not no more.”
“Besides fucking women?”
“Besides fucking women.”
I guess I’d keep doing construction. College is not in the works for me. What else you gonna do. What about you?”
Billy spit on the ground. Randy spat on the ground in turn. For Randy, though, the expectoration was chew, a habit he had picked up from some of the other riders. Billy refused to even try a chew – It was not the Navajo way. They were standing outside their trailer, frying hamburgers. “I have no idea. Probably the same. Probably construction. All I want is to keep on riding.”
“Me, too.” They touched Budweiser cans.
But what Billy truly wished for was to succeed on the professional rodeo circuit. And he needed the points for that. Beginning his senior year at the high school in Gallup, his father died of stomach cancer. None of the poisons to kill the cancer at the medical center in Alburquerque worked for him, they just seemed to make the cancer fester, eating away that much faster. Before he expired this he told his son: “Follow your stars; be happy; never leave The Blessing Way.” It was, though, a matter of time before his father relented and wished his son luck on the rodeo circuit. With his father’s blessing that he became a rodeo cowboy, and moved to Cody. He told the story for the first time to Randy.
“Man, that sounds tough. What do you think he’d say if he could see you now?”
“Got no idea,” said Randy. With that he put one grilled hamburger patty on Randy’s bun, and then put one on his own.
“Ever think you’ll get married?” inquired Billie.
“Not so long as I can pick up a stray in Maggie’s.”
“Same here. My parents didn’t have a good marriage, and it would take someone looking like Bridget Bardot to get me to tie the knot.”
“See, you’re not saying it will never happen?” said Randy.
“I ain’t saying it’s impossible. I’m just saying it’s about as likely as being hit by a bolt of lightning,”
When the rodeo season ended, they stayed on doing construction on the Meteetsee highway. When they closed down for the winter, the two of them picked up jobs constructing houses in Red Lodge, an old mining town in the Beartooth Mountains of Montana that was trying to remake itself into a ski resort.
Finally, having bulked up during the winter lifting heavy tools and building supplies in freezing weather, they were fit when the second season began on Memorial Day. Nothing had changed, except for some new faces of cowboys, who like they were, had come to Cody to rodeo enough to join the professional riders. But the livestock had hardly changed. The unbroken broncos and bulls stamping on the dirt and manure, their muzzles foaming, looking blankly at the riders and the crowd in the stands, who looked back at them with the same blank expression. This as all the cowboys looked on with expectant faces, hoping that their expressions hid the anxiety they felt inside.
That second summer they didn’t return to the highway repaving work; they stayed doing building construction in Red Lodge. The village was an old mining town an hour away from Cody. Again, they endured the incertitude and impoverishment that life delved out for them as they chased their dreams on the rodeo circuit in Cody. Things proceeded apace as they rodeoed most every night placing high in the rankings of the bull rides, but higher in the broncos’ division During the rodeo on Independence Day, though, he drew a bull who unceremoniously threw him four seconds into the ride, and landing hard on that soft dirt, he dislocating his right arm. When Billy Yazzie injured himself, John Desmond painfully reduced the shoulder in the treatment tent, Desmond pulling on the arm as Randy and another rider pulling in the opposite direction with a sheet tucked under his armpit. With exquisite pain, the team of them reduced the arm in a couple of minutes. Desmond told him he needed an X-ray of the shoulder, as he put the limb in a sling. Giving him a prescription for Vicodin, Parr told him not to ride for eight weeks. Billy never went to the hospital to have the X-ray taken. But it didn’t seem to matter. In one errant fall, Billie’s season was essentially shot. He had to take two weeks off from work. When he did go back, he was restricted to light duties for another four weeks. While he healing, he returned faithfully to the fairgrounds every night to watch Randy ride. Rather than being down among the riders, he sat up in the stands to watch the cowboys perform their pas-de-deux with the creatures, the some of the bulls over a thousand pounds of pure muscle and fury. To chase the pain of not being in the hunt and the ache in his right shoulder, Billy took drank that much more at Maggie’s. Incapacitated, he ached to be out rodeo arena. Desmond made sure he didn’t ride for the rest of the season for the separation to his right shoulder to heal. Like the doctors in Gallup so long ago told him about his left arm, that it would never completely heal, Desmond echoed the same caveat. “Billy,” Desmond said. “I can almost guarantee it will never be the same for you.”
He spent the winter in Gallup, mainly doing odd jobs and working out in the gym of the local high school to build up his upper body strength. Amid all this, he saw so many of his classmates who’d fallen by the wayside, drowning their lives awash in alcohol; some even drinking after-shave getting by on their monthly welfare checks, which many had sent to one or another of the numerous liquor stores in Gallup, just off the boundaries of the reservation, where there was a temperance ban.
By Memorial Day, he was back in Cody. This time sharing the same trailer with Randall and working construction in Red Lodge. On the opening day of the Cody rodeo, Billy rode a twitchy Appaloosa, named Spendthrift, but he found that the strength in his right arm just was not there as it had been before he dislocated it. Spendthrift three him unceremoniously in the middle of the ring six seconds into the ride. Too frail now to ride the bulls, Billy still rode the broncos, but unlike previous years, he only rode once or twice a week. Spending the summer on the broncos, Billy came to the sad and unfortunate conclusion that his days on the rodeo circuit were over. He was twenty-one years old and he felt like a man in his forties or fifties. He continued doing construction in and around Cody, and though he still frequented the Silver Dollar and Maggie’s, he could not force himself to go watch other riders as they rode the bulls and broncos at the Cody Rodeo Fairground.
The years piled up, like snow stacking up on the nearby Beartooth and Absaroka Mountains in the winter. He continued working building construction. Never did he take a wife. Like Randy, he picked up the strays not opposed to the color of his skin. Recurrent pain – pain in places he never knew he never knew he owned, nor he ever knew he injured – wearing like holes in the old highway between Cody and Meteetsee that first summer, to hang on like the last drunk at a bar at closing time.
As the years piled up, so too did his medical problems. First it was the arthritis and then it was the diabetes. Diabetes ran in the family. Forced to use a cane when he walked, he could only work as part of the flagging crew constructing the highways in season. The rest of the time, he fed and cared for the rodeo horses of one rich and prominent soul owned. That was in the winter. But after a few winters, the weakness forced the rancher to hire on a young buck to help Billy. The diabetes was not enough to get him to stop drinking, and he had graduated from Budweiser to Jim Beam. He was but in his forties when Billie’s health seemed to go to hell. He began drinking more, drinking to the point where he was never quite drunk, but he was always on the threshold of it. The diabetes claimed some toes on both feet and soon he was fit no longer to work. The few friends he had encouraged him to go back to the reservation, but perhaps it was his pride that kept him from returning. He had to apply for Medicaid; he had to apply for welfare and food stamps. Billy drank to ease the aches and pain; he drank to remember glorious days of his youth riding down at
