We cut a couple of cows out from the main group and raced along beside them. We gradually singled one out, a long lean gray cow with sharp tapering horns. I had to make a loop wide enough to settle over her head. I stood in the stirrups with the running end of the rope in my teeth and whirled the loop over my head and leaned forward and dropped it over her horns. I snubbed it tight on the saddle horn and Thunderbolt put on the brakes. When the cow hit the end of the rope, she went tail over head and hit the ground flat on her back, all the wind knocked out of her. Uncle Lou roped a hind foot and we got off the horses while they stood with their backs arched and holding her tight, and we wrapped two of her feet together with a pigging string. We took the ropes off her horns and the hind foot, and left her on the ground, bawling, with her eyes rolled up white in her head with anger. Then we coiled our ropes and took off after another one.
My uncle had been with a boy from Montana in the war. He had become close friends with this boy and after the war was over the boy invited him to come and stay with him and his family for a while. My uncle wasn't married, and didn't have anything at home to hold him or draw him back with any immediacy, so he went. The boy's family had a ranch high in the mountains, and they had been punching cows for four generations. My uncle didn't know which end of a horse was which, but they taught him. They taught him how to rope and brand and bulldog and bullride and even cook. They
taught him how to hunt elk and how to rig packsaddles. They took him in like another son, fed him and washed his clothes. My uncle in turn had showed me some of these things. The thing unsaid that was hurting him the most was knowing that now he might not get to do it for my kids.
We didn't talk while we worked. We flushed the cows from the woods like coveys of quail, and then he pointed to a brutish-looking cow that was trotting away rapidly through some sage grass, watching us over her shoulder. She had some truly wicked horns. I wouldn't have gone after her. Uncle Lou rode straight for her. I let Thunderbolt get too close. He put his shoulder against her rump, and she whirled and opened a five-inch cut in his shoulder with her horn. Uncle Lou snatched a 30.30 Marlin from a scabbard on his saddle and shot the cow dead between the eyes and hollered that he'd dress the motherfucker later. Blood poured down Thunderbolt's leg. The lips of the wound were flapping, open and loose. I could see the muscle beneath it bunching and working. These were the things I had done to my uncle with the circumstances of my own life, my divorce, my writing. I had cost him money and pain in a way that was no fault of his whatsoever. We kept riding. Thunderbolt bore it silently. We roped another cow. I kept working somehow. The day was long and I knew that other days would be long, and I knew that men sometimes had to be close to other men to help them through the hard times. Because that's what these times were.
We stood outside in the dust of the New Albany stockyard. The smell of shit was overpowering. Nobody was being murdered yet, they were just now getting sold. It made me a little sick, but how else could I enjoy my juicy T-bones if not some cattle took the big one in the brain? I tried not to think about them being hoisted, throats cut, skinned, sawed up. Ground up. Once in a while a little piece of rebellious bone from a long-dead cow would rise up in my mouth from the hamburger meat at Kroger's and threaten to chip a tooth.
Revenge of the Cows.
Let's don't make a movie out of it.
Lots of guys around there had cowboy boots on. Some had barrel chests and bellies and checkered shirts. I felt somehow inferior and unmanly in the midst of them, even though plenty of shit was smeared on my own boots. I leaned, if not physically, at least spiritually in the direction of my uncle, who was at peace there, at one with his own kind. Which I certainly didn't have anything against.
We had our cow tickets and we perched up on the corral above the auction ring.
Obba deebe mobba beebe forty mouth a poe,
Six potater sebm potater fo potater moe,
I'm a tater you a tater kick him out the doe.
Hummmbabe who gonna gimme ten gimme ten ten
    gimme Rin Tin Tin;
Humbabe well you wanna watch this cow on the flo,
Hooma jimmy homma fimmy moe.
It went on like that for a while. I admired the auctioneers. They wore straw hats and were good old boys. They had big, round voices. I hated it that I had a scratchy, raspy voice, the kind of voice that made me sick when I taped it along with “Top Forty Hits” and listened to it late at night, singing songs like “Puff the Magic Dragon” and “Blowin in the Wind.” I had a small cheap guitar I tried to play when I couldn't write, with twangy strings, but I only knew four chords, G, C, D, and G7. I had once made the mistake of making a tape of myself playing and singing George Jones's “Yabba Dabba Do, The King Is Gone, And So Are You,” and leaving it lying around. Marilyn had played part of it, much to the amusement of some guests at a party at our house one night, while I was in the kitchen mixing drinks and boiling shrimp, and it hadn't endeared her to me to walk in and realize what was going on, people sniggering, and so on.
First thing they did was run two shoat pigs out into the ring. First thing one of the pigs did was leap through the pipe bars and shit in a man's lap. The man was trying to get up out of his chair, and he was holding the pig while it was shitting on him. Later on the man bought the pig, I was sure just so he could kill it. But the pig wouldn't understand. I've heard that pigs are very smart. Pigs learn how to hunt truffles. A pig in Arkansas was trained to point birds once. I believe pigs contributed to Ulysses' downfall. I've eaten a lot of pork chops myself. Imagine the pigs that have to die for us. These pigs go valiantly not even to their graves; they don't even have any graves, when you think about it. You ever seen a pig graveyard? What would you put on his tombstone?
Here lies no pig;
Don't dig.
Ain't no bones,
Just leave em alone.
Some horses ran through, got sold pretty fast. I had eyes for a Mexican-looking señorita who was selling sandwiches. I ate two pork barbecues and then realized that the pigs had probably come through the ring a few weeks before, pigs without a future, pigs without a life insurance plan. Pigs who'd never been set down around the supper table and oinked to. Pigs who just didn't know how good they'd had it, plenty of mud and corn to wallow among, happy days over with now.
She seemed to be a señorita, but I didn't know for sure. I was still thinking about Betti Del Oreo. I decided I would write her a real nice letter.
Dear Miss DeLoreo,
Thanks for taking so much time to tell me why the story was rejected. Most editors wouldn't do that. It's pretty lonely out here, you know, writing all these things and not getting anybody to pay any attention to them. I appreciate you taking the time, though. I'm gonna try to write something better for you. Something that'll make you stand up and put the gloves on with them.
Best wishes,
Leon Barlow
I was nervous as hell when I mailed the letter. I don't know why. I didn't even know her. And maybe she was seventy years old, retired from Florida or something, with skinny knees. But why couldn't she be some
goddess,
kneeling in the streets of New York for the right prophet to come along? With the rain in her face, black hair beautiful, screaming for me?
I licked it shut and sent it. I'd enclosed a story, also.
I was waiting for the check from my uncle for the two cows he'd given me that we'd subsequently sold. The other cow, the one he'd shot for goring Thunderbolt, was probably down in the pasture still, stinking, covered with flies, coyotes eating on it, but I didn't want to go check. There were some things I didn't want to be around and rotting putrid meat was one of them.
I smoked some marijuana and drank a lot of beer one day and then wrote this:
HONED
Honed's daddy had a good reason for changing his name early. But he was almost too late with the thought. He had Honed up in his arms, wrapped in a nice soft blanket Honed's mother had spent about eight and a half months knitting, with little flowers and soft bunny rabbits hopping around on it in fields of green cloverâreal nice stuff for a kid they'd just gotten to knowâjust pure damn love for the little guyâand he'd been
kissing around on Honed's head and telling his koochie-poo that MomMom was right behind them in a wheelchair and so
he
was going to warm his bottles and stuff for him for a while, since MomMom had had her puss stretched inside out. But Honed didn't have any idea what was happening. They'd had to calm him down anyway. He was upset big time. He'd been rudely expulsed from the warm dark saltwater sea of his mother's belly, where he'd begun to think he'd always be, into the hard red hands of a grinning bald-headed guy with big white teeth (Like fangs! Shit! Honed thought) who hit him on the ass four or five times. And then a whole bunch of people he didn't even know had been dressing him and undressing him and they even messed with his goober for a while one dayâthere was still something going on down there but he was scared to look (I've got to figure out what the hell's going on, he thought)âso he was just mainly trying to sleep and hide from it all he could. He knew that he was helpless and at their mercy. He couldn't walk, couldn't talk, couldn't do anything but shit and cry. And they were all a lot bigger than he was.
Honed's daddy named him Ned originally. And it occurred to him just as he was going down the hall with Honed in his arms, getting ready to take him home, that people would be saying Hi to Ned a lot in his life (which he hoped would run about a hundred wonderful years) and where they were going home to, they wouldn't necessarily say Hi. They might say Hey. But a bunch of them would probably say Ho. Ho Ned. Whassup, main? And then when Ned came up in his world and put his legs into his britches like men do, he'd be out in
it seeing people. If they said Hi they'd say Hined and if they said Ho they'd say Honed. (He was a little whacky, Honed's daddy. But he didn't live long after Honed was born anyway. And he was a good guy. He could have done a lot for Honed. He was a millionaire playboy/professor with two published novels, and the MacArthur Foundation was getting ready to give him about $60,000 a year for five years when he got killed. It actually happened in a freight elevator. It was very ironical. It was at the very top of the Empire State Building, when it was still the tallest. Honed's daddy was the kind of brilliant person who is severely dumb in other ways. He mistook the freight elevator for the one people were supposed to ride. He rode it all right. He punched floor seven, and what they thought happened was all the relays that controlled the up cables blew, and the damn thing just took off, straight up, flying. Honed's daddy peed all over himself. It was a horrible death. And he knew he was going to die. That was the thing. He did have enough sense to know that it was going up way too fast, the floors just flashing by on the lights. But he was calm even in the face of that. He allowed himself three-quarters of a second of all-out, mindless mute screaming-ass terror, and then dropped his briefcase and started punching elevator buttons. Nothing happened. A bunch of mechanical things that the elevator people
should have been maintaining a little more closely
gave way at the same time. Oh, they had a big lawsuit, and Honed's mother got richer than she already was, but it didn't bring Honed's daddy back. The elevator car hit the top of its channel with so much force that it threw Honed's daddy up against the ceiling of the car and broke open a big place in his head. One cable snapped on impact,
and the motor downstairs started freewheeling without belts because they had snapped, too, and the other cable was strong enough almost to hold the car all those hundreds and hundreds of feet above the floor of New York City. But then it snapped, too. Honed's daddy was on the floor, stretched out, his eyes closed, his fingers trying to dig. The downward rush was so great that Honed's daddy's body was actually floating about an inch above the floor of the car a millisecond before it hit the basement.) What Honed's daddy thought, standing just short of the doors of the hospital with Honed in his arms, was that he would save all those people the trouble of saying Ho, comma, Ned, and call him Honed. And in that way be kind of like a tribute to Honed for someone to say his name. That kind of thinking may be crazy, but that's the kind of thinking Honed's daddy did.
I never finished that one, either.
The check from my uncle came in the mail. It was $1,143.68, and it was made out to me. I booked. Salad tomatoes, some movies, couple of cassettes, shrimp, some oysters, couple of sirloins, beer, whiskey, some blue jeans, a belt, two shirts, some underwear, some Collins mix, garbage bags, a broom, Spic 'n' Span, a cigarette lighter,
The Sound and the Fury, Hot Water Music, Jujitsu for Christ, Child of God, The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor, The Old Man and the Sea,
some barbecue bread, socks, a
TV Guide,
fourteen typewriter ribbons, some of those little chocolate-covered cherries,
some kids' clothes, a little blue squeeze giraffe that squeaked when you squeezed it, a little baseball and bat and glove, some rubbers, some toothpaste, some English Leather, some fingernail clippers, some shampoo, Slim Jims, barbecued pigskins, some Jimmy Dean smoked sausage, catfish, some seafood sauce, two reams of paper, some correction film, four dozen manila envelopes, some ink pens, a new
Writer's Market,
a new band for my wristwatch, some rolling papers, a fanbelt, some brake shoes, a sending unit for my oil pressure gauge, G and A guitar strings, and some charcoal.
It was kind of like Christmas.
I hauled all that home, called my ex-wife and told her I had some stuff for the kids she could pick up at my mother's, told her I was fixing to write her lawyer a check for two months' alimony, hung up, sat down, wrote the check, addressed an envelope, considered writing him a letter, didn't, licked it shut, put a stamp on it that I steamed off one of my returned envelopes that the postal employees had let edge through the cancelling machine, and walked down the driveway whistling and put it in the mailbox.