Meatloaf in Manhattan (21 page)

Every Wednesday afternoon from then on Micky took to sitting in the car park of Dr Benteen's practice, watching for Joanne to arrive and leave. He'd park his car just out of sight of the entrance so that Joanne wouldn't spot him. During the hour of the session he would torture himself by wondering what was going on behind the closed door and drawn curtains. He imagined the worst and the pain grew more exquisite as a result of his imaginings. Not once did he mention any of this to Joanne, nor did he tell her what he had heard and seen on their wedding day.

Afterwards he would drive off to meet up with Big Steve to go ten-pin bowling and drink beer. It was their Wednesday night ritual that had bonded them together for two decades. Maybe it was because of what happened at the wedding reception, a remembrance, an anchoring, or perhaps it was just the way Big Steve told the story, but Micky found himself asking more questions about the life and times of Buffalo Bill. When he listened to the tales of scouting and wilderness Micky's pain and sorrow abated, even sometimes completely disappeared. Like a before, rather than an after. He'd listen, as if in a trance, imagining the herds of buffalo galloping across the hard-baked ground. He'd smell the heat and dust billowing all around. I'll lend you my books if you like, said Big Steve, you seem to have gotten something of an obsession with this guy. When Micky looked slightly alarmed at the thought, Big Steve said: a healthy obsession, I would say, on the scale of obsessiveness, that is. Nothing wrong with a healthy obsession. Nothing at all.

He's just getting stranger, said Joanne to her cousin Dawn. We hardly speak. If the truth were known he's been odd ever since I married him. It's like he's living on another planet. This cowboy thing is totally weird. He's taken to dressing up and going horse riding with Big Steve. He sometimes goes off at weekends and I don't see him until late Sunday night. He says it relaxes him. Takes him out of himself. I don't know what to think. Big kids, said Dawn, dunking her shortbread biscuit in her coffee, men, just big kids in bigger pants. And, said Joanne in a hushed tone, he's not interested in the bedroom department, never has been really. Now that's another story, said Dawn, looking pensively out of the window, the end of her biscuit softening and dropping silently into her coffee.

Dr Benteen will see you now, said the receptionist. Over the last six months Micky had grown a beard and moustache and let his hair grow down to his shoulder. When he'd booked for an appointment he'd given his name as Buffalo Bill. The receptionist had shown little surprise, but had asked him to spell it out, just so there'd be no mistakes. He was paying as a private patient, in hard cash and Dr Benteen had no objections to a little eccentricity: especially not this variety. In fact, amongst the local psychiatric fraternity he was renowned and respected for taking on unusual and novel cases.

For the first two sessions Micky said nothing, not a word. Nor did Dr Benteen. Micky just stared at Dr Benteen and Dr Benteen stared back. Halfway through the third session, Dr Benteen asked Micky if he'd like to lie on the couch. Without being quite sure why he did it, Micky stood up from the chair then lay down as directed. Micky liked the soft coldness of the brown leather. He felt relaxed and at ease, looking up at the ceiling, making out all the cracks and crinkles. Did you know, he heard his voice saying, that Buffalo Bill's father was killed when he was young boy? Murdered for speaking out in favour of the abolition of slavery.

And that's where they began, the psychiatrist and his new patient and the talk of the Wild West. So, said the psychiatrist, midway through their fourth weekly session, tell me more of your thoughts about what Buffalo Bill means to you. He seems to figure large in the furniture of your mind. Micky twirled his luxuriant moustache and stroked his flowing locks. When I think about Buffalo Bill, said Micky, his life on the plains, his tracking and scouting, it's as if I'm another person, in another life. And what does that mean to you? asked Dr Benteen, to be in another life? Micky thought long and hard before answering. Buffalo Bill, said Micky, is my guardian angel. He is my saviour. Dr Benteen stayed quiet, stroked his chin, then rubbed the tip of his nose.

He knew who this man was. This new client who called himself Buffalo Bill. He was the husband of the wife who laid down on the couch in this same room and cried out her unhappiness, her lack of satisfaction, her disappointment in all things marriage. Only last week it was he, Dr Benteen, who had listened to her pleas for freedom, her longing for release. Oh yes, even if this man did not know who Dr Benteen was, Dr Benteen knew this man and knew more of him than he knew of himself. And, no, thought Dr Benteen, this was not yet the moment to be disclosing any secrets of his own.

Micky changed his name by deed poll. By now he'd read everything he could find out about Buffalo Bill, seen every film, searched the archives for footage and photos. He felt such an affinity, such a completeness. Micky too had lost his father as a small child, not murdered by a lynch mob as had happened to Bill, but the drunken driver of the car that hit his father's truck at the crossroads produced the same result: a fatherless child. Like Bill's, Micky's life had been one of wandering and uncertainty. Joanne and marriage had seemed to offer an anchor, but maybe that was just a notion, an ideal that had no real currency for him. What he now knew was that at night he often dreamed of landscapes he could only imagine, of scouting missions and Sioux Indians on the warpath. He'd wake and taste the prairie in his mouth, feel the tiredness of the trail in his bones.

Every weekend he'd dress up in his cowboy gear and join up with a group of Big Steve's friends. They'd drive way out of town to secluded spots: woodland and hilltops. There they'd act out events, or else just set up camp by a stream, tie up the horses and live the lives that pulled them back down the centuries. When Joanne moved out to her cousin's place he sold the house and gave her half the proceeds. He quit his job and determined to live on his savings, embracing completely his new identity. He found a tailor who made him a suit of clothes copied from an 1876 photo of Buffalo Bill in a town in Kansas he had built in the middle of nowhere: the scheme that was to make him his fortune, but was then literally taken away from under his nose and moved closer to the new railroad track.

In this session, said Dr Benteen in a calm but authoritative voice, I will use suggestion and hypnotism, to unlock, to unleash, some of the mysteries that you hold within. Micky (aka Buffalo Bill), when he came to recount what happened next, would always begin with the preamble: this was the most extraordinary thing that I've ever experienced. Micky lay still and quiet on the couch, the very same couch where Joanne had so often writhed in her unhappiness and lack of fulfillment. He had no idea what to expect, but he could hear the soft tones of Dr Benteen's voice and was aware of an overwhelming desire to sleep.

Before he knew it he was swept back in time. The Great Plains, the blue shirts of the cavalry, the markings in the dust that told him so much, were all real in a way he had barely imagined, never quite envisaged. Most of all, exquisitely so, he knew that he was indeed Buffalo Bill. In body and spirit, not just in mind and imagination. In whatever span of time he was under this spell he travelled vast tracks of land, explored huge moments of experience. Then, sometime later, somewhere later, he could hear, in the distance, the voice of Dr Benteen calling him back from his incredible adventure. On the count of five. One … two … three … four … five. And then he opened his eyes. There above his head the blades of the fan turned rhythmically around, as if tracking his progress. Now look up and see me, said Dr Benteen in a tone of a voice, a Texan drawl, that Micky barely recognised. When he glanced up, he saw not Dr Benteen, but the hazy outline of a figure from far away. Do you know who I am Bill? he asked. With but little hesitation, Micky replied with the broadest of smiles: Yes, I'm pretty sure I do. Indeed, I know I know you.

Joanne was true to the promise she'd made to herself, to her cousin, and most of all to her psychiatrist. She filed for divorce and bought herself a small apartment in the city where she could pick up her life. It was like living with a stranger, a freak, she said as she stared up at the fan twirling on the ceiling, the comforting, reassuring presence of Dr Benteen just behind her, only just out of sight. As was his wont, he said nothing; but his being there was more than enough for Joanne. Two months later she answered an advertisement in the lonely hearts section of the Sunday paper and found, in the older man with a love for adventure mixed with cosy nights around an open fire, the constant companion she'd been yearning for.

Winter had set in. Dr Benteen's consulting rooms were cold and Micky was glad of the kid-leather gloves he wore. Lying on the couch in his full Buffalo Bill regalia he felt complete, contented. Who did you see? asked Dr Benteen. Who did you recognise? When you woke up? This was the first time the psychiatrist had referred to the hypnotism session. It was General Custer I saw, said Micky without hesitation. I remember him from the buffalo hunt with the Grand Duke Alexis. It was I who took the first Indian scalp after he was slain at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. That was more than enough evidence for Dr Benteen. Follow me, he said, it's time for my secret.

So Micky stood up from the couch and walked behind Dr Benteen, back along the corridor he knew so well, the one that ran from the front door to the consulting room at the back of the house. This way, said Dr Benteen, as he opened a door to the left. The door led to a steep staircase that spiralled down to a cellar below. When Dr Benteen switched on the light Micky gasped at the splendour laid out in the room below. Amidst the glass cases displaying yellowing diaries and crumpled letters stood full-sized mannequins. Two were dressed in the ceremonial robes of great Sioux and Cherokee chiefs. Standing alongside them were figures adorned in the blue uniforms of colonels from the US cavalry, flanked by scouts with their buffalo skin coats and raccoon hats.

Dr Benteen looked on in silence as Micky moved from one exhibit to another. He smiled at the younger man's obvious delight and interest in all he saw. He watched keenly as Micky looked up at a row of black-and-white photographs that hung on the wall. They showed pictures of Custer's Last Stand, the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Micky examined each closely, slowly coming to recognise the features of the man dressed as the general. Custer? he said, looking at Dr Benteen. Yes, Custer, the man of your dreams, said Dr Benteen with a loving smile.

A year later to the day, at their wedding, or civil ceremony as the authorities still insisted on calling it, Micky and Dr Benteen swapped vows dressed as Buffalo Bill and Colonel Custer. The hockey sticks of Micky's previous big day were replaced by an arch of Winchester 73 rifles held high by the local re-enactment group. Over the previous months the two had grown closer and intimate, confiding tales and confidences that could be shared with no others. Their complicity grew into love, deep and enduring. To the outside world, at least in the small country town where they lived, both came out as something different, something above the ordinary.

And, to give the world its due, in a place of hatred and monsters, distorted egos and greed, it found a way to accept them, to allow them their place. Dr Benteen continued in his practice, much sought after by the misfits, the misunderstood, those on the margin who struggle and tumble through life. Micky set up a store in town that specialised in clothes and artefacts from the Wild West. And, just as Buffalo Bill had done more than a hundred years earlier, he produced and directed re-enactments and tableaux that toured, to much acclaim, festivals and fetes in the towns round about. And so, with time, they grew together into older age, forever talking, forever reminiscing.

But never once did they speak of Micky's and Joanne's wedding and how the psychiatrist appeared uninvited, unannounced. Not even once.

Also by Robert Power

In Search of the Blue Tiger

Robert Power

9781921924163

Transit Lounge Trade PB 336pp

Also available as an e-book

‘This is a marvellously surprising and rewarding work. By turns precociously clever and darkly disturbing, eleven-year old Oscar Flower's quest for the mythical blue tiger takes the reader on a transformative journey that challenges one's expectations.'

Liam Davison, author of
The White Woman
and
The Betrayal

Oscar Flowers is on a quest to make sense of the strange world of adults that surround him in the seaside town of Tidetown. The bizarre behaviour of his parents and great aunt impels him to search for the blue tiger, a powerful and beautiful animal that will save his family from themselves. Mrs April, the town's librarian helps Oscar in his pursuit of knowledge and generously shares her great love of books with him. A deep and wondrous friendship develops. Yet as Oscar falls under the influence of his peers, the fishmonger's peculiar twin daughters, Perch and Carp, he becomes embroiled in a dark crime of vengeance with seemingly disastrous consequences.