Ground Money (29 page)

Wager had to wait to get into the small office where men studied the lists hanging from whitewashed boards. Finally, he caught the eye of the woman hunched behind a small desk and busily scrubbing at something with a worn eraser.

“Can you tell me if John and James Sanchez have registered?”

“I hope so. Registration closed Monday. If they haven’t, it’s too late now.”

“I’m looking for them. It’s important to find them.”

“The message board’s right over there. If they’re here, they’ll find it.”

“I have to tell them personally,” said Wager. “It involves a death.”

“Oh? Now that’s too bad—let me check. Do you know what events they’re in?”

“Bareback, bronc, and bulls.”

“The rough stock, is it?” She turned to a master list and ran her finger down the names. “Here’s James—he’s up for saddle bronc riding tonight, on Tough Spot. He drew slack time for bareback and bulls.”

“What’s that mean?”

She looked up. “It means he already rode. He had his go-round this afternoon. We got too many contestants to pack them all in during the show, so everybody draws and takes their chances on what animal they get and when they ride.”

“What about John?”

“He’s already rode his bareback. But he’s up tonight for saddle and bull. He should be somewhere around the chutes if he’s not wandering around looking at the girls.”

“Can I get to the chutes without a pass?”

“Not in them, but you can sit right behind them if you want to. This is a good arena for seeing what goes on behind the chutes. Just take the next gate down to your left and that’ll put you in the seats closest to the chutes.”

Wager thanked her and squeezed his way out of the small office and back into the strolling crowd. A small knot of women in their late teens or twenties studied him as he came through the door, their eyes searching his waist for a championship belt buckle. But he didn’t have one, and he wasn’t a cowboy, and something about his eyes made them uneasily shift their gaze to someone else. He followed a jacket that said “Holloway Stock Contractor” out through a short tunnel leading to the arena. Here, clusters of cowboys talked and searched the passing crowd for familiar faces; one in a shiny red jacket flung his small saddle over a railing in front of the lower seats and hollered, “Gilbert—Gilbert—over here!”

Turning up the concrete steps, Wager made his way halfway up the green rows of wooden seats and paused to study this end of the arena. He could see behind the first three chutes and into the tunnel that led to the stock pens outside. Three more chutes were on the other side, but his view of them was blocked by the wooden superstructure bracing the announcer’s box. Already horses stood nervously in the white-painted chutes, an occasional hoof thudding loudly against a plank. On the packed dirt behind, half a dozen cowboys, their numbers bright squares on their shirts, worked over their bareback rigging to stretch the straps and grind rosin into the handgrip. Others wrapped tape around their arm, the one that would be yanked and jerked by the plunge of the horse’s head; and here and there a cowboy went through limbering-up exercises, twisting his torso, bending, pulling the kinks out of cold leg muscles.

High up in the opposite seats, an organist played something that sounded like “You Are My Sunshine,” and farther down the grandstands, in the central sections where rows of faces made animated pink dots, vendors picked their way up and down the busy stairs calling, “Cold beer—cold Coors beer!”

He bought one and carried it with him, sipping at its thick foam as he climbed higher and centered himself in the almost empty seats over the tunnel that led from the animal pens and under the announcer’s box to the arena. There, a flash of bright colors, the flag bearers were lining up, their horses prancing sideways and the pennants of the rodeo associations and sponsors wagging stiffly as riders anchored the flagpoles in their stirrup sockets. The organ music gave way to a woman singing “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” and inviting everyone to say arf-arf. On the platform just below Wager, the arena secretary and a battery of judges shuffled papers and double-checked the contestants’ names against the animals they had drawn.

The organ gave three loud chords and the singer thanked everyone and asked them to shift their attention to the announcer’s box, where Marvin Sutton would welcome all you cowboys and cowgirls to the second go-round of the fifteenth annual Mountain States Rodeo Ride-Off.

The arena lights brightened and an amplified voice asked, “Is everybody ready to rodeo tonight!” and milked louder cheers and shouts and applause to warm up the spectators. The arena behind the chutes filled with more cowboys as the flags of the Grand Entry galloped in a circle into the arena. At one of the gated chutes, a rider eased his bareback rigging over a nervous animal, and a stock handler fished with a hooked stick for the loose ends of cinch and flank strap. The organ music rose as the final pennants snapped and waved behind galloping riders, and the announcer called the crowd to their feet to greet the American flag and sing the National Anthem. By the time the last flag cleared the arena sands, the announcer was introducing the first rider, and Wager was having trouble making out any of the faces or numbers among the throng that now milled in the dim area behind the chutes.

Gate one suddenly yanked open, and the first bareback rider burst into the arena with a spray of muddy sand and organ music. Judges with clipboards trotted a safe distance from the flying hooves, and the pickup men circled their horses behind the twisting, jolting animal to wait for the eight-second buzzer. But the cowboy, his hat still floating in the air behind him, was yanked forward as the horse doubled, flying from the handgrip to crash loudly into the boards of the arena wall. A wad of black, gummy mud thudded onto Wager’s program as one of the pickup men galloped in to yank loose the horse’s flank strap, and the animal stopped bucking and turned quickly, head high and ears up, to trot toward the animal pens outside. He ran beneath Wager and out of sight while the rider, staggering slightly and holding his shoulder against movement, squeezed through a fence gate into the crowd behind the chutes. The second bronc rider was racing into the spotlights while the first cowboy sank onto a bench and two men in jackets with “Sports Medicine” across the backs began to feel around the dislocated shoulder.

Saddle bronc riding was fourth on the schedule, and the flow of cowboys milling or talking or leaning on the arena fence gradually changed with each event. John was listed to ride third, and his number was 343. The hometown following his name was Rimrock, Colorado, and his score last night had been a 68. Tonight, he would ride Duster, and the program insert had two blank slots behind his name so spectators could mark his time for the second go-round and the total score so far. James, too, was listed as coming from Rimrock, and he drew thirteenth spot. His horse was Knothead. Wager wasn’t sure which chute they would be assigned, but as the steer-wrestling competition—launched from the far end of the arena to gallop toward the announcer’s box—moved into its final contestants, he squinted among the restless faces and numbers that moved constantly in the shadowy angles behind the fencing at this end of the arena.

There—612—James’s number. It lifted and fell on the back of a checkered shirt that leaned tensely over a plunging horse being locked into chute two. Wager moved down the aisle, edging past contestants who sat on the steps to talk with friends or relatives in the seats. At the chutes, cowboys sat in their saddles on the ground and stretched leather, while others strapped on their gloves with rawhide thongs and rubbed rosin onto sticky fingers.

In the chutes—quick glimpses of hairy legs or tossing heads—the saddle broncs were outfitted and cinched. Wager passed a cowboy who dropped his jeans to anchor a spine pad down the back of his pants; an arena policeman loosely patrolled the alley that opened into the chute area, and Wager saw John, hat jammed down far enough to fold his ears out, clamber up the wooden fences of chute two and straddle them to squat just above the brown heaving motion that was his animal. Face down and staring intently past his leather chaps, John focused all his attention on the horse waiting beneath him. Chute one slapped open to free the horse, and the audience cheered as the announcer howled, “Oh, no! That’s too bad, but let’s give that cowboy a big hand, ladies and gentlemen—that’s the only pay he’ll take home tonight, so please be generous.”

John nodded at something said by one of the cowboys and then eased quickly but lightly into the waiting saddle. The horse heaved up, white eyes catching the arena glare, and swung its teeth at a cowboy, who jumped away quickly and swore as the others laughed at him. The chute boss said, “Ready?” and John’s hat brim nodded and the gate swung open, baring the left side of horse and rider.

Duster leaped and twisted once, then ran in a series of short kicks straight for the arena barrier. It scraped its flank along the boards to brush off the rider, then fishtailed and spun, hooves cracking loudly against the fence. Plunging sideways, the horse lost its balance, and John, one hand high against the glare of spotlights from the arena roof, felt the horse stumble and plunge sideways. He yanked his feet from the stirrups, and as the animal thudded against the sand, he rolled frantically from the tossing head and flailing hooves to come up sprinting for the wall. A pickup man darted his horse between John and the bronc, and another chased after the now galloping animal to yank free the flank strap. The two judges stood talking together as John, slapping dirt from his hat, walked slowly back to the chutes. The crowd began chanting, “Reride, reride!” and the announcer, leaning over the rail of the box to hear the judges, was happy to answer them, “Yes, sir, the men with the clipboards say Johnny Sanchez gets a second chance—he’ll be having a reride and another shot at the money!”

Under the applause, Wager moved closer to the gate that swung open to let John back into the dark at the edge of the brightly lit arena. He tried to push close enough to reach the man, but waiting contestants crowded in, and Wager felt a hand tap his shoulder. He turned to see a politely smiling face. “Sorry, sir, contestants only back here. You can see everything real good from the seats up there.”

“Thanks.”

John’s number disappeared behind a wall of shifting cowboy shirts and hats, and a few moments later Wager saw him talking with James, his hands describing the ride. James grinned at something, and the two laughed, their voices unheard beneath the clamor of amplified music and the steady voice of the announcer describing the current contest. John pulled his spine pad and unstrapped his chaps to let James have them, and the two men worked their way to a chute, where James began to lash a riding glove tightly around his wrist.

James stayed on for the full eight seconds of his ride, earning a good seventy-three for his score. At halftime the groundsmen cleared the arena and began raking the sand for the Ladies’ Barrel Racing event, and the announcer urged the crowd to stretch and help themselves to some of the good food and beer they could find in the arena arcade. Among the stir and swirl of cowboys, Wager lost sight of them. He climbed to the top row and walked around the edge of the large bowl, searching the tunnels for numbers or faces. But the halftime crowds were too big and constantly shifting. In the arcade it was worse, a carnival of hawkers and gawkers who strolled and stopped and stood talking in loud clusters in the middle of the alley. Once he thought he saw the two flank a girl with curly blond hair, but they were gone before he could elbow through the crowd. Later, he might have seen James disappear behind a pale green post, but he was too far away to be sure. When the distant organ music began to sound over the noise of the crowd, Wager drifted with the flow of bodies back toward the arena. Gradually, he worked his way up and above the chutes to the emptier seating high over the end. His only opportunity now would be the bull riding, the final event.

The team roping started from the far end. The calf ran hard toward the announcer’s box, and the horsemen galloped fast behind with their ropes whistling in large loops. Halfway through the event, the first six bulls were run through the tunnel and chuted up for the last contest. John rode eleventh out of fifteen, and Wager, restless, worked his way down to the staging area where the cowboys waited. In the first chute, already mounted, a rider drew his grip rope close under the bull’s body and thudded his fist into the animal’s ribs to drive air from its lungs and yank the rope even tighter. Legs high on the bull’s broad back to keep from being crushed against the fences, the rider listened to the cowboys around him: “You got this one, Gene—ain’t no goddam bull mean enough to throw you, boy!” “You can do it, Gene; you can do it, man, you know you can!” “Hang on and give this sucker a ride, Gene. He’s a spinner—he likes to go left, remember.”

Wager hovered at the edge of the guarded section. A steady stream of cowboys rubbed past, and near the gate to the arena floor the bull-fighting clown and his barrel man gave a few last adjustments to their costumes and props. He searched the faces of the men and boys who pressed toward the chutes, and finally he spotted James. Hatless, the young man paused at the mouth of the tunnel and tried to edge his way around a group of girls flirting with some of the cowboys. He was by himself, and his eyes brushed across Wager without recognition. The crowd opened slightly, and James worked his way through a mob of cowboys who stood and craned up toward the stands for familiar faces.

“James—I want to talk to you.”

The boy’s heavy eyebrows pulled together in puzzlement. Then he knew Wager and his face went hard and blank.

“Let’s go up this way—up the stairs, here.”

“I don’t want to talk to you.”

Wager grasped the wiry arm that tried to pull away. “It’s about what’s on that ranch—your fall crop—and you’d better hear it.” The arm stopped tugging. “Up here—up where it’s empty.”

Wager could see angry redness streak the back of James’s neck, and he stayed close behind as they made their way through lines of spectators filing back to their seats with cardboard trays of beer and sandwiches. When the crowd thinned near the upper rows, Wager said, “This way,” and turned him toward the empty seats high behind the announcer’s box.