“Let’s see,” he’d say, pulling off his tired cowboy boots. “Well. I had all ten toes broken, I know that.” Next he’d pull off his holey socks. What toenails he still had were yellowed and the dirty milky color of quartz; they seemed to grow in defiance of his flesh. “Some of these toes were broken twice, I think. An angry brahma is going to come down wherever they want to come down, see, and sometimes that’ll be on you.” Ronny would pick up our son, Alex, and set him on his back on the living-room floor and then pretend to be a bull, crashing down gently on the little boy’s body, tickling his ribs, armpits, and toes. “In Kalispell they wanted to take both pinkie toes, but I escaped the hospital before they could put me under. Had a girl there who I called and she was waiting outside with the engine running.…
“This scar here,” he said, indicating his pale right ankle, “a bull named Ticonderoga come down on it and snapped my leg in two.”
My kids thought this was the best game in the world—seeing how many garments they could get Ronny Taylor to shed, how many broken bones he could remember, how many nasty scars their little fingers could trace.
But the drunken fall had ended his rodeo life, and we were sad for that. He had dropped out of high school to rodeo; he had no trade and no skills.
Lee paid for his medical expenses, his apartment, his food and clothing. We weren’t supposed to know any of that, but we had grown up with Rhonda Blake, who worked in one of the Eau Claire hospital’s medical records departments, and she told Eddy Moffitt one night at the VFW. She had been shaking her head and smiling kind of winsomely and Eddy went over to her, bought her a drink, and asked what was going on.
“You know, I could get fired for saying something,” Rhonda said, “but the thing is, something like this. People ought to know. I never heard of a good deed like this. Christ, I could lose my job, but truth is, it’d be worth it.”
And then she told Eddy that Ronny hadn’t had insurance. That the bills had been well over a hundred thousand dollars. “One day,” she said, “we get a delivery from New York City. An envelope from some record company to Ronny’s attention. And sure enough, a goddamn check for a hundred and twenty-three thousand dollars.”
She drank her beer fast, her eyes wet.
“It was just so sweet,” she said, “I couldn’t keep it to myself.”
Eddy told us all this story one night after a high school football game. (Us versus Osseo.) None of us had children old enough to be in high school yet, but when you live in a town as small as Little Wing, Wisconsin, you go out to the high school football and basketball games. It is, after all, something to do, cheap family entertainment. We all stood underneath the bleachers, some of us sharing a pouch of Red Man chewing tobacco, others passing a bag of sunflower seeds, listening to Eddy as the crowd thundered its support right above us, boots stomping the wooden bleachers, the rickety metal scaffolding shaking loose rust. From overhead, aluminum cans and crumpled-up hot dog wrappers rained down. We crossed our arms, spat, tried to imagine what a check for a hundred thousand dollars even looked like.
Lee was already our hero, but this only deepened our love for him, grew his legend. We all went out the next day and bought ten more of his albums, each of us, even though we had duplicates at our homes. And that money we spent was precious too because so many of us were just scraping by; it could’ve been plugged into savings or used for groceries. Still. We mailed them to relatives and distant friends, donated them to libraries and nursing homes.
Ronny never saw a bill; Lee’s lawyers took care of all the logistics. Ronny would be taken care of forever. Ronny did not seem to know that he had a patron in life, or, maybe he did, I don’t know. All I know is that Lee never talked about it, and neither did Ronny. Then again, it was only right. There were countless posters of Lee in Ronny’s apartment, and they had been there well before the accident and surgery. Most had gone a little faded with sunlight, greasy with kitchen smoke. They had adorned those shabby walls long before Lee became famous. Ronny had always loved him the most.
Also by Nickolas Butler
Shotgun Lovesongs
Beneath the Bonfire
About the Author
olivejuicestudios.com
Nickolas Butler was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and raised in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. His writing has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review Online, The Progressive, The Christian Science Monitor, and elsewhere. He is the author of the national bestselling novel Shotgun Lovesongs, which won the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award, the Great Lakes Great Reads Award, and France’s Prix PAGE/America 2014, as well as the forthcoming story collection Beneath the Bonfire. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he currently lives in Wisconsin with his wife and their two children.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this story are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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First Edition: November 2014
In Western Counties Page 5