2
S
ONNY
S
HANKS DREW THE LAST BULL
of the evening—a large white-eyed brindle bull. As soon as it humped out of the chute the crowd began to cheer. Usually by the last bull of the evening the crowd would have become blasé, bored with danger and tired of cheering. But Sonny Shanks was the king of the sport—the World’s Champion Cowboy—and for him they cheered eagerly, even before they saw the ride. The brindle bull humped straight ahead, swinging strings of slobber left and right and kicking his hind legs high every second jump. He didn’t twist or whirl, and Shanks rode him so confidently that to the crowd it seemed almost as if the ride were taking place in slow motion.
Pete had placed himself far back, by one of his barrels. He knew the brindle bull as well as Sonny did, and he wasn’t worried. When the buzzer sounded he moved forward. Shanks stayed with the bull two more jumps and then left them. He went off his feet when he hit but was up in a second. The bull whirled back toward him dipping a horn, but at that moment Pete yelled and came into his line of vision waving his arms. Confused, the bull turned toward Pete, paused, made a short grunting dash at him, and when Pete sprinted aside, paused again, his head up and a string of clear slobber hanging from his lip. The crowd, knowing that the show was over, stood up and began to leave the stands.
Pete stood still a few seconds letting the bull look at him. He was a good-tempered bull, as rodeo stock went, a massive animal with the horns of a Brahma and a hide that showed every breed from Angus to Jersey. When he had studied Pete, he dipped his horn at him once more, snorted, and trotted heavily off toward the stock-pens, the cowbell roped beneath his belly jangling at every step. As the bull passed, the rope came loose and Pete walked over and picked it up.
Shanks had not gone to the chutes but stood near the center of the arena probing in his mouth with one finger.
“Bite your tongue?” Pete asked in passing.
Shanks shook his head. “Feels like I jarred a fillin’ out,” he said.
“Well, you done fair,” Pete said, handing him the bell rope. “You can afford a new filling.”
Shanks’s curly black hair fell over his forehead. He gave Pete a cool grin. “It beats clownin’,” he said. “Reckon that rookie’ll live?”
Pete walked on toward the chutes and didn’t answer. He felt low enough about the rookie, and an argument with Sonny would not improve his mood. The rookie, a kid from Duncan, Oklahoma, had got a hand hung in his rope, and the bull had been a twister, almost impossible to get close to. When the kid had finally come free he compounded his mistake by moving at the wrong time, as Pete was trying to take the bull away. He had been kicked hard and was in the hospital with some broken ribs and a smashed collarbone. Compared to what might have happened, the injuries were minor, but knowledge of what might have happened was never any help to Pete. He took every such accident to bed with him, and had for years.
He found Boots sitting on the steps of the trailer waiting for him. She had seen the accident and knew exactly what mood he would be in, and she was chewing her nails.
“That’s where I like to find you,” he said. Boots stood up and hugged him silently and then went to the rear of the trailer and talked to Hercules, the tiny donkey, while Pete went inside to clean up. A small dachshund named Jumbo had been sleeping under the trailer steps. He was jealous of the donkey and came over and nosed her ankle possessively.
“I wish nobody ever got hurt,” she said, stroking the donkey’s silky nostrils.
“How’d you do?” Pete called.
“Sixth,” Boots said. She was a barrel racer. “That’s not so bad—not at the Santa Rosa.”
Pete came out of the trailer and stood on the steps looking down at her. He had washed his face and found a clean gray work shirt. He unbuttoned his britches to tuck his shirttail in, then turned his cuffs back almost to his elbows. He whistled when he was sad, and he was whistling.
“Let’s go honky-tonk,” he said. Boots had her back to him. All he could see was her white bleached-blond hair.
“Maybe sometime I’ll win a first,” she said. Barrel racing was her passion. Pete stepped down and embraced her and they kissed. Boots was eager and vigorous, yearning as she did every time they touched to prove with her young mouth, or her young self, that she was old enough to be his and his alone and his forever. Pete lacked a year being twice her age. Her mouth moved on his, fresh and uncertain, trying to kiss the kiss that would make him sure of her.
“You gonna drive or am I gonna drive?” he asked when they stopped kissing.
“Me,” she said.
They got into her Thunderbird and cut at once into the stream of traffic that was feeding out of the grounds. No sooner were they on the highway than Boots passed three cars. “Don’t worry about it so,” she said. “The bull might have killed him if you hadn’t been there.”
“Sugar, hush,” Pete said. “One thing you have got to learn is that you can’t cheer me up by trying to cheer me up. Try not to plow into no trucks, if you don’t mind. I’d like to survive to drink the matter off.”
But no cautions reached Boots when the wheel was in her hand. She drove like the road was hers. When she got into a clear stretch, ahead of the traffic, she put the Thunderbird up to ninety, her white hair whipping about her face. Pete watched the fence posts and the culverts and the road signs flash by, out of the darkness a second, into the darkness in another second. He almost never drove without pulling his horsetrailer, and high speed worried him unless something else was worrying him so much that he was indifferent to speed. But fast driving made Boots feel bold; at the wheel she had absolute trust in herself. When the barrel racing was over she had changed from boots to sandals, and she wiggled her toes a little and kept the footfeed down.
“Hope there ain’t no livestock wandering around loose tonight,” Pete said wryly. “If you was to hit a cow, there wouldn’t be a hamburger left of either us
or
her.”
“I want to get there ahead of the crowd,” Boots said. “Maybe if you get smashed enough you’ll even dance with me. It’s not your fault if people ride bulls. Think of all the people you’ve
kept
from getting hurt.”
Her nose was round and a little too short and when she tried to cheer somebody up she tried hard. Pete reached a hand across the gap between the seats and began to rub her neck. Her swirling hair tickled his fingers. He rubbed high up, behind her ears.
“See, we’re early,” she said.
The honky-tonk was called The Hole in the Bucket and was located just across the line in a wet county. Twenty or thirty cars and a few pickups were parked in front when they got there. It was a long one-story frame building, set by the highway in a clearing in the brush, with a flashing neon sign to slow people down. In spite of Boots a lot of the rodeo crowd was already there, but they found a booth in the back and ordered beer. There were booths, a few tables, a sawdusty dance floor, and a bright squat jukebox. The barmaids wore Levi’s and satin shirts.
Pete went over and fed a dollar into the jukebox and, in time, fed another and, in time, another, and Boots tapped her fingers on the beer bottles and matched him beer for beer, though she would much rather have danced. But Pete only danced when he was drunk, and that took time.
Long before Pete felt the beer, Boots was high on it and talking loudly. She felt lightheaded and light-bodied and wanted all sorts of things from moment to moment: to dance, to have more beer, to kiss Pete and have him kiss her. The room was gray-blue with cigarette smoke and the neon of the jukebox; it was loud with shuffling feet and giggles and curses, some happy, some angry. Pete dropped beneath his melancholy into a state of calm, now and then losing himself for a moment in one of Boots’s hopeful beery kisses, now watching the shuffling dancers or the barmaids with their trays of beer bottles.
“There’s old Sonny,” Boots said. “The bastard. I guess he’s a bastard. You hate him, don’t you?”
“We ain’t chums,” Pete said.
“I don’t like him, either,” Boots declared loyally. “Even if you won’t tell me why you hate him.”
“I doubt he’s in love with us, either,” Pete said, amused.
“I know you had a fight on the bridge,” Boots said. “Everybody knows that. It’s the one thing I know.”
It was the one thing that everyone in rodeo knew: that Pete and Sonny had had a fist fight on the bridge above the Rio Grande, in El Paso. It had been eight years since the fight. No one in rodeo had seen it, but no one in rodeo was without an opinion as to how it had started and who won.
Pete kissed her lightly. “Tell you one secret about it,” he said. “Old Sonny gave me a present that night. Only thing he ever gave me. What it was was a dirty movie.”
Boots could not have been more impressed. She stopped kissing to think about it.
“A real one?” she asked. “I didn’t know you could buy them. What did you do with it?”
“Threw it into the Rio Grande,” Pete said. “That was about when the fight started.”
Boots could not get over it. None of the legends that had grown up around the fight included a dirty movie. “What did people do in it?” she asked.
“Oh, a little of this and a little of that.”
The woman Shanks was dancing with was a tall brunette, fairly drunk. They were an easy couple to follow because the woman was wearing a white dress and almost all of the other women there wore cowgirl clothes. Shanks was dancing very Western, with lots of bending and swooping; occasionally he bent the woman so far over backward that she shrieked and clasped his neck, but he always brought her up easily. When the number ended he spotted Boots and Pete and led the woman over to their booth.
“You children are up late,” he said, grinning at Boots. “A young thing like you needs lots of sleep, honey.”
“I’m not so young,” Boots said, annoyed.
“Sit down, since you’re here,” Pete said. Shanks was willing but the woman pulled on his arm.
“Let’s go on,” she said. “We can take some beer with us. I want to get out of here before Monroe comes in.”
“Piss on Monroe,” Shanks said, still smiling at Boots. “I’ve survived a bronc and a bull tonight, why’d I worry about Monroe?”
“It’s me that’s worrying,” the woman said. “I got to live with him, don’t I?” She kept glancing around toward the door.
Sonny shrugged. “Looks like I got to choose between company an’ adultery,” he said. “See you boys and girls tomorrow.”
The woman hurried toward the door and Shanks followed, picking his way lightly between the crowded tables. At one table he stopped and lifted a cowboy’s hat, tried it on, and returned it to its owner’s head. The cowboy didn’t even notice. He was drunkenly trying to explain to his wife that he wasn’t drunk.
“The hell you aren’t,” his wife said, crying. Her chin was propped on one hand and tears ran down her arm. “You’re drunk as a bastard and all our kids right out there in the car asleep.”
Shanks tilted the man’s hat at a slightly jauntier angle than it had been and followed his date out the door.
“I thought his rich girl friend lived around here,” Boots said. “Eleanor Guthrie. What’s he doing fiddling around with people’s wives?”
“You got me,” Pete said.
She put her head against his neck, and he held her and before long she was asleep. When she slept she looked even younger than she was, sixteen rather than nineteen, and watching her sleep made Pete feel the more guilty about her, but also the more strongly drawn to her. He could not let her go, not after having taken her. He cradled her against his chest, motioned to the waitress, and listened to the jukebox through two more slow beers. When he finished and tried to ease Boots out of the booth she came half awake and with him guiding her stumbled out to the car. The wind had come up, with thunder behind it in the west. Some rain was on its way, close enough that Pete could smell it on the wind. In the dry country it smelled good.
After he folded Boots into the Thunderbird he discovered that she had the keys in her pocket and he had an awkward time digging them out of her tight Levi’s. Boots thought he was wanting to make love and giggled a little and kept squeezing his hand against her in acquiescence, though she was limp and sleepy.
He got the keys finally and started back toward the town of Vernon. He had driven only two or three miles when he saw Shanks’s hearse, dark inside and parked well out on the level shoulder.
For years Shanks had driven Cadillac hearses—they were an essential part of his legend. The hearses were white and he always had three sets of bulls’ horns painted in gold on each one: a set on each door and one on the top, so people in airplanes would know it was him, he said. On occasions when he had to fly to make a rodeo he would hire a needy rookie to drive the hearse to him.
That’s one place Monroe won’t never think to look, Pete said to himself. As he passed the hearse he honked as loud as he could. Boots did not even stir. She slept with her head thrown back against the seat, her mouth open, her small light bosom barely stirring the satiny rodeo shirt as she breathed. Pete glanced at her now and then and settled it with himself definitely, no backing out, that the next day he would wake her early and ask her how soon she wanted to be married. Beyond Electra, on the straight highway leading to Vernon, he ran into the heavy early-summer rain, and he held his arm out the window until his hand and arm were wet. All tension had left him and he felt a little too tired. He wiped his face with his wet hand to clear his head. There wasn’t much traffic on the road, but he had gone to sleep at the wheel a number of times in his life and was taking no chances. He took his time on the slick pavement and in twenty minutes swished into Vernon and put his sleeping sweetheart safely to bed.
3
T
HOUGH HE KNEW
it was probably Pete who honked, Sonny sat up when he heard the horn. Pete was one of the few people who would risk disturbing him at his amours, but in this instance he hadn’t been disturbed and was quite ready to sit up. The woman, whose name was May, lay asleep on the low bed, her mouth open, her legs open, everything open except her eyes. She had had more beer and more excitement than she was accustomed to, and had quickly spread out into slumber. Sonny had had no beer and only a most modest amount of excitement and wasn’t sleepy at all. In The Hole in the Bucket, amid a crowd of cowgirls, May had looked better than she looked asleep, and he wished he had had the good sense to leave her strictly to Monroe.