Off Main Street

by Michael Perry

  The idea of an unannounced inspection struck me as goofy as it was creepy. But that paled in comparison to the idea of this man filled with such vindictive hubris that he was willing to risk this woman’s soul to Hell, to abandon her in her own home, willing to stand before the throne of God on the Big Day and say, Lord, she was clad in shorts, so I turned away. I got her behind me, back there with Satan.

  I can still see him, down at the south end of the long cookhouse table, right across from me, his big frame backlit in the window, telling this story with booming certitude, and I remember thinking, if the kingdom of heaven can swing on a pair of hot pants, if the cut of your shorts can shift the firmament, then we got trouble. And now, when I think back, I feel a little sorry for him, sad that he could tell these stories in front of a kid like me and not have any perception of my perception. Blown up in his own spiritual bulk, he unwittingly blocked the one true light, and a shadow fell on my heart. In time, I came to know others like Tim Copper. In their zeal to count heads, they lost track of souls. And when they saw some of us turn away, they assumed we simply strayed, or were tempted away, or left in ignorance, when in truth, many of us left in full awareness, seeking a purer truth. He wasn’t the only one. But I remember that Sunday. For the first time, I felt the foundation of my faith crack.

  On Mondays, we left the Sunday world, and dove back into work. In the weeks leading up to Brother Tim’s gospel in the granary, we had been branding. Branding days usually began with a roundup. Understand: When I showed up at the Double 8 Ranch in Elk Mountain, Wyoming, I was no cowboy. I was wearing blue corduroy pants and a flowered disco shirt. It was only my second-favorite disco shirt, but it had flowers on it, and I figured these ranchers I was meeting would be more receptive to flowers than the jarring black and orange geometrics of my number-one favorite disco shirt. I was sixteen, and I had ideas about these things.

  I had never ridden a horse. Well, I had, but never really on my own, or to any useful end. There was this neighbor girl once, she was eighteen, I was twelve or so, and I had for her a saturating case of puppy love, and once, at the pitch of my fever, she gave me a ride on her horse. I remember tingling and trying not to tremble, or trembling and trying not to tingle, and I remember acting desperately nonchalant, but I do not remember the horse, except that I suppose it might have been brown. Then my friend Reno Norsk had a pony named Daisy. He brought her over one day and shared his thermos of sugary iced tea and we rode her out to the swamp, and, because we had heard high schoolers talking about it, we got naked and went streaking. A buddy from high school, George Brux, whom I always remember fondly when I look at the disfigured half-moon under the nail of my right index finger—he flattened it with a racquetball racquet—sent me out on his horse once, and I should have known better, because Georgie was one gleefully sadistic cat, and before it was over the horse was on a runaway. I was dangling by one leg and one arm, just like a movie Indian attacking a Conestoga. I don’t remember how we got the horse stopped, but I remember Georgie cackling maniacally. My grandpa had horses; I think he might have taken me for a ride once. And I had this high school girlfriend for a while, we’d ride double out into the moonlight, the horse’s hooves whispering through the damp alfalfa, and I’d murmur in her ear and keep my arms around her, and we wafted from one Teen Romance Hall of Fame moment to another, until I reached to open a gate, slid from behind the saddle and landed flat on my back, where I lay gasping like a guppy in the Gobi.

  The point is, when I showed up at the Double 8, my horse-riding skills were those of an Eskimo hairdresser. I got away with this for the first two years, since I was only on hire for the haying season. But the third year I came out early for branding season and had to saddle up with the real hands. I learned how to put the saddle blanket on, checking it for any burrs or wrinkles that might cause a saddle sore. I learned about bridles and hackamores, and how to trick a horse into accepting the bit. I was given a saddle, and learned how to cinch it up and strap it down. Some horses fight the cinch, huff up full of air, holding it until you’re done, hoping you won’t notice. Then they exhale and leave the cinch dangerously slack. When you catch a horse doing this, you knee them in the belly, hard, and when they woof out the air, you snub that cinch up snug as a barrel strap.

  I learned, but I just never felt comfortable around horses. For one thing, the other cowboys had been doing this all their lives, and it was impossible for me to replicate their natural ease. They’d see me being tentative, and one of them would say something about acting smarter than the horse. Don’t let them know you’re afraid of them, that sort of thing. Which is fine, unless you’re afraid of them. And I was. Not in a skittery, weak-Willy way, but in a contemplative My, look at the size of those murderous hocks way. I grew up around giant Holstein cows, including ones that tried to kick me when I milked them, but acting smarter than a milk cow and acting smarter than a horse are completely separate propositions. And horses, they always look at you with a certain malevolent disdain. Even when you’re up in the saddle, reins firmly in hand, a horse can emit palpable rays of contempt simply by adjusting the angle of its ears. They’re faster than we, they’re sleeker than we, they’re hung better than we, and they seem to know it.

  In a way, I’m short-selling myself. In all my years on the ranch, I was never bucked off, and I did ride some buckers. Well, one. I learned to slouch into the sway when the horses were walking, I learned how to ride the every-other hippity-bippity groove of a horse on the trot, and I loved to cut out across the prairie after a galloping stray. And my proudest achievement? I never—never—grabbed the saddle horn when things got dicey. Only a nancy greenhorn grabs the saddle horn, and I would have sacrificed my sacroiliac before I’d have grabbed the saddle horn in front of all those real cowboys. Of course, it helped that I spent the bulk of my horseback time aboard a one-eyed ball of fire named Cisco.

  Cisco was held in reserve for amateurs. He had the disposition of a cranky tortoise, meaning he sustained all the haughty nature of his equine peers, without the sudden moves. I could do just about anything—sneeze, drop my reins or hat—and he would remain stoic, waiting patiently for the incompetent nincompoop on his back to gather up his gear. Apart from the one nonfunctioning walleye, he was in generally good health, and able to perform passably—albeit perfunctorily—in the field. At least, he was able to perform up to the standards I set. I came to feel a measure of affection for Cisco over the years, and even though I knew I was astride the official horse with training wheels, it didn’t stop me from slouching and squinting just like all the other cowboys as we headed up the meadow each day to gather the day’s branding stock. I may have been riding with training wheels, but by heck, I was riding.

  Then came graduation day. Someone else showed up whose horse-riding abilities were worse than mine. As I recall, it was some fair-skinned citified friend of the family on a lark. “What’ll we do with Mike?” asked the boss’s son. “Put ’im on Warts,” said the boss.

  My boss, Pres, the sawed-off, jut-jawed personification of a dyspeptic banty rooster, was a solid and fair man, but he possessed a lurking wild-eyed temper accessed by a fuse shorter than his little bowlegs. When the fuse lit, he was prone to sputtering, high-octane tirades. His anger burned bright, but it burned brief. There would be an explosion, a lovely pyrotechnic spray with plenty of boom-boom-boom, and then, just as quickly, silence—the better in which to contemplate the reverberations of his declarations. “Put ’im on Warts,” he said, and the adventure began. Warts was a good bit taller than Cisco, lean and deep chestnut brown, and the minute I stepped beside her in the stall, her ears flattened and she began emitting palpable contempt rays. No one told me at the time, but Warts was a head-tosser. That is, in addition to saddle and bridle, she required a piece of equipment, called a tie-down, that ran from her chin to her chest. Without the tie-down, she responded to the reins by tossing her head in the air and shaking her neck. Without the tie-down, she was unsteerable and unstoppable. When
I saddled up, I left the tie-down hanging on the tack-room wall.

  I led Warts out the stable door, where all the other cowboys and horses were gathered. Several of the hands were fussing over Cisco and the city slicker. I smiled indulgently. No more tenderfoot pony rides for me. Let the Boy Scouts ride that old bag of bones. I tightened the cinch and squinted against the sun. I’m a cowpuncher, baby. I’m a bona fide, rootin’-tootin’ brushpopper on a rootin’ tootin’ brushpoppin’ mo-chine. With one last smug glance at the pasty tourist, I swung aboard.

  Perhaps I should say swung halfway aboard. For as it turned out, my bona fide, rootin’-tootin’ brushpoppin’ mo-chine was actually a bona fide, rootin’-tootin’ rocket sled. Just as my foot was about to clear the saddle, that horse ignited.

  I’ve seen drag racing cars that can throw fire thirty feet into the air and burn rubber halfway down a quarter-mile track—this horse made them look like a Rambler with bad clutch plates. My head snapped back, my adrenal glands liquefacted, and my life may have flashed before my eyes, but I couldn’t be sure, since the calving shed flashed past at the same time. I sawed on the reins as if I were trying to bring a stampeding water buffalo to heel: Warts just tossed her head back and grabbed another gear. All across that rock-studded field, I sawed, and that horse speed-shifted—whinnying, tossing her head and shaking her mane like Lady Godiva sprinting through boot camp. We just kept gaining speed. I began to imagine I could see a cusp of air before us, bending and whitening as we pushed toward the speed of sound.

  And then I saw the fence. Dead ahead, strung high and tight—an endless stretch of five-foot-high barbwire. Warts was on course for impact, and showed no signs of slowing. If she hit the fence, she’d be lacerated horribly. I’d probably be thrown clear, but would collect my own unique set of deceleration injuries, the type incurred when one terminates atmospheric reentry with a headfirst dive into an assortment of tortoise-sized boulders. If she jumped the fence, my end result would likely remain unchanged. And so I took a stupendous breath, slammed my heels into the stirrups, and reared back on the reins like a man trying to shift the Sphinx. If I had yanked on those reins any harder, that horse and I would have journeyed backward in time. The rocks flew, the grass came loose in great clods, and that nag turned her truck around in the space it would take a tree toad to tap-dance.

  And shot back across the pasture like an asteroid.

  I don’t remember much about the trip back. Except for the part about did I have clean underwear on, and if you scream will a horse detect fear? I couldn’t see too well, as we were roaring right back through the vapor trail we left on the way out. Next thing I remember we skidded smack into the middle of Pres and the rest of the crew. Somebody grabbed the bridle, and somebody grabbed a stirrup. I grabbed my chest. Pres ran to my side, reaching up to help me down. “Get that boy down offa there!” he yelled. Of course he’s upset, I thought. He nearly lost his best hand. “He’s a-gonna ruin that dang horse!”

  I say I left the church, but I suppose the departure is necessarily incomplete. My Christian upbringing provides me with a foundation, I suppose, or a sort of sketchy paradigm, but the shining certainties are long gone, corrupted by details. We finance our journey for truth by pawning off our purities, using the wages of sin to purchase insights unavailable to those who choose to remain cloaked in the robes of the true believer. I’m not fool enough to think I’ve discovered truth. I know better than to rely on my interpretation of anything, be it the gospel or the weather or Sergeant Pepper’s. I talk about the search for truth, but it is a fool’s pursuit. The more you look, the less you know, to paraphrase Lao-tzu. My travels have shown me so many believers—leftists, rightists, Buddhists, Muslims, televangelists, crystal worshipers, and so on—and shown me how many of these same people are sincere and kind and misguided and difficult, that I am left spiritually schizophrenic. There is only one truth, and it is infinitely complex.

  Nothing was complex in the granary that hot, late-June evening. There was Brother Tim and the one thunderous truth, and there was a brown-eyed girl two rows over. Two choices. Brother Tim had the stage, and the sound system, and the raging heavens, but that girl had just the breath of a ringlet furled at the lobe of her left ear, and lips like twin strips of silk. I looked at Tim, and for the first time I can recall, realized that all that thunder might just be thunder. I looked at that girl and I saw gentleness, and peace, and the hint of a smile, and I looked back at Tim and I saw bluster and thought maybe he’d soon be belching molten slag, and all I could think of is how that girl’s hand would feel in mine. We’d been sneaking around a little bit already. The night before we’d watched the sun set over the peaks of Sybille Canyon, which were fifty miles away but still visible across the Chugwater Flats. According to local lore, the name Chugwater dated back to the time when Native Americans stampeded buffalo over a nearby cliff into a stream below. The buffalo hit the water with a chug. I don’t know if the story is true. Someone showed me the cliff once.

  The girl was half Native American. It never occurred to me to ask from which tribe. She was smart, and delicate, and strong. Later, when she married a jet engine mechanic in Kansas six months after our last date, I wrote horribly adoring poetry about her, filled with hackneyed references to her ethnicity, including made-up names intended to sound Native American. Horrendous. Verses about her “keeping a tepee with another paleface,” equating her “braided raven strands” to a headdress and her denim tennies to moccasins, and lines casting her as “cousin to the wind.” Yikes. But tonight everything was poetic on its own, thick with color and possibility. That hunger-making wind kept pushing under the door, and through the rectangular window panels I could see miles of wheat, orange-drenched and sinuous beneath the billowing octopus-ink sky, the fat gusts pressing the full heads down, making them bow and sway like a vast tribe of slim, trancing pagans.

  Still, there was drama within the clean-swept granary as well. Because Brother Tim was winding things up. And because it was Saturday night, he’d be testing the meeting. This is when you find out if the Lord has been moving about in the unsaved souls of the assembled. Brother Tim had laid it all out, let us know what we were in for, and now he would give those who hadn’t yet made their choice the opportunity to leave the wickedness of the world—and hot pants—behind. Toward the end of his sermon, he toned it down, became a bit more cajoling. I can’t quote him, it’s been too long. But having vividly detailed the twists and turns of the path to Hell, having tripped through the nooks and crannies of the fiery pit, he now made a counteroffer. Avoid all this, he said, find your shelter in the Lord, simply by standing to your feet on the last verse of our closing hymn. Make the choice for Christ, choose to walk in the path of righteousness, so that when that final day comes, you will be chosen to stand at the right hand of God.

  The place gets electric when the meetings are tested. Grown men shake and weep. Brash youths rise to their feet, faces stained with tears, their souls positively naked with holy humiliation. The buildup to that final verse is unbearable. Even thinking about it now, my chest gets light and edgy, and my pulse lifts. All that preaching, and then, in the space of six or so a cappella lines, you find out if any of it took. We finished the chorus, headed into the first lines. Heads swivel. Has anyone risen? Brother Tim lifts his eyes from his hymnal, sweeps the crowd as he did before, only now his eyes have cooled. Heat replaced with hope. The singing falls off a bit, what with everyone rubbernecking, but comes right back. No one is standing. Brother Tim keeps singing and searching. The words scale by and he becomes more furtive, more desperate. There are no histrionics, just subtle shadings. And this isn’t about his ego. I believe his fear is true; he doesn’t fear that his tour de force will go unrewarded, he fears that souls are being lost. The verse is drawing to a close. We’re headed for the final chorus. Eternal salvation, going once, going twice…

  If you want to look good at a branding, you got to have yourself a good heeler man. You got to know that when you
arch your back, flip that dogie and free-fall to your knees bear-hugging two hundred pounds of bawling, head-butting bull calf, somewhere in there your heeler shot his arm out, snapped his fingers shut on the calf’s left rear hoof, yanked straight back with all he had, and hit the dirt butt-first, with his left foot jammed in the back of the calf’s right hamhock, driving it forward so the two legs form a splayed V. Meanwhile, the horse at the other end of the lariat should maintain a steady pull, keeping the loop taut. If the heeler does his job, and if the cowboy on the horse does his, their opposing efforts should anchor the calf between them. Either one lets up, you’ve got yourself a frantic lapful of beef, thrashing like a bathtub-sized trout with hooves. And if you are timid, or tentative, if you don’t dive into that calf like you’re twisting up and taking down a speed-freaked halfback, you’ll find yourself flat on your back, tasting hot tooth chips and tonguing the gouge in your cheek.