Dr. Olsson took me fishing quite often as he awaited the opening of bird season, and made me carry all his gear while he addressed himself to my future. At a time when I was universally regarded as an idiot, Dr. Olsson was sure I had great potential, though in need of a more substantial education that would involve getting out of my house. He was very fond of my parents but thought my mother was fanatical. I was flattered that he was so interested in me. We fished and hunted, he gave me books to read, he corrected my English. I still have a vivid picture of him looking as I thought a doctor should: medium height, thick white hair in a brush cut, a carefully trimmed military moustache. You would take advice from a man who looked like this, and I readily succumbed to his authority, though it led me on one of the strangest missions of my life.
I learned a great deal during my stays with Gladys and Wiley, and I was well fed. Wiley taught me to smoke cigarettes, something I no longer do but still miss and plan to resume late in life. And Gladys taught me over the many times I stayed on the ranch about the hard, wordless love of some country women who lead by example in these out-of-the-way places.
Gladys also liked cigarettes. Sometimes the three of us smoked instead of talking, in individual styles: Wiley rarely took the cigarette from his mouth and squinted one eye; Gladys held hers in an elevated manner between the first two fingers of her hand; I pinched mine between thumb and forefinger and sometimes sucked up the smoke that rose from the ash. Paper sticking to lips, irregular burning, the advent of filters, assaults by the surgeon general — all came under discussion. When we watched TV, I felt stylish lacing my hands behind my head, slouching in my chair, and allowing the cigarette to hang from the exact center of my mouth. We liked to fill that room with so much smoke you could barely see the screen. I enjoyed forcing one or the other to remind me that my ash was about to fall. The hiss when I dropped a burning butt into a beer can as Wiley fussed with the volume control was a memory that would recur long after Wiley was gone. Horses and farm equipment were dangerous and produced a fatalistic culture impervious to health warnings.
I irrigated, fixed fence, cut cedar posts, rewired the calving shed, repudiated the government, ate three squares a day, and borrowed Wiley’s International truck to pay regular visits to Tessa, who treated me like something she might have acquired at a pet store. That was just fine with me, though. I only wanted to be around her.
Tessa soon took charge of my life. She would have given me money if she’d known I needed it. Instead, she decided that it would be good if we did something together, just for fun. “Mr. Hoxey feels terrible about all that has happened,” she said. “He wants to treat us to a night on the town.” That Friday, we signed up for tango lessons.
Tessa and I and six other couples entered the Elks Hall, with its terrible acoustics and all-consuming clamminess. We were conventionally dressed, I in a secondhand sport coat and wide tie, Tessa in a black sheath that struggled to encase her well-muscled shape. The others were more South American in style, hot-red lipstick on their small-town faces, tortoiseshell combs in swept-up hair. The men had gone with a pomaded look that spoke of their sense of mission. They seemed to smolder in anticipation of their future proficiency.
Our instructor was Juan Dulce, or just Dulce, a genuine Argentine who worked his way around the American West giving lessons. He had created a real interest in the tango in the most unlikely places — cow towns, oil towns, uranium towns, coal towns — where such a hint of another kind of life carried a special allure. He was perhaps sixty, thin as a herring in his striped pants, formal black coat, ruby cravat, and stacked heels. His hair, slicked to his skull, emphasized eyes that seemed to belong to some sort of marine creature. He was without humor in conveying the sacredness of his mission. I doubt that I shall forget the sight of him standing on a Pepsi crate and pouring out his introductory remarks in a deep and vibrant voice that seemed to make the room hum.
“When I am fifteen in Buenos Aires, I am longing for love and suffering and, above all, success — the hope of becoming a legend of our hot and drowsy tango. I underwent numberless deprivations, but success would reward the sensual designs that I displayed in many venues. Now the money I earn is exchanged for my fatigue, but I have no other way to go, and there are days I awaken upon wretchedness. Once I converted my dancing of three weeks’ duration by a pocket ruler into three hundred seventy-two kilometers. Still, tango is all! Without tango, my face inspires doubt. Therefore, my advice is, press your tango to great advantage! And now we begin.”
He turned on the big sound system, which had hitherto been employed to enlarge the voices of prairie politicians bent on higher office or nostalgic Scandinavian chorales with cow horns on their heads. The system had astounding capacity, and as the old tangos were broadcast by Dulce, the room was filled with the somber, inevitable cadences of this prelude to intercourse. At school, I had not only enjoyed several instances of copulation — albeit with Mr. Goodwrench staring down at me — but I had seen it explained on huge blackboards, so that there could never be any doubt about what was going on.
We began to learn the little steps, in the chest-to-chest Argentine style. We arranged ourselves counterclockwise and concentrated on maintaining our space between the other dancers. The great power of Tessa, at first exhilarating, gave way to apprehension, as though I were riding an unruly horse, and when I failed to comprehend the crossover steps as required by Dulce, Tessa, a determined expression on her face, used her might to drag me into position. To avoid humiliation, I attached myself by my wiry grasp to her flying carcass. Her cry of alarm brought Dulce to our side and the other dancers to a dead halt just as I was beginning to enjoy myself.
“Señor! Grappling has no place in our national dance!”
“I cannot follow her movements,” I explained in an accent accommodatingly identical to Dulce’s, which I found infectious.
“You are not to follow — you are to lead!”
“It’s my fault,” Tessa said. “I lost patience with him during the first abrazo. He just seemed lost. I’ll try to do better.”
“Perhaps, this is the time to work on our syncopation,” Dulce said sternly to both of us, “with greater respect for the movements of each other.”
“The music is unfamiliar,” I explained. “You don’t happen to have ‘La Bamba’?” He held his head and moaned as though he’d been shot.
The other couples had deftly caught on to the oddly triangular chests-together, feet-apart position. An older pair of bottle blonds, obviously trained in other kinds of ballroom dance, made an effort to slide past us. The woman had a fixed and toothy Rockettes smile, and at close range she caught my eye and called out, “Piece of cake!”
I gave Dulce my word that I would syncopate respectfully, and I proceeded in earnest. At first, Tessa complimented me on my “good hustle,” but she soon proved unequal to my speed and dexterity. Whatever had been going on in my life up to that point came out in my tango, and the exultation I began to experience was interrupted only when Tessa let out a real showstopper of a screech. Then Dulce came between us and made the mistake of laying hands on me. Insofar as I retained a modicum of male pride, this quickly devolved into a dusty floor battle, with the raucous music of Argentina and the angry sounds of interference from the other students. With their help, I was flung into the street. “Good night, Doctor!” I realized that Tessa had told the others that I was already out of medical school and that she was no cradle robber.