Last Bus to Wisdom (28 page)

Now, that was man talk. Imagine how my vocabulary would increase around somebody like him. Swamped with hero worship, I could think of only one thing to do, and I did it—a little frantically, but I did it. “I'll be right back,” I yipped to Herman, and charged over to the most famous cowboy there was, yanking the album out from my belt as I ran.

“Rags? I mean, Mr. Rasmussen. Can I get your autograph, huh, can I?”

He broke stride enough to give me a curious glance.

“I'm helluva sorry to bother you,” I bleated, the pitch of my voice all over the place. “I know you're getting ready to ride and everything, but this is maybe the only chance to put you in my book and I'm trying to get really famous people in it and you're right here and—please?”

Amused at my prattling, he smiled and offered up in the same easy drawl as before, “Guess I don't see why not, if it's gonna put me in such highfalutin' company.”

He handed me his chaps to hold, taking the autograph book in return, a swap so momentous it nearly made me keel over. A kid in Cleveland with the pitcher's glove of Bob Feller bestowed on him, an eleven-year-old New Yorker gripping Joe DiMaggio's bat—it was that kind of dizzying moment of experience, unexpected and unforgettable, a touch of greatness tingling all through the lucky recipient. Resting the autograph book on the front fender of the Cadillac, Rags Rasmussen started writing. Not merely his signature, I saw with a thrill. An inscription, from the way he was going at it! World championship words, right in there with the observations on life by the night writer Kerouac and the sage old Senator Ridpath. At this rate, the autograph album was headed for
Believe It or Not!
fame in no time.

“Hey, Rags,” a hazer at the nearest bucking chute hollered to him, “better come look over your rigging. You're up in this first go-round.”

“Great literature takes time, Charlie. Be right there.”

When you lift your hat,

to ladies and that,

make sure you have something upstairs

besides a collection of hairs.

“There you go,” he said, his signature and all the rest on the page in Kwik-Klik purple ink magically matching his riding chaps—clear as anything, a sign to me this was meant to happen. Lucky arrowhead, happy coincidence, the spitzen finger that had put Herman and me in this place at this time, something finally was working in my favor this loco summer. Sky-high about my newly found good fortune, I heard, as in a haze, Rags Rasmussen talking to me almost as an equal. “Seen that little ditty on the bunkhouse wall at the old Circle X ranch down in the Big Hole country, a time ago. Wasn't much older than you when I started breakin' horses for outfits like that.” He gave me a look up and down and a long-jawed grin. “Figured it was worth passing along to somebody who knows how to wear a rodeo shirt.”

“Wow, yeah! I mean, thanks a million,” I fumbled out my appreciation for his supremely generous contribution to the autograph book, hugging it to myelf as though it might get away. Unwilling to let go of these moments of glory with him, I blurted, “Can I ask, what horse did you draw today?”

He shifted from one long leg to the other. “Aw, sort of a crowbait—” He broke off into a rueful laugh and scratched an ear. “Guess I hadn't ought to use that word around here. Anyway, I pulled out of the hat a little something called Buzzard Head.”

Hearing that just about bowled me over. Talk about a
Believe It or Not!
moment. Buzzard Head was famous—the notorious kind of famous—as the most wicked bucking horse on the rodeo circuit, the bronc that had never been ridden. Through the years, contestants at Cheyenne, Pendleton, Great Falls, Cody, Calgary, all the big rodeos, had done their best to stay in the saddle for ten seconds aboard Buzzard Head, and had eaten arena dirt for their trouble. Here was the matchup that people would talk about ever after, the bronc that threw them all and the rider who was never thrown, and Herman and I, as fate and luck and blind coincidence would have it, were on hand to see history made.

When I had my breath back, I said with more fervor than diplomacy, “Good luck in riding to the whistle.”

“Might need it,” Rags Rasmussen said agreeably. “Get yourself a good seat and enjoy the doings.” Flopping his chaps over a shoulder, he strolled off to meet the meanest horse imaginable as if he hadn't a worry in the world.

Herman had come up behind me and laid a hand on my shoulder. “Some man, he is. Like Old Shatterhand, cool custard, hah?”

“Cool customer,” I fixed that, still idolizing the strolling figure in his riding finery. “Look at him, not worried at all about that cayuse in the chute.”

“Buzzard Head does not sound like merry-go-round horse.” Herman cocked an inquisitive look at me.

“He's the worst,” was all I could say. “C'mon”—I still was on fire from the miraculous encounter with my hero Rags—“I know the best place to watch him ride, if they'll let us.”

•   •   •

“Y
OU ARE SURE
this is good eye-dea? Dangerous place, if we fall?” Herman shied away as far as he could from the bronc pawing at the bucking chute beside us, as he crept after me on the narrow plank stairs.

“Then don't fall,” I gave him the cure over my shoulder. “Shhh. Leave this to me,” I cautioned further, keeping on up the midair steps that led to the shaded platform beneath the announcer's booth.

When we popped our heads through the opening in the floor of the platform, what awaited us was pretty much as I expected from other rodeos I'd been to. Clustered there where the arena director and anyone else who counted in running the events could keep track of things at close hand were several Indian men in snazzy beaded vests and the darkest sunglasses made, beside big-hatted rodeo circuit officials and a few other white guys in gabardine western suits who had to be the livestock contractors supplying bucking horses and Brahma bulls for big shows like this one. As I scrambled onto the perch with Herman stumbling after, the only personage paying any particular attention to our arrival was a Crow elder, lean as a coyote, with braids like gray quirts down over his shoulders, who gave us a freezing stare.

“We're friends of Rags and he told us to get a good seat to watch him ride,” I said hastily, as if that took care of the matter. “My uncle here is from, uh, out of the country and this is his first rodeo”—Herman wisely only grinned wide as the moon and did not ask if there were any Apaches around—“and it'd be a real treat for him to see it from up here like this and we'll stay out of the way, honest, and just—”

“Welcome to Crow Fair, don't get too close to the horses.” The gray-haired Number One Indian made short work of us and swung back to overseeing the commotion in the chutes beneath our feet where the rigging crew was wrestling saddles onto thrashing broncs.

Establishing ourselves at the far end of a long bench softened by gunnysack cushions filled with cattail reeds—boy, these Crows knew how to do things—Herman put his attention to the printed program that listed saddle bronc riding, calf roping, steer wrestling, barrel racing, bareback riding, and of course, the fancy-dancing exhibition. “Same as circus, many acts,” he expressed in satisfaction as I read over his shoulder. But then, coming to the names of the broncs the riders had drawn, Widowmaker and Funeral Wagon and Dive Bomber and similar ones, he nudged me in concern. “Sounds like war, this buckjumping.”

I had no time to reassure him on that as the saddle bronc riding explosively got underway almost beneath where we sat, with an Indian contestant named Joe Earthboy sailing out of the chute on a nasty high-kicking horse called Dynamite Keg. Earthboy and airborne animal became a swirl of dust and leather and mane and tail as the crowd cheered and the announcer chanted encouragement. A full few seconds before the timer's whistle, the rider flew up and away from the bronc as if dynamite had gone off under him, all right. “Ow,” Herman sympathized as Earthboy met the dirt, gingerly picked himself up, and limped out of the arena.

Which set the tone for that go-round, contestant after contestant getting piled without coming close to completing the ride. By now it was obvious Crow Fair did not fool around in staging bucking contests. Deserving of their blood-and-guts names, these clearly were the biggest, meanest, most treacherous horses available on the professional circuit, as veteran in their way as the career rodeo cowboys who tried to master them. Watching these hoofed terrors with Herman swaying next to me as if he felt every jolt in the saddle himself, I couldn't stop my nerves from twanging about Rags Rasmussen's chances on the monarch of them all, Buzzard Head.

•   •   •

A
LL THE WHILE,
I also was having the time of my life. Beside me, Herman was entranced in a Karl May knights-of-the-prairie way as he ohhed and ahhed at the spectacle of cowboys and broncos whirling like tornadoes in the arena. We were sitting pretty in the shade in the best seats in the rodeo grounds, comfy as mattress testers, while an acre of sunburn was occurring in the sweltering grandstand across the way. The announcer's steady patter overhead was as soothing to my ears as a cat's purr, filling time between bucking contestants by joking with the rodeo clown down in the arena as he went through his antics in overalls six sizes too large and a floppy orange wig. Like committing poetry to memory, I took in every word of their beloved old corny routines, as when the clown hollered up to the booth that he hated to leave such a good job as dodging broncs and Brahma bulls but he needed to move to Arizona for his seenus trouble. “Hey, Curly, don't you mean ‘sinus' trouble?” I could have recited the deep-voiced announcer's line right along with him. “Nope.” The clown made the most dejected face ever seen, and I knew this part by heart, too: “The trouble is, I was out with another fellow's wife, and he seen us.”

Hooting and hollering, the crowd reliably responded as if that were the height of humor, while Herman slapped me on the back and nearly fell off his gunnysack seat guffawing and I laughed as hard as if I hadn't heard that mossy joke at every rodeo I had ever been to. Life can tickle you in the ribs surprisingly when it's not digging its thumb in.

•   •   •

A
LL OF WHICH
is a way of saying, what an emotion came over me in that precious space of time at Crow Fair. For the first time that unhinged summer, I felt like I was where I belonged. Around horses and cattle and men of the ranches and reservations, and the smell of hay in the fields and the ripple of a willowed creek where magpies chattered. Most of all, I suppose, because he was the author of this turnaround of our lives, in the company of halfway wizardly Herman, the pair of us blest with freedom of the road wherever the dog bus ran, enjoying ourselves to the limit at this peaceable grown-up game of cowboys and Indians. This is not the prettiest description of a perfect moment, but it was a king hell bastard of a feeling, filling me almost to bursting.

•   •   •

E
VEN THE
INTRODUCTION
of danger as the next rider was announced—“Here's the matchup we've all been waiting for,” the announcer's voice hushed as if on the brink of something colossal, “down in chute number six, the reigning world champion in this event, Rags Rasmussen, on a pony that has never been ridden, Buzzard Head!”—felt like it fit with the fullness of the day. Secretly, I would have given anything to be in those Diamond Buckle boots snugging into the stirrups down there on the notorious horse that the riding champ of all mankind was easing onto. A fantasy like that knows no logic and common sense, of course, because the most treacherous hazard in all of rodeo was hanging up a foot in a stirrup while being thrown and getting dragged by a saddled bronc determined to kick the life out of its trapped victim. While my imagination naturally pasted me into Rags Rasmussen's place as he rode to the top of his profession, I nonetheless fervently fingered the arrowhead in my pocket for whatever luck it might bring in his matchup against the killer horse.

Herman looked as breathless as I felt, on the edge of his seat as we craned to see into the chute below, watching Rags make his preparations, his purple chaps vivid against the buckskin flanks of the waiting horse. Buzzard Head plainly deserved its name, with a big Roman nose and cold, mean eyes at the end of a droopy neck. Rags took his own sweet time getting ready, joking to the chute crew that they might at least have dabbed some chewing gum in the saddle to help him stick on, casually pocketing his world championship diamond ring so it wouldn't catch in the rigging and yank his finger off, tugging his hat down tight, flexing his boots into the stirrups until it felt right. Then, every motion easy but practiced, one hand gripping the hackamore rope and the other high in the air according to the rules, spurs poised over the point of the bronc's shoulders, he leaned back almost sleepily in the saddle, balanced against the catapult release he knew was coming. Throughout this, the glassy-eyed horse stayed deathly still, according to reputation saving itself up to attempt murder in the arena.

The tense chute crew stood ready until the man in the saddle said, cool as can be, “Open.”

Then the gate was flung wide, and the bronc erupted out of the chute, twisting its hindquarters in midair that initial breathtaking jump. Buzzard Head alit into the arena practically turned around and facing us, as if to convey,
You wanted to see
what a real horse can do, here it is.
Instantly the buckskin bronc went airborne again, throwing itself full circle in the opposite direction from the first maneuver, snapping Rags from one side to the other like cracking a whip.

“Damn, it's a sunfisher,” my fear found words.

Herman needed no translation of that, the crazily bucking creature contorting in its leaps as if to show its belly to the sun. He worried in return, “The picker-ups, they can't get to Rags neither if he don't fall.”