she left him out there with the dead boy? Who was she to drag him back through the door and thaw his blood so that it could feed flesh already
too damaged to be worth trading for another breath? The torture he endured was all her fault. Who was she trying to fool with her tiny charities? Her miniscule morality could not understand the real shade of his grandson’s eyes, that blue so pale it felt like an iceberg slicing its razor edges across your eyeballs.

  “Stop the car,” she said to Luke.

  “What?”

  “Stop the car.”

  He slowed and pulled over onto the shoulder, and Irene jumped out of the car and scooped an armful of snow from the ditch. The police car had whirled around and was coming back towards them. She waved that they would follow, and got back into the car. The cop who was driving studied them before pulling another U-turn and slowly heading west.

  “Okay, go. Follow them.”

  “What are you doing?” Luke said.

  She took some of the snow and applied it to the old man’s fingertips, and in a moment he stopped moaning and opened his eyes.

  “Does that feel better?”

  He nodded wearily and closed his eyes. “You’re an angel,” he said.

  They reached the top of a rise, and the lights of a town appeared, winking at them through the storm, a swath of low buildings huddled across the bottom of a frozen valley. Despite the wind and snow, Irene imagined a pale wreath of smoke unfurling from each tiny dwelling. This, she supposed, must be Broken Head. She reached over the seat and put a hand on Luke’s shoulder. He looked up into the reflection of her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “But it’ll be okay. I love you, Luke.”

  The old man moaned, and she applied more snow.

  The police car pulled off onto the service road, passed motels, gas stations, then turned and drove beneath the highway at an underpass and into the town. Here the officer switched on his siren, and they followed him right through a stoplight. The drivers in the few cars waiting at the intersection swivelled their heads to watch the Studebaker pass, wondering at the Indians being escorted off to jail and going so obediently. The wonder was repeated by two or three pedestrians, heavily bundled and hunched against the cold, but mostly the streets were empty, the houses stiff on their foundations. Snowmen watched from yards, their carrot noses dripping icicles.