When the Women Come Out to Dance: Stories

  Ruben Vega said to Bonnet, “Do you know who I am?”

  “Tell us,” Bonnet said, “so we’ll know what the cat drug in and we drug out.”

  And Ruben Vega said, because he had no choice, “I hear the rope in the air, the one with the rifle is dead. Then you. Then the roper.”

  His words drew silence because there was nothing more to be said. In the moments that Ruben Vega and the one named Bonnet stared at each other, the woman came out to them holding a revolver, an old Navy Colt, which she raised and laid the barrel against the muzzle of the foreman’s claybank.

  She said, “Leave now, Mr. Bonnet, or you’ll walk nine miles to shade.”

  There was no argument, little discussion, a few grumbling words. The Tonto woman was still Mrs. Isham. Bonnet rode away with his young hands and a new silence came over the yard.

  Ruben Vega said, “He believes you’d shoot his horse.”

  The woman said, “He believes I’d cut steaks, and eat it too. It’s how I’m seen after twelve years of that other life.”

  Ruben Vega began to smile. The woman looked at him and in a few moments she began to smile with him. She shook her head then, but continued to smile. He said to her, “You could have a good time if you want to.”

  She said, “How, scaring people?”

  He said, “If you feel like it.” He said, “Get the present I brought you and open it.”

  He came back for her the next day in a Concord buggy, wearing his new willow-root straw and a cutaway coat over his revolvers, the coat he’d rented at a funeral parlor. Mrs. Isham wore the pale blue-and-white lace-trimmed dress he’d bought at Weiss’s store, sat primly on the bustle, and held the parasol against the afternoon sun all the way to Benson, ten miles, and up the main street to the Charles Crooker Hotel where the drummers and cattlemen and railroad men sitting in their front-porch rockers stared and stared.

  They walked past the manager and into the dining room before Ruben Vega removed his hat and pointed to the table he liked, one against the wall between two windows. The waitress in her starched uniform was wide-eyed taking them over and getting them seated. It was early and the dining room was not half filled.

  “The place for a quiet dinner,” Ruben Vega said. “You see how quiet it is?”

  “Everybody’s looking at me,” Sarah Isham said to the menu in front of her.

  Ruben Vega said, “I thought they were looking at me. All right, soon they’ll be used to it.”

  She glanced up and said, “People are leaving.”

  He said, “That’s what you do when you finish eating, you leave.”

  She looked at him, staring, and said, “Who are you?”

  “I told you.”

  “Only your name.”

  “You want me to tell you the truth, why I came here?”

  “Please.”

  “To steal some of your husband’s cattle.”

  She began to smile and he smiled. She began to laugh and he laughed, looking openly at the people looking at them, but not bothered by them. Of course they’d look. How could they help it? A Mexican rider and a woman with blue stripes on her face sitting at a table in the hotel dining room, laughing. He said, “Do you like fish? I know your Indian brothers didn’t serve you none. It’s against their religion. Some things are for religion, as you know, and some things are against it. We spend all our lives learning customs. Then they change them. I’ll tell you something else if you promise not to be angry or point your pistol at me. Something else I could do the rest of my life. I could look at you and touch you and love you.”

  Her hand moved across the linen tablecloth to his with the cracked, yellowed nails and took hold of it, clutched it.

  She said, “You’re going to leave.”

  He said, “When it’s time.”

  She said, “I know you. I don’t know anyone else.”

  He said, “You’re the loveliest woman I’ve ever met. And the strongest. Are you ready? I think the man coming now is your husband.”

  It seemed strange to Ruben Vega that the man stood looking at him and not at his wife. The man seemed not too old for her, as he had expected, but too self-important. A man with a very serious demeanor, as though his business had failed or someone in his family had passed away. The man’s wife was still clutching the hand with the gnarled fingers. Maybe that was it. Ruben Vega was going to lift her hand from his, but then thought, Why? He said as pleasantly as he was able, “Yes, can I help you?”

  Mr. Isham said, “You have one minute to mount up and ride out of town.”

  “Why don’t you sit down,” Ruben Vega said, “have a glass of wine with us?” He paused and said, “I’ll introduce you to your wife.”

  Sarah Isham laughed; not loud but with a warmth to it and Ruben Vega had to look at her and smile. It seemed all right to release her hand now. As he did he said, “Do you know this gentleman?”

  “I’m not sure I’ve had the pleasure,” Sarah Isham said. “Why does he stand there?”

  “I don’t know,” Ruben Vega said. “He seems worried about something.”

  “I’ve warned you,” Mr. Isham said. “You can walk out or be dragged out.”

  Ruben Vega said, “He has something about wanting to drag people. Why is that?” And again heard Sarah’s laugh, a giggle now that she covered with her hand. Then she looked up at her husband, her face with its blue tribal lines raised to the soft light of the dining room.

  She said, “John, look at me. . . . Won’t you please sit with us?”

  Now it was as if the man had to make a moral decision, first consult his conscience, then consider the manner in which he would pull the chair out—the center of attention. When finally he was seated, upright on the chair and somewhat away from the table, Ruben Vega thought, All that to sit down. He felt sorry for the man now, because the man was not the kind who could say what he felt.

  Sarah said, “John, can you look at me?”

  He said, “Of course I can.”

  “Then do it. I’m right here.”

  “We’ll talk later,” her husband said.

  She said, “When? Is there a visitor’s day?”

  “You’ll be coming to the house, soon.”

  “You mean to see it?”

  “To live there.”

  She looked at Ruben Vega with just the trace of a smile, a sad one. Then said to her husband, “I don’t know if I want to. I don’t know you. So I don’t know if I want to be married to you. Can you understand that?”

  Ruben Vega was nodding as she spoke. He could understand it. He heard the man say, “But we are married. I have an obligation to you and I respect it. Don’t I provide for you?”

  Sarah said, “Oh, my God—” and looked at Ruben Vega. “Did you hear that? He provides for me.” She smiled again, not able to hide it, while her husband began to frown, confused.

  “He’s a generous man,” Ruben Vega said, pushing up from the table. He saw her smile fade, though something warm remained in her eyes. “I’m sorry. I have to leave. I’m going on a trip tonight, south, and first I have to pick up a few things.” He moved around the table to take one of her hands in his, not caring what the husband thought. He said, “You’ll do all right, whatever you decide. Just keep in mind there’s no one else in the world like you.”

  She said, “I can always charge admission. Do you think ten cents a look is too high?”

  “At least that,” Ruben Vega said. “But you’ll think of something better.”

  He left her there in the dining room of the Charles Crooker Hotel in Benson, Arizona—maybe to see her again sometime, maybe not—and went out with a good conscience to take some of her husband’s cattle.

  TENKILLER

  I.

  At Kim’s funeral—people coming up to Ben with their solemn faces—he couldn’t help thinking of what his granddad Carl had said to him fifteen years ago, that he hoped Ben would have better luck with women.

  “We seem to have ’em around for a year
or so,” the old man said, “and they take off or die on us.”

  It was on Ben’s mind today, along with a feeling of expectation he couldn’t help. Here he was standing ten feet from the open casket, Kim in there with her blond hair sprayed for maybe the first time, her lips sealed, a girl he lived with and loved, and he was anxious to take off. Go home as a different person. Maybe look up a girl named Denise he used to know, if she was still around. Get away from the movie business for a while.

  He could’ve taken 40, a clear shot across the entire Southwest from L.A. to Okmulgee, Oklahoma, fourteen hundred miles, but took 10 instead, drove four hundred miles out of his way to look in on the Professional Bull Riders Bud Light World Challenge in Austin. Getting away was the main thing; there was no hurry to get home.

  He thought he might see some of his old buddies hanging around the chutes, not a one Ben’s age still riding. Get up in your thirties and have any brains you were through with bulls. Ben entered the working end of the arena to the smell of livestock, got as far as the pens shaking hands and was taken up to the broadcast booth. An old guy he remembered as Owen still calling the rides.

  Owen said, “Folks,” taking the mike from its stand as he got up, “we have a surprise visitor showed up, former world champion bull rider Ben Webster, out of Okmulgee, Oklahoma.” He said, “Ben, I liked to not recognize you without your hat on. Man, all that hair—you gone Hollywood on us or what?” Owen straight-faced, having fun with him.

  Ben slipped his sunglasses off saying yeah, well, he’d been working out there the past ten years, getting by.

  “Your name still comes up,” Owen said. “I see a young rider shows some style, I wonder could he be another Ben Webster. I won’t say you made it look easy, but you sure sat a bull, and didn’t appear to get off till you felt like it. Listen, I want to hear what you been doing in Hollywood, but right now, folks, we got Stubby Dobbs, a hundred and thirty-five pounds of cowboy astride a two-thousand-pound Brahma name of Nitro.” Owen turned to the TV monitor. “You see Stubby wrapping his bull rope good and tight. Ben, you don’t want your hand to slip out of there during a ride.”

  “You’re gone if it does,” Ben said.

  He had taken Kim to a rodeo in Las Vegas, explained how you had to stay on the bull eight seconds holding 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 Guantánamo, 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.”