|
Tonto shrugs it off |
Why we? he blinks,
in vowelish puzzlement, and walks away,
confused, certainly, by the masked man
and all his masked complexes,
whatever drives him to save the day
and then ride away
before reality creeps back in: Mary Anne
knocked up by the tax revenuer
and Uncle Ned back down at the local
saloon, nursing the habit that got them
in this fix to begin with — three whiskeys
squinting into the afternoon dust,
listing every job he's ever held
for the benefit of some cattleman
who's drifting through and who –
meaning the cattleman – couldn't care less
if the farm gets foreclosed upon. It's a stretch
for Uncle Ned, who's been working one job
or another for the last fifty plus years.
There are, of course, the usuals:
ranch hand, bar keep, shop attendant—
but the gaps between regular work
offer up oddities — the day job
loading twelve hundred buffalo hide
onto a waiting train car, or the three weeks
he served as hired muscle for a lady friend's
bordello. He – meaning Uncle Ned –
keeps starting over, keeps remembering
some other odd job he's long forgotten,
retracing his steps in an attempt to chronicle
what he's always, up until this moment,
supposed was a linear progression,
guided by his own choices, trying to
pick that thread up at the beginning
and follow himself forward in time
to this place, where time is as blunting
to the senses as the whiskey he sips.
So when the masked man sends Tonto back
through to check on progress, and Uncle Ned
turns out to be in the same pickle, or worse,
a certain confusion surrounding pronouns
is hardly a thing to wonder at. The oddest
of his — meaning Uncle Ned's — jobs pales
in light of Tonto's work, performed competently
in a strange tongue in which none of the pronouns
seems quite adequate to the task at hand.
Might as well ask Why he? Or put paid
to the whole mess with Why I?
and acknowledge, finally, the fragile illusion
supporting our most cherished truths.
copyright 2007
Gene
Justice |
