Aiden slipped down into the pit to look things over and pushed a circled thumb and finger out at him. Joe Willie nodded. Aiden had talked him into allowing a mechanic from town to do the nitpicky work of installing everything, and he saw the sense in it. He was surely lost when it came to this, and Aiden was plum tired from the effect of four bulls on the first day. Besides, he’d sooner have it done right once than mucked about with a dozen times. Getting her on the road was what mattered to him now, and his pride and the anger that drove it in the early days with her had been replaced with a quiet devotion, a yearning to see her free, wide open on another road, gathering another generation of stories into her steel-and-leather bosom. If he had to step aside for a real truck guy to do the intricate work, so be it. He’d be there to watch, to learn, to come to understand how to care for her once she was ready, how to keep her moving. It was a settled feeling in his chest when he thought of it. He reached out a hand to touch the steel of her frame and felt the cool hardness like the granite and iron it had sprung from. She was a marvel. Sitting there, skeletal, the engine shining at her front end, the heart of her waiting to beat.
Aiden climbed out of the pit and stood beside him. He handed him a smoke and they stood there awhile casually examining the work they’d done together. Four bulls, twelve seconds. That’s what Aiden’s first day on the rodeo bulls had earned him. Twelve seconds. They’d been a handful of ornery and Joe Willie wondered how he might have made out. The smell of them set off pangs of something like jealousy in him, the fight still in him, the reaction to the challenge still able to flare. But watching the kid satisfied that too. He was a rider. Joe Willie could see that. There was a fraction of a second of adjustment each time, a minor shift in approach that told him the kid was thinking it through, learning to see himself out of the chute long before it opened, learning to anticipate, to read the animal beneath him and prepare himself. When the bull erupted he saw the shift play out, saw the kid try another trick, saw him fly out of the rigging, land roughly in the dirt and stand up quicker, angrier, ready for another go. A rider. He looked at him out the corner of his eye. Slouched. Easy with his body. Hurtin’ for certain. But taking it, accepting it, learning from it.
“She’s gonna be hot,” Aiden said.
“Yessir. I changed the order on the paint job, though.”
“What? Thought we agreed on deep metallic blue. Like the sky above the peak.”
“We did. I just added a little something.”
“Jesus. I can’t wait to see what the cowboy mind came up with. Flames and shit. Maybe a cartoon bull? Pinstripes like a lasso curled around the whole body?”
“Never thought of that. Maybe I’ll call back and add some of that. Just wait. You’ll like it.” He punched him lightly on the shoulder. Aiden winced and arched the shoulder around. “Hurt?” Joe Willie asked.
“Some,” Aiden said. “That last bull. Caught me leaning, couldn’t adjust in the air and landed pretty square on it.”
“Could be worse.”
Aiden looked at him. He took a long draw on the cigarette, held it deep in the lungs, then let it go slowly, head tilted back and watching the smoke plume toward the roof of the shed. “Yeah,” he said. “You still hurt?”
“Some,” Joe Willie said. “That last bull. Caught me leaning.”
They snickered. Aiden scratched at his ear and when he looked at Joe Willie again there was a grave expression on his face. “Was it worth it? Getting busted up like that?”
Joe Willie pinched out the smoke and put the butt in his chest pocket. “Love’ll bust you up sometimes,” he said. “Hurts like a bitch for a spell. Long spell. But in the end you come to prefer it. Knowing that it was love done it to you. Not something else. You can get by knowing that.”
“It was worth it, then?”
Joe Willie looked at him. “Damn straight,” he said.
He ran across the wide stretch of pasture to the road, climbed through the rails of the fence and continued trotting casually along the shoulder. The dog followed him but turned back once he’d ventured down the road a ways. He waved to it and picked up the pace. The muscles in his legs were tight and sore, but as he loped through the first mile they became more elastic and he held the pace easily. Around him the valley was like a postcard, bathed in an impossible morning light. There were shades of green around him that Aiden had never seen, never known were possible. Against the sky a hawk circled, and he caught the flare of brown at the edge of a hill that marked a coyote’s quick escape from sight. Ground squirrels chattered in the pastures on each side of him, and here and there was the small smudge of cattle or horses against the green. The land was full. He breathed it deep into him and felt his heartbeat in his chest, strong and hard. When he got to the turn toward town he stopped, jogged in place a moment and then turned back down the road toward Wolf Creek Ranch. The valley plowed an elongated V toward the far horizon, and as he ran he closed his eyes now and again to seal the image of it in his mind. He was sweating now and he rubbed a hand across his brow and back through his hair. He felt the keen sense of his own blood hot in his veins, his breathing hard in his ears and a clarity of vision and thought he’d never had. He shadow-boxed as he ran, flicked out the right and then the left in imaginary jabs and smiled at the feeling of freedom in his limbs.
He’d ride again today. Another four bulls anyway, maybe six. He wanted that feeling back, the feeling he got in the chute when everything had been done that could be done and it was just him and the animal. Waiting. Waiting for the release, the challenge, the answer to the call. He felt alive then, fully and completely alive, and even though the rodeo bulls were winning these initial battles, he got up off the ground with more determination and intensity than before, the ground pounding an education into his bruised muscles. Nine more to ride. Nine more challenges. He sent his mind through the ritual of preparation, seeing himself rubbing rosin into the bull rope, the elaborate pantomime of the ride, lacing his boots to his feet, pulling the chaps snug to his legs, and the weight of focus in his eyes. He ran faster. When he got to the driveway he sprinted full out, kicking up puffs of dust, his arms churning, knees raised high with each stride and the feeling in him, rich and steeped by the run, of aliveness, readiness, certainty. He sprinted all the way to the main barn, where he towelled off some, caught his breath and then picked up the first of the weights Joe Willie had bought for him. He lifted them. Filled with intention.
They were on the veranda shelling peas when they saw him run by. Claire watched him until he disappeared into the black of the barn and then she shelled solemnly, letting the small marbles roll off her fingers and drop into the bowl at her feet. The Wolfchilds let her be, and for a long while there was nothing but the sounds of the ranch in the early morning and the skreel of hawks in the wind.
“This place has been good for him,” she said.
“Yes. He’s lighter now,” Johanna said. “He doesn’t fill space the same way.”
“I’ve never seen him look so determined.”
“When you find a dream it changes you,” Birch said.
“What do you mean?”
“Bulls,” he said.
“Bulls?”
“He’s a rider. He can feel it. He knows it and he wants it now.”
“We’re only here a short time,” she said. “After that I don’t know what he’ll do. In the city there’s nothing like this.”
“I don’t expect you’ll find that he wants to be back there so much,” Birch said. “There was a cowboy in him waiting to be born, and now that he is there won’t be nothing less than that for him. Can’t be.”
“He’s not a cowboy.”
“Try telling him that.”
“Bill Pickett,” Lionel said. He looked at Claire and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “He was black. He was the one invented bulldogging.”
“What’s bulldogging?”
“When a cowboy jumps off a horse in full gallop to wrestle a steer to the g
round.”
“Why?” she asked, and they all laughed.
“Part of the life,” he said. “Part of the tradition of rodeo now. Probably didn’t look to Bill Pickett’s mama that he was cut out to cowboy either. But he was. Gave the sport a whole new look.”
“Black cowboys? I had no idea.”
“Been many a good man I knew was black,” Lionel said. “Damn good riders and some damn fine men. Got a book in there tells all about it. There’s a whole history, a whole tradition of black cowboys. He should see that.”
“Truth is,” Birch said, “was black men that settled the west. Did all the hard work leastways.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“No, ma’am,” he said. “When he’s riding the boy’s coming from a rich past, a rich history.”
Claire looked at him a long moment. “A tradition.”
“Yes,” Lionel said. “A damn good and proud one.”
“I’ll look at that book,” she said.
He found it on the tenth bull. There was a moment, just before he was launched into the air again, when Aiden sensed the pocket behind the bull’s shoulders, felt if he closed his eyes he could see it, begin to work it like the bull worked it, energy against energy, force against force, that small area the centre of everything. It was a brief intuition. The moment he focussed on the sensory perception of the pocket he lost it and the bull spun into his rigging hand. Picking himself up off the ground and watching the bull kick its way into the exit chute he shook his head and turned to prepare to remount.
“What happened?” Joe Willie asked him when he got to the fence.
“You saw what happened. He spun into my wrap hand and I lost it.”
“That’s not what I meant. You looked different up there.”
“When exactly,” Aiden asked with a grin, “in the three seconds I was up there?”
“It was six.”
“Really?”
“Really. I thought you were gonna break it.”
Joe Willie had limited him to three bulls a day with a day’s rest in between. Five days had passed since he rode the first four bulls. In that time Aiden calculated that he’d spent a grand total of twenty-seven seconds rigged up. The bulls were wild. They blasted out of the chute and into paroxysms of spins and kicks and bucks that had been impossible for him to read, gauge, predict and hold through. For the brief time he was mounted he paid attention to the fine points of riding, the free hand high and wide, the legs spurring the shoulders repeatedly and his upper body leaned with his perception of the bull’s movements. And he paid attention to his landings in the dirt. Each time he sat on the top rail, alone, far away from the Wolfchilds, the wranglers or his mother, whom he could see watching him nervously, checking his condition from a distance, worrying. In those moments he replayed the ride in his mind. He tried to recollect the twists and yanks and crazy elevations of the bull. But now as he looked up at Joe Willie straddling the top rail, he forgot the animal’s moves and imagined the pocket, saw it clearly, felt it in his seat, hips and thighs through the six seconds of recollection. “I’m gonna break it,” he said.
Joe Willie studied him. “Yeah,” he said.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Fire away.”
“If I do it, if I make eight on the last three, all of the last three, will you get me my permit?”
“You want to rodeo?”
“Not exactly,” Aiden said. “I want to ride bulls. I want to join the professional circuit.”
“The Professional Bull Riders Association? You want to tour?”
“Yes. More than anything.”
Joe Willie shook his head. “Those boys aren’t even cowboys. Not all of them. Hell, they go to school for it. They go to college and then join up. For the TV. For the lights, for the money. It’s all for the money, Aiden, not for the sport, not for the tradition.”
“Still.”
“Still nothing.”
“Joe Willie, I’m not even a cowboy,” Aiden said. “I’m a city kid. But I know how it makes me feel when I’m up there. I know how it makes me feel even when I’m spitting dirt. When I limp around after and every muscle in my body is crying out for me to stop the insanity, I still love it. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me.”
Joe Willie climbed down off the fence. He pushed his hat back on his head, put his hands in the back pockets of his jeans and leaned against the fence. He looked over at Claire, who watched the two of them closely. “If you do it,” he said, “I’ll get you your permit. But to rodeo. You want to tour, you tour the rodeo circuit just like I did, like my daddy and my grandfather did. Like my great-grandfather. You respect the tradition that gave this to you. You respect the tradition that woke up everything you feel inside of you. It ain’t worth it to me any other way.
“Because it’s not just about the ride. Hell, that’s only the smallest part. It’s all of it. Everything. Hitting the road in an old jalopy and watching those miles spin over horizon after horizon. Waking up in a rodeo motel with eight other cowboys and their women, the room ripe with feet and liniment and bulls and beer. The colour of the talk. Everything coming out like songs. Walking into a back lot and knowing that you know the people you prepare with. Knowing that no matter what happens out there you already won, you’re already safe, you’re already home. Feeling like you’re living in something bigger than bulls, bigger than competition, bigger than you. You live like that and it becomes your heart, Aiden. The way you breathe. You owe it to yourself to discover that.” He turned away. “And you owe it to me.”
He walked a few steps off and then turned quickly on his heel. “One other thing,” he said, so quietly Aiden had to strain to hear. “The ache I felt when it was gone? It wasn’t in my bones. You owe it to yourself to feel that too someday. Busted or just plain old, you owe it to yourself to feel that.”
Aiden watched him walk away. When Joe Willie reached the end of the corral, he shouted after him, “You got a deal.”
Joe Willie walked through the gate, one fist raised high in the air.
She found him in the small room at the back of the barn. It was evening and he was washing the dust of the day from him and whistling. She stood in the doorway and watched him. He had a bowl set on a small table and he sloshed his hands about while he lathered the soap and then raised his palms to his face to spread the lather around and then slopped water over his face and hair. Shirtless, he looked lean and lithe from her vantage point, until he turned and made a grab for the towel that hung off the back of a chair. The arm. It still shocked her. Against the rest of him it hung like a crooked afterthought and she stared at it until she felt his stillness and realized he was watching her. He slowly draped the towel over his left shoulder and and waited for her to say something.
She carried the book Lionel had given her and she walked to the table and laid it there. Then she turned to him and very slowly reached for the towel. He let her. It slid off his shoulder and she hung it off the chair back. She pressed her lips together and reached her hand up to his left shoulder and traced the narrow blade of bone to where it dropped off at the ruined joint. She let her fingertips slide into the small depression between the nub of the upper arm bone and the pocket of the shoulder and then traced the line of his arm over the region of the bicep down to the elbow. He didn’t move. She formed a cup with her palm and fingers and rubbed the length of it down to the wrist and back up again, and when she reached the shoulder joint again, she looked at him and smiled softly.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
“Never much thought so,” he said.
“It is,” she said. “It makes you beautiful.”
He laughed then, one short, sharp bark of laughter, and then he reached for the shirt that hung against the back of the door. “Most women wouldn’t think so,” he said.
“Most women aren’t me.”
He slipped into the shirt and looked at her carefully. “What do you mean?” he asked.
/> “I mean we all have flaws. But most of us keep them a secret, or at least we spend an awful lot of time and money learning how to hide them. The men I’ve known have all kept the dark parts of themselves away from me—their hurts, their pain, their rage, their shame, their shattered dreams. I never knew who I was dealing with until it was too late.
“But your arm is a testament, Joe Willie. It speaks of everything you’ve gone through and it’s a plain and direct and honest voice. That’s what makes you beautiful,” she said and rubbed his arm through the shirt again.
“Always seen it as a testament to failure,” he said.
She laughed now. “You couldn’t fail anything if you tried.”
“You neither.”
“I failed my son.”
“Bullshit. Where do you think he got the gumption?”
“He went to prison, Joe Willie.”
“He walked out whole, Claire. He got that ability from you. He got that from watching you tussle with all the crap you endured. You taught him how to carry on, no one else.”
“And the anger?”
“Same place.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. But you took it to eight. You rode it out. You made it work for you. He saw all that and it made him different.”
“You’re saying that I’m a good mother?”
He started to button the shirt. He watched his hands while he did and made the fingers of the left do the delicate threading of the button through the hole. When he finished he gave her a tight-lipped little grin.
“Can’t say about that,” he said. “I was just saying that you’re a real good woman. Most times they’re one and the same. From my experience, anyhow.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“No,” he said. “Thank you.”
It was a brindle bull with a full rack of horns, and Aiden could feel it before he lifted a leg to the rail. It filled space like a mountain, seeming to pull all available light into it so that it drew your eye even from a distance. It stood quiet in the chute, and when he did begin to climb he could feel it pull its own energy tight, draw itself down into its centre, gather itself like a storm front. Readying itself. He pinched his lips together, flexed his shoulders a tad and began to focus his own energy so that when he straddled the top rail, then stepped over and crossed his leg over top of the bull his face was composed, stern, hardened, like a mountain.
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