News From the Rodeo
Edward J. Delaney

Fourth of July was coming, and I had arrived at a place where I had embedded myself into the daily routine to the point that I was invited to the barbeque of a man I’d been doing some field work for. He surprised me with that. He said I didn’t have to bring anything because he would have everything I would want. He said I was the only farmhand he was having to it, because I was the only one who wasn’t a Mexican and that had to count for something. The work was digging ditches for irrigation. There was a lot to do and it would be steady work.

I had been living with Kim then but neither of us was completely sure people had realized it. I’d sort of slid in through the back door and if people had taken note they had said nothing to my face, or to Kim’s.

It was hot at that time of year in that part of the country. I had washed out my jeans the night before and had a white shirt Kim had picked up for me somewhere. I didn’t wear a cowboy hat; laborers weren’t stupid enough to do that, but I did have a reasonably clean cap so I put that on, too. Kim wore a pink cowboy hat and matching belt. She was invited as well and showing up together could have been looked at as either a coincidence or an announcement.

We drove out in Kim’s pickup. When her husband had lit out for the territories, he must have thought the old rig wasn’t worth the trouble, but I had resurrected it little by little from its place in the mudded ruts of the backyard. It smoked a lot, but in that place you didn’t often find people driving behind you.

The barbeque was not an intimate get-together. This man, whose name was Applewhite, may have had some designs on public office, and his comment about my not being Mexican may have been less a statement on my supposed racial superiority but on the fact I could be registered as a voter. In that respect I was an equal to the more comfortable and successful men of the county and I figured—and Kim clearly did—that my appearance at this event was a threshold for general social acceptance. I knew, without her saying it, that she didn’t want me to screw this up.

I had no intention of doing so. Being in this situation with her was like living on the other side of the moon, after my years of moving on and working where I could get work. Kim was a difficult woman, and I was not sure I loved her, but it was as much a sense of permanence as I could dredge up since I had left what I thought was my conventional life. Or maybe been forced from it. I had a handle on my drinking these days, considered myself marginally amiable, and was smart enough to converse but not so smart that people would look at my station in life and wonder what the matter was with all this. The West, though, was filled with people like that, smart enough to be doing something better but in love with not being tied down.

Kim drove the truck and I sat on the passenger side watching the fencelines roll by. I was a little disappointed that she seemed to have so little faith in me, but the fact of how I had arrived in her life probably would make her always feel that way about me. The fact that I had drifted into her life not long after her husband’s departure, and I always had the abiding sense that she had no real idea of what to do with me now.

*

On the dirt path that led up to the Applewhite house from the front gate, trucks and old cars were lined up on either side. The smoke from the barbeque pits rose up white from behind the house, which was also white. This was not what I thought of as sociable country, so the spectacle of more than a hundred people nervously shuffling about with their bottles of beer or their paper plates was another strange sight.

I don’t know why people seemed so thoroughly uncomfortable with life in those parts, but they were undeniably so. The women all seemed to be waiting for someone to say the wrong thing, or for someone to do something that fell outside what seemed to be their rigid rules of existence: No shows of poverty or wealth were tolerated, no bursts of emotion, no concession to the frustrations of life. Only an upright stoicism about everything from rough weather to stillborn children. I think they were all Pentacostals.

Kim seemed, as we stepped forward, to be especially clenched. She had a birdlike nervousness that perfectly matched her wiry, taut constitution. Her lipstick was of a redness darker than what I was used to, almost suggesting a hardness that her pink cowboy hat could not possibly alleviate.

The men looked at me from under their Resistol brims. Narrow sidewise looks with furrowed lines crinkling up around their blue Protestant eyes. Mumbles and grunts. A spit of tobacco onto the ground. Most of them were from the outlands, hard-lifers, and I was foreign stock to them, a face they hadn’t known for twenty or thirty years.

Applewhite was wandering around backslapping and joshing. He spotted Kim and me and made a wide arcing approach.

“Kim and Hal,” he said. “Good to see y’all.” He expressed no surprise and asked no questions, but then again, he was getting into politics.

“And you,” Kim said with her usual air of suspicion.

“You got your ribs there, and your burgers there, and your beer and whatnots over there,” Applewhite said. “Help yourself and enjoy.” And then he moved on, shuffling through the group as people seemed nervously attentive to one another.

“Okay, here we are,” I said. “What now?”

“Just hold steady, doll, and we’ll see what we’re worth around here.”

*

There were children down by the corral and a couple of little girls were riding a horse bareback in lazy circles. They looked no more than eight or nine, and they had to be sisters, and the horse moved in an indulgent canter, brushing them along the fenceline as they looked dreamily off to nowhere.

“Them are Applewhite’s girls,” Kim said. “Their momma used to be a barrel racer.”

The girls looked thoroughly bored, and the horse didn’t seem to be having much of a better time. I was thirsty and I would have liked to uncap a beer and lean on that fence and just watch the horse circle with the two girls on its back. But Kim, I knew, wasn’t going to let the day go to such a neutral conclusion. We were here for reasons better than that, but I wasn’t sure what it was.

Applewhite came wandering down the rut to the corral and watched the girls for a moment. Then he said to us, “You two need to come up and have some of that food.”

We nodded and followed him back up to where the smoke of the ribs swirled up over our heads. I filled up a plate and then Kim did, and Applewhite said, “You all should do some mingling. Kim, did you see who was here?”

“I did, thank you,” she said, but neither of them explained.

“Hal, can y’all stay behind and talk to me for a minute.”

“Sure.”

Kim wandered up toward the crowd and Applewhite leaned against the fence.

“You been doing good hard work out here,” he said.

“I appreciate you saying that, Mr. Applewhite.”

“A man might ask what someone like you is doing that far down.”

“I’m just trying to overcome some bad luck,” I said.

“Someone might reasonably wonder what you’re trying to outrun.”

“A lot of things, really,” I said.

“Some kind of crime?”

“No, sir, I don’t think so. Anyway, it was all a long time ago.”

“I been thinking that it makes no sense to waste you doing plain labor,” he said. “I thought I might make you the foreman for these jobs. I think the Mexican boys respect you, a man twice their age getting down and dirty with them.”

“It’s honest work.”

“So is foreman. You free me up from having to keep an eye on things and I raise your pay by a dollar an hour.”

“I’d be happy for that.”

“There’s just that one thing. Let me ask you this: If I tried to check you out, what would I find out?”

“If I’m guessing right, you already did check me out. And you wouldn’t have found anything. I come from a long way from here.”

“You guess right. So should I worry about you? Coming into town and taking up with a woman on her own? It’s no real secret I’m going to be a candidate, and I can’t have troubles from trying to give a man a leg up.”

I looked him in the eye. “I will cause you no trouble.”

“Good,” he said, slapping me on the shoulder. “We’ll talk Monday.”

*

I grabbed a beer from an ice-filled trough and worked off the cap in my belt buckle. Kim was silent as a stone and I knew I had to ask.

“What did he say about me?” Kim said.

“Nothing. We were talking business.”

Kim looked at me. “He never liked me. I know he said something.”

“He didn’t,” I said.

“I don’t believe you,” she said.

“So who’s here?” I said. “When he said ‘Someone’s here’?”

“Lowell, of all people,” she said.

“Your ex-husband?”

“He ain’t my ex, darling. He’s my husband who run away. And now he’s back, and his woman is here with another man.”

I looked out onto the gathered people. Any one of them could have been Lowell, because they all seemed equally wary. But in the back of it all was one grinning face, toothsome and sunburned. He had on a rodeo shirt with a sponsor’s name embroidered into the yoke and a belt buckle the size of a serving dish. He was a lot younger than I would have guessed.

“Is that him there?” I said.

“Picked him right out,” she said.

“What’s he doing here? I thought he left.”

“He left me,” she said. “He didn’t leave here.”

It was now my clear notion that I had just become the main source of entertainment, as that was characterized in these dour regions. I knew I didn’t have to do anything, except stand there; I was still playing the wild card.

“Should I say hello if he comes by?”

“You do what you want,” Kim said in irritable sharpness.

They had a little jug band playing, off somewhere at the edges, but with all the noise they were barely audible. It was a sustained mumble with the occasional belch of laughter or tittering appraisal. I looked down in my beer and I figured that this was as much an arrival as I expected. I had been going to church, but nobody was going to chase me out of church; I had worked for a number of men in this town and they had to have seen that I was a worker. But the Mexicans were workers, too, phenomenal workers, and that counted for just about nothing.

Kim just stood there. No woman in the entire proceeding had said as much as hello.

“Maybe we should slip off home,” I said. “We have made our appearance.”

“No,” Kim said. “They are not doing this to me.”

I could see Lowell working his way through the clusters of people, shaking hands and squeezing elbows. You would have thought he was the politician here.

“If it ain’t my pretty little Kim,” Lowell said. “I seen the pickup out front and never thought it would go again.”

“I got some work done,” she said.

“You must be getting good work done,” he said, grinning at me. Up close, I was guessing he hadn’t cracked thirty.

“Depends on how you look at it,” she said.

“Well, I think I’m looking at it now,” he said, fixing on me. “You Hal?”

“That’s right.”

He reached out to shake my hand, the big grin undiminished.

“Glad to see my girl Kim has someone to keep her warmed up at night.”

“Watch your mouth, Lowell,” Kim said in a harsh whisper.

“I’m meaning no offense,” he said. “I admire that you’re willing to see the good side of a farmhand like Hal. I respect that, Hal, you working down there like a Mexican. But I know Kim makes you take a bath.”

Kim was reddening. “I don’t know what gives you the right to say things like that.”

Lowell was still laughing out loud at his own joke. “I never once got on those sheets without having a bath.”

I nodded. There were a lot of things I could have said but I wasn’t going to say any of them. He was a boy and I wasn’t playing boys’ games.

“So are you rodeoin’, Lowell?”

“That’s right. That’s why you never saw me. I’m on the circuit and it keeps you moving.”

“What’s your specialty?”

“Calf roping,” he said.

“And how’s that working out for you?”

“Not enough winnings to retire on, but enough to keep chasing more of them calves,” he said. “It’s a hell of a time on the road.”

“I bet it is,” I said.

“They run a story in the paper about you,” Kim said. “About winning in Reno.”

“Yeah, I heard.”

Lowell was running the tip of his tongue along his bottom lip like he was deciding what to say next.

“You know, Kim,” he said. “Some one of these days we need to get a proper divorce.”

“If that’s what you want,” Kim said softly.

“Yeah, you wouldn’t want her putting claims on your winnings,” I said, and laughed at my own joke.

Lowell was smiling but his eyes went a little hard. “Kim would never do that. It ain’t honest. What do you think she is?”

Kim was looking at me, waiting.

“I know what Kim is,” I said.

“Damn right,” Lowell said, swigging on his beer. “Whole town knows what Kim is.”

I had that sense of this being watched. Anyone glancing over would have seen three people talking, two men laughing it up like they were old buddies. Which is what I saw when I looked at everybody else.

“Hal, when are you getting out of the fields and into some respectable work?”

“Nothing bad about hard work for fair money,” I said.

Lowell grinned again, like he had just hooked a fish.

“So you think Applewhite pays fair?”

“I agreed to it, didn’t I?”

“You got a funny outlook on life, my friend. I expected Kim would have tried for someone a little prouder than that,” Lowell said.

Behind him, a man was standing with two little boys in their Sunday cowboy hats, and they were waiting to be able to speak to Lowell. I nodded at them and Lowell turned.

“Lowell,” the man said. “What’s the news from the rodeo?”

*

We were walking to the truck when Kim said, “You have humiliated me.”

“I don’t see how,” I said wearily.

“You should have punched him in the mouth for saying those kinds of things.”

“I’m not going to be punching anybody in the mouth,” I said.

“That’s the damn shame,” she said.

This time I drove while she looked out the window. She was breathing through her nose and I didn’t have anything to say to her. I saw Lowell as nothing but an annoying child, and it seemed to me that it was Kim who has married him. And the fact that she was not yet divorced suited me fine, for reasons that had nothing to do with how much I did or didn’t like her. I was hoping Lowell would just go away.

I pulled up in front of her house, and she got out of the cab and headed for the front door. I followed her in, but she had gone to the bedroom and shut the door. That was about the best thing that had happened to me yet that day. I went into the icebox and pulled out a bottle of my own beer, earned with sweat and exertion, and took it out to the porch, where I sat on the steps and took a drink. It tasted far better than what they had at the barbeque, even though it was the same brand.

*

Kim didn’t come out, even to use the bathroom, and I wasn’t going in. I had no real stake. The problem with moving on, as I had for so long, was always that promise of fresh start, the way you could simply wipe it all away. Most people didn’t do it because they had too much they’d have to give up. I hadn’t had that problem in a long time. I finished my beer, fetched another, and sat in the big chair to find something on her old tombstone radio.

“The National Barn Dance” was coming on the radio out of Chicago, and tonight I had a good signal. The Arkansas Woodchopper and Red Blanchard were both on tonight. That show had been playing since I was a kid, and I liked it. The beer was setting in, and as I began to sink warmly into the chair with Kim hardly a thought on my mind, someone was knocking on the door.

I got up and looked through the front window. It was Lowell, gently swaying in his tooled boots.

I opened the door and this time he wasn’t smiling.

“I want to see her,” he said.

“Think she wants to see you?”

“I’m her husband.”

“How the hell old are you, Lowell?”

“Twenty-eight.”

I snorted at that one, and he got mad but did nothing. He was a rodeo man, but I’d been doing heavy work for a long time.

I left him standing at the door and went to the bedroom, where I knocked gently.

“Lowell just showed up,” I said.

I didn’t hear anything for a moment and then she said, “Tell him to come in here.”

I went to him. “She said to go into the bedroom.”

Lowell tripped trying to make it over the doorjamb. He was even drunker than I thought, and I expected he had closed out the barbeque and moved on to the bar, the homecoming of a man who had won the calf-roping prize in Reno. I held him by the arm and walked him to the bedroom door. He went in and I heard Kim tell him to shut the door.

I got another beer out of the icebox. My show was still on the radio and I turned it up a bit. Whatever was going on in the bedroom, I didn’t want to know.

The music on the radio was nice, and the day had been a complete ballbuster, to say the least. After an hour, Lowell had not emerged from behind the closed bedroom door and I had not heard a sound. They were either fucking or they’d killed each other, as far as I could tell, and after Kim’s nonsense of earlier in the day, I didn’t know if I much cared either way.

This was my home for now, and I would enjoy its comforts. There was an old shawl on the back of the chair and I wrapped it around my shoulders. Sleeping in the chair was no hardship after years of sleeping on bedrolls and flophouse beds. The Barn Dance was in full swing, and I listened to the bluegrass with the real pleasure of someone who might not have such a pleasure for some time, like the last drag on the last cigarette.

*

Long around dawn , Lowell got up to take a piss. He had his cowboy boots on but was otherwise unresplendent. His dick hung unimpressively off his body, which clearly would not be mistaken for that of a bull rider. Lowell came stumbling by me and when he looked at me he seemed surprised that a stranger was in his house but not inclined to do much about it.

“Oh… Hal,” he said.

“Lowell…”

“I kind of forgot you existed. I would’ve put on some drawers.”

“You are a gentleman.”

“Look, uh…”

“Hal.”

“Yeah, right…Hal… is that really your name?”

“You found me out,” I said.

“Your name ain’t Hal?”

“I guess you know.”

Lowell looked like he was sobering up all of a sudden. He stood there with his shriveled little prick, trying to make sense of me.

“Then who all are you?” he said.

“Hal,” I said.

Lowell shook his head. “I don’t have no idea about what you’re talking about.”

“Go back to bed, Lowell.”

He looked groggy, thinking so hard.

“Who the hell are you?” he said.

“Go to bed.”

From the bedroom I heard Kim. “Lowell, come back to bed.”

Lowell looked at me and shrugged. “My wife needs me,” he said.

He shuffled back to the bedroom and shut the door.

*

I woke next to sunshine and heat. It was later than I was used to and my head hurt. I didn’t take as long to remember what was going on. That did not keep me from brewing coffee, fetching the Sunday paper from the front walk, and otherwise appreciating the fact that it was another day and I was a middle-aged man who needed to be happy when a new day presented itself.

I heard a little stirring from the bedroom and I tried not to think too hard about what that represented. Who was I to Kim, and who was she to me? After all, really. I drank my coffee and enjoyed the morning air. Summer mornings were cool in that part of the prairie, and I was enjoying it.

Around nine, there was some rustling in the bedroom. I heard some low-toned conversation, the back-and-forth of two voices, the apparent awareness that I was still in the house. A half-hour later, Lowell came stumbling out of the bedroom, this time with his jeans on but no boots.

“Jesus, Hal, are you still here?” He said it without the slightest hint of sarcasm. It was a genuine question.

“Lowell, I do live here. At the very least, I need to get into that bedroom and clear out my things.”

Lowell shrugged, comprehending. “I guess you can’t walk away from your belongings. What’s in there?”

“You know, socks and underwear and that sort of thing.”

“That’s something you don’t want to walk away from,” Lowell said. We were clearly speaking the same language.

“Are you going back to bed now?” I said.

“No. I have to be in Cheyenne by tomorrow night for the preliminaries.”

I nodded. “So you’ll leave this to me now, then.”

Lowell considered this for a second or two. “I got to get a move on,” he said.

A half-hour later he came out of the bedroom fully dressed, his hair thatched and spindly. He came to me and extended his hand.

“Well, pardner, not the most usual of circumstance, but good acquainting you.”

I shook his hand. “Likewise,” I said. He went quick out the door, pulling it shut hard behind him.

*

It was Sunday, but I expected we wouldn’t be attending church today. Kim stayed in the bedroom while I went down into town to get some eggs and sausage. I sat on the stool at the counter concentrating on my food. I was a man with enough money in his pocket to eat well and leave a good tip, something the Mexican laborers I worked with could not do. I was living in a comfortable house I didn’t have to pay for, eating food she brought in, the exchange that I always paid when we went to have a steak and a beer down at the café in town. I had used money to accumulate some new clothes—couple pair of jeans, workshirts, underwear, socks—and I could indulge in the luxury of a daily shave and bath. There had been long stretches where I could only wish for those things.

By eleven, when I came out of the place, the day was heating up like a griddle, wind blowing in from the hot plains. Tomorrow morning I would be back to it, working down at Applewhite’s, but today I would not squander the peace that comes from a few days’ respite from hard labor.

I came through the front door of the house and stopped to listen. I could smell the lilt of Kim’s bath powders. I sat on one of the rockers out on the porch to enjoy the air and every once in a while, I could hear the water running, Kim running a bit more hot to warm it.

It was more than an hour before she finally emerged. She came out on the porch in her bathrobe and sat in the other rocker.

“Y’all mad at me?” she said.

“No,” I said.

“He is my husband.”

“That’s fine,” I said.

“Lowell isn’t a bad sort.”

“We had a conversation when he left,” I said. “He was friendly enough.”

“You don’t have to worry about him now,” she said. “He won’t be back from the rodeo circuit for a long time. If something catches his fancy out on the road, he may not be back at all.”

I nodded.

“You tired?”

“A little bit. Not so much. I’ll be fine.”

“Can I make you something?”

“I already ate, but thanks.”

We both sat rocking in our chairs. I could hear a big truck rumbling through town a few streets up. I remembered being on the road, standing on a shoulder on a hot day like this, trying to get somewhere else. That was what I could choose again, if I wanted to. Kim knew it as well as I did.

“Want to go out for a drive this afternoon?” Kim said.

“Sure.”

“We could pack a lunch and go out by the old wash and sit down in the shade by the rock.”

“I’d like that.”

So we would drive. We would go out in the old pickup I had resurrected with my own hands, and we would sit feigning sleep and not talking. We would loll until late afternoon; I would try not to think about work tomorrow. We would drive back to the house late in the day, and without speaking about it, we would enter it as if the hot breezes of the day had scrubbed it clean.

© Edward J. Delaney