by Gerald Duff
“Cowboy up,” the first cry came from somewhere deep in the crowd, from back beyond the rows of wooden pews, all the way from the folding plastic chairs for overflow, and other worshippers chimed in as quick as a top hand slapping a tie-down rope around a yearling’s back-legs on a branding takedown.
“Cowboy up,” the chant lifted and strengthened, and Jimbo Reynolds let it go on until it seemed that every cowpoke and lady and child in the building had to be giving voice to achieve the level of vocal thunder being generated in the steel-enclosed space. “Cowboy up, cowboy up, cowboy up.”
Now, Jimbo said to himself, the internal clock of exquisite timing he possessed giving him the sign, now. Cut if off when it’s at its peak, don’t ever let it start to dwindle and fade on its own. Do that, and they’ll be in danger of realizing that the commotion is self-ignited and there ain’t a damn thing but them doing it by themselves. Thank you, Lord, Jimbo Reynolds said to himself, as he raised his Stetson high as though to get the attention of a herd of white-faced steers barreling toward him. Thank You for giving me that clock. I never knew to ask You for it, but You knew what I’d be needing to further my career path. You had the foresight. I give You the glory.
“Amen,” Jimbo boomed into the Sanyo throat-mike, the sound from the banks of speakers as true as a dinner bell’s ring at day’s end. “Amen and amen.”
In the rear of the building, the great steel-sided cathedral of the Sun-Up Ministry of the Big Corral, Coy Bridges and Bob Ferry looked at each other from where they sat side by side on two pale green molded plastic chairs in among the stragglers who’d arrived too late to make it into the rows of salvaged wooden church pews.
Jimbo Reynolds’s announcement of “amen” had cut off the chants from the crowd of “cowboy up” as though a spigot with a new washer had suddenly been closed down iron-tight by a strong man, but people were still making noise, talking among themselves, beaming at each other as they jostled in their seats, rubbed shoulders, slapped each other on the back, nodded heads vigorously as though to seek agreement as to what they had witnessed and were now full-fledged part of, wiping their foreheads with the backs of their hands like a hard task had just been successfully completed, and showing all the signs of being members of a worshipful congregation at a Sunday morning service in the Mid-South. The Lord was moving, and they felt it.
“Who was he talking to?” Coy Bridges said to Bob Ferry, “that tall jaybird up there on the loading platform?”
“God,” Bob said. “He was talking to God, fool.”
“He never said God’s name,” Coy said, leaning closer so Bob could hear him over the buzz of voices and the scrape of boots on concrete and the sobs of two kids right in front of him. “I never heard him anyway say it.”
“Yes, you did,” Bob Ferry said. “That just shows how far you’ve drifted away from the Lord, Coy. By now you wouldn’t know God if He walked up to you on the street and asked for a cigarette.”
“Don’t say shit like that while church’s going on, Bob.”
“This is not a church, Coy,” Bob Ferry said. “It’s a flooring company warehouse recently vacated.”
“You said Reynolds was talking to God. And look at these folks all around us in here. Tell me these crazy fuckers don’t think they’re in church.”
“They don’t think period,” Bob Ferry said. “And besides, all they are is a reverse truth-barometer.”
“Truth-barometer?” Coy Bridges said, his voice lower now as the jubilation of the worshippers of the Big Corral began to subside. “What you talking about?”
Coy was beginning to feel like he’d like to backhand Bob Ferry on the side of the head, see how he’d like to have his teeth rattled around a little, but he couldn’t do that where they were, of course, and the thought was not a new one anyhow. Ever since he’d met Bob Ferry in Huntsville, Alabama, where Tonto Batiste had arranged for all four of them to get together on this deal, Coy had often had the urge to come up strong beside Ferry’s head after some smart-ass statement he’d made.
But the sawed-off little dip had a way of saying things you knew were against you somehow, they were meant to put you down and make you look dumb as a fence post, yet the way he put them you couldn’t really tell what he was saying exactly. Coy knew at those times that if he acted the way he knew he was being tempted to and ought to that the other ones would never listen to what he was saying and they sure wouldn’t back him up.
There’d come a time, though, and it would be the right time, and when it got here, Coy promised himself, he wouldn’t just be swinging flatfooted. He’d get up on his toes and put everything he had into it. He’d rock Bob Ferry’s world.
“You said,” Coy said, this time almost in a whisper since Jimbo Reynolds, up on the loading platform in his cowboy clothes and boots and waving that big white hat in his hand, was now talking again and the crowd had knocked off the talking to listen, “you said he was talking to God, but I never heard God’s name mentioned a time. What’s that mean, huh? That’s what I’m wanting to know.”
“God hasn’t got a name, Coy,” Bob Ferry whispered back. “He’ll answer to anything.”
“Bullshit,” Coy said. “God’s name is God. Every asshole in Memphis knows that.’
“Jesus Christ,” Bob said and put his hand up to his mouth as though he was about to laugh out loud and had to choke it off there in the church so as not to be rude.
“That’s God’s son, that ain’t God who you just said,” Coy Bridges said, feeling the prickling sensation build in his shoulders and hands and the buzz start up in his ears No, he told himself, no, not now. Later, later on I’ll bust Bob Ferry so hard he’s be squealing God’s name out loud over and over again, just begging Him to notice.
At the end of his sermon or talk or whatever it was, Jimbo Reynolds, the one everybody kept hollering “Range Foreman” at, sat back down on his bale of hay and sang along with the cowboy band a tune Coy Bridges had never heard. It had lots of words and verses, and it mentioned the wind and rain and cattle and sunshine and sage brush and lost calves and tumbleweeds and cowboys by themselves riding horses in cold and stormy weather. It had the name of God in it, too, Coy noted, in lots of places.
Down both sides and in the middle and across the back of the steel building and the far side of the rows in front, a team of men in full western regalia proceeded from one member of the crowd to the next, not skipping a one, including each child in its own seat or on somebody’s lap. The colors of the team’s shirts and hats and bandannas and boots and the cut of the chaps most of them wore varied greatly, but one item each cowpoke carried was identical to all others. It was a silver galvanized bucket attached to a metal handle fully four feet long, and as the cowboy working the row of seats where Coy Bridges and Bob Ferry sat came steadily closer the words written on the sides of the container he moved from one worshipper to the next could be easily read. “God’s Bucket” was printed in deliberately scrawled letters designed to look homemade around the top edge and below that was another statement. “He Paid YOUR Entry Fee.”
Bob Ferry had a bill waiting when the bucket reached him in its journey, a fifty, Coy noted, and that made him want to bust Bob up alongside his head again. Coy had only a couple of quarters and some dimes picked out of his pocket to drop in, and they made a loud and terrible rattling sound against the side of the bucket, disappointing Coy’s hope that the wad of bills already in the container would soften the sound of his change. Coy couldn’t stop himself from showing something in his face, because the cowboy holding the bucket spoke to him, and he did so way yonder too loud for Coy’s taste.
“Just give what you can, hoss, this time, and make it up the next. The Boss ain’t worried about counting up the amount of each cowboy’s contribution. He ain’t in it for the money. He’s looking for a giving heart.”
“Amen,” Bob Ferry said, booming out the word loud enough that others in the vicinity joined in “That’s right, Pecos, amen and amen,” some woman next
to Coy said.
The cowpoke with the bucket moved on, and Coy twisted his head from one side to the other, trying to get his neck to pop, but it wouldn’t. “Who’s Pecos?” he said.
“The man with the bucket,” Bob Ferry said. “Didn’t you see his name tag? That one over there’s Shorty, and Wichita just passed by. There he goes.”
“Not a one of them’s got a real name,” Coy Bridges said. “They made every one of them up.”
“What’s in their buckets is real, though,” Bob Ferry said, “and they get filled up and poured out every time the Big Corral opens the barn doors.”
“And he keeps it in his house?” Coy said. “For a fact?”
“The Range Foreman don’t like banks,” Bob said. “That’s what his assistant’s been telling us. Banks ain’t the cowboy way.”
“Praise Jesus,” Coy said. “Praise Him.”
“Amen and amen,” Bob said, and that made Coy feel for the first time this morning they were riding the same trail.
SEVEN
Randall Eugene McNeill
He knew it was happening again, and he knew he couldn't stop it. He would see the whole thing as though it were starting new. He would watch himself do what he'd done, and he'd hear the same voices telling him what they'd told him before.
It was old and over and done, but it would be new, and it would happen again. It begins like it had never been, and he can't stop himself from seeing it come upon him without warning and without surprise.
Randall Eugene McNeill had felt that day the braided wire pulling him slowly but steadily toward the mouth of the cave, struggle against it however much he did or could do. The wire was fastened somehow to his feet, around both ankles, with enough slack to allow him to move his feet apart eight or ten inches, but no more than that.
Although he couldn’t see the wire in the dark, Randall Eugene McNeill knew its colors, three strands to the braid – one red, one black, one green – and he knew that if he were pulled feet first through the opening of the cave into the passage into the earth, dark and musty and cold behind it, that he’d never see light or feel fresh air moving across his face again.
A whine was forced through his lips without Randall Eugene willing it, and that frightened him more than anything else about what was happening, more than the wire braided red, black, and green, more than the hole of the cave mouth, framed by boards like those set around a window, more than the dank, dark passage leading somewhere beneath the ground, more than the fact that he couldn’t move and his arms lay dead beside him no matter how much he told them to push his hands down toward his feet. Take it off, unwind it, Randall Eugene begged his arms and hands, get it away from my feet. Don’t let it pull me, don’t let it drag me underneath the ground.
Calling on all he could of his waning strength, forcing his lips apart as far as he could manage, Randall Eugene tried to cry out, but the sound he was able to make was weaker than the whine that had been pried from him, and he felt a sickening lurch as the braid of wire pulled him further toward the window into the cave, the dark mouth into the earth, the teeth of boards framing it.
“Why can’t you get up, sleepy-head?” his mother was saying. “I’m about to pull your little toe off, Randall Eugene, and you still won’t stop trying to sleep.”
“Mama,” Randall Eugene McNeill said, “it’s you, it’s just only you.”
“Who’d you think it was, baby? One of your girlfriends?”
“No, I ain’t got no girlfriends,” Randall Eugene said, pushing his hand toward the foot of the bed where his mother stood. She was dressed for work and ready to leave the house, a raincoat covering all of her uniform and her purse hanging from a strap on her shoulder. Her hair was combed out straight, and her make-up was on.
“Don’t talk like that, son,” she said. “You know better than that.”
“Well, I ain’t got no girlfriend. I’m just telling the truth.”
“Don’t say ain’t no. Who’re you trying to fool? You weren’t raised to speak that way, and you do know better. Anybody hearing you who didn’t know any different would never believe you’re in that gifted and talented program.”
“All right, I’ll do it,” Randall Eugene said. “I’ll get up.”
“You’ve got a lot to do today, remember, Sugar. You have the counselor to see this afternoon, and don’t you forget to tell her what I said about your meds.”
Randall Eugene began to speak, but didn’t, stopped by the way the wall of his room across from his bed looked different somehow. Had his mother changed it in some way, put different paper on it, painted a design where there was only a pale blank space before? There was a pattern evident now, regular small squares in alternating colors, black and red, changing as he watched them to separate shades of gray.
“Why did you do that?” Randall Eugene said, pointing toward the wall by lifting his head as though to indicate with his chin what he wanted her to see.
“Do what? What’re you talking about? That picture over there? The one of LaFrance? Is that what you mean?”
“No, nothing,” Randall Eugene said, watching the pattern on the wall shift from squares of gray back toward white, fading quickly into blankness again as though to vanish before his mother would be able to see what was happening before her in her own house. Another thing that he knew only he could detect, a state of change which always eluded everybody but him. She couldn’t see it. She wouldn’t see it, and if she did, she’d be afraid to admit it. “I guess it’s just the way the light’s doing.”
“As little light as you let get in this room, I don’t know how you see to find your way around. When you were little, you couldn’t let enough light get through your windows to satisfy you. Now you act like an old bear trying to hibernate.”
Randall Eugene picked up the shirt his mother had put across the foot of his bed while he was asleep and looked at her.
“You’re allowed to talk, young man,” she said. “The polite thing would be to say mama I need to get dressed now. And if you did that, I’d leave the room. But I know if I do, you’ll just crawl back under the covers and go to sleep.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” Randall Eugene said. “I used to would’ve done that, but not no more.”
“You couldn’t sleep again last night, honey?”
“I could sleep all right, but I didn’t want to. What I’d like to be able to do is never go back to sleep again. That’s what’d satisfy me.”
“If you keep going to that counselor lady and taking your meds, you’ll grow out of this, Randall Eugene. I know you would. It’s just a stage of development.”
“Don’t call it meds. I hate it when you call them that. And don’t say development.”
“You hate it when I say anything these days. Meds is what it is. I know what I’m talking about. Now get up and get dressed and do it quick now. Eat your breakfast and be ready in fifteen minutes. I’ve got to be in the surgical unit in less than an hour. Move it, Randall.”
I know why the window, Randall Eugene told himself as he watched his mother leave the room, I know that part all right, up and down and sideways and backwards. But why the rest of it? A cave, a cave? A frame around the hole? Wires on my feet? The wall moving?
I have got to cool down, he lectured himself as he dressed and walked by the plate on the table in the kitchen where she’d left something for his breakfast. He picked it up, not looking at whatever was there, and succeeding in scraping it into the garbage pail under the sink without having to see what it was. He couldn’t avoid hearing the sound it made, though, as it hit something flat in the garbage container, a piece of cardboard maybe. It splatted, it sounded heavy and wet, and Randall Eugene’s stomach dipped and rose as though it was headed all the way to his throat.
I have got to cool down. I’ve got to get something else into my head, something big enough that nothing can get around it, nothing can make me think, not a sound, not a sight, not a smell.
***
They said
he wouldn’t do it. Antwan mainly, standing there laughing, his teeth so white when he threw back his head to show how funny he thought it was.
“Dog,” he said, “you ain’t going to do shit. You too much of a white man to do nothing but talk.”
“Naw, naw, wait a minute,” Damon said. “Do Run Run be going to show us something. Show us some shit, ain’t you, Do Run Run?”
“You got that right,” Randall Eugene said, all of them standing there on the steps going up to the big doors in front, the ones under the stone carved with the Gothic letters spelling out Central High of Memphis. “You just watch my natural ass.”
“Oh yeah, oh yeah,” Damon said, “Do Run Run going to show us something, all right. He going to show us his vocabulary.”
Then they all laughed and fell about the steps, spinning and staggering like they were about to fall, hands thrown up in the air, pushing, pushing, pushing. Three white girls coming up the steps toward them changed the way they were walking to take a path further away, and Randall Eugene saw that Amy Amonette was one of them. She looked right at him, and he looked off as though he didn’t see her, but he knew she could tell he did. He turned his back to her, but he could feel her eyes sliding off of him, and he heard her say something to one of the other ones, Elizabeth Hubbard, maybe.
“Fuck that monkey shit,” Randall Eugene McNeill said to Damon. “Dog, you don’t know what’s up with me.” The street in front of the steps was doing it again, slow this time, but Randall Eugene knew if he let it know he saw it, the street would do it more and more quickly, too fast for him to keep up and hold it contained in his eyes and then the sound would start up. He couldn’t afford the sound this morning, not today. Don’t look at it, move your eyes away and face the building, but don’t hurry so it’ll be able to know you see. Look at the words cut into the stone above the door. Let the stone keep your eyes. It’s not moving.
