by Tim Sandlin
I said, "Yes, ma'am," and limped off to the truck.
3.
Back at the Super Eight, I didn't have a problem in the world couldn't be solved by a couple of Tylenol and codeines washed down with Jolt Cola followed by a hot shower. It's amazing how much pain you can be in and still maintain a positive attitude when you win, compared to when you lose. Normally, being kicked in the ass and having my head cracked on a bull's skull would have made the motel room with its shampoo tube, vinyl chair, and the TV remote bolted to the bed table feel as empty and depressing as week-long rain. As it was, the place seemed almost cheery.
I left the buckle box on top of the TV where I could see it while I watched Food Network and got dressed. Rachael Ray was whipping up swordfish cutlets. There's two cowboy fantasy outlets on the circuit — Food Network and Weather Channel—and no way will they ever understand each other. Rachael made me so chipper I whistled a Charlie Daniels song about patriotism and alcohol as I popped open a can of SpaghettiOs and ate with a plastic spoon I'd picked up at a Burger King in Laramie. One thing being on the road will make you appreciate is cold SpaghettiOs. People with homes and families can't relate.
On an impulse, I picked up the telephone and jabbed numbers. Big mistake.
Tyson answered and I could tell by his breathing he'd raced to beat his mother to the phone. In the background, I heard Mica say, "Jesus, Ty, watch where you're going."
I said, "How's my little cowboy?"
There was a moment of quiet, then, "I'm not a cowboy."
"Sure you are. You're my cowboy."
"I'm not a cowboy and I'm not yours. Cowboys are stupid."
I heard Mica say, "Is it him?" Ty must have nodded because Mica said, "Tell him he's late."
Ty said, "You're late."
I was working out the significance of I'm not yours. Ty was only seven, which, to my mind, made him too young for the verbal knife thrust to the ribs that was Mica's weapon of choice. So, it wasn't likely he knew something I didn't know and this was his way of dropping it on me. But then again, he might have heard Mica talking to one of her liberated friends — that gang listens to Bonnie Raitt and works themselves into a frenzy over one another's ex-husbands.
"How can you take that from the miserable bastard?" they say to one another. "I would never put up with his crapola." Then they list the sins right in front of impressionable kids who don't know there's two sides to a snake.
"I won a rodeo today," I said.
"Big whiz."
"I'm bringing you a present."
That perked him up. "What?"
"It's a surprise."
"Better not be another pair of baby chaps. Mom says we have enough cowpoke trash."
"Put your mother on."
I leaned over to the remote bolted to the nightstand and clicked off the TV. Rachael had been replaced by an ad starring a pinkfaced man with flappy lips selling chicken roasters. I didn't need a chicken roaster.
The way I see the love deal, it falls off the tree either this way or that. Either the object of your emotions makes you feel better about yourself, or the object makes you feel worse. I have limited experience with the loved ones making me feel better — there was a sorrel mare back when I rode Little Britches, and I used to feel pretty good about myself around Ty, before he got old enough to resent me not being at home. Romance often starts out making you feel better but it goes the other way fairly quickly.
Dad's take, before he died, was The kid is useless and always will be but I am a man who does his duty therefore I love him but you'll never hear me say it. I think. Since he never said it, I'm taking the last part on faith. You can get away with wishful thinking when the person you're talking about is dead. The truth is Dad never forgave me for being short. Mama loves me the way she loves her dog, Fergie. Back in my toddler days, she's the one taught me tricks to show off for the bridge club. I could recite every word of Edgar Allan Poe's Lenore when I was four, but I had no idea what it meant. Neither duty-love nor pet-love is the type that makes you feel better about yourself.
Here's how my love for Mica makes me feel: I once knew a college girl named Stella who was hiking alone in the DuNoir when a grizzly sow charged out of the treeline, knocked her down, and tore off her right buttock. The bear then flipped Stella over, ripped open her belly, and proceeded to eat fourteen feet of her intestines. I never found out if it was the large intestine or small and I wish I knew because I think of the attack regularly, in hopes of composing a poem, and my mental picture is incomplete without knowing which intestine. I see Stella on her back in the short grass of the meadow between the sage and greasewood. The meadows in there are covered by elk droppings, so I see them, too. In my mental picture, the bear tears off Stella's clothes along with her butt cheek, but that's just me. It's not real. The true picture is Stella lying there in the dirt watching her guts go down the bear's throat.
Stella never lost consciousness, not while the bear snuffled around inside her and not later when a Swiss hiking club complete with bear bells and store-bought walking staffs came along and chased the bear off. They stood in a circle around Stella, in their Kelly green shorts and chunky boots, talking whatever language Swiss people talk while one of the men ran down to the trailhead and found a couple of guys from Game and Fish who, not trusting the word of a tourist, hiked back to the meadow to see for themselves. The Game and Fish guys wrapped Stella in borrowed Saran Wrap so her parts wouldn't fall out.
It was only in the helicopter on her way to a hospital in Salt Lake City, hours later, that Stella finally passed out. Her roommate who told me the story said the Salt Lake doctors spent six hours picking pine needles, sagebrush, and elk pellets out of Stella before they started sewing her back up.
I only saw Stella the once after the experience and it wasn't in circumstances where I felt comfortable asking if it was her small or large intestine the bear ate. She was having breakfast with some people at Denny's the next fall, on her way back to the DuNoir to finish the hike, only not alone this time. I waited around knocking down coffee refills until she went to the cash register to pay, but I couldn't see one buttock there where it should be and one buttock not. Maybe she had an ass transplant.
Stella's roommate, who was my friend as opposed to Stella, who I barely knew and wouldn't have remembered if she hadn't been eaten by a bear, told me that during the weeks in the hospital and months of rehab, Stella grew obsessed with the grizzly that hurt her. She felt her flesh was in the bear's flesh, she and the bear had merged on a cellular level. She drew hundreds of pictures of the bear in oil pastels and the next year, after I saw her at Denny's, she went into the DuNoir searching for the grizzly sow who ripped off her right buttock and ate a fair length of either her large or small intestine.
The way Stella felt about that sow, that's how I feel about Mica. Mica said, "What?"
"Where's he getting this 'cowboys are stupid' idea?"
"Tyson is a smart kid. He figured it out."
The first impulse was to break glass. "You're poisoning him against me. Whenever I'm not there you say terrible lies about me and how I make a living."
"You're never here and you don't make a living."
Knife thrust. In the ribs. "Last time I was home Tyson was so proud of those spurs I brought him he wore them to bed."
"That was over a year ago when he was six."
"What's that got to do with squat?"
"He was a baby then. All babies think their daddies are great men. Then they grow up and see the truth and aren't fooled anymore. He knows the real you now."
"The real me the way you tell it."
I waited. She waited. Someday I'm going to compute how much I've spent on phone calls in which nobody on either end of the line talks. On the Sprint card, that's dead air at twenty-two cents a minute.
Finally, Mica said, "You're three months late, Rowdy. One more week and I call my Child Support Enforcement Officer."
I said, "I won today. You'll have your money. Ju
st don't forget, Tyson is my son."
"Just because you're his birth father doesn't give you entitlement."
Lord knows which magazine or TV show Mica got the fancy word from. I looked entitlement up on my Internet dictionary and in this case it means rights you are born with, as in the right to talk to your own child even though his mother hates you. When she said it, I had no idea what it meant, so I reacted the way you would expect.
"You can take your entitlement and stuff it up your ass."
She made a gum chewing sound. "Every time you curse at me I write down the date and what you said. If you ever stalk me, I'll have a paper trail thick enough to bury you under."
"I never stalked you, Mica. You're the one got pregnant so I'd marry you again."
"You are a loser and an adulterer and a deadbeat dad. Little Tyson says he'll shoot you if you are ever mean to me again." Her voice drifted from the mouthpiece. "Won't you, Ty, honey?"
From the background I heard Tyson's voice. "In the belly button."
Mica said, "Are we through?"
I hung up.
4.
When Tyson was going on two he taught himself how to sound like a pig. I don't mean oink-oink. I mean a real porker. With your back turned, you'd swear Ty was a piglet digging into his mama's teat. Lord knows where he heard one in the first place. We don't have pigs in GroVont and I can't make the sound myself.
Tyson was hilarious and he knew it. We had this game where he faced me, sitting on my lap, all shining blond hair, new teeth, and freckles. He would say, "How does pig go?"
And I would say, "I don't know, Ty. How does pig go?"
His little nose scrunched as far as he could take it, his cheek muscles snuffled back, and he'd, "Snort-snort-snort."
Then it was my turn again: "How does a hog go?"
"Snort!" This one deeper, more from the sinuses.
Then I would say, "How does Mama go?"
"SNORT!" Drawn out. Top volume. A hoot.
The first time Mica heard Ty's trick she laughed. After fifty times, she slammed the refrigerator door, snatched up her keys, and announced she was going out for cigarettes. The Mini-Mart was only four blocks down, but the trip took Mica two hours. She came back to find me and Ty sitting on the couch, watching World's Scariest Police Chases on cable TV.
Mica flew off the handle because Ty wasn't in his jammies and his teeth weren't brushed. She raised her voice. "Can't you ever do a damn thing around here?"
I said, "Not that would please you."
Ty pretended he couldn't hear us.
Soon after that I walked off my ticky-tack job at Purina Feed and went back to the rodeo. Which explains why five and then some years later I joined Yancy Hollister at the Gut Shot Bar and Sports Lounge to celebrate my first championship.
"I'm not an adulterer."
Yancy plugged his Blue Ribbon into his mouth and poured beer down his throat without swallowing. It's a neat trick, kind of unsettling the first time you see it. He drained the bottle then wiped his chin on his shirttail. "Who said you were?"
"Mica."
"The alcoholic, money-grubbing, sleep-with-any-man-and-half-the-women-in-northwest-Wyoming Mica?"
"That's her. She said I'm a loser, an adulterer, and a deadbeat dad."
"Loser, maybe, but I call bullshit on the other two."
"I've lived by a strict policy of monogamy when I'm in a relationship and promiscuity when I'm not."
"That's my policy, too." Yancy burped. "Or it would be if I ever had a relationship."
"And I may fall behind on child support, but I always catch up. God knows I never skipped a month."
The Gut Shot is typical of pretty much any rodeo bar in the Rocky Mountain Time Zone. Three coin-operated pool tables, five wall-mounted TVs, four of them set to rodeo and Nascar and the last one on a bar trivia contest, two waitresses ten pounds underweight and one twenty pounds over, a goateed bartender named Snuffy who has been there thirty years, seen it all, and is willing to tell you about it, truckers, working cowboys, rodeo cowboys, hunting guide cowboys, gay cowboys, veterans who never recovered from whichever war they were in, slumming fraternity boys, and a hutch of buckle bunnies who laugh too loud, smoke Marlboro Lights, and suck ice out of their rum and Cokes.
A local four-piece band that played mostly weddings until rodeo week came to town was shoehorned on a stage no bigger than a coat closet back at GroVont grade school. The dance floor, which wasn't much bigger than the stage, was chock-full of ten-steppers, two-steppers, twelve-steppers, and buckle buffers. Whenever a bunny wailed, "I'm so drunk," the men closed in like ravens on roadkill.
Yancy and I had a table by the unplugged CD box where we could view two girls who were definitely not bunnies. These two were shooting nine-ball and drinking shots. The one was fairly short with hair the color of a well-circulated penny. She wore a red scarf top that left her back exposed — I love the female back above all other parts — and a way-short purple skirt. Dijon mustard — colored tights covered whatever skin the skirt would have exposed. Red Keds with untied laces. Among other pieces of facial jewelry, a diamond post poked out of her right eyebrow. When she bent over to break the rack, I saw the sunrise tattooed over her thirteenth vertebra. I know it was thirteenth because a bull cracked mine.
The other girl was dark complected with straight black hair like she ironed it. She dressed all in black down to her fingernails and high-shine stiletto boots. Her layered-on makeup made her eyes look partly closed, and she didn't laugh after she missed shots like the short one. She chain-smoked hand-rolled cigarettes. She looked like a woman who would break a pool cue across your kneecap. She was also a better shot than the colorful girl. The tall one never used a bank. Her cue ball stopped on a dime, while the short one drilled the cue hard as she could, blowing balls all over hell in hopes something would eventually fall in.
"I bet they're East Coast intellectuals," Yancy said. "Lesbians who eat bull balls." There's a female dude ranch outside Darby, Montana, where women come to be empowered. At the end of two weeks, they graduate by castrating a two-year-old bull and eating his testicles raw. Ever since Yancy heard about this ranch, he thinks every woman who looks a little different is a bull-ball eater.
I said, "East Coast or prison. Why don't you wander over and put fifty cents on the table. See if you spot any jailhouse tattoos."
Yancy fished in his pocket for quarters but before he could wander over by the girls four doofuses in Colorado State sportswear got up the courage to take their shot. They had the demeanor of frat rats who had double-dared one another into coming out on the plains to mingle with the cowboy set in the false belief it would be entertaining. They didn't seem to realize they were in the last American smoke-filled room where men frustrated by love or horses and trapped in the neo-cowboy code of nonverbal communication feel that beating the crap out of strangers is an acceptable emotional outlet.
The leader of the pack was a blond giant with watered-down blue eyes and a forehead flat as a dinner plate. I took him for an offensive lineman. My guess is having the giant along gave the other three the illusion of safety.
The lineman grinned shyly and tucked his chin into what would have been his neck if he had one. "You girls look like you could use protection from the nasty cowboys." The three frat boys clustered up behind the big guy thought this was about the funniest opening line they'd ever heard.
The dark girl scowled in a way that no amount of alcohol would have led me to take as encouragement. She muttered something I didn't catch and the shorter one with red hair launched into a stream of foreign phrases, at the end of which, the dark one laughed, as in Ha, ha, joke's on you.
The giant jock said what jocks always say when confronted by things they don't understand. "Huh?"
The rat off his right pocket said, "It's French."
The giant said, "What are they saying?"
The weaselly-looking guy in back said, "Why don't you ask them, Homer?"
By then Yanc
y and I were rolling our eyes at each other, like catch this, and I signaled to the waitress Patty for another round of Yukon Jack with a Blue Ribbon chaser, on the theory that if this scene was headed where I thought it was headed, I'd better stock up on anesthesia.
Homer the giant spoke loudly and distinctly. "Do you understand American?"
The girls laughed and talked amongst themselves in French. Or, to be more accurate, the colorful girl laughed. She was having fun. The one doing Cher-on-PMS cracked a tiny, snake-like smile.
Homer spoke to his friends. "I guess they don't."
Weasel Boy said, "Say, 'Parlez-vous anglais?'"
"You don't know French," said Homer.
"Any asswipe knows that much. Don't you watch television?"
There's this myth that very large people are stupid and small people are sneaky. Since a few ignorant folks consider me in the small group, I resent size profiling, but still, I can't help myself when it comes to assuming that brawn and brains are mutually exclusive.
Whatever his intelligence level, he sure as heck mangled the accent. "Parley view angles?"
The girls looked at each other and shrugged.
Homer grinned. "Would you like to touch a big American muscle?"
The shorter girl smiled and nodded the way people do when they don't understand a question but wish to exhibit goodwill. Yancy stiffened and started to rise. I put a hand on his arm. "It's none of our affair."
He didn't go on but I'm not sure if it's because I stopped him or Patty brought our drinks. I was paying, of course. I'd finished in the money.
Yancy said, "The college dildos are taking advantage."
The girls exchanged a few words. The friendly one said something that made the mean one nod and shuffle over next to her. Together, they studied the college boys with the mild interest of watching animals at the zoo.
I said, "Those two can take care of themselves."
The rat we hadn't heard from yet said, "I would like to spank your cute little bottom."
This time both girls laughed and chattered in French. This smile-and-nod tendency is why there's an actual law on the books in Wyoming making it illegal to talk dirty to a deaf woman. Not many people know about the law, but I do. Sometimes, I can be a goddamn font of information.