by Baxter Black
Valter and Pike couldn’t see into the trailer from the side, so they walked around instead. Pike grasped the handle of one of the tailgate doors and lifted, then he and Valter each swung a door wide. Inside the trailer, T.A. unlatched the middle divider separating her from the cow and pulled it open just as Valter and Pike stepped into the breach. The cow bellowed and charged right over the top of them! The thundering herd of cow walked Valter like a foot log and knocked Pike back against the open door.
T.A. took her best shot, leaping out of the trailer and over Pike, who was still flailing. Pike’s sweeping hand caught her butcher’s apron in midair, clotheslining her. Her feet sailed out in front of her and she crashed back onto the gravel shoulder.
While Pike was pinning a screaming T.A. to the ground, the pickup and trailer rig peeled out onto the highway, leaving them locked in mortal combat. Valter lay flat out on the highway and dryin’ in the sun. The cow had trampled his leg, stomach, and shoulder, then left a stream of guacamole down his crumpled body.
It took Pike a few minutes to handcuff T.A. into the second seat of the Suburban and lay Valter out in the back. He gave T.A. a final shove before jumping back behind the wheel.
“Hey, that hurts, you jerk!” she fumed.
Pike looked back at her expressionlessly, then started the car, hung a U, and headed back toward the ranch.
44
DECEMBER 10: BACK AT THE RANCH
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, T.A. turned in her sleep and her manacled wrist pulled against the bed frame, waking her. She sat up against the headboard and rubbed her eyes with her free left hand.
She was sore all over. Scratches and welts burned. Her eyes and nose felt gritty. She noticed she was wearing a khaki shirt with the sleeves rolled up. It was at least two sizes too big for her. They’d pulled her boots off but left her dirty tube socks, she saw with relief. She still had the nearly ten thousand dollars in those socks. She spied Pike, who’d been dozing in an overstuffed armchair by the door.
“Pike,” she said, “why are you goin’ along with these criminals?”
He didn’t answer.
“They don’t give you much credit, ya know. Valter would sell you out in a New York minute and F. Rank treats you like a shoeshine boy. I thought you were a cowboy—a buckaroo. I’ve heard you talking when you get around some of the cowboys that come in to gamble. I just want to know what kind of cowboy you are.
“I know you know what F. Rank’s up to. You’re gonna let him and that maniac Ponce de Crayon shoot a bunch of endangered animals? Just to impress a busload of cheezy billionaires?
“You wanna meet a couple of real cowboys? Get to know those two who saved my life. I’m honestly surprised at all they did. They’ve risked their lives against low-life weasels like Valter. And why? To save me! They don’t even know me, Pike. How ya like them apples? They don’t even know me, and yet they put themselves between me and people who want to hurt me. Does that make any sense? I’ll bet they don’t even know why. Real heroes. How many times do you get to be around real heroes?
“And look at you, taking money to go out and ruin people’s lives. You’re not much of a cowboy, Pike. You’re a hood. A dirtbag. Scum. I’ll bet your mother’s proud of you.” Pike had remained silent throughout T.A.’s tirade. Now he slowly turned toward her.
“I saw him ride Kamikaze,” he said without emotion.
“Who?”
“He rode into the arena naked on a camel, borrowed some spurs, a bull rope, a hat, climbed on the back of that man-eatin’ son of a bad dream that had never been rode—and punched his clock.”
Naked? thought T.A.
Pike continued, “It was absolutely the greatest thing I’ve ever seen at any rodeo, hell, at any sport, in my entire life.”
“Did you use to rodeo?” asked T.A.
“When I was—” Pike started, then caught himself. He stared at her with a flicker of awareness, then shut down.
“Did you?” she persisted.
“There’s a bedpan under the bed,” he answered. “I’ll leave the room for a moment if you need to use it.”
T.A. threw him a pleading look, but before she could say another word, he’d closed the door gently behind him.
45
DECEMBER 10: A RANK’S CONFESSION
Ponce de Crayon was pacing like a coed waiting for the results of her pregnancy test. He hadn’t taken F. Rank’s confession that his wife had stolen their five million dollars in down payments well at all. He ranted and raved and blistered F. Rank with a fusillade of insults, castigations, and demeaning comparisons in metaphor and simile.
It was nearly a quarter hour before the lava flow began to harden. Ponce’s eyelids became slits. His left eyebrow crinkled down; his right one would have joined the scowl if it hadn’t been for scar tissue.
“You,” he rumbled, “are ze stuff vot collects in ze bottom of a tool drawer dat hasn’t been opened zince ze carpenter died! You are ze grease stain on ze carport, ze rust on ze anchor of a ship lost at see during ze Spanish American Vor! You have ze visdom of a barnacle, ze insight of a mayfly, and ze imagination of a lobotomized brussels sprout!
“How I ever managed to let you talk me into anyzing is beyond my ability to appreciate. You have zuch good judgment. You vall in love vit a vaitress, hire her to fool your doting parents. Now she takes our money—and hides it!”
Ponce’s eye began to twitch. “Thank gootness, it is only your half of de money that was stolen. You find it or you may find you and her both pushing up codfish.”
“No way,” F. Rank said, crossing his arms like a pouting child. “We both take the risk. Anything we make we still split, even if it’s only the second five million.”
“You impotent little shrimp!” screamed Ponce.
F. Rank cringed but still held his ground, “Half! I get half, whatever it is!” He stuck out his lower lip.
“You chiseling little weasel! You find that money,” threatened Ponce. “If you don’t, I’ll stuff you in a culvert and plug both ends— vit cement. You bring me zat voman. I vill make her talk.”
Both ends? Of me? mused F. Rank. Or both ends of the culvert?
Ponce de Crayon spoke into the intercom on the wall. “Pierre, prepare le Habitation Napoléan pour le nôtre houseguest,” he instructed in a perfect rendition of Maurice Chevalier mangling the Queen’s English.
“Oui,” answered the wall.
46
DECEMBER 12: COWBOYS IN VEGAS
“Pharaoh’s is right up there.” Lick pointed.
Cody eased the pickup into the right lane. They’d parked Al’s dogs with Mr. Roanhorse back at the rez until the old man returned.
“Where you reckon we should park?” Cody asked.
Al answered, “Valet-park it there, right in front. Them boys’ll take care of it. Sure is a nice truck, Cody. I had one this color once when I was riding pens down there in Nebraska. I run it through the truck wash out on I-80. They had some big sprayers they used on aluminum trailers. Said it cut through the dried stuff on the floors and sorta polished the aluminum. Peeled the paint right off that baby! I’m tellin’ you, it turned this color in fifteen seconds. By the way, what do you call this color?”
Cody steered up next to a doorman shivering in a Cleopatra hat and a toga.
“I’d like to valet-park my rig,” Cody told him when he got the window down.
The shivering Egyptian handed him a ticket. Cody turned back to Al.
“Primer,” said Cody. “I call it primer.”
As luck would have it, and as I’ve said, it sometimes does, which makes the story go smoother, the Cowboy Reunion, better known as “the Turtles,” was having its meeting at Pharaoh’s. These were the original professional rodeo cowboys dating back to Leo Cremer, Yakima Canutt, and Bill Pickett, who represented the first three books of Pro Rodeo’s Old Testament.
There were lots of seventy-plus-year-olds in the large ballroom on the second floor of the casino. Most were still
ambulatory and able to tell plenty of tall tales. Some were old enough to remember the first big rodeo in Boston Gardens, where the cowboys had a “strike” for a bigger part of the gross in 1936. They remembered the great broncs like Midnight, Five Minutes to Midnight, Descent, and Tipperary. They could still picture the great rides: Casey Tibbs on Neck-tie or Freckles Brown on Tornado. There wasn’t a story to be told that someone couldn’t stand on a chair and tell a taller one. This annual gathering of the Stove-Up Cowboys Association was overseen by Sunny Day, who’d been a rodeo wife and secretary for more years that she could remember. She was the glue that held the living scrapbook together.
They were also given special treatment in the Gold Card Room at Thomas & Mack Arena, a place set aside during the National Finals Rodeo for venerable professional cowboys. Membership required that the cowboys be at least fifty years old and have participated in the sport and won sufficient money. The “Room” was actually a bar where the blue collar royalty of rodeo mingled. A place where you didn’t have people asking you what it was like to nearly be a champion, or how it felt to get bucked off, or be required to listen to a fan tell you about how he almost rode a bull . . . but a sandstorm hit, he lost his shoe, or his mother wouldn’t sign the paper.
The Turtles were the founders of professional rodeo. They are the elite. The old man was a Gold Card member and a Turtle.
The Turtles spent their daylight hours meeting and visiting at Pharaoh’s. In the evening some would venture over to Thomas & Mack to watch rodeo performances. They might slide by the Gold Card Room to put in an appearance. They had a certain cachet, these septuagenarian vaqueros, but remember, dear reader, that Al Bean was a typical member of this group, so you can see it wasn’t like a reunion of college presidents or secretaries of state.
It didn’t take Al long to find the Cowboy Reunion on the second floor and get into the thick of the reminiscing. However, he was in the midst of his contemporaries, who could remind him when he deviated from the acceptable lie.
“Gosh, Bean Brain, I ain’t seed you since you rode that buffalo through the lobby of Howard Johnson’s back in—”
“It weren’t a buffalo, it was through the boathouse at Evangeline Downs—”
“Evangeline Downs weren’t even built in ’56—”
“Were, too. Yer thinkin’ of Johnson City, not Howard Johnson—”
“Harry Johnson, you mean? Cow boss in Bruneau for a hundred years—”
“I had a dog named Bruno. Blue heeler. Mean as a snake—”
“You mean the Snake River Stampede? That’s where I met her. Brunette. Almost bucked me off.”
Lick and Cody soon glazed over. They took their drinks and free food and went downstairs to the casino.
“How about it, cowboys,” invited one of the blackjack dealers. She was a fair-haired, pink-cheeked, blue-eyed, cocked-and-loaded pistol. Her long blonde hair was pulled back into a shiny waterfall and her smile was a dentist’s dream.
Cody and Lick looked at each other, contemplated, then shrugged “Why not?”
“Till we finish our drinks,” said Lick.
Lick only had ten dollars, so he got ten one-dollar chips. Cody had over three hundred in his pocket, so he bought one hundred dollars’ worth of fives and ones.
Lick had an easy way with strange women. The dealer smiled at him and minded her own business. He was out of money in three minutes. “I knew I shouldn’t have split those sevens. You ready to go?” he asked Cody.
“Not quite yet, my friend,” said Cody without looking up. He peeked at his bottom card, then scratched the table with his cards. The dealer placed a four of spades faceup on his pile. “Twenty-one,” said Cody as he rolled over his cards.
Lick discreetly studied Cody’s pile of chips, which had grown taller. Roughly three hundred dollars, he figured.
Cody placed twenty dollars’ worth of chips in two piles to his right and left. The dealer dealt him two down in each pile. “Blackjack,” said Cody, rolling over an ace-ten under his left hand. He peeked underneath the two cards by his right hand, then looked into the dealer’s sweet steely eyes. He slid his two cards under the stack of chips to indicate he would stand pat.
The dealer rolled hers over: 3, 6, 2, 3, ace, pause, 9, bust.
Cody counted out three hundred dollars’ worth of chips from the table and put them in his jacket pocket. That left two hundred sixty dollars on the felt.
He bet two hands at a time, split about every third one, and won 80 percent of the time.
Lick kept looking at Cody quizzically, a great big smile on his face. The waitress, dressed as Cleopatra, complete with a snarling asp rising from her widow’s peak, kept the boys’ refreshment glasses coming. Cody was too deep in concentration to drink much of his complimentary beverage, so as to avoid offending Cleopatra, Lick was finishing it.
Lick didn’t mean to break Cody’s run of good luck, but his raucous hooting—yee-haws, right ons, blow me downs, and “Git this sailor another tequila!”—was drawing a crowd.
At the end of the deck, the blonde dealer dunked the cards and stepped back. Another dealer slid into her spot.
“Here, darlin’,” said Lick as he reached into Cody’s pile of chips and picked up what looked like a couple hundred dollars, and gave them to her.
“Thanks,” she said to Lick, and wished Cody good luck.
“So,” Lick said to the new dealer, “think you can stop the lucky streak? Take yer best shot. Why, I’ve seen him win twenty times in a row. He sits at home day and night playin’ blackjack. He’s autistic, ya know. A genius, an idiotic Seville, an Einstein in sheep’s clothing. Belongs to Menstra. He’s figured out the system. He knows the secret!”
Lick was rising to a crescendo. “And you wanna know what it is?” He turned to the gathering crowd. “Do you wanna know what it is?”
“YES!” yelled the enthusiastic audience in unison.
“Get twenty-one every time!” With that explosive expulsion of wisdom, Lick fell over backwards and the crowd cheered.
The dealer waited till Lick’s interruption subsided, then dealt Cody two hands. Cody won. He won the next thirty of thirty-eight hands through two more dealers. Cleopatra kept bringing him drinks. Lick kept protecting Cody by drinking them, keeping him out of harm’s way.
After two hours, Cody had won nearly five thousand dollars and Lick was still upright.
Then Cody lost three in a row. He looked at his pardner leaning on the table and pushed himself back. “I’m done,” he said. He gave the dealer a hundred and looked at Cleopatra. She offered him a fresh drink.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Anything else you’d like?” she asked innocently.
“Yes,” he replied. “Directions to the men’s room.”
“What a run!” said Lick. “We haven’t done that good since we placed in the money eleven rodeos in a row back in . . . whenever that was.”
Cody and Lick were side by side in front of the upright porcelains, each one unilaterally occupied.
“Two years ago, Lick. That’s when it was. ’Cept eight of that eleven were yours. We sure smoked ’em that year.” He paused and looked at the wall, “Wonder what ol’ Kamikaze’s doin’ these days.”
“Aah, they are turning him out to pasture,” answered Lick. “Emerald Dune, the announcer, bought an interest in him. They’re gonna use him as a breeding sire. Gonna make a killin’ sellin’ his calves. More power to ’em.”
“I’m sure you know,” said Cody, “they was afraid he’d kill somebody else. He just got meaner and trickier. Did you know Manly Ott drew him at the Finals last year? Turned him out. I saw it. Lilac and I went. Manly straddled him in the chute and when they pulled the gate, he just stepped back up on the rail.
“Nobody booed or nuthin’ like that, but it was a strange moment. That was Kamikaze’s last rodeo. The conglomerate got together and started promoting him. Sellin’ semen. Only thing they couldn’t say in the advertising was UNRIDDEN.” Cody
looked over at Lick, who smiled.
It had only been two years since these two “once professional” rodeo cowboys had concluded the most exciting year of their lives, culminating with Lick making the National Finals Rodeo in the bull riding. At the Finals, the top fifteen money winners of the year competedin ten rodeos, ten days in a row, the “Super Bowl” of rodeo. Lick really had no chance to win the PRCA world championship, and was a long shot even to do well at the Finals, but by the seventh go-roundhe was still in the running to win the average. However, gamblersintervened and kidnapped him in an effort to reduce his chances. But Cody and Lilac rescued him in time to compete in the last go-round.
The bull Lick had drawn was the unridden widowmaker Kamikaze.With horns like an upraised preacher, the look of Lucifer in his eye, and malice for all who climbed on his back, he was Darth Vader, Black Bart, and T. Rex all rolled into one.
Lick made a ride that tore the roof off the stadium, melted hearts, and made grown men cry. It was a no-hitter at the World Series, a Hail Mary for a touchdown to win the game, the last step in a walk across Texas.
Lick left his mark on the sport he loved. Cowboys would talk about it forever.
That chapter in their lives lay beneath Lick and Cody’s conversationlike the ocean under two survivors in a rowboat. It’s funny how friends can pick up where they left off. Not necessarily on the outside, because the outside changes with time, but on the inside, in those private places where memories don’t get worn out by overuse and the constant scrutiny of revisionist doubt.
Emotions well out of some deep pot as if they’ve been simmeringquietly. Yet when you tip the lid even slightly, they billow forth like steam clouds, smothering you with sights and sounds and aromasof memories as fresh as your last breath.