McMurtry, Larry - Novel 05 Read Online Free PDF Page A

direction.
                   "Why hell. Jack, I don't even thank you
like rodeoin'!" he exclaimed, some thirty miles later.
                   It was true. I didn't, particularly, although
I had not got around to admitting this to myself. I was honestly fascinated by
bulldogging, but apart from that what I really liked about the life was the
opportunity it gave me to drive across vast, lonely American spaces.
                   Still, there was no way I could dispute Goat's
main point. The world of the arenas was a tawdry one—pridefully crude,
complacently violent. I had already started to escape it by spending what spare
time I had in junk shops and low-grade antique stores.
                   The day before, at a little store outside
Pendleton called Babe's Antiques and Plaster, filled mostly with hideous
plaster lawn ornaments, I had bought what I later discovered was a Tlingit
copper-and-bone dagger. I gave Babe $30 for it, just because it was pretty.
                   But my passion for objects was still latent,
and I had not consciously considered Goat's point.
                   "Well, what do you like about it,
Goat?" I asked.
                   Goat could hardly believe I would be gauche
enough to ask him two questions in the same day. On the whole he was not a
talkative companion, though once in a while he could be induced to talk about
some of his more impressive accidents, which he called storms.
                   "Got in a storm down in Laramie ," he would say. "Hung myself to a
dem bull and that sucker jerked my arm too far out of the socket, they had to
fly me to Dallas , to a socket doctor. Missed
two rodeos because of that storm."
                   My question put him into a sulk, but it*s a
long way from Pendleton to Sedalia , Missouri , where we were going. By the time we were
fifty or sixty miles into Idaho , Goat had looked into his soul and found the truth.
                   "Why hell, what I like about it is all
that over-age pussy," he said. "All them drunk grandmothers. I’d be lucky to get any other kind, bunged up as I
am."
                   It was true that an awful lot of middling to
old ladies used rodeos as an excuse to get lit, not to mention laid .
                   "Some of them was my fans," Goat
added, respectfully, meaning that they had been hopeful young women when, as a
young cowhand fresh out of Guthrie, Oklahoma, he had made rodeo history at the
Fort Worth Fat Stock Show by riding a bull called Sudden Death—a monster black
Brahma, sort of the Moby Dick of bulls, killer of two, crippler of several, and
never ridden for a full regulation 8 seconds until Goat came along.
                   Goat was not particularly moved by his
observation, but I was. Rodeo people of a certain age, staring out into the
arenas around which they have spent painful and mostly disappointing lives,
still talk reverently about the night Goat Goslin rode Sudden Death. It was a
bittersweet thought that all over the west there were old ladies eager or at
least willing to grapple with Goat, in a pickup seat or miserable motel room, because
of a brief, dust-cloaked ride thirty-five years back down the highway, that most of them had not even been there to see.
                   But whether they had seen it or not it was the
diamond in the popcorn of their lives—an event that only lasted 8 second.
                   A month later, at the National Finals Rodeo, I
nearly hit perfection, throwing a steer in 4.1 seconds. It won me a
championship saddle and a belt buckle that would have stopped a bazooka bullet.
When I let the steer up I felt sad—the same sadness I felt driving out of De
Queen with the Sung vase. I was looking downward from a peak, and my descent
was swift. A month later I was taking 10 and 12 seconds to throw steers I
should have thrown in 5 or 6. But I