The crowd applauded, whistled, yelled.
Mike nodded to Barrows. The chute boss pulled the flank strap tight. As Tabasco felt the irritation of the overcinched strap, he reared, he bucked. That instant Mike dropped onto the stallion’s back. Tabasco thundered, erupted into the air, kicked the slat boards.
“I’ll take him.”
Barrows slammed open the chute gate. Tabasco exploded out.
Deep into the arena, bucking, rearing and roaring, whirling in a cyclone, the crowd shouting with every rise.
It’s the first time, Mike thought, as the animal blasted up from the ground, it’s always the first time, always scared and exhilarated, always the broken neck at stake, always the hang-on for the pride of stillness.
Up, up, you bastard—down, down, you son of a bitch—throw me, crud-heel, throw me—you mean son of a bitch bastard, kill me, kill me—buck, buck, you son of a bitch—wind on one leg, go up on it!
Down!—down, you motherfucker, pitch the goddamn breeze, try to ride riderless, try it, try it—try, try, try-y-y!
Just that suddenly it was over. He was still riding and the animal was calm. Snorting a little, complaining to show he was not yet a beast of burden, shaking his head to clear it, the stallion blew a white spume from his mouth. But he was subdued. Mike’s victory. Now he rode the beast easily, as if the wild stud were a lady’s walking horse, an elegant one with mincing footsteps. Mike too was elegant. As rugged as he was before the bronc was broken, that’s how delicate he was now. He lifted his hand gracefully to make a courtly salutation to the crowd, he held it aloft to show how casually he could manage a wild horse with a single hand. The crowd didn’t miss the point; they cheered. He raised his milk-white beaver hat off his head and waved it. More cheers, more.
The waving was painless. The arm had no ache in it now. No arthritis, no goddamn tennis elbow, nothing. The pain was gone.
He waved harder. No pain.
The crowd cheered louder. It wouldn’t stop cheering, he thought. He would do it now, the trick to swell the ovation a few extra decibels. Sitting confidently on his chastened mount, he performed his signature gesture, the flourish the crowd knew him by and waited for. He threw his white hat into the air, as high as it would go, and raced the horse to where the hat was falling. He caught it. He waved it harder than before, challenging the pain to come.
The crowd went wild. “Milo!” they screamed. “Milo! Milo! Milo!”
He had his fill of their applause and their adulation and the Pepsi bottles flying onto the field. He turned Tabasco sharply to the right, toward the catch pens, to make his exit. And just as he saw the gray gate open to welcome him, it happened.
The horse reared. He let out a whinnying roar. He twisted wild and Mike, unprepared, was thrown. Down, with the earth in his teeth. The crowd uttered a cry of dismay. Mike heard them. On your feet, he said to himself, on your feet. But he couldn’t rise, not yet. As he was about to try, the horse was up, then down, too close. Berserk, legs up, hoofs down, trampling the earth, trampling the rider.
The stands started to scream, a different sound this time. A hazer rushed out of a chute, punchers from alleyways, pickup men across the field. The crowd rose shrieking.
Up, Mike said to himself, up, show them you can get up. And the miracle: he got to his knees, then stood. His white clothes were soiled now, he was hobbling, he stumbled in search of his hat. I’m up, he thought, but I need my hat, I have to wave my hat. He found it, picked it up, dropped it, picked it up again. Now he had it for certain and he waved it. This’ll show them I’m all right, he thought, better than I was yesterday, as good as I ever was. Wave, wave the hat, show them, wave harder, wave.
At this show of valor the audience went mad. The joy, the ecstasy, we love you, Mike, love, love—stamp, clap, sing out in unison—love, love, love!
Mike fell.
This time he didn’t get up.
He lay very still.
2
He lay very still in the hospital bed, with the cast on his leg as hard as stone and, as the anesthesia was wearing off, pain all over his body, but no feeling in his leg. Maybe it wasn’t his leg, he thought, maybe it belonged to somebody else. His body certainly did belong to him, for there was pain in it, and pain confers ownership. Anyway, it didn’t matter if he was crippled; pretty soon the vet would arrive and put a gun to his temple, bang, bang, always shoot them twice, the crippled horses, give them the extra bullet, kill the gimpy horses, bang, bang.
Yes, horses. But he was not a horse, he had to cling to that, it would clear his brain if he could keep it straight. It would clear his brain still further if he could disentangle the order of things, what came early in his life, what later, what never. Start with the facts: which plaster cast was this? There had been many—his left wrist, his right arm, his right leg. Was it the right leg again, the first time, with Donna trying to mother him?
No, he was getting her mixed up with a mother he could barely remember. His parents had died before he was five. All he could recall of his father was that he was all grayness and his mother was a little gold watch in a locket and white rabbits and a soft hand. And loss. The ache he could never identify, except loss.
However, he could remember his mother’s parents, yes, very well. Good. Cling to that, it’s quite early in the order of things; early should come first. It had an added advantage—his grandfather and horses—there was an association there. Follow it.
The old man was a saddler. More than that. He used to brag that he had something to do with anything that went on a horse—saddles, bridles, stirrups, bits, hardware, leather—and he could physic any sick animal back to health if you called him early enough. As far back as Mike had any clear memory it was his grandfather and horses.
“Get off that stallion, you little pisshead,” Mike heard him yell. “He ain’t ours and you’ll break your pecker.”
Mike loved horses and he loved his grandfather. But he and the old man were always fighting. Once the boy spat licorice in his face and, another time, kicked him in the groin. The old man laughed. “Damn near made pebbles out of rocks, you little farthead.”
His grandmother pretended to be frightened of her husband—his hot temper, his vulgarity, his bellowing voice. She was always pretending to be demure and absentminded and not entirely responsible. It was only when Mike was graduating from high school that he realized the old lady had deluded him.
She was better educated than her husband and, as she put it, kept up on her reading. She said the difference between her and her husband was that when she put her hand to her head she scratched thoughts, but he scratched rust.
However, Mike’s obsession with horses and his total disinterest in books didn’t seem to bother her until the boy was approaching his teens. When she saw him become increasingly preoccupied with the fuzz on his chin and clean shirts every day and the dream dampness of his bedsheets, she saw her opportunity and began her campaign. She inveighed against the new style in book writing—“lechery and soilacity”—and threw the dirty books into the wastebasket. She knew Mike would retrieve them. He had to read a lot to find the dirty pages she was referring to, and he didn’t find many. Once there was a scene where a boy had an erection and did something nameless about it; another time a man kissed his wife’s nipples; and there was the girl who, trying to pee like her brother, stood up and aimed into an empty tomato juice can and got most of it on her Mary Janes. Tame stuff like that. He didn’t catch on until he was seventeen that the old lady, using a few fatuously naughty books as bait, had tricked him into Dickens and Thackeray.
His grandfather called him bookish, his grandmother called him ignorant. He was neither, but he determined, no matter what his grandmother wanted, he wouldn’t get mixed up with anything as idiotic as college. Horses were what he wanted, not professors, horses.
“Horses are the dumbest creatures that ever walked,” sh
e said.
“They’re beautiful!”
“Yes—and dumb,” she repeated. “Ride a horse toward a stone wall and if he trusts you he’ll smash his dopey head right into it.”
“Well, I trust you, Gram, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let you smash my head into college.”
His grandfather effected the compromise. College and horses. “Go for bein’ a vet. Animal husbandry and all that crap. Ain’t worth a shit—you won’t learn nothin’ you wouldn’t learn in a stable. But it’ll give you a paper to frame and the right to charge more than you’re worth.”
Mike went off to an agrarian college, a thousand miles away, and took premed courses and farriery and hippiatry and came home the first Christmas darkly unhappy and lonely and deeply confused. But when he came back at the end of his first year, mid-June, he had made excellent grades. Things looked better at college and worse at home and he suggested to his grandfather that the saddlery might be too small to handle the work and to think seriously of electrifying the forge: it was a nuisance stoking it all the time, and old-fashioned, and it might be smart to be modern, keep up with the times.
For the rest of that day the old man was hateful to him and at dinnertime he got up from the table and blurted at Mike, “You got your goddamn nerve, growin’ up so fast! Was you so unhappy as a child?”
It was the nearest he’d ever come to saying he loved Mike.
At the end of his second year, just as he was going into his last examination, he received a message that the old man’s smithy had caught fire the night before, the house had burned down and the old people were dead.
Loss. The ache for all the things unspoken, even the arguments unfinished, unresolved, the half sentences still hanging in the air. And the touchings that hadn’t happened. If only he had one more chance to touch them . . .
Still no feeling in his leg. Shoot the crippled horse.
“A crippled horse isn’t worth a bubble on a puddle of urine.”
No, it wasn’t his grandfather talking; the old man never used the word urine in his life.
It was Mr. Croag. His first employer, the summer his grandparents died, when he quit college. Mike became the apprentice to a “medical man,” as Croag liked to call himself, although he wasn’t a doctor or even a licensed veterinarian. An inspector, more or less, for the animal husbandry office of the County Department of Agriculture.
“Poultry, cattle, horses,” Croag told him on their first meeting. “We inspect, we inoculate, we fumigate.” Then he added with a touch of relish, “And we condemn.”
He was a tall thin man and unremitting, like a hypodermic needle. He looked older than his fifty years, for his gaunt face had a grizzly dust on it as if powdered with ashes. He carried a worn Old Testament in the left-hand pocket of his alpaca jacket; he didn’t really need the book, he knew it by heart. Mike lived in a back room of Croag’s dismal little house on the outskirts of Fredericksburg and often, long past midnight, he would hear the lonely bachelor loudly declaiming Deuteronomy as though he were Moses rebuking a mountain.
Mike worked all summer for the inspector, tending the truck that carried their equipment, keeping the inventory of chemicals and drugs, cleaning the testing paraphernalia, administering shots from time to time, demonstrating the use of fumigants and disinfectants, showing the farmers how to identify molds, funguses, blains, smuts, lichens, parasites.
Almost from the first he disliked the work; by the end of summer he hated it. It wasn’t only that he was deeply afflicted by the suffering of animals. It was something else, something almost indefinable that had to do with the arbitrariness of man’s relationship with the so-called lesser beasts. At what point in man’s cohabitation with his family of dependent creatures is he their justified executioner? When he wants to eat them? Or when they are ailing and beyond cure? But he had seen sick animals who were indeed curable, burned by the thousands or buried in deep pits by bulldozers. Why not cure them? Not worth the pellet, Croag would say, not worth the time. And not worth fighting about, certainly, this redressing of the imbalances of nature; only romantic fools fight about such things.
So, even before the outbreak of anthrax, Mike decided to find some other kind of work. The anthrax simply wrote the period to it.
It broke out on a horse ranch two hundred miles from the county seat. By midnight, when it was reported to Croag, twenty-two horses had it. By dawn, when they drove up to the place, fifty horses had contracted the disease.
“Murrain!” Croag called it. “Plague of Exodus!”
The immense horse barn, with all the doors and windows wide open, stank of it. A suffocating stench, terrifying, acrid and sweet at the same time, stabbing sharp yet smothering everything with a blanket of filthy dampness. The horses that had the external disease were not so badly off, ugly as they were with their burning coal carbuncles and their feverish black blains and running sores. But the others, with the inward death, were rottingly ill, unbearable to look at. They vomited in gusts and their nostrils blew a bloody rheum, their turds reddish, the blood vessels of their anuses seeming to explode. Yet, unlike most horses that lie down at the first sign of malaise, most of the animals were still on their feet. This gave the owner of the horse farm a frantic hope.
“They’re standing!” he kept yelling. “They won’t die—they’re standing!”
“Shoot ’em down,” said Croag.
“No!”
“Shoot ’em down and set fire to the barn,” the inspector said.
“No!” the owner yelled. “I can save ’em! I can save half of ’em!”
“Well, run the good ones out.”
With Mike’s help, the owner ran the healthy horses out into the open air, letting them go free, wild, anywhere. Stupid bastard for not having done it before, Mike thought.
As the last of the hale horses was breaking from the barn, Mike heard the first gunshot. He ran indoors and saw Croag killing a second prostrate animal, then a third and a fourth. When his gun was empty, instead of reloading, he pulled another gun from the right-hand pocket of his alpaca coat. He resumed the shooting and Mike hurried outdoors.
A little before noon the state sent two bulldozers and three front-end loaders, and they began to dig the enormous pit the horses were to be burned and buried in. By three in the afternoon one of the front-end loaders was scraping the dead horses off the barn floor and nudging them, foot by bloody foot, into the grave. When about a dozen dead beasts were lying on top of one another in a running, swollen mass and there were still many more to kill, Croag decided the barn shooting was too slow.
He pointed to the pit. “We’re going to corral them down there. We’ll shoot ’em when they get into the hole.”
He reached into his pocket, pulled out one of the guns, reloaded it and handed it to Mike.
“I’ll throw you more cartridges when you need ’em,” he said. Then he directed Mike toward the grave. “Get in.”
“No!”
“I’m routin’ ’em out and you’re shootin’ ’em,” he said angrily. “Now get down in.”
“No—no!”
“Get down there, you yella bastard!”
Mike looked at the bulldozer operators, the loader men, the owner of the farm, but nobody said anything; they simply stared at him.
He took the gun and walked down the incline the dozer had made. He was standing on the dead horses, walking over them, their bloody flanks, their heads, toward the far end of the grave. Then the first horse came. When he smelled the carnage ahead of him, he snuffled and started to go back but Croag’s whip was behind him, the bulldozers were on the left and the loaders were on the right, so he shuffled forward, down the incline.
Mike saw the animal descending into the grave, straight toward him. He didn’t know what to do. He had never killed anything in his life, didn’t know how much pressure a trigger took. The animal was almost upon him
.
“Shoot, you dumb sonofabitch—shoot!” Croag yelled.
He pulled the trigger. The animal shook a little but didn’t fall.
“Again—shoot him again.”
Another shot. The blood from the horse’s head splattered on Mike’s face, blinding him.
“Shoot ’em all twice!” Croag shouted. “Bang, bang—you get it?—bang, bang!”
Oh, Christ. Bang, bang.
There must have been fifty horses. His hair, his shirt, all his clothes were soaked with their blood and pus. When the last sick horse was dead, he climbed out of the pit. It was then the liberating thing occurred.
One of the healthy horses, terrified by so much blood in the air, had run amuck and fallen. He was a yearling, a graceful chestnut animal, his grace broken in the leg. Croag and a few others stood over the thrashing, flailing horse. Then Mike saw his employer draw the other gun.
“Don’t!” Mike yelled and he ran toward the group.
“Get away, you cheesehead,” Croag muttered. “His leg’s broken.”
“He’s not sick!”
“It’s broken.”
“Not sick, not sick!” He grabbed the gun. He threw it as far as he could. When Croag started after it, Mike hit him. The inspector struck back and Mike pulled him toward himself in a brutal embrace, rubbing the horse blood and sickness off onto the older man, then hitting him again and again, drawing more blood, drawing his last blood of the day.
He never saw Croag again.
In the fall he became a stock boy at Keeley’s Rodeo, roping a little, wrangling, steer bucking. That winter, in Oklahoma, he started bronco riding. The following spring he won his first medal, not much, a bronze one. A year to the day after he won his first gold buckle he had his first accident and broke his leg. He thought he was going to be a cripple, have his leg amputated.
I’m going to be a cripple for life, a cripple, a cripple.
His leg’s broken. Shoot him. Bang, bang.
Cry Macho Page 3