The Last Ride of the Rodeo King
Rayner’s in the chute, on the horse, the white horse named Last Mile. The lights are hot in his eyes. After the national anthem and the opening prayer (Our Heavenly Father, we thank you for the friendship, and the fellowship, and the) he’d gotten another coke nosebleed—blood down the front of his red cowboy shirt.
Right from Dillon, his helper, sees the blood—
“That stuff’s gonna kill you one day!”
Shit fuck shit and Rayner wipes his nose on the back of his hand. His whole body shakes like a drum. Out in the arena Gunner Wallis from Provo’s on a chestnut named January Bleeds. His horse bucks and Wallis leans back too far and his fingers brush the horse’s flank. Disqualified. Wallis hurls his hat into the dirt. Gunner Wallis from Provo wishes he was Rayner Eriksen from Hamlin, he wishes he could have that swagger, that crooked smile, that flash of buckskin fringe.
The crowd’s misted spit hangs low over the arena—the stench of horse shit, horse sweat. Ropes of slobber hang off the lips of bulls. The sun lingers on one horizon, the moon lurks on the other.
Last Mile is the pale gray of smoke. Last Mile is so powerful under Rayner that for a coke-addled second he thinks of his grandfather’s International Harvester that churned the bitter wheat up on the Hi Line. Last Mile snorts through his nose and rolls his eyes and slams Rayner’s thigh against the chute’s metal bars.
A hotel phone rings somewhere. Rayner looks over his shoulder. Only the crowd, faces smiling, pressed together. They cut me open.
He raises his left hand to the faces of the crowd above him. He pants like a dog with a tongue out. The blood thunders in his temple—I’m hanging up, I’m hanging up. Lightning pulses above the hills.
“You ready? Are you ready?” says Right and crams Rayner’s cowboy hat down tight over his ears and Rayner nods and moves his tongue out of the way of his teeth and the chute opens—
Last Mile kicks his hindquarters. He leaps to the center of the arena. Rayner kicks his boots forward. Last Mile twists up and away. He turns his white face to Rayner, his mad eye. Rayner’s lungs are crushed balloons. The rein burns in his hand. His knuckles are white. His ass leaves the saddle for a moment as Last Mile strains to flick him off like a flea. Rayner’s teeth clash together. The leather tack squeals and there—
First row, front seat, beautiful girl in green with her finger in her mouth.
The rodeo in Hamlin, the homecoming parade, far from home, twenty-four and a white man with that loping cowboy stride. Rayner looked so good on that horse he couldn’t stand it. Lean cowboy face, lean cowboy body, Wrangler jeans so tight you could see the straining of his muscles. Slicked-back hair and buckskin fringe and a pin in his leg from the time his father ran him over with the family station wagon in nineteen sixty-five. Rayner didn’t limp, though, he never stumbled, he swaggered down the streets of your town, cowboy boots clacking, spurs jangling, and he sure looked good in your homecoming parade on the red horse. Rayner’s gold tooth was so shiny you forgot the rest were crooked.
Your small town girls couldn’t get enough of Rayner—those rodeo queens and ranchers’ daughters and tomboys in the back row. On those hot rodeo days those girls looked up at Rayner on his stallion and pulled their damp denim shorts from between their legs. Rayner in the parade in your town, teetering down your main street in his heeled boots, in your town. His town, now.
Faith stood at the end of that parade in Hamlin. She wiggled her little ass in her green cheerleader’s uniform. She wrinkled her little nose at Ray. She flipped her permed hair. She was so blindingly clean, the big time rancher’s favorite daughter in her cheer captain’s shirt. Rayner showed her his golden tooth.
Later he’d fucked Faith in the back of his pickup. He kneed her legs apart and bent to smell the clean stench of her hair. Afterwards he said I love you. And Faith said—That was fun.
Down goes Last Mile and Rayner almost loses his balance and the smooth stroke of his spurs over the horse's flank. He tastes bile. The crowd screams. The crowd wants more. Rayner’s spine crunches. He’s locked in a battle so brutal that his eyeballs wobble in their sockets. His bones turn to dust. He’s only two seconds into the ride. Rayner does not let go of the rein. Last Mile’s hooves kick up dirt on the girl in green.
His only crime was having a good-sized set of balls that worked too good. Wasn’t that it? Because the second he stuck it in Faith she was pregnant and her father white-knuckled her down the aisle. And he came back from the last rodeo season just in time to see Tom slither out of her cunt and into the crib in the next room. Her body looked old. Her tits drooped from the baby’s greedy mouth. She looked at him on the couch and her little eyes narrowed, she wiped baby puke off her textbooks, she cooked spaghetti bolognese after her hospice night shift.
One summer day Faith’s little sister was in his kitchen (their kitchen?) with Shaylene. Shaylene drank water straight from the faucet. The water sparkled down her chest, still in junior high, short shorts and sleepovers and beaded bracelets. Shaylene’s cool, freckled forehead. To be young. Her an unbroken column, heart and lungs and electric eel brain all bounding forward. Rayner could taste her youth. The fountain of youth flowed from between Shaylene’s legs.
He fucked her for the first time on his (their?) couch. Tom cried in the other room. Her mouth tasted like Pez candy. Rayner said—I love you. Shaylene looked at him with unclouded eyes—Well, I guess I love you, too.
Three seconds in. Rayner’s thighs burn. His neck snaps back. The lights wink. His neck snaps forward. The crowd, the strange hills. Rayner’s brain slides to the back of his skull. He could just let go of the reins, let go and fly off and up into the sky. He could lay in the dust and let the crowd jeer and let the snot run into his mouth, to cry in defeat under the hooves of the horse, to cry—
The kitchen in Sunburst, egg on the floor, potato peeler rusting in an ashtray, raccoon statue thick with grease above the stove. His brother and sister stood in the living room and cried and the veins bulged in their necks. Sometimes he would grab their stringy hair and wrench until they shut up, until he got some peace and quiet—the mucus bubbled on their chins, his father’s mouth puckered on a beer bottle, his older brother rattling the lock on Rayner’s door.
His brother and sister slapped their hands on the walls and in the den his father vomited blood into the carpet. His mother squatted and squeezed them all out one by one—Kris and Rayner and Will and Siggy—but all she did was stand at the sink and smoke and stare out over the plains as a thunderstorm came down. The cigarette smoke hung in the air. That’s real love. His mother pointed to the iron cross on the wall. That’s the only real love there is.
Rayner’s nosebleed starts again. The blood pours down his throat. His stomach churns the blood into froth. Four seconds and Rayner hurts all over like he’s been hit by a car. He makes his eyes slits, and for a moment Last Mile’s coat gets so hot it burns him through his chaps and through his jeans. Just let go. Five seconds. Just hang up.
This whole thing, this whole family thing, this whole father thing, this whole thing made Rayner’s flesh creep. Tom stood up in his crib in the dark and looked at Rayner as he passed by and his eyes reflected the hall light like the eyes of a cat. Faith said—Hold him, just hold him for a second and Rayner held his son out in front of him, looked into his eyes. Part of him? Just as much a part of him as the burst blood vessels in his father’s nose, godforsaken Kris unlatching the door with a Bowie knife? His son. What a joke! What a joke. He’d stood on the moldy linoleum back in Sunburst and made a promise in front of the cross on the wall to never have kids, to never have a son, and his father threw a glass of water on him like he was a dog—Don’t you dare tell such fucking lies about your brother.
They all go to church on Sunday, in white shirts, ironed jackets, the baby in a yellow bib. Our heavenly Father, head of the household, hallowed be thy fist and they all kneel to pray. They all have a cross on a chain. They all have Wranglers with a back pocket of chew. They all hold their knife in their good hand to cut the steak on their plate. They all say—good hunting this year got myself a bull the Raiders are gonna lose sure as shit let my wife do that yeah business is great my son’s made the team he’s doing great ha ha ha—
Rayner, too. The cross on the wall. The pastor’s crumpled blazer. His mother’s face crumpled in defeat. The tarnished collection plate. Two pews down Shaylene slides her skirt up her freckled thighs.
God knows. Rayner can barely handle one son.
Last Mile bucks to rend Rayner’s bones. To make him bend the neck to eat hay. To make him crawl on all fours, bit in mouth. Rayner’s blood dries on his upper lip. The sun is a disk on fire. Tears run down his cheeks. They cut tracks in the dust there. His white hat flies from his head. The hat falls under Last Mile’s trampling hooves, into putty, into dust. Six—
One day Rayner will open the church door and see them there all seated in a circle. They all have mortgage papers in their pockets. They all have calloused hands, drywall dust, grass stains, their teeth yellow from their daily cigarette behind the shed. Talking, talking—That little shit’s not good enough for my little girl not good enough kick his ass how’s the hunting? how’s the hunting? how’s the hunting? They’re all on the school board, the homecoming committee, the volunteer fire department. They sit with boot tips sprawled and pointed to the center of the circle, making a pentagram, a cabal, firelight casting their shadows high along the wall. A wagging tongue, an arthritic hand, a hardened artery—my wife that bitch my son my son well he’s my son I can do what I want ha ha ha. Rayner will creak open that big church door and the circle will open to welcome him.
Rayner’s spurs flash in the dying light. He holds on. His balls crash against the saddle. His hip sockets grind. Sweat flicks from his hair in drops that catch the light.
The truck was a bullet through the night. Snow flashed by, black ice under the wheels, faster and faster. Tom cried in his seat in the back, the inside light on to let Faith read her nursing books—syphilis, leprosy, a million ways to die. Tom’s mouth a wet circle, the windows fogged, Faith could not shut up, she snapped and snapped, the sharp mouth of a vicious little dog—Where have you been? Where’d you go? Are you cheating on me? I’ll find out, I will.
Condensation dripped down the windows, sweat quivered down the small of Rayner’s back. His car. His son. His wife. His realm a black hole that hurtles through the blackness into the future. I don’t even know why I try anymore you’re never around I’m in school you’re not. Get a job. Get a life.
Rayner mashed Faith’s face against the glass, blood gushed from her nose and froze there. Faith was as small as a child, she slapped at him, she made little noises like a cat he’d once seen his brother kill, her struggles smeared her blood on the window. The veins in the back of his hand, wanting to force her face through the glass and away from him. The tires slipped off the road, one hand on the wheel, almost going in the frozen river. He broke Faith’s nose. Don’t you ever talk to me like that again, he said, and got back on the asphalt.
Last Mile’s hooves come down and carve a gash in the dirt so deep to split the earth to the core. The rein shreds the skin from Rayner’s palm. The saddle wails. His sinuses crackle. Just a few more breaths, just two more breaths. Seven—
Is Last Mile bigger than before? Did Last Mile grow taller by a hand?
The house was a box of darkness. Rayner could hear the baby cry from all the way out in the woodshed, he whittled a horse from poplar wood, he did lines off his father-in-law’s workbench while outside the snow covered all sins. His shadow danced around the camp light in the center of the room and his shadow became a thousand monsters, one nightmare with a million heads. Kill her. Cut her throat. Kill his son. Feed him poison. Break his neck. Shoot her. Get his hands around her throat and choke her. Put their bodies in a mine shaft, to sink into the sediment at the bottom. Light the house on fire, flee. He never wanted them but aren’t they his? Isn’t his family his realm, his kingdom, his source of petty power, Rayner both the jailer and the prisoner? Put their bodies in the woodstove and burn them into fine white ash, to nothing, to sand to scatter to the wind.
Knock knock on the door. On the threshold the hoofed prints of a deer, a horse, an elk that stretched its mouth into a scream. Cloven hooves?
Who’s there? Come out, god damn it!
No one was there.
Rayner’s intestines telescope. A slurry of undigested hot dogs, cocaine, blood, roiling bile—They cut me open CUT ME OPEN. He can’t see the faces of the crowd through the veil of sweat.
Knock, knock, who’s there, only me. The upstairs bedroom in the old house on his old street back in Sunburst, one light on in the hall. The door opened just a sliver and through the slit Kris’s face, his glassy eye, the contortion of his tongue between his lips. Rigid as a board on the bed with his brother’s breath on his face, the snarling metal teeth of a jeans zipper being parted, each metal tooth coming apart from the next, catching the light from the hall. Years later Rayner’s father threw that glass of water on him, water running down his chest—You’re a liar. But this was before Rayner became a liar.
Summer heat, crickets cry out in the grasses, Shaylene walks along the dirt roads on her long legs, the halo of youth around her. Shaylene is a child goddess, the virgin goddess in the grove, down the well, the statue held aloft by the parishioners as they parade through the streets. The unlined purity of her face, the line of her flat stomach under his hand (Christ, how was he supposed to know?) and every time Rayner puts his dick inside her he took some of that youth for himself.
Summer in Sunburst, his little brother rolling marbles down the stairs, pink-cheeked and pretty, so young Rayner wanted to grab him, hug him, cut him up and eat him. Rayner was just a kid, too, but he felt as old as the ancient men at the bar with his father, the grandfathers, all bad livers and swollen prostates, their bodies ancient twisted trees growing into the floor. The rotten stench of age, the exhalation of the grave, and Rayner reached into his brother’s underwear—What are you doing?
Rayner has never been young. Shaylene chews her bubblegum and spits the warm remains into Rayner’s palm.
The crowd all stands. They scream into hoarseness. So close, so close, and the crowd writhes. They want to see the man triumph over the horse, to see the victory of leather and steel. The buzzer sounds, he’s done, thank God. Rayner lowers his spurs. Last Mile gives one final heave. The front cinch on the saddle breaks. Rayner is smashed to the ground, on his face. The thunder of his skull as it snaps from top to bottom, thunder, the world whirls, lights explode—
Thirty minutes before the last saddle bronc round, because of course it had to be the last goddamn round, the last round of a winning rodeo where Rayner had twenty thousand dollars at stake, thirty minutes before this last round that would win Rayner enough money to make his wife feel better about the kid he’d put inside her—Shaylene called.
(Shaylene’s fifteen. She lies in the hospital bed and tries not to itch her C-section stitches. The hospital stinks of milk and she stinks of dirty milk, motherhood’s sick milk, the milky maple syrup smell of her younger siblings back in foster care in Colorado.)
Rayner got the call in his room in the Prairieview Motor Inn. One room over Right fucked a rodeo girl with the brutal regularity of a metronome.
“Yeah?”
And Shaylene said:
“Ray, I had the baby.”
His heart was a ping pong ball, his body an empty tube. Maybe it’s the adultery. Maybe it’s the coke.
“Is it a boy or a girl?”
“I know I said I could do it but I can’t, I can’t, Ray, I can’t keep it!”
“Boy or girl?”
“Please don’t shout at me.”
(Shaylene sniffles back her tears and the nurse with cold hands passes by the door, her lips pursed. She clacks her french tips as she passes. Shaylene stares at her lap.)
“Well?” Rayner would rather get his balls caught in barbed wire than listen to a woman cry. They all do that.
“A boy. But I don’t want it!”
“Don’t you give away my son. That’s my son.” He sweated through that fancy shirt his wife made for him, his wife.
(Faith sits in their living room with her textbooks piled on her lap—a diagram of a mottled cirrhitic liver or a baby curled like a cat in the womb. She flips to the chapters devoted to trauma, to broken bones, aspirated blood gasped into the air. She can see Rayner on his rodeo horse, under the hooves of his rodeo horse, and a sword of spite pierces her. In the bedroom Tom starts to cry. His diaper’s hot and fat. Faith picks him up, holds him close. She loves him. She could throw him against a wall.)
“I’ll be back,” said Ray, “Don’t do anything until then. You hear me, Shaylene? Don’t do anything.”
“Please come back? They cut me open.”
(Shaylene grips the damp blanket. If only her mother would come through the door, her father with his Lutheran fury, maybe even her older sister, who’s probably back at their shared apartment torturing her hair with a curling iron, screaming at her boyfriend. The nurse walks by again and looks at Shaylene like she’s dirt. Shaylene’s face burns.)
“When I’m done here,” said Rayner.
“They cut me open, oh my god—”
“I’m hanging up now.”
Shaylene cries and cries.
“I’m hanging up.”
He hung up. Right’s rodeo girl stumbled out into the exterior hallway and clopped away on high-heeled boots. Rayner poured a line of coke onto the pitted surface of the coffee table and snorted it through a rolled-up five. His sinuses shriveled. His heart went whammed, a drum to the rhythm of shit fuck shit my wife my child my child bride. Shit—what’s my second son’s name?
He never asked.
Last Mile mows Rayner down, snaps his femur. The bone pops from his jeans and grinds on the inside of his chaps. He screams, clutches at it, writhes in the dirt. Pain white-hot and blinding and Rayner extends an arm to crawl away. The horse breaks that, too. His iron-shod hooves caper over Rayner and snap his ribs one by one. Blood drools out of Rayner’s mouth. The crowd was silent but now it shouts KILL KILL KILL, because it’s even better when the horse wins, when bones break and blood is spilled. Even the most staid among them get down and bay for blood like dogs.
Rayner closes his eyes. His left leg is a numb lump of clay. His lungs fill with blood. Kill him, killhim, he’s a sinner. He opens his eyes.
Last Mile is not a horse. He rears up above Rayner, a great black goat, cloven hoof, curled horns. Hellfire vomits from his nose and melts sand to glass. His face is a warp spasm, a man’s face frozen in a laugh. He peels his lips back in a leer. He turns his fat yellow eyes on Rayner. His tongue is long and pink, flecked with slime. He rolls it across those teeth. He shows the crowd the erect cock between his goat legs. Burning semen drips from the tip and sizzles a hole through Rayner’s boot. Like Rayner’s mother took the cross from the wall and threw it at his face—This is what you’ve prayed to all along, liar, lying boy, this is what we’ve prayed to.
Last Mile brings his hoof down in Rayner’s face, breaks his jaw, brings the darkness. No sight, no sound, the echo of his memories falling into the darkness like marbles tumbling down the stairs.