Nop's Trials

by Donald McCaig

  Peremptorily he shrugged away. His hands flew, knotting themselves, unknotting, wringing themselves out.

  Something in the tension of his frail shoulders, his body hunched over his hands.…“Is he angry?” Lewis asked.

  The teacher shrugged. “I hope so. I’d love to see one sign that some other human being matters to him. Maybe Scottie’s angry Mark hasn’t been to visit him.”

  “I live in Virginia now,” Mark said. “It’s harder to come.”

  “I didn’t mean to be accusatory.”

  The little hands flew. Mark went over and touched his brother’s back. The boy flinched away. Mark hunkered behind the boy, keeping the contact less intimate and his hip touched against the boy’s back so Scottie could pretend not to notice.

  “How are you, Scottie? I missed you, you know. The original hardhat. Maybe we ought to take that crazy helmet of yours and decorate it. Just like the astronauts did with their names and their missions. You’re a real space cadet, aren’t you, Scottie, visiting worlds nobody’s ever seen before.”

  He spoke to his brother for half an hour or so, sitting just behind his back, touching hip to rump, the narrowest contact. After a while, when his voice slowed, Scottie’s hands slowed and when he paused Scottie’s hands accelerated.

  “You see,” the boy’s teacher said. “We can’t not talk. None of us.”

  When Mark scooted around in front of his brother, the boy’s fingers moved frantically, but Mark’s calm voice slowed him. The two brothers sat in the dirt of the playground, one to one.

  Lewis asked the teacher about the helmet.

  “When Scottie has a seizure, he drops. Right there. He’s had two concussions already. We’d like to reduce his seizure med but we don’t dare. That’s why his teeth are so bad. Dilantin destroys the enamel of the teeth, but Dilantin is the only thing that’ll keep him from seizuring. You see that boy over there, by the swings? That’s Billy D. A couple weeks ago he started hanging around with Scottie and paying attention to him, tugging him around the playground. We were all pretty excited because these kids don’t relate much to their peers. It was the helmet. When Billy set Scottie in the sun, the sunlight made fascinating patterns and shadows through the helmet’s airholes. That’s what Billy was interested in.”

  Mark went for a walk—Scottie dangling from his back. Scottie crooned eerie sounds, like the cries of water loons on a misty morning.

  Lewis sat still. As the shyest baby lambs will, if you sit quiet long enough, a few children came to Lewis. One crawled on his lap. Unknowingly, Lewis spoke to them in the same soft tones he used on skittish livestock.

  The sun slid west. Mark said, “I suppose we better be going.”

  “Stay as long as you like.”

  “It’s enough,” Mark said. “Enough.” He blew his breath out past his teeth.

  Scottie was back in the dirt again, drooling, same as before, but his head was tilted back sharply so he could stare at his brother. His gaze was quite intense. His hands were still. One scuffed half of his crash helmet was in the sunlight, the other side was dark as the moon.

  Lewis said, “Mark …”

  “Hey, Scot. What’s this? Are you crying?”

  The little boy in the crash helmet cried because somebody he loved was leaving. Somebody.

  While the teacher comforted Scottie, she was smiling too because she’d wished for such a sign, but her smile had tears in it too as smiles often do.

  Courteously, Lewis didn’t look into Mark’s face all the way back to the truck and trailer.

  They stopped for dinner at a Hojo’s just out of Columbus. Lewis had hamburger steak, Mark had the clams. Lewis paid.

  They lost their light while they were still in Ohio. Lewis filled the saddle tanks in Marietta, Ohio, because all-night stations are rare once you get into the mountains.

  Mark slept for a couple hours. When he woke up, he lit a cigarette and made a face. They were in West Virginia. “We goin’ on through?”

  “Don’t want to pay for another motel if we can help it.”

  Every now and again they’d pass a porch light, a pole light outside a barn. Every now and again they went through towns, mostly sleeping towns.

  “You want me to drive for a while?”

  The road bordered by trees. The headlights washing over the mailboxes, trees, oddly shaped bushes, overhead wires, the center line. The headlights caught the glint of broken glass and beer cans beside the road.

  “I like to drive,” Lewis said. “I can think things out when I’m driving at night. It’s peaceful.”

  Lewis cracked the wind wing to let some of the smoke out.

  Radio stations were few and far between and their signals were erratic. Mark sat with his hands in his lap.

  At four in the morning they caught I 64 at White Sulphur Springs. “It’ll be smooth sailing from here on,” Lewis said. He squirmed against his seat to stretch his back muscles. “Look at that sky. It wants to be daybreak over there.”

  Mark rubbed his eyes.

  “I think I’m gettin’ things backward,” Lewis said. “I ought to be feeling real bad about your brother Scottie, but I don’t feel bad. I’m glad I met him. I’m glad he learned how to cry. I ought to be glad Nop is done. Looking for him, I mean. We gave it our all. Nop is dead. I better get used to the idea because I got a farm to work and a fire department and I’ve neglected Beverly. I ought to be glad we’re finished looking for Nop, but I’m not. I feel awful.”

  PART 2

  A dog is not “almost human” and I know of no greater insult to the canine race than to describe it as such. The dog can do many things which man cannot do, never could do and never will do.

  JOHN HOLMES

  SEVEN

  Nop Loses His Balance

  The Littlest Buckaroos began as an intermission act—a diversion while riders cleared the arena between the calf roping and the bulldogging. From the start, the TV folks loved them. The TV folks had seen more than one rodeo and believed that if you’ve seen one man bulldogging a twelve-hundred-pound bull, you’ve seem them all. A monkey dressed up like a cowboy riding a dog who’s acting like a horse—that’s a novelty. TV has never feared novelty.

  Rodeo management believed TV could do them harm but little good. Rodeo fans don’t need local coverage to pull them in, but unfavorable coverage can keep them away. Rodeo management worried that TV folks were antirodeo and, in this, were probably correct. If the TV folks owned animals, they were small animals, dutifully registered, licensed and spayed. Finicky eaters. TV folks weren’t interested in large animals unless the large animals were in pain. Just let a horse go down or a bull break his neck and you could bet the TV cameras would be right on top of it.

  So rodeo management shunted the TV folks toward the Littlest Buckaroos and everybody got what they wanted. The TV folks had their novelty and the rodeo got some surprisingly good coverage for a change.

  At first when the interviewers came around, T.T. ducked out. Interviewers made him feel stupid and afraid. One reporter asked him for his training secrets. “That’s why they call them ‘secrets,’” he exploded. But T.T. got used to it. T.T. got glib.

  At first, T.T. didn’t like drawing a check made out to the Littlest Buckaroos, but the checks all cashed and when Good Ol’ Red suggested the Buckaroos should gather the calves after every roping—instead of just working intermission—T.T. was agreeable, so long as his check reflected the extra work “center ring,” as T.T. put it.

  T.T. didn’t spend all that money on himself, no indeed. He bought the monkey three distinctive cowboy suits. His “Tex-Mex” outfit was black leather chaps, leather vest and black sombrero with silver conchos on the hatband. His “Natural Cowpoke” outfit was a pair of tiny blue jeans, a diminutive red flannel shirt and a battered wheat-colored J. B. Stetson. The outfit the monkey preferred resembled a bullfighter’s suit of lights—white pants, white vest, rhinestones all over his ten-gallon hat. T.T. called it “Nashville.”

&nbs
p; Since T.T.’s work was finished the moment he turned Nop into the arena, naturally he came to think the act’s success or failure was determined prior to release. He attributed importance to the crowd’s response to the monkey’s outfit and studied each crowd carefully, changing outfits until the very last moment. Personally, T.T. preferred the “Natural Cowpoke,” but most of the crowds liked “Nashville.”

  Rodeo management bought a pair of cap pistols for Festus to use. Child’s replicas of the old Colt Equalizer in bright chrome with molded white plastic grips. T.T. wouldn’t use them.

  The calf roping took almost an hour. Nop had his work cut out for him. Single calves: roped, dropped, tied with a pigging string and released as the roper held up his hand to stop the clock. The calves struggle to their feet, trot on a few steps, bawl once or twice and hope their whirling brain will slow.

  Cutting horses galloping past. The blaring lights and glaring sounds of the arena. A thousand people, roaring. Before the calf had quite settled, he’d find himself facing a dog with a monkey on its back. The crowd laughed and shouted. The dog hunkered down close to the ground and the monkey waving its arms and kicking its feet.

  So long as Nop stayed back on the precise balance point, so long as he avoided the galloping horsemen and the rodeo clown (who thought, rightly, that Nop was stealing his thunder and spooked him whenever he could do so undetectably), Nop could do his work, bringing the calf back into the exhaust pen. A quick drink of water from the steel bowl at T. T. Raines’s feet and back into the arena again.

  An hour later an exhausted stockdog would reel out of the arena for the last time. Nop was glad to see his cage, back behind the horse trailers.

  Sometimes, cowboys stepping out behind the trailers for a nip, a smoke or a piss would come over to talk to Nop. He liked the sound of their voices but didn’t have enough left in him to respond.

  One afternoon curious kids found the metal pen and poked sticks through the mesh and Nop went furious, snarling and howling until T.T. cursed the kids away.

  T.T. fed his animals when he woke up—anytime between six-thirty and noon. Made little difference to Nop. Carnivores don’t always bring down prey regularly. But the monkey suffered. He was used to eating very many times each day, no great amount at one time. When his breakfast got later and later, he became hysterical, sobbing and rattling his cage.

  Matinee days they’d do twenty calves in the morning and twenty-five more at night. T.T. put out as much food as the monkey could eat and then took away the bowl. The monkey was alternately logy, full of food or so hungry he could hardly stand it.

  The monkey began to lose interest which, in his case, meant failing to flail Nop with his little sombrero and failure to wave at the crowd. That afternoon, in Waco, when he managed to get both feet out of the straps, was the last time he went out untranquilized.

  Animals speak the same language—just like a Frenchman and an Englishman speak the same language. There are occasions for understandings, occasions for great mistakes.

  Nop had accepted T. T. Raines as Head of the Pack and T.T. didn’t want him biting the monkey. Even when the monkey hurled scat at him or jerked his hair, Nop didn’t bite though he would have dearly liked to.

  When the monkey was tranquilized, he didn’t have much personality at all; between bouts with T.T.’s needle, he was mean as hell.

  Nop’s coat had been pulled out in tufts. It looked like mange.

  In Austin, May 8, T. T. Raines injected the monkey with one cc. of tranquilizer and sent him out in a leg harness so cunningly woven that no monkey (or man either, T.T. was heard to say) could possibly squirm free. The monkey didn’t get free. Nor did he pretend to be a Little Buckaroo. He pushed against the roping horn and twisted in his leg loops and hurled himself about so violently that twice, as Nop made a tight turn at high speed, the monkey overbalanced him and they both went down in the dirt. Forty-three calves that day.

  In Oklahoma City, May 10, they shared the Exposition Building with the National Quarterhorse Show and T. T. Raines went up to two cc.s because his act was looking foolish. Twenty-four calves that day.

  May 11, still in Oklahoma City, T.T. tried three cc.s and the monkey drooped over Nop’s neck as he gathered calves.

  T. T. Raines quit drinking; he’d worried himself sober. Like many another employer, T.T. attributed his worker’s troubles to moral failure. “Damn laziest monkey I ever did see,” was how T.T. put it.

  Forty-four calves in Kansas City, May 14.

  T.T. sought out Good Ol’ Red and made noises about some other rodeo job. T.T. mentioned a vacancy on the cleanup crew.

  “We were gonna eliminate that job,” Red advised. “The Buckaroos need a little more excitement in their lives. They’re bored.” Really, the cap pistols were Red’s idea.

  Every evening Nop worked calves. Every other afternoon too. In between, when the monkey wasn’t shrieking at him or hurling crap, Nop slept. When he slept, he dreamed of calves, dreamed of rounding them up, ducking horsemen and clowns, rolling with Festus’s weak kicks, seeking the mouth of the exhaust chute, a quiet chute just across the arena, so small, so far.…

  Nop was a young dog, not yet in his prime, and he was already strong. Nop was quick off the mark and usually the calf was moving before he quite knew he was being herded. Nop’s body was relentless, graceful and hard. His exhausted brain spun as helplessly as the calf’s.

  Every time the monkey sat up and waved his white hat, the audience laughed. Nice ladies thought the Buckaroos were “nice.” Men cheered them on with hollers and whoops.

  Good Ol’ Red said, more firmly now, “You take the cap pistols, T.T., and train Festus to use them. We’ll put the spark back into your act.”

  T.T. took the monkey and the pistols to an empty horse trailer. He’d never trained anything in his life and he’d bought a bunch of bananas for training bait. The caps were extra loud and the first time the monkey pulled the trigger, he hurled the exploding toy away from him in terror. T.T. said, “Nice Festus,” and fed him a hunk of fruit. Hungry as he was, Festus soon learned to overcome his fear and, fueled by bananas, began to enjoy pulling the triggers.

  May 17, the Littlest Buckaroos made their final U.S. appearance.

  As it happened, the TV cameras were there (the news crew from WBBR, Sioux Falls) and they interviewed T. T. Raines and Good Ol’ Red as they waited for the calf roping to commence.

  Festus wore his “Nashville” suit, freshly dry cleaned. T. T. Raines hadn’t tranquilized Festus tonight. Festus wore child’s holsters, one on each scrawny monkey hip. The holsters were shoe white except for a triangle of jewels, green, amber and red.

  T. T. Raines was staring a thousand-yard stare. He couldn’t seem to focus on anything nearer than the far side of the arena and his speech was slurred, like he’d used a few tranquilizers himself.

  “They say there’s going to be a change in your act tonight?” the interviewer asked.

  “Yeah.” After a moment, T.T. added, by way of amplification, “I suppose so.”

  Good Ol’ Red horned in, right in front of the camera, to say, “Our acts—we’re continuously upgrading our acts. This is the first time we’ve tried Festus with cap pistols. It should, uh, enhance the illusion.”

  “How long did it take to train the act?”

  Red jabbed T.T. in the ribs. T.T. tried to remember the question. “Couple years,” he finally said. He took a deep breath. He gave a sigh of relief.

  “Well, thank you, thank you,” the interviewer said as the lights blipped out and all the colors softened again.

  “Where’s the best place to catch the action?”

  Good Ol’ Red directed the TV crew to one of the bull-proof panels, right beside the exhaust chute, where they’d get good closeups of the Buckaroos exiting.

  When the TV men were gone, Red climbed all over T.T. “I don’t know what you’ve been taking, T.T., but I tell you, I don’t like it. I don’t care what a man does on his own time, but …” />
  “Ain’t takin’ nothin’.”

  “Then what the hell’s the matter with you?”

  T.T. rubbed his face. “I purely don’t know. I’m awful damn tired of worryin’.”

  The first calf out of the chute was older and bigger than most and when the roper dabbed his loop, the calf never went down but stayed on his feet facing the on-rushing cowboy. Cowboy slid right down the rope and the calf ran at him instead of away, veering wildly, and the cutting horse couldn’t keep a taut rope. The cowboy slapped his Stetson into the dust in disappointment. “Bad luck, cowboy,” the announcer said. “That was Bill Granger from Thermopolis, Wyoming. That was awful bum luck. And now, coming out of the chute, our own little pickup team. Maybe you heard of them. Let’s have a nice hand for the Littlest Buckaroos.”

  The minute the Buckaroos came into the arena, the calf took off in a long diagonal and Nop changed direction, hoping to cut him off. That is, Nop’s body changed directions, his mind was whirling like a piece of thistledown on a gusty day. Nop didn’t really know whether this calf was real or a dream. He swerved violently and Festus ripped a hunk of hair out of his ruff.

  The Littlest Buckaroos weren’t having a bit of luck getting their calf and the audience laughed. Festus responded with a weak wave of his hat. When Nop came behind the calf, the calf stood its ground. It had been pushed around enough.

  Lowered his head. Bawled.

  Nop crept toward him. The monkey was quite alarmed. The calf charged and Nop dodged, monkey and all. The monkey squealed.

  Nop came around to the calf’s head and nipped at his nose.

  Well, that did the trick and the stubborn calf backed down. The crowd hooted and cheered. Festus perked up. He waved his hat over his head to applause as the calf trotted toward the exit chute.