Big Lonesome

by Joseph Scapellato

  Cowgirl starts crying.

  The sad teen girl says, Want to come down?

  Cowgirl doesn’t move.

  Okay, says the impatient teen boy. His impatience becomes patience. He stands on the pedestal. Let’s go, come on.

  Cowgirl becomes patient.

  Careful, says the sad teen girl.

  The patient teen boy motions. I’m helping you.

  Cowgirl says, I have to go now.

  Yes, he says, and reaches for her.

  Cowgirl strikes him in the face with the action figure—he throws up his arms and falls—the sad teen girl screams—cowgirl scrambles down the other side of the sculpture and sprints through the graveyard, sad and concerned and angry and confused and screaming, and she scales a fence and crosses a road and enters a field, it’s a farm, the sun is setting all over it, stacking bricks of color and breaking them, and she darts into an open barn where she passes stables and troughs and an old woman curry-combing a big horse, and she ducks under a bench.

  She listens to the curry comb whisk the big horse. She stops screaming.

  The old woman says, Would you like to hear a story?

  Cowgirl would.

  The curry comb begins to whisk the big horse in a different way. The old woman tells a story about a little horse, named Little Horse, who runs away from her mother and father. Little Horse wanders the countryside, thinking that the land is home, finding that the land is foreign. The longer that Little Horse is away from her mother and father, the more she misses them, and the more she misses them, the more ashamed she feels about returning to them.

  Cowgirl is now sitting on the bench.

  The old woman dandy-brushes the big horse. She’s watching cowgirl but pretending not to.

  It’s okay, says cowgirl, and it comes out sounding like, This is important.

  The old woman tells a story about a small horse, named Small Horse, who’s never met her mother or father. She wanders the countryside, thinking that the land is answers, finding that the land is questions. Small Horse meets animals who invite her to join their families—deer, raccoons, bears, squirrels, skunks, wolves—but to all she says, No thank you. The more animals she meets, the more different she feels from them. Then she meets an old horse, named Old Horse. Instead of inviting her to join her family, Old Horse invites her in for dinner.

  The old woman is now sitting next to cowgirl. She touches cowgirl’s hand.

  Cowgirl’s whole body quivers, tightens.

  What do you think? says the old woman.

  Together they walk out of the barn and toward a house. It’s dark. The moon rises, a bleary red stone. In the driveway a middle-aged man grunts, heaving crates out of the bed of a scratched-up truck. He stops what he’s doing to stare at cowgirl.

  Careful, says cowgirl.

  He leaves the crates where they are and gets in the scratched-up truck and starts it.

  The old woman leads cowgirl into the house, where there are many of the things that were on the tables in the old men’s driveway. Here their arrangement is more harmonious. The light is dense and muffled. Between everything rolls a thickness of smell: warmth, bodies, food. A square table is being set by a young woman. She’s pleased to see cowgirl.

  Cowgirl stares, unsure.

  The old woman leads cowgirl into the kitchen, where a middle-aged woman is knifing into a beef roast, wedging it open to check its color. She’s pleased too.

  Cowgirl stares.

  The old woman leads cowgirl through the kitchen and into a bathroom, where she helps her into a tub, undresses her, scrubs her, rinses her, dries her, puts her in a dress, and gathers her hair into a ponytail.

  You’re brave, she says.

  Cowgirl says, Whatever.

  Come out when you’re ready, says the old woman, closing the door behind her.

  Cowgirl stands on the toilet and looks out the window. The middle-aged man and his scratched-up truck are gone. She sits, guiding her dress. A change moves through her—an inside-outing, an outside-ining—a stopping and a starting and a stopping. She touches her body: the beginnings of breasts. Her skin shines. She imagines the most important place inside herself. The place, she whispers, that’s me. The place that I mean when I feel or think “myself.”

  She says to this place: I’m helping you.

  There’s a tap at the door.

  Cowgirl goes to the table and sits where she’s told, next to the only empty chair, its spot set. The three women lower their heads and hold hands, and the old woman says a prayer like it’s a story about a horse. Food is passed on platters. Cowgirl eats beef and gravy and bread and vegetables, all of it heavy, condensed. She drinks cold whole milk. Everything inside her slows. The old woman talks to the middle-aged woman about important matters, and although cowgirl recognizes the words, she can’t make out what they mean, not here, and the young woman asks cowgirl kind questions, and although she understands what she’s asked, she can’t answer, not now, and the young woman, who notices, answers unasked questions, going into why she’s enjoying college and what she does during her shifts at the gas station and where she and her boyfriend will take a drive to next weekend, and cowgirl farts. The fart is ignored.

  Cowgirl says, Where are you from?

  Here! laughs the young woman. I was born down the road.

  Where are you from from? says cowgirl.

  The old woman and the middle-aged woman have stopped talking.

  The young woman says, How do you mean it?

  Are you lost? says cowgirl.

  The young woman is annoyed.

  Cowgirl is annoyed. She starts to say more, but the words hitch.

  The old woman nods. Go on, now.

  Cowgirl stutters. She pounds the table.

  Say something new! shouts the middle-aged woman. Say something we don’t already get!

  Cowgirl starts and stops and stops and starts.

  You aren’t special, says the young woman.

  The young woman looks out the window.

  This isn’t special.

  The front door bangs open. In tromps the middle-aged man from the driveway. Beside him is the young man with the face of a woman.

  Cowgirl stands. She feels stuffed, sick.

  The young man is dressed up and clutching flowers. His smell nudges through the other smells, nothing like a farm or a park or a graveyard. It’s insistent. He’s nervous.

  He tries to make his nervousness look like relief.

  Cowgirl says, Come on, let’s go.

  They step outside. The moon is high and white and busy. They walk to the scratched-up truck.

  It’s not mine, says the young man. I’m borrowing it.

  He opens the passenger’s-side door for her.

  Don’t worry, when we get our own, we’ll take care of it.

  She doesn’t move.

  On the far side of the field a truck bobbles by, hauling a tall trailer of livestock. Inside the house the women put old music on. A baby cries.

  That doesn’t mean what you think, says the young man.

  Cowgirl slips under and out of the dress.

  Blushing, he urges her to get into the truck. He doesn’t seem to know if he should look at her or not, but he doesn’t tell her to put the dress back on.

  She folds it up and gives it to him.

  He tries to be okay with this.

  She closes the door he opened, walks to the driver’s side, and gets in. The keys curve with moonlight. She twists them. The rumble feels good as it goes through her body.

  She shifts from park to neutral to drive.

  The young man has dropped the flowers and the dress. He can’t even cover his face. Standing there, he is a kind of question.

  I’m no answer, she decides.

  She coasts the driveway until it ends in the road. She takes the time to signal. Then she turns.

  A Mother Buries a Gun in the Desert Again

  It was loaded, I was loaded. The bottle was not the only way but it was
the way that was available, my husband’s way, the weakest way to make me strong. How else could I gather the fear to steal the gun from my son, to drive out of town with it in my lap, to park like a wreck on the shoulder, to stumble up a desert slope from where the city’s bay of lights looked shallow?

  The shovel heavy in my hands. The gun a hope in the ground. The booze hot fumes in my belly. Around me the moon dulled the bladed shapes of yucca, cacti, and shrubs. Only the strongest stars were awake and watching. The mountains looked stronger than the stars but less awake—the Sandias, the only range my family knew, watermelons returned by night to rock. What a pit to put a city in. I studied my bare arms and the tops of my breasts. My sweat prickled. My skin, my mother’s, looked edible in this light. I remembered my son as a baby, in these arms and at these breasts and burping on milk I no longer made. Remembering this hurt. I made a promise to my sober self to stop remembering.

  I buried the shovel next, kick-covering it in sandy dirt.

  I was thirty-nine then. My son had turned sixteen. He’d tightened into a lean and stylish silence, a silence with my sister’s mean blank stare, my husband’s stinging smile, and my embarrassed eyes. My eyes! My eyes had been his since he opened them. The gun was a gift from a boy I hadn’t met. How I saw it then was this boy had tried to steal my son. I refused to know my son’s own role in stealing himself himself.

  My husband saw our son’s own role but this was all he saw. His refusal was to refuse knowing more than one thing at once. His way, hurried by the bottle, was hard, though no harder than mine. We discussed these ways in bed, before and after sunrise, arguments, plan-hatching, lovemaking. I was lucky then. I went to work. My husband went to work. Our son went to school.

  Now I sleep on an air mattress at my sister’s. My husband sleeps in his new apartment. Our son sleeps through college.

  The first time I stole a gun of my son’s to bury it in the desert I told my husband right when I returned. We confronted our son at breakfast. I had made my mother’s chilaquiles, the meal that signaled something big, a new job, my mother’s death, a move, a miscarriage. My husband put his burn-scarred fists onto the table. He told our son what I’d found. He didn’t tell him how I’d buried it, how he’d wanted to take the gun to the police, to his brother, how although he’d raged at me he’d also admitted to feeling proud of me. Pride was his other way, just as hard.

  Our son, looking at our faces, masked his shame in irritation and his relief in indifference. He ate.

  “Where is the respect?” screamed my husband.

  Our son left for school without his backpack.

  “Where is it?” screamed my husband, pounding the couch.

  I disagreed. “It’s there, it’s under things. Look for it.”

  “Where did he learn disrespect?”

  “It’s only what he’s wearing.”

  He grabbed my arm. When I winced, the anger-strength in his grip went slack. But he held on.

  “If you find another gun,” he screamed, “it is mine.”

  I found another gun wrapped in t-shirts in a box of old toys and I drank and I drove and I buried a gun in the desert again. I was alone but everyone was with me, standing on my head. There is no other way to say it.

  I pulled down my shorts by a manzanita and peed. I fell in it.

  Far off, the horizontal headlights of lone cars had beginnings, middles, and endings, pushed along like golden bars. I started the car. I drove home a different way, a way I knew would meet a drunk-driving checkpoint. It was Friday.

  The checkpoint gleamed at the mouth of an old mall. With its stage-like arrangement of police cars, lights, and testing stations, it had the feel of an underfunded circus. The officer who leaned into my window was not my husband’s brother, but he knew our family, he’d been to our son’s confirmation, he’d brought his rehabilitated wife, a card, cash. His look of gentle pity made me queasy. He was handsome.

  “Take me to jail,” I said.

  He led me out of the car and to a bench. I watched him scratch his neck and make a phone call. Other men and women, assisted by police officers, failed walk-the-lines and breathalyzers. Some protested, some didn’t. They were eased into cars and driven away like retirees. I craved retirement. A young police officer, he couldn’t have been more than twenty-two, he parked my car down the block. I put my head between my knees. I threw up. I threw up again.

  When I sat straight I saw that a car I knew had arrived. My husband got out of it. The police officer who’d tended to me hustled over to him. They had a disagreement. My husband, who didn’t want to get back into his car, got back into his car. The police officer walked over to me.

  “We know what you’re doing,” he said. “Don’t.”

  My husband who was drunk drove us home.

  “Where is the respect?” he said.

  I disagreed but I didn’t touch him. “It’s there.”

  “Once, I can forgive. Again?”

  “When it happens again we will go with your way.”

  My husband pounded the dashboard and made a shouting-face but didn’t shout.

  I made apology-orbits with my hands but didn’t apologize.

  He hit a median and then a curb.

  At home we didn’t turn on any lights. He refused to come to the bedroom. He stripped and lay on the family room couch. I stripped and lay on him. He got up and went to the bedroom, and I followed, and he got up and went to the couch, and I followed, and somewhere in the hall I hugged him, I held him where we were. We kissed.

  “It isn’t there,” I said.

  The light went on—our son had stepped out of his room.

  We didn’t move.

  He yawned. Pajamas and sleepiness had taken half his years away.

  From the end of the hall we watched him walk to the bathroom without looking our way. We watched him close the door. We listened to him lock it.

  Immigrants

  Our baby’s first name will be ___. ___ will be born in Chicago, delivered from his mother by a doctor who will whisper in her first language while she unwinds his tangled cord. ___’s mother will be an immigrant. His father will not. Immigrants, ___ will agree, pass like coins from pockets to hands, to counters, to fields and streets and public fountains, to pockets, and if the immigrants are children when they pass the way they pass, like ___’s mother, they may find that even with four decades spent they’re still between two cultures, each a currency, one worn vague but warm from being carried, the other so bright it bleaches, making things that aren’t equal seem so.

  ___, our baby, will turn into our child.

  Our child’s first childcare worker’s name will be Lupe. Lupe will be born in Juárez to a family that won’t own their home but will own the way they are when they aren’t working. Lupe will rarely not be working. Immigrants, Lupe will argue to other childcare workers, roll like tires from wherever-the-hell to here, uphill, downhill, off-hill, wobbly with the hope that the new cities they hit won’t lead to leaking, to being dragged and piled and burned.

  ___, our child, will turn into our kid.

  Our kid’s first landlord’s name will be Marija. Marija will be born in Zagreb, in a library, to a mother who will laugh into and out of moans and a father who will hold her, singing. Before them will stand a crowd of anxious and hopeful students. Marija will help her tenants, also immigrants, complete their forms. Immigrants, Marija will ask her tenants, forget their favorite old-country songs because they strain to remember them, or remember their favorite old-country songs because they strain to forget them?

  ___, our kid, will turn into a preteen.

  Our preteen’s first best friend’s name will be Hasan. Hasan will be born in Ramallah, on a ruined farm, to a mother and a father who will be persuaded to immigrate by mothers and fathers who were persuaded to immigrate. Hasan will study the conditions under which his parents will and will not ask him for help with their English, in grocery store lines or at the dinner table or on walks to the park, and wi
ll be unable to find a formula, the distance between their pride and their embarrassment shifting every day. Immigrants, Hasan will declare to his imam, are immigrants until they have been edged so far away from where they were born that the place in which they live becomes the place that they are closest to, but only by default.

  ___, our preteen, will turn into a teen.

  Our teen’s first favorite teacher’s name will be Bea. Bea will be born in Manila to a mother who will die a day later in bed and a father who for a year will look to die on accident on the docks. Bea will wedge her classroom door open after school to start conversations in English and Spanish and Tagalog with the students who will not want to go home. Immigrants, Bea will explain to her girlfriend, are a certain order of orphan, adopted by their new country and their new-country selves, adopting ways to chat up or to shush the old-country selves that hesitate inside the limits of their new-country selves.

  ___, our teen, will turn into a young adult.

  Our young adult’s first boss’s name will be Bolesław. Bolesław will be born in Buenos Aires to Warsaw refugees, to a family that will squat in one wrecked place after another. Bolesław will tell the young adults that he will hire for his community center’s summer program the stories about young adulthood that they will think they have heard until they hear them, stories about chances, how to grip these chances, how to lift or carry them, how to bend or crack or free them. Immigrants, Bolesław will write to his family around the world, are between the legs of language. Legs that kick, legs that squeeze, legs that tighten with restraint.

  ___, our young adult, will turn into a young adult who will not know how to feel like himself.

  ___’s first love’s name will be Susan. Susan will be born in Pyongyang to respected engineers who will travel on government business to Beijing, and from there, on family business to Chicago, where they will move into an apartment with relatives, change their names, and find work at a restaurant. Susan will force the first kiss. Immigrants, Susan will think, aren’t me.

  ___ will say: Immigrants are and they aren’t.

  Are and aren’t what? Susan will say.