Western Swing Read online

  This kid, number one, showed a certain persistence and a winning smile, but he looked too young to trust. I wanted a man who could take my mind off me for an hour, not a cute charmer with clear eyes. Certainly not a cowboy—a typical, thin, side-burned, dressed-up-to-go-to-town kid cowboy. I figured his age at twenty-two, only one year older than my daughters. Confidence practically oozed from under his huge felt hat. I don’t care much for men with that kind of seducing confidence. They intrigue me, but I don’t like them.

  Maybe the kid sensed this or maybe he only knew one approach and that happened to be the winning line.

  He smiled. “You left your husband today, right?” The thirty points for intuition light must have flashed because the boy pressed on.

  “You’re looking for a fast, meaningless good time. No strings. No aftershocks. A basic quickie.” Brains in a cowboy always shock me. I know they’re no dumber than anyone else, but they usually act like they are and it throws me off when they aren’t.

  I nodded. “Something like that.”

  “Look no farther. Nobody gets hung up over me and I get hung up over nobody.”

  Further might have been better than farther, but I wasn’t certain. Besides, his chin was cute. “I can get that from my fingers.”

  “I’m better than fingers. I weigh more.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay what?”

  “You can buy me a drink. But I’m warning you. I don’t like you so far and I’m not stuck on this stool. If I see a better offer, you’re out of luck.”

  • • •

  Wyoming cowboys are real strange people. They dress funny. You see a character in town made out like a complete dude, jeans tucked inside knee-high Tony Lamas, three silk handkerchiefs around his neck, bandanna out the back pocket, cowboy hat the size of a Karmann Ghia with a little string pulled tight under his neck, that character almost surely works with cows. The tough, macho cowboys you run into on the street probably drive trucks or sack groceries at Safeway. They dress up like a real cowboy at work, and a real cowboy come to town decks out like Tom Mix in The Border Bandito.

  The kid, whose name turned out to be Billy G, worked with cows. His jeans weren’t jammed into his boots, thank God, but he wore a side-button, black cavalry shirt and a belt with a giant bronze buckle that said COORS. His hat was a dark brown umbrella with a peacock eye feather stuck in front. He offered me a pinch of wintergreen snuff. I refused.

  • • •

  Billy G bought a few drinks which turned into dinner which turned into your usual modern system of verbal foreplay. The boy had a certain smoothness, I’ll have to give him that. Whether instincts or experience, he paced us through the various levels of enticement, never pushing at any crucial moments which would have allowed me to make a decision. Some eye contact, a touch to the hair, a hand on the knee, another round of scotch, and suddenly I was a little drunk and being steered by the elbow into a restaurant full of Billy G’s buddies.

  “The whole damn spread’s here,” he said.

  “Spread?”

  We wasted ten minutes on slapping shoulders, waving across the tables, and answering What’s going down, You’re growing uglier by the minute, Gettin’ any lately, and Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. Not a man in the place spoke a sentence he hadn’t spoken at least three hundred times. Billy G showed me off—“Look what I got, guys”—like a mounted elk.

  Well, I wasn’t mounted yet. Reading the cute menu (Buffalo Bill Burgers and Calamity Jane Steaks) I began to feel misgivings. Loren needed me to remind him when to eat. Also, I had meant to pack his Vision Quest bag that night, even saved a Twinkie surprise to hide under his spare socks. Now he wouldn’t remember the spare socks.

  I knew exactly what would happen. Loren would realize he was helpless without me and trot off down the road for salvation from pimply Marcie. For months now she’d been waiting to save his tortured artistic soul—which was my job. Marcie couldn’t handle Loren. He’d convince her that saving a tortured soul meant sitting on it.

  The waitress had bloodred fingernails, blue hair, and chewed gum, naturally.

  “Can I getcha another drink?”

  “Scotch.”

  “Whatcha eatin’?”

  “I’ll have the Bridger cut prime rib and a baked potato. Russian dressing on the salad.”

  “All we got’s French and Thousand Island, honey.”

  “Thousand Island, then.”

  Billy G was born in Chicago, but turned cowboy when he hit thirteen.

  “How long ago was that?”

  “A lifetime.”

  “Mine or yours?”

  He cowboyed at the Flying Fist Ranch, which he called the Flying Fuck, FF for short, and seemed to think I was totally uneducated because I never heard of it.

  “Big as Delaware but worth more,” he said. “Thorne Axel’s private kingdom.”

  “Who’s Thorne Axel?”

  Billy G was aghast. “You never heard of Thorne Axel?”

  “Well, shit, I’m sorry.”

  “He owns the Flying Fist. Everybody knows Thorne Axel.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You’ll have to meet him.”

  Supper came and Billy G lost the train of thought. He cut up his entire steak before taking the first bite. I found that odd. My prime was a bit rare for my tastes, I don’t suck blood as a rule, but it tasted fine and Billy G was paying, so I didn’t complain. If I am a bitch, which is hard to deny, I’m a better bitch than most. I almost never complain. Nobody likes a complainer, but everyone loves a bitch.

  Ten minutes of silent chewing later, Billy G’s mind came back from his stomach. “Thorne’s on a drunk.”

  I’d been thinking of calling Loren to remind him about the socks, so I missed it. “What?”

  “Thorne’s been drunk three days. The whole crew came to town to cheer him up. I saw him around here sometime yesterday.”

  “Why’s Thorne on a drunk?”

  Billy G put his right hand over his liver like a half-mast pledge of allegiance and belched, not loudly, but still enough to antagonize my romantic interests. “Wife left him again. Kid’s a dope dealer. Daughter turned dramatic and shot up a herd of yearlings. It was a mess.”

  “Why’d she shoot the yearlings?”

  “Who can figure the mind of a crazy woman? You want the potato skin?”

  “No.”

  “Vitamins’re in the skin. I always eat the skin.” Billy G speared my potato leavings with his steak knife. “That’s the trouble with E.T.”

  “Who?”

  “Thorne’s hippie son. He’s a vegetarian, but he don’t eat potato skins. No protein’ll make your brains dry out.”

  “His real name is E.T.?”

  “Ain’t it a shame.” Billy G lowered his voice. “He sits with his legs crossed above his knees, like a girl.”

  I whispered back, “Maybe E.T.’s a fag.”

  “Naw, Thorne’d kill him if he sucked wienie. Probably just a lack of potato skins.”

  “I don’t eat potato skins.”

  He pointed with his knife. “You cross your legs above the knees.”

  • • •

  Given that Billy G belched after supper, said “crazywoman” as if the two went together, and wore a black shirt, which ever since Johnny Cash I have found obscene, I wonder why I went ahead and slept with him.

  I knew I was going to sleep with somebody. The sleeping—nice word for sex, isn’t it—came from a personal need caused by anxiety at leaving Loren. Some people get drunk. Some people go for long walks and cry. I fuck. Perhaps it’s Grandma’s blood again. She’s easy to blame. She’s dead. More likely, though, I just need to feel another man’s butt every now and then. The marriage with Ron lagged along for fifteen reasonably good years, but once every eight or ten months, the pres
sure of mediocrity became pain and, without premeditation, I drove to some country bar on the southeast side of Houston and picked up a stranger.

  I get off with strangers and I didn’t with Ron. He wasn’t bad in bed, he lasted as long as most, but with Ron I had a past and future. I can’t get off if I’m worried about past and future. Same with Ace and sometimes, but not always, Mickey and Loren.

  Anyway, Billy G was my first transgression against Loren, and since we’d split up that morning, I didn’t count him as a technical fool-around.

  However, Billy G wasn’t the usual type I chose for morphine sex. I generally pick guys who need me as much as I need them. Lost souls, nerds, and salesmen. These guys appreciate me. The Billy Gs of the world look at it as conquering me—another notch on the bedpost. I’d rather find a man with an active fantasy life and make all his dreams come true. While satisfying my own itch, of course. The pain lays have nothing in common with the true loves. That’s a whole different thing.

  Roxanne says my attitude toward sex is practically male.

  I chose Billy G because he didn’t agree that his boss’s son was probably gay. That seemed almost noble of him. Every man I ever met would jump all over an insinuation about another man’s heteroness. Each confirmed queer means one less competitor, I suppose. You try it. Say, “I think that guy’s a fag,” to any man about any man and he’ll agree with you every time.

  Thorne’s son was a hippie, a vegetarian, and a drug dealer, all causes for manhood suspicion, but Billy G dismissed my fag label. I liked that. So I took him upstairs and fucked his brains out.

  • • •

  Women have chosen lovers for less.

  That’s why it’s all right for me to move on Billy G, but it’s not all right for Loren to stick one in little Marcie. This is no double standard here, I don’t buy that crap. This is truth. Loren can’t make love without falling in it. Look what happened with me and that mouse of a wife of his. One hump and he’s ready to get married.

  I use my extramarital sex for medicinal purposes. There’s a lot of pressure in being me, and a six-hour frenzy session with a stranger releases that pressure. It damn sure beats drinking and crying.

  • • •

  Besides, I’m not the coldhearted man-eater my daughters and almost everyone else thinks I am. Leaving Loren caused me considerable distress. If it hadn’t, I wouldn’t have kept Billy G awake all night, but every time we collapsed in a heap of sweat and exhaustion, I’d stop and think of poor Loren—Loren reading, or Loren walking in the woods alone, or Loren sitting at his typewriter.

  The only way to block the tears and nausea was to shove Billy G in and go at it. After five or six hours, even that didn’t help, so I let the wasted kid go to sleep. He wasn’t worth much by then anyway. Billy G must have thought he’d gotten hold of God’s own nympho.

  I mean, I loved Loren. I married the creep. Personal extravaganzas should be fair. True love overcomes circumstances. That’s what I’d always been taught and that’s what I believed. I wanted to be loved. Is that asking too much? I wanted a man I could talk to and count on. I wanted two lawn chairs on a sun deck, and a piano, and a greenhouse for my vegetables. I wanted another baby. I didn’t want to drink twelve shots of scotch and suck a cowboy’s dick, for Chrissake. I wanted to be normal.

  Things just never worked out the way I wanted.

  Around dawn, I slid out of bed and knelt on the bathroom tile and threw up everything.

  Part Three

  8

  Given life to live all over again, I wouldn’t have crawled into my bag and fallen asleep next to the dying fire that third night of the Vision Quest.

  I’ve had these dreams for a couple of years now, they’re like reverse nightmares, but much worse than a nightmare because with a nightmare, waking up is relief. In my dreams, something good happens, something very good that feels so real, and I know is real. I’m happy. Often I’m so happy I say, “Thank God, this isn’t a dream, the waiting is over,” only it is a dream. The happiness carries over for a couple of seconds after I awaken, then recognition rolls in and my stomach contracts like I’ve been hit. A day that begins with one of these dreams is a hard day to finish.

  We were all together, Buggie, Ann, and I in the Alice Street duplex—in our tiny kitchen with the cartoons held to the refrigerator by strawberry magnets and the herb chart on the wall surrounded by Buggie’s preschool drawings of eagles and elephants. Buggie looked around five, maybe. His blond hair hung down in his eyes and over his collar. Ann never would cut his hair. She always made me do it, then she would pick at his head for a week, sighing and saying I’d cut too much.

  Ann stood next to the double sink, backlit by the sun pouring in our kitchen window. I couldn’t see her face clearly, but she wore an old Denver Broncos football jersey she’d picked up at a yard sale, faded jeans, and sandals she bought from a hippie store up by the capitol. They were supposed to do something good for her feet, something to do with the natural slope of the arch.

  The Bug wanted to go outside and dig a hole. He sat at the breakfast table, ignoring cold Zoom, banging his plastic bucket with his plastic shovel. The handle of the shovel was wood, but the scoop part was plastic.

  I quizzed him on Walden. “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth,” I read. “What do you think Thoreau meant by that?”

  Buggie looked down at his little blue pail. “I dunno.”

  “You knew yesterday. Did you forget already?”

  Ann turned on water at the sink. “Don’t you think that’s a little abstract for a kindergartner?”

  “You’re never too young for Walden. What do you think he meant by truth, Buggie?”

  Buggie squirmed in the chair and banged the shovel from side to side in the bucket. He twisted his mouth around, thinking. I taught Buggie to always twist his mouth around when he was thinking.

  “Truth is knowing what happens,” he said.

  I beamed at Ann. “Aha,” I said, “too young to understand, huh?”

  Buggie continued: “The man says it’s better to know what’s happening than to be famous or rich or those other things.”

  “Right. Now do you think that’s proper?”

  “Mary wants to go outside. The worms leave if we’re not there early.”

  “Do you think it’s better to know what’s happening than to have love, money, or fame?”

  He slid out of his chair. “I’d rather be loved.”

  Hell, it was only a dream. I think.

  It would be just like Buggie to say, “I’d rather be loved.” He was a real earnest boy with melting brown eyes and a straight mouth. As a baby, he hardly ever cried, but he didn’t laugh much either. Buggie never acted the way I would expect a kid to act. He didn’t demand the attention other kids crave, and he never put out precocious sayings we could write down and send to his grandparents—which was probably for the best, since none of his grandparents could stand us.

  Mostly he pushed soldiers or trucks around his room or the backyard. Soldier pushing was serious business to Buggie. He was much too intense to “play.”

  As I recall, Buggie rode his bike a lot. A red Western Auto Flyer with pedals he had to stand on to reach. The details still come to mind, his hands, for instance, and those filthy off-white tennis shoes he was so proud of. I can remember every crack on that plastic shovel with the wooden handle, but I can’t seem to remember what Buggie was like. I can’t see his face anymore.

  • • •

  Ann and Buggie. Where did the woman leave off and the child begin? How was I supposed to see a difference? Maybe that jumbled-together feeling, my inability to separate one from the other, was why I let Ann down so badly the last couple of years. I like to think there was a reason other than me being me.

  It’s just that nothing in my background prepared me for the emotions of fatherhood. Before B
uggie, I stuck children in a category with geography, motorcycles, and corporate structures—things I’d never thought about, had an opinion of or any curiosity for. Buggie was the first child I ever looked at up close.

  Ann, too, was something I’d never experienced. She was a nonstudent who’d been taking care of herself for so long she knew what she was doing. At the time, I thought that was kind of unique, though now I realize there’re a lot more single moms in the world than there are students.

  I don’t know what I was emotionally prepared for back then—smoking pot, I suppose. Watching TV. Fantasizing a rich and creative sex life based mainly on female English professors and graveyard-shift waitresses.

  The spring of my junior year at DU, I used the one-two punch of marijuana and daytime television to, for all purposes, lobotomize my sensibility. I slept fourteen hours a night, ate no hot food, made it through school by putting in just enough effort to keep from losing my Guaranteed Student Loan. The problem was my attitude, of course. What other problem is there? I wanted to be a writer and refused to be anything else. I thought life was meaningless unless I was a writer and the fact that I hadn’t written anything longer than the dedications to my first three novels depressed me into becoming an apathetic, make that pathetic, wreck. That Ann saw anything salvageable in me is one of those mysteries that reinforces my belief in Unexplainable Shit.

  But women are always falling in love with potential instead of fact. Men aren’t like that.

  • • •

  The joint I was smoking had a runner, a little line of fire that crept down to my finger and threatened to cut off the burning end, dumping hot coal in my lap. Besides the uncontrolled runner, my attention was split pretty evenly between a half-finished essay on “Dryden’s Use of Romantic Imagery” and Gilligan’s Island on the TV. All three confused me somewhat, which is nothing new.