Читать книгу Close Range: Brokeback Mountain and other stories - Annie Proulx, Энни Пру - Страница 8

RODEO NIGHT IN A HOT LITTLE OKIE TOWN AND Diamond Felts was inside a metal chute a long way from the scratch on Wyoming dirt he named as home, sitting on the back of bull 82N, a loose-skinned brindle Brahma-cross identified in the program as Little Kisses. There was a sultry feeling of weather. He kept his butt cocked to one side, his feet up on the chute rails so the bull couldn’t grind his leg, brad him up, so that if it thrashed he could get over the top in a hurry. The time came closer and he slapped his face forcefully, bringing the adrenaline roses up on his cheeks, glanced down at his pullers and said, “I guess.” Rito, neck gleaming with sweat, caught the free end of the bull-rope with a metal hook, brought it delicately to his hand from under the bull’s belly, climbed up the rails and pulled it taut.

“Aw, this’s a sumbuck,” he said. “Give you the sample card.”

Diamond took the end, made his wrap, brought the rope around the back of his hand and over the palm a second time, wove it between his third and fourth fingers, pounded the rosined glove fingers down over it and into his palm. He laid the tail of the rope across the bull’s back and looped the excess, but it wasn’t right—everything had gone a little slack. He undid the wrap and started over, making the loop smaller, waiting while they pulled again and in the arena a clown fired a pink cannon, the fizzing discharge diminished by a deep stir of thunder from the south, Texas T-storm on the roll.

Night perfs had their own hot charge, the glare, the stiff-legged parade of cowboy dolls in sparkle-fringed chaps into the arena, the spotlight that bucked over the squinting contestants and the half-roostered crowd. They were at the end of the night now, into the bullriding, with one in front of him. The bull beneath him breathed, shifted roughly. A hand, fingers outstretched, came across his right shoulder and against his chest, steadying him. He did not know why a bracing hand eased his chronic anxiety. But, in the way these things go, that was when he needed twist, to auger him through the ride.

In the first go-round he’d drawn a bull he knew and got a good scald on him. He’d been in a slump for weeks, wire stretched tight, but things were turning back his way. He’d come off that animal in a flying dismount, sparked a little clapping that quickly died; the watchers knew as well as he that if he burst into flames and sang an operatic aria after the whistle it would make no damn difference.

He drew o.k. bulls and rode them in the next rounds, scores in the high seventies, fixed his eyes on the outside shoulder of the welly bull that tried to drop him, then at the short-go draw he pulled Kisses, rank and salty, big as a boxcar of coal. On that one all you could do was your best and hope for a little sweet luck; if you got the luck he was money.

The announcer’s galvanized voice rattled in the speakers above the enclosed arena. “Now folks, it ain’t the Constitution or the Bill a Rights that made this a great country. It was God who created the mountains and plains and the evenin sunset and put us here and let us look at them. Amen and God bless the Markin flag. And right now we got a bullrider from Redsled, Wyomin, twenty-three-year-old Diamond Felts, who might be wonderin if he’ll ever see that beautiful scenery again. Folks, Diamond Felts weighs one hundred and thirty pounds. Little Kisses weighs two thousand ten pounds, he is a big, big bull and he is thirty-eight and one, last year’s Dodge City Bullriders’ choice. Only one man has stayed on this big bad bull’s back for eight seconds and that was Marty Casebolt at Reno, and you better believe that man got all the money. Will he be rode tonight? Folks, we’re goin a find out in just a minute, soon as our cowboy’s ready. And listen at that rain, folks, let’s give thanks we’re in a enclosed arena or it would be deep mud below.”

Diamond glanced back at the flank man, moved up on his rope, nodded, jerking his head up and down rapidly. “Let’s go, let’s go.”

The chute door swung open and the bull squatted, leaped into the waiting silence and a paroxysm of twists, belly-rolls and spins, skipping, bucking and whirling, powerful drop, gave him the whole menu.

Diamond Felts, a constellation of moles on his left cheek, dark hair cropped to the skull, was more than good-looking when cleaned up and combed, in fresh shirt and his neckerchief printed with blue stars, but for most of his life he had not known it. Five-foot three, rapping, tapping, nail-biting, he radiated unease. A virgin at eighteen—not many of either sex in his senior class in that condition—his tries at changing the situation went wrong and as far as his despairing thought carried him, always would go wrong in the forest of tall girls. There were small women out there, but it was the six-footers he mounted in the privacy of his head.

All his life he had heard himself called Half-Pint, Baby Boy, Shorty, Kid, Tiny, Little Guy, Sawed-Off. His mother never let up, always had the needle ready, even the time when she had come into the upstairs hall and caught him stepping naked from the bathroom; she had said, “Well, at least you didn’t get shortchanged that way, did you?”

In the spring of his final year of school he drummed his fingers on Wallace Winter’s pickup listening to its swan-necked owner pump up a story, trying for the laugh, when a knothead they knew only as Leecil—god save the one who said Lucille—walked up and said, “Either one a you want a work this weekend? The old man’s fixin a brand and he’s short-handet. Nobody wants to, though.” He winked his dime-size eyes. His blunt face was corrugated with plum-colored acne and among the angry swellings grew a few blond whiskers. Diamond couldn’t see how he shaved without bleeding to death. The smell of livestock was strong.

“He sure picked the wrong weekend,” said Wallace. “Basketball game, parties, fucking, drinking, drugs, car wrecks, cops, food poisoning, fights, hysterical parents. Didn’t you tell him?”

“He didn’t ast me. Tolt me get some guys. Anyway it’s good weather now. Stormt the weekend for a month.” Leecil spit.

Wallace pretended serious consideration. “Scratch the weekend I guess we get paid.” He winked at Diamond who grimaced to tell him that Leecil was not one to be teased.

“Yeah, six per, you guys. Me and my brothers got a work for nothin, for the ranch. Anyway, we give-or-take quit at suppertime, so you can still do your stuff. Party, whatever.” He wasn’t going to any town blowout.

“I never did ranch work,” Diamond said. “My momma grew up on a ranch and hated it. Only took us up there once and I bet we didn’t stay an hour,” remembering an expanse of hoof-churned mud, his grandfather turning away, a muscular, sweaty Uncle John in chaps and a filthy hat swatting him on the butt and saying something to his mother that made her mad.

“Don’t matter. It’s just work. Git the calves into the chute, brand em, fix em, vaccinate em, git em out.”

“Fix em,” said Diamond.

Leecil made an eloquent gesture at his crotch.

“It could be very weirdly interesting,” said Wallace. “I got something that will make it weirdly interesting.”

“You don’t want a git ironed out too much, have to lay down in the mud,” said Leecil severely.

“No,” said Wallace. “I fucking don’t want to do that. O.k., I’m in. What the hell.”

Diamond nodded.

Leecil cracked his mouthful of perfect teeth. “Know where our place is at? There’s a bunch a different turnoffs. Here’s how you go,” and he drew a complicated map on the back of a returned quiz red-marked F. That solved one puzzle; Leecil’s last name was Bewd. Wallace looked at Diamond. The Bewd tribe, scattered from Pahaska to Pine Bluffs, filled a double-X space in the local pantheon of troublemakers.

“Seven a.m.,” said Leecil.

Diamond turned the map over and looked at the quiz. Cattle brands fine-drawn with a sharp pencil filled the answer spaces; they gave the sheet of paper a kind of narrow-minded authority.

The good weather washed out. The weekend was a windy, overcast cacophony of bawling, manure-caked animals, mud, dirt, lifting, punching the needle, the stink of burning hair that he thought would never get out of his nose. Two crotchscratchers from school showed up; Diamond had seen them around, but he did not know them and thought of them as losers for no reason but that they were inarticulate and lived out on dirt road ranches; friends of Leecil. Como Bewd, a grizzled man wearing a kidney belt, pointed this way and that as Leecil and his brothers worked the calves from pasture to corral to holding pen to branding chute and the yellow-hot electric iron, to cutting table where ranch hand Lovis bent forward with his knife and with the other hand pulled the skin of the scrotum tight over one testicle and made a long, outside cut through skin and membrane, yanked out the hot balls, dropped them into a bucket and waited for the next calf. The dogs sniffed around, the omnipresent flies razzed and turmoiled, three saddled horses shifted from leg to leg under a tree and occasionally nickered.

Diamond glanced again and again at Como Bewd. The man’s forehead showed a fence of zigzag scars like white barbwire. He caught the stare and winked.

“Lookin at my decorations? My brother run over me with his truck when I was your age. Took the skin off from ear to here. I was all clawed up. I was scalloped.”

They finished late Sunday afternoon and Como Bewd counted out their pay carefully and slowly, added an extra five to each pile, said they’d done a pretty fair job, then, to Leecil, said, “How about it?”

“You want a have some fun?” said Leecil Bewd to Diamond and Wallace. The others were already walking to a small corral some distance away.

“Like what,” said Wallace.

Diamond had a flash that there was a woman in the corral.

“Bullridin. Dad’s got some good buckin bulls. Our rodeo class come out last month and rode em. Couldn’t hardly stay on one of em.”

“I’ll watch,” said Wallace, in his ironic side-of-the-mouth voice.

Diamond considered rodeo classes the last resort of concrete-heads who couldn’t figure out how to hold a basketball. He’d taken martial arts and wrestling all the way through until they spiked both courses as frills. “Oh man,” he said. “Bulls. I don’t guess so.”

Leecil Bewd ran ahead to the corral. There was a side pen and in it were three bulls, two of them pawing dirt. At the front of the pen a side-door chute opened into the corral. One of the crotchscratchers was in the arena, jumping around, ready to play bullfighter and toll a bull away from a tossed rider.

To Diamond the bulls looked murderous and wild, but even the ranch hands had a futile go at riding them, Lovis scraped off on the fence; Leecil’s father, bounced down in three seconds, hit the ground on his behind, the kidney belt riding up his chest.

“Try it,” said Leecil, mouth bloody from a face slam, spitting.

“Aw, not me,” said Wallace. “I got a life in front of me.”

“Yeah,” said Diamond. “Yeah, I guess I’ll give it a go.”

“Atta boy, atta boy,” said Como Bewd, and handed him a rosined left glove. “Ever been on a bull?”

“No sir,” said Diamond, no boots, no spurs, no chaps, T-shirted and hatless. Leecil’s old man told him to hold his free hand up, not to touch the bull or himself with it, keep his shoulders forward and his chin down, hold on with his feet and legs and left hand, above all not to think, and when he got bucked off, no matter what was broke, get up quick and run like hell for the fence. He helped him make the wrap, ease down on the animal, said, shake your face and git out there, and grinning, blood-speckled Lovis opened the chute door, waiting to see the town kid dumped and dive-bombed.

But he stayed on until someone counting eight hit the rail with the length of pipe to signal time. He flew off, landed on his feet, stumbling headlong but not falling, in a run for the rails. He hauled himself up, panting from the exertion and the intense nervy rush. He’d been shot out of the cannon. The shock of the violent motion, the lightning shifts of balance, the feeling of power as though he were the bull and not the rider, even the fright, fulfilled some greedy physical hunger in him he hadn’t known was there. The experience had been exhilarating and unbearably personal.

“You know what,” said Como Bewd. “You might make a bullrider.”

Redsled, on the west slope of the divide, was fissured with thermal springs which attracted tourists, snowmobilers, skiers, hot and dusty ranch hands, banker bikers dropping fifty-dollar tips. It was the good thing about Redsled, the sulfurous, hellish smell and the wet heat buzzing him until he could not stand it, got out and ran to the river, falling into its dark current with banging heart.

“Let’s hit the springs,” he said on the way back, still on the adrenaline wave, needing something more.

“No,” said Wallace, his first word in an hour. “I got something to do.”

“Drop me off and go on home then,” he said.

In the violent water, leaning against the slippery rocks, he replayed the ride, the feeling his life had doubled in size. His pale legs wavered under the water, pinprick air beads strung along each hair. Euphoria ran through him like blood, he laughed, remembered he had been on a bull before. He was five years old and they took a trip somewhere, he and his mother and, in those lost days, his father who was still his father, brought him in the afternoons to a county fair with a merry-go-round. He was crazy about the merry-go-round, not for the broad spin which made him throw up, nor for the rear view of the fiberglass horses with their swelled buttocks and the sinister holes where the ends of the nylon tails had been secured before vandals jerked them out, but for the glossy little black bull, the only bull among the ruined horses, tail intact, red saddle and smiling eyes, the eye shine depicted by a painted wedge of white. His father had lifted him on and stood with his hand reaching across Diamond’s shoulder, steadying him as the bull went up and down and the galloping music played.

Monday morning on the schoolbus he went for Leecil sitting in the back with one of the crotchscratchers. Leecil touched thumb and forefinger in a circle, winked.

“I need to talk to you. I want to know how to get into it. The bullriding. Rodeo.”

“Don’t think so,” said the crotchscratcher. “First time you git stacked up you’ll yip for mama.”

“He won’t,” said Leecil, and to Diamond, “You bet it ain’t no picnic. Don’t look for a picnic—you are goin a git tore up.”

It turned out that it was a picnic and he did get tore up.

His mother, Kaylee Felts, managed a tourist store, one of a chain headquartered in Denver: HIGH WEST—Vintage Cowboy Gear, Western Antiques, Spurs, Collectibles. Diamond had helped open boxes, dust showcases, wire-brush crusty spurs since he was twelve and she told him there was probably a place in the business for him after college, one of the other stores if he wanted to see the world. He thought it was his choice but when he told her he was going to bullriding school in California she blew up.

“No. You can’t. You’re going to college. What is this, some kid thing you kept to yourself all this time? I worked like a fool to bring you boys up in town, get you out of the mud, give you a chance to make something out of yourselves. You’re just going to throw everything away to be a rodeo bum? My god, whatever I try to do for you, you kick me right in the face.”

“Well, I’m going to rodeo,” he answered. “I’m going to ride bulls.”

“You little devil,” she said. “You’re doing this to spite me and I know it. You are just hateful. You’re not going to get any cheerleading from me on this one.”

“That’s all right,” he said. “I don’t need it.”

“Oh, you need it,” she said. “You need it, all right. Don’t you get it, rodeo’s for ranch boys who don’t have the good opportunities you do? The stupidest ones are the bullriders. We get them in the shop every week trying to sell us those pot-metal buckles or their dirty chaps.”

“Doing it,” he said. It could not be explained.

“I can’t stop a train,” she said. “You’re a royal pain, Shorty, and you always were. Grief from day one. You make this bed you’ll lie in it. I mean it. You’ve got the stubbornness in you,” she said, “like him. You’re just like him, and that’s no compliment.”

Shut the fuck up, he thought, but didn’t say it. He wanted to tell her she could give that set of lies a rest. He was nothing like him, and could not ever be.

“Don’t call me Shorty,” he said.

At the California bullriding school he rode forty animals in a week, invested in a case of sports tape, watched videos until he fell asleep sitting up. The instructor’s tireless nasal voice called, push on it, you can’t never think you’re goin a lose, don’t look into the well, find your balance point, once you’re tapped, get right back into the pocket, don’t never quit.

Back in Wyoming he found a room in Cheyenne, a junk job, bought his permit and started running the Mountain Circuit. He made his PRCA ticket in a month, thought he was in sweet clover. Somebody told him it was beginner’s luck. He ran into Leecil Bewd at almost every rodeo, got drunk with him twice, and, after a time of red-eye solo driving, always broke, too much month and not enough money, they hooked up and traveled together, riding the jumps, covering bulls from one little rodeo to another, eating road dust. He had chosen this rough, bruising life with its confused philosophies of striving to win and apologizing for it when he did, but when he got on there was the dark lightning in his gut, a feeling of blazing real existence.

Leecil drove a thirty-year-old Chevrolet pickup with a bent frame, scabbed and bondo’d, rewired, re-engined, remufflered, a vehicle with a strong head that pulled fiercely to the right. It broke down at mean and crucial times. Once, jamming for Colorado Springs, it quit forty miles short. They leaned under the hood.

“Shoot, I hate pawin around in these goddamn greasy guts, all of a whatness to me. How come you don’t know nothin about cars neither?”

“Just lucky.”

A truck pulled up behind them, calf roper Sweets Musgrove riding shotgun and his pigtailed wife Neve driving. Sweets got out. He was holding a baby in pink rompers.

“Trouble?”

“Can’t tell if it’s trouble. Both so ignorant it might be good news and we wouldn’t know it.”

“I do this for a paycheck,” said Musgrove getting under the hood with his baby and pulling at the truck’s intestinal wires. “Had to live on rodeo we couldn’t make the riffle, could we, baby?” Neve sauntered over, scratched a match on her boot sole and lit a cigarette, leaned on Musgrove.

“You want a knife?” said Leecil. “Cut the sumbuck?”

“You’re getting your baby dirty,” said Diamond, wishing Neve would take it.

“I rather have a greasy little girl than a lonesome baby, mhhmhhmhh?” he said into the baby’s fat neck. “Try startin it now.” It didn’t go and there wasn’t any time to waste fooling with it.

“You can’t both squeeze in with us and my mare don’t like sharin her trailer. But that don’t mean pig pee because there’s a bunch a guys comin on. Somebody’ll pick you up. You’ll get there.” He jammed a mouthguard—pink, orange and purple—over his teeth and grinned at his charmed baby.

Four bullriders with two buckle bunnies in a convertible gathered them up and one of the girls pressed against Diamond from shoulder to ankle the whole way. He got to the arena in a visible mood to ride but not bulls.

It worked pretty well for a year and then Leecil quit. It had been a scorching, dirty afternoon at a Colorado fairgrounds, the showers dead and dry. Leecil squirted water from a gas station hose over his head and neck, drove with the window cranked down, the dry wind sucking up the moisture immediately. The venomous blue sky threw heat.

“Two big jumps, wrecked in time to git stepped on. Man, he ate me. Out a the money again. I sure wasn’t packin enough in my shorts today to ride that trash. Say what, the juice ain’t worth the squeeze. Made up my mind while I was rollin in the dirt. I used a think I wanted a rodeo more than anything,” said Leecil, “but shoot, I got a say I hate it, the travelin, traffic and stinkin motels, the rest of it. Tired a bein sored up all the time. I don’t got that thing you got, the style, the fuck-it-all-I-love-it thing. I miss the ranch bad. The old man’s on my mind. He got some medical problem, can’t hardly make his water good, told my brother there’s blood in his bull stuff. They’re doin tests. And there’s Renata. What I’m tryin a say is, I’m cuttin out on you. Anyway, guess what, goin a get married.” The flaring shadow of the truck sped along a bank cut.

“What do you mean? You knock Renata up?” It was all going at speed.

“Aw, yeah. It’s o.k.”

“Well shit, Leecil. Won’t be much fun now.” He was surprised that it was true. He knew he had little talent for friendship or affection, stood armored against love, though when it did come down on him later it came like an axe and he was slaughtered by it. “I never had a girl stick with me more than two hours. I don’t know how you get past that two hours,” he said.

Leecil looked at him.

He mailed a postcard of a big yellow bull on the charging run, ropes of saliva slung out from his muzzle, to his younger brother Pearl, but did not telephone. After Leecil quit he moved to Texas where there was a rodeo every night for a fast driver red-eyed from staring at pin headlights miles distant alternately dark and burning as the road swelled and fell away.

The second year he was getting some notice and making money until a day or so before the big Fourth of July weekend. He came off a great ride and landed hard on his feet with his right knee sharply flexed, tore the ligaments and damaged cartilage. He was a fast healer but it put him out for the summer. When he was off the crutches, bored and limping around on a cane, he thought about Redsled. The doctor said the hot springs might be a good idea. He picked up a night ride with Tee Dove, a Texas bullrider, the big car slingshot at the black hump of range, dazzle of morning an hour behind the rim, not a dozen words exchanged.

“It’s a bone game,” Tee Dove said and Diamond thought he meant injuries, nodded.

For the first time in two years he sat at his mother’s table. She said, “Bless this food, amen, oh boy, I knew you’d be back one of these days. And look at you. Just take a look at you. Like you climbed out of a ditch. Look at your hands,” she said. “They’re a mess. I suppose you’re broke.” She was dolled up, her hair long and streaked blond, crimped like Chinese noodles, her eyelids iridescent blue.

Diamond extended his fingers, turned his carefully scrubbed hands palm up, palm down, muscular hands with cut knuckles and small scars, two nails purple-black and lifting off at the base.

“They’re clean. And I’m not broke. Didn’t ask you for money, did I?”

“Oh, eat some salad,” she said. They ate in silence, forks clicking among the pieces of cucumber and tomato. He disliked cucumber. She got up, clattered small plates with gold rims onto the table, brought out a supermarket lemon meringue pie, began to cut it with the silver pie server.

“All right,” said Diamond, “calf-slobber pie.”

Pearl, his ten-year-old brother, let out a bark.

She stopped cutting and fixed him with a stare. “You can talk ugly when you’re with your rodeo bums, but when you are home keep your tongue decent.”

He looked at her, seeing the cold blame. “I’ll pass on that pie.”

“I think all of us will after that unforgettable image. You’ll want a cup of coffee.” She had forbidden it when he lived at home, saying it would stunt his growth. Now it was this powdered stuff in the jar.

“Yeah.” There wasn’t much point in getting into it his first night home but he wanted a cup of real blackjack, wanted to throw the fucking pie at the ceiling.

She went out then, some kind of western junk meeting at the Redsled Inn, sticking him with the dishes. It was as if he’d never left.

He came down late the next morning. Pearl was sitting at the kitchen table reading a comic book. He was wearing the T-shirt Diamond had sent. It read, Give Blood, Ride Bulls. It was too small.

“Momma’s gone to the shop. She said you should eat cereal, not eggs. Eggs have cholesterol. I saw you on t.v. once. I saw you get bucked off.”

Diamond fried two eggs in butter and ate them out of the pan, fried two more. He looked for coffee but there was only the jar of instant dust.

“I’m going to get a buckle like yours when I’m eighteen,” Pearl said. “And I’m not going to get bucked off because I’ll hold on with the grip of death. Like this.” And he made a white-knuckled fist.

“This ain’t a terrific buckle. I hope you get a good one.”

“I’m going to tell Momma you said ‘ain’t.’”

“For Christ sake, that’s how everybody talks. Except for one old booger steer roper. I could curl your hair. And I ain’t foolin. You want an egg?”

“I hate eggs. They aren’t good for you. Ain’t good for you. How does the old booger talk? Does he say ‘calf-slobber pie’?”

“Why do you think she buys eggs if nobody’s supposed to eat them? The old booger’s religious. Lot of prayers and stuff. Always reading pamphlets about Jesus. Actually he’s not old. He’s no older than me. He’s younger than me. He don’t never say ‘ain’t.’ He don’t say ‘shit’ or ‘fuck’ or ‘cunt’ or ‘prick’ or ‘goddamn.’ He says ‘good lord’ when he’s pissed off or gets slammed up the side of his head.”

Pearl laughed immoderately, excited by the forbidden words and low-down grammar spoken in their mother’s kitchen. He expected to see the floor tiles curl and smoke.

“Rodeo’s full of Jesus freaks. And double and triple sets of brothers. All kinds of Texas cousins. There’s some fucking strange guys in it. It’s like a magic show sometimes, all kinds of prayers and jujus and crosses and amulets and superstitions. Anybody does anything good, makes a good ride, it’s not them, it’s their mystical power connection helping them out. Guys from all over, Brazil, Canada, Australia dipping and bending, bowing heads, making signs.” He yawned, began to rub the bad knee, thinking about the sulfur water deep to his chin and blue sky overhead. “So, you’re going to hold on tight and not get bucked off?”

“Yeah. Really tight.”

“I’ll have to remember to try that,” said Diamond.

He called the Bewd ranch to give Leecil a hello but the number had been disconnected. Information gave him a Gillette number. He thought it strange but called throughout the day. There was no answer. He tried again late that night and got Leecil’s yawning croak.

“Hey, how come you’re not out at the ranch? How come the ranch number’s disconnected?” He heard the bad stuff coming before Leecil said anything.

“Aw, I’ll tell you what, that didn’t work out so good. When Dad died they valued the ranch, said we had a pay two million dollars in estate taxes. Two million dollars? That took the rag off the bush. We never had a pot to piss in, where was we supposed a get that kind a money for our own place that wasn’t nothin when Dad took it over? You know what beef is bringin? Fifty-five cents a pound. We went round and round on it. Come down to it we had to sell. Sick about it, hell, I’m red-assed. I’m up here workin in the mines. Tell you, there’s somethin wrong with this country.”

“That’s a dirty ride.”

“Yeah. It is. It’s been a dirty ride sinct I come back. Fuckin government.”

“But you must have got a bunch of money for the place.”

“Give my share to my brothers. They went up B.C. lookin for a ranch. It’s goin a take all the money buy it, stock it. Guess I’m thinkin about goin up there with em. Wyomin’s sure pulled out from under us. Hey, you’re doin good with the bulls. Once in a while I think I might git back in it, but I git over that idea quick.”

“I was doing o.k. until I messed up my knee. So what about your kid, was it a girl or a boy? I never heard. You didn’t pass out cigars.”

“You sure do ast the sore questions. That didn’t turn out too good neither and I don’t want to git into it just now. Done some things I regret. So, anyway, that’s what I been doin, goin a funerals, hospitals, divorce court and real estate closins. You make it up here this weekend, get drunk? My birthday. Goin a be twenty-four and I feel like I got mileage on for fifty.”

“Man, I can’t. My knee’s messed up enough I can’t drive. I’ll call you, I will call you.”

It could be the worst kind of luck to go near Leecil.

On Thursday night, sliding the chicken breasts into the microwave, she prodded Pearl to get the silverware. She whipped the dehydrated potatoes with hot water, put the food on the table and sat down, looked at Diamond.

“I smell sulfur,” she said. “Didn’t you take a shower after the springs?”

“Not this time,” he said.

“You reek.” She shook open her napkin.

“All rodeo cowboys got a little tang to em.”

“Cowboy? You’re no more a cowboy than you are a little leather-winged bat. My grandfather was a rancher and he hired cowboys or what passed for them. My father gave that up for cattle sales and he hired ranch hands. My brother was never anything but a son-of-a-bee. None of them were cowboys but all of them were more cowboy than a rodeo bullrider ever will be. After supper,” she said to Diamond, pushing the dish of pallid chicken breasts at him, “after supper I’ve got something I want you to see. We’ll just take us a little ride.”

“Can I come?” said Pearl.

“No. This is something I want your brother to see. Watch t.v. We’ll be back in an hour.”

“What is it,” said Diamond, remembering the dark smear on the street she had brought him to years before. She had pointed, said, he didn’t look both ways. He knew it would be something like that. The chicken breast lay on his plate like an inflated water wing. He should not have come back.

She drove through marginal streets, past the scrap-metal pile and the bentonite plant and, at the edge of town, crossed the railroad tracks where the road turned into rough dirt cutting through prairie. To the right, under a yellow sunset, stood several low metal buildings. The windows reflected the bright honey-colored west.

“Nobody here,” said Diamond, “wherever we are,” a kid again sitting in the passenger seat while his mother drove him around.

“Bar J stables. Don’t worry, there’s somebody here,” said his mother. Gold light poured over her hands on the steering wheel, her arms, splashed the edges of her crimped hair. Her face, in shadow, was private and severe. He saw the withering skin of her throat. She said, “Hondo Gunsch? You know that name?”

“No.” But he had heard it somewhere.

“Here,” she said, pulling up in front of the largest building. Thousands of insects barely larger than dust motes floated in the luteous air. She walked quickly, he followed, dotting along.

“Hello,” she called into the dark hallway. A light snapped on. A man in a white shirt, the pocket stiffened with a piece of plastic to hold his ballpoint pens, came through a door. Under his black hat, brim bent like the wings of a crow, was a face crowded with freckles, spectacles, beard and mustache.

“Hey there, Kaylee.” The man looked at her as though she were hot buttered toast.

“This is Shorty, wants to be a rodeo star. Shorty, this is Kerry Moore.”

Diamond shook the man’s hot hand. It was an exchange of hostilities.

“Hondo’s out in the tack room,” said the man, looking at her. He laughed. “Always in the tack room. He’d sleep there if we let him. Come on out here.”

He opened a door into a large, square room at the end of the stables. The last metaled light fell through high windows, gilding bridles and reins hanging on the wall. Along another wall a row of saddle racks projected, folded blankets resting on the shining saddles. A small refrigerator hummed behind the desk, and on the wall above it Diamond saw a framed magazine cover, Boots ’N Bronks, August 1960, showing a saddle bronc rider straight, square and tucked on a high-twisted horse, spurs raked all the way up to the cantle, his outflung arm in front of him. His hat was gone and his mouth open in a crazy smile. A banner read: Gunsch Takes Cheyenne SB Crown. The horse’s back was humped, his nose pointed down, hind legs straight in a powerful jump and five feet of daylight between the descending front hooves and ground.

In the middle of the room an elderly man worked leather cream into a saddle; he wore a straw hat with the brim rolled high on the sides in a way that emphasized his long head shape. There was something wrong in the set of the shoulders, the forward slope of his torso from the hips. The room smelled of apples and Diamond saw a basket of them on the floor.

“Hondo, we got visitors.” The man looked past them at nothing, showing the flat bulb of crushed nose, a dished cheekbone, the great dent above the left eye which seemed sightless. His mouth was still pursed with concentration. There was a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket. Emanating from him was a kind of carved-wood quietude common to those who have been a long time without sex, out of the traffic of the world.

“This here’s Kaylee Felts and Shorty, stopped by to say howdy. Shorty’s into rodeo. Guess you know something about rodeo, don’t you, Hondo?” He spoke loudly as though the man was deaf.

The bronc rider said nothing, his blue, sweet gaze returning to the saddle, the right hand holding a piece of lambswool beginning again to move back and forth over the leather.

“He don’t say much,” said Moore. “He has a lot of difficulty but he keeps tryin. He’s got plenty of try, haven’t you, Hondo?”

The man was silent, working the leather. How many years since he had spurred a horse’s shoulders, toes pointed east and west?

“Hondo, looks like you ought a change them sorry old floppy stirrup leathers one day,” said Moore in a commanding tone. The bronc rider gave no sign he had heard.

“Well,” said Diamond’s mother after a long minute of watching the sinewy hands, “it was wonderful to meet you, Hondo. Good luck.” She glanced at Moore, and Diamond could see a message fly but did not know their language.

They walked outside, the man and woman together, Diamond following, so deeply angry he staggered.

“Yeah. He’s kind a deaf, old Hondo. He was a hot saddle bronc rider on his way to the top. Took the money two years runnin at Cheyenne. Then, some dinky little rodeo up around Meeteetse, his horse threw a fit in the chute, went over backwards, Hondo went down, got his head stepped on. Oh, 1961, and he been cleanin saddles for the Bar J since then. Thirty-seven years. That’s a long, long time. He was twenty-six when it happened. Smart as anybody. Well, you rodeo, you’re a rooster on Tuesday, feather duster on Wednesday. But like I say, he’s still got all the try in the world. We sure think a lot a Hondo.”

They stood silently watching Diamond get into the car.

“I’ll call you,” said the man and she nodded.

Diamond glared out the car window at the plain, the railroad tracks, the pawnshop, the Safeway, the Broken Arrow bar, Custom Cowboy, the vacuum cleaner shop. The topaz light reddened, played out. The sun was down and a velvety dusk coated the street, the bar neons spelling good times.

As she turned onto the river road she said, “I would take you to see a corpse to get you out of rodeo.”

“You won’t take me to see anything again.”

The glassy black river flowed between dim willows. She drove very slowly.

“My god,” she shouted suddenly, “what you’ve cost me!”

“What! What have I cost you?” The words shot out like flame from the mouth of a fire-eater.

The low beams of cars coming toward them in the dusk lit the wet run of her tears. There was no answer until she turned into the last street, then, in a guttural, adult woman’s voice, raw and deep, as he had never heard it, she said, “You hard little man—everything.”

He was out of the car before it stopped, limping up the stairs, stuffing clothes in his duffel bag, not answering Pearl.

“Diamond, you can’t go yet. You were going to stay for two weeks. You only been here four days. We were going to put up a bucking barrel. We didn’t talk about Dad. Not one time.”

He had told Pearl many lies beginning “Dad and me and you, when you were a baby”—that was the stuff the kid wanted to hear. He never told him what he knew and if he never found out that was a win.

“I’ll come back pretty soon,” he lied, “and we’ll get her done.” He was sorry for the kid but the sooner he learned it was a tough go the better. But maybe there was nothing for Pearl to know. Maybe the bad news was all his.

“Momma likes me better than you,” shouted Pearl, saving something from the wreck. He stripped off the T-shirt and threw it at Diamond.

“This I know.” He called a taxi to take him to the crackerbox airport where he sat for five hours until a flight with connections to Calgary left.

In his cocky first year he had adopted a wide-legged walk as though there was swinging weight between his thighs. He felt the bull in himself, hadn’t yet discerned the line of inimical difference between roughstock and rider. He dived headlong into the easy girls, making up for the years of nothing. He wanted the tall ones. In that bullish condition he tangled legs with the wife of Myron Sasser, his second traveling partner. They were in Cheyenne in Myron’s truck and she was with them, sitting in the backseat of the club cab. All of them were hungry. Myron pulled into the Burger Bar. He left the truck running, the radio loud, a dark Texas voice entangled in static.

“How many you want, Diamond, two or three? Londa, you want onions with yours?”

They had picked her up at Myron’s parents’ house in Pueblo the day before. She was five-eleven, long brown curls like Buffalo Bill, had looked at Diamond and said to Myron, “You didn’t say he was hardly fryin size. Hey there, chip,” she said.

“That’s me,” he said, “smaller than the little end of nothing whittled to a point,” smiled through murder.

She showed them an old heart-shaped waffle iron she had bought at a yard sale. It was not electric, a gadget from the days of the wood-burning range. The handles were of twisted wire. She promised Myron a Valentine breakfast.

“I’ll git this,” said Myron and went into the Burger Bar.

Diamond waited with her in the truck, aroused by her orchidaceous female smell. Through the glass window they could see Myron standing near the end of a long line. He thought of what she’d said, moved out of the front seat and into the back with her and pinned her, wrestled her 36-inseam jeans down to her ankles and got it in, like fucking sandpaper, and his stomach growling with hunger the whole time. She was not willing. She bucked and shoved and struggled and cursed him, she was dry, but he wasn’t going to stop then. Something fell off the seat with a hard sound.

“My waffle iron,” she said and nearly derailed him—he finished in five or six crashing strokes and it was done. He was back in the front seat before Myron reached the head of the line.

“I heard it called a lot of things,” he said, “but never a waffle iron,” and laughed until he choked. He felt fine.

She cried angrily in the seat behind him, pulling at her clothes.

“Hey,” he said. “Hush up. It didn’t hurt you. I’m too damn small to hurt a big girl like you, right? I’m the one should be crying—could have burred it off.” He couldn’t believe it when she opened the door and jumped down, ran into the Burger Bar, threw herself at Myron. He saw Myron putting his head over to listen to her, glancing out at the parking lot where he could see nothing, wiping the tears from her face with a paper napkin he took from the counter, and then charging toward the door with squared, snarling mouth. Diamond got out of the truck. Might as well meet it head-on.

“What a you done to Londa.”

“Same thing you did to that wormy Texas buckle bunny the other night.” He didn’t have anything against Myron Sasser except that he was a humorless fascist who picked his nose and left pliant knobs of snot on the steering wheel, but he wanted the big girl to get it clear and loud.

“You little pissant shit,” said Myron and came windmilling at him. Diamond had him flat on the macadam, face in a spilled milk shake, but in seconds more lay beside him knocked colder than a wedge by the waffle iron. He heard later that Myron had sloped off to Hawaii without his amazon wife and was doing island rodeo. Let them both break their necks. The girl had too much mustard and she’d find it out if she came his way again.

That old day the bottom dropped had been a Sunday, the day they usually had pancakes and black cherry syrup, but she had not made the pancakes, told him to fix himself a bowl of cereal, feed Pearl his baby pears. He was thirteen, excited about the elk hunt coming up in three weekends. Pearl stank and squirmed in full diapers but by then they were seriously fighting. Diamond, sick of hearing the baby roar, had cleaned him up, dropped the dirty diaper in the stinking plastic pail.

They fought all day, his mother’s voice low and vicious, his father shouting questions that were not answered but turned back at him with vindictive silences as powerful as a swinging bat. Diamond watched television, the sound loud enough to damp the accusations and furious abuse cracking back and forth upstairs. There were rushing footsteps overhead as though they were playing basketball, cries and shouts. It had nothing to do with him. He felt sorry for Pearl who bawled every time he heard their mother’s anguished sobbing in the room above. One or two long silences held but they could not be mistaken for peace. In the late afternoon Pearl fell asleep on the living room couch with his fist knotted in his blanket. Diamond went out in the yard, kicked around, cleaned the car windshield for something to do. It was cold and windy, a cigar cloud poised over the mountain range forty miles west. He picked up rocks and threw them at the cloud pretending they were bullets fired at an elk. He could hear them inside, still at it.

The door slammed and his father came across the porch carrying the brown suitcase with a tiny red trademark horse in the corner, strode toward the car as if he were late.

“Dad,” said Diamond. “The elk hunt—”

His father stared at him. In that twitching face his pupils were black and huge, eating up the hazel color to the rim.

“Don’t never call me that again. Not your father and never was. Now get the fuck out of the way, you little bastard,” the words high-pitched and tumbling.

After the breakup with Myron Sasser he bought a third-hand truck, an old Texas hoopy not much better than Leecil’s wreck, traveled alone for a few months, needing the solitary distances, blowing past mesas and red buttes piled like meat, humped and horned, and on the highway chunks of mule deer, hair the buckskin color of winter grass, flesh like rough breaks in red country, playas of dried blood. He almost always had a girl in the motel bed with him when he could afford a motel, a half-hour painkiller but without the rush and thrill he got from a bullride. There was no sweet time when it was over. He wanted them to get gone. The in-and-out girls wasped it around that he was quick on the trigger, an arrogant little prick and the hell with his star-spangled bandanna.

“Hit the delete button on you, buddy,” flipping the whorish blond hair.

What they said didn’t matter because there was an endless supply of them and because he knew he was getting down the page and into the fine print of this way of living. There was nobody in his life to slow him down with love. Sometimes riding the bull was the least part of it, but only the turbulent ride gave him the indescribable rush, shot him mainline with crazy-ass elation. In the arena everything was real because none of it was real except the chance to get dead. The charged bolt came, he thought, because he wasn’t. All around him wild things were falling to the earth.

One night in Cody, running out to the parking lot to beat the traffic, Pake Bitts, a big Jesus-loving steer roper, yelled out to him, “You goin a Roswell?”

“Yeah.” Bitts was running parallel with him, the big stout guy with white-blond hair and high color. A sticker, Praise God, was peeling loose from his gear bag.

“Can I git a ride? My dee truck quit on me up in Livinston. Had to rent a puny car, thing couldn’t hardly haul my trailer. Burned out the transmission. Tee Dove said he thought you was headed for Roswell?”

“You bet. Let’s go. If you’re ready.” They hitched up Bitts’s horse trailer, left the rental car standing.

“Fog it, brother, we’re short on time,” said the roper, jumping in. Diamond had the wheels spattering gravel before he closed the door.

He thought it would be bad, a lot of roadside prayers and upcast eyes, but Pake Bitts was steady, watched the gas gauge, took care of business and didn’t preach.

Big and little they went on together to Mollala, to Tuska, to Roswell, Guthrie, Kaycee, to Baker and Bend. After a few weeks Pake said that if Diamond wanted a permanent traveling partner he was up for it. Diamond said yeah, although only a few states still allowed steer roping and Pake had to cover long, empty ground, his main territory in the livestock country of Oklahoma, Wyoming, Oregon and New Mexico. Their schedules did not fit into the same box without patient adjustment. But Pake knew a hundred dirt road shortcuts, steering them through scabland and slope country, in and out of the tiger shits, over the tawny plain still grooved with pilgrim wagon ruts, into early darkness and the first storm laying down black ice, hard orange dawn, the world smoking, snaking dust devils on bare dirt, heat boiling out of the sun until the paint on the truck hood curled, ragged webs of dry rain that never hit the ground, through small-town traffic and stock on the road, band of horses in morning fog, two redheaded cowboys moving a house that filled the roadway and Pake busting around and into the ditch to get past, leaving junkyards and Mexican cafés behind, turning into midnight motel entrances with RING OFFICE BELL signs or steering onto the black prairie for a stunned hour of sleep.

Bitts came from Rawlins and always he wanted to get to the next rodeo and grab at the money, was interested in no woman but his big-leg, pregnant wife Nancy, a heavy Christian girl, studying, said Bitts, for her degree in geology. “You wont a have a good talk,” he said, “have one with Nancy. Good lord, she can tell you all about rock formations.”

“How can a geologist believe that the earth was created in seven days?”

“Shoot, she’s a Christian geologist. Nothin is impossible for God and he could do it all in seven days, fossils, the whole nine. Life is full a wonders.” He laid a chew of long-cut into his cheek for even he had his vices.

“How did you get into it,” asked Diamond. “Grow up on a ranch?”

“What, rodeo? Done it since I was a kid. Never lived on a ranch. Never wont to. Grew up in Huntsville, Texas. You know what’s there?”

“Big prison.”

“Right. My dad’s a guard at the pen in Rawlins, but before that he was down at Huntsville. Huntsville had a real good prison rodeo program for years. And my dad took me to all them rodeos. He got me started in the Little Britches program. And here’s somethin, my granddad Bitts did most of his ropin at Huntsville. Twist the nose off of a dentist. That bad old cowhand had a tattoo of a rope around his neck and piggin strings around his wrists. He seen the light after a few years and took Jesus into his heart, and that passed on down to my dad and to me. And I try to live a Christian life and help others.”

They drove in silence for half an hour, light overcast dulling the basin grass to the shades of dirty pennies, then Pake started in again.

“Bringin me to somethin I wont a say to you. About your bullridin. About rodeo? See, the bull is not supposed a be your role model, he is your opponent and you have to get the best a him, same as the steer is my opponent and I have to pump up and git everthing right to catch and thow em or I won’t thow em.”

“Hey, I know that.” He’d known too that there would be a damn sermon sooner or later.

“No, you don’t. Because if you did you wouldn’t be playin the bull night after night, you wouldn’t get in it with your buddies’ wives, what I’d call forcible entry what you done, you would be a man lookin for someone to marry and raise up a family with. You’d take Jesus for a role model, not a dee ornery bull. Which you can’t deny you done. You got a quit off playin the bull.”

“I didn’t think Jesus was a married man.”

“Maybe not a married man, but he was a cowboy, the original rodeo cowboy. It says it right in the Bible. It’s in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.” He adopted a sanctimonious tone: “‘Go into the village in which, at your enterin, ye shall find a colt tied, on which yet never no man sat; loose him and bring him here. The Lord hath need a him. And they brought him to Jesus, and they cast their garments upon the colt and they set Jesus on it.’ Now, if that ain’t a description a bareback ridin I don’t know what is.”

“I ride a bull, the bull’s my partner, and if bulls could drive you can bet there’d be one sitting behind the wheel right now. I don’t know how you figure all this stuff about me.”

“Easy. Myron Sasser’s my half-brother.” He rolled down the window and spit. “Dad had a little bull in him, too. But he got over it.”

Pake started in again a day or two later. Diamond was sick of hearing about Jesus and family values. Pake had said, “You got a kid brother, that right? How come he ain’t never at none a these rodeos lookin at his big brother? And your daddy and mama?”

“Pull over a minute.”

Bitts eased the truck over on the hard prairie verge, threw it into park, mis-guessing that Diamond wanted to piss, got out himself, unzipping.

“Wait,” said Diamond standing where the light fell hard on him. “I want you to take a good look at me. You see me?” He turned sideways and back, faced Bitts. “That’s all there is. What you see. Now do your business and let’s get down the road.”

“Aw, what I mean is,” said Bitts, “you don’t get how it is for nobody but your own dee self. You don’t get it that you can’t have a fence with only one post.”

Late August and hot as billy hell, getting on out of Miles City Pake’s head of maps failed and they ended on rim-rock south of the Wyo line, tremendous roll of rough country in front of them, a hundred-mile sightline with bands of antelope and cattle like tiny ink flecks that flew from hard-worked nib pens on old promissory notes. They backtracked and sidetracked and a few miles outside Greybull Diamond pointed at the trucks drawn up in front of a slouched ranch house that had been converted into a bar, the squared logs weathered almost black.

“On the end, that’s Sweets Musgrove’s horse trailer, right? And Nachtigal’s rig. Goddamn calf ropers, talk about their horses like they’re women. You hear Nachtigal last night? ‘She’s honest, she’s good, she never cheated on me.’ Talking about his horse.”

“How I feel about my horse.”

“Pull in. I am going to drink a beer without taking a breath.”

“Lucky if we git out alive goin where them guys are. Nachtigal’s crazy. Rest of em don’t talk about nothin but their trailers.”

“I don’t give a shit, Pake. You have your coffee, but I need a couple beers.”

Above the door a slab of pine hung, the name of the place, Saddle Rack, scorched deep. Diamond pushed open the plank door, pocked with bullet holes in a range of calibers. It was one of the good places, dark, the log walls burned with hundreds of cattle brands, dim photographs of long-dead bronc busters high in the clouds and roundup crews in sweaters and woolly chaps. At the back of the room stood the oldest jukebox in the world, a crusty, dented machine with the neon gone dead and a flashlight on a string for patrons fussy enough to want to make a choice. The high gliding 1935 voice of Milton Brown was drifting, “oh bree-yee-yee-yeeze” over the zinc bar and four tables.

The bartender was a hardheaded old baldy with a beak and a cleft chin. Bottles, spigots, and a dirty mirror—the bartender’s territory was not complex. He looked at them and Pake said ginger ale after gauging the tarry liquid on the hot plate. Diamond recognized he was going to get seriously drunk here. Sweets Musgrove and Nachtigal, Ike Soot, Jim Jack Jett, hats off, receding hairlines in full view, sat at one of the tables, Jim Jack drinking red beer, the others whiskey and they were sliding deep down, cigars in honor of Nachtigal’s daughter’s first barrel race win, the cigars half-puffed and dead in the ashtray.

“What the hell you doin here?”

“Shit, you don’t go past Saddle Rack without you stop and git irrigated.”

“Looks like it.”

Nachtigal gestured at the jukebox, “Ain’t you got no Clint Black? No Dwight Yoakam?”

“Shut up and like what you get,” said the bartender. “You’re hearin early pedal steel. You’re hearin priceless stuff. You rodeo boys don’t know nothin about country music.”

“Horseshit.” Ike Soot took a pair of dice from his pocket.

“Roll the bones, see who’s goin a pay.”

“You buyin, Nachtigal,” said Jim Jack. “I’m cleaned out. What little I won, lost it to that Indan sumbitch, Black Vest, works for one a the stock contractors. All or nothin, not a little bit but the whole damn everthing. One throw. He got a pair a bone dice, only one spot between the two, shakes em, throws em down. It’s quick.”

“I played that with him. Want some advice?”

“No.”

It was come and go with the drinks and in a while Jim Jack said something about babies and wives and the pleasures of home which started Pake off on one of his family-hearth lectures, and with the next round Ike Soot cried a little and said the happiest day of his life was when he put that gold buckle in his daddy’s hand and said, I done it for you. Musgrove topped them all by confessing that he had split the $8,200 he picked up at the Finals between his grandmother and a home for blind orphans. With five whiskeys and four beers sloshing, Diamond took a turn, addressing them all, even the two dusty, sweat-runneled ranch hands who’d come in off the baler to press their faces against the cold pitcher of beer Ranny stood between them.

“You all make a big noise about family, what I hear, wife and kids, ma and pa, sis and bub, but none of you spend much time at home and you never wanted to or you wouldn’t be in rodeo. Rodeo’s the family. Ones back at the ranch don’t count for shit.”

One of the hands at the bar slapped his palm down and Nachtigal marked him with his eye.

Diamond held up the whiskey glass.

“Here’s to it. Nobody sends you out to do chores, treats you like a fool. Take your picture, you’re on t.v., ask your wild-hair opinion, get your autograph. You’re somebody, right? Here’s to it. Rodeo. They say we’re dumb but they don’t say we’re cowards. Here’s to big money for short rides, here’s to busted spines and pulled groins, empty pockets, damn all-night driving, chance to buck out—if you got good medicine, happens to somebody else. Know what I think? I think—” But he didn’t know what he thought except that Ike Soot was swinging at him, but it was only a motion to catch him before he smashed into the cigar butts. That was the night he lost his star-spangled bandanna and went into the slump.

“Last time I seen that wipe somebody was moppin puke off the floor with it,” said Bitts. “And it weren’t me.”

In the sixth second the bull stopped dead, then shifted everything the other way and immediately back again and he was lost, flying to the left into his hand and over the animal’s shoulder, his eye catching the wet glare of the bull, but his hand turned upside down and jammed. He was hung up and good. Stay on your feet, he said aloud, jump, amen. The bull was crazy to get rid of him and the clanging bell. Diamond was jerked high off the ground with every lunge, snapped like a towel. The rope was in a half-twist, binding his folded fingers against the bull’s back and he could not turn his hand over and open the fingers. Everything in him strained to touch the ground with his feet but the bull was too big and he was too small. The animal spun so rapidly its shape seemed to the watchers like mottled streaks of paint, the rider a paint rag. The bullfighters darted like terriers. The bull whipped him from the Arctic Circle to the Mexico border with every plunge. There was bull hair in his mouth. His arm was being pulled from its socket. It went on and on. This time he was going to die in front of shouting strangers. The bull’s drop lifted him high and the bullfighter, waiting for the chance, thrust his hand up under Diamond’s arm, rammed the tail of the rope through and jerked. The fingers of his glove opened and he fell cartwheeling away from hooves. The next moment the bull was on him, hooking. He curled, got his good arm over his head.

“Oh man, get up, this’s a mean one,” someone far away called and he was running on all fours, rump in the air, to the metal rails, a clown there, the bull already gone. The audience suddenly laughed and out of the corner of his eye he saw the other clown mocking his stagger. He pressed against the rails, back to the audience, dazed, unable to move. They were waiting for him to get out of the arena. Beyond the beating rain sirens sounded faint and sad.

A hand patted him twice on the right shoulder, someone said, “Can you walk?” Trembling, he tried to nod his head and could not. His left arm hung limp. He profoundly believed death had marked him out, then had ridden him almost to the buzzer, but had somehow wrecked. The man got in under his right arm, someone else grasped him around the waist, half-carried him to a room where a local sawbones sat swinging one foot and smoking a cigarette. No sports medicine team here. He thought dully that he did not want to be looked at by a doctor who smoked. From the arena the announcer’s voice echoed as though in a culvert, “What a ride, folks, far as it went, but all for nothin, a zero for Diamond Felts, but you got a be proud a what this young man stands for, don’t let him go away without a big hand, he’s goin a be all right, and now here’s Dunny Scotus from Whipup, Texas—”

He could smell the doctor’s clouded breath, his own rank stench. He was slippery with sweat and the roaring pain.

“Can you move your arm? Are your fingers numb? Can you feel this? O.k., let’s get this shirt off.” He set the jaws of his scissors at the cuff and began to cut up the sleeve.

“This’s a fifty-dollar shirt,” whispered Diamond. It was a new one with a design of red feathers and black arrows across the sleeves and breast.

“Believe me, you wouldn’t appreciate it if I tried to pull your arm out of the sleeve.” The scissors worked across the front yoke and the ruined shirt fell away. The air felt cold on his wet skin. He shook and shook. It was a bad luck shirt now anyway.

“There you go,” said the doctor. “Dislocated shoulder. Humerus displaced forward from the shoulder socket. All right, I’m going to try to reposition the humerus.” The doctor’s chin was against the back of his shoulder, his hands taking the useless arm, powerful smell of tobacco. “This will hurt for a minute. I’m going to manipulate this—”

“Jesus CHRIST!” The pain was excruciating and violent. The tears rolled down his hot face and he couldn’t help it.

“Cowboy up,” said the doctor sardonically.

Pake Bitts walked in, looked at him with interest.

“Got hung up, hah? I didn’t see it but they said you got hung up pretty good. Twenty-eight seconds. They’ll put you on the videos. Thunderstorm out there.” He was damp from the shower, last week’s scab still riding his upper lip and a fresh raw scrape on the side of his jaw. He spoke to the doctor. “Thow his shoulder out? Can he drive? It’s his turn a drive. We got a be in south Texas two o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”

The doctor finished wrapping the cast, lit another cigarette. “I wouldn’t want to do it—right hand’s all he’s got. Dislocated shoulder, it’s not just a question of pop it back in and away you go. He could need surgery. There’s injured ligaments, internal bleeding, swelling, pain, could be some nerve or blood vessel damage. He’s hurting. He’s going to be eating aspirin by the handful. He’s going to be in the cast for a month. If he’s going to drive, one-handed or with his teeth, I can’t give him codeine and you’d better not let him take any either. Call your insurance company, make sure you’re covered for injury-impaired driving.”

“What insurance?” said Pake, then, “You ought a quit off smokin,” and to Diamond, “Well, the Good Lord spared you. When can we get out a here? Hey, you see how they spelled my name? Good Lord.” He yawned hugely, had driven all the last night coming down from Idaho.

“Give me ten. Let me get in the shower, steady up. You get my rope and war bag. I’ll be o.k. to drive. I just need ten.”

The doctor said, “On your way, pal.”

Someone else was coming in, a deep cut over his left eyebrow, finger pressed below the cut to keep the blood out of his rapidly swelling eyes and he was saying, just tape it up, tape the fuckin eyes open, I’m gettin on one.

He undressed one-handed in the grimy concrete shower room having trouble with the four-buckle chaps and his bootstraps. The pain came in long ocean rollers. He couldn’t get on the other side of it. There was someone in one of the shower stalls, leaning his forehead against the concrete, hands flat against the wall and taking hot water on the back of his neck.

Diamond saw himself in the spotted mirror, two black eyes, bloody nostrils, his abraded right cheek, his hair dark with sweat, bull hairs stuck to his dirty, tear-streaked face, a bruise from armpit to buttocks. He was dizzy with the pain and a huge weariness overtook him. The euphoric charge had never kicked in this time. If he were dead this might be hell—smoking doctors and rank bulls, eight hundred miles of night road ahead, hurting all the way.

The cascade of water stopped and Tee Dove came out of the shower, hair plastered flat. He was ancient, Diamond knew, thirty-six, an old man for bullriding but still doing it. His sallow-cheeked face was a map of surgical repair and he carried enough body scars to open a store. A few months earlier Diamond had seen him, broken nose draining dark blood, take two yellow pencils and push one into each nostril, maneuvering them until the smashed cartilage and nasal bones were forced back into position.

Dove rubbed his scarred torso with his ragged but lucky towel, showed his fox teeth to Diamond, said, “Ain’t it a bone game, bro.”

Outside the rain had stopped, the truck gleamed wet, gutters flooded with runoff. Pake Bitts was in the passenger seat, already asleep and snoring gently. He woke when Diamond, bare-chested, barefooted, pulled the seat forward, threw in the cut shirt, fumbled one-handed in his duffel bag for an oversize sweatshirt he could get over the cast, jammed into his old athletic shoes, got in and started the engine.

“You o.k. to drive? You hold out two, three hours while I get some sleep, I’ll take it the rest a the way. You drive the whole road is not a necessity by no means.”

“It’s o.k. How did they spell your name?”

“C-A-K-E. Cake Bitts. Nance’ll laugh her head off over that one. Bum a rag, brother, we’re runnin late.” And he was asleep again, calloused hand resting on his thigh palm up and a little open as though to receive something in it.