The Last Cowboy

by Lee Gowan

  Make your hair turn white, that sound.

  He’d suck my hand right down to his four stomachs if he could. I take the empty tit away, and use it to help pull on the socks and pick up a wet boot and try pulling that on. They’ll likely be back soon, and there’ll be no escaping their eyes, and the wailing will go on for days. I get the boots on, but my fingers can’t manage with the laces.

  “We’ll just warm ya up and get ya back outside to her, and you can have a good big drink of warm milk. A good big drink. What do ya say about that?”

  I look at the boy when I say this, and he kneels and ties up one boot and the other. He’s watching me with his big eyes, not that different from his brother’s eyes. Blue. Round. Those black spots in the centre. I hand him the bottle. He screws off the cap and takes a drink. He doesn’t cough.

  “A good warm drink. I’m just gonna step outside and let your mama know you’re all right. Vern’ll stay here with ya, so there’s no need to be afraid. He knows the place. He’ll get ya whatcha need.”

  I teeter back onto my feet and head for the door, imagining I can already hear his parents coming to tell me the terrible emptiness of that ragged hole in the ice, but when I open the door only the cow’s there, waiting. I turn back a second and look Vern in the eye, and he looks back and says, “You forgot your parka.” I nod and close the door.

  The cow looks at me too, sniffing at the scent of her calf, and I place a hand on her nose. The wind’s still blowing, but we’re in the shelter of the house and the chill is a relief from the flare of the blood that’s already begun to flow.

  “There, mother,” I say. “Your boy’s waitin’ inside. Don’t wander off.”

  And then I do just that, heading out the driveway, in the opposite direction of the crick, so I don’t run into the boy and his wife. Wouldn’t want them to have to look at me again. Wouldn’t want them to have to tell me they forgive me. I’ve been forgiven one too many times already. Just can’t remember when. Maybe it was Mary. Maybe it was the boy himself. Or maybe it was his son.

  Or maybe only the weather. It’s cold, but the warm was beginning to hurt.

  JUNE 29th, 2000: NEAR BROKEN HEAD

  SAM HAD NO conception of how long he’d been walking along the grid road, lugging his suitcases, when his father’s dented pickup truck stopped beside him. He looked around and saw he’d passed Vern’s driveway and was halfway to the home place. After tossing his bags in the back, he opened the door and climbed inside. The dusty smell made his nose crinkle, and he held back a sneeze.

  “What’s goin’ on?” his father asked. He had on his orange cap, and it had a stain of grease that roughly matched the one on Sam’s white shirt.

  “Nuthin’.”

  The old man held him in his hard gaze a long, long time, but didn’t ask again—didn’t want to be hurt as much as Sam had. They drove into the yard without saying another word, his father grinding through the gears in silent fury. Not for the first time, he reminded Sam a little of his grandfather. Something in the way he clenched his jaw or the undirected fury in his eyes. But she was wrong. He did not hate his father.

  His mother already had the table set, but seeing Sam and his suitcases, she was adding another plate when Sam stepped into the kitchen.

  “Well, howdy, stranger,” she said.

  He’d stopped in the doorway to look around him. Of course, he’d seen it many times, had been seeing it all his life, but he suddenly noticed both how much and how little it had changed in all these years. They had a new fridge and stove, new linoleum on the floor, and the walls were a fresher yellow, but the furniture was the same, the plants in the windows were pretty much the same. They were even the same green curtains.

  “What’s going on?” his mother asked, needing to know, no matter how much it would hurt her. And, when she asked him, he couldn’t help thinking of the day she’d been told, right here in this very room, of Sam’s terrible death, under the ice, floating away into darkness. Her youngest son. Vern had told him about it enough times. The way his mother had cried out for him. Sam remembered strangely little of that day he did not die. The whiteness of the blizzard had erased all his memories. He did recall the moment the ice cracked, and how he slipped from the horse’s back and up to his neck in icy water. He had no recollection of how he got out of the creek, or of scampering the two hundred yards to the house. He must have run himself a hot bath, because Vern remembered him coming down from the bath and asking for hot chocolate. His parents and his grandfather were out in the blizzard searching for him. Everyone was afraid he was dead. His mother had never got over it. None of them had, least of all Sam. It would have been better if he had gone under and never come up.

  He met her eyes. She could read it all in the look on his face.

  “Can I stay with you guys for … a while?”

  “I … guess.”

  And then, as though by way of explanation, he said, “I hope you weren’t expecting Vern for supper.” As if he’d just left him lying in a pool of blood. As if he were brave enough. His mother sighed that she wasn’t and gave Sam a deep silent hug. She did not grieve the older boy the way she had the younger, and Sam thanked her for that. Pulled into those soft arms, he buried his nose in her hair, but he couldn’t help looking over her shoulder to where his father had lifted his eyes to meet Sam’s.

  “You should never have let it happen,” the old man said.

  The way he held his jaw.

  The family—mother and father and son—sat down to eat.

  It could have been 1970. There were boiled potatoes and boiled peas, and meatloaf with tomato sauce and bacon on top. Pickled beans. Pickled beets. The best dills on earth. Spanish onions in a shallow dish of vinegar. Fresh baked buns. Date squares for dessert. More than enough for everyone, as though they’d been expecting him since that day he’d walked out to get the bus for university twenty years before. The same yellow plaster walls, though the cracks had been plastered and painted over. The same little plaques with their reassuring wishes: May the Road Rise to Meet You and May God Hold You in the Palm of His Hand.

  The same Mom. The same Dad.

  Sam was alive. He was three or four or five or six or seven or eight or nine or ten, and he was more loved than anyone else in the universe. He was warm, and he was filling his stomach with beautiful, solid food. He never needed to go anywhere, to be anything, to love anyone else but his mother and father, and they needed nothing else but him. All else was vanity. All else was pain. After lunch he would help his father with whatever he needed help with. They would do it together. In the middle of the afternoon, without a word, they would leave the job behind, complete or not, and walk back to the house for tea. Perhaps Mom would have done some baking.

  They ate for a long while in silence, their forks scraping on their plates, his mother frowning about something she would never share with them, his father’s jaw clicking when he chewed, the way it always had. Sam kept looking at the spot on the floor where the calf had been beside the stove. The one they’d saved, the one long since dead. He’d come down from the bath, and Vern was sitting petting it and drinking from their grandfather’s whiskey bottle, and he’d asked Vern if they could have hot chocolate. Vern looked at him like he was a ghost. “Everybody’s lookin’ for you,” he said. “Grandpa just went lookin’ for you.” His grandfather had got up and walked out the door and into the cold. “Irene,” he had said, and then he had died.

  Sam rose to his feet.

  “I never meant to hurt you,” Sam said.

  Both of their forks stopped in mid-air.

  His mother touched his arm.

  “I’ve got to go for a walk,” he said.

  Sam’s father set down his fork. “Where do ya think you’re goin’?”

  “Everything’ll be all right,” his mother interrupted him.

  “Yes,” Sam said. “Everything is going to be all right.”

  And he squeezed his mother’s shoulder, and walked past her, past
the stove, and out the front door.

  There was a warm breeze. He walked down to the creek and stood on the bank where the swimming hole used to be. It had long since silted in, and Vern had found a new spot, between their place and his, where they sometimes took the boys. The creek changed, just like everything else. It was just another thing you learned if you lived close enough to a creek to learn such things.

  He kept walking, out across the big pasture Old Sam had bought from Janson. The air was soft, and the light glowed a brilliant orange. How easy the world could be. It would be practically impossible to die on an evening like this one, when all you had to do was breathe to be alive.

  He didn’t know where he was going, but he kept walking, cutting off the trail and following a cow path he remembered from when he was a child. It headed eventually to a clump of willow that the cattle used for shelter, and the willow were gnarled and worn and tufted with fur from the cattle’s rubbing, but he left the path before he reached them. He headed away from the creek, climbing a steep hill. A cactus caught in his sock, and he had to stop and remove it. It stuck to his finger when he tried to throw it away, but he finally got rid of it.

  At last he sat down on a small knoll about halfway up the valley, nowhere in particular, but with a view of his own house about half a mile away. A safe place. He had to be a safe place. How do you do that? The shades were drawn, and he saw the lights go on as the sunlight dimmed. Behind him, when he looked to the west, the sky was awash with the setting sun. Purples and oranges and pinks.

  He waited silently, but Irene did not come. It was not a surprise. He knew she would not come.

  It didn’t matter that she did not come. What would he have said to her?

  As it began to get dark, he saw the lights of his father’s pickup meandering along the trail below. He was looking for Sam. Sam did not want to show himself, but that would have been cruel. They were worried about him. At any rate, it was nice to be looked for. He got up and walked down to where the truck sat waiting, the lights turned off.

  His father saw him as he approached, but was turned the other direction looking out his open window when Sam climbed into the cab.

  “Been watching her since noon,” his father said, motioning towards a cow that Sam now saw lying in a patch of rosebushes beside the creek.

  His father had not been looking for him.

  “She’s late,” Sam said.

  “Yeah. She’s the last. Might have to take her home and pull it.”

  They watched a while. The hooves were already visible when she strained with her labour.

  “Maybe I’ll just slip down and see if I can help her,” his father said, lifting the calving chains from the floor between them. He opened the door, got out and walked slowly towards her. She stopped to nervously look at him once, but was overtaken by another pain, and lay back on her side and strained, the white hooves and socks pushing out to where Sam could see them clearly in the moonlight. His father reached her and looped the chains around the hooves, and when she strained, he pulled.

  His father motioned to Sam to come and help him. As a child he had watched his father do this many times, but his father had never called for his help. A white shirt and suit pants was not the proper thing to be wearing to pull a calf. But his father was getting old and no longer had the strength.

  He waved again, motioning the route Sam should take to come from behind and not startle the cow. Sam got out of the truck and obeyed, approaching slowly, though the cow just lay there panting and never looked back. When he reached them, his father motioned for him to grab one hoof, and his father grasped the other, and they pulled.

  The calf emerged easily, slippery and gasping, into the night. Sam stood back, then kneeled and wiped the amniotic fluid from his hand onto the grass. His father made sure the calf’s airway was clear, patted it on the side and lifted its tail.

  He could have pulled it without Sam.

  “Big girl,” he said.

  Sam nodded. For a moment he wanted to tell his father they should call her Irene, but he thought better of it.

  She had no need for a name.

  EXT. PRAIRIE. DUSK.

  A cowboy stands beside a Toyota. He points his finger the way the camera aims: down a prairie trail that becomes a gravel road running into the horizon in the hazy distance.

  COWBOY

  You see? Looks like you could drive

  right to the horizon? Now, follow me.

  He motions to the camera, then turns and walks along the trail, and the camera follows, jiggling unsteadily. The cowboy talks as he walks, but his voice is muffled or entirely impossible to make out.

  AI (off shot)

  I can’t hear you.

  The cowboy peers over his shoulder.

  AI (cont’d)

  You’ll have to speak to the camera, or

  I can’t hear you.

  He turns and walks backwards, continuing his story.

  COWBOY

  … and we actually lose the cops, ’cause they can’t drive like us, but we know they’re bound to radio ahead, so we figure we’ll double back on a back road and head for home, so we take off down this trail we’re on now, doin’ about ninety miles an hour, watchin’ for the cops on our tail, and keepin’ an eye on where we plan to disappear over that horizon …

  The cowboy motions to where the road meets the blue, but by now a valley has revealed itself between where the trail runs out and where the road continues on the other side.

  COWBOY

  … and we just keep drivin’, right

  into the sky.

  He stops, and a moment later the camera is beside him, looking straight down a hundred-foot cliff. His finger points to a hunk of twisted metal rusting in some rosebushes.

  AI (off shot)

  That’s their car?

  The cowboy nods.

  COWBOY

  Yeah. They never bothered to try and get a truck down there and tow it away. Course, they only ever found his body. Do you think she could’ve walked away?

  He looks into the camera. The camera jerks away and pans the valley from one horizon to the other, the creek snaking along the bottom, the draws climbing up steep clay banks to the flat prairie, until we arrive back at the cowboy, looking down.

  COWBOY (cont’d)

  Just goes to show ya, even the flat old prairie’s got a few surprises … under her skirt.

  AI (off shot)

  Up her sleeves?

  He shrugs.

  COWBOY

  Whatever ya say.

  The camera sweeps across the vista again, pausing momentarily at that rusted metal in the rosebushes.

  AI (off shot)

  And her name was Irene.

  The cowboy is rolling himself a smoke.

  COWBOY

  Somebody’s name was Irene. There’s a lot of women in the world.

  He offers the camera a cigarette.

  AI (off shot)

  No thanks. You’re right. It is beautiful.

  The cowboy nods and lights the cigarette.

  COWBOY

  Beautiful way to die.

  He exhales.

  AI (off shot)

  You think so?

  COWBOY

  Drivin’ off the horizon? Sure. No better way to go.

  AI (off shot)

  Ever tried it?

  The cowboy considers this for a second.

  COWBOY

  I’m drivin’.

  He strides back towards the car, the camera joggling behind.

  AI (off shot)

  Vern. Vern!

  He gets in and starts the engine. The camera closes in on him as he smiles at us out the window. He revs the engine.

  COWBOY

  Comin’?

  AI (off shot)

  No. I don’t think so.

  COWBOY

  Somethin’ wrong?

  AI (off shot)

  Well … I don’t see it ending this way. I think I’m looking for something
more … conventional.

  COWBOY

  Conventional? Why?

  AI (off shot)

  All I need you to do is to walk off in that direction and not look back.

  The cowboy looks the direction she’s pointing, and chuckles, and then the camera pans to show us why: the western horizon is bruised with a spectacular purple, orange and pink sunset.

  COWBOY (off shot)

  I guess that makes me the hero.

  AI (off shot)

  That’s right.

  The camera pans back to his face. The cowboy shuts off the engine, disappears for a moment and gets out of the car displaying a large handgun. He smiles and stuffs it into the front of his jeans.

  COWBOY

  Okay. So, give me the gist. Who am I supposed to be, exactly?

  He takes a deep drag.

  AI (off shot)

  The last cowboy.

  The cowboy releases the smoke, peering into the camera.

  COWBOY

  The last one? I guess that’s why I’m walkin’ and not ridin’, is it?

  AI (off shot)

  Yeah. That’s why.

  COWBOY

  Well, what’s he like? What am I supposed to … act like?

  AI (off shot)

  You. He’s exactly like you.

  The cowboy looks doubtful.

  COWBOY

  Really?

  AI (off shot)

  Yeah. Exactly. Just be yourself.

  The cowboy points to himself.

  COWBOY

  Me? Myself?

  He nods and turns to look at the sunset.