The bull’s attention soon drifted back to the barrel, and after giving it one more push with his head, he turned and slowly walked back to the gate with the audience hissing every step of his stride.
My father licked back the spit of his excitement and nudged me. “That one liked to tore him up. That fella can sure say he did something tonight, riding that bull the way he did.”
I’d never seen my father that full of life before. He sat on the edge of his seat, hands propped on his knees, waiting and watching for the next movement in the arena. His enthusiasm was that of a boy at the circus, watching a man walk a tightrope while balancing a pole of fire.
Later, when he got hungry again, my father slipped out to the truck for a piece of sausage and a smoke break. He didn’t say it, but I knew he didn’t want me inhaling the cigarette smoke, most likely out of fear that it would feed my white spot.
After the barrel-racing event, I made my way back through the halls lined with photos of the famous that had visited the arena. A sign read “Staff Only,” but I kept going. Sometimes when you’re living like there’s no tomorrow, you just have to learn to ignore signs meant to hold you back.
Through a set of double doors, I found the place I’d been expecting all along. Bulls were packed into stalls until some showed their anger by racking the iron gates with their horns. The smell of sweat and manure overpowered that of the popcorn that flowed from inside the air-conditioned arena. Walking past a group of men with their feet propped on a feed bucket, I nodded and kept going. The bull that fought harder than the rest was what I’d come to find, and somewhere within the iron gates, he was waiting, snorting and stomping in a rage that nobody else could possibly understand.
A woman with a T-shirt and short gray hair was holding a hose and filling up a bucket of water hanging inside one of the stalls. She laughed at the man standing next to her and then glanced in my direction. A man with a handlebar mustache and coal-colored eyes kicked his boot against the gate and laughed harder than the woman. “I’m not lying to you. That’s just the way it happened.” His words trailed off, but his smile never wavered. “Afternoon,” he called out.
“Afternoon. Looks like ya’ll are keeping busy,” I said.
“Always, my friend. Always.”
The woman murmured “Excuse me,” and pulled the water hose to the next stall.
“Sure are a lot of bulls,” I said and then feared the stupid remark would cause me to get thrown out before I’d come face-to-face with the one thing that was madder than me.
The man laughed in a graveled, smoker sort of way and then spat tobacco on the asphalt, inches from my feet. “You looking for a bull in particular?”
I scanned the livestock pavilion like I was searching for a lost friend. “That gray one . . . that one named something-Chew.”
“FuManChu,” the man said nodding. His smile grew wider with each syllable, and he motioned for me to follow him. “That bull paid off my truck and a second wife.”
“What, you mean you own him?” I asked, trying not to follow too far behind him and make him think I was some boy.
When he turned slightly, his hooked nose stuck out like a claw. “I bought that bull six years ago. Nothing but a scrawny railroad rat. You could count his ribs. The man down in Belmont who sold him to me told me I was the first natural-born fool he’d ever met. But there was this thing about that bull’s eyes.” The man stopped and pointed to his own eye. “He liked to have stared a hole through me. He held up that head just as straight as you please like he thought he was somebody . . . and him half dead. Right then I knew that bull still had vinegar left in him.”
At the corner gate next to the livestock trailers that lined the parking lot, I saw the look, up close and personal. The bull snorted and trotted around the small stall like he was insulted not to have more room. His horns raked down the side of the iron rails, and I fought from jumping back. Noticing my hesitation anyway, the man laughed. “He’ll flat sure put a hurting on you.”
Staring into the slanted eyes of the bull, eyes that seemed better suited for an alligator, I kept the gaze until the bull turned and circled the other side of the stall.
Looking at that bad boy, I felt every ounce of adventure that I’d pushed back over the years flood to the surface. The words spewed out as fast as the beat of my heart. “How much will you take to let me ride him?”
In the snack bar with a buffalo head hanging over us, we negotiated the details while rodeo fans drifted by, filling their cups with ice and soft drinks from a dispenser.
Ham, I learned the man was called, sat back in the chair and tipped the hat from his brow. “Man, you mean to tell me you never rode a bull and you’re wanting to start with mine? Huh-uh,” Ham said shaking his head. “It can’t be done.”
“Says who? Look, I’ll take lessons, clean the stalls, pitch a tent in your backyard . . . whatever it is you think I need to do to get me on that bull.”
Ham laughed and picked up a straw from the drink-stained table. With a piece of the straw in his mouth, his dark eyes focused on me. “Now, let’s get to it. What’s really behind this?”
Watching a woman wearing a denim shirt with a rose stitched on the back move toward the drink machine, I tried to organize my words with caution, knowing that if he didn’t see it my way, I’d be back on the road with my father, and FuManChu would be back home in his pen.
“The thing is, all my life I’ve played it safe, never taking real chances. Then something happened . . . I found out I had a spot on my lung and the job I thought only I could do got turned over to somebody else. My world got knocked upside down. You know, looking at the world from a different angle, you figure some things out pretty fast. Somewhere back there I stopped living and ended up a walking dead man. I’m fighting to make sure that never happens again.”
Chewing the straw, Ham kept a gaze on me the same as I had on his bull. A voice called out over the intercom that the pole-bending event was about to start, and I got up to leave. I’d had my say. Now it was time to move on.
Before I could get past the drink machine, Ham’s graveled voice called out. “You gonna have to sign a release. You got a problem with that?”
Turning, I smiled and said, “Don’t worry. That’s one thing I’m getting pretty good at.”
After Ham came to terms on a fair price for training me, my father and I drove out to his place north of town. He lived on a state road dotted with farmhouses and scrub oaks. His place had a painted sign that looked like homemade: Rancho FuManChu. Seeing as how the bull was his prized possession, I wasn’t as surprised by the name as my father. “Naming someplace after a bull,” he mumbled and pulled into the driveway littered with crushed beer cans and rocks.
I’d figured that my father would’ve been harder to convince than Ham, but after vowing that he wouldn’t call Heather, he rubbed his chin and shook his head. “We’re all terminal, remember,” I said.
A black-and-brown sheep dog met us at the house. His tongue was dripping from the dry heat. “Shadow, get back here,” Ham yelled as he eased down the back deck that hung from his house. South Fork Ranch, it wasn’t. Ham’s modest block home with dusty red shutters looked more like a garage with some windows tacked on to the front. Rows of birdhouses painted in different colors of the rainbow were scattered across the deck railing. “You made these?” I asked.
“Yeah, gives me something to do between gigs with FuManChu. Sell ’em at the rodeos.”
“How much does a house like that one with the church steeple go for?”
“Depends,” Ham said, rubbing his jaw and looking back at the birdhouse. “Between seventy-five and a hundred.”
Ham flipped on a light switch inside the tin-roof building that housed a lawnmower and a mismatched set of two-by-fours. The smell of planting manure and gasoline met us at the door. Ham never seemed to notice when he kicked over a bucket and nails scattered across the concrete floor.
“Now, this here is what they call th
e electric bull,” Ham said while yanking a blue, tattered blanket from the machine. Underneath, a saddle-shaped iron machine was bowed down in submission. “You ever seen one of these before?”
I stopped short of commenting about the one I’d seen in the movie Urban Cowboy and just shook my head no.
After Ham jumped up on the machine backwards and held up his fingers to show me how to grip the rope, I gave it a try. The ease of motion made me think of riding a baby calf, and I let my hands go free. “Yee, dogies!” I yelled. “Man, please. Is this all she’s got?”
Without warning the machine dipped and bucked, becoming nothing less than a full-fledged bull with daggers in his side. When I tried to reach for the rope, the smile I’d been wearing was ripped from my face. Flying upward, I came falling down against the metal saddle, landing smack-dab in the middle of my groin.
I wasn’t thrown off, really. It was more like I slid off, rolling around on the blue pad, eye to eye with Ham’s silver-tipped cowboy boots. “Ride ’em, cowboy,” Ham called out as my father leaned over the riding lawn mower, trying to hide the laughter that caused his shoulders to shake.
Lesson learned, I sort of drug myself over to the side of the mat, legs clamped together. Ham went to reach for the blue blanket and then turned the switch off. “Crank it up again,” I yelled while trying to stand upright.
That night as the moths hit against the light that dangled from a ceiling cord, and Shadow barked at the sound of the electric bull, I kept a grip on the challenge. With each jar of my teeth, I came crashing down against the bucking metal saddle, picturing the white spot being torn loose from its hold on my lung. The spot would get knocked higher and higher up my throat and out of my mouth. It would fly into the humid night air to suffocate and disintegrate into the gravel driveway at Rancho FuManChu. One way or the other, I made up my mind I was going to win. —
The next morning I rose early while my father still slept in the back of the trailer. Thigh muscles that I didn’t know I had ached, and it was then that I knew the real reason cowboys were bowlegged. In the back of the camper the beige curtain that partitioned off my father’s sleeping quarters swayed to the beat of his snoring.
Outside, the grass was wet with dew, and Shadow only glanced up from his spot underneath the deck of the house. All might have been quiet that morning, but FuManChu was like me, restless. He stopped eating from a bale of hay long enough to snort and look in my direction. When he pranced toward me, the ground shook from the weight of his moves. A trail of fluid ran out of his nose as he stomped against the wooden fence that separated us. We stood there against the purple haze of a new day, eye to eye, watching and waiting. I’ve come this far, bad boy, I thought. I’m not backing down now. Walking away, I heard him kick the fence once more before trotting away.
Ham had wrapped my hands in tape and gripped the end of a rope, reminding me to keep my thumbs up. My heart beat faster with each swipe of tape that he put around my hand. But it was funny, when I signed the paper saying that he couldn’t be sued if FuManChu stomped the living tar right out of me, my heart slowed to a pace meant for an afternoon nap.
My father ambled over with his hands tucked inside his pockets. He looked out into the tall, grassy field that ran out from Ham’s house to the edge of the highway. “You sure you want to do this?” His mumble sounded more like a statement than a question.
“Let’s do it.” Walking to the chute, the word echoed in my head. “Let’s.” There was no let’s to it. It was me and me alone. But watching the way my father circled the area just beyond the chute and how he kept casting his eyes off toward the field, I realized that I’d used the right word after all. A piece of my father was right up on that bull with me. FuManChu’s muscled back quivered when I eased down on him. The gates of the chute rattled as he tried to twist around in the enclosed area. Pinned against his free will, he snorted and fought to raise his head in defiance to this latest man who was now on his back, trying to break his ego. “Ready?” Ham asked, holding the stopwatch.
Holding one hand up in the air and gripping the rope with the other, the door of the chute flew open before I could finish nodding. We both came flying out of the chute, kicking. The bull’s hind legs flew up in the air, and he jerked his head with a torment that I’ve yet to see again. Twisting around, I gripped the rope tighter, feeling my neck contort with each strike against his flank. Digging my legs deeper into the side of the bull, I looked down and fought with every bit of spit and vinegar that I had left in me. And all of a sudden, it was not the jerking and twisting head of some bull that I saw: it was the face of Jay Beckett. As I squeezed my legs tighter, the bull snorted and kicked higher until he was almost standing on his front legs. Manure-stained sand was all that I saw when I landed against the dirt, the breath knocked out of me but the spirit stronger than ever.
“Yaaaaa! Yaaa!” Ham yelled from inside the arena, flagging his arms at the bull. At the edge of the fence, my father reached over to lift me, but it was his praise that got me over the fence. “Good job, son. Real good job.”
Gasping for air, I tumbled forward and slid over the fence. From the other side, FuManChu raked his horns across the fence and snorted. I looked at the meanest son of a gun I’d ever faced since Jay Beckett and managed to laugh. Laughter continued to ring out as the thing that I thought might kill me trotted away for good.
That night, at a honky-tonk named Road Kill, Ham sucked down Jack Daniels with a frenzy equal to that of his bull. Stumbling up to the tiny stage where a DJ played classic country music, the microphone squealed when Ham snatched it away from the young boy. “I want everybody to listen up,” he said, leaning against the DJ’s sound system, “that skinny Georgia boy sitting over there . . . Stand up, boy,” Ham said, waving his hand and tipping his glass until the drink sloshed to the floor. “That boy just put a natural-born hurting on my prized bull. Fuchow . . . FuManChu.” The applause was weak, but my father winked at me just the same. “Come on,” Ham shouted. “Let’s see how many of ya’ll can stay on that bull for 2.7 seconds.” And with that somebody yelled, “Play ‘Call Somebody Who Cares.’”
A bouncer wearing a black wrestling T-shirt helped lift Ham from the stage, and he meandered through the crowd towards me, pulling something from his pocket. “While you were getting your insides ruptured, I took this picture . . . a souvenir . . . a medal.” He tossed a blurred instant photo of me leaning far back, feet in the air, while FuManChu kicked up dirt and twisted sideways.
The next morning, after we’d shaken Ham’s hand and paid him what was promised, he reached over and handed me the birdhouse that hung on the deck rail. “Here. A trophy.”
Riding down the bumpy sand road, I held the white-steepled birdhouse in my lap and decided that it would go in Grand Vestal’s backyard next to her clothesline. She wouldn’t know how I came by it. For all she knew, I might have bought it at some roadside stand filled with velvet rugs and plastic flowers. Just as long as my father and I knew the story behind it was all that mattered. That birdhouse would be something that we’d both glance at long after the migrating birds had come and gone. The house would stand as a memorial to the day I broke the phrase “it can’t be done.”
Taking a pen from the glove box, I wrote on the bottom white margin of the picture Ham had taken, “When life tries to buck you, don’t look down and don’t give in. Few things are as tough as they first appear.”
Addressing an envelope to Malley at Grand Vestal’s house, I tucked the photo inside. Life’s only worth living if you’re willing to share it with the people who matter most.
“Are you getting bored yet?”
Heather asked the question twice before I answered. Holding the pay phone closer to the edge of my chin, my two-day-old beard scratched against the receiver. “No, I wouldn’t say I was bored.” A group of children ran screaming around the chain-link fence that separated them from the booth of pay phones at a campground outside of Amarillo, Texas.
“Well, it s
ounds like somebody’s having a good time,” Heather said.
“There’re a bunch of kids out here swimming. Man, I wish you and Malley were here. I’m missing you bad.”
Looking out into the flat landscape scattered with small oaks and the pink-colored sky that comes with the close of day, I pictured Heather wrapping the phone cord around her wrist and leaning against the wall at Grand Vestal’s house, trying to become invisible as she whispered.
“It won’t be long,” she said. “How’s your daddy?”
“Pretty good. He’s loosened up a little. Not gripping the steering wheel as tight. Refuses to let me help drive though.”
Her laugh was as rich as the sun that was dipping lower across the plain. “Some things won’t ever change,” she said. “Hey, speaking of change . . . Malley’s become a country girl. She’s got her fingers all over this farm. She’s working that garden like a field hand. I bet we won’t be able to drag her back to Atlanta.”
“Get out,” I said.
“No, I’m serious . . . here,” Heather said, handing off the phone to Malley.
While Malley talked of the sale she and Grand Vestal had made at the Farmer’s Market and how the row of corn reminded her of green crayons with tips dipped in gold, a light feeling swept over me. I pictured my daughter running through the field of my past, leaves of green slapping against her ankles as she fought her way through the dirt to the other side. Hearing the rise of her voice as she got more excited about doing simple things that I’d taken for granted, I said a prayer right there in front of God, the setting sun, and the squealing children around the pool. With eyes wide open, I thanked the Lord for second chances.
After the call, I walked across the campground. I passed the log cabins and iron picnic tables and felt a change in the wind temperature. Warm, dry air seemed to be tangled inside a cooler current. A piece of crumpled wax paper swirled up into the sky and landed at the edge of the door of the campground laundromat. Inside, a woman with a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt and wet, kinky hair looked at me, her eyes as wild as the wind outside. “It’s going to storm,” she said, snapping a pair of boxer shorts. “The weather spins on a dime in the Texas Panhandle. It just spins on a dime.”
Live Like You Were Dying Page 8
