by Tim Sandlin
ROWDY IN PARIS
BY
TIM SANDLIN
OOTHOON PRESS
GROVONT WYOMING
NEW YORK
LOS ANGELES
OOTHOON PRESS
ISBN 978-0-9893957-2-4
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2008 by Oothoon Press. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Cover by Cynthia Huyffer
FOR CAROL
Also by Tim Sandlin
Sex and Sunsets
Western Swing
Skipped Parts
Sorrow Floats
Social Blunders
Lydia
Honey Don't
Jimi Hendrix Turns Eighty
The Fable of Bing
The Pyms: Unauthorized Tales of Jackson Hole
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
Thanks to Kate McCreery, who was with me at the Coffee Bean on Sunset when Rowdy came into my life.
Aude-Noëlle Nevius translated my weird BabelFish French into the real thing. Stephanie Cardon — the same Stephanie who took the photo on the cover — lives in Paris but doesn't have a French accent. She added her insights and language skills.
I'd like to thank the Paris American Academy for providing me and my family with an apartment on the rue St. Jacques. Kevin McKenna and Lucy Butler lined me up with these fine folks and explained the proper way to order coffee in Paris — one double café au lait with two shots of espresso to throw into the mix. Alice Richter did everything humanly possible to get me thrown into a Paris jail. Erin Buell and Dan Mortensen gave advice and aid on rodeo lore.
CONTENTS
Colorado
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Paris
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Wyoming
Chapter 37
AUTHOR'S NOTE
SELF-EVIDENT TRUTHS
Colorado
1.
Self-evident Truth #1: The world over, cowboys are the envy of honest men and heart's desire of adventuresome women. Real cowboys are the top link in the food chain and bull riders are to cowboys what cowboys are to the rest of the male population. A man can dream of no higher aspiration than to survive eight seconds astride a rough-stock bull.
Out loud, people who can't climb on 1,200 pounds of pissed-off beef say those who can are crazy, that we have needs normal life cannot fulfill. But deep inside their guts and nuts I've never met a man yet who doesn't wish he had what it takes.
The bull was a rank Brahma name of Ripple. It was second go of a two-go rodeo in Crockett County, Colorado, on a Labor Day weekend Sunday so crackling hot the stock pens shimmered from rising stink. I'd rode my first bull to a 66, which may not sound like setting the West afire, except only three others stayed on a full eight seconds and all three of them had been bucked off in the second go. Or, to be faithful to reality — which I promised myself I would be because when you're telling a story you ought to either tell the true way it was or shut up — two bucked off and Neb Parks was so keyed up he drank a pint of 151 and got shook off in the chute.
Neb leaned forward to heave, fell over the bull's right shoulder, and pinned himself against the back of the chute. Neb's bull, who was named Loose Stool, kicked him in the face on the way down, then stomped his ribs into kindling before the gate men could turn him out. Neb lay against the bottom slat, on his smashed head, his feet and boots curled up over his belt buckle. I was up on the chute over, preparing to mount, and from my view, Neb looked like one of those boneless straw men the clowns build so as to give the bulls something to stomp.
The EMTs took a half hour strapping on neck braces and stabilization devices and all that guff they do while Neb's little East Coast bride was throwing a hissy like she married him not knowing his occupation. The crowd drifted off to their trucks to drink and feel up one another's spouses, and I'm on the fence, set to mount Ripple, who like I said was so rank if Neb had taken the chute dive under him there'd be nothing left but a reconstruction challenge for the mortician.
There's not much worse than timing your adrenaline for a ride only to have it put off. You can't just relax and write a poem because you don't know how long it will be. Besides, Neb's bride is losing her composure and from where I sit I can see down her blouse onto a set of breasts so evenly colored you'd think they never saw sunlight. She was unblemished as a new sink. So I rewound my left-hand rig, then unwound it again, then wound it, all the while looking appropriately long in the face for Neb and his bride, when mainly what I'm doing is trying to come up with a rhyme for purple. Every kid over eighth grade knows there's nothing rhymes with orange, but they don't tell you about purple. Girdle? Hurdle? The poem was about a Virgin Mary I once saw in a thunderhead cloud east of Raton Pass. Cars were pulled off all over the highway, looking at this thing, and everyone who saw it agreed it was the Virgin Mary, although anytime you see a woman's face in a cloud or a tortilla or even an oil stain in a puddle in that part of the world somebody's going to call it the Virgin. They don't know. One thing I've learned in life — Self-evident Truth #2 — You can't tell a virgin by her face.
This Mother-Mary-in-the-clouds stuff is outside the norms of cowboy poetry subject matter, I grant you, but I don't aspire to normal cowboy poetry. My goal is Andy Devine dates Walt Whitman. Or Emily Dickinson finds bliss with Brad Pitt and they both write an ode to the afterglow. Forget the cloud — purple is as rhyme-proof as orange. I'll describe the silver head.
What rhymes with silver? Squat, that's what.
The EMTs finally scraped Neb up and carted him off. As the ambulance wailed into the night the announcer said, "Let's give a big hand for Neb Parks." He got a smattering but not what I'd call a big hand. It wasn't like Neb got busted up in the arena in front of the crowd. Most people didn't even know what happened until the ambulance came through, so it's not like they were emotionally involved.
"Next up we have Rowdy Talbot from GroVont, Wyoming. Rowdy here hasn't finished in the money in a month of Sundays, but today is his big chance, so let's all put our hands together for the cowboy who rarely wins."
No applause at all.
Yancy Hollister said, "What the hell you doing?"
I pulled folds of loose hide up forward under the bullrope. Ripple had about twice as much skin on him as was needed. "Secret to riding this bastard is you got to knee up on his shoulders. Ride the hump instead of the bull."
"Secret to riding this bastard is to get off without getting killed."
"That, too."
Yancy Hollister was my flank man in charge of drawing the back-end rope up from under Ripple and m
aking it secure. Yancy comes from Texarkana. He has this cold tar accent I swear is fake but I've never caught him out of it. He's six-three and a steer wrestler and pretty much my only friend on the circuit, if it's possible for a short man to have a tall friend. I'm not certain. Yancy thinks bull riders have a death wish, which isn't true, but his belief in my insanity tends to balance out his extra eight inches of height, so we get along. Most of the time, anyway.
The gate puller was an old-timer called Chicken Jim, who'd lost his tongue to cancer on account of Beechnut. He couldn't swallow his own spit so he stuffed his mouth with Kleenex to absorb the saliva. Chicken Jim was the same puller who'd taken his sweet time turning Loose Stool out while Neb's face was undergoing the change, and Neb's wife had been rude to him. She called Chicken Jim a "fool." The Bible — Matthew — says you'll go to hell if you call anyone a fool. Doesn't say a word about bastard, asshole, or son of a bitch, but it's real specific on fool.
Chicken Jim couldn't say anything back to the woman because of no tongue and a mouth full of Kleenex, and he was feeling put upon.
He looked up at me and grunted the question.
I said, "Not quite," and he pulled.
Ripple hooked the half-open gate and slammed it into Chicken Jim, knocking him over the fence onto his back, which served the tongueless wonder right for going when I wasn't ready. The bull blew into the arena, fifteen feet in a single bound. He whipped a horizontal with my spurs at his ears before heaving forward onto his front hooves. His big head plunged between his legs and I saw nothing but dirt and horns. I threw my riding arm away right before the forward slamming thrust, which almost caught me.
Same damn move the bastard used to break my cheekbone in Calgary — popped me with a horn and threw me off the front end, that time — as opposed to the counterclockwise spin he'd made to separate my shoulder out in Cheyenne. Every rider has a deep personal relationship with one bull, the sort of love-to-hate deal you develop with a woman you marry and lose three times, which is something else I've pulled. Hard to say which has been harder on my body, drawing Ripple more often than is statistically probable, or marrying Mica over and over. They've both led to extensive rehabilitation.
The bull stretched out, jackknifed, kicked his rear quarters way over my head, like he was trying to kill me from the backside. He went into a right-hand spin where the snot string whipped around us like a trick rope, or a halo. I'm a person who can see an eight-foot snot string and think halo. Cowboy poets often express a unique view when it comes to beauty in nature.
He put me in a handstand against the bullrope pad and it was nothing but dumb luck that when I came down, his hump was under me — banged the stuff out of my pelvis.
His spin rolled under his skin, which didn't seem attached to his bones. More like a tiger, say, in a burlap bag. He tried to hook my leg and when that didn't break any bones, he dropped his right shoulder and whirled. Whiplash was involved.
I lurched hard to the outside, then overcompensated and almost fell in the well, which is the last place you want to go when falling off a bull. Flipping headfirst into the inside of a clockwise spin twists the bullrope around your glove hand and pinches the knuckles to the bull's back, locking the tail wrap tight as a noose. Imagine tying your wrist to the back bumper of a Hummer and being drug two miles through jagged rocks and cactus.
I rammed my knees into his hump and scrambled for a spur hold. We must have been near the fence because I flashed on a prosperous buckle bunny with a sky blue cowboy hat and passable tits under a yoked shirt with sequins, talking on a cell phone. No doubt making an appointment for a massage and pedicure. It pissed me off.
I screamed a word that goes against the entire cowboy code and threw myself forward with my free arm, damned if I was going to get killed while she chitchatted.
It was just enough. Ripple went into a front-end dance and came down like a Buick dropped off the third floor of a parking garage. My feet blew out, my head bounced off his ugly skull, and the Klaxon buzzed a quarter second before I pulled a face plant in the arena dirt. Ripple was so humiliated he kicked a solid shot to my tailbone before trotting off to the pen, docile as a Jersey milk cow.
I lay in a three-point stance, knees and forehead in the dirt, until the clown came up beside me. The dusty toes of his red and yellow hand-painted tennis shoes stepped into my peripheral vision. "Can you walk?"
"Possibly."
"Then cowboy up and get your ass out of my arena."
2.
The Crockett County fairgrounds men's room was this cinder block bunker with a drip wall-and-trough urinal and sheet metal mirrors instead of glass, like looking at yourself in the side of an Airstream trailer. I unbuckled, unzipped, dropped my Wranglers and jockey shorts knee level, and twisted around to view the bruise on my upper butt. My rear end hung like a pair of rotten bananas. I could make out the blue-black outline of Ripple's hoof and the split in it, off to the side of my own split.
When I was a kid my cousin Pud told me that if you break your tailbone, you'll grow a tail.
"More like a rat's than a dog," he said.
I've broken my tailbone twice now and I know it's not true. You just don't sit down for a few weeks.
While I was taking a leak a spiffy man with the look of a real estate mover and shaker, or maybe a state-level politician, came into the john. He was dressed in Dockers and a chamois shirt with a trout and dry fly pattern. His hair had been professionally grayed at the temples.
He stood down the wall, with proper space between us, just two guys making water. He said, "God, you're a mess."
I said, "You ought to see me when I lose."
I didn't so much as glance at his tallywhacker but I have to say right here and now, the man dribbled. He had nothing like my steady flow. And, although he started after, he finished way before me. From viewing the relative uselessness of his prostate, I'd guess the man was from Denver.
He shook twice, waving his elbow like he had a flag in his hand. "What's with you little bastard bull riders?" He answered his own question. "It's a Napoleon complex, that's what it is. You think you're inferior so you have to act twice as tough as a real man. My wife has a Napoleon complex."
For the record, I am not short, at least not by bull riding standards. I'm five-seven and a half, in my boots anyway, which you have to count' cause I'm always in them, which is basically average. Out West, when people talk about average, as in height and weight, ranch or truck size, weather, women, mean horses, ugly dogs, anything you might want to compare, they always act like the norm is more extreme than it is.
Tool in hand, I said, "I'm tall enough to kick your Yuppie ass out the door."
"See what I mean." The man Baptist-chuckled as he washed his hands at the metal sink. "That's just what Napoleon would have said."
I finished leaking, zipped it up, and headed for the door.
The man said, "In Colorado, we wash our hands after we urinate."
I looked back at him. "In Wyoming, we don't pee on ourselves."
The woman at the pay window had what we on the circuit call Provo hair set off by violet fingernails and an iridescent blouse the color of a bluebottle fly. She was reading Dell Horoscope magazine, an article entitled "Love Comes to Pisces," but she wasn't chewing gum. I'll give her that.
She looked across at me with exasperation. "You Rowdy Talbot?"
I said, "That's right."
"Ever'body else has come and gone. I had to stay around for you."
Bulls are always the grand finale of any rodeo, so it would figure bull riders would be the last to pick up their winnings. "How much did it come to?" I asked.
She studied me like I was on TV and couldn't study her back. "I wouldn't let my boy Donnie on a bull if his life depended on it. I'd break his legs first, save the bulls the trouble."
"My mama felt the same way."
"But she didn't break your legs?"
"No, ma'am, she cut me out of the family picture."
The cashier slid a sheet of legal blah-blah across the counter. "Sign here." As I signed, she said, "It came to four thousand three hundred twelve dollars and six cents. You win this kind of money often?"
I watched her snap open a Bass Finder tackle box full of cash. "This is the first."
"Let me ask you a question." She licked the tip of her pointer finger and started rifling hundreds. "How much do you pay for insurance?"
"Do I look like a man with insurance?"
She stopped counting to study me again. "I guess not."
She handed over a stack of bills. "I don't have a nickel. You'll have to take six pennies."
I rolled the bills tight and stuffed them into my front pants pocket where they felt pretty damn natural. I stacked the six pennies heads up for luck and slid them into my shirt pocket and tipped my hat like you're supposed to when a woman gives you money.
"Thank you, ma'am." I started to walk away, but she called me back.
"Wait a minute. You forgot something." She dug in a drawer and came out with a white cardboard box, maybe four inches by five inches.
She said, "You earned this, cowboy," and pushed it across the counter. I turned the box over, but there was no writing or embossed corporate logo or anything. While I opened it the woman bit her lower lip in anticipation, as if she'd picked it out and paid for it herself.
Inside the box I found a silver belt buckle nestled in a cushion of white cotton balls. There was a gold raised picture of a cowboy on a bucking bull set on a black enamel background. The cowboy leaned way back with his riding arm out of position while the bull did a sixty-degree headstand. The cowboy had a kerchief around his neck, like he was planning to rob a liquor store. The cowboy and bull were encircled by gold writing that said CROCKETT COUNTY RODEO around the top and 20 BULL RIDING CHAMPION 03 underneath.
She said, "That's real silver inlay."
I said, "Thankyou."
She said, "Take my advice, boy. Now you've won your buckle, quit riding bulls and get a proper job with benefits. That's what I'd want Donnie to do."
