When the Legends Die (17 page)

The liveryman looked at Tom. With his ragged haircut, faded work shirt and Levi’s and his battered boots Tom looked like just another Indian kid. The liveryman smiled. “They aren’t running any juvenile events this year.”

Red grinned. “Tom talks big, almost man-size.” And he made a deal with the liveryman to put up their horses and let them spread their bedrolls in the hay.

They stalled their horses, left their gear in the hayloft, then went out to size up the situation. They made the rounds of the saloons, pool halls and cafes, and Red told the same story he had told in Aztec. By the next morning the word had got around. The Indian kid thought he could ride. And as though that wasn’t enough of a joke, the saddle bum seemed to think the boy could, too, and apparently had a little money to back him. The trap practically laid itself.

The night before the rodeo opened Red summed it up and gave Tom his orders. “These wise guys have got it all figured. So we’ll just play along with them. You’re going to make a fair to middling ride in the first go-round. Then in the second go-round you’re going to foul out. Understand? We’ll play them fair and square, give them what they expect. But in die finals you’re going to go to town, and we’ll give them the works. We’ll take their shirts.” He grinned. “Fair and square. Can’t ask more than that, can they?”

Tom followed orders. Red placed a scattering of small, cautious bets on the first go-round and Tom made an awkward, amateurish ride. Red paid off his bets, got odds on the second go-round, but still kept his bets small. And Tom pulled leather, fouled out. Then Red played the drunken braggart. He still thought Tom could ride, thought he was the best damn rider of them all. Tom had just had bad luck up to now. Bet on the final go-round? Damn right he would! And when he got the odds he wanted he made half a dozen big bets. So Tom made a spectacular final ride, clean and clear all the way, and Red collected his winnings. They got out of town before the bettors knew what hit them. It was, as Red said, as easy as falling out of bed dead-drunk.

That set the pattern. For the next two months they shuttled back and forth across the state, Red picking only the little rodeos that offered purses too small to lure even the third-rate professionals from any distance. The system wasn’t foolproof. Once Tom made such a flagrant foul-out that the judges barred him from the finals. Red ranted at him for two days after that one. And once Red tried to set up the deadfall, only to have the local betting crowd catch him in it by refusing to go for the extra ride. But it averaged out, as Red said. They worked seven rodeos and Red cashed in at five of them.

Then they went to Carrizozo, and everything went wrong. Trying to make a losing ride look honest in the first go-round, Tom was thrown and landed heavily on his left shoulder. His arm was so lame he had to ride right-handed in the second go-round. Off balanced, he grabbed the saddle and fouled out to spare himself another fall. The situation was hopeless, and Red agreed that there was no use even trying to ride in the finals. And to cap it all, Red got roaring drunk that night, started a brawl and landed in jail. It took him a week after he sobered up to argue himself out of jail by paying a fine and promising to get out of town.

By then, Tom’s arm had begun to heal. But he was ready to call it quits. Tom was tired. He had averaged one rodeo a week all fall, with long, hard rides between. He was young and strong, but the beating he took in the saddle was beginning to tell on him. And he wasn’t even getting the satisfaction of winning on horses he knew he could ride. There were a dozen ways to lose a round, and he knew them all by now. But every one of them took something out of him. When he rode loose in the saddle, his spine took a beating. When he broke rhythm, his neck was jerked. And his arm still throbbed and his whole shoulder ached night and day. He wanted to quit and go home.

Red, however, had been rolled and robbed of better than a thousand dollars during the big drunk in Carrizozo. Red wasn’t quitting. “There’s a little jerkwater called Felice,” Red growled, “down the road a piece. They’re putting on a show next week. Probably some of the riders at Carrizozo will be there, but that’ll just help the setup. We’re going to work Felice. And I mean work it!”

Felice was a hard-bitten little alkali-water town with equally hard-bitten bettors. As Red had suspected, they had heard about what happened to Tom at Carrizozo. And, as he had said, that helped rather than hurt. Red began working toward a deadfall.

Everything went according to plan for the first two go-rounds. With his lame arm, Tom couldn’t be a power rider. He couldn’t keep pressure on the rein. So he had to be a rhythm rider, giving the horse its head. It didn’t take much faking to lose the number-one ride, and he was glad to grab the saddle and foul out on the second go-round. Red’s plans couldn’t have worked out better.

But before the finals Red said, “We’ll just saddle our horses and tie them in those cottonwoods back of the stands. Just in case. There’s a couple of loudmouth know-it-alls that may start trouble. You ride like I told you in the finals, and then I’ll set up the extra. And when you’ve rode the extra horse into the ground, get ready to run. Things start popping, like they may, you get the hell out and bring the horses to the main gate. I’ll meet you there.”

So Tom made his final go-round ride, and lost it as Red had ordered him to. Then Red put on his drunken braggart act, set up the extra ride and got the bets he wanted.

The horse the bettors chose was big and mean, but Tom knew after the first few seconds that he could ride him even with that sore arm. There were horses in the bucking string that could have given him plenty of trouble, horses that kept shifting rhythm. But this one was a pattern bucker, full of fight and meanness but predictable. Tom rode him clean for the first ten seconds, then raked and roweled and loosened up with all his tricks. It wasn’t the best ride he ever made, but it was good enough. He rode the horse to a standstill.

But even as he dismounted he heard the rumble of trouble at the chutes. He stepped out of his chaps and saw the fighting start. Two men jumped Red, Red knocked one of them down, then began to retreat toward the gate. Then the sideline crowd surged out into the arena, toward the chutes. Tom ducked into the crowd. Nobody paid any attention to him, all intent on the fight. Tom squirmed his way, finally got clear and ran to the gate. He got outside, got the horses and rode back toward the gate. Just as he got there, Red came charging through the crowd. He had reached the gate and was almost in the clear when someone grabbed him by the shirt. Red slid out of the shirt like a snake out of its skin, yelled, “Get going!” and grabbed the horn of his own saddle. He slapped his horse in the flank, pulled himself up and both horses lunged into a run.

As they raced through Felice’s dusty main street Tom saw Red trying to stuff wads of money deeper into his pockets. Several green bills fluttered free and Red grabbed at them, then began to laugh. He slapped his horse with his rein ends and they went out of town in a cloud of white dust.

They rode almost a mile and came to a brushy gully. Red led the way into the brush. A few minutes later half a dozen men went pounding past, spurring their horses. Red watched them go and grinned. “They’ll be halfway to Alamogordo before somebody gets the bright idea that maybe we didn’t go that way.” Red had a big bruise under his left eye, his nose was skinned, the knuckles on both hands were bleeding, he had lost his hat, and his naked torso was grotesquely white from his neck to his belt. But he had set up the deadfall, and won it.

When the posse was out of sight they rode up the gully for a couple of miles, came to a creek and followed it for almost an hour. By then Red’s naked skin was beginning to sun- burn, so they stopped in a grove of box elders till sundown. Then they went on, heading west into the hills.

Toward midnight they came to a little rancho where the woman, probably tired as well as careless, had left her washing on the line. Levi’s, work shirts and underdrawers flapped in the dying moonlight like dismembered ghosts. Red chose a shirt, put it on, then pinned a five-dollar bill to the clothesline. As they rode on he said with a laugh, “That woman will leave her washing out every night for the next six months, figuring some well-heeled saint did this for her and may come back.”

At dawn they came to a sheep camp just as the Mexican herder was getting up. Red picked up the rifle the herder had carelessly left standing against a tree and ordered him to cook breakfast for them. When they had eaten, Red appropriated the herder’s hat, and when the herder called him vile Spanish names Red took the rifle to the second hilltop, emptied the magazine and jammed the weapon muzzle-down into the sod.

They worked north, keeping to the hills, eating at sheep camps and little ranches, until the money in Red’s pocket and the thirst in his throat got the better of him. “To hell with this!” he said, and they rode in to Socorro. Red found a saloon and a poker game and Tom waited out his spree in a shabby little hotel room. And at last, haggard with a hangover and his pockets almost empty, Red said, “Let’s go home.”

T
HE NEXT SPRING THEY
worked the early rodeos in eastern New Mexico and the Oklahoma panhandle, and that fall they worked little Colorado towns. It was the same story over and over. Tom won or lost, pretty much as Red told him to. Tom had learned most of the tricks, but now and then a horse outguessed him, and occasionally he was thrown when Red had ordered him to win. Red was furious each time, accused him of the double cross, but in his sober, good-natured intervals he said things evened out pretty well. “We’re still eating, and I always say a man’s doing all right as long as he don’t go hungry or thirsty too long at a stretch.”

Tom’s life settled into a pattern of long rides between rodeos, when he just drifted and didn’t even think; of days and nights in shabby hotels, third-rate cafes and noisy little towns where he slept, ate and waited; of hot, sweaty, horse-smelling, crowd-noisy arenas; of hard-riding go-rounds when he really lived. Those were the times for which he endured everything else, especially the winning rides that Red eventually ordered at every rodeo. The other riders paid him little attention. Time after time some gay-shirted, arrogant rider mistook him for a stable boy or a gangling kid who had sneaked into the arena and either ordered him out or tried to send him on some errand. That was inevitable. Tom had grown a couple of inches, put on twenty pounds of muscle and sinew and was almost as big as Red, but he still played the part of a back-country Indian kid with ragged hair and shabby work clothes. The other contestants, even the local amateurs, wore gaudy shirts, bright neckerchiefs and fancy-stitched boots. Tom looked like a rusty, bedraggled crow in a pen of peacocks.

Another winter and, when spring came, Red said he guessed they’d better try north Texas this time around. It was a long ride there and rodeos were far apart, bettors cautious. Red became sullen and surly. “No profit in this,” he said. “We got to find some way to cover more ground.” But Tom was riding well when he rode, and by early June Red decided to make a killing in one of the better shows up near the Oklahoma line. He picked up a fair-sized stake of winnings along the way and they moved in on the show Red had marked.

Red sized things up and decided on a final go-round win with big stakes. Tom made his routine rides in the first two go-rounds and was all set for the finals, when he would not only win Red’s bets but would have the satisfaction of a really top-form ride.

When he went to the chutes before the finals, Tom wondered why Red was so pleased with the world. Finally Red said, “ I’ve got a surprise for you.” Tom asked what it was, but all Red would say was, “You just go out there and do your stuff and we’ll go home in style!”

Tom had drawn a big roan that had thrown the best of the local riders in six seconds on the first go-round. It looked like the worst horse Tom had drawn all spring. Red said it was a tight bucker to the right, and fast. “Keep a short rein, power the bastard all you can, and you can ride him till hell-and-gone.”

Tom settled himself in the saddle, dried his hands, measured a short rein and threaded it between his fingers. He set his spurs. The judges signaled ready and Tom gave the signal to the gateman. The bucking strap was jerked tight around the bronc’s flanks, the gate swung open and the roan lunged out, bucking viciously. Tom powered the rein, hauled the horse’s head around, and it went hog-wild. It bucked twice, then ran straight across the arena and slammed into the fence as though it were stone-blind.

Tom didn’t even have time to kick free of the stirrups. His right leg was caught against a fence stringer and the stab of pain was like a lightning bolt through him. But he kicked free as the bronc went down and he sprawled on hands and knees. He got up, took three steps and fell, just out of reach of the bronc’s thrashing hoofs. The horse had broken its neck.

The crowd groaned. The pickup men galloped up, swung out of the saddle and helped Tom to his feet. He tried to step on that right leg and would have fallen again if the men hadn’t held him up. Red came running from the chutes, cursing like a devil, and helped Tom hop back to the chutes and sit down, dizzy with pain. A doctor came, a tall, leathery man, and after a quick probe with his fingers he said, “I think your leg’s broken, son.” He looked up at Red, standing by and still damning everything in sight. “Are you this boy’s father?”

“Hell no!” Red said. “He’s an Indian.”

“ I didn’t ask the color of his skin,” the doctor snapped. “Are you responsible for him?”

“I run things, if that’s what you mean.”

By then they had brought the stretcher. “Get him over to my office,” the doctor said, “where I can make a proper examination.”

The office was only a block down the street. The doctor gave Tom a shot to ease the pain, made a thorough examination and said, “The tibia’s broken. That’s the big bone in your lower leg. You’re through riding for a couple of months, son.”

Red, who was scowling and muttering to himself, exclaimed, “That’s a hell of a thing to do to me!”