was peeling loose from his gear bag.
“Can I git a ride? My dee truck quit on me up in Livinston. Had to rent a puny car, thing couldn’t hardly haul my trailer. Burned out the transmission. Tee Dove said he thought you was headed for Roswell?”
“You bet. Let’s go. If you’re ready.” They hitched up Bitts’s horse trailer, left the rental car standing.
“Fog it, brother, we’re short on time,” said the roper, jumping in. Diamond had the wheels spattering gravel before he closed the door.
He thought it would be bad, a lot of roadside prayers and upcast eyes, but Pake Bitts was steady, watched the gas gauge, took care of business and didn’t preach.
Big and little they went on together to Mollala, to Tuska, to Roswell, Guthrie, Kaycee, to Baker and Bend. After a few weeks Pake said that if Diamond wanted a permanent traveling partner he was up for it. Diamond said yeah, although only a few states still allowed steer roping and Pake had to cover long, empty ground, his main territory in the livestock country of Oklahoma, Wyoming, Oregon and New Mexico. Their schedules did not fit into the same box without patient adjustment. But Pake knew a hundred dirt road shortcuts, steering them through scabland and slope country, in and out of the tiger shits, over the tawny plain still grooved with pilgrim wagon ruts, into early darkness and the first storm laying down black ice, hard orange dawn, the world smoking, snaking dust devils on bare dirt, heat boiling out of the sun until the paint on the truck hood curled, ragged webs of dry rain that never hit the ground, through small-town traffic and stock on the road, band of horses in morning fog, two redheaded cowboys moving a house that filled the roadway and Pake busting around and into the ditch to get past, leaving junkyards and Mexican cafés behind, turning into midnight motel entrances with RING OFFICE BELL signs or steering onto the black prairie for a stunned hour of sleep.
Bitts came from Rawlins and always he wanted to get to the next rodeo and grab at the money, was interested in no woman but his big-leg, pregnant wife Nancy, a heavy Christian girl, studying, said Bitts, for her degree in geology. “You wont a have a good talk,” he said, “have one with Nancy. Good lord, she can tell you all about rock formations.”
“How can a geologist believe that the earth was created in seven days?”
“Shoot, she’s a Christian geologist. Nothin is impossible for God and he could do it all in seven days, fossils, the whole nine. Life is full a wonders.” He laid a chew of long-cut into his cheek for even he had his vices.
“How did you get into it,” asked Diamond. “Grow up on a ranch?”
“What, rodeo? Done it since I was a kid. Never lived on a ranch. Never wont to. Grew up in Huntsville, Texas. You know what’s there?”
“Big prison.”
“Right. My dad’s a guard at the pen in Rawlins, but before that he was down at Huntsville. Huntsville had a real good prison rodeo program for years. And my dad took me to all them rodeos. He got me started in the Little Britches program. And here’s somethin, my granddad Bitts did most of his ropin at Huntsville. Twist the nose off of a dentist. That bad old cowhand had a tattoo of a rope around his neck and piggin strings around his wrists. He seen the light after a few years and took Jesus into his heart, and that passed on down to my dad and to me. And I try to live a Christian life and help others.”
They drove in silence for half an hour, light overcast dulling the basin grass to the shades of dirty pennies, then Pake started in again.
“Bringin me to somethin I wont a say to you. About your bullridin. About rodeo? See, the bull is not supposed a be your role model, he is your opponent and you have to get the best a him, same as the steer is my opponent and I have to pump up and git everthing right to catch and thow em or I won’t thow em.”
“Hey, I know that.” He’d known too that there would be a damn sermon sooner or later.
“No, you don’t. Because if you did you wouldn’t be playin the bull night after night, you wouldn’t get in it with your buddies’ wives, what I’d call forcible entry what you done, you would be a man lookin for someone to marry and raise up a family with. You’d take Jesus for a role model, not a dee ornery bull. Which you can’t deny you done. You got a quit off playin the bull.”
“I didn’t think Jesus was a married man.”
“Maybe not a married man, but he was a cowboy, the original rodeo cowboy. It says it right in the Bible. It’s in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.” He adopted a sanctimonious tone: “‘Go into the village in which, at your enterin, ye shall find a colt tied, on which yet never no man sat; loose him and bring him here. The Lord hath need a him. And they brought him to Jesus, and they cast their garments upon the colt and they set Jesus on it.’ Now, if that ain’t a description a bareback ridin I don’t know what is.”
“I ride a bull, the bull’s my partner, and if bulls could drive you can bet there’d be one sitting behind the wheel right now. I don’t know how you figure all this stuff about me.”
“Easy. Myron Sasser’s my half-brother.” He rolled down the window and spit. “Dad had a little bull in him, too. But he got over it.”
Pake started in again a day or two later. Diamond was sick of hearing about Jesus and family values. Pake had said, “You got a kid brother, that right? How come he ain’t never at none a these rodeos lookin at his big brother? And your daddy and mama?”
“Pull over a minute.”
Bitts eased the truck over on the hard prairie verge, threw it into park, mis-guessing that Diamond wanted to piss, got out himself, unzipping.
“Wait,” said Diamond standing where the light fell hard on him. “I want you to take a good look at me. You see me?” He turned sideways and back, faced Bitts. “That’s all there is. What you see. Now do your business and let’s get down the road.”
“Aw, what I mean is,” said Bitts, “you don’t get how it is for nobody but your own dee self. You don’t get it that you can’t have a fence with only one post.”
Late August and hot as billy hell, getting on out of Miles City Pake’s head of maps failed and they ended on rim-rock south of the Wyo line, tremendous roll of rough country in front of them, a hundred-mile sightline with bands of antelope and cattle like tiny ink flecks that flew from hard-worked nib pens on old promissory notes. They backtracked and sidetracked and a few miles outside Greybull Diamond pointed at the trucks drawn up in front of a slouched ranch house that had been converted into a bar, the squared logs weathered almost black.
“On the end, that’s Sweets Musgrove’s horse trailer, right? And Nachtigal’s rig. Goddamn calf ropers, talk about their horses like they’re women. You hear Nachtigal last night? ‘She’s honest, she’s good, she never cheated on me.’ Talking about his horse.”
“How I feel about my horse.”
“Pull in. I am going to drink a beer without taking a breath.”
“Lucky if we git out alive goin where them guys are. Nachtigal’s crazy. Rest of em don’t talk about nothin but their trailers.”
“I don’t give a shit, Pake. You have your coffee, but I need a couple beers.”
Above the door a slab of pine hung, the name of the place, Saddle Rack, scorched deep. Diamond pushed open the plank door,
