by J. R. Helton
The grand procession began, led by an old, lean cowboy in a white shirt and brown hat. Two old, heavy Shriners in cowboy hats and red vests followed close behind him. One held the American flag, the other hoisted the Lone Star proudly. Making the circle, the two men began a duel of the flags; when one was raised, the other would be held higher or waved more, until they were both waving and shaking the flags like a baton routine. The lead cowboy broke rank and rode his horse elegantly to the center of the arena and faced the grandstand. The flagmen and the rest of the procession, twenty cowboys and cowgirls, formed a line across the ground behind him. Everyone rose to their feet and hats came off throughout the audience. Karen and Betty Sue came back into the box laughing. They were followed by two middle-aged men wearing expensive cowboy hats. I shook hands with the smaller of the two.
“Jake, good to see you, buddy.”
“Hey, BH.”
A slight coke grind was working in BH’s jaw. “You wanna go out to the truck for a second?”
I smiled. “Maybe later, I think this thing’s getting ready to start.”
“You’re right, you’re right. Let’s watch this rodeo. Hey, this is Denny Hit from Victoria.”
Denny stepped up from behind BH and gave my hand a quick extrafirm shake.
“Nice to meet ya,” I said.
Denny looked away, smoothed his neatly trimmed mustache, and said something to Karen. BH greeted Joseph by name. Denny removed his hat, and everyone in the box turned to face the arena for the national anthem. A young girl led from the grandstand. No one in the box really sang. Soon the song was over, and we sat back down.
I sat next to Joseph. Karen started to sit next to me but then decided to stand and lean on the railing. Betty Sue took the seat and left an empty chair for Karen on the outside of the row. Denny Hit and BH were forced to sit in two metal chairs behind us. I turned to talk to them and asked BH how he’d been doing while Denny seemed to stare intently at Karen’s tan shoulders and back. BH talked about UT baseball and a new housing development he was planning in Cypress. Betty Sue turned to us and ended the conversation with the announcement that the bronc riding had begun. BH and I dutifully watched the short event. Karen sat down in her seat, and Denny leaned over and spoke for some time into Karen’s ear while Karen nodded and smiled, said “Uh-huh,” and watched the rodeo. She then shared a secret with Betty Sue.
The bronc riding was over. Two clowns ran out and did a routine where their pants fell down and they aimed shotguns at each other. A little dog with horns tied to his head emerged from a barrel. A four-year-old boy, dressed in black as a gunfighter, was led onto the field and shot the bad clown in the ass with blanks. The whole show was narrated by an old man in the grandstand wearing a white hat. He kept wiping his face with a red bandanna. I pointed to the emcee and said to Joseph, “That’s my old trigonometry teacher, Mr. Olcovsky.”
Joseph pretended to suppress a laugh. BH leaned over and offered Joseph and me a Pearl from his ice chest. A sheen of sweat covered his forehead. Joseph and I took the beers, and after a few pulls, I asked Joseph what he did in Italy.
Joseph hesitated for several seconds. I watched the clowns set up for the barrel races.
“I’m a finger pointer,” Joseph said.
“Who do you point at?” I asked.
Joseph stared at the arena. “People who deserve it.”
Betty Sue and Karen switched places. I turned, and Karen was less than a foot away. She bent over and said, “God, it’s hot.” Her vest fell forward revealing small breasts with small dark nipples. Her skin was brown and damp. She wiped her neck. “Jake,” she said, and looked away.
“Yeah?”
“The reason I didn’t have my panties on was because my nails were wet.” She held out her hands, palms down. Her fingernails were bright red. “I would have asked you to help me if I’d known you longer.”
“How much longer?”
“At least five more minutes.” She closed her eyes and smiled.
“Okay, I’ll have a beer,” Betty Sue said loudly from behind Karen’s back.
“I want one too,” Karen said.
“My God, Karen!” Betty Sue said in mock horror. “I feel like I’m corrupting you.”
“I don’t care,” Karen said, tossing her ponytail in defiance of health. “It’s the Fourth of July.”
“Well, shit—here,” BH said. He pulled two cold, wet Pearls from the ice chest and handed them out.
Karen opened hers and took a drink. Betty Sue tried to open her bottle and failed. She sighed. “I’m so weak. Jake, could you open this for me?”
Denny Hit quickly removed the bottle from her hand. “Here, I’ll get it, Betty Sue.” He twisted the top off with a flourish and handed the bottle back.
“Thank you so much,” Betty Sue said and had a sip of beer.
We watched the clowns position three barrels in a triangular pattern in the center of the arena. Five cowgirls lined up at the starting gate, and then, one after the other, they pushed their horses as fast as they could go around the barrels. The crowd cheered each rider except for one girl who knocked over every barrel. But then, following Mr. Olcovsky’s advice from the grandstand, they gave her a big hand anyway. The event ended, and a group silence fell on BH’s box. Betty Sue dispersed it by telling everyone how her mother had been a champion barrel racer in Dallas.
“She was Miss Dallas two years in a row. Her first husband, my father, was a terrible alcoholic and calf roper, in that order. He never did as well as she did at the Dallas rodeo. He was very handsome but a horrible man. One thing he never let her do was wear red, and of course all she ever wears now is red.”
“What happened to him?” Joseph asked.
“He blew his brains out with a shotgun.”
“That’s terrible,” Joseph said. “Did she remarry?”
Betty Sue smiled. “Oh God yes. Five times.”
Mr. Olcovsky announced it was time for the calf scramble, an event, he explained, where six poor unsuspecting calves are let loose in the arena and set upon by a score of hungry seven- to twelve-year-olds. “God help those calves!” Mr. Olcovsky boomed. “Remember now, if the child can catch the calf, and, more importantly, if he or she can hang on to the thing, that calf will be his or hers, as the case may be. Looking at the contestants here tonight, I think we’ve got some strong competition for the boys.”
“Her fifth just died, though,” Betty Sue said to Joseph.
All the children were lining up across the width of the arena. They wore the same outfits: blue jeans and white T-shirts with paper numbers pinned onto them by helpful parents. The kids milled about, fingers in their mouths, hands resting on best friends’ arms, all more concerned with the crowd watching them than the jittery calves being assembled in a chute at the far end. A young girl, maybe five or six, with blonde hair tied up in a pink ribbon and jeans tucked into tiny red boots, wandered out of the line. Her bottom lip out, she staggered over the dirt clods toward her mother. The woman leaned through the railing and scooped the crying girl up and over to safety.
“What happened?” Joseph asked.
“Well, Mother loves to square-dance, and George just couldn’t keep up.”
“What happened?” Cathy asked.
Betty Sue laughed. “I’m sorry. One Saturday a month ago she asked him to dance and, well. . . .”
“No,” Joseph said.
“He said yes, did one twirl, and dropped dead right there on the floor.”
“Goodness!” Karen said.
“She felt terrible about the whole thing, but she has a new boyfriend now. She’s only seventy-four years old.”
“Wonderful,” Joseph said.
Mr. Olcovsky’s voice filled the grounds: “And here we go!”
The calves ran scared, staying close to the edge of the wall while children frantically grabbed for their tails, ears, and legs. A strong twelve-year-old girl quickly tackled a calf in full run, sat on him, and put her knee in his ne
ck until his tongue came out. Two tall boys fought over another. The rest scrambled, dived, missed, and hung on until all the calves were caught.
Joseph asked me what was next.
I looked at BH, and he said he thought bulldogging was next.
Denny Hit spoke up. “They canceled it tonight.”
“No,” Betty Sue said.
“Yep,” he said. “There’s not gonna be any calf ropin’ tonight either. They changed it all to tomorrow night for some reason.”
“Oh no,” Betty Sue said, “that’s—I love calf roping. That’s one of my favorite events.”
“Me too,” Denny said.
I asked Denny if they were having slack time later.
Denny shook his head. “Hell, there ain’t enough riders here tonight to justify it.”
“That’s a shame,” Betty Sue said.
“What’s left?” Joseph asked.
“I guess just the bull ridin’,” Denny said. “An’ they only got five bulls goin’ tonight. An’ they don’t look like they’re worth a shit. That’s it then, for tonight.”
“Well, hell,” BH said to me. “This ain’t much of a fuckin’ rodeo, is it?”
“It isn’t,” I said.
We watched the first rider sitting down on the bull, trying to get his hand in just right, under the rope. The bull was called Dingo. The lean cowboy in the brown hat and still-clean white shirt was backing his horse up in the middle of the arena. Another cowboy in a pink shirt sitting atop a tall bay was there to help him. Mr. Olcovsky told the crowd that Dingo had gored someone in San Antonio last week. The rider, a young man from Mesquite, got his grip, nodded his head, and they let loose the gate. Dingo came roaring out and immediately began to spin. Just before the buzzer sounded, he stopped spinning and changed directions so quickly he left the rider suspended in midair. When he hit the ground, Dingo turned back and flipped the man into the fence. The two clowns were quickly between the hurt rider and the bull. Dingo chased one into a barrel. As the clown ducked down inside, the bull crashed into the barrel and knocked it over. The white-shirted cowboy and his helper tried to steer Dingo back into the pen. The big bull veered away at the last moment and ran around the edge of the entire arena before the cheering crowd. He ran past BH’s box. A long stream of mucus hung from the bull’s nose.
“Ha! Get out of here!” Denny called to the bull.
BH handed Karen another Pearl and said, “Did you see that snot?”
Karen laughed. “Yes, it was gross.”
His tour over, Dingo ran unencouraged into the pen. The other four riders came and went with lackluster bulls. The last cowboy beat the buzzer but had trouble getting off his bull. As the lean cowboy rode up to help free the man’s hand, the bull jabbed his horse with a sharp horn. The horse jumped away from the bull into the fence and threw the white-shirted cowboy headfirst into a steel pole. He crumpled down into a manure-and-mud puddle at its base. The helper got the rider off, guided the bull back into the pen, and quickly rode back to get the other cowboy up out of the mud. The lean cowboy staggered for a few seconds, then limped back toward the grandstand, waving to the crowd.
“And it looks like . . . he’s . . . he’s gonna be okay!” Mr. Olcovsky said. “We’d like to thank the King Feed Company, T & R Auto Supply, the First National Bank of Cypress, the Cypress Chamber of Congress, Local 337, and every one of you who came out here tonight. Remember, tomorrow night we got a lot of things happening, so we’re starting at seven instead of eight.”
Betty Sue stood up. “Are you coming inside for the dance, Joseph?”
“No, we’re going back to Austin tonight.”
“You don’t want to go to the dance?” Cathy asked him.
“I don’t know. Do you?”
“Not really.”
“Well,” Betty Sue said, “we’re going.”
People began to fold up lawn chairs, close ice chests, pick up seat cushions.
“What about Sixth Street?” BH said. “I thought we were going to Austin.”
Betty Sue shook her head. “BH, if you want to go to Sixth Street, go right ahead.”
BH shrugged. “No, that’s okay. We’ll go to the dance for a while”—he put his head down like a sorrowful little boy—“if we have to. . . .”
“No one’s forcing you,” Betty Sue said.
“I know, I know. I’m gonna go put this stuff up in the truck.” He popped out of his chair and carried his ice chest up the stairs.
Denny helped Karen from her chair. As he led both women up the steps, he put his right arm around Karen’s waist and draped his other arm over Betty Sue’s shoulder.
“Oh, good-bye, Joseph,” Betty Sue called back. “Bye, Cathy.”
They said good-bye in unison. I shook Joseph’s hand and said it was nice to meet them both and wished good luck to Joseph’s daughter at UT. They wished me the same good luck in the movie business, and I left them alone in the box.
* * *
Several teenage girls blocked the entrance to the dance hall, debating whether or not to enter. I stood a little straighter, said, “Excuse me,” and walked past the girls. Inside I kept my head down and moved through the fringe crowd surrounding the dance floor. Four young men sang cover songs from the stage. I leaned against a table covered with plastic cups.
Betty Sue and BH came twirling by on the dance floor. Betty Sue stared happily up at BH’s face. He spun her around, and they moved smoothly among the other couples.
“Jake!”
Karen leaned over the table behind me, smiled, and held up a finger. She walked at first, and then skipped around to my side of the table.
“Where were you?”
“Where were you?”
“I”—she said, looking over my shoulder at Denny Hit—“was trapped. I’d ask you to dance with me, but I don’t know how to two-step. Plus these shoes hurt.”
She balanced herself with a hand on my thigh and took off her shoes.
“That’s all right. I’d hate to think what these boots would do to your feet.”
“I could just stand on your boots.”
I stood up, and she smiled, stepped up on my boots in her bare feet, and put her arms around my neck. I held her by the waist and we stared at each other for several seconds.
“I guess we could just stand here,” I said.
Karen smiled. “Or—”
“Well,” Betty Sue said, suddenly beside us. “BH and Denny want to leave.”
Karen let go of my neck and stepped off my boots. She touched Betty Sue’s arm. “Why?”
“They want to go to Austin, to Sixth Street.”
“Do you want to go?” Karen asked her.
“I don’t know,” Betty Sue said. “I can’t decide.”
I turned. BH raised a plastic beer cup in salute from across the room. Denny Hit stared, chewing on his bottom lip.
“What do you want to do, Jake?” Betty Sue asked.
“Yeah,” Karen said.
I sat back down on the table and crossed my arms. “I think I’ll head back to the house.”
“Go back to Austin?” Betty Sue said.
“Well, I was going to—”
“Yes, stay at my house. You shouldn’t drive back tonight.”
“Y’all can go ahead and ride with them, and I’ll drive your car home.”
Betty Sue smiled cheerfully. “Okay, dear.”
“You know,” Karen said. “I don’t think I really want to go to Austin. Maybe Jake and I can just go back home.”
Betty Sue shook her head no. “If you’re not going, I’m not going.”
Karen smiled. “Great.”
Betty Sue turned slowly, examining the room. “O-kay,” she said, her voice drifting into the lost-little-girl register. “I guess I’ll have to tell them. Y’all don’t want to leave now, do you?”
“Oh no,” Karen said, fanning herself, “it’s just so hot and crowded in here. Aren’t you hot?”
“Yes,” I said.
; “Maybe we should go outside and cool off,” Karen said, pulling at her vest.
“Let’s go,” I said.
“Okay then,” Betty Sue said, “let’s leave now. I’ll meet y’all outside.”
She walked back to Denny and BH.
“Maybe I should say good-bye to Denny,” Karen said.
“Okay, I’ll see you at the car.”
“Oh, forget it. Let’s go.”
We left the dance hall. Karen stopped to put her shoes on at the edge of the parking lot. She stared at me intensely, her brow furrowed.
“You’re just coasting along, aren’t you, Jake?” She made a sweeping motion with her hand, palm down, and stepped firmly into her shoe.
I started to walk ahead of her, looking down at the ground. “I guess so.”
We stopped and leaned, side by side, on the Toyota.
“I think that’s great,” Karen said.
“Thanks.”
“Look, there’s Betty Sue.”
Betty Sue, keys jangling, pretended to be too exhausted to walk. “Let’s go home and sit on the porch.”
“That sounds fun,” Karen said.
“We can have a glass of wine and smoke more of that evil marijuana.” She turned her key in the door, unlocking them all with a click.
I bent myself again into the tiny backseat. Karen sat up front with Betty Sue. They spoke quietly of BH and Denny Hit. I let my head fall back on the seat and looked out the window at the moving cedars.
“Were they mad?”
“I don’t know.”
Betty Sue looked for me in the darkness of the backseat through her rearview mirror.
“Frankly, I wasn’t ready for an evening with those two. They’re going to be up all night.”
“Right,” Karen said.
We drove back through Briarcreek, the headlights illuminating live oaks along the road. The neon bowling pin and dry cleaner’s sign appeared in the darkness.
“There’s supposed to be a meteor shower tonight,” I said.
“No, that was last night,” Betty Sue said.
“Oh.”
“But maybe we’ll see some tonight,” she added.
“Some stragglers,” Karen said.
