LITMIR.BIZ

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anxiety. But, in the way these things go, that was when he needed twist, to auger him through the ride.

      In the first go-round he’d drawn a bull he knew and got a good scald on him. He’d been in a slump for weeks, wire stretched tight, but things were turning back his way. He’d come off that animal in a flying dismount, sparked a little clapping that quickly died; the watchers knew as well as he that if he burst into flames and sang an operatic aria after the whistle it would make no damn difference.

      He drew o.k. bulls and rode them in the next rounds, scores in the high seventies, fixed his eyes on the outside shoulder of the welly bull that tried to drop him, then at the short-go draw he pulled Kisses, rank and salty, big as a boxcar of coal. On that one all you could do was your best and hope for a little sweet luck; if you got the luck he was money.

      The announcer’s galvanized voice rattled in the speakers above the enclosed arena. “Now folks, it ain’t the Constitution or the Bill a Rights that made this a great country. It was God who created the mountains and plains and the evenin sunset and put us here and let us look at them. Amen and God bless the Markin flag. And right now we got a bullrider from Redsled, Wyomin, twenty-three-year-old Diamond Felts, who might be wonderin if he’ll ever see that beautiful scenery again. Folks, Diamond Felts weighs one hundred and thirty pounds. Little Kisses weighs two thousand ten pounds, he is a big, big bull and he is thirty-eight and one, last year’s Dodge City Bullriders’ choice. Only one man has stayed on this big bad bull’s back for eight seconds and that was Marty Casebolt at Reno, and you better believe that man got all the money. Will he be rode tonight? Folks, we’re goin a find out in just a minute, soon as our cowboy’s ready. And listen at that rain, folks, let’s give thanks we’re in a enclosed arena or it would be deep mud below.”

      Diamond glanced back at the flank man, moved up on his rope, nodded, jerking his head up and down rapidly. “Let’s go, let’s go.”

      The chute door swung open and the bull squatted, leaped into the waiting silence and a paroxysm of twists, belly-rolls and spins, skipping, bucking and whirling, powerful drop, gave him the whole menu.

      Diamond Felts, a constellation of moles on his left cheek, dark hair cropped to the skull, was more than good-looking when cleaned up and combed, in fresh shirt and his neckerchief printed with blue stars, but for most of his life he had not known it. Five-foot three, rapping, tapping, nail-biting, he radiated unease. A virgin at eighteen—not many of either sex in his senior class in that condition—his tries at changing the situation went wrong and as far as his despairing thought carried him, always would go wrong in the forest of tall girls. There were small women out there, but it was the six-footers he mounted in the privacy of his head.

      All his life he had heard himself called Half-Pint, Baby Boy, Shorty, Kid, Tiny, Little Guy, Sawed-Off. His mother never let up, always had the needle ready, even the time when she had come into the upstairs hall and caught him stepping naked from the bathroom; she had said, “Well, at least you didn’t get shortchanged that way, did you?”

      In the spring of his final year of school he drummed his fingers on Wallace Winter’s pickup listening to its swan-necked owner pump up a story, trying for the laugh, when a knothead they knew only as Leecil—god save the one who said Lucille—walked up and said, “Either one a you want a work this weekend? The old man’s fixin a brand and he’s short-handet. Nobody wants to, though.” He winked his dime-size eyes. His blunt face was corrugated with plum-colored acne and among the angry swellings grew a few blond whiskers. Diamond couldn’t see how he shaved without bleeding to death. The smell of livestock was strong.

      “He sure picked the wrong weekend,” said Wallace. “Basketball game, parties, fucking, drinking, drugs, car wrecks, cops, food poisoning, fights, hysterical parents. Didn’t you tell him?”

      “He didn’t ast me. Tolt me get some guys. Anyway it’s good weather now. Stormt the weekend for a month.” Leecil spit.

      Wallace pretended serious consideration. “Scratch the weekend I guess we get paid.” He winked at Diamond who grimaced to tell him that Leecil was not one to be teased.

      “Yeah, six per, you guys. Me and my brothers got a work for nothin, for the ranch. Anyway, we give-or-take quit at suppertime, so you can still do your stuff. Party, whatever.” He wasn’t going to any town blowout.

      “I never did ranch work,” Diamond said. “My momma grew up on a ranch and hated it. Only took us up there once and I bet we didn’t stay an hour,” remembering an expanse of hoof-churned mud, his grandfather turning away, a muscular, sweaty Uncle John in chaps and a filthy hat swatting him on the butt and saying something to his mother that made her mad.

      “Don’t matter. It’s just work. Git the calves into the chute, brand em, fix em, vaccinate em, git em out.”

      “Fix em,” said Diamond.

      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

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