A Phantom Herd

by Lorraine Ray

"And you did too, kid. Do you remember that tanned, bald boy with freckles in first grade? Well, he was one of the richest Cowboy Princes in the state of Arizona and you knew him, but you didn't know it. You didn't know that he was so incredibly rich, because he always blended right in, the way a Cowboy Prince would, as I told you. It's in their nature to blend into their environment naturally. Oh, Arizona is full of those rich people, those ranches of fantastic dimensions, old lands, too often taken from our Spanish brethren, or sometimes they intermarried..." This was about as close as Mother ever got to mentioning S E X.

  The creative person has got to be a listener. I listened to the stories, as Mother told us one of her favorite fantasies. "Arizona is jam-packed, simply loaded with Cowboy Princes," Mother claimed happily, starting her version of a folk tall tale, a ridiculous story on a hot afternoon in the summer of 1962, "why, the place is so crowded with them that it's a wonder anyone else has got an inch of space to call their own." She spoke from the front seat of the green and white Ford station wagon as we drove out into the country on one of her long jaunts into the realm of the Cowboy Princes and the sad glass bottle hunts in ghost towns. On these trips she would consult maps, documents, and books and urge and then compel my frightened father to take turns down dangerous dirt roads, navigate rock strewn paths, glide over nearly vertical stretches that made it seem we were crawling alongside canyon walls, on roads that had Posted No Trespassing signs on them, dynamite warnings, hidden mine shaft notices, loose mountain lion postings, and clearly visible tracks of flesh-eating bears. She would command our father to drive over downed barbed wire and one time in Colorado she actually ordered him to drive on a certain street which resulted in us driving onto the path of an actual mule race, the crowd screaming obscenities at us and chasing our station wagon for several blocks. Another time she would sent us several miles down a river bed, only stopping when the steep walls closed in on the car. We had to back out for a mile with my father saying curse words which I had never heard spoken. The car would sink and the tires spin, but we got stuck only once and she tore up a cardboard box and threw it under the wheels to give us traction. Although none of our cars were in any way equipped for off-road adventures, they were ordinary sedans and station wagons, to her mind there was always an interesting old ranch house around the curve, a deserted home of a certain wealthy Cowboy Prince, which we would have to drive out and see.

  Often, though we doubted it before, there would actually be an old house on the property she sent us to, though only someone fantasying could think it was the center of any fabulous ranch. Usually the home had windows shot out, the doors caved in, dilapidated fences around it, sometimes with a whole roll of barbed wire tossed in the front yard as though some lonely person had wrapped themselves in it for entertainment, gotten free, and run away forever. A misbegotten rusty windmill surmounted a plain dotted with grinning cow skulls. Quite a few of these houses looked more like a final warning to a young man of the folly of certain dreams, one being the command: Go West, Young Man! Owning a fabulous ranch somewhere far out in the middle of Arizona guaranteed you a rusty nail to puncture your heel and a case of deadly lockjaw.

  A front yard riddled with snake holes would be the only thing that would dissuade her from going right up to the smashed windows and pressing her face near the broken glass and paint peeled frame and telling us that this must be the original homestead of the Original Fantastic Cowboy Prince. There was always a sense in her that we had blundered into a piece of great history. Nothing was allowed to be insignificant, unimportant, irrelevant to the course of American history or just plain dangerous and dumb.

  She was very interested in old pianos she found on covered porches. She marched right up on the porch and banged on them, playing old songs she learned on porches in Indiana, "The Maiden's Prayer" usually, a complicated piece that involved vast, tremulous chords and crossing hands. They were songs unsuited to the place we were in, and the pianos were always out of tune.

  The Cowboy Prince would be nowhere in sight in any of the abandoned homes; even the piano playing would not summon him. The man who actually would arrive sometimes had a gun trained on us and a barking dog and filthy trousers. Once the man who arrived had a large knife jammed into his waistband. He took no truck from strangers and bid us get off his land before he shot us all to hell and beyond. Mother brushed the whole incident off as unimportant and pretended she knew all about him from the caretaker on the telephone, someone had described him to her, and she reassured those of us who were worried that we were foolish to fear him, in fact he was only there to scare off the plebes, people who shouldn't be there, which obviously did not refer to us. About that time, Father usually clenched his jaw tightly and drove us home.

  In the car that day her left arm, so thin and so brown, hung over the seatback as she spoke, we teased her by trying to barely touch the center of her palm and she tried to snatch at our hands or slap us, not looking directly at the three of us in the back seat, but letting her eyes float over the passing earth of Arizona, and she wore impenetrable dark glasses and her lipstick spoke, "yes, out at some fabulous ranches, here and there, in the back country of Arizona, farther out than we are now, way out near the borders, some glorious ranches, my goodness the money it would take to buy them, kids, I tell you there isn't any money like that anymore, ranches that were bigger than whole states in the East, and I tell you kids, make no mistake, those were mysterious ranches, ranches with real histories. And they lived like princes out there, these cowboys, out on their fabulous ranches and you could say they just about owned everything in their sight, mountains and hills, trees and arroyos, rocks and rivers. Owned everything on the face of the earth and underneath it, don't forget the mineral wealth, that made Arizona great too, for as far as they could see. You hear about it in movies, but it was real in Arizona, not a made-up thing. Sure, they have thousands of head of cattle and no need to pen them up-the ranch was so big."

  "They'd come into town in, oh, old beaten up trucks, trucks that didn't look like much to those who weren't in the know about who the driver really was, and they drove themselves, of course, and they wore old worn-out jeans, and thin but expensive shirts, and dirty boots, but looks aren't everything, children, because they've got wealth, real wealth, I mean the old fashioned kind: land. Plenty of it. Land bigger than you'll see in most countries. Land that would impress almost anybody with any sense. Ranches as big as some counties in parts of America. You went to school with one of them, kid. I'm talking to you now." She stopped to point at me. "You actually went to school with one of the Cowboy Princes. Did you realize that, kid? You better listen up sharp because I'm talking about you." She said this to me again, but I was barely listening, lulled by the sound of her voice into semi-sleep.

  Here was another amazing fact. It fit rather well in with the Rancho Supremo that Meredith said we owned, although Mother hadn't made any direct mention of it. That she believed in these people, these mythical, friendly rich people, people with excessive amounts of land and goodwill, some kind of benevolent squires, galloping over their land and eager to give it away, instead of putting up No Trespassing signs every few feet along the perimeter of their property, which was more like what really happened, what you really saw when you got near one of these oversized ranches, and she had faith that these Arizona land barons, if they ever even existed, would somehow want to have something to do with us, that she somehow vibrated at the same frequency, a certain knowledge of quality, and if there was no real ability for us to consume quality, living in a tract home wearing old, ill-fitting clothes, was unbelievable. She couldn't conceive of them looking down their noses at her or us, although there was ample evidence that this would be exactly what they would do. In her mind our finer qualities would shine through. She thought she was imparting this ability to glow with superiority to us. She believed their views and hers would coincide, never mind the fact, seemingly well known to her, that most of the wealthy ranchers in Arizona were confi
rmed reactionaries and quite a few were even John Birchers, even founding members of that horrid society. She hated hunting, which they did all the time, and barely tolerated fishing. She knew nothing about ranch life, although she did know quite a bit about life on a small farm in Indiana.

  She would impart her fantasy to Meredith. I suppose that is where Rancho Supremo came from. Meredith had told the Easterners all about our ranch and the whole wonderful world that we owned. She was only making real the stories Mother told her. I was infected by the same thoughts without knowing it.

  Mother believed that if we would only acknowledge the presence of these Princes in our midst in Arizona they would make themselves known to us in recognition of our higher breeding. Where this higher breeding had actually come into us was dubious. It was an amazingly romantic notion. By traveling into the countryside, Mother believed we were increasing our knowledge of the Cowboy Princes' environment, learning Arizona history and correspondingly we were increasing the chance that we would run into one of them at a country store, under a large oak tree, in the wilds of Arizona, and Mother seemed certain that then she would discuss library science or Hawthorne or some such thing and introduce her children to people of prominence, people of real substance, people who secretly owned Arizona. And she projected a supreme confidence that they would want to know us, if only they could. They would probably want to invite us to their ranches for the weekend and provide us with a little of their spare land, some out-of-the-way parcel that they currently were irritated by and which they had been thinking they would like to give away to some quality people like us.

  That we were just their kind of people resonated with some part of the romance of her arrival in Arizona. As she told it, when she left the Women's Marine Corp, and traveled to Arizona to go to college on the G.I. Bill the first stop in Arizona had been Wilcox and the sight of real cowboys lounging against the wooden side of a hotel and sitting on the veranda caused her to never forget the importance of this image of little cowboys in the shade, leaning their chair backs against the store wall and watching the Southern Pacific pull into the station. Her memory of the small line of casual cowboys never left her.

  It was hard to reconcile her belief in the Cowboy Princes with her actual life experience and friendships. She made connections easily with middleclass Midwesterners, people from Indiana and Ohio, people from small town America, like her, that knew about small farms and hard times, people who were "Midwest Friendly." She knew a few natives, a scattering of them, most of whom had long since lost all of their money, imagined or not, or were almost insane, if they were wealthy. Around truly wealthy people she appeared nervous, insecure, and uncomfortable. She supported the rights of the poor in the face of unfair working conditions and unsafe homes, but this notion of the Cowboy Prince lurked around to make her uncomfortable with poor people, too. She, who could detect quality, ought to be surrounded by it.

  I rejected the Cowboy Prince as an unrealistic fantasy. Hadn't she believed fervently in this image of the Cowboy Princes and look where it had that gotten her. That was an extraordinary nonsensical notion. There were rich people in Arizona but most of them were not the benevolent figures she had created. Many of them embodied cruelty and enjoyed being crude and evil. They were fans of the John Birch society and argued that taxes needed to be kept low, people needed to advance themselves without the aid of the government, that they had the right to put cows on public lands and pay next to nothing, that beef was the most important product in America, that women were inferior, education wasn't necessary, relations with Mexico were impossible because they were worse than monkeys! How could she who was reasonably enlightened, entertain the notion that these people were going to be friends of ours?

  Under no stretch of the imagination was Father a Cowboy Prince. We were living in a depressingly small home surrounded by dyed gravel. We barely had any furniture in our house for years and our clothes were always hand-me-downs. Throughout the early years of my life I wore both Meredith and Jack's outgrown clothing. Jack wore shirts that were painfully small for him.

  On the way back to our house, Mother's voice often comforted me as she told and retold tales of the Cowboy Princes that she had known or imagined at the edges of her life, and along with her voice there was the comfort of the repeated, steady drip, drip, drip of water from a canvas water bag. On trips out of town, when one was venturing into the desert (as a protection in case the car broke down in the heat, or their radiator overheated) everyone had a flax bag full of water. Some people hung them on the outside of the radiator; some kept them inside the car. Ours commanded that we "Saturate Before Using." We liked ours in the rear passenger windows and because we had soaked it, and because of condensation, those bags inevitably dripped, and the dripping splat of the water on the station wagon floorboard kept time with my mother's voice like the steady tick of a mantle clock at midnight.

  And with glorious this two-beat rhythms, like hooves on the clip-clop bearing the story along, like the Westerners crossing the Great Plains in their covered wagons, I planned many times to bestow the animal hoof beat/heartbeat from inside the human chest cavity to the empty cavity of blank paper pages, blank at the beginning of life and blank at the beginning of art, and all of it, the sounds of my real past life and my grandiose future lies, seem extraordinary, every splash echoes in me.

  But I must confess, after a little thought, that the tap of the dropping water is too obscure, as elusive as another wonderful sound from the canteen, which comes to me as I write, a sound from the cap, a whistling, whizzing squeak which shoots sideways its exasperation, exasperation with me and my inability to tell my story, letting out great fizzes and hopeless pops. And to me that second sound mimics the universal squeal of complaint, like that which I hear again in my own life punctuating certain horrifying moments, the shear shrieking mess of my involvement with dangerous people in order to advance my art, wherever my art could be destined to advance to. But what I learn from writing is to be thankful for everything that comes, no matter the horror at the time and to think of the interference as the real force of live that the writer must experience and then put into the entirely false world of writing.

  Each of these bags or canteens had a silver lid, held on with a silver chain. And then finally I hear the voice of the silver chain which holds the cap of the canteen to the neck with its little, uniform sequence of precise links. It begins jingling a long, loose narrative, a wild story, a story free with casual associations, through years spent nervously bottled-up, ready to spill its lovely, glittering lies.

  And these are the canteen's sounds, its voice to me. Imperfect, like the canteen's rough canvas cover over the water-filled body, not unlike an Arizona pioneer's tanned and toughened hide, this noisy, beautiful story is preserved by the silence that I studiously maintained, during long rides across hot valleys.