COWBOYS
There are some who say I did not kill my father.
Not technically they mean.
But the ones who say I did not kill my father are the ones who want to have sex with me.
They say I did not kill my father because they cannot have sex with a woman who killed.
What I mean is they cannot have sex with a woman who carries, though all women carry, an unbearable weight.
So they mix me another drink, they laugh, they say, You did not kill your father.
What they think they believe and what they truly believe: two different things.
I am still able to lie there nights, but I am unable to do much more than that.
Meaning I am still able to lie there nights, but I am unable to stick around in the mornings.
Meaning I am unable to lie there pretending I want what it is I’m supposed to want.
Because of this and because of that. And I cannot pretend to be anything other than the result of this and that.
When the doctor called at four a.m., waked me from a dream I can almost remember, something about chasing dogs in a field, something about a fence, he introduced himself as the doctor.
He said, I am doctor such-and-such, in this uptight voice, this deadpan voice. And I laughed and said, You’re who. I said, Who is this.
My brother was also on the line. My brother was in Boston. The doctor was in Baltimore. And I was in a place called Warrens-burg, Missouri. I was in Warrensburg, Missouri, for a job I was trying to quit. When I mention Warrensburg, Missouri, people say, Where the fuck is that.
I tell them there are cowboys there. I tell them there are tornadoes that can blow your house across the state. There are brown recluse spiders, I tell them, in every corner of every room. It’s a shit hole, I tell them.
And there I was in it, trying my best to sleep right through it, a doctor telling me, at four a.m., please, to please be serious.
I was not always serious, and somehow the doctor already knew this, knew perhaps because I laughed when he said he was the doctor. Or perhaps he knew because my brother told him I would not be serious. Or perhaps he knew because when he told me to kill my father, I laughed again.
He did not, of course, use the word kill. He had another word, a series of words, a more technical way of wording.
The doctor sounded exhausted, and my brother sounded exhausted. My brother and his wife had a one-year-old boy. The boy was always crying in the background. My brother was always saying, Shh.
My brother always had circles under his eyes. They were bluish, the circles, and they made him look beaten down.
You look like Dad, I said to him once.
Fuck you, he said to me more than once.
We were no longer kids and this was a serious matter. The doctor had been up all night.
Trying to save your father, he said.
To no avail, he said, and I wondered at the word avail, wondered if the doctor got to be a doctor because of whatever it was he had that made him use that word.
I wanted something to eat. I wanted to run downstairs in the massive house I was renting in Warrensburg, Missouri, and root through the refrigerator for the leftovers. The leftovers were in take-out containers, and I wanted to bring them up to my bed, switch on the TV, settle into that blue-lit space.