Strange Cowboy (8 page)

“Oh, I look so dumpy,” says my wife. “My hair’s stuck to my head. You didn’t tell
me there was blood on my gown. My God, I look like a half-wit. Put those things away,”
she says, “that’s not the way that I remember it.”

She forgets, as an example, that she refused to picture for herself a seaside, or
she says that she was drugged. How else explain
herself? She knows very well what seasides are. If she said she wasn’t sure if seasides
ought to have a lighthouse, or a sandy beach, or rocky, or if there ought to be a
boardwalk and a Ferris wheel or rather seaoats hissing on the leesides of deserted
dunes, then I should be ashamed for not assisting her in choosing which she ought
to picture. And if I truly had been urging on her the deserted seaside, and she truly
had rejected it, well, then, I should be ashamed of failing to direct her to the peopled
seaside she desired. She liked people. Men. Men and women. She had her hopes, she
meant to say; she was “basically an optimist.” She is afraid, she says, of being left
alone; she would sooner share a bedroom at the Anchorage with Mother, than be made
to contemplate that
quiet place inside her.
That quiet place, she will remind me, is a pit. She said she was surprised to find
it. She went once, as a girl, she closed her eyes and made as if she fell inside herself,
falling upward, somehow, somehow thinking she might find, when she had finished falling,
something to resemble something bright and clean as heaven. She did not. She lay in
bed and fell and kept on falling through this pit until she could not say which way
was up, and which way down, or where the light she thought was at the core of her
had disappeared to. She was scared, scared, “just a girl,” she said; she thought it
might be dangerous to turn her gazes inward.

“Myself,” she says, “I need to see the good stuff.”

So who doesn’t? I suggested, in my case, that she regard the good stuff as a person’s
favorite serving on a plate of food, perhaps, and to think of me as being one who
likes to save his favorite servings for the last. Furze, for instance, I would like
to save out from the telling of this party, and waking up with Daddy. Whim, the horse.
Barbecue, I tell my wife, the sauce, especially, I would like to save how many friends
I played with in the hayloft.

“It was war up there,” I told my wife. “All smokey, that funny sort of jumpy light.
Everything we played was war. Except I never had to die. It was my birthday. I got
shot, all right, and the rule was that it had to hurt enough so getting shot would
stop me shooting. I couldn’t just go waltzing through the enemy and willy-nilly kill
him. We were never anybody in particular. It was always war in general. I couldn’t
stand to lose. I liked not dying, but I remember when we lost the way it felt to be
the living token of our losing. Oh, I would get hot. Even with the snow outside, all
of us had got so hot up there and itchy. We went through lots of armies. I remember
we would only stop for cake.”

But the boy, I tell her, when I told him, could not see the fun there.

“But did you tell him that the dead ones could come back to life?” she said. “Are
you sure he understood that you were just pretending?”

It was fine, she said, “a start” to have him see the possibilities in war, but did
I need to linger always over poor old Owen Dangberg, who said he wasn’t dead yet,
who we could only kill, officially, by stuffing up his mouth with hay and tying him
in pigging string until the next war? This is a gentler time, my wife explained, “War
just isn’t war,” she said; I would need to cull the “rough stuff,” seek the “brightest
corners of my memory” and smilingly relay the kinder glories I engaged with on my
birthday, if I wanted any “say-so” in the happy maturation of this latest Lincoln.

Dahl, I thought. Stolid Dahl. Lincoln Dahl is turning five. One week, we once had,
a month before his birthday. It seemed to me the boy was failing, only yesterday,
to blow out even three of his four candles. Where does all the time go? To the birds,
we hear, out the window, up in smoke, it flew. Or it went the way
the breath my son expended on his cake went, riding on a germ, directed at a flicker
on a nib of wick, a stub of wax, an oblong mound of lemon fluff and chocolate frosting
we consumed, appreciated, and digested, squatted, in due time, on the toilet to deposit,
the germ of our son’s breath invested in a turd we turned to smile upon, if we were
healthy, to curse, if we were ill, to linger over and consider where its future lay,
as I myself will sometimes do, thinking: Well, it runs downhill from here on out—from
a small pipe, says the plumber, to a big one, and from the big pipe to a bigger, and
so on, says the plumber, and etc., succeeding to a cesspool, a treatment plant not
far from here, where on an evening when the breeze is right I can’t convince myself
it isn’t our son’s breath that I am breathing, the germ of it, and of my own breath
and my wife’s breath, and the germ of every neighbor’s breath we share our cesspool
with, returning.

“I don’t know about any of that,” my wife has told me, “but for you, your time is
almost all run out.”

Not so long ago, I felt that I could answer her. There was time enough for me to tell
her I was getting somewhere with this story; thanks to her, I said, it happened now
I lost it.

I used to tell her, I said, “This is a family unit, am I right? As in,
Keep the family unit constantly advancing
? Now I ask you, how am I to keep this family advancing, if you’ve got me always starting
over from retreat?”

Not that all my efforts to deflect her interruptions were repulsive. I invited her,
from time to time, to join me. I persuaded her to sit. We could leave the lights on,
if she liked, though I suggested that she let her eyes close, or focus on the waterspot;
she could hold my hand, suck on something sour, chew a stick of gum. But she could
not talk. What we were doing here, I told her, is
trying to remember, in order to forget, and trying to forget, in order to remember.
Words first, I said, no words. Experience is too much in a word. History is too much
in a rush. Too much past intrudes itself into a single recollection, I explain, just
as water will intrude itself into a fissure in a rock, and will freeze there, and
expand, and melt, and will intrude and freeze and melt again, deepening and widening
the fissure in the rock with each succeeding season. I tell my wife that I cannot
say goiter without prodding into view my uncle Ikey, nor remember uncle Ikey without
also saying goiter, whereas uncle Ikey’s goiter was unknown to me, when I was five,
a blemish in experience impossible for memory to rightly visit. If I am to see my
uncle Ikey rightly, as I saw him at my birthday, then I must reapproach him, unwillfully,
place myself somehow behind experience, prior to my past, as if he were intruding
for the first time in my life, as if he once again were fissureless, bigger, my daddy’s
older, youngish brother, standing goiterless before me.

So I forget the words, I tell my wife, when I can, the names, my game here is to cast
away the traveler’s yearning from my mind for destination. Whatever comes to me, I
let it go, quickly; the action of my memory, ideally, outpaces my ability to question
or to comment on its content. My birthday. It will come to me, I tell myself, in time,
intact, unannounced and roundly risen from the field in which it finds me, preoccupied
and wandery, defenseless, unable to do other than receive it.

In the meantime, I explain, my tactic is to recollect the way the last few hours went.
I put my feet up, recall the bad news I received about my mother’s permanent. I have,
by now, a pretty fair impression of the curls that she describes, the liver-spotted
patches on her scalp the tightness of her curls has left uncovered. I am reacquainted
with her outrage, and my commiseration, the
legions of commiserators we hypothesize whose “gut reactions” ought to move them,
“in their hearts,” to villify the “penny-anny cheapsteaks” who decided on the hiring
of student cosmotologists to treat the hair of seniors. Together, we are baffled by
the absence of an “outcry.” My mother says that she herself has cried out “till the
cows came home,” and cites this as the reason for her having kept what precious little
hair that God, “in all his wisdom,” has seen it fit to leave her.

“Otherwise they’ll shave you,” says my mother, “or else they’ll clap a wig onto your
head and keep your own hair fastened to your skull with stickpins. It’s how I kept
my teeth,” she says. “They’ll tell you you are better off to let them cut your teeth
out, how much easier it is to clean them, you know, how sweet your breath will be,
but I told them, I says,
You give me my six feet back of intestines, and then we’ll talk about my pearlies.
”

She kept her pride, in other words, I recall her saying after all she’d lost to sickness
and her husband (bless him) that she didn’t need a little girl in tennis shoes with
scissors and a curling wand to steal the little she’d preserved. I recall her wondering
what kind of “statement” she would make, looking like a “fright,” and what would Vernon
think, and need she mention me, her son, my wife, all those young and pretty people
who might see her at the party?

All of this comes easily of her, and is easily let go, so long as thought does not
expand the interval between the mother I’ve recalled, and the mother I’ve forgotten.
In the same way—if I am playing by my rules—I might recall and forget the broken fence,
the ceiling, work, the Roxy, Hope. I unburden. I do not fall, I tell my wife, I see
no pit, nothing dark or “awfully, awfully heavy.” I grow lighter, rather, rise, emergingly,
an inertial heat appears to bear me up and outward as the past succeeds itself, accelerates
and passes in and out of me, colliding with itself, disintegrating as it comes and
goes, resolving finally into unfamiliar fragments, unwedded to the words and names
through which such sounds and flashes once cohered and once enshrouded.

On a good day, the best day, when I am given time, and peace, no memory persists;
I am spun out and abandoned where a great, blue dome appears above me and beneath
me, suspends me, seems to beckon my approach and my desire to inscribe it. I could
be anything. I am unaged, unsexed, unmothered and unfathered, refractive, brilliant,
magnified, divided, recombinative and whole. My past appears to be a future whose
dispersion through the world is immanent and universal. My apprehension is unbounded,
undistanced, the little shocks of being unexclude me. Pale suns burn up from me by
days and are returned in icy beams to me by nights when I am cold and silver. A leaf
turns in my chest, my arms are feathered, I crow, am scaled and finning idly in the
blazing eddy. Whatever thing I am I feel that I am also not. My ears pour out a brief
and golden liquor. Beneath my ribs the arid blossoms sweeten. I tell my wife my cries
are milk and cool caresses. I consume myself, greedily, urgently, I know that I must
pass, and then I pass, fixed; I perceive a lag, observe the world form up apart from
me. I must listen for myself. I watch the great, blue dome recede from me and cease
to beckon. The leaf, I see, is turning out of reach. A flowered branch sings. I recognize
a presentation, I feel the need to make some sort of an assessment. I coo. I gurgle,
snatch the air and kick my feet and scream. Gradually, I am somebody’s raccoon. I
am a pride and joy. I will go to Rome. I am told this is the orchard. This here is
an apple. Can I say it, apple? This here is a peach. I’m your mama. This is mama’s
garden. Corn. Peas. Tomatoes. In the fall, these seeds will be a pumpkin, and we will
carve a face in it for Halloween. Can you say Halloween? How about Thanksgiving? Do
you remember Christmas? Because pretty soon it’s Christmas, and then will be your
birthday! Soon, I crawl. I walk, I skip, I hit, I catch. I plot, discern the merit
in fulfilling obligation. I say, Mama. I say, Papa. What’s that? I say. A tractor.
What’s that? I say. A bird. I say mine and mean a rope, say rope and mean it’s mine.
Because I said it, I explain, because I learned the word. I repeat the words, believing
I might draw the things they name a little nearer. It is as if I never saw the barn
before I said it. Barn, I say, and see the tilted dream of it. My dream. My birthday.
My pinata, I remember. My friends and hayfort and my cake and uncle Ikey. I show.
I am antic, showing, I want everyone to know the troughs are mine; Jesus there and
Mary, they are mine; and the band up there is mine, the music they are playing, too,
is mine; the baling wire moons, the wire stars I pull down and untie and tie again
to prove that they are mine, are mine; and the air, too, the cold, the frozen ground,
the snow that falls and sticks there, the clouds the snow has fallen from, and on
the other side, higher than the clouds, the constellations, they are mine, Orion and
the Dipper, you can’t see them, or the planet Venus either, mine, I say it quickly,
Venus, I do not want to hear it said by anybody else, nor Mars, and my Losivya—My
milkcow, I explain—and walk away, and think that nobody must know that, none of this,
not today; today I am the only seer, the only sayer, any other seeing, any other saying,
I believe, will wake me from the dream, will return my party to the shadows, history,
I think, perspective, I am terrified, today, at five, that the celebration of my birth
could be much less fantastic. That man, I say, the little one, he’s my uncle Ikey.
He can put a string into his nose and pull it through his mouth! I say, Look! Look
at this! It’s a... it’s a... it’s a pigeon! I say, You can’t kill
me! And, Did you ever smell a furzebox? I say, Everybody has to play by my rules,
it’s my birthday!

That’s the game, I tell my wife. Sleight of hand, a magic trick. I tell her, when
she sees me in my easy chair, it isn’t that my head is in the sand, but rather that
the sand is pouring back into my head. First I empty it, and then I fill it up, though
I only very rarely will succeed in either emptying or filling. I cannot forget enough.
The similarities between my wife’s demands, and my mother’s having asked for my assistance
in the preparation of the party are considerable. I suggest my wife is pressing too
hard for performance here; vitality, I tell her, cannot be authored by coercion and
rehearsal.