The Last Cowboy

by Lee Gowan

  “May I buy you lunch?”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I insist.”

  And, with a flourish of his right hand, he directed her across the street.

  JUNE 29th, 2000: BROKEN HEAD

  SAM THE BANKER marches me across the street and holds open the door. Anyone would think we were entering the Ritz. Considering his recent attempt at a kiss, the behaviour makes me nervous. Suddenly I feel like I’m on a date, but I’m hungry enough that I’ve decided to take it all as an offering of apology for scaring me, and a chivalrous show of support for the daughter of a dying father. I have to wrap this up as quickly as possible, and get back to Saskatoon. Then again, my flight isn’t until tomorrow, so there’s no point in panicking. He is lying there waiting for me. Wait just a little longer, Dad. One more day.

  I step inside to see a payphone set into a niche modelled to look like a seashell, and I think of that line from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” What is it? And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells. The sky like a patient on an operating table. And Banker Sam’s thinning hair. He should not wear his trouser rolled.

  The phone also makes me think I should call my mother. And it makes me think of Philip, whom I just called to argue with from the relative privacy of the Broken Head Mall, keeping my voice low enough so the people trooping by, to and from the washrooms, wouldn’t hear the bombs landing in our pitched battle.

  He told me I’m selfish. He told me I’d always been selfish. I told him that someone who had always been given everything he wanted had no right to call anyone else selfish. I told him that Dad understands, and I’ll be home by tomorrow afternoon. He told me that Dad no longer understands anything and tomorrow afternoon will probably be too late.

  As we round the corner, we are greeted by metal tables and orange Naugahyde and chrome chairs on a worn orange carpet in a dim underwater room. There are no windows. A middle-aged woman sits on a stool, smoking a cigarette and watching a soap opera on an ancient twelve-inch colour television set. A few Oriental figures, a little like kitchen witches, decorate the dark red walls. The woman is certainly not from China. Not Peking—perhaps Peoria. There is no one else visible.

  “Would you mind if I took a photograph?”

  Slowly, the woman turns her head to us, releasing the smoke from her lungs as she does. The sight of the camera makes her narrow her sad eyes and tilt her head slightly, as though looking for another perspective. She does not, however, appear overly surprised. I imagine it has been a long time since she appeared surprised.

  “Are you from the newspaper or something?”

  “No, no.”

  “Suit yourself. Sit where you like.”

  I flash a few shots of the room while she fetches the menus, and Sam chooses a table against the wall.

  “Sam,” she says, when she reaches the table, and he nods, a bit embarrassed by her familiarity. “I see you’ve brought us the lost princess of the Peking Palace. Your loyal servant awaits your order.”

  I consider laughing politely, but I’m afraid that would encourage her. She seems to believe the comment is innocent enough, and that’s fine with me. I’m hungry.

  “Sheila, this is Ai,” Sam mutters, not quite at a loss for words. “Ai, Sheila.”

  “Hello,” I nod.

  “Did you say ‘I’?”

  I nod, but don’t offer any explanation. She turns to Sam, and he nods too. “Ai. That’s her name.”

  “Don’t get many I’s in here,” she says, handing over the menus. “Lots of IOUs, though. Any relation?”

  I smile and shake my head. She rests her pencil on her pad. “New York steak’s the special. Or a chow mein combo. That comes with …”

  “I’ll have the steak,” I interrupt her.

  She looks at Sam, perhaps wishing an explanation for this rudeness, but he offers none. Instead, he nods in agreement.

  “I’ll have the steak too.”

  “Yeah? How would you like it?”

  “Medium rare.”

  “Same.”

  “Baked, stuffed, fries or rice?”

  She meets my eyes.

  “Baked, please.”

  “Same for me,” Sam nods.

  Sheila scribbles on her pad. “Anything to drink?”

  “Would you like some wine?” Sam asks me, and I shrug willingly. I could use a drink.

  “Okay.”

  “The French red.”

  Sheila scribbles and retreats, glancing over her shoulder once. When she disappears into the kitchen, I look around at all the empty tables.

  “The French red?”

  “They only have one French red. It’s a Bordeaux. Pretty good, actually. I think the Chews, the people that used to own this place, must have bought a few cases a decade ago, and no one but me ever orders it, so it’s well aged. And great value. Cheaper than the liquor store.”

  I examine the orange, cigarette-scarred utility carpet. “So, I’m the lost princess of the Peking Palace. That’s why you brought me here?”

  He actually blushes. “Sorry. I didn’t think about Sheila when I suggested the place. She means no harm. She’s been here forever. Since the Chews owned it. I think this is the only job she’s ever had. I went to school with her.”

  “You and the Peking Palace have a long history?”

  “Actually, yes. I had my first drink here.” He looks around at the ghosts of his past slouched in the empty chairs. “It was Keith Hawkins’ birthday, and his mother brought us here for a special supper. She and her husband were separated, which was unusual in those days. She was very pretty, as I recall. Young. I was only ten, so I didn’t really register how young, but I noticed she was different from other mothers. She ordered a screwdriver, and Keith asked if he could have a sip. It was his birthday, after all. So, when she gave him a sip, she had to give his guest one.” He looks around. “I thought this place was pretty exotic back then.”

  “Exotic?”

  “Yeah.” His look is all too serious. “Exotic. Like Keith Hawkins’ mother.”

  A ghost bends and whispers in his ear.

  Our meal comes without much delay, and the wine is okay, and, thankfully, Sheila has no more colourful comments. When I look up from my plate, I catch the banker watching me. I imagine he is thinking about introducing me to his brother. Considering what might be coming, I will need my strength. I should have just ditched him—literally—and headed back to Saskatoon. But, a bird in the hand. With any luck, his brother will be able to draw me a map, and I’ll be on my way in a few minutes.

  Suddenly, a thin, middle-aged Asian man rushes out from behind the curtain, charges our table and vigorously shakes the banker’s hand, using both of his own. It’s a full-body handshake. Sam seems to have braced himself for the assault.

  “Mister Sam! Mister Sam! Why you not tell me you coming? I make special something for you.”

  “I would have, Bill, but it was all a bit spontaneous. Ai was hungry.”

  Sam motions at me, and the man looks across the table. At first, his expression reveals shock, but then he smiles. “Oh. I know you?”

  “No. You must be thinking of someone else.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sam says. “Ai, this is Bill Chan. Bill, this is Ai.”

  Bill Chan nods, confused. He turns back to Sam. “You doing well?”

  “I’m fine. How are you?”

  “Very well. Very well. Very busy.” He looks nervously around at all the empty chairs in the empty room. The two men stand in awkward silence.

  “Things’ll pick up,” Sam says.

  Looking grateful for this optimism, Bill begins to tell Sam how things are picking up at his other restaurants. Apparently he owns more.

  “Do you mind if I take your photograph?” I ask.

  He smiles a doubtful, pinched smile.

  “You don’t mind, do you, Bill?” Sam decides to help me out. “Ai likes to take photographs.”

  “Oh? Okay. You picture all you
want.”

  He poses, smiling brightly.

  “That’s all right. Just relax. Talk to Sam like you were doing.”

  Again, he smiles doubtfully, but he obeys, and eventually he seems to forget about my camera.

  Listening to this small-town restaurant owner’s battle with English, I can’t help but think of my grandfather. He was from Hong Kong, and my father hated him for his accent. My father has always been so proud of his English accent. Not that it made people in England or here think of him as an Englishman. Only the Chinese thought of him as an Englishman. Which meant he never had a place where he felt he really belonged. Not that he wanted to belong. He wanted to be a cowboy.

  “Bill’s a real star of local business,” Sam tells me, trying to include me, though I would just as soon stay invisible. “He has another restaurant here in Broken Head, and another in Gull Lake. He’s on the board of the Chamber of Commerce.”

  I nod that I’m impressed and click the shutter, catching, over Sam’s right shoulder, Sheila watching with obvious amusement from her stool by the order window.

  When my grandfather came to visit us, he loved to go down to Chinatown and walk along through the markets and chat with all the shop owners, and he’d feel more at home in Toronto than my father ever felt, even though my father had lived in Toronto for more than half his life. My father really hated his father for that. Or he seemed to. The way he talked about his father always made me think he hated him, and made me think I was supposed to hate him too.

  “Ai works in the movie industry.”

  “Movies?” Bill Chan cranks the air with one hand.

  “That’s right.”

  “Actress? A movie star!”

  “No, no. Much more mundane.”

  “She finds places to put in movies.”

  “Places?”

  “Yes. The background. The settings.”

  “You find places?”

  “Yes, I look for backgrounds.”

  He laughs and spreads his arms wide. “Like my place?”

  “Yes, well … whatever they need for a scene.”

  I shrug and take another shot, and he nods and mentions to Sam some television movie that was supposed to be filmed here five years before, bringing big business to the area, that had never materialized.

  Once, when I was a little girl and my grandfather was visiting, he took me to a playground in a park near where we lived. I was six years old, so I didn’t need to be watched that closely, and while I was swinging and going down the slide he started picking the flowers in the park until he had this beautiful bouquet. But then a man who must have worked for the Parks—or maybe he didn’t even work for the Parks, maybe he was just a concerned citizen, because I don’t remember him having any kind of uniform—came over and started screaming at my grandfather, calling him this and that racist slur and threatening to have him arrested for picking the flowers. My grandfather smiled and nodded. And for a moment, I too hated my grandfather for being stupid enough to pick those flowers. And I hated his silly accent when he tried to answer. I really hated him.

  “Canada is good. Broken Head is good. Business is good.” For some reason Bill Chan is giving me his Chamber of Commerce speech, perhaps imagining that the photographs will grace the front page of the next Chamber newsletter. “I have everything I want. Nice clothes. I very happy. Canada is good.”

  “Where are you from?” I ask him.

  “Yes?” Bill Chan asks Sam.

  “Vietnam,” Sam answers for him.

  “Oh, no,” the man says. “Cambodia.”

  Sam looks somewhat surprised and embarrassed.

  “Cambodia?” I say. “When did you … leave?”

  “Yes. I escape. Just me. No family. Very bad. Very bad men work us very hard making dam. Clothes only rags. Here I have good clothes.” He indicates his green suit. It looks like he got it from the Salvation Army. “Canada very good. Thank you, Mister Sam.” He throws his arm around Sam, who accepts the embrace with an embarrassed glance towards me.

  They stand, awkwardly one, and I can see that there is a genuine kind of love for the banker from this proud client who escaped without his family from Pol Pot’s Year One, and a genuine respect for the client from the suffering banker who is facing his own new beginning.

  “There is one thing about Canada that Bill doesn’t like,” Sheila calls, as Sam extricates himself from the restaurateur’s arms.

  Mr. Chan thinks, grimacing slightly as if with the effort, and then looking apologetically at the banker as he speaks: “Very cold. You want more wine?”

  JANUARY 2nd, 1971: NEAR BROKEN HEAD

  IT’S BLOWING to beat heaven and hell and all the life insurance salesmen who won’t ever die and go to either place. Could blow for quite a time. Wasn’t that long ago—′51 it was, I do believe—we had one blow five days straight, and when it was over the driveway was under twelve feet of snow and John had to find a path through the pasture along the ridge of the hill and take the fence down to get the car out to the road so he could get to town. He was that age it was that important to get to town, and he wasn’t likely to take the horse. But I recall the ’51 blizzard was in February, and we only had to wait a month for it to start melting, and when it did there was so much water it practically took the dam out and it did take the bridge out at the river. Ice started jamming up against it, and next thing you know the whole thing come tumbling like the walls of Jericho. Only just built that bridge the year before. When the government’s paying the bill, likely as not it’ll fall down in a year or so.

  Quite the winter, but this one could be far worse. By the time the ice goes out this year, there’ll be a pile of dead animals and a bigger mountain of money spent on feed. Price of a bale of hay will be worth more than five pounds of beef. These young yahoos who’re up to their armpits in debt to the banks will be lucky if they don’t get buried completely. Oh, well. I’m sure they’ll find some banker who’ll be glad to read their eulogies.

  Yep, quite a decent blow. Kind of weather that makes me want to go for a ride. Significant weather, you might say. The history of this country has nothing to do with kings and queens and princes and guillotines. Nothing to do with this here classy whore they call democracy either. This country is strictly a dictatorship of nature, and our history is a history of big harvests, big winds, big droughts and bad winters. The Indians used to keep track of how old they were by calculating how they were born in the year of the deep snow or the year of the skinny buffalo or that kind of thing, and nothing’s really changed all that much. Other places have great wars; we have great winters.

  I can hear them on the porch, pulling on their boots and snowmobile suits, getting ready to go out and feed the cows, and so as usual I send Young Sam to give them a hand, and he goes in his usual unwilling way because he wants to watch something important on the one-eyed monster. The Christmas tree’s still blinking in the other corner ’cause nobody’s got around to throwing it out yet.

  “You stay here and look after Grandpa,” I hear his mother say.

  Now I’ve heard it all. The nine-year-old’s looking after me, and meanwhile the blind, deaf and stupid walk out into the blizzard. Wait till the animals start dying and they come crawling for my help.

  The son admits the count’s off by one, but he insists that one less than he was expecting is just fine with him. Something about how a cow lost its tag and they put a new one in and then counted it as two different animals. Can you imagine? What’s the point in having a count if you don’t even know if it’s right? What’s the point in counting if you only try to find a way to pretend that your numbers work no matter what your numbers come out to? Must be the new math. A good hard winter will bury that kind of nonsense once and for all.

  Meanwhile, the small one’s back and, checking for holes in the top of his socks, reports his orders to the prisoner: “They say there’s no room in the truck for me.” Which shouldn’t stop him from sitting in his proper place on his mother�
�s knee. God knows how you do any work with a truck in a winter the likes of this one. It’ll be stuck solid before they’re halfway to the balestack. The old Clydes never got stuck. They’d just stride their way through anything you cared to put in front of them. If you did the math—the proper, old math—you’d find you were no farther ahead in time or money using these mechanical devices and modern conveniences. But that don’t matter—everything’s got to be done the new way. What difference if it takes longer and makes everything more of a pain in the pocketbook?

  As usual, the small one’s not in the room for fifteen seconds before he’s got the television back on. What is it? That afternoon cooking show, The Galloping Kookoo, or whatever you call it. Some guy with a permanent grin who’s a little light in his loafers, prancing about, telling you how to cook food you’ve never heard of, while he swills at a glass of wine every fifteen seconds. Only galloping that fella’s ever done is in his boyfriend’s lap. What’s a fellow like that going to do to a nine-year-old’s mind? Even more damage than watching boys get shot.

  I can just barely see them out there by the garage unplugging the truck and getting inside, and they’re not more than twenty feet away. It’s so bad even young Vern, who likes to pretend cold and frozen flesh are a fantasy made up by us Good-as-Deads, has one of those ski masks over his face.

  “I doubt that your brother believes in God, but I think he might be startin’ to believe in the cold. Which do you spoze is the greater Master: love or wind chill?”