Missives From The Mountains: Iron Furnace.

 

The Iron Furnace

 

They say time travel isn’t real, but they have never ridden on a bull named Iron Furnace. I wasn’t sure, exactly, what I was doing but I knew if I survived 8 seconds on the back of a cow I could walk away with enough money to not only pay Seneca back and redeem my name, but also buy a ticket to come home in the first place. Eight seconds sounded helluva lot better than making up addresses on applications at fast food joints that had no real way of contacting me with my cellphone expired and dead as a hammer.

                “You got some chaps? Anythin’?” The old man looked at me as I registered for the rodeo. He looked down at my boots and then up at my blonde hair, now matted in sweat from walking in the Texas heat. “Son, you even know what in the hell you are even doin?”

                “Nope,” I beamed sarcastically at the man, and signed my name on the register. I had none of the gear, but with any luck, Will would loan me his for the event. He was, after all, a real cowboy. I was just a dumb hillbilly learning the culture.

                “Toss that lasso around them there stumps,” Will commanded at me. I tried to practice for my event back at the ranch. He flipped his sixth Corona up emptying the bottle. His other hand slid deep into Meredith’s thigh, under her jean skirt, as she winced in discomfort of ploy. “Rope ‘em and you might win a hundred bucks in the deal.”

                The stump seemed simple enough, but the rope was like bonded plastic, stiff and inflexible. The unforgiving texture distracted me as I tossed the rope and it merely fell to the ground.

                “Aintcha ever thrown a damn ball?” Will squeals at me from his lawn chair, starting his next beer. He looks over at Meredith for commentary. “You believe this shit?”

                “Leave him alone, he’s learning,” she stammered. Her defense of me caught me off guard. I looked back at her and mustered a smile.

                I flipped my wrist and tried again. Then tried even more. After about the fiftieth toss I managed to wrangle the stump. I jostled in place and Will studied my boots. “You ever wore spurs before?”

                I stopped dancing my jig of victory and looked back at him. “No?”

                “Gimme them boots, I’ll put some on ‘em.” I looked down at my dismal boots and shucked them off, and handed them to him. He jostled with the spurs for a moment, then groaned. “Goddamn, you ever take these off? Plum nasty.”

                I looked down at my dingy socks, now three weeks into being worn. I shied away from being honest, I refused to let them know that I was homeless. “Just working the ranch a lot.”

                “Working somethin’,” Will quipped as he got the first spur on. “Leave em in the sun to dry out, damn.” He tossed them into the yard, the spurs making a jingle as they ratchetted into the yard, clasped on the boot. “I got my chaps in the truck bed. Go on and try them on.”

                I nodded and walked over to the truck and fetched them, the leather brown and faded, wrinkled and tired. As I began fastening them around my waist he stopped me again.

                “Aintcha got a buckle?”

                I looked at him funny. “No.”

                “Good lord, here,” he stumbles from his copious beer drinking and starts wollering in his truck, before producing a cheap pewter-like buckle from the mess of fast food wrappers and empty Copenhagen cans. “You can have this one.”

                I examine the buckle, small and oval with a cowboy riding a bucking Bronco, framed in generic flowers and wreaths. It’ll do, I thought. “Thanks.”

                “Now I don’t have a cowboy hat for that big noggin of yours, and you’re gonna need one them, too.” He spoke sternly, dusting off a vest. “You can wear my vest too, but you gonna have to get your own shit if you gonna do rodeo.”

                I took the vest and nodded. I sighed at spending my one hundred dollars on a hat, but I knew that any cowboy in a rodeo has a cowboy hat. “Where you get a cheap one at?”

                “Cheap?” Will chuckles. “Your paycheck from the ranch is gone today, bud. Marcy’s Farm Tack at the edge of town has some reasonably priced. C’mon I’ll give you a ride.” He stopped and looked at Meredith. “When we get back, I want you in that trailer ready for me.”

                I looked at Meredith and frowned a little bit. I felt sorry for her, knowing what he meant but also knew that she was with Will out of her own volition. I collected my boots from the yard and shucked them back on and hopped into his truck. I nodded at Meredith as we pulled away, looking ahead at the road dancing in the Texas heat. I grew anxious at nightfall, and at the prospect of investing my paycheck to earn enough money to go home.

                A sizeable crowd grew on the bleachers around a shoddy deck of fence and a dusty bowl of a field. The brilliant lights reminded me of the football games back home. For some reason, I scanned the crowd as if expecting to see Seneca and Danny perched up in the stands to give me a morale boost. I saw nothing but strangers, foreign and benign faces. I was on my own. The spurs on my boots jingled with my footsteps, little boys dressed as cowboys looked at me in awe, as if I had somehow earned to wear this black Stetson and this musky vest and faded chaps. I avoided eye contact and focused on riding a bull for 8 seconds.

                As I heaved myself over the pen I glanced down at a massive Charleigh bull, his white fur tired and tacky, like he had been out in the rain rather than the heat of the day. I looked down at Will slapping a cinch on him. He looked up at me from atop the pen. “Remember. One hand up by your face, the other hold on tight with this.” He motions the maneuver to tighten the cinch, the bull prodding forward in disdain of him.  I nodded, as my heart started to rip out of my chest and my mouth run dry. I couldn’t say a word now, it was game time.

                I slid down on the bull, his body warm and wet, fur slimed and slick, cold on a passing graze but his body heat like a furnace on my legs. His breadth pulsed and labored, I wasn’t sure if that was my heartbeat I felt or his, or maybe we were in sync with one another. I waited on the gate to open as Will now mounted the pen next to me. “Get it done, hoss.” He smiled at me and squeezed my shoulder like a proud father would do.

                In an instant, the gate ripped open and time stopped. My adrenaline made the world go silent and my vision blur, we galloped out of the gate, and danced for what seemed like an hour. I could see the tan of the dirt below, the white hide of the bull, and not much else. In an instant, I saw the tan ground grow vivid and close, before all the air in my lungs emptied out, the world went black for a moment. I thought, perhaps, maybe I was back in the meat shed again, back on the farm. I had been here before, I thought to myself. Then a silly looking man breaks the darkness and looks down at me offering his hand. I reach and realize the darkness wasn’t me passed out, but merely the night sky. Suddenly the noise of the rodeo splits into my skull and I am back to reality, lungs filling with air for the first time. I look up and see Will, hands extended for me. I ran over and grasped.

                “Did I, did I win?” I try to speak with the little air that had refilled my lungs.

                “Hell no,” Will laughs. “You lasted maybe two seconds.” He listens to the announcer for a moment. “Well, 2.7 seconds, according to them.”

                I looked back out over the rodeo, watching Iron Furnace be secured into a separate pen across the lot.  “Damnit.”

                “Hey, it’s your first time,” Will reassures me. “Not a bad run for a rookie.”

                I didn’t need to be a rookie, I needed to win that money, I charred on his words. I tore the glove off my hand and looked at the purple abrasion across my palm. I looked down at the chaps, a fresh coat of dust on them. It had been years since I felt dirt on my arms, the grime of being a country boy.

                “You took it like a tank,” Will goes on bantering to me. “Maybe you’ll do better with the roping. I’ll make it easy for ya, I’ll be header and you be heeler.”

                I forgot about the roping part. I collected myself for the next act in this rodeo thing. We walked over to the stalls and prepared our horses. This I was familiar with at least. I slid up on Meredith’s horse and massaged her on the neck gently, then looked at Will. “We are gonna lose on this, too.”

                He grabbed the plastic ropes. “Well yeah, you have no idea what you’re doing.”

                His words soured on me. I knew what I was doing, I was trying to win money to go home. I looked out over the lot and prayed to myself, praying that God give me the strength to overcome my own ignorance. Will started riding towards the gates and Meredith’s horse Yola followed behind him out of her own habit. I adjusted the plastic rope in my hand, ready to pounce.

                The gates tore open but my adrenaline didn’t obscure the goal this time, I watched Will gallantly encircle the calf, his lasso held high in the air, before he quickly struck the calf around the neck with it and pulled tight, I tossed mine towards the ground, aiming for the calf. Out of luck or divine intervention, the calf stepped right into the rope, kicking the rope high up on its leg as I tugged it secure. The crowd this time had a favorable reaction. I looked to Will for approval.

                “You did it, cowboy!” He beamed. “You fucking did it!”

                Back at the stables Will has yet another beer, and looks at me like a proud father again. “What?”

                “I can’t believe you ropped your first calf.” He laughs. “I thought for sure you was gonna be tonight’s top rodeo clown.”

                “I grew up on a farm, ya know?” I reminded him. “This is my first rodeo, but not my first time around the animals.”

                “Welp, you got your money back for the hat at least,” He nodded, looking at my bent and dirty Stetson.

                “What ya mean? We don’t get the prize money?”

                “Nah,” he looks off in the distance. “Two hundred bucks for second place. Split it fifty fifty.”

                My heart sank. I wasn’t going home.

                “What’s the matter?”

                “I was wanting to win so I could go home,” I whined. “Now I am back where I started.”

                “What’s so great about Western Virginia, anyway? What’s wrong with Texas?”

                I couldn’t reply to him, because I had never thought about it.

                “I mean, hell, you got a job working the ranch here. You’re far away from whatever it is you was running from. Why not make a life here for yaself? Why not, you know, make this home?”

                I had been so focused on returning to West Virginia I didn’t even consider staying in Texas. Then my mind flooded with possibilities and also fraught with concern. How would I afford to stay here? How would afford housing and a car? How could I do that and pay Seneca back for all that I stole to get here in the first place?

                “Let’s get our money from the box office and call it a night,” Will chucks his beer bottle into a pen across the lot. “You can crash on my couch. Maybe wash them clothes and let them boots get some air.”

                I perked up at the idea. Not sleeping in a barn or having sex with some stranger in Dallas for a bed for the night was the best news of the whole night.

                Back at his place, Will converses with Meredith through the thin walls of his trailer about our night and winning second in the roping contest. They grow silent as I gaze up at the smoke-stained spackled ceiling. Then abruptly the headboard in the next room starts banging into the wall. I roll over and plug into my iPod. I was grateful that it wasn’t me having to have sex with a drunk for once, even if at Meredith’s expense.