on with one hand, and you can't touch the bull with your other hand, and she said, 'Eight seconds, that's all? Hell.' He told her she might last a second or two, being athletic. Kim said, 'Bring it on,' waving both hands toward her body, 'I'll ride him.' He'd miss the way things he said to her could become fighting words.
'All right,' Owen was saying, 'I believe Stubby's ready, tugging his hat down... And here we go, folks, Stubby Dobbs out of Polson, Montana, on Nitro. Ride him, Stubby.'
Ben watched the butternut bull come humping out of the gate like he had a cow's butt under him, humping and bucking, wanting this boy off his back in a hurry, the bull throwing his hindquarters in the air now with a hard twist, Nitro humping and twisting in a circle, Stubby's free hand reaching out for balance, the bull humping and twisting his 'caboose,' Owen called it, right up to the buzzer and Stubby let go to be flung in the air, whipped from the bull to land hard in the arena dirt.
'Well, you can hear the crowd liked that ride,' Owen said, 'it was a good'n. But it looks like Stubby's favoring his shoulder.'
Stubby holding one arm tight to his body and looking back as he scurried to safety, the rodeo clowns heading Nitro for the exit gate, Ben thinking: Don't look back. You're a bull rider, boy, get some strut in your gait. Check the rodeo bunnies in the first row and tip your hat.
'You can ride to the buzzer,' Owen was telling the crowd, 'and still get in trouble on your dis-mount. Ben, I imagine you had your share of injuries.'
'The usual, separated shoulders, busted collarbone. That padded vest is good for sponsor decals but that's about all.'
'You think riders'll ever have to wear helmets?'
Ben said, 'Owen, the day they won't let you wear your cowboy hat, there won't be anybody riding bulls.'
'I know what you mean,' Owen said. 'Well, I thought Stubby rode that train to score a good ninety points or better. How did you see he did, Ben?'
They were waiting for the number to show on the monitor.
'I think the judges'll give Stubby his ride,' Ben said, 'but won't think as much of that bull. He hasn't learned all the dirty tricks yet, kept humping in the same direction. I'd have to score it an eighty-five.'
And there it was on the monitor, eighty-five, Owen saying, 'Well, Ben Webster still knows his bulls.' Owen was looking toward the stalls now, saying that while the next rider was getting ready they'd take a commercial break. Owen turned off his mike and said to Ben, 'Come on sit down. I want to hear some of the movies you were in.'
'I was in Dances with Wolves, my first picture.'
'What were you in it? I don't recall seeing you.'
'I was a Lakota Sioux. Got shot off my horse by a Yankee soldier. I was in Braveheart. Took an arrow in the chest and went off the horse's rump. Die Hard with a Vengeance I wrecked cars. I got shot in Air Force One, run through with a sword in The Mask of Zorro. I got stepped on in Godzilla, in a car. Let's see, I was in Independence Day...'
'Yeah...?'
'Last Action Hero, Rising Sun, Black Rain... Terminal Velocity. Others I can't think of offhand.'
'I missed some of them,' Owen said. 'I was wondering, all those movies, you have a big part in any of 'em?'
'I'm a stuntman, Owen. They learn you rode bulls, you're hired.'
A kid from Brazil named Adriano rode a couple of bulls that hated him and were mature and had all the moves - one of them called Dillinger, last year's bull of the year - and the kid hung on to take the $75,000 purse. Seventy-five grand for sitting on bulls for sixteen seconds.
Ben picked up three cases of Bud, a cold six-pack and a bag of ice for his cooler at the drive-thru Party Barn and aimed his black Mercedes SUV north toward Dallas, two hundred miles. He'd cross the Oklahoma line and head for McAlester, home of the state prison he used to visit with his granddad, Carl, and then on up to Okmulgee, the whole trip close to four-fifty - get home at three A.M. No, he'd better stop at a motel the other side of Dallas, take his time in the morning and get there about noon. Drive through town, see if it had changed any. The last time he was home, seven years ago, was for his granddad's funeral. Carl Webster, who'd raised him, dead at eighty.
Ben was thinking, sixteen into seventy-five thousand was around... forty-five hundred a second, about what you got for smashing up a car. He had earned $485,342 less expenses his last year of bull riding, way more than he ever made in a year doing stunt gags.
The six-pack was in the cooler behind his seat, a cold Bud wedged between his thighs, Ben following his high beams into the dark listening to country on the radio. The three cases of beer were in the far back with his stuff: travel bags full of clothes, coats on hangers, four pair of boots - two of them worn out but would break his heart to get rid of. He had boxes of photographs back there, movie videos, books...
One of the books, written before Ben was born, was a volume of Oklahoma history called Hell Raisin' Days that covered a period from the 1870s to the Second World War. Ben's grandfather and great-grandfather were both in the book. He had told Kim about them.
How Virgil Webster, his great-granddad, was born in Oklahoma when it was Indian Territory, his mother part Northern Cheyenne. Virgil was a marine on the battleship Maine when she blew up in Havana Harbor, February 15, 1898. He survived to fight in the Spanish-American War, was wounded, married a girl named Graciaplena in Cuba, and came home to buy a section of land that had pecan trees on it. Inside of twenty years Virgil had almost twelve hundred acres planted in pecans and another section used to graze cattle he bought, fed and sold. Finding oil under his land and leasing a piece of it to a drilling company made Virgil a pile of money and he built a big house on the property. He said they could pump all the oil they wanted, which they did, he'd still have his pe-cans.
Ben's granddad Carl, Virgil's only son, shot a cattle thief riding off with some of their stock when he was fifteen years old. Hit him with a Winchester at a good four hundred yards. He was christened Carlos Huntington Webster, named for his mother's dad in Cuba and a Colonel Robert Huntington, Virgil's commanding officer in the marines when they took Guantanamo, but came to use only part of the name.
Once Carlos joined the Marshals Service in 1927 everybody began calling him Carl; he was stubborn about answering to it but finally went along, seeing the name as short for Carlos. By the 1930s, he had become legendary as one of Oklahoma's most colorful lawmen. There were newspaper stories that described Carl Webster being on intimate terms with girlfriends of well-known desperadoes from Frank Miller to George 'Machine Gun' Kelly.
Ben showed Kim photos of his mother and dad, Cheryl and Robert, taken in California sunshine, his dad in uniform, but said he had no memory of them. Robert, a career marine, was killed in Vietnam in '68 during Tet, when Ben was three years old. Cheryl gave him up to become a hippie, went to San Francisco and died there of drugs and alcohol. It was how Carl, sixty-two at the time and retired from the Marshals, came to raise him. Kim would ask about Cheryl, wanting to know how a mother could give up her little boy, but Ben didn't have the answer. He said Carl would tell him about his dad, how Robert was a tough kid, hardheaded and liked to fight, joined the marines on account of Virgil telling him stories when he was a kid, and was a DI at Pendleton before going to Vietnam.
'But he'd never say much about my mother other than she was sick all the time. I guess she took up serious drugs and that was that.'
Actually, Ben said, Carl didn't talk much about any of the women in the family. 'Not until I dropped out of Tulsa after a couple of years to get my rodeo ticket and we sat down with a fifth of Jim Beam.'
He told Kim some of what he remembered of the conversation. Carl, close to eighty at the time, saying the men in the family never had much luck with women. Even Virgil, came back from Cuba and never saw his mother again. She'd gone off to live on the Northern Cheyenne reservation, out at Lame Deer, Montana. Carl said he came out of his own mother, Ben's great-grandma Grace, bless her heart, and she was already dying from birthing him.
Carl said that time, 'Now your grandma Kitty - I can barely remember her face even though I'm still married to the woman. If she died I doubt she's in Heaven. Boy, Kitty was hot stuff, wore those real skimpy dresses. She'd read about me in the paper and pretend to shiver in a cute way.''
It sounded to Ben like Carl's idea was to take Kitty out of the honky-tonks and show her a happy home life. Only Kitty found herself living with a couple of guys who dipped Copenhagen, drank a lot, argued and took turns
