Touch Anywhere to Begin by Mark Anthony Jarman

Author:Mark Anthony Jarman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780864927231
Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
Published: 2022-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

WHAT WOULD JESUS’S ROBOT DO?

Bill’s landline had been severed by a section gang digging by the CN tracks, so at night my friend the cowboy would call me long-distance from his truck, Bill’s cell getting better reception out in the yard under the meteor showers and spooky northern lights and magpies shifting in the poplars.

Then one day a stroke zaps Bill’s head. Inside his farmhouse he struggles, but can’t move, can’t get to his phone, held to the floor for two days and his cellphone sitting out in his damn pickup truck. Bill’s legs and arms won’t function, and Bill can’t crawl to the cell in his truck. His old landline phone, right in front of him, made useless by a railroad gang.

I hate the idea, my friend Bill trapped two days while I wander freely and bike by the river with no clue. Does his dog, Jagger, wonder? His bomb-proof horse standing in the corral, his cattle puzzled and hungry, no sign of Bill, no water, no food.

In the house Bill tries to haul himself up, he is tough (cowboy up), but he keeps falling and hitting his head, making things worse. He crashes over a wooden chair, tries to crawl into bed and loses his balance and hits his head on his homemade bed built of big peeled logs.

Bill shoes horses for a living. Over the eons my friend Bill hit on the head so many times, a concussion falling on ice, kicked by ornery horses, the occasional drunken punch. And the metal rasp that flew from another horse-shoer’s hand.

Bill and Buddy working horses side by side: Buddy whacks a rangy-tang mare, the iron rasp comes free of its wooden handle, rises up, then dives to gouge Bill’s head as if a guided missile. Bill’s hard head covered in blood at the ER.

The doctor, India in his accent, jokes: “You are quite sure this man is your friend?”

Near Stony Plain, Bill was bucked off a big horse, thrown down onto cement and knocked out cold, falling from a horse into another ER. How many contusions and concussions? So many times in and out of ER, but now Bill is staying put in the hospital for long-term therapy, a bleed in his brain, his left side crippled by the stroke, and he is left-handed. So, friend, learn to button your shirt, learn to walk, learn to use your phone without dropping it on the hospital floor. His cracked phone repaired over and over.

Now his boot-cut jeans and rodeo belt-buckles are too complicated.

His younger sister Kathleen says, “I feel so sorry for Billy, a cowboy forced to wear sweatpants.”

I start looking at airline tickets to Alberta, but can I get away from work?

Bill the cowboy says, “I’m going crazy here, I hate being bathed by the staff as if I’m an old derelict. Which I guess I am.”

Bill has Irish ancestors, but he has a Spanish look, olive skin, brown eyes, dark eyebrows; in another world maybe a bullfighter or unruly vaquero.

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