Marathon Cowboys

by Sarah Black

  Jesse looked at me for help, but I just held up my hands. He put his hands on his hips. “Mary took it away from me.”

  “Thank you for keeping this shit-for-brains grandson of mine off death row for killing another idiot with my shotgun.” I hadn’t known him long, but the old man was ready to spit nails, anybody could see that.

  Sadie pulled her robe closed, held the fabric together at the neck. “Granddad, I’m gonna stay here with Mama. As long as he’s in custody, I’m okay, right?”

  “Yes, darling. They’ll call before anything else happens. But you come on over to my house in the morning, we’ll talk about what’s best to do.”

  “Okay, Granddad.”

  After she had been bundled back into the house, The Original turned to look at Jesse. I started walking back to my truck.

  “Did you hit that boy, Jesse?”

  “Yeah, I did. It would have been better if I could have hit him across the mouth with the shotgun. All I had was the flashlight.”

  I glanced back at them. “He deserved it,” I told the old man. “He had a smart mouth. If Jesse hadn’t popped him, I was thinking about dislocating his shoulder.”

  No one had anything else to say. When we got to my truck, Jesse slid into the middle, and The Original climbed in after him and shut the door. When we got back to the house, we all three made for the kitchen and took seats. Then Jesse got back up and put on a pot of coffee.

  The Original looked at me a long time. “Why did you let that idiot boy drag you into another piece of trouble? I know full well who is responsible for this and who was responsible up in Alpine.”

  Jesse turned from the coffeepot. “Granddad, that’s not fair.”

  The Original pointed a bony finger at him. “You just keep your peace.” He looked back at me. I don’t know if he was expecting some kind of answer, but I wasn’t sure I had anything to say.

  “You wouldn’t expect me to let him go by himself?”

  “No, I guess not.” He turned to Jesse. “Son, can’t you see that Lorenzo has got things to do? He came down here for something and you’re just sweeping him up in all your nonsense and distracting him from his work!”

  Jesse looked at me, his eyes troubled. He rubbed along the angle of his jaw. “Mary, I didn’t mean….”

  “You didn’t do anything. Jesse, you mind if I talk to your Granddad in private?” They both looked startled, and Jesse nodded, went out of the kitchen with another long look at me.

  “Mr. Clayton, if this isn’t a good time for me to be here, I can always find another….”

  He was shaking his head. “No, sir. You and I made an arrangement, and I want to stick to it. But I’m worried, son.” He looked at me a long time then, his eyes such a beautiful blue, like Jesse’s. “I don’t want you to feel like you have to get wound up in that boy’s business. Since he was a kid, it was like living with a bunch of honeybees in the house. Things always seemed to get stirred up around him.”

  I sat back, studied the worry in his face. This wasn’t about Alpine and it wasn’t about a little head-knocking in the middle of the night. We must have been louder than I thought, out on the couch in the studio. “I like Jesse a lot. He’s smart. I like listening to him talk about his art. Anything else going on between us, it’s not going to be a problem. Not for me. I hope not for you. We’re just learning how to be friends, getting to know each other.”

  He waved this away like he was brushing off one of those honeybees. “I’m not trying to get into your business. I was just worried. Jesse could talk an Eskimo into buying an icemaker.”

  Okay, I got it now. “He didn’t talk me into anything. I’m….” Something seemed to catch in my throat, and The Original got up, poured me a cup of coffee. He set it down on the table and looked away so I could say it out loud and not be embarrassed. “I’ve always been with men. You know, that way.”

  “Well, that’s your business, like I said.” He sighed, poured another cup of coffee and sat down at the table. “It must have been hard in the corps.”

  “No harder than anything else. Most of the time, we were too busy working to worry about it.” And he grinned at me then. “If you feel uncomfortable with this, then you just tell me, and I’ll find my own way. Things are getting more complicated than I expected, pretty damn fast too. I don’t intend to bring trouble into your house.”

  “I think we’re good.”

  “Sir…. That man, the one Jesse calls the dipshit. He suggested your granddaughter may have a problem with drugs. That’s why Jesse hit him. But if it’s true, she might need some help. From a doctor, or a clinic.”

  He drank his coffee real slow, eyes squinted like he was looking into the sun. “It’s crossed my mind. I’ll look into it.”

  “I think I’m going back to bed.” I walked down the hall, stopped in the door of my bedroom.

  Jesse poked his head out of the room next door. “Well? Are we in trouble?”

  “You might be.” I grinned at the look on his face when we heard The Original shouting down the hall.

  “Jesse! Get your butt in here, son.”

  I listened to them yelling at each other for a few minutes, then Jesse walked down the hall and stuck his head in my door. I had to laugh at the comical look of outrage on his face. “Can you believe it?” He was whispering. “He thinks I lured you away to the dark side! You better ’fess up, cupcake.”

  I rolled over. “I got cartoons to draw.”

  EARLY the next morning, the truck with Jesse’s painting supplies arrived. I enjoyed lying in bed, listening to him moan and complain, then the excitement when he started unpacking his gear. I suspected we wouldn’t be seeing him for the rest of the day.

  It was after ten when I finally got up, and I filled up the bottle he’d given me and went out for a run. Out in the sun, the heat was brutal, but the shade wasn’t bad. Every dog in town raised a head to watch me, then went back to sleeping in the shade of their porches. I got a shower back home, pulled on my jeans, and went into the kitchen. The Original was sitting at the table, drinking coffee. “Son, you feeling hungry? Want a sandwich?”

  “That sounds good. I’ll make them. What do you want?”

  “I think we’ve got some sliced ham, and we’ve got some Velveeta, if you want a grilled cheese.”

  I studied the inside of the fridge. “Too hot for grilled cheese. You’ve got some ripe tomatoes. That might go good with the ham.” I made a big pile of sandwiches, left a couple wrapped up in plastic for Jesse. “You want me to go get him so he can eat?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m too tired to deal with him today. Let him stay out in the studio and play with his paints.”

  “Have you seen his paintings?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. He’s a genius, Lorenzo. A world-class genius, a world-class pain in the ass, and it is just my luck he was born into this family.” He took a big bite of his sandwich.

  “Jesse had this idea, about making the characters in the cartoon more obvious, like caricatures. Thinks that will get the point across. Makes it more likely for people to identify with character types.”

  He thought about it, his eyes distant. “Well, people do recognize caricatures. They’re good for a laugh. It would be easy to fall into the habit of making all your characters one-dimensional, though.”

  “I was thinking about Doonesbury. You know that character BD? He wore his college football helmet—for what, thirty years? But he was always a fully realized character.”

  “It’s easier to do that with a comic strip instead of a stand-alone. With a strip, you’ve got narrative. That helps you develop character.”

  “We don’t have so many newspapers anymore. I always wanted to do a comic strip, so I could tell stories over time, but most of the markets these days are for stand-alones.”

  “I think you should go for what you want it to be, make it as good as you can, then worry about finding markets.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. I’m trying to think about too
many things at once.”

  We ate our sandwiches in peaceful silence, then The Original cut an apple up into pieces and we ate that for desert. “You know, I was thinking about the military cartoons out there. Doonesbury, he sent BD off to war. In Jarheads, those boys went off to war. Those were the only two, though. The rest just had a lot of stale jokes about peeling potatoes for KP and that tired, old officer-enlisted shtick.”

  I thought about it for a bit, eating my apple wedges. There was enough funny in a war to make a comic strip. Wry humor, but real. A strong sense of the ridiculous. More than enough absurd. I hated to step into politics, though. I could see how people would want me to come down on either one side of the line or the other.

  I sat up. Wait a minute. I could come down on the side of the people sent to fight the war. I suspected they had a perspective different from the strong right or the strong left. I could do a comic with a unit at war, and in forty years, they would probably still be at war. Somewhere. There was always a war.

  “Huh.” I stood up, put my paper plate in the trash can under the sink. “Can I look at some of your books? I took some out to the studio last night.”

  We sat together on the porch, and I looked at cartoons from his huge collection. Sometimes he would lean over and point something out to me, but mostly he just sat with me and let me think. The really good comics, they were subtle. They had something to say. They used exaggeration and caricature in a very quiet way. Most of the really good ones were daily cartoons, narratives, the old-fashioned newspaper comic strip.

  It was coming clear in my mind, not any specific content, but what I wanted to aim for. I felt like shadowy building blocks were rearranging themselves in my mind, and my cartoon was starting to take shape in my head. I was pleased. More than pleased. Happiness, excitement were bubbling up in my stomach. The old man and I, we fit together. What he had to teach me was just what I needed to learn, and his style, the quiet way he made a point and then sat back while I thought about it, was perfect for me. Navajo men and women, the elders, they taught this same way. They told a story, and the story had a point, but the person listening, they had to work out how that story mattered to them. It was a subtle way of teaching.

  Sadie came by, tripped up the porch steps, talking about bringing umami to the bakery. Maybe she’d have better luck with umami pastry, and she could sell them through the café. Apparently only members of her immediate family had been willing to try the Umami Dogs.

  She was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and shorts with sandals, and her legs were skinny as chicken legs. She was probably naturally high-strung, but the frantic jitteriness, the way she kept shivering and wiping her nose on her sleeve, made me wonder if the man we had rousted in the alley last night had been telling the truth, that Sadie had called him to bring her some dope. He could have been out in the alley, waiting for her. The Original was watching her as she talked, his back getting stiffer and stiffer. I stood up to give them some privacy. “I better go check on Jesse.”

  “Did he get his supplies? I thought I saw the truck this morning. I can’t wait to see what JC’s going to paint. Did you see his last show, Granddad? Oh, of course you did. I’m forgetting.”

  “Sadie, sit down. Let’s talk.” His voice was tired and sad, but she sat down on the top step. She must have known what was coming. She wrapped her arms around her knees, dropped her head.

  I walked down the steps. “Sadie, I’ll see you later.”

  “Yeah, sure, um… Granddad, what’s his name again? I can’t remember.”

  Jesse was moving around the studio like a whirling dervish. At first I thought he was dressed in a bunch of silk scarves, then I realized he had them draped over his arms and shoulders and was hanging them up from one of the rafters to flutter in the breeze. When he hung the last one up, he was wearing boxers and nothing else. His side of the studio was arranged with the huge blank canvases in a circle. There were eight of them, with some spares along the wall. He had been telling the truth—they must have been ten feet tall, probably five feet wide. They formed a sort of barrier, separating the sides of the studio, and the scarves made another line. “We could have just put some masking tape down on the floor,” I said, and stuck my head between the scarves.

  “Hey, where have you been?”

  “Having lunch with your granddad, and then we looked at cartoons on the porch. I made you a couple of ham and tomato.”

  “I’m hungry. I didn’t realize I’d missed lunch.”

  “Sadie’s talking to him on the porch.”

  He must have heard something in my voice. He went on alert, his back snapping stiff and straight. I thought he was going to look just like his grandfather when he was eighty. “Why? What’s wrong? What did she say?”

  “Jesse, you know she’s using. Maybe she can get some help if she admits it.”

  “No, she’s not.” He looked tired, cranky as a toddler, his face moving from worried to scared. “You don’t know her. You don’t know anything about it.”

  “No, of course I don’t. Oh, wait. Where did I grow up? On the Navajo reservation? What would I know about people using.”

  “Shit.” He pushed open the door.

  “You’re wearing boxer shorts.”

  “So what? It’s ninety-four degrees out here.” I ignored him, went to my couch, and lay down. Then I moved the other direction, gave him my back, so I could look at the quiet empty walls of my half of the studio. I could hear him cursing behind me, but he pulled on his jeans and T-shirt before he went back to the house.

  Chapter Six

  I TOOK up my watercolor pad and worked on the cartoon I’d done of the bar fight in Alpine. I used the markers and colored in Jesse’s pretty honey-colored hair, stormy blue eyes, even gave his red sneakers some sparklies on the shoestrings. Some green on the pool table, and the beer bottles got a bit of amber. I took his advice and sketched in a little Confederate flag on the back-jeans pocket of the cracker who’d tried to roust him. I felt a little chill, looking down into that guy’s dumb, brutal face. Jesse might have really been in danger. Those two guys, they could have hurt him, badly. They were looking to hurt someone. Now I wished I had done a little more damage to that dumb redneck’s face so he’d remember next time.

  I hung the cartoon up on Jesse’s side of the studio, then I peeled out of my jeans and T-shirt and lay back on my couch, enjoying the fans overhead. Jesse was right: it was over ninety in here, but he’d lowered the blinds so it was dark, and it was cooling off with the breeze.

  I woke up an hour later, and there was a little cooler next to my couch, full of ice and a couple of beers. I looked at them. Shiner Bock again. Pinned on my bulletin board was a sketch of me sleeping. He’d drawn my hair sticking up like a little kid with a cowlick, and it gave me a comical look, like I was five years old. He’d put a little devil dog tattoo on my cheek.

  I guess that meant we’d made up. I could hear him over on his side, but I decided to let him work. I visited the head, then sat down at my desk. Let’s sketch out a platoon, I thought. This is my platoon, and they needed to be good for forty years. No, fifty years. We’d need a medic. We’d need a team leader. That would have to be me. Trying to take care of a platoon was the funniest job in the Marine Corps. Jesse would have to come along, or JC3, maybe, now that DADT was history. We’d need a radioman and a gunner. Infantry platoon, no question about that. I made some preliminary sketches, toyed with names. I worked for a couple of hours, and it was dark by the time The Original came in and leaned over my desk. He studied my sketches, grinned at the sketch of me sleeping, then went over to Jesse’s side of the studio.

  “You boys have to strip down because of the heat? I can rig up one of those portable air conditioners if you want.”

  “I’m okay,” Jesse said. He stuck his head through the scarves. “You want air conditioning, Mary?”

  “I’m good.”

  The Original came back through the scarves, swatting at them irritably. He gesture
d toward Jesse’s side. “Good cartoon. I like how you colored his sneakers. Looks just like him. You boys ready for some supper?”

  We got dressed and met at the kitchen table. The Original was cooking steaks in an iron skillet, on top of the old gas range. “Here you go, boys.” He put a plate down in front of Jesse, must have been nearly sixteen ounces of T-bone. His eyes got big, and he reached for the ketchup. The T-bone that was put down in front of me was even bigger, its sizzling edges flopping over the side of the plate. I looked over at Jesse, gave him a wtf? look, but he just grinned at me and passed me the bottle of ketchup.

  The old man sat down. The steak in front of him was as big as mine. “Cartoonists and artists, they need lots of beef, they want to get anything done.” He pointed the tip of a steak knife in my direction. “Remember that. You won’t get dick done running on rabbit food.”

  We ate for awhile, the quiet of the kitchen filled with the mighty sound of molars on steak. I wondered how many other houses in America were sitting down to a dinner like this. I put some pepper on my steak. This might be the very best steak I had ever eaten. It tasted like The Original had fried it in bacon grease. Well, if there were many other households eating like this, I suspected they were probably in Marathon, Texas.

  “I think I’m going on a little field trip tomorrow,” Jesse said. “You want to come?” I looked up. This was directed at me, but I was too happy eating and couldn’t be bothered to talk. “I’m going to look at Bathtub Marys. You want to see that, don’t you, Mary?”

  Actually, I did. I had seen one of those roadside shrines on the way down from Alpine—a glass-fronted cabinet painted white, and inside the Virgin of Guadalupe, her arms wide to embrace the sinners. It looked like there were pieces of paper stuck inside too, and the votive candles were holding them down. “Yeah, I’ll come. What do people put inside?”