Blue Rodeo

by Jo-Ann Mapson

  When she joined him in the living room, he said, “The least you could have done was gotten a goddamn television set with closed captioning. What the fuck am I supposed to do here for three weeks? Learn macramé?”

  She stopped at the closet door and turned to him. “That’s up to you. I don’t really need a TV, do I? Up until a week ago, you made it pretty clear you didn’t want to see me or come here. If you’re bored, you might try getting hold of that girl you have the crush on.”

  He walked across the room until they were standing elbow to elbow, the heat of the woodstove surrounding them. “How am I supposed to do that?” He was yelling now, just like his dad. Echo was trying to fit herself under the couch, her skinny back legs scrambling against the floor. “You don’t even have a goddamn telephone! Am I supposed to send her a fucking smoke signal?”

  She slapped his face. “Lower your voice. In case you’ve forgotten, I’m not the one who’s deaf. And you might want to rethink that last little racist remark, considering your father’s background, not to mention your friend Bonnie. Now, if you will excuse me, I have a date.”

  And after applying burgundy lipstick to her mouth, rolling the gold tube shut, and dropping it in her purse, she went out the front door, started up the Landcruiser, and was gone, leaving him absolutely alone, five hundred miles from anything remotely resembling civilization.

  He hated himself for not being able to will the tears back inside. They slobbered over his cheeks, had him wiping snot on his pants, and breathing in hot, fist-size gasps. Nothing made sense. There were trucks filled with radioactive chemicals driving around looking for places to dump poison. Some woman, not even ten years older than he was, was about to make his dad a father. His mother wasn’t even trying to hide what she was up to with the cowboy. Echo slunk across the floor until she was next to him and tentatively placed a paw on his leg. The old familiar gesture only made him cry harder. At once, she came into his lap, moving lightly, arching her neck until she could butt her head into his face, lick away the tears that just wouldn’t stop. He put his arms around her. Not so long ago he could go to his room, turn on music to soothe away bad feelings, even something wanky like Morrissey would do it. Or go over to Harbor, swim a hundred laps to bleed out the panic, make himself so tired he could fall asleep. He couldn’t hear. He didn’t have a vocabulary for how much that hurt. Sometimes his hands throbbed from trying to explain.

  His throat ached, and he realized that he had been crying so long and so loud that he’d torn it up good. Echo sighed against him, settling down in his lap. Against his cheek, her ears felt like warm velvet. Outside Blue Dog was white and forbidding, and in three days, like it or not, it would be Christmas.

  13

  TO MAGGIE’S EYES, DOWNTOWN BLUE DOG SPARKLED LIKE THE glitter on those Hallmark cards she’d loved as a kid. Tiny yellow-white twinkle lights and silver garlands festively transformed ordinary snowy street corners into a small-town magic that caused her to slow down her ingrained California Christmas-shopping pace so as not to miss a thing. Even the life-size statue of the red-and-white steer outside the Trough restaurant sported his own personal wreath, wound with red chili pepper lights, a crust of ice ridging his backbone. It was a bone-numbingly cold evening, but at least the snow had stopped blowing momentarily. People traversed the sidewalks in small groups, hurrying in their heavy coats, taking advantage of late shopping hours the stores offered in hopes of squeezing a few more holiday dollars from everyone’s pockets. To keep the blood flowing, Maggie stamped her feet inside her Gore-Tex lined boots as she waited outside Rabbott’s Hardware for Owen to finish with his customer. As soon as his break time arrived, they’d eat dinner. Looking forward to dinner was what was getting her through the days, made even longer by Peter’s sulking. Through the plateglass window, she could see Owen helping an old lady buy a wok. What Owen knew of the attributes of Chinese cookery was a mystery to Maggie, but he had the old lady squinting at its sloping black steel bowl with informed consumer awareness. After a few minutes Maggie watched him take the larger of the boxes to the register, where Minnie Youngcloud stood waiting to ring up the sale. Then he laid his work apron on the counter, held up his hand, the fingers spread wide—he’d be hers in five minutes. Using the few gestures he’d mastered, he signed, “Please wait,” and that touched her. Here he was, working two jobs, being insulted by Peter on just about a daily basis, and still managing to find time to learn the basics of her son’s language.

  So much between them these days was left unsaid. By tacit agreement neither had brought up Thanksgiving, that horrible close to a wonderful time away. In the space of twenty-four hours Maggie had managed to remove her sister, and Nori drove off toward Albuquerque in her rented Rover. Maggie held firm, telling her, Look, I moved for a reason. Don’t call, don’t write, and don’t tell my son what to do. Emotionless until the end, Nori’d hung in, yelling before she pulled out of the drive: Did you ever stop to think maybe Peter loves me, too? We’re related, Mag, and we’re all the family we have left. Just like her father—overwhelmed by one of Nori’s many shenanigans—used to say: You’ll find no tears in that one.

  The morning after Nori left, Maggie had gone to Owen’s. In the too-neat quiet of his room she discovered a note, indicating he’d taken a sudden trip out to the reservation. In town Big Lulu confirmed it. Yes, he said he was going off to help Verbena with her sheep, but when Maggie drove out to the reservation, Verbena hadn’t seen him. It was winter—what could you do with sheep in the snow besides throw a little supplemental feed their way, and make sure nobody got caught on the fence? Then Joe Yazzi appeared at her door, shuffling uneasily, asking for a ride back to his place. In silence she drove him where he wanted to go. Maggie went to the barn every morning and evening, measuring out four-inch-thick flakes of hay for Red, who came running as soon as she approached, whinnying questions for which she had no answer. She fed the sheep; she had watched Owen mark the charts, slowly upping their grass-hay as more and more snow covered the ground. While trying to court sleep, she listened for the sound of his truck, his three-legged dog—anything—nervously straining her ears for a sound that didn’t come.

  Then one night, long after midnight, she woke to see him standing next to her bed, a good start on a beard covering his cheeks and chin. He’d put a finger to his lips, shushing her questions, undressed in the dark, and climbed in beside her. After the shivering subsided, and he was thoroughly warmed in her arms, he began to tell her with his body that nothing mattered more than what they were doing right that moment. Maggie didn’t want to speak; sound would mar the physical sensations. Tears filled her eyes. Relief rippled through her muscles. He seemed never wiser than just then, taking her underneath him, opening her legs with one sure hand. It made her ache with longing just to remember, but behind the rush of pleasure, what he’d said about the state trooper still haunted her. It might be about me, Maggie. They would have to discuss what he meant. But not now. Not while their bodies offered this quiet corner in which to forget. It could wait. After Christmas, they’d have a big talk, clear up the mysteries and start the new year fresh.

  He shut the glass snow door and gave her a quick smile outside Rabbott’s. “I’ll testify to a warming trend. It must be at least half a degree hotter than yesterday, although that could be due to my present company.” He appraised her from her Isotoner gloves to her black overcoat, then whistled. “Hello there, pretty lady.”

  “Hi yourself.” She clutched her shopping bag and smiled. They were a pair of fools, weren’t they, standing on Main Street pretending they had no past, perfectly aware that same past dogged their ankles like newly hatched fleas. “Are you hungry?”

  “Always. I could put away a plate of your stew or forget eating altogether, kiss you till morning. It’s your call.”

  “Given Peter’s current emotional state, we’re probably safer eating take-out burgers and thinking about renting an armor-plated hotel room.”

  “You know, the other n
ight I almost felt sorry for the little pea-pecker.”

  “Sorry? How can you feel sympathy for him when he’s practically choreographing his misery?”

  “That kid doesn’t know what to do with himself, and he sure won’t take any advice from me, now that he’s figured out what I’m doing with his momma.”

  “He’s working hard to be the perfect little shit. When I think of how many tears I cried, wishing he’d come back home.” She blew out the sigh that had been caught in her chest all day, huddled up next to the guilty memory of slapping her son.

  “What is it they say? ‘Be careful what you wish for?’”

  She finished the sentence for him. “…For you may surely get it. And I did.”

  Owen took her free hand in his, and they set off walking toward the restaurant. “He’s just yanking your chain, Maggie. He’ll quit once it snaps back and smacks him upside his smart mouth.”

  She bristled at his word choice—why had she gone and hit Peter, something she’d never had to resort to before? “Never mind. I don’t want to spoil your appetite talking about it. Let’s just go pretend food will fix everything.”

  Inside the steakhouse Maggie told Owen she wanted the herb-and-rice chicken special, then let him order while she stared out the windows, which someone had needlessly sprayed with decorative flocking, creating swirls and banks of pretend snow. Shop owners did that in Southern California, romanticizing the element they never had to endure. Outside on the Blue Dog sidewalks, the real thing had been painstakingly shoveled away so people could pass. The storm had begun down in the Florida Panhandle, dumping snow in three-and four-foot amounts everywhere it went, leaving destruction in its wake. Already people had died from exposure, and she couldn’t help being glad Joe had once again been talked into staying warm at Owen’s, that in this weather he wasn’t trying to heat that worn-out hogan. As soon as the blizzard started blowing in another direction, she’d made Owen take the Landcruiser and go check on Verbena. Verbena was doing just fine, thank you, no little snowfall was going to get the better of her, he said, describing the hot pink long underwear peeking out from beneath her Rams jacket. But the storm was serious; the governor was talking about calling in the National Guard if it didn’t let up soon. In the Blue Dog library, she’d stopped looking through art books long enough to flip open a copy of the Los Angeles Times, its familiar front page there before her like an old friend. Some reporter had taken it upon himself to christen the storm “the Mother of All Blizzards,” as if an act of nature was just one more thing to blame a mother for. But that kind of thinking didn’t stop with newspapers. Yank your phone wires, and your sister would find a way to fax you nasty letters, like Nori had, straight to the only copy shop in town. They’d called Lulu Mantooth at the trading post, she’d told Minnie at Rabbott’s, and eventually Owen had delivered her the news, so the whole town had probably read the fax before she had. Just because you gave birth to him doesn’t mean you can make me stop seeing Peter if he wants me to…. Morally, I have as much right to see him as his father. Damn it all, Mag, why are you being like this? Because of that one night I slept with Deeter? Give me a break! He wasn’t even that memorable, if you want the ugly truth…. Maggie’d crumpled it up, told the clerks to throw whatever she sent next away, just send her the bill and she’d pay it.

  But silence, too, had its own punishment. Maybe she should buy Peter that television set for Christmas—closed captioning might even him out for a few hours, ease up the pressure he was foisting on her to be a type of mother that matched his ideal. If she had learned any truths since her husband had left her, one was that she didn’t miss television and had managed to fill the space where racket used to blare into her life, insisting she respond, with a rich peacefulness, and from that serenity, somehow, she was painting again. But what kind of mother slapped her kid and tried to justify it? Here he’d gone through eight months of hell, watched his parents split up, lost his hearing, and she couldn’t bring herself to locate a shred of sympathy.

  “Maybe I should get us some counseling,” she said aloud.

  Owen dropped his fork, and it clattered against the ironstone plate. “What did I do?”

  She smiled at his confusion. “Not us. Peter and me. A therapist. Somebody who understands teenagers. A professional.”

  He chuckled with relief. “Well, if there was such a thing, some old fool with a rule book, sooner or later I expect the teenagers would catch on and change everything, just to keep the deal tipped in their favor. You don’t need a headshrinker, Maggie, but you do need to grit your teeth and hang on for the ride, because I’m telling you, it’s only going to get rougher.”

  She twirled the greasy salt shaker under her fingers, sprinkling grains in an arc across the red tablecloth. “Well, that’s happy news.”

  He took the salt shaker from her and set it back next to the pepper. “From where Sara Kay stood at thirteen, it must have looked like my leaving was directed at her. Until they’re about fifty, kids think the universe rotates around them. You can’t take that kind of logic personal.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’ll drive you to the nuthouse. Now go on and eat your dinner. I guarantee you, everything looks more manageable on a full belly.”

  She pushed the chicken around her plate with her fork tines.

  He set aside his apple-stuffed pork chops and reached across the tablecloth for her hand. “You know, when you pout, you look so much like him I start looking for the extra pierced earrings. Of course, you’ve got nicer hair, and you’re a little friendlier.”

  Under the table he nudged her knee with his own, that familiar warmth bringing her worrying to a halt. He was willing to wait, yes, but what was it that would keep, and how long would it even be there? With Joe camped out at Owen’s and Peter’s resentment crowding every room of the farmhouse, the only inevitabilities they could count on this Christmas were a set of equally frustrating unrelieved tensions: Peter’s—God only knew when that would end—and their own, at having to sleep apart.

  If his mother could justify dinner out every night with O-w-e-n, Peter thought, fine, screw the rules, and went through her desk No love letters, no loose wads of bills, not even so much as a journal in which she recorded her whining. She was up to date with the gas and electric, boring, but Jim at Minuteman Copies in town sent her monthly statements for faxes, so maybe Nori was sending her messages, too, though he couldn’t find any hard evidence to prove it. Behind the bills there was a brown envelope from the lawyers, and inside, legal papers. He took it over to the armchair and sat down. Echo jumped up in his lap, turned a circle, tamping down some distant primal memory of prairie grass, and made a nest out of his jeans, resting her head on a throw pillow.

  So okay, here they were, the final papers. His dad didn’t want to be married to his mother, he wanted to be married to the woman he’d knocked up. Those were the facts. He got her pregnant, and unlike a lot of people these days, they wanted to have the baby. He imagined seeing a picture of her. The baby would have to be a girl, wrapped in a pink blanket, looking like a humanoid burrito, as all newborn babies did. But this one would be his half-sister. Her eyes dark and wet, like the glass eyes on a stuffed animal. Her ears in perfect working order.

  Dr. Kennedy, in their never-ending counseling sessions, was always on him to discuss the divorce, saying that his parents’ splitting had “impacted” on him even before the deafness. Peter always answered this ridiculous inquiry the same way, “Just because two people can’t hang on to their marriage doesn’t mean I feel erased.” Kennedy rolled in that like a dog in stink, as if his word choice revealed something swimming under the surface of this psychological swampwater. What did he expect from the son of a screenwriter? His father used to give him a hard time when he didn’t try to amp up his vocabulary, as if words were right up there with breathing. Like a simple-minded cat, Kennedy chased Peter’s words all around the office, batting at them, trying to get them to roll over and show their b
ellies. Around them there were volumes of books on the child’s mind, the trouble with adolescents, so many books on the subject of sex that Peter began to wonder if the people who wrote them weren’t more obsessed than those who admitted to having a few problems and stupidly went looking for help.

  There was a crappy handmade ceramic vase on the shelf between the two chairs Kennedy liked to sit in. It was glazed sloppily, so that big gray drips marred the design, which was a hand signing the letters I, L, and Y simultaneously, shorthand for “I love you.” Peter wondered who on earth, deaf or hearing, could find something in Kennedy to love. His thinning black hair, which he grew long on one side and then gelled into an Elvis comb-over to fake nobody out? His hey-bob-a-rebob minibeard growing in the center of his feeble and otherwise hairless chin? He could just see Kennedy snapping his fingers to some Dizzy Gillespie riff while girls in sequined gowns waited for him to notice their cigarettes needed lighting. He often made references to the sixties, warbling about peace and community, Spaceship Earth. Such bullshit. That whole generation had their consciences wiped Windex-clean. His dad, starring in Family Man—the sequel; Kennedy, the ultimate brain-fuck; Owen the cowpoke poking his mother—your basic male role models, Pete, my boy.

  He read the divorce papers for awhile, then got bored with the legalese and put it back in the desk. It was six-thirty, the time his mom usually had dinner on the table. His stomach in a knot, that frozen cheese pizza was the last thing he wanted.

  The cowboy had left his snowshoes by the front door. Probably he was planning to sneak home after midnight and didn’t want to fall down in the snow. Peter told Echo to stay, strapped them on, and went for an exploratory hike across the now-white pasture toward the barn and bunkhouse in the growing dark. He didn’t really have a plan—he just needed to breathe air, no matter how cold. Lifting his feet carefully, he made his way across the pasture, leaving waffle-iron footprints. The red horse he’d seen the day he drove up was standing in one of the stalls, looking out hopefully at Peter’s presence. Now Peter understood that the horse belonged to the cowboy. He unlatched the snowshoes and went over to say hello. It was a decent horse, friendly, with halfway intelligent eyes. Peter leaned across the stall door to scratch the horse’s neck, burying his gloved fingers in the thick fur, pulled them back and sniffed his hand deeply—if only people smelled that good, nobody would ever need cologne.