What Would Jesus's Robot Do?

MARK ANTHONY JARMAN

Bill’s landline had been severed by a section gang digging by the CN tracks, so at night he’d 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, his cattle puzzled and hungry, no sign of Bill, no water, no food.

In the cabin, 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 has been hit on the head so many times: a concussion from falling on ice, kicked by ornery horses, the occasional drunken punch. And the metal rasp that flew from another horseshoer’s hand. Two farriers working horses side by side: Buddy whacks a rangytang mare, the iron rasp comes free of its wooden handle, rises up above them, then dives to gouge Bill’s head as if a guided missile. Bill’s hard head covered in blood at emergency.

Near Stony Plain he was bucked off a big horse, thrown down onto cement and knocked out cold, falling from a horse into emergency. How many contusions and concussions? So many times in and out of emerg, 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 suppose a robot would not have such malfunctions. 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. In the hospital his pay TV keeps cutting out without warning. On TV a wide receiver runs a ghost motion and the quarterback throws a rope. The sports announcer says, “But I diverse,” which makes me laugh. The nurses discover his secret stash of painkillers that he is taking on top of the pills they dispense. He has a history of pain from working with heavy horses; feels the nurses don’t give him enough meds. They are mad at his secret stash and he is mad that they take away his collection.

Bill hates the hospital the way he hated our high school, hated being cooped up. His father Mickey, a no-nonsense electrician, mad at Bill skipping classes, drove him right to the school door, but Bill would walk inside the brick building and leave by another xit. Bill’s siblings excelled at school; Bill was the black sheep, the puzzle.

You’re killing your father, said Bill’s mother. You’re killing your mother, said Bill’s father.

Bill’s older brother, a prosperous, handsome doctor, crashed his mountain bike hurtling down a steep trail and knew he had broken his neck. Paralyzed from the neck down, hoisted in and out of bed with a small crane, hoisted in and out of a custom van.

No use of his hands, just a head sitting there, curly hair and keen eyes. Operating a laptop by blowing a straw to move his bed up and down, to arrange letters, words, thoughts. His charming wife grew less charming, grew weary and left.

In and out of hospitals for years, Bill’s older brother grew sick of that grind and his brother arranged to pull the plug. I know this recent assisted-suicide weighed on Bill’s mind; my friend the tough cowboy fell into tears any time he talked of his big brother’s long struggle with paralysis and his extended, exhausted death. Bill fears being stuck in rehab, trapped in the same rut.

One afternoon, Bill sneaks out of the hospital to hit a bar, barely able to use his fingers on his cell, but manages to call a taxi, asks for a van big enough to fit a wheelchair. Bill wants to bring along his new buddy in the ward, a Native man from Saddle Lake who lost both legs to amputation.

Bill and his legless buddy escape to a watering hole for guacamole and tortilla chips and Irish stout with sports on the big screen. The waitress is kind to her hobbled outcasts. What do the Italians say? At the table you never grow old.

The two stay late at the bar talking and laughing, hours passing gladly, but the nurses are furious when the boys finally return to the hospital. Bill the rounder in trouble again. Bathed by people who don’t like him. He swears at them, angry at being trapped, wants out of the machine.

Butter up the nurses, I advise him, Jesus, try to get along, you need them. And do your rehab.

His sister Kathleen tells him the same, but hardheaded Bill has never been good at listening. Bill and I once drove to Batoche to see that haunted Métis battle site; two days crossing Alberta and Saskatchewan and I never got to finish a single sentence. Never.

We met in Grade Four. I was a new kid at St. Vincent’s. We fought in the schoolyard and then best friends for five decades. Now we watch TV, there is a President’s Day Mattress Sale, we wait for the newest version of Zyklon B, we wait for the robots to take over from us.

We miss railroad jobs at union wages, we miss the gandy dancers and doomed cabooses and the rock-crusher in the quarry, before Nestle bought the aquifers, before Greenland caught fire. We simply remember our favourite things and I feel badly for my sons, what they inherit.

Over the years, Bill has gone out with a few “pretty little cowgirls,” but they do not seem to visit. Bill wants

out of the hospital in time for the Wild Rose Rodeo in Mayerthorpe. Sorry, not going to happen. Bill’s face and legs are swollen, circulation and kidney problems, fluids refusing to drain from his body. Maybe a care home in Mayerthorpe, but not the rodeo.

What would Jesus have to say about robot jobs and AI and dicey ethics? A Robot Rodeo—now there is a hell of an idea waiting for some Alberta venture capital!

Bill keeps dropping his phone so often we can’t contact him. He loses his wallet, not sure if it fell from his wheelchair or has been stolen. Then his cracked phone is stolen in the hospital. Bill’s buddy Bronc shoes horses at the racetrack and since the stroke, Bronc has been helping Bill with his horses and his dog, Jagger.

His buddy Bronc had years of therapy after his own head injury. His girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend crept in at night and raised a good hammer to Bronc’s skull as he slept. Cave in a skull for love. Bronc had to learn to walk, learn to tie his shoes; he did it and got back to shoeing horses, but a fucking hard slog.

Anyway, Bronc calls Bill’s missing phone and some weasel answers.

I found the phone, Mr. Weasel says, I’ll hand it over for a reward. One hundred dollars, says Mr. Weasel.

Sure thing, says Bronc, really need it, man, all my numbers are in it.

They meet at a mall where Bronc punches the guy and takes the phone. I envy such direct approaches to life, Bronc not a hesitant Prufrock like me. Mall security let Bronc walk free, but they haul away the shitrat

who thought the phone his meal ticket. It’s a strange male world. Bronc heads out to celebrate St Paddy’s. At The Roundhouse on St. Paddy’s, businessmen meet for drinks and clichés.

Bottom line, are there assets if we buy this?

Well, they took it right to the edge at the end, but it’s still on the positive side, still a bit of meat on the bone.

Joe, Joe, we need to find out what’s real, not what we hope.

A business lesson for us: hope against real. Do we dare hope that Bill will rise and walk and start hammering horseshoes and nails once more out on the Range Roads? Two days on the floor: is that considered real?

When Bill was around twenty, he thumbed to Banff with his good friend Quigley and had a bad acid trip in the mountains. In a rustic tourist restaurant, Bill climbed the pine walls to tear down decorative snowshoes, tear down cross-country skis and mounted deer heads. Like Holden Caulfield, he thought it was phony. His parents got a call; Mickey and Irene had to drive hours in the middle of the night to bail him out and pay the phony restaurant for damages.

Quigley slugged Bill one night, gave him a black eye. Bill fed me a BS story that his horse threw its head back, caught him smack in the face. I think our relationship was less volatile.

One night, Bill and Quigley had a few and lost a truck. They mired it in a ditch, stuck. They flagged a ride out, but the next day couldn’t remember exactly where they’d gone off the straight and narrow. They combed miles of back roads, zigzagging past glacial erratics, those big rocks where buffalo rubbed their big buffalo itches. Bill and Quigley stopped at farms to ask strangers if they’d seen a truck. How do you lose a truck?

Bill was a good drummer, adored Ginger Baker of Cream, and Quigley played harmonica in the stygian depths of Banff’s Cascade Tavern, soaked the harp in beer to make it louder. Quigley read Dispatches and knew he had to be a war correspondent. He landed a job with The Sun, wrote reams of copy, dated a Sunshine Girl, but never found his smoky warzone-landing zone.

Decades later in the hospital, Bill, with little to do, tries to track down old friends. He finds Quigley’s sister. Where is that rascal now? Oh, I’m sorry to say my brother took his own life two years ago. Bill’s big brother pulled the plug and now an old pal exiting early through the turnstiles.

My friend Don tells me that Bill found out about yet another suicide: a rancher shot himself in a field by his cattle where seldom is heard a discouraging word. His wife found him and his truck. Stuck in his hated hospital ward, Bill took these suicide litanies really hard, some dreaded weight in these missives from the winter fields, something ominous in all these pickup trucks slouching toward Bethlehem.

At some point the railroad crew returns to the ditch to fix Bill’s severed landline.

In Alberta’s badlands we know a sandy road above the malpaís that curves and sinks into a canyon by the buffalo jump where we used to camp. Wordless chickens convey disapproval of us driving past in Bill’s truck. How many wings have we ingested at Mr. Ed’s? Bill’s molecular makeup fed by thousands of skewered chickens and salty fried egg yolks and cases of Club beer stashed in his barns and sheds and trucks so a bottle was never out of reach.

I wish we were purer, our body a temple, but this is not so, we are not temples, we have used our throats.

I will order anything and everything in hospitals and iron restaurants in China and France and Zagreb and India, no more restraints or doubt, no more worries of tomorrow. I pledge allegiance to the shiniest ham sliding down my throat like a nervous oyster. The house special is Pablo Escargot. I’ll take it. We must try that new place, Casa Chagrin.

We swear our throats will live on like souls, we will live and travel and feed our private festivals of defecation. Move around a world and move our bowels in each country. They need more of our shit. That outhouse with pigs lurking below to eat our waste: where the hell was that?

Bill’s diet was black cowboy coffee and cigarettes, painkillers and booze; kale kombucha or soy lattes do not exist for my friend Bill. You live hard, then your sister and brothers sprinkle your ashes in a corral.

Bill did make it back home for a while, but a care worker checking his place found him, Bill again on his damn floor. Cowboy down, no more rodeos, no more barns and dancehalls. I feel he pulled the plug, like his brother, exited early, and in that situation I might want the same.

At the table you never grow old, but Bill and Quigley and the rancher drop their cutlery, leave their seats at the table, blurred ghost motions into ghost nations.

I fly across our blurred nation to a memorial service in Coyote Hall at a country crossroads north of Cherhill, fly from my east coast home to the west of my childhood. Don meets me at the airport. Trucks park on the grass all around Coyote Hall, a good turnout for Bill.

My friend Don and I are the only males not wearing big oval cowboy hats. Every hat shaped individually, the hats are light or dark, but really, every man wears an identical theatrical prop, as if it might rain inside Coyote Hall. No berets or boaters or hipster fedoras amble in the door in Lac Ste. Anne County; cowboys may be sold as rugged individuals, but they exist with a dress code narrower than those in a nunnery.

Nervous with these strangers, Don and I play Neil Young tunes for Bill. “Borrowed Tune,” “See the Sky about to Rain,” Don’s Fender Strat with a bit of tremolo and my plaintive harp.

Bill’s sister Kathleen said she felt Bill there during our set. Though a serious skeptic about such matters, I too felt a pulse or chill during our minor-key music. Kathleen lets me know that Bill left me his drum kit, the one he’d played since we jammed in his basement in junior high.

In Coyote Hall I say hello to Bill’s mother Irene; she has Alzheimer’s and doesn’t know me, but she does know that she lost two sons in fast succession. I remember that her late husband Mickey crooned “Goodnight, Irene” when courting her and that Mickey’s little brother died in a field, run over by horses pulling harrow blades that cut open the child. I remember Irene was mad and amused when as a teen I ate an entire tub of ice cream from their basement freezer. We had hotknifed some hash and Irene wondered, What on earth happened to my knives?

Alcohol affected Bill more than most; his eyes looking both wild and absent. Bill got drunk with me at a dance, vodka poured into bottles of orange pop on the dark golf course, and his parents were called to pick him up. Fuming, Irene locked the car doors. Bill began vomiting in his parents’ car, but he couldn’t open the locked door to lean outside. I was beside him on the backseat as he puked onto his feet and Irene yelled, “Puke like the dirty dog you are!”

I still get a giant kick out of Irene’s line. At their house, I walked away from the puke car and thumbed Groat Road back to the dance, back to the dim cave of dogs.

As a teen in his basement, Bill put the barrel of a .22 in his mouth, but didn’t pull the trigger. Am I the only one who knows that? We all had .22s. It’s strange to recall so much about Irene, yet she doesn’t know me from Adam. The same genetic gift awaits many of us.

Inside Bill’s house, I think of two days stuck on that floor. After the service, some of us walk from Bill’s house up through pale poplars to his roping corral: a ring of rails and solid metal posts set in an overgrown grassy field above the farmhouse.

In the corral, Bill’s brothers Kevin and Patrick scatter ashes while Bill’s dog Jagger waits on edge for calves to fly out of the chute, a dog’s wild-eyed dreaming at the metal chute. To this blue heeler, a crowd at this corral means calf-roping. Why else gather in the field?

Bill’s land and cattle sold to a neighbor, but a stray cow watches us, looking lost and lonely in the poplars. Whose animal is it?

Toward the end, Bill’s finances were bad. He couldn’t work hammering horseshoes, so no money coming in for truck payments or power bills; on the phone he told me he ran out of cash for groceries or extra pills from his crooked pharmacist; Bill was using two-dollar bills that he had saved as collectables, clerks puzzled seeing strange two-dollar bills, the Queen looking so young.

Bill was kicking himself, “Why didn’t I put a steer in the freezer before I sold all the damn cattle?” Yet here is one white-faced Hereford in the lank trees. Is it his?

In the high corral, we play the Stones and Neil and Gram Parsons and Emmylou and Gene Clark, seriously scratchy vinyl spinning on a Luddite stereo that Bill has kept in a caboose in the field so the riders had music while roping in his corral. I’m amazed that the ancient turntable works after sitting out hard winter after hard winter.

“Paint It Black,” “Fair and Tender Ladies,” “We’ll Sweep Out the Ashes,” “The Streets of Baltimore,” “No Expectations,” “Lost Highway,” “Albuquerque.” Ben Keith’s haunting pedal steel in GBX speakers the size of phone booths as Bill’s vinyl records unfold strange tunings and tonal voices in a boreal field a million miles from any California recording studio redolent of Milagro tequila and nose candy.

Tunes spin, country blues and murder ballads. Brothers sprinkle ashes, and Bill’s blue heeler grins nervously, waits for ghost calves to spring from a metal gate, a dog wanting mad life from a machine rusting in a field, a dog trembling with hope for wild-eyed calves to be released from a fondly remembered world. Bill always had beautiful dogs around him.

Horses vanished, roping calves vanished, snare drum and high-hat cymbals sailing away. Months later Kathleen lets me know that Bill’s blue heeler wandered to the distant highway and was hit and killed. In their pretty tuxedoes, magpies danced around the dog’s small body.

“What got into him,” Kathleen asks me. “Jagger never went that way.”

“I’m pretty sad,” she says. Kathleen thinks the dog was looking for Bill, still hoping for his truck on fortythree, hoping to meet Bill on his way home from shoeing mares out past Sylvan Lake.