I began to twitch. The muscles in my thighs and lips and eyelids began to ripple and flutter. I am, of course, looking at that morning through older eyes, but it seems to me that even then, standing there looking up at Andy Glynn and trying to control my breathing and my twitching, I could see that the conversational territory ahead of us was treacherously boggy.
“Oh, sure,” said I, with a shrug to suggest that the time I had had, while good, hadn’t been much better than, say, the time to be had eating a hamburger with fried onions and ketchup. (Nowadays, when I see an adolescent deliver that shrug, I read it as the equivalent of a blush.)
“The movie was good?” he asked.
I was so relieved, and so pleased with myself for not having betrayed what a very good time I had had, that I nearly betrayed our deception about the movie we had seen. “It was great,” I began. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It was about these three—” And then I remembered that we were not supposed to have seen the movie we had seen.
“Hm?” said Andy.
“—three—um—”
“Yes?”
“Cowpokes.”
“Cowpokes?”
“Yeah. It was called—um—Dust—Dust something.”
“Dust?”
“Yeah. Dust something. It was really—you know—pretty good.”
Since I had nothing else to say about a movie I had never seen, I hoped that Andy would be willing to let it go at that.
“Well, come on in,” he said, “and tell us all about it.”
I followed, determined to tell him nothing at all about it.
He led me through the echoing entrance hall, across the slate floor, past the huge fireplace, to the kitchen. Everything was as it ordinarily was. Rosetta was sitting there, flipping through the paper. There was a basket of those rolls on the table, now a familiar and comforting constant in my Saturdays. Margot and Martha were, as usual, exploring the sundry relationships possible between a girl and a chair. Andy sat and said, wearily, “Girls, will you please settle down?”
“Hi, Peter,” said Margot, as if indifferently.
“Hi,” said I.
“Good morning, Peter,” said Rosetta.
“Good morning,” said I.
“Have a roll.”
“Thanks.”
“Do you want coffee?”
“Um—no,” I said, which was the truth, since I didn’t really like coffee and was never offered it anywhere but here, where I always refused it when Rosetta offered it.
She poured me half a cup of coffee, as she always did, regardless of what I said. She poured some milk into it.
“Enough?”
“Um—”
She added a little more and paused.
“Sure,” I said. “Thanks.”
She placed the cup in front of me, set the coffeepot down, folded her hands, leaned toward me, and said, “Now, Peter. I’ve been trying to get the girls to tell me about this movie you saw, but they plead ignorance of the technical aspects of cowboy films—such as the mysterious business of ‘covering’ someone—and they promise me that you will tell me the whole story. What do you say?”
I sat there, wondering what, exactly, I would say, if I found myself able to say anything. I reached for my cup, but I could tell that if I attempted to lift it, my hand would shake, so I folded my hands in imitation of Rosetta, leaned toward her, and simply began.
“There were these three—”
“Cowpokes,” said Andy. He raised his cup with a steady hand.
“Yeah,” I said. “Three cowpokes. When the movie started they were just riding into town. You didn’t see their faces, just their backs. They were kind of bouncing along on their horses, and they were raising a lot of dust—”
“Hence the title,” said Andy.
“Huh?”
“Dust Something.”
“Yeah. Dust. Ahead of them, through the dust, you could see the town that they were heading for.”
Sun filled the room. Rosetta raised her cup and took a sip of coffee. The girls rearranged themselves on their chairs. Andy settled back and took a bite of his roll.
“It looked like a peaceful place,” I said, and paused, and then added, “from a distance.”
Andy and Rosetta nodded, as if in recognition of an element of the conventional structure of a Western.
“But somehow,” I said, bringing an ominous note into my voice, “you could tell that something was going to happen.”
“Maybe it was the dust,” said Andy.
“Yeah,” I said. “It made everything seem kind of hard to figure out—”
“Nebulous?” asked Rosetta.
“Uh-huh,” I said, “and kind of on edge—”
“Portentous?” Rosetta suggested.
“You said it,” I said.
I talked for quite a while. At some point, the girls got up, went upstairs, showered, dressed, and left to play with their friends; at some other point, I drank my coffee and ate my roll; and, finally, with lunchtime drawing near, I came to the conclusion of what I had decided to call Rustlers in the Dust: “So the two cowpokes came riding out of the town, and you could see that they were upset about their friend, the way he died covering them while they got away from the Vulture Gang that was run by the corrupt sheriff, but they kind of gritted their teeth and spurred their horses on, and they rode off into the sunset, kicking up a lot of dust.”
There was a silence.
“Powerful,” said Andy after a while. He was staring out the window as he spoke.
“Perhaps I’ve underestimated the genre,” said Rosetta. She rubbed her hands as if they were cold.
“It sounds almost like a parable,” said Andy.
“Despite all the cattle and the saloon and that ‘showdown’ business, it seems to be a serious exploration of life under fascism in Europe before the war,” said Rosetta.
“Exactly, but done as a Western,” said Andy, “so that the American idiom itself serves not to distance us from what is actually being explored, but rather to bring it closer, by making it homely and even—familiar—in the sense that folk legends all occur in familiar territory.”
“Remarkable,” said Rosetta.
“Yeah, it was pretty good,” I said. I took another roll.
[to be continued]
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🎧 847: I began . . .