Luke Goebel - Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours

Days ago, the Apache strode up to Mother and said Boss. “Boss, this is the Kid?” Apache had said, and looked Kid in the face, “I hear your brother is dead.” Apache stared at Kid and then let his old eyes search to the red hill of the mining mountain, past the iron fence and gate of the pool, beyond ocotillo and mesquite and chaparral saguaro and totem. Past kept grounds to the vast onward expanse.

“Then I'll teach you to race,” Apache said after looking more into the Kid's face which didn't move. Mother looked unhappy or unwell. In all the splendor of sun and oddness of saguaro dancing or arms up or multiverticed and coy, the desert alive in winter, the stripped gneiss and red stone and mica in the glare of mindless heat, and every hidden thing the Apache had names for including sidewinder and black rattler and banded Gila.

“Tomorrow after breakfast. Come see.” The Apache listened at the Kid's eyes, Kid trying to look back unflinching, un-young, as if worthy of certain particulars — the particulars of which he hadn't had the first thing about knowing.

Paloverde, stucco, ponderosa vegas, lacquered mesquite in herringbone patterned ceilings, this guest-pleasure-ranch Mother owned.

Mother coughed and made a sound low in her pale white underbelly of throat. Neither of the men seemed to notice her. She cleared it away. “Hey there, Cowboy. You better ask my permission. Before wasting your days playing kid stuff with my kid. You work here,” she turned up one side of her thin mouth, having bought the ranch and settled into ownership. Being a woman running a dude ranch.

To earn his name Kid had only to steal one race and win it. If he was to count — all he wanted was this — he'd have to earn. All he had to earning his name — to making a name for himself through the gut-flinching races — was the borrowed animal to speak to with his kick. To learn fast to work it around and kick it fast to count. He had been called and named by the great Apache who looked hardly Apache at all, more white and white haired and chord cut in the cheeks, beguiling with strong features of leather so perhaps a bit Apache, his squinting blue eyes, if Kid squinted out in the desert, told to see Apache, told to see Corporal, yes, he saw Apache, plenty of Apache, Hell yes, though he was likely no Corporal to any nation. Yet to say it, that name, to call the man Corporal, did excite certain bodily functions in the Kid, the heart, the eyes, the wetness or dryness of mouth, the desire, fear, the awe and stance, the need for guts-getting.

Made him want to earn his name, have-to-earn-his-goddamn-name-in-the-racing-flats, to see the leathery man with hand on saddle beside him, or not saddled because he was barebacking the buck spine of his Indian pony he rode.

He'd been called. Be this the real desert West or a fake, be him Apache or not full Indian, be him a Corporal or not a real Corporal. Now here were two men, Corporal and Kid, mounted in the furze gold and red of desert, in the chaparral and buckskin, in the sage and death of heat-scented airs in the hot expanse that made him feel unhooked to anything but his need to be called, to change himself, in the desert and close to Mexico, saguaro wide and strange and the fox in their dens and the rattlers asleep, perhaps, near Christmas, but looked for in any chance to pick one up — to see if he would try and pick one up behind the mouth in the months-away-from-flowering hills and be bit if he was to be bit which was the ultimate test and the other truer test, the truest test, was racing full-goddamn-not-flinching speed and winning — beating that tan Apache.

The man raised his half fist into the air and brought it down and they kicked. Kid kicked and kicked again, but the Apache was a black bullet on that black Cayuse with its skewbald stained white over its rear flank — and he raced Cayuse like a dog, bending its spine, its legs all akick at once. Three horses fast ahead and gaining ground. Kid kicked and jerked within, by the time the Corporal had five lengths ahead or ten — he stopped and hollered, “You lose, Cocksucker. You faking shit,” and lit a cigarette and opened a warm Schaefer Light for breakfast. On his horse, smoking and drinking in the sun's morning blinding glare.

“I have foregathered you here for the duty of proving yourself. In proving you care more for yourself than for your very soul,” the Apache began, smoke rising. “Your soul, you know, that thing which cannot be proved existent, and that cannot, in truth, be injured. I have brought you here to save you, for you to save yourself, from all that you come from, from your guilt, from shame, fershtay? From moral law, from your very home, which was never your home, except by brother, now deceased. Ignis Aurum Probat, gold? Quit fucking losing, Kid.”

Upon the flats Kid rode the Apache's other horse. Was big and muscled, fourteen hands at least — twenty-eight of the hand — and they stood, Kid post-defeat, in the desert morning sun, high above the hoof-marked flats. Kid needing to sing from his guts with guts he didn't have and fix land into his dominion — to give a look in the eyes that meant once and always never to lose again, above high ground, ground fast and stomach-flinch inducing in speed across distance. A quail pack ran through. He had lost his only and big brother, was lost himself, and if he lost now he would be forever. There was Mother, too, the only thing he hadn't lost. And Mother was sick, was exactly what he did not want to face, better to prove himself by a man impossible to beat than in her impossible world, where everyone respected her prize which was her money and her act was that of someone who knows they have nothing to fear by nature of their great cash and the great amount of fear they already live with inside themselves. The world was impossible. Death made it. To be with any one and really be with them, before they died, was impossible, and especially not possible was Mother, who showed too much, who owned all, who was sick in her sunchair with swimwear cups too big around her pushed up sunken breasts, showing too much in the sun, holding all. Nearly.

They were mounted. Here was the desert dream. A flat strip to race and test his guts against the man who had them. Apache was seated with his half hand gripping the stiff mane of the small horse, the Cayuse Indian pony he raced, maybe just to prove how weak the Kid was not to win. Apache a smaller man, an old man with bad bones, with pain, with missing bones — with a bit of bone sticking up through the top of his half thumb, sealed in dull clear skin — Corporal was Corporal for having picked up rattlesnakes with the barehand as a boy younger than Kid, and having been struck and bit. Having proved. Having done. Having accomplished what so far Kid had not and must, and if Kid failed he could go back to Mother. Go to where he lunched with her at the pool, and Kid could sulk in faker luxury. Be a shit of her ranch, his brother lost, himself just her boy.

For the rest of his life he could go back to floating and farting around with fakers back at the sun-hot lodge and live there. Because if he could not show his heart and guts and hold his meanness, once — he'd heard every word the Apache Corporal had ever said to him — who was watching him now with those deadblack shaded eyes out of a leather face — then he was a fake Kid at play in a fake dream of a dying West. And he counted for less than desert horseshit pie. If Mother sent him away to school or not. If he got his dick wet ever or not. If he had faith. If he was a sweetheart. If he was anything or not.

“Meanness counts,” Apache said.

“Maybe give up, Kid. Go back to the swim pool.” He shot Kid a look.

“Maybe quit!”

They had been at this for days.

The air was humid and the sky was changing.