Luke Goebel - Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours

While drinking, the old man was silent. He would glare at him sometimes. But what could be said? He tossed him a first beer, after some time making him sit in the silence of the not far away dusk, and they drank in the small heat of a golden-lit world different than days past. They didn't belong anywhere, and they didn't belong together. Certainly weren't friends — weren't going to head in and sit by the pool at Mother's resort, the two of them, men and women nearby with drinks and magazines.

So this was that.

“I know what I know, and I know what you don't,” the man said. “I know you don't know shit. I know in my blood what I got and I know what you got and what you don't. Kicking a horse's eye. You puny shit coward. You left my horse to suffer.”

The two sat under the antennae that rose above the Apache's trailer, looking out at nothing. Apache drinking from his left hand in the brightening blue of the mountains, blanket flower beyond, and night coming with the cool coming down. At the old trailer with the waste tube running out to the desert, how many retards could be found? How many other people? How much new A/C? From Younkers or Sears or elsewhere? They were the two of them — a young man and old man — and nothing to prove remained. The man had had a real heart attack.

“What you do have is need,” the old man concluded. “But who are you, Kid? Without me, or your mom, or brother?”

Mother had heard the man's horse had been blinded, and the men had gone out and put it down — even the Cayuse, it turned out, she had owned. She knew about the hand. There was something good with her, too, and she found her way the best she could, and kept up her part of the act. She could keep rising up better than before. She kept herself up. He knew death and races in the desert and fear and how to overcome some of it — but he wondered if he were a fraud — he hadn't proved himself without cheating.

He had done and he'd seen the truth — ah, madness and lies and human farce and kindness — and now he needed to hide it from himself. He could not let himself get closer to people — he had always been far away from himself and right there pushing to have each moment deliver itself like God rising from the desert in gold and music and covered in penises, redheads, and virgins riding upon Him — the great aggregate whole receding with each approach. He wanted back in that riding and needing with all his heart, wanting, and needing, having to have then what the Apache had, and thinking it could be done; that old sonofabitch — the boy thinking he could win that sort of thing — true greatness of will. Wanting to prove. He had killed the Cayuse. Almost murdered the Apache.

What right did a guy have?

Slaughter the horses.

He would see his brother in heaven or there was no such thing — if not — if so, then this was the horridedessly beautiful thing here on the world. Even a fool or a coward can see it and feel it — that if there's nothing more than this life it is the wildest and most painful farce. The art of being here to watch the ones you love go away from you, and die — and one's self slip away. If there's more, why can't we know? Why stay, if we are to be cowards, most of all? All except the Apache, who lost none of himself in anyone's eyes or by any sense perceivable except by that hand, now gone.

A hundred hands a hundred times cut them off him. Leave the hero deformed. A great resounding love to the deformed man, and our sorrow, and our admirations.

The Apache had given him a call, a symbol of the life — the old Native. Native? No. Call him original, a self-fashioned old kind, self-formed and devoted to himself, his vanity, his craft, his skill, and performance — his greatness of difference in performance most of all, his absolute devotion to his performance.

For a kid's sake the brother should have lived, but didn't. The Apache looked at the boy. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself. I lost my hand, and you know what, I'm going to get pussy. Good rich pussy. With only one hand, with all the will left in me, I'll excite the waters. That which is more in me than you'll ever have. In each of the fingers of this full hand.” He held up the hand and he still had it, in the eyes, the wild firing charm of confidence. “Even in the pinky! More pussy than you'll ever know. Is what I have ahead of me.”

Apache, the thunderhead, the human god let him live forever, the most genius — the imbecile — the boy was done feeling shame. But the Apache had stories similar to tell, family lost, life maddened, head yet alert — wildly watching and alive before his eyes — decided on the adventure of having a hot heart, for or against each person entirely. That goddamned old man had his, he, himself's, the young man's love, all of it, for he had given the boy something. Everything. It still couldn't be enough. The young man would decide for himself. The odds. A fully galloped race counted only. Half of a hand now none. You have to stay in the race to win, even when no one wins. Your brother is your brother. A star appeared. Lightning on the distant shore over the mountains.

They sat and watched it come and saw it to dark.

In their time, two by two, the boy would only change one thing and that he could never change. Then there was the time with the Apache. They had had some rides.

ONE WENT FOR TWOand became one again. I'm telling you of me and my mother. Meaning a boy beside his mother, and the mother sleeping. Two was just one confusing itself. A person could get sick like this, to put a fine point on the end of things.

There was a little house in the yard behind the house. Can you imagine? The possibilities in the mind, when there was more than one house? A house behind a house, like for kids? Like for a boy. Another world beyond the world!

There was corn out one window and over the other window was a sheet. Here was summer to wake up wild. Here, a summer to chase chickens. And the hot hogs that squealed in the hog stalls next door. His mother lay sleeping. His brother was not there and his sister was not there. Only he.

Her hand held long bones and the ropes rolled and popped under her skin. She let him work the ropes back and forth across her bones, but one could get bored with it. The selfish self not getting any response. It was only her loose skin that he knew. And what lay underneath there? It was harder.

And what lay underneath that hardness? A mother? On a morning. Still sleeping.

Light came cauliflower across the sheets, then mushroom, then cauliflower again. The light almost touched one's hair. It was the kind of light you wanted more and more of. It would not reach her face. He touched her hair. Morning doves cooed wooden sounds in the corn. The sheets were hung. You could get sick. A person.

There was a closet with old things inside — baby clothes, a chest. Wedding gowns. This was the room his mother had grown up in. And then other sisters had taken over the room for a turn. In the closet, also, were trophies. Other dresses.

Up close her face looked made in light. The closet smelled like wood and dust. A small bird and its shadow flew across the sheet over the window. Strings on her bones popped in and out of place. Places, places, houses! Imagine. The shadow was gone. The bird was gone. It was already late in summer.

The closet held old trophies she had won.

She had run so fast.

Scraps of paper cut from papers said so.

She was tired, tired — she had run.

With her face near, he felt air come out. Slipping lower, he ran his leg down one of her legs. He felt her smoothness and then her short leg hairs tugged.

Sleep, she said.

Her mouth was shut. He heard a tractor. He imagined little bits of husk floating. She breathed through her nose.