Close Range: Brokeback Mountain and other stories

In his cocky first year he had adopted a wide-legged walk as though there was swinging weight between his thighs. He felt the bull in himself, hadn’t yet discerned the line of inimical difference between roughstock and rider. He dived headlong into the easy girls, making up for the years of nothing. He wanted the tall ones. In that bullish condition he tangled legs with the wife of Myron Sasser, his second traveling partner. They were in Cheyenne in Myron’s truck and she was with them, sitting in the backseat of the club cab. All of them were hungry. Myron pulled into the Burger Bar. He left the truck running, the radio loud, a dark Texas voice entangled in static.

“How many you want, Diamond, two or three? Londa, you want onions with yours?”

They had picked her up at Myron’s parents’ house in Pueblo the day before. She was five-eleven, long brown curls like Buffalo Bill, had looked at Diamond and said to Myron, “You didn’t say he was hardly fryin size. Hey there, chip,” she said.

“That’s me,” he said, “smaller than the little end of nothing whittled to a point,” smiled through murder.

She showed them an old heart-shaped waffle iron she had bought at a yard sale. It was not electric, a gadget from the days of the wood-burning range. The handles were of twisted wire. She promised Myron a Valentine breakfast.

“I’ll git this,” said Myron and went into the Burger Bar.

Diamond waited with her in the truck, aroused by her orchidaceous female smell. Through the glass window they could see Myron standing near the end of a long line. He thought of what she’d said, moved out of the front seat and into the back with her and pinned her, wrestled her 36-inseam jeans down to her ankles and got it in, like fucking sandpaper, and his stomach growling with hunger the whole time. She was not willing. She bucked and shoved and struggled and cursed him, she was dry, but he wasn’t going to stop then. Something fell off the seat with a hard sound.

“My waffle iron,” she said and nearly derailed him—he finished in five or six crashing strokes and it was done. He was back in the front seat before Myron reached the head of the line.

“I heard it called a lot of things,” he said, “but never a waffle iron,” and laughed until he choked. He felt fine.

She cried angrily in the seat behind him, pulling at her clothes.

“Hey,” he said. “Hush up. It didn’t hurt you. I’m too damn small to hurt a big girl like you, right? I’m the one should be crying—could have burred it off.” He couldn’t believe it when she opened the door and jumped down, ran into the Burger Bar, threw herself at Myron. He saw Myron putting his head over to listen to her, glancing out at the parking lot where he could see nothing, wiping the tears from her face with a paper napkin he took from the counter, and then charging toward the door with squared, snarling mouth. Diamond got out of the truck. Might as well meet it head-on.

“What a you done to Londa.”

“Same thing you did to that wormy Texas buckle bunny the other night.” He didn’t have anything against Myron Sasser except that he was a humorless fascist who picked his nose and left pliant knobs of snot on the steering wheel, but he wanted the big girl to get it clear and loud.

“You little pissant shit,” said Myron and came windmilling at him. Diamond had him flat on the macadam, face in a spilled milk shake, but in seconds more lay beside him knocked colder than a wedge by the waffle iron. He heard later that Myron had sloped off to Hawaii without his amazon wife and was doing island rodeo. Let them both break their necks. The girl had too much mustard and she’d find it out if she came his way again.

That old day the bottom dropped had been a Sunday, the day they usually had pancakes and black cherry syrup, but she had not made the pancakes, told him to fix himself a bowl of cereal, feed Pearl his baby pears. He was thirteen, excited about the elk hunt coming up in three weekends. Pearl stank and squirmed in full diapers but by then they were seriously fighting. Diamond, sick of hearing the baby roar, had cleaned him up, dropped the dirty diaper in the stinking plastic pail.

They fought all day, his mother’s voice low and vicious, his father shouting questions that were not answered but turned back at him with vindictive silences as powerful as a swinging bat. Diamond watched television, the sound loud enough to damp the accusations and furious abuse cracking back and forth upstairs. There were rushing footsteps overhead as though they were playing basketball, cries and shouts. It had nothing to do with him. He felt sorry for Pearl who bawled every time he heard their mother’s anguished sobbing in the room above. One or two long silences held but they could not be mistaken for peace. In the late afternoon Pearl fell asleep on the living room couch with his fist knotted in his blanket. Diamond went out in the yard, kicked around, cleaned the car windshield for something to do. It was cold and windy, a cigar cloud poised over the mountain range forty miles west. He picked up rocks and threw them at the cloud pretending they were bullets fired at an elk. He could hear them inside, still at it.

The door slammed and his father came across the porch carrying the brown suitcase with a tiny red trademark horse in the corner, strode toward the car as if he were late.

“Dad,” said Diamond. “The elk hunt—”

His father stared at him. In that twitching face his pupils were black and huge, eating up the hazel color to the rim.

“Don’t never call me that again. Not your father and never was. Now get the fuck out of the way, you little bastard,” the words high-pitched and tumbling.

After the breakup with Myron Sasser he bought a third-hand truck, an old Texas hoopy not much better than Leecil’s wreck, traveled alone for a few months, needing the solitary distances, blowing past mesas and red buttes piled like meat, humped and horned, and on the highway chunks of mule deer, hair the buckskin color of winter grass, flesh like rough breaks in red country, playas of dried blood. He almost always had a girl in the motel bed with him when he could afford a motel, a half-hour painkiller but without the rush and thrill he got from a bullride. There was no sweet time when it was over. He wanted them to get gone. The in-and-out girls wasped it around that he was quick on the trigger, an arrogant little prick and the hell with his star-spangled bandanna.

“Hit the delete button on you, buddy,” flipping the whorish blond hair.

What they said didn’t matter because there was an endless supply of them and because he knew he was getting down the page and into the fine print of this way of living. There was nobody in his life to slow him down with love. Sometimes riding the bull was the least part of it, but only the turbulent ride gave him the indescribable rush, shot him mainline with crazy-ass elation. In the arena everything was real because none of it was real except the chance to get dead. The charged bolt came, he thought, because he wasn’t. All around him wild things were falling to the earth.

One night in Cody, running out to the parking lot to beat the traffic, Pake Bitts, a big Jesus-loving steer roper, yelled out to him, “You goin a Roswell?”

“Yeah.” Bitts was running parallel with him, the big stout guy with white-blond hair and high color. A sticker, Praise God, was peeling loose from his gear bag.

“Can I git a ride? My dee truck quit on me up in Livinston. Had to rent a puny car, thing couldn’t hardly haul my trailer. Burned out the transmission. Tee Dove said he thought you was headed for Roswell?”

“You bet. Let’s go. If you’re ready.” They hitched up Bitts’s horse trailer, left the rental car standing.

“Fog it, brother, we’re short on time,” said the roper, jumping in. Diamond had the wheels spattering gravel before he closed the door.

He thought it would be bad, a lot of roadside prayers and upcast eyes, but Pake Bitts was steady, watched the gas gauge, took care of business and didn’t preach.

Big and little they went on together to Mollala, to Tuska, to Roswell, Guthrie, Kaycee, to Baker and Bend. After a few weeks Pake said that if Diamond wanted a permanent traveling partner he was up for it. Diamond said yeah, although only a few states still allowed steer roping and Pake had to cover long, empty ground, his main territory in the livestock country of Oklahoma, Wyoming, Oregon and New Mexico. Their schedules did not fit into the same box without patient adjustment. But Pake knew a hundred dirt road shortcuts, steering them through scabland and slope country, in and out of the tiger shits, over the tawny plain still grooved with pilgrim wagon ruts, into early darkness and the first storm laying down black ice, hard orange dawn, the world smoking, snaking dust devils on bare dirt, heat boiling out of the sun until the paint on the truck hood curled, ragged webs of dry rain that never hit the ground, through small-town traffic and stock on the road, band of horses in morning fog, two redheaded cowboys moving a house that filled the roadway and Pake busting around and into the ditch to get past, leaving junkyards and Mexican cafés behind, turning into midnight motel entrances with RING OFFICE BELL signs or steering onto the black prairie for a stunned hour of sleep.

Bitts came from Rawlins and always he wanted to get to the next rodeo and grab at the money, was interested in no woman but his big-leg, pregnant wife Nancy, a heavy Christian girl, studying, said Bitts, for her degree in geology. “You wont a have a good talk,” he said, “have one with Nancy. Good lord, she can tell you all about rock formations.”

“How can a geologist believe that the earth was created in seven days?”

“Shoot, she’s a Christian geologist. Nothin is impossible for God and he could do it all in seven days, fossils, the whole nine. Life is full a wonders.” He laid a chew of long-cut into his cheek for even he had his vices.

“How did you get into it,” asked Diamond. “Grow up on a ranch?”

“What, rodeo? Done it since I was a kid. Never lived on a ranch. Never wont to. Grew up in Huntsville, Texas. You know what’s there?”

“Big prison.”

“Right. My dad’s a guard at the pen in Rawlins, but before that he was down at Huntsville. Huntsville had a real good prison rodeo program for years. And my dad took me to all them rodeos. He got me started in the Little Britches program. And here’s somethin, my granddad Bitts did most of his ropin at Huntsville. Twist the nose off of a dentist. That bad old cowhand had a tattoo of a rope around his neck and piggin strings around his wrists. He seen the light after a few years and took Jesus into his heart, and that passed on down to my dad and to me. And I try to live a Christian life and help others.”

They drove in silence for half an hour, light overcast dulling the basin grass to the shades of dirty pennies, then Pake started in again.

“Bringin me to somethin I wont a say to you. About your bullridin. About rodeo? See, the bull is not supposed a be your role model, he is your opponent and you have to get the best a him, same as the steer is my opponent and I have to pump up and git everthing right to catch and thow em or I won’t thow em.”

“Hey, I know that.” He’d known too that there would be a damn sermon sooner or later.

“No, you don’t. Because if you did you wouldn’t be playin the bull night after night, you wouldn’t get in it with your buddies’ wives, what I’d call forcible entry what you done, you would be a man lookin for someone to marry and raise up a family with. You’d take Jesus for a role model, not a dee ornery bull. Which you can’t deny you done. You got a quit off playin the bull.”

“I didn’t think Jesus was a married man.”

“Maybe not a married man, but he was a cowboy, the original rodeo cowboy. It says it right in the Bible. It’s in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.” He adopted a sanctimonious tone: “‘Go into the village in which, at your enterin, ye shall find a colt tied, on which yet never no man sat; loose him and bring him here. The Lord hath need a him. And they brought him to Jesus, and they cast their garments upon the colt and they set Jesus on it.’ Now, if that ain’t a description a bareback ridin I don’t know what is.”

“I ride a bull, the bull’s my partner, and if bulls could drive you can bet there’d be one sitting behind the wheel right now. I don’t know how you figure all this stuff about me.”

“Easy. Myron Sasser’s my half-brother.” He rolled down the window and spit. “Dad had a little bull in him, too. But he got over it.”

Pake started in again a day or two later. Diamond was sick of hearing about Jesus and family values. Pake had said, “You got a kid brother, that right? How come he ain’t never at none a these rodeos lookin at his big brother? And your daddy and mama?”

“Pull over a minute.”

Bitts eased the truck over on the hard prairie verge, threw it into park, mis-guessing that Diamond wanted to piss, got out himself, unzipping.

“Wait,” said Diamond standing where the light fell hard on him. “I want you to take a good look at me. You see me?” He turned sideways and back, faced Bitts. “That’s all there is. What you see. Now do your business and let’s get down the road.”

“Aw, what I mean is,” said Bitts, “you don’t get how it is for nobody but your own dee self. You don’t get it that you can’t have a fence with only one post.”