they became friends. Randy never treated Billy like he was in anyway different than any of the other riders, all of whom had white skin, except for one Hispanic from New Mexico. Neither of them spoke much, but when Randy told a story, Billy would interfere with him, finishing the tail, and vice-versa. Like two brothers, they had a way of communicating to each other like a middle-aged couple. The trailer that old Man Morrison (or so the cowboys at the Cody rodeo called him) rented them, was once a rodeo rider. On principle, he preferred “rodeo bums” because they took him back to his glory days in the rodeo ring. The trailer squatted on the eastern outskirts of the city. Old man Morrison rode the rodeo for about a decade. He rode it long enough to be crippled up by it. He walked with a limp in both legs, listing more to starboard. It was the leg he broke the worst. Standing with the stoop a good decade or two older than Morrison could claim, he showed the two of them the date of his date of birth clear on his driver’s license. Morrison was just fifty-seven, but gazing at the man, he appeared to be in his late sixties or early seventies. The trailer sat down the lane from the ranch-style home that Morrison lived in with his wife. Though neither of them rode anymore, they still kept two horses in a pasture next to their house. Retired, he had worked construction while enjoying the rodeo life, until it ended with his marriage to Susan. The woman was skinny, to the point of being bony, looking much younger than Morrison, and with that cheerful but plain face she looked like an old school marm with a stack of papers to grade in the kitchen. She often baked cookies for Randall and Billy, or, without being asked, washed their clothes, which were filthy with macadam and horse deng.
It was during the day that Billy and Randy toiled away doing construction or paving the highway from Meteetsee to Cody that he earned his money to live to support their lifestyles as rodeo cowboys at night. So, almost every night, no matter how exhausted from the construction work, the two put on their rodeoing clothes, replete with old cowboy boots and spurs, and Stetson cowboy hats, and drove over to the fairgrounds to find out which horse they had drawn for the night. Then they sought out to find out any tendencies or peculiarities the animal might have, having time for a quick belt, or a chew, or a cigarette, whatever each rodeo rider had as if performing a sacrament before the true confirmation came. At first, he endured the insults of the other cowboys because he was an Indian; but when they saw he came to ride, when they saw how well he rode, the insults faded away. Billy, with his quiet, but affable ways, his willingness to help his fellow competitors; his lack of arrogance, became one of the more popular riders in Cody. Toiling all day to live out his dreams at night under the stars and moon in the sulfurous miasma of the rodeo ring, scarcely dampened his dreams. But the dreams came with a price. The broncos and bulls beat and battered their bodies as if they were welterweight pugilists, other athletes who grew old before their time. There was no old timers competition for retired rodeo riders. There was only whisky and Vicodin, sparingly doled out by John Desmond, the official rodeo doctor, who attended the competitions to counter the pain they each felt. Whisky, which was even more effective at assuaging the lingering discomforts of the rodeo grounds was their mainstay, and each night they rodeoed they stopped by Maggie’s Bar to reload before heading home. Despite the aches and pains, Billy felt he was living the life of a god.
For the riders, the arena served as a place to learn and then display their skills with the bulls, and the bucking broncos in the saddle bronc competition. That first year in Cody Billie learned to ride in Cody, the boy developing his technique for staying on his mount. His technique wasn’t unique: Spurting out of the gate, he’d rock back spurring the creature above it’s shoulders as it reared up, keeping the spurs dug in its hide, rocking one arm in the air as he hung on with his other; in the The trick to it, he found, was keeping one’s center of gravity within that circumscribed by the animal’s, This as they danced and whipped through their routine on the creature. All in a sinuous movement – all but choreographed – the rider matched the beast move for move for the interminable eight seconds they’d spend risking their life. It reminded Billy what the seismograph must have looked like during the San Francisco earthquake. Each ride taught him something new about cowboying that first year. At the same time, he hoped that his mount would jump and bound and leap from side to side in the most exacting way it could, as much a show of nature as a thunderstorm, rather than just bucking like an old and jaded mount that plugged a straight course, hopping rather than bursting through the air. And most of their mounts did; most of their mounts threw them off before the requisite eight seconds. Some nights, Randy would beat Billy in points; on other nights, Billy would surpass Randy. Both good riders, they were evenly matched.
Importantly that first year, he perfected his dismount whether being wrestled from his mount by the second rider, or him how to fall when ignominiously thrown from his mount. Learning to fall from the creature he rode he reluctantly relinquished his hand from the surcingle, while preparing himself to be jettisoned from his mount. The rodeo clowns distracted the inflamed beast he romped and kicked – surely injuring them if they connected – showed him how to quickly get out of their way as they stomped past, their anger surpassed only by the excitement of the crowd. With each ride an education, it was a battle of strength and a matter of endurance. In short, that first year in Cody showed them both how to be a complete rodeo riders.
Along the railings of the rodeo ring, thirty and forty year old former rodeo riders, crippled by their same dreams, watched on. Each time Billy had a good ride, they would cheer him. Looking like the accident victims of a car crash, they appeared as if they were in line to see their attorney. Billy always paused when he saw them gazing at him.
Most nights when they went to Maggie’s, the should have just gone home for a well deserved rest. Most nights, though, they mustered enough testosterone to leave with two rodeo groupies. It was in August of that year, that Randy picked up a skinny one with coltish legs who had a mouth on her. “You know what you call a homeless person in Cody?” Randy asked her. “A cowboy without a girlfriend.” She laughed. Seeing he had a receptive audience, Randy proceeded on. “You know what constitutes foreplay for a cowboy?” he asked her. No, she told him. “Get in the pickup, bitch.” She laughed even harder. Randy didn’t return to the trailer that night.
At least five times a week, they went rodeoing. Many a time after a bad night and he’d been thrown, Billy woke feeling as though he’d been in some vehicular catastrophe where he’d been thrown from the automobile. When one of the cowboys did take a bad fall, there was Doctor John, himself an old rodeo rider who now worked in the emergency room, would attend the broke down rider, lying on the flood lit rodeo arena. If it was something that Dr. John Desmond couldn’t handle, he’d send the rider off to the emergency room at West Park Hospital. Taking a bad tumble from a bull, being kicked by a tempestuous bronco, sent Desmond racing over to where the cowboy staggered towards the riders’s section of the stadium to check him out. Only once that year was Desmond put to the test and that was when a journeyman rider was thrown from a bull. Stomped once by the bull, he fractured three ribs and collapsed a lung.
Later, as Randy watched the ambulance haul the rider, Chris Morton, away, he said to Billy, “I hate to see anybody hurt, but if it had to be someone, I’m glad it was that arrogant prick. He never sat well with me.” Billy just nodded. As amateur rodeo rider, none of the contestants had medical insurance. If they got their professional cards, they’d be allotted medical insurance which they duly needed. Morton, the injured rider, spent one night in the ICU and a week in the hospital, with a chest tube inserted into the right flank to reinflate the lung, possessing a hospital and doctors’s to pay with insufficient funds. The hospital had not the sentimentality to forgive the bill writ large in medical fees for the very rodeo riders that provided entertainment for many tourists coming through town to watch. Billy wondered how he would pay for such a misadventure if it occurred to him. Not long before the end of that first season, Billy wandered just how long he would last on the rodeo circuit. That was all he truly wanted to do in life, but he knew the odds were stacked against him. Now with all his accumulated injuries, he felt like a professional football player trying to convince his body that one more down was just one more collision. One more collision that might not be that bad.
One night, just before Labor Day and the last
