by Bella Pollen
‘Kids.’ It’s Chavez’s turn to crane his head round now. ‘This will be a fun day out, you’ll see. Rodeos began as informal competitions among cowboys to show off their skills with roping animals and stuff. They’re a big deal round here. Today is the International High School championships. A kid that wins today gets three maybe four years of free school.’
‘Three or four years of school?’ Emmy squawks, horrified.
‘Bummer,’ Jack agrees.
The rodeo is in full swing by the time we arrive. In the car park, music, pounding from speakers lashed to a telegraph pole, competes for supremacy with the thud of electrical generators. The entrance is through an enormous tent selling western wear. Chavez, citing official business of some kind, furnishes us with a meeting place, then disappears into the crowd leaving Jack, Emmy and me to explore. Here are accessories from another world. Saddles, stirrups, reins, leather chaps, walls full of tough, wicked-looking lassos; in fact pretty much anything that can be attached to a horse is on sale. The aisles are heaving with people. Families with small children clutching cotton candy and bags of fritos. Packs of slim-hipped teenage girls, identically dressed in high-waisted jeans and checked shirts knotted under their breasts; their hair either combed up into elaborate sugar confections or let loose to cascade down their backs like shiny gold ribbon. Every man, woman, child, old, young, fat and thin alike, wears a cowboy hat. Even babies in strollers have red bandannas knotted round their throats. The place is thick with the smell of leather and the chick-chack of spurs clattering by. Counting out dollars and cents, two old men hold out arthritic hands to each other and proudly compare loss of digits as though competing at a leprosy convention. ‘I was roping a steer,’ I hear one say to the other, ‘thumb came right off and rolled in the dirt. Every one of them dogs was sniffin’ and scrabblin’ for it but Tom’s big ol’ sheepdog snapped it up.’
I stop for a minute, feeling almost surreally out of place. There is something so self-contained about this world and those who belong to it. I try to imagine any single one of the people in this tent transported back to Camden High Street, but it’s hard. In London, a West Papuan in full ceremonial dress complete with nose horn would probably incite less finger pointing than a cowboy, and as they split and pass around us, I wonder if they too can tell, just by looking, that there are interlopers in their midst.
Emmy finds a jewellery stand and inveigles me into buying her a turquoise necklace and I talk Jack into trying on hats. The smallest is still a little big for his head, but he looks good and there is a definite strut to his walk as we leave the tent and head out into the glare of the main event.
A mismatched band of musicians is stationed in front of the food stands. The lead singer looks as if she’s been teleported straight from Carnaby Street circa 1965. A thick hair piece falls asymmetrically over one ear. Her lower body is shoe-horned into a red mini skirt and as she stamps from one chubby white leg to the other she croons ‘Take Me to the River’ with great gusto. Her guitarist strums away, apparently on a different hit, while an even funkier-looking back-up singer, with a lopsided afro and fuzzy sideburns, swings his hips not entirely in time to either beat.
I clutch the hands of the children and look around for Chavez. There are faces I recognize in the crowd. Sue, Jack’s teacher, some children and parents from school, the arts and crafts lady from Ague. It’s only eleven-thirty but people are already eating at trestle tables piled high with food. Catfish hoagies, quesadillas, curly fries, hamburgers, buffalo wings. A couple of benign-looking old-timers are selling cobs of roasted corn which get spat, blisteringly hot, out of a huge tombola-style grill. At a funnel cake stand, an Indian woman dunks patties of batter into boiling oil. Next to her a fit-looking Navajo, wearing a baseball hat emblazoned ‘Desert Storm’, sprinkles the golden pillow with icing sugar and hands it to Jack in a crenellated box. The air is so clogged with the smell of fried food I think that if I can ever bring myself to leave this place, this will be the scent I’ll have to bottle for nostalgia.
Chavez is sitting with one of the cowboys from the town hall meeting. He’s a tall gangling man, his shirt starched to attention and a grey felt hat pulled low over his face. Chavez beckons us over. ‘Alice, Jack, Emmy! Come and say hi to Moss Adams.’
‘Ma’am.’ The cowboy touches his hat creakily, then places an enormous chapped hand on top of Emmy’s head. ‘Now you’re a fine little lady. What are you going to be when you grow up?’
‘A hit man,’ she says.
The cowboy looks taken aback, then grips his knees and wheezes out a laugh revealing three ochre-coloured teeth staked precariously in his gums like loose fenceposts.
‘Moss, let Emmy pull your moustache,’ Chavez says noticing Emmy eyeing up the man’s full Walrus, which is thick and wide and a superlative six inches long. Obligingly the cowboy bends his head. Emmy’s hand remains resolutely in her lap. ‘C’mon, girl,’ he whispers, ‘no need to be shy.’ Emmy looks at me for reassurance then, reaching up, curls her hand around the bristly tail of hair and gives it a tremendous tug as though it’s an old rope door-pull she’s been warned doesn’t work terribly well. The cowboy straightens up very quickly, his eyes smarting with tears. Chavez chuckles and introduces the girl sitting next to him as Moss’s granddaughter. ‘Ima’s a big champion,’ Chavez says. ‘A national champion.’
‘What event?’ I ask her.
‘Go-tang.’
‘What?’
‘Go-tang.’
‘I’m sorry, what?’ I know what she’s saying is a close approximation but it just isn’t English.
‘Go-tang,’ she repeats politely but firmly enough for me to lose the required confidence for further questioning and it’s only when she bursts out of the stalls a couple of hours later on her horse, lasso in hand, corkscrew hair flying under her hat, and bearing down upon a skinny little goat at the other end of the field, that I realize, silly me, Go-tang is obviously Goat Tying.
Chavez makes his goodbyes and is herding us towards the sale tent when, to my surprise, I see Nora a little distance off. She seems to be heading our way, parting the crowd effortlessly before her, her streaky grey hair splayed across her shoulders under the familiar Bass Buster cap. Before I get a chance to wave she’s already bearing down on us, but instead of stopping, she simply rolls on through us like a bowling ball scattering pins.
‘What on earth was that all about?’ I pull Emmy up off the grass.
Chavez stares after her as she powers on through the trestle tables. ‘Poor Nora,’ he says, shaking his head, and I wonder whether anyone ever uses Nora’s name without attaching poor to it.
Inside the sale barn, old metal cinema seats have been racked up on three sides and the giant propeller fan fixed to them is so efficient that it almost blasts the hair off the skulls of people sitting closest to it. There’s a children’s auction in progress. A wide-eyed, gawky girl leads her sheep around the sawdust ring. ‘These are all ranchers’ kids,’ Chavez explains. ‘They raise these animals themselves. Money goes to charity, in case you’re tempted into buying anything.’ The gawky girl goes to sit down in the stalls. She watches her sheep, knobble-kneed in the ring, and crosses her fingers behind her back. The auctioneer calls the auction as if he’s speaking double Dutch on fast forward. Emmy giggles. Jack imitates him in a Disney voice: ‘Gobbledee, gobbledee, gobbledee.’ ‘Hyperbole, hyperbole, hyperbole,’ the auctioneer reciprocates, and in the choked dustiness of the tent I find myself searching faces for Duval. Where was he? What really happened out there in the desert? That Duval was responsible for locking the coyotes in the truck, I had no doubt. But that he had intended them to die? I don’t know; and if not, how could he have been so certain the Border Patrol would release them in time? Questions spin around my head. How many men had Duval killed? Was he any better than a vigilante himself? Then I began to picture it. The blackness in the truck. The fearful heat. Seventeen people with nothing left to them but to measure the pounding of their hearts
as the temperature kept on rising. Had they waited quietly, conserving oxygen? Or had they struggled, panicked, tried to beat that door open? Seventeen human beings. Two old men, and women, amongst them, and I think I would have locked the coyotes in that truck had it been Emmy or Jack. And hadn’t this been how Estella’s journey began?
Duval told me he came to the border to learn the truth, but he’d found more than that. There were two truths: what had happened to Estella and her son, and the reality of what was happening every day. Despite everything, he had fallen in love with the border. For its beauty and its ugliness, for its passion and all its secrets. And in his more philosophical moments he persuaded himself that in staying he’d found some measure of purpose.
‘Helping people or looking for this El Turrón character?’ I’d asked him. ‘Looking for revenge?’
‘You don’t think revenge is a good enough reason?’
I’d thought then of all the reasons people give to justify decisions that ultimately trap them. Security, money, children, fear, and I decided that revenge was as valid a rationale as any.
The night following Chavez’s unannounced visit I hadn’t been able to sleep. I stood out on the deck long after the children were in bed. The stars were so dense it looked like someone had spilt salt over the sky. Somewhere under this same lemon slice of moon, the workers slept, holed up safely in the schoolroom, the children turned and muttered, and Duval rumbled to a place unknown with his charges. I was forced to admit to myself that whatever he was capable of, whatever he had done, I didn’t care. I stood there, a blanket round my shoulders, dreaming of his skin touching mine; and at the thought, a pain shot through to the pads of my fingers, a surge of electricity so strong that I reckoned I could light up a bulb simply by cupping my hands around it, or power one of Jack’s toy trains along its track with the touch of my finger, and I knew then that I had never been as hungry for anyone as I was for this man.
‘Well yihaw!’ The slam of the hammer brings me back. The auctioneer has knocked down a big steer for $800. On the other side of the ring, Jeff Hogan stands up and receives a round of applause for his philanthropy.
‘That shaw iz one pretty dumb-looking animal,’ I drawl in my best Arizonian. Next to me, I feel Chavez stiffen. ‘The one down there,’ I add sweetly. ‘Look, Jack! Emmy!’ A small boy is leading an emu around the sawdust ring. It bucks its head coquettishly and purses its lips in a broad come-hither to the auctioneer, who holds out his hands in exasperation.
‘Will somebody please find out whether you can eat these damn things,’ he drawls to general laughter.
‘Well, folks.’ Hogan sits down behind us. ‘I just bought myself one hellova steak dinner.’ He shakes hands with Chavez, claps me on the shoulder. ‘Ma’am, kids, good to see you here. Enjoying your day at our little fair, I hope?’ He shakes his head sorrowfully as the emu is led out of the ring. ‘Some damn fool thought it a fine idea when they bought it for two thousand dollars and now they’re having to sell for a hundred.’ He pulls down on the corners of his Waylon Jennings waistcoat and slides a quick look in my direction. ‘It’s a cautionary tale you could apply to most border economics, wouldn’t you say, Chavez?’ He beckons to a girl, who approaches brandishing a clipboard. ‘Time to pay for my sins.’ He rises from his seat. ‘Mrs Coleman, ma’am, I’m thinking you and I need to get together.’ He stoops closer. ‘Real soon.’
I watch him in mute anger as he squeezes his stone-washed derrière between knees and the backs of the racked seating.
‘There’s talk of you going into business with Hogan,’ Chavez says.
‘You know I always wondered what “there’s talk” actually means.’ I turn to him disagreeably. ‘Where is there talk? Is it just out there somewhere, like radio soundwaves, floating by on the breeze for everyone to hear?’
‘I can see you’re not used to small-town life,’ Chavez says gently.
‘I guess not.’
He rotates his hat in his hands. ‘Don’t misunderstand me, Alice, I support neither vigilantes nor any of this white supremacist craziness, but if you join up with Hogan it would give both your investment and your family some level of protection.’
‘I don’t want men with guns around my children.’
‘I appreciate that,’ he says in a low voice, ‘but if that’s the case I must ask you to promise me one thing.’
‘Of course. What?’
‘That you come to me personally. If there’s trouble of any kind. If you feel scared or threatened by anybody in any way. I want you to promise not to hesitate and not try to be brave. You call the Border Patrol.’
I turn to look at him but there is nothing but reassurance in his serious brown eyes.
‘Thank you. Of course I will,’ I tell him gratefully. ‘I promise.’
‘And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air . . .
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there . . .
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave . . .
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?’
In the rodeo ring a former Miss Arizona finishes a wonderful rendition of the national anthem in a quavering soprano voice. Everyone sits and the action begins.
Bull Riding, Bareback Riding, Steer Wrestling, Calf Roping, the children watch it all, rapt, teeth chewing on straws poked inside gallon-sized buckets of lemonade. Tirelessly, Chavez explains the rules. Cowboys must ride one-handed. To avoid disqualification they must keep their hand above a certain level. Cowboys may not touch their body, the animal, or the saddle. They must stay on for seven or eight seconds in order to get judged.
‘See those two?’ He points at the men on horseback waiting by the starting gate. ‘If the cowboy does manage to stay on his eight seconds, they’ll come alongside and hoist him off the bronco and get him safely to the ground.’
After the boys we get the girls and it’s Ima out of the stalls first. She thunders across the dusty ground, the poor goat shivering in horror at her approach, looking for all the world like it’s about to burst into tears. Snap, Ima’s lasso is out and whirling. Snap, she curves her spine over the saddle and throws. Snap, she straightens up and the noose tightens around the goat’s neck. I watch in awe as she sails off her horse without worrying about which side to dismount or getting her toe snagged in the stirrup, and pounces on the hapless panting goat, gathering its four legs together and whipping rope around them. Her fingers fly nimbly over the animal’s hooves, and having secured the final knot she raises an arm in triumph as though having delivered a faultless performance of Rachmaninov’s Third, which I suppose in go-tang terms she probably has. Like old pros the children look to the clock and wait for the rumble of the loudspeaker to announce her time.
Jack is desperate to pee. He hops from one foot to the other, clutching his pants. I drag him off, entrusting Emmy to Chavez. We make our way past melting ice creams and squelched corn dogs to the foot of the stands and duck under the raised wooden structure to short-cut through to the portacabins. They’re all occupied. Jack’s feverish to get back to the action but I make him wait. Underneath the stands it’s shaded and cool and there’s a pleasant smell of sawdust and horseshit. Jack holds on to his crotch and presses his nose to a chink in the seats, unwilling to miss anything. I follow the fortunes of the next competitor from the ‘Oofs’ and ‘Aws’ coming from my son then peer through a rival gap trying to pick out Emmy, finally getting a glimpse of her up on Chavez’s shoulders, her cowboy boots pressed into his ears. I smile and shift position. She’s waving her straw in the air like a flag. ‘Now, folks,’ the commentator booms, ‘the Rodeo is about more than just a Bronco Buster trying to stay on an angry bull, am I right?’ The crowd roars. Another boom. ‘It’s about Courage, it’s about Character, it’s about . . .’ The crowd sways in agreement and I lose sight of Emmy. When I spot her again Chavez is bent over talking to another man, their heads close together. Suddenly, unexpectedly, they both look in my direction and
for a split second the cold shadow of foreboding passes over me and I’m back outside the cabin, the night Emmy had been sick, watching Benjamín and Duval whispering under the oak trees. Then the crowd roars yet again, a leg blocks my view and I shake myself. It’s absurd to always see dark conspiracy in everything and I resolve to stop. Jack pulls his head out of the gap.
‘This is so cool.’ His eyes are shining. ‘Isn’t this cool?’
‘Yes!’
‘Do you love me?’ he demands.
I grin at his pink sunburnt face. ‘Uhhhhhhh, gee, let me think.’
‘Mum!’
‘Hey, it’s not like this is an easy question or anything.’
‘Mum!’
‘Just give me a minute, okay? Jeez! The pressure.’ I make a great pretence of thinking. ‘Now do I love you or do I not?’
‘Mum!’ He remembers himself. ‘Hey, look, just a simple yes or no, okay?’
‘Well, if you’re going to rush me, then no, sorry, I don’t love you at all.’
‘You’re so mean.’ He writhes with delight. ‘You’re such a witch.’
‘Yeah, well, it’s a witchy world, dude.’
His response is drowned out by the noise of the crowd. I lean closer to him. Spontaneously, he turns his face up for a kiss but suddenly his new, too-big-for-him cowboy hat slides over his face and he finds himself with a mouthful of brim instead. Surprised, I look up and there right in front of me stands Duval, his hand holding Jack’s hat down on his head.
‘Mu-uum,’ Jack is protesting in a muffled voice.
I say something but my voice also sounds muffled and far away.
Duval wrenches up the sleeve of my shirt. ‘So Sanchez was right.’ He stares at the cholla punctures on my arm. ‘You crossed the line and now there’s no turning back for either of us.’
And I feel the warmth of his hand on my wrist and know it’s true.
‘Goddammit, Alice.’ He raises angry eyes to mine.
