English Creek

by Ivan Doig

  Above and to the left of Ray and me was the announcing booth and its inhabitants, a nice proximity which added to the feeling that we were part of the inside happenings of the rodeo. To look at, the booth resembled a little woodshed up on stilts, situated there above and just in back of the middle of the bucking chutes. It held elbow room for maybe six people, although only three of the booth crowd did any actual rodeo work. Tollie Zane, if you could call his announcing work. Tollie evidently was in residence at the far end of the booth, angled out of view from us but a large round microphone like a waffle iron standing on end indicated his site. Then nearest to us was the scorekeeper, Bill Reinking, editor of the Gleaner, prominent with his ginger mustache and silver-wire eyeglasses. I suppose he did the scorekeeping on the principle that the only sure way for the Gleaner to get any accuracy on the rodeo results was for him to originate the arithmetic. Between Bill and Tollie was the space for the timekeeper, who ran the stopwatch to time the events and blew the whistle to signal when a bronc rider had lasted eight seconds atop a bareback or ten in a saddle ride. The timekeeper’s spot in the booth was empty, but this was about to be remedied.

  “Wup wup wup,” some Paul Revere among the chute society cried. “Here she comes, boys! Just starting up the ladder!”

  Heads swiveled like weathervanes hit by a tornado. And yes, Ray and I also sent our eyes around to the little ladder along the side of the announcing booth and the hypnotizing progress up it of Velma Simms.

  “Tighter than last year, I swear to God,” someone below us was contending.

  “Like the paper fits the wall,” testified another.

  And yet another, “But I still need to know, how the hell does she get herself into those britches?”

  Velma Simms came of Eastern money. Plumbing equipment I believe was its source; I have seen her family name, Croake, on hot-and-cold spigots. And in a community and era which considered divorce usually more grievous than manslaughter, she had been through three husbands. That we knew of. Only the first was local, the lawyer Paul Bogan. They met in Helena when he got himself elected to the legislature, and if my count is right, it was at the end of his second term when Velma arrived back to Gros Ventre and Paul stayed over there at the capital in some kind of state job. Her next husband was a fellow named Sutter, who’d had an automobile agency in Spokane. In Gros Ventre he was like a trout out of water, and quickly went. After him came Simms, an actor Velma happened across in some summer performance at one of the Glacier Park lodges. By February of his first Two country winter Simms was hightailing his way to California, although he eventually did show up back in Gros Ventre, so to speak, as one of the cattle rustlers in a Gene Autry movie at the Odeon. Lately Velma seemed to have given up marrying and instead emerged each Fourth with a current beau tagging along. They tended to be like the scissorbill following her up the ladder now, in a gabardine stockman’s suit and a too clean cream Stetson, probably a bank officer from Great Falls. I cite all this because Paul Bogan, the first in the genealogy, always had served as rodeo timekeeper, and the next Fourth of July after his change of residence, here Velma presented herself, bold as new paint, to take up his stopwatch and whistle. It was her only instance of what might be called civic participation, and quite why she did it nobody had a clue. But Velma’s ascension to the booth now was part of every Gros Ventre rodeo. Particularly for the male portion of the audience. For as you may have gathered, Velma on her Fourth appearances was encased in annual new slacks of stunning snugness. One of the theoreticians in the chute society just now was postulating a fresh concept, that maybe Velma heated them with an iron, put them on hot, and let them shrink down on her like the rim onto a wagon wheel.

  I saw once, in recent years at the Gros Ventre rodeo, a young bronc rider and his ladyfriend watching the action through the pole arena gate. They each held a can of beer in one hand, and the rider’s other hand was around the girl’s shoulders. Her other hand, though, was down resting lightly on his rump, the tips of her fingers just touching the inseam of his Levis back there. I’ll admit to you, it made my heart turn around and face north. That the women now can and will do such a thing seems to me an advance like radio. My awe of it is tempered only by the regret that I am not that young man, or any other. But let that go. My point here is just that in the earlier time, only rare self-advertised rumps such as that of Velma Simms were targets of public interest, and then only by what my father and the other rangers called ocular examination.

  It registered on me there had been a comment from Ray’s direction. “Come again?” I apologized.

  “No hitch in Velma’s gitalong,” Ray offered one more time.

  I said something equally bright in agreement, but I was surprised at Ray making an open evaluation of Velma Simms, even so tame a one as that. The matter of Marcella maybe was on his mind more than I figured.

  Just then an ungodly noise somewhere between a howl and a yowl issued above us. A sort of high HHHRUNGHHH like a cat was being skinned alive. I was startled as hell, but Ray knew its source. “You see Tollie’s loudspeaking getup?” he inquired with a nod toward the top of the announcer’s booth. I couldn’t help but have noticed such a rig. The contraption was a pyramid of rods, which held at its peak a half-dozen big metal cones like those morning-glory horns on old phonographs, pointing to various points of the compass. Just in case those didn’t cover the territory, there was a second set of four more ’glory horns a couple of feet beneath. “He sent off to Billings for it,” informed Ray, who had overheard this information when Tollie came to the lumber yard for a number of two-by-fours to help brace the contraption into place. “The guy who makes them down there told him it’s the real deal to announce with.”

  We were not the only ones contemplating Tollie’s new announcing machinery. “What the goddamn hell’s Tollie going to do,” I heard somebody say below us, “tell them all about it in Choteau?” Choteau was thirty-three miles down the highway.

  “WELCOME!” crackled a thunderblast of voice over our heads. “To the Gros Ventre rodeo! Our fifteenth annual show! You folks are wise as hooty owls to roost with us here today. Yes sir! Some of everything is liable to happen here today and—” Tollie Zane, father of the famous Earl, held the job of announcing the Gros Ventre rodeo on the basis by which a lot of positions of authority seem to get filled: nobody else would be caught dead doing it. But before this year, all that the announcing amounted to was shouting through a megaphone the name of each bucking horse and its rider. The shiny new ’glory horns evidently had gone to Tollie’s head, or at least his tonsils. “The Fourth of July is called the cowboys’ Christmas and our festivities here today will get under way in just—”

  “Called what?” somebody yelled from the chute society. “That’s Tollie for you, sweat running down his face and he thinks it’s snowflakes.”

  “Santy Claus must have brought him that goddamn talking contraption,” guessed somebody else.

  “Naw, you guys, lay off now,” a third one put in. “Tollie’s maybe right. It’d explain why he’s as full of shit as a Christmas goose.”

  Everybody below us hee-heeed at that while Tollie roared on about the splendiferous tradition of rodeo and what heart-stopping excitement we were going to view in this arena today. Tollie was a kind of plodding talker anyway, and now with him slowed down either out of respect for the new sound system or because he was translating his remarks from paper—this July Christmas stuff was originating from somewhere; had a kit come with the ’glory horns and microphone?—you could about soft-boil an egg between parts of his sentences.

  “Anybody here from Great Falls?”

  Quite a number of people yelled and waved their hands.

  “Welcome to America!”

  Out in the crowd there were laughs and groans. And most likely some flinching in the Rotary beer booth; a real boon to business, Tollie cracking wise at the expense of people who’d had ninety miles of driving time to wonder whether this rodeo was worth coming to.

>   But this seemed to be a day when Tollie, armed with amplification, was ready to take on the world. “How about North Dakota? Who’s here from North Dakota?”

  Of course, no response. Tourists were a lot scarcer in those days, and the chances that anybody would venture from North Dakota just to see the Gros Ventre rodeo were zero and none.

  “That’s right!” blared Tollie. “If I was you I wouldn’t admit it neither!”

  Tollie spieled on for a while, actually drawing boos from the Choteau folks in the crowd when he proclaimed that Choteau was known as a town without a single bedbug: “No sir they are all married and have big families!” At last, though, the handling crew was through messing with the chute alongside Ray and me, and Tollie was declaring “We are just about to get the pumpkin rolling. Bareback riding will be our first event.”

  “Pumpkin?” questioned whoever it was in the chute society that was keeping tab of Tollie’s excursions through the calendar. “Judy H. Christ! Now the whistledick thinks it’s Halloween.”

  About all that is worth mentioning of the early part of the rodeo is that its events, a section of bareback riding and after that some steer-wrestling or mauling or whatever you want to call it, passed fairly mercifully. Ray and I continued to divide our time snorting laughs over something either Tollie or the chute society provided. Plus our own wiseacre efforts, of course. Ray nearly fell off the corral from cackling when I speculated whether this much time sitting on a fence pole mightn’t leave a person with the crack in his behind running crosswise instead of up and down. You know how that is: humor is totally contagious when two persons are in the same light mood. And a good thing, too, for by my estimation the actual events of a rodeo can always use all the help they can get. Although like anybody out here I have seen many and many a rodeo, to me the arena events are never anything to write home special about. It’s true that bareback riding has its interesting moments, but basically the ride is over and done with about as it’s getting started. I don’t know, a guy flopping around on the naked back of a horse just seems to me more of a stunt than a sport. As for steer-wrestling, that is an absolutely phony deal, never done except there in front of a rodeo crowd. Leaping onto a running steer has about as much to do with actual cattle ranching as wearing turquoise belt buckles does. And that calf-roping. Calf-roping I nominate as an event the spectators ought to be paid for sitting through. I mean, here’ll come one yayhoo out after the calf swinging a community loop an elephant could trot through, and the next guy will pitch a loop so teeny that it bounces off the back of the calf’s neck like a spitwad. Whiff whiff whiff, and then a burst of cussing as the rope-flinger’s throw misses its mark: there is the essence of rodeo calf-roping. If I ran the world there’d be standards, such as making any calf-roping entrant dab onto a fencepost twenty feet away, just to prove he knows how to build a decent loop.

  “Alec’s bringing his horse in,” Ray reported from his sphere of the arena. “Guess he’s roping in this section.”

  “So’s everybody else in the world, it looks like.” Horsemen and hemp, hemp and horsemen. It was a wonder the combined swishing of the ropes of all the would-be calf ropers now assembling didn’t lift the rodeo arena off the ground like an autogyro. As you maybe can tell, my emotions about having a brother forthcoming into this event were strictly mixed. Naturally I was pulling for Alec to win. Brotherly blood is at least that thick. Yet a corner of me was shadowed with doubt as to whether victory was really such a good idea for Alec. Did he need any more confirming in his cowboy mode? Especially in this dubious talent of hanging rope necklaces onto slobbering calves?

  This first section of the calf-roping now proceeded about as I could have foretold, a lot of air fanned with rope but damn few calves collared. One surprise was produced, though. After a fast catch Bruno Martin of Augusta missed his tie, the calf kicking free before its required six seconds flat on the ground were up. If words could be seen in the air, some blue dandies accompanied Martin out of the arena.

  The other strong roper, Vern Crosby, snagged his calf neatly, suffered a little trouble throwing him down for the tie, but then niftily gathered the calf’s legs and wrapped the pigging string around them, as Tollie spelled out for us, “faster than Houdini can tie his shoe laces!”

  So when the moment came for Alec to guide the blood bay roping horse into the break-out area beside the calf chute, the situation was as evident as Tollie’s voice bleating from that tin bouquet of ’glory horns:

  “Nineteen seconds by Vern Crosby is still the time to beat. It’ll take some fancy twirling by this next young buckaroo. One of the hands out at the Double W he’s getting hisself squared away and will be ready in just—”

  The calf chute and the break-out area where each roper and his horse burst out after the creature were at the far end of the bucking chutes from us. Ray cupped his hands and called across to there: “Wrap him up pretty, Alec!”

  Across there, Alec appeared a little nervous, dandling his rope around more than was necessary as he and the bay horse waited for their calf to emerge. But then I discovered I was half nervous myself, jiggling my foot on its corral pole, and I had no excuse whatsoever. You wouldn’t catch me out there trying to snare a two-hundred-pound animal running full tilt.

  The starter’s little red flag whipped down, and the calf catapulted from the chute into the expanse of the arena.

  Alec’s luck. Sometimes you had to think he held the patent on four-leaf clovers and rabbit’s feet. The calf he drew was a straight runner instead of a dodger. Up the middle of the arena that calf galloped as if he was on rails, the big horse gaining ground on him for Alec every hoofbeat. And I believe that if you could have pulled the truth from my father and mother right then, even they would have said that Alec looked the way a calf roper ought to. Leaning forward but still as firm in his stirrups as if socketed into them, swinging the loop of the lariat around and around his head strongly enough to give it a good fling but not overdoing it. Evidently there had been much practice performed on Double W calves as Alec rode the coulees these past weeks.

  “Dab it on him!” I heard loudly, and realized the yell had been by me.

  Quicker than it can be told Alec made his catch. A good one, where all the significant actions erupt together: the rope straightening into a tan line in the air, the calf gargling out a bleahh as the loop choked its neck and yanked it backward, Alec evacuating from the stirrups in his dismount. Within a blink he was in front of the tall bay horse and scampering beside the stripe of rope the bay was holding taut as fishline, and now Alec was upending the calf into the arena dust and now gathering calf legs and now whipping the pigging string around them and now done.

  “The time for Alec McCaskill”—I thought I could hear gloom inside the tinny blare of Tollie’s voice, and so knew the report was going to be good—“seventeen and a half seconds.”

  The crowd whooped and clapped. Over at the far fence Leona was beaming as if she might ignite, and down at the end of the grandstand my parents were glumly accepting congratulations on Alec. Beside me Ray was as surprised as I was by Alec’s first-rate showing, and his delight didn’t have the conditions attached that mine did.

  “How much is up?” he wondered. I wasn’t sure of the roping prize myself, so I asked the question to the booth, and Bill Reinking leaned out and informed us, “Thirty dollars, and supper for two at the Sedgwick House.”

  “Pretty slick,” Ray admired. I had to think so myself. Performance is performance, whatever my opinion of Alec’s venue of it. Later in the afternoon there would be one more section of calf ropers, but with the main guys, Bruno Martin and Vern Crosby, already behind him, Alec’s leading time looked good enough to take to the bank.

  Tollie was bleating onward. “Now we turn to some prairie sailors and the hurricane deck,” which translated to the first go-round of saddle bronc riding. I will say for saddle bronc riding that it seems to me the one rodeo event that comes close to legitimate. Staying on a mount that is tr
ying to unstay you is a historic procedure of the livestock business. “The boys are hazing the ponies into the chutes and when we commence and get started the first man out will be Bill Semmler on a horse called Conniption. In this meanwhile though did you hear the one about the fellow who goes into the barber shop and—”

  I never did get to hear Tollie’s tonsorial tale, for I happened to glance down to my left into the bucking chutes and see disaster in a spotted horsehide charging full tilt at me.

  “Hang on!” I yelled to Ray and simultaneously flipflopped myself rightward and dropped down the fence so that I had my arms clamped around both the top corral pole and Ray’s hips.

  Ray glommed tight to the pole with his hands. WHOMP! and a clatter. The impact of the pinto bucking horse slamming into the chute end where our section of corral cornered into it went shuddering through the pair of us, as if a giant sledgehammer had hit the wood; but our double gripping kept us from being flung off the top of the fence.

  “Jesus!” Ray let out, rare for him. “There’s a goosy one!”

  Our narrow brush did not escape microphone treatment. “This little Coffee Nerves pinto down at chute six has a couple of fence squatters hugging the wood pretty good!” Tollie was alerting the world. “We’ll see whether they go ahead and kiss it!”