you, Hondo. Good luck.” She glanced at Moore, and Diamond could see a message fly but did not know their language.
They walked outside, the man and woman together, Diamond following, so deeply angry he staggered.
“Yeah. He’s kind a deaf, old Hondo. He was a hot saddle bronc rider on his way to the top. Took the money two years runnin at Cheyenne. Then, some dinky little rodeo up around Meeteetse, his horse threw a fit in the chute, went over backwards, Hondo went down, got his head stepped on. Oh, 1961, and he been cleanin saddles for the Bar J since then. Thirty-seven years. That’s a long, long time. He was twenty-six when it happened. Smart as anybody. Well, you rodeo, you’re a rooster on Tuesday, feather duster on Wednesday. But like I say, he’s still got all the try in the world. We sure think a lot a Hondo.”
They stood silently watching Diamond get into the car.
“I’ll call you,” said the man and she nodded.
Diamond glared out the car window at the plain, the railroad tracks, the pawnshop, the Safeway, the Broken Arrow bar, Custom Cowboy, the vacuum cleaner shop. The topaz light reddened, played out. The sun was down and a velvety dusk coated the street, the bar neons spelling good times.
As she turned onto the river road she said, “I would take you to see a corpse to get you out of rodeo.”
“You won’t take me to see anything again.”
The glassy black river flowed between dim willows. She drove very slowly.
“My god,” she shouted suddenly, “what you’ve cost me!”
“What! What have I cost you?” The words shot out like flame from the mouth of a fire-eater.
The low beams of cars coming toward them in the dusk lit the wet run of her tears. There was no answer until she turned into the last street, then, in a guttural, adult woman’s voice, raw and deep, as he had never heard it, she said, “You hard little man—everything.”
He was out of the car before it stopped, limping up the stairs, stuffing clothes in his duffel bag, not answering Pearl.
“Diamond, you can’t go yet. You were going to stay for two weeks. You only been here four days. We were going to put up a bucking barrel. We didn’t talk about Dad. Not one time.”
He had told Pearl many lies beginning “Dad and me and you, when you were a baby”—that was the stuff the kid wanted to hear. He never told him what he knew and if he never found out that was a win.
“I’ll come back pretty soon,” he lied, “and we’ll get her done.” He was sorry for the kid but the sooner he learned it was a tough go the better. But maybe there was nothing for Pearl to know. Maybe the bad news was all his.
“Momma likes me better than you,” shouted Pearl, saving something from the wreck. He stripped off the T-shirt and threw it at Diamond.
“This I know.” He called a taxi to take him to the crackerbox airport where he sat for five hours until a flight with connections to Calgary left.
In his cocky first year he had adopted a wide-legged walk as though there was swinging weight between his thighs. He felt the bull in himself, hadn’t yet discerned the line of inimical difference between roughstock and rider. He dived headlong into the easy girls, making up for the years of nothing. He wanted the tall ones. In that bullish condition he tangled legs with the wife of Myron Sasser, his second traveling partner. They were in Cheyenne in Myron’s truck and she was with them, sitting in the backseat of the club cab. All of them were hungry. Myron pulled into the Burger Bar. He left the truck running, the radio loud, a dark Texas voice entangled in static.
“How many you want, Diamond, two or three? Londa, you want onions with yours?”
They had picked her up at Myron’s parents’ house in Pueblo the day before. She was five-eleven, long brown curls like Buffalo Bill, had looked at Diamond and said to Myron, “You didn’t say he was hardly fryin size. Hey there, chip,” she said.
“That’s me,” he said, “smaller than the little end of nothing whittled to a point,” smiled through murder.
She showed them an old heart-shaped waffle iron she had bought at a yard sale. It was not electric, a gadget from the days of the wood-burning range. The handles were of twisted wire. She promised Myron a Valentine breakfast.
“I’ll git this,” said Myron and went into the Burger Bar.
Diamond waited with her in the truck, aroused by her orchidaceous female smell. Through the glass window they could see Myron standing near the end of a long line. He thought of what she’d said, moved out of the front seat and into the back with her and pinned her, wrestled her 36-inseam jeans down to her ankles and got it in, like fucking sandpaper, and his stomach growling with hunger the whole time. She was not willing. She bucked and shoved and struggled and cursed him, she was dry, but he wasn’t going to stop then. Something fell off the seat with a hard sound.
“My waffle iron,” she said and nearly derailed him—he finished in five or six crashing strokes and it was done. He was back in the front seat before Myron reached the head of the line.
“I heard it called a lot of things,” he said, “but never a waffle iron,” and laughed until he choked. He felt fine.
She cried angrily in the seat behind him, pulling at her clothes.
“Hey,” he said. “Hush up. It didn’t hurt you. I’m too damn small to hurt a big girl like you, right? I’m the one should be crying—could have burred it off.” He couldn’t believe it when she opened the door and jumped down, ran into the Burger Bar, threw herself at Myron. He saw Myron putting his head over to listen to her, glancing out at the parking lot where he could see nothing, wiping the tears from her face with a paper napkin he took from the counter, and then charging toward the door with squared, snarling mouth. Diamond got out of the truck. Might as well meet it head-on.
“What a you done to Londa.”
“Same thing you did to that wormy Texas buckle bunny the other night.” He didn’t have anything against Myron Sasser except that he was a humorless fascist who picked his nose and left pliant knobs of snot on the steering wheel, but he wanted the big girl to get it clear and loud.
“You little pissant shit,” said Myron and came windmilling at him. Diamond had him flat on the macadam, face in a spilled milk shake, but in seconds more lay beside him knocked colder than a wedge by the waffle iron. He heard later that Myron had sloped off to Hawaii without his amazon wife and was doing island rodeo. Let them both break their necks. The girl had too much mustard and she’d find it out if she came his way again.
That old day the bottom dropped had been a Sunday, the day they usually had pancakes and black cherry syrup, but she had not made the pancakes, told him to fix himself a bowl of cereal, feed Pearl his baby pears. He was thirteen, excited about the elk hunt coming up in three weekends. Pearl stank and squirmed in full diapers but by then they were seriously fighting. Diamond, sick of hearing the baby roar, had cleaned him up, dropped the dirty diaper in the stinking plastic pail.
They fought all day, his mother’s voice low and vicious, his father shouting questions that were not answered but turned back at him with vindictive silences as powerful as a swinging bat. Diamond watched television, the sound loud enough to damp the accusations and furious abuse cracking back and forth upstairs. There were rushing footsteps overhead as though they were playing basketball, cries and shouts. It had nothing to do with him. He felt sorry for Pearl who bawled every time he heard their mother’s anguished sobbing in the room above. One or two long silences held but they could not be mistaken for peace. In the late afternoon Pearl fell asleep on the living room couch with his fist knotted in his blanket. Diamond went out in the yard, kicked around, cleaned the car windshield for something to do. It was cold and windy, a cigar cloud poised over the mountain range forty miles west. He picked up rocks and threw them at the cloud pretending they were bullets fired at an elk. He could hear them inside, still at it.
The