The Bushwacked Piano

6

It is five o’clock in the morning of the Fourth of July on the fairgrounds at Livingston, Montana.

The day before, Payne sat in the grandstands in unholy fascination as Tony Haberer of Muleshoe, Texas, turned in a ride on a bucking horse that Payne felt was comparable to the perfect faenas of El Viti he had seen at the Plaza Mayor. One moment, stilled in his mind now, Haberer standing in the stirrups, the horse’s head between his feet, the hind feet high over Haberer’s head, Haberer’s spine curved gracefully back from the waist, his left hand high in the air and as composed as the twenty-dollar Stetson straw at rest on his head: a series of these, sometimes reversed with the horse on its hind legs shimmying in the air, spurs making electric contact with the shoulders of the outlaw horse, then down, then up, then down until the time is blown from the judge’s stand and the horse is arcing across the sand in a crazy gallop; a pick-up rider is alongside the bucking, lunatic animal, the bronc rider reaches arms to him and unseats himself, glides alongside the other horse — the outlaw bucking still in wild empty-saddle arcs by itself — and lands on his feet to: instant slow motion. Haberer crosses to the bronc chute with perfect composure; lanolin-treated goatskin gloves, one finger touches the brim up of the perfect pale Stetson with the towering crown; the shirt blouses elegantly in folds of bruised plum; faded overlong Levi’s drop to scimitar boots that are clouded with inset leather butterflies. Payne sweats all over: Make it me!

But at five o’clock in the morning of the Fourth of July in the arena of the Livingston, Montana, fairgrounds, one day after Haberer rode, Payne crouched in a starting position in the calf chute. In the next chute, his quarter horse backed to the boards, Jim Dale Bohleen, a calf roper from the sandhills of West Nebraska, slid the honda up his rope and made a loop. He swung the loop two times around his head, flipped it forward in an elongated parabola and roped the front gate post; then, throwing a hump down the rope, he jumped the loop off the post, retrieved his rope, made his loop again, hung its circularity beside him with the back of the loop held tight under his elbow, leaned way forward over the saddle horn, his ass against the cantle and his spurs back alongside the flank strap. “Any time you are,” he said to Payne.

Payne sprinted out of the calf chute, running zigzag across the graded dirt. Jim Dale gave him a headstart, then struck the quarter horse which came flat out from the chute, the rider rising forward, his looping rope already aloft for the moment it took to catch Payne, then darting out around Payne, tightening around his shoulders to an imperceptible instant as Jim Dale Bohleen dallied his end of the rope hard and fast around the saddle horn to flip Payne head over heels, the long thin rope making a gentle arc at the moment of impact, between the saddlehorn and Payne. The horse skidded to a stop and, backing very slightly to tighten the rope, dragged Payne. Jim Dale was upon him now, lashing hands and feet with his pigging string.

Payne lay there, feeling the grit between his lips and teeth. Beyond the judge’s stand he saw the Absaroka Mountains, the snow in the high country, the long, traveling clouds snared on peaks. He remembered the record player over yesterday’s loudspeaker—“I want to be a cowboy’s sweetheart”—its needle jumping the grooves as six broncs kicked the timbers under the judge’s stand to pieces.

“Two more,” Jim Dale says, lazily coiling his rope between his hand and his elbow, “and I’ll teach you how to work a bronc saddle.” Payne heads for the calf chute.

The Fitzgeralds had box seats. They were almost the only rodeo patrons who were not in the grandstand and were consequently islanded among empty boxes. Mister, Missus and Ann Fitzgerald sat with Fitzgerald’s foreman. He had been hired by the realtors who were managing the Fitzgerald ranch and keeping its books at a hefty fee. This was Wayne Codd. The ranch itself was one of a valleyload of write-offs, being sleepily amortized by the Bureau of Internal Revenue.

Wayne Codd was a young, darkly stupid man from Meeteetse, Wyoming. His eyes, small and close, suggested an alternative set of nostrils at the other end of his nose. It would not be fair to take unexplained peaks of Codd’s recent history and evaluate him without talking of his past; it is possible, for example, that he was run over by an automobile quite a few times as an infant.

One of Codd’s tricks was to drag his saddle out of the back of his GMC and take it into a bar where he would strap it on a stool, placed in the center of the dance floor, and make some little clerk sit in it all evening by slapping the piss out of him every time he tried to dismount. From time to time, Wayne Codd had been shot and stabbed with various weapons; but had not died.

Codd made no secret of his attitude toward the elder Fitzgeralds. He often said, “Duuh!” to Fitzgerald’s obvious remarks and sometimes called him Mister Dude P. Greenhorn.

did Codd hide his scratching lust for Ann. The Fitzgeralds had a little bathhouse near the stream from which their ranch was irrigated; and one day when he was supposed to have been repairing the headgate, Wayne Codd lay under its green pine floor, the interstices of whose boards allowed him a searing look at Ann’s crotch. Two days later, he blew a week’s salary on a Polaroid Swinger which he stored in an iceskate carrying case under the bathhouse.

It seemed to take so long to get through the drearier events. The barrel races, wild cow milking contests, synchronized group riding by local riding clubs often composed entirely of ranch ladies with super-fat asses, wouldn’t stop. “Let’s hear it for Wayne Ballard and his Flying White Clouds!” cried the announcer after a singularly fatuous event in which an underfed zootsuiter shot around the ring with his feet divided between two stout Arabians.

In the far towering Absarokas, a gopher and a rattlesnake faced off under an Engelmann’s spruce. Mountain shadows, saturated with ultraviolet light, sifted forty miles down the slopes toward the Livingston fairgrounds. And far, far above this confrontation between two denizens of the ultramontane forest, a cosmonaut snoozed in negative gravity and had impure thoughts about a tart he met in Leningrad or Kiev, he forgot which.

“Folks,” said the announcer mellifluously, “ah wont to speak to you about croolity to animals. We have got the broncs coming up here in a minute or two. And as some of you good people already know, certain bleeding hort spatial intrust groups is claiming croolity on this account. But I wont you good people to see it this way: If you wasn’t watching these broncs here today, you’d be lickin the pore devils on some postage stamp.” Far, far from the grandstands and box seats, the announcer raised hopeful hands to those who would see.

And announced the next six riders on the card.

The first was Chico Horvath of Pray, Montana. “Let’s try the horse, cowboy! Yer prize money’s awaitin!” Chico got himself bounced right badly and marred the stately cowboy’s retreat with a slight forward bend from the waist indicating damage to the stomach. A clown ran out and collapsed in the dirt, jumped in and out of a barrel, frequently permitting his pants to fall down. Two good rides followed, in the order of their appearances, by Don Dimmock of Baker, Oregon, on a horse named Apache Sunrise, and Chuck Extra of Kaycee, Wyoming, on Nightmare. The fourth rider, Carl Tiffin of Two Dot, Montana, was trampled by a part-Morgan horse name of Preparation H. The fifth rider scratched.

“Our Number Six rider,” went the announcement, “is a newcomer and an unusual one. Our cowboy is Nick Payne of Hong Kong, China. Nick spent his early years fighting Communism. Let’s watch him now. He draws hisself a mean ole roan some of you know by reputation. Let’s watch now, Nick Payne of Hong Kong, China, on Ambulance!”

“A Chinaman bronc buster,” exclaimed Wayne Codd. “I have seen spooks and redskins but this here is some sort of topper.” The Fitzgeralds, their interest galvanized, competed, clawing, for the binoculars. It was herself, La Fitzgerald, who confirmed their awfulest suspicions.

“It’s him,” she breathed. Ann raised her telephoto lens to the arena, her hand perspiring on its knurled black barrel.

Giddy with horror, Payne stood on the platform beside the Number Six bronc chute looking slightly down at Ambulance. He could not look straight at the horse. The ears of Ambulance lay back on his vicious banjo-shaped skull and the hoofs of Ambulance rang like gunshots on the timber. A man in a striped referee shirt — falsely suggesting that this was a sport we were dealing with here — ran up to Payne. “God damn it, cowboy! Get aboard!” Artfully, Payne avoided the nazzing of his undies. He looked down at his gloves. He moved as though underwater. Jim Dale had resined his gloves for him and they were sticky as beeswax. Looking, then, at Ambulance he wondered which of them was to end as glue. Everyone was yelling at him now. It was time. The strapped muscle of Ambulance’s haunches kept jumping suddenly at the movement of hooves cracking invisibly against timber underneath.

He got on. Friendly hands from behind pulled his hat down so he wouldn’t lose it. Payne tried to keep his legs free by extraordinary Yogic postures — inappropriate here at the rodeo — then dropped them into the stirrups and took his lumps. As Bohleen had shown him, Payne wrapped his gloved and resined hand palm up in the bucking rope. When the rope was wrapped to the swell of thumb, he closed his grip and mummified quietly. Then Payne lifted his left hand in the air where the judge could see it was free and clear.

Payne’s joy — filling him now — was steady and expanding; and lit the faces of the cowboys sitting on the fences around him, smiling at one whose turn it was now, whose own million-color shirt filled and billowed softly in the wind, whose own sweet and gambling ass rested without deception on a four-hundred-dollar Association saddle having bought a one-way trip on a thousand pounds of crossbred viciousness. All questions of his history and ambition were null and void. Whoever it was had pulled his hat down around his ears would have known that. Payne had gotten on.

He nodded and said as the others had, “Let’s try the horse.” And someone reached down behind him and jerked the bucking cinch. The gate flew open and the cowboy from Hong Kong, confusing the clangor of the clown’s comic cowbell with his own rattling testicles, wondered how, after two terrible plunging bucks, he had not only managed to stay aboard but also — as the horse soared forward onto its front legs so that he feared going butt first down over its head — had made the magic touch of spurs to shoulder, the left hand still sky-high and the right hand way back under his crotch somewhere.

Then the horse stood full length, towering on its satanic hind legs, wriggling and sunfishing its thousand-pound torso, and fell over backwards.

Payne cleared, rolling free of the enraged horse who, still on the ground, actually stretched to bite at him; its enormous legs churned on the opposite side of him as it surged to get to its feet again. Payne, already standing, his joy flooding in blinding rainbows that it was over before it had begun with no evidence that he could not ride a bronc revealed, adjusted his hat beside the flailing horse, took two exquisitely bored steps, kicked Ambulance a good one in the ass, turned and bowed delicately to the cheering crowd now rising to its feet in homage.

The horse finally got its footing and soared angrily away between two pick-up riders, one of whom reached to snatch the bucking cinch free so that the horse seemed to glide to a stop, flaring at shapes and fences.

Payne smiled to the lingering applause and beat the dust from his Levi’s with the borrowed Stetson straw.