Blue Rodeo

by Jo-Ann Mapson

  Bonnie walked briskly alongside him to the red front door of the farmhouse. Eddie lit a cigarette, and the smoke smell was sharp in the cold air. What if Mom hated Bonnie on sight, had his weeks sewn up with endless planned outings to make up for lost time? He couldn’t wait for Bonnie to meet Echo. Bonnie’d like the dog. He eased the scowl from his face. Unsure whether or not it was okay to just walk in, he lifted his hand to knock at the door. His mother opened it at once, as if she had spent the day standing behind it, waiting. She smiled at him in a way that made everything seem okay, then said hello to his companions. It was funny, when she moved her mouth, he could still hear her voice in his head, clear as ever. She had a funny voice, one of those deep sopranos that sometimes grew creaky with laryngitis—her weak spot. In his dreams Bonnie sounded the same way. To his surprise, Bonnie was talking now. She signed simultaneously, so he could tell exactly what she was saying. “Hi, I’m Bonnie, Peter’s friend. This is my Uncle Eddie. We live in Shiprock, on the reservation. Merry Christmas….”

  His mother gestured for everyone to come in, get warm. Then all at once, Echo came flying at him, a mutt bullet traveling at warp speed. He knelt to let her properly welcome him home. Dodging licks and paws, he looked at the room around him. Woodstove radiating warmth, pale yellow walls, an overstuffed couch and rocking chair. Maybe in a little while it could feel like home. But right now the only thing he recognized was the old dresser from the guest room, and the threadbare rug his dad used to make fun of, which now hung above the mantel. The rest of the place was crowded with easel, sketches, crinkled tubes of paint and half-finished canvases. Several of them, he noticed with embarrassment, were portraits of himself.

  Eddie said they had to go, that people were waiting on them, and as he and Bonnie walked back out the door, Peter wished he knew how to combine the goodbye he wanted to say—putting his arms around Bonnie, burying his face in her hair, smelling enough of her clean girl smell to hold him over until the next time he saw her—with the polite goodbye wave of his hand. He watched her get back in the truck and drive away, the outside rush of cold air infiltrating the warm house until the lights on the truck disappeared around the curve in the road. Then he was alone, his dog scratching at his leg for attention, his mother standing behind him, waiting for him to say or sign something.

  If she was nervous having him there, she was doing a damn good job of hiding it. She made pasta for supper, stir-fried carrots and broccoli, then dusted everything with Parmesan cheese. The vegetables were a little burned, classic Mom, but she didn’t apologize and even went back for seconds, the first time Peter could remember her doing that. She was the kind of mother who ladled out her own tiny portions of whatever she fed him. Lots of nights she just had salad and crackers. She bought herself fat-free everything, from cheese to yogurt, stuff Echo wouldn’t even bother begging for. They sat across from each other at the kitchen table, silently cleaning their plates. She refilled his water glass without his asking, and if he shut his eyes, he could almost pretend they were back home, on one of a million nights his father was “working late.”

  “School’s going okay?” she signed when she laid her fork down on her plate.

  He shrugged.

  His mother looked down at the table, as if concentrating hard on getting her signs right. “Your friend Bonnie—nice.”

  Rapidly he shot back the letter F, ASL shorthand for fine. He could see she didn’t know what that meant. Too bad.

  “I missed you,” she signed.

  She was using the letter I to indicate herself—which was practically forbidden—that was like holding out your pinky to drink your tea, like sticking your nose in the air as if you were some snobby Englishman. He smirked at her blunder.

  She looked embarrassed and excused herself. He buttered a third slice of French bread. She took her plate to the sink, rinsed it, and disappeared upstairs. After five minutes of waiting for her to come back down, Peter went looking for her.

  “Some mother,” he said aloud in her doorway, as she looked into a dresser mirror, dressed now in a purple silk shirt, brushing her hair. “My first night here and no dessert?”

  She looked over at him, startled, and signed back as she answered aloud, the signs lagging so far behind her mouth they were pointless. “My God, Peter. It’s been so long since I heard you speak. Of course there’s dessert.”

  She ran the brush through her hair once more, then she said, “Whether I brush it for three hours or not at all, it ends up looking the same. Wild.” Then, as if she had just remembered he was deaf, she signed “wild” and pointed to her hair.

  She smelled nice, like soap and lotion, clean and natural, not marinated in perfume, like the old biddy who worked in the library at Riverwall. “Your hair looks okay. Your signing’s improving. You can talk to me. When it comes to speech-reading you, I kick ass.”

  “Thanks, but I need the practice. I was hoping you’d help me. For dessert, there’s cherry—”

  Peter watched her hands make the sign for pie, that unmistakable wedge shape. “Since when did you learn to make pie?”

  She abandoned her signing and simply spoke. “About two months after I watched your father flush my life down the toilet.” His heart sped up. He didn’t want to talk with her about that Ever. It was over. If he didn’t think about it, there was no other family, no half-brother or -sister on the way, nothing.

  “Pete, relax. I’m not going to try to convince you to hate your dad because he decided he loved some other woman.”

  He made an O with his right hand and circled it with his left index finger.

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “It means asshole.”

  “Lovely things you’re learning at school.” She shook her head no. “Well, he does have moments where he definitely qualifies. For a long while, I hated him.”

  “Now?”

  She turned the brush over in her hands and touched the bristles. “I don’t know, Pete. Part of me’s still hurt. He’s just trying to make sense of his life, the same as you or me.”

  “By fucking actresses?”

  She smiled. “Another one of my favorite words! I was wondering where that one had gone to.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Try to understand, Pete. Sometimes sex is how people initially go about finding their happiness. It’s not like marriage, but sometimes it leads there.” She gave his shoulder a shake. “Don’t you get any ideas in that department, you hear? Oh, there’s the door. Come on downstairs and meet—” She stopped and finger-spelled the name: “O-w-e-n.”

  O-w-e-n?

  “It’s fixing to blizzard,” the man said, shaking snow from his shoulders, and Peter watched as his mother signed the translation, though this guy spoke so slowly he didn’t need her to translate what he’d said. He’d pictured this neighbor she’d invited for dessert to be some old maid his mother’d befriended, like the Welcome Wagon lady. Not six feet of cowboy on snowshoes, carrying a carton of vanilla ice cream to go with the goddamn pie. Fixing. Jesus Christ, was this guy the same one out there feeding the sheep? The handyman? What?

  Owen held out a hand for Peter to shake. He was all smiles and good manners. Peter left his hand resting at his side. Margaret, halfway to the kitchen, fixing to serve her pie, missed the whole exchange, but the cowboy didn’t. Not missing a beat, he reached over with his left hand, shook his own right one and gave Peter a look that said, “Okay, for now we’ll play it your way.” He went back to the door, opened it, and let in a small spotted dog with three legs.

  Then Owen left him standing in the living room and went to the kitchen. Both he and his dog had been here before. They seemed to know the house—both floors, as the dogs took off up the stairs in a game of chase. Peter pulled the living room curtains aside and looked out the window at the heavy snow falling, making peaks on the hood of his mother’s car, the only car around. If the man came on snowshoes, he had to live close by, like say that shack off the barn where he’d glimp
sed the sheep feeder. Maybe it was the same guy. Driving in, the nearest house they’d seen from the road was way across the river, and cherry pie wasn’t that humongous a draw in two feet of snow. He peered into the kitchen, and saw the man place his hand on the small of his mother’s back as she leaned over to take the warming pie out of the oven. He saw his mother lean ever so slightly back into that hand, like she’d done it before.

  “I’m not really hungry,” he announced.

  His mother gave him the palm-down sign, which meant he needed to lower his speaking voice. “That’s okay,” she signed. “There’s plenty if you change your mind.”

  She’d cut the cowboy a huge wedge, then topped it off with a generous scoop of artery-hardening ice cream. No one in this state had ever heard of nonfat frozen yogurt, and his mother, standing there licking the spoon, seemed to have forgotten about fat-free anything. It looked to Peter like she was doing him.

  “My dad makes movies,” Peter said when Margaret and Owen were well into their pie. “What do you do?”

  The cowboy patted his mouth with a napkin before he answered. “Clerk in a hardware store, raise a few sorry sheep.”

  “What for?”

  His mother set aside her plate to sign as Owen spoke. “Money. To sell. For meat.”

  Peter said, “Let me get this straight. You raise them, feed them, and then kill them?”

  “Not exactly. You skipped over a few steps.”

  His mother interrupted. “I can make cocoa—anybody want cocoa?”

  Peter ignored her, intent on watching the cowboy. “So you don’t kill them?”

  “No, son, I don’t.”

  “But you pay someone else to, right?”

  The cowboy was trying hard to follow his logic. “Slaughter’s the term. After I sell them, what people do is their business.”

  “You’re right. Slaughter is a better term. But you don’t even need to think about what to call it, really, if you sell them.”

  “It’s a fact animals give up their lives for people to eat.”

  His mom had quit trying to keep up the pace, but he didn’t really need to know what the guy was saying at this point. “You know what? I’m not your son. And not everyone eats meat. Breeding sheep—what’s that mean, essentially? Fucking?”

  The cowboy didn’t respond, but his mother stood up, tensing, giving him the look that said he’d gone over the edge.

  Peter said, “Hey, we’re all adults here. It’s just an expression for sex. Kind of like ‘fucking your lights out’ is also an expression for sex.”

  “Peter! That’s enough.”

  The cowboy set his pie down on the table and placed his hand on his mother’s arm and patted it twice. Crudely pointing, “You-me, go-to-snow,” in elementary sign, he said aloud, “Pete, let’s go bring in some firewood. Blizzards can last days. You need to know where the wood is, and how to stoke the stove. That is, unless you feel comfortable with your momma doing all the work around here.”

  He was trying to get to him with that old reverse psychology bullshit. “A slight problem. I don’t have boots. You wouldn’t want me to catch pneumonia, would you?”

  “Use mine.”

  “Owen,” his mother said. “I can get the wood. I do it every day.”

  “Maggie, sit tight. You went to the trouble of making this delicious pie, the least two men can do is fetch firewood.”

  Maggie. He was calling her Maggie.

  Owen was already snapping the laces over Peter’s Doc Martens, the dogs sniffing and prancing nearby at the brilliant idea of going out in the snow. His mother was staring at her pie, the ice cream starting to melt in a slushy, blood-colored puddle studded with cherries. Her shoulders were hunched forward, and the silk shirt had lost some of its luster.

  If Riverwall had been cold, by comparison Blue Dog at dusk was Antarctica. Snow knives in your face—and he was talking cojones-freezing cold. Peter trudged behind Owen the ten feet from the house to the woodpile. Owen took a pocket flashlight from his jacket and turned it on for Peter to follow, though it was still light enough to see clearly. The snowshoes kept him from sinking, but he could only move like he was dream-running, pointlessly struggling to move out of some gluey muck, getting nowhere fast, until the man came and guided his arm, lifting him up and pulling him along.

  “Thanks.”

  The cowboy nodded. He shone the light on his own face. “Fell flat on my ass the first time I tried them. You got to remember to lift your feet.”

  At the woodpile Owen stopped and took out a notepad, removed the fat glove he was wearing, and gestured to the pad.

  “Your momma says you read lips. How well?”

  “I’m what they call a goddamn natural at it. My teachers all think I’m ‘gifted.’ But sometimes I miss stuff if you speak too fast.”

  “Then I’ll talk nice and slow and write you a note when I don’t want you to miss anything.” He leaned against the woodpile and scribbled onto the paper. Peter stood there, awkward in the oversize shoes, waiting while the cold pierced him. Finally the cowboy handed the note over along with the flashlight.

  It read: “You treat your momma meaner than an abscessed tooth. She may not win no mother-of-the-year contest, but she’s trying.”

  Peter gave him a frank appraisal. “Tell me why should I give a shit what you think? Because you’re screwing her?”

  The cowboy rubbed his thumb across one of the split logs, then turned back to Peter’s face, smiling. “You’re a long-headed little mule.”

  Peter shrugged. “And you’re an asshole.”

  He penned more words onto the pad. “If you think you can get away with a nasty mouth because God saw fit to take your hearing, think again.”

  Peter handed him back the pad.

  Owen pocketed it, chipped loose a stick of wood from the icy pile, then spoke. “I’m not your dad. To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t exactly be eager to adopt you. Your momma brightens my days, not that it’s your business. You seem downright anxious to get into it with me. I’m no fighter. I left that nonsense behind me some time ago. But you keep talking trash about your mother, I swear I will be happy to haul in your neck and hobble both of them useless ears permanently.”

  Peter said, “Oh, write that down, would you? In the King’s English for those of use who didn’t grow up playing cowboys and Indians.”

  Owen the cowpoke laughed hard at that. “I think you got the gist of it. Now hold out your arms. Let’s see how much wood a little whiner like you can manage.”

  As if screwing the “Bonanza” extra in private wasn’t enough for her, his mother had to go out with him as well. Day after day, snow or not, they went out to dinner, said they were going shopping, but he knew what that really meant. Oh, they always asked him to come along, but no way was he going to say yes and watch them make cow eyes at each other. They were probably regulars now, renting a room at the Easy-Eight, not even bothering to use fake names. While his mother painted trees and birds onto canvases, three endless days passed, slower than a gas leak. The paintings had all started to look the same to him. Perfectly accurate representations of the outside world, a place too cold to go to. Echo was about as tired of fetching the ball as he was of throwing it to her. He looked forward to going outside to get firewood, because even having to scrape away snow, get splinters in his glove, and snort away freezing snot as his nose ran, at least the woodpile was a change of scenery.

  He wondered what Travis and Brian were up to. They had planned a ski trip a million years ago, when they were still friends. No biggie, just a couple of days someplace close—like Bear Mountain. Probably they’d gone without him. He wondered about Aunt Nori, too, why she hadn’t come by—she practically lived in airports—it was unbelievable that his mom had no telephone, that her mailbox was enough of a hike you had to stop and rest on the way back. What if something happened to them out here in hooterville? He’d read all her back issues of Redbook and thought about trying the macadamia-nut cookie recipe he
’d read about in the July “Let’s Have a Backyard Luau” article, but the Blue Dog market probably never stocked anything more exotic than beer nuts. He was beyond sick of sitting around—he felt like he might explode before Christmas got here. When he had half-completed the old waterwheel jigsaw puzzle that had undoubtedly been left behind by God’s grandchildren, he thought maybe he might get out the map and borrow the cowpoke’s snowshoes and go off in search of Bonnie. Even rejection would be more interesting than finding the green edge pieces and the blue water shapes. He shoved the puzzle off the kitchen table back into its taped-up box. Maybe, in between her dates, his mother could find the time to drive him to Shiprock.

  Around five she cleaned up her paintbrushes at the kitchen sink, then went upstairs. He knocked at the half-open door of her bedroom and saw she’d changed into a whole new outfit.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Dinner with Owen. We’d sure like it if you came along.”

  “Right.”

  She sighed. “Okay. There’s frozen cheese pizza in the freezer. How does that sound?”

  “How would I know? I can’t hear”

  She sighed again, rolled her eyes at him, and tried two different earrings against her lobes, a silver disc with a house and tree carved into it, and a long beaded green one that lay against her neck, drawing attention to its length and curve. “Which do you think goes better?”

  “If you’re trying to get Roy Rogers to slip you the tongue, why don’t you just rub chewing tobacco behind your ears?”

  She laughed. “That’s pretty funny. But Owen doesn’t indulge.”

  “Why not? I thought that was a cowboy requirement—Skoal can in the back pocket, lip full of chaw. Is he some kind of saint?”

  She didn’t answer.

  Maybe, Peter thought, he had no time for it, since he was so busy indulging in something else—like his mother. She unhooked both earrings, set them on the dresser, and he looked at her, her hair tucked behind her ears. Next thing she’d probably start wearing miniskirts. Go with them to dinner—like they were going downtown to chew barbecued cow bones, this happy little “family,” pretend they weren’t groping each other under the table. She reached for the beaded green earrings, and just the thought of it, his mother’s neck, that cowboy’s mouth—he left the room and went downstairs.