Darrel's heart swelled. The day was hot and the dust hung, all of it staggered towards late afternoon. Men took pulls from flasks, perspiring. From the stands around the rodeo ring plumes of smoke billowed up toward the sky, laid out wide like the breadth of a cowboy's arms and just to breathe that air, that California air, was enough to seize Darrel's tongue. Darrel's father sat in the seat next to him and carried his Sunday-drunk respectably, gently sipping from his flask without shame.
A man in the center of the ring chased a floundering, sickly looking calf on a stocky stallion with a mottled coloring and a certain texture of mange, but Darrel's young eyes were thirsty. In Oklahoma he lay in bed in early evening and held his ear to the thin wall and listened as Robert, his oldest brother, listened to the radio – Challenge of the Yukon and The Lone Ranger, the tales of men of the west – the buxom women, the stagecoach robberies and rushes for gold – and through that wall the vibrations of the radio voice he could smell the till of the earth.
The man in the rodeo ring roped the calf. The lariat slid around the head and down to the neck. Darrel stood up in his seat and his father clutched the arm of the chair. The calf maneuvered it's spindle-thin front legs through the loop, but was unable to clear it's hind legs. The lariat clipped the hind legs, taut like a trip wire, like something out of The Shadow, and the calf tumbled, face and legs and nose and skull grinding to a halt in the dusty grit of the ring's floor.
“You see that Papa?” Darrel screamed. “That was quick, couldn't have been more than twenty seconds, wouldn't you say Papa?”
His father took a pouch from his shirt's breast pocket and rolled tobacco into a paper. “You stay here, son,” his father said, and he stood and stretched swinging his arms wide. As his father walked away he stumbled and fell to a knee on the stairs. Then he was gone.
Today was Darrel's birthday. There was no better place to spend his birthday than here, he thought. His father had woke him before dawn that day with a start. It was cold, early enough in the summer that the nights were cold enough to chill but not cold enough to warrant keeping a fire all night. His brothers and sisters at home would be jealous that Darrel had been to the rodeo. Beryl would probably leave shavings and splinters in his dinner as she was prone to do when jealous and Robert might wrestle him to the ground until he squealed, sometimes forcing a finger down his throat till he coughed and spat.
But Robert hardly knew about the world of rodeo – not like Darrel. In his free time after church on Sundays Darrel walked five miles to Valentine's farm and he taught him how to rope cattle and even explained to him many of the rules of rodeo.
Darrel wiped the sweat from the back of his neck with a handkerchief. He looked around for his father. He had been gone for some time. Nearly an hour had passed and people had begun filing out of the stands, full of rancor and vitriol. Darrel stood and waited for a moment, then headed out to look for his father. He wandered up the stairs and surveyed the area, with no sign of his father. He walked back down the stairs, each step heavy with the ornament of his just-cleaned boots and the chaffing of his over-starched jeans, the bumbling stiffness of his birthday decorum. Near the ring men hollered in busy work, clearing the ring of debris and transporting cattle, and the handling of money.
Darrel, still searching for his father, walked around the ring, staring over his shoulder towards the stands, becoming worried as the sun settled towards the horizon. He stumbled and fell forward into something. He turned his gaze upward to the face beneath the too-wide brim of the ten gallon hat.
The man was a giant, a monolith. His jaw was set so strong and his hair was brown like rich dirt, California dirt, not the desolate dirt of Oklahoma, not like the dirt that Darrel's father had mixed with their own shit desperate for something, some act of providence. This man had hair thick and trimmed and brown like that California dirt and breathed like California air.
“Where you trying to go, cowboy?” the man asked.
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