by KT Sparks
A pause, during which Martin was certain the screen would blink off, then: “I’m buying sheep. Jacobs. I like their horns. You know, you can buy sheep online, pay-now button and everything. I think I’ll make an awesome shepherd.”
Martin didn’t know what to say to that, so he said the wrong thing: “Are you drunk?”
Another long pause, a deep sigh, the clink of ice against glass. “Drinking, not drunk. What do you want?”
Now or never, thought Martin. “To say I’m sorry. About Elko, about everything.”
“Worked out for you, though, didn’t it?” she said.
“But not for you,” he said.
She snorted a laugh. “Don’t worry about me. In fact, I should thank you. You gave me the bitch-slap I needed to get back on track. You made me see how stupid I was to latch onto such a stupid dream, and it wasn’t even my stupid dream.”
“That’s a lot of stupid,” he said.
“Yes, it was,” she said. “I had a long drive back to think about it.”
“I wish you were still here,” he said. “It’s not going that great. Lattner’s crazy and we lost Hero’s ashes.”
Julie laughed again, this time in a tone thawed a degree or two from subzero. “Use dirt instead. It’s not like anyone’s going to be running DNA tests.”
“I thought of that, but the deception really bothers me.” It wasn’t that he couldn’t live a lie. He could. He had. He was a master lie-liver, honed the talent over the last thirty-odd years, a sizable chip off his father’s shape-shifting block. But Martin couldn’t live this lie, a lie to Elko.
“Lying to me was okay, but not to your cowboy poet friends—excuse me, imaginary cowboy poet friends? You do know, don’t you, that everything about your beloved cowboy poetry is a lie. Have you ever looked up your hero, Vess Guffry? He grew up Morry Cohen, the son of a shoe salesman in Queens, got his start in radio reading Christian inspirational poetry for the local station’s Saturday shut-in programming. From the time he was about twenty until he was almost forty, no record of Morry, though there are rumors of jail time for statutory rape and bookmaking. He shows up again in the late seventies in Dallas as Vess Guffry, a rodeo announcer. He gets his first public radio gig from the station manager down there, a gambling addict with a taste for the sort of high-stakes games Morry-slash-Vess liked to run. The rest is history, maybe not poetry, but history. There’s your sanctified Cowboy Poet. So I wouldn’t sweat a little subterfuge in the funeral prep.”
Martin knew about the Cowboy Poet’s East Coast origins, but not the rest of it. And he didn’t believe it. “Really?” he said. “What tabloid did you read that in?”
“Wikipedia,” said Julie. “Vess Guffry isn’t famous enough or interesting enough to get covered by the tabloids or any of the online gossip sites that people from this century read. You could have looked it up yourself. But you’re lazy. All those years, I thought you were so noble, living by this strict code of honor that demanded you silently suffer and help others along the trail and keep your eyes on that far mountain horizon. But that’s pure bullshit. You just set your sights on something so unattainable and unreal that you never have to make the effort to take the shot. You’re not idealistic. You’re lazy.”
Martin gulped back a sob. “What do I do?” he said.
“Prove me wrong,” said Julie. “Take your box of dirt and get your ass to Elko.”
After Julie hung up, Martin lay back on the bed and, stunned by her call to action, passed out. Two hours later, he awoke to a pounding on the connecting door between his and Lattner’s rooms.
“I got donut holes,” Lattner yelled.
Martin unlocked the door to a showered and shaved Lattner. “You’ve got to read this USA Today piece,” he said, waving the paper in the hand not clutching the Dunkin’ Donuts bag. “Our funeral’s gone national.”
Martin took the paper and scanned the article, dated that morning. “Nice job,” he said, trying to shake off the funk of Julie’s words. “You sound very professional. Vess and Lina have got to love it.”
Lattner popped the donut hole in his mouth, choked, recovered. “I am professional. And Lina did love it. She called this morning, looking for you.”
“Does she know about Hero?” said Martin.
“Know what about Hero?” said Lattner. “She wants you to call back.”
Martin decided to shower first. He also decided not to mention the premature scattering of Hero’s cremains. Not because of what Julie said, but because it didn’t matter, he realized. Nor did Vess Guffry’s sanitized history. Or whatever the Cowboy Poet had done to get himself in trouble with the NPR legal department. A yarn, embellished with cowbells and whorehouse piano tinklings and talking broncos, was in the fine tradition of cowboy poetry. So why should Martin have a problem lying about, or simply not explaining every little detail of, the funeral to Lina? He climbed into the plastic tube that passed for a shower at Super 8 and ran the water until it steamed. He rubbed his fingernails with a washcloth until his cuticles bled and his hair with a sliver of Wyndham branded soap until his scalp burned. He rehearsed what he would say to Lina and what he should have said to Julie and washed his body like every inch of it was made of Lady Macbeth’s bloody hands.
Martin returned to the office, took out his cell, and punched the number Lattner had given him.
“Martin.” Lina picked up before it could ring. “I only got a minute. Vess has me picking up some new spurs for Elko, but I just wanted to say thank you. That article could have been a disaster for him, for us both, but your PR guy saved the day. We’re getting calls now from NPR top brass about making even a bigger deal out of the funeral, and they’ve stopped all that trash talk about contract violations. And PBS wants to record it for later broadcast, you know, like Aretha Franklin at the White House. Or that guy from Full House on the Capitol lawn on Fourth of July. Vess is so happy. He’s accepting it all, retirement, Hero’s death, the last show at Elko, with the kind of good grace I haven’t seen out of him since—I don’t know—since the first Hero.”
“First Hero?” said Martin. “There was another Hero?”
“Oh my God, there’ve been at least fifteen, maybe close to twenty,” said Lina. “Some sucked on stage and we sold ’em off for pets or to dude ranches. Others were just mean or couldn’t be properly broke. Let me tell you, if we had to do it again, which thank God we do not, we wouldn’t start with a mustang, that’s for sure.”
“What happened to those?” said Martin. “The mean ones.”
“The kill pen, usually,” said Lina. “The West has unrideable mustangs like that latest Hero had flies, God rest her itchy soul.”
“Of course,” said Martin, trying to take in her cavalier roll call of the dead and murdered Heroes of the past. Lie upon lie. Taint upon taint. Riding to Elko on the back of a bunch of slaughtered frauds.
“One sec,” said Lina and then something else in a muffled tone. The familiar Cowboy Poet’s bass bore into Martin’s right ear, and he instinctively reached to turn the radio down:
The pony drinks, but with gasp and sob,
And wan is the man at its side;
The way has been long, past butte and knob,
And still he must ride and ride.
“Arthur Chapman,” said Martin. “‘Pony Express.”
“Will you recite it, Martin?” said the Cowboy Poet. “Will you recite it for Hero, for me? Will you read at Elko?”
Yes. Of course. He would read over the fake ashes of a fake Hero, one of a line of fake Heroes. Yes, he would answer the call of his hero, flawed mortal though he may be. Yes, he would rise to Julie’s taunts, be a man of action and find his place in a Western world of Beaufort and Ginger and cowboy poets living and dead, a world he believed—he knew—was real.
“I will read at Elko,” said Martin. “Count on it.” And he hung up.
Forgotten
by Bruce Kiskaddon (1878-1950)
Yes, he used to be a cow hoss
that was young and strong and fleet.
Now he stands alone, forgotten,
in the winter snow and sleet.
Fer his eyes is dim and holler
and his head is turnin’ gray,
He has got too old to foller—
“Jest a hoss that’s had his day.”
They’ve forgotten how once he packed ’em
at a easy swingin’ lope.
How he braced his sturdy shoulders
when he set back on a rope.
Didn’t bar no weight nor distance;
answered every move and word,
Though his sides were white with lather
while he held the millin’ herd.
Now he’s stiff and old and stumbles,
and he’s lost the strength and speed
That once took him through the darkness,
’round the point of a stampede
And his legs is scarred and battered;
both the muscle and the bone.
He is jest a wore out cow hoss
so they’ve turned him out alone.
They have turned him out to winter
best he can amongst the snow.
There without a friend and lonesome,
do you think he doesn’t know?
Through the hours of storm and darkness
he had time to think a lot.
That hoss may have been forgotten,
but you bet he ain’t forgot.
He stands still. He ain’t none worried,
fer he knows he’s played the game.
He’s got nothin’ to back up from.
he’s been square and ain’t ashamed.
Fer no matter where they put him,
he was game to do his share.
Well, I think more of the pony
than the folks that left him there.
15
Martin sank into a modern—if by modern one meant awkwardly shaped and ugly—tall-backed office chair in the windowless conference room in the Cowboy Poetry Hour’s suite at the Denver Creek Office Complex and Condominiums. The room smelled of carpet cleaner, and a thigh-high wall vent blew cold air through the mesh on Martin’s chair. He worried the sweat that had collected in the small of his back might ice over.
He was the first to arrive and so considered moving to another seat to avoid the draft. But he already had his folder of possible funeral poems, a virgin yellow legal pad, and two pens set in front of him and his briefcase leaned against his chair leg. He was phlegmatic at the moment, and the flurry of resituating would make him less so. Martin checked his phone for messages from Lattner, who had opted out of the meeting to go find a place to get the Mustang detailed, preferably a car wash with saloon attached. “We’re in the West, my boy,” he’d said. “Who knows what wonders await!”
“Martin, thanks so much for coming. Don’t get up.” Lina circled the table and laid a concealer-caked cheek on Martin’s freshly shaved counterpart. She reeked the waxy reek of too much make-up. He put a hand to his face and examined the greasy residue transferred to his fingers.
“Oh my God, I must look like an Oompa Loompa,” said Lina, taking a seat and touching her own cheek. “I was doing an interview for the PBS guys. They’re treating this show like the bleeding Olympics, you know, with short features on the athletes, about how they grew up in some hut with no feet?”
“Show and funeral,” said Martin.
“Right. It’s getting really complicated. Wyatt Wendt is involved. We should have known he’d horn in, and there’s all sorts of questions about timing. Mac will be in in a minute. He’s photocopying.”
Martin sniffed and wrote photocopying on his legal pad. Looked at it. Underlined it twice. Thought about what it meant that Wyatt Wendt, the second most famous cowboy poet after the Cowboy Poet, would be part of Martin’s funeral. Hero’s funeral. On one hand, there’s no denying the upside of having star power illuminate his Elko debut. He would perform with two of the greats. Except for having a neoclassical arch erected at the front door to the Elko Convention Center, entrances don’t get much more triumphal than that. But on the other hand, the left hand, sinister, the one that hides with the pistol while the right one shakes “howdy…”
“Sorry, guys, toner was low.”
Mac pushed into the room with an armful of stapled documents and dumped them on the table. “One each,” he said, slid a packet to Martin and another to Lina, took his own, and sat. Martin looked at the top sheet, gasped, then fake-sneezed to cover. First in the numbered index was the item: Order of Service/draft program. Martin flipped to find the page. He had not sent them anything on the service, though he had his ideas. What if it were all set? With Wyatt Wendt and Vess Guffry (and maybe even Nina Totenberg) and Martin relegated to the overflow room to watch it on a rented TV. He found the page.
IN THANKSGIVING FOR AND
IN CELEBRATION OF THE LIFE OF
BENJAMIN CROWNINSHIELD BRADLEE
AUGUST 26, 1921-OCTOBER 21, 2014
“I had no idea he died,” said Lina.
“Copeland processional, Sousa recessional,” said Martin, flipping through the program, deep breaths of relief. “Nice choices, though I think it’s unlikely we can get David Ignatius for the eulogy. Not on such short notice.”
“Top notch logistics work here, Mac,” said Lina.
“It’s just an example, of what we could do,” Mac said and fiddled with his bolo tie, the one concession to the West in his otherwise pure Brooks Brothers, Michigan Avenue corporate uniform. “I found it online.”
“Could do, if Hero had been a revered editor of a major paper credited with bringing down President Nixon,” said Lina.
“The TV people needed something.” Mac’s face flushed, and Martin feared the young man had garroted himself with his neckwear.
Lina sighed, looked at Martin, bit her bottom lip, and smiled. Lipstick remnant smeared like blood from eyetooth to eyetooth, a raccoon after a chicken kill.
“There are a couple things we know for sure,” she said. “One, the red Mustang will deliver Vess to the funeral but won’t be in the processional. We finally got him to agree on that. There’ll be a mounted honor guard up first, then the celebrants, or mourners, or whatever they’re called. That’s you, Martin, and Wyatt and whoever else pushes in once they find out it’ll be on TV. And Vess. We’re still talking about this, but Vess wants you all to be on horseback, and he would walk, the walking man, that poem, you know it right?”
Martin cleared his throat:
Sunny summer day it was when loping in to Laramie,
I overtook the Walking Man, reined up and nodded “How!!”
He’d been a rider once, I knew. He smiled, but scarce aware of me,
He said, “If you would like me to, I’ll tell my story now.”
“Oh, no need, Martin,” said Mac. “I’ve got a lunch, and we have more to get through.”
“It’s a poem,” said Lina.
“Knibbs,” said Martin.
“Great,” said Mac.
“So riding is okay?” said Lina to Martin.
No, of course it was not okay. It would, in the best possible of circumstances, add a Jerry Lewis-like slapstick quality to the proceedings, and, in the worst, kill Martin and probably at least one of the horses.
“When I ride, I prefer my own mount, Vesuvius,” said Martin. He pressed his lips together and tried not to say anything else. He feared more regrettable words were about to flow, like the toxic lava from the volcano after which he had just named his imaginary horse.
“Because the other option is for you to ride on the caisson, with Hero’s remains, which might actually be more appropriate.”
“Oh, absolutely,” said Martin, so pleased he had opted for the classiest of cremains c
hests to hold the handful of surviving Hero ashes and several shovels of dirt from an I-80 traveler’s plaza. The container was a handsome thing, with its engraved hasps and russet leather straps and distressed wood slats and discreet Plexiglas holders for two portraits of the deceased. It would photograph well on the back of a horse-drawn hearse. And he would cut a poignant figure in his black Circle S suit with the double peak backed Western yokes and the center vent for ease of movement. It would be cowboy poetry in motion. Performance cowboy poetry. Might even make the poster for the confluence one year.
“And,” said Lina, “show Martin that picture, the one Vess found on Pinterest. This is something we’ve got to do.”
“At the end of the handout,” said Mac, not meeting her eye and in a tone that suggested he had not forgiven their reaction to the Bradlee funeral template.
Martin flipped pages. The last was a color print of Princess Anne, a fur hat straddling her chestnut bouffant like a poisonous fungus atop a forest stump. She held one gloved hand to the gleaming amber muzzle of a horse, his head drooping from the back of a sleek trailer marked with the royal seal in flourishes of gold. If Martin had not known the steed was dead, had not been able to make out the silken sling, colored the same deep brown as the animal, that kept its head up, he would have assumed it was just bowing in deference to its royal owner.
“You know it?” said Mac.
Martin counted to ten, tried not to pant. Of course he knew it. What pet memorialist worthy of his title didn’t know about Starwood’s funeral? 2009. Carried live on CNN and CSPAN. Seven thousand people in attendance at Gatcombe Park, including Prince William and newly minted Secretary of State Hilary Clinton. A tribute medley performed by Elton John and Lady Gaga. Twenty-three bottles of embalming fluid and two cranes to lower and secure the body in the custom-designed combination horse trailer, casket, and tomb. Martin had spent many hours convincing grieving equine owners of the impracticality and prohibitive expense of the “Starwood Service.”
