by Lee Gowan
It’s a lovely day, this last one. A pure kind of day, and the sort of day made especially for those who need and accept purity. The dead, mostly, I would expect. It’s the kind of day when the dead are on their best behaviour: even they go bad in the spring.
But from this time on there will be no more sprouting and spurting and rotting. It will stay like this for forty days—each one like the next, so that there will be no need to separate between them on this last day of all days. And when it’s all over, the houses and churches and brothels will all be buried right over their roofs, and not even the cross on the steeple peeping through into the light, and the earth will be frozen right down to the hot, sticky marrow of its hot, sticky womb so that there’s not a single seed left living even if the sun ever does manage to melt through.
And if it doesn’t, so much the better.
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.
Oh, Sam, you old fool. Face it. It’ll be cold for awhile, and then the sun will get the upper hand, just like always.
A man needs to dream, though.
By now they might be finished the chores and back in the warm house, wondering whatever became of us. If they even notice we’re gone. Have to notice by the time the late night news comes on. Son won’t miss that. Then they’ll wonder why the small one ain’t in front of the TV and start looking under the beds and in the closets and in the cupboard over the refrigerator and finally give up and watch the news to see if that tells them what’s going on in the world. Maybe we’ll even be on there. If they stay up real late, until after they play the national anthem and the blizzard comes on. There we’ll be, riding by.
Goddamned bloody bastard who makes his old man go out in this hell because he’s too lazy to look after the herd that was built up from a few scrawny animals by a better man’s sweat and blood and handed to him on a silver platter just like everything else he’s been given in life. Never had to work for a thing, and so he doesn’t appreciate the value of the true suffering it takes to make a place for yourself in the world. At least his son will have had a taste of the kind of bitter medicine we used to have to gulp down by the shovelful every winter, day in and day out. There was sure no riding around in warm pickup trucks, the heater blowing like a bonfire so your fingers and toes are as warm as toast and you feel like nodding off. If you start to feel that way out here, you know your number is just about to be called. Bingo.
What the hell?
Oh, Christ, the boy’s horse stumbled, and he’s slid off, ass over tea kettle, right into a snowbank bigger than he is, thank the Lord for small favours. Horse is okay. Hope to hell the small one hasn’t broken anything, or we’ll have to turn back. Nope, he’s bawling his head off, so there can’t be anything too serious wrong. Horse must’ve stepped into a hole. Badger, likely. Saw that badger out here last summer and told the son he should be dealt with. Told him it’d dig a hundred holes to trip horses if we didn’t put a hole between its eyes. But did he do anything about it? And now he’s almost killed his own little boy. Should have dealt with it myself. Would have, if I were not so fond of badgers.
I get down to help the small one—grab him under the arms and pull him up to his feet, even though my goddamned leg feels like somebody’s driving a nail into my hip.
“You’re okay.”
“I wanna go home,” he’s screaming.
“So does your horse, but I don’t think she knows where it is anymore.”
“I wanna go home!” he wails even louder, so I lean in close and say what needs to be said.
“Better not cry, or your eyes’ll freeze shut. That’s why your horse tripped. She was cryin’ like a baby ’cause she wanted to be back there in her warm stall, and her eyes froze shut. Couldn’t see the badger’s hole. Now she’s blind.”
Which is true, if seeing nothing but white is blindness, and I guess it’s as good a definition as any. The ice on her lashes has frozen over her eyes. Not that that should make a difference. Nitro would have smelled a badger hole through six feet of snow.
I throw my arm around his mare’s neck to hold her head still and melt the ice with my hands. When I’m finished, she blinks at me with those stupid, docile lamps. Or am I once again mistaking pity for stupidity? They’re sibling offspring, after all. It might just be that those eyes are saying to me, “You stupid old man. Why the hell would you want to die out here in the cold? What is wrong with your silly, frozen brain? Have you not understood all there is to understand about white? I pity you mightily.”
But why should she pity me any more than she pities herself? Maybe that’s all it is: she’s asking herself what she’s doing out here with a boy on her back and a crazy old man leading her away from the last best warmth.
Or maybe not. Maybe it’s something else entirely. Maybe that’s actual gratitude I see. Maybe there’s even something in her that realizes that barn she calls home was built by me, and she owes me every comfort she’s ever enjoyed, including that latest warmth of my hands that melted off her lashes. Maybe there’s still such a thing as gratitude in dumb animals, even though it no longer exists in their masters.
I check my own horse. Not blind yet, but won’t be long, so I melt away what’s accumulated, and use the other side of my hand to wipe my own nose before I pull my mitt back on. Finally, I go back to the boy, who has sat down in the snowbank like that’s where he belongs, and I get him up on the flats of his feet.
“There. Now they can see there’s nothin’ to see.”
He does not seem to find much comfort in these words.
“Are we lost, Grandpa? We’re lost, aren’t we, Grandpa?” he asks, hoping I’ll deny that I don’t know where we’re at, and so I accommodate him.
“Not to worry there, small one. I know exactly where we are. I’ll get ya home and into a warm bath just as soon as we find that cow and calf. I’m sorry you have to be out in this, but it’s really the only thing we can do. Think how cold that poor little thing is about now.”
And he nods, downcast, and maybe just a wee bit ashamed, and I get him back up on the back of his pitiful and pitying mare and get back up on my own equally sorry animal, and we ride off into the clouds, floating there, the last shepherds on the last cold ride, going nowhere, finding nothing, except, perhaps, a whole new appreciation for white.
JUNE 29th, 2000: NEAR BROKEN HEAD
THE COWBOY blinks down at me, his eyes puffy and unfocussed as though he’s just risen from a long nap. He has one of those chiselled faces, a pair of those pale blue eyes that make you forget what you were about to say. His white T-shirt shows where he paused in his work to wipe his hands on himself. The job was not perfect: his hands are still dirty.
“I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” he says, descending the blackened timber steps of his rusty trailer and extending one of those slightly blackened hands to me. The fingers are rough and scarred, and look twice as thick as his brother’s. “I’m Sam’s big brother, Vern.” He is no taller than his brother, but his muscles are larger, his skin tanned and leathery. He also has more dirty-blond hair, a shade lighter than Sam’s, and it’s standing up as though he’s just crawled out of bed. The scent of whiskey and cigarettes is on his breath. Smoky whiskey. Perhaps the reason for the bleary look and the messy hair is afternoon drinking and not an afternoon nap.
“I’m Ai.”
I can feel the work on his hand.
“You’re who?”
“Her name is Ai. A-I. It’s Oriental. It means love.”
Sam leans on my rented car, arms crossed on his chest, watching us as though he expects something unexpected to happen. The cowboy takes a long look at his brother, then looks back down at me with a smile that shows every one of his coffee and nicotine stained teeth.
“Is that so? Well, I’m damn sure I’ve never had that pleasure. Friend of Sam’s, are ya?”
“Yeah.” He’s still holding my hand. I now understand that James Aspen is only a pale imitation of a cowboy. “I hope you don’t mind
me taking a few pictures?”
“No, no. Just so long as you promise to leave a bit of yourself when you go. To replace what you take. That’s fair, isn’t it?”
“I’ll … do my best.”
“I’m sure you will. I’m sure you will.”
He releases my hand, and I let it drop to my side and float there, weightless.
“Were you planning on fixing this?”
We both turn to see that Sam has walked over to a relatively new car parked in the doorway of the large steel shed, and is peering under the hood. I say “relatively” new because it is the only machine in sight that could be described in such a way.
“Yeah. Sorry about that, Sam. I got cuttin’ the hay and never did get around to it. It’s just the fuel pump. Why don’t I rectify the situation without any further delay? Shouldn’t take me too long.”
“That’s okay,” Sam says, taking off his beautiful jacket and tossing it beside a pan brimming with dirty oil. “You’re busy with the hay. I’ll do it myself.” Sam’s shirt is so white it’s hard to look at in the afternoon sun—an entirely different white from his brother’s T-shirt.
“Now, Sam! You wouldn’t know a fuel pump from the business end of a … Greco-Roman.”
“Whatever the hell that means,” Sam says, picking up a wrench and leaning over the engine.
The cowboy stands, watching his brother adjusting the wrench. “Listen, Sam, I just wanted to say how sorry I was to hear about …”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I told her she needs to think about this more. You know Gwen …”
Sam turns and glares. “I said, I don’t want to talk about it.”
The cowboy glances at me, an uncomfortable grin on his crooked face. “Well, all right. Maybe we can talk about it later.”
“No. I don’t want to talk about it at all.”
The cowboy nods. “All right. If that’s the way you want it. But remember there’s another side to every story.”
Despite the cowboy’s charm and ruffled gentility, I have no doubt of his guilt. At the same time, I can see that he can’t imagine himself as anything but innocent. He turns and speaks to me, even though I’m doing my best to pretend I’m not here. “Dad made a rule we couldn’t drive a car until we could build one, but if Sam hadn’t broken the rule he’d be walkin’ to this day. Come to think of it, that’s the only rule you ever did break, wasn’t it, Sam?”
Instead of replying, Sam leans over the car with the wrench in his left hand, reaches down with his right hand and touches something, then brings the hand back up to look at the grease on his fingertips. He rubs his fingers together, testing the viscosity, then wipes them on his shirt. He might be a Zen artist capturing a gesture on his body. It is beautiful. I take a photograph.
“Jesus, Sam! What the hell’re you doin’? Those are your good clothes. Let me do that.”
Sam ignores him, extending the wrench towards an apparent target. “Ai’s looking for the place where that guy drove off the cliff.”
“Sam, that’s not the fuel pump. Leave it alone.”
The cowboy reaches down and confiscates the wrench with the ease and authority of a parent dealing with an unruly child. Sam stands up straight and looks directly into the eyes of the cowboy, and for a moment I think he’s going to throw a punch. I wish I was not here. At the same time, it’s fascinating. Despite the depth of the betrayal, I can feel and see that they are brothers and that what I’m watching is all part of some sibling power ritual that has been played out for forty years. They could be teenagers, both so different and yet strangely similar in their dirty white shirts. I take another shot and another. Neither of them even notices. Sam finally grabs hold of his banker self by the scruff of his neck, and takes a step back from the car.
“Where exactly is it? That cliff? Ai wants to put it in a movie.”
The cowboy turns his eyes on me, as if he’s only just remembering my presence. “You wanna what?”
“Yeah. I’m looking for a location that sounds much like the one Sam told me about.”
“A location?”
“Yeah. For a film. I work in the film industry.”
“Industry?” He scratches the corner of his mouth with his little finger. “You met Sam in Toronto?”
“No.” I look to Sam, hoping he’ll help me out.
“You ever heard of James Aspen?” he says.
“Sure. He’s an actor.”
“No,” Sam says. “He’s not an actor.”
The cowboy shrugs and smiles at me. “Movies aren’t my thing.”
“He’s a director,” I explain, “and he’s making a western, and we’re looking for a location that sounds like the one where … that tragedy took place.”
“I see,” the cowboy says. He walks over to the car and picks up another wrench. “And you wanna put that actual place in your movie?”
“That’s right.”
He bends over the car and begins to work at a bolt with his wrench. “That’s what you do for a livin’?” he asks without looking up from the engine. “They’ve got jobs like that? You find places to put in movies?”
“Yes. That’s what I do.”
“And somehow you managed to find Sam instead of a place?”
After he’s spoken, his tongue appears in the corner of his mouth.
“I picked him up. He was stranded on the side of the road.”
He glances at his brother, who has picked up a small cardboard box from the clutter on the ground and is examining its contents. “Oh, yeah?” the cowboy says.
“If you could just draw me a map …”
“You think it’s a good idea?”
“Pardon me?”
For a long time he doesn’t elucidate, as he is struggling with whatever he’s doing under the hood, but at last he stands up straight with the bolt he’s removed, holding it out towards me like a dentist showing off the culprit tooth.
“I’m just not sure it’s a good idea to put that place in a movie.”
I study the bolt, hoping it might explain his comment. “What do you mean?”
He shrugs. “Somebody died there. Maybe it deserves a little more respect than just puttin’ it in some movie.”
He leans down over the engine and goes back to work. Sam looks at me, but the empty look in his eyes has returned, and he is obviously too obsessed with what’s going on inside him to have any interest in my response. Perhaps he hasn’t even noticed that I have been broadsided, completely exposed as an exploiter of places and their ghosts.
“We’re not putting his story in the movie. I didn’t even know anything about his story until today. I just want to put the location in the movie because something happens to the characters that’s something like what happened to that man. But that’s just a coincidence. It isn’t based on him.”
“Coincidence?” The cowboy is still working away on the engine, grunting at the effort. “I see,” he says. “But the place is still connected to him, isn’t it? I mean, you can’t get much more connected than that, can ya? And anyways, who really knows what happened to him. Maybe you should tell his story. I think the problem is that nobody wants to tell his story.”
“Oh?”
“You’ve told it a million times,” Sam points out, setting the box back down on the ground where he found it. He has been listening after all.
“Sam doesn’t like stories.”
“Sure I do,” Sam says. “I eat them up. Any kind of stupid story. But I’m beginning to get over my gullibility.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah.”
They stand glaring at each other, having some sort of violent conversation with their eyes.
“What do you think happened?” I ask the cowboy.
“I don’t know. Why? Are you a story collector too?”
“No. Just curious.” He smiles crookedly at me, and I look away, shrugging to dismiss my own guilty curiosity. “I would like to see the cliff, though. I mean
, maybe we won’t even use it. Maybe you’re right. I’ll have to think about what you’re saying some more. But I would appreciate seeing it. I really feel I need to see it.”
“Like I told ya, I’m not so sure it’s a good idea.”
Sam rolls his eyes at me. “I’m sure I can find it for you.”
The cowboy keeps working. It’s he who knows, and I realize I’m not going to reach him by telling him that this is all about some job or even some work of art.
“I had a dream about my father and me driving off this cliff. My father’s dying, and I have to find this cliff in the next couple of hours so that I can get back to Toronto,” I say.
The cowboy stops what he’s doing. Sam’s mouth begins to open, but no words come out.
“What do you mean?” the cowboy says.
“I dreamed about the cliff last night.”
“Dreamed?” Sam asks.
“Yes, I was driving with my father across the prairie, and we drove off this cliff. I told the director my dream, and he told me he wanted the cliff for the movie. I happened to pick Sam up on the side of the highway, and I told him I was looking for the cliff, and he told me the story. Then I got a call that my father’s dying. I have to get back to Toronto, but I really do want to see the cliff before I go. I’d like to get some film of it and show it to my father.”
The cowboy and his brother stare at me.
“And her name is Irene,” Sam says.
“Pardon?” the cowboy asks.
“Irene,” Sam says.
“That’s true. I don’t call myself Irene anymore. But my father still does.”
They’re both still staring.
“Her name is Irene,” the cowboy says.
“That’s right. If you could draw me a map, that would be great.”
The cowboy slowly sets down his wrench on the fender. “I guess I should take you there.”
“You don’t need to do that,” I say. “A map’ll do fine.”
No one speaks. I glance at the car. I left my cigarettes in the car.
“Yeah,” Sam says. “Just draw her a map, Vern. Let her get going.”
Sam has lowered his eyes and is staring at the ground.