BY KIY
The Evening Breeze Arena didn’t live up to its namesake. Heat shimmered above the dust: hard brown dust kicked up by two men walking along a fence. One pulled at the fringe on his shirt to unstick it from his chest. He looked up at the sun, and I saw prayers glint in his eyes. Gaudy clown makeup on the other, triple XL jeans and American flag suspenders. He just stared off. This was the kind of weather that puts distance between people.
This was also our first rodeo. That’s why we went. My coworkers and I saw signs for the event staked on lawns across Elizabethton, Tennessee, 7:00 pm, fireworks included, and we thought why not? Well, half the town did too. Full capacity meant stranger’s knees jabbing wildly into my back like bad acupuncture or, god forbid, those stadium seats the sick and twisted bring. You learn to hate those. A group of us went, ten or so people. Jeff sat to my right, wearing a kilt. Peter, left, had suggested earlier that he wear it as a joke. Jeff was the kind of guy who thought it would be funny to actually do it. A loose banner smiled above the whole scene that said, CHAMPIONSHIP; we were at the championship rodeo. The $20 entrance fee stung as bad as my ass on the metal bleachers.
Imagine stage lights turning on at a concert or the curtain opening at a play. Here, it was a lone harmonica and the voice of Johnny Cash over the speakers: I walked through a county courthouse square. On a park bench, an old man was sitting there. A cowgirl rode into the arena carrying a car dealership-sized American flag. She paused at the gates until she had our full attention. The horse began walking the grounds. I said, “your old courthouse is kind of run down.” He said, “Naw, it’ll do for our little town.” The smell of fried everything wafted over from the concessions. Plates of loaded fries, funnel cakes, and corndogs dotted laps. I said, “your old flag pole is leaned a little bit.” And that's a ragged old flag you got hanging on it. Pickup men, rodeo hands, sat along the top bar of the bullpen, straddling the gates. They all wore matching pink button-downs and tugged at the shirt’s corners or spat in the dirt and looked uncomfortable. He said, "Have a seat," and I sat down. "Is this the first time you've been to our little town?" Clothes rustled as people in the crowd straightened their backs. A sniffle behind me. The audible smear of highway traffic way in the distance. I don’t like to brag, but we’re kind of proud of that ragged old flag. Three snare hits sounded as the drums came into the accompaniment. The horse picked up speed in time with them, running a three-beat canter. You see, we got a little hole in that flag there when Washington took it across the Delaware. People watched the rider circle the arena with hard stares of dignity and pride. On Flanders Field in World War I, she got a big hole from a Bertha Gun. The most patriotic among us stood up. They yelled big throaty woos every time the horse came around. She was in Korea, Vietnam. She went where she was sent by her Uncle Sam. Kids gripped the fence and pushed their foreheads against the bars. They gawked as the flag’s shadow passed over them. In her own good land here, she's been abused. She's been burned, dishonored, denied an' refused. The horse entered full gallop, and the flag rippled violently. More and more people began to stand up, slow then all at once. And she's getting threadbare, and she's wearing thin. But she's in good shape for the shape she’s in. The horns came in on the song and electrified the crowd. They clapped. Hollered. Stomped their feet. All synapses firing. We buzzed and crackled like live wires. On second thought, I DO like to brag. 'Cause I'm mighty proud of that ragged old flag. “LET’S GOOOOOO BRANDON!” the announcer bellowed, and everyone came alive in a wall of noise, and the sun bore down like the barrel of a shotgun.
“Sorry folks. I like to start things off with that just to get it off my chest,” the announcer said over the PA.
“You’re telling them the god damned truth. That’s what you’re doing,” the man in clown makeup said from the middle of the arena. He stood alone with a headset mic on. The announcer chuckled.
“I’d like to introduce everyone to Johnny. He’s your rodeo clown, and we’ll be your entertainment tonight.”
“Did I tell you about my new tractor? I just bought a tractor, a brand new tractor.”
“You got a new tractor, Johnny?”
“Let me tell you. I went down to West Hills Tractor.” Johnny pointed to the dozens of West Hill Tractor advertisements lining the back fence. “That’s the only place to buy a tractor. Boy, I got me a new one, front-end loaded cab and all. But I went back because I kinda wanted to spruce it up a little bit. You know, modify it.”
“Sure, sure.”
“So I go in there, and I talk to my salesman. I said what kind of seats do you have? I want a custom seat. He said, well, lemme tell you what we got. We got the working man's seat. I said, what's that? He said, boy, it's great. It’s air-conditioned. It vibrates. It even has lumbar seating. Oh wow, I said, that's good. What else you got? He said, well, we got that Nancy Pelosi seat. I said, what's that do? He said it don't do nothing but blow smoke up your butt.”
The Cowgirl Triathlon: a calf, three barrels, and a goat roped to a stake in the dirt. A timed event, the clock starts when the calf leaves the chute. The cowgirl must rope the calf by the neck before she reaches the first barrel. 10-second penalty if she misses. She loops around each of the barrels set up at three corners of the arena, avoiding a collision and 5-second penalty, then dashes back towards the start for the final obstacle, a goat for goat tying. Now, the fastest way to tie a goat pulling on its rope farthest from you is to get it on its side. The fastest way to get a goat on its side is to body slam it. I mean really get up under it and throw it in the dirt. Then it can’t use its legs to fight and get away. Time is called when three legs are bound.
The problem was there was no goat turnover. The calves got switched out, but it was the same goat every time. So this one goat got slammed by every cowgirl, 36 of them. I thought it would get tired by about the tenth RKO, but I was wrong. It only fought back harder after each successive humiliation. One of the last athletes, a 13-year-old girl, couldn’t pin the goat. It wiggled out from under her grip and stood up. When she reached for it again, it shot a kick into her side, and we all gasped.
It was violent with the cow. The branding event graduated the goat to a 700lb. heifer. Three cowboys worked as a team. One roped the cow, and another tried to pin it to the ground. He worked down his teammate’s rope, coming up behind the cow, surprising it, and wrestling it into the dirt. The third teammate assisted in the conflict, throwing punches and pushing where he could. He then grabbed a metal rod off the fence and touched it to the cow, symbolizing its brand. To keep the cow in place for branding, the other cowboy shoved the heifer, jostled it around, cursing, and often turned its head almost 180 degrees backward. It was cruel how they dominated it. And the sounds that animal made! You didn’t need a big heart to feel something when it moaned out its seesaw wails of pain and confusion, all for the equivalent of tag-you're-it with the branding iron. I couldn’t look away.
The heifer fell on a cowboy’s arm during one run. After time was called, he held his hand up to his teammates. His thumb dangled at his wrist.
Jeff walked off to the concessions. He’s a vegetarian, and something about this event was too close to hamburgers.
“Johnny. Johnny? What are you doing?” the announcer asked. Johnny was pulling a box on wheels across the arena. It said Lost & Found in bright red letters on its side. “Johnny!” Johnny looked toward the crowd.
“What?”
“What on earth are you doing?”
“I’m takin’ all this stuff. My trailer is back that way.”
“You can’t just steal the lost and found. Other people’s belongings are in there.”
“Boy, they wouldn’t even know what to do with this stuff here. There are valuable articles in this box, and imma use them to their full ben-e-fit. Lemme show you what I got.” Johnny took a baseball bat out of the box and waved it around, swinging at invisible pitches. “You know what this is?”
“That's a baseball bat.”
“This is not a baseball bat, buddy. This is a basketball bat. Yes sir. You need to catch up with the times.”
“What do you mean basketball bat?”
“Well, this is what it’s used for. If you go to one of them NBA games, where all the players make $10 billion a year, and they take a knee during the National Anthem? You walk out there and bust them in the back of the head.” Some people around us blew sharp air out of their noses and began a slow clap. A woman in front raised her fist, toasting her cigarette.
Johnny rummaged through the box again, digging, digging, and came back out with a large brassiere.
“Oh boy! Double barrel slingshot!”
“No stop Johnny.”
“OooohooHoooOhAhAHAHA! Look it here!” He slung it towards the crowd, ran over, picked it up, and shot it a few more times. Everyone laughed.
“Johnny! Are there any markings on the inside that say who it belongs to?”
“Let me look at the tag. Oh, we got a note. Listen. ‘To whom it may concern, I found this in my husband's car. Could you please return it to its rightful owner?’”
“Johnny…”
“Signed, Hillary Clinton.”
For his last bit, Johnny blew up the box with a small explosive, and all the kids shrieked.
The announcer called all children participating in mutton busting down to the pens. I thought this ‘mutton busting’ would be where things simmered down, where the kids could have some fun. I wasn’t wrong that the event was a form of relief, but it wasn’t for the kids. It was for the parents. A pickup man led the first child into the pen. The gates blocked our view, but through a little gap at the bottom, you could see shoes disappear upwards. The bigger pair of cowboy boots shuffled. Then the gate opened, and a sheep ran out with the child on its back. The kid laid flat across the animal and wrapped his arms around its neck, frightening it, which made it run harder, throwing the kid off its back into the dust. The parents roared with laughter. Each run was scored, but points were shouted out by the announcer arbitrarily based on how hard the crowd laughed when the child fell off. 75 points for Jeremiah because his face plant had people howling so hard they fell onto each other. 30 points for one girl who was weirdly graceful with the dismount. The crowd only clapped for her.
Johnny introduced each daring competitor: “This six-year-old man is named Adam. He is from Abilene. He is married to a girl named April, and he sells apples.” Adam ate shit. He got scared and flung himself off the sheep almost as soon as it left the gate, tumbling multiple times in the dirt, garnering a wooooah from our section of the stands. But he kept a tough face. He stood up and dusted himself off. When one of the pickup men put his hand on his back, he pushed it away. Adam walked out of the arena all by himself, over to his dad, who picked him up, and he promptly exploded into his shoulder, crying uncontrollably.
The high-pitched wail of a kid who wouldn’t let go. The sheep spun in tight circles. “Way to go Darnell!” from a lady behind me. I turned around. She had her iPhone extended at arm's length and spammed the photo button a hundred times a minute. She looked at me looking at her and said, “What?” all aggressive like she wanted me to snap back. But the truth is I didn’t mean to say anything. I only wanted to see.
Jeff came back with fried Oreos to share. I had never had fried Oreos.
“I have seen a lot of beautiful people here tonight,” said Johnny. He paced back and forth and addressed the crowd with open arms. “Beautiful women. Look, there are beautiful women here. There are good-looking guys. Good clean-looking guys.”
“You would say that,” said the announcer. Johnny pointed to a man on the other side of the stands.
“Except that guy, he ain't from here.” We all laughed. “Well, I’ll tell you something else. So I told you about my tractor? With the new seats?”
“Yes, Johnny.”
“Funny thing about those tractors. They have interchangeable parts. You bust a belt, and you can go down to West Hills Tractor and get a replacement.”
“You’re damn right you can, Johnny.”
“Well, I was getting my haircut the other day, trying to look good for y’all. I got there kind of early, so I looked at those magazines they got. The ones on the table? You know what I’m talkin’ about. Funny thing. Seems like a lot of the people on those magazines are just like my tractor. I mean Bruce—” that was all Johnny could get out. People around us broke into laughter, strange laughs though, swinging in pitch from low to high, like question marks, like shock was a part of it. Johnny even broke character just to laugh himself. They reverberated off each other and saturated the air in supercilious noise, empty and echoing.
“YEAH! GET HIM OUT OF HERE!” came from a voice behind me that rang clear above all the rest. I spun around. Three feet from me was a man leaning over two rows of people, pointing his index finger, not at me, but off to my left, his right, Jeff. “GET HIM. OUT OF HERE!” he said with spit clung to the corner of his mouth. Jeff turned around, saw the finger, and looked to the side to see who the man was talking to. He opened his mouth like he was about to yell again, but he leaned back towards his seat and made an ugly sound like a cackle. People pointed at Jeff’s legs, his kilt, and snickered. He looked down at it too. Another one of my coworkers said she was creeped out and asked if we could move to the grass beside the stands. We left without saying much.
Bull riding was worth sticking around. Bull riders pulled an assortment of clothes from the closet to protect themselves: leather chaps, mouthguards, and football helmets. One wore a protective vest with a patch that said, Rib Saver. Even though most riders stayed on the bull for a couple of seconds, you couldn’t criticize them when you saw it come out of the gate. A 1500lb. beast, rippling muscle, bucking, throwing the rider like all hell. And that half-second window after he fell off and hit the ground, and before he scampered to safety, was honestly terrifying. One rogue step from the bull could mean the difference between life and death. This was an event won by inches. We clapped out of respect when each rider hobbled off. But none of them could stay on the bull for the full eight seconds they needed to have a scored run. One by one, they fell.
The announcer introduced the last rider. He called him the man to do it. The rider had strips of gold foil tacked onto his jeans that shimmered when he walked. He pulled himself over the top of the bullpen and disappeared behind the gate. The pickup men jeered at the bull, prodded it, and lowered a rope into the pen. The gate opened, and the bull came out bucking. The rider held on with his right hand, laid back across the bull, and put his left hand into the sky. At 2 seconds in, he had people’s full attention. The foil caught the stadium lights and sparked as he contorted around. 4, the bull locked into a circle bucking clockwise. The rider read the turn and leaned back to the left. 6, I felt a hum shoot up my spine. I stood up. My eyes opened wide. At 8 seconds, he hit the mark, the chorus of “God Bless the USA” came blaring over the speakers, and I screamed along with the crowd, a genuine yell of excitement. It was ridiculous and real, and I meant it.
“THANKS FOR COMING OUT TONIGHT!” shouted the announcer, and they set off fireworks overhead.
I looked to my coworkers to share the excitement, but when I turned, I saw none had stood up. Peter chewed on his cheek and stared off at the middle distance. The others squirmed in the grass. And Jeff, only Jeff, didn’t seem bothered. He chewed gum, smacking wildly with an open mouth like he didn’t have a single thought running through his head. My coworkers will complain about tonight, Johnny, the bits, and the man in the stands for weeks on end and speak to their friends about it with hushed tones of contempt and awe and -ists and -isms. But there are still fireworks going off, bursts of color, red, blue, kaleidoscopic, colliding, lighting up hollers miles into the hills. And it’s all just spectacle really, the lights, events, jokes, the grit, the thin violence. It’s a rush of blood as old as stone or water.
I sat down and wrapped my arms around my knees, pulling them to my chin.