Close Range: Brokeback Mountain and other stories

Leecil made an eloquent gesture at his crotch.

“It could be very weirdly interesting,” said Wallace. “I got something that will make it weirdly interesting.”

“You don’t want a git ironed out too much, have to lay down in the mud,” said Leecil severely.

“No,” said Wallace. “I fucking don’t want to do that. O.k., I’m in. What the hell.”

Diamond nodded.

Leecil cracked his mouthful of perfect teeth. “Know where our place is at? There’s a bunch a different turnoffs. Here’s how you go,” and he drew a complicated map on the back of a returned quiz red-marked F. That solved one puzzle; Leecil’s last name was Bewd. Wallace looked at Diamond. The Bewd tribe, scattered from Pahaska to Pine Bluffs, filled a double-X space in the local pantheon of troublemakers.

“Seven a.m.,” said Leecil.

Diamond turned the map over and looked at the quiz. Cattle brands fine-drawn with a sharp pencil filled the answer spaces; they gave the sheet of paper a kind of narrow-minded authority.

The good weather washed out. The weekend was a windy, overcast cacophony of bawling, manure-caked animals, mud, dirt, lifting, punching the needle, the stink of burning hair that he thought would never get out of his nose. Two crotchscratchers from school showed up; Diamond had seen them around, but he did not know them and thought of them as losers for no reason but that they were inarticulate and lived out on dirt road ranches; friends of Leecil. Como Bewd, a grizzled man wearing a kidney belt, pointed this way and that as Leecil and his brothers worked the calves from pasture to corral to holding pen to branding chute and the yellow-hot electric iron, to cutting table where ranch hand Lovis bent forward with his knife and with the other hand pulled the skin of the scrotum tight over one testicle and made a long, outside cut through skin and membrane, yanked out the hot balls, dropped them into a bucket and waited for the next calf. The dogs sniffed around, the omnipresent flies razzed and turmoiled, three saddled horses shifted from leg to leg under a tree and occasionally nickered.

Diamond glanced again and again at Como Bewd. The man’s forehead showed a fence of zigzag scars like white barbwire. He caught the stare and winked.

“Lookin at my decorations? My brother run over me with his truck when I was your age. Took the skin off from ear to here. I was all clawed up. I was scalloped.”

They finished late Sunday afternoon and Como Bewd counted out their pay carefully and slowly, added an extra five to each pile, said they’d done a pretty fair job, then, to Leecil, said, “How about it?”

“You want a have some fun?” said Leecil Bewd to Diamond and Wallace. The others were already walking to a small corral some distance away.

“Like what,” said Wallace.

Diamond had a flash that there was a woman in the corral.

“Bullridin. Dad’s got some good buckin bulls. Our rodeo class come out last month and rode em. Couldn’t hardly stay on one of em.”

“I’ll watch,” said Wallace, in his ironic side-of-the-mouth voice.

Diamond considered rodeo classes the last resort of concrete-heads who couldn’t figure out how to hold a basketball. He’d taken martial arts and wrestling all the way through until they spiked both courses as frills. “Oh man,” he said. “Bulls. I don’t guess so.”

Leecil Bewd ran ahead to the corral. There was a side pen and in it were three bulls, two of them pawing dirt. At the front of the pen a side-door chute opened into the corral. One of the crotchscratchers was in the arena, jumping around, ready to play bullfighter and toll a bull away from a tossed rider.

To Diamond the bulls looked murderous and wild, but even the ranch hands had a futile go at riding them, Lovis scraped off on the fence; Leecil’s father, bounced down in three seconds, hit the ground on his behind, the kidney belt riding up his chest.

“Try it,” said Leecil, mouth bloody from a face slam, spitting.

“Aw, not me,” said Wallace. “I got a life in front of me.”

“Yeah,” said Diamond. “Yeah, I guess I’ll give it a go.”

“Atta boy, atta boy,” said Como Bewd, and handed him a rosined left glove. “Ever been on a bull?”

“No sir,” said Diamond, no boots, no spurs, no chaps, T-shirted and hatless. Leecil’s old man told him to hold his free hand up, not to touch the bull or himself with it, keep his shoulders forward and his chin down, hold on with his feet and legs and left hand, above all not to think, and when he got bucked off, no matter what was broke, get up quick and run like hell for the fence. He helped him make the wrap, ease down on the animal, said, shake your face and git out there, and grinning, blood-speckled Lovis opened the chute door, waiting to see the town kid dumped and dive-bombed.

But he stayed on until someone counting eight hit the rail with the length of pipe to signal time. He flew off, landed on his feet, stumbling headlong but not falling, in a run for the rails. He hauled himself up, panting from the exertion and the intense nervy rush. He’d been shot out of the cannon. The shock of the violent motion, the lightning shifts of balance, the feeling of power as though he were the bull and not the rider, even the fright, fulfilled some greedy physical hunger in him he hadn’t known was there. The experience had been exhilarating and unbearably personal.

“You know what,” said Como Bewd. “You might make a bullrider.”

Redsled, on the west slope of the divide, was fissured with thermal springs which attracted tourists, snowmobilers, skiers, hot and dusty ranch hands, banker bikers dropping fifty-dollar tips. It was the good thing about Redsled, the sulfurous, hellish smell and the wet heat buzzing him until he could not stand it, got out and ran to the river, falling into its dark current with banging heart.

“Let’s hit the springs,” he said on the way back, still on the adrenaline wave, needing something more.

“No,” said Wallace, his first word in an hour. “I got something to do.”

“Drop me off and go on home then,” he said.

In the violent water, leaning against the slippery rocks, he replayed the ride, the feeling his life had doubled in size. His pale legs wavered under the water, pinprick air beads strung along each hair. Euphoria ran through him like blood, he laughed, remembered he had been on a bull before. He was five years old and they took a trip somewhere, he and his mother and, in those lost days, his father who was still his father, brought him in the afternoons to a county fair with a merry-go-round. He was crazy about the merry-go-round, not for the broad spin which made him throw up, nor for the rear view of the fiberglass horses with their swelled buttocks and the sinister holes where the ends of the nylon tails had been secured before vandals jerked them out, but for the glossy little black bull, the only bull among the ruined horses, tail intact, red saddle and smiling eyes, the eye shine depicted by a painted wedge of white. His father had lifted him on and stood with his hand reaching across Diamond’s shoulder, steadying him as the bull went up and down and the galloping music played.

Monday morning on the schoolbus he went for Leecil sitting in the back with one of the crotchscratchers. Leecil touched thumb and forefinger in a circle, winked.

“I need to talk to you. I want to know how to get into it. The bullriding. Rodeo.”

“Don’t think so,” said the crotchscratcher. “First time you git stacked up you’ll yip for mama.”

“He won’t,” said Leecil, and to Diamond, “You bet it ain’t no picnic. Don’t look for a picnic—you are goin a git tore up.”

It turned out that it was a picnic and he did get tore up.

His mother, Kaylee Felts, managed a tourist store, one of a chain headquartered in Denver: HIGH WEST—Vintage Cowboy Gear, Western Antiques, Spurs, Collectibles. Diamond had helped open boxes, dust showcases, wire-brush crusty spurs since he was twelve and she told him there was probably a place in the business for him after college, one of the other stores if he wanted to see the world. He thought it was his choice but when he told her he was going to bullriding school in California she blew up.

“No. You can’t. You’re going to college. What is this, some kid thing you kept to yourself all this time? I worked like a fool to bring you boys up in town, get you out of the mud, give you a chance to make something out of yourselves. You’re just going to throw everything away to be a rodeo bum? My god, whatever I try to do for you, you kick me right in the face.”

“Well, I’m going to rodeo,” he answered. “I’m going to ride bulls.”

“You little devil,” she said. “You’re doing this to spite me and I know it. You are just hateful. You’re not going to get any cheerleading from me on this one.”

“That’s all right,” he said. “I don’t need it.”

“Oh, you need it,” she said. “You need it, all right. Don’t you get it, rodeo’s for ranch boys who don’t have the good opportunities you do? The stupidest ones are the bullriders. We get them in the shop every week trying to sell us those pot-metal buckles or their dirty chaps.”

“Doing it,” he said. It could not be explained.

“I can’t stop a train,” she said. “You’re a royal pain, Shorty, and you always were. Grief from day one. You make this bed you’ll lie in it. I mean it. You’ve got the stubbornness in you,” she said, “like him. You’re just like him, and that’s no compliment.”

Shut the fuck up, he thought, but didn’t say it. He wanted to tell her she could give that set of lies a rest. He was nothing like him, and could not ever be.

“Don’t call me Shorty,” he said.

At the California bullriding school he rode forty animals in a week, invested in a case of sports tape, watched videos until he fell asleep sitting up. The instructor’s tireless nasal voice called, push on it, you can’t never think you’re goin a lose, don’t look into the well, find your balance point, once you’re tapped, get right back into the pocket, don’t never quit.

Back in Wyoming he found a room in Cheyenne, a junk job, bought his permit and started running the Mountain Circuit. He made his PRCA ticket in a month, thought he was in sweet clover. Somebody told him it was beginner’s luck. He ran into Leecil Bewd at almost every rodeo, got drunk with him twice, and, after a time of red-eye solo driving, always broke, too much month and not enough money, they hooked up and traveled together, riding the jumps, covering bulls from one little rodeo to another, eating road dust. He had chosen this rough, bruising life with its confused philosophies of striving to win and apologizing for it when he did, but when he got on there was the dark lightning in his gut, a feeling of blazing real existence.

Leecil drove a thirty-year-old Chevrolet pickup with a bent frame, scabbed and bondo’d, rewired, re-engined, remufflered, a vehicle with a strong head that pulled fiercely to the right. It broke down at mean and crucial times. Once, jamming for Colorado Springs, it quit forty miles short. They leaned under the hood.