A real cowboy shows me the ropes

We never knew exactly what Mr. Fishman did, for a living or anything else. All we knew about Mr. Fishman was that he wore a black raincoat in the summer and he went to Arizona in the winter.

Oh, and we also knew that he had four beautiful daughters: Helen, Rose, Tina, and Gloria, from top to bottom. The Fishmans, including Mrs. Fishman, of course, lived across the street, one house over. They had the lower flat. The upper flat was home to the Cohens, featuring Beverly, known as Bubbles, and her younger sister, Rhoda.

Arizona, which was barely through its second generation of statehood at the time, was as remote a concept to ordinary Midwesterners as was the Belgian Congo. We knew Arizona only from cowboy movies. If called upon to draw a picture of Arizona, we'd sketch a cactus or a cow. (What Grand Canyon?)

Why Mr. Fishman went there and the nature of his Arizona activities never were clear. (Though I'd once heard some talk about nice dry heat.) Was Mr. Fishman dabbling in ranch lands and oil fields? Was he buying cattle futures? Who knows.

When he came home each spring, did he bring the missus and his four pretties cartons of lavish gifts - bounty from his Western adventures? Who knows. What I do know was that one spring he brought home a cowboy.

Bob the Cowboy wore blue denim jeans, the work pants of the West. They, like cowboys generally, were only Hollywood stuff to us then, nothing in our daily lives.

Bob's boots had raised heels, designed to keep them in the stirrups. But a man in high heels traveling through our provincial world could generate some snickering no matter how rugged his appearance or his work might be.

Now, if we didn't know what Mr. Fishman did at home or in Arizona, we certainly didn't know what Bob the Cowboy's role in Mr. Fishman's life was. Did he work for Mr. Fishman? Was he Mr. Fishman's adopted son? Perhaps a feral child who'd been abandoned at the side of the trail as a wagon train slogged toward the new American dream? Who knows.

What I do know is that Bob the Cowboy talked like Gary Cooper. "Yep" and "Nope" just about got him through the day, with the occasional elaboration of "OK." Special situations might evoke a traditional "Howdy," "Adios," or "Thank you, ma'am."

"Say," I said to Bob the Cowboy one day, "you're a real cowboy, so I'll bet you can twirl a rope. Just like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry."

"Yep," he said.

I asked if he'd show me, and he said he didn't have a lariat. If I could get him some rope, he said, even just a chunk of clothesline, he'd give it a try.

First he tied a special open-eye knot at one end, explaining that the rope had to move freely through this noose, yet not so loosely as to be uncontrollable. Then he passed the other end through the eye, pulling the loop closed to make a circle about five or six feet across.

"Like this," he said gripping the rope just behind the eye and letting the rest lie softly across the palm of his other hand. "Like this," he said, pulling his arm back to the side, as if to throw a ball and then snapping the loop across the waist-high space in front of him. Then he circled his hand as if winding a giant horizontal wheel. The loop of clothesline spun while the free end continually untwisted itself.

Not much of a smiler, Bob the Cowboy answered my astonishment with the slimmest of grins. "Watch," he said, driving the loop into elevating and descending spins.

"Watch," he said, backing two sidewalk squares away from me and sending the circle spinning toward me and around me. He pulled the rope, tightening the loop that now pinned my upper arms. "Calf ready for branding," he said.

The next day, seeing me out on my front lawn trying to duplicate his twirling, he walked across the street and reached for the rope in my hands. "It's that first move," he said, snapping the rope sharply and cleanly into a spin. "If you don't start sharp and clean, you can't get a good loop. Won't twirl."

By the end of summer, when Bob was ready to head back to Arizona, no doubt to await Mr. Fishman's autumnal arrival, he offered to review my twirling. "Good," he said, as I started with a sharp, clean snap, raised and lowered the loop, and then spun it around his shoulders. "Good," he said. "That'll catch you a little filly."

Bob left on the westbound train the next day. I sat on the front steps with a coil of clothesline at my feet. Once clean and ivory-colored, it was now stained with the oil of my hands and the soil of scores of errant scrapings along the ground.

Would I ever see him again and hear more stories about riding the range? Was I the only 14-year-old east of the Mississippi who could twirl a lariat? Was Rhoda Cohen a little filly for catching?