Luke Goebel - Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours

“Look, I met a new friend today.” Mother held up her arms a bit, showing the strange silk shirt with big sleeves she wore after the rain. Peach. She said friend like maybe she was aware of the falseness of calling any girl a friend, especially one who would associate with her kid. All of this, seemed to Kid, was in how she said it. “Says you two already know one another! How about lunch.” Mother grimaced. Surely Mother was joking? She meant to smile? Was Kid so bad as to make a mother set on smiling grimace? When she means to only smile at her kid? Nothing says Kid. Fart pie, he wants to say. Fuck soup. “Okie Doke,” he finally says. “Let me put riding clothes back on.”

He looked at Mother, who smiled only with the muscles in her mouth and jaw.

He looked at the redhaired girl from the night, in running shorts, smiling in sun.

How did Mother get her involved with Mother? “Think the rain is done?” he said to the girl, fake smiling. “Oh Brother.” He went to his room. In the room the air was going nuts. Back outside, she had the poor girl's ear. They were off to eat soup. Mother had won. Mother was smiling and talking quietly to the girl.

They ate. They sat. The Kid was Kid. Sun was out. He stared off to the red mountain where the Apache lived and with the huge sky above. Needless to say where he must be in the A/C. Out to where he was unsuspecting, surely, blowing out his spunk? No idea that things would be different this one time, after lunch, this day. Mother and the girl talked, the girl glancing at him, picking at this and that, chewing. Mother smiled and showed the world she still had it, was still a beauty, was capable of facing the world and playing her part. Even after the family funeral. Even… after all the years in the late Earth and her life mostly used up in children — still searching to show herself. To prove she had it — and to prove she had she had this ranch. One place where the rich came to ride and soak and live it up in the gold and red of desert. Crystal on the table. Good silver. Bamboo cloths. Mexicans wearing string bowties holding silver pitchers of hibiscus tea floating great cubes of ice on top and all this sun. Lately, she'd been putting up signs all around on posts.

Fake pressed wood-board and lacquered signs that read: Do Not Block Roadway. No Parking . Worse still: NO PORKING with a wild boar, which weren't even in this part of the desert. SNAKE CROSSING , with a picture of one snake mounted by another, drawn with big faking rattles, the two approached like dogs, a crudely drawn snake penis launched out of the “male” snake's underbelly, grins on their snake faces. It was pathetic! The sex organs were internal on snakes and everybody knew. There was an illness of trouble and sadness after each thing she did that arrived in her face but which she tried to hide. Kid stared off at the mountain. The girl looked at him, trying to get Kid to knock it off. He had been in his body, he was thinking, and it didn't matter, and now it all was to be different. With a difference he announced he was off to race and beat that sonofabitch Apache!

“I'm going to go beat that goddamn Apache.”

Mother knew how to stop him, and how to keep him at the table.

“He's not real Apache,” said Mother. “Not a true one, no. Puerto Rican. Or Peruvian maybe, a 20th of either. Or just worn down saddle wet and drunk,” she said. “A hundred dollars says he's no amount real Apache.” She put both hands flat on the table. She stood. Reached out her hand to Kid.

“Bet me. Two hundred.”

She looked between the boy's eyes. Her son's, before the girl he liked and who liked her boy.

She wanted to bet on something that could not be proved but by the Apache, and that was going to cost a lot more than a few hundred dollars. That would cost the entire game, all of his life, and even then it could not be bought, the proof.

“Come on, bet me.”

She was standing, hand out, open and turned upward in the sun. “Probably caught his hand in a garbage disposal. I know someone that happened to.”

She was louder.

“The wife turned it on with his hand down inside. You laugh?” No one had. “Spend the afternoon with us. It's almost Christmas.” She lowered her eyes. She lifted her hands up to appraise the place she owns all of. She looked around and smiled. Guests looked. Her hair was thin and colored in an expensive show of blonde. “This isn't the real West, Son,” she pretend laughed. “This isn't that real. Don't you know what a night here costs?” She brought down her hands. She looked sad for him and old. “It is a pleasure ranch. It's all for pleasure.” She stood looking at him like she could not believe him. “Five hundred dollars a night. And that's just for the bed and coffee. Add riding. Add golf. Add massage, facials, kid camp, room service, cocktails, Son. The whole thing. Add tax. Add state and federal, Kiddo. Add inflation. Plus tip. Figure in the sleeves of balls. The suntan oil, and the shops! Don't forget who owns this place. Don't forget who is no fool. This isn't cowboys and Indians! This isn't about Goddamned Indians!”

“I'm going to race,” Kid said and stood and got away from the table. He strode toward the corral, leaving Mother's table behind him. And the girl. Away from all the pleasure.

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The plan was to kick the Apache man's horse in the face with his right spur. He did it.

As soon as they'd reached the flats, the hand rose up in the air, the spunk blown or not, the retard retarded or not and the hand came down, Kid remembered his horse. He got just enough ahead with his foot out of stirrup, and kicked the spur back into the eye. Hit the face with the spur, hard, and felt it connect. The Cayuse threw and rolled and bled. It was awful to hear the sound. The small man was fast under the small horse with his old leg under; he looked bigger with the downed horse. The horse was rubbing him into the rocks. The eye of the Cayuse was bloody and bubbled. Apache groaned and seemed to be having an attack in his mind. He didn't look right, with the jerking and the spittle. The man gripped his hand into a crack in a great flat rock, like an altar he was pinned to, and he shook. Cried out nonsense in his terrible shaking and it was so real in the earth seeing the man like that. A small rattler from the handhold bit him. Christ. There it was in the air ahold of that halved hand and Kid grabbed the filet knife off him. He cut the snake, small thing, baby, no control over its poison, getting his own shirt off, and cutting it into a tourniquet that he wound so tight under the wrist and tied it. With the filet knife, Kid pierced into the man's wrist center and cut, the rest of the man's hand, off, which was tough to do, going between bone and joint and getting through skin and strings. Apache screamed and cried out, even in his terrible shaking fit, and Kid had to pop the joint out and slice through skin. The screaming. The vastness of sound and wetness and soundlessness. This is what the Apache had done long ago, cutting off the poison, but was that right?

In the sand it lay there. A thing Kid didn't want to look at and was trying to forget while seeing it. In stillness, as if not there, ripe, vacant, loud in its deadness with the black parts dead from long before — and then it was time to move — God — fast.

He grabbed the man and pulled him, helped him to saddle the horse. Kid rode him in to the corral on the front of the Kid's horse. At the corral he got someone to drive them to the hospital in town. He'd kicked the pony's eye and left it writhing there in the dust. He'd gotten the Apache to help. Left the crazed Cayuse writhing with the torn eye by the hand.

The man was released back to the ranch, and days after Kid finally rode out to see him at his trailer and squat. The old man was angry. About his horse. Hand. Heart attack. Bum leg. Plenty of things he was angry about. He was older looking than he had been on horseback days in his hat and oilcloth. There were patches of pink that showed on his old whiskered neck and on his face and hands. Still, he was proud and stubborn. Kid had never been out to see the old man's home, leather tack and old plywood were littered around the trailer. Fenders in the sand in the white pipe-fenced yardless yard.