New West Fiction

Calcutta

By Noelle Sullivan, Guest Writer, 4-22-11

	Illustration by Patrick Gill.

Cal was an angel of death. He noticed before anyone else that his private jinx hovered over all, visible as the sky’s lupine blue or the cloud of dust behind a duelly on gravel. Sooner or later, someone was bound to see it. At the Dairy Queen, the AgriNeeds store, the grain elevator, someone would sidle by and slyly let loose: “Calvin, why is it that every time I see you at a rodeo, some kind of livestock gives up the ghost?”

He had asked himself the same question.

At the Lincoln show, a pale dun gelding backed into the start corner and promptly had a heart attack, collapsing, grounded, stone dead. The team roper was a young cowboy who worried his black Stetson, shedding real tears, wandering at a loss saying, “It wasn’t even mine. I just borrowed him. He wasn’t even my own damn horse.” That one shook even the wranglers, stoic by nature. It took Cal and five others to walk the stiff alabaster steed to a flatbed and heft it like a salt block, a feedsack.

The previous July, in East Helena, the count had begun: one brindle steer, one calf, two Brahma bulls all hauled away by backhoe in the same night. The calf died a moron after a horse stepped on its neck artery and severed connections between blood and brain. It swooned. The last bull lost was an honest-to-god tragedy, its leg swinging free after it ran its cocky rider into the fence. Inflicting its own demise, the flat-faced beast circled with steroid surge, mindless of ruin. It wore the visage of a man who’d shot himself in the temple but missed somehow and had gone on raging.

These things gaped gruesome, but for Cal, the admitted, frightening part was this: he possessed power over those lives and deaths. He knew it as soon as the dumb things fell over. He had created all the incidents, subconsciously willed them into happening. Worse, he had sometimes blessed the corpses. He had cussed at prolapsed cows, had asked wide-eyed adolescent deer to run, run you freaking idiots, across the path of his truck. He had dared them to leap from life, and they had.

It was not a history he would have had other ranchfolk know about, though he kept a private count. Forty animals in two years. Forty of nature’s children that would just as soon not have laid eyes on him.

At the Lincoln show, after the roping horse dropped dead and the young cowboy sobbed, Cal had an illumination, a palm touched to his head. As he and the other men lifted horseflesh, he knew his path faced a “Y”. He’d have to cut all connections to life. He’d become a voyeur, a lone silhouette on the range. The only way to keep the innocents safe from death was to stay wild, quiet, distant, and make sure that nothing crossed him or set him off. The only way to keep anything domestic from perishing was to push it away. That, or a less appealing alternative: he could make the call on himself. Decide his own fate. Say, My ass is grass.

And so it was, for both those reasons, Cal came back to rodeo. After seventeen years of marriage, only bull-riding could do him in. He felt old, and evil, and he wanted to go out as the sad creatures had, at the end of a bang-up ride.

He waited until September, end of the season. It was Labor Day, the sort that everyone liked, with sun-warmed creosote seeping from the timbers of the Helmville grandstand and a hint of hoarfrost in the grass. Cal arrived early by more than an hour and a half, too early, so he sat in his truck for a while before rousing himself, unloading his doubts, and marching over to pay his fee to ride the bulls. He had decided to give the animals a fair shake, even the odds. The bulls stood a chance: they could return his thrust, knock him down if they wanted, block his death wish. They had no inkling of this but milled in corrals, humping, chawing, waiting. They drained black plastic water tanks. Their tongues lolled. As he climbed the stile into the pen, Cal imagined some of the pipe-nostrilled bulls panicked and roll-eyed with his arrival. Which of them, poor servile meat, would stiffen this time? They ignored him, in fact, letting out excess liquid and emptying their bladders against the hardpack.

Gearing up behind the stand was a tall, slim guy, the kind who never got quite enough to eat and fit just right on a saddle, the kind jeans are cut around. He stood with his legs astride some mystery spot on the ground as he wrapped leather reins around a fencepost, reading with rosin. Cal unpacked a roll of white tape, then another, a small scissors, a bottle of chalk dust. The kid didn’t look his way. He just stood there, intent, minding his own.

Cal tried to do the same, but his eyes wandered. It’s not easy to look at one thing only, except in sequence: a bull’s wide back, a small cowgirl’s certain walk, a wire loop, a box of rusty horseshoe nails. He had trouble picking his target.

The horses in the first bareback round were mean cusses, rank. Bronc riders lost their grips on the suitcase saddle holds. The animals arched their backs, hard-starched their legs, came down like toboggans on bumps. No re-rides, and nobody made time. It made a good show.

That soon changed. Next was steer wrestling, in theory, but not for this Helmville crowd, not today. The stock failed. The steers wouldn’t run, wouldn’t bend their scrawny necks, wouldn’t kiss the dirt. They stood like rocks on the plowed enclosure. They stabbed widely like Spanish bulls, turning big farm boys into pansy toreadors. Burly humanity shrunk against animal inertia.

They were cleverer than they seemed, Cal thought. The crowd booed after the fourth slow-motion drop, so he opened his evil eye. The steers clearly had turned to rebellion. He wished for a few steaks carved from their shit-smeared bodies. He sketched patterns in the dirt for a few Texas purses made from their fleabit hides. Then he took it back. He reserved the call.

The announcer, a regular, sat barely above the arena in his box. He read off scores almost before the judges called them up, as if they were inevitable. He asked the colorful masses in the stands for their kind consideration of some poor sap, some man whose ass was sore as his head would be. He stopped insulting bad rides just long enough to please the crowd and give them what they waited for. “And now we’re gonna take time for the Calcutta for the saddle broncs. Time to play your money, folks,” he brayed. “Oh, Calcutta!”

In the Calcutta, they auction a man off according to his skill and split the pot between winner and wager. Selling a cowboy makes the action keener, puts the fear of an empty wallet in it. It’s a rite of passage, a marriage of sorts, a turning of independent man into employee. Cal spat out a cotton clump of white as he watched some boy’s talent sold for someone else’s gain. It riled him.

“Come on fans, how much you think this cowboy’s gonna win? I’ve got fifty, who’ll give me sixty? Fifty, fifty. Come on fans, it’s added sport,” the announcer droned.

Dee Smitson had gone out first, pushed by his uncle. Bids faltered. The bronc buster turned his red face back to his peers and muttered, thin-lipped, “Shows what they know.”

Cal climbed over the boards to sit at the sidelines. He looked at the rider called J. C. out there now, thumbs in his chaps to raise the crowd’s interest, standing there in pink and orange leather, one lucky cuss. J. C. had a Missoula girlfriend who’d bet on her man; he might get lucky after all. “Strut your stuff!” Cal yelled, sneering when J. C. went pinkish.

He’d been roped in with that hero thing. It wasn’t hard to take at first, because the woman worshipped you. But the rope pulled. She wanted more. She went out to get you when you weren’t willing to be found. Or you married her and it was she who went out, to the Copper Queen bar, to dance with some jerks, to get you back.

Still, crowds love flirtation. Missoula won J. C., so he would be hers as he rode. He ambled back to the chutes, happy about it, poor dumb hormonal beast.

A man dumped three hundred dollars in the pot to see his nephew go and the comedy ended. The boys rode long. J. C. gave a good ride, woman-whipped as he was, but the local kid pulled through. Dee, that brazen good-for-nothing, was not so lucky. He got hung up on a stirrup, kicked in the head. Concussed. The horse won. As the ambulance crew pulled him out, mopped him up, got him walking again, the crowd yelled a punchy joy.

Rejuvenation. Redemption. It comes so cheaply to youth. It’s a universal coupon, a credit line. Cal had felt no pain or even remorse when he was that age, not like now. Nowadays he smelled fear, anticipated too much. As the bulls loaded and crashed around him, he imagined the herd bull knew him. He flashed on a nightmare: stomped in the head.

Light leapt off the pale green hills. The gray afternoon sun cast no shadow but acted on the air like a lens, magnifying spiky Douglas-firs in the distance, flaming ridgetop meadows, splaying landforms under glass. The onlookers saw autumn, a radiant last blaze.

They do the bulls last in a rodeo, for reasons of drama and for making both spectators and beasts more brutish. Cal’s draw was mild compared to the crazed lunger in the chute next door, a huge, ugly, white son-of-a-bitch with broomed-off horns and a few Brahma spots. The bull didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to have to prove he could shake a man off. As soon as the wranglers got him to the chutes, he reared, clanging metal and making a whole lot of skinny cowboys shiver with electric prods in hand, waving hats. Somebody had drawn that bastard, but no one would ride him. They moved him out.

Meanwhile, men stretched and pulled their seats tight and arched their necks and threw their arms up to loosen themselves. The scene opened.

Chute Number One.

Chute Number Two.

Chute Number Three.

Here the bull stomped and the crowd sighed almost simultaneously. Cal heard his own breath pause, a confusing silence. The EMTs ran out with their stretcher as the announcer rambled on about a cow milking contest, the barbeque beef, the prize belt buckle. The crowd replayed what they’d seen and tried to see into the ring of men mid-arena. From atop the gates Cal looked down as they loaded the cowboy into an ambulance at the right side of the ring and thought, I’ve never seen a man lie so quiet. I’ve never seen anyone so damn still.

The next day, when it appeared in the papers, he could say honestly, “I’ve never seen a man die before.”

Listening to the dark whispers of his brain, he thought, It’s all a mistake. The bull took out the wrong guy.

Rodeos are glib occasions, so the crowd stayed blind. The announcer said he’d give updates but never did. The men running the chutes smoothed their faces like sheet metal. Cal took his turn, climbing onto the back of the killer’s brother, urging it to take him, too, with a violent rocking. He dared it to drag him down in rigging.

“Chute Four, the Powell Feed & Supply chute. Go when you’re ready, boys,” the announcer said.

The bull went out sideways and backwards beneath him, then stiffened its legs and jumped with a twist. It was the downward move that nearly cracked him. Seat turned centrifuge. The creature shook. Cal flew.

Thrown. Landed. He stood. He breathed.

There’s no longer walk than that traipse across the arena, the dirt’s dry clumps against your boots. It’s a walk of repudiation. If he hadn’t been so grateful for his damn family, Cal thought, for his girls, he’d have paid off his debts to society. If he’d been culpable, it might be he who raced in an emergency vehicle toward the helipad at Ovando. It might have been his soul, not some other man’s, on its high-speed way to hell.

Cal saw a longer, slower road to his final destination. Man and beast would roam the garden until a larger power could decide. Who stays, who goes?

He packed his duffel and jury-rigged it with a little loop of horsehair, token of animal grace. He stepped over the fence into the world of trucks, trailers, engines, and the cab of his Dodge. He turned the ignition key and found himself in the rear view. “Such a damned softie,” he thought, sighing with a clover-scented relief. He gazed at his own moon face, not a bad face, not a bad man anyway. His calf’s eyes were bright and alive, that’s the point, and he directed them to the road.

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Noelle Sullivan cooks and serves three meals a day for her family, with sides of fiction and poetry. Her work has appeared in Stone’s Throw, Abridged/Magnolia, Crannóg, and other journals in Montana and Ireland.

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