Читать книгу My Crescent Moon (A Collection of Short Stories) - Joseph Dylan - Страница 6

Slithering like a leopard through the defiles of the canyon west of town, the freezing waters of the Shoshone River, gathering as tears of moisture that descended from the snow-clad spine of the Continental Divide in the surrounding Absaroka Mountains, poured through western lip of Cody. There they encountered the sulfurous hot springs that sluiced into its cataracts. When the wind was stiff out of the north and the northwest, the sulfurous miasma of the hot springs spread over the town as if it was some hidden portal to the gates of Hades. Inured to the smell, just as he was used to the smell of horse piss and cow deng, Billy almost delighted in it. For him, it was the happy sweet-sour smell of freshly attained manhood. Palpitations erupted just at the smell of it all, as his body flushed with adrenalin. The decaying scent of the excrement and the cauldron odor of the hot springs reminded Billy why he was there and just what his quest in life was; to ride the rodeo. Every night between Memorial Day and Labor Day, Cody hosted a rodeo event at the Cody Fair Grounds. Those summer nights, young men haling from all over North America (though mainly from the western states) drew their rides, be they broncos or be they bulls, each rider attempting to win enough points to qualify for the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association – for the big-time rodeos that they where they hoped to perform.

For as long as Billy Yazzie could remember, he dreamed of them – of riding the horses, steam pouring from their flaring nostrils as they bucked and gyrated, jumping and swirling, in their punishing pirouette before a rapturous crowd. His first contact with these larger than life creatures was in the family paddock, he would sit in the saddle with his father when he was barely two years of age. He continued riding his horse with his father and uncle in the saddle. when, only a few years later, while he was in elementary school, his father had him feeding their three horses, and mucking up after them. Later, when he recalled the smells of his youth, he recalled the smells of his mother’s food, but that recollection was scarcely more than the odors of the horses in their pen. Born under the endless blue dome of the high plains and plateaus of northern New Mexico, in the heart of the Navaho Reservation, the horse, to his mind, was the only beneficent gift the Spanish Franciscan friars brought with them when they violated the land of the Diné on their explorations centuries ago. Born a half hour west of Crownpoint by pickup, well within the confines of the Reservation, his first fantasy of the noble beasts were of god-like creatures. Not even the gods could run faster that the horses his father kept. Now, no longer in just his dreams, now old enough to ride the bucking broncos, he saw them up close, as graceful creatures who suddenly convulsed when spurting out of the bucking chute, their tense muscles tugging like steel cables as they exploded out of the bucking chute and into the rodeo ring – as angry as a state patrolman, discovering an alcoholic driving with a suspended license – dancing right, then left; coiling, curling and unfurling, rising and falling, his arm aching to muster all the strength he had to hold onto the surcingle attached to the leather halter about the animal as tightly as one would grasp a lifeline tied to a trawler in a typhoon at sea. But during the eight seconds of his ride, while he held on to the surcingle, to the halter that held it on, he was at one with the beast.

Born under a wandering star, The Blessing Way for Billy did not embrace the life of a traditional Navajo way in him. For him, the desire to make it on the rodeo circuit began on the sand and shale formations of the vast reservation as large as the state of West Virginia, where as a young Navaho living in a traditional hogan in the inhospitable desert of the Great Southwest was ordained as a cowboy at a young age, when he was given the thankless task of feeding and mucking up after the horses his father and brothers kept in more of a lean-to than a barn. Besides the lean-to, there was appended a hogan, its door facing east, and a clapboard house that his father and his father’s brother had built over the course of a year when he was still too young to walk.

While in high school on the reservation, Billy joined the “cowboy club,” where he rode the bucking broncos beginning the summer after his sophomore year. It was while he was in high school, that he dreamed about riding bulls, too, but the horse to him was a far nobler creature. In his memory, they would always be his favorite for their casual grace and beguiling beauty. Not only was Billy a good rider, he was an exceptional one. Trophy after trophy won in rodeo competitions attested to his own special prowess with rodeo horses. To further confirm this fact were all the rodeo belt buckles he won at the rodeos he entered, collecting them and lovingly placing them in his dresser drawer back in his room in the house that Billy’s family kept next to the traditional hogan. Because he was so good, the officials on the rodeo grounds saved the most savage, tortuous broncos for Billy to ride. But Billy did not make it through rodeo while he was in high school completely unscathed. While riding an unbroken Appaloosa gelding, dark as midnight with a large white star on his right flank, called Night Train, one evening in Window Rock, Billy – who was left-handed – tore the biceps in that arm while trying, without success, to outlast the beast in all its rippling and ripping contortions. Holding on to the saddle, he felt the rent of tendons and muscle fibers as they tore, shredding from the bone, as Night Train took him through its hellish dance, moving first to the right, then the left, jumping up on his hindquarters only to jerk his head down in attempting to displace Billy from the saddle. Never relinquishing his hold, Billie made it through his ride, all eight seconds of it. Bone doctors at Gallup Indian Medical Center, examined him. Telling him that he had a “three piece fracture” of his left humerus, they said he would never rodeo again. Telling him that unlike the bone, the muscle fibers would never really heal, they informed him that his rodeo days were a thing of the past. All they could do was put his arm in a sling and let the arm heal on its home, while prescribing the appropriate physical therapy. All they gave him for the pain was ibuprofen. To kill the pain, Billy, who was not one to imbibe, took a few shots of his father’s Jim Beam. Billy knew his rodeo season was over, but he didn’t believe that his rodeo career was at an end. The gods had given him a right arm as well. He had just completed his junior year at high school. For him, the unwelcome news that he would never have the same solid strength in his left arm attended him like the death of a close friend. But he would have the last word. Almost from the moment he felt the rent in his muscles and tendons while he was holding onto Night Train, he realized the injury would be permanent.

But he swore that he’d make all the doctors who attended him look like fools, he plowed ahead with his rehabilitation. All fall, winter, and spring, he worked out in the gym of the high school, mainly to gather strength in both arms. Gradually the muscles were gained some strength in his left arm, but it truly never was the same. He would never ride the rodeo with his left hand in the future So much for his ordination into rodeo cowboying. When the sling came off, he had limited range of motion in the left arm, but what plagued him more was its palsied weakness, a disability that improved month by month, but never completely went away. So he forced himself to ride right-handed. Though left-handed, he was ambidextrous in many ways: he wrote with his left hand, but he threw with his right. Not nearly as difficult as he feared it would be, he transitioned to riding with his right hand holding on to the surcingle. By next season, he was riding the rodeo again, this time, his right hand holding onto the beast by his right hand. Fortunately, he did not have to ride Night Train.

When Billy graduated from high school, he migrated to Cody, Wyoming as if on a mission. All those who truly loved to ride, all those who possessed dreams of riding professionally, dreamed of Cody sooner or later. Nowhere else was there a town that catering to a rodeo every night during the summer. Since riding the amateur rodeos, which accorded points for rodeoing, Cody was a Mecca for amateur cowboys dreaming of becoming a professional rodeo cowboy. To Billy, it was like called up to the major league after languishing on the farm team in baseball. Billy knew he must pursue gainful employment, but he didn’t want to just ride broncos on the weekends drifting from town to town, from rodeo ground to rodeo ground. Furthermore, he wanted to compete against the best, at least the best of the amateur cowboys. He needed a job that would afford him the time to work the Cody rodeo weeknights and as well as weekends.

Billy arrived In Cody just after Memorial Day. Within a week he secured work doing construction resurfacing the highway between Meteetsee and Cody. He found the job on a tip from one of the riders at the rodeo. An hour away from Cody, Meteetsee was no more than a hamlet and the highway leading to it, with its holes and bumps, as discomfiting as the sight of the scrofulous complexion of a high school wrestler. There on the highway, pouring asphalt, he would work from eight in the morning, take an hour for lunch, then work until five. That would give him a couple of hours before the rodeo in Cody. Finding an old, corroded Airstream trailer (that was curiously drafty given its name) to rent with another rodeo rider, one that was more hovel than home to them, they shared rides to the rodeo grounds in Cody.

Randy Hope was his roommate’s name. Randy, who, like Billy, just graduated from high school in Billings. In a dim light, as if in a chiaroscuro, their profiles were nearly identical. They were exactly the same height, being short in stature, both exactly five-eight. Bandy-legged, while being bow-legged, they were proportioned like high school tailbacks, with wide, muscled torsos and long, gangly, heavily-muscled arms. The one distinction between the two was that Hope was blonde, while Billie shone darkly in the amber essence of his Navajo blood. Despite the difference of their backgrounds they became friends. Randy never treated Billy like he was in anyway different than any of the other riders, all of whom had white skin, except for one Hispanic from New Mexico. Neither of them spoke much, but when Randy told a story, Billy would interfere with him, finishing the tail, and vice-versa. Like two brothers, they had a way of communicating to each other like a middle-aged couple. The trailer that old Man Morrison (or so the cowboys at the Cody rodeo called him) rented them, was once a rodeo rider. On principle, he preferred “rodeo bums” because they took him back to his glory days in the rodeo ring. The trailer squatted on the eastern outskirts of the city. Old man Morrison rode the rodeo for about a decade. He rode it long enough to be crippled up by it. He walked with a limp in both legs, listing more to starboard. It was the leg he broke the worst. Standing with the stoop a good decade or two older than Morrison could claim, he showed the two of them the date of his date of birth clear on his driver’s license. Morrison was just fifty-seven, but gazing at the man, he appeared to be in his late sixties or early seventies. The trailer sat down the lane from the ranch-style home that Morrison lived in with his wife. Though neither of them rode anymore, they still kept two horses in a pasture next to their house. Retired, he had worked construction while enjoying the rodeo life, until it ended with his marriage to Susan. The woman was skinny, to the point of being bony, looking much younger than Morrison, and with that cheerful but plain face she looked like an old school marm with a stack of papers to grade in the kitchen. She often baked cookies for Randall and Billy, or, without being asked, washed their clothes, which were filthy with macadam and horse deng.

It was during the day that Billy and Randy toiled away doing construction or paving the highway from Meteetsee to Cody that he earned his money to live to support their lifestyles as rodeo cowboys at night. So, almost every night, no matter how exhausted from the construction work, the two put on their rodeoing clothes, replete with old cowboy boots and spurs, and Stetson cowboy hats, and drove over to the fairgrounds to find out which horse they had drawn for the night. Then they sought out to find out any tendencies or peculiarities the animal might have, having time for a quick belt, or a chew, or a cigarette, whatever each rodeo rider had as if performing a sacrament before the true confirmation came. At first, he endured the insults of the other cowboys because he was an Indian; but when they saw he came to ride, when they saw how well he rode, the insults faded away. Billy, with his quiet, but affable ways, his willingness to help his fellow competitors; his lack of arrogance, became one of the more popular riders in Cody. Toiling all day to live out his dreams at night under the stars and moon in the sulfurous miasma of the rodeo ring, scarcely dampened his dreams. But the dreams came with a price. The broncos and bulls beat and battered their bodies as if they were welterweight pugilists, other athletes who grew old before their time. There was no old timers competition for retired rodeo riders. There was only whisky and Vicodin, sparingly doled out by John Desmond, the official rodeo doctor, who attended the competitions to counter the pain they each felt. Whisky, which was even more effective at assuaging the lingering discomforts of the rodeo grounds was their mainstay, and each night they rodeoed they stopped by Maggie’s Bar to reload before heading home. Despite the aches and pains, Billy felt he was living the life of a god.

For the riders, the arena served as a place to learn and then display their skills with the bulls, and the bucking broncos in the saddle bronc competition. That first year in Cody Billie learned to ride in Cody, the boy developing his technique for staying on his mount. His technique wasn’t unique: Spurting out of the gate, he’d rock back spurring the creature above it’s shoulders as it reared up, keeping the spurs dug in its hide, rocking one arm in the air as he hung on with his other; in the The trick to it, he found, was keeping one’s center of gravity within that circumscribed by the animal’s, This as they danced and whipped through their routine on the creature. All in a sinuous movement – all but choreographed – the rider matched the beast move for move for the interminable eight seconds they’d spend risking their life. It reminded Billy what the seismograph must have looked like during the San Francisco earthquake. Each ride taught him something new about cowboying that first year. At the same time, he hoped that his mount would jump and bound and leap from side to side in the most exacting way it could, as much a show of nature as a thunderstorm, rather than just bucking like an old and jaded mount that plugged a straight course, hopping rather than bursting through the air. And most of their mounts did; most of their mounts threw them off before the requisite eight seconds. Some nights, Randy would beat Billy in points; on other nights, Billy would surpass Randy. Both good riders, they were evenly matched.

Importantly that first year, he perfected his dismount whether being wrestled from his mount by the second rider, or him how to fall when ignominiously thrown from his mount. Learning to fall from the creature he rode he reluctantly relinquished his hand from the surcingle, while preparing himself to be jettisoned from his mount. The rodeo clowns distracted the inflamed beast he romped and kicked – surely injuring them if they connected – showed him how to quickly get out of their way as they stomped past, their anger surpassed only by the excitement of the crowd. With each ride an education, it was a battle of strength and a matter of endurance. In short, that first year in Cody showed them both how to be a complete rodeo riders.

Along the railings of the rodeo ring, thirty and forty year old former rodeo riders, crippled by their same dreams, watched on. Each time Billy had a good ride, they would cheer him. Looking like the accident victims of a car crash, they appeared as if they were in line to see their attorney. Billy always paused when he saw them gazing at him.

Most nights when they went to Maggie’s, the should have just gone home for a well deserved rest. Most nights, though, they mustered enough testosterone to leave with two rodeo groupies. It was in August of that year, that Randy picked up a skinny one with coltish legs who had a mouth on her. “You know what you call a homeless person in Cody?” Randy asked her. “A cowboy without a girlfriend.” She laughed. Seeing he had a receptive audience, Randy proceeded on. “You know what constitutes foreplay for a cowboy?” he asked her. No, she told him. “Get in the pickup, bitch.” She laughed even harder. Randy didn’t return to the trailer that night.

At least five times a week, they went rodeoing. Many a time after a bad night and he’d been thrown, Billy woke feeling as though he’d been in some vehicular catastrophe where he’d been thrown from the automobile. When one of the cowboys did take a bad fall, there was Doctor John, himself an old rodeo rider who now worked in the emergency room, would attend the broke down rider, lying on the flood lit rodeo arena. If it was something that Dr. John Desmond couldn’t handle, he’d send the rider off to the emergency room at West Park Hospital. Taking a bad tumble from a bull, being kicked by a tempestuous bronco, sent Desmond racing over to where the cowboy staggered towards the riders’s section of the stadium to check him out. Only once that year was Desmond put to the test and that was when a journeyman rider was thrown from a bull. Stomped once by the bull, he fractured three ribs and collapsed a lung.

Later, as Randy watched the ambulance haul the rider, Chris Morton, away, he said to Billy, “I hate to see anybody hurt, but if it had to be someone, I’m glad it was that arrogant prick. He never sat well with me.” Billy just nodded. As amateur rodeo rider, none of the contestants had medical insurance. If they got their professional cards, they’d be allotted medical insurance which they duly needed. Morton, the injured rider, spent one night in the ICU and a week in the hospital, with a chest tube inserted into the right flank to reinflate the lung, possessing a hospital and doctors’s to pay with insufficient funds. The hospital had not the sentimentality to forgive the bill writ large in medical fees for the very rodeo riders that provided entertainment for many tourists coming through town to watch. Billy wondered how he would pay for such a misadventure if it occurred to him. Not long before the end of that first season, Billy wandered just how long he would last on the rodeo circuit. That was all he truly wanted to do in life, but he knew the odds were stacked against him. Now with all his accumulated injuries, he felt like a professional football player trying to convince his body that one more down was just one more collision. One more collision that might not be that bad.

One night, just before Labor Day and the last competition at the rodeo grounds, he asked Randy, “What would you do if you couldn’t rodeo anymore. I mean like not no more.”

“Besides fucking women?”

“Besides fucking women.”

I guess I’d keep doing construction. College is not in the works for me. What else you gonna do. What about you?”

Billy spit on the ground. Randy spat on the ground in turn. For Randy, though, the expectoration was chew, a habit he had picked up from some of the other riders. Billy refused to even try a chew – It was not the Navajo way. They were standing outside their trailer, frying hamburgers. “I have no idea. Probably the same. Probably construction. All I want is to keep on riding.”

“Me, too.” They touched Budweiser cans.

But what Billy truly wished for was to succeed on the professional rodeo circuit. And he needed the points for that. Beginning his senior year at the high school in Gallup, his father died of stomach cancer. None of the poisons to kill the cancer at the medical center in Alburquerque worked for him, they just seemed to make the cancer fester, eating away that much faster. Before he expired this he told his son: “Follow your stars; be happy; never leave The Blessing Way.” It was, though, a matter of time before his father relented and wished his son luck on the rodeo circuit. With his father’s blessing that he became a rodeo cowboy, and moved to Cody. He told the story for the first time to Randy.

“Man, that sounds tough. What do you think he’d say if he could see you now?”

“Got no idea,” said Randy. With that he put one grilled hamburger patty on Randy’s bun, and then put one on his own.

“Ever think you’ll get married?” inquired Billie.

“Not so long as I can pick up a stray in Maggie’s.”

“Same here. My parents didn’t have a good marriage, and it would take someone looking like Bridget Bardot to get me to tie the knot.”

“See, you’re not saying it will never happen?” said Randy.

“I ain’t saying it’s impossible. I’m just saying it’s about as likely as being hit by a bolt of lightning,”

When the rodeo season ended, they stayed on doing construction on the Meteetsee highway. When they closed down for the winter, the two of them picked up jobs constructing houses in Red Lodge, an old mining town in the Beartooth Mountains of Montana that was trying to remake itself into a ski resort.

Finally, having bulked up during the winter lifting heavy tools and building supplies in freezing weather, they were fit when the second season began on Memorial Day. Nothing had changed, except for some new faces of cowboys, who like they were, had come to Cody to rodeo enough to join the professional riders. But the livestock had hardly changed. The unbroken broncos and bulls stamping on the dirt and manure, their muzzles foaming, looking blankly at the riders and the crowd in the stands, who looked back at them with the same blank expression. This as all the cowboys looked on with expectant faces, hoping that their expressions hid the anxiety they felt inside.

That second summer they didn’t return to the highway repaving work; they stayed doing building construction in Red Lodge. The village was an old mining town an hour away from Cody. Again, they endured the incertitude and impoverishment that life delved out for them as they chased their dreams on the rodeo circuit in Cody. Things proceeded apace as they rodeoed most every night placing high in the rankings of the bull rides, but higher in the broncos’ division During the rodeo on Independence Day, though, he drew a bull who unceremoniously threw him four seconds into the ride, and landing hard on that soft dirt, he dislocating his right arm. When Billy Yazzie injured himself, John Desmond painfully reduced the shoulder in the treatment tent, Desmond pulling on the arm as Randy and another rider pulling in the opposite direction with a sheet tucked under his armpit. With exquisite pain, the team of them reduced the arm in a couple of minutes. Desmond told him he needed an X-ray of the shoulder, as he put the limb in a sling. Giving him a prescription for Vicodin, Parr told him not to ride for eight weeks. Billy never went to the hospital to have the X-ray taken. But it didn’t seem to matter. In one errant fall, Billie’s season was essentially shot. He had to take two weeks off from work. When he did go back, he was restricted to light duties for another four weeks. While he healing, he returned faithfully to the fairgrounds every night to watch Randy ride. Rather than being down among the riders, he sat up in the stands to watch the cowboys perform their pas-de-deux with the creatures, the some of the bulls over a thousand pounds of pure muscle and fury. To chase the pain of not being in the hunt and the ache in his right shoulder, Billy took drank that much more at Maggie’s. Incapacitated, he ached to be out rodeo arena. Desmond made sure he didn’t ride for the rest of the season for the separation to his right shoulder to heal. Like the doctors in Gallup so long ago told him about his left arm, that it would never completely heal, Desmond echoed the same caveat. “Billy,” Desmond said. “I can almost guarantee it will never be the same for you.”

He spent the winter in Gallup, mainly doing odd jobs and working out in the gym of the local high school to build up his upper body strength. Amid all this, he saw so many of his classmates who’d fallen by the wayside, drowning their lives awash in alcohol; some even drinking after-shave getting by on their monthly welfare checks, which many had sent to one or another of the numerous liquor stores in Gallup, just off the boundaries of the reservation, where there was a temperance ban.

By Memorial Day, he was back in Cody. This time sharing the same trailer with Randall and working construction in Red Lodge. On the opening day of the Cody rodeo, Billy rode a twitchy Appaloosa, named Spendthrift, but he found that the strength in his right arm just was not there as it had been before he dislocated it. Spendthrift three him unceremoniously in the middle of the ring six seconds into the ride. Too frail now to ride the bulls, Billy still rode the broncos, but unlike previous years, he only rode once or twice a week. Spending the summer on the broncos, Billy came to the sad and unfortunate conclusion that his days on the rodeo circuit were over. He was twenty-one years old and he felt like a man in his forties or fifties. He continued doing construction in and around Cody, and though he still frequented the Silver Dollar and Maggie’s, he could not force himself to go watch other riders as they rode the bulls and broncos at the Cody Rodeo Fairground.

The years piled up, like snow stacking up on the nearby Beartooth and Absaroka Mountains in the winter. He continued working building construction. Never did he take a wife. Like Randy, he picked up the strays not opposed to the color of his skin. Recurrent pain – pain in places he never knew he never knew he owned, nor he ever knew he injured – wearing like holes in the old highway between Cody and Meteetsee that first summer, to hang on like the last drunk at a bar at closing time.

As the years piled up, so too did his medical problems. First it was the arthritis and then it was the diabetes. Diabetes ran in the family. Forced to use a cane when he walked, he could only work as part of the flagging crew constructing the highways in season. The rest of the time, he fed and cared for the rodeo horses of one rich and prominent soul owned. That was in the winter. But after a few winters, the weakness forced the rancher to hire on a young buck to help Billy. The diabetes was not enough to get him to stop drinking, and he had graduated from Budweiser to Jim Beam. He was but in his forties when Billie’s health seemed to go to hell. He began drinking more, drinking to the point where he was never quite drunk, but he was always on the threshold of it. The diabetes claimed some toes on both feet and soon he was fit no longer to work. The few friends he had encouraged him to go back to the reservation, but perhaps it was his pride that kept him from returning. He had to apply for Medicaid; he had to apply for welfare and food stamps. Billy drank to ease the aches and pain; he drank to remember glorious days of his youth riding down at the Cody Rodeo Fairground. A neighbor, checking on him after he had not been seen around his trailer, found him still and lifeless. Dead at forty-nine, he had still not reached his sixth decade. Neither was there a widow to mourn for him, nor children to cling to his memories.