Strange Cowboy Read Free

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 thetoilet, 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