Once They Heard the Cheers

by Wilfred Charles Heinz

  "Sometimes now," Tescher said, "I wish I had had sense enough to go to a few more rodeos, not for me but for my friends and family. I stayed home for harvest, and at Denver I judged, where Marty won, but I was just so darned tickled to finish second."

  "I was the one that hurt," Gary said. "I remember that night I was in tears, and I promised myself I was gonna win it. When things are goin' tough, I guess that keeps me going, because I think that if a guy just rides hard enough, he can win it."

  Loretta and Betty were starting to set the table for the noon meal that, where the work is still around the home and the workday starts at 5:30 a.m., is still called dinner, and we moved into the living room. When I asked him about his schooling, Gary said that after he finished high school in Beach, which is forty-four miles to the south, he had a rodeo scholarship for one year at Jasper Junior College, in Wyoming, and then he went for one semester to North Dakota State Teachers College in Dickinson, and for another to North Dakota State in Fargo.

  "I was having to sell my cows to go to college," he said, "and I wasn't gettin' any rodeos. Then one year I didn't go anywhere. I got a job in Beach in a cheese plant. I wanted to see what it was like, and to prove to myself that I wouldn't like it."

  "And other than rodeo," I said, "what do you hope to do?"

  "I've been workin' on a loan to buy a ranch up here," he said. "It's about thirty miles northwest, and Dad owns it. It's a 200-head place, with five sections of land on it, seven miles from Trotters."

  "What's Trotters?"

  "There's a general store and gas station and a post office and a church."

  "We built this basement here in 1960," Tescher said, "and we lived in it for six years. Now the FHA wants you to have the best, the biggest tractor, the biggest house that a young fella don't need. They won't let Gary live in a basement, and it's tough on the young."

  "What about the others you went to school with around here?" I said to Gary. "Back East a lot of the younger generation haven't known what to aspire to, and they're lost."

  "It's like that here."

  "Really?"

  "A lot of the guys I went to grade school and high school with were straight and clean cut, but now some of them have sure strayed. They're long-hair, pot-smoking guys, and some have been alcoholics already."

  "A lot aren't willing to work," Tescher said. "They think they need big modern equipment, and to hire other guys."

  "Why do you think this has happened to your age group," I said to Gary, "where it didn't happen to your dad's?"

  "People get exposed more now," he said. "They see a life that looks easier to them."

  "You mean on television, where in the commercials everybody is lolling around at beach parties drinking beer, or if they're not doing that, they're flying off to Hawaii or comparing the riding qualities of a Lincoln Continental with those of a Cadillac?"

  "I think that does it," Gary said. "People get an outside look they never had before."

  I asked about the rest of the family, and Tescher said that Cindy, the second oldest, is married and living in Beach. Barry, whom I remember as a four-year-old walking around the motel in Phoenix in boots, jeans, and a western shirt and under a Stetson that, Skipper Lofting said, made him look like an ant moving a soda cracker, was living with his sister and her husband and going to high school in Beach.

  "Troy's thirteen and Bonnie's eight." Tescher said. "They'll be out of school in a few minutes, and they'll be in for dinner."

  "Where is the school?"

  "It's in a house trailer out back in the yard here."

  "It's right here?" I said. "How does that come about?"

  "Well," Tescher said, "there were the two of ours that go and Rodney Burnam, who's an eighth-grader with Troy. He lives across the river and comes over in the cable car, so because we have the two they moved it here."

  "In other words, the school moves to the home place of the family with the most pupils?"

  "That's right."

  "And there's a teacher for just Troy and Bonnie and the other boy? Where does she live?"

  "In the teacherage, in the back of the trailer," Tescher said. "We can go out and look at it later, if you care to."

  When Troy and Bonnie came in and we were introduced, we sat down to dinner. Tescher said grace, and we had buffalo steaks and prairie hen, home-grown vegetables, home-baked bread, and homemade ice cream. After we had eaten, Gary started to carry some things to his car and I followed him out.

  "Do you like this car?" I said. It was a Chevrolet Nova, not quite a year old.

  "I like it fine," he said. "The only thing I have against it, it's not paid for."

  It reminded me of his father. In Phoenix in 1964 I had watched him take out of the trunk of his car the bronc saddle he had paid $185 for in 1949 and had been using ever since. The leather was scarred and dry, and I had asked him what he treated it with.

  "Just abuse," he had said.

  "How far have you driven to rodeo this year?" I said to Gary now.

  "I'd say about 100,000 miles."

  "Do you share the driving with others, or do you do most of it alone?"

  "Alone," he said. "North Dakota is kind of the armpit of the world as far as rodeo goes now, and there's not too many guys from around here."

  "So to get to Abilene by tomorrow evening," I said, "you'll be driving most of the next twenty-eight hours. How do you stay awake?"

  "I drink a lot of Coke," he said. "Coffee gives me heartburn. There's a lot of tricks, too. Eat sunflower seeds. Take your boots off. If you've made a good ride, though, you can drive around the world."

  When he went back into the house to say good-by, I waited by the car, and when he came out his father was with him. They talked awhile, standing on the walk, and then he came over and I shook hands with him and wished him luck.

  "Thanks," he said. "I sure hate to leave."

  "I was the same way," his father said. "I always stayed too long."

  We watched him drive out the gate for Abilene and then Albuquerque. When the car had disappeared down the slope, we started to walk slowly around the outside of the house.

  "He's a fine young man," I said, "and I hope he makes it in rodeo."

  "I've talked to two or three bronc riders who said he's goin' good," Tescher said, "but he just hasn't been drawin' good."

  "Realizing how much he wants to win the world championship," I said, "and knowing how difficult that is, I've been wondering if I'm partially responsible. I mean, in that piece I wrote about you, I wrote how he wanted you to win it and how, when you just missed out that last night, he cried. I'm wondering if, focusing that attention on it, I may have helped to start him reaching for something he may very well never attain."

  It is a responsibility that has concerned me for many years. A writer pries into many lives, and since what he writes and is printed and is read can alter those lives to some degree, he can only hope that, while it is accurate and the truth, it is also for the better.

  "I don't think so," Tescher said. "I think he'd have tried anyway. I told him, 'If you're doin' it for me, don't do it.' "

  "Do you give him any coaching, or any advice?"

  "If I know the horse he's drawn. This one he's on in Albuquerque, I tried him out when Mike Cervi bought him. He's the biggest rodeo producer in the world, and Gary and I and two nephews went down to Spearfish to try out about fifteen horses for him when there was still snow on the ground in the arena. I just told Gary now that he's got to really hustle and keep throwing his feet ahead, because the horse really snapped, and you really have to hurry on him."

  In Phoenix he had known them all, all he had ever ridden or just seen. He had studied them all, the way in big-league baseball the pitchers study the hitters and the hitters the pitchers, and in pro football the defensive backs keep mental book on every change of pace and fake and move of every receiver they have to face.

  "You know what these are?" he said now.

  We had walked around to the f
ar end of the house. There were a half dozen large animal skulls, bleached an off-white, propped against the foundation.

  "Buffalo," he said. "They're a hundred years or more old. We found them buried ten to twenty feet underground. Where the draws wash out you see a horn, and you dig it out. They died in the creek or were washed in, and where Roosevelt lived they found a hairy elk. There are people who pay money for these now."

  "Those buffalo steaks we had," I said. "Where do you get those?"

  "I bought ten buffalo calves three years ago," he said, "from the fella who restored Medora, and I've still got two left. Two years old is prime, though."

  "What about the buffalo in the National Park here?"

  "About a dozen years ago," he said, "they began to rebuild the herd. It got to 220 head in the south unit, and last year they shipped out over 100 head to Indian reservations and other parks. There's about 150 or 160 in the north unit, and when they're movin' them, we help round 'em up."

  "You actually round up buffalo?"

  "About eight or ten ranchers and a few rangers that can ride. Some are help, and some are hurt. You've got to be mounted real good, because they're hard to handle. You have to crowd buffalo a lot to get 'em started or to bend 'em, and if you're not mounted good, you don't dare get in there.

  "They'll charge you real bad, the cows with the bulls and when the bulls get tired. You just have to outrun 'em, and I think the biggest thrill I ever had in my life was last year. Some other fellas were bringin' some in, and I had to run my horse real hard to help bend 'em, and it stepped in a prairie dog hole. It turned a somersault and skinned up its nose and head, and that takes a lot of drive out of a horse. It hurt my leg, but I remounted and rode in to help. One fella said, 'Look out, or that one cow will really take you.' She was the worst I ever seen. She charged me and she took me two hundred to three hundred yards through sage brush, and it was thick. I couldn't see downed trees or holes or whatever. She was on my tail, and my hat fell off and she turned with that. We had trouble with her for two days straight.

  "They're more vicious than the bulls," he said, "and they're so strong. There was a brand new semi backed up there, and one took a run at another. Their horns come out straight and up, and they're terrible sharp. The one got its head under the other and threw her and the second one's horns went through the roof of this new semi. I remember the driver was kind of complainin', cryin' about his new semi. The biggest will go to 2,400 pounds and one bull hit the gate eleven times and broke it. They have no reasoning power, and the last half mile from the pens you have to go as fast as you can, hootin' and hollerin' so they can't turn back."

  "And how long does one of these roundups take?"

  "About three days."

  My wife had come out of the house, and we walked down to the bunkhouse. There was a large main room, with a poured concrete floor and a fieldstone fireplace, and, at one end, two bunkrooms and a bath.

  "Who built this?" I said.

  "We put in the foundation," he said, "and hunters who come up here regular stayed for five days and put up the shell, and then we finished it. We've had two wedding dances in here, and they have the Christmas pageant in here, too."

  "A Christmas pageant?"

  "One year we had it back at the house in the living room," he said. "There's another school ten miles from here, and they combined. There were eight to ten kids, and the teacher took a part. All the neighbors will come from up and down the river, maybe thirty or so. Would you like to look in at the school?"

  "I don't think we should go in while it's in session," my wife said. "I told Loretta we'll be going back to Medora for tonight, but we'll come out again tomorrow and stay over, if we may, and we'll see the school then."

  "Fine," Tescher said. "Whatever you say. We're just pleased to have you."

  Driving back out that afternoon, we were almost as hesitant as we had been coming in, afraid of taking a wrong turn, even of being stranded by a mechanical breakdown in this country where we did not see another vehicle or another person for the more than thirty miles. The next morning, after we had eaten breakfast again at Bud's Coffee and Gift Shop and I had checked out of the motel, we drove the Interstate and turned north once more. Now, knowing where we were going, we were relaxed enough to notice even the smaller bird life, the meadowlarks and magpies, and to appreciate the patterns of sunlight and cloud shadow playing across the grasslands and illuminating the buttes and down into the draws.

  We were to sleep that night in the basement room I had shared, that night twelve years before, with Gary, and after I took the bags out of the car, Loretta led us down. There were the two bedrooms, with the bath between, and what had been the kitchen and laundry, and off that, what had been the living room, all of it where they had lived for eight years under the flat roof of six layers of tar and tar paper.

  After we had eaten that evening in 1964, Tescher and I had sat in the living room having a couple of drinks, and I had got him to talking about how, when he and his brother Alvin were living alone in the bunkhouse after the family ranch house had burned, someone would leave a horse with them to be broken. It would take them three or four weeks to get it roughed out and ready to handle, and then they'd take it back to the owner. That was how he got the thirteen dollars for his first pair of boots and ended his shoe wearing right then.

  "We used to run wild horses, too," he said. "In those days these Badlands were full of 'em, and when I was seventeen I had forty-three head."

  "In other words," I said, "when you wear those jeans and boots and that hat, it's not just a costume and you're not just acting."

  Levi Strauss, a Bavarian sailmaker, brought blue denim and dungarees to the California gold miners in 1850, and the American cowboy adopted them. In the 1950s the jeans, which when new will almost stand alone, became a prop for the newly pubescent and an excuse to go unwashed for the arrested adolescent. They have since been bleached and bespangled, hijacked, counterfeited, and even corrupted by couturiers into costumes for the chic.

  "Just acting?" he said. "I guess that's right."

  "I understand that some people don't know that," I said. "They told me in Phoenix that when you and Tom were rodeoing together, and somebody in a bar would start the abuse with that 'Where'd you park your horse, Tex?' it was a delight to see. They say that you two, wreathed in smiles, would just clean out the place."

  "They told you that, did they?" he said.

  "That's right," I said, and he was then on the Board of Directors of the Rodeo Cowboys Association. "I understand that last summer at Cheyenne this cowboy came up and shook his finger in your face and said, 'You RCA directors are a lot of fatheaded sonsabitches!' They say you knocked him on his tail, and he was still out five minutes later."

  "I guess that's about right," he said.

  "What about the night in Dickinson?"

  "Well," he said, "Loretta and I were going to Fort Madison, and we stopped in this cafe to wait for Pete Fredericks, from Halliday, who was goin' with us. While we were eatin', there were three or four fellas in the next booth who got to arguing and cussing and finally the big guy challenged this little fella to go out in the street. I went out and the big guy just bloodied up the little fella somethin' awful, and finally he knocked him out.

  "The big guy was feelin' pretty good now," he said, "and back in the booth he got to using some pretty rank language. Finally I said to him that there was a lady present, and I told him he should shut up. He jumped up and said, 'I'd like to have you shut me up!' I had my right hand on the top of the back of the booth, and I kinda pivoted on that, and I hit him a left.

  "He went back over the table, but he came out of the booth and I hit him another shot and I flattened him. Then I picked him up and I threw him out. By then the manager had called the law, and when they got there, this manager said, 'It's all right now, officers. This gentleman has already handled it.' One of the cops said, 'Was that you threw him out in the street?' I said, 'That's right.' And the cop said
, 'You know, as we come along in the dark, we thought you were throwin' out a saddle.'"

  "I like that," I said.

  "Then the manager wouldn't let us pay for the two dinners," Tescher said.

  "What about that time in Dallas?"

  "They told you about that, too?" he said. "Well, after the rodeo, we got paid off kind of late, and it was about two a.m. when I went to eat in this cafe right across from the hotel. There were about a dozen cowboys and a lot of others there, but there was only one waitress, and we had to wait. There was one fella there and he started that 'Tex' stuff. The longer nobody said anything the worse he got, and finally I'd finished eatin' and George Williams just kinda nudged me.

  "So I said to this fella, 'Why don't you just get out?' He said, 'Maybe you'd like to try to put me out.' Then we went to it, and as soon as we did I knew he could fight. I guess we must have gone for three or four minutes until finally I hit him a good right, and he went down and he just lay there by some chairs. The other fellas got me out then, because they figured the law was comin'. Later, when I went back to pay my bill the manager said somebody had already paid it, but he said, 'Do you know who that fella is, you knocked out? He's the light-heavyweight champion of Texas.' I could tell he could fight."