The Last Cowboy

by Lee Gowan

  The boy looks up at me, but pretends he hasn’t heard the question so that he won’t have to ask me to repeat myself. That’s a bad sign. Up until last month he wouldn’t have let something like that go by—he’d have tried to understand the question so he could take a shot at answering it. But now I’m just some crazy old coot who goes around waving guns at Chinamen and talking nonsense to himself. Pretty soon they’ll lock me away in one of them homes where there’s a nurse to hold your wee-wee and wipe your bum. Throw away the key.

  So much for my hopes of passing on something to him. So much for my hopes of surviving in some little way in this stupid world.

  “Are you gonna roll me a smoke?”

  That question does manage to get his divided attention. He drags himself up off the floor and away from the Fruity Gourmet, as though he’s worried he’ll miss some of the recipe and won’t be able to whip it up for us tonight. Ask your mother where she keeps the fresh basil and the cooking sherry. He’s certainly not nearly as enthusiastic as he used to be, like he’s worried there might be something besides a cigarette owing when I hand him over the fixings. These days everything’s being weighed over again, and that damned Chinaman’s always got his finger on the scale.

  The small one doesn’t say a word, but sets to work, forehead wrinkled like a freshly summer-fallowed field, fumbling the tobacco out of the package and sprinkling it onto the paper. His tongue’s sticking out the corner of his mouth. When he gets to the actual rolling part, he screws his face up to such a point you’d think he was dismantling a bomb, but for the first time ever he does manage to twirl the paper around the tobacco, then to lick the stickum and get it closed before the whole shebang explodes. It looks like one of them marijuana cigarettes you see the hippies out in California smoking on television. But I’ll be darned if the thing don’t look halfway functional.

  He hands it to me. I give it a once-over, then shove it in his mouth, take out a match and strike a flame off my thumbnail. The expression on his face would make a stone lion laugh. Believe it or not, when I hold the match to the tip, he draws in at the right instant and gets it going. I wait for him to cough, but he manages to avoid that embarrassment and eventually blows out a puny trail of smoke. His eyes are watering, and you can see the sweat beading out on his forehead, and his whole face turns a little blue, but for all that there’s an undeniable look of pride in those watery lamps that makes me clamp a hand down on his shoulder and give him a good hard squeeze.

  “Any boy who sits around watchin’ that idiot box doesn’t deserve the name Sam McMahon,” I tell him. “Whaddaya say we go on an adventure?”

  Well, next thing you know he’s backpedalling faster than a rodeo clown with a Brahma bull’s horn in his testicles.

  “Mom and Dad said we weren’t supposed to go anywhere.”

  “We’re not goin’ to the Chinaman’s. We’re just takin’ a little ride out in the pasture to look for that lost cow.”

  “Mom and Dad said …”

  “I don’t give a damn what they said. You’re with me now.”

  “But Mom and Dad said …”

  “Are you sassin’ your grandpa! I listened to your father talkin’ back to me enough years, but I’m not ready to start puttin’ up with it from the next generation quite yet.”

  “But Mom and Dad said …”

  It only takes me thirty minutes of cajoling to get him into his winter duds. I think he’s a bit dizzy from the smoke, and so he gives up on complaining, or maybe he just rightly detects that that cigarette marks the end of his simpering and mewling days, and the beginnings of the lifelong push up the everlasting hill—like he was moseying along in his diaper and crawled right into a rock with his name on it.

  A rock with his name on it. I like that. You push it up the hill your entire life, and in the end they plant you under it.

  Out in present weather, you have to keep your head down, ’cause the wind will freeze your eyelids shut if you go walking straight into it. The boy trudges along behind me so I can break a path—both on the ground and in the air. The leg’s feeling a bit better. Only hurts most of the time. Better than all the time. When we get to the barn, there’s already a three-foot snowbank against the door, but I push the bloody thing along the track—it weighs about a thousand pounds—and we traipse in through the snowbank, then switch on the light and pull the door closed again so as not to let out the cold. The horses turn in their stalls and give us a second look. Welcome to our humble adobe. They swish their tails as though they were keeping the flies away, and one drops a gift for the same. Do not open until spring.

  It would be a good idea to take an extra mount, but there’s only the two left now, and they’re these willowy half of a quarter things they breed nowadays. Both boys’ horses. The son doesn’t even have one for himself. Never liked horses. Or horses never liked him. Now, there’s a good judge of a man’s character. Oh, well. If mine starts to get winded, I’ll just have to trust that the small one’s will be more rested due to the fact it’s only carrying his skinny rack of soda-pop-fed bones.

  More rested. Compared to Old Nitro, their entire lives have been one long picnic lunch.

  The boy helps me saddle them up, but the questions have started spilling out of him again.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I told ya. We’re goin’ to find that cow.”

  “But Dad says the cows are all home. He says there’s just one with two different numbers.”

  “Well, let’s find her other number then.”

  “But what if there’s no cow out there?”

  “What if the sun don’t come up tomorrow? What if it do, and the sky’s black instead of blue? What if my name turns out to be Seymour and not Sam?” He’s got nothing ready to come back at me with, so I go on. “We’ll have to be careful, but it ain’t that bad out there. Earl Withers died on a day worse’n this one. Went to the outhouse and got lost comin’ back. Just drifted into the storm, and they found him two hundred yards from the house. I’m assumin’ he made it to the shithouse, ’cause there was none in his pants.”

  The mare puffs out her stomach, so I knee her a good one and cinch her up tight. The agony of victory. It was her who got it in the gut, but she looks just fine and my leg feels like it’s been skinned and flayed out on a piece of plywood.

  “But the cows are all home,” the small one whines.

  “How do ya figure? The count weren’t right, and I saw one wanderin’ off. I recall she was bred early. Bull got out ’cause your Dad don’t keep his fences properly mended. There’ll be a new calf out there. How would you like to be born in this catastrophe? Not too pleasant. Wouldn’t you hope there’d be somebody with enough gumption to come and haul you home? Wouldn’t you?”

  He nods his head, trying his pitiful best to look brave.

  “I can tell you truly, I don’t want to go out into this awful mess either, but if you and I don’t, who will? The only other cowboys around are the ruined kind that ride around in pickup trucks. You think you could find that calf in a pickup truck?”

  “It’s really cold,” the little pecker’s whining again. “We won’t be able to see where we’re going. What if we get lost?”

  “Weelll, if we can’t find our way home, we’ll just have to check in at the Ritz Broken Head and hire us a couple of girls. Whaddaya say? Goddammit, can you hold this bitch’s head down for me?”

  So he holds the rope, and I manage to get the bridle on her without any more extra pain in my leg than I likely deserve. Ohhh God. To hell with deserve. What stupid beggar in the history of this sorry planet ever got what he deserved?

  “Listen, I wanna tell you somethin’,” I say to the boy, after I’ve got him up on his horse. Mine’s ready to go, and I’m about to open the door so we can head out into that beautiful storm. “I wanna tell you somethin’ about your Grandma.”

  He nods his head like one of those little doggies in the car windows.

  “You know how everybody’
s always told ya that she died of a cancer of the breast? Well, there’s no truth to that. She hung herself. In our bedroom. The same bedroom I still sleep in now. Left me alone to raise up your Dad on my own. I found her, and I cut her down myself. Your Dad was just a baby at the time. And I think your Daddy still blames me for that.”

  The small one’s eyes are the size of silver dollars. “Grandma?” he says.

  “Yeah. Mary. Your Dad’s mom. Or didn’t you realize your Dad had a mom?”

  He nods the way he nods. With that click in his neck like there’s a piece missing. “But … we went to Grandma’s house for Thanksgiving. Grandma lives in Calgary.”

  “No, not that grandma. Your other grandma.”

  He looks away. “I don’t have another grandma.”

  Which, come to think of it, is absolutely correct. There’s no point talking to him about what’s never existed in his way of thinking. Like this other grandma, his mother’s mom, who has never existed in mine. And I’d just as soon not hear his mother jawing on at the breakfast table about her latest adventure to Timbuktoo or the shopping mall.

  “Is that so?” I say. “Well, I coulda swore I remembered her body hittin’ the floor when I cut that rope.”

  And I pull open the door and lead us out into that bitter wind.

  INTERNAL EXAMINATION:

  HEAD AND NECK:

  The scalp reveals some hematoma, but the skull is unflawed and shows no sign of bone injury. Swollen meninges. Cerebrospinal fluid has vanished. The brain, badly decomposed, weighs 1300 g. There appears to be no substantial intracerebral hemorrhage. The neck is unremarkable, aside from decomposition. Excision of the mandible and maxilla is undertaken and same are retained for purposes of identification. There are no dental fillings.

  THORAX AND ABDOMEN:

  In general, the tissues and organs show decomposition, with a distinct malodour present. The blood is dark throughout and unclotted, and there is pinkish staining of the intima of the arteries.

  The heart weighs 260 g and appears entirely normal in size and shape. The epicardium and endocardium are smooth, and the myocardium, valves and coronary arteries appear normal.

  The left lung appears congested: 350 g. Extensive lacerations to the right lung: 380 g. A large hemothorax is displayed on the right side, and all of the ribs exhibit multiple fractures, with numerous jagged edges protruding into the pleural sac.

  Liver, 950 g, is extensively lacerated, as is the right dome of the diaphragm. Examination of the gastrointestinal tract reveals the stomach to be empty, but otherwise appearances are normal aside from decomposition.

  NOTES:

  1. Blood and urine samples are forwarded to the provincial laboratory for alcohol testing.

  2. The head injury, though significant, doesn’t appear to be the primary cause of death. It is not possible to determine whether it resulted in immediate unconsciousness at the time of impact. Death was most probably due to the crushing of the chest and abdomen, with extensive hemorrhage.

  JUNE 29th, 2000: NEAR BROKEN HEAD

  FOLLOWING SAM’S DIRECTIONS, Ai headed the Toyota out of town on a dirt road that appeared where the pavement ran out at the end of Matterhorn Drive.

  “Matterhorn Drive?” she asked.

  “Developers. Mountains are beautiful. If you don’t have mountains, you can always pretend.”

  She laughed heartily, and for a moment Sam actually felt defensive. He wasn’t sure why. He wanted to tell her that until not very long ago this had been a pasture, and he could have explained to her how the spread of Broken Head across what was once open prairie didn’t indicate that the population was actually growing, but only that the families in these houses in this new subdivision had not wished to buy the tiny houses downtown, and so those crumbling boxes now stood empty, or housed one or two elderly people who would soon leave them empty. He wanted to help her place Broken Head and the desperate pretensions of its developers into some sort of context, but he knew it would only make her laugh harder.

  “Are you and your father close?” he asked her instead.

  The levity the laugh had brought was instantly gone. “Not … really.” She sat up straighter, flexed her fingers on the steering wheel. “You’d probably have found him charming, but he always seemed pretty distant to us. To his family. On the other hand, he’s my father.”

  She pushed in the lighter and took another cigarette.

  “Sheila’s not so bad,” Sam said. “She grew up in poverty.”

  “She’s … delightful.”

  “Well, she’s worked there her entire life. She can’t be all that racist.”

  “I never said she was racist. Why don’t you drop it, please.”

  “Sorry.”

  Sam was tempted to tell her about the terrible teasing Sheila had endured, how the boys had written Sheila-proof on their hands in a game of contagion tag they played at recess. A game he had taken part in. He might have told her, but again that would only implicate him. It was just something else to be ashamed of in a life that was filled with shame.

  He was tempted to tell her how in grade seven he and three other kids had been caught smoking at recess in a culvert not far from here—the pasture the recently erected subdivision had erased had been across the road from his elementary school, which at that time had been right on the edge of Broken Head—tempted to tell her because he thought it was the kind of story that might make her see him in a new way (the young rebel in the schoolyard), but he was just as afraid she’d realize that was what he was trying to do, and she’d think he’d been only a twelve-year-old playing at being a tough.

  He would like to tell her more about his grandfather, and how by all rights he should have been a smoker, considering the old man’s influence; that his brother certainly hadn’t escaped it, but Sam had managed and should be congratulated for not participating in her death wish. He thought about telling her.

  The car began to fishtail.

  “Woooaaah,” Sam said, putting a hand to the dash as though to settle the Toyota, and she slowed, fighting the wheel, and got control.

  “New gravel,” Sam said.

  She nodded and continued on at sixty klicks. “What if I get a rock through my windshield?”

  “They never go right through,” Sam assured her.

  Her knuckles on the wheel revealed the white knobs of her bones beneath her skin. “What am I doing here?”

  “Looking for a cliff,” Sam said, lightly tapping his fingers on the dashboard.

  She slowed even more, butted out her cigarette and pushed in the lighter again.

  They descended into a wide valley with a small creek snaking along its lowest contour: the creek that had run through most of Sam’s life. As they crested a ridge, they approached five Charolais cows sunning themselves in the middle of the road.

  “Oh, my goodness,” Ai said. She slowed as she approached them, and finally came to a complete stop. The lead cow lifted her head and sniffed the air, but didn’t move. “Can we chase them off the road?”

  “Honk your horn.”

  She honked. The cows jumped to their feet, and then stood their ground. She honked again. They studied the car, trying to interpret the language it was speaking.

  “I’ll chase them off,” Sam said, and he opened the door and stepped out of the car. The cows eyed him curiously, chewing their cuds. He had not trusted Charolais since he had a bad experience with one when he was eight or nine. It was their neighbour’s cow—the McMahons’ were strictly purebred Hereford—which had got into their pasture, and when they tried to separate it into the corral it had turned to eye them, picked out Sam as the smallest and weakest link, and charged. Sam had jumped to the side and felt the cow brush by him. Old Sam was furious and embarrassed that it had happened in front of the neighbour: “You showed it you were afraid! Did that old cow scare you?”

  “Get on there, bosses,” Sam said, imitating the way his father talked to his cows, but he couldn’t help but feel that
they were the bosses and it was he who was invading their world. He waved his arms without conviction and they walked a few yards farther along the grid before turning back to see what he was up to now.

  Ai’s door opened, and she got out, her camera raised. “They’re not aggressive, are they?”

  She had the door between her and them, so Sam didn’t think her life was in too much danger, but he was not so sure about his own. He shook his head, trying to look nonchalant. She took a few shots of the blond cows standing on the gravel road, chewing their cuds, staring placidly at the man in the Italian suit. A meadowlark called. One of the cows seemed to be preparing to lie down.

  “Okay,” she said. “Chase them away.”

  Apparently she thought he had only been waiting for her to get her shots.

  “Amen,” Sam muttered to himself.

  He charged, howling and flailing his arms like some fiery demon had taken over his soul. The herd scattered, wheeling off into the ditch, kicking their hind hooves into the air as though to fend him off from tackling them bare-handed and branding their warbled hides.

  “Good work, Sam!” Ai called.

  He turned and bowed for the camera.

  “Nothin’,” he said, and folded himself back into the car.

  They rose out of the valley, skidded the benchland ten minutes to the turn and proceeded east, pulling the dust like the train of a wedding gown. Ai had not said one word in many miles, and Sam only spoke to tell her to turn at the corner where the fence posts were capped with old boots. A large knot was forming in his shoulders and stomach. He had done this drive a million times before, but never in this car, never with this driver, never with his destination so unclear, and it all looked different—terrifyingly alien from this perspective. As they coasted back down the grade into the valley where he had grown up, Ai drove even more slowly, her arms tense as she fought the wheel to keep the Toyota from spinning out of control.

  “Like driving on ball bearings,” Sam said, and she nodded grimly, staring straight ahead, her tongue clenched between her lips in a pose of concentration he recognized from his mother.