Fair Grounds. Those summer nights, young men haling from all over North America (though mainly from the western states) drew their rides, be they broncos or be they bulls, each rider attempting to win enough points to qualify for the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association – for the big-time rodeos that they where they hoped to perform.
For as long as Billy Yazzie could remember, he dreamed of them – of riding the horses, steam pouring from their flaring nostrils as they bucked and gyrated, jumping and swirling, in their punishing pirouette before a rapturous crowd. His first contact with these larger than life creatures was in the family paddock, he would sit in the saddle with his father when he was barely two years of age. He continued riding his horse with his father and uncle in the saddle. when, only a few years later, while he was in elementary school, his father had him feeding their three horses, and mucking up after them. Later, when he recalled the smells of his youth, he recalled the smells of his mother’s food, but that recollection was scarcely more than the odors of the horses in their pen. Born under the endless blue dome of the high plains and plateaus of northern New Mexico, in the heart of the Navaho Reservation, the horse, to his mind, was the only beneficent gift the Spanish Franciscan friars brought with them when they violated the land of the Diné on their explorations centuries ago. Born a half hour west of Crownpoint by pickup, well within the confines of the Reservation, his first fantasy of the noble beasts were of god-like creatures. Not even the gods could run faster that the horses his father kept. Now, no longer in just his dreams, now old enough to ride the bucking broncos, he saw them up close, as graceful creatures who suddenly convulsed when spurting out of the bucking chute, their tense muscles tugging like steel cables as they exploded out of the bucking chute and into the rodeo ring – as angry as a state patrolman, discovering an alcoholic driving with a suspended license – dancing right, then left; coiling, curling and unfurling, rising and falling, his arm aching to muster all the strength he had to hold onto the surcingle attached to the leather halter about the animal as tightly as one would grasp a lifeline tied to a trawler in a typhoon at sea. But during the eight seconds of his ride, while he held on to the surcingle, to the halter that held it on, he was at one with the beast.
Born under a wandering star, The Blessing Way for Billy did not embrace the life of a traditional Navajo way in him. For him, the desire to make it on the rodeo circuit began on the sand and shale formations of the vast reservation as large as the state of West Virginia, where as a young Navaho living in a traditional hogan in the inhospitable desert of the Great Southwest was ordained as a cowboy at a young age, when he was given the thankless task of feeding and mucking up after the horses his father and brothers kept in more of a lean-to than a barn. Besides the lean-to, there was appended a hogan, its door facing east, and a clapboard house that his father and his father’s brother had built over the course of a year when he was still too young to walk.
While in high school on the reservation, Billy joined the “cowboy club,” where he rode the bucking broncos beginning the summer after his sophomore year. It was while he was in high school, that he dreamed about riding bulls, too, but the horse to him was a far nobler creature. In his memory, they would always be his favorite for their casual grace and beguiling beauty. Not only was Billy a good rider, he was an exceptional one. Trophy after trophy won in rodeo competitions attested to his own special prowess with rodeo horses. To further confirm this fact were all the rodeo belt buckles he won at the rodeos he entered, collecting them and lovingly placing them in his dresser drawer back in his room in the house that Billy’s family kept next to the traditional hogan. Because he was so good, the officials on the rodeo grounds saved the most savage, tortuous broncos for Billy to ride. But Billy did not make it through rodeo while he was in high school completely unscathed. While riding an unbroken Appaloosa gelding, dark as midnight with a large white star on his right flank, called Night Train, one evening in Window Rock, Billy – who was left-handed – tore the biceps in that arm while trying, without success, to outlast the beast in all its rippling and ripping contortions. Holding on to the saddle, he felt the rent of tendons and muscle fibers as they tore, shredding from the bone, as Night Train took him through its hellish dance, moving first to the right, then the left, jumping up on his hindquarters only to jerk his head down in attempting to displace Billy from the saddle. Never relinquishing his hold, Billie made it through his ride, all eight seconds of it. Bone doctors at Gallup Indian Medical Center, examined him. Telling him that he had a “three piece fracture” of his left humerus, they said he would never rodeo again. Telling him that unlike the bone, the muscle fibers would never really heal, they informed him that his rodeo days were a thing of the past. All they could do was put his arm in a sling and let the arm heal on its home, while prescribing the appropriate physical therapy. All they gave him for the pain was ibuprofen. To kill the pain, Billy, who was not one to imbibe, took a few shots of his father’s Jim Beam. Billy knew his rodeo season was over, but he didn’t believe that his rodeo career was at an end. The gods had given him a right arm as well. He had just completed his junior year at high school. For him, the unwelcome news that he would never have the same solid strength in his left arm attended him like the death of a close friend. But he would have the last word. Almost from the moment he felt the rent in his muscles and tendons while he was holding onto Night Train, he realized the injury would be permanent.
But he swore that he’d make all the doctors who attended him look like fools, he plowed ahead with his rehabilitation. All fall, winter, and spring, he worked out in the gym of the high school, mainly to gather strength in both arms. Gradually the muscles were gained some strength in his left arm, but it truly never was the same. He would never ride the rodeo with his left hand in the future So much for his ordination into rodeo cowboying. When the sling came off, he had limited range of motion in the left arm, but what plagued him more was its palsied weakness, a disability that improved month by month, but never completely went away. So he forced himself to ride right-handed. Though left-handed, he was ambidextrous in many ways: he wrote with his left hand, but he threw with his right. Not nearly as difficult as he feared it would be, he transitioned to riding with his right hand holding on to the surcingle. By next season, he was riding the rodeo again, this time, his right hand holding onto the beast by his right hand. Fortunately, he did not have to ride Night Train.
When Billy graduated from high school, he migrated to Cody, Wyoming as if on a mission. All those who truly loved to ride, all those who possessed dreams of riding professionally, dreamed of Cody sooner or later. Nowhere else was there a town that catering to a rodeo every night during the summer. Since riding the amateur rodeos, which accorded points for rodeoing, Cody was a Mecca for amateur cowboys dreaming of becoming a professional rodeo cowboy. To Billy, it was like called up to the major league after languishing on the farm team in baseball. Billy knew he must pursue gainful employment, but he didn’t want to just ride broncos on the weekends drifting from town to town, from rodeo ground to rodeo ground. Furthermore, he wanted to compete against the best, at least the best of the amateur cowboys. He needed a job that would afford him the time to work the Cody rodeo weeknights and as well as weekends.
Billy arrived In Cody just after Memorial Day. Within a week he secured work doing construction resurfacing the highway between Meteetsee and Cody. He found the job on a tip from one of the riders at the rodeo. An hour away from Cody, Meteetsee was no more than a hamlet and the highway leading to it, with its holes and bumps, as discomfiting as the sight of the scrofulous complexion of a high school wrestler. There on the highway, pouring asphalt, he would work from eight in the morning, take an hour for lunch, then work until five. That would give him a couple of hours before the rodeo in Cody. Finding an old, corroded Airstream trailer (that was curiously drafty given its name) to rent with another rodeo rider, one that was more hovel than home to them, they shared rides to the rodeo grounds in Cody.
Randy Hope was his roommate’s name. Randy, who, like Billy, just graduated from high school in Billings. In a dim light, as if in a chiaroscuro, their profiles were nearly identical. They were exactly the same height, being short in stature, both exactly five-eight. Bandy-legged, while being bow-legged, they were proportioned like high school tailbacks, with wide, muscled torsos and long, gangly, heavily-muscled arms. The one distinction between the two was that Hope was blonde, while Billie shone darkly in the
