Why am I even wasting my breath? I leaned back against the passenger window. The tops of houses and downtown streets flashed below. The bullheadedness of Ron Bishop was a surprise at every turn, and all of a sudden I was staring at the tall Greyhound bus station sign off in the distance.
The ticking of the blinker rang out against the soft country music that played on the truck radio. Rising up, I noticed that we were going down a bypass ramp. “I think you keep on going straight, don't you?”
“Not if you want to see the rodeo, you don't.”
The fancy pavilion called Longhorn Center was not exactly what I'd call roughing it. The red and beige building housed lights and catwalks good enough for any Las Vegas show. Standing at the ticket booth, talking to a woman who wore a black cowboy shirt with silver arrows stitched across the chest, it was no surprise to learn that Elvis had even been in the building at one time.
“Who's the meanest, baddest bull out there?” I asked the cashier through the vents in the glassed window.
The heavy woman flipped through my change and gave me a frightful look. Her coworker, a girl wearing silver bangles and occupying the adjacent stool, wasted no time in hitting a button on the panel next to the register. Just when I expected security to show up and book me for being overly nice, the girl smiled and her soft voice drifted from the speaker. “FuManChu.”
“Him, huh?”
Shaking her head, the girl's dark eyes grew wider. “Oh yeah. You'll see.”
Inside the arena my father came to life as the smell of popcorn and spilled beer overpowered the scent of livestock.
We watched from the middle row as man after man got his tail worn out by the bucking bulls that made the riders seem like nothing more than rag dolls. Eight seconds was all that they were after, but I'm sure that to the riders it seemed like eternity.
The announcer who sounded fresh from a radio station told us that Tony Camber from Lubbock would be riding FuManChu. A hiss sounded from the audience, and one man stood up and put his cap over his heart. The gray-and-white bull flew out of the chute, kicking wildly. From the start his head spun like he was having a seizure, a seizure meant to shock the man from Lubbock right into the dirt. The rider bounced back and forth on the bull just like a windup toy. Yelling some shrill sound of fury, the cowboy kept a smile on his face. He was kicking the tar out of this bull, and no matter how rough it got, the man was not going to let go until he was bucked completely off and flat on his back. Edging closer to the end of my seat, I could almost feel the rider's adrenaline as he lived a life that his mama refused to want to know about.
In no time, the bull won, or so he thought. Before he ran away, the cowboy reached for his hat from the ground, bowed, and then ran from the arena, laughing loud enough for us to hear it up in the bleachers.
A clown circled a red-and-white barrel, waving a handkerchief to coax the bull through a side gate. The bull kicked at the dirt, anger packed in the muscles of his shanks. He snorted with fire, and a cloud of dust whirled over his back.
The dance went back and forth between the bull and clown while the audience jumped to their feet, gasping and yelling with each turn of the bull. Able to make a jump for it, the clown landed in the barrel and was pushed twenty yards. A hush fell over the pavilion, and we all leaned forward. Looking up to the grandstands, the bull seemed to be staring right at me as he snorted and kicked the dirt. Never looking away, I watched while he shook his head in a rage that I don't think man has ever known.
The bull's attention soon drifted back to the barrel, and after giving it one more push with his head, he turned and slowly walked back to the gate with the audience hissing every step of his stride.
My father licked back the spit of his excitement and nudged me. “That one liked to tore him up. That fella can sure say he did something tonight, riding that bull the way he did.”
I'd never seen my father that full of life before. He sat on the edge of his seat, hands propped on his knees, waiting and watching for the next movement in the arena. His enthusiasm was that of a boy at the circus, watching a man walk a tightrope while balancing a pole of fire.
Later, when he got hungry again, my father slipped out to the truck for a piece of sausage and a smoke break. He didn't say it, but I knew he didn't want me inhaling the cigarette smoke, most likely out of fear that it would feed my white spot.
After the barrel-racing event, I made my way back through the halls lined with photos of the famous that had visited the arena. A sign read “Staff Only,” but I kept going. Sometimes when you're living like there's no tomorrow, you just have to learn to ignore signs meant to hold you back.
Through a set of double doors, I found the place I'd been expecting all along. Bulls were packed into stalls until some showed their anger by racking the iron gates with their horns. The smell of sweat and manure overpowered that of the popcorn that flowed from inside the air-conditioned arena. Walking past a group of men with their feet propped on a feed bucket, I nodded and kept going. The bull that fought harder than the rest was what I'd come to find, and somewhere within the iron gates, he was waiting, snorting and stomping in a rage that nobody else could possibly understand.
A woman with a T-shirt and short gray hair was holding a hose and filling up a bucket of water hanging inside one of the stalls. She laughed at the man standing next to her and then glanced in my direction. A man with a handlebar mustache and coal-colored eyes kicked his boot against the gate and laughed harder than the woman. “I'm not lying to you. That's just the way it happened.” His words trailed off, but his smile never wavered. “Afternoon,” he called out.
“Afternoon. Looks like ya'll are keeping busy,” I said.
“Always, my friend. Always.”
The woman murmured “Excuse me,” and pulled the water hose to the next stall.
“Sure are a lot of bulls,” I said and then feared the stupid remark would cause me to get thrown out before I'd come face-to-face with the one thing that was madder than me.
The man laughed in a graveled, smoker sort of way and then spat tobacco on the asphalt, inches from my feet. “You looking for a bull in particular?”
I scanned the livestock pavilion like I was searching for a lost friend. “That gray one . . . that one named something-Chew.”
“FuManChu,” the man said nodding. His smile grew wider with each syllable, and he motioned for me to follow him. “That bull paid off my truck and a second wife.”
“What, you mean you own him?” I asked, trying not to follow too far behind him and make him think I was some boy.
When he turned slightly, his hooked nose stuck out like a claw. “I bought that bull six years ago. Nothing but a scrawny railroad rat. You could count his ribs. The man down in Belmont who sold him to me told me I was the first natural-born fool he'd ever met. But there was this thing about that bull's eyes.” The man stopped and pointed to his own eye. “He liked to have stared a hole through me. He held up that head just as straight as you please like he thought he was somebody . . . and him half dead. Right then I knew that bull still had vinegar left in him.”
At the corner gate next to the livestock trailers that lined the parking lot, I saw the look, up close and personal. The bull snorted and trotted around the small stall like he was insulted not to have more room. His horns raked down the side of the iron rails, and I fought from jumping back. Noticing my hesitation anyway, the man laughed. “He'll flat sure put a hurting on you.”
Staring into the slanted eyes of the bull, eyes that seemed better suited for an alligator, I kept the gaze until the bull turned and circled the other side of the stall.
Looking at that bad boy, I felt every ounce of adventure that I'd pushed back over the years flood to the surface. The words spewed out as fast as the beat of my heart. “How much will you take to let me ride him?”
In the snack bar with a buffalo head hanging over us, we negotiated the details while rodeo fans drifted by, filling their cups with ice and soft drinks from a dispenser.
Ham, I learned the man was called, sat back in the chair and tipped the hat from his brow. “Man, you mean to tell me you never rode a bull and you're wanting to start with mine? Huh-uh,” Ham said shaking his head. “It can't be done.”
“Says who? Look, I'll take lessons, clean the stalls, pitch a tent in your backyard . . . whatever it is you think I need to do to get me on that bull.”
Ham laughed and picked up a straw from the drink-stained table. With a piece of the straw in his mouth, his dark eyes focused on me. “Now, let's get to it. What's really behind this?”
Watching a woman wearing a denim shirt with a rose stitched on the back move toward the drink machine, I tried to organize my words with caution, knowing that if he didn't see it my way, I'd be back on the road with my father, and FuManChu would be back home in his pen.
“The thing is, all my life I've played it safe, never taking real chances. Then something happened . . . I found out I had a spot on my lung and the job I thought only I could do got turned over to somebody else. My world got knocked upside down. You know, looking at the world from a different angle, you figure some things out pretty fast. Somewhere back there I stopped living and ended up a walking dead man. I'm fighting to make sure that never happens again.”
Chewing the straw, Ham kept a gaze on me the same as I had on his bull. A voice called out over the intercom that the pole-bending event was about to start, and I got up to leave. I'd had my say. Now it was time to move on.
Before I could get past the drink machine, Ham's graveled voice called out. “You gonna have to sign a release. You got a problem with that?”
Turning, I smiled and said, “Don't worry. That's one thing I'm getting pretty good at.”
After Ham came to terms on a fair price for training me, my father and I drove out to his place north of town. He lived on a state road dotted with farmhouses and scrub oaks. His place had a painted sign that looked like homemade: Rancho FuManChu. Seeing as how the bull was his prized possession, I wasn't as surprised by the name as my father. “Naming someplace after a bull,” he mumbled and pulled into the driveway littered with crushed beer cans and rocks.
I'd figured that my father would've been harder to convince than Ham, but after vowing that he wouldn't call Heather, he rubbed his chin and shook his head. “We're all terminal, remember,” I said.
A black-and-brown sheep dog met us at the house. His tongue was dripping from the dry heat. “Shadow, get back here,” Ham yelled as he eased down the back deck that hung from his house. South Fork Ranch, it wasn't. Ham's modest block home with dusty red shutters looked more like a garage with some windows tacked on to the front. Rows of birdhouses painted in different colors of the rainbow were scattered across the deck railing. “You made these?” I asked.
“Yeah, gives me something to do between gigs with FuManChu. Sell 'em at the rodeos.”
“How much does a house like that one with the church steeple go for?”
“Depends,” Ham said, rubbing his jaw and looking back at the birdhouse. “Between seventy-five and a hundred.”
Ham flipped on a light switch inside the tin-roof building that housed a lawnmower and a mismatched set of two-by-fours. The smell of planting manure and gasoline met us at the door. Ham never seemed to notice when he kicked over a bucket and nails scattered across the concrete floor.
“Now, this here is what they call the electric bull,” Ham said while yanking a blue, tattered blanket from the machine. Underneath, a saddle-shaped iron machine was bowed down in submission. “You ever seen one of these before?”
I stopped short of commenting about the one I'd seen in the movie
Urban Cowboy
and just shook my head no.
After Ham jumped up on the machine backwards and held up his fingers to show me how to grip the rope, I gave it a try. The ease of motion made me think of riding a baby calf, and I let my hands go free. “Yee, dogies!” I yelled. “Man, please. Is this all she's got?”
Without warning the machine dipped and bucked, becoming nothing less than a full-fledged bull with daggers in his side. When I tried to reach for the rope, the smile I'd been wearing was ripped from my face. Flying upward, I came falling down against the metal saddle, landing smack-dab in the middle of my groin.
I wasn't thrown off, really. It was more like I slid off, rolling around on the blue pad, eye to eye with Ham's silver-tipped cowboy boots. “Ride 'em, cowboy,” Ham called out as my father leaned over the riding lawn mower, trying to hide the laughter that caused his shoulders to shake.
Lesson learned, I sort of drug myself over to the side of the mat, legs clamped together. Ham went to reach for the blue blanket and then turned the switch off. “Crank it up again,” I yelled while trying to stand upright.
That night as the moths hit against the light that dangled from a ceiling cord, and Shadow barked at the sound of the electric bull, I kept a grip on the challenge. With each jar of my teeth, I came crashing down against the bucking metal saddle, picturing the white spot being torn loose from its hold on my lung. The spot would get knocked higher and higher up my throat and out of my mouth. It would fly into the humid night air to suffocate and disintegrate into the gravel driveway at Rancho FuManChu. One way or the other, I made up my mind I was going to win.
â
The next morning I rose early while my father still slept in the back of the trailer. Thigh muscles that I didn't know I had ached, and it was then that I knew the real reason cowboys were bowlegged. In the back of the camper the beige curtain that partitioned off my father's sleeping quarters swayed to the beat of his snoring.
Outside, the grass was wet with dew, and Shadow only glanced up from his spot underneath the deck of the house. All might have been quiet that morning, but FuManChu was like me, restless. He stopped eating from a bale of hay long enough to snort and look in my direction. When he pranced toward me, the ground shook from the weight of his moves. A trail of fluid ran out of his nose as he stomped against the wooden fence that separated us. We stood there against the purple haze of a new day, eye to eye, watching and waiting. I've come this far, bad boy, I thought. I'm not backing down now. Walking away, I heard him kick the fence once more before trotting away.