Blue Rodeo

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Blue Dog

A man's work is nothing but a slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those one or two things in whose presence his heart first opened.

—Albert

To Owen Garrett's keen sheepherder's eyes, it appeared entirely likely that the woman in the blue shirt and red panties running back and forth between the water faucet and the two copulating dogs was the Californian. First off, the red panties were the itty-bitty lace variety. You didn't come by those easily in a town like Blue Dog unless you ordered off one of those fancy color catalogs. If you did, the folks who worked at the post office got to know your weakness, and before long everyone from Shiprock to Silver City would hear about it. From the way she ran—high up on the balls of her feet—he figured probably she was a jogger. When they weren't driving convertibles, Californians ran everywhere, pumping arms and legs and inhaling diesel fumes from Mercedes, all in the name of health. Every time she banked and turned from the water faucet and raced toward the dogs—hands cupped in front of her, making good time but not good enough to keep hold of the water—he could see those panties strain for all they were worth, a deep Comstock cherry-pie red that graced the tops of the longest legs he'd seen all at one stretch in maybe fifteen years. It was common knowledge they all dressed like that out there, you know, certified members of a nation of crazy people. Women who never wore brassieres except as outerwear, doing aerobic exercises twenty-four hours a day in neon-colored girdles. The men, too.What kind of man was it who voluntarily put on tights and went out among them? True, they had to exercise, because they never did any hard work aside from pushing a computer button now and again or sending one another a fax. And in the state of California it was a sin to be soft. Little wonder they all got skin cancer and had nervous breakdowns every fifteen minutes. Good Lord, had she come to Blue Dog to get over one? She might also be one of those New Age crystal-rubbers searching for a cure-all to the kind of depression that came from idleness and too much money.

As Owen pondered these questions, he sat straight atop Red Bow, his twelve-year-old quarter horse, an animal with just enough mustang thrown in to keep things exciting. Together they surveyed the woman's lack of progress. Hopeful, Owen's three-legged blue Queensland heeler, was locked up tight to the Californian's sorrel bitch, one of those tall skinny dogs that probably cost two months' salary and was too nervous to finish a meal. Long Legs wasn't having much luck breaking them up, though with handfuls of water she was managing to sprinkle them in a pretty kind of way. It brought to mind old Father Morales down at the reservation with his holy-water rattle and the Easter group baptism.

Might even be that the dogs appreciated the water. It was a warm day, somewhere in the high eighties, could hit ninety before noon. He could see she was about to give up now that it was clear the dogs were set on following nature's urgings. He watched her stamp her long, bare foot and give out a holler of frustration. She had powerful lungs, and the yelling indicated she was plenty angry, probably about something or other that happened long before the dogs got into it.

Owen Garrett knew about anger. How it could turn you to a chunk of crumbling asphalt, all tarred up, just stinking in the sun. Anger could change your whole life. It had his. He hoped it wasn't like that for this woman. She was built lean, not too heavy up top—a characteristic that caused most men he knew to stammer and beg like fools. Owen himself didn't care for that kind of breast on a woman. As his father used to say: More than a mouthful's just being greedy. Though Owen wasn't clear about the greed part, he knew he liked his women trim but not rib-showing skinny. She was five ten or so, he figured, close to his own height, but at least thirty or forty pounds lighter. Nice little slope to her tummy—he liked a tummy on a woman—it usually meant she took a relaxed view of things. Her curly hair, all messed up, had a healthy red glow to it in the sunshine. It looked like she'd just woken up. And wasn't that a handsome thing! Some women were at their best in the morning, smiling at you over the coffeepot, reliving what you two had done the night before. Others were downright beastly until they'd poured half that pot of coffee on down their stringy throats and had a firm hold of your paycheck. On God's own earth it came down to basically those two types of women, whether you were in the country or the city. Ones who wouldn't flinch reaching up inside a laboring ewe to yank out a turned lamb, and the rest. who didn't want to do anything but shop, listen to the radio, and put on layer after layer of pink nail polish—like Sheila.

Half a day's drive northeast, in the skyscraper-and smog-filled city of Denver, Owen's ex-wife rode around Larimer Square in her little black 600 SL. Small as a wind-up toy, costing more than any house should, the car was a gift from Sheila's current husband, Hal, the real estate magnate. Old Hal, who could do no wrong. Owen and Sheila's daughter, Sara Kay, had turned twenty years old this last spring. Living at the university, she was studying on something that she assured him "would damn straight keep me from ending up like either one of my parents." Well, as much as Sara Kay wanted that statement to wound her daddy, he recognized it as ambition, and Owen Garrett was the first man to applaud aspirations, having come to his own so late in life.

You name it, he'd worked it. Offshore oil-drilling rigs in Texas; pumping gas, peddling shocks and tires in Flagstaff, Arizona, to road-weary families stopping off at the Grand Canyon and then later that same day heading east on their way to Meteor Crater for a six-dollar disappointment. He'd even done a short stint at UNM, where all he had to do was dress up in his cowboy clothes, pose for art students, and they got him twenty-five dollars an hour.

He wasn't uneducated. He'd finished high school, just barely, because when you fed the superintendent's cows at dawn, he was more than glad to give you a ride on down the hill with him. He kept up. He read books he traded back and forth with his Navajo friend, Joe Yazzi. Growing up on working ranches had given him a solitary nature and supplied him with an overload of patience, which certainly helped out with Sara Kay, who took after her momma.

Patience had given him the courage to quit all that and change his life after that sorry night in southern Colorado. Once a day he forced himself to think about it, to give it a full ten minutes by his eighteen-dollar Timex, to assess the pros and cons of continuing to live his life piecemeal or driving north to the nearest sheriff's office to confess his part in what happened.

After that, he'd made a deal with himself. He wasn't allowed to think about it anymore until the sun had gone all the way down and come back up again. A man could drive himself mad just thinking. Too much thinking turned your nights to enemies.

He'd tried following the Big Book, going to AA meetings and working his twelve-step program, but after awhile those people started to get on his nerves with their chain-smoking and holier-than-thou attitudes. Step eight stalled him: Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. Did you go clear back to breaking your brother's toys, or even further, to being born to your momma at a time when she should have been done with mothering, had put in her hard time rearing four other children? To this day he still puzzled over it. Certainly you could make restitution up to a point—right most wrongs—and what he'd done was about as wrong as they came, but chasing after sainthood twenty-seven hours a day swung things just as far out of balance as too much drinking did.

Just because he'd quit didn't erase his status of being a drunk. That much he did buy. He accepted the fact that he was, for all time, a drunk who no longer drank. He amended those twelve steps and lived by them as best he could, offering his insurmountable worries to his Higher Power. There were times he even went back to AA—when a job took him to a new town or the guilts steeped him in a terrible brew of self-pity—he'd search out a meeting in one of the churches or American Legion halls, and listen, both ears open, to what other folks had to say. Saying the words of greeting always started out the same—a confession that stuck in his throat like too-sweet cake: Hello. My name is Owen, and I'm an alcoholic. The rush of kindly voices that came charging back: Hi, Owen! never failed to cheer him, to reassure him he could blend into the background of whatever small town he'd landed in. And for ten full minutes each day, each minute a considerable chunk of time when you weighed them against one another, he forced himself to recall one particular day seven years back, in as much detail as he could summon. Blue Rodeo. Copyright © by Jo-Ann Mapson. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.