Generations and Other True Stories (26 page)

Silence.

“You never get up!
Lots of guys bulldog their entire life on the ground, trying to
get up
! If you learn nothing else here,
learn this!”

Then, resuming his interrupted conversation, he says, “I get a lot of kids whose dads I had in school. If I get any grandkids, I'm quitting.”

By late morning, some students already have advanced to the Sure Catch. The four-wheel off-road vehicle roars about the arena, bearing a would-be bulldogger perched fourteen and one half hands high (the height of the perfect bulldogging horse) in the saddle attached to the wooden framework. On his bizarre mount he chases the Steer Saver, which is towed behind a pickup. He catches up, leans from the saddle, then falls onto what would be the shoulders of a real steer. But he fails to fall on his butt. This displeases Rope.

“We're not going to teach you how to be world champions in three days,” Rope says. “We're going to teach you how to practice. Learning how to practice is how we end up learning how to bulldog, because
I'm
not going to be able to be your coach.
Dad
isn't going to be able to be your coach.
You're
going to have to be your coach. And when you go home, and a steer gets you down underneath him, you're going to have to be able to say to yourself: ‘OK. Now what did I do wrong?' ”

At 3:00 p.m. the machines are put away, and the students are introduced to real steers. They're Mexican cattle, called
corriente
—common, cheap, inferior—in their homeland. Hernán Cortés landed their ancestors on the eastern shore of Mexico, and their breed has been improved not at all in the past four hundred years. Their lean, lanky bodies and bony, homely faces betray their kinship to the old Texas longhorns, although their own horns aren't unusually long.

“They're tough, tough, tough cattle,” Ron Wilkinson says. “They're tough little cattle from a tough country.”

A student gets into the chute with a steer and gets a hold on his horns. When the gate opens, the steer and his would-be dogger take off together down the arena. Another student grabs the animal's tail and hangs on as a sort of brake. Some of these encounters turn into wrestling matches, often with the steer on top.

Jim Wilton, another ex-student of Butch's, who has come down from Toronto to help with the school, hollers Canadian-accented encouragement to the boys.

Why does a fellow willingly submit himself to this sort of ruction?

Jim grins. “You'd think a lot of them would say, ‘Naw, this isn't for me,' but once you try it, it's hard to keep from doing it. I would say conservatively that 75 percent of the guys at this school will keep going. It's the macho event of the rodeo, you see. The big guys, the guys who are too big to ride bucking horses and bulls, they do well in it. And even if you lose, you get to go to the dance with mud on your clothes.”

Rope is a patient teacher. He concentrates his attention on each student and vividly explains what he's doing wrong. He remembers what each one has done earlier in the day, and addresses each by name without having to consult notes. By 5:00 p.m. his charges are filthy and dragging, but Rope sends them back to the Steer Saver for more practice. He rides on the tailgate of the pickup, closely watching each take his last exhausted turn.

“They'll be better in the morning than they are now,” Butch says. “They improve overnight. I've never figured out how. They'll go in tonight and they'll take a shower and eat and sit on the bed, and they'll talk. And they'll come in tomorrow, and we'll warm them up a little bit, and they'll all do better.”

Saturday morning, everybody's wearing clean shirts and jeans. Several of the young men are inserting a pinch of Skoal or Copenhagen between cheek and gum. Rope asks: “Is anybody sore?”

Silence.

They resume their crazy game, chasing the Steer Saver around the arena on the Sure Catch. The students are more talkative today, though not much.

“Morning.”

“Morning.”

“How's it going?”

“Pretty good.”

“You done bulldogging before?”

“Yeah. But I'm used to a whole different style, you know. When I get hold of the head, I just want to crank it in, and I'm getting the hell beat out of me. But it's going OK. Maybe I can come to a happy medium between the two styles, know what I mean? It's a good school.”

He's Tim Moorhead. He drove eleven hours from Montgomery, Alabama, to attend the school. He says he has thrown steers in practice, but hasn't yet competed in a rodeo. “I was running with a PRC [professional rodeo cowboy] named Terry Kelly for a while. He got me interested. I didn't touch my first steer until last year. At thirty years old. I went to another school in Alabama, and that was brutal. Oooh, man! That was steer-wrestling boot camp there. They started out with fifteen students and wound up with six on Sunday. I was black and blue all up my legs. I had a steer horn rip my pants and cut my leg. I got kicked right here. I had a big cut over here. I was bleeding. I went through hell. I didn't get that kind of brutal treatment in the Marine Corps.”

“Why do you want to do this?”

“I just got bored. I grew up playing football from the time I was seven years old, then I went into the Marines. I missed the physical contact. I've had two lower-back surgeries. I've broken just about every major bone in my body. But I can't stay away from something like this, know what I mean? I got to running with Terry, and he asked me if I wanted to throw a few on the ground, and I just loved it. The first time that steer hit the ground, I was hooked. And coming off the horse! That's like a high!”

Among bulldoggers, coming off the horse is called “going in the hole.” Later on this day, some of the students will “go in the hole” for the first time in their lives. “A lot of these boys out here are scared,” Tim says. “You can see a lot of bad crashes among beginners. But the ground doesn't hurt that bad.”

He lights a cigarette. “You have to sort of like pain to do this. Plus the women. That's another point entirely. Women like anything that's physical, I think. Know what I mean?”

While the beginners continue to work with the Steer Saver and the Sure Catch, Rope divides the advanced students into teams of two to work with the steers again. When the first steer bursts from the chute and the guys grab him, Rope yells: “Yeah! Yeah! I like it! We're getting things done this morning!”

Butch was right. The boys
are
better than they were yesterday. “You thought I was fibbing to you yesterday, didn't you?” he says. “It's a little amazing.”

Rope is bright-eyed and cheerful. “Get your elbow up and drop down to your butt one time for me, Pecos!” he yells, as Pecos is being steer-handled about the arena. “Good job! Good job! There you go!”

At the other end of the arena, Ron is supervising the work of the beginners on the Steer Saver. One of them jumps from the Sure Catch, misses the Steer Saver, and hits the ground on his shoulder. Ron runs to him.

“You OK?”

The boy jumps up. “Yep.” He walks away and goes back to work.

“Ah, that thing called youth,” Ron says.

After lunch, the school moves on to the acid test: bull-dogging from horseback. It's a different story entirely from everything they've done so far. When the steers and the horses leave their chutes, they'll be running thirty to thirty-five miles per hour. The boys must jump from the back of one to the back of the other.

The
corriente
steers run like coyotes, so fast that the first five or six riders can't “go in the hole.”

“We either need slower cattle or faster horses,” one of the students says. Finally, Steve Brady from Liberty, Mississippi, throws one, and a cheer goes up. But the next boy almost falls off the horse when it bolts from the chute. The boy's so busy trying to stay aboard that he can't begin to think about “going in the hole.” Then he falls in front of the steer, and the steer runs over him.

Rope hollers: “You've got to tell me if you've never ridden a horse before! I can't tell that just by looking a you!”

The boy is slow getting up. He walks stoically back to the fence. Rope says: “Pardner, you didn't tell me you don't know how to ride. Riding is part of this bulldogging, OK?”

The boy nods.

By 2:15 p.m., more and more of the students are requiring help to get off the ground, and the steers are strutting about as if they're in charge. Some are bucking like jackrabbits. You can almost hear them thinking, “I'm
bad
! I'm
bad!”

Some of the riders can't bring themselves to leave the horse and make a try for the steer. “We got to move out of that saddle, folks, from Point A to Point B!” Rope yells. “That's what it's all about!” Are you willing to make a commitment to me to drop in that hole and go from Point A to Point B? You been kind of weakening on me, and right now's the time to get that squared around! On the next steer I want Jeff! You ready, Jeff?”

“I… I…I guess.”

“I don't want to hear ‘I guess.' Are you ready?”

“Yeah.”

As the boys each throw their first steer, the only sign of pride that they allow themselves is a big grin. But there's much camaraderie among them now. They're no longer strangers. Rope grins, too. “Every guy today who was a virgin, I broke him in,” he says.

At the end of the day, he names several whom he wants to appear at 9:30 Sunday morning to work some more on the Steer Saver. The others don't have to come until ten.

“Get some sleep,” he tells them. “Don't stay out in the bars too late.”

Two guys don't show up for the third day. “They had enough,” Ron says. “It was not what they thought it was going to be. It was a little bit too much. A little bit scary. They make it through the Steer Saver and do OK going off of the Sure Catch, but when they back those horses in there and start running those live cattle, that's a whole different game. One boy yesterday, he just told me, ‘Ronnie, I'm just scared to death.' And I said, ‘Well, let me tell you something. Nobody here is going to
make
you get down. And if you don't like it, if you don't want to, you just get a good night's sleep and see how you feel in the morning. If you decide you want to run cattle in the morning, come back.' But he didn't show up.”

A third student's back is hurting too much for him to continue. But the others are on horseback. Several show marked improvement, but by 2:30, some haven't yet brought themselves to “go in the hole.”

Tim Moorhead, who has had the two back surgeries, goes, but misses his steer. He lands on his head and turns a flip. He doesn't get up. He lies very still. Several of the guys group around him, asking questions. Finally, he rises and walks over to the stands and sits down. The others applaud in relief.

“How you doing?”

“All right, I guess.”

“Did you hurt your back?”

“Yeah. Upper back, though. Right between the shoulder blades.”

“You turned a flip out there.”

“I did something. I sure didn't bulldog right, that's for sure. Man. It felt like a dream when I was first laying out there.”

“Can I get you anything?”

“No, sir. I'm fine. Thanks.” He sighs. “Oh. My back hurts. Damn. Wooo! I feel kind of disoriented. I've got to drive home tonight. That's going to be a looong eleven hours. I hope it's just the muscles. I can't stand another surgery. I've broken every bone in my body. Oh! Damn! I'm in pain! I think I'm done for the day. But I'll be back. I ain't going to quit. That's what it's all about, you know? It was my fault totally. I didn't come out of the saddle the way I was supposed to. Man, I'm going to be sore tomorrow. Damn it! Wooo!”

“You got a right to hurt, I tell you.”

“I did it the wrong way, you know? I don't think I'll do it wrong again. Oh. Man. I wish I was home right now. I've got to drive eleven hours.” He gets up. “I'm going to walk this off, sir. And have myself a cigarette.”

As the afternoon wears on, the weariness of the students and the horses and the Mexican cattle begins to show. Rope decides it's time to shut down. “Everybody wants to go more,” he says, “but everybody's so tired that their bodies can't take any more.”

Tim Moorland pleads for one more try. Rope reluctantly assigns him the next-to-last steer of the school. It's a good steer, and Tim gets a good ride and a good haze, but he doesn't “go into the hole.”

Should he have gone?

“Maybe,” Ron says. “But he had a lot on his mind.”

“Go and do good,” Rope tells his students. “Take care of yourselves. And practice, practice, practice right.”

One by one, the young men solemnly shake his hand, then walk stiffly, some limping, to their pickups and vans for the long drive home. They'll meet again, “on down the road,” as rodeo hands say. Some of them will, anyway.

June 1994

Almost every little town in Texas, it seems, throws a party sometime during the year to celebrate some local glory. One of the reasons, of course, is to raise money for civic clubs, schools, churches, or other doers of good works. Another reason is just to have a good time
.

I love these small-town festivals and the sense of community I feel when I attend them. They make me think that humankind were meant to live in small towns, and that big cities are a huge mistake
.

A Time to Reap

Cheerleaders shiver in the bright morning chill, mothers herd excited children to their places on the floats, Miss Teen Texas arrives in a stretch limousine, waving, waving. A white kitten with black ears saunters down the street, pauses, glances incuriously at the hullabaloo, then continues on toward the courthouse.

At last the drum major's whistle shrills, the Brownfield High School band steps out, its music golden as the October morning, and the big parade is on its way.