Strange Cowboy (2 page)

I may have my eyes tricked out for seeing Mama’s next deep breath, yet what I really
see is Mama powdering her cheek, Mama rubbing bag-balm on her calloused heel, Mama
kissing Papa on the forehead, before she pulled the sheet up. Same way with the boy,
only in reverse. In him, I do not see his scalp so much as I am figuring a future
boot size, or will his foot correct itself so he might wear a boot, or will he pass
from one grade to the next, graduate and make his way through life without requiring
any supplementary assistance. Big bucks, I mean, from me, monies I might rightly rather
count on spending on expensive tickets to the beach. I think in this boy’s dander
I have seen another old guy unentitled. I see me seated here, a little deeper down
here in the impress of my own expiring carcass, a little looser, a little sparser,
my fillings crowned, my gums rebuilt, my paunch redoubled, a really pretty old and
pretty lost guy dozing off and dreaming of a brown-skinned native, blemishless, nicely
plumped up through the hips on coconuts and mangoes, a newly breasted child whose
joy in life is listening to me and dabbing aloe vera on my sunburnt ankles.

I do. I do. I feel sorry for myself. Awfully. And, then I don’t. And then I do. And
then I come into a day much like today and understand I might try feeling sorry for
my son, or for my wife, or mother, or my father, who is dead, after all, and arguably
most deserving of my sorrow. Unless his death was a relief. To him. Unless he meant
to spare himself his misery by feeding on those foods most likely to induce in him
a chronic constipation, a pressure in the bowels which relayed to the brain with force
enough, he might have thought, to cause the stroke which would eventually, mercifully
kill him. Whereas Mama saw no mercy in her death. Nor did my wife, nor would I expect
my son to even see such
mercy in his death, were he able to conceive of death in one way or the other. In
the same way, I might understand how the entire lot of them could choose to not accept
my sorrow, sorrow being not a widget handier than death in life, according to my mother,
“Nothing you can spend, nothing you can keep and wish for luck on in your pocket.”
My mother only wants another, longer life. I know my wife would like a better husband.
And if I am to listen to my mother and my wife, then I might safely say that in addition
to a dog, the boy would simply like a party. A party, says my wife, that I myself
need not lose any shuteye over throwing. Myself, I need only tell the boy a story,
a story, as it happens, not so simple in the telling as it sounds. I have no doubt,
for instance, that this birthday business is precisely how we came unhappily to be
here.

Not that turning five is an exclusively unhappy cause of celebration. For me, do not
forget, being five meant Grief. It meant a party spared no lavishness, according to
my mama, who will recall as crowning proof of lavishness how she confected an entire
five tier cake. Cake, which she didn’t even like, she says. German Chocolate, which
she even liked much less. As for me, I will recall that I was giddy, “wound up tighter
than a tick,” my Uncle Ikey said it; I was whiney, silent, mopey, five. I wore suspenders,
and a shiny pair of lace-up shoes, and this very classy, diamond patterned bowtie,
not a clip-on. I recall I wanted not to say a word unless I felt it was the right
one, and the first one, the earliest, rightest word I saw that I could fit in edgewise,
when the guests came. I was to be seen, my mother said, not heard. I said
and then
a lot. And then, I opened up my eyes. And then, I put my socks on, and then I put
my shoes. I knew enough to play. I thought to listen. I heard my Grandpa Al, who said
a boy the size that I was wasn’t all
unlucky, being nose-high to the furzebox. There were hundreds, guests galore. Peppermint
and barbecue, perfume and ammonia or straw—I could not say what I was smelling. Ranch
smells, barn rot. Views of many legs, slacks and dresses, shiny hosiery and shining,
silver buckles. People spoke above me. Even then I must have seen that in a world
of words I was not favored. So I fudged, or did not fudge, but said that I was waked
up by my papa’s voice, and breath, and by his size, this thickish, humid space, a
smaller shape of dark I felt his body claiming of the larger dark he woke me into:
“My room,” I said, and by his whiskers, as it seemed to me it really happened then,
as it likely was expected to have happened, by any guest whose leg I held for long
enough to make him stop and listen.

“Tell the boy a story,” says my wife, something, she says, from back when I was his
age. But I ask if this is possible. She has purchased him the bowtie, since I refused
to lend him mine, and suspenders, and a pair of shiny shoes and shoebrush and a little
tin of shoeblack. She says it isn’t clubfoot, what the boy has, when I asked if she
has maybe been extravagant, taking care to keep him shod so fancily, considering his
podiatric ailment. He is only slightly pigeontoed, my wife says. The doctor, she explains,
has made her understand that all the best Olympic sprinters, “from antiquity on down,”
in case I had not noticed, are also pigeontoed. Of the teeth we’ve witnessed springing,
willy-nilly, from his jaws, she says they are his baby teeth. She promises that he
will shed them, the same as he will shed his baby fat, the same as it had happened
once with me, and once with her, as we grew older.

“He’s just staying younger longer,” says my wife. “If you ask me my opinion, I would
say you’re jealous.”

Very possibly, I think, and yet I wonder was I ever, in any sense that matters, his
age? In what way can a blonde boy be a lankish brown? In what way is the boy who sat
a blooded horse the boy who topples face-first from a plastic rocker? Myself, I grew
up with rocks and fur and feathers. I knew how to use my knife, could get a drowned
cat skinned quicker than the time it took to have the flies swarm. My son, on the
other hand, has got his allergies to every weed and blooming beauty; he turns a lurid
shade I’ve seen of sunsets in a smog belt, puffs up like an adder in the presence
of a living cat, is induced to nausea, having sighted dead ones being picked at by
the magpies on the roadside. He has yet, so far as I know, to fetch the blade out
from the handle of his knife without extensive counsel. The fly swarms of my youth,
no doubt, would make of him a walking fester, while he chewed his tongue and clawed
the handle with his fingerstubs.

No, I should say that we were doing well, my son and I, to leave our mutual affiliation
be. We seemed neither of us bothered much to be particulates accounting for the general
decline, the trend away from bats and balls and gloves, paternal intervention, relative
to rearing children. As for me, my sleep had been untroubled, this past year, my dreams
have reinspired me to look upon the breasts and buttocks of my wife in otherwise than
glands and cushions; I have waked up every now and then as in the early days, clammy
in the old illusion, thinking I might suckle there, tweak, caress, and penetrate,
while the boy has had far fewer days consumed in idle weeping. I have even caught
him, on occasion, smiling at me, showing me a semi-toothsome, frightened, hopeful
grimace, which recalls me to a boyhood vision of my father: old, alone, wrinkled,
gummy, clutching at his troubled kneecaps on the
toilet, engaging bravely with his hemorrhoids and constipation, straining to postpone
his second stroke.

“Is he happy?” said my wife. “Well, look at him, why don’t you? Can’t you see the
boy is smiling?”

Undoubtedly, she says, I will regret not having been a bigger part of our son’s future
memory. I don’t smile enough, my wife says; the smile, she must remind me, is the
Invitation to Desire, the Living Wings of Memory.

She says, “You keep it up, and he won’t want to remember anything of you. Nothing.
Do you read me? I said that he’ll remember
nothing,
nothing,
nothing
.”

Yet if the boy will not recall me chopping wood or lying on my back beneath the family
wagon, will not be able, as my wife insists, to reproduce me on my hands and knees,
riding him about the cold linoleum, singing songs and spooning dribble from his chin
of twice-mashed carrots, will not remember me, the father,
smiling,
then will my son at least not see me someday in his future, just right here, in this
chair, poised, seated, an integrated man in a disintegrating household? Anything,
I told my wife, is something. Through speed and speciation the smallest vital crumb
on earth exerts a force commendable to memories extended well beyond the retrospectings
of the local child.

“Just think about those guys we saw on that show on Rome,” I said. “The Master of
the Bearded Unicorn; The Master of the Virgin Torso. Not all of us can be a Botticelli.”

Surely, there must one day be a shrine built to the memory of every mastered passion.
A place of record and collection, visited and mythic. Mine is to sit. I broaden, sitting.
For me, for the boy, I foresee a chair-sized chamber in his skull to which he pays
his visits, waits for a word, watches for a gesture, sees me,
uncorrupt, anonymous, Master of the Seated Half-Dads. I believe that I may not be
bested in the seated greeting. I have the effect, upon a person’s entering our household,
of having stood, kissed a cheek and begged a person please to help himself. Should
I choose to, it is possible for me to cause a person to believe that I have suffered
polio, or multiple sclerosis, nervous, muscular diseases, past or in remission, whose
ravages have wrested from my life the spry, athletic days I sit in order to display
myself as having once been promised. I am the only person, to my knowledge, who is
able to consistently relieve himself of his dyspepsia through certain bowel-specific
postures. Naturally, I cannot satisfactorily describe my power, nor why I believe
in its effects. I have simply asked my wife to look at me, see me in my chair and
ask herself how any son could grow up crossing at my footrest and forget me?

Until today, on occasion, my wife has temporarily forgone the boy, admitting she is
not so sure she’d want to have me as a memory either, if she had not known the Me
she knew in courtship. She insists I was a different man then, wants to know if I
remember our inaugurating days of marriage, the brief, halcyon months of carnal love
and culinary amplitude, before the news broke that the boy would come. In those days,
she explains, I bought her silken underpants. I lapped mousses from her cleavage.
Apparently, I said I liked the flavor of her cunny-stew. I would growl—it seems to
me, implausibly—coming up from there, smeary-lipped, and kiss her. I was truly, truly
frightening, and bigger, it had seemed to her, hurtful, in a handsome way, when I
forgot myself. She recalls our favorite game was Horsey. I neighed. It seems to me
no likelier than growling, but she claims she spurred me on and slapped my flanks,
unmercifully, at my urging. She loved, loved, loved to ride me. I was the stallion
of her childhood dreams come true. She
sometimes called me Silver. Other times she called me Trigger, and on the nights I
reared and bucked the rankest I became, to her, Black Beauty. It wasn’t any pervert,
she insists, nothing bad, or even too unique, in our part of the country, where so
many of us grew up in the neighborhood of horses, and those of us who didn’t grow
up with a horse were made to grow up wanting one, or just, it seems, with wanting.

“Oh, it was a romp,” she said. “My God, I swear that I could feel it when you—you
know—I’m not kidding. I even knew which times you gave me more than others. I swear
I knew which time it was you finally knocked me up.”

My wife said it was then, with the advent of the boy, that I began exploring Oriental
diets. I went easy on the cream. I distrusted cuts of meat much larger than my thumb.
I suddenly liked rice, discovered strength through fasting. In the eyes of my wife,
I was in the process of becoming, increasingly, less Me. To support herself, my wife
hauled out the snapshots of our happiest occasions as a family, showing me consistently
appearing not the way I ought to. I hear my wife inform me that my duty to the boy,
in part, is to provide for him a model. If I had stood a little nearer to him, smiling,
preferably, “expressing interest,” said my wife, then I might have kept the boy from
getting hurt so often—his fingers broken on the day we fed the horses, his chest bruised
by the goat, his hide chewed off by colonies of fire ants he’d found to crawl through
at the picnic. I could have been a hero to him. As it stands, my son’s past with me
has been a woozy spiral of neglect and woundings. Lucky for us—for me, she meant—he
isn’t likely to remember. Till now.

“He’s at the age where he remembers,” said my wife. “Give the boy a party. Anything
is possible. I bet he’ll forget you were the one who burned his drawings.”

I was doubtful. At our best, the boy and I these past few weeks have been reactive
agents in a mother’s midnight stab at family alchemy. There I hear him padding up
behind me where I’m resting on the sofa; there he hovers at my elbow while I read
the morning paper; there I see him tug my pantleg just below my operation. Or else
I see him on the carpet, with his tablet and Crayolas, filling in what seem to be
the contours of a snowman and a lizard. Of this last occasion I recall I watched him
long enough to know that he was whistling through his nose, and that the damp spots
on his tablet were the emblems of his deepest intellectual exertions, the stream of
spittle falling cleanly from his chin while he had pondered the expressive capabilities
of reptiles, as he knew them.

I said, “Whatcha doin, sport?” surprising him, despite myself, judging by the swerving
action of the Crayola he was working.

He sat back on his hams and strained his head around and up to see me, as if he was
emerging from a shell. His eyes were monstrous, distorted by the thickness of the
spectacles his sight depends upon. I half expected him to answer me in tongues of
damaged birds and fawning quadrupeds.
Aawrock
! I heard him saying,
Feed me, please, hngrrahh, chirrup
!