Close Range Read online

  “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 crazyass 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 Molíala, 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 withRING 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 Iwon’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, Lukeand 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 rimrock 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 halftwist, 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—”

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