Thu, 19 May 2005

The Ballad of Cowboy James
We hadn’t been there more than three months before we got our walking papers. Cowboy and I had just come into work, strapping on the kevlar and zipping up our orange JPWA jumpers when King told us we weren’t working today. Three months is a really long time to do professional witness work; most people were out after a week, but Cowboy was there when I started and probably a month before that, even, so he and I were the two biggest kids on the block by then. We’d come in a little late, leave a little early, wouldn’t get uptight about talking to the citizens when we were on rounds. I’d managed to get by with nothing more than a couple shots taken at me, but Cowboy still had bruises from where some fucking kid winged him with a deer slug. You don’t know what, oh, okay. Professional witness is somebody who gets paid to stand around somewhere where there’s a lot of street crime, so that if an incident happens the witness can testify. The cops make a donation to Jourgenson Witness Protection Agency and some measly amount of that trickles down to the actual witness. The money part is if the victim or the victim’s family wants to press charges they can make a direct payment to the witness, which I guess is kinda like tips. The only bad part about the whole setup is if somebody decides they’re gonna plug some guy on the street they start looking around for the witness, you know, so as to make it a clean hit, but we’re so fucking padded that unless you can drop a fridge on ‘em or something the cops’ll be there before you even get through the first layer, so why bother.

So King comes in and tells us to take the day off because he’s closing up shop. JWPA has been dodging lawsuits from all over the place over “the illegality of coercive witnesses” but these tend to disappear after certain people move certain influence over certain other people. Turns out what’s really the case is the supercooled gel they use in the second layer to slow projectiles has been springing leaks and supercooling some of the witnesses, which lead to the kinda of lawsuits that influence I was talking about earlier doesn’t have any influence over. I heard this later, from Ali, king of the Bosnian homeboys. “Always with the fucking with me and us, that King, man he such a, how do you say it, a motherfucker punk, man.” Ali spent two years at Srpski Brod; kids with .45’s couldn’t scare him less. Dammit, I’m drifting again.

So anyway me and Cowboy head over to Tzherhyd’s, just down the street, where Ali and Smiljan have been drinking Early Times all morning and can barely tell Cowboy and me what really happened, which I already told you about. Somewhere in there I get to telling Cowboy about what I’m gonna do with my last paycheck, which King had ready for us as a parting gift, along with our MEDALERT: NO BLOODBOURNE PATHOGENS badges, and apparently somewhere in there I made a crack about starting my band back up. There’s very few things I know about Cowboy: he used to be a trucker but multiple DWIs brought that job to a close, he used to be married, and he really really wants to play in a band, only he can’t play and he can’t sing. I mean, he can sing, but he can’t sing well, it’s like if you took Merle Haggard and you kept punching him in the throat while feeding him whiskey he’d maybe sound like Cowboy James. So he’s been drinking and I’ve been drinking and we’re both really pissed off about having to find new work and Ali and Smiljan keep goading us on, laughing their asses off, and finally I say “Look, man. You can’t sing. I mean, that’s nothing against you, but that’s just all there is to it.” And the next thing I know Cowboy James has a fucking gun in my face.

“I highly recommend you take back that comment immediately, son.”

Everybody else in the place gets quiet, except for Ali, who keeps giggling and mumbling “Bitches is very crazy, man, very crazy…”

“James, you put that fucking gun down right now.”

“No, no. you take it back. I ain’t killed nobody all day, don’t make me start now.”

“You put that gun down, we’ll step outside, we can have a talk like civilized people.”

“We’ll go outside. And we’ll duel.”

Cowboy James reaches into his bag and pushes an identical Glock 18 across the table. I can barely even stand up, but fortunately Johnny-on-the-spot Ali helps me to my feet and puts the gun in my hand and the three of us stagger outside while Smiljan calls the cops.

We must have been in the bar for hours because it was cold and snowing and just a totally miserable February night. I’m walking through slush and shit on the way to the back alley and I can’t even tell which direction I’m going and even with Ali helping me I have to keep one hand on the wall to keep from falling over. I’m pretty sure I pissed myself at some point. I yelled to Cowboy, who had already fallen in a heap about three paces shy of ten that there was no way we were gonna fucking duel tonight, we’re too drunk and it’s too cold and we’ll have out our differences tomorrow, midnight sharp. Cowboy lets out a grunt of approval just before passing out, and by means I don’t really understand, somehow I made it home.

For the next two weeks, Cowboy James and I would get together around three in the afternoon at Tzherhyd’s, drinking up the remainder of our paychecks only to discover each night we were too intoxicated to duel. I realized this would only go on for so long, but I didn’t see any other alternatives, though I admit I didn’t try very hard. Booze was cheap, particularly if you exclusively drank Cornhusker Vodka Brown Label, which was factory defective runoff stolen from the back dumpster behind the refinery down in Traer. Moia ran the vodka through cheesecloth to siphon out the flecks of paint, and at ten cents a shot, you’d never notice the difference after about six of ‘em. So this continues on until it becomes a treat for the locals to watch the two drunk Americans make asses of themselves in the alley every night, taking odds, cheering us on. Finally, right about the time I was starting to seriously think about spending my last fifty on a bus outta town, Cowboy comes in, stone cold sober, and asks me to take a ride with him. Cowboy isn’t supposed to be driving, but chances are he wasn’t supposed to be carrying around handguns under his coat either; he wasn’t the sort of person to take the law into consideration. We spend about twenty minutes driving south, past the meat-packing plants and the tractor factories and the abandoned refineries and trailer parks, until we get just north of the interstate. He pulls over and tells me to get out, he’s got something to show me.

It had been snowing all day and had only gotten worse since the sun went down, but with the clouded over and nothing around for miles but radio towers and power lines, I knew exactly what he wanted me to look at. There was a billboard with this little girl, maybe eight, and she was sitting in front of this huge hamburger with everything on it, and fries and a shake and the whole deal. She was grinning from ear to ear, and you could see this airbrushed glowing crown on her head, like it was a halo or something, and beneath it read “Make ‘em feel special tonight”. I remember that like I was looking at it right now. Cowboy James didn’t say a word for about five minutes, we just stood there.

“I got a couple kids, I dunno if I ever told you about that. I ain’t seen ‘em in forever, the wife has this restraint order on me and since I’m telling the truth anyway I kinda haven’t really wanted to see them all too much for a while. I kept hoping maybe I’d get it together or something and then I could go back, but since I lost my rig and she found out I was chasin’ pussy on the side anyway, I mean, shit man. She ain’t gonna take me back, kiss that shit goodbye, you know? I mean, those girls just walk right up to the door and start flashin’ their tits right at ya, I mean, these Mexican girls, I could get two of ‘em bangin’ each other while they suck me off for like ten bucks each, I mean, shit, man…”

“You don’t have to explain none of that to me, James. That’s a million years ago.”

“You’re right, man, you’re exactly right. Shit, it don’t take much brains to see you’re the one who’s had the college, huh? I mean…fuck man, it’s just fucking fucked, is all. I spent ten years saving up to buy that rig and then I got it just the way I wanted it, I got it all painted nice and put a real nice stereo in there and everything and I fucked it up. I used to go out and sit up there and look out at the lawn, and the kids’d be playing there, and I’d just sit there, I wouldn’t even drink, I’d just be thinking about everything. You might not believe that, but it’s the God’s honest truth.”

“I believe you. I got no reason not to believe you.”

“So I can’t work, right, and I have to sell the rig to keep food on the table, and I tried to work at this restaurant, y’know, washing dishes and shit, and this kid, this like fifteen year old punk kid starts yelling at me because I’m not getting the milk out of the bottom of the glasses. And I’m just thinking about how much I’d like to just shove that glass right in his face, you know? So I just walked right out, and I was so mad I just walked all the way home and when I got there and told Sandy about it she just started crying. I slept out on the porch that night, with the dog, with that damn flea-eating dog, and when I got up Sandy had all my stuff all packed. And that was pretty much it. We signed papers and shit later, but that was the last, the last time I really saw her. Or my kids. Those kids, Jayne for sure, she’s just getting to that age where they stop saying shit you say and they start saying their own shit that they made up themselves, and it’s like ‘what the fuck’, you know? It’s so cool. Kids,man, kids are just fucking cool. I had no idea, man. I mean…I mean I had no idea.”

“Yeah.”

“All that stuff I got so mad at ‘em for, it’s just, I don’t even remember why I even got like that. I can’t even remember.”

We sat there and didn’t say anything for a good while longer.

“So fuck this duel business, because I got something I gotta do first. Get in the car.”

And Cowboy James and I drove back north, back into town.

—-

We pulled up in front of this trailer, bikes in the front lawn, and I told him we shouldn’t be there. “James,” I was saying to him just the whole time, I was saying “James, listen man, let’s just go back and do some more drinking and we’ll talk about it, you don’t need to be fucking with them now, it’s one in the morning, c’mon.”

“They’re up. Jayne, she has trouble getting to sleep because she’s trying not to pee the bed but she can’t do it, so I know she’s up. And Josh, well, yeah, Josh sleeps like a log, but I know he’ll get up for food, that kid don’t never miss a meal.”

“Listen, man, how about we do ths tomorrow, during the day, it’ll be better then and you and me can work this whole thing out, okay?”

“No, I think instead we’ll do it now. And you’re coming with me, or I swear I’ll shoot you right where you sit.”

We got out and walked around to the door, which had one of those cheap-ass locks they put on every trailer that you can just push open, but apparently Sandy had installed a deadbolt since James left because that door would not budge. He tried pushing it, then shoving it, and then getting a running start and jumping up the steps to slam into it, which woke up everybody in the trailer. I heard a voice inside shushing the kids, then speaking, quietly, “James? James, you can’t be here anymore. You gotta go.”

“Sandy, listen, I know that it’s real late and I’m sorry, I mean, I’m sorry for everything, and I know that I can’t make anything okay but please, all I wanna do is take my kids out to dinner with their old man, okay? That’s all I want and then I promise I’ll leave you alone, okay? Okay?”

“There is no way you’re leaving here with my kids, there is just no way, I know you’ll do something and there’s no way so just don’t even think about it, just sleep it off.”

“Noooooo! No I don’t need to sleep it off because I ain’t drinking and I know I wouldn’t take the kids out if I’d been drinking and all I wanna do is this one thing, so just open the door, baby, just please let me do this one thing and I’ll never come around again. I’ll never come around again.”

I didn’t hear anything for a minute, then I saw a pair of eyes peek out from a crack in the door. “You promise? You promise this is the last time?”

“I promise. And you know I always keep my word, you know that,Sandy.”

The door opened. I could tell Cowboy James had been by here before, that she had seen him stagger in here before, that she had had that gun in her face before. It was like she wasn’t really there. She went in and told the kids to get dressed and went back into the living room, where she sat on the couch and got out a cigarette and stared at the ground. I tried to look at her, like maybe I could tell her that it would be okay, but she wouldn’t look up. I was sick, and the heat inside the trailer was up so high that I started sweating under my thermals. I tried to think of something to do.

After forever, the kids were dressed and wandered out to stand next to Sandy, who I think was crying but I couldn’t tell because I couldn’t see her face. James said “Hey there, pardners, I stopped by to take you out for hamburgers, how’s that sound?” and the kids stared at him, like they were waiting for the first blow. I think I et go of something in my mind then, and I felt like I had fallen backwards into myself, like I was looking out from layer after layer after layer until I could barely even see what was happening. James told me it was time to go, and we all filed out into the cold, and I think Sandy may have looked up then but I couldn’t tell.

James had all these jokes he knew that he cleaned up so he could tell his kids, only when you took the cuss words and stuff out they didn’t make any sense, but they kids pretended to laugh. I looked at the mirror and I watched the lights go by until we got to the restaurant. Nobody was there; it was two am on a Wednesday morning, the post-bar rush not coming anywhere near this place. James says he’ll pay for me and slugs me in the arm and laughs and I look at him. The waitress gives us water and James asks the kids what they want but they don’t know. “I think you’ll really like the hamburgers,” he says. The kids get the hamburgers. James gets a hamburger. I drink my water.

James asks the girl, Jayme, how school is. Fine. You learn anything new lately? No. You seen anything good on tv? No. I was looking for one of those little dollies you like so much but I couldn’t find any. They don’t make those anymore, dad. Oh. And I don’t really like that stuff very much now, really. Well, well yeah, I mean, you’re bigger than the last time I saw you so that makes sense. Yeah.

“Kids, wait until you see the hamburgers here. They’re so big you gotta hold ‘em with two hands, and they put on all the good stuff you like. And there’s fries and a shake too, though you have to clean your plates because we don’t go out all the time anymore like we used to.”

“We never went out.”

“No, we did, I think it’s just that you don’t remember because you were little then. It was a long time ago, I guess.”

I could barely hear any of this, because at the time I was floating. I was up, out of my head. I was looking at myself and I thought, hey, look, there I am. And I went up into a place where I hadn’t been in a long time. First time I was probably seven, maybe eight, spending a few days with my brother and my neighbor Tony at his dad’s cabin, out on the Mississippi river. Out walking around on the ice, watching fishermen in their shacks, kicking a hockey puck around with our feet until it slid into an ice fishing hole and went under. Then we were kinda bored so we hung out by the boathouses and I got this idea to go walking by where the ice was kinda thin, I don’t know why, I mean I knew it was stupid but I did it anyway. So I did. And I heard the ice start to crack and headed back and then the next thing I knew I was under the water. I clawed up and my hands touched the ice. And I knew I couldn’t breathe but I tried and the water poured in my lungs, cold and black and heavy and and I moved over where I thought the hole was and I was wrong and I kinda was sure I was dead then and a hand grabbed me and pulled me up on the ice. My dad looked at me and said “Boy, sometimes you are just bone stupid.”

The second time, well first I was in the navy for a few years and was gonna go off to college and I actually did for a year and a half, and I probably could have done better but sometimes things you know, they happen, and I had to come back to town, did me some fucking around and getting in trouble and told a couple high school girls I had to leave school to help my dad with the bills and got one of ‘em pregnant. So we got married and I settled down a little and we got half a duplex out by the school, which I thought was funny but I don’t think she did. So me and Lynn-Anne (that’s her name) tried to get new jobs because we were gonna start having adult bills soon but that didn’t work out so well but I didn’t worry too much about it because we were gonna have a baby which (and I’ll be straight-up here) kinda scared me some for a while but I kinda liked it after I got used to it. My cousin john and my old neighbor Tony both had kids and it didn’t slow them down any and they seemed pretty happy most of the time, really. So I was gonna be a dad, and I was pretty happy.

So one night Lynn-Anne got to screaming and we got in the car and headed to St. Joseph and they took her in and strapped her down and asked me if I wanted to watch and I wasn’t sure but I thought, well, I didn’t think anything at all but it was like something in my head made a choice for me and I said sure. So for a loooooooong time I’m standing there trying to think of something helpful to do and telling her to breathe or something and getting coffee when the doc told me it would be a while yet. But soon they told her to push and push and push and she did and soon the baby was out.

I’m not proud of what I thought when I saw the baby, but it’s what I thought anyway. I thought it looked like it was made out of wood. It was tiny and small and dried and didn’t have any of the chucky stuff you see in the movies and it didn’t move. My wife just had a little wood statue is what I thought. And the docs looked at each other, and my wife was listening to hear the kid, and I felt something cold and black and heavy in my lungs again. I backed out into the hall and I looked down and there were little drops of blood on the things they covered my shoes with. And I think for a little while there I stopped breathing.

The third time wasn’t much later after that, when she was out of the hospital and wouldn’t go to work and just sat around drinking vodka and watching TV all day, and we were both drinking by ourselves, I’d sit in the kitchen and watch the wall for a while and try not to listen to the sounds she made. We did a lot of yelling then too. It was kinda bad. It was probably about two one morning when I heard her in the other room, and I got up and turned on the light and she was packing all the things we bought for the baby in a couple grocery bags and I asked her what she was doing. She told me she was gonna take ‘em back to the store and get our money back because it’s not fair that they can do that to us. Well she said her but you know what I mean. And I tell her to settle down some and come back to bed but she just keeps doing it and I take her by the wrists and she pushes me back and I kinda fell and hit the wall and I don’t wanna say this either but it’s true I wanted to hit her. I didn’t but I wanted to a lot. And she just walks out and gets in the car and drives off and I think good, fine, and I go back to bed. About an hour later I get a call. Don’t ever answer a call at three in the morning, it’s never anything you want to hear. She was driving down the interstate kinda by where my old house was and she swerved off into the ditch and drove along down in the ditch until she hit a concrete pylon.

After they said their final words her family gathered around the coffin and they held hands and I noticed they didn’t ask me to join them so I went home. And that night I drank and drank until we were out of vodka and then I drank whiskey until we were out of that and then I drank some old peppermint schnapps until we were out of that and then I went to bed, and I had a dream she was standing there at the foot of the bed and she was saying things, but I couldn’t hear her. So I got up and I went over and looked at her and I don’t think I was asleep now and I still couldn’t hear her so I got up close enough to remember what Lynn-Anne smelled like and she said “Don’t let go. Don’t let go.”

I still have my ring. It’s not a big deal, it’s just a gold band, but I still wear it, and sometimes I think to myself “Am I still married?”, and I don’t know. When I think about it, I can almost feel what I felt that night, feel something cold and black and heavy in my lungs, feel something that feels like dying, only I can’t quite get to it, just like I can’t quite remember what Lynn-Anne looks like now. But I was there, back in that place, and I watched everything happen like I couldn’t reach out and make it stop.

James kept smiling, hard, like he was trying to hold something down, until finally the waitress brought us the hamburgers. They weren’t big, or covered with stuff, they were just hamburgers. The kids looked at them, took a couple small bites, put them back. I couldn’t tell what happened to James, not from way up in my cloud, but it was something bad, because he made these small muffled screaming noises. He forced himself to stop, got up, and went to the bathroom. I stared down from my cloud to look at the kids, who stared at their shoes. I remember something told me not to move, not to do anything, but I moved forward, and suddenly I was back in my body again.

“C’mon, kids. We’re going home,” I said. I took Jayme’s hand and picked up Josh, who was two winks from falling asleep, like a bag of groceries and I set a twenty on the table and we walked to the door. And I kept waiting for the bullet to hit me, right in the back of the head, but it never happened. Nothing happened.

On the way home, both the kids fell asleep without saying a word. I carried both of them back to the trailer, the door still unlocked, Sandy still watching the floor. I tried to tell her everything was okay but I don’t think she heard me. I tucked the kids in their beds and I watched them for a minute, sleeping, and it was like there was something there I was supposed to understand but I couldn’t quite get hold of it before it went away. I locked the door on my way out and heard the deadbolt click before I was off the steps.

I almost drove by the restaurant but I didn’t because I already knew what happened. Instead I drove out, south, until I got to the interstate. I got on the westbound ramp and I kept going until there was no more road.

I guess that’s everything.
(12:08.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #